Guild Wars 2

Specializations

Specializations are really, really well done. I enjoyed mostly Dragon Hunter, Reaper and Daredevil, but the others are also fun to play.

Dragon Hunter is fantastic after few changes. Longbow/traps combined with my previous build – greatsword/meditations – works wonders! I can’t wait till day one!

Reaper now feels smoother and faster. Greatsword is now much, much better weapon, before it felt clunky and slow. Reaper Shroud got better for sure, especially whirlwind attack not going through enemies.

Daredevil’s physical skills are… fun, but… I love third endurance bar, love new dodges, but quarterstaff and physical were little confusing. Sorry, but I don’t know how to explain it better. It was probably just first impression, but in general I enjoyed this new specialization.

Legendary Dragon Stance is quite fun, but I also noticed something. I went on fractal and I was using Legendary Dwarf Stance, but I was ASKED to use Glint. I did and I notice how easy it is to get 25 stacks of might. We were literally wrecking enemies. It’s not forbidden to stack 25 might, but it felt way to easy with help of Glint stance skills. Anyway, Glint or not, they’ll always find ways to stack the might, I guess.

I really enjoy Revenant in general. I’m in love with Hammer and Legendary Dwarf Stance. I’m also using Legendary Assassin Stance (dual swords) and it works great together. If I need to be more defensive I use Dwarf, if more offensive I use Assassin. I was bit confused, but then I created satisfying build. I really like the fact, that legends cover every aspect of the game.

Creatures and Events

I really enjoyed new content. Creatures were fun, especially beetle (I think?) that can only be damaged in front. I could handle myself, but enemies in general were in groups, so it’s natural that it’s easier to pick up a few friends and explore the jungle.

Events were as usual, but that’s not a bad thing, cause I enjoye events in general. I know it’s hard to create new kind of events, but here’s idea – maybe events that are based on gliders? Like a race or something. Hmm, that would better match guild missions.

Mastery System

I don’t have much to say about Mastery System. Progression seems slow, it’s good that we got glider for free at start. It’s not a big problem, but it may be for players that do not play 24/7.

Gliding is really fun. It helps to explore and improves movement. I really enjoyed discovering new places of power. It feels like I earned those Masteries.

This new system has future and I’m waiting for more.

P.S. mumbling as I said. Hope it was helpful in any way

Not a mumble, quite clear in fact.

Progression on Masteries is meant to be slow. Honestly, it’s probably a bit too fast in its current form. These are our primary endgame progression, we shouldn’t be able to make much progress over a single weekend.

Agree with all that. Now if they could just make tempest not suck/play just like a D/D ele that’d be great. They really screwed the pooch on that one.

I like the masteries being slow to get. As it stands, maxing a single mastery requires around 16.8 million exp. Getting from lvl 1 to 80 requires a total of around 4.8 million exp. But remember the vast number of exp improving consumables that are available in-game and the fact that masteries are account-bound, you will only ever have do it once.

The early masteries go quite fast. Almost anyone can unlock them, even people who don’t play all that much. The later masteries, those will take much longer to get. Which is necessary for people like me who play every single day.

Thanks for all the answers. Yeah, now I see that masteries progress if fine as it is.

I didn’t speak about other specs, cause they’re fine, but I’m not interested for now. I focused on Revenant and my favourited classes (Necro, Guard, Thief).

However I must say that:

Temepest is just not for me. I’ve my own, perfected build and I’m just not interested in either Warhorn or Shouts. But I see why others might find them useful

Chronomancer is similar, but I would consider using Wells. Especially gravity one, really great idea, Anet!

Berserker is fine, but doesn’t seems my playstyle. Perfected build here too, but I might consider Rage skills, who knows. Head Butt is great!

Keep up the good work. I’m looking forward to Druid and Hammer-Engineer!

I’ve put my Masteries thoughts in their own thread and will put Specializations in the Profession threads. I can discuss mobs and events here.

First, Mob difficulty/excitement:

The only really new mobs I found were the adolescent and electric fire wyverns (and a nest of wasps I didn’t fight, so they could have special jungle skills I didn’t notice). I believe there were some new types of Hylek as well but they didn’t stand out as much to me other than the need to avoid the knockbacks and the occasional huge hits. I play fairly zoomed out in combat so sometimes I miss details.

That village of Hylek was pure death (I never got a zerg with me in it) so mostly I needed ways to run through it and find safe spots. I got deliciously miffed at the shadowstepping Hylek who kept vanishing and then showing up out of melee range; so far I haven’t seen a pattern to where they reappear so I have to scan all over to find them again.

When I first ran into an electric wyvern I was happy and excited, but didn’t find it too difficult – I think I was on a Reaper at the time. The big Wyvern at the end of Faren’s chain took more effort but I realized that it was safe if I could just stay on its butt except when said butt was in a fire field. I don’t yet fully understand what skills to use to remove break bars; happily other players do so on my Tempest I just let others pin it down while I burn/zapped the heck out of it. The mordrem in the Ordnance chain who whirls around a really nasty red chain, I liked him, though I’m still not sure if I can just jump over the chain or must dodge it.

A note on the Mordrem Breachers in some of the events: if you stand behind them at range almost nothing will ever attack you and you can just range them down in near perfect safety, at least if just one or two other players are distracting the mordrem in front of the Breacher. This gave me a breather, but I think it’s kitten in their defenses ANet did not intend.

And second, are the events fun/immersive/challenging/meaningful/interesting ?

This time around I never saw an event bug out, though I did see one comment in Map that the Faren chain had once stalled when Morula vanished early on.

The Faren chain was much more fun than the Ordnance chain, but a bit less immersive. It had lots of lol moments yet felt a little less desperate than it should. I don’t feel the human nobles are such completely useless leeches as they are portrayed here, though I suppose Faren might well have put together a shipload of fools and fops. They should have been more disoriented and frightened. But then I don’t feel Faren should be quite such a lackwit as he’s turning into … in the human noble PS he proves fairly effective in practice despite his rakish attitude. I keep hoping he’s doing a Scarlet Pimpernel and will turn out to be E. His speedo should have been jungle themed, methinks, he should have gotten a bit of tan, and he definitely should have swung on a vine at least once and gotten a few more graceful animations. At least if he’s to be a proper homage to Lord Greystoke. Anyway, while I enjoy the chain and the wyvern fight a bit more than I do the Ordnance chain and giant Hylek fight because it’s a bit more relaxed, I feel the story has more impact and lore-satisfying feel in the Ordnance chain.

Now as to day/night. The night events aren’t chains, and they can be frustrating to get to, especially in the west side of the map well away from any waypoints. I found it satisfying to kick wreckage for supplies – and then annoying to realize that we’d need a lot more coordination than we had to actually carry all the supplies to needed locations. It also seemed odd to me that the rally points waited to night to gather supplies. Shouldn’t daytime be when everyone does what they can to fort up, then have to hole up in the forts and defend them through a rabidly dangerous night? Defending felt fairly easy, much more so than defending a Silverwastes fort despite the much weaker fortifications. I didn’t do many guard escorts, mostly because it wasn’t as easy as in HoTBWE1 to get to the guards and they didn’t feel as crucial to building up the rally points as just hauling supplies myself. Beyond extra mobs and the lack of event chains, night didn’t have a very distinct character or fearsome feel. Nor did there seem to be any advantage to keeping all the rallies as strong as possible; this might be because we don’t yet have the map currency and rewards. If keeping them all at Tier 5 gives a similar effect to reaching Dry Top Tier 5, or spawns more interesting stuff as in SW, I can see the impetus.

I know the map showed what tier each rally point had reached but with the same red color for 4 and 5 I really had to squint to see if a rally point needed topping off or was done. Making those icons a little bigger, on the order of the SW fort icons, would help with that. Or maybe mousing over them could expand them in size?

Roy.3862:

I like the masteries being slow to get. As it stands, maxing a single mastery requires around 16.8 million exp. Getting from lvl 1 to 80 requires a total of around 4.8 million exp. But remember the vast number of exp improving consumables that are available in-game and the fact that masteries are account-bound, you will only ever have do it once.

Isn’t this skewed by the fact that when leveling, similar actions at lower levels reward less experience, making that 4.8 million take longer? With masteries, all experience earned is at level 80. I don’t know how much a difference this would make and I’m sure the 16.8 still takes longer than the 4.8 even when considering the adjusted numbers.

Edit:

A follow-up to this: According to the wiki, the reward/requirements are kept flat from level 16 to 80 (the first 15 levels give better rewards and so are moved through more quickly). The description they give of this is:

For example, a level 16 player completing a level 16 event with a gold reward gives 616 XP out of the 8790 XP needed to reach level 17 or roughly 7%. Likewise, a level 26 player completing a level 26 event with a gold reward gives 1043 of the 14900 XP needed to reach 27 which is also 7%. Thus as long as you are playing content designed for your level, leveling will progress at a somewhat constant rate.

Another way to think about this is that if rewards were constant, the experience required to get from 1-80 would be [level 80 requirement]*80. That works out to 254,000 * 80 = ~20.3 million, assuming you don’t consider the 1-15 level bonus experience. My intuition is that when you take this into account, you actually end up with a number closer to about 18 million.

So according to all that (and feel free to speak out if you think my logic or math is flawed), the adjusted effort to level a single mastery is actually somewhat less than getting a character from 1-80.