Guild Wars 2

The Test was fun. From what I understood that this was just a stress test so I guess the results should be more objective than our subjective. Still it was a joy and privilege to get to play. Especially what others could not! Played on the Revenant like most, the skills seemed to take a while to wind up nor did I grasp the full understanding of how the energy bar gained energy, unlike in old GW. It soon became me just going barbarian and just mashing keys. Then again it could have been excitement. A big Con for me was the Mastery System. I could not tell when I was spending a point, if I had spent the point, or even if I had spent it in the mastery desired. I know the map will expand in time (if we get the chance to test it out again). So I hope more things to come!

I found the mastery system very confusing. I couldn’t tell if I was adding points or not. I thought I added 2 points to gliding with the first beta test, but then later it said 2 points on the right side. So I kept trying to give points first to gliding and then to the mushroom jumping. Even after I got a point on mushroom jumping (I think), I couldn’t do any thing with the mushroom. It said, jump, but nothing happened.

I found switching Legends to be laggy and unresponsive. (Ping was between 100 and 200).

Could we possibly have OUT OF COMBAT weapon swapping? It’s very tedious to keep opening up the inventory and digging around for the other weapon sets, which of course are scattered throughout the inventory by the 2 hours ending.

My PC clocked in at about 25 FPS max during the wyvern fight at fairly low visual settings, (low-none in shadows, low in shading, low in character processing, low in lighting; etc)but that’s only because I’m in the process of rebuilding my PC and updating it with a newer graphics card. Currently I’m having to rely on an incredibly outdated Nvidia GT 620 to run the game, but besides that the rest of my PC’s hardware is above average, to say the least.

I did notice that my frame rate would see a noticeable drop as the wyvern was breathing fire during the fight, and in some instances when zealing with mobs during the zone’s bombshell event. Other than that, no crashes or sudden disconnects of the sort whatsoever.

As for the gameplay, I enjoyed it. I can already tell that the zone is going to play out like the Silverwastes, but much more hectic with events happening left and right (which is a good thing, as it provides players with more choices in what events they prefer to do) and it looks and feels like an actual war is going on, with the helicopters falling right at your feet and so on. Thought it’s a shame we could really only play one or two of those events.

The rewards seemed a bit better too, at least coming from the wyvern fight. I had earned around 6-8 armored scales in two boss playthroughs, along with champion bags. Speaking of the wyvern itself, it was a little bit tricky at first to avoid getting pushed by it’s gliding attack, but once you nail down its attack pattern and use a stability skill at your second attempt, then it becomes very easy. Perhaps a little too easy.

Revenant seems fun so far, though I’m worried about it being way too OP in the final build, specifically with all of the torment and stability boons and skills that’s going on in their skill set. I preferred the mace and axe combo over the hammer, but it would’ve been nice to test the class in a tutorial area of sorts at first, rather than being thrown straight into the action.

However, I was a little disappointed to see that we couldn’t use any of the new skills or weapons for the other classes, they were left the same.

Lastly, for the beginning instanced story portion, I was really happy to see our personal character talking again; the writing is good and on-par with season 2’s narrative and I enjoyed most of the voice work coming from the NPCs as well.

Just thought I’d post my feedback here as well

I played revenant (like everyone else ofc), I played around with traits and utilities and whatnot and by the end of the beta, I ended up with a 6/3/5 mace/axe build. I basically spammed pain absorption with the trait that gives extra resistance for each mallyx skill used, as well as traited to heal on incoming condition and skill use (sorry, I forget the names). When I was cc’d, I would swap legends to stun break, clear a condi (through trait) and heal up or reset, then return to mallyx legend and continue spamming pain absorption. The build I used I felt like gave the best experience given the trait trees and gear available in the test.
Condi line
Adept mi: Torment on crit
Adept ma: Heal on incoming condi
Master mi: Boon removal on hit
GM mi: Torment lasts longer
GM ma: Copy conditions to enemies
Toughness line
Adept mi: Chance when hit to gain endurance
Adept ma: Enemies further than 600 range do less damage
Master mi: Gain stability on dodge
Ferocity line
Adept mi: Summon orb when spending energy
Adept ma: Using legend removes a condi
Master mi: Pull in orbs when you swap legend
Master ma: Heal when using skill that uses energy
GM mi: Swapping legend breaks stun

I ran the wyvern fight as many times as I could to practice, I felt like this gave me the best experience to test the mechanics of the class.

My feedback is that revenant does feel somewhat clunky. I swapped off of hammer primarily to test the melee range survivability with mace/axe, which in theory worked well with the build I decided to use. The weapon skills and utility skills drawing from the same pool meant that I was primarily focused on using the utility skills. I did not feel incentivized to use the weapon skills or the elite because it would drain my energy and I did not feel like it was worth the trade-off. One thing I noticed was that swapping the position of a utility skill on the jalis legend would also swap the position of a skill on the mallyx legend. I hope that on release these utility swaps will be independent.

I had a few framerate issues, it was still playable but I felt noticeably more stutter than the regular world.

Those were my primary concerns with this release. I would like to see how the power line changes the revenant and how effective it will be in dungeon runs. Given the current state, I feel like it would be a strong anti-condi bunker in pvp. The lack of stun breaks is a bit concerning to me from an anti-cc perspective…despite the stability on dodge, it can be overwhelmed and locked down through successive cc’s.

I am looking forward to the expansion and I hope the full release will be a great success!

I was able to play the second stress test. Smooth operation on my antiquated machine, only one lag issue before the only disconnect.
Revenant is interesting, some UI changes, like moving the energy bar to the right side would be a good thing.
Gliding – make the updrafts larger with a slower ascent rate, more like a real glider operates. I love the mechanic and the verticality of the map. I was only able to reach two spots near the edge of the map for some awesome screenshots.
I understand the stress test , but a few more event chains would have allowed for more members to interact and allow movement on a broader scale, maybe next time.
Wyvern, I like the battle, also using the glider to watch it from afar was very cool, and it was easy to recover from the breath attack and return to the fight. Well done.
The mastery point to the west of the waypoint was tricky to get to at first, but it was a good test of the gliding skill.

All in all, I am stoked at the potential the glimpses given show, a general “Whoooah” is deserved.

Here is my feedback:

Performance:
Did not run into any bugs or performance issues on either test.

Usability:
- Agree with previous feedback on the Mastery UI, should somehow be incorporated into the Hero panel.
- Agree that gliding was awkward to start but that could be a learning curve.

Events:
- Felt the chaos was appropriate for the story line and liked having options on how to help.
- Sniping mordrem from across a cliff is awesome and hilarious if you kill them before they fully get out of the ground.
- I loved the Tendril event, felt like Sigourney Weaver burning up all those tendrils!

Revenant:
- I don’t like playing melee, I like to be ranged. However, I gave it a try and was surprised at how well I played. Didn’t die once so I suspect the skills are over powered.
- Love how the stances are a throwback to GW1 characters (can we get a Kilroy Stonekin stance?)

if admin going to read this, it gonna take a lot of effort to read all this.
I don’t mind to fill in a survey form create online for beta tester feedback

I found it to be awesome. I think the rev’s double heal ability balances out the longer weapon attack times… Which seemed fair based on their damage. I WANT HoT NOW!!!! It seemed much more of a strategy solo or run with small packs type game setting. The wyvern was pretty easy compared to a few of the henchmen. Over all I think its full of potential. A bit hard to judge most of the stuff due to actual lack of skill levels in the hang gliding and I hope there is plenty of instances like this demo portrayed though I fear that it was more to give us all an idea of what all will be involved. Loaded with potential and for the most part I found no cons that concerned me with it. I can’t wait now.
Myrddin Rasputin [TNO]

Pros:
Nice mechanics on the Wyvern fight.
Revenant skills offered a very nice change of pace from the other classes, though I spent most of the time with the hammer. I was not very fond of the axe or mace, it also took me awhile to remember it had a 1200 range, I kept using it as melee.

Cons:
Was unable to talk to guildies during the beta.
Would have been nice to have some choice in armor stats, as apposed to celestial.
Little disappointed in the gliding, which seems to be environmentally specific.

Concerns\General thoughts:
I am hoping that we can change up the utilities for the various legends, other wise it will seem to make the class very rigid, especially since you only have 1 weapon slot.
Also not sure if it was intended but the hammer skill 3, Phase smash. I noticed if targeted Wyvren and it was in a burning area I would take fire damage, not sure if that was intended.
The difference in Legends was nice, but I did not really like the self-inflecting penalties some of the utilities caused, since other classes don’t really have those types of penalties. Of course that could change with specializations. I did seem to spend most time in the Dwarf Legend, only time I switch was for the double heal, and the demon elite. Just generally speaking, with the recent stability changes I can defiantly see the Dwarf legend being useful, with it’s “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” stability skill; it might bring back some of those pushes. It also reminded me a little of the Hammerdin form Diablo 2.

All in all, very fun two hours, only crashed to desktop once, I hope to be included in future tests.

I don’t have much to say other than I really enjoyed this beta/stress test. Even though I’ve seen pretty much everything on the internet I found myself having a lot of fun doing the events and the adventure, really a step in a good direction in my opinion. And the performance was great, running at 70 fps the whole time and everything in high/ultra.
There were some small things that I found that I hope they get changed, for example, necros can’t use gliders while in death shroud, once the wyvern knocked me out of that arena while in DS, I was done.
I spent a lot of time in the flamethrower adventure, and I found that when that cutscene starts (when the adventure can’t be done anymore) I get stuck with the flamethrower and the only thing I can do is run very far away for the game to teleport me back to the beginning of the adventure without the flametrhower.
Also, I don’t know how big the map will be and how many things there will be there to do but I feel like it’s not going to be fun if I had to do all of the first events by myself to unlock the adventure because I just want to do that and the rest of the players are on other part of the map.
But apart from that (and the gliding feeling a bit clunky), it was really fun and Im looking forward to this expansion, can’t wait to play more of it! (also looking forward to the condi cap changes, thank you so much for that!)

MASTERY UI.

I was completely confused by how to use it, even though I thought I understood. Dark on dark, not sure when mastery points were all allocated or not…

The WvW masteries is already awesome, please look at using this for the new masteries.

My rule of thumb is if you have to explain how to use it, it’s not the best it can be

Still.. great even, thanks so much!!!

Second session of the test had a little lag on occasion for me but nothing major. Revenent hammer 3 skill turns out to be the one that refocuses the camera seemingly randomly which is disconcerting. Going mace/axe for the wyvern fight was an interesting experience. I didn’t completely die, but the NPCs rezzing people was appreciated.

I took the opportunity to quickly make an ele and engie to check out the wyvern fights on them, and can confirm that the hang gliding is indeed account bound which is very nice. Ele held her own nicely against enemies including the wyvern, as did engie. I’m looking forward to getting in there again in the future to try out more of the zone.

The flamethrower adventure part could have used some explaining about what it was about. I had read enough in other places to figure that it was some sort of completion but my guildie who played with me didn’t know that, of course, and thought it was a regular event.

Couldn’t drop the flamethrower when I wanted to. The flame resistant husks were confusing also. I ended up ignoring them as I had no control skills to push/pull them to a bomb site (which is what I was assuming would damage them). I couldn’t tell how to fight the husks if I couldn’t drop the flamethrower, had no control skills, and they were resistant to fire.

I’ve never been part of a stress tests, or a beta test before for a game. Over all i liked what i was able to play though. I only had 30 minutes from the start of the evening test, had to be elsewhere this evening during the full test time.

Aside from the fps drops during the group fights and the Story boss fight. I feel went went much smoother than i was expecting. I didn’t seem to run into an issue with character models dropping like i normally. I did find that some of the hammer skills were unresponsive during the story boss fight but they seemed fine while exploring the map.

I didn’t find the mastery trait section until later. i was looking for it with the other traits.

The event of clearing vines with the flame thrower seemed too short, or more vines need to spawn in the time frame.

Over all I liked what I’ve seen so far

I enjoyed the dialogue in the story instance and the loot from the story, it actually felt rewarding, which is often the opposite in this game. I also found the scenery to be great in the small area we could see, I particularly enjoyed the many heights in the zone.

Overall, the content felt lacking, but that was probably due to the lack of content since it was just a stress test. Most of my friends and myself left the beta feeling pretty underwhelmed with the amount of content that we were given, but we hope that having the # of people in the zone accomplished the stress tests anet was hoping for.

Sparks.5207:

Cons:
Was unable to talk to guildies during the beta.

There was a bypass for this.

All you needed to have happen was for someone to invite you to any guild. Once that happened you were given a new UI option to look at Guild Invites or Accept the request.

That brought you to the Guild Panel. From there you could represent any of your active guilds or accept the new invite.

i experienced no lag or drops in fps.

story has some audio issues where voices wern’t being heard, it caught up after a few seconds tho. I personally felt that the dialog in the story was comparativly faster to previous content so it all seemed a bit rushed, i am unsure if i accidentally missed content because of that.

the mastery GUI is not very intuitive and i had to have mapchat help get my glider mastery assigned. I missed part of the pop-up help guides because i ended up double clicking them all away. I woudl probably be best to have masteries in the hero panel.

on the revanent, you may want to add some sort of graphical aid to indicate if you have a maintained ability on or off i would often forget that i had dwarf4 or demon5 on. this will be especially important if utilities like these are added to the vanilla professions. Rev-hammer sort of felt off, not sure why.

wyvern needs to have some improvements on the flame line attacks when it goes up into the clouds. my instict was to track it into the sky and seeing it just blink out of existence kinda ruined my immersion in the fight. I think that the break bar seemed well attuned for the fight (10-25ish players in my run throughs) It was rather hard to see the wyvern’s tell for its breath attack.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to take part in the Beta. I enjoyed it and am looking forward to experiencing more of the expansion.

I agree that the flamethrower aiming could use some work as I faced forward then ended up shooting sideways, for example.

I also feel that the Mastery UI could be improved to be more understandable / intuitive.

1. Gliding is a bit disappoint. If only there is a dedicated key to activate it. Cause the F key is a bit late.
2. Love the new condi mechanic.
3. I would like to think the Legendary Wyvern is the unpolished version. Cause it’s too easy for ranged. There’s no counter mechanic for range weapon (fire shield ?). Some of its a attack like those straight fire line has misguided visual. If i walk across at the very tip of the fire line, i won’t get damage. So the area of the damage shorter than the visual graphics its show. The new defiance mechanic is like Revenant piece of cake. With only 5 Revenant it can be removed within 30sec. Also it only appears once?
I hope Anet revamped it like make it a timer when the defiance disappear. After say about 30 sec later it will back up.
5. Love the map. It looks huge and very indiana jones style. this is what i imagined when i am in the jungle.
6. I think Revenant is too much OP.
7. Love the new mobs mechanic ( the mist wolf ) have to melee to kill it. Range will miss cause the mist mechanic.
And that pack of mini raptor? First encounter they looks like harmless.. but when you don’t mind them they attacked you. ( Althought i don’t like they took so long in ganked stance, not directly attack.) — I hope you know what i am talking about.
8. If only i could hit esc button to remove the new masteries UI
Thank you for inviting me as beta tester .

The one part that I found really boring was the rifle event, where you stand on top of the hill and shoot mordrem. It was mildly interesting for a short while but quickly became very boring. Just stand there, target, shoot, repeat.

Maybe if there was more than one skill or if the one skill had more of an effect, balanced by a longer cooldown. Idk, but after a couple of minutes I leaped down to have fun because I was about to go to sleep doing that. The 2 or 3 times I did it, I was the only person up there.

The stress beta worked very well, but nothing broke. Which was a little bit disappointing.

- Very good improvement to personal story in the first instance. It was nice to see the characters actually talk to each other.
- Rev was feeling a bit slow with the armour, weapons, traits and legends provided. But then again, it was the same as in demos for people who might now have played so I can’t complain. Really want to see more damage and burst oriented Rev in action though. Hammer was a bit wonky at times. The whole thing was a bit too chaos-y for me to have a solid opinion on mace/axe tho
- The mastery screen was a bit too hidden (found it by accident), confusing and big in my opinion. Clicked stuff, didn’t have any idea if my masteries were actually spent before I actually used the glider. Needs a better implementation imo
- Dumbed down wyvern was still pretty fun!
- I didn’t have any lag or DC issues during the little while I played in the test.
- Please let us play something else than humans in future betas.
- The event chain after personal story was pretty simple, but fun. I really want to see the whole event system in the map in action for a better opinion though.

Thank you Anet for letting us try it out though! Here’s for successful future betas

- Gliding was super fun
- Revenant was really cool but i think it is kinda OP.
- The wyvern was still a boring fight, buffed it up more pls.
- There was a bug where my rev can get to places where im not supposed to reach yet by pressing hammer skill 3 then spamming f
- I got a black screen but only 1 time
- Some of the mobs seemed to have “intelligent” AI which was pretty cool.

Overall, it was pretty good. I want to see more though. Hoping for another event. Thumbs up anet!

Here is my feedback, but firstly, I am appalled at those complaining about the Beta Test being “boring”. You were chosen out of thousands to test new things before anyone else and you complain about how “boring” it is?!

I really liked the new class, though I really would like to see what other weapons they can use. Opening loot bags showed me that Scepters, Long and Short Bows, Rifles, Greatswords and Tridents were all unusable (unless it was limited because of the beta). I don’t tend to use maces at all, but I found mace on Rev a load of fun. What I saw with the beta really hypes me to see what else we can see from this class.

Masteries: Very interesting, but hard to understand, the UI is very ugly and blocks your chat and half your screen. Consider another method maybe?

Handgliding: A load of fun once I figured out how to use it. Can’t wait to be able to use this in a bigger area. I hope we can use it in other maps too, though, not just the Maguuma maps.

Wyvern Fight: People were saying it was too easy, but I suppose with the number of us there it had to be. I still saw people get downed/dead by it, so it couldn’t be that easy. I enjoyed it.

Story: The brief story we saw made me really hyped for the expansion. Did Destiny’s Edge and Trahearne survive? What does Mordremoth look like? I really can’t wait to find out these answers.

Events: Though limited, due to the nature of Beta, were interesting enough for me to stick around for a couple or rounds. The Torch event had me hooked for at least 15mins.

New mobs: I found the new mobs very interesting design-wise. Did anyone else see the Pocket Raptors and the Smokescales?

Bugs/Glitches: I suffered a great decrease in framerate after being there for more than an hour. Not sure if its because my computer is only moderate with games, or if it was the test. Also, my sound started lagging, distorting and cutting out entirely. During the cutscenes, some dialogue cut out entirely. My friend and I discovered a few glitchy things (such as a floating mortar bomb thing).

I wanted to add that I am very honoured I was chosen for the Beta Stress Test, and that from what I saw from the limited content, you have all worked very (not soft) on the expansion. Thank you, I can’t wait for HoT to be finished!

(Apparently the opposite of soft is a swear and it was censored by “kitten”)

I must say it was fun the beta version.

I would like to wish the hand bsp here:
The beta testers get a certain time as for example 12 hours !!
The beta tester can use as he likes,

4 times 3 std testing time
3 times 4 std testing time

This may be the beta testers make yourself more familiar with the class !!
If one of the beta testers has a job have to be penalized.
I can imagine that it is also a beta tester on the tags can not.

What would interest me would be the milestone 2 is still not clear,
but which is already displayed on the map and the wvw with the revenant !!

I was able to play during both sessions. I had no major lag issues or crashes at all, which was an awesome surprise. So as far as stress test went: perfect

I had a lot of fun playing Rev with the hammer. I think gliding will be a blast, but I was a little confused on how to get started with it and use it. I never was able to do anything with the mushrooms or the flamethrower adventure. The mastery UI is a little clunky as well.

Graphics were beautiful and story, although short, was great. I’m excited to see it all come together. Thanks for letting me take a sneak peek at Rev!

For a stress test I think it did well. I had no issues lagging or crashing, everything seemed to act as it should.

General thoughts -

• The Mastery UI could use a little work, needs to be more intuitive and easier to see.

• The wyvern fight was nice, great animation/effects.

• It wasn’t too bad for me since I’ve kept up with info, but for a new player the concept of channeling legendaries on the Revenant needs more explanation.

• Armor and weapon skins for the Revenant look AWESOME!

• Could use an indicator for the wyvern event or any other similar events such as in Silver Wastes when a breach occurs with the orange arrows. That should help newer players get to where they need to go.

• Overall well done so far, looking forward to seeing the next stage

=)

I’ll preface this by saying the tests today were a lot better executed than the original GW2 tests in 2012. I was expecting to get booted off the server once every 5 minutes but these held up really well.

Played in both stress tests, only crashed once during a Wyvern fight. Submitted bug report, relogged, continued as normal.

Now I know a lot of people here won’t know what the hell I’m talking about when it comes to skill lag but activating the glider took a lot longer than it should have done. For the sake of simplicity if nothing else, the glider (if mastery traited) should auto activate when the client detects falling (enough for the toon to scream). Doing this would alleviate the frustrations of the people who have interminably bad lag. It wasn’t peak time for me but I still had at least 400 ping through both stress tests.

Also, along the same lag vein, the bouncing off the wind from the choppers below the platform was incredibly clunky.

Overall I thought the Revenant has good potential but needs a few tweaks, most of which have already been addressed here. Axe/mace wielding made for some nice rapid attacks, but the hammer (although it’s made to projectile) was just too slow. I get it that a hammer is supposed to be big, heavy, bulky items that have a lot to throw at an enemy, but this is a game. Some of the skills took just too long to activate, and the auto-attacks need a speed buff.

The mordrem had too many immobilises for my liking, and as soon as my Rev had broken out of one he was locked down with another. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to see these get an adjustment down.

Mastery screen took a while to figure out, especially when it wouldn’t come up on the screen. No matter where/when I clicked I couldn’t get that menu up. I share other’s sentiments about adjusting the size/layout of the menu for masteries as well, right now it’s rather invasive and not really intuitive.

Edit: forgot camera angles. Hammer 3 seems to get a mind of its own once activated, and jumping off a ledge while not gliding and then hitting the bottom and resetting to the ledge will auto-rotate the camera to about 45°. Quite annoying when you’re used to a static camera angle.

Spent my time playing a Revenant almost exclusively on Mallyx Legend with a hammer (only really switching to Jalis to heal – I found the mace/axe combo uninspiring). Redid my traits to be 6-6-2 which seemed pretty effective.

While others have noted that the Wyvern could be simply handled at range I discovered that the most effective thing I could do was stand under or next to the Wyvern and spam skill #9 and the hammer attacks – properly positioned I could avoid the fire and the wing buffets could not hit me. Skill #9 displaces opponents and inflicts Torment on them while it creates a dark combo field – with lots of blinds and life steals/leeches from other players as well as myself as a result. The #9 skills was just a little too spam-able – seemed like it created tons of CC in a group event. The Wyvern had a near constant 25 stacks of torment on it. I might be wrong about causation but it seemed like when a couple (2-3 at most) of Revenants did that the Wyvern was unable to actually take off for long periods and got quickly dps down pretty significantly. When it did finally attempt to take off the Revenant Jalis taunt/chain skill (maybe plus other cc) frequently brought it right back down.

Other Stuff: The mastery screen was too hidden – couldn’t find it at first asked in chat and got the answer. Not very intuitive when skill and trait screen are integrated into the Hero panel and you expect the mastery screen to be similar. Also, did not understand I had to check the mastery in order to progress.

Overall Impression: Fun encounters with nice loot but a little too repetitive since it was so limited. Seemed very stable for a stress test – did not encounter any memorable bugs.

Thanks for letting me try the beta.

The stress test was great although I expected more sneak peeks

I wouldn’t go into all the traits and skills as it’s yet to be seen in other area of the game.

However, imo there’s a few issues that I would like to highlight which is somehow can be refined:

The revenant hammer 5th skill, it would be great if the timing and the animation of the dropping hammer match exactly the character animation as the hammer effect is slower than the character to me.

As for the gliding, overall experience is nice, but it took a bit too long to be able to start gliding after jumping off(not sure is it supposed to be fixed by leveling up mastery in Gliders). And like the others have said, probably a tutorial on using glider is needed, as I was reluctant to jump down even though I know there’s supposed to be a glider somewhere.

Anyway, thanks for the effort letting us trying out !

Since this is the stress test feedback, I ran both test for the full length of time and had no crashes or disconnects. Left all my game settings the same and didn’t notice any difference or have to adjust anything. Basically hoped right in and started to play. Overall I think it went well and it was a lot of fun.. Looking forward to whats next!!

I enjoyed playing the new BETA, the character felt quite easy to play, and got used to the skills quite quickly. I used mainly hammer as I found the ranged attack more practical for that map. I unlocked the gliding, and must say I really enjoyed this part of the testing, pretty smooth and cant wait to unlock the rest of the gliding skills. My only concern was every now and again I did a 180 Deg turn away from my target when hit. This wasn’t a fear, but happened to me a few times to be noticeable. Damage was quite severe, but that can be expected from this kind of boss, and I did get caught a few times when starting but learnt quickly to stay out of AOE damage zones. It would be nice to unlock the other traits later, and found the xp bar with all the info quite usefull. The armour look and feel was also really good, movement was also pretty quick which would make a difference in support roles while running with zergs. I found skill 4 on hammer to be quite good, but the wall did tend to drift a bit leaving me exposed. Otherwise excited for the expansion.

I know that this is not the final version, so there is nothing to judge. However, there is one thing I really want, COULD YOU MAKE A HOTKEY FOR MASTERIES INTERFACE? And “esc” key to close it too. PLEASE!

Edit: I forget to mention, I am worried about my main mesmer. In the fight against the wyvern, no clones or phantasms can survive under that amount of constant aoe.

It was short, but I enjoyed it.

The Revenant took me awhile to adjust to, and I still don’t know how to properly use some skills yet. The default hammer seemed slow and dull to me, but it “felt” like a hammer’s speed. Switching to mace-axe made it much more enjoyable.

Concerns:

• The cutscene with the vine. After seeing it the first time I didn’t need to see it again. It often interrupted what I was doing and got a bit annoying. It even caught me mid-glide once. I’m guessing this is just due to the demo format though.

• The mastery UI. I can tell it’s an early release. I saw several players confused that they had to put a point into the mastery and then equip it though. An auto-equip might be better. The interface is also currently pretty clunky. Again, I know it’s early, I’m just hoping it goes through drastic changes. It’s not particularly easy to figure out without spending some time trying to understand it.

Overall feedback from me:

I liked the map, wish i could see more of it, a bit laggy and the fps drop was slightly annoying, but assume things like that will be fixed.
I like how the Mallyx and Jalis skillsets works, but find Jalis to be more useful right now, but the stabitily/ inspiring reinforcement sound imo wasnt that good.
I liked the hammer way better then the mace/axe, how the skills works on them the hammer just seemed to do more of everything then the mace/axe.
Gliding around the wyvern area seems to be a bit laggy and uncontrollable, when you do glide it takes too long before it actually works (may be due to lag of course) but i like the gliding overall and hope it will improve.
The masterys was more of a “meh” state atm, but as the same with the map, i wanted to see more of it and cant wait til they show us more.
I love the look on the revenant, cant wait to play it!
As a stress test i actually liked it, the events were fine and i had a positive experience.

I decided to play as some new players might, instead of doing my usual research and analysis to figure out how to get the most of a build or an event.

• Masteries were annoying. The interface is unlike any other GW2 interface and it was hard to see what I was choosing between. Also, with so few points available, it was hard to get a feel for how much any of it mattered.
• Gliding was clunky. I know it is tied to a mastery and there needs to be room to grow, but… it didn’t captivate me from the start, as a feature like this should do.
• There wasn’t much to explore, so I don’t think I got any sort of feel for the new area. It’s fine to leave that for the full release, but as a ‘tester’, it felt cramped to me.
• The new area was gorgeous and I’m really glad to have the new camera to see it; the old camera wouldn’t have done it justice.
• I liked (but did not love) the revenant. It is going to be a fun challenge for me, to learn how to play it properly. The game’s existing skill prompts don’t seem to match the rev’s skills: aoe rectangles vs the traditional circles.
• Performance was excellent. No additional latency or stuttering.

8/10 — would pay for the expansion based on this initial taste of the game.

In future betas, could we pick our own gear stats and runes/sigils? Possibly from a PvP type panel.

The celestial is good for people who can best use stats evenly distributed but in the future betas, people should be able to play using the stats they like best, anywhere from high dps to high support/tankiness.

Personally I was finding my dps too low and my health and healing too high. It meant I only died once during a fight (I was rezzing someone and got caught in a fire field). With the ability to choose stats, people can try out different builds during the betas and if betas are going to be limited to small instances and a couple of events, it will help to keep them interested.

Something that bothered me was the mastery system tab placement i believe it would be easier to figure out if it was place in the traits and skill points tab mainly because is not really visible to us players in the same context as other things.

I also feel gliding is abit clunky least for me i would love if you could open the gilder more early but this is just till i try the full mastery line as 2 hours isn’t a lot of time for that :P so i could be wrong but right now as how far i got it was abit silly how slow it was to give me the choice to open it.

I can’t wait to try the specializations for the classes especial my favorite the mesmer.

Pros:
great environment
revenant is very interesting class, looking forward to play it more
player character talking
gliders
wyvern fight was fun

Cons:
mastery UI, do something about it, please

Overall, i had lot of fun playing and greatly enjoyed it.

Edit: armor and weapon skins awesome!

I think the wyvern’s going to become the new sand giant: a huge spectacle that people do once or twice, and then decide that the rewards aren’t worth the time it takes to kill it.

Had some fps issues in the beginning, but my fps increased after 5 minutes or so.

Revenant is definitely different from the other classes. First impression is good.
Impressed by the fact that my fps didn’t decrease due to the fire dropped by the Wyvern. Overal the beta was running quite good (fps was a bit lower than normal though).

However, I didn’t like the mastery UI. It wasn’t easy to work with. I think it would be better if it was similar to the WvW UI or the trait UI. Gliding feels clunky too, holding space, or something like that, to open it would be much better.

Tested the revenant class for about an hour and here’s my first impression on the particular class:

1. Animation on hammer AA (skill 1) is weird and seems like it’s prolonged
2. Skill no 2 and 3 on mace+axe combo is very OP in my opinion, especially with 3 blast finishers within a line form. I think either reducing the amount of blast finisher or increase cooldown time which will be reduced using a specific trait will justify it
3. Conditions inflicted on enemies should be reworked, I’ve seen obscene amount of bleed, poison, and torment damage.

Tried the glider briefly before the wyvern fight and I think it’s a bit clunky because you have to in freefall for a brief moment before you can actually deploy it, but can’t comment on this too much because limited mastery points is given to actually test it on full potential.

Mastery UI is a bit rough and may need repolishing. Took me a while to ensure that I was investing some points in a specific mastery line

Lastly the breakbar, It’s a great system and I highly agree that this will replace the old defiant stacks. I like the idea of differentiate CCs by how hard or soft player inflicting CC affect the breakbar. However, I noticed if there are only 3 players or less around the Wyvern boss the breakbar scaled poorly, not sure if this is intended in this demo test or may need some rework.

Overall the expansion is going the right way and I really do hope there will be another beta test for players to actually feel how the new class and other classes can work together in all aspects of the game

Have to say, the first story mission? Loved it.

It’s SO good to hear my character actually taking charge with active voice acting! And no more passive pacifistic responses, she sounded like a real bad-kitten ready to take charge. There was something about the whole progression of it which reminded me a little of Resident Evil. Taking charge and making a choice in what to do next, the whole ’There’s blood here’ and then following it down into a foreboding and unknown environment and, well I don’t know but it worked well for me.

Not to mention the environments being stunning.

I was a little disoriented, but this would be because I was in an alien environment, and I wasn’t playing my native profession but instead was playing the Revenant (which I didn’t take a shining to, just not my style really).

OH and even more importantly the challenge of clearing out the vines from the ship with the flamethrower, fantastic. It was a real challenge, with those immensely tanky and brutish husks coming at you from different sides and knocking you about so suddenly. I got a feeling lke “THIS is level 80 content”. It challenged me in ways that The Silverwastes challenged me when I first entered them (and they still do challenge me occasionally when I’m not paying enough attention to my surroundings).

Thad had to be the highlight. If it’s any indication of how challenging the content will be, then spot on A-net. VERY pleased.

Honorable mentions:

Condition stacks going past 25, amazing.

The break bar, also amazing.

I was only able to make it to the second stress test, but didn’t experience any connection or performance issues. Overall very positive impression of the map with two exceptions that stand out in my memory:

The torching vines adventure’s explanation appears briefly before closing itself and there is no UI element for progress on the adventure, so I had no idea what I was doing wrong while repeatedly failing it.

The UI for masteries definitely needs to be redone, possibly as another page in the hero panel much like how PvP reward tracks are presented in the PvP window; currently it’s rather intrusive and cannot be closed by quickly hitting escape, so if you were to somehow accidentally open it in the middle of combat you’ve basically just slapped on a blindfold.

- Beta went amazing. For 2 hours I had lag only for about 5-10 mins all together.
- Wyvern fight was fun and me being mostly melee player, I have managed to melee him every single time I did the event which made me very happy.
- What I didn’t like is that my FPS was 30-45…. and my PC usually manages to go over 110 FPS, so I do hope that it is only because it’s BETA with quite a lot people around.
- I absolutely love voices you hear on legend swap.
- I was hoping other classes would have more voices in BETA, because Anet said others will be getting them. My main is mesmer, so I made one, just to see if Anet did put anything new for them but they didn’t.
- I am hoping that next time they will allow us to try some specializations, Stronghold and maybe see a bit of new borderland.
- Mastery UI needs a bit of rework, a bit smaller window. (for example like WvW masteries).

Fixed the forum bug, so I’ll take a bow. ^^

I made a deep analisis of what i experienced yesterday on the spanish forums, but let me say here that i really had fun with the 2 hours test and the game worked pretty well on my pc.
The masteries are going to be a huge thing (loved the glide) and the map, even being small, you could feel that “deep” they talked about so many times in the past. I just wonder how that will be in bigger enviroments.
Wyvern was like Behemoth, imo. But maybe is what they said: the difficulty was turning down for the stress test.
The adventure was great, really addictive where you try to improve your rate and win to your friends.

Nice start, as a conclussion. Im really looking forward for more new content and more testing!

Absolutely fun and looking forward to playing this, but I did have some issues which you probably expected.

-Mobs I was fighting just dissapeared at times (Full health all the time then disappear)
-Adventure did not show me any progress, is it meant to be? And then got a fail message and it restarted.
- Wyvern boss model would appear on the platform at time when it was flying over

Some problems I experienced:

- I spent 2 mastery point in Gliding by accident, can there maybe be a confirmation or a cancel
- Had an issues vs the wyvern boss that my pet could not do anything, kept saying “target to far from your pet” – Ranger
-Skills seem to not alway trigger when I used them

Fantastic area and mechanics. Wonderful artwork all around in distance. Cannot wait to play this area again.

I played both sessions from start to end, so 4 hours with a break. I chose to play mesmer.

The content is certainly evolving well and the main demo area is bigger than people realise once verticality is taken into account. Pocket Raptors are cute and explorers are going to love the map.

I managed to get to 2 Maguuma Mastery Orbs and channel them for mastery points. These are going to be a lot of fun… I used the glider to get to one, and beyond the orb itself leads outside the demo area into the Itzel Grounds, which I managed to reveal with a bit more gliding.

Masteries

I’m only going to have a first impression once, so here we are…

• The masteries window was initially hard to find, but once tipped off by map chat that it existed is in a logical place.
• Activating my first mastery and having xp flow to it was more difficult than it needed to be. I placed my first point in the Mushroom mastery, but I didn’t realise I needed to tick a box as well to “equip” the mastery line. The first line a player puts a point into should probably auto-equip.
• I didn’t initially notice the Glider line, as I had to scroll down to reveal it. I did that by accident. Maybe it’s not an issue.
• After learning my first mastery ability (unlock+xp gain both done), the system felt intuitive and easy to use.

Abilities are fun. Overall I’m liking the mastery system and looking forward to the rest.

Adventure

I had quite a few goes at getting the gold reward but I’m not quite there yet. Think I had 82/100 at one point. Other than being rather good fun(! It’s own reward in my opinion), it’s a mysterious activity.

Dynamic Events

The only one I want to bring up is the bonus after killing off the five Burrowers (enemy spawners), which I didn’t see get completed once. There is a strict time limit and the 5 tentrils you have to kill are not marked on the radar… very tough! Otherwise, a nice cycle of events.

Map

Just a tease for other players… I took this screenie of my map showing some currently out-of-bounds areas.

My comments on the test:

• Mushroom mastery, although it was equipped and had 1 point, didn’t activate with the jump mushroom. Worked only after relogging.
• Revenant Hammer Skill #3 on return reorients the camera and can be … well, disorienting.
• Mastery panel seems too wide/huge.
• Escape key should let the Mastery panel close just like other dialogs.
• Had 2 (or 3) crashes during the wyvern fight (Reported via crash report tool)
• Sometimes, NPC audio overlaps with the event. For example, Laranthir talks to the Charr for the first time, but the Charr audio is about the choppers that “shouldn’t take off”.
• Enjoyed the demo revenant skills/gameplay. Can’t wait for it to be completed.
• Liked the new telegraphs: bright yellow orange, non-terrain obfuscating, and they animate into existence; they don’t just “popup”.