"Easy Mode"

I noticed that some naysayers equate the ANet devs' vision of making everything accessible to the game being child's play. I'm wondering if they saw the videos where actual designers of the game were getting manhandled by their own creations, and that's with ANet stating that the full release will be much more challenging.

If GW2 is anything like GW1, people will have their work cut out for them trying to solo mobs without a good plan ahead of time. I'm not really trying to allay any fears that the game will be "easy mode", but at the same time I'm wondering what people's thoughts are on these claims. I personally feel that the scaling system will take care of the problem of there ever being a lack of challenge presented by the living, breathing world of Tyria. I've heard that more skilled players will find satisfaction fighting higher level enemies, provided they can maintain survivability via dodging.

Originally Posted by Skorr

I'm one of those 'idiots' that try to solo anything and everything (such as some group-intended content) in the world and mostly succeed in going so. ;p

I do the exact same thing in most MMOs, because a lot of them don't encourage grouping like GW2 does, but I almost hope that I'll fail to adequately solo the entire game, because for one thing, that's not the point of such a great group game, but mostly I don't want to feel that the game failed to provide a meaty challenge.

That's why I almost feel relieved when I see people getting slapped around in PvE content on Youtube videos of the game. It leads me to believe that if you form an impromptu group with another person, that the difficulty + the lack of traditional quests that might send you in different directions, you'll always be glad to have people around and you'll stick together more often than in the past.

I'm ok with the whole grouping thing as long as it doesn't become a requirement. That what started to suck about Everquest.
It was ok getting groups at the lower lvls, but as you got to lvl 60+ is was extreamly hard finding a group. Thats where the fun stops. Nothing like sitting around spamming "LFG" for 5 hours cause no one has a use for your class or lvl. Hope that it is a mix of grouping and solo action. If you want to solo you can, and if you need to group you can. Just don't want to be forced into a box.

i'm like Skorr and Eir in that I solo just about everything I can manage to and even in GW I've managed to persist fairly far, with the update of being able to use a full team of heros instead of you + 3 heros + 4 npcs. I think what a lot of people are getting confused on is Anet coming out bright and cheerful about how they're trying to do away with things like DP which overly punish people for failing to make the game more fun. Personally considering some other games which would drop all your loot when you died for others to pick up if you didn't get back to it quick enough, getting a hit to hp and energy isn't so bad. It can get fairly annoying to be an hour or so into a mission (like some of the long winded asuran missions) and make a mistake costing 15% or even better getting rez'd and splatted for extra 15% then it becomes much harder to continue on. My assassin is very squishy and for whatever reason the mobs tend to avoid magic users and head straight for me. I've since worked out ways around it and such, but there were times where I would just go into IDGaF mode and take them out one by one if I had to. As such, last I checked, my sin has somewhere in the range of 700+ deaths (out of 51m/o).

Taking away DP for a new mechanic because in their words, when you die, you know you died and you messed up, there's no reason to constantly beat you down further. I do think that death penalties like in Rift (gain x% with no actually penalties until you are at a high enough %) are a little to lenient though. Looked like Anet is incorporating a near death situation where you still have a chance to revive which seems like a fairly neat concept, I've only seen it in FPSs so I can't wait to see their take on it.

@Eir I believe I read an article saying Anet is trying to do the impossible and make the main campaign soloable while at the same time keeping it from not being to easy. The only way I can really see this happening is if with their push for dynamic content, they have the # of enemies scale with the # of people in the area. I'm anxious myself to see how they pull it off especially since I thought I read (could be wrong) they're trying to change or get rid of formal grouping and push more for a PUG style.

^ Agreed, all the more reason that they bring on the pre release BETA sooner than later so that we get to see how some of this will feel/work out.