First Impressions on GW2 Beta Weekend (April 27-29)

Okay guys, I'd like to hear your first impressions having played the beta. Here's some thoughts of mine. I didn't sit there all weekend playing it, I just casually logged in for an hour or so when I could, so I can't give in-depth views about PvE or PvP systems but here's my general thoughts:

• The combat is interesting and requires a decent amount of skill to dodge attacks, know when to use cooldowns, etc. I think this will be more fun than your typical MMO where you stand around spamming keys. Some areas were quite challenging, actually.

• The maps, areas and cities feel vast. I rolled a human and was in Divinity's Reach and it looks awesome and active.

• The "dynamic events" are a nice concept kinda like RIFT's portals, but more varied and interesting. They definitely help make the world feel more active.

• I love the concept of the "scouts" and the fact that quests you do are essentially taking part in mini-stories around the map. This is a welcome change from the traditional, boring "quest hubs" where you have to take tons of quests and complete them in a drone-like fashion.

• I love the fact that in the quests I've played, you don't have to pointlessly return to quest givers and click a few times to finish it. The quest rewards were delivered to my mainbox which is accessible from anywhere from the UI. This was a refreshing change.

• The individual character story quests are a nice touch and help keep things interesting. That's sorta unlike other MMOs I've played and follows on from the original GW concept of playing through a storyline to a conclusion. I can definitely see this keeping levelling up interesting throughout and it paves the way for later expansions to deliver new story content.

• As a caster (elementalist) I found it really odd that moving didn't interrupt casts and was essentially required in order not to die. It took a little getting used to.

• Didn't like the fact that I found no way to map the "auto run" function to my middle mouse button press. I used the R key as it was the same as the original, but I'd find this immensely annoying if I were not used to it.

• The servers were really full and it was hard to get on sometimes. That's understandable, but I found the concept of "overflow" servers quite confusing and there was no real way to tell which "overflow" you were in at any given time.

• Don't really like how static the skill bar seems to be. The first 1-5 are chosen for you based on weapon/profession/attunement, the 6th is your heal and the rest are "utility" skills you choose with skill points, with the final one beign the elite skill locked until level 30. Seems there's quite limited scope to be able to adjust the position on the bar of various skills, etc. I liked the flexibility of the original.

• Having skills tied to the type of weapon you're holding seems weird to me as an elementalist. I can only cast a fireball when holding a staff, but if I was using a scepter that skill slot is flamestrike? Huh? I think this works with melee but it seems werid when the concept is applied to casters.

• The UI is minimalistic but seems to work well... I think.

• I would absolutely love there to be mounts in the game. Even for the short distance you have to travel the speed boost would be nice, imo.

• The dynamic levelling thing which alters your level depending on the zone you're in keeps things interesting and challenging. Even venturing out in the starting zones as a higher level character can be a challenge as your level is scaled down so you can't just steamroll through everything.

• As an elementalist it was a bit annoying that I had to "unlock" my other primary skills when switching attunments. I was playing mostly as fire, then decided to switch to air for a bit but was stuck with 1 skill and had to unlock the rest through killing stuff. This was kinda just a lame and pointless restriction and I think they should unlock in unison personally.

• It's still weird to be missing the "tank" and "healer" roles, particularly as I prefer playing as the latter. I think it works though.

• The game runs really smoothly on my laptop with minimal performance issues. I'm kinda surprised a lot of peoople were complaining about such issues with much more powerful systems than mine. Seems to be kinda hit and miss. ANet definitely have to look into optimizing for those guys.

• The graphics in general are adequete but nothing revolutionary. I actually prefer how the original GW looked personally. Things feel more cartoony in the sequel, kinda similar to WoW's feel.

• The level of character customisation was decent. I don't spend much time building characters generally, but I enjoyed building my elementalist and felt the options were okay. Hairstyles for females seem a little limited though (didn't find any of my patented real-life pigtails! ). The ponytail with ribbons is pretty enough. >.>

Overall I'm quite enthusiastic still about the release and glad I pre-purchased it! There are some issues which ANet need to resolve and hopefully they take their time to iron them out before release, but the gameplay and feel so far are nice. I love where they're going with this and for a beta things seem to be heading in the right direction.

Would love to hear how you found the weekend.

Mainly adding on to yours here, as I agree with a lot of what you said. However, I mapped auto-run to M4, so no middle-click isn't a big problem. I also don't really know how I feel about the cities being so big. Everything is so spread out, I feel like I'd rather it all be centralized, but I do like the look of it.

Now, on to my observations. I played a Hunter and a Necro mostly, and that showed that circle strafing is pretty over-powered, as Lorx pointed out already. Kiting them in a small circle, constantly hitting them, and they have no options.

The distance doesn't feel bad since the waypoint system is a good one, but the placing of the waypoints was odd sometimes. I can't remember any off the top of my head, but I remember thinking it.

I only played a Charr for maybe half an hour, but there was a level 7 Flame Legion Shaman in the starting zone completely destroying everyone and made a section of the zone unplayable. We have probably 30 people trying to kill it, and it never even got to half health. Some definite balance issues, atm.

My first character I didn't use Scouts and I was a little lost on where I was supposed to go and where the next level increase was. It was only on my second character that I started using them and things got a little clearer.

Server's were definitely packed and there were times that there was no enemies around me, it lags for a couple minutes, and when it's done I'm lying there dead and still no enemies around. Very confusing. Server optimization is required. Though, that could just be people from other countries being on the same server bogs it down a lot.

I never got to use trait points. I don't know if they weren't available or I never saw when to use them, but I never noticed a way to get to adept in order to use them.

I only played a few hours of PvP (so this is purely from a PvP perspective) but here are some things I found annoying:

Good luck trying to level in world vs world as a melee (if starting at level 2 right after the tutorial), melee classes will definitely need to wait until 7 to unlock the weapon switch for a range weapon. Trying to melee in a zerg vs zerg ranged standoff is like asking to instantly die lol (or standing there waiting for people to get closer will equal zero exp for the most part).

The pvp instances were fun, but kind of lame how you get no experience (you only get pvp points, but your character comes with all skills and traits unlocked for pvp instances). I wanted to level through just instanced PvP/WvW for the most part like Warhammer, but it looks like I will have to do some PvE for this game. I also noticed how you play the same people over and over, but sometimes it swaps certain people to different sides. I don't think this will work well when you have friends queueing up together, I feel it would be better if they just let you queue up again after a match like other games.

I'm afraid the queue for WvW may be an issue like Warhammer's cap at forts, the release will have much more players so they really need to increase their server caps.

I didn't have any lag at all for instanced pvp, but it got quite choppy for me for the WvW.

The combat was really nice, this game definitely has a "skill" factor to it; I was getting tired of all those "autofacing" MMOs lately.

All in all, I'm still glad I purchased the game because this is pretty much my last hope for MMORPGs. The game seems really fun, but it definitely shows they could use some more polish (especially their servers).

I also noticed a few killer bugs for thieves. One of them would be: If you apply a root or stun poison before using your "Get over here" (can't remember game name, think Scorpion from mortal kombat), it will root/stun the target there instead of pulling them to you and rooting/stunning. That definitely needs to be fixed for PvP lol

P.S. For future reference, how do you use those "scouts"?

quote Shiris

P.S. For future reference, how do you use those "scouts"?

Scouts are NPCs on the map represented by the icon. When you talk to them, they put you into map view and show you locations in the area that need assistance. These locations are then marked with an empty heart symbol. Once you go there to complete the objective, it becomes a full heart.

Essentially these show you the way to events, quests, etc. and are really helpful as they even mark areas of the map which you've not uncovered yet.

Yeah, I mean, i'm not really concerned about balancing for melee, because as I got my warrior to about 20, I noticed I was able to stick in combat a bit more easily, and handle several foes at once. It might very well be that they are hard to pull off in the early levels, and since pretty much no one got higher than 30 over the weekend, who knows how that stuff will play out once you have all of you skills and such. I have faith it'll turn out alright. I had a lot of luck and did very well with sword/sword and mace/shield, personally.

Engineers are, as I suspected, flarking awesome. I have ZERO doubts that an engineer will be my main.

That monocle! I *bleep*ing love that thing dearly, heh! I agree completely, though. Once I got my second utility skill on my engineer, shit just started rolling, and it was super awesome how I could do a bit of everything well, but not amazingly. I felt like I was always doing something important/necessary.

Though, i'm thinking i'll be a Sylvari Engineer, for the lulz.

quote Lorx

• 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.

Surprised Anet doesn't let you bind keys to shift+#'s. I have a razer naga (12 button mouse) so I just bound 6-0 and the f'keys as numpad numbers (i put the mouse 12 buttons in numpad mode) since my left hand is used to `1-5

quote Lorx

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.

Yeah, I saw this but this only apply towards pvp instances (you get a seperate maxed charactet has most stuff unlocked). World pvp actually uses your pve character (the only difference is it bumps you to max level, but you still have to unlock everything yourself). At first I thought it would be like pvp instances (already unlocked), but once I stepped through the WvW portal my character reverted into my PvE character except max level.

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I'm glad you guys said the PvE is awesome though, as this is one of the few games I'm interested in for PvE; The personal storyline seems cool. Are there tons of personal storyline quests or is it only once every certain amount of levels?

I dropped ~20 hours as well, I played only a Charr warrior and got him up to level 25. I didn't have a reference as to how easy it was compared to ranged strategies, but I definitely noticed it was easier for other characters to stay alive when I was up front. If anything, it made me improve my skill and learn to dodge back and forth and maintain my direction. It's a shame characters don't take up any space in the world anymore, no more pro body blocking.

PvP was fun, although I found it was too much like Alliance Battles. There were the dumb people who mobbed around to get kills, and then the people who capped areas. Also having so much health and survivability completely changes the dynamic of the game. It's much more WoW-like (as I predicted) in that teams need to focus on solely their damage output over long periods of time. The beauty of GW1 PvP was the invention of the spike. It made rote mathematical calculations of damage irrelevant, when teams could kill in three seconds. It seems that's what the PvP will depend on with GW2

Overall I was a bit surprised as to how different the game is from GW1. I expected changes but I mean it really looks almost like a copy WoW, which isn't a bad thing necessarily because there are a bunch of things they do well as well as keeping the lore and Easter eggs from the last game (I killed Warmaster Tydus somewhere, and Grazden the Protector)