Guild Wars 2

Just thought to give a quick impression of the Desert Borderlands from the stress test of the past few days and share some videos I took. You can find them all in this Youtube playlist (a few have yet to be uploaded).

The maps are beautiful; it’s refreshing to be in a whole new environment and explore all of it. The map also feels a lot larger, but that is a double-edged sword as it takes longer to respond to events.

I think it’s great that we can see enemy numbers and positions from sentries, keeps, etc. Pretty useful to figure out if it’s a tap or a full assault. The reverse is that when we assault the element of surprise can easily be lost. I also think the new guild claim upgrades are really cool now. I tried the banners and I can image them being heavily used, especially the turtle banner.

The towers and keeps, especially when T3, take a very long time to take down. With 3-4 omegas and no rams, it took us about 5-6 minutes to break down the T3 outer gates at Earth keep. Those indestructible auto-turrets are also incredibly annoying. The gate guards are also much stronger and use a variety of attacks and CC. All in all, it encourages teams to aim for breaking walls rather than gates. The keep lords are also very strong and challenging to take down, which I actually think is rather fun.

Overall, the new Desert Borderland seems stacked heavily in favor of defense. Perhaps the gate/wall HP was accidentally set too high? I understand they’re supposed to be defensible, but right now it’s a little too much. I never got the chance to see the Oasis event, so I don’t know how effective that will be.