Look, I love Guild Wars 2. I’ve abandoned every other MMORPG for it and have no regrets. But any guildie who is honest with themselves knows there is room for improvement.

But if you’re wondering how I feel (and I just know you are!) about Guild Wars 3, then look no further than the latest chapter in the newest expansion pack for Guild Wars 2, “Visions of Eternity”.

For my money, too much of the last three expansion pack stories have boiled down to tedious lists of chores with a little bit of plot development in between. Sadly, I haven’t found the story in between the busy work to be very intriguing. The ideas were there, but the story just seemed like a vehicle to show off new maps and fast-track new users, providing easier ways of obtaining a skyscale mount and legendary armor than previously.

Janthir is an OK story, but still way too much busy-work. But it brings the Warclaw into open world.

So, I wasn’t really surprised when the Visions of Eternity story seemed to culminate with two or three rounds of “search the map for everything on this list.” I think ANet developers were all raised in a special clinic where they were forced to watch Lord of the Rings movies, alternating with episodes of Supermarket Sweeps.

I WAS surprised to find that after all the collecting, I had to spend a good 10 minutes consulting a book to process the various items I’d collected and build a device.

The fun doesn’t stop.

After using the device to finally break into a temple of some sort or other and confront the big bad…. nope. Now we have to do more chores. Like dragging heavy rocks around a simple maze… which takes forever. It goes on and on.

None of these puzzles are all that difficult. But they’re STUPID. And time-consuming.

Yeah, new maps and another path to the Skimmer mount. A new legendary item.

Some of the events are fun. The story is mediocre. The story mechanics and objectives are tedious and clunky.

But no one is buying Visions of Eternity for the story. They’re buying it for the new elite spec added to each and every class. They’re buying it for a very quick path to training that spec from 0-100 as most of the hero points in Castora are unprotected communal sites. (I trained three elite specs on three different characters yesterday.)

I hope ArenaNet takes a very new course with Guild Wars 3, but Guild Wars 2 seems to be all about grinding renown hearts and collections, and at some point I have to think that’s going to get really old.

I’m done washing windows for xp.