Guild Wars 2

I have decided to play Necromancer for one of my alts and I haven’t played in a long time. So my question is, are the minions still useless in this game due to the lack of regeneration?

kratan.4619:

I have played other games, WoW and DaoC, that have had test servers and the only times I ever saw anybody there was when they announced a weekend test for something specific. Sounds kind of like a BWE to me anyway.

Very few ,if any, were actually playing the test server to “test”. PTRS seems like more of a waste of a server to me.

Still, being able to test patches/constant creates a better experience and far less bugs and far less upset people that their class got very unfair nerfs that demolishes their builds. There’s to be more interactive with the devs and players.

Public Test Realms, or PTRS is something I experienced with playing World of Warcraft, for those who don’t know who PTRS are, let me explain.

Public Test Realms in WoW are realms that are designed to test content, patches, and balance minions, bosses, and classes.
It involves, you, the community to test the game’s content on a daily basis and provide feedback before the content hits the retail game itself. Almost every patch in WoW, content update, etc, hits the PTR before it hits the retail version. You can either start at level 1 and level your way up to 80, or choose to have an instant level 80 with max gear.
So why does this matter?

BUT WAIT. We do beta weekends! Isn’t that enough?
You might ask… well, no it’s not enough and here’s why.
While beta weekends are good for getting the hype train moving and stress testing the servers, very little beta testing get’s to actually go on compared if we had a constant test realms for people to play in. The HoT Beta Event this past weekend was just horrible.. imagine if we had more than just 4 days to test the content? Patches could’ve been rolled out to fix the quest chains, story quest. Then we got to test that patch for bugs, find bugs, new patch comes out, and on and on. Then we could’ve test the other content that progressed into the next area for bugs and such. Beta weekends are just not enough time to beta test a massive game like this. It leaves majority of the game in a bug riddled state at lunch.

Here are some pros and cons to having a public test realm.

+ Better class balancing.
Since the community is playing these PTRS and Arenanet makes a buff/nerf patch, this patch can hit the PTR first and they gain feedback on the patch and make adjustments to the patch before hitting the retail game.

+Bugs.
I don’t know how many staff members Anet has, but it’s nothing compared to the countless thousands. of players who are just trying to break your game, figure out glitches, and cheat your system and exploits bugs.
Developers who play their own game isn’t the same as a player. As players we may think of 1000 different ways to do a certain task that might make the content either too easy or boring by finding in an exploit. Which this rolls into my next reasons.
(Also, since WoW has done this, their bugs have been reduced 50-60%)

+Redesign content.
With testing the content before it hits the game, we could have the chance to go back and redesign how it works because the players have found a way too cheese the system, or maybe the content is too hard and stats need to be tweaked. Or maybe the content is way too easy!

Example:
The Shatterer, Shadowbeast, and more.
Some world bosses are just too easy and boring compared to Jormag and Tequatl.
These could be easily fixed by adding more chain of events and more attacks for the bosses.

Example:
Do you know the Molten Furnace Fractal?
How for the entire time at the end, you just stand in the corner when all the AoE hits?
That could’ve been redesigned in PTR before it the retail game to make it a better experience than just to stand in the corner and wait.
This could be done for all content potentially, dungeons, fractals, everything.

Example:
You know how nobody runs Citadel of Flame path 3?
Well, that could’ve been tested before it hit the game and changed to make it a better experience.

+More active developers and community.
A more active role between the community and the developers.
This as whole benefits everything and makes the community feel more important in the game they have paid for and support.

Cons!

- Splitting the community.
Some people may choose only to play on PTRs instead of the retail game.

-Resource cost.
Of course extra servers cost more money to maintain.

- Spoilers!
While we play all the new content for an extended amount of time, we will see everything before it launches to retail. Although we all know how the story ends, we’re going to defeat the big bad guy at the end and that’s that. While plot twist may be spoil, in my opinion this is a small price to pay for a better over-all experience.

I love this game so much and I want nothing but the best for it, but coming over from WoW and sad to see there is no PTR for this game was a little disappointing because of all the benefits Blizzard has gained from having a PTR. This could be a great addition to Gw2 and help Arenanet understand the community better and the wants and needs of their player base.

Kocoff.7582:

Can you stop it please? Seriously. There wasn’t even a druid reveal yet, and you already don’t like it.
RIFLE WON’T BE HAPPENING. Thieves don’t cope with long range combat, deal with it.

We were given plenty of teleportation to close gaps. I mean Steal is 1,200 range for f’s sake, and you could get that every 20 seconds if traited.

This range weapon argument doens’t hold anymore. stahp.
You want a stealth sniper with teleportation enabled? You don’t think that’s generic? I have played a few MMOs with characters with those abilities

1200 range doesn’t guarantee a nice synergy/usefulness as a thief and Staff weapon skin has been out for months now.

Now when it comes to kits? Idk. Neither excited nor annoyed by it.

Well the Druid has only be mentioned as the first Elite Spec, it was still a disappointment just because I already knew it was coming before they showed it. Because I saw it coming from the first moment they said Elite Specs were going to be thing in the game.

I am already disappointed in the core class itself for the lack of new and fresh ideas for the bows and the horrible pet system.

Orpheal.8263:

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This would be a great idea as well, I much rather see this.

assassin.7895:

Unless they keep the Assassin name and give us a rifle/long bow anyway, I just don’t want a generic melee assassin.

So what? Who cares

I liked assassin in GW1 and I would like to see something similar in GW2 too.

I would hate to see it go down a route that would just end up being generic assassin spec that gives us perma stealth, high single target damage but very squishy.

I disagree 90%

I care, I don’t want something that’s been done to death 1000 times over and have to play a spec I have already played in many countless other games.

This game has some of the most interesting classes, I just don’t want it to be held back like the rangers are right now by being the stereotypical class structure.

Nolimitz.9467:

I am fairly confident that because druid demands a staff weapon to coincide with the theme that staff for thief won’t be a thing. While i want a 1200 range choice i am against rifle purely on the fact that it is single target. I am really hoping for “kits” along the lines of engi grenade kit but of course something like ninja stars or kunais type of stuff that promote an aoe style of thief.

This would be an awesome idea.

Is the same reason why I was so disappointed in the ranger’s elite spec.
Boring, generic, and wow, a druid? you don’t say. I never saw that coming.
Which is sad because rangers are so generic and boring in this game as it is.
Even sadder when the melee skills for rangers are far more interesting than the bow skills. Rapid fire? yawn

The fact is the druid reveal didn’t excite as much as Tempest, Dragonhunter, and Engineer due to the fact I already saw that coming from 3,000 miles away.

I much rather see warriors get the assassin elite spec than thieves.
Here’s why.
Currently we are missing a 1,200 range weapon. (Rifle, Longbow.)
Which would be nice to see in a Sniper, Deadeye, Deadshot, whatever the name would be for the Elite spec to give us a longer range weapon.

Assassin for thieves would just be boring for me which is sad because I love the thief class, it’s my favorite one. I think thief for the most part is one of the most well design classes in this game and I would hate to see it go down a route that would just end up being generic assassin spec that gives us perma stealth, high single target damage but very squishy.

Unless they keep the Assassin name and give us a rifle/long bow anyway, I just don’t want a generic melee assassin.