Guild Wars 2

Thanks for a great new map and a fun episode!

I appreciate the changes to the final boss fight. My first time through on a ranger, I wasn’t even a voting member in how it was going. Second time through last night after the patch was a success, and I was able to actually use the special skill instead of getting the ping after it was already too late.

Not So Fond:
- The pacing in A Meeting of Ministers is a little frustrating, I think partly because of all the walking with Jenna. It might have been improved if I had ever gotten around to setting a toggle for walk, but the run-and-wait to get the dialogue while she moseyed along made it feel like it dragged out.
- Heart progress in Lake Doric is fine when there are events happening, but miserably slow when they aren’t. Some of the non-event tasks could probably award a little more progress.

Like:
- Logan’s character development. Man’s been through a lot, and I’m glad to see it has changed him.
- Hidden achievements. I like that some are easy to just fall into if you’re the sort of player who goes along with your character’s impulses to bow to their Queen or visit the shrine of the Spirit they look to or pay their respects to the fallen, while others are a bit more obscure.
- The overall layout and flow of the map events. There are plenty of things to do, and they’re fairly easy to find and get to.
- The Dragon’s Watch story line. As someone who occasionally organizes events in a tiny guild, I can really relate to our character’s challenges there.

Love!
- The profession-specific bonuses in Confessor’s End. More like this, please, either profession- or race-based! It was a really nice touch, and it will encourage me to run this episode with all my characters instead of just two or three of them.
- The artwork. This is a really beautiful map, and I’m looking forward to finishing my exploration.

I had this problem with the mastery point west of Faren’s Flyer Waypoint. It let me commune several times and never registered that I had completed it.

There was a possibly related problem with the mastery point west-northwest of Bongo’s Bungalow, which showed on the mini-map but was not visible in world. I glided over to where it was located in the last BWE and was unable to interact, so it seems to have been missing entirely and not just invisible. Submitted in-game reports for both instances.

Thanks for the invitation!

I participated in the second session on a ranger, and performance was mostly good. I noted a framerate crash to single digits around the 1:45 mark, but I had no trouble prior to that, even in the most populated wyvern fight I did. That was about 25 players, and from the numbers and the effects, I would have expected a huge FPS drop in a Pact Tyria fight of similar magnitude and effects level. Ping seemed stable around 120-125 each time I checked, which is about as good as I can expect here in Rural Broadbandania. Usually my ping approaches 250-300 when my framerate crashes that hard, but it seemed to hold steady even when my fps fell to 4-5.

System: Acer Aspire 7750, Windows 7 64 bit SP-1, Intel i3-2350M CPU @ 2.3 GHz, 6 Gb RAM, integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics. (Clearly not bought for its visual impact, but my gaming machine is in dire need of a complete overhaul. And a new monitor.)

I had a bit of a weird experience in the last few minutes with a “sticky” F to deploy glider button that popped up at the end of a long jump when I was not intending to glide. It stayed on the screen while I ran by the Tendril adventure area, and I clicked it to see what would happen. The button disappeared, but the light/particle effect of a glider launch blinked over my character briefly, like it started to launch and then realized I was on valid terrain and cancelled it.

I would like to apologize for sending the most embarrassing bug report of my life, in which I started to say that Heal as One was not working properly to heal my pet, realized that I had misremembered and that it was actually working as intended, and then instead of cancelling, I hit Submit on an incomplete and incorrect thought. Very facepalm. In my defense, I was also trying not to be cooked by a wyvern at the time.

I enjoyed the events available to us. I thought the Tendril adventure was a good introduction to the adventure concept, the Wyvern fight was a good introduction to somewhat more intelligent enemies and was forgiving enough to let players adjust to the break bar before encountering it “in the wild,” and that the Breacher event seemed well scaled and well paced whether there were five or fifteen players involved.

In particular, I was pleased that the actual gliding portion did not trigger my vertigo, though I confess that I had a little trouble making my character jump off the cliff to try it. Kudos to the artists for making it close enough to real even on my lower-end graphic capability. I found the deploy glider button showed up later than I would have wanted it. I found the timing of the actual deployment to be where I expected it once I stopped waiting for the button to appear, when considered against an expected mastery for a quicker launch.

Finally, I would like to say that I would love to see a Miniature Pocket Raptor Flock in the form of three extra-pocket pocket raptors, like the dust mites or karka hatchlings. I have never before squealed with so much delight at something that wanted to eat my face, and I would be happy to spend gems to have my own little flock of them.

Cheers!