Guild Wars 2

First ofc the culling.

Finally it’s gone. Awesome. the w3 experience for me just became far more enjoyable. good job (it should have been like this from the start, but hey…). i was a bit afraid about the effects of lag and framerate that it would cause but it seems that on my hardware it doesn’t impact framerate in a percievable way. from what i can tell from the friends i have who play the game, and having watched it play on their computers too, that the added graphic options make up for the increased GPU/CPU load.

i would rate this as a “good job”.

Then the character advancement.

first impression was “finally they also copied the realm ranks from DAoC, huzzah !” and then i went to the tab with the bonuses and thought “now that’s a bit worthless, let’s scroll down to the good abilities” .. and found i couldn’t scroll down .. those are the abilities and i wasn’t sure if i had to start laugh or cry.

i can understand (but don’t like) that they didn’t want to add active abilities but no stat increases ? i absolutely expected to find stat increases. +20 (so, +100 at 5th level) to each of the 8 stats or something like that. comparable to the bonuses that the best foods give for a maxed stat tree. something that allows you to tailor your character a bit more than what is allowed by gear. considering that character creation (what do you mean, i can’t spend points on character creation ???) or race (an asura has the same strenght as a norn or a shar ? a shar is as proficient with technology and magic as an asura ?) have absolutely zero effect on your character and only gear makes a difference i was really hoping … nah, EXPECTING that the realm ranks, erm, i mean, the w3 ranks would allow us to tailor our character’s stats a bit in order to make them a bit more unique.

so, this leaves me a bit baffled and disappointed (to put it mildly) about the character advancement part.

i would rate this as “showing potential, but inadequate in the current state”

the new gear.

it’s good to see we can now get more or less the same weapons and armor (stats) as the people who do pve. the jewelry section is a bit underwhelming though. no purple jewelry :/ one could argue that with the changes to dailies that it is now possible for w3 players to get purple jewelry with laurels, but that it will take longer for a w3 player to get his jewelry than for a pve player. oh well, too bad, but that’s not the end of the world (to me).
a lot of people seem very unhappy about the lack of different skins available to w3 (but i can’t say that that matters to me)

i would rate this as “sufficient”