WvW is certainly interesting. You spend a lot of time running from place to place - supposedly when you capture areas new waypoints will appear, but I didn't see any and we completely wrecked one of the other servers while we were playing.
On the other hand, it's pretty damn entertaining and fun when you do get into massive fights and take out forts and stuff 😄
Edit: I have just been informed by a friend that you're supposed to use Supply that you can pick up from around the map to build waypoints. We were just running from tower to tower blowing shit up, so we never did any of that 😂
Well, I had intended to record the finale, but at some point before it started fraps decided to crash and I didn't realize. Goddamnit.
However, here's the start of it:
And a bit later, while hunting down moas, this happened:
One of my friends (the Mesmer standing behind me) and I managed to slide our way down without dying and then had to revive everyone.
This game is amazing. I cannot wait for the next beta weekend. I ended the weekend with around 20 hours of play, a level 16 human Mesmer, level 4 charr Guardian, and level 4 norn Thief. Mesmer is, not surprisingly, my favorite. I think I unlocked nearly every weapon skill for it - only thing I never used was the torch. Staff and Greatsword are awesome, and I really liked the scepter/pistol combo.
Also, for the record, Mesmers are amazing for trolling other people in-game. One of my friends and I managed to chain our portal skill so that we were sending people way across the map 😂
Boo I missed the finale, even though I was there for the moment the servers shut. What kind of finale finished before the end?!
Anyway, yeah, game is great but there is a lot of disappointment around from people expecting the second coming. I think ranged weapons have a big edge over melee right now as well, which is a view I am hearing a lot of.
They set a level 80 group event for everyone, haha. I died twice trying to kill a pig. The moas I spoke of were level 19 Champion Black Moas that even with 50 people attacking too a few minutes to kill.
Melee is damn hard - I stopped using sword as my mainhand weapon pretty fast. There needs to be some sort of autolock or something because enemies move around too much and it makes melee really difficult.
I also found the personal story (on all three races, but especially human and norn) to be scaled up way too much in terms of difficulty. I think I got a fairly good idea of how to play well, doing stuff like dodging at the right times, but there were parts I simply could not get past because the enemy difficulty was scaled too high for the level the game put you at for those.
Ah, pleasingly, looks klike the melee thing is being addessed; a dev opened a new threead on the beta forums with this paragraph:
"Melee vs. Ranged
Hey all. I wanted to talk about this a bit since it is a hot topic here and also on the internets. The intention is that both styles are viable. Certainly right now Melee is more difficult than ranged. There are some things we will try to do to address this, but I think the more you play you would find they are closer than you think."
Haha, yay. Yeah I didn't do much melee in the BWE, though I do plan on playing a Warrior come release, so that's good.
I've also seen lots of comments on how the personal story tends to be scaled to be too damn difficult, and the point where I got stuck a lot of others have pointed out as being too difficult.
That northern bandit cave in Queensdale was weird with the back-scaling; I didn't have a hope of doing it even with two others, and it's not even anywhere important. I don't know if it is coincidence or not that that difficult mission's part is in the same place. Still, balance issues are a good find for betas.
I did find the personal story rocketed up the level grade pretty darn quickly, though so long as you aren't being utterly wiped every second it is pretty generous on respawns.
It's actually very easy to get put down very fast indeed, especially by anything more than two enemies. That is one of the issues with melee as you very quickly get ganged up on and you can't kite like you can at range.
Downed status is similarly awkward, because unless you were just about to kill one of the guys that dropped you, and so can rally immediately, you barely get any time to do anything when downed before the same guys put you down for good.
I was always able to rally pretty easily unless there were more than about three enemies around (or I was fighting a boss enemy); when that happened, though, they killed me pretty fast. So that I didn't have problems with.
**** that bandit cave, though. I've seen a lot of people countering complaints about how the personal story is too hard with "use your NPC allies" and "bring a friend". Number one, in that step, you have no NPC allies. Number two, it's your story, not your friends', and if one part of the game should be designed to be done solo, it's the personal story.
Looking through that thread, the dev is saying that melee is meant to be anti-tank and you will definitely go down if you just toe-to-toe people; the only hope of fighting like that is if you go heavy on conditions like Blind and Weakness on foes- part of their philosophy that status effects should be more attractive in PvE than in other games. He recommends that you move around a lot and not using mouse look so attacks automatically steer you to your target (another melee problem is actually trying to target anything- doubly so during a mass battle where you cannot see a damn thing) and he says it is definitely harder to get used to and more control intensive than ranged.
He adds they are already looking at giving more defensive options to lower armour melee characters (which won't help me at all) and spreading aggro a bit away from meleeists (which will).
We'll see where it goes- but for now, ranged s definitely king. People can get the same or better results for much less effort.
BTW, did you ever get to fight the Shadow Behemoth in the swamp? I didn't, and from what I've heard from others, I really missed out in not doing so.
Anyway, so finally got all of my videos I took uploaded. Not nearly as many as I had originally intended to, sadly. I had planned on recording everything I could but...kept forgetting to hit the button to start, and then something cool would happen, and I'd be like "Damnit!"
Character creation and opening cinematic:
YouTube video
Elemental boss fight:
YouTube video
Durmand Hall in Divinity's Reach:
YouTube video
Palace Garden in Divinity's Reach:
YouTube video
Combat stuff (underwater!)
YouTube video
The diving board in Lion's Arch (narrated):
YouTube video
Going swimming in LA:
YouTube video
Messing around and throwing kegs around in a monastery...😛
YouTube video
Playing around with an owl tonic while waiting for the finale:
YouTube video
And the previously-linked fun with Mesmer portals:
YouTube video
Nah, didn't see a behemoth. There was an event happening in the swamps first time I got near them but the humans won it so I guess Mr. Scary never arrived.
Some people have expressed dissatisfaction with the event chains not being as comprehensive as they thought they would. Geez! There are hundreds of the damn things going on everywhere you go- they can't all be sagas. I was happy with the mix of simple and complex. Kessex, for example, truly felt like a constant battlefield due to the event chains within.
I was also amused by the complexity of the pumping station- just a small area providing water for the human city, but they'd put a lot of detail into what happened there. First time I got there, bandits were poisoning the water supply and we had to stop them. We failed, then then a new event started where we had to get poison samples from the new toxic blobs by the pipes in order to get the poison analysed and cured. I then went off to do some personal story, and when I came back the event was now that bandits were trying to blow up the pipes, and then when we stopped that there was yet another event about trying to fix the damage they had done.
That's just for one small area of the human starting zone. Not all events where that detailed/chained but they are very numerous. No other game like this has made the world feel so active and alive. It's very easy just to go out and find stuff to do.
Originally posted by Ushgarak
Looking through that thread, the dev is saying that melee is meant to be anti-tank and you will definitely go down if you just toe-to-toe people; the only hope of fighting like that is if you go heavy on conditions like Blind and Weakness on foes- part of their philosophy that status effects should be more attractive in PvE than in other games. He recommends that you move around a lot and not using mouse look so attacks automatically steer you to your target (another melee problem is actually trying to target anything- doubly so during a mass battle where you cannot see a damn thing) and he says it is definitely harder to get used to and more control intensive than ranged.
Yeah i was having a hard time with melee, the having to move around and doge will take getting used to for me.
I got used to dodging pretty quick. Constantly moving around was a bit harder but by the end I was used to that, too.
I think I've been spoiled by that sort of gameplay already; now every other game I'm going to be trying to always move and dodge and being annoyed I can't.
I think people were mostly complaining that the event chains weren't very long - only a few events chained together. Which is silly. Most people stayed in the starting area all weekend; they're not going to have huge and overly complex chains where everyone's coming to grips with the game.
There's also a lot of commentary that the tutorial areas stick you in the deep end and are utterly confusing and unhelpful for many, which I can see being true. Another area getting a lot of comentary is the storyline- a large and pipular thread opened in the support forums attacking it. The complaints are that it is a. not very well told (both froma storytelling angle and because of the very boring cutscene approach they took) and b. utterly lacking in context for someone who has not followed the lore before playing- it doesn't actually tell you, for example, what Destiny's Edge is and hence why you should care about these characters.
The Norn story is getting the most flak, whilst the Charr one seems to be more popular. To his credit, the lead writer has been engaging with people in the thread complaining about the story to see if he can make improvements. He's already said they'll likely do it differently in future content, especially in making it a bit more gritty (though I hope they don't over-angst it; I am fine with a heroic storyline myself).
The charr story is indeed pretty good, what I played of it. There was one hilarious bit (I was playing as Ash Legion) where I had to infiltrate a Flame Legion camp, and being as I was playing a female charr, I had to disguise myself as a male. Which led to the line "I'm fine and I'm male!" at one point.
Plus I think the charr one is the one that's the most familiar to people who played GW1...which is weird because you'd think that human would be, but that's not the case at all.
I also noticed the game being rather bare of tips/explanations at some points, too. Like I had no idea that you need tools to gather stuff (because most games don't) until I tried to gather, and then I had to go all over DR trying to find the merchant that sold gathering tools. I had no freaking clue how to access WvW - the only explanation I could find was to go to the Mists from the Hero panel...which doesn't tell you that you need to do that, go to the next area, and then go through a portal. The portal is not labeled in any way, either.
I had no idea you could deposit gathered materials directly to your bank from you inventory until after the weekend ended, discovering recipes in crafting wasn't well explained...
There are also a lot of complaints about the fact that dyes were originally supposed to be unlocked account-wide and they were only character-wide over the weekend. Which sucks, a lot, considering how many of them there are.
