Guild Wars 2

Excluding exploits, bugs, and the amount of players active since this was a test, this some of the things I thought of the Desert Boarderlands.

I’ll start off on the positive things I absolutely loved.
1. Map: Clicking on objectives on the map opened a panel showing current and upcoming upgrades(see also https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuvtest/My-Favorite-Feature-of-the-Test)
2. Themes: The different environments/theme of each area were beautiful and made the map substantially visibly more appealing than the current alpine BL.
2a. The enemy npc types in objectives breaks up the boringness of fighting the same enemy in every objective like what we have on the current maps.
3. Defender’s Advantage: Everything seems to point towards holding your world’s section on map as opposed to owning your world’s entire home land map.
4. Tower design: Some towers and keeps had platforms/arches that overlooked the gate for defenders. Some towers also had a two oils adjacent to the gates with a larger pouring range rather than one above the gate.
5. FORTIFIED gates. They are finally a thing.

Things I liked:
1. Escorting a dolyak gave it a buff reducing all incoming damage and condition duration on it, but I feel the radius you need to be to the dolyak is a little small.
2. The oasis has path ways to every area of the map and usually is the quickest route to get around and can be jumped into from the garrison.
3. Owning an objective is impactful to to allies and enemies in the objectives region; such as, a wall that blocks travel between an area and only those who own the associated objective it can pass through and if you dont own it you have to either break the wall or go the long way around, another example would be around the garrison enemies are thwarted by small walls that pop up and block the way and force the play to go pass a under pulsing cripple laser.
4. Sentries apply a 4 minute cripple to dolyaks and provide a med kit(identical to old engineer healing kit) for players who own the sentry.
5. Supply camp layouts are much better: the dolyaks and the guards tending to them are in their own ‘housing’ section out of the camps capture radius; also there is no longer an [Upgrades] npc to block the cap either.
6. The controllable rock wall maze defense just inside the garrison outer gates is awesome and looks like for a really fun time for defended to mess with attackers.
7. There is a shark in a stasis tank type thing hanging from the spawn just north of the north supply camp.
8. You can break every wall that looks like you should be able to, unlike some walls in the current maps.
9. Upgrades are automatic and do not require supply; dolyaks reduce the time remaining on upgrades.

Things I thought were okay:
1. The amount of ambient mobs.
2. The oasis event(not the outcome) where you can gank other players and steal the power cores from them if you chose instead of killing the mobs yourself.
3. You can treb the inner walls of the garrison from the north supply camp(however I feel the garrison mortars need more range to hit there)

Things I did not like:
1. It felt like getting to the wind keep area from oasis was too difficult since only the defending players could use the wind jump pads.
2. The maps feels a too big for the current wvw map population limit.
3. The area above the fire keep feels too open and empty(dont add more mobs), perhaps add a couple out of combat interactable ziplines(with a 1 minute reloading time cooldown to prevent a large group using it to move around the map) that allow players to slide down into the pool of the oasis, or some ropes to repel down to the lava keep.
4. There still is not a personal reward to escorting dolyaks or staying in a tower to defend(scouts) when nothing attacks the objectives.
5. The automated defensed such as the gargoyle statues in the lava keep and the wind blowing heads in the air keep shouldn’t be fully automated and should require a player to turn them on for x duration.
6. The minimap would not update to the interior of the lava keep when underground but would on the large map.
7. Players can rally on npcs while in combat with a player. I think this shouldnt be a thing in wvw and spvp.
8. The mega-laser event thing in the oasis is a bit too strong if it is as powerful as I think: reason, my team won the event, I went to a tower we did not own, it had a fortified gate and it was at about 15-20% hp. If the laser did that much damage it is too much. I feel it should bring a normal door to about 5-15%, reinforced door to 10-33% and a fortified door to 30-45%.
9. Some of the defending npcs do WAY to much damage. I had around 2900 armor and the 20% reduction of damage from wvw ranks and still some of the veteran guards could toss one grenade or shoot me with a rifle shot for 5-9k and there would be more than one of them roaming around.

You basically said nothing about the actual combat itself, just described a lot of the npc and wall action and a pve type event in the middle.

Most worrying for a squishy would be that defending NPC damage – might be ok facing it on a regen guard or warrior but having to use up your heal just for one NPC damage amount isn’t fun for squishies.

Maybe one day a dev will actually test some of this stuff out on classes other than guard/warrior..

Summary: looks pretty, lots of shiny pve style mechanics and not sure how it will be playing in three months time after the 100th time your knocked off by an auto air blower or prevented from getting somewhere by a random wall or trapped in a maze whilst ACs rain down from all over.

Well the combat system felt the same as on live. I didn’t spend much time ‘zerging’ or seeing large assaults as most of the time I spend on the test was after of the initial ‘tournament’(lol), when there wasnt queues for anything and some maps even had the outmanned buff. I did get to fight every keep lord though; for the most part the lords only have a few different moves but they use them all the time which was fine to me. The same goes for the few tower lords I got to engage. In all my time of the event, I only saw the oasis event once, probably due to the maps crashing(beta test is beta) before it ever triggered. Even if there was large assaults and defending, I still wouldnt be able to judge well enough how they work from just a 25 hour test, would need to see how well they work with a full week of play in an actual match.

Khezekiah Bellamy.5016:

9. Some of the defending npcs do WAY to much damage. I had around 2900 armor and the 20% reduction of damage from wvw ranks and still some of the veteran guards could toss one grenade or shoot me with a rifle shot for 5-9k and there would be more than one of them roaming around.

This here is one of the biggest reasons eotm doesnt work as a roaming map. The npc’s cut off massive portions of the map because you have to steer clear of them in the event that you get into a fight with another player.

In my eyes as ive said many times this is just wasting the developer of the map’s work by making large portions of the map go completely unused because roamers will never go near there so that they dont end up giving an enemy they stumble upon a ridiculous advantange.