Doing actual guild stuff on Guild Wars 2

My humble guild consists of a mere six dedicated members. Originally, my own father, who used to join me on the original Guild Wars many years ago, was supposed to be part of the whole thing, but out of a surprise change of character, "work keeps him too busy to play Guild Wars 2". I suspect the sad truth behind that statement is fat, furry and chews bamboo.

In most games, guilds of this size offer very limited benefits other than maybe the guild bank or a fancy emblem. Hardcore endgame content, raids, competitive gameplay and awesome guild upgrades are usually reserved for well-organized groups of at least 50 members. 100+ with a proper raid-force, raid-leaders for every single class, forums and a Teamspeak-Sever is where the real fun begins. That is, if you actually enjoy rules, ranks and regulations as well as being called only by your class or function rather than your actual name. Only the raid leaders talk, the rest has to shut up and listen. And yes, I'm emphasizing extremes here, but I've experienced this exact same thing and it's not rare or unusual in any way.

GW2 has been out for less than a month and our fun little guild has access to nearly 50% of all upgrades. We have our own workshop, a nice little vault, guild armor... we may not be moving as rapidly as some of the bigger groups out there, but there is a steady sense of progress and I don't feel like we're gimped or missing out on anything. And after tonight I'm confident that we can tackle just about every bit of content the game has to offer, should we feel like it. We've just finished our first dungeon as a guild.

We're still trying to figure out whether we couldn't work out a proper strategy or whether bad game design allows for no such thing

Up to this point my personal experience with the dungeons in this game has been limited at best. I've played the very first dungeon (Acalonian Catacombs, level 30) a day or two after release and found it chaotic and not very fun, but blamed it on lack of experience and a possible need to fine-tune the difficulty some more. The game also forced me to beat the level 80 dungeon in order to finish my personal storyline, which was ridiculously easy. Other than that, I'm only familiar with farming an explorable mode dungeon (Citadel of Flames) for armor tokens. This is a bit of a special case, as the player base has already worked out every trick and shortcut, allowing them to farm the whole thing in 15-20 minutes with very little effort. Think WotLK random hc. Ogog1!

As it so happened, five of our six guys and gals were online tonight, all of us fulfilled the minimum level requirement for the Ascalonian Catacombs and so we decided to group up for shits and giggles and see how it goes. Our brave little band of adventurers consisted of hardened raid-veterans as well as casual dungeoneers and even a complete MMO newcomer with no dungeon experience whatsoever. We didn't use voice, as it was our first ever spontaneous group event, but I'm hoping to record our future exploits, voice chat and everything, to share them on here. Oh hey, Mr. Brick, if you're reading this - could you put the name of that voice changing tool thingie in the comments section so I can sound like a charr when we do this? :P

Our main problem with the dungeon was aggro and sometimes lack thereof. When a boss baddie decides it's spank the necromancer day, there is very little the rest of us can do to prevent his untimely death. If, on the other hand, one of my group members is trying to revive the necro and I want to keep the boss off of him in the meanwhile, we're all fucked, as I have no taunts or any other means of getting the bad guy's attention. One might argue that everybody has heals, dodge moves and the ability to take care of themselves, but in a dungeon, where even the trash is very capable of just one-shotting you, a pathetic once-per-40-seconds selfheal is as useful as reattaching a severed head with a band aid.

It was fun, but everybody seemed glad when it was over.

The dungeon itself wasn't bad at all. Traps would kill careless group members on multiple occasions until the more perceptive among us would find a way to disable them. Placing a boulder on a tread plate wasn't the most sophisticated puzzle in the world, but it encouraged at least some mild brain activity. Lore-wise, the whole setting is pretty great, too. Mad King Adelbern and his loyal underlings, whose hatred for the charr keeps them coming back as vengeful spirits.

Sadly, most of the good stuff was overshadowed by sheer chaos. Group member down - should I run there and pick them up or try and pull the baddie away from them, so they can get up on their own? And when I'm down, should I spend two minutes trying to revive myself or should I just teleport to the nearest waypoint and hoof it? And that's the next thing: With the ability to just revive and run back to the action, where's the challenge? For as long as at least one guy is alive and near a boss, you can rez and run back as many times as you want and the battle won't reset in the meanwhile. Respawn-zerging a boss may not be the most desirable way to go, but it's entirely possible. I don't like this at all.

I'm not sure what to make of this. To me, the fun part about a boss battle is figuring out the pattern, the strategy, understanding how it all works and adapting to the situation. Win the day with brains. That said, even simple tank & spank seems more enjoyable than respawn & run back. I really hope we're all just missing something here and there's some clever way to tackle difficult boss battles as a team, avoiding constant respawning like idiots, with very little regard to health and safety.

All my bitching aside, I had lots of fun. We died a whole lot, we revived each other a lot, there seemed to be very little concept behind what we did. But eventually the bad guys were dead, we bagged some phat lewt and we've achieved something as a guild. Better yet - now I know we can do all the dungeons and all the explorable modes ('hardcore') together, if we so desire.

Sure, it wasn't perfect. Some of us are worried that this is all there is to it. Brute-force your way through it, be persistent rather than clever or skillful. And yet, the whole thing is actually more fun than the 5+ guild members stuff I've done during my final days on WoW. I've got mad love for the Goatbusters and everything, but the sad truth is this: Doing ancient level 70 raids, because the guild is too small, weak and inexperienced to handle any proper endgame stuff was fun for a little while, but not very rewarding. But that's just the way it is on there: Play with a small amount of people you can stand and never do anything important or play the real endgame with 100 assholes you loathe. On GW2 we can do everything. And that's a pretty good thing.

-Cat