GW2 All Around Feedback

Warning, Wall-O-Post.

I'm going to start by saying that I've been playing this game since a few days after it was released. At the moment, it's about all I play. I mostly play the Garden Ops mode for various reasons, so most of my experiences/opinions will be based off of what I've had happen during these games. 

-Character Balancing Issues

This has been beaten to death on these forums over and over, so I won't go too much into detail. I stated that I mostly play Garden Ops, and this is the main reason why. The online play is simply, unplayable, un-fun, and not worth my time for such a poor experience. I'm aware that many people state that "x" isn't overpowered, but "y" is and etc. The fact of the matter is, the zombies side has a huge edge in terms of an advantage. This is more than obvious, considering the dozens of posts on these forums. Most of these issues were masked by the dominance of the Rose variants, but since the death of Rose, it's just not worth playing the multiplayer with such a huge advantage towards the zombies. Several posters on here, like Zaheen, have taken it upon themselves to positively assert themselves into the balancing issues, so I won't talk about it any more.

-Variant Uselessness?

I will say, I haven't used EVERY variant in the game, yet, although I plan to. I've just found several of them to be a complete waste of time. I'm more of a completionist when it comes to this game in particular, and a part of my completionist obsession, is that I have to max out all of the variants to master. More often than not, I've found that a lot of the variants just down right suck. The entire Rose class is just godawful now. Trying to level her up is a nightmare. Iron/Party Citron, most of the newer variant Peas, Party Corn, and just about every Chomper is just a grind. (I know I'm missing several of them, but this is what comes to mind at the moment.)

The thing that aggravates me the most, though, is that leveling up the characters/variants are different for each character, and some are very unrewarding. For instance, right now Rose is considered a "support" character. Which, I'm perfectly alright with, but why does it take me three times the hours to max her out compared to sunflower, scientist and all-star? If she's going to be a support character, I think the experience points should more heavily reflect that.

All in all, many of the variants are worse off than their stock versions. I can understand that the variants shouldn't be giant steps forward compared to the stock version, but some of the variations are completely unable to be applied for their uses. What's the point of Electro Pea for example? Or Iron Citron? The ideas behind them are cool, but they're not really usable without becoming a liability. Especially considering the other variants/stock version are so much more useful.

- Infinity

What a boring disaster this is. After the first two or three times playing it, it just gets old...fast. That's only if you can get it to work as well. It sucks, because this mode has a LOT of potential, but it's just bad, and another waste of a grind for the completionists. The crashes around 20K shards are at the top of my list of issues with this mode. There's also been issues with being killed in the Chest Room by a Singularity. I don't even understand why that entire room exists. It seems like a complete waste of time, when you could just show us opening the chest and giving the reward. The whole, feeding the chest with the shards, bit was cool the first time, I guess. It's completely unnecessary now though, considering I have to pray that I don't get killed as I open it.

Just by making the shards their own currency for items could change my outlook on this mode. Adding simple customizations, and creating other abilities for the mech would make this mode less of a drag. (Seriously, who uses the tail slam? ) I, personally, don't mind the randomness of the rewards, but I do mind them not being tiered very well. For example, a 26k shard game got me 5K coins. -__- What was even more painful, was that I received those 5k coins after I was kicked out of the game around 20k shards 3 times in a row. After unlocking around a third of the stickers in the stickerbook, I realize that there aren't very many legendary items in the game, but if you're going to have an entire mode dedicated to unlocking the more rare items, don't shaft the players because of your lack of selection. Find an alternative to the shards, such as being able to use them for packs. Or make it so that you can outright purchase a party sticker piece for 100K shards or something like that. Rotate that sticker piece every time you add new quests, that way, if you didn't buy the sticker piece, you'll have to wait another cycle through all of the other party pieces, before you can purchase it again. This would give the players a definite reason to want to play this mode. There's just so many missed opportunities here.

-Ability Uselessness

Some characters just have, flat out, useless abilities. The Cactus Tallnuts, for instance. These have no practical use in multiplayer. In Garden Ops, they're essentially useless as well. Although, you can corral a few zombies behind them, it does little if anything to help your cause. The Peel Shield, although not completely useless, is just incredibly weak. It's more of a hassle to click the button to put it up than it is to just roll in a ball and get out of harms way. Rose' Arcane Enigma is a death trap. Pirate's Rodeo Cannon isn't worth the damage, seeing as you can shoot them from the same range twice and do the same damage as a direct impact with a rodeo shot, except you have the ability to stay mobile. I'm still trying to figure out what the hell the RB button does for Lil' Drake's mech. 

- Garden Ops

This is my bread and butter for this game. I absolutely love the mode, or at least the idea of the mode. To start off, it's extremely annoying that I can't switch characters in the middle of a game. I understand that you shouldn't be able to in the middle of a round, but in between rounds, I don't see the problem. The main reason I would like this is because, sometimes I hit level 10 on my character at wave 2/3, and I'll tell ya, I'm not staying in a game for 8/7 more rounds and getting 0 XP for it. I know it sounds childish, but that's a valuable 3000-5000XP that you'd be wasting. Another reason, is because sometimes certain combinations just don't work out. I often start by creating my own match, and people join me as I start the beginning waves. There's nothing worse than starting a game as a chomper, and 3 other people join and decide to play as Chomper, as well.

I previously explained that I start my own match and let people join off of me. The reason for that is because the Garden Ops mode was dropped from the servers, so it's all ran by the host of the game now. I know someone out there is going to argue that it's always been host-based, but the ridiculous laggy games only started after the "server maintenance" the same week the patch dropped. Before that, I never had an issue with lag in the Ops mode, so I can assume that the games were server assisted during the beginning days of the game being released. Generally speaking, finding a custom match isn't worth the struggle. Even when you do happen to find someone with a decent connection on ops, they back out as soon as the game is over to grab more quests, promote or switch sides. You're better off hosting your own, and waiting the extra few minutes at this point for people to join.

The "Wave 8" glitch is also still alive and well. I've had this happen with just about ever Wave 8 Challenge, where you finish the challenge, but it still shows that 1 enemy is still alive. Only to find out there is no enemy. On some maps, you can hop off the map and retry, but on others, like Aqua Center, not so lucky. The only option is to back out of the game and start over. 

I would also like to say, that many of the pots/bots are just really bad, and are not worth putting up at all. The melee ones don't last but maybe 2 enemies. What's the point in even putting it up? The regular pea is also just dumb. I get that they're pretty common, but they're really just a waste.

Some of the Super Boss Waves are simply impossible on Hard/Crazy with 2 people. The Yeti's are incredibly OP even with 4. They just skate around the map, while slinging ice at you from Narnia in some weird movements that a controller simply couldn't control. Along with the Yeti's, the Soldiers shoot from far away, and the combination of the two freezes you for an eternity to your doom. Even if you do get unfrozen, by the time you get unfrozen you have little to no health, while the Yeti's "auto-track" you from across the map to finish you off. 

Super Bean is also an issue. It just takes ages to vanquish him. On top of the ridiculously erratic movements, he also has the ability to drop your health from max to nothing in a blink. I mean, literally, sometimes,  I just lose all of my health from what seems like one little "PewPew" beam. Meanwhile, he eats 3 Mechs bulldozing him at the same time for a minute straight. -__-

I've also noticed that many of the bosses are completely impervious to some of the "tackle" attacks. All-Star, Mech Tackles etc., just go right through the boss, but does no damage. I can understand not knocking them over like the others, but the damage should still be done, in my opinion. 

The "auto-tracking" that I was talking about earlier is also an issue. It's not game breaking by any means, but it's quite annoying when you're sniping/garlic drone/parrot drone a boss, and then they sprint from the other side of the map, hard left, hard right, up some stairs, PASSING ALL OF YOUR TEAMMATES, to attack you. Seriously, can we at least try to pretend that this game is fair. That's just ridiculous, in my opinion. There's also the Heroes that "auto-shoot" back on command. I get that the game isn't supposed to be a walk in the park, but a cactus 180 sniping me in half a millisecond is a bit much, or the chompers 180 gooping me.

I'm going to stop here, although, I feel like I could continue this on for another hour. Let me know what you guys think, am I being a little harsh, or is it a pretty decent rendition of what you've got going on as well?