Guild Wars 2

What I like —-——————————————————————————————————————————-

• Elite Specializations. Because I have new skills at my disposal, I’m immediately drawn into the game. I feel making the Elite Specializations available immediately is a good idea. Have it unlocked as soon as a player signs in post HoT and don’t make them work for it. The only exception is if you’ve worked the Elite Specializations into the story. I find it doubtful you will since Rytlock was a Warrior and instead of him becoming a Bezerker or whatever Elite Specialization is planned for Warriors, he instead becomes a Revenant. So continuity is out the window with this specializations from the get go, why make players wait?

• The design of the maps overall are great. They don’t feel like GW2 maps. They feel like a place we’ve never been in every way possible. Excellent job to the developers on the map design. I do think adding an additional waypoint or two would be a good idea. You’ve obviously designed the maps in hopes we’ll fall to our death. When we do that (and you know we will) it would be nice to just a little closer to our team mates. Not having one or two additioanl waypoints along the way does not make the game more challenging, it really just ensures more repeat content (grind) which philosophically ArenaNet is suppose to be against. Without them, you’ve essentally designed a map that plays a lot like a dungeon except you will have people not in groups trying to play so it’s not a dungeon and shouldn’t be treated as such.

• The (not so personal) story. The mechanics, dialog and overall execution of the first story chapter really pulled me in. Kid gloves off most of the personal story execution in GW2 was a failure. Your writers did a horrible job, but you have the numbers on how many people actually played though all their personal story chapters. I imagine you know how badly you failed. So it’s very refreshing to see how well the story is being executed in GW2: HoT. I wanted to keep at it because I wanted to know how it was going to end. You NEVER achieved that with me on GW2. I can only say I hope all the story/missions are as good as the first.

• PvP Leagues ok this wasn’t playable but it was announced and I just want to say thank you, thank you, thank you!!!! A league system combined with changing queuing so that only same league players are matched will change sPvP and turn it into something great that even the most casual player can approach. This is the one feature I’ve dreamed about from the beginning guys. I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear this is coming.

What I didn’t like —-——————————————————————————————————————-

• Mastery system apparently there was some instruction on how to use mastery points following the first stroy conclusion. That information was not repeatable and I went to the Mastery tab unsure how to spend my points. The whole thing was confusing and I felt should have been blended better with the story. As implemented I hate it. You can do better and you should do better with something that offers such a valuable play mechanic.

• Linear design of maps I did actually like this, I just think you need one or two more travel points along the path.

• Catastrophic bugs everywhere Dynamic Events are core to this expansion. For Beta Weekend #1 your team was tasked with getting those events working for a single map and you couldn’t even pull that off. Yes, we all know it’s a beta but i’m shocked at just how early everything feels. It felt more unfinished the original GW2 betas ever did. Since every event in the game was bugged at some point in this beta weekend. I used the word Catastrophic because many of the bugs were blockers because the linear design of the map. You guys should really be ashamed of how poorly this went over unless of course you were expecting us to just not care that all the events were bugged. It felt like we were Alpha testing not Beta testing and there is a big difference.