I am a casual player and I generally play PvE exclusively. I will go into WvW and EotM once in a while and I haven’t done any PvP.
I went into this beta knowing that I would have limited chances to try things out. Plus I don’t play enough to have tons of experience talking about DPS, etc. I did have enough of a plan that I got to play with the Revenant as it came equipped. I also went with a full Zerker set up and a Dire Armor/Rampagers weapon build for some condi. I played with all three weapon sets. I did very little in the way of testing the traits because time was a issue for me.
With the full Celestial set and using the hammer, I had some fun running around in group events. I was able to do enough damage that it was satisfying in groups in most levels. But when I played solo, which I often do, it took a long time to kill anything (Yes, I know that involves DPS). That got frustrating after a while, and even changing Legends wasn’t a big help.
With the full Zerker build, I was more effective with all weapons. While I enjoyed using the hammer, I felt the the best damage was with the Mace/Axe combo. I has some issues staying alive when soloing, but it mostly required that I be careful. Being able to switch Legends in combat and using the second heal definitely helped. I found that using the staff wasn’t a good option. Also channeling Ventari, while interesting, didn’t do as much as I had hoped for healing and condition removal. Again, since I was doing a lot of solo play, this set up didn’t do enough for me. In groups it was much more useful.
Lastly I tried the Dire Armor/Rampager Weapons build. I chose Rampagers to try to build up my precision and my chance to crit. When I used this with a mace/axe, I found that it was pretty effective. Obviously, it wasn’t going to give me the fastest kills, but I was able to go toe-to-toe in Straits of Devastation with individual monsters and even small groups. It might take a while to kill them, but at least they didn’t down me in the process. I actually wished I had more time to play this build because I was enjoying combat in the tougher zones.
Overall, I found that in all builds I had to spam skills as fast as possible. I felt that in a Condi build, the weapons had a limited amount of condi damage and that there weren’t enough condi options on them. Having more bleeding, daze or something similar, instead of being mostly torment, would have been good. On the Zerker build, I still wanted to do more damage. The idea was to kill them before they killed me. Too often I had to back out and heal up against the lowest level monsters.
If I had had more time, I would have build a Cleric’s set or something similar to test out the Ventari Legend. As it was, I didn’t find that Legend useful for my normal play style. I also would have liked to spend more time playing with the trait lines, but this wasn’t a weekend where I had the time to do that.
I am looking forward to the next Beta and I will probably bring back my Revenant just so I can do some of the things I missed doing this weekend.