Reply With QuoteI'm pretty that it's broken and the devs have mentioned something about having to get it fixed. So for at least this time around it's pretty much a crap shoot as to whether or not you'll be able to play with friends.Originally Posted by ducker
Hmmm yes phasing in gw2 would be a nice addition to some of the events that don't make much since to happen time and time again.
I was rather pissed at the fact me and a friend of mine couldn't adventure together. Sure we could group up and even saw each other in the main city. But as soon as you zoned out. For get it. We we both in diffent instanced overflow servers. Neither of us are GW players so perhaps there is just some method to do it correctly. Not sure.
I'm pretty that it's broken and the devs have mentioned something about having to get it fixed. So for at least this time around it's pretty much a crap shoot as to whether or not you'll be able to play with friends.
Well, I guess I find that when considering a game purchase having to determine if it will even work in my given machine is a pain in the ass. Obviously mileage may vary here.
I don't no why, but I couldn't get GPU-Z to download and work. Probably due to security settings. I'm sure given enough time and effort I could figure it all out....but meh.
I haven't been following this thread, but some (expected) technical issues and rough edges aside, i had a blast this weekend. ArenaNet delivered precisely what I was hoping they would.
While I was already familiar with the fact that they did away with the Holy Trinity, the one thing that still surprised me was how versatile the classes were based on what weapon they took. I tried to play every class to the point where I had all weapon skills unlocked (I didn't make it, having missed the Elementalist and Guardian, unfortunately) and I was really blown away. The Ranger, from my experience, was no more or less a ranged class than say... the warrior. As a matter of fact, I think I preferred the Ranger in melee and absolutely loved the rifle skills with the Warrior.
The most frustrating thing for me was that I had planned to spend this weekend playing around with the classes and getting an idea of what I would play at release, since looking at all the info on the Guild Wars 2 wiki make several classes sound like good choices for me. The weekend ended up having the opposite effect - every class I played became my new favorite class. Each time by the time I got the weapon skills unlocked I'd say "Alright, now this has gotta be my guy after release" only to fall in love with the next class I rolled. Very frustrating, but very much in a good way. :)
Anyway, people's mileage may vary but for me I'm very happy with the purchase. Now I have to find some way to shelve this game mentally and forget it exists until release... however damn long that might be, ugh.
Just had another go at WvW and it seems quite a bit more playable now. It actually feels kinda like WAR's open RvR (which was really fun at times), but with butt loads of improvements.
I have a few questions though. What's the difference between Green/Red/Blue and Eternal Battlegrounds? I don't get it.
Also, these battlegrounds are MASSIVE. I take it when you die you always have to respawn at the starting waypoint? Do waypoints ever appear on the map?
Each team (Red, Green, Blue) has a "home territory." That's the Battlegrounds. Then there's the Eternal Battlegrounds, which is essentially the "center map" (the design is really like the maps in Dark Age of Camelot, tell the truth).
I believe there's a waypoint where you zone in and one in (maybe) the center keep if your team owns it. Not sure there are any other waypoints. I believe it's to prevent rez-zerging.
You can buy a waypoint in a keep you own by paying one of the upgrade merchants. I think it costs both supply and gold.
So I've gotten this weird bug where I can't log in my Guardian. Keeps telling me that the map I'm trying to load has crashed or something. Thing is, I can log in my Thief who is in the same place. Ah well, beta weekend is almost over anyway and it'll give me an excuse to play something else.
Having played Guild Wars 2 now for some time I would say it is certainly more an evolution than a revolution of the classic MMO design.
It seems like they've been looking at each aspect of traditonal MMO gameplay and asked "how can we improve this?".
The result is a game that isn't dramatically different from other MMOs but has some really forward thinking ideas applied to nearly every gameplay element - or it borrows good ideas from other MMOs and improves upon them (for example: Public Quests from Warhammer)
As an aside: Was there much chat going on on your servers? On my server the chat was almost dead which I find uncommon for MMO betas, not even the usual "WoW this, WoW that" talk.
I've been finding chat in games overall to be much quieter, both live and beta. I never participated in it a great deal, but I do find I'm missing it.
I don't mind if chat was quiet since that was the one element I found the most lacking in the game. As far as I can tell all chat was either zone wide or party only. And since it appeared that opposing servers shared the zone wide chat, it certainly made WvWvW interesting as people were broadcasting their plans to the enemy without often realizing it.
Well, I don't think I could have enjoyed a beta for an MMO more. Once we figured out that you just have to zone in and out again and again to get the same spillover, the game is great played as a duo+.
I really do think they tried to include and improve on the best of MMOs -- previously, my best mmo experience was Warhammer PQs... they not only made that the standard but greatly improved it (as others have mentioned earlier in the thread).
They also seem to have gone out of their way to eliminate the soul killing tedium of travel times. That beta weekend was basically worth the entire cost of he game, hope I don't get to addicted :o
I went over to the Charr area during the Beta on my human Engineer, while on the road I saw 2 Ascalon peasant ghosts chatting about how it's unsafe to travel the road because of the Charr.
I jumped out and attacked them, instead of fighting, they turn around and run like the little girl they are, I gave chase and follow them straight into a band of Ascalon peasant ghost..
The End.
P.S..
It was pretty funny watching normally aggressive monster running away. The Lore is awesome as usual.
idrisz, as our official powergaming stats nerd, did you ever find out what different weapon DPS made to skills?
nope. I'm sure there is some crazy calculation somewhere on the wiki, but I was too busy reading the lore trying to figure out what happen at end of eye of the north.
edit:
I guess wiki doesn't know about damage calculation either.
here is what is listed.
Damage calculation is currently unknown in details, but the following elements provide guidelines.
Thanks for the good summary on staying alive back up in post #1215, Charlatan.
Some of that is just what I was looking for and missing while I was playing. I didn't know that if you killed a mob while knocked down that you would get up and didn't know you needed to hold down the 4 skill (bandage?).
Some of the encounters surely seemed very tough. I had a hard time determining when to dodge, but hopefully that will improve with practice. I was trying to watch a monster animation to determine when to dodge, but could not pick up on much most of the time. Perhaps some of it was lag or maybe there is another way?
I held off trying to salvage/craft/harvest for a long time to save my coins, but seeing you get 25 kits or 50/100 harvest tools at a time makes it a lot easier to get into early on. I got weaponcrafting up to 20 without too much trouble. When you make multiple items, each one you make crafts faster than the previous one so you can whip out 20+ sets of bars or planks really fast. The discovery system is also kinda neat. I made up some special dowels enhanced with poison or blood and then swapped the normal blood ingredient with the enchanted dowel and it allowed me to unlock/discover a new recipe that made the same weapon, but a bit better stats and a different enhancement. It also gave a lot more craft experience. I am wondering if you have to discover all non-starter recipes.
The dynamic "quest" system is pretty well done. I can see it getting boring eventually, but no more than other MMOs out there. I did realize that grinding mobs is not the way to level. You are much better searching out events going on, even if they are way below your level. Still, the system is better than more recent attempts as others have already pointed out. I just wish the variety of choices with the quest currency was bigger. It can take quite a while to find a reward that you are looking for.
WvW has a lot of possibilities to be something great. I was part of many assaults on keeps and outposts and defenders have a decent advantage, especially with siege. However, a couple times we had our supply cut off and thus couldn't support ourselves with siege and got taken over much more easily. The variety of terrain and keep/outpost structures will add quite a bit compared to the more limited options that previous games have had.
I understand there is an overall score to the WvW, but what types of personal rewards do you get? I participated quite a bit, but didn't seem to acquire any PvP style rank/points or rewards. I guess I need to read up a bit more on how that works. I am glad that the enemy shows up as only a name of the team they are on like DAoC did it. I don't care to know the names of my enemies and would rather the Local chat wasn't heard by the enemy. If we get the Team chat working well and I can turn off Local, I would most likely do that instead. Maybe they will add a channel that is enemy chat and I can just turn that off.
I tried a bit of a necro and thief, but will probably stick with my guardian. I enjoyed the mace/shield the most and for a while was unsure if my skills were helping at all. However, after switching to the thief and necro, I realized how much more punishment me and my allies could take when I was throwing up my shields, protection, healing and removing conditions, etc. It is also nice to know he can switch out weapons on the fly for more DPS and knocking people flying with a 2h hammer is one of the most rewarding things I can think of.
If the game had no WvW, I must admit I would probably not have much of a desire in the game. However, the WvW looks promising enough and enough of my guild friends over the past 12 years are going to play that I plan to jump in with both feet.
The worst thing of this beta weekend is that now going back to GW1 is going to be hard ;_; and i just need 8 more HoM points :/
Going back to any game is hard for me right now!
So, Anet has stated that the release date will be determined by how the BWE goes. What's everyone's thoughts on the state of the game and when it'll get released?
I personally thought the game was in great shape, barring optimization (which always comes at the very end) and niggling issues like chat. I still think they're going for the June 26th date with the last BWE on June 22nd, which will turn into a headstart for everyone that's pre-purchased (with Monday being a headstart for preorders).
They need to make it easier to play with friends. Once people start getting shuffled to overflow grouping becomes impossible.
With two races and their starting areas not yet playable I am not so sure about the end of june. In general it was fine, but I would like the game to run a bit better, for them to look at the scaling of events and perhaps making melee somewhat more survivable (especially in larger scaled events). In the mean time, starting in two weeks, I'll be enjoying Diablo 3 anyways so there is no rush, at least from my point of view.
That's a known issue. It will get resolved some time between now and release, no doubt: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/foru...-Join-Same-Map
WendeliusCurrently, players are having some issues getting members of their party into the same map. This has to do with players being on different overflow maps. We are working to get this issue resolved
I would be happier with an October/November release, personally. There is a lot that they need to get right, and as stated above, we haven't even seen half the races in the game yet.
You get loot drops and experience. I also read that you get honor points which work like karma point in PvE I think. So you should be able to buy gear with that. I didn't try this during the beta though.
Yes. I'd be pretty comfortable with another 6 months myself. What I saw was great. I've had tons of fun all weekend long. But I've also sent a fair number of bug reports. Not due to engine stability. The game was rock solid for me (we know there is still some graphics optimisation to do). Mostly emails getting lost, players getting separated between instances, balance issues, ...
So I think the game need polish and tuning and those last 2 races presumably have work to be done as well.
In an ideal world, I'd give the devs another 6 months to get everything right. And if they do, I'll be spending a lot of time there. Because the game surprised me a lot in good ways all weekend long.
Wendelius
I am having the same problem. :)
I always wanted to roll a mesmer and after getting him to lvl 11 I thought "Yep, that's going to be my class".
Then I tried Guardian and it was SO much fun! 2h hammer and 2h sword are just amazingly fun. I was a little bit bored with him until about lvl 5 but then the fun just skyrocketed. Very interesting class, lots to do, lots of roles to fill.
Then I tried Necro. BTW, I didn't have any difficulties with charr necro's personal story as someone mentioned they had around lvl 4, although personal story quests depend on the options you choose during the character creation. Necro was also fun, certainly very durable class but I wasn't excited about that much. Played it only to lvl 8, maybe that's why, and also was pretty tired.
Then I tried a Ranger. Holy cow, buckets of fun. Also very interesting class with lots to do. I was a bit sick of rezzing my pet leopard all the time but then Charlatan suggested I tame a boar and that thing changed everything. It's a very tanky pet and allowed me to unlock my bow skills nicely. Also convenient how you can swap the pets instead of healing or rezzing them, pretty much no cooldown when out of combat. IMO pet switching is overpowered in PvP considering how much time it takes to kill a pet. Really liked my Ranger.
Dynamic events system is awesome. It's light years ahead of traditional questing, it's so ridiculously better. I rolled two Human characters and it was interesting to see how different their leveling experience was. Certainly, some events where exactly the same, especially the simple ones in the beginning. But there were a lot of events I haven't seen on my first human or saw them developing differently. Some events popped for my first human and haven't for my second and vice versa. My first human was rolled when there were millions of people in the newbie zone, we just zerged any event in seconds, forcing it to go through and reset extremely fast. My second human was rolled in the beta's last day, when people were spread out much more evenly. Suddenly everything was 10 times more exciting - events would last longer and would be more challenging (although they definitely scale). I saw much more variety in the world on my second char. Killing that cave troll with 4 people is a completely different experience than when I did it with 20, the same goes for the skill challenge nearby.
The game just feels epic. The shit you do in the first 10 levels, most games save for their "endgame". On Saturday, when I was on my norn Guardian, a world event popped in the norns' zone. It was a freaking world raid with multiple concurrent objectives (so we couldn't just zerg it) and those objectives were also branching based on the results. It took about half an hour or so, we BARELY won it in the end, it was pretty hard and a lot of fun. That was the most fun I got out of any lvl 9 character in ANY game. And I stumbled upon it while questing in the newbie zone! Everything started as a regular cleanup event and then all kind of shit started to happen around. I was like "WTF!" until I saw that "World Event" thing pop in the top right corner.
Yes, individually, some (or maybe even most) of the events in the newbie zones are not that much different from WAR's PQs. But when you look at the entire SYSTEM and the kind of experience it enables, you realize it much more than just a bunch of looping "kill the spiders, get the apples, blah blah, blah" quests. For once, rolling alts feels like a new game instead of re-running the exact same stuff you've already experienced.
I think they need to spend a few months adding in some polish. Mostly in terms of explaining game mechanics - apart from the popups on certain level-ups, a lot of the systems are really hard to work out. It needs a tutorial because there's so much to learn in all areas (how to get to WvWvW - once you're there, the tutorial's pretty good, how crafting works, the fact that you can right click on common crafting mats in your bags to send to the collections tab in your bank, the fact that the bank is shared across the account, etc, the fact that filled hearts become vendors, etc etc).
I also think there's some work to be done on the UI. I found it hard to recognise whenever I had conditions or boons on me or on the enemy, because combat requires you to focus on the enemy's movement more than in most other games. Those icons are awfully small and pretty samey. Obviously a poisoned, crippled or burning enemy is clear to see, but I have no idea what a confused one looks like!
Oh another example. Remember that lumber mill in the human newbie zone? It has about lvl 7 event nearby. On my first human I spent some fair time in the skrits' (?) mine nearby killing mobs, looting stuff and destroying some equipment. On my second human, when I got there, some NPC dude started an even to get into the mine and blow it up. So we did, we got in, placed the explosives and the whole mine caved in. So my second human didn't spend any time in that mine except for blowing it up. Very cool.
And a few minutes later, near the same lumber mill, my second human was killing a nasty wasp queen boss my first human never encountered. It was a nice fight.
In that fight with the queen, as well as in the earlier fight with the cave troll boss, I noticed an interesting thing that is a byproduct of the game's systems. When fighting bosses, it becomes important to move them away from downed teammates and we had to find some balance between the people who were attacking and distracting the boss (crippling, knocking down and other conditions are extremely important in fights like this) and those who would sneak in and rez the fallen people. This ability to combat rez people adds a whole new dimension to the fights.
Speaking of rez, I just remembered a nasty bug I've found. In WvW, when you are killed, what you could do is select a waypoint in another zone and if that zone is full, the game would offer you to queue or cancel. The problem is that the game rezzed you first, so one could select Cancel and stand up right where he was killed. During one of the sieges, we've had some entire enemy guild knowing about this bug. They would get to our trebuchets and stuff, get killed there and then stand up over and over again, eventually killing all our cannons. Cheaters.
You can tell many conditions that are afflicting you by the border of your screen. More visual cues would definitely be nice though.
It'll be interesting to see when it comes out. Personally, I don't feel like they need that much time. End of summer seems like it'd be enough time to polish, clean things up, optimize the engine, etc. Of course, a big caveat to that is what state the content is in (higher level and other races). Obviously if that isn't close to being done then they'll need a lot more time.
One thing I will say is that I was impressed with their stability. Yes, there was some downtime, but that still went far smoother than I expected for the first BWE. They certainly outperformed Blizzard and the Diablo 3 open beta, although that's a bit apples and oranges since this was pre-purchases only and thus more controlled.
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