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I ranted about the September Feature Patch on Tumblr, and I'll probably type that up in a more comprehensive form and repost it here, but since a lot of people have been like "Don't judge the new leveling system until you've tried it" I decided to give it a shot and level an asura necromancer.
Thoughts so far (level 1-5):
- The opening quest is now boring as hell since all you do is autoattack. You don't even have any incentive to kill the rampaging enemies because you can't unlock your other skills (I know, pre-patch, sometimes I would go after the enemies running around because I wanted to see what cool skills I could unlock. Not anymore).
- Because all you can do is autoattack, it feels like you get a massive DPS drop. This may be profession-specific (I know the mesmer now starts with a sword instead of scepter, so that's more DPS for mesmers), but as a necro, I was at 1 health for most of the boss fight, a.k.a. I should've died, and it was absolutely ridiculous because the opening quest is not supposed to be hard. I noticed some of the default heal skills changed as well, and it was pretty bad for necros in particular because now the default heal skill has a whopping 40 second cooldown.
- Seriously, why did they have to remove the rallying system? Was it too hard to have a tooltip saying "You're downed! Use these skills and if you kill your enemy, you'll rally!" Because the current system doesn't do a better job of teaching you what the downed state is, it just delays new players from having to figure it out sooner.
- Underwater combat is such a unique feature of Guild Wars 2. I sure am glad that they lock new players out of it at early levels so they can't experience the diversity of combat in the game early on. (/sarcasm)
- I also really really hate locking the profession-specific skills, because it was a great way before to give people a sense upfront that each profession was unique. Now I just feel like if I were a new player, I'd be thinking "So necromancers are different from other professions because...their skills are black and green?" Hell, they even changed the minion heal skill and the auto-generation of clones for mesmers with the scepter because apparently minions/clones are Too Complicated for new players to understand.
- At least in Metrica Province, they changed some of the quest locations around...because it will clearly be Too Confusing to new players to follow a map marker to an area farther-but-not-really-that-far from where they're currently standing.
- Because there are no more bundle items, the heart quests themselves are more homogenous and also more tedious at times. Really, if bundle items were really that confusing, they could just put a notification on the screen like "You've picked up x! Interact with y to help the NPC!"
- I absolutely hate the removal of the personal story until level 10. I used the personal story as a way of leveling, so if I got tired of heart quests I had some variety, and also the personal story was often pretty fun. I really don't understand why people were complaining about this, because in the previous system, you COULD bundle the personal story quests together if you wanted; no one had a gun to your head saying "You've hit level z, now you MUST do your personal story." My sister basically ignored her personal story because she didn't like the way it was broken up, but the thing was, you had a choice. Now? Everyone's forced to wait to do their personal story in 10-level bundles.
Again, what I really don't get is that if these were such significant problems, why didn't they beta-test this before launch? They marketed Guild Wars 2 as different from other MMOs. They had to realize that this would attract some people but also turn some people off. Trying to compromise by going back on their earlier promises to secure the crowd who doesn't like an MMO that isn't like other MMOs is terrible for their manifesto and PR.
Thoughts so far (level 1-5):
- The opening quest is now boring as hell since all you do is autoattack. You don't even have any incentive to kill the rampaging enemies because you can't unlock your other skills (I know, pre-patch, sometimes I would go after the enemies running around because I wanted to see what cool skills I could unlock. Not anymore).
- Because all you can do is autoattack, it feels like you get a massive DPS drop. This may be profession-specific (I know the mesmer now starts with a sword instead of scepter, so that's more DPS for mesmers), but as a necro, I was at 1 health for most of the boss fight, a.k.a. I should've died, and it was absolutely ridiculous because the opening quest is not supposed to be hard. I noticed some of the default heal skills changed as well, and it was pretty bad for necros in particular because now the default heal skill has a whopping 40 second cooldown.
- Seriously, why did they have to remove the rallying system? Was it too hard to have a tooltip saying "You're downed! Use these skills and if you kill your enemy, you'll rally!" Because the current system doesn't do a better job of teaching you what the downed state is, it just delays new players from having to figure it out sooner.
- Underwater combat is such a unique feature of Guild Wars 2. I sure am glad that they lock new players out of it at early levels so they can't experience the diversity of combat in the game early on. (/sarcasm)
- I also really really hate locking the profession-specific skills, because it was a great way before to give people a sense upfront that each profession was unique. Now I just feel like if I were a new player, I'd be thinking "So necromancers are different from other professions because...their skills are black and green?" Hell, they even changed the minion heal skill and the auto-generation of clones for mesmers with the scepter because apparently minions/clones are Too Complicated for new players to understand.
- At least in Metrica Province, they changed some of the quest locations around...because it will clearly be Too Confusing to new players to follow a map marker to an area farther-but-not-really-that-far from where they're currently standing.
- Because there are no more bundle items, the heart quests themselves are more homogenous and also more tedious at times. Really, if bundle items were really that confusing, they could just put a notification on the screen like "You've picked up x! Interact with y to help the NPC!"
- I absolutely hate the removal of the personal story until level 10. I used the personal story as a way of leveling, so if I got tired of heart quests I had some variety, and also the personal story was often pretty fun. I really don't understand why people were complaining about this, because in the previous system, you COULD bundle the personal story quests together if you wanted; no one had a gun to your head saying "You've hit level z, now you MUST do your personal story." My sister basically ignored her personal story because she didn't like the way it was broken up, but the thing was, you had a choice. Now? Everyone's forced to wait to do their personal story in 10-level bundles.
Again, what I really don't get is that if these were such significant problems, why didn't they beta-test this before launch? They marketed Guild Wars 2 as different from other MMOs. They had to realize that this would attract some people but also turn some people off. Trying to compromise by going back on their earlier promises to secure the crowd who doesn't like an MMO that isn't like other MMOs is terrible for their manifesto and PR.
