Guild Wars 2

First off, great map in terms of looks and performance (FPS). Very well done to you guys.

In terms of the Beta test (NA), I felt that it would have been better to have actual organized teams fight over objectives rather than to just run around mostly disorganized because being able to test tactics in a real WvW situation would have been very helpful in understanding the ideals behind the map. For example, some of the new walls are very well designed in that ACs can be placed on the top and not get completely nuked by Eles and Necros AOE but in the entire 3-4 hours I only saw like 2 arrow carts so it was harder to grasp how well the change actually is.

The shrines themselves looked ok, I can see them being useful but not game breaking. Some of the stuff like the transform into the dog might need balancing because it is super strong in terms of damage.

I like the stuff such as the Lava Portals and the stealth thingy as well as the ignore fall damage buff. The only thing I really disliked was the air vents that knocked people off but then again I also dislike it in Cliffside in Fractals of the Mists. The Jump pads were OK even from an Australian perspective (unlike sanctum sprint) which is fantastic.

In terms of the map design, some really wonderful chokes and terrain to fight in. I do kind of worry that there isn’t much incentive to fight in those areas though, such as the north west area behind the tower(?) I think. Also I feel that the southern half of the map is too easily accessible compared to the top half which might not really be a problem if that’s the intention. I like how sentries now cripple yaks which means roamers can contribute heavily to stalling upgrades. Some of the things like the rock walls and asuran turrets in chokes are interesting and could help smaller groups break bigger zergs which is nice. The long & wide hallways in keeps are a great plus, I can imagine lots of great fights in those places.

The keep designs were also pretty neat, not all the same and each with a variety of things.

The new siege weapon (Shield Generator) might need a bit of tweaking, not sure how overpowered it will be with blocking out AC fire which could make defending hard.

The center event seems to try and promote spreading out but I feel that lower population servers would have trouble (just like bloodlust) due to the amount of orbs required? Perhaps if the event scaled to how many people actually did it per color it would work better. For example blue has 50 people, they need 50 orb and red has 5 people, they need 5 orb. Not really sure how it works right now because nobody got any orbs when I was playing but us.

In terms of the layout of mobs, there’s a fair amount of “dangerous” mobs that CC and do heavy damage which could give a smart commander tactical advantage. I’m not really sure how I feel about having mobs around that let people rally off of but I would suggest lowering the respawn rate just a tad because it felt really high in the beta (as did the guards).

Overall I feel that this map is fairly well designed and superior to EotM.

Oh and there were some bugs we ran across (some were told to the devs already):
- Gates sometimes bugged and spawned 2 gates, the second one untargettable
- I could get life force attacking the wall but not in combat on necro
- Sometimes rams didn’t do damage to doors
- You can waypoint in when enemy owns your home tower