Guild Wars 2

Part 1:

Masteries:

I have yesterday played the Beta for roughtly 2 hours.
Thats naturally not really much to get a really big impression on alot of things, cause therefore it simply takes too much time to explore all the stuff that the Beta offered to receive a full impression on everything.

Also don’t know really, what Anets expectations and goals were behind such a short Beta.
However, a first impression is naturally also very valuable surely for Anet to receive from us and oftenly a first impression is already more than enough.

So here are my own personal impressions that I received from my playtime in the Beta.
You don’t have to share these impressions, the sole purpose of this thread is to share my impresisons with ANet, not to make here now a huge discussion around it, but hoewver, feel free to add your opinions if you wan,t can’t forbid it anyways lol
So here we go:

1) Mastery System
For my personal taste I find the way how you get Masteries in HoT extremely uncreative and grindy, not to say boring. The whole design leads only to 2 points:

• A – You either grind your butt off to get all the Exp that you need to unlock your Masteries and so more you progress, so slower do you progress at the next step proportionally, which makes the grind behind the design more and more totally ABSURD, or

• B – You have the luck to be already a very long and active player with tons of stacks of Level UP Tomes and other Exp Givers to basically boost your Masteries at a matter of minutes up instantly to the Max, what makes the whole Mastery System instantly pointless, when Player can have this way everythign maxed directly after having started the HoT Client a few minutes later.

Suggestion: Please overthink and reiterate this System. Its bad, its uncreative.
You can do better! First off, there should be not only Masteries in HoT.
HoT (or Follow Up Feature Packs) should add more neutral Masteries shortly after Hot Release, that add also various Masteries that can be worked on all over Tyria and for which players don’t need to have HoT. Example Precursor and Fractal Masteries are such Masteries of such a neutral Category, which I wouldn’t link to HoT.
These two should be Masteries, which everyone should get, regardless if you buy HoT, or not.
Another thing that I would love to see gettign changed is the general way of how you do training for your Mastery Knowledge.
Thats the whole thign about the System, thats so boring, uninspired and uncreative so far about it at all, that is pure grind.
You train your Masteries by killing countless of enemies and doing Events.

I wish it would be more creative than that. Something, like having to find all over Tyria for all of the Masteries various kinds of MOVING AROUND Sages, that are NPCS that take you under certain circumstances you as their disciple to TEACH YOU the Masteries and from the point on when you are a disciple of such a Sage NPC, he gives you daily changing tasks, challenges and things to do, that have to do with the Mastery, which you want to learn, so that you learn over tiem from those NPCs first all of the basics, then when you are advanced, you learn more of the adept things, until they bring you to the point, where they are willing to teach you more expert knowlege, until you reached the point, where they have teached you everythign that you know and where you can try to challenge your Sage “Master” to try to surpass them in various “Tests” and if you beat them in all of their tests, then you master the Mastery, from where on you have access to ability.
After that, you gain experience by performing and using the new Mastery that you have gained and by reachign the maximum required amount of exp as a Master of that Mastery, then you become a Grand Master of that Mastery unlocking this way some kind of visual rewards, stuff like titles, skins, minis, whatever, just so that plalyers have some kind of motivation to keep on using their learned masteries, so that they can unlock with them some kind of unique rewards that are attached to each Mastery.

Thats the kind of Mastery System, that i personalyl would expect from a Game like GW2 and not some kind of boring generic Exp monster Kill/Event farm grindfest that you would mostly likely see in every silly 0815-MMORPG out there …
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Part 2:

Revenant Impressions

• In regard of its Gameplay, this Class needs still alot of work, so uncomplete as it is currently, I can’t make really up my mind yet, if this class will please me later, or not.
  The Stances = changing all Healing/Utility and Elite Skill just feels way too Build Limiting
• Energy builds up imo too fast and certain Utility Skills cost too less Energy, and are due to this way too spammy, like for example Unyielding Anguish. With full energy, you can instantly spam this skill 3x in a row. = 3 big Aoes that launch foes away and add multiple stacks of torment. This together with a Condition Build and a Setting, that causes even more torment on criticals ect. is way too OP, especially together with that Bonus Torment Effect.
  Don’t forget that you play reveneant in this Game alone, just think about if, if multiple of these Reves play together, they would totally wreck havoc and would easily be able to put everyone and everything quickly under 25 stacks of torment making everyone force to stop moving = kill fodder on the silver plate for everyone else, or you die in a matter of seconds from all the condition damage if you move around, if you can#t get that torment instantly away and for that its way too easy to cover the Torment with other conditions to prevent people from too easily cleansing your burst torment away that makes basically the job for you while you have to watch only ohw your enemies kill themself or stand only silly around and wait to be killed.
  Torment is as a Condition way too powerful to make out of it such a spammy condition. Not even the similar Confusion can be spammed so much and since you introduced Torment, you added it more and more and with the Rev you add even another Class, that can spam now Torment on Auto Attack!!
  Isn’t the Mesmer as Torment Bot already enough!!?
  Does the Game Balance need seriously that ruination by adding another Class that can spam even much faster and alot more torment quickly?
  Please overthink this Anet!

• Stability on Dodge Roll… does this Class seriously need this, when they can spam this road of falling rocks (hallelujah!) and can have due to this, especialyl when playing together basically permanently stability???
  Seriously, please remove this effect and change it into something more useful and give instead THIEVES aa Stability on Dodge Roll with the same duration like that.
  They are the class which absolutely needs such a kind of effect on dodge roll.
  They have no stability at all besides when using Dagger Storm and even then is this skill so bugged currently, that you can way too easily interrupt it for an ELITE SKILL in a matter of seconds, that using the skill feels like a waste (not mentioning how inaccurate this skill hits targets and should receive a little rework to hit more accurately, especially so nearer the targets are at you so that enemies want to get away from you quickly when you use DS if they don’t want to find themself getting hit very quickly alot of times similar like that Whirlign Axe attack that does alot of hits quickly…with DS you move much faster and deal like a slow turtle compared to that just your hits – just unreasonable!…)

• The Hammer Skill 2 is for its range and its powerful cascade effect too OP. Its CD needs to get increased. 2seconds CD for a 1200 range hit, that deals multiple hits and becomes stronger over range is just simply said INSANE Not to mention that it hits 5 targets at the same time … This skill needs absolutely an appropiate nerf.

• Hammer Bolt could get increased slightly in damage, but its range needs to be redunced to 900, dont forget that it can hit also 5 targets at once. No singel other AA can do this on a 1200 range, with makes this AA for that range OP. 900 would be still good enough for a slight increase in damage. And reduce the number of targets it can hit to 3. Maybe add therefore a chance to cause vulnerability if foes suffer already on conditions.

• Searing Fissure is with its 3s of CD also OP, you can keep with this skill theoretically multiple targets perma burning with a right condition build … the weapon just screams condition build with its auto attack torment that came somehow fro mthe betas build that we had pregiven, so it came somehow from the traits…
  No other class has such fast skill two CDs of just only 2/3 seconds… increase them to make these skilsl more on par with the CDs of all other classes weapon skill numer 2 skills which have mostly ranges between 5 to 10s The only exception among this is the thiev’s spammy shortbow cluster bomb, but its the nature of this weapon and the class to be spammy and quick, not that of the Revenant …

Part 3:

Graphics, Performance and Presentation:

Not much is to say here, other than that for a Beta, what I have seen and what I have experienced in these two hours, was just superb, very polished and of high quality.

I haven’t personally seen any huge game breaking bugs or had any problems at all in that time in regard of game performance. Everythign worked smoth, even in a huge zerg of skill spamming revenants that spammed ridiculously thatroad skill everyone non stop, it was absolutely ridiculious how much rocks fall mystically permanently from they sky (hallelujah) for serveral minutes all the way wherever the zerg runned along, the game run smooth and without any lags at all

So absolutely kudos for that beta performance.

Part 4:

Songtrack

Awesome, from what I hear it is really gorgeous and fittign the map and the mood of the map design very good. I’m already in love with that kinda new Login Screen Songtrack, but that I sad basically already in an own thread special for it that I felt I need to make just to bring the attention to that new songtrack to the people.

Can’t wait to hear the full HoT Songtrack