Guild Wars 2

Regarding the zoom out distance which I was finding rather annoy as it was just that bit too close to my character.
I've actually realised/noticed that when I went and made a human necro (my main is a char ele) that camera did appear to be zoomed out further and the characters movement seemed quicker too.

i found that too, it's just that the charr are big characters and their run just looks slow, they are the same speed and zoom distance as humans and norn
 
i found that too, it's just that the charr are big characters and their run just looks slow, they are the same speed and zoom distance as humans and norn

That's exactly what I reckoned was the case.
However the much smaller human compared to charr does seem to give you a more 'comfortable' view, which as an elementalist is kind of crucial.
 
Even on tougher classes melee is a death sentence in WvWvW, I want to see the attraction of it because the potential for a thief class is huge. Either the start of the game is severely harsh against melee and as skills/utility and gear opens up in the endgame it becomes more viable or quite simply melee is doomed from the get go.

I think it intrinsically is. You begin with daggers, you have no skills and you can come across some tough enemies in early events. Much more so than when I was lvl 7+ where I would open with daggers and if I'd aggro'd too much switch to bow. Annoyingly I really liked the mainhand sword skills too..

Were you pulling off the combo from starting, steal, active steal, immediate first attack should give you a shield bubble. That's what I used throughout the starting thief bit. Also, I didn't try it but an alternate healing skill is one that activates on attack.
 
Engineer is probably going to be my main on release. Enjoyed it so much that I ended up not playing much else for the weekend. The FPS style medkits and boosts you can drop are a nice touch, and turrets should be fun if they scale up properly. And you get guns, lots of guns :)

Guardian was a bit of a surprise hit too, didn't expect that to be nearly as much fun as it was. Didn't even get a chance to play a ranger much, and I'd initially planned for that to be my main.

The big surprise was the scale of everything. I must have spent a good two hours just exploring Divinity's Reach and Lion's Arch - proper cities with separate districts and back alleys. It would have been nice to have events kick off in cities like they did in Warhammer, but I didn't find any. Underwater is really well done too, Lion's Arch ruins looked fantastic.

The RvR areas looked very DaoC, can't wait to see how they play out with large numbers of players. Plenty of objectives for smaller groups of players too - it might work to break up the zerg if you can split off with a single party and take one of the smaller objectives.

Buzzed for release now. Unless they've done an Age of Conan on the later levels, it's going to be absolutely huge.
 
Hi. I played the beta over the weekend with two chars. One was a male Mesmer (level 6) and the other was a female Human Elementalist (level 10). Below are pros and cons of the game so far

Cons:

  • General Performance (On a build up area/city or a large battle, frame rates are poor. I’m seeing as low as 10fps with both my cup and GPU on idle and hardly being used).
  • Game Breaker bug (If you are in a WvWvW battleground map and get DC, you CANNOT log back in as you get an error saying the map is full! This will happen to any place where the map u was playing is a highly populated map but Arena Net are aware of this as they responded to my forum post about it)
  • WvWvW battleground que(i manage to get in once early on Saturday and then got kicked out and lost my character, see previous con. After trying to get back in battlegrounds on a new char, the que was too long.)
  • Login (As some people may have been aware, the login system was very very flaky. I manage to login fine an hour before official green light of the beta but after that I could not login at all on Friday night. Saturday Morning it was fine but then later tried Saturday evening and didn’t work. Throughout Sunday it was fine though but I hope they fix it permanently. I can deal with que’s on certain servers but logging in? That needs to be sorted.)

Pros:

  • Best Graphics and art style in any game I have played (dynamic weather, night and day, fog!!).
  • Fantastic World designs (Just go and take a look at videos of Lions Arche. I was speechless when I saw this place!).
  • Great Combat (More dynamic then many other mmo’s I have played and even better then skyrim).
  • WvWvW(I can see myself spending weeks just playing this game mode. Literally 10000’s of people battling it out across a gigantic game world with the ability to get supplies and build various defensive weapons to defend your castle/base. A level 1 can participate! This is because everyone’s health and damage abilities are level 80 but you can only use the skills/weapons you have unlocked yourself).
  • Dynamic Events (This is fantastic. No more of the old quest type system found on basically every mmo you play nowadays! Dynamic events happen randomly in various places in the world. I spent hours just doing them! )
  • Story mode (Story mode is instance based. It is basically a personally story mode where u go to a particular place and load up the instance. The story mode is brilliant from the small bit I played. Finally a MMO that has a compelling story mode that’s similar to a typical single player RPG game. I did a few last nights but did not want to do a lot to ruin the experience when final game comes out.)


As you can see I really enjoy this game. Elementalist is a fun class. Lots of abilities and Mesmer is not bad too. For next beta I will try two different classes again and see how it goes. I cannot wait for this game to be out but from my experience so far, this game is maybe 2-3months away from release IMO as there is a few things that need to be ironed out as noted on my Cons. One being a game breaker.
 
Thought I'd end the beta with some WvW last night and really enjoyed it. The 3 faction system makes for really interesting fights although the general chat needs to change so each faction has their own chat.

Anyone else enjoy some diving in lions arch :D so much fun.
 
Melee doesnt need a pocket healer to be viable, Melee alone simply isnt viable without using your professions other skills. Learn to use all your classes weapon sets.

Arenanet stated that the Thief is the hardest class to play. Warriors have lots of blocking, shield and tactics skills to help them win fights, guardians have lots of support and heal skills.

Last night I was messing about on my Mesmer in PvP, there was this lone Thief player that tore me apart within seconds everytime he saw me. My clones sometimes threw him off me giving me some time to throw in some attacks but once he got in melee range I simply didn't stand a chance.

It was the only class I hadn't tested over the weekend so had to have a quick go before they closed the servers. I only got to about level 4-5 but I found it the easiest class to level and took down mobs much faster than any of my others. (note, I never played warrier/guardian classes)

I really like the way you can shadow step to the target, weaken them then flip behind them to do massive damage then shadow step back to your original point of safety. I guess if you trait up for certain weapons + extra crit and poison durations the class would defo come into it's own.

I have always played the thief/stealth based class in MMo's but decided that in GW2 I'd be a stick waggling magic type but looks like the thief is winning :p
 
Well Cj's offered me a refund and when I mailed them back to accept, I got this response linking the GW2 forum post earlier in the thread -

"Customer experiencing the 'usa region' and unable to set a European billing address in the gem store on guild wars 2, please be assured that this is a game bug, and that you DID receive an EU key. Please check this for more information regarding this problem with proof that this problem lies with guild wars 2 and not us:

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/support/account/Item-Shop-US/page/1#post63197

This is a bug with the Guild Wars 2 system and will be fixed shortly.

CJS CD Keys source their keys directly from NCSoft. There is no choice between EU/USA Region. All keys are the uni-region as there is just one type of key. Guild Wars 2 developers are suffering problems with their log-in system, which means that customers cannot log into their accounts in order to select the correct region. Once you can properly log in you will be able to switch to the correct region."

So looks like I personally have to wait, which is fine if the above comes good.

Hi, I have just brought up this message with my new best-friend Gaile Grey and this is her official response (via Forum PM) to the CJS keys thing:

CJS CD Keys source their keys directly from NCSoft — I don’t think so, especially when he mentions “his supplier” later.
There is no choice between EU/USA Region — NOT true.
All keys are the uni-region — NO
There is just one type of key. NO (obviously not!)
Our supplier — But he said that NCsoft was the supplier?
stated that right now, Guild Wars 2 developers are suffering problems with their log-in system, which means that customers cannot log into their accounts in order to select the correct region — NOT true. If the key is not fraudulent, people can play.

This is after consulting the head of NCSoft sales to get confirmation on their relationship with CJS. It seems CJS received their keys from an unauthorized reseller - i.e. they are not an official seller. Nothing will "come good" of this other than us receiving a refund from them. ANet will not support our problems with these keys! This is definitive.
 
I hope they designated certain servers for certain countries. I played on Petrified Forest which, according to the server list somebody posted, had not been "claimed" by anyone in particular, and it was full of germans! I have no problem with them personally, I just like to know what people are saying so I can help.
 
Well I spent the weekend mostly playing a Mesmer, I can see this being my main come release, was a lot of fun to play. I did try a Ranger but found the pet would just pretty much always die quickly and I would spend half my time patching it up, whether that improves with levels I don't know but it was pretty annoying. I tried both a Warrior and Guardian and can only say lolmelee to that.

As the Mesmer whilst bimbling around in WvW I had quite a few 1v1s which I lost a grand total of 0. The high damage, high control and high mobility just seemed too much. I was playing with a Staff / Scepter-Pistol, I essentially would only swap to the staff for the field that damages/fears them and spent most of the time with the scepter/pistol which had very high damage output (same dmg auto attack as the staff but attacks seem much quicker) as well as a long range multi-target stun (the ultimate anti-runner ability :D). I had also maxed out my damage going for full power on all gear including trinkets / rings etc, then maxed out domination for even more damage, glass cannon worked whilst everyone was low level, whether it works at 80 would be interesting to see. Plus there was one amazing trait speciality that at 25% hp would replace me with an illusion and put me into stealth, can see that causing a lot of wtf's :)

It did lack that heavy dmg AoE during keep sieges that my friend playing an Ele was getting to go mental with, also your illusions / phantasms don't attack doors and can't get to the people inside so a large portion of being a Mesmer seems to be suspended during key parts of a siege. Perhaps siege cannon monkeys would be better suited to Mesmers in sieges both attacking and defending.

I found the difference in levels to be huge in WvW -- at lvl5 my staff's auto attack was doing about 150~ dmg, at lvl20 that was 450. So people wanting to level WvW when there are actual lvl80s about are going to be a massive detriment to a server as they will just be complete fodder if that damage keeps scaling like that.

I quite liked the dynamic events etc but it wasn't as 'explorable' as I felt it was made out to be, basically there is a breadcrumb trail you follow as theres only a couple of things in your level range at any given time. When watching the Yogscast videos of them just 'going wherever' they were lvl30+ running around a lvl15 zone. I also did feel that lack of XP in Kessex Hills, I ended up about 4-5 levels behind the next lowest quest available to me at one point -- now whether or not this is down to tuning or the game or they intend you to go to the other races lowbie zones I don't know.

But can't wait for the next beta weekend -- going to try the Ele / Necro properly next time, hope theres much more optimization to performance as some of those WvW fights we're pretty laggy to the point where I preferred being in small groups defending supply camps and the like.
 
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I think that was a largely community-coordinated thing, Souness. ANet did say on their blogpost about the server list that it would be "highly advisable" that players/guilds/communities plan ahead for the (home) server they will be rolling on. Perhaps check Reddit or some other GW2 Forums for an updated list? I remember it was posted on a shared document file somewhere...
 
Hi, I have just brought up this message with my new best-friend Gaile Grey and this is her official response (via Forum PM) to the CJS keys thing:

"Quote:
CJS CD Keys source their keys directly from NCSoft — I don’t think so, especially when he mentions “his supplier” later.
There is no choice between EU/USA Region — NOT true.
All keys are the uni-region — NO
There is just one type of key. NO (obviously not!)
Our supplier — But he said that NCsoft was the supplier?
stated that right now, Guild Wars 2 developers are suffering problems with their log-in system, which means that customers cannot log into their accounts in order to select the correct region — NOT true. If the key is not fraudulent, people can play."

This is after consulting the head of NCSoft sales to get confirmation on their relationship with CJS. It seems CJS received their keys from an unauthorized reseller - i.e. they are not an official seller. Nothing will "come good" of this other than us receiving a refund from them. ANet will not support our problems with these keys! This is definitive.

Nice to know, now to get a refund and try and get my key switched over so i keep my id and GW1 account.
 
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