Going off the form, mostly:
Specializations
I mostly messed with Reaper, Daredevil, and checked out Berserker and Herald.
Reaper is much improved. Finally feels like it’s on-par with other professions. It’s hard to go back to normal Necro after being a melee beast as Reaper. I still think the Shout trait is super boring but otherwise it feels like Reaper has a multitude of fun builds to try out. It’s great to experiment between a Cavalier’s build vs a Berserker build vs a Condition damage build vs a pure tank build.
Reaper could still use some scaling defense, imo. Movie Monsters are supposed to shrug off lethal damage like it’s nothing and just keep coming back with more. Reapers currently either dodge or take full damage from whatever hits them. Their best mitigation is rapid life force generation in some situations allowing them to shroud more damage, which cuts into DPS potential, which is cool design, but I was killed once or twice from Shroud by hits that were just so big they destroyed shroud and the rest of my health bar. Notable when I got ambushed by several mordrem who were glitched into terrain. They ran out and all simultaneously burst me and even though I shrouded in time, they instantly depleted it and my health and downed me.
Daredevil felt great, but not with the Staff. Staff felt useful, but clumsy. And there’s an odd contradiction in designing Daredevil to be quick and mobile and then giving it slow utilities. For example, using Bandit’s Defense while under fire from enemies might still get you killed because the block and kick animations take a while. Likewise, going through the entire Elite chain leaves you a sitting duck. And heal takes way too long to channel. I often got downed or only got one or two pulses off when trying to use it in thick combat. There didn’t seem to be much synergy in the utilities, either.
I ended up feeling like Direct Damage Daredevil (DDDD?) was the weakest build, and played a Carrion build myself. Caltrops and the triple condi dagger utility plus Dagger/Dagger+Shortbow kit and loved it. I killed some smokescales by just avoiding them because dodging dropped caltrops and flung poisoned daggers out, so they ended up with several bleed stacks and some poison and torment, and were crippled, so they couldn’t catch me. I just walked away, dodging a few times, and they dropped dead behind me.
I used steal traited to daze + the Elite chain combo to pick out and execute high priority targets or lone stragglers when it was safe. Felt like a good balance between single target direct damage and some AoE condi damage. It also helped with annoying enemies like Smokescales and Fire Wyverns, by disrupting them long enough to kill them before they smoked the area or took off flying.
And as others have complained, the dodges don’t seem to flow well. They all feel like they make you stop, execute the dodge, stop, and then keep going.
Herald was great, too. Energy management is still really unclear to me but that may change once I can spend like a week straight on a Revenant. It feels like the worst resource system in the game at the moment, to me. I really liked swapping Dragon facets based on the content. “Do I (And the people around me!) need Swiftness to quickly finish this event or do we need Fury and Might and burn this Champion down more quickly, or do we need Regen and Protection to survive Diarmid’s arrow shower?” It was pretty kitten amazing for group content, if a little underwhelming for solo content.
Revenant is very squishy in any configuration that does decent damage so it feels like a very poor soloer, but its massive synergies with other players make it feel like a really, really good team player. I ended up running Cleric’s on mine and enjoying it. Shield 4 is outstanding, but Shield 5 seems to break extremely easily.
And finally, Berserker seemed really cool thematically, and I really liked the new voice clips, and the skills just looked and felt awesome, but actually trying to execute on all of that in combat proved to be difficult. There wasn’t much flow in the abilities, and trying to quickly execute combos didn’t go over very well, generally. The direct damage build seemed meh, so I ended up in a condi build and it was pretty good, if still soft.
Creatures
How is the difficulty of the new hostile mobs, and are they fun and exciting?
The mobs in this BWE were… interesting, at least. There wasn’t a smooth difficulty curve, but rather a rollercoaster from single negligible enemies to suddenly being downed.
I’ll break it down by category of enemy:
Hyleks.
It was pretty frustrating to be fighting hyleks that disappear, wait several seconds, then reappear. They didn’t seem to be in stealth because spamming AoEs didn’t usually hit them. It was even worse when they popped up next to you and did their dagger combo and instantly downed you. I was once standing and chatting with someone I’d just met and had a Hylek appear next to me in a puff of smoke and drop me from 20k hp to 4k instantly. Combat log said they threw a dagger and stabbed me twice. In that one single moment.
The ones with beatle pets were extremely weak, doing little damage and having little health themselves, while their pets seemed to hit twice as hard, have twice the health, and being beatles, took no damage from the sides or rear.
The taunting hylek can taunt through dodge and evade. That’s terrible. Unavoidable CC that makes you stand and hit them for several seconds. Really hurt my Daredevil playstyle.
The big Flopper veterans, Nuhoch Floppers, I think, were consistently knocking me down for 3 seconds through dodge rolls and evades. It seemed like their belly flop attack was unavoidable but always followed the tongue-lash attack, so maybe it’s intended that you use the tongue lash as a warning to get away or interrupt them.
Mordrem
The poison ground-tracer attacks some mordrem throw hit way too hard for how invisible they are against the jungle floor, and for the fact that they chase you even as you dodge. This was the single thing that killed me most in this BWE. Little green gas clouds curving at right angles to chase me hitting like trucks while blending into the jungle floor AND clipping into the ground a lot. I think Mordrem Tormentors threw these, and the Elite ones that spawn during the Mordrem Breacher events threw gas balls that sometimes hit for 50% of my hp, it seemed.
Also ran into a problem with Mordrem that shoot lines of damaging roots doing massive damage with those roots, so if you were locked in an animation, stunned, or otherwise occupied you could quickly be downed by squiggly little roots under your feet. They also seemed to ignore reflective abilities. I tried to counter a group of Mordrem, including 2 or 3 with bows, with Dagger Storm by positioning myself between them and the player group behind me in order to reflect their shots and got instantly downed because they all shot root lines under me that instantly dropped me despite having 20k hp.
Diarmid was really cool, but that arrow storm ability used in the tree event was a bit over the top. The area seemed so big, and the duration was so long, you’d have to flee the entire fight to survive even on a Carrion set. Only my Reaper and Herald survived the storm. The Reaper by dancing between Shroud and normal health bar the whole time, and the Herald by spending all of his energy on regen and protection while running around reviving the poor fools playing Zerker Tempest and Daredevil with 12k hp.
I like the idea of making players build defenses. But my Carrion, 20k hp Daredevil, even after blowing all dodges and evades, got downed once or twice on that part of the fight.
General beasts
Smokescale groups are as frustrating as ever, often 1-shotting you before you realize what’s going on when they all blink-attack you simultaneously as you crest a hill or round a corner.
And it really seems like AoEs should hit through their smoke cloud. Missing a direct attack due to smoke makes sense, but dropping a well, or poison gas field, or torching the whole thing with fire, seems like it should still connect. Maybe even if AoEs just did reduced damage instead of 0 damage it’d be nice.
As mentioned above, Adolescent Beatles seem to be much stronger than their Hylek handlers.
Mushroom enemies are interesting but sometimes frustrating. The knockdown the Kings do and the AoE spam the bombers do mean you can sometimes round a corner and get blown up immediately. Not very fun.
Adolescent Fire Wyvern are annoying if they do their fly evade attack EVERY TIME you fight one. The fire area seems far too huge, and the blind seems unnecessary.
The huge fire field is especially troublesome near rally points, where they spill over while you’re defending and cover a quarter of the control point.
It’s nice that they help deal with Mordrem, though.
Adolescent Lightning Wyverns only seem to telegraph their beam attack well. The other attacks they do just seem to hit you for 10k suddenly. But then again they also die in just a few hits. So they seem negligible as enemies. They do make me excited to run into adult lightning wyverns in the future.
The big fire wyvern was a very cool fight. I liked the wing buffet gust attack.
I liked the Elite spider and its clutch hidden up on that plateau, much like the Veteran Tigers in the last BWE.
World
With the Opening of two new outposts, we are adding in a bunch of new events. Are they fun?
I liked them. My main problem was finding them! I spent my first hour or more in the zone wandering around looking for things to do and not finding anything. I did eventually complete 100% of the BWE achievements, but to do so I had to ask where each chain started, then go hang out at that location until daybreak so I could follow the event chain start to finish. It would’ve been nice to see more one-off events scattered around. Because after doing the entire Noble chain and the entire Blighted Tree chain it didn’t really feel like there was all that much to do but wait for them to retreat and to defend the rally points at night.
I did really like that the events seemed to build some persistence. By gathering supplies the rally points got some defenses set up and you were able to build a defensible position and withstand more mordrem attacks. It might’ve been nice to have more to do at night than defend rally points and escort pact soldiers to them, though. I think I ran into a Champion Husk headed toward Faren’s rally point more than once, and that was nice. An excuse to stop camping in one spot and run over and fight something tough.
I remember watching one Point of Interest and I think it was Colin that said the design intent with these new zones was to make players think “tonight when I login I want to go here and do these events, fight these types of enemies and interact with these npcs and accomplish these specific goals.” Like he wanted players to be able to spend a few hours in one segment of each map and just roam around as they saw fit and help out wherever they wanted.
I feel like this BWE’s map segment did accomplish this. I did feel like I could log in and spend over an hour helping Faren’s party out and collecting the Mastery Points in the area and just exploring.
Frankly, these BWEs are getting perilously close to reigniting the magic I felt exploring Queensdale or Wayfarer Foothills or Caledon Forest for the first time.
Do the new events bring you more into the world?
I would say so. The advancement of the story is great. Seeing names you know like Beigarth is great. I recently advanced a character’s personal storyline in Arah on live servers and ran into several NPCs I had just seen in the BWE.
Are the new events challenging, meaningful, and interesting?
I’d say so. They seem to be impactful for their specific areas, and they progress the stories for the whole area and for the individual NPCs present, which is really cool. It’s nice that a bunch of NPCs we took to Arah don’t just sit there forever in the story. They move on like we do.
Mastery System
How is the progression?
Feels pretty slow, to be honest. I guess if it has to last weeks or months of content, that makes sense. I’m sure they’ll all fill up really quickly once real play is underway and we’re roaming across all of the maps and doing all of the events. The ordering and pacing of abilities is nice. eg: One active mastery like bouncing mushroom, then one passive one like unlocked vendors, then another active one.
How is it using the mastery abilities in the current area?
In BWE1 gliding was amazing because you could climb high then glide down anywhere you wanted. In BWE2 it’s much less amazing because most of the important objectives are up on plateaus and the paths between them are down in valleys, so you spend a lot of time wandering maze-like environments. Bouncing Mushrooms were really the standout mastery perks in BWE2 because they flung you up the plateaus, up to the airship salvage parts, and across wide ravines.
But it felt pretty bad to be always running around like a rat in a maze and getting ambushed by mushrooms, spiders, mordrem, etc in narrow passes and on ledges.
Is the mastery system providing a meaningful area of progression?
It feels like more of an afterthought, actually. Because 99% of the time you ignore your mastery progress, then when your bar is full you get that popup, enable your next mastery, and go back to playing normally. It’s nice to open up abilities as you go like this, though.
My main concern is most mastery bonuses are jungle-specific. Bouncing Mushrooms likely won’t show up growing in other areas of the game. Nor will Mordrem enemies with Tough Bark or special hylek passages unique to Maguuma. But Gliders have no reason to be jungle-specific, lorewise, yet we won’t get to use them in central tyria and perhaps future areas of the game.
It might be neat to see gliders reappear in future mastery sets, with veterans from Maguuma having credit for them already, while still letting new players unlock them in current content rather than run back to the jungle to train it.
Do you care about experience and mastery points?
I had fun collecting mastery points, and I had fun with new mastery abilities, but the actual grind to build mastery lines and the need for more exp to do so were mostly unfun and out of mind. I just ignored it, played in whatever way seemed most fun at the time, and it worked itself out. I was disappointed to be unable to test Central Tyrian Mastery, since I want to know already what precursor collections are looking like so I can plan ahead.
Does it provide a good framework to add more masteries in the future?
I think so. The grind is unavoidable so I can’t actually think of any way to improve on the system.
Do you want to learn as many masteries over time to overcome challenges later in the future?
More options are always better. I’d worry about it getting too close to a treadmill. Then GW2 would have avoided a gear and level treadmill but replaced it with a mastery treadmill.