After the beta weekend, all I’ve determined is that I haven’t found a class I truly enjoy yet. Gotta keep hitting that create button I guess.
I have no comparisons to GW1 or WoW, my MMO experience is FFXI from 04-05 and FFXIV’s beta. GW2 beats the shit out of both those games, especially in terms of game design. How much this game can be qualified as a grind I dunno, never played any Korean developed MMO’s either.
I like how you get XP for traveling and discovering points of interest. You’re putting in the same amount of time in the game as everyone else and should be rewarded for it, except you’re not always fighting something and it encourages exploring the game’s locations.
Leveling your character down/up inside certain zones is a great idea. It forces players to develop some skill instead of playing brain dead where you come back to a beginner level 15 zone as a level 80 so you can help your low level friends power level by one shotting everything in zone.
One PvE complaint I have is mobs re-spawn way too fast. Re-spawn timer should scale depending on how many people are in the immediate vicinity. I was alone in a 15-25 zone inside a cave trying to clear it out and the mobs would re-spawn within minutes and I’d get attacked from behind while fighting the ones a little deeper in.
Played WvW PvP for about an hour. We were Green, defended the fort in the center of the map against Blue on SE side where we wiped their entire attacking force. Then we were attacked by Red on the north side, defended that, ran up took one of their outposts but they took it back again. Then Blue attacked the main fort again.
There was probably 200+ people playing and the battles were less laggy than I expected. Game runs pretty well when I’m alone though but still needs to be optimized before launch.
However I’m not sure how you’re going to be making Gold if all your time is spent pvp’ing. I love how you can access the auction house from anywhere in the world. I’ll probably focus on crafting to make my bank and just undercutting prices when I sell loot gear.
Just reading the first 2 posts, this seems to be what I’ve wanted in an MMORPG.
I was extremely disappointed in WOW. I was hoping that in WOW, the Horde could take over an Alliance city, or vice versa, and ultimately it would be up to the players to take back the city. And whatever the results would be, it would be in real time. There was NONE of that in WOW. Guild Wars 2 seems like they’re moving in that direction, which is awesome. I’m all for PVP, but just being able to play a character that is so unique and different to someone elses character has gotten me excited to play it.
This beta’s tooo fucking good. Trying not to play it since it’s so engrossing and I don’t have the time this month to spare!
I love the effort gone in to making AT LEAST 15 different origin stories and even then those differ even more depending on your choices in the character creation stage, I wonder how it’ll mesh into the grand story and all.
Combat is pretty sweet, love how even staves aren’t limited to a certain bunch of weapon skills and that each Staff can differ from another as far as weapon skill loadout is concerned. Shaping up to be a phenomenal game so far. CAN. NOT. WAIT.
I really enjoy how they’ve done the leveling, even if I think it’s incredibly lame your 1-5 skills are tied not to your class but your weapon. Why the fuck would a necromancer use an axe? Shit feels real goofy to me. Aside from that, the variety with weapons is also good so I’m pretty torn there. Events are interesting, if a bit of a zerg, and I have a good time. The PvP, however, feels as though it’s going to be a ranged-fest.
When I do manage to get in, I don’t deal near enough damage before I’m rooted, knocked down, feared, snared and exploded by a rocket turret. Kiting fer days.
woot, my first animated weapon!
Actually played 4 stories to level 10, to get a feel for things (well 3, one of the char missions was so annoying I gave up on that one, and went and rolled a human)
General notes;
I don’t see how its much like WoW…
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[]combat is endurance/bar/time management instead of mana/energy/rage management.
[]especially in PvE, rolling matters a LOT, if you don’t evade during the dynamic event fights you’re gonna die over and over
[*]kill sharing is choice, nice not having to group. That alone makes it 1000x different than any MMO
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Combat seems really antimelee to me as well, the only melee class I had any luck at all with was a sword/dagger ranger. 3 of your skills have evades on them, and you have a ranged and a leap skill to keep you in (kind of 2 leap skills, but one is weird). The one piece of advice I’d have for folks is use your cripples more, melee weapons have a lot of them.
Storywise, your ‘background’ choice seems to effect level 1-10, and your ‘personal event’ choice seems to effect level 11-20. Some of the story quests are a serious bitch and a half, too.
Good impressions for me so far. I didn’t want to try everything out in beta but I just focused on playing some thief at the moment. Recorded some small footage for my friends to show them some innovative stuff cuz we all play WoW.
Underwater combat
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Weapon swap leveling
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Fighting elite outside with strangers
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I really like this game. Between Diablo 3 and Guild Wars 2, I think I have all or 95% of my PC gaming time sealed here.
i made a human ele a couple hours ago before the beta was done, got her to lvl10. and holy shit that was a much more pleasant early game than with the charr warrior i started off with. no bitching flame shaman etc…lol. elementalist are amazing, u get different skills for different attunments and weapon combinations. i didnt get to try dagger only staff and scepter + focus. i like the attunment switching/ combos, too good. im so sad the beta has ended, im really looking forward to this game, i enjoyed the hell out of it this weekend.
There are always more BWE’s to come don’t worry- gonna try a new char every weekend event but not push them past level 10. Wish the Asura and Syvari were in it, those are the 2 I really wanna check out =;
(
Most likely a homage to one of the best Necro Builds in GW1 (55Necro or SS) which always used the green Totem Axe
Ah, I see. Didn’t have any experience with GW1, so that’s why. Oopsy
Well then let me give you a quick run-down of the purpose of that build =D
It was basically a Necromancer that countered crazy Aggro, so you’d have mobs mawling you but you had 3 spells on which would:
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[]Deal Equal (or maybe it was double) the damage received back, as an AoE (so 1 guy hitting you would deal that damage to everyone else in the area).
[]Speed up their attacks so that they dealt damage to themselves faster.
[]A spell that duplicated the AoE-reflection/ damage spell so you could use it twice without worrying about recharge times.
[]Used Totem Axe to deal quick melee damage and make your spells last 20% longer.
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Damn that was so fun…
That game is seriously seriously impressive.
I played quite a bit this weekend, and I have a very positive impression.
Seriously though, people who think melee sucks in PvP are not doing it right. Melee does a ton of damage compared to ranged, but you have to work to get in. You need to limit their movement, close in, throw any condition that slows, and kill. For example, use a warrior with a longbow for weapon set one and a sword/sword for set two. Get to medium range and use “pin down”, swap to set 2, impale on the way in, hamstring when you get there, and then rip the impaled sword out. You’ll have a crippled close-range target with a stack of bleed without much effort.
Or, you can axe-mace to cripple them with the thrown axe and then tremor when the cripple is expiring.
The mesmer has it easy, just leap and swap places with the clone. It’s funny how many people underestimate the massive damage potential of a melee mesmer.
From talking to ilthuain some about it, it seems like WvW and Dynamic Event boss fights are a whole different deal than Structured PvP, as far as the melee issues go.
ranged has advantages in the really big fights because people are less likely to notice/respond to you, and you’re in fewer incidental AOE’s.
Especially that latter part, I’m starting to think that’s why melee feels so fragile. IN the big fights you’re being hit by a million things not even aimed at you, but rather fire-and-forgets.
http://www.twitch.tv/alphacollective
been watching that stream all day. very informative from a pvp standpoint. they also talked about how warriors felt outclassed. but they said if built right, they are a monster. they also said they think thieves are the worst class in the game.
Thieves are the worst in terms of PvP? Arena or World? What’s their reasoning behind it? There are no ranks or tiers where you can continue to power up skills, you buy them once and that’s it.
Is there even a point to theory fighting the beta? Things will most likely change by the next BWE. Naturally, I don’t expect perfect balance across all the classes even at launch but the fact that it’s up to the player’s own ability to effectively utilize class skills (along with dodging and weapon swapping) I feel like all the classes can hold their own. I played Necro and Ranger and judging from what I saw you can mix the utility skills to create a build for any situation be it PvE, PvP, Solo or Group play.
Beta is arguably the most important time to report perceived balance problems.
That’s exactly the kind of input they’re looking for at this point 
I spent most of the first day playing with a single weapon set because I didn’t know you could swap sets with no cooldown penalty on skills. After that, things got better.
Melee is troublesome when you’re facing one of those elites with a lot of other players. You can barely react because of all the particles on screen, and you go down faster than in Dark Souls.
This game is dope. However…
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Thieves suck ass, same issue with other MMO’s and their rogue-type classes. You get eaten in WvW as a dual dagger thief, I don’t find picking off morons who break the line very fun at all.
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I thought the starting zones were a bit difficult, I was underleveled the whole time going through content with a big group not sure what the deal is there.
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Structured PvP is boring.
Highlight of the weekend was taking the whole Eternal Battlegrounds portion of the map and boxing the Green server into their keep. Most fun I’ve had in an MMO in awhile.