Guild Wars 2

I figured it would be a good idea to have a general feedback thread, just whatever thoughts came to mind:

New area: I played around in the new area for about an hour, it is very dense. Lots of verticality, but with glider and bouncing mushroom unlocked it is interesting to traverse (I weep for players who are starting on this map without either).

I climbed all over the Mellaggan’s Valor, and eventually got well into the middle of the map, to an area where I could theoretically keep climbing up towards a big round boulder, but I think I was reaching Canopy level and the game told me to turn back or I’d be teleported. Fun though.

I hopped off and found myself in an area with a Pact tower that needed defending. This event did not scale well at all for a single player (I was the only one around). It summoned one of those giant Vet frogs and a few little ones, and I couldn’t really keep up. I survived for a bit, but could not defend the tower effectively so the event failed. It would probably have worked better with more people around, but should have scaled down for only one, as this is a very big and complex map, and I imagine there will be a lot of these events with only one person around. There was also a bouncing mushroom in this area that I believe was intended to launch me only a cliff about 50ft up, but instead I ricocheted off the edge of the cliff and bounced into the abyss. I landed on a vine way below where I was, with no way back up. I tried to glide to a visible sandstone ruin, but ran out of steam.

Overall combat in the new area was not terribly fun. The giant frogs had a lot of interesting moves, but also a LOT of HP. They were marked as Veterans, but even when I was fighting with 3-4 other players, it would take as long to wear them down as a Champ typically would, and there were a ton of these guys around. I can’t imagine soloing them alongside their adds. It seems like almost every random enemy you see is designed to be a fair fight with you solo which can be fun in small doses, but there’s no “stomping” minion enemies, which can get exhausting. I mostly just ignore most enemies completely because actually fighting them is more hassle than it’s worth. I think there needs to be better “pacing” of the enemies, spread the “even fight” enemies out more, and have a lot more “beneath you” enemies in between.

Daredevil:
I really like the DD so far. Lots of fun. I was running staff/SB (never used the SB much though), with a combo of zerker and soldier stats, Trick/Acro/DD traiting, and Signet of Malice, Fist Flurry, Shadow Refuge, Impairing Daggers, and Impact Strike. I tried Distracting Daggers but found that the “loading” mechanic was too distracting, and Dandit’s Defense didn’t much appeal to me.

Fist Flurry was fun, although I kind of wish that the finishing blow was automatic. Having to jam on that attack was kind of annoying. I also grew to like Impact Strike, but would also kind of like it to be an automatic three-hit combo. Having to hit utility keys multiple times while in combat is just a hassle. And don’t tell me I should rebind them, they should be designed based on the default key bindings.

Staff was a hoot and a half. It’s kind of hard to judge how good it is when fighting the new content, since the new content seems harder than I’m used to in the rest of the game, but it seems at least “strong enough.” It’s highly mobile, and has useful effects to it, but I’m sure I don’t have the best combat flow down for it yet. The #5 skill is super useful. It lets you cross flat gaps with ease, and even carries you up a bit, not higher than you can standing jump, but higher than you can make on a horizontal jump. It also seems a bit safer than a normal jump. The only downside as a mobility power is that you can’t jump off cliffs with it, but that’s fine.

The dodge powers seemed fun. I went with Lotus most of the time, although I wish the thrown daggers were more visible, I often couldn’t tell who or what I was hitting with them. I like the mechanic on dash, but miss the flippy animation my Asura. Bound seemed a bit clunky, since you seemed to jump so big but not go very far. All the new dodges actually seemed a bit clunky, they seemed to react a bit slower than I was used to, a bit less fluid.

The new three-bar energy was interesting, but regenerated way too slowly, especially out of combat. I was even using all the possible +Vigor traits, and yet never had as much energy as I wanted. I do not believe that the new Daredevil mechanic is a fair substitute for the old Feline Grace trait, and would like to see that returned. At the very least there need to be better ways to regain energy that do not require you to actually “Evade” an attack.

More to follow.

Ok, I played a bit more. I did the entire Quaggan story chain, a lot of fun, good story. Love Shashoo. I tagged up when the first boss fight started, which seemed to draw in more people, we has maybe 10-15 by the end. The reoccurring boss, Legendary “d”, was pretty fun the first time in the cave, but I think bugged out later on, or doesn’t scale well, because once more people joined the group during the later phases, she seemed stuck in her “broken” state most of the time and just wandered around looking mopey, not really attacking at all that I could tell and certainly rarely doing the “spin-nado” move she’s got. She looks cool though. The frog with the hammer was hard to keep stunned, but we managed ok. Fist Flurry and Impact Strike are a lot of fun to use on dazed bosses.

Each segment seemed to run a little longer than might be ideal, a wave or two too many, an enemy with too much health bar, that sort of thing, maybe even drop one of the lesser events. The whole chain, start to finish, should complete in like half the time it actually took. In general I don’t like the idea of these mission chains that can take upwards of 30-40 minutes to complete, if I wanted to invest in something like that then I’d be doing a dungeon. I prefer events where you can show up, knock out the whole thing in like 20 minutes or less, and then move on to a completely different task or jump to another character on a different map.

I did end up getting every mastery point on the map (or at least all the ones that were visible and I think like 1-2 that weren’t), though I’m only on my 4th actual mastery track because the XP gain is soooooooo sloooooooow. I have gliding, bouncy shrooms (both MUST have pickups for the jungle), Updrafts (although I haven’t seen any in this area), and I’m working on the “lean” skill next.

Overall though I was having fun, and having more people around made the challenges much more doable.

Edit: I also forgot to add, after ANet’s fantastic efforts with the Scarlet invasion, DT, and SW mobs having clear and varied telegraphs, the VB mobs tend to be missing them a lot of the time. The giant frog, for example, has one move where he charges up a cone AoE, then another where he does a PBAoE belly smash, neither of these generate a ground image telegraph. These need to be added.

Ok, so yesterday I spent most of my beta playtime as my Revenant from the previous build. This time I was running Sword/Axe, Shiro/Glint legends, Shiro/Jallis/Glint traiting. It was a BALL. I absolutely loved the combination so far. It was very complex, and I’m sure I wasn’t making the most of it, but what I was able to accomplish was a lot of fun. I would typically stay in Glint mode, with the Speed and F2 abilities on. Then when combat started I would “burn” the speed utility and switch on the Fury and Might ones, maybe also the heal if I felt that necessary. Then I would “toggle/burn” the utility, and toggle/burn the speed one on cooldowns. If I started running low on energy I’d swap to Shiro, usually just long enough to turn on Haste and make some attacks, then switch back. I love Glint’s heal, it’s basically the “suicidal heal,” where if there’s stuff going down, I can turn it on and then just jump face first into the fire! So lovely.

Sword/Axe is my favorite combo for the characters, I like that it offers two solid gap-closers, and love Unrelenting Assault in general. It’s a purely agressive weapon set, but the utilities help to offset that. I felt that my DPS was great overall, at least comparable or better to other classes I’ve played in the beta, and my survival rate was considerably higher. I think over an hour or two of play, I was only even downed in combat once or twice, while on other characters I would get dropped fairly regularly.

For content, I mostly ran the Nobles mission line, clearing that one out. I think the story and various objectives were a lot of fun, although some of the boss fights we did seem to overpower the boss with shear numbers. I also felt like multi-Herald groupings can be a bit dangerous, we were buff-factories, there were like 4-5 of us in the party (easy to see because of the psychedelic footwear), and for most of it we all had 25 stacks of might and plenty of other buffs going around. Also, on a mission objective feedback, there was the part where you had to collect supplied from the mushroom cave, and instead of a vague bar it asked for a specific number of items? I really liked that. Does it scale based on players like other similar events? We managed to complete it in only a minute or two, but with far less players the 50 he was asking for would take quite a while.

Btw, I can get why the glowing Herald ground pattern was making some people ill, it is lovely, but perhaps a bit too distracting? Perhaps at least remove the animation from the texture, and just make it a flat pastel purple or something?

I did have two issues with the nobles’ area night defense. One, I could never find enough supplies around the main crashsite. The Wyvern cliff has that little crashed ship that provides a bunch of supplies to use, but if there is a similar event near the primary crash site I couldn’t find it. I could only ever find 3-4 supply anywhere on that plateau, and the defense tier never got about zero. There need to be more supply, and there needs to be some way of finding them other than wandering aimlessly. That also reminds me that on the Quaggan mission, there is a bit where you need to find ship parts to rebuild or something, and they are all in an area well above that is full of frogs? Those parts are very difficult to find, they are near invisible and don’t react when you hold down ctrl. Please make them much more visible, like much larger models, or little glowy arrows over them or something.

Anyways, my other problem with night defense in that area is that the crashsite needs another bouncing mushroom that launches you to the top of it. It’s not that it’s a terribly long jog back up after you drop down, but you have to make that run numerous times per event, and it gets to be a bit of a chore. There is a mushroom that launches you up to the Wyvern cliffs, there should also be one on the crashsite plateau that launches you from the “ground level” portion (where most of the tents are) to the “peak” portion, where the supply gets deposited.

Also, about mushrooms in general, two changes I’d like to see. First, if a mushroom shoots you sideways rather than up, I’d like some indication of that, like having it pointed slightly at an angle towards the destination. I get that you can figure these out through trial and error, but a well designed game makes these things clear at a glance, like how AC games apply white markings to shot off the fastest movement routes, or Mirror’s Edge uses red streaks. You know what’s waiting for you before you get there.

The second is that I’d like a second variety of bouncing mushroom, and that would be the “kickstart” mushroom. Maybe make them red instead of yellow or something, but these would be a mushroom that do not deposit you on the ground at a preset destination, but instead just launch you straight up and then let you go, to kickstart a gliding path. I suppose this would be dangerous if you don’t have glide unlocked yet, so maybe make them bouncy if you land back on them or something. Don’t make this something you need to train separately though.

Oh, and two Herald bugs: one is that when I would switch to Shiro Legend sometimes, the Haste utility would be grayed out, and clicking it said I “did not have enough energy,” even though it’s only a 5-point upkeep and I’d have at least 50. This persisted even once maxing out my energy. I believe that turning off the f2 ability would open it up again. I also remember having the same issue going from Shiro to Glint, where the Elite skill would sometimes be grayed out.

The other issue was that sometimes when using bouncing mushrooms, all my upkeep toggles would switch off, forcing me to reset them each time.

Verdant Brink
Map is very beautiful and fun to play. I cannot wait to play in the full map and experience other events. Only problem I heve with this map is that night events seemed a bit boring in comparison to day events. Day events have story that you can follow and interesting characters, but at the night you just defend rally points and every rally point is the same, there is no many differences beetween them and overall is much more boring experience than day time. I think night time should be much shorter and intense than it is right now.

The Reaper
My main is necromancer so I was very excited to play as Reaper. I’ve got no problem with greatsword and shroud skills, they are fine. But shouts… Shouts seems to weak to run them in pve, I don’t understand why should I run shouts instead of wells. Only powerful shout is elite one but still not powerful enough to consider switching from lich form for it. As a skills that should be offensive, shouts deal pitiful amount of damage.

Masteries
They seem fine, I was caring about experience points agin, which was very nice. I also like that further you go in to mastery line it becomes harder to level it. But after one weekend I already saw people who have a lots of them, so I think experience needed to gain them should be increased a little.

Just wanted to second the OP’s points about scaling and about long event chains. I get that the intention is for HoT combat to be harder and for groups (or zergs) to be optimal, but realistically, a couple of months after launch many events may not attract a critical mass of players, especially at off hours.

Events should scale down to solo difficulty or, if you don’t want events to be doable by solos/duos/small groups, then those events should probably not spawn at all until a sufficient number of players are in the immediate area. The convoluted topography mitigates strongly against enough people arriving by chance to finish an event that has spawned and stalled in time to do much about it, which might be an issue if long chains rely on specific events concluding.

I’ll just add in my bit here, this time, as it’s a lot shorter than last time. I have mainly three points:

First up, thank you to ArenaNet about the changes to the beta equipment boxes – very good! It was really awkward on BWE1, getting ALL equipment, 70% of which I can’t use, and having to open two of those all-packs to get an item twice for main hand and off hand. Getting exactly the weapons I need, only those I can use, and twice if necessary, to be able to use ANY weapon config the character can use is so much better. Thank you!

Second, I can’t provide much to the point of specializations. I did play a bit of Chronomancer – like the new gravity well, the other wells still seem a bit cut&paste AoE DoTs – a bit of Tempest – considering my general inability to play Elementalist, it didn’t seem that weak – a bit of Berzerker … you should make that interface a bit clearer, hiding the Rage mode behind the normal burst skill is a bit odd. Maybe put F2 for Rage above the Burst Skill, and have the Primal Burst hiding behind the normal Burst instead?

Most importantly, I looked at masteries – On BWE1 I commented on how naturally gliding fits into the game (and I still think so), but I was still worried, as I was since the announcement, that masteries might take away too much of the game. But the events around Mellaggans Valor (getting parts from further up) showed me how well this can be implemented: You CAN absolutely contribute to it without Masteries. You might want to stay up and fight and thus free more parts for others to get, who might have an easier time delivering them down and getting back up again. You can run up, it just takes a bit longer, and you can jump down you just have to be really careful. If you do have gliding mastery, getting down is much easier and safer, and if you have the jumping mushroom mastery, getting up there is quicker and easier as well.
So far, I really liked that. There was one downside of that event, and that was that it was unclear when, how or why new parts appeared and it wasn’t evidently visible (to me, at least) that it had happened, and it seemed like the parts took a long while to appear (or just everyone else was so much quicker that I didn’t have a chance, even keeping CTRL and ALT pressed.)

About the opponents we get to fight. Still hate the “damage from front” beetles. New Hylek seem really interesting and a bit more varied. Severely dislike the Smokescales, especially since it’s relatively hard to get it out of its immunity zone (but that isn’t necessarily bad, I know that I’d have to kite it out of there, but a possibility to interrupt its casting would be very welcome). Mordrem are Mordrem.

Lastly, the defiance bar could still be a bit clearer – if an enemy is weakened when broken, does this mean while the shield icon is red and the bar is filling up again, or only during the stun? But I hope there will be more clarification added when they also add the mouseover tooltips.