Guild Wars 2

Sadly, these two specializations will most likely suffer the most on release.

Lets look at the time left before release:

• Week of Sept 20th – 26th (this week): TwitchCon, definately no BWE. Druid reveal at Con.
• Week of Sept 27th – Oct 3rd: Maybe BWE.
• Week of Oct 4th – 10th: Most likely BWE, probably last.
• Week of Oct 11th – 17th: Very Very doubtful BWE may occur.

I get that not all the professions would have an equal amount of time, but at least two weeks should’ve been the minimum. At most, we are looking at ONE for Druid and Scrapper.

And yes, I know tweaks will be made after release. Heck, I expect at least 4-5 patches on opening day for quick fixes on the game itself.

I am not sure why this is such a big deal. class/specialization balance goes beyond alpha and beta testing, and each will be continually tweaked as time goes on. ANet has their own test team that goes through stuff before we ever see it. And who knows the druid may have been worked on the most out of all classes.

The Scrapper and Druid will be fine, I’m sure.

I think that depends quite a bit on the state they are in initially. If they are fairly good out of the gate (and some of the elite specs have been) then I don’t see it as a problem. They can continue to tweak things a little bit after release. If they are in a terrible place during the BWE, I think there might be cause for concern, as seeing dramatic back-to-the-drawing-board changes would be less likely.

I think Anet has confirmed Druid reveal this week, especially since we’ve got the Druid art up all over social media which has literally always been the case when there’s a reveal during that week.

And I’m sure Scrapper and Druid will be fine. They had enough on them to show brief glimpses of them during the first trailer months ago, it’s not like they just created them. And less player testing? I guess, but technically so did necromancer and mesmer which weren’t available in some early GW2 demos. These elite specs will be fine, no worries.

Their should be a beta weekend either this week or next. Gives them more time to implement changes for these two since most of the others have had a lot of work already so they can focus. Also just because its just before release doesn’t mean they wont keep working on them after release.

Even with less beta time, does not mean they won’t tweak them after beta tweaks.
If they need more changes, they’ll make it.

Serophous.9085:

• Week of Sept 20th – 26th (this week): TwitchCon, definately no BWE. Maybe Druid reveal at Con.

Definitely no BWE, but they absolutely are revealing the Druid at the con. In fact, this is why they are not having a POI episode this week. This has all been confirmed in red posts.

Serophous.9085:

• Week of Sept 27th – Oct 3rd: Druid reveal most likely. Maybe BWE.

As stated above, Druid reveal is this weekend, not next. BWE could be on this weekend though.

To those that said “They’ll make more changes after release”, I know. Sorry, I should’ve made that more clear that its basically the initial reaction when it does go live.

It just feels a bit wrong to see two specializations that didn’t get much “training” compete and trip at the start while everyone else jogs ahead.

MiniEquine.6014:

Serophous.9085:

• Week of Sept 20th – 26th (this week): TwitchCon, definately no BWE. Maybe Druid reveal at Con.

Definitely no BWE, but they absolutely are revealing the Druid at the con. In fact, this is why they are not having a POI episode this week. This has all been confirmed in red posts.

Serophous.9085:

• Week of Sept 27th – Oct 3rd: Druid reveal most likely. Maybe BWE.

As stated above, Druid reveal is this weekend, not next. BWE could be on this weekend though.

Took a few days break from forums, but I’ll update with this info. Thanks!

Should make it a beta week instead of just a weekend for Scrapper and Druid testing.

Best thing to do is get together as a community and test the hell out of it. Necromancers did just that and the difference in reaper between BW1 and BW2 is like night and day.

Let’s be honest here. If there’s a good dev behind the spec, then not only is it more likely to be in a good place for the one weekend of testing, but it will also get the attention it deserves after HoT goes live. And if it’s one of the bad devs (and I don’t think I need to name names), then it will be a mess and be kept a mess no matter how much we get to test it.

the truth is that changes after release have a smaller scope, and less resources. They will likely make number tweaks, but you wont see many larger scale changes like say revenant getting weapon swap, or the drastic change in functionality of the tempest. Things like new animations, etc basically become long term goals.

Just like in 3 years, many skills only just now got fixed, and some are still bugged. The company allots resources differently when building for an expansion than when doing live. One of the main reasons they said they did an expansion was they needed to make the type of changes that wouldnt fit into the scope periodic balance patches.

So yeah truth is, thief engineer and ranger probably wont get a lot of strong changes in these elite specs for some time if ever. If they were at the current stage months ago, they could alot resources to big changes like in mechanics, animations, etc. But now? its basically number tweaks only, no matter what type of feedback they get.

RIP “When It’s Ready”.

Long live, “It’s okay to release low iterated, partially tested content. They’ll just patch it later probably maybe”

Apophis.2498:

I am not sure why this is such a big deal. class/specialization balance goes beyond alpha and beta testing, and each will be continually tweaked as time goes on. ANet has their own test team that goes through stuff before we ever see it. And who knows the druid may have been worked on the most out of all classes.

The Scrapper and Druid will be fine, I’m sure.

For sure you are not a ranger or engi. That’ s why you write this

Serophous.9085:

To those that said “They’ll make more changes after release”, I know. Sorry, I should’ve made that more clear that its basically the initial reaction when it does go live.

It just feels a bit wrong to see two specializations that didn’t get much “training” compete and trip at the start while everyone else jogs ahead.

Programming a game is all about long term not short term. In a month no one will care.

Yes, testing and balancing goes on well after a release. However, if classes are released with little testing, then there’s a huge imbalance. This makes the game less fun for quite a while. We’ve already gone through our large swings 3 years ago. We’ve gone through years of tweeking this and that. Now, we’re going to have to go through all that again, except this time, it seems that the general public is going to be subject to a less balanced release than the original GW2. Un-fun for new players. Un-fun for existing players.

Eh, I don’t think it will be badly unbalanced. Most of what we have seen has worked fairly well right out of the beta gate, and the devs are constantly testing things even outside of the wider events.

We only get to play with it when they’ve done their own beta process, put them into the open beta for us to test and break, and so on.

Of course, the first couple of months are going to be problematic, there simply hasn’t been enough stress work to find all of the bugs, especially since the BWEs are so limited in scale for the HoT content. OTOH, it also allows them to take each section of it to test, using us as the lab rats.

Eh, I expect bugs, and welcome them. If it went perfectly smoothly at first, then there would be something major about to go wrong.

Spurnshadow.3678:

Yes, testing and balancing goes on well after a release. However, if classes are released with little testing, then there’s a huge imbalance. This makes the game less fun for quite a while. We’ve already gone through our large swings 3 years ago. We’ve gone through years of tweeking this and that. Now, we’re going to have to go through all that again, except this time, it seems that the general public is going to be subject to a less balanced release than the original GW2. Un-fun for new players. Un-fun for existing players.

I think you mean little “public” testing, meaning, compared to other classes it wont have the same amount of testing by us the players, but that doesn’t mean it has had “little testing” in general. We’ll see how the druid is with the amount of internal testing it has had next beta weekend, some specs were already good in their first beta weekend. So best to just judge then after you have had time to test it yourself.

Worst comes to worst, it is underwhelming compared to the hype, much like revenant was when it was tested the first time around. At the very least, it will be mechanically stable, with the rest tunable before HoT goes live.

I’m a bit iffy on whether or not they’ll get enough time to iterate on our feedback after the next (and known to be last) BWE. So I full expect to see lots of tweaking coming in for these to classes after launch on the 10/23. Sad really, but they are coming right down to the wire with the work. Just trying to keep positive at this point.

I wouldn’t have pre-purchased if I knew the druid (the first elite spec referenced? and the only one I was really excited for) was going to be shoehorned in for released. I certainly wouldn’t have paid $100 for 3 weekends of Dragonhunter.

But the Black Lion keys it came with made me 2000g, so whatever. I guess I technically profited from the pre-purchase.

Fool me once…

anything balance wise tested in beta probably wont see a fix until long after the launch.

anyway balance is usually something that comes to light after extensive testing, relying on a small group of players usually results in “op builds” being kept quite at first as well, eventually everyone figures it out and it becomes something that needs to be looked at.

I think the beta is more or less aimed at fixing stuff broken and game breaking, something that would require an emergency fix prior to launch to ensure gameplay is fine.

balance is something that comes afterward, once everyone becomes familiar with the class and has had extensive time to get comfortable with what works best.

I’m not a developer but I doubt that druid is getting shoe horned in here, I don’t think it works like that, I think they chose to release certain classes to add to hype, but also to possibly test classes they were “unsure” about how they would be received. For instance the DH had a lot of changes, and that spec to me seems the most drastic of them all, being totally off the chart to what a guardian is and does normally.

Honestly druid and scrapper both seem to be in line to what I would expect a pet based class set up to be. They were probably finished long before the announcement, and most likely saved them for last because well, build the hype of the crazy stuff, test the strange specs to see reception, and save the “safe bets” for just before launch while hype is still strong.

I work as Games QA tester (not for ANET) and i can assure you, that the fact that both Druid and Scrapper will be only briefly available to the players, DOES NOT mean that they have not been tested.

You may not know that, but most game content is designed, produced AND tested months or even years before being showed to the public.

Us QA-s are gamers like YOU. We notice the same issues and we care about the same things. We DO care for the final product. We want to be proud of working on it once it hits the shelves.

Truth be told, “BETAS” are just a PR stunt. Usually, most bugs submitted by players have been found way earlier and taken care of (or not).

Keep in mind though, that the fact that something has been tested DOES NOT mean it is/will be fixed. Reasons are many.

Sorry for the vent. Stating that something will not be tested is an insult to all those testers out there.

Cheers

Azuriusz.6724:

I work as Games QA tester (not for ANET) and i can assure you, that the fact that both Druid and Scrapper will be only briefly available to the players DOES NOT mean that they have not been tested.

You may not know that, but most game content is designed produced AND tested months or even years before being showed to the public.

Us QA-s are gamers like YOU. We notice the same issues and we care about the same things. We DO care for the final product. We want to be proud of working on it once it hits the shelves.

Truth be told, “BETAS” are just a PR stunt. Usually, most bugs submitted by players have been found way earlier and taken care of (or not).

Keep in mind though, that the fact that something has been tested DOES NOT mean it is/will be fixed. Reasons are many.

Sorry for the vent. Stating that something will not be tested is an insult to all those testers out there.

Cheers

Couldn’t agree more with mmorpg “betas” being nothing more than PR hype machines.

Agreed, all modern beta’s are nothing more than hype stunts. You would either have to be a broke indy dev, or stupid, to allow your customers to play a game that isn’t polished, at any phase of development.

All you would do is sow seeds of negativity and concern about your product, and hurt initial sales.

I see it more as a “get their reaction” and "make sure all the odd hardware/software builds people use work…you know the guy using some random Linux and running a voodoo gpu might have issues…but no one bothered to test that configuration.

One more thing.

For each bug you find, a hundred has been found and fixed, and i’m not even over exaggerating.

Do the math.

Out there are poorly paid people who make a living out of finding those.

StrangerDanger.3496:

Azuriusz.6724:

I work as Games QA tester (not for ANET) and i can assure you, that the fact that both Druid and Scrapper will be only briefly available to the players DOES NOT mean that they have not been tested.

You may not know that, but most game content is designed produced AND tested months or even years before being showed to the public.

Us QA-s are gamers like YOU. We notice the same issues and we care about the same things. We DO care for the final product. We want to be proud of working on it once it hits the shelves.

Truth be told, “BETAS” are just a PR stunt. Usually, most bugs submitted by players have been found way earlier and taken care of (or not).

Keep in mind though, that the fact that something has been tested DOES NOT mean it is/will be fixed. Reasons are many.

Sorry for the vent. Stating that something will not be tested is an insult to all those testers out there.

Cheers

Couldn’t agree more with mmorpg “betas” being nothing more than PR hype machines.

Agreed, all modern beta’s are nothing more than hype stunts. You would either have to be a broke indy dev, or stupid, to allow your customers to play a game that isn’t polished, at any phase of development.

All you would do is sow seeds of negativity and concern about your product, and hurt initial sales.

I see it more as a “get their reaction” and "make sure all the odd hardware/software builds people use work…you know the guy using some random Linux and running a voodoo gpu might have issues…but no one bothered to test that configuration.

To be fair, the last pair of BWEs were pretty truly betas, they changed a lot of stuff based on our feedback, at least from the first one, I know a lot of people couldn’t test the way they wanted to on the second one due to no bank reset, but it was still useful as a beta test.
Yes, they are meant to hype up the new content, especially when getting access to the betas becomes a selling point for the new content (something I disagree with), but just because they want to generate hype doesn’t mean the beta weekends can’t also be useful for content feedback before it’s “mastered to disc” if you will.

Azuriusz.6724:

One more thing.

For each bug you find, a hundred has been found and fixed, and i’m not even over exaggerating.

Do the math.

Out there are poorly paid people who make a living out of finding those.

If I were being honest here (and I pretty much always am…), I don’t give two kittens about bugs. With the size of games these days, you’ll find game breaking bugs a decade from now that you haven’t seen before.

When I play a beta event, I usually want to make sure the balance is right…which it almost never is, even after thousands of hours of hundreds of beta testers running every possible combination of stats into the ground. Just talking about Rangers, there dozens of things that got way out of hand before Anet ever fixed them, and no, its not a coincidence that things got out of hand just as Anet patched them and magically knew about the issue months before the game even released.

Azuriusz.6724:

One more thing.

For each bug you find, a hundred has been found and fixed, and i’m not even over exaggerating.

Do the math.

Out there are poorly paid people who make a living out of finding those.

u mean us players ?

Wondrouswall.7169:

Should make it a beta week instead of just a weekend for Scrapper and Druid testing.

I would love this. I am so enthused to try out Druid and Scrapper. A week long fun would really be fantastic. It would also calm people who feel like the last two aren’t getting as much love. ^.^

Ranger and Engineer mains don’t need an entire week to see what’s what.

Darkness.9732:

Apophis.2498:

I am not sure why this is such a big deal. class/specialization balance goes beyond alpha and beta testing, and each will be continually tweaked as time goes on. ANet has their own test team that goes through stuff before we ever see it. And who knows the druid may have been worked on the most out of all classes.

The Scrapper and Druid will be fine, I’m sure.

For sure you are not a ranger or engi. That’ s why you write this

I do play ranger.

After every single BWE they had a big list of changes based on feedback on every specialization that was available.

Some specializations will have had three itterations before launch, others only one. Can’t see in what possible universe it would be fair that:
Profession A has had a test, feedback, change, test of change, feedback, change, test of change, feedback, change.
And profession B had test, feedback, change.

Gee i wonder which profession is probably more polished.

Terrahero.9358:

After every single BWE they had a big list of changes based on feedback on every specialization that was available.

Some specializations will have had three itterations before launch, others only one. Can’t see in what possible universe it would be fair that:
Profession A has had a test, feedback, change, test of change, feedback, change, test of change, feedback, change.
And profession B had test, feedback, change.

Gee i wonder which profession is probably more polished.

as if any of the professions were polished… amirite fellas?

Jaxom.7310:

Terrahero.9358:

After every single BWE they had a big list of changes based on feedback on every specialization that was available.

Some specializations will have had three itterations before launch, others only one. Can’t see in what possible universe it would be fair that:
Profession A has had a test, feedback, change, test of change, feedback, change, test of change, feedback, change.
And profession B had test, feedback, change.

Gee i wonder which profession is probably more polished.

as if any of the professions were polished… amirite fellas?

The earlier professions will have been through several rounds of revision come launch, whilst the last ones will not have, and thus be in a much rougher state. I’m not sure why they planned it this way.

It’s especially galling for Ranger because it was already in a kittenty spot. And now they’ve dumped another great pile of kitten on the class, by deciding to shove it into the live game with minimal development time on it.

This time I have to say it: Druid is in a much much better situation than Scrapper.
They clearly focused their time on the Druid.
Scrapper doesn’t even have a proper spec mechanic.
Polishing both will be really different: Druid will be adjusted and balanced, and will be ok in time. Scrapper needs a complete rework they WILL NOT do: its going to be half-baked FOREVER.