TL:DR
Some things I really like and a bunch of critique about night time events and leveling masteries, but overall I really enjoyed it.
Details:
Daytime: I like the two daytime events we saw, as long as Faren doesn’t bug out. It would be good if there end up being a couple more running in different places simultaneously.
The dialogue in Faren’s cracked me up— respect to the writer on that!
I really like the interaction among the NPCs in the chain involving Beigarth, and enjoyed that one a lot too.
The final events were both good, except the final boss in the Beigarth chain seems easier that in previous beta weekends, which was a shame.
Nighttime:
Nightime still feels really grindy, though the canopy boss fights help. The trouble is that defending the outposts doesn’t seem as fun as defending forts in the SW. The areas are small and cramped, the barricades are no protection really, just something to trip over. :P And, worst of all, we can’t use the seige that gets built. So I hope we just didn’t see everything that will be going on. And killing that one vet ram up by Faren’s flyer over and over, that got old really fast!
The canopy bosses were fun, especially the tetrad. One of my favorite parts of the weekend was that I finnaly got up to that one, we killed them all, and suddenly the legendary boss appeared. I hadn’t expected it and it was a great surprise! We didn’t kill him fast enough, sadly, but I really liked that fight.
Finally, leveling up masteries:
This felt really grindy until I managed to get a level of gliding, but that might have been because event chains kept glitching out. If doing a couple whole event chains plus the first LS chapter will get you to the first level of gliding, that’s ok, but if not, fix it! Since you have to have gliding 1 to do even one canopy fight, and you need gliding 2 or (I think) gliding 1 and mushrooms 1 to get to the second fight, leveling masteries shouldn’t feel so tedious. once you have the first 2 in either of the above combos, it’s not bad at all. —Or at least that’s how I felt.
Mastery unlocks: it appeared that some of the mastery tracks were locked behind reaching certain parts of the map. This rubbed me the wrong way, but I’m reserving judgement. If it turns out you don’t need them till you get to that map, maybe it’s ok, but still, it seems annoying that you can’t plan ahead by starting to train one before you get to that map… I just don’t like feeling my choice is restricted.
But as I said, I’m waiting to see how that actually works and I mention it here so that you devs can consider it and others can say if they have that concern.
In spite of al the above critique, I love the new areas, the events, and omg the jumping and gliding! Can’t wait for release. 