User:Quizzical/Approach

I like to meet a challenge in many different ways. As such, I play ten characters, and keep them together, to all be on the same set of content at any given time. Going through a mission ten times within a few weeks means that I'll understand that mission very well. But having to do the same mission as ten different classes means I'll have to take a different approach every single time. The way that an elementalist approaches a mission is necessarily very different from the way a monk approaches it.

In order to keep my characters separate, I have a rule against putting points in secondary professions. This usually means that I don't use secondary profession skills at all, as most skills aren't useful without any attribute points. This is necessary to force each character to approach a given mission in a different manner. Otherwise I might end up playing several characters by heavily relying on the same secondary profession, and thus end up doing the same mission in the same way several times. That's boring.

I'm violently allergic to grinding. If I can clear some content in a particular manner two or three times, I could in principle do so a hundred times, and there is no need to actually do so. For the same reason, I loathe farming. If simply doing quests and missions isn't enough to be properly equipped in a game, then it's a stupid game, and the rational thing to do is not to spend time farming or grinding, but rather to quit and go play some other game. Fortunately, getting perfect gear is relatively easy here.

People sometimes ask whether this mission or that is "worth it". To that I say, worth what? Half a sack of rice and two Argentine pesos? Why are you playing this game if you don't like doing quests or missions? Getting rewards that do not exist outside of an online game cannot be worth much if you fundamentally hate that online game.

Rather, completing a mission by meeting the challenge it presents is its own reward. But this actually requires meeting the challenge, not just getting past the mission. For this reason, I hate the concept of "runs" through missions or to various towns or outposts.

With rare exceptions for certain areas that are very difficult to do alone, I'm also against the concept of players "helping" guildmates get through various missions beyond offering some tips on how to beat it. It's not that I'm against grouping, mind you. But the efficient way to group is for players who are interested in doing the same mission to group with each other, such that both gain from the cooperation, rather than one gaining at the expense of another who had no interest in doing the mission.

I'm likewise against using the GWEN pve-only skills outside of GWEN. To use unbalanced pve-only skills at high ranks to get through a mission does not meet the challenge that the mission presents. Rather, it evades the challenge. If the reward is that you've met the challenge that ArenaNet laid out for you, then going ursanway to avoid the challenge may get you a title, but that's not the reward that matters.

For that matter, I'm mostly against GWEN entirely. GWEN is so radically different from the campaigns in critical ways that the campaigns are similar to each other (e.g., emphasis on skill and content rather than grinding and farming) as to feel like an entirely different game. It is a bizarre coda to a previously great game franchise. GWEN isn't Runescape-awful, mind you, but just mediocre. And I'd rather spend my time on good games than mediocre ones.

The Norn fighting tournament was cool, I guess, but most of the "content" in the expansion is insipid. I wasn't able to push myself to go all the way through it before saying, forget it, I'll go back to a campaign that actually has decent content.

It's not that leveling is intrinsically bad. There are right ways and wrong ways to do leveling. If the game frequently pushes you to do something that you wouldn't otherwise consider doing for the sake of leveling, then that's a wrong way to implement leveling in a game. It seems that GWEN does little else. Even if you might otherwise enjoy doing the quests, the constant "5n enemies killed" messages that strongly imply that you should be grinding rank instead of whatever you're doing are gratuitously obnoxious.

For now, I'm doing hard mode missions. In order to get a mission and bonus in hard mode on each of my ten characters, I have to beat the mission enough times to see a lot of what could possibly go wrong, and refine tactics while keeping them general enough that a lot of combinations of classes can work. That's ideal preparation for writing a wiki article on how to beat the mission.