Well, this ended up a lot longer than expected, so sorry about that! To begin with, a bit of context to this. I was away for BWE1 so this is my first time playing with any of the specialisations and the Verdant Brink map. I did play revenant during the beta weekend, but apart from that I cannot comment on any changes.
I’m mostly working off of the testing form and my own notes taking while playing. In some cases general inexperience may be the cause for criticism or found flaws, rather than inherent design, so take what you will with a bit of salt. I mostly ran around with berserker stat weapons and toughness gear so I had some defensive leeway with the new mobs. Considering my runes were also unchanged I’m not really going to comment on damage much as my load out was very suboptimal for dps.
I’m mostly a PvE player so no feedback on pvp or stronghold.
Tempest
I main an ele so I immediately rolled a tempest and after running around verdant brink for several hours I was able to get a good ‘feel’ for how the spec plays. I like the overall concept behind the spec but it does fall flat in the execution.
While the tempest did feel like a specialisation rather than just playing an ele the overloads are very clunky in their current state. The fire and air overloads especially felt off as the cast time is just so ridiculously long that it’s likely that you will need to either dodge or get interrupted before you can finish. Furthermore, the overload affects seem to be designed as an ‘oh kitten’ skill to get out of emergency problems but the long cast times (assuming you even have the overload available when you need it) undermine this. Water overload failed me more than a few times as allies that were in enough trouble to warrant the big heal either got the heck out of danger (and my heal zone), healed themselves, or died before the big heal could go off. On the occasions it did work though, it was nice to see all those big green numbers pop up on the screen. Trying to go into battle leading off with an overload usually got me bursted down to low hp due to lack of mobility. I found overloads worked best when in a large group event where I could run around with abandon as the mobs ate the faces of other players rather than me, but they worked less well in solo play.
I’m not really a person to pay particularly close to traits and min-max stuff. With the BWE especially I usually just slapped on my favourites from lines (if I knew the class, such as ele) or just went with what looked cool or interesting (eg necro). The traits for the tempest seem lackluster overall and I cant really recall many. I used the trait that gave auras on overloads in combination with the aura sharing trait and that seemed to work quite well. But apart from that trait, no others stood out to me. I felt obliged to take the grandmaster that reduced warhorn recharge as otherwise the downtime just seemed to be too long to use the skills effectively (looking at you fire #5 with your poor fire field upkeep time).
I ran around using s/wh or d/wh and did have a lot of fun might stacking and trying out the new skills. I really like warhorn skills as they’re more dynamic or interesting than normal (eg moving water field). I had trouble with getting earth#5 to work reliably but earth #4 was fantastic for support and buffing. The water and air warhorn skills offer great support and control and I had a ton of fun lining up enemies for air #5. Overall, numbers may need to be balanced or changed depending on internal testing and other feedback but the mechanics of the warhorn skills are really good imo.
On the other hand, shouts were pretty disappointing. The only one I used was ‘Shock and aftershock’ solely for the quick aura (projectile reflect). I couldn’t feel justified taking the other shouts over my blast finishers or defensive shield, which just ended up being so useful with the new mobs.
Overall the spec was fun to play but the overloads and shouts do need a bit of tweaking to make them satisfying to use.
With tempest and other specs I noticed a bigger emphasis on positioning – which I assume will tie into raids and other challenging content. I’m looking forward to this as I found it a more engaging style of play than normal.
Herald/Updated rev
Just want to start off by saying that the revenant has been vastly improved since the original rev weekend – kudos ANET. Staff feels really satisfying to use and weapon swapping has greatly improved playability. I found offhand sword to not be very useful as #5 did not drag my enemy with me half the time. I don’t know if this is due to a bugged skill or me not utilising it correctly, but either way I swapped back to axe pretty quickly for the control and teleports.
Onto Herald – holy hell was this fun to play! I wasn’t too sure about it after reading the blogpost but it works so well in practise. I had a great time balancing the passive boons vs active effects and keeping energy in line. The elites was fun to use – fantastic work by the animation team(s). I played around using Shiro/Glint a fair bit with staff & s/a.
The biggest drawback I noticed was the lack of condition removal on the loadout I was having so much fun with. I often wanted to take a hammer for the ranged option but was pigeonholed into taking staff for the condi removal on #4 as I was reluctant to give up the sword dps. Yes, I know that conditional removal is available on other legends but I did not wish to slot them for one reason or another. There’s probably a condi removal trait somewhere that I completely missed but I feel that a condition removal on one of glint’s active effects would benefit the herald – especially with the focus on support for the Herald – and that it should at least be discussed.
Dragon Hunter
I have mixed feelings about the dragon hunter. On one hand, I enjoyed traps – fantastic animation and useful effects. On the other, the longbow didn’t feel that great to me. Longbow #5 was nice as a kiting/control tactic but the aoe on #4 and the charged #2 shot were very underwhelming. #3 has a very limited area of effect that requires precise positioning to be useful as projectile management. Why bother with #3 when I can just use a wall of reflection?
I fully admit that I am probably not a very good guardian – despite mucking around at level 80 and in the silverwastes for ages I still rely more on the passive virtue effects than actively firing them off. I tend to use f2 for condi cleanse and f1 for a might burst when I need it. What this meant was that I rarely activated new DH virtues so it’s difficult for me to give useful feedback. The spear felt a little awkward to use as I often sent it sailing off to the side of an enemy rather than at the enemy itself, but this may have been my fault for not targeting enemies often enough.
Overall, fun utilities, awkward weapon, and my playstyle meant that half of the spec changes were not used nearly often enough.
No feedback on the other specs as I either did not get around to testing them out or I don’t have much to say other than ‘this feels kinda cool to play’ due to a lack of experience with the base class (eg necro).
New mobs
Most importantly: Smokescales are evil and I avoided them like the plague. I didn’t find these guys fun or engaging to fight at all and usually just ran away.
Mushroom mobs caught me out at first due to the whole ‘explode on death’ thing but once I got past the initial encounter I had a better time fighting them. My only nitpick is that the stomp attack that a few them pull off has the breakbar show up for such a small amount of time I found it next to impossible to break.
One of my biggest gripes was with the sniper enemies. Most of the modrem are entertaining to fight – I especially enjoyed going up against the hammer enemies (crushers?) as I enjoyed the avoid-or-break chances when they charged up their big swing. Do I save my cc for that time or use it now so I can group up and aoe the mobs? Things like that made the encounters interesting instead of just pulling off normal dps.
Snipers, on the other hand, were so deadly with their rapid fire I felt I was locked into taking some kind of projectile management or get stomped. Or particular note are the charge attacks they do which leave a damaging trail on the ground. I often felt that it persisted for too long or did too much damage when I ran over it. 1 on 1 avoiding this line isn’t too bad, but it’s a different story when you’re trying to manage a group of mordrem, new mechanics, tendril aoes and have particle effects filling your screen. I appreciate the design behind rapid fire – it cant just be dodged as it goes on too long and therefore must be countered in other ways (which is good) but the hp damage for failing to do so it a bit too much imo. Hence feeling required to have easy magnetic aura access on tempest and the staff #3 on revenant.
The wyverns were fun to fight, but with the large legendary wyverns I quickly discovered that by hugging its behind you are safe from the vast majority of its attacks, which took a lot of the entertainment out of the fight.
And for the pettiest of petty enemy feedback: The Ram is terrible and needs to be destroyed. At the noble primary rally point, there is a veteran ram that spawns there that just loooves to take out the barricades I spent time collecting supply for. Excuse me, ram, those barricades are for the mordrem, not you. It was infuriately having to kill this veteran mob over and over again so the barricades could be up when they were actually needed. Basically, don’t have ambient enemies spawn in the middle of your camp. Please.
World
During the daytime, the events are wonderful. They are full of character and really drew me into the world. Seeing Lord Faren become Swordmaster Faren and fight off a wyvern in a loincloth was fantastic. The problem was that after playing through these events chains a couple of times the map became very predictable and therefore boring. This is especially true at night where the events are just standard hold/escort events non-stop for 40 minutes and gets very dull very quickly. Supply gathering becomes monotonous after doing it a few times.
I expect most the above will be addressed with the opening of the entire map, as it will be much larger with the floor biome and hence will have a greater variety of events available. I do suggest making sure that there are some more events that pop up semi randomly to make the map feel more dynamic, rather than having every event scripted off of another as the case seems to be now.
Also, the new ambient music is wonderful. I know it’s not Jeremy Soule anymore but it fits in so well with the environment and the rest of the GW2 soundtrack.
Mastery System
Gliding is probably the most fun I’ve had in the past year and I’m going to accidently jump off of a high ledge, forget I can’t glide, and faceplant soon.
Verdant brink felt rather restrictive until I was able to unlock both gliding and mushroom bouncing. The map and verticality of it was a bit overwhelming at first but by the time I had unlocked gliding I’d figured it out and wanted mushroom jumping asap so I wasn’t so restricted by the big gaps everywhere. I don’t know how feasible this is but having less exp needed to unlock the very first tier of a mastery would be nice solely so you can access these important navigational basics asap.
Once both of those masteries were unlocked though I was gliding and jumping about like a madman, seeing what new places I could get to. It’s a really nice, organic way to open up the map and explore it at your own pace. I am envisioning some very interesting jumping puzzles that require gliding halfway across the map to get your treasure.
I found mastery points were very quick to gather (especially once I started hunting them all down) and while they were fun to find and collect I had nothing to spend them on. Also, having to click a shiny thing that tells me I have a mastery point when I have JUST channelled at a mastery point is completely unnecessary. It says mastery point on the map and on the shiny bit. I get it. Please don’t make me click more – I have enough of that from opening all the loot bags.
Masteries are an excellent framework for progression – provided they are actually expanded upon. ANET has a worrying penchant for abandoning systems when they don’t work the way originally envisioned and there are been planet of systems that could have used work that have been mostly abandoned in favour of starting again. Dungeons are the biggest example of this. Don’t do this with masteries, because having to wait another 3 years for the next expansion due to re-doing everything that didn’t work perfectly (which will probably be most things) is going to suck.
Other
The breakbar system is much improved upon compared to the defiance method, but it suffers from a lack of explanation. There’s no indication than soft cc can help break enemies and I have no idea what was meant by the recharging yellow bar after to break a mob. The tooltip tutorial for masteries was pretty good so it was a shame to see breakbars completely unexplained in game. Furthermore, skill tooltips should be updated to let you know how much your skills do to a breakbar. How much more does my knockback do compared to my chill? Double? 1.5x? There’s no indication of this anywhere and it is extremely difficult to test with a whole ton of other people running around.
That’s pretty much most of what I had to say. Apologies for the massive wall of text and inevitable typos. I sincerely hope it’s useful. Despite some nitpicking, my overall take from this BWE has been largely positive and I am looking forward to launch.
