My positive feedback:
1. The map design is so awesome. At the first beta weekend I spent all my time to look at the beautiful landscape and buildings. Good work!
2. The oasis event is really fun.
3. No PvD anymore, I love it. I also like that enemies are marked on the map when they walk by sentries etc.
My negative feedback:
1. More players should’ve been invited to the stress test. Everytime I went on the map (played 3,5 hours alltogether) we had about 4-7 players on each side.
We managed to flip earth keep with a small golem army and only 1 defender. This map is too big for such small numbers. How are we supposed to test the new map like this? I would really love to test it with at least 20 players on each side to do some sieges for the keeps and so on.
2. Too much PvE in general. There are too many PvE mobs on big areas where you could do really good zergfights. Sometimes they are even Elite. The keep- and tower-lords seem a little hard for a small group. Do they scale? We were unable to take a spawn tower as five players vs. a lord and 1 defender. I don’t know if this is intended, just wanted to report this. I want good fights and no PvE-Events in WvW. If I were on a low population server I would hate this map. Not that I love blobbing, but all the NPCs are too much PvE for me.
3. The map seems way too big for the current population. Even when I imagine some of the big servers fighting each other, there are so many pathways on different layers, where two zergs could easily walk past each other without noticing.
Conclusion: I’m afraid this map will become a karmatrain-map like EotM. Please focus on players fighting each other. Maybe make better rewards for killing an enemy and for defending or something like this.
Bugs / Suggestions:
1. Many “no valid path to target” when I tried to blink on a plane ground.
2. No underground-map for the fire keep makes it really hard to move around. Some people of our small “zerg” got lost in there when we tried to capture it.
3. Having two waypoints in your spawn tower (one emergency waypoint) is a bit confusing.
4. When you lose a buff like the wind-buff (no falling damage) the icon should blink for about 5 seconds so that you are not smashed to the ground when you lose the buff in mid-downfall.
5. The result of the Oasis-event needs to be shown. We won it but I didn’t notice what impact it had.
Elementalist of [Salt] – Kodash