Guild Wars 2

Was fun the only glitch i found when u have to pick bombs to destroy the vine thing, as it happened that i had to use pick up twice as for 1st only animation of picking played but didnt pick it.

I am in Australia server and usually expecting lags but with this beta tests it seems to be manageable, it was good. no stress on stress test :P
rev is a fun and interesting prof… need time for me to explore more with traits and weapon combo
gliding was cool.
hope to see some improvement on fractal and additional dungeon maps or party missions in expansion.

EVERYTHING WRONG WITH HoT IN ONE POST:

Psyke. Made you look.

I understood that we were given a very limited amount of actual game content simply for means of a test, so I wasn’t expecting more than I got. I did get more than I expected, however. A few things:

• I liked my character suddenly talking while not in a cutscene. Cutscenes, while cinematic, also break immersion. It was nice to see my guy as more than a stoic monument to silence during actual gameplay.

• I’m pretty sure the Revenant skills were on 0s cooldown just so that we’d have most opportunity to play with them in the 2 hours allotted. If they aren’t seriously nerfed by then, I’m going to have no reason to play my guardian ever again!

• As mentioned by others, some sections were unintuitive, like how masteries were spent and used. A section in the Hero’s panel would fix this.

• I liked the new graphics for the area effects, especially the expanding/contracting poison circles. Nice new touch.

• I loved the glimpses of the new Modrem enemies, with both their new mechanics and look! Like that humanoid one and the OMG WHAT IS THAT THING IT’S GOT MY FACE

So far, very promising! I dearly hope I can be a part of another stress/beta in the future.

I thought the beta was great for a stress test.

Sure, there wasn’t a lot to do, but I’m glad I got to try it

I rolled thief at first (hoping we would be able to see what the specializations were).

I would like to say that I find the mastery interface a little confusing. I put one point in the mushroom one and could not use the mushroom pads to jump. Then I couldn’t put any more points into it even though I had 3 more mastery points. However, I was able to (very quickly i’d add) level it up through events.

My input for this is a) make the interface more straight forward and b) maybe make it harder to level up in it since that seemed too easy today. Although this could have been easy because its just a quick test idk, or maybe it gets exponentially harder as you progress.

Also, the Wyvern wasn’t as difficult as I expected. That was talked up a lot and I was nervous going into that fight, but everyone killed it way easy.

I didnt have any crash or fps related issues. Everything ran smooth with full graphics, except post processing because that bothers me – in the rest of the game, not HoT, didnt even try post processing in hot.

Everything else I really liked! I like the idea of the ‘adventures’ that popped up when we completed events. I didn’t get past a score of 60 today but it was still fun! I also really liked the art/design and being able to find new allies and new enemies so early into it! I did try revenant and I’ve read a lot of concerns from others but I think its too early to comment on that.

Thanks for letting us try it!!

Overall experiance:
First thing that i noticed is the FPS drop. I already had this from the 16th March patch. But my drop was even more in the beta. Second was the lags. But i cant tell for sure if it was caused by the stress test considering i had lags now and then during the whole day. (No its not my connection. that is working perfectly fine)

New class (prof):
Started with the Revenant class. I was kinda afraid that it would be kinda simulour as the other two heavy classes. But as it turns out, it feels very different. So i am happy to see this. However the hammer felt very slow in my opinion. Warrior for an example swings the hammer like its nothing. Sure it’s a two handed heavy weapon. But some possible tweaking might be good. Rather that’s increasing the speed on the revenant or slowing down the casting time on other classes that are able to use the hammer.

Beside that i am curious if the Revenant will be able to use more legends? If yes, how is this going to work? Will you be able to choose legends if there are more? Kinda like choosing a pet on ranger’ish? Or will this be determined by the traits or something?

Environment:
Felt very dynamic, looked great, events (adventures) where fun to do. Gets an A+! All thought it was very short. But on test like this its not about doing story, but about finding buggs / issues in the gameplay and such in my opinion.

Enemies:
They are definitely “smarter”. I had a good laugh when i saw couple of them picking up an unstable explosive and trowed that back at us. Me and a couple friends dropped this near them just to see what they would do. I also noticed that the enemies that are easier to kill are dodging. But i think this still can be improved. In the way of knowing how to encounter you (like a thief is using dagger storm to encounter ranger’s rapid fire) and dodging more often.

Final note:
I enjoyed testing out the HoT beta. Didn’t really find any bugs and such, so i think that Anet did a great job. Looking forward for more testing and of course the expansion itself.

PS: Please give the Thief Greatsword as weapon specialization I know rumors are that it will get the rifle. But this doesn’t add anything to the thief. Sure long range sniper’ish. But that is not what the thief stands for. The mobility, spawn in and out, bursting foe’s down, assassin’ish. That is what the thief makes unique and fun to play. Thus greatsword would fit here perfectly in my opinion.

Firstly, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to be a part of the stress test. I have no idea how I managed to be a part it, when I did not sign up for it.

Apart from the mushroom bug. I got nothing to report.

As for feedback, besides the understandable bugs that exist… Good Job!
I appreciate bite and bark or just bite; unlike many practices these days, mostly bark.
Looking forward to the expansion. Keep up the good work.

I’ll spare you my dramatic version. XD
I’m going back into the game, not going to waste my time on forum wars.

Really appreciate the efforts you guys put in in making this game worth investing in.

Dragons… Please, please for the love of all the pixels that make up beautiful females; don’t fry this handsome pervy Norn.
I really wish TP would have an invincible shell or trash can where I can crawl through the terrain without monsters rushing up to me and ask for my autograph violently.

For the First 2 Hours that you let us be there it was maybe the most smooth stress test I have participated in.
No Crashes not even a single one in the two hours, No noticeable lag either few Frame drops here and there but nothing serious.
So performance side it was surprisingly good.

Few bugs People flying on the roof on the wywern fight The wywern itself glitching to the roof or just dissapearing.

The confusing part was the Mastery UI even thou I personally knew you needed to “activate” the mastery lines and then get xp to it to get it working its not that clear yet from the UI so that is something you guys are probably already working on.
And it was somewhat clunky to use overall so that needs some work yet.
Gliding well it is clunky not as clunky as people have said it was or could be but yea it is bit clunky.
I think most of the problems come from the be in freefall before activating it and that the gliding animation itself looks bit stiff it would need to be bit more animated to feel good but as a mechanic yea it does what it is supposed to be doing glide.

Revenant oh boy. where to start….
Weapons perhaps well at least the few we had access to.
Hammer: Didn’t like it at all not sure what it was perhaps that the animations and the skills were bit well meh.

The autoattack was bit boring to say the least
The number two kinda had the feel of the hammer.
but it was brought down by the other skills it had the necessary UMPH that hammer should have but somewhat lackluster compared to say warriors hammer.

Didn’t like the number three skill at all I felt I lost the control of the character when I did it and at first I was not even sure if I was supposed to move with the animation or not it was bit confusing in the middle of the chaos.

The number four skill the reflect wall was a cool thing about the hammer it worked better than i hap hoped thou the lack of ranger mobs on the area kinda didn’t give enough opportunities to test it but overall it was a nice skill.

Number 5 DROP THE HAMMER oh well it kinda felt lackluster as well,
on wywern it was handy but against the normal mobs it felt bit lackluster again.
The overall feel from the hammer as a ranged weapon or as a hammer lacked the Umph a massive weapon like the hammer should have.

Mace oh boy now we are talking.
Autoattack chain was amazing the torment and poison you could deliver on a big group of mob was nice to look at and the skills themselfs felt like mace swings should feel like.
Number two skill might be bit op to be honest 3s cd and a 3s fire field that is fairly large it was not even hard to get 25 stacks of might with few blast finishers and few more revenants around so might be potential skill to be looked at.
Animation and feel wise it was awesome but the perma firefield might be bit op in certain places.

Number 3 blast finisher that travels forward damaging everything in its path?
Sign me up.
The number 2 and 3 combo on revenants mace was amazing to use but in all honesty might be bit op later down the line I was not even specced at might stuff and i had constant 5-9 stacks of might alone with these two skills and in groups easily over 15 and we capped it on several occasions

Axe felt like a grappling hook which was kinda amazing
Number 4 amazing shadow step skill all around the ability to target third mob in the line blitz trough them all and then line a firefield under their feet and blast them with the mace 3 was amazing combo to repeat again and again.

Number Five in theory it should have worked like the mesmer temporal curtain but I think cause the terrain on the map was so uneven it didn’t quite get the job done right but on the few places it did it was a pretty cool skill nothing else to say on it really.

The Legends well those didn’t quite hit the mark Jalis outshined the mallyx by a large amount due to the lack of conditions thrown by the enemy mobs. Both had their uses yes but jalis was just so much more usefull on the area we get to play at and mallyx was kinda useless on the wywern fight as well.
Also on the mechanic side of things was it intentional that if you changed one of the utility skills on the legends it also swapped the rest of them on the other legend? that was bit annoying to say the least.

Oh boy that is quite a large wall :S sry about that ^^
Overall feel from the Stress test and the Revenant was good some minor quirks here and there but nothing major of course the area we got to test was so small in the grand scheme of things but so far nothing glaringly broken poped up.

OtakuDFifty.2965:

I’ve found that if the Wyvern’s wingbeat knocked you into an updraft, you’d get tossed up an extreme distance. Not much of a problem once you have Gliding Basics, but without it… haha.

BTW, was the ability to glide by hitting an updraft even if you didn’t have Gliding Basics intentional?

After playing, I began wondering about this. What if people do not want the gliding mastery or choose something different first? How will they get to the Wyvern platform? And as you said, what if they are knocked off? Will it be “off limits” until they get the mastery?

My feedback to HoT Stresstest:

It ran pretty smooth and it was really nice to see a part of the new revenant skills.
Very interesting was the Wyvern fight, it would also be an interesting fight for a party of 5 in a dungeon or something.

Like others here i was a bit disappointed about the mastery panel. It is not very intuitive and you don’t really know if you spent a point in a mastery or not. I think a Window similar to the trait window would be better. In my oppinion the mastery panel should also appear in heros panel directly under the trait button.

You should als be able to start gliding more quickly … It isn’t that cool as i hoped it is because you have to fall free for a while until you are able to activate the gliding option… a bit earlier would be nice

The new map looked pretty nice, but unfortunately we was just able to see a small area… but for the first beta stresstest it was an eyecatcher. Especially the cave you are entering while you are doing the story sequence… pretty nice

I am really happy to see old friends like Majory or Kasmeer in the new story =)

In general a good job Anet

I really hope they rework gliding to be more like AION’s (outside of the Abyss). Doubletap to glide, steer into jetstreams, updrafts, etc.

You guys have used AION stuff before, y’all could look at what they did there.

Condi stacks infinite? Only for PvE?

I liked most of the stuff we were allowed to see (although it wasn’t much sadly).

What I didn’t like was the hammer on Rev, it feels very slow, long casting times and very static skills. And the #3 skill breaks your camera and movement. I appreciate the innovative skill visuals but if I point the camera somewhere it’s for a reason so please don’t take control from me just to show off the effects.

First of all, thanks for letting me be apart of the Stress Test for HOT. I do understand that it is in Beta and that things are still a work in progress, also that this beta stress test may not be the same as the end result.

Over all I enjoyed it, Loved the textures, the design and the animations. Having the characters talk i found amazing and a nice touch, other things like the helicopters falling out of the sky and landing right next to you i thought was also very neat. I never noticed and grafting or texture issues within the area, it all looked very smooth. So overall I found the area setting impressive.

I used a Revenant for the Test, new class, why not. It’s model I like the look of, the armor, the weapons and in a small way it reminded me of the select screen in Dragon Age 2 when you decided who Hawke was going to be. I used the Hammer most of the time as I found the Axe and Mace pretty much useless or perhaps it is just my style of play. Even with the hammer I found there were long periods of time with the Weapon Skills Activation, like skill5 for instance, it just seemed to take forever for that hammer to hit. I used the Dwarf spirit most the time, i think it just appealed more to me. I believe the Revenant would be an exciting class to play given the opportunity to explore more of an area with it.

I found the gliding pretty glitch, most the time I wouldn’t glide at all and just fall forever, other times it would throw me so high i died when I hit the platform. This made it incredibly hard to take a good part in the Wyvern’s Group Event (which i didn’t seem to have any of the problems listed by other testers when it came to the actual fighting) maybe because by the time I got over there, the thing would be almost dead. I can’t say it was lag as the rest of the time it all ran pretty smoothly.

The Mastery System, I think it’s interface is a little… yeah, rough, slapped together… don’t know why it hasn’t been given an icon at the top left screen or wasn’t added into the Hero tab under the Skills and Traits section, to me, i thought it would be more user friendly and keeps all your skills, Traits and Mastery all in one place. I mistakenly used 2 point on one Mastery when I was trying to work out how to use it, normally it would ask if ya sure, accept or a cancel select would be nice. I think an Interface like the WvW tab would also suit the Mastery System well.

All in all, i enjoyed the 4hrs of Revenant/ HOT time I got, I had hardly any lag issues, I found the people who were also testing incredibly helpful and sharing and I am very much looking forward to the time when I get so smash out HOT in all it glory.

Joey.2769:

Condi stacks infinite? Only for PvE?

I think more likely just for those boss battles.

Joey.2769:

Condi stacks infinite? Only for PvE?

It’s a 100 so far, it doesn’t matter if it made to pvp or wvw, if you let it happen you deserve to die or it will get cleansed quickly like always.

To add to my previous feedback: one minor nitpick, and one major problem i see.

1. color channels on the new armor. I really hope that those are just because it’s beta, and there will be more on release. Single color channel for an armor piece just doesn’t cut it.

2. Revenant legends, synergy and gear. Sorry, it just doesn’t work. Even with celestial stat set (which in PvE is really crappy, by the way). Mallyx legend can be sensibly utilized only with a condi set. Which is a complete waste on Jalis (and i bet most, if not all, of still unrevealed legends). Jalis might perhaps get a synergy with an offensive or support legend, if there is any (depending on traits i guess), but it’s likely the worst possible combination with demon stance. Oh wait, any other legend i can think of would be a worst possible combination with demon stance as well.

TL/DR: celestial gear is bad, and will not make matching two different legends (requiring different stat sets) work. And without it you will end with one-legend builds, which will make the already low-choice profession even duller.

I was happy with the graphical detail and story depth, HOT seems like it’s heading in the right direction.

• No crashing or lag issues happened.
• Mushroom mastery never worked for me, not sure if this was intentional.
• Blowtorching the 50 Tendrils was fun but anyone who says they got 100 on the subsequent quest is a liar.
• “Glider deployment lag” Is a term we will be hearing A LOT about if it’s not fixed. Especially with the deployment being directly responsible with how far you can travel.
• Revenant class was fun but it needs some form of swiftness.
• 1.08 Lord of Destruction flashbacks all day long. There needs to be a way to reset mastery points, if there is one already I missed it and I looked for over 20 minutes.

Good Job Anet im really looking forward to playing this expansion in the near future!

Hello, my name is Bovan. I tend to do PvP as more of a amusing distraction and I have never really had any interest in WvW. While I do value open world stuff and story my main goal in this game has always been dungeons. So everything I’m about to say will be from a dungeon perspective and mostly related to the new class unless specified.

Before I go into any details on mainly the Revenant (the one thing I’m most excited for and interested in) I wanted to give some huge compliments on the performance and latency side of things. I haven’t noticed a single lagspike or FPS drop despite having been online for the entire test. I had huge concerns regarding FPS knowing the zones would be so large, consist of 3 different layers and filled with plants and bouncing mushrooms, but this test took all my worries away.

As for the zone itself everything looked very crisp and clean. I don’t like large open areas personally, but the first story instance where you went down under the rocky floor into a green canopy like area was absolutely amazing.

The events were fun and interesting, but I felt very punished for being down on the lower platform (floor?) killing mobs because every mob I ran towards was either being sniped by someone doing the sniper event, or they died because of some other reason I couldn’t quite determine. Another thing that caused issues for me was at least one of the vines that spit out enemies was on a steep slanted ledge, and I couldn’t hit it from the lower side of that ledge. It made moving out of AoEs more frustrating because I had to stay on this one side to be able to hit it, but I suppose we have a dodge button for this stuff. Might be worth looking into that hitbox though.

The wyvern fight was really cool. It did however felt a bit too easy. I quickly learned you could melee it without any issues whatsoever as long as you stayed behind it. I feel once we get the mastery where it won’t be able to knock you down anymore, this just becomes a loot pinata. The only thing I was unhappy with was how long it took to kill it once it got upscaled by a large amount of people. Granted most people were playing a new class in celestial gear, but the very first fight took so long that I was starting to get bored halfway through. Later on near the end of the test with a small group it was just perfect.

Now onto the thing I took the most time to examine, the Revenant.

(hammer)
The class felt very fluid with mace/axe but rather slow and clunky with a hammer. I’m aware it kind of goes with the weapon’s theme but it didn’t make the hammer gameplay very interesting. Phase Smash is a visually pleasing ability but unfortunately I didn’t find much use for it. The main issue was that it locked you into the animation, made your character model disappear, and mobs were still able to hit you. A small evade frame would do wonders for the skill. Overall the damage from hammer felt really low and kind of passive. I’m aware the class isn’t finished and that we were using celestial gear, but it felt too low to be of use. The dark field from Field of the Mists and 100% projectile finisher from Hammer Bolt are both really neat ideas.

(mace/axe)
The auto-attack chain felt good and my original worry about Manifest Toxin’s chaining being difficult to aim was taken away instantly. Searing Fissure’s cast time is in my opinion way too large. I’ve had moments where I canceled the cast because in my mind it felt it should have went off already. It’s not fun to stand around for over a second waiting for this one attack to go off. Especially if you see another fire field and you quickly want to blast it with Echoing Eruption. Which nicely brings me to Echoing Eruption. This is a fun skill and I could not get enough of it. Usefulness however I’m having some concerns. The blasts aren’t visible enough and I had a hard time figuring out roughly how and where to aim it so I would blast my fire field twice. By the time I got the hang of it I noticed the 2nd blast wouldn’t even be close enough to give me might. If everyone is stacking up in a dungeon I feel I have to walk backwards, wait for the Searing Fissure cast time, move back a little further, cast Echoing Eruption and then walk into melee range again. What this would gain me is 3 might, and 6 might for my allies (I’m convinced you can get 2 might blasts for allies, although I haven’t tested that). It doesn’t feel rewarding for the Revenant himself. More importantly, using it against a wall makes the blasts disappear. I suppose it’s needed for balance purposes and people not getting 3 hits and blasts in on the same target, but this just doesn’t seem all that beneficial for dungeons and close spaces.

Frigid Blitz felt like the smoothest and nicest ability of the lot. Its quick, it can shadowstep you out of danger, and it just felt really fluid to chain in before or after other abilities. I feel the same about Temporal Rift.

(part 2 in next post)

(Jalis Ironhammer)
The heal felt where it should be because of the added effect of removing conditions, can’t complain. Inspiring Reinforcement fits the stance and felt good to use, but personally I would quite like to see the animation be sped up a little. When you want to travel around and blast the field for swiftness, you currently need to wait a moment for the animation to land and the field to form before you can blast it. That aside the skill does what it’s meant to do although the stability felt a little over the top. I feel for the sake of balance in non-PvE areas this might need to be toned down a tad. Forced Engagement feels good to use as well, but the energy cost felt too high. I understand this is needed for PvP purposes to prevent players locking someone down with a CC that has no cooldown and you can’t cleanse, but for PvE I never had a good reason to use the skill because of it’s high energy cost. I don’t really want to touch on Vengeful Hammers. It’s just perfect, and I sure hope it stays unblockable as well including PvP purposes. Rite of the Great Dwarf seems good in it’s current iteration as well. I wish you could dodge during the cast time but that would probably not be very healthy.

(Mallyx the Unyielding)
This is the stance I used for most of the testing because of the simple reason that it offered more damage and control instead of defense. The heal felt very lacking. It’s in my eyes way too low unless you have a high amount of condition on you, and if you do you’ll melt from those conditions shortly after the heal. I would like to see a small increase to the base heal and the heal per condition on you to be toned down a little. And why is the cast time above 1 second? As for Mallyx in general, getting the required conditions to trigger the bonus effects was very difficult. This may be up to me not being able to play the class correctly yet, but it just wasn’t triggering often enough in scenarios where I wasn’t being attacked by several condition applying mobs. Banish Enchantment is in my eyes fine. The energy cost felt good, the cast time is nice and quick, the damage is an added bonus and it removes boons. Awesome. This seems rather deadly in PvP with it’s current cast time and energy cost however. Only used Pain Absorption when an ally was dying from conditions so I haven’t done much with this. The energy cost felt high but other than that it does what it was meant to do. Unyielding Anguish is my all time favorite skill. Hate the cripple it applies but what it does, how it works and the stunts you can pull off with it is just brilliant. It was difficult to test but to me it seemed like you could stack the fields and make every tick of it remove defiance during the wyvern fight. What I started doing after the first fight was pool my energy and stack 3 fields on top of it when it started to take off. Even when there was barely anyone nearby (let alone using a CC skill) it just knocked the wyvern down instantly. But again, I couldn’t test this properly with all the other people nearby. Embrace the Darkness was the main reason I saw no reason to leave Mallyx’s stance in the beta. 10% stats is the biggest damage bonus I could get from all the utilities so I started pooling energy just for this skill. The cast time on it wasn’t fun to use and much like Searing Fissure it felt too long to trigger.

(traits)
Obviously I didn’t get to test every trait in full detail, but a couple of them stood out. Opportune Extraction and Spontanous Destruction feel too passive. I like good play to be rewarded with better results, but this to me looks too powerful in PvP just because a computer can react faster than a player can. I know the class isn’t finished, but Bolstered Anguish seems out of place in the trait line and I fear this will go the same way as some other traits currently already in the game. Eye for an Eye’s taunt duration looks a bit long on paper especially combined with Improved Aggression. The cooldown on Reflexive Summon seems a bit on the high side as well. Swirling Mists’s orbs were… well, where were they? I didn’t see any of these orbs while trying to trigger them on purpose. Cruel Repercussion’s text is vague. Negated how? Blind? Block? Evaded? I couldn’t figure this out in the short time I played with it.

(general)
All in all I’m still as excited for the Revenant class as I’ve always been. The theme of the class, the way it plays, the resource system and everything is right up my alley. Not going to comment on the damage because the class isn’t finished yet along with having celestial gear, but it worries me currently to say the least. I’m hoping for some non-condition based weapons and a more raw damage stance soon. It probably needs some solid damage multipliers in the traits to keep up with the other classes. Crossing fingers for raw damage swords.

Fighting the Wyvern was great and it had no timer which I liked. The event chain kept me active and had good rewards as in loot and exp. It was awesome to be able to fly with the glider. I didn’t have much lag with all the visual effects. Overall it was a positive event.

Alright, I’ll start out by saying…wow. The look of the beta was stunning. Better yet, my fps seemed solid throughout the entire 2 hours. Max graphics and GemFX mixed for a great looking experience. But as we all know, looks aint everything.

The Story Instance:

I loved all of the voice acting here. Not much text to read. Just sit back and let things play out in fully voiced conversations. Having the player character have a voice was a nice touch, even though I knew it was coming (as WoodenPotatos mentioned such prior). I know people might say “But that’s not what I envisioned my character to sound like.” True, for those that RP (and I do RP) you have a voice in your head fro your character, but come on, it’s the game’s story, not yours.

I wanted to take the option that was locked out, but I’ll be able to come release, no sense in bashing it ‘cause not everything I want is there. The fights weren’t at all that hard until the boss guy summoned his dogs. Man those things are annoying. Overall, not super hard (at least for me) but was a nice fight. Not much more to say about the story part.

Map Section:

Small portion of the map that was open to us didn’t have that much in it. But when I zoomed out on the map and saw just how big the map really is I was excited. I can’t wait to have free reign to explore and soar. And also considering we’ll have three levels to traverse just makes it that much bigger.

The mobs were the same old same old, but it’s just a demo. Further into the jungle we go the more we’ll see.
Now, the wyvern was just awesome. That’s the kind of boss fight I’ve been waiting for.
Will I fall off or can I hang on? This fight makes you need to position yourself to not die instantly or fall off the edge. The damage you take (though based on gear) wasn’t too much nor too little. Overall was a really fun fight. Hope to see more engaging fights like this one.
On a side note: +1 to the breakbar mechanic, I really liked that.

The Revenant:

Now I know things are likely to change, but I would like to voice my concerns with the class as I played it today.

The weapons are pretty cool. Hammer was interesting as a ranged weapon. Drop the Hammer seemed a little slow to cast, and in pvp if you didn’t see it coming you’re either blind or new (or both). I’d think it’d be a little too easy to dodge. Haven’t seen the effects of Skill #4 (Sorry I don’t know the exact names of the skills) since nothing really used projectiles. I didn’t like how long Skill #3 kept you in place. I know some skills do (e.g. Meteor Shower or Barrage) but this skill just didn’t feel fluid like others do. Needless to say, I didn’t use it much. Skill #2 was really spammable, but I can’t say if that’s good or bad considering the gear I was in. The auto seemed to be solid. One thing I noted was that it is 100% projectile finisher and attacks at the same speed as many other classes’ autos (e.g Necro staff auto). Will those skills be tweaked as well?

Mace/ax felt…underwhelming to me. I actually really liked the ax offhand, but mace…blah. The skills seemed a little too spammable and the auto just seemed weak. I know there’s more weapons to come for the Rev, but I didn’t feel I had any sort of burst damage there. I tried the wyvern fight with both setups, I liked hammer the best overall. Mace Skill #2 needs to tell you it’s a fire field as it doesn’t currently. Skill #3 was nice, but seemed weak. Ax #4 seemed really good, wouldn’t change anything with that one as of now. Ax #5 didn’t see much action so I can’t say one way or another.

The Legends:

First thing to note is that you basically have access to two heal skills if both are off cd. That just seems a little unfair. The CD on legends is only 10s, seems a little too short to me.

The dwarf skills are pretty nice. The heal is effective and clears condis (has good synergy with the Mallyx skill to pull condis to you. Skill #7 I think). The Stab field…oh boy. At wyvern I just spammed the skill. I could maintain 5 stacks no problem. Longer CD for that one is needed imo. Skill #8 and #9 I think are nice and I can’t say one way or the other at this time. The elite’s cast time seemed a bit long. I’d shorten the cast time but maybe add on a cooldown to it.

Mallyx skills are really cool. I like the effects they have. The heal is effective and I can’t really see it being too strong. Skill #7 is really strong with the new boon, Resistance. Skill #8 I can’t say yet, mobs normally don’t have boons to strip. Skill #9 is awesome. It’s like an instant knockback but not exactly CC. I can see it being fun in pvp/wvw. The elite I didn’t even touch. Why? Just didn’t see the use of it during the beta.

Overall good, but there’s some work to be done. I know what we’re seeing is far from the finished product, but just wanted to share my thoughts about it all. I look forward to the release of HoT though. Can’t wait to explore the new areas with my own characters. Cheers~

Some impressions based on the stress test:

Map/Events
Overall, I felt that the event-chain was fine during the stress test. I do however wonder if/how this will scale with fewer players. Especially depositing the 50 bombs already felt over-long even with the NPC’s giving a hand.

Furthermore, being repeatedly rooted for 8 seconds is nothing short of annoying. My inexperience with the revenant class aside, for any class/build not specifically aimed at condition removal, this is a drag. It didn’t really make the encounter more difficult or got me anywhere close to being killed, it was just an unnecessary downtime/annoyance.

Masteries
I kinda expected this to be integrated into the hero panel, so there was some initial confusion about accessing it. Additionally, the point allocation wasn’t as intuitive as I would have thought based on how the traits currently work. Needed some extra clicking till I got it figured out. Maybe this could be done more in line with what we currently have (hero panel, trait allocation)?

Glider
Very promising as such, but feels a bit clunky at this point. When deploying the glider, I didn’t like the activation-delay (time from jump till you get the “press button” notification) , which often resulted in the gilder getting activated later than I would have liked. I’d prefer to be able to activate it manually with a key-press. Also, I’m not sure if I was supposed to be able to gain altitude again while flying, at least I couldn’t figure out anything other than slowly gliding downwards.

Revenant
The overall visual impression was very good. However, the actual game-play felt repetitive fast due to the locked-in-place skills. I’m not sure what is planned here, but I feel that if there were 6 instead of 3 utilities available per legend, then at least there would be some kind of build diversity. Same goes for healing and elite skill, though it was less obvious there. Even with more legends available, the 15 fixed skills would still bother me as such, no matter which 2 legends I picked at a given time.

Overall impression
Server stability, frame-rate and general polish of the content felt very good to me. Noticed no game-breaking bugs apart from some revenant-skills (a matter of balancing rather than bugs I imagine) and matters of convenience such as the clunky glider or the somewhat confusing mastery-window.

Feedback on actual performance during stress tests:
One crash during first one with graphics setting at best performance except fro rendering sample was set at native, character model limit at high and Character model quality at low. I’m not even sure what I was doing at the time except trying to back up, given my crash report had an errant “ss” in the text box. The crash was totally with out any warning….no excessive lag or anything. I set my graphics on the second test to “autodetect” for my nVidia GTX760, but only played for approximately 1 hour and 40 minutes of the test. There were no crashes and no perceivable lag spikes. I did not actually check my FPS (my bad). Things definitely seemed to run smoother in this playable demo than in the normal game. The current live game appears slightly framey at the higher settings.

I have nothing bad to say about the test, no lag or stuttering in the new map the new boss is interesting, well mabye the new adventure was boring.

The living story sequence was quite intriguing. It came as a pleasant surprise that my toon was actually “talking”.

With regard to Masteries, it would be nice if there is a way we could reset it when we eventually accumulate enough points—even for a fair amount to pay an NPC (like the old trait reset).

Fighting the Wyvern was interesting. However, with the continuous might-stacking, it was easy to kill even with just a party of 5 Revs. I’m sure you will make this more challenging in the expansion.

The Rev’s hammer skills are actually sweet…I love the reflect that moves with the toon during fights. I thought “Release Hammers” was awesome animation. On the other hand, skill 1 motion seemed a little awkward. The swinging motion looked more appropriate for a ball chain. But maybe it only looked that way for a female human toon.

Switching between Dwarf Stance and Demon Stance was very helpful during the boss fight because we could use both heals right away. Having said that, it may also be exploited because we could use both heals right away.

Generally, the stress test was an enjoyable experience and I do look forward to, among other things:

the story’s progression in the future; bigger maps to explore where I could glide on a click’s notice, rather than waiting for something to trigger it; and the convenience of weapon-swapping.

Thank you for letting me participate in this event!

Reading through the posts it looks like some people were expecting a completed game. Clearly that’s not the case.

I really liked the first piece of content. It was basically what was released in the PAX events. The only real glitch I had was when porting back from the Wyvern event, a cinematic was already underway on the battlefield, which never rendered. I got the audio with just a black screen except for the button to end it. The Wyvern event also scaled nicely. Large groups took longer because less people knew what they were doing. A small group of just five of us took it down in probably less than a minute. There were no issues with lag or frame rates.

On the Revenant, it clearly had a limited skill set that would be expanded before release. I like heavy armor, so it was fun to play. I preferred the sceptre/axe combo in close combat fighting rather than the ranged hammer. The exotic weapons we started with were really nice as was the armor. The exotic weapon loot drops left much to desire, but that may have just been my luck.

Took a bit to figure out the mastery panel, but once I did it was okay. Maybe a tip prompt would be helpful there. Can’t wait to try the legendary precursor line. The deployment of the glider would be nicer if it was tied to a key once you entered free fall. Since it was like a closed story map I couldn’t glide to the bottom of the jungle in some areas. I would expect the open content to allow me to.

Other than that, I’m looking forward to more testing as HoT moves forward.

The wyvern should be a lot of fun once the difficulty is adjusted. I liked the pocket raptors. The mushroom mastery was a tad confusing until I was told to activate it. I assumed it would activate whatever mastery I had last put a point into. You might not notice while.playing revenant, but I played a staff ele in the demo (which I play quite a bit) and the attack speed was definitely faster (not as fast as quickness, but definitely faster). So I assumed they gave us a mini jolt of quickness to make things easier. The husks seemed to just keel over after attacking them to about 85% health, which seemed odd. I had no connection issues, though I always play on Autodetect.

I am an “older” player (really older). I do not have the skill or computer and gaming savy of younger players. That said, I enjoyed the HoT stress test a lot. The revenant seems very different from the old professions and I’m anxious to see how character development from level one progresses. The graphics in the map, small as it was, were amazing, and the “new” skills and weapons such as sniper rifle were exciting. Switching utilities rather than weapon sets is an interesting approach. I played only the hammer in the time available. Like others I’d like to see a new race or races but that’s not the subject. The sniper rifle “jammed” once but was quickly fixed by dropping and re-equipping. The wyvern fight flying – mob laying down deadly fire.- was exciting, although it seems that attacking at melee range and surviving was virtually impossible (for me). And when “gliding” or attempting to was difficult achieve distance to land at desired location. Perhaps I just haven’t learned the “trick”. Anyway, stay at it. I think It’ll be a success – although I too am concerned about the new cost factor. Although “free to play” I find I’m spending more on GW2 than I ever did or other games. Good business plan already LOL. More when/if I think of it.

The only concern was about the fact that the ability of the new class will be visually showy than others. But everything is fine.

Thanks for the invitation, Anet. Everything was great. Run all four hours. Come on more tests!

I’ll go past the fan boy part and go straight down to the point.

I was bored.

Now let me get a little more detailed.

First time trying to connect to beta: Game Froze. Understandable since it’s a stress test. I like that we were able to skip the story from the get go.

Once I got to the actual map I was surprised how little was open. It was barely the size of swamps in Queensdale. Aside from 1 “mastery point”, there was no PoIs, no vistas, no hearts. I’m an explorer, but there was nothing to explore. It felt… Empty, if you will.

Activities were just… well… boring to be honest. I’m sure it’ll be more interesting once the leaderboards come in place, but running around with flamethrower was just about as exciting as watching it being done on Point of Interest stream… (not at all)

Gliding was fun. It was really fun. Probably my favorite part of the Beta. But (and it’s a big “BUT”) the delay on the glider is just too long… In my understanding it’ll get faster as we progress the line? Because if not, it feels… broken almost… clunky. Although “flying” itself is tons of fun. The problem is that aside from the dragon fight and that one mastery point, we had nowhere else to glide other than to our deaths off the map… Kind of sad about that.

Three event chain was nice but short as it could be completed in under 10 minutes. Then the dragon fight was something really fun. First time me and my friends did it, we were excited and challenged. But after we came back 20-30 minutes later there was nobody there, so we three manned the boss as it was rather predictable. At one point my glider threw me up so high in the air I got the “going out of zone” warning message. And that little bug was probably the most exciting part of my gliding play…

Revenant was rather confusing at first. But got a hang of it rather quickly. And as much as I enjoyed playing it, it’s still far from becoming my main class. Weapon swapping would be nice. More weapon verities would also be kind of nice too. Hammer felt weird to use as ranged, and DPS was very low. Mace/Axe was much more fun, but DPS was mediocre at most. Fun skills and all. It felt kind of empty as I had no power in switching anything on the skill bar. Almost like it was a cookie cutter class with set parameters and limited to what you can do. I think traits will be the only thing that will make this class feel personalized, but if I have to hunt them down with the current trait acquisition system, I don’t think I’ll be touching the Revenant for a while.

To summarize:

- Revenant
a) Fun
b) Limited
c) Kind of cookie cutter-ish
d) Low DPS

- Map
a) Dry Top-ish
b) very small
c) Limited verity
d) Not much to do at all
e) Don’t understand why the dragon fight was located in separate instance

- Beta
a) Very limited
b) Nothing much to do
c) Everything could be completed in under 20 minutes
d) Nowhere near as exciting as anticipated

It’s incredible how many people forget that this was a test of the servers and not the expansion. All the feedback regarding skills, stacks of conditions, and lack of content, etc, are mostly pointless. That was not the point for this test.
I will admit that it was pretty boring being confined to that small area and being so limited in what we could do with skills and masteries and whatnot but I made the most of it. I stayed in for the entire two hours both times. During my time, I didn’t experience any significant latency issues, graphic anomalies, or server disconnects. I had one crash, which I sent in a bug report for, that kicked me back to the desktop.
Having said all that….I think the revenant will be a fun class to play. I like the new skills, the animations, and I also like the interaction from the NPCs being more dynamic. I cannot wait to try out the additions for the other classes when HoT releases. The new expansion should definitely breathe new life into the game.

Feedback on Revenant:

Hammer weapon clearly outdid mace/axe combo for the boss fight but I think this is due to the nature of the boss. Hammer ability 1 had a 1200 range which is Ok but ability 2 should be nerfed to 900. It has a lot of damage and virtually no cooldown. I suspect we could have killed the boss from far away by just spamming this ability. 3 and 5 are nice but I feel they are too similar to each other, hopefully they will be changed slightly (like maybe 3 turned into a cone AOE with much smaller range than 2). Wall on ability 4 looked nice too but this wasn’t tested at all by mobs in beta.

Mace/Axe combo was bad for this test but it looks really good for dungeons.
Mace 2 followed by 3(almost no cooldowns so we can spam this) gives almost permanent might stacks on its own and this could be too powerful in all the stackathon dungeons. Ability 4 with axe feels powerful and great to execute but 5 seems pointless in pve because mobs were rarely near the rift to be effected by it (not to mention all the bosses in game have stability up). Given its cc nature more testing is needed for its PVP effectiveness but I would like it changed atleast for PVE.

Stance Feedback:

Jali’s feels powerful and very effective for bossfights. But I want the ability 9 changed. It costs way too much energy to keep it up for even a small duration. Given revenant is more powerful constantly switching and spending small amounts of energy on all kinds of abilities, it seems out of place and I never saw it being used by anyone around me. Hopefully it will be redesigned to be more bursty at a lower cost . Jali’s elite seemed too spammable and probably deserves a cost increase.

The demon stance seemed very weak but again i suspect it will shine more in pvp. Conditions generally did nothing to the boss so it seemed useless.

Swapping stances gave almost limitless healing ability and this is something that should be changed. I was swapping to demon stance just to heal and use abilty 7 to negate all ongoing condition effects before going back to Jali.

Environment Feedback:

Graphically the game looked great without any lag or performance issues. The new fire effect looked good too and I did notice they cost less on my GPU to render on highest settings. Hopefully Anet brings this to all the boss fights. I have crashed atleast 50 times on Teq because of the poison aoe effect overloading by GPU (at lowest possible settings).

Environment looked great too but hopefully the constant “fall to death” valleys at every 100 yards is only for a very few maps. Gliding around is great but I want to feel the world to be big instead of constantly being stopped by some unpassable environment. Anet tried the same in drytop and I could not play the map for more than a couple of weeks (got my achieves and never been back there but I do like to go back and farm in SW). I would like vertical climbing in the game but there should be an explorable map down below too. So my feedback would be not to do more 3D Mario worlds in the new expansion. For me GW2 is about killing stuff, not to take part in a giant Jumping Puzzle.

Thanks for reading and letting me participate. I enjoyed the new content (and improvement to old systems) but I really hope some bigger and more expansive maps are present in the game.

So much has been said already so I will keep it short.

- overall: I love the Revenant. Big props to the devs. I also loved gliding, that was a stroke of genius.
- major: Please move the mastery UI to the hero panel. If it won’t find integration there, please make finding the mastery UI more noticeable or intuitive to find. Also: opening the current mastery UI can interfere with gameplay.

- minor: mushroom mastery didn’t work. Tried really hard, reloading didn’t work in my case.
- minor: don’t know if intended but the unreachable skillpoint was reachable using hammer skill 3.
- minor: I was unable to ditch the blowtorch in the new event to extinguish the vines. Had to wait for the event to finish, or leave combat and WP.

I played a Revenant this Beta so I’ll leave a comment about them. Since this Beta is basically a Demo from PAX and Rezz I don’t see how to comment much on those.

1. Revenant – The skill set looks very interesting. Jalis was very easy to understand (that’s why probably most played with that Legendary) but Mallyx was a bit complicated. I can see Mallyx like a condition manipulator (which I applause for bringing a new playstyle) but with Celestial right now and the time limit I wasn’t able to theorycraft much. Mace seems like a fine condi weapon but we’ll need an OH that works too. Also I

I don’t see Axe being used much because the pull radius is really small. If it was like Temporal Curtain it might be better.

I have a problem with Hammer’s 3rd skill. The animation is really slow and as cool as it looks I think it should be faster.

Elites seem a bit underwhelming. I’m affraid that they don’t end up like Elementalist’s Elites. Their duration is really low to make any difference.

As for the zone it was very fun to play them all, and I was happy to see how we all organized together to beat the Legendary Wyveryn. t was an interesting fight and I think he was toned down in the Beta so I’m expecting more power from him in the release. We’re no longer in starter zones, fights should be challenging like in Orr.

Follow up after 2nd round,
I did get all 5 mastery points that were available in the Beta and tentacle run is much better if you ‘know the path’ and could use the broken mushroom on the end to start the path over again (I think I got 66 total and there was an option to get out of /100). However, I foresee the event being done a few times and then being done with it. It feels a bit tedious and too repetitive (nice if there was various tentacle types worth more and less points).

By the way for all you wondering, Mushroom mastery did activate but it was near the 3-minute left mark of the second round of Beta. I had mastery points in it and was doing various smiting for the next round event when an onscreen message was activated that I had ‘learned’ the skill so I assume it was disabled for most of the Beta.

The Mushroom leap is basically a launch upwards (the one I used just underneath the rifle platform) to a predetermined spot in the middle area. It’s nothing like the Wildstar mushrooms which actually was a bit disappointing; also, glider ability option did not activate during launch.

You do not need to have the Mushroom Mastery equipped to activate it. IMO, “equipping” should probably be removed entirely but it appears to only be how experience is allocated to the mastery line which was disabled so it may change. It would be nice if the logic followed similar to WvW xp where each level gave you one mastery point and from there, you just spent and allocated regardless of what you had equipped at the time.

Kieran Axeblade.1756:

It’s incredible how many people forget that this was a test of the servers and not the expansion. All the feedback regarding skills, stacks of conditions, and lack of content, etc, are mostly pointless. That was not the point for this test.
I will admit that it was pretty boring being confined to that small area and being so limited in what we could do with skills and masteries and whatnot but I made the most of it. I stayed in for the entire two hours both times. During my time, I didn’t experience any significant latency issues, graphic anomalies, or server disconnects. I had one crash, which I sent in a bug report for, that kicked me back to the desktop.
Having said all that….I think the revenant will be a fun class to play. I like the new skills, the animations, and I also like the interaction from the NPCs being more dynamic. I cannot wait to try out the additions for the other classes when HoT releases. The new expansion should definitely breathe new life into the game.

keep in mind this is the part of the expansion that is supposed draw people in, Wow them, and make them realize how much Hot has to offer.
You dont make a boring demo if you can avoid it. You can assume that everything else is going to be so much better later on, but what are you basing that on? Im not saying they needed more content, but the content they showed wasnt much better/deeper than anything else we have seen.

I think you also got a good look at, for right now, the direction they are going with revenant, it may change, but if it does, it will be in part based on feedback here. If you think this areas content wasnt engaging, say why, let them know, they are still developing it, your feedback may be useful. If its not, they will ignore it. Dont assume there is going to be so much different, and then end up dissapointed when things arent too different later, afterall if you never told them you didnt like XYZ they will assume you did.

Cirian.8917:

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.

Thank you so much for this!

And the best thing that I’ve seen so far… No hearts! At least none that we can see from this area and screen shot.

Only needed 30 mins to see all. More content should have been provided. At begin no lags, later i had heavy skill lags.

Masterysystem: didnt had good look at it, as i couldnt really use them and didnt have enough points to spend.

Revenant: There could have been more traitlines, other weapons and other gear, then you could judge, with only 2 weapon sets and one gearset i can just say his damage is quite low. Still miss the damage multipliers in the traitlines, hope they are in the other 2 lines

I haven’t read any previous replies in this thread so that my feedback of this stress test remain unbiased. Here goes:

Overall, I felt the demo was very entertaining, if a bit repetitive and a tad rough around the edges.
Story:
The story was very well done and has me super excited for the release of the expansion. This was true before this event, but I have reached a fever pitch now. I really liked that the enemies had dialogue as well. Nice touch.

Revenant:
The Revenant was incredible fun to play, but, like the events, it started to feel somewhat repetitive after awhile. The weapon skills seem balanced, but I feel like the utility skills were a tad overpowered, if only because the cooldown for them is almost nonexistent because of the use of the energy bar. The energy bar got refilled almost constantly which led to using the elite and utility skills extremely often; a lot more often than other classes. The long cooldown on the healing skills seems fair, however, given that the Revenant technically has two healing skills available at any given time. I also liked that the passive traits sort of built on each other for the Revenant.

Mastery System:
The Masteries, in and of themselves, are a very innovative idea and, I think, are the correct step forward for this game.That being said, the mastery system menu was very confusing for me to the point that it was almost unusable. In order to actually spend a mastery point for one skill in a line, you have to click the bar with the skill you want which then widens the bar across the screen. Then, you have to click the icon on this long bar for a prompt to make sure you’re choosing the right mastery skill. There didn’t seem to be any obvious indication suggesting how to go about this easily. I had to clumsily click through the menu for 5 minutes until I figured it out. If I may make a suggestion, I would advise putting the mastery system menu on a tab next the skillpoint and traits tab in the hero panel, also.

Lastly, as far as performance is concerned, I felt like my framerate was unusually low for the duration of the session. I usually have about 35 to 40 fps during regular play with lots of character models on screen. But, during the test, I was sitting somewhere between 20 and 30 constantly. The environment, I think, seemed to put some stress on my system, more so than usual.

Final words:
The story was excellent and I greatly look forward to playing through it. The revenant deserves a little tweaking, if only to prevent it from being too overpowered compared to other classes. And the mastery system needs some serious attention in order to simplify its execution. Also, Pocket Raptors are adorable.

EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention was that the gliding (In which I spent some mastery points during the test) was well polished, in my opinion. I didn’t see any issues with that skill.

Hi all.

1. There was a problem with Wyverne fight when the Boss was randomly appears and dissapears on the platform before and after the flight-firebreathe-phase.
2. I got 3 crashes right after the Wyvern landing when i was close to the Boss.
3. I couldn’t use Mushrooms to jump with 1 point in new Mastery system – is it right?

Everything else i liked a lot so thank you =)

Revenant is very fun and enjoyable class to play. I did testing on traits and the map.

Revenant Trait:
-Last 3rd Trait Line have one 300 ferocity… Why not add power on it as Revenant need power to hit kitten some mobs? I feel Revenant is little weakling but I will see it future if we plan to test beta again or official it on the GW2.
-Some of heal trait lists not working or not understand how to work. How it is effective to support the group? I don’t get it. I did test on other players to heal at the boss. They aren’t get healing from fields or from any skills.

Mastery:
-glide is great to use. It is good start to learn.
-Hard to find the mastery window. It took me searching it like 50 mins to hour. Same with my friends that struggle to find it.
- Mastery skills is better to move up to Hero panel. We always use the skills are in Hero panel.

Map:
-Glide to skill point is hard timing to reach it. I don’t have problem with that one. It’s better to start off us to practice.
-Boss. It’s look like easy to farm the rare bags in each 15 mins. Sometime I got move different map after left the boss and find the boss map start to spawn in 5 mins later. Maybe it is glitches.
- Boss getting seriously conditions as much as three times stacks than capping like 70 confusions, Terror, and more. Poor the boss. Anet did main post about it for comfortable condition players to do it. I think its good idea. Thank for main post, Anet.
-The flamethrower event: it is continue event and not get credit. Did I missed something about it?

Thank you Anet for letting me get in the beta! I’m forward to it!

Thank you Anet for letting me participate in the stress test. I really enjoyed the opportunity. It was clear from entering the map that it was just the demo version that was being used, so I played with that in mind, not really looking for bugs or anything, although I did find an odd floating rock in the terrain. I sent that to support as a terrain issue.

Even though this was only a stress test, I haven’t watched any of the demos, so I was happy to get in to it and play around.

I played through the story the first time I entered and thought it was done well, although there were a few places I wasn’t sure the dialogue matched what was shown in the chat box for the npcs. It was fairly fast paced and some of it wasn’t clear until I read the chat too. Not sure if that was intentional since it is a character and not everyone speaks perfectly. Overall, it was a nice glimpse into what may come.

The events seemed well timed for what was available. I don’t think that they were too long or too short. I agree with others that it was enjoyable not having a timed Wyvern fight.

Playing the revenant was enjoyable. I’m looking forward to hearing about other features that will be available to it. And I agree with others that the armor is really well done.

The adventures, gliding, bouncing mushrooms, and new mordrem creatures are great and it is exciting to think of all the things that we don’t even know about yet.

The only downside, in my mind, was the mastery system. Although it seems some found it easy, I thought it was difficult to understand. My first thought was that it was in the hero panel. It took me awhile to figure out how to access it to get the gliding to get to the Wyvern fight. I’m guessing that there will be more information when it is actually released to guide people through accessing them, adding to them, and actually using them, but my first impression was confusion. And I know that the version we had in the test was very basic, so I’m not complaining about how it was done, just wanted to give my feedback on how I experienced it.

I was a little surprised to hear the Mordrem actually speaking. They must be evolving quickly!

For some reason I wasn’t able to spend Mastery points in anything other than Gliding. A guildie reported the same issue. I was fine with that, because I wanted to experiment and practice. However, I’m hoping that the next test (assuming I get into it) will feature a slightly larger map. I sort of felt like I was in a cage part of the time.

I’m not sure what aquatic weapon a revenant is expected to use. I had one of each type drop during the evening and noticed the same tooltip on all of them: “This weapon type is unusable by your profession.” Are aquatic weapons simply not enabled yet?

I played for the full 2 hours on the evening stress test. Overall, I liked what I saw.

I noticed that a lot of the vine tendrils would just disappear when you were attacking them long before their health was gone and the event was not over.

I really liked the Revenant with the hammer. I typically play an engineer, so being able to keep some distance was nice. I did not care for the mace/axe combo, especially since you had to use it like that and not given the option of axe/mace.

The glider takes way too long to give you the option to deploy. If you are going to take ideas from other games, you should take the best part. I should be able to deploy my glider while on the ground and then it puts itself away if I don’t use it within x amount of seconds or it should give me the option to deploy as soon as I jump off something, then I can decide if I need it or not.

I had absolutely no issues with the FPS or lag during the 2 hours I played. After fighting the Wyvern and completing the other events, I just ran around seeing how high I could jump and how low I could go in the map.

The rifles we had to use for one of the events are sweet (general consensus of my guild) and would like to see this become available in the game as a permanent rifle to use. Perhaps upgrade The Predator to perform like this?

I found the play area a little small as I seem to recall the play area during the GW2 stress tests was larger, but it was acceptable to give me a small taste of what to expect and how things will work…to a degree.

Overall experience was nice and a pleasure to be included in the group of testers.

First of all thanks for me being part of the stress test! It was really nice to have a try on the new map and the boss fight. I had no problems with crashes and the game run rather smooth, or maybe I should say, it run as usual, a few hickups but mostly smooth.

I had a try with the new revenant and it was great fun, but I think the cooldowns of some skills needs a tweak. It’ll be interesting to take it to www or pvp. I also found it pretty hard to see which skill I was using since the where no obvious ‘you can’t use this skill since it is on cooldown’, so maybe some more feedback to the user is needed. Now I don’t know if I’m interrupting one skill by using another. But that might be the learning curve of the profession.
Some skills didn’t respond, probably not due to lag, but they just wouldn’t activate sometimes. I have seen the same problems with the ranger in the latest patches of GW2, but thought it was up to moving targets. but here it was more obvious with the Revenant. This might be one of those hard bugs to try to nail down and describe to get a developer to look at it (working as a softwaretester myself, and not being able to readly reproduce and describe a bug, or rather a feeling for a bug, is a nightmare!).

I found the environment really nice and wanted to glide around in the air and just look at things. I hope it will be a new/another ‘world completion’ achivement for the new maps! The glider responded well but I found it a bit hard to tell which places where solid to land on and which where not. Hopefully we will be able to take it down to the ground floor in the future.
I spent a point in mushroom mastery, but couldn’t use the mushroom. At that point I just thought it was disabled for the stress test, but it maybe was a bug?
Also the mastery UI was a bit confusing and kind of big on my large screen… I found it a bit hard to tell where I had spent my points, and I couldn’t remove them and put them in another line. Will this work as www, that the traits has to be reset by time to time?
At least a rework of the UI is needed and maybe put it in the heros panel instead?

I also rolled a ranger (my main profession), a guardian and an elementalist and all three could hold their own both in the events and in the wyvern fight. The main issue I had was that the ranger pet wouldn’t attack the wyvern (bug reported ingame).

The adventure was a nice little side activity. I guess it will be a fun activity for guild members.

It was a nice surprise to hear you own voice in the story (and elsewhere in the game, responding to npcs). I like the change going from a written dialog to more character involvement. Also liked that the story felt like being a bit more controlled by me, the player, instead of all npcs.

Overall it was a positive experience and I look forward to more!

Concerning the play of the Beta Stress Test, overall I enjoyed it immensely. As this was a test of the servers I’ll state that I had no issues of lag (either from slowness or freezes) and no issues with connectivity. The quality of the cinematics was extremely crisp and showed without any hesitations and sound to image was always in sync. Now concerning aspects that were not part of the stress testing…having a chance to create and play the revenant character, plus experience the new mastery format, was very informative and extremely fun.

I like the diversity of both the hammer skills and the mace/axe combo. The first of the two demos was played almost exclusively with the mace/axe combo which I loved, the second of the two demos was placed mostly with the hammer. Both were useful in all the areas, just with adjustments to the style of play needed.

It’s tough to decide which right-side skill set I liked more, Jalis or Malix. Both were fun with each set being useful in different situations. The “rotating hammers of death” is certainly a winner in my book. The fun they present in their appearance, and play, is great but the skill to use them effectively and efficiently adds a wonderful aspect.

Concerning the right-side skill set, I have to comments, 1) I wish the cool-down on the healing skills were just a couple seconds less but I survived in the long run so I guess it’s fairly well set, and 2) the “energy bar” for the right-side skill set is above the left-side skills and I think it would be more easily noticeable if it were above the right-side skills. I know the F1 key handles the switch between the ride-side skill sets (beginning with Jalis & Malix) and that could easily stay there as that’s where the F1 key is for the other class skills…but if the energy bar could shift to the right-side, it’s make things easier (just my thought as I found myself clicking on a right-side skill without effect and then glancing over to the left and realizing the energy bar was empty…if the bar had been above the right-side skills I’d notice it better).

Gliding took some getting used to. I think I died about 30 times with failed glides at various times…but when you get it right, it’s a ton of fun.

The Mastery system was a tad confusing and felt a little clunky at first…but then trying to see it the first time while a combat is going on was not the best choice I made. grin A tip tutorial on it might be helpful for folks.

The dragon fights were awesome!! Although I am convinced it sought my character out specifically on some of its strafing runs!!! laugh There is certainly a feel of intelligence and interactions from the opponents in the combats that occurred.

All-in-all…I give it top marks and look forward to expansion.

Stress test was real fun, thanks for letting me be a part of it. I was so excited to try out the revenant! Paving roads is the new meta!

Masteries- took me a short while to figure out, wasn’t quite sure how to put the points into it but eventually I found out where to click. Even so I only managed to get 4 points so only explored with gliding a bit. It should be interesting to explore full traits once the expansion is released.

New Defiance bar- I really liked the fact that the champion showed a bar over stacks of Defiance. It didn’t take the beta players very long to figure out how to CC the wyvern and keep it from flying away.

Revenant
Interesting class aspect of survivability of being heavy with a mix of range/melee and condis (with the hammer or mace/axe). Also very cool looking armor!
Likes:
-The mix of range/melee on the weapons we could play with, just hammers and mace/axes. Hammer 1 skill has a projectile, as well as 2 slightly range attacks. Axe/Mace also has two attacks with some range capability as well. That being said these are still close combat focused.
-The hammer wall could be very useful, I really like that it follows wherever you face and move.
-Legendary stances, of the two we could use (Not sure if there are more coming?) I found Dwarf stance the most useful for the short PvE content, it was very tanky and stable for fighting the wyvern, plus provided some CC with the chain skill. Demon stance is likely something I’d use more in PvP/WvW, and may be more useful when we have more than 3 trait lines to work with.
Not so likes:
-Really good survivability, but kind of lacked on power. Though that might have been because we were all full Celestial and there wasn’t very much to change the build.
-Hammer was a bit underwhelming, it could be more useful in PvP/WvW perhaps, but I found myself using mace/axe exclusively during the test.
-No weapon swapping, even out of combat. I’ve never played an Ele so the idea of not being able to weapon swap is a bit foreign to me. I’m doubtful it will be kept in the full version, but perhaps with more stances (if that will be a thing) this would be a better tradeoff? Also the lack of other weapons, but I think Anet was just keeping those things on the downlow.
-Just 3 traitlines, though again I understand it is still in beta, so Anet doesn’t want to reveal everything just yet so it was fine.

That’s about all I can think of at the moment. It was a very fun and apparently successful stress test (I never got kicked out, so I assume the servers handled the numbers well). I can’t wait for the official release, will take the day off to play it fully, whenever that is!

P.S. BRING BACK TYBALT LEFTPAW!

The stress test yesterday i feel went very well. I made sure i took a chance to look at the scenery etc involved in the map. The graphical appearance of the map was very clean and crisp almost mystical as i looked up and down from different locations. I experienced no lag at all which made doing the events very fun and enjoyable. The ability to glide on wings was awesome and a great edition to what characters will be able to do . Almost breathtaking with the background scenery. Reminded me almost of Avatar the movie lol. I made a revenant and altho it took a little bit to get used to i loved the mechanics of it. I prefer the hammer and used that most of the time that i played. I thought the drops and the chests were nice and i did get one nice exotic and many rares. The storyline part of the test was good just wished it was longer. Overall i had a lot of fun and i cannot stress enough the beauty graphically of the map. The revenant is truly going to add great depth to the game in all areas. Good Stuff !!!!

Kieran Axeblade.1756:

It’s incredible how many people forget that this was a test of the servers and not the expansion.

This is funny coming from someone that wanted to use tomes of knowledge and transfer over ascended gear for your beta toon yesterday.

The stress test was brilliant. Thank you for letting me and my husband be a part of it. The PC I am using isn’t built at all optimally for this kind of intense game and I was worried before about whether it could take the motion and the graphics that HoT may bring as it struggles often even on low settings in the Silverwastes. BUT I was truly surprised and over the moon in that is worked a dream, it was smooth, skills worked great, it didn’t crash once and there was no lag. I did the entire 4 hours total of the test and it was a joy and I videod all of it for my YouTube channel (obviously cut down).

The only concern I have is, is Wyvern like a world boss? Because if so, there will be MANY more people on this boss than there were during the test and so it may not have been stress tested enough for the reality of the numbers encountered during current world boss fights, BUT this is probably irrelevant since I am 100% sure Anet will know this.

For the Revenant, I think it looks to be a fantastic class. I agree the Mace and Axe aren’t great for the boss fight, but, how many of us alternate weapons during different encounters? So, this doesn’t bother me. I am looking forward to trying this weapon set in lower level areas and on fewer mobs, different encounters and such. I also agree I was in Jalice mode for most of the Wyvern fight, but the condi cleanse and abilities to be detangled and help others in this way, torment and such was great in Mallyx.

The use of energy was great, like GW1 days! I likened it a bit to a Thief’s Initiative…

I REALLY liked how everyone knew more of how to control the Wyvern the second time around and we really kept him grounded. It was really exciting and excellent to watch him with tons of chains around him, struggling to fly. I am still unsure to an extent how we keep his defiance low to be able to control him, but this is my problem, not the game’s and I will learn – so exciting.

Gliding is awesome… we found it hard to judge where exactly the updrafts were and it took a few deaths to realise also we can control when we glide, when we can free fall and pop the glider again and so on and the Masteries system UTTERLY confused us to begin with… BUT these are all things that were overcome and will be learnt as we get more content to pursue.

The mushrooms were easy to use and really great fun watching my husband miss and fall and hearing his toon scream – hilarious.

The torching of the vines was such fun – not much else to say about that, but I scrambled like someone on hot coals to get the 50/50 torched vines. Great little side game.

The content looks fab and I truly cannot wait to see more of this new world.

No doubt there will be patches, balances and such – but all in all, we truly can’t wait for this expansion and if last night is anything to go by, I am just utterly relieved that my old doddering PC can take it.

Thank you GW2 – 10/10.