Guild Wars 2

Here we go with the wall of text \o/

Map
The map is beautiful. Breath-taking in some places. Every tower and keep has it’s own identity and I really love that.
There’s more than one path from one point to any other. That means that scouting will be extremely important (and we don’t have a proper interface for that yet: map chat is not enough!!). As a side effect, I believe towers and keeps will be the real focus point where most of the battles will happen because it will be hard for groups to actually find each other. It makes sense since ANet said they wanted to focus more on defense.
The walls cutting off the shortest path are a brilliant idea and work really well in making life harder for who’s not holding the nearby objective, but they also represent an important “blind” choke: perfect for ambushing your enemy!

Scale
Although the map is not bigger than the Alpine borderlands, it feels a lot bigger. Keeps and towers are huge: that is good thing because you can have meaningful fights inside (if you don’t get slaughtered by ACs and shield generators), but it could represent a problem for underpopulated servers: I doubt a single player can scout an entire keep in a timely manner, let alone defend the shrines.

Splitting the zerg
It felt to me that the removal of waypoints in East and West keeps and the design of the map will make defending or even attacking with one single blob a lot less effective. Moving from one side of the map to the other takes a long travel time and if the enemy is organized enough to have the Earth keep contested, moving from spawn to defend Air and Fire keeps will take ages. You can’t just WP and run to defend everything. Good job!

Siege wars
The keeps and towers really felt like you could actually defend them, but between the already rampant use of superior arrowcarts, the introduction of the shield generator and automatic upgrades, I feel we risk ending up in endless “siege wars” where the ultimate weapon will be either the Omega golem or the Trebuchet to attack from afar. That could be fun for someone, but most WvW guilds would like to have a proper fight instead of sitting around trebs, waiting for them to clear out the siege and tear down the walls… All keeps have tons of space to place arrowcarts and that scares me.

Auto upgrades
From one point of view, as a member of a “combat oriented” WvW guild, I love auto upgrades. We never cared about upgrades and now they’ll mostly take care of themselves automatically. The flip side of the coin is that if you don’t apply constant pressure to the enemy, in no time you’ll be facing fully upgraded keeps that takes ages to cap. And from what I’ve seen, defending a fully upgraded keep is so easy that most of the time the attackers won’t even be able to get inside and have a fight with the defenders, it’ll only be arrowcarts and shield generators raining down on you: boooriiiing.
Flipping upgraded keeps will really be a problem on underpopulated servers. Three of us tried flipping an upgraded Air keep with 3/3 shrines and even reaching the outer gate was incredibly hard: guards stunning/taunting, pushing us back, immobilizing us in AoE and the “turrets” launching us in the water, life feels easy for defenders!

Shrines
They might seem like a “minor” objective, but they are not. And I’m really glad of this. I hated every single second I was under fire of the turrets in Fire and Air keeps (Earth turrets seemed less annoying by comparison) and that means that shrine buffs are working. I would say that flipping Shrines felt mandatory to flip a defended keep and that means that you need to split your group if you want to succeed. Good job!

Guards and Lords
Guards hit like trucks and merrily spam CC on your head. I’d say the “basic” gate pack felt as annoying as the upgraded packs of the current borderlands. They are a bit too much on the strong side, if you are in a small group they definitely represent a challenge by themselves, so they will be important if a same-sized group will try to defend.
The lords actually feel more “alive”: not only a custom skin, but custom attacks and strategies for each one of them. As someone mentioned, they can actually make the difference in a even-number fight for defense.

Misc

• The console in Earth keep that controls the configuration of the rock walls behind the gate is pure genius. You can split an attacking force literally by pressing a button. Amazing!
• I could hit most cannons as a mesmer \o/
• Weirdly, some cannons (I think I noticed it in South West tower) cannot hit their own gate, rendering them useless for defending against rams or alpha golems.
• The range for the buff on the dolyak felt a bit too short, if I’m fighting off an attacker I might want to be able to move around a bit
• Exploits. There’s already a few known for each keep. I really hope the map will be thoroughly tested for this and everything will be fixed before release!
• Test Timing: it was really bad for EU… The tournament went on during the (late) night and the prime time the next day was weekly reset, so people went to “real” WvW and the test borderlands were empty
• Oasis event: I think it was broken on the map I was on, didn’t get to test it
• I got stuck many times climbing or descending stairs, especially in Fire keep (the staircase with the lava cascade in the middle)

Another thing I noticed is that it seems that due to the keeps being so huge, there’s no “cata spot” where you can hit both outer and inner with the same siege (but I didn’t test specifically for this, maybe there is some?)