Should I just be leveling through dungeons? It doesn't seem right with how much running around I have to do to get some XP going ... I definitely won't disregard any "ur doon it wrong" posts either because honestly, I might be. I try to do WvW but the que's range from 30 minutes to hours. You can't just drop in/drop out. And sPVP is my favorite part of the game so far but I can't level doing that!
Here are my thoughts/suggestions:
-I'd be slow to assume you're "doing it wrong"- it's not likely, cause you seem to be taking a pretty pragmatic approach (looking for XP from multiple sources). However, I would be interested in a little bit more info about what you are doing that you feel gives you unsatisfactory XP. 100%ing Fields of Ruin last night, I went from level 39 to 43.5 in about 4 hours, so a rate of more than one level/hour. Personally I can't argue with that, especially as the rate of leveling seems only to increase after level 40 in my opinion. I didn't repeat any events, though I did do almost every event that popped up in the area while there (there are a lot more than I realized in that zone!)
-Dungeons are great XP too of course, and become better XP the higher level you are, which is pretty awesome. But I definitely don't recommend
just leveling through dungeons at all, though. In fact, it's kind of detrimental to your enjoyment to approach the game from "what should I do next to level up?" at all. Just think "what do I want to do next?" and do it, and you'll get XP.
-Are you gathering every node you see, and making sure to complete your dailies every day? Remember, you get a chunk of XP for every milestone during your daily, plus XP for completing it.
-How's your crafting? Good for a handful of levels every time you sit down at the crafting station for a while with new discoveries.
-Bugged content (especially skill points which can keep you from 100%ing a zone you've got everything else in) is totally frustrating, of course. There's definitely less this week than there was last week in my opinion, and less last week than two weeks ago, etc. But there's plenty of work to be done. However, definitely a key point- bugged content shouldn't come anywhere close to keeping you from leveling at a steady pace, there's just that much XP to go around.
-Finally, if you're really looking for something different to get a handful of levels, you might be surprised at how much XP you can get by fully 100% exploring all of the cities.
-If sPvP is what you like best, you can thankfully just play that as much as you want without having to worry about leveling at all! Maybe it would ease your frustration to just stick to that for a while, and come back to PvE when you miss it- this might sound idiotic, but there's no reason to do anything you don't enjoy for what's ultimately an arbitrary purpose.
I'll admit that I feel I have a different mindset than a lot of people who comprise the highly-active segment of the MMO community. Maybe it comes from my stubborn refusal to ever pay a monthly fee for any game ever, but I can't imagine getting to a place where I would refer to the developers of a game as "assholes" or "dicks" or that bannable one (a brief aside: hilarious to consider all of these anatomical metaphors being simultaneously applied). Or rather, if I did get to that point, I can't imagine it would come alongside any desire to continue playing the game- of
course I understand being frustrated and even offended by changes made by the dev team and wishing things would go in a different direction sometimes, but on the whole I'm always conscious that these decisions are made in good faith, that there's no reason the company would
intend to upset their player base, and on the whole I ultimately enjoy the game an enormous amount and find it very difficult to imagine any given patch or class change (which there will be hundreds of by the time I'm done) being substantial enough to change this fact.
I really do wish I could understand it better- it makes my brief sojourns to the official forums kind of tough to stomach, because it appears to the casual observer that a
majority of the playerbase disagrees with me- that such changes really completely alter their perceptual enjoyment of the game, that some aspects of the game are so upsetting that the developers must be malicious toward their customers, that certain buffs or nerfs are so offensive that the game must be dying, and so on and so forth. I can see how, if one was paying a monthly fee, or used to paying a monthly fee, this kind of thing would be absolutely egregious. That is to say, under that model, every moment I spend waiting for content to be fixed or adjusting to a balance change I dislike is actually a potential
decrease in the value of an ongoing investment- one which, after six months at $10 a month, has already
doubled the cost of being able to play the game. I can actually only begin to imagine the frustration of being in this situation, because the longer it would take for things to get to the point of "getting my money's worth," the more money it would have cost me- one of a handful of aspects of the tradition pay to play model that has prevented me from ever being willing to do it.
On the other hand, with GW1 and GW2, every hour of enjoyment I obtain from the product solely
increases the value of the initial investment, just like a singleplayer game. In fact, in this case the value will in fact occasionally spike over time; we're getting free Halloween content of some sort quite soon, just over a month after release. This makes the frustrations and patience required as things are fixed immeasurably more tolerable to me. Any time spent that I'm not counting toward my "hours of enjoyment" causes the value of the product (at the moment, roughly 15 cents per hour for me) to stay the same for me rather than decreasing. To me this is a huge deal- it seems to not make much of an impact on others, which I can respect as well, but I do have difficulty understanding it.
I know I went off on kind of a rant here, but I guess I wanted to share the nature of my near-constant enjoyment of this product despite its flaws and the mechanism by which I've maintained my sanity while playing it
Note that I'm
not, as I have been accused of a couple of time, saying to any degree that "no monthly fee means everything is perfect." That's ludicrous, everything that's broken can and should be fixed; everything that's flawed can and should be improved; everything that's imbalanced can and should be tweaked. I'm merely saying that no monthly fee makes the wait tolerable (or, I can only hope, more tolerable if you're coming from a paid MMO), and makes it easier for me to continue enjoying the game without much frustration in the meantime.
In other words: On a personal level, I don't get why pistol whip was nerfed, but damned if I don't prefer an occasional inexplicable nerf to $10/month.
edit: The above is very helpful, here's the way the Wiki lays it out which I think is really handy:
