Guild Wars 2

I was able to spend more time on this Beta than the last, taking part in more than one instance. (Still was the middle of the night for me in Taiwan.) I never bought a ticket for the hype train, so I was neither greatly overwhelmed nor distraught at what I encountered. Here are, however, some notes on what I liked and what I’d like to see polished:

PROS:

• Smarter Enemies. I noticed this with the previous stress test, but enemies talking (and even evading!) attacks make them seem much less like walking plants and more akin to Zhaitan’s or Kralkatorrik’s minions. Good job.
• Pocket Raptors and Pudgy Mounts? And those Mushroom Soldier things that remind me of D&D’s myconids? SQUEEE! We’d better get those in minis. They’re adowable!
• Shadowmaws(?) I apologize that I didn’t get a better look at their names. Truthfully, I was running as fast as I could to get away from them. Terrifying as hell.
• “Taunt” Mechanic. Really handy when I got to use it. I was able to turn the attention of a hypogriff away from the NPCs and keep them alive.
• The Unique Visual Themes. Just like Southsun Cove and Dry Top “feel” very different when you’re walking through them, so does the Maguuma canopy. I especially liked the Itzel village, where I could believe I was back in Disney’s Adventureland. (“And don’t forget to face the fury of our….gift shop!!!”)
• Regular Classes Still Contributed. As I had already played with a Revenant during the stress test, I decided to see how a flamethrowing engineer would hold it. It did perfectly well in the new environment against the hordes of Mordrem, reassuring me the new content was not simply based around hyping the Revenant.

FIXes:

• Will the “Legendary Demon” skill of Mallyx’s aspect have some form of telltale transformation, kind of like a warrior’s Rampage? It would be a helpful visual reminder.
• The southwestern ruins WP (forget the name) was uncontested during a defending event. I assume this was intentional, in order to not punish beta players; but will this be altered in the final content?
• Some of the red/blue capture squares bled over the edge of nearby cliffs, turning them into large, floating capture parallelograms. Probably a minor fix.
• The broken bridge next to the Champion Troll Vinetender could be directly leaped over via several Revenant skills. Was this intentional? I can’t help feeling it wasn’t, much like Thieves and Mesmers need a legal path to use their similar arts.
• Also, with the broken stone bridge—it magically reforms at night. This doesn’t make any sense thematically. Are the Pact repairing it? If so, can we have the repairs look more cobbled-like and less like perfect stone?
• Using the Revenant’s Phase Shift skill against enemies on a different level prompted the “Deploy Glider” skill, though I couldn’t actually use it. I guess the game considers my character actually in air long enough to prompt it.
• For skills like Phase Shift, can we have the POV camera jump forward perhaps 10% of the distance to the target before returning? It would give a better sense of your character actually moving, instead of watching a doppleganger of yourself being thrown into distant battle.

…

Lastly, Masteries.

• Masteries are a good bit more intuitive than the last iteration, where I was completely lost. Still, however, I feel the process is a bit overly-complicated. To train a Mastery, you need to:

1. Open your Masteries window.
2. Choose the appropriate tree to begin training.
3. Click the small Check at the top of the window. Double-clicking a mastery as an alternate method isn’t enabled. (Could we make it that way?)
4. “Earn a level.”
5. Once your level/mastery bar has filled, go back to the Mastery window. Spend a Mastery point to complete the training process.

I like the way this is reminiscent of completing PVP tracks, though it still seems overly convoluted. Why doesn’t the system simply let you train generic mastery levels, awarding you a Mastery Point to spend as you see fit once the process is through? (Yes, this would be much more similar to the Skill Point process after level 80 as we have now.)

What’s the point of “training” a Mastery in order to be able to unlock it? Unlike in some games, you don’t train it by completing theme-specific tasks. You simply do random stuff and boing now you know how to Hang Glide. Why was this system envisioned this way? What’s the purpose behind the extra steps?

And if the extra steps are indeed necessary, can we have red text screen prompts for when a) you’ve begun training a new Mastery, and b) when your training is complete and you need to spend that Mastery Point. Also, perhaps have the “Training” text in green on the Mastery bar to make it stand out more.

All in all, I enjoyed the new content and loved seeing the interplay between theme and mechanics. I want to learn more about the different frogs’ cultures, and I want to learn how to combat Mordrem on the dicey bridges of the ruins. Rewarding and leaving me hungry for more!

Good job!

About glider activating too soon after jumping, I think it’s because they haven’t optimized client/server sync. It should be somewhat easy for them to track the “duration” of a jump, i.e. how much time you’re “in air”, and use that average duration as a trigger for activating it, so it doesn’t constantly lock your skillbar and enable the “Deploy Glider” action.

This beta was better than the first, we had the opportunity to glimpse into what Heart of Maguuma may be about, and I wish the very first beta were like this one. The way day/night experience rolls out is sure a great framework for a map-wide mechanics/meta-event, but could use more tweaking not to feel so confusing. During the night I didn’t quite understand what was going on, there were escorts and I was overwhelmed in almost all of them, so I take all “defend” events in night time will require at least two-three people playing together.

I got extremely intrigued and interested about Vine Salvage Pit adventure, and I guess GW2 has found a sweet potential to grow them into something spectacular. It’s like Guild Puzzles and Dynamic Events had a baby, and the experiment was successful! I can’t stress enough how much potential I see there. Great job.

Opening more of Verdant Brink showed how much the map is fluid, and you feel like it’s moving. The difficulty of mordrem was a little better, but I’m afraid zergs may overrun them. Depending on how rewarding the map will be, and how much important “spreading” the zerg will be, we could see faceroll zergs re-thinking coordination and hopefully naturally create balanced encounters where going blind-zerker will reward much less, after all zerkers claim they’re the best gear reward-wise. Rewards should be earned for beating content as designed to prevent faceroll experiences.

Masteries iirc were kinda sold as the new endgame account-wide progression mechanic that would fix the pointlessness of xp after 80

I understand that. They’re needlessly convoluted and counter-intuitive in their present form, however.

Re: Masteries, they are not like the skill bar now because as you get more advanced Masteries, the XP required to unlock them goes up. It’s not a static number across all mastery levels.

Then have them require 2, 5, 10, whatever Mastery Points. Like ranks in WvW, or skills as they are now. That still makes more sense than activate, train, purchase to complete.

cocowoushi.7150:

Re: Masteries, they are not like the skill bar now because as you get more advanced Masteries, the XP required to unlock them goes up. It’s not a static number across all mastery levels.

I thought the quadrupling of the exp required for the 2 level of gliding was ridiculous. I could see doubling it. Are they going to make you get eight times that required for 3 level? Lots of grinding for exp.

Heibi.4251:

cocowoushi.7150:

Re: Masteries, they are not like the skill bar now because as you get more advanced Masteries, the XP required to unlock them goes up. It’s not a static number across all mastery levels.

I thought the quadrupling of the exp required for the 2 level of gliding was ridiculous. I could see doubling it. Are they going to make you get eight times that required for 3 level? Lots of grinding for exp.

Endgame right now has copious quantities of xp that serve no real purpose. I’ve played for barely 3 months now and I’ve already accrued over 400 skillpoints on my main, not to mention 3 alts. In the long term I expect everyone to have maybe 60-80% of every line unlocked before it’s necessary to pour all the xp into one to advance.

Heibi.4251:

cocowoushi.7150:

Re: Masteries, they are not like the skill bar now because as you get more advanced Masteries, the XP required to unlock them goes up. It’s not a static number across all mastery levels.

I thought the quadrupling of the exp required for the 2 level of gliding was ridiculous. I could see doubling it. Are they going to make you get eight times that required for 3 level? Lots of grinding for exp.

It’s hard to say right now regarding this. They either made level 2 extremely high so beta testers would not obtain it, or these are accurate numbers and they are intended to just take that long to level.

If the latter I can understand, as the payoff is account bound. Good when you have 18 characters, not so good when you have 1-2. I found that doing events naturally granted me much bigger chunks of XP, to the point where I don’t think killing mobs even moved the bar at all. If the new content will be event based like SW then it might not be so long.

I really want to see a good payoff for pulling off event chains though, like SW. Otherwise I can’t imagine a reason to stay on this map.