Guild Wars 2

ANet, as always, the maps are extraordinarily beautiful and detailed. I absolutely love the vertical layers.

Great job, I cannot wait to explore more in depth with all the masteries.

Thumbs up !

^_^

But why do you like it? Is there anything you would change? Hardly feed back just saying it looks nice good job. Not trying to be an kitten , just saying.

As for design of the map:

The map is huge and we have seen very small parts only of it. It feels great to explore it. Also all the small paths out there leading to some areas or just shortcuts make it feel well designed. For example in the north you can jump upwards on some stones really high, to reach just a few griffons.
I do want to say however there are small things that feel weird to me. For example when a helicopter gets wrapped by a vine (Which is not an enemy), You can still wakl through it. It is an object, make it an object.

The map events:

So far the events weren’t very appealing to me since I was bored quite fast. I do like the fact however that it takes very long to complete a whole chain event. The reason they felt underwelming could also have been that there are no rewards at this moment.

Mastery points:

I did not notice alot about the mastery points. However the design of the select screen feels a bit clunky and could use some more improvement to make it easier to select and see. As for the mushrooms etc, they do not feel very important in the map since every area I’ve seen so far can be reached by just 2 more seconds walking.
I think Mastery points could be a great way of raising the stat cap (as we have now full ascended) higher with adding bonusses when you complete a mastery.

@BrotherBelial

Good point.

I like secrets, hidden places, things that can be avoided if you don’t explore carefully. I also like JP and hard-to-reach places. Multi layers vertical maps are really fun to explore, imho.

What I would change : I don’t like the endless fall that kills you. I would work on a lower map just like in Silverwaste under the ship.

I am under the impression there will be lower sections and getting killed is because you are falling out of the beta map area. I could be wrong, clearly there’s a lot more explorable area in this beta than there was in the stress test and it might include the verticality.

I have a friend streaming that I’ve watched since my own access got borked. Ten minutes from the end of the first time block and she’s just this moment gained the “ding” to her first glider point, so level ups aren’t coming as thick and fast as they did in stress. If that persists than unlocking the exploration masteries in HoT will take a solid amount of time.

I think the mushrooms seem a bit too prevalent at the moment. Not using them yet so could be wrong but they are everywhere!

Illuna.2846:

@BrotherBelial

Good point.

I like secrets, hidden places, things that can be avoided if you don’t explore carefully. I also like JP and hard-to-reach places. Multi layers vertical maps are really fun to explore, imho.

What I would change : I don’t like the endless fall that kills you. I would work on a lower map just like in Silverwaste under the ship.

I think there is a high chance that they might change this, but we arent set to explore the bottom area yet.

Compared to the last beta event, I’ve noticed the following:

While the map is much larger this time, the events feel slow and not very appealing to play:

• I’m not sure at what rate the “security level” is supposed to fill, but it just simply doesn’t fill much at all.
• A single escort-event taking something like 15 minutes (and feels like it’s an hour) is definitely too long.
• Some of the large rooted in place enemies take a long time to take down due to an endless hp bar, yet they do not offer an interesting fight at all.

Some fast-paced boss-battle like the wyvern is definitely missing… also to gain XP at a reasonable rate to unlock some masteries. In the 75 minutes or so I was playing, I didn’t even manage to unlock the gliding mastery, while I had this easily done within like 15 minutes during the last beta. This is really a shame, as I would think the beta benefits more from players actually testing this stuff instead of grinding xp (or trying to).

I’ve also noticed skill-activation lag (mostly heal-skill and swapping legends on revenant), which didn’t happen last time.

What I did like however are the improvements and overall polished parts of the story-quest.

Spending the remaining minutes of this first beta-slot typing this post simply because there is nothing interesting left to do. For a next beta, please generally shorten the event-durations, add more of them and bring back something like the wyvern-fight. Even though the map was much smaller, I preferred the previous beta over this one

I’m liking being back in Maguuma proper again. Has a very GW1 feel, like coming back home.

I found the map visually stunning, but difficult to navigate. That being said, I did not have time to level either the gliding or mushroom masteries. I have to assume that they get easier when those are leveled. It was fun running around though

Pretty. Very dense. And a lot bigger than I though.
Loved gliding

The V.8759:

The map events:

So far the events weren’t very appealing to me since I was bored quite fast. I do like the fact however that it takes very long to complete a whole chain event. The reason they felt underwelming could also have been that there are no rewards at this moment.

I was more confused about what to do where to go. Is the event above me? Below me? Were to now? Granted most of those would probably be addressed by my familiarizing myself with the map.

I like the aesthetics, but I don’t like how constrained it currently feels, nor how the events make the map feel so frenetic. I’d prefer a large place that just feels open to exploration.
Granted, with gliding/mushrooms, etc. mastered and more of the map available, this may help somewhat, but right now, there doesn’t feel like a lot to see or get lost in, and instead, it all falls back on some extremely repetitive events (That said, the day stuff didn’t seem as bad. Night just felt incredibly repetitive though).

Not really fond of masteries either thus far. Didn’t manage to unlock one, but just grinding XP to buy them wound up feeling kind of underwhelming. :-/

I agree that the map was confusing to navigate, but then that could be on me. I get lost really easily and the layers to the map are going to take some getting used to.

I wasn’t hugely invested in the events and I felt they all lasted too long. After initially escorting Laranthir to the ruins, there’s an event to defend a char who is setting up explosives. That went way too slow, to the point I was bored.

I’m also concerned about how the map will function if there are too few people in the map instance. SW suffers from this. If you don’t have enough people to defend, you can never get the meta event to occur. I didn’t play long enough in beta to fully understand how the event chain works, but I’m worried this may be a problem.

Visually the map looks very nice but the whole zone felt incredibly cramped to me. It just kinda felt like you were being funneled along set corridors that led from one event to the next.
I tried to go off exploring but there doesn’t really seem to be much to discover. One time I found a load of rocks that seemed to form a staircase leading up the side of a cliff but once I got to the top I was rewarded with a tree and some griffins. Maybe the zone will open up a little and there’ll be more places to get to once you’ve unlocked things like gliding and the mushroom stuff but I’m not really sure what the point would be. Like the Silverwastes the whole zone is gonna be event-based, so exploration feels discouraged. Take a bad step or bump into the wrong enemy whilst poking around and you’d better hope the closest fort is uncontested otherwise you’re heading all the way back to the start of the map.

Hi, my first post on here!

I think the map looks beautiful with a lot of wilderness and debris everywhere, but it feels more like a rocky mountain area than a dense jungle and lacks wide open spaces. Some people pointed out that it is merely a transition between the desert and deep jungle areas, so hopefully there will be more lush green areas and large fields to explore in the final.

Admittedly I expected a bit more from the whole “verticality” thing in the map than what is there. Seems like you can look high up into the sky and also deep down into the depths, but the actual vertical playfield still feels limited somewhat. Mind you, I haven’t figured out how to get / use the glider yet, however on foot it is easy to fall out of the zone and die

Apart from enemies clipping into other static objects and the previously mentioned warping / missing enemy animations, I did not come across any bugs myself.

Two hours are barely enough to fully explore the skills of the new Revenant class, so I just pressed anything that flashed and it was more or less effective during battles