Guild Wars 2

Well, I’d say the beta was fun, and about average. Not really under or overwhelming.

General Notes:
It looks like the day/night cycle is on a 75min/45min timer. Personally, I feel that night needs more work, but more on that later.

Sadly, no new trait system. Makes me think that the TDB engi traits are still in the works and/or they are still messing with the numbers for a lot of professions/working with any feedback we gave them.

It seemed that the first level of every mastery took 254,000 exp (we were unlocking gliding ~90min into the beta from killing mobs/events, but it was no where near as event heavy kitten is). The 2nd level of gliding took 1,016,000 exp or 4 levels to get.

I’ll have to check my recorded vids but I think it took ~17 mastery points to master each line, at least for all of the HoT lines. I know the Fractals and Precursor lines had more. Sadly the fractals line facts were still obscured and no new lines either.

Map
The map looks gorgeous and felt pretty darn large, we had access to maybe about 1/3 of it. Though a good chunk in the center was just a bunch of vines for you to glide to/around. There was a lot of nice detail looking up to see wyvrens flying around, or off into the distance to see more crashed pact ships.

The northern section focused on the tree frogs and their village. The southern section focused on ruins and a lot of vertical climbing space. I think the north west was the for the other frogs, but that’s just based on my speculation. I only went to the middle western part at night, and it was very barren.

Day/Night Cycle:
During the day I didn’t have too much trouble finding something to do. I tried following the southern chain of events (I think there was another chain that went north). It was
defend/retake the center base
—> follow the group to the ruins (harmless escort event)
—> defend them while they plant explosives (this felt like it took way too long, the enemies were neigh invincible, with a break bar to be able to hurt them, or you had to use the riffle up top to either 1 shot them or kill them in a few hits. It may have been the upscaling, but it took way too long to progress.)
—> Secure 8 areas in the ruins (fun event, a bit easy to get lost running around there for the first time)
—> 2 events at once, I got lost and ended up top where you had to kill Mordrem and free the Slyvari snipers so they could kill a special Champ, while another event was going on below to defend an area. This is where I got dc’ed, but I presume there was at least 1-2 more events in the chain.

I never was around for the defending the base camp, but it seemed to fail really quickly. And then you had to take bombs from destroyed pact choppers to destroy massive vines.

The day time events that I did were fun (except the one to clear a path into the ruins/open a wp took way too long), but night time seemed pretty “meh”.

At night there were points marked on the map of areas that you controlled, I think it was up to 2 in the tree frog area and maybe 2 in the southern ruin area and 2 by the starting pact base camp. But at nightfall we only had the two starting camps, this may be my bigger issue. But there seemed to be only 2 types of events at night.

Defend the camp every 1-2 min.
Run to a seemingly random appearing pact solider, save him, and then escort him back to the closest camp. And if he dies the event fails, no chance to rez him.

I was not a fan of the solider events. It was hard to apply swiftness to them with other players in the area. They do have a buff that increases their toughness and vitality, but it wears off over time. It’s the only thing that keeps them alive until someone can get close enough to rescue them. But then it’s too long of a walk back to base, for little to no reward.

The only other thing to do at night is to pick up supply from the ground and bring it to a base to increase it’s supply. And I think all that does (along with escorting survivors) is to slightly increase that camps defense against attacks. I didn’t notice a camp supply bar, but did see it eventually change from Tier 1 to 2. There was also a larger meta event, which hardly moved the entire night. It may just be because we only had the two base camps to defend, but the night was kinda boring, especially since it lasted 45 min.

Also, without playing it a couple of times, it’d hard to tell this, but, it seems a really, really long meta event. 75 min for the day, 45 min for night. I had no clue what the point of the night meta was, for the full 45 min. After about 10-15 of just seeing the same defense event, I got bored and started wandering around, but still couldn’t find anything of value to do.

Enemies
It seems normal enemies will have break bars. I only noticed two types that had it though. Big hammer wielding guys, who wound up the same attack from the 1st boss from queen’s gauntlet. And the husks who were immune to all damage and applied conditions during the “setting the charges” event to open up the ruins. In both cases the warrior shield #4, which is a 1s stun, was enough to break their bars.

In the story mission while you are defending the camp there is also another “champ” with a break bar. A horseman type enemy, that Rytlock deals with. He took ~7 damage per hit, but conditions were applied as normal. If that’s a new feature I’d greatly appreciate it. Condis can do their normal damage, but direct damage users need to first CC the enemy.

The design of most enemies looks nice. I found a couple of mushrooms in the northern mid area of the map, lots of mordren, and I didn’t notice too much else. I believe that’s where I thought the 2nd frog tribe would be, but I didn’t see any in the area. But to be fair I only say 1 tree frog in their marked off “area” anyways. There was an enemy, a breakmaker(?) that looked like a structure (yellow name) but it was able to have conditions applied to it, again I hope things stay that way.

Adventures:
The only adventure I was able to do was a “collect supply” event, with a ton of tendrils throwing poison and trying to knock you over, with no weapon or utility skills.

You can access this area via gliding though, and could potentially help allies below, via buffs. I didn’t try to see if I could attack the vines, will need to do that on the next test. You do get ported out if you get too low, but there are plenty of things for you to rest on along the edges. Bronze was getting 10 supply, I think silver was 15 or 20. It looks like it uses your actual hp/armor values for damage, so higher hp pool classes/people in toughness gear will have an advantage, but they could do a % of your hp and I didn’t notice.

You also are not stripped of any boons upon entering. So currently it seems unfair that someone can go in with ~1min of swiftness, or vigor, regen, or potentially stealth. Anet may want to have the adventurers strip boons/boosters from you if you enter, unless they are fine with some people getting a leg up that way.

Bugs:
For the taking the 8 areas in the ruins event, at least one of the area markers was up into the air instead of along the ground.

See above notes in the Adventure about gliding down into it, and boons lasting once you walk into it.

I think that’s everything off the top of my head. Anyone have any questions?

So, the 2nd test was better. I tried the northern event chains during the day. And the one where you need to keep the hunters alive while getting big, bigger, and the biggest prey seem a bit hard without a dedicated healer(s) to keep them alive.

I understood the southern chain a bit better, and I like the 2 groups having to work together to kill the vine crawler. And having more camps at night did make it a bit more fun, but the soldiers still walk so slow and die pretty easy. Also I was standing by one camp for a couple of defense events, just waiting for the next one to spawn, and I was hit by some massive DR. I think it was ~18k exp, ~5k exp, ~400 exp.

Also, for as strong as I thought the Rev seemed on paper (and maybe it is once you get used to it) I still preferred my war, I doubt the cele stats helped. I’m sure also it hurts that he’s still missing 2 trait lines, 3 legends, and X amount of weapons.

Also found another bug:
When doing the “get supply from tendrils” adventure. There is a raised rock in on corner of the room, if you go on top of it and jump you are able to glide. When you land, your utilities are useable again until you pick up another supply unit. I don’t know if it was a rev only thing or any profession, but it’s something that should be fixed.

Gliding makes getting around so much easier. Which kind of put people off. The map is slightly annoying to get around before gliding, so that really stream lines things. And the mushrooms also help a lot for mobility.

A minor annoyance with the mushrooms though, they constantly show that I need a mastery to eat it as I run by. Maybe a check box to disable that information? I figure it’ll only be relevant as long as you don’t have the mushroom mastery, so it may just be a moot point.

I think the Rev Hammer 4, Field of the Mists, needs to have it’s effect more noticeable. I have a feeling in PvP or WvW the translucent wall will hardly stand out. And while visually stunning, a lot of the moves don’t feel to have any “oomph” to them, again that just may be the last of trait/legend/weapons/stat set options.

More Bugs:
With the Revant’s Hammer number 3 “Phase Smash” (at least I assume it’s this skill) it sometimes bugs and leaves “Deploy Glider (Space)” on my screen, as though I was still in the air. It goes away when I use the #3 again. I can’t figure out what causes it to show up though.

During the capturing location points in the ruins Point 4 also has a corner of the area marked that goes into the nearby wall/is raised off the ground slightly.

During the destroy the Colossal Vine event. I’ve noticed, that the Mortar Supply isn’t able to be picked up directly after the kill the Vine event starts, at least on my Rev it took 2-5 sec for it to be interactable. Sometimes when I do the pick up animation, I end up not actually picking up the bundle. And if two people use the same mortar very close together then it looks like only 1 shot fires and the other ammo is wasted. I feel that it should either not be interactable during it’s CD to shoot again, or make it independent if another player is using it at the same time. It seemed we killed the Colossal Vine event, but didn’t get an event reward and the Vine was still there with it’s shield floating around it, and no new event popped up. I also noticed the protector still alive as well.

Also the “Salvage Pit” adventure was labeled “Air Strike” on the map.

Sometimes while jumping into a wall (trying to jump up places) my glider would deploy. It’s odd that it didn’t seem to happen when I was just running on a flat surface and holding down spacebar, but it would when I was jumping into a wall/cliff.

The Rev trait Rolling Mists, doesn’t increase the effectiveness of fury by 50%. It changes the crit chance bonus of fury from 20% to 50% (going from 30% to 80% with the starting gear). So I think the tool tip should be changed a bit, I assumed that it made furry go to +30% crit chance (which would be a 50% effectiveness increase of 20%) or it went to +70% crit chance (which would be adding 50%).

Final thoughts:
The beta was fun, but it didn’t “wow” me that much. I mean the map was pretty, the enemies were mostly diverse, and after unlocking gliding getting around became easier. Though the map does have a bit of a learning curve to navigating. But nothing about it, told me that I have to play more right now.

I do think that their should be more event markers on the map, or at least make them bigger. I didn’t even realize the wyvren event was in this beta until 5.5 hours in when someone was talking about it in map chat. And with no real WPs in the map it takes a long while to get from one end to the other. I also noticed several people saying in map chat that they didn’t know what was going on or where to go to do things. The story instances may offer more direction, but looking at SW you can tell if a fort is under attack and in Dry Top many events show up on the screen to alert you that they started. It doesn’t need to be in our face, but some indicator would be nice.

There’s a dev post floating around that says that Masteries won’t level up via exp, thus you can’t use tomes of knowledge or writs of experience on them. Yet, the mastery bar did say that it needed “exp” to train, and every enemy killed did give exp. So, unless they are going change the names, it feels a bit disingenuous. Personally I feel this is a silly reason, just because they want it to take longer to unlock all of the masteries. I feel the limiting factor should be gaining mastery points, not having to grind out the exp. It also devalues tomes and writs, at least currently they are worth a skill point, but there has been no mention of what they would do on a lvl 80 other than “what they do currently”. But since we will no longer have an exp bar at lvl 80 in any game mode, what will they do? Tomes just give us the new forge currency (would be nice if that was confirmed) and writs will be completely useless. Besides it means tomes only have 2 purposes, alts (which plenty of people have already maxed out their accounts with a bunch of lvl 80s) or key farmers. Besides, even without tomes, I assume that people will find the fastest way to farm events/mobs within the first week of launch, and most hard core players will have what they want in the first 1-2 weeks, and the majority of more causal players in the first month or two (assuming we have enough mastery points).

Edit: Because I forgot to mention this.
Some of the events felt like they took way too long. If that’s the intention fine, but I think we spent ~20 min during day trying to kill the Colossal Vine, maybe longer. And since we didn’t even get an event complete reward it felt like a big waste of time (outside of securing the top camp at night). I only noticed 3-5 mortar shots flying off each damage phase (each person can really only do 2-3 shots, and the long flight time may mean the last shot doesn’t hit), and it looked like the protector kept healing the vine inbetween dps phases. Plus the long lasting “kill shot” vine trail on the ammo became annoying very quickly.

Oh, also the night phase seems really lackluster. People were leaving the beta once night fell just because there was nothing really to do, and no real incentive to defend the camps or walk the too weak and slow soldiers. And if that’s how fast they intend the meta bar to fill, you’ll need to have an entire map coordinated defending every camp (I think we had 6-8 available to us, and most likely there’d be more in the other 2/3 of the map). During the entire 45 min cycle, it moved less than 5%. Also the supplies were a bit of a pain to find. If the intention is to spread us thin to defend everywhere and 2-3 players escorting each soldier, it’s counter intuitive to have the supplies be in random spots where you then need to run back to a camp to help defend. Maybe have them marked on the map so you at least can judge if it’s worth trying to get to it instead of having to waste time looking then having to rush back to the camp to defend against the next attack.

This is excellent feedback imo, I’d love to see more thoughtful analyses like this.

Navigation was a bit difficult – it was somewhat confusing to find your way around. Mini map layers may help with that a bit. Finding events also was a bit difficult, though, thank goodness for the mighty doritos out there! You could at least see where an event might be. It was finding the route to get there that posed most of the difficulty. There were a couple of POI that we could not figure out where the heck they were or how to get around to them. I am sure familiarity with the map will fix that and we did have a limited time in which to explore, try to get at least one mastery and to try events. We used up a lot of our time just figuring out how to get from point a to b. I hope future betas will allow more time for better immersion. Also both hubby and I made Revenants so we were also learning the profession as we went.

Hubby and I had a great time figuring things out though. I loved the mushroom cave and the mushroom soldiers as well as the frog village. Some of the battles were interesting because of the warriors who had mounts. The Wyvern fight was a bit different than the stress test but no less interesting to figure out. The ruins were awesome and we think we may have found a bug – there was a bottle neck doorway with a husk, leeching thrasher and a mender. You could not lure any of them away from the doorway down the hall and you could not kill any of them as they almost instantly respawned their health. We finally gave up and ran by them.

Mastery is still kludgy and hard to figure out. I am glad they reduced the screen from what it was in the first stress test but like the first one I had trouble figuring out what to click to get a mastery started and then it was what do we do next since we could not apply any points to anything at first (maybe a tool tip is needed to explain on those?). Once we realized we had to level up the experience bar before going any further it was oooooh, ok, is there something special we need to do or just find events?

I would have liked to be able to work on more than one mastery at a time.

We should be able to do certain specific things to unlock the gliding as well as other specific things that would apply to the mushrooms all at the same time. Maybe use the first point to just unlock the mastery and have specific things we need to do that applies to training the unlocked masteries such as certain events or collecting that apply to the shrooms and certain events or collecting that applies to gliding, etc. for any mastery that has been unlocked. Being able to train multiple masteries at the same time would be a huge plus for folk.

Finding the specific things/events/collecting/speaking with npcs that apply to training that that mastery over the map would have you still leveling each at different speeds depending on what you are doing. One at a time seems very grindy to me with a generic, fill the bar to get to the next level – ugh.

I think Wallace covered everything I wanted to say. Nice job

I didn’t mind the long meta event. I’m assuming it is going to cover the map so there will probably be quite a bit more to do once we can access the entirety of Verdant Brink.

- I only found one bug (I think?) myself, and that was that Vinetender and the Vine would respawn after the event was completed. It would be up on it’s pillar with the Pale Reavers shooting at it occasionally even after the event had completed.

General feedback:

- I’m sure it has something to do with how huge the map is, and how much is going on, but I’m hoping there’s some way to increase the optimization. I play GW2 on low to get ~30fps in the base areas, but if I remember correctly it was around 15-20 (sometimes going lower) while in Verdant Brink.

- Masteries were not very well explained. I’m sure this can be fixed with a mini-tutorial/tooltip, but I encountered many people who didn’t know that they had to go and select a mastery, level that up and then they can use their mastery points. It seemed to confuse people quite a bit when they earned a mastery point very early on, but didn’t see any progress from it/couldn’t use it on a mastery line (like how we’re used to with skill points and traits).

- Night events were fairly confusing to me the first time around. Most of the explanations/guidance came from commanders who had done it before (I only got to experience the night events during the 3rd period). Maybe I missed an outpost with explanations over the “rally points”, but I think mentioning that would be a good idea.

- Last, but probably the biggest, thing for me was that the Vinetender event was way too long. I’m hoping the time was extended because of the limited outposts in the Beta, but it really threw me off. All the events leading up to that were amazing, I was excited, and while basic, they were fun (the capture point part of the ruin event was amazing). When we got to Vinetender though, the first few cycles were okay, but I really started wanting it to be over. It wasn’t really challenging, and there didn’t seem to be any sort of signal/sign about progressing through the fight. There were quite a few people in my server who were also questioning when it would end as well. I can’t speak towards the mortar side of the event though, as I didn’t get to experience that.

Other than those things, I had a ton of fun. The outpost system was a huge hit with the people in map chat. I disagree with OP about the event around opening the ruins taking too long. As long as you had snipers taking down the husks it would be over fairly quickly.

Selene.9415:

Last, but probably the biggest, thing for me was that the Vinetender event was way too long. I’m hoping the time was extended because of the limited outposts in the Beta, but it really threw me off. All the events leading up to that were amazing, I was excited, and while basic, they were fun (the capture point part of the ruin event was amazing). When we got to Vinetender though, the first few cycles were okay, but I really started wanting it to be over. It wasn’t really challenging, and there didn’t seem to be any sort of signal/sign about progressing through the fight. There were quite a few people in my server who were also questioning when it would end as well. I can’t speak towards the mortar side of the event though, as I didn’t get to experience that.

Wallace MacBix.2089:

During the destroy the Colossal Vine event. I’ve noticed, that the Mortar Supply isn’t able to be picked up directly after the kill the Vine event starts, at least on my Rev it took 2-5 sec for it to be interactable. Sometimes when I do the pick up animation, I end up not actually picking up the bundle. And if two people use the same mortar very close together then it looks like only 1 shot fires and the other ammo is wasted. I feel that it should either not be interactable during it’s CD to shoot again, or make it independent if another player is using it at the same time. It seemed we killed the Colossal Vine event, but didn’t get an event reward and the Vine was still there with it’s shield floating around it, and no new event popped up. I also noticed the protector still alive as well.

This. I was also on the mortar side and there was a noticeable delay between the start of the Mortar-loading event and actually being able to interact with the ammo, meaning that each mortar could only fire 1 or 2 shots off before the Colossal Vine became invulnerable again. This resulted in about 20 minutes of repeating the same thing over and over again which wasn’t that fun, unless we missed something about the fight.