Guild Wars 2

I also feel that the UI for Revenant feels a bit clunky, thats probably because the animations are entirely new for each skills and not use to it yet

and Anet, LOVE THE MUSIC SCORE AS ALWAYS <3!!

Enjoyed it a lot.

Didnt have any issues, no disconnects or crashes, thats pretty good IMO.

Loved the Revenant, interesting skills so far.

Still couldnt find out how to get to the points thingy, idr the name :P

Overall great stress test IMO, at least from the player side

the -
-Probably been mentioned above but the glider delay could be adjusted by a teensy bit.
-For the torch adventure the vines don’t really appear although i could see the names
The torch doesn’t point in the direction of the vines but the vines burn anyways, could make it go in the right direction cuz its a little confusing
-sometimes when fighting the mordrem they teleport a bit to the left or right.
- maybe due to the size of map but there’s some frame rate problems.
- Mastery UI is too big, maybe you could merge it with the hero panel since everything else such as traits are there already, it would make things more convenient .
-not sure if it counts as a negative but bleed stacks can go over 25 is this intentional?
-a bit easy but its a stress test so whatever :p

the +

-I love the look of the map and how you can see how vertical it is, if ur going with that sense of scale i think you got it.
- So far the revenant is pretty fun but rather over powered. I think a 4 second stability might be a bit of an overkill especially if you have more than 1 revenant
- I have a terrible urge to explore this map cuz it looks good
- The fights are interesting, I think the sniper rifle idea with the outposts are an interesting mechanic.
- I like the new armor
- i also like the music
- I like the cinematics showing the vines sprout out of the ground and just cinematics
- I did have fun on this map despite the big – section
- would be nice if we could get some extra mastery points to try out at least 1 tier of the combat, mushrooms and gliding mastery

The stress test did well. Many areas of the Rev are fun, but having not build it up and experienced them in normal combat hard to say how they will be long term.

The graphics was excellent, no graphical glitches at all, and fps was good. It did dip some on the Wyvern flaming, but never got laggy. That said though, I did end up sending in 6 crash reports during the Wyvern fights.

The mastery UI needs to be cleaned up drastically, and reduced down from the 72 point fonts. The gliding was fun, although now sure how it will be after the newness wears off. Hopefully it will be useful for more than the jumping puzzle type items.

I found the test utmostly educational and fun! Thanks a lot for the experience.

I had a few moments that seemed to be, as it should’nt. For one: in a melee battle with the Mordrem Breechers I experienced a ’ falling through the map’. It was kind of like when you fall in to the water with Teqatl, but then not intended, I was situated within vinelike substance and could’nt do much. And with the Wyvern battle I had a few times that I dodged, but instead of actually moving where the dodge went, I dodged back. Resulting in Me-BBQ. This happened a few times in a row.

I had a fun. The rev seems fun to play and I’ll enjoy figuring out the best skill combos etc. Someone above commented that gliding was too annoying because of having to catch updrafts. I thought so too, until I spent a mastery point on gliding basics, and then I was just sorry that the test boundaries stopped me from getting over to the cool looking areas I could see from the test zone.

I enjoyed the wvyern fight. I want a flock of pocket raptors as a ranger pet. Or a smoke scale. Both were cute new creatures and the smoke scale’s attack is neat.

I didn’t have FPS problems, or in fact any problem (which surprised me). I harvested, opened bags, dyed my armor and that kind of stuff; it all seemed to work. I should have counted my mats beforehand to see if anything I deposited went in

The resource nodes included mithril and elder wood (from palm trees, this time), and a new type of mushroom. Hoping for new recipes from that. There were also some “mystery” trophies of diff levels (blue and green) along with drops of axes and daggers etc. Didn’t have a chance to try every weapon, but I’m sure others did.

I also took a pile of screen shots, but I’ll put those in another thread.

One concern; the cut scenes played over and over when various events started; I hope that won’t be the case when this goes live!

Environments:
Performance wasn’t so much an issue I felt. Given the increase to detail in environment, which are exciting to explore. I was impressed with performance. Its a step up from the current GW2 environments, I know people will have a lot of fun to explore and just take it in, its amazing.

Revenant:
The revenant was exciting to play. The skill animations are gorgeous to watch and play with and the VO was impressive. Jalis and Mallyx talk when u switch to them and use skills. I really enjoyed playing this profession. It’ll be interesting to see how the revenant establishes itself in the future.

Events:
Open world events felt like more of the same, I didn’t find them any different to what we’ve seen already.

The Wyvern fight was…. Disappointing.
It felt drawn out. Maybe this will get better as people learn the mechanics, but I wouldn’t be surprised if its an event that people afk at once they got a few good hits in. Having said that it looks gorgeous and I enjoyed to watch its animations as it would come in to attack you.

*I enjoyed the fight more this round, you could see that people were learning their skills which made the encounter feel more engaging. Still have concerns about the impacts of afkers.

Gliding:
Was HORRIBLE. Unless you live on top of an Anet server you can expect to fall a lot and to witness ‘zig zag’ effects on the thermal drafts. Ping/latency is definitely going to be an issue for your enjoyment of this.

*Is it possible, I think I dislike this even more. I tried to investigate it further but found myself getting further frustrated. As others have said their needs to be more of a tutorial around this. Further more, I once again kept dying trying to make short flights to the Wyvern fight due to latency issues. Very disappointing.

Overall:
I enjoyed my experience. The revenant is gorgeous and exciting to play, much like the environments. The Wyven fight was ok and at this point, I’d be happy if gliding was left out.

EDIT: *2nd stress test attended

So far with the stress test I noticed a small FPS loss at the beginning. And a sound glitch that has happened to me before like a year ago, not sure what causes it but it returned.

I didn’t expect a lot from the stress test but I was expecting a little more than the Demo.
For future note A-net, if you are having a stress test with content that has already been played and viewed at a major convention. You may as well invite everyone who signs up. You aren’t revealing anything new and the numbers would probably help test the server a bit more. Just my two cent’s on that matter.

I noticed some things with the rev.
-The mace sometimes would activate very slowly, specifically the 2 and 3.

-Offhand axe is a dream. It’s what I wanted it to be, but, I think that pull could use a small radius increase, OR a quicker activation.

- You may run into some balance issue’s with the utility skill’s, namely the displacement in the demon invocation. I would honestly increase the energy cost a slight bit.

- No stun breakers, while I do understand that the class isn’t finished, this is something I hope to see later for utilities, because for stuns and KB I had to trait for a removal.
If you don’t plan on giving the class stun breaks on it’s utilities ( which I already know is a ludicrous idea) I would move the trait to adept. So the class isn’t shoehorned into that trait line, like the mesmer is with DE for the majority of it’s meta builds.

- The starter area is small. I do not mean this as an ungrateful child, but the entrance zone is not going to hold us over, I do hope you add something in the zone to keep us coming back into it. Otherwise the zone will end up like strait’s or southsun.
My idea for this is to make an event of some sort that directly effects or unlocks an event in the later parts of the world. Something to tie in the importance of the new zone with the others instead of it being a stepping stone that you never really want to revisit after you have completed the masteries.

-I enjoyed the music. Great scores.

-The hammer is a great weapon, its fast and ties into the fast pace feel that I think you are going for with the revenant.
However. The skill 3 that teleports you( i believe it was 3 I dont remember the name) has a small delay that to me made the weapon a bit sluggish.

-The Wyvern
So I am not gonna lie, and I appreciate the thought that went into the fight but, It is lackluster.
It needs something more to make it dangerous, or at least a threat to ranged players.
It needs a mechanic that you really really don’t want to get hit by that is area wide and a killer.
I think the marionette (which imo think was an awesome awesome boss fight ( probably one of the best ones since release ) should be a bit of inspiration for its tweeks OR even a phase that needs condi pressure?). Something different needs to be done to make the encounter a bit more ..epic
Right now the new boss does nothing to discourage the zerk meta

Thanks for the opportunity to test.

Well.. even though it took an hour to complete. I my self had a fun time playing the new revenant. some of the skills were a little slow, but jumping in on a lvl 80 new class is gonna take some time to get use to. The new armor/weapon skins look great!

Hi,

Positive,

I could connect right away and start directly with the beta so that is a big plus.
There was no lag or anything else that was frustrated to play the beta also in the events and in game there was no lag or other issues.

I did notice as well in the beta the change for the Defiance that is also a great improvement.. i dindt notice it earlier.

Negative,

Indeed the skills of Mallyx where not so interesting/workfull for me with the wyvern enemy.
I would find it better if we had a longer Beta time, and with that gain the skills of the weapons instead of get everything right away.. (reason for that: is that its better to learn the proffession then)

Furthermore,

I wasnt able to play to long because of work time but i did appreciate the beta invite and i hope i provide you with good feedback so far.

I do did like the Axe/mace set over the hammer.. but i think its also a matter of time for people to get to know the weapons, skills and proffession.

Did anyone else have issues of the mordrem randomly teleporting out of aoes? Other than that, I am really liking the Revanent with the axe/mace option and Mallyx. Also got some awesome screenshots, but since there were minor fps drops at times the video might not have turned out right. I had hoped that they might included some different content rather than the exact same thing that has been played at 2-3 events so far. (I can’t fault them on that though since that was not the purpose of this trial run)
Definitely looking forward to playing more of the xpac in the future

I too like the hammer skills.

I did not experience any frame rate issues.

The new skills were working great for me, and they seem to be introducing new mechanics that will bring more complexity to the combat in the game. Also revenant looks like it could be an effective anti condi class anyone who doesn’t like condi roaming groups in WvW should be excited xD, also that projectile blocking wall that moves in front of you will be nice for people who have been complaining about rangers. Everything seemed to play pretty well i didn’t come across any bugs while i was playing. Also the Revenant armor looks amazing.

Edit: No framerate drops or issues for me

Definitely found it an interesting experience.

Id say my only criticism is that without at least adding stronghold to test the area we got to play in was very limiting and so were the options.

I understand that its targeting specifics of the game but it would have helped to give us specific things to target, since the content we had to test was very minimal barring Revenants very small game-play sampling and the mastery system.

So what can I say:

Revenant:

The hammer/mace/axe combos were interesting to play with though I tried mace/axe more than hammer just to be different from the amount of flying hammers I saw being spammed, it worked rather well with the Mallyx combo.

The PvE is rather solid and fairly balanced for the class, messing around with it felt right, nothing too strong, nothing too weak, you get punished if your too excessive and equally not excessive enough.

Its a burst damage class, it works well if you like building up and slamming down but that does kind of make it feel weak with only 2 of its legends to sample.

My criticism here is that I didn’t get enough weapons to play with and enough Revenant legends to really form a solid pros and cons list because there just isn’t a lot I can say.

It works? For what it is.

The Story PVE content:

I definatley say that one of the biggest pros of this “demo” lets call it that, was the way that the story both in open world and in personal story seeminglessly transitions.

The voice acting is star quality, the content really flows nicely and each individual situation feels challenging enough that it actually makes you have to play with engaging game-play rather than just hit buttons to win.

That said the content was, again, too little to give you a strong enough impression on pros and cons.

A small bug I did notice was when I played the story segment I noticed that there was a small glitched patch of land near Laranthir that appeared elivated over the normal terrain.

That’s about all I can say really.

I did not bother with the activity games since its not really my thing so lets skip to the gliders and mastery.

The Mastery system really does work for what its supposed to be and I like the fact you actively have to earn extra bits as opposed to just farming your way to the best parts.

Gliding was entertaining but without more to experiment with, again, I cant really tell you how I feel because there’s not enough to say.

Overall then, ill leave it at.

Stress Test was functional, had a tiny bug with the Laranthir thing, and apparently Shroom mastery didn’t work.

Other than that, the rest was fine.

Major plus for PC character voice and the way you’ve done it in game, and, major plus for the way the commander actually feels “like” a commander for once.

It’s a two hour ‘stress test’ not a full blown beta, so not entirely sure what people were expecting exactly. Considering we have been given very little information past what was available in the demo at Pax and Rezzed, it stands to reason why this test has only the area that was available there. I would also imagine they want to see how their systems perform in a small controlled spot with lots of people before opening the flood gates and allowing us to actually test and break things.

While it was just the same preview demo, I was pretty impressed with the overall atmosphere of the area and can’t wait to see more.
-Very lush and active/alive environment.
-The music is so well done.
-Really nice to see my character talking in real time to other NPC’s around her.
-Enjoyed the Revenant as well. Can’t really comment much on the play style as there aren’t enough varied encounters to properly critique abilities.
-The feeling of having the legends actually talking through you while activated is very immersive, and the color glowing around your hands/forearms depending on the legend you are channeling is a really nice touch.

There were some issues:
-My character was twisting around in very unnatural directions when moving during the story. She was just bound and determined to stare at someone at the Pact crash site regardless of how much contorting she had to apply to her spine to do it…
-Voices were not always working. Braham’s dialog was completely absent.
-Activation of gliding seems clunky. It just doesn’t react as quick as one would think when you hit the space bar. Thought this was lag on my end, but was sitting at 80ms during the hour I was able to be logged in.
-The window for spending mastery points seriously needs to be either in the character panel or somewhere easier to access. I saw a lot of people asking in zone chat where it was, and I could not find it easily at first either.
-Mobs were just vanishing/appearing at random.

Well, there wasn’t much to test, so my opinions are going to be short sighted, not sure any of us can help that though..

First of all considering that this was a beta test concerning game stability I will comment on that first. I know very well that my AMD 8120 cpu struggles with GW2, simply because it’s an AMD chip, and they don’t work well in this game. This gives me a perspective on performance that most people don’t otherwise get, because Intel chipsets don’t seem to have any issues. I noticed that my framerate was fluctuating wildly in the new map. I average right around 65-90 fps in cities, and 45-60 in dungeons or WvW, but even towards the end of the testing time, I was seeing constant mid 30’s and low 40’s for my FPS. I’m not sure what exactly is taking up that much extra processing power, but my game certainly doesn’t like it. As I said earlier though, it’s a beta, an early one at that, it will probably be fine when it releases later this year. I expected this test to be worst-case performance. Something that all of my guild mates noticed is that our pings were consistently about 30 or 40 ms higher than normal. I’m not sure if this was because all of us were on one server, or if there’s some un-polished networking in the expansion. Either way, something else that is fairly minor considering my ping was still under 100 almost the entire time.

Now I will talk about my thoughts on the Revenant and Wyvern… Having played over 700 hours on a Thief, I really like how the Axe works for the Revenant, that being said I think Temporal Rift could use some polishing, as it has a hard time hitting enemies when you’re not on flat ground, and flat out does not follow the ground when you don’t have a target. Otherwise the Mace/Axe set feels very solid and I like how it applies conditions. The Hammer on the other hand feels entirely too anemic to consider using. I’m not sure if it was a lack of traits, or armor stats, or what. At one point I tested my auto attack damage from the hammer against a guild mate who had one of his minions from a necro attack the same enemy. Turns out the hammer auto attack does about the same damage as a bone fiend. I really hope Revenant has a stronger melee weapon in the works, or a trait line that can heavily buff the hammer, because it’s certainly not the weapon I expected.

The Wyvern boss fight is a little boring, to be honest, but I know that we’ve been told it will get harder the more you fight it, and i’m definitely looking forward to that. My only complaint is that his fire breath stripes he lays down while flying cover a much larger area than the texture they have, and it’s very hard to determine where you are safe and where you are not. I think the condi stacking change is very good, so long as it’s reserved for large bosses that require many people to kill anyways, and I’d love to see it encourage some more condition builds in PvE.

Overall, it’s exactly what we were told it would be. I’m looking forward to HoT, but it definitely needs some work before we see it released. So, do we get to play Stronghold later?

Incredibly underwhelming.

The Wyvern fight was not particularly fun or challenging, but I can see it as a nice platform to be built upon.

The flamethrower in the mini game did not seem to respond the way the engineer flamethrower does. I’m not sure if it was buggy or what.

I almost fell asleep fighting some of the mordrem in the main area.

Gliding is pretty buggy.

I managed to harvest the ancient sapling from 9234823498 feet away by jumping up, hitting ‘F’ sliding off the cliff and then opening my glider.

I also experienced several client crashes, due to one error in coding.

It seems that if you are pulling out your glider as you are activating Revenant F1 skill (by activating as you fall off/scrape a ledge) the game will crash every time.

The Revenant doesn’t seem to excel in support or raw damage as much as it does in condition damage…. which is disappointing unless the PvE in HoT caters more for condition dmg builds.

If you are going to give us another class that can’t swap to a second weapon set….. at least make it so we can swap weapons while out of combat.

There is literally no difference between opening your inventory and manually equipping your weapons versus hitting the weapon swap button if you are out of combat….. except you have to do it for two weapons when you could just hit the swap key.

I really didn’t have too much fun….. we weren’t able to test any specializations for the other classes….. and we didn’t even get all the traits for revenant. …nothing new added for the other professions.

There wasn’t much content to explore.

I think the most fun I had was farming mace + hammer kills for the AP on the pocket raptors.

Overall it was pretty depressing since I was really looking forward to this beta.

Seems I’ve set the bar a bit too high.

Only really had 4 issues in the stress test and 1 isn’t huge.

1. Searing Fissure on mainhand axe didn’t state it was a fire field.
2. Framerate drop was huge during the Wyvern fight.
3. Mastery window didn’t close using the Esc key.
4. Couldn’t get the mushroom jump to work despite having mastery points in it.

I agree. I had no issues with performance at all. It played smoothly.

Other remarks:
Some of the Revenant skills felt a little sluggish but that could also be my inexperience with it.
The gliding to the platform with the big bad boss was sometimes difficult. Just as if the wind didn’t catch you. Could also be a case of inexperience with new skills.

All in all a successful test on my part.

SoPP.7034:

Environments:
Performance wasn’t so much an issue I felt. Given the increase to detail in environment, which are exciting to explore I was impressed with performance. Its a step up from the current GW2 environments, I know people will have a lot of fun to explore and just take it in.

Revenant:
The revenant was exciting to play. The skill animations are gorgeous to watch and play with and the VO was impressive. Jalis and Mallyx talk when u switch to them and use skills. I really enjoyed playing this profession mainly for the animation and voice work. It’ll be interesting to see how the revenant establishes itself in the future.

Events:
Open world events felt like more of the same, I didn’t find them any different to what we’ve seen already.

The Wyvern fight was…. Disappointing.
It felt drawn out. I wouldn’t be surprised if its an event that people afk at once they got a few good hits in. Having said that it looks gorgeous and I enjoyed to watch its animations as it would come in to attack you.

Gliding:
Was HORRIBLE. Unless you live on top of an Anet server you can expect to fall a lot and to witness ‘zig zag’ effects on the thermal drafts. Ping/latency is definitely going to be an issue for your enjoyment of this.

Overall
I enjoyed my experience. The revenant is gorgeous and exciting to play, much like the environments. The Wyven fight was ok and at this point, I’d be happy if gliding was left out.

Very well put, I was going to type my own thoughts but you nailed it on the head. Wasn’t a fan of the gliding option, but everything else was okay.

Performance wise, things felt fine, lag or ping wasnt typically an issue, graphics looked well done, and while the Wyvern fight was meh at best, the animation of it and its attacks was awesome. Reminded me of the movie Reign of Fire at times. I do like the fact that we’re able to use the dwarf stance chain SS skill to keep the Wyvern down and in the fight so that he’s not able to reign fire as well as get it over with quicker.

I already made a thread about the healing issue I saw with rev class but i’ll mention it briefly here, being in one stance, switching to the other to heal again should be fixed, otherwise i really enjoyed the new class and look forward to playing it!

1. FPS was a major issue.
2. Nice new skins.
3. Obv. too early to judge, but Rev. traits seemed underwhelming.
4. Rev. seemed to be a bit slow and a bit clunky.
5. I liked skills on both available weapon sets, no filler skills.

Played the whole 2 hours, though the last few minutes was spent joining the Pale Reavers duck-shooting the Husks and Tendrils. My impression was it looked better than the original GW2, especially in colors and details. However, the flying/gliding is real clunky and non-intuitive at all. Fought that legendary wyvern 3 times successfully, but getting to it initially was frustrating to say the least.

Two things I took away from the short time I was actually playing:

1). Searing Flames (Rev Mace #2) has a lot of issues with terrain cutting the fire field off. Not only does the animation get cut off, but the field itself will not do damage, and you can not create a blast finisher where you normally should if it were on even terrain. You’ll essentially create 1/2 – 3/4 of the intended field size. The issue seems to be mostly where the terrain goes up or downhill (even slightly).

2). The Wyvern fight was fun, but I would think missing out on the break bar would be more punishing. His/Her flight with fire breath that follows a failed stun seems pretty easy to avoid as it is, and overall seems to be hardly any threat during the entirety of the fight. It could have been issues with scaling, and/or the fact that Revenant’s seem pretty built to handle that encounter well (tons of stab, elite reducing party damage, resistance boons, etc.), but seemed very easy to beat.

Though, I am also aware it was stated that it was intended to be introductory for newer players, so that could just be the way it needs to be, but I would at least consider making it more punishing when missing out on the stun.

The skins looked great – it did feel a bit more immersive – I flung myself off of stuff just to see what would happen. I tried my best to break something as I know that’s part of the stress test – but had no issues. Its going to take a bit to get use to the Revenant class. It seemed like my hammer was ranged but it didn’t seem like I was hitting anything if I was a bit away from the mob. The effects were nice – though I didn’t see the chain every time that I used that function. All in all looking forward to seeing more of this.

The masteries UI is not intuitive. Everyone would expect them beneath the traits menu. That was annoying and most of the friends I spoke with were having big issues to set up the glyding mastery.

Edit: And the fact that you can’t close masteries window with ‘esc’ was a facepalm.

Well for starters made a Rev. Ran through the instance an events. Deleted the Rev. and made a Ranger to see how other professions may handle the area. The map is done quite nicely IMO. Will take some getting use too, I can see allot of time spent on maps just exploring. Though wish we had at least a vender or something in the test to get rid of some of the gear was picking up.
As for the Rev. I do think the Hammer is a little bit over powered. Seen allot of same attacks being spammed over an over. The stability can’t really make a call on that yet not till I fight with and against the Revs. in pvp/wvw.
Did crash a few times only during the wyvern fight . Might be bugged there, not sure if any others had that issue. The Mushroom mastery was bugged as well. Wasn’t able to use them at all.

I spent a lot of time messing with the various skills with the Revenant. Before you come to any conclusions on my claim, please read ALL of the post before saying anything. Particularly the third and fourth paragraph.

While I found no specific issues regarding bugs, glitches, etc, I do see a potential balance issue with the Revenant, namely the amount of Torment it can apply so quickly and easily, and how long it actually lasts. I am aware a mesmer can apply torment fairly easily, particularly with Scepter, but it doesn’t last anywhere near as long, which gives it balance as Torment is a nasty condition, especially in Structured Player vs Player, World vs World, and Edge of the Mists(sPvP, WvW, EoTM) where people move constantly. I feel the amount of condition damage potential Mallyx the Unyielding stance has is pretty substantial already. I keep seeing people say it’s basically useless, but I was getting in total between 1400 to 1700ish on average damage per tick between confusion and torment by myself. Combine that with the rest of the regular attacks, my DPS on Celestial stats is fairly high combining them. This is just me, the one player, alone doing this. Do the math between 10, 20, 30 people. It starts getting pretty substantial fast and this is just the Revenant. I haven’t even began to consider team composition, traits, etc.

For PvE, this is fantastic, as it actually makes condition users more viable in PvE content so people can stop whining about “zerker or ur bad. plz uninstall gw2”, “alt f4 scrub”, etc, etc. I would honestly love to see more uses for other stat sets in PvE content besides Berserker and Assassin’s as being “the only viable option.”

So why is this an issue? Well if you have access to damage like this in sPvP and WvW/EoTM, you might as well just run Revenant the entire time on Celestial stats and laugh at people trying to kill you. Others will disagree with me I am sure, but its just something to possibly consider for competitive gameplay when using this class.

Edit: To add, I found the server stability just fine. No lag issues here connection-wise. For specs if you wish to know, I was running a PNY GeForce GTX 550Ti, Intel Core i5 3350P processor, 8 GB Dual channel G-Skill RAM (Forgot the MHz rate), and Windows 8.1 64-bit for the OS. With this general setup, I was holding a steady 45 to 60 FPS the entire time.

Just spent almost 2 hours on beta, I don’t think I was able to completely emerge in the whole experience because I woke up at 2 in the morning for this.

Comments:
- The revenant armor skins are GORGEOUS, really glad to be able to see it first hand in game. I literally screamed when I first saw it on WP channel. Sadly I won’t be able to use it now for our other heavy professions..
- It was a rather weird yet pleasant experience to use hammer as a ranged weapon. A breath of fresh air to how we view weapons in the game.
- Somehow I feel that the current revenant skills are too OP. I know it’s too soon to say and I’m looking forward to how revenant is going to play out with other classes later when the expac is out.
- Story was nice, I cannot be more thankful about the improvement of the dialogue system for our characters. I would love to try out not to help the sylvaris in the story but I guess I’m patient enough to wait for that one.
- Dragon fight was okay. At first I was using mace/axe to hit but there were no numbers popping out (even in melee distance), once I changed to hammer everything went back to normal. I would like to see this boss to be on par with Tequatl (difficulty wise) when expac launches.
- I was a bit confused with the adventure (burning vines), few minutes and a couple laps around the wrecked ship I abandoned it because there wasn’t any indication of progress on my screen until I went out of the area and got thrown back to the adventure flag symbol. By then I lost my interest in getting back to it.
- Gliding felt like something that I’ll spend a long time getting used to.
- FPS are all good, no lags, everything seems stable to me.
- I was hoping for trying out specialization (Necro GS), but I see none.., and that makes me sad :C (or maybe I couldn’t find it because I didnt dig deep enough in the heroes window)

Overall it was a nice experience, thank you Anet for giving us this little taste of expansion. Hopefully there will be more things that you’ll leak to us before HoT release

-Servers stability was awesomly fine! o/ I had a few lags at some time but not a big deal, it disappeared quite quickly. Maybe we need to be more in order to give them a real challenge >:D

-I… don’t have any bug to notice here as everything went quite fine with what we had to do. It might be because of the lag but the skill “rite of the great dwarf” had an issue once that disappeared : When I cast it, the effect take place before I finish the cast and disappears right after the cast x)

-About the revenant? I thought it was OP when I saw I could heal twice with the 6 skill, one per legend, but the enemies also put a good challenge when packed xD I wonder now how the other classes will compensate in term of resistance, having only one healing skill while the revenant has 2! It was very nice and dynamic to switch between legends to have access to our second healing skill!
He’s got only middle HP pool but this second healing spell can really make him as tough as a warrior. Heavy armor profession here guys! XD
The resistance trait which grants resistance for each legendary demon skill used is very original as I’m not cleaning conditions this time, but I’m compensating by resisting to them! It’s not cleanse, but it has also a strong effect!

-I can’t wait to see more adventures, the concept is nice, it adds some new things to do! It reminds me of the challenge missions of Guild Wars 1, but in a more accessible way, also easier and with rewards according to the challenge it puts. I could never go further than 50 vines burned though, I don’t know if the rewards are higher when we burn 100 or more.

-Loved the new music.

-Nice to see the new defiance system, can’t wait to see other bosses to see how well it will be exploited! ^^ The wyvern were stunned when we broke her bar, but I heard that the effect of the break bar would depend of the boss fought, so I’m curious to see the next effects when the extension is out! Nice idea!

-The wyvern itself was quite easy indeed, and seemed to be the good old boss with many HP though her skills added some fun! Gliding to get back to the battle after being bumped by the wings was nice!

-The events available in the map looked more like what we had in the low level maps (I mean from 1-15 maps to Orrian ones) more than what we had in Silverwastes or Dry top. I mean that currently, there was no phases like those two maps. Though it might just be because this is a stress test.

-I only tryed the glider with the master system so I don’t have very much to say about it. What I can say is that I liked seeing mastery orbs on the maps. Collecting them by exploring the map might be a funny thing!

To conclude : Thanks for the invitation. I had a lot of fun with everything. Musics, revenant, looking at the masteries etc… There is many fun ideas, keep up the good work!

I loved the armor the rev was wearing. Sadly, I did find it somewhat boring. However, it is a stress test so… I bugged out about 4x during the wyvern fight. I think the skills will be fun as time goes on. I found hammer was good during wyvern fight, like others did. Really wanted to love the demon skills but the jalis skills seemed more useful/op.
All in all I enjoyed trying it out and getting a peek at the Rev class.

Hi, I have positive feelings about this beta. We saw small part of this new area but it looks pretty polished. First I tried to learn rev’s combat. Hammer as a ranged weapon is cool idea and skills look awesome. So do animations during stance change.
When I fought vyvern my character got stucked in textures but when I was writing bug report sudenly boss pushed me from the ground and I fell down. This bug was the only one I saw.
Average ping was about 70 ms, no lags, no crashes.

Interesting experience, but after 40min I was finished.

Story
- repetitive and too much dialogue
Mastery UI
- bad for interaction
- it fills half screen just for it
- improving masteries wasn’t clear enough for me for the first tries
- I found myself trying to leave Mastery UI by clicking Esc (the same way used to close any other window in game)
- either in Hero Pannel or a new pannel for this would be much better
Revenant
- interesting combos
- hammer basic-attacks sloppy and slow
- damage gap is high when solo/duoing with other revenant

Didn’t have any problems with server and lags

6/10

PROS:
- I liked the extension of the personal story. The player’s role as Commander seemed more prominent with more dialogue.
- Hang gliding. Enough said.
- Revenant related skins have a mystical demonic theme that I really like. Separates them from normal plate wearers.
- Revenant animations are very cool.
- More interactivity within zones (Not restricted to heart tasks and map completion.)
- A Mastery System that extends player experience post level 80.
- Hang gliding!

CONS:
- The beta starting zone killed my FPS. This may or may not be a personal problem, but I don’t usually encounter these issues.
- The Wyvern battle felt a bit lackluster for a meta boss. Bigger pool of HP, annoying burns, but the effort put in did not equal the reward/experience for me.
- Revenant didn’t feel very mobile… maybe include one skill with access to swiftness?
- Hang gliding was a bit confusing to understand. I didn’t receive any prompt (that I would have liked) notifying me I was able to hang glide.
- The Mastery System’s UI was also slightly disorienting initially.

I understand this is only the first beta test, and my opinions are based solely on a first impressions stand point. Overall, I am happy with the idea of an expansion. It is very refreshing.

My overall impressions of the Beta was good. Going in, I appreciated that it was a Stress Test, so I expected frame rate issues, lag, disconnects, etc. I didn’t disconnect once. No lag. There were some graphics issues, but again, this is a beta. Overall it was pretty smooth.

I had a great time during every Wyvern fight. It could stand to be more difficult. It was the Revenant party I expected it to be, and we simply shouldn’t have been able to take it down the way we did. But I have little doubt this will be addressed. In my efforts to flank the Wyvern, I ended up on it’s wing several times. It didn’t seem to register that I was standing on it as it took off several times and really had no affect on me. Not that I needed Another thing to avoid charring me to a crisp, or blasting me across the platform, but I certainly shouldn’t be able to stand on a moving wing.

The Revenant was really interesting, but it felt clunky (and no stun breaks?). I also felt as if I were strategically mashing a lot since there was little time to just stop for a bit to have a look at the skills. This was also a fault of mine, since I wanted to jump in and play, so I will look more closely in this evenings test.

The starting zone was really small and really chaotic. I realize it is supposed to be chaotic and I enjoyed that aspect, but it felt too small.

This is the first time I have had the opportunity to join in a beta and I had a really great time. I also got some ridiculous screenies. It really didn’t surprise me that the content was what we have seen demo’d. As such, I did my best to simply play and I was able to do exactly that. I realize there is a lot of fine-tuning left to do and based on this experience I am looking very forward to more of what HoT has in store.

The stress test went unexpectedly well. There was an fps drop which was just about the level of some bigger zerg fight in WvW. There was not much content but that’s okay. It’s not what a stress test is about.
The Revenant was very fun to me (Mana class hyyyyyyype). The M/A set and the Hammer both have a consistent playing style tied to them which are both well balanced for the open world. Considering WvW on the other side…no. On the Hammer Set you’re a Stability-Bot with a moving WoR and a whole lotta CC. That’s imbalanced. Same goes for the double healing: the idea of having 2 seperate healing skills is great but there should be an internal CD (5sec after legend swap?), so you’re not able to heal yourself for ~10k almost instantly.
Also the increased condi cap on the Wyvern (if intended) could be metabreaking, but please Limit this to Bosses in PvE
Regarding masteries there should be a more detailed description of the ability lines and a clean up on the UI. ALso, please add a keyboard shortcut for Masteries.
Other than that, gj Anet!

i’m out gliding \o/

Hi everyone!

I’d like to start my feedback of the stresstest of HoT with the positive and get on with the negative afterwards, however most of my experience from this stresstest has been positive.

First off; wonderful environment with almost too many visual treats no matter what graphic-settings you’re on (yeah I did go through the trouble to try out everything in the beta demo with different settings). The landscape in whole looks very impressing and promising! Revenant as it is, might actually be the most fun profession so far if you ask me. I love skill #2 on hammer, it’s absolutely stunning! I also love how HoT seems to pave the way for a more skillful playstyle given that the new mechanics makes it less of an “autoattack-styled PvE-scene”. Masteries looks very promising and the hanggliding feels very nice, especially after putting more points into it. Jumping mushrooms didn’t work at all so I never got to try that out.

I’m going to jump into some of the negative impressions I got now starting with the revenant. I got the impression that revenants will be able to quite simply keep up stability a bit too easy, I’m not sure if this is actually the case though when it’s played under more stress in harder parts of the game. I’m really looking forward to playing revenant in WvW, especially for outnumbered solo-fights to see how much pressure it can really take. Ok I jumped off the topic of negative there for a while, lets get back to that… Jalis was working alot better than Mallyx, even if you stayed on hammer when switching to Mallyx which however could just be preference. Other than the revenant I only really have the mushroom issue and a few graphical glitches (like not seeing myself when first walking into that place with the vines you torch).

Overall everything was very positive and I’m greatly looking forward to seeing the final result. I would also like to thank the Guild Wars 2 team for the oppertunity to participate in this beta, it has been greatly appriciated!

Thank you!

I actually really enjoyed the testing period, it was fun to try out the new class. I had an issue with the glider that was basically it didn’t deploy and I died (hopefully that was a glitch), but I kept trying with it and eventually it came out correctly and I landed safely. I did have a bit of a rubber band effect going while moving at times but that is what the testing was for so I am glad I can help report that. Wanted to try something other than hammer but will have to try that later.

No real complaints the only issue I had was trying to glide to the wyvern. I have high lag due to satellite internet which is the only service available which made the gliding impossible to do. Other than that I had fun.

Performance was the same.
Revenant weapon skills cast time is too kitten high.
Had huuuuuge server lag when conditions went to 100+ stacks. Anet pls clarify is that a bug or a feature and if it is a feature why vulnerability and torment are still capped at 25.
Delay between falling down and glider popup is too big.

A few things i noticed from the stress test. Not being able to reach the master point on the stone tower without glitching it with a leap skill and mashing F. The revenants traits that make ‘healing orbs on energy skill use’ don’t seem to work or the orbs just aren’t visible. The rivers around the WP had very distinct segments (could see the lines where river sections joined). Also the rivers had a weird bug where the water around my character would appear see through. Lastly I HATE the way the revenant holds the hammer. When the weapon is wielded he’s looking right over his shoulder, the shoulder with all the spikes. The shoulder spikes that he cant see through. Tho that would explain how the revenants became blind, shoulder spikes to the eye’s hahaha.

Here’s my super mini review.

I’ll get the bad parts out of the way first.

- Mastery UI is awful, I’m thinking its just a working version though.
- Skill 3 on hammer (rev) feels a bit off. It felt as though it was taking the attention away from the fight and focusing on an animation.
- Wyvern fight was reaaaaaalllllllllly easy, like waaaay too easy.
- The vine burning adventure was something i’ll do once and never think about again.
- Cele armor, ew

Now the good.

Revenant:
- The animations and armor are stunning.
- The skills are very interesting and the amount of utility and choices you have to play around with is great.

Area:
- Again, stunning. I may have been a bit afk on one the fights just looking around. Can’t wait to explore it all.

Gliding:
- To me it felt fine, the delay after you jump isnt terrible. Though some glider skins would be a nice feature.

Extra comments:

“Drop the Hammer” Vs. “Backbreaker”.

So revenent gets a 1200 range, 2 second KD with 15sec recharge that hits 5 targets while Warriors get a single melee target 2 second KD with 30sec recharge … seems legit.

Fresh off the beta here to provide some feedback.

Masteries seemed somewhat unclear. I believe I understand them now but didn’t at first as I unlocked the mushroom mastery and was confused as to why I couldn’t use the jumping mushrooms despite putting a point in it. If I understand it correctly now you have to level up through the entire bar in order to unlock the skill to use the jumping mushrooms but there I never got to use the mushrooms myself because I didn’t finish the bar, a friend was able to use the mushrooms however.

The tendril torching adventure was straight forward and simple I didn’t get to experience any different level of rewards if silver was to give different reward from bronze but a single bag of gear seemed somewhat unrewarding for bronze even though it was pretty easy to get. I couldn’t figure out a way to restart during the adventure and I think I remember being told that you are able to do that during a stream preview?

As I’m sure other people said the wyvern is relatively simple I enjoyed the fact that bleeds and other conditions were stacking over 25. I participated in the fight on a revenant and engineer and felt like the amount of break bar removal from taunt and the hammer KD seemed really high compared to the CCs I used on engineer, overcharged shot, crate and flamethrower knockback. The fight made me feel like I shouldn’t go into melee range because of the fire and the winds seemed easily countered by stability while at the same time not having any other CCs to worry about so it seems very straightforward even if you choose not to move out of the zone you’re relatively safe if you have stability.

The revenant with hammer felt slow and fairly weak even though its a weapon with really only one utility skill. I mostly just felt like I couldn’t do any real solid damage with jalis + hammer at the very least. The cascading attack on hammer #2 seems a little unreasonable to hit the third area for the most damage I feel like it would make sense if the 3rd area encompassed maybe more than 1/3 of the skills area so you don’t have to stand at almost max range to get the max damage.

My biggest complaint about revenant was the lack of stun breaks with knowledge that these are the only utilities we can use. To have to use your elite on jalis to stun break is a pretty large hit to your energy and from what I noticed there was only one trait that gave stun breaks, on legend stance swap, which I assume will be maybe a little too necessary for PvP and WvW. The fact that mallyx and probably other stances will have no stun breaks at all is really quite a change I don’t think every stance should have one but I certainly hope there’s at least a medium energy cost one outside of the legendary stance swap trait in one of the stances.

I felt a little weird about banish enchantment as it seems like it will mostly be used for the confusion more than the fact that it removes boons. I also felt like vengeful hammers seemed somewhat weak even though it had a relatively large upkeep but with celestial it’s hard to tell with a purely power scaling ability.

Watched the streams a little bit and I still don’t get it.

Feels like the series has finally completely done away with trying to be Guild Wars.

The focus on open world content does not excite me because they never did it well. Open world is supposed to feel wild and unpredictable, instead it always feels like it’s looping, because that’s exactly what is doing in GW2. They didn’t leave actual “openness” in there for monsters to even so much as wander and find their target camp at random. It’s a total bore to me the way they’ve approached it.

Unless there’s some secret like 10 amazing big group dungeons coming with this I still just don’t get how it’s supposed to be an exciting expansion.

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.

So, you never use Hallowed Ground, or Wall of Reflection, for example?

phys.7689:

Revenant didnt seem very deep, the class mechanic didnt seem to make up for lack of weapon swap.

I’m afraid i have to agree. It was especially visible at Wyvern fight, where your choice was practically limited to “get hammer, switch to Mallyx only to refresh legend bar/for second heal, and switch back as soon as possible”

The good:
skins. Seriously, i want that armor.
revenant shows real promise (but see above and below).
what i have seen so far of the zone and events is interesting. I see that the Mordrem swarms were cut down a bit compared to SW, which is also good.\
Wyvern fight was cool. It’s good that the boss was more mobile than we’re used to.

The Bad
Revenant requires lot of touching up and reworking still. The no-weapon-swap and utilities-defined-by-legend system needs to get revamped – playing longer is just too static. There is also next to no synergy between legends we were shown, which exacerbated the problem.
Problems with hammer skill 3 – it can refocus and redirect your camera randomly, which causes disorientation.
Mastery system seems really uninteresting so far.
Some glitches during the wyvern fight. Wyvern texture can “blink” between his flying state and his pre-flight position, which makes noticing his fly-by breath attack harder to anticipate.
Sometimes Wyvern takes flight way too fast after blue defiance bar appearing (too short to actually activate cc skills, unless you started before defiance bar changed).
Wyvern’s wing buffet attack cone seems to be over 180 degrees wide (that might not be a bug though, even if it’s not intuitive).
Gliders trigger too slowly.

General opinion: positive (but definitely requiring a lot of polish and tweaking yet). Beyond that wyvern glitches seemed quite stable as well.

Well, for me Beta was great in general. I like new weapon animations and more voice acting for player character. Need to get used to new Mastery UI, it seems a bit out of place for me. Gliding was a bit lagy for me, but it’s maybe because of stress test loading on servers. Revenant looks cool, but for me Hammer attacks fell a little slow. New story seems more live so far. And most important thing for me- there is no stability issues.

Hi,

First of all, I’d like to thank ArenaNet for the opportunity to test the HoT demo.

I’ll start with what I liked, beginning with the looks of it all. The landscape is really beautiful and I love the new Revenant skins (armor, weapons, skills). The level design is also great, I love the verticality there and the fact that we can reach certain areas only by using our masteries.

I enjoyed hearing my character talk during the story instance, that’s a nice touch. I don’t have much to say about the story per say though since it was a bit too brief to have share valuable feedback.

I also liked the Wyvern fight and the new defiance system which will probably be linked to neat mechanics. I look forward to seeing what ANet has prepared for us regarding boss encounters.

The Revenant seems refreshing and cool but it’s kind of hard to judge since the profession is not finished yet.

In regards to gliding, I was a bit afraid I’d find it a bit stiff to use. It turns out that I really enjoyed it and I had no problem controlling it.

Now what I liked a bit less, starting with the mastery UI. I love the mastery system but the UI is terrible. It is not intuitive at all. I had a hard time just to succeed in allocating points and even when I managed to do it, I wasn’t sure that I’d done it correctly. It’s also not clear whether I have to earn XP after spending a point to validate it or not. I asked my friends what they thought of it and they were just as lost. Honestly, I think it needs heavy rework.

There was a little bit of lag with the skills. I think the stress test was quite satisfying regarding lag and FPS but not perfect. It might be linked to the lag but there was a small glitch with the Wyvern when flying. It would appear in down state from time to time and disappear right away (just its skin, not the actual mob).

During the adventure with the vines, I noticed a little bug. If you are in the adventure and the cinematic triggers (with the big vines), the UI of the adventure disappears from the screen (time left, number of vines fried,…) after the video is finished so you need to start over if you want to get the UI back.

That’s all for now. I enjoyed the beta and I hope we’ll get to test more stuff later on!

Thanks ANet!

After playing for 2 hours of the first window, my overall experience was good, I may edit this later after playing in the next stress test window.

Pros
-I did not experience any instability, server or FPS wise, in the first session.
-On second session, had continued stability, though did crash once while I was downed for a reason i’m not sure of.
-Comboing revenant skills together felt pretty good, mace 2 + mace 3 in quick succession is some decent damage with some decent might stacking.
-The cinematics were well done in my opinion.
-The new voice acting for the player character sounds fantastic.
-Gliding felt fun after I got used to the system.

Cons
-The starting of gliding feels a bit clunky, it takes a bit too long to launch.
-Some of the tool tips were a bit uninformative, the tool tip for mace 2 needs to say it creates a fire field.
-The mastery point on top of the stone pillar felt awful, trying to get to it felt like a battle against a rock covered in soap.

As a closing statement, I felt that the stress test ran fairly smoothly.

I have to say, I’m thoroughly enjoying this.

I was not at all interested in revenant, to be honest. Even the videos leading up to it didn’t excite me. However, actually trying one out was fantastic! It’s like a guardianecromancer!

It took a bit to get used to the skills, and a few of them I was still a little kitten y about, but I think it’s pretty solid gameplay. I highly preferred Jalis to Demon, personally.

There was also a bit of learning curve getting used to the flow of events. It took me probably a good hour to figure out the pattern of events and how to get the most out of them.

The constant knockback/knockdown (with no stun break or stability available on the flamethrower bundle) during the Thorn Torching adventure was a little frustrating, but I assume that’s intended?

Not all of the vines were valid terrain. I’m assuming that this is due to it being a beta, but it’s a bit weird to fly right through a giant vine.

I loved the wyvern fight. It was long and grueling, but not overly difficult. I absolutely loved the breakbar technique – making that thing come crashing down (especially because of 5+ Forced Engagement) is super satisfying and almost feels like Monster Hunter.

I’d really like it if there were little hidey-holes and hidden things, like there are in the rest of Tyria. I adore exploring every little nook and cranny, and I didn’t get a lot of that out of the limited area we were allowed to visit. I hope there’s more in the full zone!

I’m also really interested to see how things play out if your main character is a sylvari (which mine is). The fantastic racism in this story is pretty close to my heart, and I find myself getting more worked up about the anti-sylvari sentiment than I probably should.

Ran 2 hours straight on 4k resolution with DSR. 30 – 40 fps on Wyvern, almost always elsewhere on 60 fps capped. Little sad that you still not fully support DSR on the expansion so far.
A little bit of lags on the 1 hour mark into the test. Was abit disappointed of how challenging the Wyvern fight was in the end.
Revenant DPS seems to be fairly low, while the skills it self seem a little op? Sounds strange I know, but playing with Ele the secound hour was like walking around with a chainsaw, while revenant was more likely a spoon.

I personally loved the test! Firstly, I should say that I didn’t encounter any noticeable lag or fps issues (my fps is usually really low 8-15 anyway) so I can’t really comment on that other than that the demo ran really smoothly for me.

Revenant feels so exciting to me with the melee options with teleports, awesome visuals for skills, and basically looks very promising! The hammer felt a bit clunky to use (I personally think the auto-attack would look much better if the PC was smashing the ground with each hit rather than practicing his/her baseball swing). I can’t wait for more weapons/traits/skills?/stances to be added for rev which I already feel is going to be my personal favorite class!! This is my personal opinion of course influenced by the fact that I love heavy armor classes and have been desiring a heavy class with this playstyle since I first started GW2.

Gliding felt a bit clunky and definitely needs some work. One interesting problem I found was that if you were falling from any dangerous height, I could activate the glider right before hitting the ground and although I’d still hit the ground, I’d take no fall damage and slide several feet in whatever direction I was last facing.

The Wyvern omg yes THAT was fun. I went full-melee of course and had tons of fun dodging its attacks, utilizing stability and stun breaks effectively, and helping coordinate the cc bursts in the first few fights; after the first few wyvern rounds, everyone already seemed to have a good sense of when to use their cc. The wyvern seems a bit too easy to fight with ranged attacks, but loads of fun in melee range in my opinion.

Story seems off to a good start with several choices giving the player a greater sense of control over the story’s direction again. I was most pleased to find that our characters are no longer mutes! Yay! And no stage-format cutscenes! Double Yay! I am really excited to see what kind of story is planned for HoT, and I’m assuming part of the story will be available when HoT is released and the other parts will be through Living Story extensions or something. I personally disliked all of the Living Story chapters so far with exception of several season 1 segments, but I could see it working a little better now seeing how HoT is set up. Although I believe this request won’t be granted, please.. Please… PLEASE don’t make the NPCs call me “Boss” anymore!

Masteries need a better UI imo and aside from gliding, we really didn’t get to explore much else in the demo. I can only speculate that the masteries will look more appealing after more time passes.

Overall, I’m thrilled with this demo and was really happy I was able to participate. I don’t want to give up the revenant from beta!! lol I can’t wait for HoT to be released and hopefully more opportunities to participate in beta events. Thank you for the opportunity and all the fun so far!