Guild Wars 2

I honestly think we need a proper thread for this. But let me get started with mine.

The only major issue I have with this beta is framerate drops which are noticeable at the beginning of the PS instance and on some occassions when looking at the environment, which I kind of resolved by decreasing my FOV drastically. I understand that the game has plenty to render, but I hope Anet comes up with a way to optimize it further to make the game feel as smooth as possible even to gamers who don’t have proper gaming PCs.

As for the Revenant skills, I honestly found Jalis Ironhammer’s skillset to be more useful than Mallyx in general especially against the Wyvern. I use Mallyx every so often but I hardly notice any attractive results as of yet when compared to Jalis.

In addition, I don’t find the mace/axe to be very useful against the Wyvern as opposed to the hammer. Also, I found the Skill 4 of the hammer a bit jittery at times.

Aside from that though, my first impressions for the beta are mostly positive. I am able to connect to the beta without a hitch. I got a bit of lag here and there but that is to be expected in this current form.

the revenant on jalis basically has semi unlimited source of stability. that and add the stab on dodge, makes it a joke. considering that…moving reflect wall, it’s basically a guardian replacement soon in wvw and it will happen.

i was doing double heals for the price of nothing. i do 1 heal on jalis, then i press f1 to switch to mallyx and lo and behold, another heal is ready. change this please.

tooltips on the cds seems to be wrong. not really important for now.

(i would pay serious gems to have those sideboo…i mean that armor available in gemstore right now)

the gliding is a bit of a let down. it turns out to be a platformer system. i’ll keep mum on my opinions on it since it’s your intention. i’m not sure if it’s prevalent on other areas but the area where we have to catch the updrift for the wyvern has some bugs which might be in the gliding system itself and not the area. the vertical incrementation on the updrifts seems to be able to exceed whatever the maximum vertical value that area has resulting in a “you have left area blah blah” if you stay in the updrift although you won’t get kicked off the map anyway. also i find it very hard to control the gliding system. the positioning system seems to be flawed and ends up being teleport-ish. aka i seem to be not in the position where the game is telling me that i am. could be lag. but if this kind of system is this sensitive to lag, you might want to do some adjustments to how strict implementations can be.

(again plase bring that armor in gemstore. my warrior needs to show some skin. and bunny ears please)

(another thing. is it possible to get a full condi spec armor on the next test? i know what’s provided is cele but…considering this baby seems to be able to pack alot of torments like nothing else i’ve seen and i’m pretty much anti condition everything in the forums, i don’t know…call it curiosity just for the sake of testing. )

I really enjoyed the stress test. The quality of the story and content looks great. The boss fight was cool but it was too easy. That might just be for beta though because we defeated it with about 20 revenents. Overall the Idea of the expansion is great and I hope it keeps going in the same direction.

Played it for an hour, heres what I thought

Pro’s
-great skins for gear
-some of the events were fun, the more battles the better
-storyline was interesting, and your toon talks
-map looked nice

Con’s
-activation times to long for weapons
-incomplete trait list and only celestial set available, with only 2 weapon sets available made it feel very weak and left much to be desired
-Skills descriptions are very long and often confusing
-to much condi damage on revenant which is terrible for pve
-utility skills come in a set of 3 tied to legendary, limits build variety
-Wyvern fight was lackluster, all you have to do is basically equip hammer and range it
-gliding, no controls for it

wow, did everything in a whole hour in a beta….

worse xpac evah

I found it very chaotic, largely in a good sense – there’s a lot going on and people working together.

The Rev was impossible to judge straight in at level 80, although I hated the hammer as a weapon and enjoyed mac/axe far, far more. That’s more a playstyle thing though.

Gliding didn’t feel intuitive, but there wasn’t much chance to really test it over a wide area. Probably one of those things that will become more natural with play.

I liked the Wyvern and I loved he didn’t have a timer. He was very much a boss straight out of TSW world though (anyone who remembers Flappy will see some small similarities here).

Yeah fps was a major issue with so many effects – smoke especially. I mainly tried the beta to decide whether my PC needs upgrading and I think this will give encourage me to do so. It should be playable just fine on lower settings though for anyone else with fps issues in effects heavy zones.

Apart from the latter, there was very little negative to take away. There were certainly less bugs than I expected too.

yea, i only watched it, but didnt look too exciting. The wyvern fight was boring, players just walked around at ranged it.
The masteries look bland, and require you to grind exp to progress.
Revenant didnt seem very deep, the class mechanic didnt seem to make up for lack of weapon swap.

Its an early build, but nothing seems groundbreaking or extremely interesting that we have seen

I got bored after 5 minutes, there’s literally nothing to do.

X T D.6458:

Con’s
…
-utility skills come in a set of 3 tied to legendary, limits build variety

And build variety in other professions is any better? Last I checked you pretty much have 2 or 3 good options for utility loadout on just about any class. With Revenant at least you don’t even have to think about it.

rotten.9753:

I got bored after 5 minutes, there’s literally nothing to do.

Obviously you didn’t do the stress tests for the original release. What were you even expecting? A grand welcome party and a laundry list of content to do? Maybe a parade in your honor?

it was the first beta, and basically a stress test so I wasnt expecting much, actually finished everything in 20-30mins with the starting mission, after that there is like 3 events with the wyvern fight. Main issue I have is with the revenant

Great that you’re so negative.
I had a complete blast. Revenant was amazing as kitten. So far I’m blown away, and that was just in PvE alone.

The traits and legendary skills, and weapon skills are just amazing xD

Oh and the storyline was cool and drew me in. I like that our character actually talks too.

Andred.1087:

X T D.6458:

Con’s
…
-utility skills come in a set of 3 tied to legendary, limits build variety

And build variety in other professions is any better? Last I checked you pretty much have 2 or 3 good options for utility loadout on just about any class. With Revenant at least you don’t even have to think about it.

not true at all.

beta felt more like an alpha. Evrything was unbalanced.

phys.7689:

Andred.1087:

X T D.6458:

Con’s
…
-utility skills come in a set of 3 tied to legendary, limits build variety

And build variety in other professions is any better? Last I checked you pretty much have 2 or 3 good options for utility loadout on just about any class. With Revenant at least you don’t even have to think about it.

not true at all.

My Guardian would like a word with you. What’s that Guardian? Your only options are shouts or meditations? Interesting.

Andred.1087:

Obviously you didn’t do the stress tests for the original release. What were you even expecting? A grand welcome party and a laundry list of content to do? Maybe a parade in your honor?

Obviously. During previous stress tests there was actually something to do. Right now, all I can do is mine some mithril.

Andred.1087:

phys.7689:

Andred.1087:

X T D.6458:

Con’s
…
-utility skills come in a set of 3 tied to legendary, limits build variety

And build variety in other professions is any better? Last I checked you pretty much have 2 or 3 good options for utility loadout on just about any class. With Revenant at least you don’t even have to think about it.

not true at all.

My Guardian would like a word with you. What’s that Guardian? Your only options are shouts or meditations? Interesting.

guardian is only one class.

Andred.1087:

X T D.6458:

Con’s
…
-utility skills come in a set of 3 tied to legendary, limits build variety

And build variety in other professions is any better? Last I checked you pretty much have 2 or 3 good options for utility loadout on just about any class. With Revenant at least you don’t even have to think about it.

if you dont like having choice in builds, and not having to think about it thats your business, some people actually like to craft their own builds and decide what skills to use. And every other profession has like 20 utility skills to choose from as well as different healing/elite skills. With revenant everything is tied to the legendary and there is no variety

Deaths.9165:

beta felt more like an alpha. Evrything was unbalanced.

Ok, you might want to learn more about industry standards for the terms ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ when discussing builds.

Because you’re using them wrong.

The most boring beta ever tested in my life.

Dear Anet you are following the wrong path.

I wonder if people chosen for this one will get a chance again. When they decide to test some other stuff or if that chance is wasted with first invite.

I got discouraged from playing pretty much the demo all over again just with the bigger zerg of revenants.

Oh well, thanks for another chance to actually enjoy the demo without someone hovering above me.

Well now, here are my avies:
  the -
  hang gliding puts too much time to trigger. it takes too long to say, I fall. it should be the trigger almost immediately.
  kinematic arrive a little after three.
  the top of the rock mastery is not reachable.
  I cross a texture bug early.
I had a crash during combat with the Wyvern!

the +
Hang Gliding!
I love the idea of maitrises.
The animations are awesome! I was afraid seeing the helicopters dropping to right to left.
I love the decorations.
The ghost is fast asser a handle.
The card seems to me asser great, can not wait to see the output for a ride there!

Test the new Beta for about 2 hrs, was impressed with the skins, hope there will be different ones in the future. Seem a little sluggish while in combat, but doable for the
most part. I agree with the earlier comment about weapon skills can be a little faster
on re-charge. Don’t know if there will be any explorer-able areas, but hope there will be.

Over all it was a great experience playing and the events were fun. Look for it to open
for full play.

The point was not to entertain you. It was to test how the content behaves under pressure.

Garambola.2461:

The point was not to entertain you. It was to test how the content behaves under pressure.

We were asked in the email to post our thoughts here, and thats what we are doing

The map is active, but overly so. There’s no place that feels like you can catch your breath or get your head together. This is actually a problem for me, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

We need the occasional safe point to reorient ourselves and catch our breath. If it’s all action all the time it soon becomes nothing but noise.

As has already been said, it’s hard to judge the Rev at this point. I need to be able to compare it against a known value, content I’m familiar with. So far though, it doesn’t impress. And while I understand why the power drops to 50 when out of combat, that doesn’t mean I like it.

Garambola.2461:

The point was not to entertain you. It was to test how the content behaves under pressure.

uhh, even short demos are supposed to be entertaining.
this was essentially the content they were promoting at conventions/trade shows.

the wyvern, in still pictures, might be cool, in action though it doesnt really feel any more interesting than an abomination champion. In fact i would say an abomination champion is more entertaining.

I would have liked to have some explorable areas as well as get to know what the Rev can do before being thrown into battle.
Doing the same thing over and over did get boring, but after all it was a stress test.

Impressions of beta:
1) Combat actions seemed sluggish, several times it took multiple key hits to activate utilities.
2) Wyren fight was stupid for revenant with lack of range weapons (so much easier to range).
3) BUG, every time Wyren flew passed and lay flame down all PCs engaged in battle lost their character textures (reverted to baseline texture).
4) Masteries need work.
a) Allow change of masteries after selection (like traits).
b) I liked how the masteries were laid out but not selecting them using a increment button (should allow user to just click directly on mastery at the level he chooses like traits – e.g. If I have 3 masteries points and I select the 3rd one in a specific row all up to the third should select).
5) Need further info/help on the swapping legends related to the threshold bar. The flow of combat is not obvious and the bar is more distracting than thief initiatives or adrenaline bars of warriors (the bar progress from middle overly complicates it).
6) One quest done with Larenthir was confusing and the flamethrower did not allow aiming with number one action (was random in how it pointed). That event was unable to complete because of the ineffectiveness of the flamethrower number 1 action. Also, the husks never seem to take damage on the HP bars but after some hits would go back in ground. This questline needs rework. Other quests were okay.

Garambola.2461:

The point was not to entertain you. It was to test how the content behaves under pressure.

kitten man you are such a White knight. You are too shiny for us.

I repeat stress test or not: the beta was ultra boring.

the only issue i really have to report was the bouncing mushroom mastery didn’t work when i tried to use the mushrooms. other than that it was brilliant. no graphical issues or crashes

as for weapons and skills, i really only found the hammer useful for the wyvern. axe and mace had a much better play style for me with faster attacking speed etc. the mallyx skill set is really nice for fights with lots of enemies. all that torment jalis was nice during the wyvern for forced engagement whenever the wyvern tried to take off

really looking forward to seeing how the story goes too (all that sylvari hate) :o

I agree with the catch your breath bit Palador, but I think that is partly by design for the beta test. There are clearly little nooks and safe paths off from this bit, but cut off by the demo’s boundaries. I think they wanted it like this to a) show off the warzone aspect of the expac for streamers and demos and b) ensure the stress test had as much strain as possible.

my general impression of the beta was overwhelmingly positive, when you overlook the frame-rate drops, and laggs (which is to be expected at this stage).

l like the new brake-bar mechanic, but i fear that this will be hard to scale properly, but it will anyway be much better then the curent open world defiance system.

kitten far as the revenant goes, i never saw the purpose of use the malix st acne, maybe it was the maps or it needs re-balancing, its hard to say. i find it hard to judge the revanant too hard in its current state cause i fell like its not done,

the mastery’s are an long awaited feature, but needs some refinement,, mostly guidance on how to get new skills.

sorry for bad english

i really love the revenant the combos between utilities and between legends them selfs, very cool
1st fighting in a celestial armor felt weaker then i thought,
dono if its lag but there was a delay between changing legends and delay on the healing skills
Rite of the Great Dwarf – the dmg reduction seems not good enough
Taunt – not alweys works
Searing Fissure – casting time seems too long
Banish Enchantment – LOVE THAT SKILL tho i think no cooldown is too strong i would suggest a cool down and add aoe to it
Embrace the Darkness – i would say make it hurt us more but change it to 15%-20% to all stats
overall i love the revenant,
THE MAP some times mobs just disapear and then Y-vren seems abit buggy wen it flys cuz hes model appears for a sec on the platfotm and also with a group of 15 revs and no 1 knows execly what to do we killed it pretty fast and it was easy, i think adding some melee dmg to it would add dificult

As stress tests go, I’d say this one was pretty smooth, I have a fairly high end machine but it’s nothing special and I encountered very very few situations where my FPS would drop at all on max settings, even during the Wyvern fight I still had roughly 60 FPS.

Connection wise it’s the same story, I experienced next to no lag at all, my ping stayed in the reasonable range at nearly all times (over the two hours I averaged 72 ping).

Gameplay wise it was enjoyable but that wasn’t the main focus of this test I guess.

(I was on EU server)

No matter what one may think of the content… I played for nearly two hours without any serious glitching, bugging out or disconnecting.

If the object is a stress test… so far so good on my side of the game.

Beta impression:
Glider:
- fun
- but lag or ping issues will make this unplayable, because of the delay that the glider already has default – people with bad connections won’t make some of the flights to hard to reach locations

Mushrooms:
- interesting

Masteries in general:
- UI is not good looking; needs implementation in Hero Panel. If you activate it it takes half of the screen away and is just bad to handle.
- The first two available ones only needed 1 level up to unlock after you spent your mastery points on them. Hopefully the later ones will take more

Revenant:
- Class seems very “slow”, but this may be only caused by the two tanky stances
- Hammer 3 feels not right, the animation sometimes fails. I would rather like it to be a port instead of a range dps . To keep distance to your enemys and make up for some interesting playstyles
- The available traitlines dont seem to have really good traits compared to other classes

Stability:
- No crashes, no frame issues
- some lag around the half time of the beta

General:
- Some of the new things seem not fully finished, like the flamethrower; the handling is sometimes wired and pulls you in one direction
- Found new mushrooms which drop new items
-> Cooking 500?

I haven’t done the test yet but will be getting in there for the 5 pm PST time slot. Can someone tell me how to easily find my FPS while I’m playing? Never done that before.

I played for almost 2 hours and so far i like the revanent. I found the trait and utility skills to seem somewhat incomplete but still kinda interesting. I myself tho would prefer to actually level it and gradually get used to it instead of being thrust into a bunch of mobs and be trying to read the skills to see what they do. but still looks good. It did seem a kittenaotic in the beta area but i didnt notice any major problems with the skills or anything on my own character. As far as connection goes… i didnt have any connection issues at all.

From a PvE aspect, the new story line as well as things to do will keep people entertained. I enjoyed playing with the new achievement traits and gliding around. I think this achievement traits will add an interesting new twist. The new Rev class, that was a lot of fun to play. It will be easy to see what a the WvW/GvG driver class will be. It was a very limited area to be in and the events quickly became repetitive and dull. It was disappointing, the lack of variety in this test though.
Being a WvW/PvP player myself, I was looking forward to seeing the new game content for it. I hope further Beta testing will allow for this before it goes live. I was also looking forward to previewing the guild halls, which again weren’t in this test. Maybe that’s something else for a further testing.
The rewards dropped from the events I felt was fair and online with other GW2 event drops. This will be a very nice PvE train which i’m sure will start up again just like with the Avatar trains about a year ago.
The graphics were amazing as always, and the story line is a nice combination of both areas. The lag was surprisingly not bad! I was able to run on full high graphics for the entire thing with no lag issues. Of course i’m sure that will change as more people have access.
All in all, well done to the expansion. It’s something I look forward to buying for all my accounts when it’s available.

Perhaps gameplay feedback is not what you’re looking for here, but just in case:

Gliding, right now, feels very clunky and odd. It takes way too long to activate. You can’t control it at all. It seems almost too gimmicky to require that the user delve deep into mastery to be able to do anything with it. At least give some basic controls, and fine tune them with mastery points. I guess the best word I could use is non-intuitive.

Some sort of “Hey, here’s how you equip the glider!” pop up, like the “hey, dummy, WASD to move!” popup when you make a new character would be great.

Masteries feel weirdly assigned. If it more closely matched the WvW masteries, that would at least be a bit easier to understand. It’s a pretty menu, it is, but the placement and way you assign things is strange.

Overall, I suffered no lag spikes/no fps drops/no glitches/no bugs. It was an ideal, and smooth experience.

ozmaniandevil.6805:

I haven’t done the test yet but will be getting in there for the 5 pm PST time slot. Can someone tell me how to easily find my FPS while I’m playing? Never done that before.

Press f11…the fps and ping is at the bottom of the menu

I had a lot of fun, but couldn’t get the mushroom mastery to work. I was able to glide over to one of the mastery point communes but couldn’t figure out how to get to the one on the rock or the plateau by the vine adventure thing.

The story part of the demo from the into to killing the wyvern was neat, I liked that killing the wyvern was more than most dragon fights where you stand in one spot and auto attack. The flamethrower adventure thing was frustrating at best, it kept resetting on me before the timer ran out and I have no idea how you’re supposed to get more than 50 in a minute.

It was what I expected…the playable demo from PAX, not the full expansion already (I assume that will come later). For what it was, I thought it was fun and I didn’t experience any lag or disconnects on my end.

Thanks for the opportunity to play the demo

Randulf.7614:

ozmaniandevil.6805:

I haven’t done the test yet but will be getting in there for the 5 pm PST time slot. Can someone tell me how to easily find my FPS while I’m playing? Never done that before.

Press f11…the fps and ping is at the bottom of the menu

Thanks man!

Pretty much what I expected. Been staying on top of all the info that has been coming out before hand. One thing I noticed and was already mentioned. My fps dropped about 20%. The fps drop was only in window mode. At full screen it was normal. And already said as well, very little control of the glider. Having done many real life sled rides as well as current rides, controls are a must. I know it’s a game was just expecting a little more from the glider than what we had.

Had zero problem with game freezing or disconnecting.

First impression, can’t wait for HoT to come out. Will be playing again later tonight. Enjoyed what little we were able to do.

I love the new class and its play style. The only thing I believe need working on is the glider abilities. It seems a bit weak, even when traited for it. Maybe it was just in beta, but if you didn’t catch an updraft you simply fell to your death. I had my traits maxed in it, but again perhaps because it’s beta?! But I will love being able to use this!!!

Great job!! Oh yeah, I also love the new armor look!

The mastery UI feels a bit clunky, not sure what I would prefer, but the current isn’t very ascetically pleasing either.

lol at everyone freaking out about lack of content. This isn’t the beta calm down they just needed to make sure the servers and everything else was stable. Everyone should be happy that the stress test went well, now they can focus on getting everything else ready for the actual beta.

MethaneGas.8357:

Great that you’re so negative.
I had a complete blast. Revenant was amazing as kitten. So far I’m blown away, and that was just in PvE alone.

The traits and legendary skills, and weapon skills are just amazing xD

Oh and the storyline was cool and drew me in. I like that our character actually talks too.

My thoughts exactly! I had a blast and loved the Revenant!
I do hope the heal by swapping legends is changed in the future. You can swap from one legend to the other and heal while the other heal recharges.

Overall Feedback: Great! the stress test performed really well in my opinion. I didn’t experience frame rate drops or anything. All in all the game handled really well. With my game only freezing/crashing out during the wyvern fight once. After that it was pretty smooth. There wasn’t any glaring technical issues just feedback overall on game.

Wyvern Fight:
- Fire was easy to avoid if you were careful .
-not much time to break defiance on wyvern. so it requires a coordinated effort.
-Maybe it’s just me, but I had alot of trouble getting the hang glider to work. It wasn’t very intuitive/well explained. I feel more than i died doing anything else.
-knockback on wyvern wasn’t terribly annoying you just had to stack stability or stand on longer parts of the platform

Revenant:
eeeee
okay but seriously, due to my playing style i love classes with high surviability. Even though the stats we were given (celestial) are kind of mediocre i still found that i had an pretty decent time staying alive since i didn’t go down at all
-mana pool is pretty good. it’s easy to manage/maintain it doesn’t make it feel micromanage-y to me
-i hope that axe and mace can be used in main hand and off hand in future
-build those roads, build them!

1. Mastery UI – althought I think it nice that you are placing the mastery trait system on the bottom right corner of the screen, it is weird for me to use, and at the start I was looking for that in the existing UI system.
I’m not saying that it is terrible placement whatsoever, but it is something that we, as players, will have to get used to and I doubt it will be a quick “using to”.

2. Descriptions on the mastery traits should have more info – I gave up on using mushroom after I bought the mastery and still couldn’t use it, only to find 10 minutes before the end of the stress test, that I actually need to get experience points. And there was no info regarding that in the Mastery UI

3. Glider gliding skill starts too slowly in my opinion. Interval between me jumping off the ledge and the option to glide appearing was too long, thus my character was either too low to get anywhere or I was spamming my space like crazy and didn’t know if I won’t disable it by doing so.

Those are the only things I really found annoying in the stress test. I didn’t have any issues with either lags or fps drops on my PC.
I was also pleasantly suprised to see my character finally talking, and actually talking with(!) emotions in his voice. THAT was very nice to see guys!

Beside that I think this Stress Test was too small and too short to actually tell anything else.

Overall I liked it