f13.net

So I get the game downloaded and I successfully log in.  I'm presented with a list of servers and I have to choose one to be my permanent home server.  The server I want to pick is full, and I cannot select it.  Since this is a permanent choice and I'll only get 5 character slots on just that one server ever, I apparently have to not play with my friends or leave and come back some other time.  This is not good.

So since I want to actually try out the game I pick a server that wasn't my first choice, thereby ensuring I'll never be able to play with my friends.  I go to character creation.  Looks like some nice choices with how you can make your character look.  Pretty much like GW1 but with some more options.  Based on how she dresses, my Necromancer's day job is apparently turning tricks as a hooker but whatever.  Then I'm presented with a number of questions about my character.  I haven't the foggiest idea on how the answers to these questions will impact my character, but I'm forced to answer them now anyway.  Woe be to me if it turns out my Necromancer should have been charismatic instead of fierce, I guess.  Personally, I think I should be made aware of what the impact of these choices are before they're set in stone.

For the most part I haven't been running into the framerate or lag problems other people have been reporting, but a few times my screen blacked out for a couple seconds and once the game stopped responding.  I don't know if that's an issue with the game or my computer though, which in the past has been flakey.

So I start to play.  Voice acting isn't bad, but it's not up to SWTOR standards.  For all the mocking TOR takes, the voice acting is very good and while I wouldn't say most of the voice acting here is bad or anything, the difference is still noticeable.  I'm apparently sent to a tutorial area, but it teaches me very little about the game.  I seem to slowly unlock my second and third skills by using the first one.  Unlocking other skills will take skill points.  I get to second level but I still don't have a skill point to use to unlock another skill.  How do I get more skill points?  Who knows?

I'm doing ok killing centaurs but then I'm supposed to defend some gate.  I stand there waiting, as people kill centaurs on the other side of the bridge.  No centaurs are making it across to where I am, which is by the gate I'm supposed to 'defend'.  Do I wait here?  Do i go back and try to find some centaurs to kill?  Who knows?  The only thing the quest text says is 'defend the gate'.  Eventually I successfully 'defend' it but I have no idea how.

I go inside the keep and kill some more centaurs that are coming in the other side (why did they leave *that* gate open?).  Things are happening fast, I apparently finish another quest that I never even saw that I got, and now I'm supposed to go out and kill some giant elemental thing.  Ok, I try to get close enough to use my axe.  I'm pretty careful, making sure I'm only close enough for the numbers on my skills to turn white instead of red, because in my experience in MMOs it's generally not a good idea to stand too close to something 20x your size.  I die in about 5 seconds from... something.  I have no idea from what.  The game is now telling me to 'FIGHT FOR MY LIFE!' and there's a couple of bars and four skills of some kind.  One bar is filling up on its own.  The other I guess I'm supposed to fill up somehow.  The game isn't telling me how.  The buttons don't seem to actually do anything when I press them.  They go on cooldown, there just doesn't seem to be any effect from any of them.  After about 10 seconds everything fades out and I end up at some hospital in the zone after the tutorial zone.  Did someone kill the elemental?  Did I fail?  Who knows?

After I leave the hospital, I'm told I'm supposed to help some people around the village.  I see on the map an icon that says 'Earn skill point'.  Ok, I want to go there since getting to second level didn't get me a skill point and so far the game hasn't told me what does earn skill points.  I head that way but an NPC warns me I should 'train more' or something.  Gee thanks, give me a skill point and I would!  Going back the way I came, a quest pops up that I'm supposed to catch some rabbits.  I go into the field and look for rabbits to catch.  There are no rabbits.  There are watermelons, but I can't seem to do anything to them.  The next field has some kind of other crops and some chickens, but no fucking rabbits.  Eventually, after wandering around the rabbit-free fields, the quest removes itself even though I didn't see any kind of visible timer.  I guess whoever wanted the rabbits caught eventually realized there were no fucking rabbits to catch.

At this point I realized I wasn't having any fun at all with my rabbit hunting axe-wielding hooker.  Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.  Maybe.  I'm far from an MMO novice and I can pick up most games really fast, but so far this one seems very user unfriendly to people trying it for the first time.

Booooo, hookerwear. Booooooo.

Sorry you had a bad first time out, perhaps it will pick up on your next try!

I have to say most of the instructions/quest text seems to be written by someone with very poor communication skills. I found the same vagueness frustrating me today too.

I am under the impression that this game is trying more little new things that many here are ready to swallow at first try. That's what I read between the lines of Nevermore's post, and what I felt myself in the initial 30 minutes of my beta experience.
Needless to say, I told myself to stop trying to box the game into all the bad habits the last 10 years of MMORPGs taught me and try to approach this as if I was an almost completely new player, and slowly got the hang of it, and totally loved it.

I feel I could write A LOT about this game but that would be boring and stupid, considering I've only seen the first 3 hours of the whole thing. I'll just bullet point a few of the things I loved the most so far.

- Little personal story bits at character creation. Generic, maybe totally useless in the long run, but definitely nice.
- Long character names with spaces in it. Sure it was in GW1, and yay it's here too. I LOVE that.
- Combat system, allowing me to swing my skills whenever I want wherever I wan, and the whole soft targeting system. It's really good and I hope every single game will develop on this from now on. Sure it was already in Age of Conan, great to see it here.
- Quest system. Public, open, with multiple ways to complete it. If it is "kill ten rats" it certainly feels a lot less like it.
- "Fight for your life" when you reach zero life is just a great, great idea. I love it!
- For pretty much the same reason I absolutely love the "Finish them" mechanics in PvP. Awesome.
- The map is gorgeous and useful. The little trail you leave behind you is so convenient.
- PvP feels "right" so far. But it's just a hunch, nothing I can put my fingers on yet and I definitely don't have enough elements to give it a proper review.

There is so much more that I like, and of course a few things I am not so fond of too, but this sums up my "first impressions", the things that stuck with me as soon as I logged out.

Yep, I played to level 11ish and I'm very satisfied with the game overall (even as a beta I'm enjoying it more than many other mmos at launch). However, I do agree with Nevermore that a lot of systems aren't explained adequately (like skills, traits, etc). Just add an introductory breadcrumb quest like in [insert favorite diku] and done.

Really liking the dynamic quests - in particular, the ones that the player can trigger by reviving an NPC / doing the equivalent of pushing the "do not press this button" button / etc.

I'm liking it.  It is pretty confusing at the start, especially since there's a lot of stuff to take in and a fair number of new mechanics to get used to.  One thing I was surprised to actually like was underwater movement and combat.  Not only do you start with weapons for both terrestrial and aquatic combat but the game automatically switches between them.   If you are a ranger it will automatically switch to an amphibious pet if you have one, and there is no breath holding bull shit as far as I can see.  The best part is that thanks to the weapon skill progression system (you learn a weapon's skills by using it) I now have a gun that shoots PIRANHAS!

This is very good advice, but very hard for experienced MMO players to break.  It took me quite some time to relax and take things slowly and figure out what the hell was going on.  I was really confused at first.

Events also need some serious tuning for the early rush.

Which is why the critical mass of players is so important. The events scale based on number of people locally. I'd be shocked if there were a tenth of the people in right now on the closed test side of things.

The world feels alive, there are some things I don't understand yet but for this MMO I actually feel interested in finding more about the systems and the world around me. I never really felt hugely lost honestly.

After getting killed repeatedly by the flame shaman, someone revives me and I go to run back to town to repair my equipment. Then an NPC runs up to me and says to me something like "YOU THERE! HOLD IT! We have a flame shaman at the river!" and I'm "~_~" and go back to fight some more. Im not sure how this iwll sustain itself after the launch rush, however.

People playing together, helping each other, TALKING, its nice to see a new MMORPG actually facilitate these behaviors. It hasnt been unusual to see a giant group form at one group quest and continue forward to many others, groups form, grow, shrink, grow again, you can stay with the mob however long you want or break off into smaller groups and tackle quests.

The ad hoc grouping is pretty cool, I'm also enjoying the complete lack of a quest log.  The little hearts on the map basically function like one, but they somehow aren't as annoying as having a to do list staring you in the face every time you log in.  Also, so far at least everything seems fairly local in scope, farmer brown may need rats killed but they are the ones on his farm and not some random farm 4 zones away.

If you see a heart, pretend that there's a big circle around it. You won't ever go outside of that circle.

Game really does need some better tutorials. It rethinks a lot of base assumptions of the diku. It comes to the same conclusions already reached in some places, mind you, but there are so many little differences which can throw people off.

Random thoughts after getting in this morning when the lag wasn't as bad.

It's a load of fun when it works, but I'm still surprised at how raw some bits are.

It seems to be very open about what you're supposed to do. Not as many breadcrumbs, a lot more exploration. That comes across as a lack of direction and polish because there are some directions.

Melee seems to be in a tough spot because things die before you get to them. Combat is extremely fast and its easy to die while spamming the heal button because some other abilities is still in the middle of executing.

The overflow thing needs to die a quick death. If you are going to instance people, you need to be able to swap instances to join your friends.

Looting is irritating, is there a setting for autoloot or something? This also becomes an issue at a large event because the event respawns before you can get through looting the last one.

Yeah. Check your options. Turn on autoloot. Looting's also bound to F, just like most interactions, so  you just run across a big fucking pile of corpses spamming F and pick up everything.

I read somewhere that the early events don't scale up beyond 10 people. I don't know if this will change or not but I can kinda see why they might have difficulty scaling it up further given the limited abilities and health pools of low-level characters. Plus I assume they want them to be completed pretty quickly to get people moving through the area as fast as possible.

Uh, no the alternative to the overflow thing is sticking you in a queue.  It is one of the best ideas the game has.

All they need to do is let you swap instances or dump the entire party into the same instance or allow people to go to the same instance as someone in their party.

You are missing the point.  If you get put into overflow is because that other instance was full, when it isn't a notice pops up to let you in.  The alternative to that is a queue.

I thought it was possible to 'play as a guest' on any other server you wanted for all non-WvW activities -- and if you were temporarily put on another server due to overflow you'd get the option to return to your originally chosen server once it cleared up enough.

Those are probably not working in this beta though...

I clicked on the guest thing and it said it wasn't in quite yet.

Doesn't matter because WvW *is all that fucking matters.*

I don't think this is a different server, it's a series of overflow instances. You can even be in a party with people and chat with them. But you can't switch so you're all on the same instance. If the instance is full, when a new party member joins offer to send the entire party to the overflow. Whatever. Lots of games manage this just fine.

Server transfers are free today, if anyone picked the wrong one. I believe they're re-evaluating the not letting you re-home when you delete every character though.

I've managed to play for 10 minutes of the norn area before hitting another insta crash bug, whee. I enjoy it, but the level 1 experience seems.. bland? Mostly because you have one ability, and level to 2 quickly enough that you don't get anything else. And they need a tutorial for people on How U Dodge, and How U Gain Skills (via leveling, but mostly via the skill-icon'd quests)

They're trying to do something far more expore-y with the main maps, and need to hand hold you through that concept via an actual tutorial. The idea is they don't hand out man breadcrumb quests, and instead your map says how many of N you have to do on that map and try to make your achievement hunter instincts level you. I liked it, for all of the 10 minutes I could play it ;)

Nope, fairly certain they are clusters of people from different servers.

Performance is wildly different between specs. Fair number of people are convinced it's way more CPU dependent than anything else.

Norn starting area is the blandest, in my experience.

I have a very vague memory of a dev saying something hadn't been moved to the GPU yet and it was more CPU intensive at the moment. It could have been another game, but I'm really not following anything else so I think it was GW2.

Is it me or the Auction House has something really cool going on? No idea if this was in GW1 too or what, but you can "backorder" stuff that isn't being sold by anyone at the moment? Colour me impressed.

GW1 had no auction house but, yes, the GW2 one (slow loading aside) is fucking nuts.

Just noticed, the "Outmanned" buff in the borderlands (WvW PvP), giving 33% buff to XP and loot to your party when severely outnumbered, is another awesome touch. Dammit, this game is good.

There's a known issue thread on the forums that states it's currently horribly CPU bound, and the beefiest machines will randomly get crushed by it.

Played for an entire day (Aussie guild filled up two guilds since they cap at 100 accounts). My card is not quite up to it because it is only medium spec-'d and I have a big screen (too poor to buy something with enough grunt atm) but bump the sliders down and it was fine and looked good. No crashes in pretty much a whole day.

It's a noble successor to city of heroes in that you can just get into a big group and pound mobs. With everything being shared, the zones littered with public events and the group dynamics very free-form you can just go to town. Plus with PvP giving you access to all skills immediately (which makes the PvP lobby a great place to mess with skills you haven't earned) and high level characters getting scaled down to the level of the zone you have a wide variety of places to explore (plus no power-levelers taking over zones).

That said it also loses a lot from trying to be different. The events can be sudden death if you are solo and a crazed zerg-fest if they are being over-run (the default for today) and in general the challenge level is all over the place. Of course it is beta and they still have some time to balance (they seem to work reliably) but it's more or less an inherent problem of the design. And the human mind is still excellent at seeing through them even though they've done their best to make them varied. The dream of a world with realistic dynamic events is still to be realised. Still, it's probably the first viable improvement over "do this quest, then do that quest".

With skills being tied to weapons there's less satisfaction or meaning to gaining a level. But I think this will grow on me. There's not really that much variety in terms of "builds" though. And I really worry about the role of melee. Playing a rogue was awesome in terms of animation and style, but being a melee in PvE and PvP is a very risky endeavour I suspect. It still has the guild wars fascination with conditions meaning some of the powers are quite complex, and some of them are "cluster" powers which over-write your skill bar. Having dedicated underwater powers is interesting, and thankfully no drowning.

A Guild wars game where you can jump and submerge, the shock.

The weakening of party synergies is great for "pick up and go" gaming, and not being dependent on building the trinity. It's not without cost though. It's going to be a substantial balancing act to avoid some classes being seen as lame ducks since there is no role segregation. And the group dynamics does have an inherent tendency towards zerg and rez-rushing. It's possible that in time the player base will fully integrate the subtle synergies that do exist while enjoying the greater independence but they still have to balance progression to the "average" gamer and they're the reason the trinity is made so obvious.

I also still hate the starting tutorial idea approach which lets you fight some awesome epic monster that has been gift-wrapped before dropping you back to reality... just feels like a silly bait and switch. The new CoH tutorial and lots of others did this and it bugs me.

Ultimately it looks like it will be fun, and quite expandable. With the lack of sub-fee being a really strong argument for its value.

(Edit)

The cities seem unnecessarily huge. The over-flow stuff works pretty well (and queuing is given as an option).

The mocking is for SWTOR spending an insane amount of money on high quality voice over and set-piece cinematics when most of it has marginal game-play value. The GW2 ones are more than good enough to explain the game-play attached to them.

The map has icons with "gain a skill point here" and "skill point gained" when you've done them. But you also get some for levelling (plus unlocking the slots).

Ok, maybe that's why I started to randomly get black screen flashes, then the game would stop responding.  It's not the same as the problem I had with other games, where my whole system would freeze up sometimes, so in this case the game might be the problem instead of my system?  Hard to tell, since I don't know for sure why my system can be flakey sometimes.

Marginal for you perhaps, but I can definitely tell the difference in quality and I much prefer the illusion of choice I'm presented with in SWTOR instead of being told how my character behaves in GW2.


Which the game itself never tells me.

I mean that I'm a Necromancer and get steam-rollered by a spawn because I tried to get close enough to use an ability.  Then while I'm down they all kill me in about one second.

Buffing the group up to match the number of people is fine, they just need to not focus fire on newbies.

The game needs a tutorial section, with "how skills unlock for weapons", "how you gain skillpoints", some basic dodging, how combo fields work, what world events are(and why they're far more of the content than story quests) and what the various buffs and debuffs do.

It seems like that's what the intro area is supposed to do, it just has no content yet. Instead I got a quest to go kill a large mob, turn that in and kill another large mob. And then fade to black and zone into the real game.

In GW1 I loved my Necromancer.  I could put together different skillset and be able to play a variety of radically different ways.  A melee with lifetaps, a ranged nuker or minion master.  Curses, conditions, whatever.  So far in GW2 all I can do with my Necromancer is be in either melee or at best medium (?) range wearing nothing but negligee and I'm dying constantly.  Apparently I as wrong earlier as there's only one bar to 'FIGHT FOR MY LIFE' but I still have no idea how you fill it to actually get back up again.

I'm really not liking the skill system at all.  It seems to be press 1 for your autoattack and watch your character fight by itself, while occasionally pressing another button if you've 'unlocked' the skill on that weapon while running around like a madwoman as the mobs eat your face off.  Of course, most of the other skills seem to have a cast time (in melee range? really?) so you can't run to keep mobs off you.  Clearly I'm terrible at this game but it's not exactly giving me much opportunity to learn how to play.  Aggro seems as obtuse as it was in GW1.

Also, last night I logged out apparently in the middle of a 'personal story' or something because now I have to start that chain all over again from the beginning.  That sucks.

The beginning of the game is frankly a mess. A bunch of shit happens and you're just kind of along for the ride, making the player immediately confused is no way to start an mmo. Your description of the confusion upon seeing those four choices when in downed state is emblematic of a lot of the problem - a bunch of options that are not explained well and the player is not given time to gradually understand. You are down, you know its a crisis situation, and you're presented with four choices with no explanation which is better, or why. So you just end up spamming keys. And I don't care for having my main combat skills tied to weapons, it's too much choice at the very start of a game. Should I spend time getting each weapon, then leveling it just to see what these skills are? How will I decide what's better? Am I gimping myself by using this weapon? Combat is so hectic, often with other players hitting the same mob, and with the jerky framerate, its sometimes even impossible to tell how effective you are in combat.

Overall much of the time, there was just too much shit going on to get a grasp on what was really happening on a mechanics level. The game needs to slow the fuck down and gradually ramp up to that kind of chaos as the player progresses.

Ah ok, yes that's happened to me quite a few times as well. Or the one-shot by the final boss of the tutorial. In the case of the earth elemental it's not even something I could avoid. There's no telegraphing, no red circle on the ground I'm standing in, but one second I'm standing there with full health beating on it and the next I'm in the downed state.

I'm guessing when they increased the difficulty between the last press beta and now they may have just slightly overtuned it  :awesome_for_real: I found one personal story quest for the Norn that was completely impossible to solo. At least half a dozen mobs, including a named, that all aggro at once and the named summons elementals just for good measure. My necro was ground into a greasy stain in seconds time and time again until I just finally just gave up.

Do you dodge? Not a flippant question. You really do have to dodge. Often.

That auto-death in the tutorial at the big boss is intended. It's their idea of a tutorial for how you get up from near death. They need better tutorials. This isn't the first time it's been brought up.

You basically don't gain skillpoints until level 5 cause you can't spend them anyway (except for one, in healing). At level 5 you unlock the first Utility Slot, so you can start spending points which from now on you should get at the rate of one per level. I know this cause the game told me when I reached level 5 with a little tutorial-like box. It could have been explained better, or earlier, but it wasn't that big of a deal to me. I figured it out, and my patience has been rewarded with an absence of frustration for not having my hands held too tight.

Maybe it's me, but aren't we talking too much about tutorials and too little about the gameplay?

And how the fuck do you dodge?  You know, GW1 actually had a pretty good tutorial for teaching basic game concepts.  There's no excuse for this clusterfuck.

Edit: The title of this thread is 'First Impressions'.  Tutorials tend to be integral to a player's first impressions of the game, since they teach a player how to actually play the game.

Either double tap a direction, keybind it to something else, or that giant DODGE button that looks like a guy right under your skill bar.

I'm kind of torn here. Because there really DO need to be way better tutorials. And the first thing I would do, if I were in a relatively small closed test with a lot more dev access, is give a post-mortem on the open beta and STRESS THAT BETTER TUTORIALS NEED TO BE THERE. But I couldn't say if I were in that closed test, even if I were. So we will never know!

But on the other hand, dudes (not necessarily dudes here, but dudes in general) really do need to chill out a bit. I'm thinking back to the very first diku MMOs I ever played. Their tutorials sucked, too. And I made do. Then we all look back at the ten years of diku gaming we did and we're thinking WELL THIS IS REALLY CONFUSING. Except it's not, other than when compared to the last ten years of baby food mental mush we've been spooning into our mouths. I mean, Christ, people are freaking out on the forums that they don't know where the quests are.

I have had a tendency, because I figured it out on my own, to think of this game as just an iteration on old formulas. But now I'm really rethinking just how revolutionary it is, based on what seems to be a loud minority reaction to the stuff people don't understand or don't know. Falc is right: tutorial or not, people really need to leave a significant chunk of their assumptions outside the door before they walk in. There are some really fundamental changes which I thought were mostly subtle but, I'm now realizing, really aren't.

Um, Guild Wars one managed to have a way for people in different instances to hook up and how hard is it to actually put people in the same group in the same overflow area?

There are a lot of fundamental changes from any other game you'd be coming from. And they're not explained, at all. The only reason I walked in knowing what to do is that I watched a shitload of videos from the press beta weekend and had them explain to me what half this shit was.

What I'm a little surprised by is the amount of hardware/driver issues showing up, considering the press event. Given the issues, either this is a really unstable build, or they lucked the fuck out with half the invited press actually being able to play.

The mistake you're making is assuming I (or someone like me) haven't left my assumptions behind.  The problem I'm having is the game itself isn't filling in that void with information of its own.  There's a reason why games of the past 'spoon fed mush' to players:  because many players don't find struggling to figure out basic game concepts to be fun.

Dodging works well when dealing with small numbers of foes.  A big event with lots of people is chaotic enough that it can be hard to time them.  (Yes, I know how to dodge.  Quite well...)

Someone make a bunch of people log off Fort Aspenwood so I can transfer.  All the servers where I know people are full, so I can't queue up onto them, and my attempts yesterday didn't work.

By no means I intend to tell people what they should or should not say about the game. Just wondering... who gives a fuck about tutorials? This is not rocket science nor Eve. You are gonna learn everything in a couple of hours, if you are really slow, and then gonna stick with all the other aspects of the game for weeks/months. I'm more interested in Arenanet crafting a game that works, has depth and content and I am glad they apparently put resources into that instead of making sure to babysit every single aspect of the first 2 hours in case someone wasn't willing to wait or figure things out simply because they aren't as cookie cutter as usual.

I dig. And there need to be better tutorials. But it's like the dodge button. There's a big DODGE button to the right of your health, over the hot bar (I said it was under, but it's over; I'm staring at it now). If you hover over it, it even says "double tap or press this to dodge and evade attacks". There has to be a middle ground between "we need more/better tutorials" and "I'm not going to press anything on my UI". I am not especially smart and I figured the game out pretty darned quickly.

Funny how I'm apparently stupid enough to not be able to pick up this game very quickly yet I picked up Eve (and literally every other MMO I've ever played, including GW1) very fast.  You know there's a problem when Eve has a better introduction to their game than GW2 has.

I don't know what you want, dude. You used the word stupid, not me. I just don't find this fundamentally more complicated than the first time I played WoW. Which doesn't mean that it doesn't need more and better tutorials. It just means that folks need to chill because nobody was talking about WoW's tutorials after the first week.

Not stupid at all. Lazy.
I am sure you weren't this lazy when you started playing EVE, but the more the gaming industry has tried to open up to more people through extreme handholding, the lazier everyone got, including older players.
Also, EVE didn't have a good introduction, but they had to work hard on one (and it took them years) because the game presented a WALL to new players.

Come on.

Anyway, sorry for the prolonged derail. Back to the gameplay. Or the lack of tutorials.

If you don't see the difference between how WoW starts their game and GW2 starts, then I don't know what to tell you either.

Lazy is devs not wanting to explain their mechanics anymore. Instead they put them on loading screens and such and just hope you've seen the loading screen tip before you actually need to know it.

Where, exactly, are combo field effects explained? They're not in game, they're not in the tooltips, and they're a huge part of the game. You know how they work because you read dev interviews and blogs outside the game. Which leads to a SHIT experience for new players.

edit: and the difference with this and WoW is that at level 1, there's barely any mechanics to explain and it's unpossible to die. WoW doesn't throw you into a raid encounter in the first 5 minutes and say "good luck!", if they did they wouldn't have nearly the subs they have.

Yes, clearly the poor introduction to this game is my fault.  I'm the lazy one, not the Arenanet developers who half-assed the introduction to their game.

Anyway, I'm not going to argue about this anymore.  When you wonder why more people aren't playing this game after it's released, be sure to blame the lazy players and not the mistakes Arenanet is making.

There is an explanation of dodge in game, it's tucked away in the PVP lobby.  When you first go to pvp there's a small lobby that explains how to cap an area, how to deliver a death blow and one other mechanic.  From there you go to the pvp lobby and can enter WvW or just wander around hitting different heart markers.  One of them is about dodging and even has practice bots.   I made an alt to see how PvP leveling looks and while it's possible it looks like it will be a very slow path to unlocking skills.

I'm trying to be constructive here. I'm granting that probably you and Falc are both right. More tutorials, better tutorials, and you're lazy. These are not mutually exclusive propositions.

Ok want another real pisser? You cant mail stuff you your alts. Wtf??

My understanding is that that's temporary. I could be wrong, though.

That's right.  Keep telling yourself that I'm 'lazy'.  I hope Arenanet has the same attitude as some of the people in this thread in regard to criticism.  We'll see how well that works out for them.

HOW CAN I PLAY THIS GAME WITHOUT TUTORIALS? HOW CAN ANYONE? I BET NOBODY GOT PAST LEVEL 3!

Also, the alt mailing thing. Bank knowledge is all shared to my knowledge, which I just remembered. So you can switch that way.

So I went into the keep where the skill point thing is.  Turns out you just buy a book from the guy.  Double click the book for a skill point, straight forward enough.  But what do I do with this book now?  Double clicking it did give me the skill point, but it didn't consume the book.  It just seems to take up a space in my very small inventory now.  It says 'Account Collectible' so is this something I should keep?  I don't know of any way to transfer it to another characters, as mail doesn't work for that (tried that last night).  Is there an account bank?  I would just destroy it because I need the inventory space but I have no idea if there's anymore use for it.

There was something but it's not there currently and I can't elaborate because it would be :nda: if I were in the closed test. Which I'm not. You don't need to keep it in the beta.

But yeah, the bank is an account bank.

It needs more tutorials. It's not unplayable without it, but it's disappointing in a game that's reached this point as are the hardware bugs.

The bank is available to all characters on the account.  You can probably dump Arena Net isn't big on explaining every little bit of the game, but they do tell you if an item has a utility beyond being a random piece of loot and making sure that even if you throw away something vital that you can fairly easily get a replacement.

I think you're missing the point, it sounds like if people are in the full instance they can't leave to go to the one their friends got overflowed to. That is a big problem.

OMG! I got to level 6!  How did I do that?!?

Being able to struggle your way through the game and having fun doing it are not the same thing.  There are some things I actually like.  I like the way the minion skills have separate uses that affect the minion after their summoned depending on the minion (sacrifice for health, explode).  I like the idea of the Necro shadow form thing, though in practice it doesn't seem to accomplish much.  I love the art and visuals, aside from the hooker clothes.  But when the main challenge of the game early on isn't the quests or mobs you fight but the game itself, then there is a problem.  You can dismiss that as the fault of the user, but you'd be extremely foolish to do so.

Well, that's why this book specifically confuses me.  The name is in blue, as if it's important.  But it seems to have no use at all after you double click it for the skill point.  It sounds like it'll have a use eventually, it just doesn't right now.  Which is fine, this is still a beta after all.

Remember when I said that the tutorials were fine and shouldn't be beefed up? That was awesome.

And yet you still felt the need to argue.  Funny, that.

Yep. Because even with tutorials being desperately needed in spots  you're being a huge blubbering baby about it. Both things can be true. And from there, I'm really NOT going to argue about fucking tutorials anymore.

So instead of the convenience of mailing items to other characters they want you to go all the way back to the main city and put it in the bank then run there on the other char and fetch it out?

And you're being a defensive fanboy about it.  If you're going to take criticism about a game personally, then maybe you should just take a step back and get some perspective.

Just hit level 14 on my necro cat... structured pvp is kind of strange in this game, it feels more like a TF2 cp_* map or a LOL dominion match than anything. I don't think that's a bad thing, but ymmv. Haven't tried wvw yet, but from the wvw summary screen it looks like we managed to pick the underdog server anyway, so yeah.  :awesome_for_real:

Anyway, game definitely has balance issues (but then, most betas do). As an ash legion charr there was a mission where I had to kill a mesmer boss 2 levels above me along with 4 of his guards. I had two (mostly useless) allies helping... or rather, dying while beating on the mesmer illusions. The boss actually followed me to the spawnpoint and corpse camped me for 3-4 deaths (rezzing my allies was obviously out of the question) until I figured out a way to burn him down. Earlier there was another charr boss that 1-shot me as soon as he aggroed. Yeahhhh... no.
It did get easier / more fun after I unlocked weapon switching and got a staff... I could mark everything to oblivion and kill pulls of 3-4 mobs without problems (shades of coh). The starter self-heal skill is shitty, I dumped it for well of blood asap. The death form thing is great for deferring defeat (you can hop into it at 1 hp and stay alive for a ridic long time). After unlocking the fourth skill, it becomes a very potent pbaoe ability as well. It really shines in pvp though, since there are lots of traits that buff it to give knockdown immunity, give various buffs/debuffs when entering/leaving it, etc... not to mention it has a version of warlock deathcoil. My favorite 'shapeshifting' ability in pvp has to be plague form though, it just messes people up so bad.

e: speling hard

While I sit here futilely hitting the login button it occurs to me that man they sure underestimated their capacity, but I guess they got our money so dont have to care.

I hear they punch old ladies in the office. Old ladies they rented with the money you gave them.

I'm betting their Ops folks were overruled on "we need more than 2 weeks to get more hardware in place with that sweet preorder money"

This game is decidedly 6 months out from release. I've loved the bit I could play, but it needs a lot of bug stomping, and a content/tuning/polish pass.

If it's a reason for optimism, GW1 had their preorder beta weekend events MONTHS AND MONTHS prior to release. I could totally see them doing the same thing if they need to.

There's a difference between a preorder box with a $5 "deposit" (or no deposit at all) and a "pre-purchase" at $60. It's not big money to me, but people are going to expect a product. I think they're also on shaky ground in terms of consumer stuff.

Ya I wish I could get Visa to reply with when they go to get the cash.

Better tutorials are always a good thing but i don't really see what was complicated or confusing about the game.  Seemed pretty straight forward and simple.

As far as actual quibbles go i am pretty annoyed my greatsword mesmer doesn't have any actual "hit the guy with your gigantic sword" skills.  I certainly did not pick greatsword to be a ranged class.

I agree better tutorials are needed, but it's not like the game isn't playable without them. For bugs, the biggest thing I've really run into is I was assigned a random server on start up and server transfers aren't working...so I'm fucked on that end. Besides that, players can't delete all of their characters and then choose a new server freely, then some buttons in the UI aren't full working (start a new character then choose to go to the mists immediately, it won't let you) so just small stuff.

Otherwise, I'm enjoying it.

Combat has a certain rhythm to it that I both like and hate. A lot of skills aren't instantaneous so I feel like this itch that I should be doing more when really I've done all I could for the time being. Shadowstep skills feel awkward especially the ones that let you blink in and out, beta issues most likely. Maybe the thief class isn't for me, even though those promo videos made the Charr thief look so  :heart:

Nevermind, Im getting used to it now. Love it.

I understand the importance of dodging and do it as much as possible. It's just in the particular instance of the earth elemental, there's no cue telling me when I need to. With Barradin and Jormag there's a fairly obvious windup letting me know when it's time to get the hell out of dodge (ahem!) but the elemental doesn't really seem to do much of anything.

If it's meant as a tutorial for the downed state, then yeah, it could do with some work. Even if they just allowed us to view what our downed skills do without having to be in the state it would help. But I assume there's a good few months between now and release so I'm hoping to see things improve in that time.

They really should pop up some sort of message there like when you get your first skill point to let you know it was intended and what happens when you die.

Think you're misunderstanding me. The auto-down attack is not dodgeable and should be happening to EVERYONE in the fight at some point, just not all at once. It's an automatic thing. This is their idea of training you what being down means and how to get up. It's pretty crummy.

Oh, ok. Yeah that does seem like a rather clunky way of going about things. Is that why it always happens when the little minions spawn, so you have something you can kill to rally off of? Hopefully they come up with something a bit more elegant before release.

These open world events are fun now, but will be soul crushing in a few months when the novelty of the game has worn off.  Having groups of 3 and 4 level 8 mobs charge a level 3 area isn't good game design, particularly when the number of low level players will dwindle with time.  We saw this in WAR.  We saw this in Rift.  World events happening at the low levels require a constant population of players to maintain interest.  Three months after release, new players will get crushed by these events due to a sheer lack of player numbers in the low levels.   

They scale. Trust me, those events are nothing like that big when there aren't lots of people around.

You can put it in the bank and have other characters read it for an easy-to-get skill point.

It also says account collectable.  The bank has a collection tab, though nothing for books at the moment.  You can put crafting materials, minis, and food in the tab.  (PS: right-click any crafting material in your inventory and you can send it to the bank.  From anywhere.)

The posts completely dry up as soon as the game lets us in, hah.

Finally had enough room on Fort Aspenwood to be able to transfer there.  With 15 minutes left for free transfers if they didn't extend them.

What does "effective level" mean?

I've just gotten frustrated and wandered off to play other things. The three intro areas I could play? I will adore this game.

The complete lack of response if we should even expect an attempted fix this weekend from ANet says either they don't have near the support staff ramped up that they need to actually run this thing (likely), or that they were expecting as smooth a run as the press weekend and all their actual coders skipped town for the weekend and will come back to 4.7 million crash reports on monday.

Anyone on that can toss Pheyde an invite? I lost my guild somehow.

It's the level your character is scaled down to when you go into a lower level area.

For all the people bitching about running all over the place:

THERE ARE FUCKING WAYPOINTS EVERYWHERE.  Use them.  Port all over the fucking place.  Traveling in this game is easier than any other game in the world.

TERA's combat is significantly better. And I guess I've come to realize this matters to me more than anything else in an MMO. The moment to moment fun of combat. Not these stupid cutscenes that GW2 has with characters voice acting the most banal, uninspired drivel you'd expect out of some B-grade euroRPG. I mean, SWTOR went balls deep on story and voice acting, and it still wasn't good enough to carry a game. This kind of drivel is just thin tasteless frosting. For me, these last few MMO's I've played have really exemplified what matters and what doesn't - some developer-enforced story I am almost always going to fast-forward through because the writing is hackneyed shit in even the best scenario. My MMO story comes from the random stuff my character does and the real people my character interacts with along the way, full stop. Not this force-fed pablum like GW2's cutscenes that are on the dramatic level of some poorly acted high school play. This shit SUCKS, even at its best in SWTOR, this shit SUCKS and comes off as juvenile and contrived and poorly acted. What matters is how fun is the repeated interactions my character has with the world. How fun is it to slice some motherfucker up, for the twentieth time, hundreth time, how fun is that carving motion.

They're not in competition. One is the action and the other is giving flavor for why you are mashing buttons.

It's a fun pop-corn game, get in and kill stuff, but I do wonder about the depth. And I have to say my interest in beta-testing something I've basically bought is really minimal. I feel sort of obliged if I'm playing for free, but since I'm not I don't. And given how crazy the action is popping up little survey boxes is generally met with a quick click on cancel.

Though in general at this stage they're not going to change anything fundamental and they probably have a fully populated todo list before launch.

As someone who's henchmen/heroes carried them in GW1... This is a strange change.

I liked the little intro thing (Human Thief), which went well enough, but after, the events while helping the farmers were frustrating as the baddies seemed a bit overpowered (and I don't seem to have any way to heal yet), so I got stomped on once or twice.  Not entirely sure I understand how the fight-for-your-life minigame works.

I was annoyed after hiking a long ways to get to the next part of my quest to *then* be told "recommended for level 3" -- if I had known that up front I might have fought more critters before hiking over to the next waypoint.

Every class at level 1 gets a self heal in slot 6. The thief one is a combined short stealth and heal, "Hide in Shadows".

The map does show the suggested level if you mouse-over, but they really should put that on the mini quest tracker they use.

The down skills are basically 3 "stop hitting me!" skills and a 4th bandage skill to get you back up without outside assistance. Most of the time you'll either get ressed if the zerg wins or get finished off if no one is left standing.

It has this already, the number in brackets after the name of the quest/event is the suggested level.

This thread cements my personal First Rule of MMOs: never take part in betas.

I'm not sure if it does for story-line quests though.

It does.

For once, I am taking your advice.  :awesome_for_real:

Through a day or so of play, I have managed to reach level 16.  (I believe the beta is capped at 20.)

That has been enough time to learn all my weapon skills except for one underwater one, which I could do in about five minutes if I desired.  I have six trait points invested into Death Magic, so now when I kill anything there is a chance of a tiny minion being summoned.  Having done all the skill challenges in the Norn starter area, I've bought a healing skill, two semi-pricy skills, and have 9 points saved up.  Overall I've got a good hang of the Necromancer skills, with my two sets allowing me a close range dagger fighter and a long range staff support.  I would really like a third medium range scepter/focus option as it's pretty fun, too, and has the potential for a ton of damage.

Exploring all of the Norn starter area got me a mail with a random level 14 green (qualities: white -> blue -> green -> gold) piece of armor and weapon, and 20 crafting resources.  The last thing I did this morning was complete the Raven's Rookery challenge with one of the FML guys who was randomly in the area.  (Bann, I think, but I might be confusing him with the other person on this morning.  I'm bad with names. :|)  It's doable solo, but having a few people to handle the fighting is nice because the knockbacks and fears have a high chance of pushing you off.  Also the final Leopard Shamans are tough.

Been having alot of fun doing the wvwvw despite it being very zerg-like now. Once people get to higher levels and have more money and experience zergs will probably end up being like the charge of the light cavalry (a few cannons on the keep walls should vaporize an average zerg in seconds if it just stands there hitting the keep door)

Keeps will always involve some level of zerg, it's kind of the point. Lots of folks will die, solid planned defenders will do well, but the idea is that you don't bring an appropriate sized force to take something in an objective based game: you take overwhelming force and make sure you take it.

I don't really get why people think "the zerg" is bad in an open world pvp system. As far as I can tell, it's existence is simply how shit is supposed to work. As long as there is still something to do if you don't have a large force available, the game is working as intended.

I agree entirely with this post, except for the idea that combat is the only interesting thing.  I enjoy exploring, playing the auction house, socialization, and the emergent things that come along with good MMO's.  But none of those things are ever to do with any story that is actually presented by the developers, which is always trash and always irrelevant to my MMO experience.  I think that MMO's are a terrible story telling medium.  The only story that matters in an MMO is the story of my gameplay experience.  Where I went, what I did, how I did it.  Hopefully with other people involved as well.  When that shit goes on total rails to support a half-assed developer-created unimmersive (it's mandatory that it is unimmersive due to the MMO platform) story it ruins the game for me.  

I think with GW2 it sounds like there is so much else to do that hopefully ignoring the personal story won't be a big deal.  With SWTOR, if you didn't enjoy the story, you were fresh out of luck because there wasn't much else there.

How do you get to the WvWvW if you dont mind me asking?

Pull up your hero panel and it will let you teleport to the pvp lobby and after the tutorial there's a gateway from there.

I had fun with it and if I have fun with PVP, it's got to be pretty decent.

After playing for 15 minutes Im quickly realizing razor wire is going to be one of my favorite skills.

Finally got a lot more gameplay without crashing (but now all my characters are stuck in crash-on-load locations again), and game balance and crashing aside: when finished, this game will eat my life. I adore the actual functional gameplay inside. I have a feeling the reason we're all dying so much is they may have altered leveling XP a bit. You spend a lot of time between levels 1 and 5, where all the heart quests and events go from levels 3-9 in that basic area. So things hit like a truck.

Mesmer is a lot of fun, but anything but mainhand sword seems to do dick all damage right now. Rangers are a lot of fun, and Elementalists are really neat to play if you switch forms and combo yourself. Game still needs a lot more in game documentation about what the heck is going on. I love the scout NPCs that will give you a walk through of the nearby area and display all the quest locations and vendors/uncover your map. Nice touch.

The trick to mesmers is to get lots of illusions out.

Yeah but how is a difficult question. Some skills always produce illusions, some skills sometimes do but sometimes don't, and then illusions will spawn randomly when just auto-attacking mobs for no reason at all.

I really, really would like to see advanced tooltips in the game - casting time would be helpful for example!

How is the response of the character's actions to keypushin' on a scale of instant and awesome (WoW) to eh it's ok (SWTOR) to this is kinda mushy (CoH) to hey I told you to do something are you going to do it today (WAR)?

I haven't come across any skills that only sometimes spawn an illusion. Are you using the skill just as the mob is about to die? Illusions vanish when the mob they were cast on dies. As for the auto-attack bit, the scepter one is a 3 step chain skill (ether bolt > ether blast > ether clone) so every third strike will summon a clone who also casts ether bolt. Sadly the only way to see that is either read the wiki or mouse over the skill while it's chaining and read very quickly. It doesn't even show in the 'Weapon Skills' section of the hero panel and is something I think they need to include in it, along with Necro death shroud abilities and downed state abilities.

Good, but melee is a bit wonky since it will let you push buttan when out of range, with no actual indicator of such. So there's a bit of swinging at air going on (auto skills will only swing in range, but anything you press will happily attack the darkness)

Otherwise, press buttan, effect happens. Most effects appear to be interrupt able if you need to dodge.

Lanty: Yeah, I did the millions of illusions thing. I mean like, winds of chance and ether bolt both did 7ish damage a hit, while the sword spam attack did 20-30. It took years even with three illusions and a phantasm to kill something with the staff, which was even more noticeable when skilling it up and you had nothing but the funky spam attack. It's probably just a balance pass thing. The sword second attack is absolute murder (AE sword slice spam, and you're invulnerable while it channels)

edit: nothing has a chance for illusion, there are some conditional illusions (if you block, spawn illusion. otherwise no dice). I love the mesmer system, and the greatsword seems hilariously good when I played with it in the pvp practice island. Just by accident I wound up with three sword spamming illusions of doom. I just feel like the basic attacks for the condition based weapons leaves much to be desired for the start of the game.

Haste wall thingy makes every other class unbearable to play, though. Wheeeeeee

Yeah the non melee mesmer do jack shit for damage, and greatsword is not a melee weapon.

The greatsword seemed pretty decent when I was messing around on the pvp tutorial island (side note: see ANet? You CAN make tutorials! This one is so awesome it lets you dick around with siege aiming all you want!), it's just that mesmers seem to take a giant direct damage hit when they are using a set that applies conditions. This may get better with traits for condition damage, but level 1-6? Kinda takes a year and a day to kill things compared to walking up and just oneshotting it with blurred strike.

I pvp'd for a bit on the thief. It was ok. Then I switched to a staff elementalist. Oh my. That was a lot of fun. Now I'm not sure what I want to focus playing.

I think I might have to play with the character planets a lot. The classes are a lot more limited than gw1.

And razor wire is amazingly fun.

So how is this game on lower end machines?  Is it like GW1 where it can be played with much older hardware?

Guess I should have read the description.  I assumed it was some kind of stealth thing and wasn't super useful in the situation I was in...

I did some of the random team pvp today.   I hit the go button and went straight into a map, it took a while to get used to but by the end I was actually able to be effective with my Ranger.  I had what was probably the coolest pvp fight I've ever had when I chased a Mesmer up onto the roof of the clock tower which is in the center of one of the two maps that matches spawned for.  We must have fought over every inch of the roof before I finally killed him and it felt like I was in the middle of a movie what with effects going off all over the place and all kinds of funky leaps, dodges and swings.  The maps feature multiple cap zones and the odd usable seige weapon.  There's not much time to do much planning before the doors drop so it helps to be flexible.  

We also tried a dungeon crawl but when the guy in front says minimum level 30 he really means it.  There's no apparent way to teleport group members to the entrance and the group got split across different instances 2 out of the 3 times we tried to go in.  When we finally did get into the same instance we were a 17, 16, 11, and 9.  I'd say we lasted a good two minutes into the first fight, which occurs as soon as the door from the instance lobby is opened.

Considering  I've been playing a class race combination (Charr Ranger) that I wasn't planning on playing in live, I've had a great deal of fun.  If they announced that the launch was in May I'd be concerned about the state of the game, but given their current when it's ready stance I'm not sweating the mostly small stuff.  Hopefully when the next beta weekend happens they'll have made some visible progress on the bugs, stability and usability issues that have shown up this weekend.  

So I just had a mystic chest drop and thought I might as well use the key I had. Got an XP potion, 3 krait tonics (picture of results below) and...another mystic key! :grin: Looks like they're thankfully not taking lessons from Cryptic.

This.  I couldn't even tell you what it was but the pvp seemed very... cinematic i guess.  Specially one on ones.

They are... but some people really like it. Lots of the people I was gaming with were discussing all the characters they knew from the Guild Wars books. I didn't even know there are books, and certainly wasn't going to hunt them out. The trick is to not spend too much development effort on it. And GW2 has certainly spent a whole leap less than SWTOR.

I didn't mind them. A short conversation to give some flavor and then a short customised instance with some lore hooks. But you could fast forward through conversation and just follow the mission log or skip them altogether and it doesn't look like it would hurt you.

The trait system is either a clever piece of game balance or a random kludge.. I can't tell which . You have to spend 70 points (at level cap) on one of 5 areas which which when filled to 30 points give you 3 modifiers, 3 picks from a pool of 15'ish modifiers and 2 numerical boosts (eg. accuracy and power). It seems for many classes a given trait will reinforce a selection of 4 powers, or maybe even a specific weapon, so it encourages specialization. But it also forces a trade-off in that you might be boosting powers you don't want to ever use and having to take points from generally useful numbers (like more health).

It actually gets quite complicated and some of the modifiers have a meaningful change on how your character plays. It was both exciting and confusing at the same time. There's not quite enough detail in the info pop-ups to fully understand how it will play out though, I can see build discussion will have quite a lot to talk about.

A lot of the powers are also based on the interplay of conditions (as expected from a GW1 successor). Multiple classes give the same effect, for example "bleed", and it stacks either in intensity or duration. Buffs work the same. And there's lots of powers to cure or move conditions, traits and gear which modify their power and stacking buffs. I'm guessing a lot of the PvP and group PvE is going to be about managing conditions and buffs.

I'm determined to make a minion-less support necro in this game. With dual daggers, wells (PBAoE) and modifiers it looks possible. There's a couple of other weird but workable results of their class system. A warrior rifle-man looks really solid (I hate pets) and you can play a guardian, which is considered a tank class, as a back line support type through your choice of weapons, skills and traits.

For reference - I'm running an e8400 (core2duo 3.0ghz), 4g ddr pc6400 ram, and an ati 4870. In structured I don't lag even the tiniest bit with settings on medium+ at 1900x1200. For WvW I was absolutely fine until it was roughly 40v40v40, or more, in the main castle (which is huge) and even then it was still playable just noticeably choppy

So basically, everything except the largest of battles are fine on a comp ~4+ years old. Older than that would probably work okay in structured pvp and pve, but WvW would have trouble would be my guess.

Hating pets in this build is pretty much the way to go. Only mesmer pets are useful that I saw, and mostly because they're intended to die in 5 seconds.

Ranger pets are pretty much perma-dead.

Next beta session try a greatsword. Also someone told me the illusions come out every 3 casts, not random.

Not in the slightest. I was running around with about 20fps while in SWToR I get 45-50. And that was with everything on low.
That's on an e8400 and a Ati 5770.

I'll need an upgrade to play this at all effectively.  On lowest settings I'm still getting maybe 20fps on my 8800gtx.  Yes, I'm well aware of the age on that card.   :grin:

They did mention the client is currently massively CPU bound, so a new card might not push you that much forward. It will be interesting to see how their optimization goes.

It's not bad at the moment. My 650ti is underpowered for playing full screen at full resolution (2600x1440) but it managed okay at low settings. Though of course once you're in the middle of 80 models it still lags, but then precision has generally gone out the window before that time.

I'm hoping they tweak exp. I really would like to run the charr area with a Charr, and the Norn area with a Norn. Having to hit other areas to catch up level-wise is somewhat annoying.

I didn't see it as being that bad (up to L12), but there is an assumption in their plan that people will run events more than once. If it doesn't work I believe you will be XP tight and it's a poor investment in content on their part.

That said you get a huge chunk of XP for exploring and a fair amount for crafting.

If release can give me 1/3 the rush I had these past 3 days then I GW2 will be "the game" for me for a long time to come.

Spent the bulk of the last three days doing the WvWvW stuff (meh I hate that acronym already),  played with an Engineer and an Elementalist... Elem is the class for me at this point, such flexibility.   Managed to hit lvl 21 /shrug which isn't significant in an epeen way but in a, hitting lvl 80 will happen fast nugget of info.  

hmm, some very large fights that were very low on lag, I was impressed (swtor's Illum eat your heart out).  Open field, keep D, keep takes, random solo, pugging, 15 person guild *raid* (not enough $$ to buy the raid option), etc.  It was all good.

After the dickbeating in so many other games, I am so very happy to see a game with 3 sides going head to head with the exact same skills/classes/races/professions avail. to all. None of this "well they are kinda, sorta the same" BS.

time to sleep, but this little Elem is pretty happy.  

I mainly PVEd this weekend, got up to finishing my class quest. Early on I was pretty damn confused. Things kept happening, I wasn't sure what I could do, what I couldn't do and so many deaths. A lot of the respawn rates are pretty crazy if it's just you clearing mobs. After I got in to a bit more of a groove, found out about my bank and crafting, started to not be bothered about events and I ended up having a lot of fun. Some of the big events are pretty damn fun, and my com was holding up but my ping wasn't and I didn't realise how integral dodge was; I would've gotten quite a few -50dkps. Really enjoyed crafting once it clicked for me, and didnt mind using the AH at all.

Is there any way to map dodge left and right to mouse buttons?  I mouse move and found having strafe and dodge on the keyboard to be awkward.   

Beyond that I leveled two classes to about 10 (necro and warrior) and found the game to be solid but uninspired.  I'm sure that I'll play this to cap on at least one class, but I'm currently not feeling the hype. The early pvp was REALLY slow paced and lacked the level of tactics that I'm used to.  Seems that LOS played a more significant role than abilities did. 

Now, if they will allow me to completely avoid the loading times of the cutscenes I'll be a much happier customer. 

I'm naturally an explorer so I really liked GW2.  There were all kinds of nooks and crannies to investigate, at least in the lowbie areas.

I also really liked how emergent working together was.  Oh, look a new event pop-up and a circle on the map -> everyone runs to check it out, lots of mayhem ensues, awards are given and then everyone goes on about their business.  Also, not once did I have to respawn, someone always gave me a hand up, I think mostly because it's so prominent on the mini-map when someone is down.

Instant. :heart:

(Pet special abilities felt slow, though.)

There's a casting time though. I certainly cursed that more than once as I died watching the little icon on my heal animate.

I found that almost every spell will cast while you are running, even if it has a cast time. Dodging will interrupt it.

The pet abilities seemed to have a long cast time that wasn't displayed anywhere. I'd press the wolf howl buff and nothing would happen. But out of combat if I watched, it just took him like 3 seconds to finish casting it.

The melee channels/cast abilities seemed fine or painful depending on the class. Some of the guardian ones with the starter mace were crazy long animations (the third swing of their spammable, their #3 AE), while the mesmer blurred strike was a long channel, but did damage through the whole thing. I never felt like anything but the pet was unresponsive though.

I'll hunt down some fun screenshots other people took of WvW (which I couldn't zone into without crashing :( ), saw one showing that yes, a barely visible keep next door can shell you with Trebs. They have an absolutely crazy range.

This game focuses on Explorer and Socializer to a much greater extent than most other games have.  I can see it having a huge draw for folks like us.

I do love that the rez mechanic is very visible on the map, and used for all NPCs and ranger pets as well. Which just trains players from a low level to always rez anything they see. It gives XP!

I had a great time.  Spent the most time on an Engineer.

--Combat is FAST.  This is a good thing.  It felt weird to stop in the middle of battles to see what the abilities were, but once we all know what the abilities are this should only add to the fast pace.  There is also extra skill involved with moves that "leap" you to the enemy.  You don't automatically jump to your target; if you're too far away you'll fall short.   You have to be familiar with the distance of the move you're choosing and actually aim yourself.

--Intuitiveness:  While I found combat intuitive, I didn't have the same experience with knowing what the heck to do.  It was more like:  Event Nearby...holycrapwavesofmobs...you win!  Quest is happening...did you know you had this quest?  Go to these 8 places and do quests!  RUN!  SHOOT!  But I imagine that over time it will make more sense.  I'm slow anyway  :grin:

--PVP:  I tried some battlegrounds.  Being bumped to max level with all of the abilities was daunting at first, but overall it's so very nice.  As someone who has been consistently behind the gear curve for most of my MMO career, this is sweet revenge.  Even fighting against obvious premades wasn't an automatic lose.  Skill finally has weight in MMO pvp.  If you're like me and you've been figuring out how to fight people with better gear than you, your persistence and ingenuity will pay off in GW2.

--WvW:  couldn't figure out how to get into this.  Is it a zone you have to travel to on foot?  The pvp buttons on my character sheet only got me to the battlegrounds or, strangely, the training areas.  After trying several different zoning options, I ended up in an overflow.  

--Overflow and misc server stuff:  After release and the initial crush subsides, I would think this becomes less of an issue.  However my initial impression is that is is kind of clusterfucky and there is high clusterfuck potential down the line with server hopping.  I can't imagine that everyone won't want to get off a low rated server and get on a higher one, and I would hate to think this is a strategy for RMT.

--Customization:  Excellent choices and variety.  But I'm wondering, can we change our toons around a-la barbershop once they're made?  Or will this cost RMT.....

--Story:  I really don't need to watch a story every time I pick up a quest...thank god for "skip to end."  The stories that I've come up with for my own characters on games throughout the years were more interesting to me than anything SWTOR had to offer.  Stopping to hear a canned story only detracts from immersion imo.  Yes, SWTOR had high quality acting, but not everyone wants that.  

--XP gain:  seems like a really small amount of xp for mobs but large amounts for quest completion, which is fine by me.   I will be interested to see what kind of xp we get in WvW

--Performance:  laggy at times but I would say it's on their end, as my machine ran SWTOR at ultra with no lag whatsoever.  Character's physical movement does seem a little unnatural but I got used to it.  

A note on the "personality choices" at character creation:  It seemed that I got dialog choices with npc's that related to my personality choice, and I got some kind of social or karma points for it.  

Game ran really smooth for me, even larger scale WvW battles - much better than SWtOR does.

Spent a lot of time in WvW, but with melee I died a LOT and EVERY death resulted in me having to repair. Repairs after every death and not much cash or items in the way of drops in PvP made me a little behind the curve I think. I know I missed a lot of looting in the zerg battles, either from dying or just flat out missing that there was something to loot.

Tried a warrior (liked), Engineer (hated) and Ranger (loved). Best part was how easily it was to run around with friends, no matter what level we were.

For the life of us, we couldn't figure out how to queue as a group. It just randomly sorted us, us being 5, onto different sides - not sure how a team of premades would work.


From the training areas there was an Asura gate that takes you to WvW.

I was very impressed how fundamentally co-op the pve is.  It is revolutionary.

The queue is awesome. When guesting comes in it'll be revolutionary.

My biggest gripe is that the story line is worth so much xp its hard to ignore it.

Solid game, a few months of polish and another pass over the UI will really make it shine.

And more importantly: achievements! I do love feeling like I'm achieving something in my online gaming  :awesome_for_real:.

I'm a bit torn on the dodging; I'm not a real fan of the trend to speed up MMO combat in general, but it does gel well with the emphasis on positioning here and the fact you have fewer skills makes more reactive combat plausible.
That said I got one/two-shot by bossmobs at events on my guardian a lot, like "finish the fight half-dressed because of armour breakage" lot.
And as a guardian you even get the option of blocking or dodging (a bunch of skills grant aegis: a buff that blocks 1-3 attacks fully afaik).

In part that seems due to the fact the event scaling seems to go nuts when 20+ people show up (level 14 boss in a level 9-11 area?), which mostly acts like a big 'fuck you' to melee people.

Also: combat needs to run smooth as a 50 year old whiskey or the whole system falls to pieces (meaning I'll have to finally upgrade my 4 year old rig, unless they tweak performance a lot).

Still pretty excited about it though, at times I almost felt the rush I got when I was just starting out in MMO's.
They're actually making an MMO, not just a lobby or a single-player with some shit tacked on to justify a sub. It's been a while since I've seen one of those.

I made it to 16 only doing up to the level 8 part the story quest , so it's not a huge problem  and the gear rewards don't seem any better than the stuff that dropped or I bought off Karma vendors.  

One problem I had with combat in general was getting used to the soft target system.  I died a lot trying to target things rather than just firing off the ability.  Then once I finally got used to it I got into a PVE castle seige and died because the soft target kept locking on destructable objects instead of the ogres that were killing me.  My pet seemed especially prone to doing this, but at least when he did it I could hit f1 to have him switch to my target.  Speaking of pets it looks like you can have them on or off, there's no guard me mode which was a little annoying when forgot to turn aggro back on after we bailed on the dungeon run.  I used a bear in PvP and he was actually fairly survivable and has a handy AoE debuff.

There are daily and monthly rewards for "do N encounters" and "kill Y variety of mobs today" which should drive people's OCD up a wall. I liked the idea of just giving me 80 different ways to gain karma and letting me pick which one I felt like chasing after.

I kept getting bonus xp randomly as well, but I have no earthly idea why.

Every point of interest, respawn location and i think quest area gave bonus exp for discovering it.

I mean from mobs. I'd kill a random mob in the middle of nowhere (for the variety quest!) and get 80 xp/20 bonus.

It might have been due to WvW bonus. 

Aha!  Thank you.  Next chance we get I'll be jumping in. 

So is the dodge thing basically the block mechanic from Champions Online?

Not sure, don't remember Champ O.

Dodge is an endurance bar, you roll out of the way and have immunity frames during the roll. There's also channeled block skills that have various effects if they eat an attack during the duration, and the aegis buff that is basically Blade Turn from daoc.

Yeah, it's not like the champo block at all. The main difference is that champo's block mechanic is terrible and GW2's dodge is not :awesome_for_real:

In more detail: in CO I needed to basically block all the time with enough time to use a taunt / aggro ability once every 4-5 sec... otherwise I'd die. In GW2 I typically use my abilities as active defense (either self-buffs like aegis or debuffs like blind) and dodge maybe once every 2-3 seconds. Timing dodge is important for big nasty abilities -- and yes, they aren't always telegraphed adequately. Can't dodge more often than that since the dodge bar dries up really quick and recharges slowly (unless you have the vigor buff, but even then you can't keep dodging constantly).

Dodge is pretty important in pvp, since you're basically invincible for the 1-2 seconds you're in the dodge animations. You can dodge some seriously nasty stuff that way like the warrior adrenaline dump skill that crits for over 9000 (eviscerate), the mesmer elite that turns you into a moa bird for a time, etc etc.

edit: words are hard

There are daily achievements that you can do everyday.  Kill 10 different mobs, kill 10 imps, kill 15 different mobs etc.  You get bonus xp for doing this. 

That's not what he means.  Or you're not explaining the why of it.

You see it with mobs, but save up some crafting materials.  Leather or Jute Scraps.  Queue them up.  Not only does the xp value go down, but the initial ones will go (numbers made up) 145 + 45, 145 + 40, 145 + 35, ... 125... 110...

I noticed this yesterday on a new character.  Some of that is due to the crafting skill leveling up, but he is asking what all that +xp is from.  Is that part of the daily bonus?  Does it decrease with each one, but once you reach the limit you get a completion bonus?

Yeah, lanty gets it. There's just occasionally a bonus +__XP under the XP popup that's completely unexplained. It would just be nice to know what I'm doing that makes the game's reward system happy, so I can keep doing it.

It doesn't seem to be "Kill X fozzles" daily related, since I'll kill 20 centaurs with no +XP, then kill 2 centaurs with +20XP. It's almost like a group contribution bonus, but I wasn't at an event at the time. That or rested type XP is accumulating while simply not in combat, instead of sitting in town.

Or it's the first craft/kill of that mob/item for the day?  WHO KNOWS!?!

I remember it popping up whenever I did something the first time in a while.

It almost sounds as if it's similar to the old DAoC camp bonus, only on a more personal level. If so, that is pretty awesome.

Oh THAT mechanic.

You get bonus xp if a mob has been in the world for a while unkilled.  It prevents people from grinding in an area for a long period of time.  It motivates you to explore and kill things off the beaten path.  You might of seen that a lot of the servers kept crashing due it being reset a lot.

Here's specifically how you can do it.

Option 1: Go to Lion’s arch by using an Asura Gate in one of the main cities. Once in Lion’s Arch head to Fort Mariner where you will find an Asura gate to the Eternal Battlegrounds, which is the center WvW map.
Option 2: Open your Hero Panel by pressing H, click the crossed swords on the left of the window to open the PvP tab, click the “Be in the Mists” button to enter the structured PvP lobby area. There’s an asura gate there (to the left of the one that leads out of the mists) which takes you to WvW.

Voila!

Wish i had tried the wvwvw, i loved the mesmer in battleground type pvp but i'm not sure how the class will fare in mass pvp.  The illusion thing is a great class dynamic.

I wish they'd take it off pets frankly. It's a pita with all the dead ranger pets running around getting in your way when you try to rez a real player or npc or loot. Maybe if the damn rangers noticed their pets were dead occasionally it wouldnt be so annoying.

Maybe if the ranger pets didn't die in literally two hits, they'd care if the pet was dead or not.

Maybe they will eventually figure out that swapping their pets rezzes the one swapped out painlessly.

You lack a second pet at low levels (or even knowledge of how to tame more..). The basic problem is that pets are built around normal pet AI (run in, spam attack) but the rest of the game is built around dodging and evading incoming damage. Pets don't die faster than players, pets simply NEVER DODGE. Which means they die as fast as a player who just stood there.

They need something to help them out, right now the pet AI is not compatible with the combat dynamic they're going for.

I bet they'll end up doing something for pets like we have in WoW, i.e. the 90% reduction to AoE damage taken.

So as long as your pet doesn't get aggro, they'll survive most boss fights.

They might cloak it with a name like "Feral Alacrity" or some other fancyness, but the mechanic will be the same. And so much easier to implement than actually programming the pet AI to actually dodge.

(edited to clarify something)

Or they'll let pets die and consider them more as "attack spells" with a limited life expectancy and where selecting the right pet (like a ranged or tank pet), using it's mitigation skills and tactical switching is important. Which lets them keep most of the class power in the hands of the player rather than his automatons. Certainly that seems to be the design intent from what I've seen.

Everyone on their design team that worked on the auction house deserves toothless BJ's...from the sh*tty designers from the TOR AH.  Oh look I just got a new weapon I cant use, let me right click that shit and sell it RIGHT NOW instead of running back to the dam trader...yeah baby!

I think I ran across my first tamable hyena at around level 5, it took longer to figure out how pet switching switching worked and why it was super useful.  Also, later I came across a tamable whiptail devourer that is reachable from the Charr city with no combat required to get there.  The problem is that there isn't anything to tell you where to look for it in game right now.  I think I ended up finding 5 pets (black bear, whiptail and lashtail devourer, Red Moa and Hyena) by the time the beta ended, all of them from the 1-15 Charr starter zone.

Pet's AI and control has been pretty consistently questionable for each beta event they've had.

Maybe they never found any juvenile critters to tame so they only had one pet, or maybe they didn't know how to tame another pet since the game has zero information on how to do it.

Yeah the taming bits are really not explained at all.  However if you're playing in lobbied PVP (not 3W), you get all the pets unlocked. 

The PVP lobby is what makes me laugh at all the confusion about the core mechanics. ANet noticed they needed a tutorial with live examples. And it is awesome and well done.

Now to put the same shit somewhere players will actually SEE it when first creating characters..

They should be getting a lot of feedback on the confusing bits, since I'm sure one of the expected focuses in this BWE with all the pre-purchasers is how total newbies react to the game in its current form. So things like tutotial breadcrumb messages (downed state options, what are skills vs. traits, runes, upgrades, where is WvW, how to dodge, weapon hints, crafting hints) ought to be seriously considered.

Things I most got annoyed with:

- they better add modifier keys; stop dumbing down PC keyboards to pretend they are controllers

- stop zooming my camera in for Downed State, isn't the whole point that I may need to quickly kill something?

- a bit heavy-handed on the scaling for a (2) DE that had level 6 bandits one-shot raping everyone. Kinda fun, but after 8 deaths it got old to run back (since no one could revive you either, as they were all being killed too fast too)

- I understand weapon and attunements swaps (but I still say they also did this for console controllers, not for "gameplay"). But why can't I still make my own skill bars with whatever skills I want on them? So what if I want a Greatsword slot 1 skill next to a Scepter slot 3 skill (since that is how my mind maps it all and how I want to arrange my keymaps for sanity)? Just enforce the appropriate swap cooldowns when I pick one, that's fine with me. But let me lay them out my way.

And no, just making keymaps over the existing fragmented bars isn't enough b/c:
1. They are still unnecessarily tied by the same slots across weapons/attunements for no earthly reason of logic (the same key does the same slot always, even though for me I would use, say, 'X' for GS slot 1 and 'Alt-E' for Scepter slot 1)
2. There is no option to display the keymapping in the bottom of the skill button icons
3. I want my keymapping somewhat organized and ordered for my mental sanity, not the way they wire them left-to-right

Ya like most of the game they could do a better job explaining how to get another pet. My freind picked a signet that regenerated pet's health. On his bear it made it almost unkillable on most even level fights.

Maybe you're taking my comments too personally.

Maybe you should stop blaming things on the players when the problem is with the game.

I'm sorry I bruised your ego with the stupid rangers crack.

Someone needs to photoshop Mel Brook's "High Anxiety" pic into that quote fractal

I'm sorry you just can't just let this go.

I guess the better man will.

(http://cdn-www.swtor.com/sites/all/files/smilies/mon_calamari/trap.png)

Yea, you sure dodged that one.

Couldn't agree more; I like the sleek look of the UI (could use a bit more information perhaps, castbar comes to mind), but mapping keys and skills was a serious annoyance.
It's actually the thing that annoys me most because I'm constantly confronted with it and although I'm more than willing to 'untrain' most of my bad habits from about 8 years of MMO, I don't want to relearn all my keyboard reflexes and instincts.

Not allowing people to map shift+ and ctrl+ is ridiculous.

The second slot can be set up to use the same type immediately.  All four if you start with an amphibious one.

Nice to know, I found the my third and fourth pets before I realized you could switch between two on the fly and never even thought to try putting the same pet in multiple slots.

My First Impressions

Startup/Login: Quick ,quick, and quick. And thank you ArenaNet for allowing me to save my entered password. Security be damned. Seriously, it's really nice that the game loads as fast as it does, and gets me into the game.

Character Creation: Extremely robust and interesting, but I have one complaint. I want a randomize button. Sometimes I want to customize everything myself, but there are other times where I would like to see a random sampling of characters because some of the most interesting combos I have found have been randomly created character models. I do enjoy the story bits of customization, although I was hoping that there would be more variation in the options across races or classes; however, since the opening "cinematic" for your character uses these choices, I understand that they would need to create a lot of extra content to support more options. At the very least, it adds an initial bit of role play to the character and gives you some back story to work from.

Character Names: Glad they kept the GW1 convention of allowing spaces in names. Now I can be Lord Sepulchrave instead of just Sepulchrave.  :awesome_for_real:

Loading Screens: Nicely done artwork with the added bonus of showing your progress toward the achievements available in the zone that is loading. Gives you something to think about while you wait, and also provides a little Pavlovian nudge to make you want to complete the achievements.

Starting Zones: I liked being thrown right into the action. They are similar in feel to the Rift starting zones that culminate in a "boss" encounter. Your character is on semi-god mode so there isn't too much concern about dying, although I was knocked down on a couple of the boss fights and had to "Fight to Survive". While the intensity of being thrown into the middle of an ongoing conflict of some sort is exciting, it can also be overwhelming. In my case, I came to the game having already viewed hours of footage of beta game play, so I knew a lot about the combat systems, the dodging, etc. I do think that (a la Rift), ArenaNet could throw in a bit more in the way of context sensitive pop-ups or alerts or whatever to ease new players into the game. There are so many systems in place that it can overwhelm. That being said, once you start to get the feel for the combat and get through the boss fight, things calm down and you can get your bearings, which brings me to the next part.

PvE Gameplay (early levels): After you leave the starting zone, you are dropped into a zone just outside the capital city. When you speak to the NPC nearby with the green asterisk over its head, you get a full view of the map where the NPC highlights and circles points of interest and areas to explore. Hovering over each heart will show a quest name and a level that its appropriate for. Of course, you can do these in any order, but running to the farthest point across the zone to do the leve 5 or 6 quests as a level 2 will just result in running back again after you die. Plus, there's a lot of other quests and events that you'll cross through on the way over, so you might as well explore and adventure around the map.

Completing the quests (or hearts) awards you with karma, experience, and money. The main thing I enjoyed about the heart quests was that as soon as you entered the ring of influence for that quest, it showed up on the right side of the HUD with a progress meter, so there was never a need to speak with an NPC to _start_ a quest (although some do start in this traditional method). Hovering over any quest in the HUD highlights it on the mini-map so it's easy to see what area you need to be in for a given quest or event. Aside from the immediate rewards for completing a quest, there is the added mechanic that you can speak with the heart-NPC (for lack of a better term) related to that quest. This NPC sells items that can be purchased with karma that you earn, and apart from a couple consumables, they usually offer armor and weapons that are really nice upgrades and attainable at low levels so your character can be nicely geared by level 5 or 6 simply from completing heart quests around the zone.

While ArenaNet has made the world feel more dynamic, the systems in play are really a combination of two previously implemented systems - public quests from WAR and rifts from Rift. The heart quests are almost identical to WAR's public quests in that the locations for the quests are static and by completing them you get rewards which includes karma that can be used to purchase equipment from the quest NPC. In WAR, you earned influence for completing PQs and that influence was used to buy rewards from the quest NPC - those rewards typically being armor or weapon upgrades. Then the events are reminiscent of rifts in Rift as they can occur at random locations and times around the zone you are in and often require a group of players to complete entirely (they also scale based on the number of players). It is not a bad thing that ArenaNet has taken the two systems, refined them, and implemented them. Just something I noticed. As I enjoyed both systems in WAR and Rift, I am certainly having fun with the implementation of them in GW2.

Capital Cities: At around level 3 or 4 (I think really after you complete your first public quest), your quest tracker will have a quest that sends you into your capital city to meet with a friend. This sends you on your first story line quest and also serves to introduce you to what I feel is one of the best features of the game - your gigantic home town. Not since EQ1 have I felt so awed and interested in running around a city and exploring all the sights and sounds. Of course, the points of interest achievements only make it all the more a compelling activity, but I give two thumbs up to ArenaNet for the city design in this game. With the NPC behaviors and the absolute scale of the cities, you really feel like you are in a thriving metropolis in a great big world. I like that. While your character may be a hero, it gives a nice scope to just how large the world is and makes room for other heroes, too. And although I really wanted to explore other capitals (and started to do so when I found the Asura Gates), I forced myself to focus on PvE and PvP for at least this first weekend of testing. Suffice to say, you should spend some time exploring the cities. They are awesome. As for that story line quest, you should certainly do it, but do mind the level recommendation. You can complete it at a lower level than recommended, but certain classes will have a harder time of it.

WvWvW: When I found the Asura Gates, I made a bee line for the Eternal Battlegrounds. _This_ is why I will be playing GW2. ArenaNet has managed to capture the best parts of DAoC RvR and WAR RvR and combine them to make a fantastic experience. Even if you dislike PvP in MMOGs, this is the best way to implement it in a game because it makes the PvP activity impact the world at large. Are you all PvE, all the time? See that experience bonus on your character? It's probably a good idea to thank your fellow PvP players for capturing the keeps and supply depots because they are the reason you are getting the bonus that lets you level up that much faster. This is something that DAoC got right. PvE and PvP players worked cooperatively to capture relics because the bonuses were a boon to everyone's play style. ArenaNet have apparently recognized this and made the excellent decision to implement it here. This mechanic is a large reason why realms/servers in DAoC became such tight-knit communities. Every player was needed to make their realm/server the best, and with leader boards to track your progress, players tried even harder to be the best. All other systems aside, this one system, WvWvW, is what will make this game so sticky for players. Not only do you become invested in your character and its progression, but you become invested in your entire team.

PvP: I did not have time to try out the structured PvP, but if it is anything like GW1, Rift warfronts, DAoC battlegrounds, WAR scenarios, then it will be great fun for quick, exciting combat with other players, although I am sure that this will be ruled by clans, guilds, groups who play together a _lot_ and who focus solely on min/maxing the PvP builds.

Conclusions: For me, GW2 has managed to combine many of the systems that I most enjoy from MMOGs into a beautiful virtual world with some unique races (thank you!) and interesting classes with combat mechanics that are compelling and fun. Obviously, this will not be the game for everyone. Is there such a thing? But, as MMOGs go, I believe this is the direction that developers should be moving toward in future games on the macro level.

And two more thumbs up for sticking free teleports practically every ten feet.

I wasn't too fond of the nickle and dimeing ones.

Well free travel around the world is very different than free travel around the gigantic city.

The part about them that bugged me was that it's an additional death penalty. You pick a rez point.. which charges you money as well as the repair costs you just ate for dying.

And then there's the guy who spent 45 minuted dead because he had spent his last copper on buying the book to unlock talents (why is this necessary?) and couldn't afford to pay for the trip back to the teleport point.  A Dev commented on the thread that apparently the last teleport point you used should be free in that case, but nowhere in the game is anything indicated or highlighted that that's the case so the poor schlub had to wait for a passerby to rez him.  There are a LOT of moneysinks in this game.

Having to repair every time I died annoyed me, having to repair every time I died in PvP REALLY annoyed me.

You only have to repair after you go naked.

Damaged gear still works fine, it's broken gear that stops working.  Since gear damage occurs on resurrection (and only at a teleport if I remember right) there's no point in repairing until you have something broken.

yeah the repairing thing is a bit ridiculous, I die twice and suddenly my gear is orange. They need to relax that or remove it entirely.

My limited experience gave me the impression that this might not be the case.  Bumping everyone up to the same gear level will help.  Sure, a coordinated group who knows all of the objectives and abilities will do better, but it's not a guaranteed roflstomp. 

I wonder also, since everyone has the same gear levels in BGs, if this will deter the min maxers from participating in a non progressive, evenly matched experience.  (Unless there is a progression I'm not aware of?  Are there points awarded to be used in the rest of the game?)

I didn't see an issue with gear breaking.  The problem here is that the game is too rapey and balance of events and mob damage is borked.

Also money sucks early on, but unless you craft, you should have enough for everything.

I liked that the bosses were seriously dangerous and players had to band together to kill them.  Honestly I'd prefer that just made them equally dangerous to everybody then picking on melee.  If they could reduce the number of one-shots without defanging them would be ideal.

So is it for sure that the pvp armor is fixed and the only upgrades you can get for it is cosmetic? I met someone who was under the impression you can upgrade the pvp armor's stats as well.

As far as I know items are fixed in PvP matches (arena like). You get boosted to top level and get fixed equipment.
But you bring your own stuff in the WvW PvP, and while I don't know the item progression, I am pretty sure you can have "better" stuff considering that are 5 degrees of rarity.

But here I hope someone more informed than me will jump in and will be more speecific.

Degrees of rarity didn't mean anything in particular for stats in GW1, so we can hope it will be similar here.

You can change the armor and weapon attributes (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Attribute) by changing the weapon sigils and the armor runes (in their upgrade slots) at an NPC vendor in the Hall of Memories near the PVP banks. Likewise with rings, amulets etc. The point being to specialize in, for example, a Precision build.

The vanity items you buy with glory, and are cosmetic.

I love that every class can cast on the move.

That really freaks me out. Unlike other games there seems to be no penalty for it - it's just something you should be doing, always.

Goes a long way to explain why caster classes fall over dead in melee combat - they just aren't supposed to be there at all!

Well... you do have to be facing the target somewhat don't you?

Yeah, this aspect will probably make ranged attacks preferable to melee most of the time.

In ranged mode?  If the mob gets close, move.

In melee mode?  Learn how to time attacks and dodges so that you avoid damage.

One of those is harder than the other.

I'm under the impression that as a ranged in PvP it won't be that easy to hit whoever you want as even your teammates obscure your line of sight and you get an <obstructed> message if you aim at someone behind your front line. For the same reason why enemies have a hard time hitting you if you have a big bad tank simply standing between their bullet and you. Am I wrong?

There are still a few exceptions to this.  I know the Ranger Longbow AoE couldn't be cast on the move, though the AoE will continue for a bit after the cast is over.

Some casts root you. Most don't. Mesmer's blurred strike also roots you for the duration.

So, how are the quests? anyone got a quick rundown? Is it standard stuff?  Whats the power curve 1-?? Will I be gated from playing with friends because of level?

There are no 'quests' in the traditional sense except for your personal storyline (which works in personal instanced zones just like TOR, only with worse voiceacting/cutscenes, basically). Most content is 'area quests' in a particular map region where you can do x things to advance the quest bar of that region (heart icon on the map), and you get a reward when it fills up. F'rex you can get credit by collecting stuff, killing certain mobs, reviving NPCs, and sometimes other things (like taking rabbit food to the 'questgiver' while avoiding rabbits). There are also dungeons with normal and 'heroic' modes, and you can level via pvp/wvw.

There are also events that can happen on their own or if someone triggers them (e.g. by using an object in the world), they can also progress to different stages depending on whether you 'win' or 'lose'. Events also give credit for the quest bar of the area (participating one will probably fill the bar on its own), and have some interesting mechanics sometimes (you're preventing enemies from destroying your fortifications or rebuilding their own, escorting a party of NPCs through some caves, etc). Events scale with the number of people present and have the traditional 'contribution' system like in WAR and rift (I think it counts how many actions you did during the event, I have yet to get less than gold in an event I've fully attended).

I'd say the power curve is flat, but it isn't really... you'll unlock a lot more skills as you level (making you more versatile) along with traits, and you won't get an elite skill until level 30 (?). I have no idea how big a difference gear makes, hope we get a BWE where people are boosted to 85 so I can check what 'crappy outleveled gear' does vs 'level 85 crafted gear' and 'phat-loot karma / dropped green gear'.. though in GW1 there was no difference between crappy cheap/free gear and uber gear except for looks, so I'm hopeful. In structured pvp everyone is equalized; in wvw pvp everyone is 'almost' equalized. The game has inherent zone-based sidekicking (if you go to a level 4 area, you'll fight as a level 4), so you can play with lower-level people all you want. It used to work the other way too (lower level chars playing with higher levels in higher level zones), but they scrapped that which is kind of lame... still, this sort of sidekicking is better than most other games.

Doesn't that effectively mean it's just like "quests in traditional sense" minus the part where you need to manually click on the NPC in order to be told you should go to spot X and collect stuff, kill certain mobs, revive NPC and sometimes do other things?

Is there any narrative framing at all for that stuff?

The heart quests to me felt pretty much the same as 'traditional' quests, except they trigger automatically when you enter an area rather than talking to someone and all the ones I did had multiple avenues to get credit for completion.  On the other hand, they felt fairly grindy in that each thing you did to get credit didn't really add that much to the completion bar.

The major difference in GW2 is the whole event thing.  I know most people really liked the events, and I sort of did too, but I prefer being able to trigger them on my own instead of happening upon one by chance or waiting around for one to start.  It also makes going afk a dangerous proposition because you can end up getting flattened in places that seemed perfectly safe.  Events happening because of a 'loss' is a really nice touch, though.

Edit:


Yes, if you go talk to the heart NPC they'll give you a rundown on why you're doing what you're doing.  But that makes it even more like a 'traditional' quest.

Yeah, that's what I meant by traditional sense. You're still killing 10 rats and collecting 20 bear asses, but at least you can choose which of them you're doing and don't need to do the run around / turn in bit. It's an OK compromise, though obviously dynamic events are superior (if one is available, that is)

e: unfucked quote.. you people post fast!

Right but what I'm asking is there any story framing for that sort of thing at all, or do you just kind of go out and do things and stuff happens?

EDIT: Ok just saw Nevermore's edit. Got it.

Wow, ok then, thanks for that. Auto side-kicking a?  Now I'm somewhat interested.

Some of the events do have turn-ins, though.

Yea, what Nevermore said. Sorry about the quote fuckup, I didn't see the post-deluge so just clicked insert-quote 2 posts down

Re the issue with dynamic quests making things dangerous - I agree, though most of the ones I've done seem to give at least some warning (similar to the big world events in rift) or they are started directly by players. Also, some of the events have bosses which DO need at least 2 people to do unless you're really good at soloing elite mobs at low levels (it can be done, but... yeah)
edit: I misread your post, and yeah I agree... it's the "collect stuff that drop from enemies / spawn randomly on the ground and take it to this guy standing outside the cave" kind of quests. I typically ignore those entirely, or just turn in a bunch of drops once while I'm leaving the area.

Also, for events it's generally really obvious why you're doing what you're doing so those basically frame themselves.  'Escort Bob the Barbarian to the fort!', 'Kill the 30 foot wasp trying to sting your face off!', 'Collect apples for Mary so she can bake you a pie!', that kind of thing.  By the way, two of those three examples I didn't make up.  :-P

So far for all the heart quests there were 2-3 ways to gain points (fight this, click that, collect and turn in the other), which was nice.

What I really liked were the branching events though. Stop kobold thieves! Whoops, you fucked up and didn't stop them. So go get the supplies back! Branching the event off a failure is <3

Getting XP/Karma still for completely failing an event was also nice.

I  :heart: the wackiness in some of the zones. I levelled a Charr and a Norn to mid-level in the BWE, and  (really, really minor spoilers about the 1-15 zones)
e: also, expanding on Kildorn's post -- sometimes failboating events can result in a minor quest area being taken over by mobs as well and spawn another event to take the area back (you can still do heart quest stuff, but can't use the waypoint until it's retaken). While this can be annoying, SO FAR it was more fun than bother.

The retakes aren't that hard so far either, so it won't completely screw new characters over down the line that I can see. But yeah, I had a fort that was taken by centaurs and I had to retake before I could get the waypoint back.

I seem to remember a dev saying that the renown quests (hearts) are really meant to get you into the areas where events will happen and then hopefully keep you there long enough for one to trigger. So they're more like breadcrumbs to dynamic events rather than being content in and of themselves.

That seemed to work about 50% of the time in my experience.

Yeah they were a bit hit and miss for me too at times. The Norn area seemed the worse but maybe it was just bad luck. Or maybe they need shorten the intervals between events, for the starter areas at least.

Must have been a time of day thing because the norn area was hopping pretty much constantly Saturday night when I was there.

There's a pretty fine balance between "too infrequent" and "resets before you make 20 paces". It seemed okay to me.

Also with quite a few of the hand-in quests the point was to get a "route" going that needed to be protected. It wasn't generally a long distance and often the item you were carrying would give you a speed boost or weapon use to keep it entertaining. Collectibles that weren't carried could be stacked (collect 20) and then handed in at once. Also with the neat trick that you could still hand in for an amount of time after it was completed so your contribution would be fully counted.

I liked it because even with the heart quests you can re-do or walk past as you like and the quest fits the environment. This dude has pests on the farm that need a kicking, why not help? While you were kicking them bandits attacked! better help. And the XP doesn't come from the farmer but from completion of the event. Which stops the feeling that all these NPC's have become incredibly lazy because they can get adventurers to fetch them bear asses because they have the magic power of gifting XP.

They're still, ultimately, go there and do things to get an XP / cash reward but it flows much better and suits the environment. It's the first viable replacement to traditional quests (which were the first viable replacement to grinding mobs).

That sounds cool, but in practice, is the failure something that happens often enough for these branches to come into play? I mean, i can't really remember a single quest in a MMO that i actually "failed"... so how does that work, do they throw bigger numbers of mobs the player can handle and have them corpse camp you until you log off in disgust, or what :why_so_serious:

No, they are free (but they don't follow you back to PvE any more than your boosted level 80 does). You can also use the NPCs to change weapons from the default loadouts. It's essentially the interface to adjust to the level 80 build you want to fight with.

Oh, you'll fail plenty and you're die a lot.

Some you fail by dieing (more than a few times) or just running of, but there are others where the NPC's take multiple paths and you can just fail them 'cause you were guarding the big gate and forgot about the back door for instance, which is kind of cool.

There is a slight scaling issue though, mostly because it seems beyond a certain critical mass the only thing that happens is mobs hit a lot harder; which means a lot of people will die (mostly melee), but at that point there's so many people there that it does become 'unfailable' anyway.
I do hope they find a way to smooth that out or I'll have to stay out of the PvE entirely for the mad launch rush zerg ... type ... thing.

You can also fail for say, a lack of snares/CC on the theft one. They run in, grab shit, and run out. If you can't spike them down or snare them, they'll get away. THAT happened a lot, because people weren't packing cripple based builds in the event.

Sounds like you had all kinds of cripples to me :P

Actually the first replacement for grinding mobs was running missions in groups. It's always been, of the three, my favorite, but when WoW didn't pick it up, everyone forgot Anarchy Online and COX. I find the GW2 gameplay to almost be a hybrid of the three.There's a quest element, there's a group zerg element a la the missions, and there's a grinding element as well. It would be nice if it were a bit more social, that was the good part of grinding, but I don't know how you can force that without idiotic levels of downtime.

One significant aspect of GW2 seems to be how your attitudes towards other players are shaped by the mechanics. In marked contrast to the Good Old Days of kill stealing, spawn camping, and trains, your fellow players are out there regularly ressing you, helping you to get that skill point as you simultaneously help them get it, helping each other with heart quest objectives just by virtue of being in the same area, etc. Having other players around is almost always welcome in PvE and WvW, and your attitude towards them defaults to positive, with the only exception being when the dynamic events scale too big for the melees (which ArenaNet says they are tuning). I think the way res is handled in particular is going to lead to a lot of people with similar play schedules remembering each other and naturally coming together as they play; you can't help feeling good about someone who you res and who later returns the "favor".

Grouping doesn't necessarily equal zerging here either imo; I did do a few events/group quests with around 5 people and it felt a lot deeper/more involved.

It's an issue that once you get above 5-6 people, fun seems to go down with every person that joins, inching ever closer to the zerg (which I would place around 10 people, if you see 10? Throw tactics out the window, equip a ranged weapon and start blasting!  :why_so_serious: ).

By 'fun' I mean, depth gets lost, which is unfun to me.
Technically you could blame the players I guess, but there's a bunch of contributing factors in the design I played: such as mobs scaling to a point where their hitpoints and damage seem so out of wack, zerging them down is the best tactic that doesn't take a 15 minute planning session.

The only problem I've seen with "having more people around" is when you're doing an event (like an escort) solo and someone steps in the event radius, but doesn't participate (they're killing mobs offscreen or what have you). A lot more mobs will spawn and can overwhelm you easily... I also wonder if the same thing happens if someone just passes by (gets in the event radius, then leaves within a few seconds).

According to their blogs/articles this shouldn't happen. People who aren't actively contributing to an event aren't supposed to be included by the scaling mechanic so it sounds like it was bugged.

I think that sounds about right, actually...

It should scale back down again once people stop contributing or leave but I don't know how long it takes for that to kick in. I guess the relative shift in difficulty between one- and two-player scaling probably didn't help either. Plus ogres are just plain nasty  :ye_gods:

While I certainly agree that kill stealing and spawn camping are not an issue at all in GW2, I was the victim of having mobs trained onto me a couple of times.  I don't think it was done maliciously, but that actually makes it worse since that means it's not difficult to accidentally train stuff onto people and it looks like it would be pretty easy to grief people and then claim you didn't mean it.

I had my personal quests get a lot more difficult when I was grouped with my friend dispite him not being pulled in to the instance with me.

Finally got to play this.  This is definitely not anything like GW1.  For me, I haven't decided if that's a good thing or not yet, especially the difference in the skill system..

Yeah, this really plays very different class to class.

Engineer seems like basically full on snoresville. Maybe when you starting getting all the kits to replace your primary weapon skills?

Elementalist was definitely more fun, but kind of highlighted (surprise!) MMO combat being not as responsive. I felt like I was fighting uphill to land any combos (which combined with the kind of randomish movement of mobs, meant a lot of misses). Also, AOE targeting from a constantly varying perspective: not that fun!

Thief seemed pretty good, although a lot of the utility skills seem a lot tricksier than is needed, which is I guess, a common fault of trap-style skills.

Story: kind of filler so far, although the human noble one is occasionally amusing.

I bitched about this in guild chat all last night, but I have to ask. Is this run speed normal? I FEEL LIKE I'M JOGGING IN WAIST DEEP WATER. I feel so fucking slow. Is there anything I can buy or equip that will make me run faster? I really dig the mechanics of the game, the story isn't bad and the art direction is top notch, but I am SOOOOOOO SLOW.

They went a little too far on letting strangers be helpful actually - two of the three skill challenges I attempted I bit the dust and then got the skill point a few minutes later anyway, presumably because some wandering random happened upon the challenge mob and killed it for me while I was nowhere near the area.

I'm generally enjoying the experience so far - Charr thief up to 8, mostly pistol+dagger or shortbow, not finding melee as fun for some reason. It's got a new-car-smell that I haven't gotten from an MMO in a long time. I've come to expect a sinking feeling every time I try a new one within the first half hour when the game says "okay, you're done with all the cool scripted introductory shit; deliver this grapefruit and bring me some platypus eggs because you're a quest-giver's bitch now." That that moment keeps failing to come is actually pretty disconcerting.

Likes:
-Getting all your main combat abilities within minutes of picking up your weapon. This is huge to me.
-Naturally running into interesting things based on where I feel like wandering.

Dislikes:
-Having to wait til 30 for the rest of my abilities.
-Run speed seems just a little bit slow (are there mounts later? (ninja'd by Haemish)).
-Mob density can make kiting a pain.
-Mobs seem to scale pretty hard with levels making +2 things near-impossible; that might be me sucking or having poor gear though.

Not-sure-ifs:
-Fighting for your life is sort of convoluted; I'd almost rather just die.
-Mob experience is so low as to be trivial. In other games this would be a strong dislike since quest grinds piss me off, but here instead of making me feel railroaded it's just forcing me to explore and faff about and then randomly get a huge reward for doing so. I think. Still not sure I wouldn't rather have the option to just go full-on moa genocide mode for an evening though.

I feel as if I'm moving slower than I was in the previous beta.  I'm not sure if something was changed, but it does feel slow to me.  I hope that can be changed at some point. 

TLDR:  My jboots were nerfed.

Echoes of Lockjaw:


I also think running is super slow.  I tried looking up which class has the fastest out of combat run speed because it's driving me nuts but didn't see anything notable.

Run speed sucks... I think that's what I bitched about the most all day yesterday. 

I'm really not enjoying the PvE leveling too much... it really reminds me of if I was playing WHO and just ran from PQ to PQ.

I always roll with a weapon set that has a short cooldown/long-ish duration swiftness buff (like elementalist staff, necro warhorn)... failing that, a utility skill that gives swiftness. I think at this point my biggest beef is the 'chancy' nature of melee -- with any kind of latency I need to be really on the ball to hit a moving target (that's not snared / knocked down / rooted / etc), and my skills still go on cooldown if I'm out of range.

Really digging the improvements they've made since the last few betas, btw. There are dudes who run up to you in outposts and point you to nearby dynamic events, etc. Also, they seem to have changed the 'jumping puzzle' type skill challenges to vistas, which is nice for both explorer (more things to do) and achiever (don't have to mess around with jumping puzzles to get those extra skillpoints) types.

After TSW guild wars 2 pve does feel super dated. And graphics is even more dated. That said I find it very addicting and there are several things GW2 does well:

- large world with interesting location to explore .
- They did add a lot of variety to wow'esque style quests. They really wanted to spice it up .If it wasnt at the core same old thing it would be totally great. As it is it just good
- skill mechanics are really varied and Id say pretty damn fun
- the dynamic events system is the best I seen


TSW is definitely superior and much more immersive  GAME. But GW2 is a  better MMO by far

So far every beta they've 'optimized' the game engine, and every beta it's run worse and worse for me despite my lowering the graphics all the way down to the minimum.  This weekend the game is completely unplayable for me.  The screen blacks out literally every few seconds, and then eventually the game just crashes.  Yes, I have the most recent nvidia drivers.  No, I don't have this problem on any other game.  TOR runs flawlessly on medium-high settings.

Even though I hate the PvE, I at least wanted to see how the PvP was doing since I like the direction they've taken with that (at least in principle, even though I don't like the skill system compared to GW1).  Oh well.

The only problem is that vistas are now on the map completion track and I HATE THAT. I don't like jumping puzzles, even if they're easy (they've kept the vistas deliberately easy) and now they're not optional if you want that yummy chest for zone completion. If something is different than 90% of your game, make it optional. The xp you gain is reward enough.

I am experiencing the exact opposite. BWE2 had some minor stuttering and at times slowish fps but this build is solid for me.

Based on the tech forum, I'm definitely not the only on with the issue I'm having.

Asura Engineer all the way!

I found the Asura starter area to be the most interesting and fun.  Finally got to see why everyone was talking about underwater combat also.  A whole new set of moves to unlock?  Yes please!

I like the look, and the Asura are kinda funny. But I guess it is not having played a previous beat but the mechanics seem inexplicable at times. I also am a little chagrined that rangers are apparently melee/throw melee weapon characters and not use a ranged weapon characters. (I looted a gun and saw not usable by your class) which was odd.

The pink flamingo pet option is awesome though.

Rangers only get Bows. Can't handle rifles because of the nature flick in their backstory.

Yeah, rangers get long and short bows, both of which are distinct weapons with different ranges and moves. Also, their axe shit is short ranged.

Messing with a warrior this beta event and I'm really enjoying it more than I did before.

One thing I noticed is that you can now access your bank when you are on a crafting station.  Also thanks to collectible storage I haven't filled my starter pack and bag yet.  I just have to remember to go through and send the collectibles to the bank every now and then.

To save you some time experimenting: you can hit H (hero panel), then skills, and Weapon Skills to see what all of your available weapon types and skills with them are.

I don't remember it bugging me at all last BWE...but since then I've been playing TSW with mobility upgrades...yeah. Seems wicked slow now.

The in combat run speed is pretty slow. Out of combat is a bit slow.

Most classes seem to have a signet passive or a trait later on for speed increases.

Well, at least after you have a few unlocked, they want you teleporting from spot to spot.

I gotta say, I really like the way they did the synergies in this game. Haven't played a game since FFXI where I actually thought to position my shots behind a fire wall or inside a rune circle. I even saw other ranged moving into a new position as time went on today.

And this is also drawing me to caster class... I am fascinated with Mesmer. I feel an MMO pull in that you are better with other people.

First time playing the game this weekend.  So far I've taken Thief, Necro, and Warrior to level 10.  Thief could be fun but most of his game seems to be short range ports and is a bit too spazzy for me.  Necro was fun once I got my hands on a staff.  The pet AI and the class's potential dependence on pets is a bit worrisome though.  Warrior was a blast all around and seemed really strong compared to the other two.  Going to try Hunter and some WvW tomorrow and attempt to nail down a main for release.

Getting used to the slower runspeed took a bit but, given how a lot of skills operate, having people zipping around any faster would be super frustrating in PvP.   

Oh yeah, I definitely agree with that. Putting them on a separate track would make things better[er]. As it is, I wasn't able to complete the sylvari area because the thorn wolf skill challenge is broken, sad face.

Re out-of-combat movement, I really haven't found it that big of a problem (yet). I just use waypoints to zip around on the map (unlocking a nearby waypoint should be priority #1 no matter what), and kill stuff / look for dynamic events otherwise. This may change after 30-40 levels, though.  :awesome_for_real:

If you didnt do  it yet  -dont bother leveling at all. Just jump straight into mists right after intro and you get to experience  fully unlocked  profession with any gear you like. Run a few dozen spvp with each class to get a good feel of it.

My conclusions so far
-warrior - solid durable damage dealer. kinda bland, but well ....its warrior
-mesmer  -pretty damn fun and has a lot of tricks.  (mesmer actually has better stealth than thief  :) )
-necro - 3 health bars. great sustained damage. Only problem I didnt like my world going green all time
-ranger -same deal as a warrior . solid but bland run of the mill ranger .
-thief - only good for stomping newbs. But its fun class

Just not feeling the fantasy setting right now, been playing TSW this weekend...

So while this game has so much polished, I'm just not feeling it.  Maybe it's because I'm probably not a standard MMO player (I've played most of them, the only ones that I played for more than 6 months were DAOC and GW1, both played for well over 2 years).  I think they decided to turn around and make a pure MMO instead of something more unique like they did in GW1.

I'm not a fan of the world pvp.  While I don't remember what made me like it in DAOC (it's been a good 10 years) I don't find it fun here.  I don't feel like I'm actually contributing to battle and it just seems like as the opposing force gets more forces they win, then we win as we get more forces, but what I'm actually doing doesn't *feel* like it's contributing.  Even when sneaking behind to flank I didn't feel like I could do enough damage quick enough (on my theif or mesmer) to make a difference before the zerg noticed me.  I miss the 12v12 alliance battles of gw1.  They felt like they had more interesting objectives and the 24 person cap helped keep things under control so people could feel like they were contributing.

While PvE is leagues above what other MMOs have, I find it a step down from GW1.  Granted gw1 pve was more of an action-rpg than straight MMO but I liked it and it gave a lot more interesting objectives that aren't really possible in a fully persistent / open to everyone world.  I also feel like once I get most of the hearts in the area I get stuck between levels, where I'm too low level for the next open heart and my personal story.  I then end up running around aimlessly trying to find a dynamic event going on since that seems to be the core way to level (grinding mobs doesn't give much).

I'm also not a fan of the skill system.  10 skills seems too much, not necessarily because of the strict amount but the strict placing of them.  The main problem is that  I can't easily reach the 7, 8, 9 and 10 keys on the keyboard while moving with WASD, so in combat I forget to use those because I have to click on them with my mouse.  In GW1 this wasn't and issue because you had 8 skills and I could rebind 7 and 8  to Q and E.  In other MMOs it's not an issue because I can have multiple hotbars, so all other abilities I can do Ctrl+(1-6) to click them.  I don't seem to have either of these capabilities in GW2.  Also I don't like how I can't change what skill is 2, 3, 4, and 5.  This causes a lot of issue in frantic combat because I can't organize my abilities so all my teleport abilities are towards the end, my passives (and low usage abilities) towards the end and have my common thief main skills (like my poison buff) towards the middle.

You can remap keys 6-0 to anything you want.

I agree this is a bit of an issue, but the trick seems to be to wander to another zone in the same level range and do all those hearts and events as well. Remember, going to a lower level event helps you, as you gain XP as if it was even level, and about half your loot drops will be on-level as well. I still don't think they explain their intended gameplay flow well at all.

I feel like they just hid a lot of the stuff that made GW1 unique.  It's still all there though.  There's no ilvl gear grind for starters.  The combat is clearly not the holy trinity either.  They still have the instant max level pvp chars.  The one thing I feel is sorely missing is the hero companions.   It's the same engine though I wouldn't rule them out in the future.

I was in Queensdale and I had done all the lower level hearts there.  Since this was my first time playing I don't even know where other low level zones are, so I can't just wander around to an uncompleted heart (as I do't know where any are that are lower level than me).  So it just felt like the only way to progress was to randomly run around until I find a random event going on, and one that can actually be completed if there aren't many people around.  I do agree they need to explain the intended gameplay flow better. 

Sometimes the only place you can find that you know will have action are waypoints that are contested, but you can't get there quickly because they are contested and thus non-portable to them.  You don't know if the event will still be going on by the time you get there.  The NPCs pointing out dynamic events are good, but they are only in town.


Hrm if I can remap them to ctrl+(1-5) then that may make it better. 

The pacing in Queensdale is possibly the worst of all starting areas.  It has a couple of dead spots.

I agree. The skillsets feel like they were made for small group battles but zergs seem to mostly just require range and AoE. Especially since even if you do catch someone and beat them in a duel, their team can just resurrect them once they push back.

I can't speak for DAoC, but in WAR I felt like my Blackguard had the capability to handle those sorts of situations well. With a dedicated healer I could survive running headlong into a zerg, putting out some aoe harrassment, debuffing a healer or two, punting a squishy towards my group, and gtfo before my defensive CDs run out. I made a sword/shield Guardian to try to do something similar, and it sort of works, but my aoe and knockback aren't great, it's harder to catch people, and I have to blow all my CDs just to have a chance at feeling useful meaning I can't do much for the next 30-45 seconds.

I FINALLY got into the World PVP today since it was completely full all last night (and WTF is that? Not being able to try out WvW because of queues almost cost them my potential purchase). Since I couldn't get into it last night, I tried the Hearts of Mist small-scale PVP. I didn't like it at all. Like enough that I really wasn't going to buy the game at all.

World PVP has changed that stance. I'm still undecided, but I really like the World PVP with the different objectives. It definitely scratches that Eman Gate itch. I still think footspeed is WAY too slow, but I started to get used to it (and I found out I could unlock a skill that increased footspeed a bit). The footspeed thing is really close to being a dealbreaker though. It means that I will absolutely HAVE to use one skill slot for the footspeed signet, no questions asked, which could limit my skills. I also have to echo Kall's problems with the 6-0 skills - I have a real problem getting to those numbers without looking in the heat of the battle when I'm using WASD for movement.

Not being able to queue with friends for non tournament pvp matches is stupid.  It's a pain in the ass to get into the same games as your friends and even then you may not be on the same side.  I actually prefer ToR warzones over their structured pvp here.

WvWvW... after finally being able to get into it after waiting like an hour, I was pretty unimpressed.  Overall it wasn't horrid, but I found myself missing WHO more than I did liking this.  Door hit points are too high and having to spend 5-10 minutes just running back from mid map is bs as well. 

Skills and keys can be remapped though, and if you choose 5 easily reachable keys for the first 5 skills, and then ALT+them all for the other 5 skills it gets all very easy to control.

Also, queueing for WvW? Are you sure you aren't queueing for the Eternal Battleground? That has queues, but you can and should attack the external three worlds too (Blue, Green and Red) for they are pretty much the same thing. Am I missing something? Did they have a queue too?

For keybindings I use 1-5 for weapon skills, z for heal, qex for utilities, c for elite, r for weapon switch, mouse3 for dodging. Standard WASD for strafe/move/backpedal (I should really stop backpedaling, but meh it's still useful for pve tanking), turn with the mouse. They FINALLY made it possible to use alt-ctrl modifiers if you like that stuff - it only took them what, 7 years since GW1 launch?  :awesome_for_real:

I'll just say that my experience differs from yours... a lot. I'd rank warzone/structured pvp 'at max level' like this: GW2 > GW1 >>>>> Rift > WOW ~ TOR ~ WAR >>> COH (I put Rift above the standard DIKU fare because they at least try to do some gear/stat equalizing) IMO having more than two people queue together for a PUG v PUG warzone is also a very bad idea (even two is a bad idea, but people play in duos often, so meh), since it just leads to lopsided pugstomping snorefests (except when the premade is so bad that they manage to lose vs a pug, but that doesn't happen THAT often :P).

About beating on the door: what siege engines was your team using? I don't remember them taking too long to break down at all with a few catapults and a treb. I've actually had more fun/success doing things like intercepting supply runners instead of running with the siege group/zerg, though.

I do think part of it is just that the game is still filled with people like me who have no idea what they're doing. It took me quite a while to figure out how supply worked, and that I should pick some up before running to siege anywhere. Hopefully mindless zerging will decrease and fights will get better as people figure out exactly what is necessary to capture/defend each of the objective types.

Yeah, this. You can funnel right the fuck in to the other fronts in W3 without queuing. Also, the issues last night weren't related to extended queues. They were fixing lag problems.

On the door thing, gotta use siege engines to make it quick. Which is a good thing. But it also illustrates what ezrast is saying: lots of folks doing the world pvp without knowing the full range of stuff you can or should do. Siege engines are important. Supply is hella important. You can pick off important supply stuff solo or in a small group away from the zerg.

Was very impressed with their patch system - logs you out , auto patches and all done in 5 minutes. TSW for example goes down for 4 hours .... Yah GW2 is light years ahead in this department


Also very unimpressed with WWW queues. I cant get in at all, 3-5 hours wait - still not in. Only time I was able to get in was right after patch. They seem to have improved performance . It was smoother than BWE2. Also I played some organized world-pvp wiht teamspeak etc - and its effing amazing. Real tactics come into play and you suddenly not playing "gate bashing" anymore....  well there is gate bashing still  , but there is a lot of direction and more action involved. We managed to take entire keep with 10 man team by sneaking trough 3 enemy posts and  ninja placing  4 catas near wall ,taking it down in 5 minutes. Then we rushed the defenders arrow carts and took em down clearing path to inner keep

 Get into good www guild - it is light and day from the random running in www  The game revolves around siege weapons and supplies, placing siege weapons ,getting supplies to them,  storming enemy defences and defending yours - it is a lot more fun when organized.

I'm pretty sure queues are just completely broken right now. I've queued up, managed to get in a few minutes later by spamming join on all the WvW areas, and then had a queue pop a few minutes later. Your best bet is to just try to manually join every couple minutes.

There was a bug with the queues yesterday per the forums, if that is when you were having issues. Something was keeping the player cap crazy low.

Apart from the bugged queues i feel it would be a good idea not to pick a server that is going to be packed all the time.

Someone on the dev team really loves jumping puzzles. 

Besides the effing jump puzzles(which I sofar manage to do but still hate) I like it.. The only thing that could kill this game for me would be pay to win.

People in chat are talking about how great they are and how they want more difficult ones. The one in Morgan's Spiral in the Sylvari area should be enough to last me the whole game, I think.

What is making me a little nutzo at the moment is that I have everything unlocked in the Asura starting area except for one POI that I can't find.  My fear is that it's at the top of a truly painful jumping puzzle that starts in a cave and seems to lead to an asura gate floating in the sky.  Since you get high enough to die when you miss that jump I gave up on it.  I had the same problem in the Char starter area.  I'm not really a completest but having everything unlocked on the map but one, not at all obvious point is bugging me for some reason.  I don't mind that there are jumping puzzles in the game, but making them mandatory for an achievement that isn't labeled jumping master or something is just annoying.

Yeah, but these super mario achievements are way better and easier than SWTOR's, by leaps and bounds.  :why_so_serious:

One thing I do like a lot is bank access from the crafting stations.  I'm pretty sure that's new with this round. 

GW1 PvE was an abomination, slow moving and repetitive, this is much better. Especially because I hate shepherding dumb NPC's.

The bank access from the crafting tables was a massive convenience advance. An obvious one but I'm glad they did that. The jumping puzzles, sigh, but giving the explorers more carrots is fine.

Any open PvP is going to be about dealing with the Zerg, it's basically inherent in the game style.

The wife really took to the game. Which I think is partly because the Asura are really cute but also because the whole approach is really casual friendly. Skills evolve naturally, there's not too many to keep track of and you can just wander round the map and get dragged into things. It's still a refreshing change from a quest driven system. I'm still fighting with the lack of role on the characters, I can't really tell if there are deep skill and class synergies waiting to be unlocked or it's just a lot of cleverness in the skills with little coherence (mostly did necro this weekend). That's probably only going to come out once you hit dungeons though or do dynamic events with a small group. I think I would have preferred a more soft role model than this mish-mash of skills, and balance is going to be interesting.

The structured PvP guys are already hitting it though, so most of the balance discussions are strongly PvP slanted.

I don't understand the Mesmer illusions that automatically pop up after a few attacks with the scepter.  They do 0 damage, literally, and just stand around lobbing purple balls at my target.  In PvE, the enemies never attack them so they can't tank, and in PvP nobody confuses them for me.  What's the point?  The best I have done is after an illusion appears I use it as a sort of bomb with F1/2/3/4 and that's it.  But the illusion has to run up to my target and if it gets caught in an AoE then it just melts.  Am I doing it wrong?

I love the battlegrounds, I could do this shit all day.  I will be glory 80 and still level 1 :P

It has lots of events and too few hearts, so people miss the events. This is especially true for the various events up near the water supply.

Illusions are free and they are sometimes nice decoy ,especially considering that you can stealth and/or blink. Basically you want them for healing and shatter . Phantasms have some health and deal damage, they also do not die instantly in aoe so you can shatter them more reliably. Strength of mesmer is in his elusiveness - blinks ,stealh, evades , healing and condition removal. He also deals nice damage if specced.

If they had weapon switching for elementalists, I would be all over the class. Ride the lightning is probably the most fun skill (dagger spec), but the staff utility and range is so much nicer.

I'd like it too, but elementalists are already the most versatile class in the game - being able to hotswap to a completely different set of 4 bars would put them way over the top.

Anyway, I use staff 90% of the time and keep a dagger/focus set in my inventory for versatility... I switch out of combat if necessary. Of course that's pve and wvw only - I don't think you can manipulate your gear setup during sPVP matches. (yea, I know this wasn't entirely the case this BWE, but devs have stated that they really don't want in-game gear switching to become a thing).

The clone spawns on the third scepter auto-attack - basically a shadow. Phantasms are slightly better... but their attacks are way too slow.  The only part I really dislike is the fact that both clones and phantasms disappear once your target dies... quite shitty if PvE when you have a pack of mobs. A timer on them would be a bit better.

I'd guess mesmer is all about the boons and conditions.

Overall, I'd like to see boons and conditions last a bit longer. 7s buffs seem a bit too low- 10s-12s might feel a bit better. Getting a nice buff like chaos armor, only to watch it be utterly useless because it is gone by the time the mob catches up to you is just disappointing.

Necromancer is similar. Lot's of conditions and buffs with really short durations. Though some of them stack duration (unlike WoW they actually considered DoT stacking properly) or are affected by talents. But so far it feels really frantic. The extensive use of ground symbols (necro and guardian) combined with highly mobile combat is also an uncomfortable mix.

It didn't seem like that much had changed between the beta tests in terms of skills. Numbers were being changed (the Necro alternate form definitely got a solid nerfing) but not mechanics.

Well the Engineer seemed to have gotten a fairly hefty balance pass from the last time I played it. Both Pistol and Rifle actually seemed to be doing decent damage now and the new grenade kit was pretty awesome. But still too much randomness in the utility skills and turrets still suck from what I've read.

I'm hoping they have a similar look at Mesmers before launch too. Jon Peters has more or less said that the scepter sucks (which is really unfortunate as it's the first weapon you get) and they'll look at it. If they did that and made the illusions stick around after the target died for even a few seconds so we could engage another target with them it would help a lot. I've also seen it suggested numerous times on the forums that they separate clones from phantasms and let us have 3 clones and 1 phantasm out at a time. This would prevent phantasms getting used in shatters or being overwritten by clones like the scepter auto-attack one.

I liked the ranger a lot better once I got a bow, starting with a throwing axe just seems odd to me, though the warhorn offhand was kinda cool.

Game was somewhat fun, but probably not enough for me to purchase right away. Might pick it up when I leave the second job and have more free time, but that won't be until late October at the earliest.

Throwing Axe + Torch makes for an awesome combination.  But then Rangers have so many good styles that it's tough for me to pick two.  I'm going to end up with multiple ones because of this.

A conditions/crit build with double pistol and the burn/bleed on crits trait was just tearing the toughest classes to pieces last night.  I still have fun with Mesmers, in SPvP at least the clones cause so much chaos i routinely stood up to 2-3 people at once and if things got hairy i could always just stealth away better than a thief.

I planned on playing an engineer when the game went live and didn't try one until this weekend.  It seemed ok for PVE but I wasn't terribly useful in WvW.  I'll probably go with a Warrior when the game goes live, and when alt-itis hits I'll get a ranger or an elementalist.  I'll probably do jewel crafting since jewelery doesn't drop nearly as often as weapons and armor and it isn't hugely expensive to level. 

Agreed, especially the phantasm bit. As far as weapons, I was doing sword/pistol and staff in the last BWE. Didn't play long enough to get into much this time around.

Love the class, especially my funkalicious human's look. Hope it gets some love quickly.

I'm really bummed that I'm so into TSW right now, hopefully that wears off for GW2 launch :) And what kind of world is it where I like THREE mmo titles in a year (more or less)?

I completed Queensdale fully. Hunting down the vistas and last few hearts by warping around the map was actually fun, I'll have to say. The AH seems a few tweaks from being totally nice, but after the nightmare of D3, it's a welcome relief.

I grew to like my warrior a lot more, for one thing: Greatsword / Sword + Warhorn is just kind of absolutely crazy run speed, for anybody complaining about that. Activate the swiftness buff, swap, do your spin thing (at enhanced speed), then do your super dash (if you're not near any enemies). You just tear across the landscape. And when I get to where I need to go, I just swap in my real set from inventory, and I'm good to go.

That said, I was kind of disappointed to get to the next area (whatever the one to the south was), and just find more: "Here's a heart. Kill centaurs."

I'm still on the fence about whether to keep my preorder in.

I didn't get the chance to try crafting at all: is it useful?

Crafting is pretty damned awesome.

I found crafting really fun.

Anecdotal, but I couldn't get any of my friends to like this.  Mostly it was a lack of direction that turned them off but they also didn't like how the game didn't put you in an instance for the first bit (so you can actually try the skill system out without getting kill stealed all the time), but also by the time they started getting the hang of their skills they got really turned off by finding a lootable weapon that was better than their current one.  When they equipped it all their skills changed and they had to re-learn a whole new set of skills. AT that point they gave up, and any attempts to explain the purpose of it just left them shrugging and not really caring at that point.

 :awesome_for_real:

I just found out about racial skills, Charzooka? holy fuck i want.  And yes i had a friend quit after about 15 mins over the lack of direction and weapon skill thing also, then she promptly went back to EQ2.

For those playing the Mesmer, they are going to go through the most balance/work (I think) of any of the classes.  There some post by Jon Peters on the beta boards talking about it .

I spent most of my time with mesmer and ranger this go round, classes that I'd mostly ignored up until now, and wound up very impressed with both.  Monsters were consistently attacking the clones rather than me, so they were actually providing a benefit.  The ranger's leaf dog was dying more often that I'd like still, but his weapon skills were universally awesome.

I was planning to roll Mesmer but wasnt impressed this round.  I saw the dev post on it but in my search for another class I fell in love with Thief lol

These totally sound like the people who are encouraging devs to put out more WoW clones. Just tell them it's not for them and get new friends. And lol at killstealed. My friend Crowen had some guy bitching him out for kill stealing as well as someone racing for a resource node.

I dunno, man.  It's kind of a game's job to make you like it.  I think there are enough "I don't get it" comments that it's fair to say the game doesn't do the best job at showing you why it's fun.  Now sure, a new and different game is going to tend to be like this, because the developers haven't learned exactly how to teach people how to play this kind of game yet, because it hasn't been done a million times before.  But it's still something to think about improving.

This is precisely why I liked this game. It is not like you have 4 toolbars filled or going to be filled with abilities and other shit. One bar, 5 main buttons for your weapon. The game is frankly easy to play, but putting together which weapon to use for those 5 skills is where it gets involved - if you want it to be. Otherwise, equip sword, target mob, hit buttons, watch the show.

Does the game even have any type of tutorial?  I can't remember even seeing one.  The game doesn't do a good job at explaining itself.

Get over yourself.  The game has a lot of very different mechanics and requires training to get out of the normal MMO mentality.  At first approach this game does absolutely nothing to help with that transition.  No other game changes abilities based on weapons, nor has the same vein of abilities.  Neither does any other game have the same questing mentality.  The game should make it obvious on why things happen and the correct way to approach the game instead of going "here's something completely different, good luck".

Also, he was fully aware that "killsteal" doesn't mean less XP/loot, but that doesn't change the fact that if you are trying to figure out how abilities work and how one ability should be used compared to another, if people keep coming around and killing the mob you are working on it makes it really hard to get a grasp on the skills.  That was his complaint.

He never once in his complaints to me told me the game was bad, he complained the game did absolutely nothing to explain to him how things are supposed to work and help him understand the mechanics and thus he decided that after 3 hours he wasn't going to buy it at launch.

*edit* Also if I hadn't had 2 and a half years of GW1 experience I definitely wouldn't have taken the time to understand the mechanics and see fully what the game has to offer.  It doesn't do a good job of making you realize why the game is amazing right away.  Instead it does nothing to explain the abilities and weapons, do one quest then go "hey check out some of these areas for potentially interesting things to do".

Maybe your friend is stupid?

Like, I dunno anymore. I get it. Just like I said months ago, I was one of the ones who supplied feedback that TUTORIALS NEED TO BE BETTER/MORE OBVIOUS. So they added a bunch of NPCs to explain shit and more pop-ups with big arrows pointing to shit saying THIS WORKS LIKE THIS. And it could be a little better, probably, with some more interactive shit in the first bit.

But then I'm seeing more people than not doing okay. It's not like this shit is impossible, or even hard. It's an MMO. It's McDonald's hard.

Well technically, FFXIV did the weapon skills based on weapon thing and it is technically a game. But no, this game didn't hold your hand in the beginning and teach you step by step how to do stuff. Perhaps it is because it was beta and not a demo... and on release perhaps they'll have a small tutorial with pictures of button presses and skill demonstrations. To me, it felt refreshing - having some MMO knowledge on how basics work and then exploring not only the map but skills and my character... but I get where you are coming from in your post and can see the wtf-ness to it.

Whatever, I'm not going to get into a full blown argument.  The point isn't that it's hard, the point is that it doesn't really explain gameplay fundamentals (not talking about UI hand-holding here) that are core to enjoying the game in a reasonable time frame before a reasonable person goes "fuck it I just had a steam sale with a shit ton of other games to play"

People are so used to doing things differently there there is no amount of tutorial one can give to show how to "play it right".  The only way is to play until it clicks, which is something I've heard over and over.

(Not that it can't use some better tutorials.)

All in all I can see GW2 becoming my main game:

- world is big and interesting to explore.  So I will play at least to see it in entirety or close to it
- many classes are innovative and very fun. Right now thief, mesmer and engineer are 3 of my favorites . Arena really did a great job with those 3 making them feel unique and fresh
- WvWvW has a lot of potential if played in a great organized guild. There is potential for tactics, organization and skill. Of course there is a caveat that in a pug setting it is mostly brainless zerg with bashing walls/gates (and you dont even realize whats going on if you just tag along wiht organized group, without actually hearing the teamspeak)


Game is far from perfect, but its  stable and looks pretty finished, it already is a huge success (over 3.5 mill pre-orders) and its mostly a question how much of a long term success it will be. If Arena.net builds on this succcess and continues improving game I think it will have great future

Right now imho those are 3 areas of the most concern:

-class balance in spvp/www . Pendulum swings wide and hard. many classes,skills, weapon sets and traits  are either a must or completely useless .
-www experience must have better tools for group organization. Right now its not existing. If they fail to give easy to use and convenient tools to players only the most hardcore guilds will enjoy it. for casual player it will be boring zergolagfest
-long term pve . I cant really comment on this as I havent experienced any of it. It just a fear that it might be same thing as rift - dynamic events are merely a gimmick a mere 1 tier step up for previous iteration. From what I seen so far pve was boring and easy faceroll I wouldnt bother with if not for exploration of the world aspect ,but obviously that could be different endgame

I don't think a longer tutorial would help much, it's somewhat hard to describe the design approach in game terms that early without boring people. They start you off with one skill, one weapon and a clear direction and most of it does come together. They've already put lots of really obvious hints and arrows all over the starter period. That said I don't like the approach that tries to build energy through a tutorial boss fight, it can feel pressured which amplifies the confusion.

EQ/EQ2 people are the most resistant to change anyway. Most of them have grown up with SOE and anything that is not EQ causes them to squawk in confusion and horror. I mean who else would still be playing it at this point?

Thinking about the first little step through - it teaches you all the fundamentals of how to play. However, it just drops you in the situations without any 'hey, you learned a new skill, press key 2 to try it out.' Bigger example is the instant death the first boss - all the sudden, you are dead and have the death ability bar in front of you without any explanation of wtf just happened and what all those death bar abilities actually do. Ends up being a spam whatever button is not on CD. It could be a little clearer... like this ability attacks and if you are successful you will rally. You only really figure it out if you mouse over and read the tooltips - though that suffers from the time limit before you die in an already tense situation.

It should be a little clearer... but it is not completely foreign. Just has a higher learning curve.

It's a stark contrast to GW1, which had some nice tutorials.  Factions especially, since I still actually remember exactly how that one went.

The insta-death on that first boss in GW2 is going to be very off putting for a lot of players.

After 2 bwes, and 2 dozen intro quests I still didnt figure out wtf is going with the first boss. I died in 70% of time and dont even know wtf happened.  Seems he has some sort of cleave at close range as all characters who died were melee. But I also died on engineer and survived on warrior once. So who the hell knows

I didn't realize you were supposed to die on those and I played like three different races!

Biggest disappointment overall is that WoW is still king when it comes to instant feedback and snappy responses on ability use.  You'd think a game focused on PvP could do better.  Not a deal-breaker by any stretch but it still feels a little muddy to me.

Loved the WvW stuff that I got to try.  Definitely gave me the old DAoC vibe.  It also cemented in my mind the need to find a crew to run with that is marginally organized with voice chat and all that.

To you people loving on Rangers, do the pets ever reach a point that they don't die to a stiff breeze?  Bad enough that the pathing is shit, but pet death is by far the most annoying thing about the class and the reason I totally gave up on playing one.  At least on the Necro they are designed to be expendable.

They don't really tell you you are supposed to die. It is more a 'here, we are going to kill you to show you what happens and what it looks like and the options you have to come back.' And you only really figure that out when you play the intro a few times and see the trend.

As for pets being perma-dead. I read on the forums this weekend that you have to spec into beastmastery to really beef them up. From what I read, they get pretty tanky from that point... of course that is at the expense of other specs, so not really that far outta line.

All the intro bosses have an instant kill move they use randomly, that usually spawns an add.

The point of it (which isn't really explained enough) is to teach you the downed mechanic.

And a way to turn off the annoying tutorial popups please.

As I said in the discussion folllowing the first beta weekend, get a bear or any of the other animals with 400+ vitality. Get the regen and toughness passives. Problem essentially solved. I solo veterans with this. I'm hoping the one with 400+ toughness can tank too.

I can accept that some games weren't targetted to my playstyle. What's your problem?

If they want to teach players that (and they should), then it needs to be in such a way as to not make the player feel like she failed for no discernible reason.  Going back to Factions, there's one spot where your instructor dude basically says 'I'm going to kill you now so you can see what happens' and he does, and then explains the resurrection shrine thing and the death debuff penalty and all that jazz.  You know what's going to happen and you know why it's happening.

In GW2 they throw you into what looks to be some kind of epic fight, except then you die seemingly at random and are left to figure out on your own what to do.  Anyone who's ever played any video game before is automatically going to think they somehow failed (I died!) and then are left to try to figure out in the heat of the moment what to do next.  It's one of the single biggest mistakes they made in my opinion, since it turns people off right at the beginning.

I always wondered what happened there, but noticed the mob spawn near me and attack it while down, and pop up every time.

+1 for paying attention.

Probably your tone.

He told me to get over myself when I used a joking tone so he started it.

I still think they should add your downed skills to the tab with your weapon skills on the Hero panel so you can see what they do before you're frantically fighting for your life. And the second and third parts of chain skills as well.

I think game designers in general don't believe, possibly correctly, that the attention span of that era still exists. CoH did the same when they re-designed their tutorial, if you're not smacking dudes in 2 minutes after the game starts it's "boring".

Yes, they do.

That and explain why some are on various cooldowns when you die, and other such things. The game leaves a lot of stuff completely unexplained, which is a shame. The more I play it, the more I love the mechanics. But the mechanics are hilariously poorly explained at times.

The one thing I couldn't figure out was:  can we move the buttons around?  I was able to rebind, but was looking for some sort of "unlock toolbar" thing.  If I rebind something to the '1' key, I want to see it there in the first slot. 

Everything else I can deal with.  I actually like not knowing wtf is going on, it adds to the mystery and makes discovering stuff all the more fun.

But then there's this ridiculous concept new kids continue to grow up and get to try things for the first time ever. Some of them maybe didn't even play what's soon to be 10 year old game for now 20-30-something old farts, that is WoW. Or X hopeful WoW clones that followed, failed and died without much splash.

So decent tutorials explaining things with focus on first-timers like those definitely wouldn't go amiss. And if they can help some of those old WoW farts too, then all the better.

I'm fairly certain that you can't.

Yeah, I mean, it's obvious how to do the "death mechanic" better. Before the first boss, have a quest to go up to a training bot. You hit interact, you get a little bit of text about how when you run out of health, you get defeated until you a) bandage yourself or b) defeat any creature. You hit "OK", and it wallops you for 2000, and then you have to either throw rocks at it, or bandage, to survive.

The end.

I think they were trying to make it non-"game"y in the intro, but it makes for a shit tutorial.

Yeah they went for immersion and ended up with wtf just happened.

Oh wells.  I'll get used to it.

The "Wtf is going on?" is compounded a lot by letting you do too many things too quick.  I found it disconcerting at first but after playing MMO's for over a decade I still had all the tools to pick it up quickly.   That's not going to work for people who've only played WoW/WoW clones.

I first thought the heart quests were required in order to trigger events.  Felt like the typical MMO grind and I hated it.  Then I was exploring another area and heard a farmer complaining.  Talked to him and triggered a group boss event.  No heart grinding required.

This is important and needs to be flashed across the screen at start-up.  I later read that the original plan did not include hearts at all, but were added because testers wanted something more familiar.  I also read that later zones don't have hearts, just events.

One of the map options is to turn off completion markers by clicking the little eye in the lower left.  I clicked it and I was surprised to see the hearts disapear along with the POIs and vistas.  This explains why that happens, it took some getting used to at first but I actually found the game more fun when I just wandered around and stumbled across things.  It may be part of the reason that I liked my Norn warrior so much since I didn't try it out until I made him on the last day.  It also means that you aren't hit with the map completion % every time you open the map which is nice since I like to wander around checking things out but hate being reminded that I missed out on completing a map because I'm not going to spend an hour on jumping puzzle.

That's cool, I'll be turning off the icons. I can always pop them back on if I'm curious about something.

That's great to know!

What happens to the heart NPCs, do they still have an indicator when you see them in person? Or do you need to strike up a conversation with everyone EQ-style to find those eventual karma vendors?

I'm not sure if they do or not but you get an email from them as soon as you complete the heart so you will know their name.

They should still have a Heart/Karma icon above their head.

Also, KallDrexx's friend sucks at video games.

I played for less than an hour and had no idea what the hell was going on.  It doesn't really seem like you have to know what to do though so it's not a huge issue.  Pretty sure I'm supposed to stumble around from place to place without any cohesion or explanation and do little things until a big thing happens.

I'm going to have to read a wiki or something on character building before the game launches though.  Logged into their forums to search for commonly asked questions I have like "what's best for solo" etc only to find they had wiped and locked the forums the day before.

So can a gw2 expert tell me "what's best for solo" and also "what's best/most useful for pvp".  Is necro the "healiest" type class given there are no pure healers?  That class looks daunting with all the weapons and different forms changing the action bar so often, of course most of them do.

No one knows.  That is the joy of learning a new system.  The conversations are underway on many forums.

Expect it to change during the life of the game with additions and subtractions.

All classes can do it.

The question for me is what class do I enjoy playing and can play reasonably well?

Engineer looks extreme in the avenues it can pursue. Granted, they only get two weapon choices, but toolkits are extensive. I like what it has to offer, but not sure if I like it more than thf and war.

Thankfully we start with (probably) five slots!

From my limited experience, Necromancers had few if any 'healing' stuff.  Elementalists (specifically in their water attunment or whatever) seemed to have the most heal-type stuff.

Thought that would have been Guardian.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_guardian_skills vs http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_elementalist_skills

I didn't play a Guardian so I wouldn't know.  All I remember is Necro = no or almost no healing, Elementalist = had some healing spells.  Ranger had a healing spring iirc, but that was it.  Warrior might have had a shout?

Necro, Elementalist and Guardian all have some area heals. Engineer too I think. The Ranger one is self only.

They're all pretty weak, either low amounts, long cooldowns and limited area or all of the above, so while you can assist the party that way you are not a "healer". Pretty much all classes can solo well, though I can see a speed advantage for direct damage classes but not enough I'd consider it a factor. Mob XP is low anyway so most of your experience is exploring and events.

From everything I've seen this game just doesn't have traditional healing?  Pretty amusing coming from the company that gave us Monks in GW1.

Every healer I currently play with hated the fact that they couldn't be dedicted healers in GW2.

I'm glad that there aren't dedicated healers.  People who like to play that role are rare and people who are good at it are even rarer

I'm very excited to see how it goes in PvP.  High level PvP has always revolved around having enough healing to basically shut down the other teams damage.  It's a mechanic that makes the PvP extremely unfun if you're just trying to get better.  GW1 was probably the best example of that in fact.

DPS battles get pretty dull, pretty quickly.  I think that dedicated healers and debuffers bring flavor to pvp.  Without them, the whole thing devolves into a dps race.  I think that healers, debuffers, interrupters, etc all add tactical elements that make pvp interesting.  I have concerns that the homogenization introduced in GW2 will make it more approachable, but also make it less interesting. 

Well every class can heal himself for huge chunks .And many classes when specced can heal group around them (ranger, ele , engi - the ones I know off) .Ele is probably closes to dedicated healer if needed be

I agree 100%.  Given the choice I'd rather have fights hinge on the strength of healing and control than on the ability to rapidly assist your DPS train.  Siege weaponry is already in place as an answer to any healing stalemates that might arise.  Revoming dedicated healers also tends to focus your game around ranged at the expense of melee, probably why just about all the classes have a suite of ranged skills.

Guardians aren't what you'd call a straight forward dedicated healer, but they have the ability to negate a lot of damage on quite a few people.
Mostly through boons of course, it's all about the boons.

So while you might not be standing there spamming heal 1 - heal 2 all the time, there are actually pretty powerful support options.
Of course it requires a bit more teamwork than it does in most MMOs (positioning is key here as well, as is 'comboing').

I can imagine the fact you can't just press a button and see teammate A's health shoot up, might annoy/confuse people that usually fill a more classic healing role, but I've seen a few slightly more coordinated mini-battles and most of the time the group with a decent healing guardian/elementalist was the one still standing at the end.

Yea, I watched some videos about high-end tournament games and healing makes a huge difference in pvp. In pve it seems to be more COH-y in the sense that you either bruteforce your way through incoming damage [healing], debuff and control the enemy so much less healing is required [blind, daze, snares/roots, etc], or buff the party so they take less damage / kill the enemy faster [regen, toughness, might, fury].

In fact, most of the healing seems to come from (ab)use of combos, specifically using 'blast' and 'whirl' attacks inside water fields.. that way the responsibility is more on the person needing the healing to make use of the field. There are a few oddball builds, like a warrior built around shouts that has pretty ridiculous group healing. Guardians also get an elite (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Tome_of_Courage) that gives them some insanely powerful heals.. for 30 seconds every 180 seconds (with the right traits).

I can hardly imagine that guardian elite to make it live or at the very least not get nerfed in the first few weeks, because that actually DOES turn them into direct healers that can shoot up someone's health with a few clicks.

Elite skills in general need a good looking at imo; some can change the outcome of a battle and some (like the engineer's for instance) I'd rather just take a 5th regular skill even.

That's presuming "assisting the DPS train" is actually viable approach in the game, when it doesn't have to be -- turn on collision detection and friendly fire, have attacks work as suitable variant of aoe rather than tab-target, and suddenly placing more than 2 people on one without them murdering one another in the process instead of their target can become a problem. And the fights may somewhat naturally break into individual scale encounters.

(gives all-ranged units advantage as long as they can actually stay at range, obv. but then it becomes a matter of maneuvering/tactics)

Collision detection is a griefer's paradise.  You have to be VERY careful if you're going to include collision detection in your pvp model.

I like how you picked collision detection out of that rather than friendly fire as the griefer mechanic.  :-P

I don't see it as being too out of place though. Besides the very long cooldown, there are some major requirements in a fast paced tPVP game such as the guardian cannot move at all while casting the heal, and is likely already somewhat low on HP when casting it. Even if they're full on HP when casting it and casting just to heal others, the guardian can actually be burst down before getting that spell off (this is with a full tank/support guardian btw).

Compare that to a nice stun on a 45s cooldown from thieves, or a pet that does as much damage as another player from Elems, etc.

Some elites need looking at, but this one actually is in line more than people realize, I think so anyways.

That's no excuse to not remove them in at least one game.  By removing them they can start developing a more interesting system.

So basically an FPS?  Where you die, respawn, and run back constantly?  Lack of healing really showed in WvW for me.  Even with everyone being able to rez it's not something you can do easily in siege conditions.  Basically what was happening was that I'd get to a location and if I died I'd wait to see if it was possible for my group to rez me, if they couldn't it was respawn and spend 10 minutes getting back to the action.

I don't see how spawn point zerging is related to healing.

Besides, like I said a few posts above, healing IS important... watch the Super Squad vs Team Paradigm videos from the last BWE, healing/support from that staff elementalist is a key factor in them winning.

I like more interactive healing in general. The 'lance of mitra' in freakin' AOC was another good example - it was a targeted line/cone attack you had to aim, and it damaged enemies / healed friendlies in its way... same with the paladin 'healing ability that works like cone of cold, only with green numbers' ability they added in cata (or maybe wotlk).

Friendly fire is much easier to document and ban for. 

What Zetor said. There are lot's of healing and damage reduction powers in the game. Just about the last thing you could accuse it of is "just DPS" when every class has powers with all sorts of interactions. The difference is they're limited, you can't rely on just healing to blunt an attack.

That's actually a flaw with the downed mechanic.   The fact that you can't get resed by group mates if you're killed is going to be really lame in WvWvW.

You can't? I was rezzing people and people were rezzing me, though I was playing on the map where you only had access to the skills and unspent skill points you entered with.

You can always raise others.  There are even map markers for it, and multiple videos showing how nasty it is in WvWvW from the defenders side, since if you win, you nearly immediately have a fully defended keep again after you repulse them.

Even Ranger pets can rezz in WvW if you spec them for that ability!

Yes, even someone who is "stomped" can be rezzed, it just takes longer (if you're on the map looking for a respawn marker, it will notify you that you're being healed), and there are a few skills that will rez people. The earth elementalist glyph is pretty mean looking (rezzes 3 nearby people)

Amaron, you do this thing about once a month where you start talking about a thing that you don't actually know about as if you know a WHOLE FUCKING LOT about it. You're kind of doing it now with GW2. Pause, take a breath, read, pay attention. Then start typing.

You can be rezzed if you're killed killed.

I think that's basically all he does.

I got confused then because he said he had to run back.  I don't know much about GW2.   It was a conversation regarding PvP in general and not GW2 from my point of view.  I've only really talked about two things regarding GW2.   The new user exp is bad and the lack of dedicated healers is good in general.   Neither of those things requires much knowledge about the game.

ok first of all long time lurker here,let me begin by telling you english is not my native language so bear with me,i played every mmorpg since asherons call,i played this last BWE and my impresion is that from a gameplay perspective is much beteer than wow and more accesible to everyone(dont have to run back to quest giver,no need to go to the bank,etc)its the first game in a LONG time that i feel is doing something truly new and is truly revolutionary ,so there you have it ,better than wow ,and no im not a troll ,i feel this is the game that will move the genre forwards,i know its a diku,but you all know sandbox is niche and wont sell except eve and i dont think they got half a million subs.

Periods are your friend.   :grin:

Please. When was the last time a quality sandbox MMO was made? Never, that's when.

Also, copypasta from Wikipedia about Minecraft, with stuff bolded by me:
Sandbox isn't niche.

UO

SWG

ATitD

All very decent sandbox MMO's. 

"Quality" is highly debatable for all 3.

Quality is subjective.  I had more fun playing those 3 games than I ever did playing WoW. 

Quality isn't really subjective. Fun is (and for a lot of people is independent of quality.) I don't think you could argue that Cyanide's version of Blood Bowl has a lot to offer in the quality department, but we still have fun.

I supposed defining what we mean when we say quality (and applied to which bits of the game) is important though.

Since we're not comparing motor oil, quality is subjective.  How does one measure the quality of an MMO?  Metrics would vary with each enthusiast you asked. 

Technical execution, is what I would generally think of first. But yeah granted, you may not be using quality the way I would.

I bet it involves charts.

Pronounced 'sharts'.

i want to know in which planet minecraft is an mmo.

Better to just measure popularity in terms of player retention since that translates into money, which is what the developers are after.

The what is an MMO delineation wars are a fun old chestnut. But a persistent, multi-player world is my baseline so I have no problem with Minecraft being considered one.

WvW in GW2 video. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnOhMeYxhRM)

Whoa, this just went from off the radar to must try. Some chaotic PvP action in there with lots of effects going on, magic and robots, looks like some sloppy fun. Hope there is some opportunity for character definement and spice.

The video tazelbain posted here

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=22423.msg1095269#msg1095269

gives you a sense of what WvW is like (minus the constant dying if you are on a weaker side...)

To some extent these two cancel each other out in this regard :grin:

More I learn about the game more I hate some choices Arena did regarding the combat feedback and races. Basically GW2 doenst have cast bars. It heavily relies on active dodge and counterblocking of important skills. All together that means that seeing the animation is very important as its your only clue to counteracting enemy movement.  Then GW2 maps and terrain is very varied - tonse of various elevation levels, small rivers and ponds, ledges ,boxes -  a lot of stuff to block your view and spice up the interaction ( a good thing)

But then enter the asura- a tiny itty bitty fugly race, who is about an ankle tall of the tallest possible characater (norn/charr). Whose weapons are so small that you cant tell whether its a greatsword or toothpick. Who can hide in the pond and you wont see anything but a top of their helm .Same with tall grass. So basically if you want  hide your animation and moves as much as you can - you go asura. THE FUGLIEST SILLIEST RACE IN  THE WHOLE KITTEN GAME!


Like gnomes in WoW never been a problem as much as this. Why?- there are cast bars.  for everything you want to know about . You dont rely on animations as much. Combat in WoW is much less twitchy and you can never dodge out of the skills.

All in all I will have to play a kitten asura . god dammit

Somewhat surprising they'd make a race as small as the Asura in a PvP-centric game. I can already see it becoming the most popular race simply because of the issues mentioned above.

I find it funny that all the big old mean pvp players are 'forced' to play the silly cutesy race.

The more i play GW1 to work on my HoM the more i realize how disappointingly bland the GW2 elite skills are.  In GW1 the elite skills were what made your build and you chose every other skill to compliment/synchronize with the elite skill, in GW2 they've been reduced to extremely underwhelming long CD abilities barely more powerful than regular ones.

Heh.  I see what you kitten did there. ;D

That's a given. The point of GW2 was to remove the choice away from players. Removing choice, decreases the need for constant balance, and you get a more "stable" game. GW1 players abused the holy fuck out of the system and they wanted explicitly avoid that coming into Guild Wars 2.

It's more that the strong GW1 elites fall into what are considered weapon skills in GW2, and have been replaced by the #4/#5 weapon skills for the most part. Elites are now long cooldown utilities that aren't weak, they're just not going to be used as part of a basic rotation like GW1's elites.

In GW1 I could string any 8 skills together between 2 professions of my choice. Not only that, but in high end pvp I had to synchronize with 4 to 8 other players for any chance of winning. In those circumstances elites served as the great periods to very long run on sentences. In GW2 I don't have 2 professions to choose from or even control over half my skill bar. I can't even choose not to take even a heal. GW2 elites have to be bland and generic to make up for the limits in choices a player can make, and the fact that half your bar is under the "kill stuff" category (though not entirely true for most weapon sets).

It's best to realize that GW2 has nothing in common with GW2 except the name and lore.  Once you get over that the game becomes more enjoyable.

From a PVP'ers perspective I don't think they are entirely two different games. At least in the sense that I or anyone else who was into the old GW1 scene will have to learn an entirely new set of skills. Specialization, positioning, stacking advantages, and communication are pretty much the core of Guild Wars 1 combat and I see that translated pretty well in GW2 without the baggage of GW1. For example anyone coming into this expecting a big long assist train is going to be disappointed and very frustrated.

They upped the difficulty a bit in yesterday's stress. I foresee the number of thieves declining.

Who said that's a bad thing  :why_so_serious:

They are definitely moving away from deck building style of pvp to something more like MOBA skill sets.

Hey no argument here, though I think the time of death is way too off for a moba, and lacking the "slow building mountain of advantage" aspect.

This is one of the big, big problems I have with the game.

I really don't understand why GW2 absolutely refuses to run for me now.  It crashes my video driver (which is the most updated non-beta nvidia driver available) *constantly*.  Like every few seconds constantly.  No other game has this problem.  SWTOR runs flawlessly.  I'm trying the free Secret World weekend and so far it's running absolutely flawlessly.  I know from the GW2 beta boards I wasn't the only one with this problem, so I'm wondering if the game is really ready to be released.

The difficulty of what?

Everything, apparently. I saw a comment from the developer that they made the game-play easier for the last beta-test and complaints plus possibly profiling convinced them they'd gone too far. So they reverted difficulty to that of the beta test before (second beta test).

Pre-ordered digital DL of this from GMG for $45 US, code: PCGMR-ALLIN-GREEN

Excellent article about GW2 by someone who went in expecting to hate it. http://sixdee.net/2012/04/last-portal-to-tyria/

Awwwww.. was hoping my preorder would mean I get to try this before it goes live.  Guess I missed the last beta weekend.   Man, I'm going to be so clueless playing this when it goes live.  I don't think I've ever gone into a MMO release blind.

I did 3 DE and 2 heart by myself in the second norm zone.  It was slightly more difficult, but still very manageable. Or maybe I am just starting to get elemantist down. Really I just wonder people complaining about difficulty just don't use dodge.

Also Mobs don't always try to leave the AOE now but still do sometimes.  Which is good, they were too easy to exploit before.

Who gives a shit about difficulty, they have a flat leveling curve for 90% of the levels which is still a lot better then most games. 

I played 2 and 3, both seemed fine to me. But the forums had some people crying about beta #3 being tuned too easy.

And yeah, I've soloed hearts and DE. The first are always soloable and the second scale to be so that's working as intended.

Any particular reason this hits thieves harder than others?

<<--- still going back and forth on a daily basis on what class to play.

Squishy melee is not fun solo.

They acknowleged I believe that Thieves were 1 class that needs work, hoping by launch they are improved since that will be my main

It's not like class or PvP balancing is going to stop on launch. It never does.

But I am happy they're looking at the necro now.

I recall them saying they will be tweaking class balance a lot so to expect it it frequently. 

Well, now that I am playing the game again (and I'm passed the omg this is different and not GW1 feelings) I'm actually really digging this game, and the mesmer.

Wait what?  Did you mean the stress test?

Yeah, game was pretty well playable until 9pm, when it started shitting the bed with unplayable lag.

Another 20% discount code for GMG from PC Gamer:

http://www.pcgamer.com/sponsored/another-great-offer-from-green-man-gaming-continuing-the-summer-of-madness/

Worked for me for the standard digital edition.

Is there a url where the game can be downloaded from in advance? GMG says download link not available as yet.

From the sounds of things, they're not giving out any codes until the game actually releases. Buying from GMG right now means waiting.

This is correct.

I bought the game with 20% discount from GMG and got the activation code in email immediately. Downloaded the game from https://register.guildwars2.com/. If you just want to download the client, I don't think you even need an activation code. Just register and you can find the download link from GW website. Worked in Europe, not sure about other parts.

Confirming the instant code from GMG thing, when buying from EU at least. Download is done from GW2 official page, like nurtsi says.

I believe those who bought it from GMG before the 8th got an instant key as well as headstart access, now GMG just says the keys will be sent in time to start on the 28th. Also the first step of creating an account on the GW2 site seems to be registering your key, so guess nothing to do till GMG starts sending out the keys I guess.

So, after playing the for 2-3 hours during the stress test today, I'm kind of torn.  Sure, it's interesting, but the PVE really isn't all that compelling.   Didn't attempt any PVP, as I just wanted to get a feel for things.

At least now I have a better grasp of the basics.

Completely unsure of what class I want to play now.  Engineer was OK, didn't knock my socks off or anything.   Played some elementalist and that had a lot more eye candy and satisfying blowing up of stuff.

edit:  Should not that I was playing with my old GPU (RMA arrives today), so the performance wasn't fantastic.  If things were a bit smoother, I imagine the combat would have felt better.

If I were playing a MMO for PvE, I'd just go to RIFT or WoW or SWTOR.  This really is a PvP centered game that has PvE for when I get bored or things are slow. 

That's my thoughts, anyways.

You can level/advance through PvP, correct? PvE is more for gearing/solo/alternate play?

Correct, you get exp in team PvP and WvW.

My understanding is you *only* get xp in WvW.  In team PvP you get glory, which is used for pvp (asthetic) gear

You also get drops when you kill people in WvW.

Right, my point is that it doesn't seem like you gain xp when you team pvp, which I find retarded and backwards to their other ideas.

What about skill points?  Are these level and PVE challenge only?

There are skill point places in the WvW map.

Plus once you get to 80, all xp goes to earning skill points like in GW1.

This.  I play the game for an hour or two and then find myself bored.  The PvP is too slow a pace for me so far in the testing, but I'm hoping that it will pick up and evolve when the game goes live.  I fear that I may just stick with WoT for my PvP fix and play GW 2 for my social gaming needs. 

I'm kind of disappointed by how little I feel compelled to play this after beta testing. 

I liked the PvE... oh well, different strokes.

Sadly I'll be away from the computer when it launches so finding some names not taken is going to be an exercise in creativity.

"Slow pace" ?!? Compared to Street Fighter or Counter Strike? hmm maybe ... but its lot faster than any MMO. ANd faster than WoT as well

The WvW is not any faster than WAR is.

Personally I find the pace a bit too fast but most of that (might be) due to not being so familiar with all the skills at level 80 especially if you get jumped by multiple players at once  :why_so_serious:

The PvE, at least early on, is early WoW ground into a concentrated serving of mind-numbing boredom.  I think TSW has somewhat spoiled me in this regard, and GW2 has an opposite approach to PvE.  I just don't have the patience to put up with this endless  grind anymore.

Everyone I know is playing this game so I'm forced to get it, but I honestly couldn't stand more than 2 hours of the PvE.  Welp, hope the PvP is good!

What exactly are you grinding?

My experience was running around the starter area and looking for bars to fill up by doing menial tasks.  Lots of picking up shit.  Lots of kill quests.  Some 'interactive' but boring stuff like fixing golems with a wrench.  Maybe I missed something.

I can see the grind if you are trying to get skills unlocked to use in WvW.  Getting boosted to 80 when you enter the PVP zones is nice but only having your basic low level skills and traits available can make survival a lot more problematic which means that leveling is faster in PVE for the lower levels since you spend less time dead waiting for a rez or running back to the battle after rezzing at a base.  From a PVE standpoint if you really want to run dungeons then you have to make it to at least 30 in order to stand a chance in the first one.

Great stuff here, I guess there is no accounting for taste.

Don't work to fill bars.  Flit about the map, take in the sights, and look for little hidden nooks.

If you try to play it like WoW, it will bore you out of your mind.

Yup, I notice that leveling just kind of happens whether I focus on it or not.  Focusing on it seems to make it slower since previous mmos have trained us to kill lots of mobs and complete quests while staring at the xp bar, which is exactly the wrong way to level in this game.  Mobs individually give almost no xp, hearts give a decent chunk for completion and events give big chunks of xp, but exploration, crafting, gathering and PvP also give xp so you don't have to worry about not making progress if you are doing something besides checking off hearts.   

Most hearts give you multiple ways to contribute so you can actually clear them pretty fast if you combine the methods, usually there is one that is slow (usually some kind of gathering activity) but gives a nice boost to completion and another (usually killing things) that gives smaller boosts but can be done in conjunction with the gathering activity. 

For me the big key turned out to be turning off map completion icons, which leads me to explore a lot more actively rather than bee-lining from heart to heart.

That makes quite a bit of sense.  I guess all you really need to grind for is the ability unlocks, then you can just level with PvP anyways.  I can handle that.

Any truth to the rumor floating around yesterday that you can conceivably get to level 11 just by exploring all the PoI in every city. Granted, that does fuck all for weapon skills, but does unlock some goodies without having to beat on anything.

I wouldn't be surprised, there are 80 levels and exporing POIs give pretty good xp.

In other words, it's great for explorer types but really sucks for achiever types.

Depends what you are trying to achieve.  There are a TON of achievements you can work towards, and plenty of levels and difficult things to do.  It just doesn't force you into one style of play.

Yeah I think Anet covered the bases for exploration AND achievements - considering my fresh warrior had a ton of pop ups for daily counting of something I beat to death along with a variety pack achievement. I might just do as much city touring as I can the first day or two. Then I can run around with that green down arrow on me the rest of the game.

There is eighty levels in crafting as well.  Would be hard as a solo char for lack mats and money, but should pretty doable if fed by alts. Not sure why you'd want to put all your crafts on one char, but its an option.

This is not hard to fix. If you are clearing the starter area out, every last heart, sticking around for dynamic events, etc, it will be easy. But if you jump to heart nodes that +1/+2 levels, you'll easily find a good challenge there, and the dynamic events will feel a lot better.  A lot of the events get quite fun if you're a little bit undertuned for it, and the rewards for jumping ahead are nice.

Basically, if you aren't circle-strafing, using CC and evades on mobs, you could be taking on much more difficult stuff. And if you don't pick those skills up, Explore Mode dungeons will wreck you.

The context of what I was replying to, as I saw it at least, was regarding leveling specifically.  Fluff achievement stuff is entirely another thing.

Pretty sure fluff achievements usually net you a large amount of xp and cash, too.

Which makes them grindy, which goes back to Trias' original comment.  :grin:

LOL, grind is losing its meaning.

It's lightyears better than (pre-nightfall) GW1 pve, and that's enough for me. If anything, it reminds me of RIFT invasions and rifts (which, incidentally, are the things I liked most about RIFT). I also liked the personal story quite a bit, soooo yeah.

e: the PVP implementation is also quite a bit better than any DIKU in the market, but that goes without saying

RP is a big one if the forums I've read over the years are to believed.  A very vocal group of posters (there seems to be at least a couple in every mmo beta forum) are constantly complaining that they have to engage in combat in order to level up their crafting.  It seems that they finally have the chance to live the dream thanks to GW2.

WoT you talking about there?

World of Tanks.

Someone is trippin and it aint me! Dude I just played WaR this weekend (free trial and all) - its like WoW in molasses. GW2 combat is about 5 times faster and more fast paced

Then why did he compare it to War then?

I did that during BWE 2, and I got to around level 11, or so.  Last BWE, I did the same thing, and I only got to around level 9ish, despite them adding 2 cities, and the vistas.  Still, it's easy XP, particularly after you've done it a time, or two, and know your way around.

Is the proper out-of-context quote progression.

So long as crafting doesn't produce the be-all end-all gear I've never had a problem with this.  When they're the sole source of viable equipment you run into lots of BS with monopolies and insane prices that fuck over non-hardcore money grinders.

I don't see gear being the pivot point in this game as in others. I may be proven wrong, but the gear FEELS like it is secondary here. That said... anyone look at crafting seriously? I am leaning, as I always do, to cooking (which when you choose it, it specifically gives you a pop up telling you you'll be spending more on that craft than the others). /cry

Cooking is supposed to be an advanced craft not just in terms of cost. It differs from other crafts because the "intermediete" ingredients you make/refine cannot be stored in the crafting bank space slots so it requires more bag space if you want to hold onto stuff you make so you can use the stuff in later recipes. That will limit you more than cost. Cooking looks fun but there's no way I'm starting with it.

Good to note. It also doesn't fully matter to me as crafting is always something I do AFTER everything else, rather than do a little of it while doing other things. I will keep all that stuff in mind though.

Legendaries are going to be pretty cool things you make in the Mystic Forge.

Like a unicorn bow that shoots rainbows.

I quoted the full quote chain this time in hopes that someone will read it thoroughly enough to find the humor that caused me to post in the first place. First Nebu says he'll stick with WoT because he doesn't find the GW2 pvp compelling or fast enough. Then Dark_MadMax begs to difffer, also mentioning specifically that he finds WoT slower paced than GW2. Then out of the blue, Trippy jumps in to tell us that WAR combat isn't slow in the slightest. I don't know maybe I'm wierd but I find that kind of non-sequitor like post amusing, though it's a lot less funny when you have to explain it.

I think this board needs a whoosh smiley for things that go over your head. I'll just use a sad panda in it's place   :sad_panda:

Cooking is probably going to be the most end-game useful item, because it produces the most useful consumables that people will keep on needing. It's also the one you definitely want to level along side PvE, because eating food gives you +10 XP to kills for 30 minutes.

Also, if you plan on only starting one character at the beginning, you should be pretty fine for cooking space: just create 4 mule alts, and you're good. Or do the "I'm in a guild of my own." trick.

That said, it's a money sink. But it gives you a bunch back.

Tell me more of this madness. I don't like making alts as storage but if I can do it all on one character then I'm interested. I had inventory problems just running around.

Start a guild, represent the guild to accumulate influence points to unlock a guild vault, since you can belong to multiple guilds you can have your personal guild for extra storage and also belong to one or more other guilds if you want.  Influence points (which are earned by a bunch of different actions in game) only go towards the guild you are representing at the time you earn them.  Additionally you get a bonus for grouping with guild mates and doing things.   I imagine you can unlock the first tier of storage fairly simply but higher tiers will take a guild of one quite a while,  you can also buy influence if you have the spare cash.


http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Architecture#Architecture

ETA better links

Super thorough guide on inventory management, which includes the "your own guild" stuff:

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/46211-guildwars-2-inventory-and-you-maximizing-space-on-the-cheap/

Looks like my casual guild will hit the guild cap limit (500 accounts) and so will be running two guilds. Pretty positive buzz on this game, will be interesting to see how long they can retain that.

I'm seriously thinking of seeing if I can cancel my pre-order.  The zealotry of its legions of fanboys is really starting to put me off this game. :argh:

That's retarded.

How is GW2 fanboy zealotry different from pre-release fanboy zealotry of any 'wow-killer' mmo since, oh, 2006? I don't see how it's any more/less intense than SWTOR, WAR, or even AOC.

edit: english iz hurd

Go for it, Vanguard is free to play now and you shouldn't find too many fanboys.

And Brad is back!

Just got my hands on my Collector's Edition- good lord! Figurine is enormous, and it is packed with cool stuff. Also comes with some in game goodies apparently. I am reasonably giddy with excitement, and increasingly bitter that I will be spending most of the weekend stuck in fantasy football drafts  :heartbreak:

Wait.  An MMO actually sent out boxed copies early?  That's another thing I've bitched about for years. :heart:

Part of the reason I'm so high on this game isn't because it's a great game (though I think it is) but the absolute professionalism on display by the company so far. The test was so top notch.... I can't verbalize it properly, because it's so far above anything else I've ever seen that there's just no real way of comparing the two.  And it's not just the big things, but the little things, like doing stress tests the week before launch, treating the BWEs like betas, getting the boxes out early, the attention they gave the paper doll UI to minimize clicking and new windows.

There's actual thought going into things, something which I feel is in increasingly short supply in the industry these days.

It would be hard for me to care less about this game right now, but since I was a dumbass and pre-ordered it, I guess I'll jump in at some point. Head start at 3am, thanks a lot for that.

And the email about getting in to reserve your character names, it just buuurns. Thanks, TOR.

Or maybe I'll just go in the den and paint...

FYI, they have said there is a good possibility they will open the servers up to 3 hours early (so midnight EST)

I don't get it.  Auto-scaling so content never goes gray.  A fun crafting that rely on exploration and not grind.  You can totally be self significant and play at you own pace.  The way you tried to force EQ2 to let you play is exactly how GW2 wants you to play.

I got mine from a buddy who has a friend at ArenaNet*, so it didn't go through the normal channels.

* Which, I just found out, is less than a mile from where I sit in my cubicle. Small world, this.

You wound me, Sirrah.

It's not the game, it's me. I'm gamed out. Other than minecraft I have zero urge to play video games.

We need to game together.  We can spin yarns about the good 'ol days while grinding on baby scorpions. 

Nebu has volunteered to babysit Sky. All in favor, say "Lumberbeard."

Lumberbeard.

Shit.  Is it too late to withdraw?

Just make your character name AndyDavo, you'll be safe then.

Yup, too late.

Lumberbeard.

Oh, zinger!

Lumberbeard.

Lumberbeard and Doctor Muscles.

Are they starting a band?  I'll go to a show if they'll get me a backstage pass.

(http://www.drummerworld.com/pics/drum46/animal1.jpg)
ANIMAL LIKE DRUMMING BLAAAAAH!

Played for two hours for my first time this morning.  Just some random notes.
1.  Character creation was good.  Good level of detail.
2.  I followed the initial event chain and it was clear and I felt it gently got me on my feet.
3.  The 'heart' events are a good idea; it pulls players together, gives rewards and feels like a part of the world.  I did four of them and they felt about the right difficulty and duration for the rewards.
4.  I made a Warrior who will use a long bow but can't find one!  Can't find one even in Divinity's Reach.  I figure I'll get one as a quest reward but I am pretty surprised how scarce weapons are.  Maybe I'm missing some NPC.
5.  Seriously, I have to hold down CTRL to reveal nodes?  Why not show on my radar?  Minor gripe.
6.  Combat is fun and I feel powerful but I wonder how I'll feel at level 60+.

So far though, a very good game.  It pushes the MMO genre forward with some of its design ideas.  Now if I could just get on :)

You mean crafting nodes?  If so then they do show up on the radar

CTRL mostly comes in handy when you are close to a node but can't see it for some reason.

I'm playing with a good size guild I've played with in other games.   Most of them really trying the game for the first time are not really showing a lot of enthusiasm for the PvE so far.   Trying to get them into WvWvW but the server situation has us all spread out at the moment.   Unfortunately the dynamic events feel a bit worse than beta as if they're being overloaded despite the zone overflows.

There's definitely a nebulous upper limit which separates "scaled up and fun mob battle" from "mindless zerg wandering around killing events in 20 seconds" which wasn't apparent in the beta. It isn't even consistent from event to event.

It was hilarious last night, one of the events in the Norn zone is to stop an invasion of the sons of sverin, the sons lasted about 2.5 seconds after they spawned in and the whole event are was carpeted with knee deep piles of their bodies.

Awesome. Now the launcher won't even start up properly. "Connection error, trying again..." (in German, which is not a good sign, since I set it to English.)

My first impressions are... not impressed. Character creation was really good, I'll give it that.

I don't really get all the crazy love this game is getting.  I mean I don't dislike it, and it's been fun-ish up to level 10, but it just feels... I dunno.  The world is so densely packed with random frantic action, but it all feels sort of soulless.  I might not notice so much if it weren't for the story quests with the voiceovers and shit, which always make me pause and think, "Oh, weird, I'm actually supposed to give two shits about this world?"

I'm just having a lot of fatigue with the controls. You're clearly supposed to be circle strafing, occasionally hitting a dodge button, hitting 1-5 skills + 4 utility + professions, doing the AOE target dance and having a swap weapons button within reach? It feels like I'm trying to contort my hand.

I know, you can do most on-level PvE content standing still.

I think my biggest complaint is the necessity to start an alt and start leveling up from zero again to try out different classes. 

The crafting system is kinda neat.  The ability to instantly stash collectable/materials in the crafting bank from anywhere is nice (and does wonders for my bag space), but I wish crafting stations were more accessible or portable.

The overall PVE gameplay is decently entertaining but not mind blowing.  The world/quests don't grab me the way TSW did -- it just feels like yet another fantasy setting.  Need to see what PVP is like.

The PVE is kind of flavorless and lame, yeah. However I just did WvW for about an hour and a half and it's pretty awesome. That's totally where the value is going to be for me, I can tell.

See, I find the PvE perfectly entertaining. It's not world changing, but I do like that I can kinda wander aimlessly and find things to do. I don't spend my time raging about my bouncy run animation like you do, though.

It's the exploration that makes me love the PvE.

There is a small river running through the area Tmon mentioned.  Just for kicks I jump in the river to see if it's deep.  No quest, no loot, just exploring.  That's when I notice an underwater cave!  But it's guarded by lvl 6 fish, and I'm lvl 2.  A few others from the dynamic event we just finished noticed I jumped in and followed me.  Together we killed the fish and made our way through the underwater cave.  We got out in an area with lvl 8 npcs.  When I opened the overworld map, I saw we had just cut under what looks to be impassible mountains to a higher level area that is accessible on land by going a long ways around.  This was an incredibly neat shortcut from the beginner zone which I found just by messing around.

That made me feel like the first time I ran to Neriak from Ogguk. Throw in getting xp for everything, auto-groups, skill points, vistas, etc., and I love the PvE.

There are some nice touches here and there like a necromancer at in a shack iin the middle of the swamp. You can talk to him and he tells of a book just outside that he dares not to read (or something like that) and you can go and read it (and something happens...) The necromancer is not marked in any way so it's up to the player to bother to chat with him and actually read what he says  :why_so_serious:

Well I was enjoying myself until I tried to finish the Asura map.   There's some energy crystal you have to attune to get one of the PoI's.  It has a TRULY retarded hard jumping puzzle where you have to fight mobs mid puzzle and you can be knocked off and die.   Falling means death as well if you're high enough.  Then you get to run back.

Of course if you voice your opinion that this is dumb some asshole will feel the need to say it's optional.

I really don't think the PvE is for me in this game. It seems to consist of nothing but Warhammer style public quests, with the same exact problems as them; when played during normal hours they get the shit zerged out of them and whatever contribution I can manage feels totally empty; or more likely for me who plays a lot at night, they have no one doing them and most of them are impossible or really tedious to do with what little people are around. This game also loves to have phases of the public quests that suddenly spawn a gang of mobs that rush whoever is nearby and gank them before they can do anything about it.

All of which sucks because I really like my classes combat.

Still early for me, but I agree with this. There's a lot of "what's that around the [proverbial] corner" going on here. That combined with how much fun I'm having with the Elementalist, well, I'm doing a lot of side things just for fun. Haven't really done that since CoH (sometimes in WoW too but that was more contrived).

I like the way the map is integrated into the story/task/quest setup with the highlighted areas revealed Football-play style. I also like the whole Google Maps zoom thingy from street view through satellite. Finally, someone has moved beyond the 2D flat map that does nothing more than take over your screen.

I'm also impressed with the you're-almost-dead stuff with the four hot buttons that come up. This reminds me of some game, where you had chance to recover if you did something, but damned if I can't remember which one (mighta been an RPG or an MMO). Here it seems a bit more advanced because I have four different tools to do so.

The quest-giving cutscenes are interesting too. No awards here for quality storytelling, scripting or voice acting. But the presentation approach is also less expensive than other ways to do it, so there's a chance it's sustainable.

Holy jesus that took me an hour and annoyed the hell out of me.  the first jumping stage (the wind area) is the hardest though.  The 2nd stage has a pretty easy shortcut from the start once you get attuned.

What is it about accessibility of crafting areas in the Asuran zones?  They're stuck in those pain in the ass confusing as hell multi-level pyramids in the big city, and in the ~lv10 starting area the jewelcrafting station requires you to have to jump up a bunch of mini platforms to get up to it.  Okay, okay, arenanet you want to make me have to walk somewhere to craft for no reason I can figure out, and I can deal, but would it kill you to leave out the platforming minigame to get there?  </grumble>

Inoticed in bwe 3 the Asura area seems to be really jumping puzzle heavy.  What I'm still liking the best is the ad hoc grouping, I really like not worrying about kill stealing, rushing for nodes or squabbling over chests.

I'm playing a warrior and melee feels weaker than missile.  My gun is great single target damage and my bow is decent AoE.  But my sword and board doesn't keep me alive.  I can't dodge, my reflexes aren't the same as a crack addicted Capuchin monkey.  I do use block but there is so much shit blowing up on screen it's hard to see the mob's wind up attack.  Plus my 1h sword leap is cool, but I sometimes leap over the target and screw up my camera.  Or I leap too soon and skid in front of the mob.  Awkward.

But the polish is great.  The quality of life features are very very welcome.  You're playing the game instead of fiddling with minor crap.

Borderlands?  That's what instantly came into my head the first time I popped back up.  Surprised this kind of mechanic isn't all over gaming.  Maybe it is but I just missed it.

Did a some partial roster sPvP last night.  Learned that I suck hard right now and also that the spell effects are way too busy, even in small fights.  I find it hard to tell what's going on.

Haha actually the one I'm talking about is HARDER than the one you're talking about.  It's possibly shorter but definitely harder.   I thought it was the one that gave attunements.  Actually you don't have to do the one I was talking about at all thankfully.

This is exactly how I feel too.  Dunno how long I'll keep playing, but am having fun wandering around the newbie zone so far.
Biggest annoyance: my pets always pull aggro and die in seconds (necro).  I assume there's some way around that I'll eventually figure out.

Also, am I missing something or is there nothing in the UI that tells you when you target is out of range for an ability?

Agreed.  In most other games, if I started exploring or doing anything "off the beaten path," it felt like a waste of time because it didn't contribute to the progression of my character.  In this game, it feels like there is a great balance of rewards for all different styles of gameplay....which makes for a "complete" game.  Everything counts.

I'm having a blast.  Group cooperation is working.  It is chaotic to run around and jump in the events but to be honest that's what I like about it.  It's a busy world and you just shit your pants and jump in.  Getting the hang of abilities, combos, crafting and UI mapping.  It flows.  Clearly Arenanet has been paying attention to the industry and its evolution in a way that other hapless companies chose not to.   :grin:

I'm perplexed - I've done all the vista's, skill points, POI and waypoints in the Asura starting zone and don't recognise anything from what you are talking about - neither a really long hard puzzle that has enemies hitting you whilst you jump, or a puzzle that requires attunement to t a crystal?

The puzzle I was trying to do is in the freezing room at the reactor plant (building to the extreme NW).   You're jumping along and there are these freezing turrets that also push you back.   You have to time your jumps , kill them and watch out for the knockback.   There are also tough mobs at various levels.   The actual jumping part wasn't that hard though really.   I don't know how long it is as I didn't finish it.

The other one is this:

exploring spoiler warning on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDmZOnPFwYE

It's a hidden jumping puzzle with waypoints that you need attunements for that's quite involved.   Each zone has several hidden things like this with a boss+chest at the end.

Underneath each of your skills there a horizontal bar. It turns red if your target is out of range of that skill.

The story quest mission writing is pretty bad.  The characters are generic and bland, I find myself skipping through dialogue constantly (whereas in TSW I would listen to 2-3 minute dialogues before missions.)

The story quests themselves aren't bad.  They have a good role in the game as to serve as a sort of backbone to the scattered nature of the game's PvE.  I just wish they had interesting characters in them.

As others have said, exploration really does make the PvE work.  The hearts and whatever other side missions that pop up range from ok to meh.  There's just not much to them.   Escort something.  Perform a menial task a whole bunch.  Kill a whole bunch of repeatedly spawning things in one spot.  Pick up stuff and give to quest giver a whole bunch, and usually way too much.  I often find myself groaning in the middle of doing these.  I think that because it has to be accessible to people just hopping into the area at any point that there can't be too much complexity to them, sadly.  There was one quest that was somewhat interesting in the first 10 levels of Norn gameplay (solving riddle statues), even if the riddles were way too easy with only three options to pick from.  

But after you finish a heart and are bored of that sort of thing you can just go exploring.  Harvest, find vistas, find points of interest.  That really breaks up the monotony of the somewhat mediocre quests, and rewards me for what I would be doing in the first place.  It's awesome, and I wish every diku would have more of this.  I wish even GW2 would have more of this!  

WvW and PvP will be fun and will be the main value of the game for me, but I will probably go through the PvE content simply due to the exploration.  And it could get at less mindless at higher levels, although I doubt the grindiness will go away.

It's been average so far for my sylari mesmer. The public event/zerg style questing leaves a bit to be desired. There's all these conditions, boons, combos but ... zerg. I get a few auto attacks in on something before it dies. Up to level 12 and I've seen two combo messages in my chat log. I never feel like I'm doing much during these zerg rushes.

Tradeskills are ok. Discovery is rather straightforward. Even with breaking down all my loots, I'm always hurting for tailoring mats though. Jewelry had a bit of hump in it, I got mostly 25 skill gems and hardly and of the <25 kind. Feels like it took longer than it should have to get it to 25 with all those 25 skill gems sitting there, mocking me the whole time.

I made a thief instead of my beta choice of a warrior. The gameplay is much, much more fun as a thief. However, I do have a big gripe about the PVE. There is pretty much no reason to make a party in this game. Even if you meet up you're just going to do the heart stuff that you'd be doing anyway and most likely you'll go hours without seeing each other as one of you is usually on another overflow server. Quite annoying. We never saw a "change instance" button or whatever either.

The quality is extremely inconsistent.  The human story was complete crap for the limited part I did.  I quite like the Asura one so far though.  There are some multistage events that are pretty neat too.

There are no POIs or anything for it.  It's a bonus puzzle that gives you a chest with decent loot at the end.  It's near the Cuatl Morass waypoint

The biggest reason to make a party is that it gives you a bonus to earning influence points for your guild, the secondary reason below 30 is because you get your own chat channel .  When you hit 30 you will need to group in order to get into the same dungeon instance. 

Hmm that might be it. Get Downed but you still had a chance to finish the mob off and if you did, all was right in the world right? Was there also some type of slowmo effect too, or am i thinking a different game (maybe ME3)?

I agree here, my human mesmer's story is pretty by the numbers and bland, but my Norn story is vaguely interesting.


EDIT: Not saying any of it has me going OMG WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, but I had pretty low expectations here anyway, so it doesn't bother me. :P

Lolz, troll by php.

Orginal post, I simple wanted to ask what level were you? Generally Guild Wars stories don't get batshit crazy until halfway into the game.

I really like the asura story. The norn story was ok (I got to level 20ish in beta) if a bit all over the place, and the charr story was interesting too as far as I got in it (level ~16ish in Ash Legion, if that counts). Haven't played sylvari or human, so no experience there.

e: what surprised me is that there's a fair bit of branching. Of course it's probably not a huge deal gameplay-wise, but still nice.

Yeah I hit a branching part with the Norn story. Ingmar's went in one direction and mine went in another (WAY BETTER) direction. She's only level 11 or so but it's still grabbed me more than my human's (who is also low level). And this is a first impressions thread! :P

The Charr story is really fucking fun, IMO. I love how some of the choices you made at champ creating have an effect.

Yeah for the PVE you just kind of need to dick around, buy your gathering matts and just walk around, chop any tree you see, kill if you feel like it, or if something attacks you, get caught up in a local event, etc.

So, from what I'm reading, it sounds like they've implemented "meaningful" PvE, or at least got dynamic and public questing from Warhammer and Rift "right", if not "close enough", right?

It's a substantial improvement over Warhammer and Rift because the events are the levelling path rather than a sideshow, scale in level and players down scale. So it solves the problem of the event handling too many people, too few people and high levels farming it. It doesn't stop people seeing the repetition in the gameplay, and it is less directed, but it confirms the approach is valid.

It seems like every time I get to the front of the queue to get off the overflow, I'm right in the middle of an event I don't want to leave. I played all evening in the overflow.

Great game for just screwing around for a few hours of mildly directed gameplay. Story sucks and VO is terribad.

As far as grouping go, I'm a guardian so I do try to stand close to people.

The technology is all really impressive I think, from the launcher to the instancing etc.

I had kind of a fffffffffffuuuuuuuuu moment in the story quest yesterday, where it was just an absolute monster jump in difficulty compared to everything I had done up to that point, and I've been making a point to do all the events/heart stuff in an area before I do the story, just because I've heard of that happening. I ended up having to death rush it like 15 times before I was able to finally get the last mob killed, I was in my underwear at that point since everything was broken. And that's after an extra couple hours of leveling in WvW, too. Some tuning might still be needed in a couple spots.

Yeah, I hit a sylvari +1 story that required a lot of bullshitting of the AI to beat last night. Was me + terrible NPCs vs around 30 of the meaner mid level mob type.

Yeah this was similar. Me, 3 NPCs, vs like 3 or 4 waves of level 12 guys. I was level 12, all the stuff in the area outside where this story quest took place was like 10-11.

The worst is that since you scale down for those events just leveling up a few times doesn't really help all that much.  I had a rough time with one of the Norn story missions (rumors of trouble I think it was), figured I could just level up a few times and it would be easy.  Nope, still a total pain.

That was the one.

Up to level 26ish, the asura story has been mostly fine balance-wise. It probably helps that I play an overpowered elementalist and Zojja (who's at least a "veteran" mob judging from her portrait icon) along with her pet golem assist me in almost every fight  :awesome_for_real:

The one egregiously overtuned thing I found was The boss does a few things that are especially devastating to zergs:
- summons aoe circles all around its room, both randomly and directly under people; number of circles seems to correlate with the number of people present. The circles trigger pretty much instantly, knocking you down (!) and doing an aoe dot for about 70% of a glass cannon's hp every two seconds. Since you're knocked down, you're guaranteed to eat two ticks (-> downed) and then a third tick before you can get away with downstate3 (-> dead)
- summons adds regularly (# of adds depends on people participating, so we had at least 7-8 flying around at any time). The adds are ranged and ALSO put aoe circles on the ground (lava font) that hit hard if you stay in them, but at least those don't knock you down.
- some other kinds of fire trails etc. that are visible, but don't have an aoe indicator... if you step in one of them, you're very likely screwed.
- the boss' room is only accessible through a narrow bridge, which is guaranteed to be saturated with AOEs (due to players standing around either alive or downed). The room itself is fairly large, but the adds spawn all over, and there are no safe spots from the aoe circles inside the room that I could see.

Now of course there are ways to deal with the boss - if you have stability or a stunbreaker, you can survive getting caught in an AOE circle, otherwise you can keep running and circle strafing the (immobile) boss. You can also get past the chokepoint by using invulnerabilities or teleports (dodging, any of the charge/rush abilities, abilities that make you "evade" stuff like burning retreat, etc). I could knock off around 10% of its health solo by running around and using all my instants / DOTs on it before I inevitably ate it due to adds spawning on me, or me dodging into another circle... then it was corpserun time. Still, it was freaking brutal for everyone involved, often I just died randomly when trying to enter the room due to a surprise AOE circle spawning under me.


Regarding dynamic events, the 'sweet spot' seems to be around 5-7 people. More than that and everything turns into a zerg/aoe-fest. There aren't really any zerg-busting DEs that I've seen, except one or two events that had those undead plague carriers that explode on people for half their hp (saw one of those explosions down about 5-6 people at once)

That boss is freaking retarded.  Even with great reflexes you won't get out of most of those circles.  Everyone just ends up zerging it from the res point.

Tip: if you want bonus kill XP, kill dolyaks. Nobody ever seems to kill them since they aren't aggressive.

So like. I hate jumping puzzles. I am terrible at them and they make me cry.

Yet I cannot stop fucking doing them to get the stupid vista points. What is happening to meeeeeeeee?

Wait till you stumble over the non-obvious ones in the PvP zones. One took me and 2 other guys about an hour to figure out. But I got some nice PvP siege engine blueprints out of it.

Oh God, they're even in PvP?  :ye_gods:

One trick I've found is several classes can get +10% speed.  For a lot of jumps this provides a sort of margin of error that makes them much easier.  Quickness is good for some jumps where you don't have to worry about about overjumping.

This is probably a pretty obvious thing, but a good way to make precision jumps (like those planks in the first sylvari area) is to stand near the edge of the thing you're trying to jump off, hold down the right mouse button, zoom in as far as you can, face the next jumping target, and press the left mouse button + space at the same time. This avoids overshooting and 'twitching off teh ledge' type moments, since you're not moving during the jump. Thankfully, the vistas are pretty forgiving -- at least they didn't frustrate me as much as some of the jump puzzles in SWTOR (screw you, Balmorra) and Rift.

(For those who played TSW, this is also the only way to do tier 4 of 'The Cost of Magic' without going completely insane :why_so_serious:)


It also goes without saying that the more movement abilities you have, the better. Stuff like Swiftness is obvious, but - for example - Elementalists should keep a dagger/dagger in the inventory for on-demand swiftness + ride the lightning, and Engineers should have a rifle for Jump Shot. Mesmers should unlock a teleport skill and swap it in when needed. Etc etc.

Why the FUCK am I being downleveled to 17 and being forced to fight 21 mobs?  Challenge is one thing but with 4 levels the mobs basically one shot you.

Well, they are in some hidden, out of the way, places, so PvP there is possible, but not very likely. The one I found for example makes you jump off a cliff INTO a waterfall where you land on an invisible (from the outside) ledge that leads you to the real jumping puzzle.

Green quality is above blue quality for items in this game  :ye_gods:

Overall I am liking it. Just plunking around with PvE at the moment and learning mechanics as I go.

I love it.  It's like giving WoW the finger!

I just want to mention that I FUCKING HATE JUMPING PUZZLES. 

Thanks. I'm better now.

The jumping puzzles would be fine if they weren't so poorly designed. Or are they well-designed because they want you to abuse the shoddy collision in the game?

The really funny part is that the jumping puzzles generally give you nothing but a scenic view, not much XP and a +1 to your count of views seen. But as long as the number is less than the maximum number it can be the drive to complete it is palpable. It's an impressive piece of player motivation without any power inflation. And given every achievement generates points I can see that approach continuing.

Their back-end systems are hurting though, going to be interesting whether they can apply enough sticky tape before retail release and pre-orders hit.

AH is still down it seems.  I finally broke down and gave one of my guys tailoring just to make some 8 slot bags since I had a giant stack of jute scraps I couldn't sell.  One benefit of crafting, even if you don't ever craft anything is that it gives you bank access from the crafting stations so you can do banking from out in the wilds.

That benefit goes away, as I haven't seen any crafting stations in the 15-24 zones.

Why do you need them?  You can instantly teleport to about any part of your capital city.

Well technically you can port to a town and use a banker too.  I'm just saying that the main benefit of using crafting tables as a bank isn't a huge deal because you still have to port out of the zone at later levels.

I wish you could retrieve items from BLTC at the crafting station.

The zone completion counter on the loading screen is insidious, and drives me to do the damned tings even if I hate the vistas. The rewards aren't half bad either (they almost always give you transmute stones for cosmetic armor changes)

I preferred when Vistas weren't part of the complete score, and were just treasure chests at the end of odd jumping puzzles. I also think it's cruel that the sylvari zone has a brutal jumping puzzle that everyone thinks is part of a skill point, but is really just to get a ranger pet.

Ranger pet? Where?!

The really tall spiral in the sylvari starter zone. That wide open plain with the skill point flower at the bottom?

If you go all the way up it, there's a tamable spider of some flavor.

Thanks! Currently working on the Norn starter zone, but i'll go Sylvari soon :)

There is also a chest and you advance the treasure hunter achievement by 1.  If you are a non-ranger, you can stop at chest.  So it's not worthless.

And for other jumps it is a horrible mistake.  I like to run around with horn off-hand on my warrior for the runspeed, and I was ascending one of those long turning jump-step puzzles, and there was some guy about two steps in front of me and I wasn't really thinking when I blew that horn and he then jumped and totally overshot and wheeee he plummeted to his doom.

I went down and did CPR on him, and I don't THINK he knew that's why he flew over (he didn't say anything, anyway), but I'm pretty sure it was my fault.   :ye_gods:

I got to cheat on the Asura Thaumonova reactor jump puzzzle quest.  A guildmate did the whole jump puzzle, key,etc.. part and invited me in to jump down for the final boss fight.  Said it took him 2 hours to do everything.

The funny part is the first attempt at fighting the boss we both wiped, and he was raging at the thought of having to do it all over again.  Luckily he was still there and more people dropped down with us, so we were able to finish it and get the chest.

I did the jump puzzles in Lion's Arch last night. The pirate one was crazy. There were probably around 20 or 30 people doing it. At one point you end up in a pitch black room where you can't see the platforms at all. But the elementalists and some rangers used various fire skills to light the room for us and we quickly got into a pattern.

Fire spell/arrows go off.
Jump.
Fire spell/arrows go off.
Jump.

Etc. It was kind of cool. The other 2 jump puzzles in Lion's Arch were much easier and less interesting.

MURDERER

The birth of a new griefing tactic.

That is the mother of all jumping puzzles  :ye_gods: (as I've seen so far), even if you don't make any big mistakes it'll take 15-20 minutes easy I think.

I don't think I'm spoilering anything by saying there is a also a weapon vendor at the end of that one selling level 40 pirate weapons for over 9k merit thingamajigs a pop, so unless you have that much, you may have to do it twice.

Does a torch offhand help at all there?

I think I'm just being a curmudgeon with this game.  Today I realized that seeing "Korea has earned the favor of the gods" (or whatever the message said) back when I first played GW1 may be the noxious little shard of brand damage that makes me tend to see anything in a guild wars game as just a curtain covering up the mechanics.  The amount of detail in the world is slowly wearing away at this.  But holy crap, it's amazing how much seeing references to real world countries in a game message hurts my impression of a game.

The weapons still feel a little bit like random collections of powers to me, rather than a coherent identity, but I'm still working it out.

Spent a couple of hours full exploring the human main city. It's really well done. Lots of good scenery, chatty characters and sky-boxes to make it look even bigger than it is. And if you go hunting there's a lot of places with a sense of character.

I still don't entirely get why it's there though. It's so huge and detailed but once you've got the various points of interest most of it has no function what so ever. Either they have plans for the cities or they just couldn't help themselves building it up to match the scale they envisioned.

In the Asura city they have various quests in the different spots.   Wait till you get to the exploration stuff though.  The amount of level design they put into some stuff a lot of people will never see is mind boggling.

Over a million pre-purchases and 400k concurrent users during headstart (http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/08/28/guild-wars-2-hits-400k-concurrent-users-before-launch/)

Not a bad start imo. I didn't get a ton of playtime in (level 20), but other than a couple of guild issues - it went fairly smoothly for me.

Second impression; I love the way you can just run around an area with no pressure to do anything, but tons of stuff to do.

I'm catching up from my marathon weekend of GW2 and first vacation in a year.  Pardon if I start answering questions already answered:

There is a slim red bar underneath skills if they are out of range.