Guild Wars 2

Not wanting to have to learn a new class as well as new game play, I went with what I knew best: being a Ranger. Here are some of the issues I’ve found specifically for that class.

The first thing I encountered was a random inability to use ‘Barrage’. I would position the AoE, but it didn’t fire. It would take a few tries before it finally did. This was a first session issue though, and it seemed to have been resolved in the following ones.

I was also disappointed in only having access to one pet. A ranger is highly dependent on his companion, and a skilled ranger knows when to switch between them to get the most out of them. So, the lack of a second pet was annoying. More annoying though was that the pet, once downed, would sometimes not reset at the end of battle. It would remain in an unhealed state, thus becoming useless eye candy.

Another pet issue is that if I recalled my pet to me (heel), once I started attacking a new target it would not join in unless it was ordered to. If that’s what I wanted, I would have put the pet on ‘pacify’.

Finally, so far as the pet goes, when landing after Gliding, the pet has been stowed away. It does not always come out once battle has resumed. More annoying though is that if you jump and the Glide option goes off, the pet is stowed, even in the middle of a battle.

Which brings me to more general issues, the first being the aforementioned Gliding mechanics. It’s very difficult to just run and jump over an obstacle without the glider coming out. This slows the character down, and as mentioned for the ranger, stows the pet. It becomes particularly annoying when attempting to jump up rock surfaces or ‘jumping puzzle’ – like places. One example of that was the Collecting Wyvern Eggs event.

The other general issue I had was targeting. Yes, we all know that the targeting has been broken for a while, but now it was targeting non-hostiles instead of the beasts coming at me. Inconvenient, to say the least.

Those were the major issues I found in game play for this beta.