Guild Wars 2

I will weigh in here just for the sake of letting ArenaNet know my point.

- Adding the base game to the HoT expansion, fine it will be good for the player base in general. I have no issue wit this.
- Cost of $50 US – fine, even though we still don’t have the full details of the expansion and it’s playable size. There are a group of companies in the business to make money.
- Not including a character slot in the $50.00 expansion pack – Not acceptable.
- Advising people that the base game is needed for the expansion (remembering the recent sales of the base game) and then changing that on the website in an underhanded way to suit their current HoT release strategy is also not acceptable.

The player base are more intelligent these days and this is just plain rude, especially to the current and regular players. Anyone who plays this game consistently will have used all of their character slots and most likely purchased more. The expansion should include at least one character slot for the new class.
I don’t want the digital extras that come with the other higher priced expansion packs, they hold no value to me, if they do to you that’s cool more power to you but they do nothing for me.

I can understand the strategy the marketing team are pulling here, but players aren’t that stupid to be pushed into the next bracket of expansion pack anymore. Quite frankly they should have known from previous game releases, expansion packs and DLC releases how the community would react.
I will say that there is a lot of over-reaction in the community but there is still a valid reason for the size of this issue.
I played a lot of time in recent months preparing for the expansion including spending money on gems etc, however this incident has soured my enthusiasm to even log in now, it even scares me that the expansion will be a flop due to lack of relevant information presented to date.
I hope things change very soon for both me and ArenaNet, for now I will support the “Do not pre purchase HoT” movement until ArenaNet show some sort of reasonable information.

I will add mine as well, a lot of repeated items but for the sake of clarity for the devs I will mention them anyway.

• Mobs in and near Doomteeth with incorrect or unfinished tags: ie: ((527920)) including npc mobs with dialog boxes ((484430))
• Initiating gliding is not responsive enough, a few times I pressed space once and my character fell for too long (like it hadn’t activated), pressed again and then in two quick movements the glider deployed and then undeployed. Possibly just lag but most other game-play had reasonably good response for me.
• Low rez cut scenes – this may be deliberate with the idea to replace with better versions later.
• When jumping sometimes the glider animation sometimes quickly flickers on and off.

Opinions:

• Revenant is fun to play but too underpowered or slow (not sure which yet) based on the available traits lines and weapons available – I tried hammer and the mace/axe combos, two trait builds with not a lot of difference DPS-wise, I tried Warrior and Ranger in the beta as well and they both had much much more power. I expected the Revenant to be a little less powered due to it’s utility but not that much under. We will need to see how the other legends and trait lines play out as well as working out good rotations.
• For my playstyle the Warrior was a little tougher to keep alive but still strong, ranger for me was so much easier to stay alive and DPS down the mobs quicker, I also found this in Silverwastes as well due to the very similar gameplay and mob styles.
• Mastery interface is not easy to understand at first, the tick at the top left to activate the mastery line (ie: Gliding) should perhaps have a (always) visible description even if small text.
• I am hoping that other maps in the expansion have varied game-play and different mob types, although I do like Verdant Brink area I would be disappointed if the whole expansion was just one big series of maps that look and play like Silverwastes/Dry Top/Verdant Brink.
• Next beta needs to be more involved, longer duration, larger map availability with more areas of the gameplay (underwater?) and perhaps temporarily increasing XP rate for mastery’s so you can actually test the different mastery lines.
• Fun was had, appreciate the ability to test some aspects with this beta access. Very little lag to speak of so a fairly successful stress test. Loved the general look, feel, vertical gameplay and colours of the Verdant Brink map.

Clearly early days and limited gameplay but I still hold enough interest to see what is coming in future betas.

For you east coast Aussies, that means you have to get up at 4.30am Wednesday if you want any time in the beta before you head off to work.

4.30am – 6.30am
8.30am – 10.30am
12.30pm – 2.30pm