Guild Wars 2

I feel like I’m the only one making a review post that isn’t angry and alarmist, but I liked just about everything I saw. Didn’t run into any bugs, content was fun, exploring the area was great! Map is beautiful. Also appreciated the out-of-cutscene dialog that my character was speaking. And most of all, love how the character development has improved around the end of season 1, and am very glad to see that quality continuing into this expansion.
Revenant was pretty fun to try out. The celestial stat setup up left it feeling kind of weak, but I guess that’s the best way to explore different ways of playing the thing with one set of gear. Found some good synergy within the limited weapon/legend/trait options, and am eager to see what other options will look like for them! The only thing that put me off about the test was the rev’s damage on hammer skills 3 and 5 (no issues with the other weapon set). #2 at max range has a good hit to it, but I found it difficult to get that kind of situation set up almost all of the time. Meanwhile, #3 and #5 both look like they’d pack quite a punch, and while I appreciate that they both have strong CC, that they were barely better than an auto attack made the weapon as a whole feel a little bleh. That and how hard it was to get the most out of #2 made it hard to dish out much damage in hammer. Maybe they’ll feel much more worth using with different stats, but that’s how it felt with the test setup… then again, I’d probably just double swords and Shiro my way through the expac.

You’re not the only one who wasn’t angry

The majority of testers on my server weren’t angry either, we only had one poophead during the last testing period.

I rather liked it. I thought it was a little short but it was fun. I didn’t like that I was stuck in celest gear but I suppose it could of been worse. I did notice a few bugs like mobs with cereal numbers rather then names, being stuck on nothing. But that’s to be expected in a beta. All in all I had a good time and the story was fun and different

Gashead.9162:

I feel like I’m the only one making a review post that isn’t angry and alarmist, but I liked just about everything I saw. Didn’t run into any bugs, content was fun, exploring the area was great! Map is beautiful. Also appreciated the out-of-cutscene dialog that my character was speaking. And most of all, love how the character development has improved around the end of season 1, and am very glad to see that quality continuing into this expansion.
Revenant was pretty fun to try out. The celestial stat setup up left it feeling kind of weak, but I guess that’s the best way to explore different ways of playing the thing with one set of gear. Found some good synergy within the limited weapon/legend/trait options, and am eager to see what other options will look like for them! The only thing that put me off about the test was the rev’s damage on hammer skills 3 and 5 (no issues with the other weapon set). #2 at max range has a good hit to it, but I found it difficult to get that kind of situation set up almost all of the time. Meanwhile, #3 and #5 both look like they’d pack quite a punch, and while I appreciate that they both have strong CC, that they were barely better than an auto attack made the weapon as a whole feel a little bleh. That and how hard it was to get the most out of #2 made it hard to dish out much damage in hammer. Maybe they’ll feel much more worth using with different stats, but that’s how it felt with the test setup… then again, I’d probably just double swords and Shiro my way through the expac.

Yup I agree with all of the above. Used Rev for first run and ranger for second run and enjoyed it even more. Only problem I found was a pitch black veil at the entrance/ exit of the cave and mastery UI, although vastly upgraded and much better looking was still a little confusing to use. Overall I loved it.

I agree with most of it too

The map is really nice even on low settings. I feel like the map does shine especially with the music and ambiance. I did enjoy it so much, i turned the effects etc off after some time.

I did enjoy the revenant too. I do like skills which need you to position yourself like hammer 2, mace 2, axe 5 etc ! Id like something like axe 4 on the reaper..thats some nice teleport/leap..
The numbers been meh with celestial, would have loved to try other gear sets, but i guess since the numbers are still beeing worked on cele is a good way to go for now.

The map events on day have been a lot of fun. E.g. i did enjoy the hunt with the Itzel a lot.
BUT..i was kinda dissapointed when night came. I was expecting something ..more dangerous. It did not feel like i had to stay somewhere and survive, actually i was exploring the map way more after the day since it was the best thing to do. Id really wish there would be more of an effect of what you do at day.
Id like something to defend, like a real base. And some dangerous monsters in the dark coming for us.
Especially when leaving the base..it should be survival horror

Well, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked due to work, but the test was pretty sweet IMO. The map looks fantastic, the events are great – fast and furious for the most part, and the story looks to be progressing nicely. As some others have pointed out, I feel the night events need some work to bring them up to the quality of the day events.

Personally, I’m glad I chose a familiar class (Necro) rather than trying out the Revenant. That can happen another time. The Celestial gear provided had some OK stats and was tankier than what I’m used to so that helped a little with survivability I guess, but the drop off in DPS was quite noticeable too. Maybe a small choice could be worked in for gear? But not a big deal.

Didn’t have much chance to delve into the Masteries system, but it’s looking pretty comprehensive; I wanted to have a look at the precursor system but didn’t manage to activate it. Overall, I’d say there is a lot of horizontal progression built into this expansion. Some feedback for the devs – please improve the tool tips explaining the mastery system, and make that system give a bit more feedback to the player. Notification on level-up is a must IMO.

About the only thing I didn’t like was the falling mechanic. I understand this is an early build and more map levels are coming, but please don’t have this instadeath thing. At least not every time you make the slightest misstep or get knocked back. It gets old very quickly on a map with this much verticality.

Overall, it looks pretty exciting.

Agreed, I found the day events really great and full of diversity, however when night came things got a bit boring and repetitive. The same defend and escort events around the map left me wanting a lot more “excitement” during the night.

All the rest of the stuff was great though, I absolutely loved combining bouncing shrooms with gliding to take some amazing shortcuts and explore this gorgeous map.

My one complaint about it was that the new areas seem to be a bit more hardware intensive than the old ones. I noticed a significant framerate drop upon entering into them.

Loved it as well – beside a few little points- but it was a Beta test – I am excited about HoT

Yeah it was a good short run. I really don’t have anything to report regarding obvious bugs, nothing game stopping for sure. Graphics ran smooth, but I was expecting to not have many problems with a fairly current geforce card as normally developers use nvidia’s graphic dev tools so likely optimized already. I’m sure they have lots of server logs to look over out of whatever debugging mode that they had going (likely reason for no huge massive zergs). Looked pretty darn good though.

Hello everyone o/

I wanted to share my experience with beta with others.
Most of people played Revenant, but i decided to play thief this time.

I used venom utilities, venom elite or TG, venom heal skill or signet, 6 0 6 0 2 most of time, sb / p/d (most time, though i used s/p little). I wanted that venom build to have more fun. I played this beta from 20:30-22:30 and from 00:30-02:30 (didn’t stay last half hour in 2nd term was already to late :/).

I was tagged on some events on map, on some not, half time i was exploring, jumping around and enjoying view. Events i did in 1st period of test and later 2nd: pact soldier escort, pact fleet defend, bug collecting, chain of events with that chief from hylek tribe (up to legendary boss where i got bugsplat and had to send report and restart game), some events with Laranthir. That is all about i can remember.

Important thing to test more is: thief utilities get often bugged, and sometimes i cannot use them even though they are on not on cd quite some time (talking about 30s and more). During time when i couldn’t use my venoms (the case was same when i had shadowstep, some signets, sr; didn’t test others, cause my weapons skills were working all time without problems). I also must say that this case of utility problem on my thief was significant in 1st period of beta test (i don’t remember having same problem in 2nd period of test more then 1-2 times, though it is possible i had this only in 1st period of test). I didn’t try pact defend event in 2nd period of test.

Bugs collecting event. That event when u do little jumping around to collect bugs for hylek (and earn mastery) for limited period of time is fun. Though there is problem that if u miss jump or have to start over again (yeah u get return to start point again which is great), u lose all your progress and bugs don’t reappear on spots where u collected them.

When u escort Laranthir into that ancient city (part where u are sniping mordrem from high range with that 10K range snipers). U can hit mordrem below u with snipers, but they reset when u damage them and not die. So having players to snipe them is pretty useless. I did this event in 2nd period of test. Also those rocks where they plant explosives, there is way to do simple jumping over them get on other side (though u need some kind of speed buff or signet).

Event when u defend pact supply for a limited time against mordrem, sometimes event wouldn’t finish and stayed on 0:00 timer for long time (taking about random ~1 min) and after that event would fail or not fail.

One thing that is also important and needs some fix in my opinion is how we get experience towards earning some mastery. There has to be some balance in experience for getting mastery to players who stay to def event and to those who play tactics: tag most u can and get everything. I was in party with my friend. We decided that he plays tag, and that i tag and do each event from start to end. When he started gliding mastery i had 30%. He finished his mastery to 100% and i had 80%. This is something that needs serious reconstruction cause everyone will eventually start tagging most they can so they get mastery asap; and it will be like we don’t care about people who stay loyal to event (like commanders for example). For example i like how events are done in SW, and balance and rewards are good there (except for combats mechanics that i’m not fun of cause they don’t promote skillfull play).

General impression about map look is good. I get feeling that map is like some floating spaceship. Reason for that is because i believe that Mordremoth has risen to ground with his thorns and made it float. Zhaitan looks like small fish comparing to this one :p

That is all from me. Thank u for reading and sorry for mistakes i made in writting. I hope this can be of some help to people in arena. Also thank u for that portal drop after hours and hours farming in DT o>

Some games have queen of thorns this one has king of thorns \m/

What I like
My character has a voice actor/ actress during the mission thus it feel he/ she is more involved now.
Thr map was very details and has alot of nice scenery.

What I didn’t like
Revenant having one weapon slot only like Elementalist and Engineer. I’m really hoping this is not pernament but I’m not counting on it (since their legendary stance is their utility like ele whiching elements and the toolkit with the engi).
The map is abit hard to navigate at time like I want to go to the lower ground but I have to find the path leading doen first.
The map being one big event. I hope the other maps would follow suit. If the mission require us to complete the whole event in order to advance then something tell me it could be a while for us to complete the expansion story.

The Revenant itself is a interesting profession as it made me actually like the hammer for the first time but the beta stats for it was awful. Hopefully the next beta, they could let us change their stat items about.

I also enjoyed the map immensely. I got frustrated at several points as to whether something was up or down and I run around in circles looking for where to go. which was frustrating, particularly at first. It took forever to find my guild-mates.
I also never seemed to advance beyond the first 2 skill points, I would find icons on the map with nothing there. And, I participated in all kind of events and never made a skill point or a level. I don’t know if I was doing something wrong, or if it was a bug.
There were a few areas along the edge of a cliff, where you could fall part way, then be stuck. There would be vines and such that it looked like you could jump onto, but you would just die instantly.
All and all, I thought the environment was beautiful, and I really enjoyed the map.

My feedback…
I was only on first test phase (time issues).

I didn’t played Rav (as I am not highly interested in it). But I have to say their utility was quite good (long lasting stability+swiftness, blast finishers, too bad their weapon (I think) have air field wasting these nice fire fields, that I provided.

Stress part. During initial day events game was very (too much) unresponsive. When we finally moved to other events it became better, and when we finally reach temple at south there was no problems.

Masteries are ok… But require way more tutorial (At first I didn’t know how to learn them etc.). I liked that I really was interested in fungus tree (as fungus were availble all around the place). Still went with my feather fall… sorry I mean glider (a bit short duration but was enough)

Events were fine mostly, but we didn’t done anything big. (We didn’t kill vine guarded by troll).
The one with clearing entrance to temple (waiting for explosive charges) was way to long. If it is due to scaling then you should consider not scaling timer, but making more (more powerfull) monsters to spawn.
During night we keep our temple spawn (most people went somewhere), but it didn’t provide us any nice loot, even with getting supplies, and rescuing people. After night ended it looked like (test ended) that point was lost anyway. If I am correct it should work like checkpoint in event chain.

The major problem with this area is… Lack of meaningful loot, or it takes very long to get one. It have chance to become next silverwastes with people taxing from “almost done” to next “almost done”. I consider it as problem.

My feedback:

Revenant:
Overall a fun profession with some really nice synergy with their skills. Strong support and control options. Hammer feels a bit weak compared to mace & axe, and I personally could not defeat more than one Mordrem Mender at a time with the hammer, making it extremely difficult to kill them when they were together. With mace & axe I had no difficulties with any mob. Hammer, with the exception of the menders, was fun and capable.

Legendary stances and utility skills are good, with some interesting and fun tools to play with. I cannot help feel Unyielding Anguish will be too strong in Conquest PvP, but I will reserve final judgement for when I have tried it in actual PvP. I feel the cast time on Forced Engagement is too long for the energy cost. Personally, I think the energy cost is fine, but feel the cast time should be reduced slightly, maybe to 3/4 or 1/2 second. All other utility skills seem pretty good as is.

Verdant Brink:
The map is really nice, with some very cool looking scenery. It has a lot of exploration value and more to be discovered via masteries. I enjoyed some of the events, especially the sylvari sniper group escort mission. Unfortunately, I was too busy exploring to fully experience the day night event cycle, but from what I saw there seems to be plenty of things to do.

Masteries:
I only levelled up 1 level of gliding and 1 level of mushroom lore, so my experience on this was limited. However, I can provide a little feedback on this. Firstly, the mushrooms. I only unlocked the bounce mushrooms, but they seemed to work well. I am looking forward to exploring areas using these.

The glider felt ok, but I do have some issues with it. Firstly, I found that you could open the glider at the tip of your jump, even on flat ground, which felt odd and when trying to do normal jumping it kinda of felt awkward and unnecessary. I can see it being very useful in some jumping puzzles, but feel the time to open needs to be extended ever so slightly. I’m talking maybe 1/2 a second or less, just so it doesn’t open when you don’t actually need it to or while jumping normally.

Another thing I think needs adjusting with the glider is the ability to close it when you let go of the button. Currently you hold space to open it, then you have to press it again to close it. I would prefer it if the glider opened while holding and closed when you let go. I know some would not like this, so I feel there should be an option to set up how you prefer to control the glider, via either a toggle or hold option.

Lastly, I think it may need to be made clearer how masteries work and how you go about activating and progressing them. Personally, I figured it out myself pretty quickly, but there were a lot of people asking in chat about how to unlock gliding. The tutorial messages that first pop up about masteries all appear one after the other, before you even have chance to do it yourself, so by the time you get to opening the masteries UI you could easily forget some of what was in the messages. I feel a more step by step interractive guide may be a better approach, one that explains each stage as the player does it.

Overall:
I was very happy with what I experienced. The map was awesome, the masteries will clearly make exploration interesting and the revenant feels fun and very capable. I had no big issues, with only one odd minor bug (people were bouncing up and down while viewing the first cinematic cutscene after entering Silverwastes). I am really looking forward to seeing more of what the revenant can do and more areas of HoT, and looking forward to trying out WvW and PvP with the revenant.

I posted this on another thread as well, but is relevant here as well…

Revenant:
-I’m reserving full judgement until we know more about the other legends, traits, and weapons, so take this with a grain of salt
-Class Mechanic is fun and I think well thought out. Overall I like the energy management and legend swapping
-Hammer is very slow and low damage. If we were able to swap weapons, I’d say this was ok, however since we can’t swap in combat I think this weapon needs some tweaking to make it a viable weapon choice
-Mace is not bad for a condi weapon. My only suggestion would be to decrease the cast time on skill 2. It costs energy to use as well, so I think the long cast is unnecessary and slows down an otherwise decently timed weapon
-Axe offhand was wonderful, don’t change a thing (loved skill 4)
-Jalis was overall not bad, but not really my cup of tea. I do really like skill 7 though. The elite has a very long cast time that I think should be reduced as it felt very sluggish to use and when I wanted it (before I foresee a big hit coming) the cast time often made it not so useful. Also, would be helpful if we actually knew what the “damage reduction” really was.
-Mallyx was enjoyable for me (though I noticed most stayed in Jalis) overall. The elite was useful, but I think the energy drain either needs to be reduced, or the stat increase of 10% should be tweaked up.
-In general, I didn’t like how you couldn’t use skills that have an energy drain while you were out of combat. Although I can understand why this is so, there were some situations where I was running up on an enemy and wanted to activate one of these skills, but couldn’t because I wasn’t yet in combat with them.

So, here’s hoping that we get more information on the Revenant soon so we can look at more legends and weapons. I think this class could be great for me, but the play style presented currently just aren’t exactly for me (though interesting enough).

Map:
-Absolutely beautiful. The part with the Itzel was amazing, if a bit complicated to get around at first.
-I was a bit bummed that I couldn’t find a place to use my Exalted Mastery that I leveled up, but got over it pretty quickly
-The event with the Wyvern attacking the Itzel was cool, though it did bug out on me a bit when trying to get the water buckets

Story:
-What little there was to have seemed solid. Our char. talking was a huge improvement (even though I don’t like human voices and vernacular).
-Can’t wait to see more of Rytlock and how he will react to Caithe (and my main who is Sylvari)

Mastery System:
-At first I had trouble figuring out what do do with the mastery point I received, but eventually figured it out. It isn’t very intuitive for new player I don’t think, but isn’t bad once you take a few minutes to sit down with it.
-As mentioned above, wish I could have used the mastery I leveled up

Invictus.1503:

Story:
-What little there was to have seemed solid. Our char. talking was a huge improvement (even though I don’t like human voices and vernacular).
-Can’t wait to see more of Rytlock and how he will react to Caithe (and my main who is Sylvari)

Very good point, and something I forgot to add to my feedback. I REALLY like how my character talks now, and how all the NPC’s talk in the same way. It really makes it feel like we are all having a live discussion, rather than a scripted cutscene. Not that I dislike cutscenes, I absolutely love Anet’s artistic cinematics and want more of them, but I was not so keen on the character dialog cutscenes. I really do like this new approach to character dialog though, they feel more natural. A big +1 for that.

I also really liked the beta! The revenant was a fun profession to learn – the differences between legendary stances will take some time to get used too, but I don’t feel its too different from eles (which is my main toon).

The beta map was visually as big as I expected, but the amount of vertical area available to explore made it seem twice as big as it looked, which was fabulous. I gave myself a motion-sickness headache from trying to scale too many sheer cliffs. :-P

Enemies evading is a welcome challenge, though I need to do more research on control effects like Taunt as mobs with them only appeared in the middle of kitten clusters, so I didn’t have the bandwidth to figure out the mechanics while fighting.

Masteries track is a bit confusing. GW2 already has a precedent set, like with skill and trait points, where you are rewarded with a point to spend on a certain track, and once spent, you unlock said track/trait and have a balance of -1 (or n) point(s). But having to select a track and then use your point only after completing it seems counter-intuitive.

I’m also in the same camp where night events feels super repetitive and a little too easy to get around (there are some areas in Orr with worse trash mobs). And even though my server seemed to be succeeding in most of the night defend events, we barely made a scratch in the overall map goal by the time dawn broke. However, I did notice getting T6 mats dropping at night while getting T5s during the day – if that is intentional, I like it as it seems a fitting reward for battling the same types of enemies but at a “supposedly” more challenging time of day.

Bugs:
Pale Reaver Rally Event
After freeing the Pale Reavers, I ran around to help defend supplies/load mortars on the other side of the area since I didn’t have gliding unlocked to reach the Troll Vinetender. However, time and time again during the event I would watch the Troll’s health get depleted in the event side bar, only to quickly reset back to to the pre-Colossal Vine at 85% health. It reset about 5 times before I got fed up and abandoned the event.

Speed Mushrooms
(Not going to lie, my inner middle schooler found this name greatly amusing.)
It got annoying while exploring that every time I ran by a the speed boost mushrooms, I would get the red text of doom warning me I didn’t have “Blazing Speed Mushrooms [mastery track] unlocked”. I’m guessing the intended mechanic is be like the Velocity Elixirs in SWs, but there’s no need to have warning text just for drive-bys.

Other than that, super looking forward to the expansion!

Cybele.9417:

Speed Mushrooms
(Not going to lie, my inner middle schooler found this name greatly amusing.)
It got annoying while exploring that every time I ran by a the speed boost mushrooms, I would get the red text of doom warning me I didn’t have “Blazing Speed Mushrooms [mastery track] unlocked”. I’m guessing the intended mechanic is be like the Velocity Elixirs in SWs, but there’s no need to have warning text just for drive-bys.

It seemed to me, on this map anyway, that the mushroom track is simply a convenience mastery. I didn’t run into a single area that had a mushroom (such as bouncing mushroom) that you couldn’t get to by going a slightly longer way. Not sure if this is just coincidence for this area or if it is fully intended to be just a convenience track.

I honestly enjoyed the beta too. I unlocked as much of the map as I could, with a few areas still being inaccessible. I wasn’t too impressed with the revenant – however, that was because of the hammer, which I found frustrating to use as well. I will definitely have to check out the mace and axe next time. I couldn’t do another beta run or truly check out everything due to work. I am also waiting to find out everything else about the profession as well – I do realize that not everything has been revealed about the revenant yet.

The only ‘bug’ I noticed was that the camera tended to shift to the side slowly and randomly whenever I was battling one of the Mordem. I was able to stop that by shifting the camera back. I asked around my guild, and a few guild members noticed it too. Hopefully they will fix that.

Otherwise it was really cool to try the beta at least once. I can definitely say I will be buying the expansion when it comes out.

Etienne.9408:

Agreed, I found the day events really great and full of diversity, however when night came things got a bit boring and repetitive. The same defend and escort events around the map left me wanting a lot more “excitement” during the night.

All the rest of the stuff was great though, I absolutely loved combining bouncing shrooms with gliding to take some amazing shortcuts and explore this gorgeous map.

You got both? Nice! I saw most people only got one mastery. I certainly didn’t get even one, I was too adhd.

How high would you bounce?

Count me as another that was happy. There are still bugs and other items that need work, but I was definitely feeling positive!

I also enjoyed the beta test. I did not run into any major problems. I DC’d once and one time I was standing on a rock and then suddenly found myself on top of a vine. Other than that I did not have any problems playing.

Morfedel.4165:

You got both? Nice! I saw most people only got one mastery. I certainly didn’t get even one, I was too adhd.

How high would you bounce?

I got both, but I didn’t try combining them, will have to give that a go. Some mushrooms bounce you quite high, but the mushroom bounce height varies from mushroom to mushroom it seems, as they aim you at a set height and direction, to land you at a specific spot. If you can glide while bouncing I imagine there may be some locations that need you to combine the two in order to get there.

Before I unlocked mushrooms I did pass by some mushrooms that lead up to areas that I could not see any other way up to, so it is likely that the mushroom line will be more than a simple convenience unlock.

I am really liking this new way to explore maps. I also like how there are few breadcrumbs. You are left to find them yourself, with no poi’s or other map icons showing you where to go. Though I think there is a mushroom unlock that makes them visible on the map? Not sure I like that idea, but I expect some will like it so can understand why they added it.

Overall I think map exploration in the new zones is going to be interesting, fun and at times challenging. Really looking forward to it.

I was really surprise at how well this close beta went a crossed the board. There were no crazy game breaking bugs well at least nothing I founded which was great! Although its quite clear that this close beta build was really a rehash of the pax build but either way I was really happy to get hands on action.

I get the feel a lot of people were expecting more which I can say I was one of those guys but I still think what I played and what I saw is great and I am looking forward to what is to come in the future.

I also did a video on my experience on the closed beta so if you wanna check it out feel free too and any feedback or time spent on my video is much appreciated.

All I can say keep it up anet I think you guys are on the right track.