Fion wrote on Mar 6, 2015, 15:47:
I've always heard this but I've never experienced it. I suspect it's people coming from WoW - the first MMO for most gamers - who think the content that drives the game is the heart tasks that are scattered around the zones. If you jump from one to the next - like jumping from quest hub to quest hub - and never do any of the myriad events that pop up most commonly in and around the hearts (especially in early levels), you absolutely don't get enough xp to level past the zone. You need to treat GW2 leveling as a dynamic experience. Everything gives you xp, so gather, craft, do your story, do events, stick around as they often chain into different ones and tell a cohesive story, explore every nook and cranny of a zone as the game really rewards exploration and get Zone Completion, which itself has good rewards and nets 1/2 a level or more. As someone who has always done this, I always out-leveled a zone before I got Zone Completion. I never once had to go to another similarly leveled zone to get more levels so I could advance. Oh and the personal story is now set every 10 levels and nets you 2-3 levels and decent gear for those levels.
Its one of the reasons I think some people dislike the game, it doesn't pull you by the hand from content hub to content hub ala WoW, (though it holds your hand more these days if you want it too) and a fair number of people just do not know what to do without that hand holding.
For me, it was because the game became very boring, very quickly. Once I did one zone's worth of hearts and events, everything else was more or less the same with slight variations. None of the boss encounters were particularly unique or interesting; everything was mostly just spam DPS and avoid the bad stuff. A lot of the zones felt too similar as well.
I bring these things up, because these are some of the things that for me make it inferior to other games, such as WoW and GW. Yes, I finally got bored of those games as well, but not until I put in thousands of hours and hundreds of dollars. Time was probably around 4K for WoW, and 3K for GW. GW2 lasted maybe 300-400 hours. I got two characters to level cap, had one fairly well geared out. But the last 100 hours at least was a chore, and not much fun at all.
The reason GW held my interest was all the skill variety, and the huge number of builds you could do. And along with that, it didn't take long to level a class to cap, so you could easily have a character of every class at level cap and experiment with everything. The rest of the content wasn't necessarily better than GW2, but the skill system made up for it and then a great deal more.
The reason WoW held my interest for so long was simply the sheer variety. Every zone felt unique. Every class felt unique. The bosses were interesting and unique. Even the quests had a lot more variety than the leveling content in any other MMO.
In GW2, unfortunately, the very things that were supposed to be innovative and make it better than WoW, actually made it more boring and worse overall. Doing away with dedicated healers didn't help, because it turned all content into DPS-spam+dodging. Doing away with quests didn't help, because everything just became repetitious hearts and events.