First Impressions

[Lantyssa]

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.

[satael]

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)

[kildorn]

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.

[trias_e]

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.

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.

[Nightblade]

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

[Numtini]

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.

[Nightblade]

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.

[kildorn]

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.

[Lantyssa]

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

[Maledict]

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!

[proudft]

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.

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)?

[Tyrnan]

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!

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.

[kildorn]

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.

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)?

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

[Threash]

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

[kildorn]

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.

[Furiously]

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.

[KallDrexx]

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

[Quinton]

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".

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...

[Tmon]

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.  

[Tyrnan]

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! Looks like they're thankfully not taking lessons from Cryptic.

[Threash]

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.  

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

[Kageru]

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.  

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.

[Kageru]

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.

[Segoris]

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

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.

[kildorn]

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.

[Phred]

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!

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

[Phred]

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

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.

[Hawkbit]

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.   

[Kageru]

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.

[Furiously]

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.

[Kageru]

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.

[Fraeg]

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.  

[Mosesandstick]

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.

[Nebu]

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. 

[Murgos]

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.