Guild Wars 2

Experience more limited that I would have liked being restricted to PVP and WVW.

Renegade – Shortbow and F abilities are excellent but legend feels weak. I can see the spec being taken for shortbow and F abilities but not using the legend.

Weaver – Very hard to get a handle on. Interface issues with the element tabs not properly highlighting/enlarging is still an issue. Would be nice to have something more prominent than the tiny bar over the skills as an indicator, as that bar is hard to see. Maybe is it were at least over the dodge bar and thicker, rather than tiny and smushed in between skills and element bar. An F5 skill that swaps the current element pair would be helpful.

Soulbeast – Very underwhelming. The beast mode doesn’t feel that good and the extra powers don’t feel very strong.

Holosmith – Seems very OP right now, especially at close range. Well designed, but the lack of heat mechanics on older skills discourages using the non-holosmith skills, which removes kit play from the engi, or discourages paying attention to heat other than the explosion.

Scourge – Hard to maneuver the shades. Seems very weak against high mobility targets.

Deadeye – Good, but seems like it will have trouble with mobile targets or at close range. Awkward coming into and out of crouch; might want to make the move keys pull you out as well. Some of the rifle skills seem like slight variations on each other (2 is single shot, 3 is identical multi-shot).

Mirage – Very mobile and hard to pin down. The odd dichotomy between how some illusions react and others don’t to some skills is an issue.

Firebrand – Good, but not sure how much use the F3 condition book will see vs F1 and F2. Mantras will have to prove their usefullness vs other skills that don’t have an inactive cast in the middle.

SpellBreaker – Seems very basic. Killing your own boons may be thematic but feels horrible. No one is going to want to be around a spellbreaker if this goes on. I’m sorry, but this needs to be changed to rip only enemy boons and allied conditions, or you have made the most anti-teamplay class in the game.

General – Mantras don’t show the right cooldown for the final cast.

My first impressions, just as to the “feel” of the Elites rather than finding things to improve like Boogiepop did, in the order I tested them. For most of them I swapped around weapons and traits (and sometimes stats and runes) to suit my personal taste before beating up golems and NPCs:

Holosmith — A lot of moving parts to keep track of. Utilities are laying down fields while the weapons are doing their things and F5 has to be used at the right time to toggle heating on and off (when off I seemed to retain heat for a very long time before any cooling began, so either that was a bug or I’m supposed to push up the heat and then take advantage of all the > 50% heat boosts for a good long while). I’ll certainly give it a try on one of my Engies but I don’t know if I’ll stick with it.

Firebrand — I liked this one. It has some complexity thanks to the three different skill bars granted by active tomes, but each is thematically linked enough to grasp relatively quickly. The ammunition system on the mantras means getting to use them relatively often. I wish my two guardians were at all bookish in RP because I do want to try using this rather than DH for a while.

Spellbreaker — Squishy! This was my only test alt to die to the Warrior NPC. I probably need to build it much better. That said, I think it will work with either of my Warriors in terms of their themes, and I like the F2 shield.

Deadeye — Wow, much damage. I had to have someone tell me where to look for my Malice stacks, and I’m iffy about being rooted in a fight until remembering to hit 5 (though at least one can dodge while kneeling). I’m not sure it’ll be handy for solo work but with a friend to occupy mobs’ attention it could be devastating. I was sad that the shadow orb teleport was affected by “No Valid Path to Target” after the Guild Chat demo made it look like it could cross slopes and gaps.

Mirage — I shouldn’t have made an Asura for this, I couldn’t see what my clones were doing in the middle of all the other players. The skills didn’t seem to flow intuitively together, either, so I found myself rather randomly doing things. I’m game to give it a try in open PvE but I think it’ll have a steep learning curve for me. It’s another one with a lot of moving parts to track.

Soulbeast — A lot more fun than I expected based on the Guild Chat (where it looked much less flashy than the other elites) and on player predictions and comments. I tested with the three new PoF pets and felt nice and strong in fights with golems and NPCs. I’m glad I have a Ranger with over 400 HP ready for launch because I think I might finally enjoy the profession.

Scourge — Tons of ground targeting means I may not be effective with this. I mouse move, so I use snap-to-target to set ground targets, which won’t work with the shades needing to be spread out. Also, barrier is a short lived enough thing that it takes some twitch reflexes to know when to pop skills that grant it. Reaper may remain my fave for bone-simple tankiness. But a lot of my issues are with having to learn new shroud mechanics. Once I’ve done that Scourge may work very well.

Renegade — I’m not a very good Rev player so my feedback is of limited use but Kalla feels like an excellent addition to the Legends and the shortbow has a lot of fun stuff involved with it. I won’t mind giving up Glint to get this one. Though the warband utilities seem a little limited given they are stationary where placed (more ground targeting needed) and don’t last very long. This is a contrast to Glint’s utilities staying ’til canceled though drawing down your energy, so resource management will be different.

Weaver — saved the most complex for last! I really like it, though it helped that fighting golems meant I could take as long as I liked to review skills as I attacked. I do think the Hero Panel weapon skills list needs to show ALL the 3 skills — I thought it did and then realized it wasn’t showing any combo 3 skills for sword, and some of those are really useful. I only tested with sword/dagger and I can see this is probably the highest skill bar of all the new Elites to use effectively and well. I’m gonna try, though, I’ve always loved Thief’s conditional 3 skill. I had to figure out how the double attunes cycle but that part became intuitive nice and fast (even got the elite skill to Perfect Weave first time I tried).

Overall I am very pleased with Weaver, Firebrand, and Soulbeast, rather pleased with Deadeye and Renegade, and unsure if I’ll be any good at Spellbreaker, Mirage, Holosmith, and Scourge. First impressions only, of course, it could all change once in open PvE with more practice under my belt.

Here we go.

Renegade: Needs better condi management its got the same existing problem that revenant/glint has its you have to sacrifice something that keeps you alive just to get something like ventari or mallyx where you needed something else and in wvw ventari is crappy because of so much condi spam its still really bad. Plus the damage from shortbow is utterly crappy I can do more auto attacking with a mace than all of the skills combined can do then the summons don’t last for more than a couple seconds if that.

Deadeye is a good concept on paper but it really is not worth playing imo. A lot of it is why daredevil was used so much more than the core thief due to its massive utility and then we got locked into using trickery so build diversity went out the window with that brilliant design. On top of that the risk is extremely high and where as the reward aspect is microscopic. Only an npc would know you are still where you stealthed at with the rifle stealth. Not much of a point in it stealthing you unless you were extremely lucky that a target did not see you. From the testing I did with it because everyone is weapon soldier or dire versions of armor you aren’t going to be killing anyone even if you had the initiative to do it that fast so after that you are dead because there isn’t any mobility. Part of that problem is that the trickery lead attacks and initiative bonuses are utility you can’t deal without so the builds aren’t going to be very diverse where it can be balanced out. There should be a non-stacking bonus of these added into elite specs for thief so we can freely chose 2 trait lines other than trickery being one of them its killed critical hits and shadow arts for 2 years because of that.

So anyways yeah these two have to get addressed before I would even think of buying the expansion.

My reaction:

Deadeye, OP as kitten. Like does ANET even have any sort of internal QA process level of OP as kitten.