Guild Wars 2

Posting here since this is where I took the list from.

Specializations
Same as the first HoT BWE, I main ranger and am waiting on the Druid spec. While I did play a little mesmer, it was mainly for insurance via portal while exploring the map with friends, so I’ll leave the feedback to those better qualified.

Creatures

How is the difficulty of the new hostile mobs, and are they fun and exciting?
The mobs seemed easier this beta, although that might be because I had some experience from the last BWE. The dagger-hylek’s (shadowblade?) stabbing attack was dangerous, but had a good tell to it. I think the Mordrem tormenters were in the last BWE, but I don’t remember the torment stacks…Honestly, that homing ball of tormented death that is their attack got me quite a few times. Smokescales and snipers are in a nice place with fairly low health to compensate for their damage.

The beetles seemed to be a little too restrictive on what’s considered their “front”. There were a few times while I was fighting them that I thought I was in front of them, but through either their animations or my positioning I was still hitting for 0.

The Legendary wyvren’s breakbar needs to scale better. I only saw it take to the air once, otherwise the breakbar was down almost as soon as it appeared.

This might be a bug, but one of the times I fought Diarmid, it just stood/walked around and didn’t do anything. It’s a great encounter when it does fight, but it’s kinda ruined if she just stands there.

World
With the Opening of two new outposts, we are adding in a bunch of new events. Are they fun?

Yes. The events weren’t bugged for the most part, so I think we got a good feel for them. The dialogue during the noble’s event chain was great. I didn’t run the other one as often, but the times I did went smoothly for the most part.

One thing that needs looking into is the amount of time it takes to gather enough ship salvage in the ordinance corps event chain. The event probably runs twice as long as it should. Even with mushroom bouncing and gliding, running supply back and fourth gets tedious after what feels like the 20th time.

As I said above, the legendary Wyvren needs a larger breakbar, so that the zerg has a decent chance of failing to break it. I’d like to actually have to deal with the consequences of failing it a few times.

Do the new events bring you more into the world?
Yes. While they hylek event chain last BWE gave us interesting info about those living in the jungle, this section of the map seemed more focused on the survivors of the crash. These events did a good job of detailing the struggles of the survivors.

Are the new events challenging, meaningful, and interesting?
Yes. There was usually a couple people downed at events, which is good to see. It means that the events are proving a challenge and helping people get better.

That said, the Legendary Wyvren fight needs a bit of tweaking. Aside from the breakbar being too small, the fire carpet mechanic is completely invalidated by the fact that there is no fire under him. The entire fight can be safely completed by staying behind its tail and inside the “character circle” that shows its position. Please make the wyvren stand in a fire field at times so that players can’t just camp behind it the entire fight.

Mastery System
How is the progression?
The pacing is at a good spot right now, contingent on new masteries being added at a fairly regular rate. The constant stream of events in VB mean that there’s going to be a lot of experience to gain quickly. I think I was getting a million experience every 2-4 hours? Not blazing fast, but not an endless grind either. People are going to have all the currently announced masteries completed shortly after a week has passed. The majority of the playerbase will probably take 2-3 months, maybe less.
How is it using the mastery abilities in the current area?

I focused on gliding for this beta, making it to advanced gliding. (I cheated on the last quarter of the bar and farmed new characters, but I wanted time to try the mastery out after I had it) Both gliding and mushroom bouncing make the map a whole lot easier to traverse and eliminates a lot of the bottlenecks the paths lead you into.

Is the mastery system providing a meaningful area of progression?
Stealth Gliding – The ~2 seconds of stealth this mastery gives you is a little underwhelming. It’s not enough to get through a mob’s aggro range, it’s barely enough to break aggro if you’re at the very edge of the Mob’s leash…I think it could do with an increase
Advanced Gliding -The infinite glide was great, along with not closing the glider when you reach the end of the endurance bar. The only disappointment I had was that I wasn’t able to divebomb like in the guild hall trailer. Is this something that we actually can’t do, or is it like diving goggles in that you can only do it from a specific point? If it’s at all possible to make divebombing a thing, please do!

Do you care about experience and mastery points?
Yes. It’s a lot of fun to work out how to get to the mastery points, although most of them seem to be “find a high point and glide for it”. Not sure how to mitigate that, but I expect there’s more like the mushroom cave that you can’t glide to.

Does it provide a good framework to add more masteries in the future?
Yes. See last BWE feedback.

Do you want to learn as many masteries over time to overcome challenges later in the future?
Yes. See last BWE feedback.

Stronghold PvP
Didn’t play stronghold
Bugs
Diarmid sometimes forgets to fight and just walks around for an extended period of time.

Noble Event Chain: Jasmina doesn’t wait for the first champ hylek stage of the event to die. (Location: after walking down from the cliff, past the first hylek ambush, to the green grassy area after the small bridge) I only encountered this once, late saturday night with a small group doing the event. I assume it’s because the group didn’t kill the spawned mobs fast enough. The result of this bug is that Jasmina walks away from the fight and when she gets to the vigil camp One-eye doesn’t spawn.

Related: There’s an eyepatch in game guys…at least make it look like One-eye only has one eye…

my thanks as well! https://xkcd.com/979/

(Part 3 of 3)
EVENTS
There is a marked difference between the day events and the night ones. The night events are more disorganized; you are fighting to stay alive through the night and get soldier back to the rally points. There’s not a whole lot of direct storytelling, more relying on the atmosphere and experience around you.
On the other hand, the day events are very much a storyline. Laranthir’s event was quite a bit of fun with the organization needed, although I feel like the health of the vinetenders could scale a bit better, in addition to increasing the health of the wurm. As it is, especially for the first group when people are just starting to gather, it can take
forever to whittle their health down, and then the wurm dies almost instantly. If the vinetender’s health was decreased so that they died faster, but the wurm’s health was increased so that it would take a good burn to completely kill it first time through, you could reward coordination by finishing the group faster with good timing and a hard burn, but also groups that don’t have as much DPS could still progress through the event in good time. As it is, it takes quite a while to make it through this event. Either a reward should come after each group (smaller, naturally, but still a reward), or the groups should die faster so that the event doesn’t take so long between rewards.
Over on the Itzel side, aside from the bug in the first event, I really enjoyed the story being told. And putting out the fires in the village…absolute chaos. It was
amazing how well you guys did with the feeling of panic in the village. Raptors and fire everywhere, wyverns laying down lines of fire, frantically trying to find the water
buckets…it was great! On that note, at least when I did it there seemed to be some people who just…could not grasp what was going on. I don’t know how you help them without ruining how amazing the event is currently…maybe add more water buckets? Hopefully /s chat will be able to inform those people what they need to do when the event happens.
My other complaint about the Itzel event chain is when you throw the rotten fruit at the Zintl priest guy. It seemed obvious what you were supposed to do (rotten food, a speaker you don’t like, 2+2=4, right?) but there’s no indication that it’s actually doing anything while he’s giving his speech. If you want us to listen to his entire speech (and it has a set length), then put an event bar up in the corner that either has a countdown or slowly fills up or something to convey that we’re actually doing the right thing. As it was, I started to wonder if there was a spot either above or below us that we were supposed to be at instead.
Following the lorekeeper guy as he walks to the wyvren egg event is probably my favorite part of the entire chain. The exposition is great to explain their motivations and how the itzel view the jungle. Also, the way his body kinda wiggles around the shoulder/neck area as he walks…props to the animation team, it looks amazing.

OVERALL
I loved it. The new map looks amazing, and the combat is more engaging in PvE than it’s been in a very long time. Gliding felt great, the masteries leveled at a good pace (assuming faster leveling once daytime events aren’t bugged). The success of the mastery system relies on actually adding to it regularly in the future, not just planning on adding to it and then never getting around to it.

(part 2 of 3)
MASTERIES
The masteries I earned were very useful in VB and served to enhance the feel of moving through the map. The bouncing mushrooms have an issue with you taking damage due to fall distance, but I’m sure that will be fixed, so no worries there. Gliding was fun, but the lack of a turn limit made the “slow down” part of lean techniques a little redundant.
That said, it was still fun to slowly float down to the ground.
Does it provide meaningful progression?
In short, yes. As you spend more time in the jungle, you gain abilities (gliding, mushrooms) that help you traverse it more easily and quickly. One think I’d like is if the mushrooms that you can’t use yet didn’t show their names. I think it would be fun if you come back through an area later after gaining the mastery and then you can see all the things that you couldn’t use before because now your character knows what they’re looking for.

Does it make you care about experience and mastery points?
I care more about the mastery points than the experience. Experience in plentiful. Play the game and eventually your exp bar will fill up. When I see those glowing mastery channels though…I forsee quite a bit of fun ahead trying to figure out how to get to them. I already had to spend a good 30 minutes trying to get the one above the flamethrower adventure. (I kept missing the platform I was trying to glide to…)

Does it provide a framework that you think we could regularly add to in live updates
YES YES AND YES AGAIN. Let me emphasise that adding to this system regularly is what will keep the feeling of progression up. Unless you make the amount of exp needed an astronomical number, you are going to have people marathoning and finishing the masteries within the first couple weeks. These are the people who will complain that they have nothing to do. It is vital that the speed one gains masteries stays in a middle ground, and that masteries are added at a pace that is just a bit slower than the speed at which the majority of the
playerbase finishes them. The issue I can see from this is that there’s the possibility of introducing masteries that have less “oomph” and are pretty much just an exp drain.

MAP REWARD SYSTEM
Sorry, I’m too busy on my glider to care about pact tyria right now…

STRONGHOLD
Still gliding….

REVENANT
Ooh i wonder if I can climb that tree…

ELITE SPECS
I main ranger. The only time I play a different class is in a specific circumstance (staff ele in dungeons recently, and thief/ele/guard in pvp sometimes), so I wasn’t all that
interested in trying out the elite specs. That said, I did roll and ele and try out tempest, and the skills are very cool. Overcharging earth on a charr looked awesome (but then when do charr not look badkitten?) Anet, give me druid so I can try out an elite spec…I want….

STORY
The story was fun, but I would like to be able to fail. As it is, you might as well be invincible. Death/party wipe should kick you out of the instance. You have an amazing community, Anet. If people can’t finish the story mission, they will be able to find people to help them with it. The risk of failure makes success that much more rewarding.
I liked the difference between the sylvari experience and the rest of the races, especially how your companions don’t react at all to the things your character is experiencing without their knowledge. Keep it up!

(Part 1 of 3)
Foreword
I tried to follow the questions posed in the blog post and answer those as best I could. Here’s what I accomplished:

-made a charr ranger
-played in Verdant Brink for ~14 hours
-finished the lean training in the glider mastery
-finished the itzel language in the itzel mastery
-followed the day event chains through Laranthir’s bomb placement event and the egg planting itzel event.
-I died 47 times. (~7 to killwall below the map, ~5 to not pulling out my glider in time, and the rest to mobs)

COMBAT
Do you feel the need to use your entire skill bar in battles?
I found that I had to use my skills more strategically. Specifically, interrupts were much more useful (especially against smokescales, snipers, and stoneheads. Also, reflects were especially useful against the sniper’s rapidfire attack.

Does teaming up with other players feel more rewarding?
Teaming up with other players was especially helpful at night, when it was often quite difficult to escort the pact soldiers by yourself.

Do you find yourself wanting to change your skills and traits to overcome encounters?
Yes and no. I usually run S/T A/D ranger, and quickly changed that to S/A LB quickness ranger for the reflects and interrupts, but once there I didn’t feel too much of a need to swap weapons or skills. QZ, LR, and SoS worked out well for burst, distance/stunbreak, and invuln when needed.

Creature Difficulty
You guys are on an amazing track here. The enemies all have their own little quirks, and much more attention needs to be given to them than before. Whatever people say, don’t nerf the smokescales. There aren’t that many of them, and they can be counteracted by luring them out of their AOE…but they’re the first thing that killed me when I got in VB and I love them for it. It’s been awhile since I’ve died to a mob in PvE, and it’s refreshing to have to keep on my toes.
The stoneheads were another great mob, although I think the distance on their charge could be toned down a bit. As it is, I think it usually takes them way out of the battle (if they don’t get stuck on something…which seems to happen to a lot of the charging animations)
I liked the mordrem snipers as well. They do a kittenton of damage, but they also eat that same damage if you reflect it (axe 5 ftw). As a side note, I don’t know if it was lag on my part, but it seemed like axe 5 doesn’t start reflecting until about a half-second after I use the skill. I think the target that appears over your character’s head should be swapped from their charge line AoE attack to their rapidfire shot instead. The line AoE doesn’t pose as much damage as the rapidfire attack, and I think the warning would be better assigned there.
The pocket raptors are great. They die fast, but if you don’t take care of them they can really ruin your day.
And the mushrooms…I hope you guys know about the expanding mushroom bug, which is at the same time both hilarious and annoying. (For those that haven’t experienced this gem,

sometimes when a mushroom dies, it expands 1000% so there’s a giant mushroom filling the entire area. Think about standing at the top of the cliff during the bomb planting event, looking out, and all you see is a giant mushroom….yeah) I love the variety of the mushrooms, and especially the ones that explode when they die…i’ve been downed so many times by not staying away from their bodies.

ADVENTURES
How well do they accomplish their goals?
I played the flamethrower adventure and the one in the ruins (sorry, can’t remember the names). Both were fun, and for the flamethrower adventure, coming back to it when I had the bouncing mushroom mastery was a great feeling of development for my character. One thing I would like to see is my own score displayed beneath the top three when the time runs out.
I don’t know what you can do to counteract this, but when I was in the vine arena adventure, I got myself downed, and instead of clicking reset I clicked close, thinking that it would take me back to the flag and let me head off. Instead it closed and I was left to die with the only WP being a fair distance away. Maybe it’s just a mistake to learn from, but it was a bit annoying at the time.

NIGHTTIME VS DAYTIME
The gradual transition from day lighting to night lighting is just amazing. It really enhances the feeling of the darkness settling in. The night feels very different from the day, and I spent a lot of time gliding from high spot to high spot making my way to pact soldier while avoiding mordrem. It’s also a lot of fun to find supply in a spot where you can jump off and glide down to the rally point to deliver it.

EDIT: changed part # to reflect total parts of this post

I’d like to point out that this thread starts with the assumption that it’s the MALE version of the armor. Why did you start with that assumption. I think there’s a bit of a “glasses effect” going on with the way you’re viewing the charr armor. As it’s been stated above, according to the GW2 lore, Charr do not consider the difference between genders important.

I believe I read from an interview somewhere that lore-wise, Charr casual-wear would be closer to the male’s loincloth, but they had to add something over the chest in the interest of keeping the T rating. (Take this with a grain of salt, I looked for a bit but couldn’t find my source. If someone else remembers this and knows where it was said, feel free to back it up for me.)

I think OP’s statement really comes down to a disconnect between out-of-game view of gender and clothing, and charr-culture view of gender and clothing.

Weindrasi.3805 already got to the example I was going to give…so I leave you with a link to Pyre’s wiki page: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Pyre_Fierceshot

The mists give a good base for a type of “guild towns” as was mentioned above, but home instances would be the place I would assume they would add player housing to. I know they’ve said somewhere that Guild Halls are something they will definitely do, while player housing always seemed like a “maybe” to me. Sirendor.1394 has a good idea, one that I’ve seen somewhere else recently (sorry, can’t remember where). It would be a good gathering area for guilds.

Heh, just for laughs there could be a bartender you could leave messages with for other members of the guild…

So I guess my thoughts are that the idea of guild towns is great, but it would pull even more attention away from the home instances, which I personally would really like to see used more.

Krosslite.1950:

The renown hearts are the tradtion quest but with a slight spin. Their intent is to break the long time MMO’er from them.

I see no advantages to this suggestion.

People are having a hard enough time switching to this system without throwing up a road block to move folks barkward

I know that the hearts are basically reskinned quests with multiple ways to complete it, so you don’t feel locked in to doing one thing. The thing is, these are very local. They cover a pretty small area, only giving information about that one part of the map. So we could say that they cover local goings-on. DEs, on the other hand, tell the story of a larger swath of the zone, often the meta events tell the story of the entire zone. Personal story then covers the story of the world itself (one-time events, like the lost shores, does the same thing, but you get what I mean).

See, the thing we’re missing here is connection between the zones on a smaller level than the personal story. How do the charr who live in Diessa Plateau interact with the norn in the Wayfarer Foothills? Do they have any friends over there? The “traditional quests” would not be “go kill/gather x of this”, since the hearts cover things like that. The only purpose these quests would serve would be to tell short stories or the goings on of the world. One quest could hop between a few maps, connecting people that live in different spots.

I think the problem is that they went from one extreme to another, all ‘walls of text’ to none at all. A mix of the two would be ideal.

So, Hearts and Dynamic events are great. It’s great when I come across a DE and get that ‘hey, that wasn’t here before’ feeling. However, I’m finding that they tend to be a little too short. With the exception of meta events, most are over in a couple of minutes, and sometimes you have to look really hard for the story. I’ve heard people comment that the zones have no story or history in them, which is sad. It’s there, but oftentimes you need to have gone over the entire map before you get a full sense of the issues and activities of the NPCs that live there.

This is why I think it would be a good idea to re-introduce some more ‘traditional’ type quests. GW2 has a lot of named characters in the world, some of them have pretty interesting dialogue, but unless you’re really trying to understand the world there’s no reason to talk to them. If some of them gave quests, I think a lot more people would talk to them.

The kind of quests I’m thinking of would have an extended storyline, like talking to a bunch of people in Beetletun (such as investigating where ‘the butterfly lands’. Sorry I can’t remember the names of the characters, but there’s some dialogue where a guy in Beetletun is being a bit stalkerish over ‘his girl’). Another reason for these would be for more cross-zone quests. I’ve noticed that there isn’t anything at all pushing you to move on from a zone. While this is great in some respects, not feeling pressured to move on for one, in others it’s not. If you had a quest of some sort where you were asked to take a letter to someone or check up on some guy’s sister in a different zone they would feel more connected. At the moment they feel a bit self-suffficient, like no one ever travels from one to another.

For a last point, Dynamic events can do a good job of telling the story of the map, but text quests, when done well, are a great way to expand on that story. Characters could gain more depth, connections could be made between different characters, and a bit of folklore or local history could be told more easily. At the moment, coming into the middle of a DE, you miss much of the storyline.

Thoughts?

I’d like to remind everyone in this thread that the sylvari are only 25 years old. To get as far as they have in such a short time is an accomplishment. They’re high in the ranks of the Orders, they’re lab assistants to the asura at times, etc. As for the norn, as it’s been stated, they’re probably the most powerful as individuals. While the other races have their civilians, the norn are just straight up adventurers.

I was going to post a suggestion for a killstreak system, but there’s already one here. I don’t even care if it’s a reward system. I think it’d just be fun to know what your longest killstreak is when you’re in huge battles that can destroy you in seconds if you’re in the wrong spot.

Tilarta.9812:

I’m pretty sure Quaggans are based on the Sirenian order of marine mammals, most likely manatees.

Note the keyword ‘based on’. It’s a fantasy universe, things are going to be different. So the design team decided to have the Quaggan not be herbivores. Although they may look it, there’s enough differences in intelligence alone to warrant them being a different kind of being.

Oh great, I just deleted everything before I posted…here we go again. From scatch.

The main difference is the person that’s telling the story. Here you’re looking at it from the charr’s point of view, not the humans. Anet’s tried to make the lore reflect a real-world course of action, and so the charr paint themselves as the heroes. Is there any society that would willingly paint themselves the villains? Aside from that, the affects of the Foefire are much the same as the searing. The entire sieging force of the charr were incinerated. The effects were also longer-standing. You can see how Ascalon has healed from the Searing, and after the initial devastation the land wasn’t much more dangerous than it had been before. However, with the Foefire, after the attacking charr were killed, the ghosts have killed more from then up till now. The death toll on the charr’s end, due to the human’s Foefire, probably exceeds the death toll from the Searing by a good amount by now. Also, it’s a part of their everyday life. They probably all know someone who was killed by the ghosts, so it’s not surprising that they talk about it a lot.

As for Rytlock, I agree that he could’ve handled the situation in the Ascalon Catacombs differently, but that would’ve been a break in his character. He’s a confrontational type, and it’s by Adelbern’s actions that many of the soldiers under him have been killed. As for fighting on the side of the King, it has been mentioned in the books that the ghosts see all the living as invaders, aka Charr. Given that, no truce would have been possible. And even though it’s a character that says that, the actions of the ghosts when confronted with the living throughout the books consists of “It’s the Charr! Attack!”

And for Loyalty? Wouldn’t he be showing Loyalty by trying to take out the threat to his people in the best way he knows how? He doesn’t trust the promises of living humans, so why would he try to strike a deal with a dead one?

Rurik is called a tyrant? Where? I don’t remember that one…

Bonfaz Burntfur is revered as a great hero because he was a great leader in the fight against the humans. Just because a charr was from the flame legion doesn’t meant that when they split, all the heroes before then were erased. There are still some, even shortly before the foefire (whatever that warband was that witnessed it, don’t have my book at the moment) who are hailed as heroes because of what they did for the Charr as a whole.

Hope I was clear on what I’m trying to say for the most part. Cheers!

Pardon not having a source on hand for this, my cousin is borrowing my copy of ‘Edge of Destiny’ but hopefully I can remember enough.

Given that none of these specifically mention words, I think that it’s more of a concept in your mind that you will into reality. Those who use magic are born with the ability to manipulate it, which is why a human mage can start out as a street rat. Now, further on you can use glyphs. Since the character draws these in the air and then activates them, this would be an example of a ‘study’ part of magic. The glyph needs to be learned, hence why you need skill points to unlock it.

Now of course, this is all speculation, but I hope I backed up my ideas sufficiently. I used the spoiler thing twice because it was deleting some of my sentence when I only used one.

I would say that you first need to define ‘atheist’. If atheist means that you believe that there is no such thing as a ‘god’, then the charr are not atheist, as they acknowledge that the human ‘gods’ are actual beings. On the other hand, if you define ‘atheist’ as someone who follows no god (god being an external, supernatural being) then they are. They have no ‘god’ of their own, unless it be themselves.

However, they are (from what I’ve noticed) normally taller than humans. So if we take the base human height as somewhere between 5-6 feet, I’d say the charr are somewhere around 6-7. I’m not sure what the shortest charr looks like next to the tallest human (there’s a picture out there somewhere…)

Ok, scratch all that, here’s a page. http://www.guildwarsinsider.com/in-game-character-heights/

Looks like charr go from 5 ft. even to almost seven. Humans go up to 6’ 3". All the other races are there as well.