I think I may have played the most out of anybody this weekend on neo, tekmosis would be the only contender. Had about 22 hours of play, maybe a little more. This post will be two sections since I just have so many bullet points to bullet! On things said in this thread so far: Dynamite's post
- The Dynamic events, random fluff NPCs, enemies fighting each other, it definitely makes the world feel very alive. While RIFT's "portals" (they're Rifts Dynamite, come on :P) tried this, I feel like GW2 is shining where Rift fell short. Rifts tended to...sit there and be stale. They would send invasion forces to nearby towns to capture them, but overall it felt very repetitive and not impactful on the world. I think all I need to say on GW2's behalf for this, is that "Impact on the world" was something on their little survey popups, and I rated at least a 3 every time (mostly 4+).
- Mail not being town-bound is excellent, and I'm glad an MMO finally decided it was time to make mail convenient. It's a service, I don't know why so many MMOs decide to make that service annoying beyond belief to use.
- Character Story was pretty cool, especially the tie-in with the character creation choice of "wanted to join the circus", that was completely hilarious and I loved it. Going to Clown College was just...wow.
- You need to be able to unpin the personal story marker, that got seriously annoying, especially when I finished every available quest in the chain. The chain is meant to span over a long period, sometimes recommended levels to do the quests will jump up two or three at a time. I'd love to not be seeing a reminder of where I need to be in five levels every waking second, both on my local quest popup...area, and especially on my mini-map.
- Overflow was a tad confusing, though that shouldn't be a problem after release (except during events), as players will be more spread out.
- Server Channels and Overflow Channels were bugged during this beta, making it hard for players in a group to be part of the same instance. Beta is beta, but I thought I would mention that in case people didn't know.
- Also, yes as far as I know there are Channels within servers not counting overflow (so like, Districts from GW1 towns), you just can't see that they exist and which you are on. That...kind of sucks and I hope anet fixes that up. Either by making them visible or by removing the need for them.
- Skillbar actually felt kind of natural to me, though I do play LoL, which has a similar kind of setup (less skills). I think the one problem I had is that I have very tiny hands and reaching all the way out to 9 can be difficult. There's a suggestion to anet right now that they should allow players to bind key...chains or whatever they're called, things like "shift+1". Which if implemented, would solve that problem for me. 1-5, shift+1-5, done. The actual skills were setup for me by range of which you should be spamming the most (Engineer), Mesmer I didn't knock too much into, but seemed to be similar. Played elementalist all of five minutes, so I can't comment on how organized theirs was I guess.
- The skills tied to weapons makes a lot of sense for physical classes, but for casters I think it's just there to give variety and allow players to still choose what kind of attacks they'll be doing. Staff might be a little slower and more powerful, Wand maybe faster and less powerful, etc.
- Agreed that the UI is very minimalistic, but there isn't much extra to...show I guess. For how awesome the combat is, you actually don't need a billion bars to keep track of it. Simplicity is definitely a theme in GW2, and I think it works out really well. I think the only thing I've seen suggested to add is numbers, things like enemy HP, debuff/buff duration.
- The game runs really smoothly until you get a ton of people spamming up the place on one mob, like in the "end of beta weekend" event. The overflow I was on actually crashed and I was getting something like 3fps. Was great fun though.
- I really liked the character creation, kinda reminded me of the Sims. You have enough sliders to personalize, but not enough to make something that would break immersion when other players look at it (ridiculously ridiculous wtf is that thing tier).
Byzantine yeah even just because of circle-strafing being ridiculous, ranged have a huge advantage. Orgazmo
- I was worried about towns being so spread out, but the checkpoints are free in towns and there's really only one spot (southern walkway) in Divinity's Reach that had anything you need besides the Asura Gate. So it all worked out pretty well from my experience. Rest of the town was kinda...dead, no players around to speak of, but it had enough fluff NPC's to still feel alive.
- Yeah I think the AI is just a bit derp with circle-strafing. I'm wondering if that will actually be something fixed for launch or not.
- There were some odd waypoints, stuff on top of enemy spawns, some towns without one, etc. In Kessex Hills there's a town without a waypoint (like, 3 actually), the closest waypoints are all down a cliff to one side. It made sense for one town, since it was one of those towns you can actually lose to dynamic events, but the others were solid and should have had one inside.
- I wonder if a player leashed the lv7 from somewhere else in the zone? That sounds like something that belongs about halfway through one.
- Trait Points had two requirements. Once you completed the two requirements it acted like a really nice skill tree. The 5/15/25 spots were passive bonuses, the 10/10/30 spots were choosable passive bonuses that rock. For example, my Turrets could be stealthed while not in combat (sup PvP), or have the ability to regen their HP so they don't die so dang often. It's really, really useful stuff.
- Be level 11 or higher
- Talk to your job instructor and buy a book from him
Dynamite again:
- Higher level mobs have ranged abilities to counter the strafing, so it loses some effectiveness. Though against anything with only melee, it's still ridiculous.
Shiris; There's a PvP Vendor that gives you PvP gear for free, allows you to use seperate weapon kits. In PvP you don't need to actually unlock all the new things, many should come standard. Though it was very buggy, a couple utility skills couldn't be equipped. I thought the same thing when I kept loading in with a rifle, until a friend told me about the vendor. Bought pistols, was a happy camper.
My experience:
- If there was any singular problem I had doing Dynamic Events, it's that the areas in which the events occurred, was not always...obvious. Not in a "LEAD ME TO THE NEXT QUEST I AM LAZY" way, but it just sometimes felt...disjointed from where the heart icon actually was. Sometimes there would be things you had to do that hid behind walls or on the other side of towns, stuff like that. For the events that had no heart icon, there was always a orange circle noting about where stuff was that you could do, implementing that around whatever <3 event you've been alerted is near you, would be nice to give a sense of direction.
- Dear god there needs to not be so many effects on mobs. It will kill people during boss fights, it will kill a lot of people. I don't think words can describe just how much of a problem this is, considering GW2 is all about reading your opponents moves and reacting accordingly in order to not die, so I'll just link this picture that shows how little you can see when thirty people beat on the rabbit from Monty Python.
- The game, overall, felt amazing and I'm glad I pre-purchased.
- Only regrets about this beta is that I couldn't find a hidden area or do a dungeon. Those hidden areas are hard to find!
- Ground-target skills suck to use when you are constantly holding right-mouse to keep the camera where you want it.
-------------------

|