Guild Wars 2

Like
-Sky box: finally a proper sky box this automatically makes the environment much more immersive rather than textured plane.
-Flatness: I loved the idea behind the ‘floors’ in HOT but it made navigation frustrating so this is much welcomed.
-Raptor mount/dismount: fast, this I like a lot.

Could be improved
-Sand: shader looks ok but not amazing, could have a higher specular and nicer wind effects across it
-Lighting: interior lighting is still weak imo, especially in the casino where you have lots of light sources but they are actually not creating light (locally or globally). This is an area the engine could do with great improvement
-City: felt a bit quiet, the stampede was cool but not much seemed to be happening there I also didn’t feel each district was unique enough

Cheers.

Environment is gorgeous. Loved the more relaxed feel of the map and that I could explore fairly casually, but I do hope there is a mix.

The mount is great. I loved the feel of it and even like that there are reasons for me to dismount. I disliked that mounts were allowed inside buildings – really hoping they are not allowed in main cities at all.

Unid items feel bad. The utility of stacking is nice, but paying for the privilege of getting mediocre loot and wishing you’d just salvaged in the first place feels bad. I had regrets each time I had to decide to salvage or ID and neither felt like the right choice.

Holy KITTEN! I understand the fiery dragon sword skin, ( an elite reward for playing gw1, ) is going to be made easily available in gw2!

That makes me pretty angry. I spent a good deal of time , energy and money ( buying the gw1 franchise,) to earn that and other rewards.

ANET needs to respect boundaries better, whether it be in terms of profession mechanics or elite rewards.

give us big kitten looking bosses in raids like deimos and stuff. also would like ’em to be unique and not same model as generic mob from the game.

Positives:

+ Mounts, don’t change a single thing about them.

+ Map exploration was so much fun, the new map is beautiful.

+ The Mastery acquisition is much better than HoT already, and feels more thought-out.

+ Unidentified Gear is fine, but add different rarity tiers to make it easier.

+ The sounds/misc. things are amazing, and really need more credit!

+ Bounties/Races are the open-world content that I’ve been waiting for. <3

+ Material Caches are perfect, and it’d be nice to have that RNG, with a map limit of 5 keys per account per day, to prevent the economy from nose-diving.

Negatives:

- This will be hard to fix now, but the story generally doesn’t feel large-scale and epic. While the opening is quite different to usual, the same happened in Verdant Brink, and then it turned into more of a Disney adventure than a darker story. I hope this isn’t the case in Path of Fire!

- Mobs need a health/damage buff to add challenge. While people will argue that the story mobs are overpowered, it’s not true. It’s just because they’re a tiny bit more challenging than usual and people can’t work out how to dodge orange cones.

- Minor gripe: Raptors can get stuck in weird places, normally steps.

TL:DR

Story (So far): 5/10
Map Design: 10/10
Mounts: 9/10
Gear/Loot: 8/10
Mastery Acquisition: 9/10
Open World Content: 10/10

Good points:

-Loved the map feel and most of the map features were fun and interesting

-Loved not always feeling in constant combat and the ability to explore on my own time (biggest pet peeve with the HOT maps is that I always felt obligated to do the map meta first before doing map completion and then the time between map completion and having the meta start up again meant that I always felt I was taking the spot of someone who really wanted to do the meta rather than finish the map or worse I wanted to finish the map but the meta prevented me from moving further in directions so I could finish it.)
-Loved mounts, it felt really good to use and very much like riding a real animal.
** Took a bit to get used to though, especially jumping, further thoughts in suggestions Would have pointed out the glider but others have already mentioned it.
-Mobs in the instance, in my opinion, were at the perfect level, not impossible, not too easy. The story-line was perfectly timed and interesting.
-Mobs in the zone were fun, not too hard and not too easy. It felt fun to engage them especially with the mounts.

Dislikes:

- I did not like spending to identify objects there’s many reasons
* Having identification tied to hearts is grindy. This means you have to go to a location you’ve already finished and then spend a LONG time (the heart fill time felt longer. I’m not sure if it was but it felt like I had to do far more to fill it) just to identify items that may be absolutely worthless.
*Paying for something that you have gotten innately from the game since the beginning feels like a regression, it takes away knowledge and in it’s place offers a “gamble” with “no good choices”. If you pay to id the items and get nothing but blues/greens then you salvage those items you have spent more than the mats you are likely to get from those items which feels bad. If you salvage those items or sell them you are left wondering if rares/exotics/pre-cursors might have been in that group which also feels bad. That puts players into a catch 22 situation where there are no good choices. That just feels bad to play.

-Did not like the Sous Chef mini-game. It was timed, the place was frustrating and the “time out” felt too short for the amount of sheer searching you had to do even with “usable items turned on” it took too long to search the room for what he needed. While I’m sure some managed to get it done, it was absolutely not fun.. I live in a household of 5 and we all played the map together. All of us were frustrated doing this mini-game, 1 of us completed it, 4 of us quit in sheer frustration. It felt really grindy/stressful especially since even if you got the right item the stupid chef was always a moving target and if you tried to hit him sometimes you’d miss and have to find his next item with even less time. His hit box seemed very small as well.

Suggestions:
- Please don’t make us identify gear this way, if the issue is because of inventory space perhaps setting up a token system that would have us retrieve items “held” for us (via genii or whatever) would make inventory space better otherwise the entire situation feels like there are no good choices.
- Do not let the salvage-o’matic’s auto-salvage unidentified loot or alternatively let there be a “salvage unidentified loot” mechanism built into it.

-Don’t have a mini-game for a mastery point or if you must don’t set such a short time limit. Also, increase the hitbox range of the chef or do something about hitting a moving target like that.

Overview:
I really enjoyed the feel of this map and I loved the sense of freedom and movement that it offered. There were a few pain points and some frustrations but the overall feel was amazing. The 5 of us who tested it together really enjoyed the feel of the mounts. I’ve had trouble getting my kids to play because “grindy” but with the mounts they were on most of the time just practicing running and jumping. It was really fun to watch and lots of fun to play. The pain points however should be addressed.

Aomine.5012:

Mount is great, but there are a few issues that need to be addressed:
1. They stuck in any type of slope where people can just walk over it and requires jumping.
2. We should be able to open gliders at air during mount so it won’t lock down our option when we accidentally fall down from a cliff.
3. Interacting with npcs and certain items shouldn’t dismount all the time. It gets annoying very quickly that anything dismounts you.

The open-world is very visually impressive but it lacks depths like back in HoT maps and LS maps.

Also don’t completely eliminate the emphasis of gliders just because of the introduction of mounts. Add in some updrifts and leyline energy for people who own HoT to enjoy gliding too!

Actually I agree here, please don’t remove content for HoT players, I really enjoyed gliding and I would like to see that continue in the expansion rather than just find gliding only in HoT and Living World season 3 maps. Otherwise it just sort of lacks continuity.

Loved the beautiful city, music and night sky. I felt like I was in a desert! My friends and I enjoyed the bounties and champ/legendary fights but felt the veteran hydras were way too easy to solo for such cool looking beasts.

Loved the feel and idle animations of the raptor mount but there were a number of spots where the map felt like it needed some cleaning as our raptors would easily get stopped, slowed or stuck unnecessarily when moving a tree from another tree a little would avoid this.

My feedback about gw2 PoF:
Positive points:
-A well modeled desert, better than dry top map….
-A very beautiful effect about water, if lava would be improved like that too…
-Nice features to have addes mounts BUT it make GW2 like a generic MMORPG like WoW….. the first thing I have to mind with gw2 it’s exploration, peoples must keep walking through the maps!!!! Peoples travel through maps with waypoints that’s ok but imagine with mounts! The game wouldn’t have the same spirit….. Stop assist peoples… Soon we will have tutorial for everythings it’s become a real mess!!
-Environment is great but the oasis seem very empty for me compared to HoT maps… We arrive in a region which look like Egypt but where are the temples and statues?! On the loading screen of the map we saw a temple, a temple that doesn’t exist that sad.
-Interesting story but too simple one, always “a bad guy appear, he make a mayhem inside the area, you have to kill him….” not very inventive.
-Quite better than HoT maps: less maps layers, awesome hydras and sand mantas rays.

Negatives points:
-No items to identify, just no, NO! Or instantly identified for nothing, copper coins…
-Like HoT, basic map without extraordinary things, main tyria maps are better than extensions ones, a shame: Why not adding great world boss? In desert we can have a giant worm with the same power as the shatterer, and as big as him!! In HoT, it’s the case with Mordremoth inside the last map. Extensions maps should have quests like normal ones, it’s quite boring all these infinite try hero points, and challenges.
-PoF maps are empty: No great structures as a fortress, asuran labs, ancient citadel…. I just seen a small town, some agricultural lands….. Desert is synonym of ruins, explorations, discoveries and Pyramids with TOMBS in it or something to explore, not cubic empty ones…
-Enough of making all class unpowered just to force peoples to buy extensions for specialization, I was there at the beginning before HoT, my engie was powerful with 3250 atk, 3250 armor, inflicting 10 vulnerability per net throwed so easily go up for 20 charges, my bullets were shrapnel so inflicting bleeding, now, only 8 charges and no bleeding, sometimes fire for critical hit! My necromancer kill enemies 3x faster than my engie unbelievable!

To conclude, I made the mistake to purchase HoT just to gain access to gliders….
I’m actually hesitating to purchase PoF since it very look like the same poor organization but in a desert… I will not make a mistake again and purchase it just for mounts! Nothing really amazing. I can’t express myself about masteries since I don’t like this system.

Mounts are well animated, but unnecessary for a game like gw2 for me, or limited to extensions maps. If after the raptor, horse, pegase and others animals would be added it wil lead to a decline for me, the game as he start was amazing and awesome the living story too, but add too many things and extensions and he become less credible… Story is bad for PoF like HoT, it become more and more a fairy tail for children and lesser for adult, darker story… Maybe for some players mounts are great, but for me it’s useless, it’s like a toy, you can discover more things while walking than running with a raptor at 40 km/h… Compare the game with real life: when you visit a church a memorial… You aren’t in your car or mounts?! I really waiting for an underground extensions with asurans complex everywhere and caverns with hidden treasures.

Rating:
Story: 3/10 without inspiration…
Map design: 7/10 great but can be improved: pyramid interiors: tombs etc..
Mounts: 8/10 Well animated and modeled…
Gear/Loot: 4/10 Blade armors of HoT where better than the gears here…
Masteries: 6/10 Ok but not really hard to get them…
Open world: 2/10 Empty, like ghost city, some events, but get boring after few minutes.

1. Mounts (10/10) – very good, especially movement – feels natural. Raptor is great. Please add option to change it’s movement for people with vertigo/nausea but allow others to enjoy it the way it is.

2. Aesthetics (113123332112321/10) – amazing! Music and graphics as always feels like art. Love you for this!

3. Map itself felt boring (5/10). I do hope it’s only due to main features like meta events or more “meaty” stuff being off for demo or accessible on second part of map. Cus Silverwastes is far more interesting desert map to play so far. Definately looking forward to check that out @ release tho.

4. Bounties (6/10) – amazing idea, poor implementation. Go, kill, get reward. I do like random mechanics on champs. But add something more – like random reinforcements, random switch of mechanics during fight, implement something interesting, not like boring circleing beams. Add some sort of hunting the beast down, not just go to point, kill, reward. And make them feel different plz. I know it can be far better.

5. Gear identification (5/10) – again amazing idea, a bit poor implementation. If only we get them separated by rarity or have a chance for ecto drop from green salvage all – ok. I would love to see less bag-ception so it’s a good way, yet I believe it has a lot of room to improve.

6. Story – err…. too short to judge. I only hope it won’t be as short and weak as HoT’s (especially ending). I – like many other – enjoy more darker vibe, more depth. Love the lore tho (more books to collect, more random pages, letters, notes, ancient artifacts to collect, read inscription, all this stuff plz, and add library to home instance or something similar – this gives far more depth to the world)

7. Mobs (7/10) – some just explode on touch like Forged around city. They are far too weak. Tweak them a bit (ONLY a bit). Hydras could be more challenging – they are this amazing, nicely modeled and animated enemy to be feared. Dust mites are too strong on the other hand. They seem to be overturned to compare to our main enemy faction – the Forged. Other mobs seem ok. And they look very nice!

Overal I got bored very fast. But it’s a demo. I’m definately looking forward for my main selling point which are elite specialisations! Yet I do hope that rest of expac will be good. Can’t wait for 22nd to try it all out!

I think everything else has been covered, but I wanted to express some concerns about voice acting. I made a norn because my main is one, and whoever does his voice has always been pretty good. Then I made a human because one of my oldest characters has Elonian descent and…

I don’t recall the male human VA being this godawful. Almost no emotion in his lines, everything was flat… it was almost like the spirit of Trahearne had take over.

ruzicka.4783:

While it might be too difficult to implement, one would think that it would be logical to be able to fire ranged weapons (bows, staffs, etc) while mounted. I mean, Native Americans and others were known to be able to shoot their bows accurately while riding full-tilt on horseback!

This maybe?

Ithilwen.1529:

Holy KITTEN! I understand the fiery dragon sword skin, ( an elite reward for playing gw1, ) is going to be made easily available in gw2!

That makes me pretty angry. I spent a good deal of time , energy and money ( buying the gw1 franchise,) to earn that and other rewards.

ANET needs to respect boundaries better, whether it be in terms of profession mechanics or elite rewards.

If you understand this from the datamine, stand easy. That’s probably a bundle for a story instance, not something easily available in the open world. It doesn’t preview properly equipped, and in the trailer we see an image of the sword stuck in the ground in the Mists while Rytlock’s voice over suggests he’ll be giving us info at last. Maybe we’ll play as Rytlock like we did as Caithe in her flashbacks.

The Reddit comments on the datamine discuss all that.

I only finished the story and tried my mount because I don’t want to spoil the whole map, I want to explore it on my main! But anyway, I liked the story, the map was nice and the raptor mount was fun (I needed some time to get used to its movements, though).

Shadelang.3012:

Im gonna have to disagree with some people here. I like the identified gear. I understand why some people may not like it. But i feel like it helps to address one of the biggest problems with loot in gw2.

That its largely worth extremely little. Lets face it no one is excited to see loot if its not a precursor. Exotic? Salvage. Rare? Salvage.

But with this people kind of have to choose whether or not they want to go for exotics or rares and even precursors.

You can just salvage for safe reliable profit. Or go for that larger reward. Now alot of people will just salvage. But that heavily reduces the number of rares and exotics floating around. Including sigils and runes, as well as ectos. This might make them more worth getting.

As the prices on those items increase. The reward for GOING for those items goes up. Atleast that is what I am hoping will happen.

At the moment loot on an individual basis is largely pointless. I feel like this might be one of the best ways the change that over time.

At the moment crafting is largely pointless as well for many items. After all you can just buy that item often for less than the materials would cost you. Maybe as rare and exotics get rarer crafting will have more of a place. Where as now its mostly for spamming the daily patterns for quick profit.

As for the rest of the Beta. I was pretty happy with what I saw though I was kind of sad to only get to mess with one of the new pets against the new enemies.

I really want to see what a legendary hydra boss fight would be like. As well as some larger scale battles against those forged. (The one that puts up the walls? That would be REALLY cool in bigger battles. Imagine a boss version that puts up a labyrinth around him you have to navigate to get around when you get him to x% health and you have to make it to him and break his bar to get rid of it)

Well said. I particularly agree with your insight on identifying gears.

Aerinndis.2730:

ruzicka.4783:

While it might be too difficult to implement, one would think that it would be logical to be able to fire ranged weapons (bows, staffs, etc) while mounted. I mean, Native Americans and others were known to be able to shoot their bows accurately while riding full-tilt on horseback!

This maybe?

Exactly!

Positives:

Mounts are ok at best…
New areas and enemy types to explore are good.
Looove the new hydra and other enemies!

Negatives:

NO NO NO NO NO DONT MAKE ME PAY AT ALL TO IDENTIFY GEAR, THAT WHEN SALVAGED, ENDS UP COSTING ME MORE THAN THE MATS ARE WORTH!!!

shame on you….

As it stands now, I pay to salvage it already, don’t make me pay for it twice buy making me pay to identify it, then pay AGAIN to salvage it…. kitten ridiculous….

Hated the mounts. Very scared for future of Gw2 fashion, and highly trained people (of any race) that run in a smooth and cool way tru maps and towns. I’m afraid it will be removed from the game, by the big raptors.

Hate identifying gear. It double rng, doubles the feeling of gating, and it makes loot, suddenly not feel like loot, but box of pandora, cause it can cost you gold, or cost a precursor (so to speak).

The towns that have Elona style from gw1 are amazing though. So far best feature of expansion for me.

Xeph.4718:

Shocking, that’s actually disgusting. Well I’ve been away a couple years so I guess I’m in the minority and I have the rest of the player base to blame.

You’re not. He’s just wrong.

Shadelang.3012:

Im gonna have to disagree with some people here. I like the identified gear. I understand why some people may not like it. But i feel like it helps to address one of the biggest problems with loot in gw2.

That its largely worth extremely little. Lets face it no one is excited to see loot if its not a precursor. Exotic? Salvage. Rare? Salvage.

But with this people kind of have to choose whether or not they want to go for exotics or rares and even precursors.

You can just salvage for safe reliable profit. Or go for that larger reward. Now alot of people will just salvage. But that heavily reduces the number of rares and exotics floating around. Including sigils and runes, as well as ectos. This might make them more worth getting.

As the prices on those items increase. The reward for GOING for those items goes up. Atleast that is what I am hoping will happen.

At the moment loot on an individual basis is largely pointless. I feel like this might be one of the best ways the change that over time.

At the moment crafting is largely pointless as well for many items. After all you can just buy that item often for less than the materials would cost you. Maybe as rare and exotics get rarer crafting will have more of a place. Where as now its mostly for spamming the daily patterns for quick profit.

As for the rest of the Beta. I was pretty happy with what I saw though I was kind of sad to only get to mess with one of the new pets against the new enemies.

I really want to see what a legendary hydra boss fight would be like. As well as some larger scale battles against those forged. (The one that puts up the walls? That would be REALLY cool in bigger battles. Imagine a boss version that puts up a labyrinth around him you have to navigate to get around when you get him to x% health and you have to make it to him and break his bar to get rid of it)

I’m going to have to disagree with you here. I enjoy checking out the loot in general. I’m more excited when I get exotic/rare/etc but I don’t mind getting the other stuff too because I’m always crafting things. I don’t like the extra steps that I’m going to have to go through nor do I like the “bad choices” feeling that it leaves.

1) If I salvage all to save time then I’m always wondering if I didn’t accidentally salvage a precursor/rare/exotic and I will have zero way of knowing for sure if I did or not.
2) I will have to spend extra time finishing a heart just to ID something that may or may not be worth less than the amount of time and money I spent identifying it.
3) I will now be paying for something that I had innately when I started playing this game and if there is a Mastery offered then the Mastery is only useful in the PoF zones and is therefore redundant for all other areas.

I don’t think it will change any of the problems in the TP because there are other zones that people can flock to where they can get rares/exotics without playing “flip a coin and hope” nor will they be risking losing money. I do worry that it will make the new areas less attractive when it costs extra to figure out what it is that you’ve gotten how do you know you’ve even been rewarded? For me it feels like a regression rather than progression.

I do understand that this new map harkens back to Guild Wars 1 but I don’t like the idea that we’re going to Guild Wars 1 style “content” just because we changed maps. If it’s changed in the 200 years since it was last visited then perhaps there should be a new mechanic involved (revisiting things in GW1 is great for nostalgia but I’m not a fan of the idea that this is the thing taken from GW1).

I was sort of hoping for another mechanic that would solve the inventory space problem, I’m not a fan of taking something that was free previously and then placing it behind a paywall.

My only suggestion is to add a hotkey for mounts so that you can just press a key to mount/dismount, instead of having to click the little icon in the bottom right.

Bron.9647:

My only suggestion is to add a hotkey for mounts so that you can just press a key to mount/dismount, instead of having to click the little icon in the bottom right.

Adding to this, I’m hoping there will be four hotkeys so we can quickly mount a specific mount.

And also that using these keys will allow us to switch between mounts without dismounting/remounting. Just hoping.

The Pod racing on Raptors went beyond cool! More please.

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

Bron.9647:

My only suggestion is to add a hotkey for mounts so that you can just press a key to mount/dismount, instead of having to click the little icon in the bottom right.

Adding to this, I’m hoping there will be four hotkeys so we can quickly mount a specific mount.

And also that using these keys will allow us to switch between mounts without dismounting/remounting. Just hoping.

You could keybind the mount/dismount button doing the preview, the default was set to x.
And underneath the normal mount/dismount keybind was an option to keybind mounting raptor specifically. Though the other mounts where not there as options doing the preview, my guess is we get the option to keybind for each mount.

Ok. Here are my two words on the mater!

Pros:

• Love how mounts feel. As an actual mount would…. They take more space, accelerate and turn slower, and generally feel like you are on to another animal. Coming from WoW where mounts are just an exctention of your feet it’s really refreshing.
• I ADORE the idea of the Barrier mechanic, scaling with Vitality and Healing. My biggest gripe with the whole game, is how unbalanced some attributes are. The problem won’t be alleviated and everyone will still be using glassy characters, as long as there isn’t a way for the rest of the attributes to end events faster, but it certainly is a step on the right direction. Looking forward to see it on my Guardian shield skills!
• I while I was hopping for a simpler way to solve the Inventory Wars problem, (Drop salvagable-stackable mats instead of blues and greens when overlooting), the unidentified gear is still nice, even if it’s badly communicated.

Cons:

• I don’t like the huge amounts of crafting mats you get from heart vendors. If there was ONE reason to travel back to Vanila Tyria beyond getting some “current event” reward was to gather low tier mats. When we asked for a way to farm cloths and leathers, I was hoping for some way to get them from their respective maps, NOT lock them behind an expansion vendor. I was hoping for making non-hostile beasts skinnable, or having cave spiders, worms and ambient creatures (sheep?) drop cloths and silk, or even giving every habitable building a cloth-rack! ANYTHING BUT A GENERIC VENDOR!
• Why is identifying so expensive! If you want a price that badly, just ask for Karma. Since it’s a non Currency ATM, you can ask as much as you want! Ask for 1000 karma per piece and we wouldn’t have a problem! NOT one and a half Silver!
• I worry about the ease of access of the mounts. It feels like that no players will be using their feet anymore, and the big cities will be cluttered with them. Especially once the inevitable sparkly gem-store skins become available. It’s also bizarre that we get to ride a raptor before a horse.
• I have a feeling, that while this expansion will include more maps than HoT, in the long-run it’ll feel smaller. One reason is the mounts, another is the lack of verticality.
• My major criticism for the Masteries returns from HoT! I think they should be character bound rather than account bound. Ideally, new characters should keep whatever mastery points have been acquired and require only 1/3 of the exp needed to unlock them on alts. Currently once a mastery is unlocked, it’ll stay that way, and that would result in underpopulated HoT maps, or any older expansion for that mater.

Nitpicks:

• I only played for a few hours, but I’m already tired with the raptor’s starting and landing animation of leaning to the side. It’s a fantastic animation that gives life to the mount, but I would prefer if you mix it up with another simpler animation to break the monotony.
• The area and events behind the casino barely had any players. I don’t know if the population was set on low or something, but I think the map needs a bit of something to lead the players there, like an escort event, or a bounty target.
• The map feels like it need a bit of a more vibrant color palette. Having Yellow/Gray map feels like a problem that will persist in the Desert, so whatever can add some color there is welcome! (like an more vibrant blue starry sky, or a more hot brown for the rocks).

Worries:

• Given how A-net would rather put mat vendors on new maps, than re-touch the old ones, I worry that issues on older maps like HoT will never be fixed or improved. How hard would it be to add some actual events (with combat and rewards) at the start of each lane in Dragon’s Stand to draw the players together and get the meta running (or remove that pesky timer of as long at the event is inactive for that mater).

I loved the Raptor mount and I think it’s great that we can tint it to make it slightly personalised.

But the unidentified loot? No. I understand you are trying to avoid the inventory disaster from the HoT era but…

Vayne.8563:

No one likes to pay to look at their loot.

Pro’s:
1. Mounts
2. Nice map with a lot of events
3. Beautiful map layout
4. Message board (though I would like it for solo play too)
Cons:
1. Casino (I don’t like gambling at all, not in real life, nor in games)
2. Gear identification (just a gold sink)
3. The Sous Chef mastery (please no mini games for masteries)
4. Rewards were poor

+ loved the raptor, am really excited for the other mounts
+ lots of things to discover without being prompted to
+ lots of freedom regarding how to get somewhere (gliding, mounts…)
+ mobs not as annoying as in a lot of LS3 and HoT-maps, being able to circumvent most of them by just running past on the mount was fantastic
+ not too many events that vie for my attention
+ no big meta-event that gets me yelled at when I just want to run around and do map completion or discovery (meta-events like the one in Draconis Mons would be ok, a new Tarir would not)
+ loved the story that accompanies the mount-mastery… even though it is only a small one… it is a lot better than in HoT… we still don’t know how we learned to glide

- mobs spawning while I open a box- I’d rather have them spawn when I get near the box or after opening it
- the cook and the portal-point mastery points… especially in the evening or when people are around they are really really stressful- I get that I would only have to do it once… but I’d rather have them be an adventure or sth. like that
- it was not clear to me when races and when the blitz event are available… I would like to have a place in game to look that up… as well as when a new bounty will be up
- as a German player: there were several missing translations… that should not happen on release

Everything is great (that includes the Chef Mastery , in fact i want more of this kind of Masteries ), but stop with the repeatable Hearts……imho that´s just annoying, especially if you have to identify Stuff @ the Vendors.

To keep it simple: Next to no waypoints + unidentified loot = No sale in my case.
No amount of long winded apologist “explaining” will change that.

Monimon.6710:

Everything is great (that includes the Chef Mastery , in fact i want more of this kind of Masteries ), but stop with the repeatable Hearts……imho that´s just annoying, especially if you have to identify Stuff @ the Vendors.

Or, make them decidedly easier to fulfill each day.

Difficulty level was surprisingly low, compared to HoT, but for a starting area this is good. Just hope later areas are more difficult, but also with matching rewards.

Bounties are not what I thought they would be and are in their current form boring. Probably going to do them once for achievements and then never again.

On that weekend I got a kitten load of loot, esp. materials. Getting loot is fun, but it was so much that I’m afraid that this will lead to inflation and thus much higher crafting costs for future recipes. I also hope most ro all of the new stuff gets a material storage slot on release.

Unidentified items: it feels odd to pay to convert my loot into “real” items. Especially when the identified items typically sell for half of what it costs to identify them. Also if one wants to keep and identify it it might get clunky to always watch out for accidental mass salvage. (Yes, invisible bags. But still must make sure stack of unidentifieds lies in it.) Also wondering about consequences for TP prices when a major source of runes and sigils gets cut.

I hadn’t though to say this when mounts leaked, but I love my raptor. Already missed it when just playing a non-demo char. Riding felt a bit laggy at first but after a minute or so of getting used to it it felt very natural.

Random likes: music, sound in general, environment (graphically), the event announcer in Amnoon, Choya on menu

Random dislikes: too easy to lose participation in casino coin event when searching but not finding/reaching coins

Too bad the kitchen mastery point is a mastery point (once per account) and not a hero point (once per character) – it was fun.

Also wondering about the heart in the story instance. He had the heart vendor icon but was no vendor. Either disabled in demo, wrong icon or I missed something. Esp. since I had to re-do the heart in the open world (maybe that was just daily reset).

thank you so much for the holosmith! as an engi main this is exactly what I wanted!

I’d posted my commentary about the first PvE beta weekend, but wanted to add my comments about the second beta weekend as well.

Liked:

• The Holosmith was a lot of fun to play, had a great balance of risk vs reward, and the traits were well-balanced. The traits really made me think about what I wanted to pick, and often multiple choices were good ones. To me that is good design.
• Firebrand also was fun, and for me it will be a toss up if I spend more time with Firebrand or Dragonhunter. Either way my Guardian has some good options.

Did not like:

• I really wanted to like Spellbreaker, but I just couldn’t find myself enjoying it. It seems like a very PvP-oriented specialization. One small thing that might help improve Spellbreaker just for me is if the healing on Sun and Moon style for offhand dagger was doubled or tripled.
• Going into the beta weekend, I expected to really like Soulbeast. I found myself disappointed by it. It seems to be most useful while in melee range only, the F1/F2 skills seemed extremely weak, and lack of pet swap while in beastmode was a deal-breaker. (Or remove the beastmode cooldown if we cannot have pet swap.)
• The demo weekend showcasing the elite specializations should have been open to both PvP and PvE. For PvE at least the limited Crystal Desert area like we had in the first demo weekend would have been nice. Being limited to PvP/WvW only was not a great way to get the full experience of what these elite specializations could do. Fighting the congestion in the Heart of the Mists for golems or profession spar partners was not fun.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I wanted to be sure that you knew this this thread is still active and your input is welcome. This thread pertains to the PvE Preview, our first of two events. I’m now (since the preview is over) posting a PvP/WvW Preview feedback thread.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on either or both subjects!

There is already A TON of feedback in the class-specific forums.
Please check that out too if you’re not already doing it.

Orion Templar.4589:

I’d posted my commentary about the first PvE beta weekend, but wanted to add my comments about the second beta weekend as well.

Liked:

• The Holosmith was a lot of fun to play, had a great balance of risk vs reward, and the traits were well-balanced. The traits really made me think about what I wanted to pick, and often multiple choices were good ones. To me that is good design.
• Firebrand also was fun, and for me it will be a toss up if I spend more time with Firebrand or Dragonhunter. Either way my Guardian has some good options.

Did not like:

• I really wanted to like Spellbreaker, but I just couldn’t find myself enjoying it. It seems like a very PvP-oriented specialization. One small thing that might help improve Spellbreaker just for me is if the healing on Sun and Moon style for offhand dagger was doubled or tripled.
• Going into the beta weekend, I expected to really like Soulbeast. I found myself disappointed by it. It seems to be most useful while in melee range only, the F1/F2 skills seemed extremely weak, and lack of pet swap while in beastmode was a deal-breaker. (Or remove the beastmode cooldown if we cannot have pet swap.)
• The demo weekend showcasing the elite specializations should have been open to both PvP and PvE. For PvE at least the limited Crystal Desert area like we had in the first demo weekend would have been nice. Being limited to PvP/WvW only was not a great way to get the full experience of what these elite specializations could do. Fighting the congestion in the Heart of the Mists for golems or profession spar partners was not fun.

I totally misread Gaile’s post, and thought she said we should add our second demo weekend feedback to this thread. My apologies! If a moderator wants to move my post to Gaile’s other thread, that would be fine.

The Map was beautiful. Mounts were awesome. Sweet Lore. I love map exploration but NO Map Meta! what’s going to keep me coming back month after month. I still run SW VB AB TD and DS, sometimes I do DT lol. The map size seems small on mounts. Have you thought of a long and thin rectangular map versus a square map… like a map running from the top of the top map to the bottom of the bottom map.
Great Job! I cant wait for PoF!

Special action key treasure to find treasure but when I went to do the heart quest to scare animals, I couldn’t. So, I tried to go after the treasure but it was outside of the playable area. Like a logic error, I think I had to restart the game or something in order to do the heart quest. Don’t remember now.

I use the look behind keybind everywhere; Raids, WvW, PvE, PvP. But it does not work when i’m riding the raptor. I don’t understand why, unless the functionality was overlooked.

Elite specs are taking away from the game more than adding to it. Core class concepts are being stolen away by other elite specs and new mechanics(barrier) have been added to classes that have no reason to have it.
Balance between classes is all over the place. Not a chance to “Play the way you want.”
No consideration was made for skill and trait synergy, pushing strange focuses on one or two skills.
Mounts were never needed.
Every class should have a reason to be in a raid, even if it’s as mundane as each class can hit a button to skip trash or steal a buff from a boss for each class present.
You want to make people happy? Make the home instances custom like guild halls. Pick your home, farm, livestock, all from different art packs of all races. Make the supplies come from a procedural dungeon.
The game could use a competitive CCG or something. Some may disagree, but it might be a good way to pass idle time.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I wanted to be sure that you knew this this thread is still active and your input is welcome. This thread pertains to the PvE Preview, our first of two events. I’m now (since the preview is over) posting a PvP/WvW Preview feedback thread.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on either or both subjects!

Glad you’re still gathering feedback but… since roughly 95% complain about the new identify-stuff-feature, would you be so kind to give a quick headsup about how the Devs think about it? Are they thinking about removing the feature? Do they want to keep it but sort stuff by rarity? Or will they simply ignore the feedback and keep it as it is? I’m pretty sure you are aware that the longer they remain silent, the bigger the impression of “we don’t kitten care and keep it as it is” grows :/

Here are only my negative points.
-After HoT multi-layer maps, the Oasis felt underwhelming and generic.
-I like the fact that we got multiple events not part of a meta event. Don’t get me wrong, meta event are cool, but whole maps centered around single meta event is not cool. I still hope you find the middle ground between meta events(multiple per map) and normal story events(core Tyria).
-The mount felt good by itself, apart from little bit clunky steering. BUT the whole mount concept felt rather negative to me. I was able to explore, literally the whole available map in no more then 15 mins. Mounts made the whole exploring part non-existing.
-Exploring. Honestly there was almost nothing hidden to be found. The whole map felt bland and apart from some fun dialogues between NPCs, there was nothing. No hidden caves/dungeons/treasures. I saw 2 places that will be open to the mount abilities, but why make no special spots outside of that, that’s just not right. very disappointing.

I really hope there are more quests similar to the elite weapon quests, where we can search for an item/person or solve some conundrum in multiple areas. Because the usual Events(apart from meta events) are very confined to a small area. an RPG need more stories that take long to solve.

i like;
- Crystal Desert, Elonians (refugees) living there.
The Crystal Desert in GW1 only had a few ghost npc’s.
Looking forward to exploring the other the new maps also.

- Two of the new ranger pets (Sand Lion and Fanged Iboga).
Ranger is my favorite class (i have two, a fem Norn and fem Sylvari).

- Mounts, has potential, seems fun. Movement needs strafing.

- My PC isnt good for GW2, have to run it on lowest quality settings.
But it seemed the Crystal Desert beta content looked a bit better.

Don’t like;
- Elite Specs.
i still dont like mandatory Elite Specs when using a new weapons.
For most Elite Specs i couldnt get a good impression, or it meant i didnt like them.
The new warrior elite spec, to me, feels completely wrong for a warrior.
Dual daggers, and anti-caster stuff. Seems better suited for Mesmer or Thief.
My Revenant char is a Charr, so Renegade looks interesting for my Revenant.

- new ID system as it seems to be now.
Enough suggestions have been made in another topic to change/improve this.

First of all I should say that I’m quite pleased with what I’ve seen in this demo, the introduction looks cool and the Raptor looks and feels amazing to ride. But as a big fan of GW2 I have some feedback that I hope will help to make some things better.

1- I had a problem with the introduction mission, I got stuck between two walls with the raptor after jumping and to get out of it I had to log out since there was no Waypoint in that map. I really wish there was one just to avoid frustration.

2- The raptor to me feels fine., I just hope we will have emotes on the mounts, it would be nice to RP, like pet it when you are on top of it or something else or even the character saying something to the mount when running around, like “faster!” or “wow easy buddy” or something more complex that would add even more flavour to the mounts.

3- Races.. I tried one and I was disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, the idea of racing is cool but it’s really limited right now. Everything is based on how often you use your jump and after understanding that it was easy to win and to get bored of it.
I can imagine that when you unlock the longer jump with the raptor you will be able to win even easier..
What I was expecting was to have additional skills while you were on the race to slow down the other people racing. Something like the Beetle Race in GW.
Just restrict the skills to the people racing or in a radius around the path of the race so the skills can’t be used to kitten off other players that are not racing.
I’m not expecting the same amount of skills as the Beetle Race but still it would be nice to have at least one, so that it gets more interesting and hard to win.
Still power ups to pick up like in the Sanctum Sprint would be nice to have.
Also I realized that if you are partecipating in a race and not manage to win you don’t get anything at the end, no way to se your timing or at which place you managed to arrive(or maybe there is but I couldn’t find it).

4- Bounties.. This was my biggest disappointment. Bounties have no flavour at all..you just go up to the board and claim one, no text explaining what your bounty will be.
I really was expecting something like that, to be more involved into it, and some text just for flavour would go a long way. A great reference would be the Witcher contracts from The Witcher 3…no need to go that far but still it would help to satisfy people looking for lore. I think that gw1 bounties also had flavour text…

• Raptor: Great feel to movement. Lack of strafing and damped turn speed made it feel like more than a cosmetic addition. A little sad that they just poof in and out of existence. I like the design of rapidly mounting and unmounting them, but it’d be nice if they persisted in the world a bit somehow, or at least ran off a bit before they despawned conceivably far enough away to pretend they didn’t just vanish, even if its just a client side effect for just your own mount. Didn’t like the lack of customization, and am afraid you’ll pull a gliders 2.0 and nickel and dime me for customization.

• Events: Indivudally well designed events that didn’t have the copy/paste feel of LS maps. Each felt unique and were fun, but I miss the chain style events that tell a little story. A whole map full of one-off events has personality, but not a lot of heart. I don’t want to return to HoT based meta timer insanity, but I’d like to see a few longer meta-style chains with a bit more story.

• Hearts/vendor system: I actually really like this setup. Enables directed farming for resources, gives a logical reason to recomplete hearts, gear identification costs seem in line with the amount of raw material you’re handing out.

• Casino: Its primitive, but I like that you tried to flavor ecto gambling as more than a blatant gamey mechanic. I am confused at the lack of Belcher’s Bluff, Golem Chess, and other minigames in the casino. I hope to see more in world gambling and more use of the gambling tokens for acquisition/rewards aside from the raptor run event.

• Map design: Overall the only frustrations I had seem to evaporate with the full expansion. I like that there are areas of the map that seems like they can’t be completed without stuff unlocked in later maps. I like that the collectables actually reward a bit of loot so they have value to people who aren’t achievement hunting. I like the way treasure hunting and keys are redesigned to not be reliant on one another.

• Bounties: Fun! I like the random affixes, although the hyena bounty seems a little overtuned with his shadowstep follwed extremely quickly by a high damage spike. Also the time bombs message very poorly. The timer “pie” display is very hard to time effectively for dodges, and the bombs themselves not having an AoE circle is problematic. Consider using the HoT-style “slowly filling circle” for them in stead, as it is much more clear. Also it would be great if the bounties had some unique rewards associated with them individually. Even just a weapon skin or something.

• Rewards: I’m still perplexed at the overall low presence of tangible rewards in postrelease content. Your team has shown capable of pushing out art at a fantastic pace, but it seems that the majority of the weapon/armor art goes in to BL skins or outfits. 80% of all new character customization is microtransactions, and this was one of the worst parts of HoT that you seem to be repeating. This alone is one of the primary reasons I become bored with new content as fast as I do. There are so few rewards for play introduced with new content that it is really unlikely I stick around if the anemic selection isn’t to my liking. Maybe sell a few less skins and outfits and reward a few more for playing the expansion this time?

Major issue with Whitewashed Kormir statues,
in Elona, the land of Black Humans like her.

Other than that, I’m all sold.