GW2 - First Beta Weekend

Welp, I just quit RIFT an hour ago. I think after one more month of making some plans to accomplish what I want in ATITD, I will be quitting that too. That will leave City of Heroes as the only off and on sub game that I may decide to subscribe to, or not. I figure it will last till June or whenever GW2 launches, where the "or not" will come in.

Yes, it was -that- good a Beta Weekend. I got Guild Wars 1 beta weekend flashbacks honestly - beautiful world, lots of potential for future playthroughs, and a damnably good fun time exploring and making gradual progress through something that feels and plays quite new.

I was having so much fun, I practically forgot to take screenshots, so this is the meagre selection accompanied by piecemeal commentary.

Character Creation
Works as advertised. Seriously, watch one of the ubiquitous videos on youtube for the whole deal. Smooth, polished, a very decent amount of customisation. I was Charring the entire weekend, so pretty much fur color, fur pattern, face shape, horns, eye color, and a bunch of facial and body sliders. Clothing has three dye areas to apply dyes to.

My first GW2 character. He had to be a big burly Charr, of course. And I went with Guardian, because melee support in heavy armor just sounded ridiculously drool worthy.

The personal story questions turn up in character creation, altering the starting look of your character slightly with shoulderguards or a helmet or mask, etc.

I made a decent variety of Charr while attempting to see if the personal story changed very much with regards how the questions answered. One of the bigger changes appeared to be the legion you were from, Blood, Iron or Ash Legion.

The female Charr are quite interesting. They are a little gender dimorphic from the male Charr in terms of their horns and face shape, and the way their body slouches such that their face angles lower than the males - but thankfully, they are not purple humans with elf ears and boobs. (Now the elementalist -clothing- however... I dunno why they need belt buckles there...)

Iron Legion warrior and Ash Legion necromancer respectively. I have no doubt that I'm going to have to be buying character slots out the arse when the game goes live - I was intending to just keep to the eight professions, but I dunno if I can control myself, there are five races and so much story branches and so much Charr...

Questing and Leveling
Dynamic quests 3.0, I guess.

If Warhammer did it first with version 1.0, where stuff happened in the overland and you had to physically find people in the same geographic region sporting the holy trinity in order to succeed at it, and if RIFT did it second with version 2.0, where stuff happened in the overland as demarcated by map icons and people in the vincinity could just hit a button to "join group" and success was more flexible because different classes could pinch hit the tank/healer/dps roles...

Then GW2 refined on the formula some more, because stuff happens in the overland and it's marked by map icons and waypoints, and success/failure at them chains into related events and you don't even need a join group button anymore and by god there is no such thing as a tank or healer any more in this game.

This honestly takes some getting used to. I don't think anyone is really accustomed to it yet, it is quite a learning curve. No ally has stronger heals than your own personal heal. So there's no way you can stand still against a mob and just soak aggro. You will die. Many of us died many times while attempting to learn how to run off when needed.

The good news is, any one can rez. And everyone pretty much tries to rez each other, except when it's too risky to do so. It makes for more interesting partial success battles, rather than all-or-nothing success or fail, though admittedly it is quite annoying when you're the one lying there dead and waiting for someone to come get you. (On the other hand, rezzing and walking back would suck even more, so yeah.)

 

This was one of the more memorable pitched battles from spontaneous group formation. We get a lot of that in this game. It is good. It also worries me that six months down the line, maybe there won't be so many people at specific dynamic quest spots - something that plagued both Warhammer and RIFT. I'm not sure if GW2 can escape the stale content fate of all matured MMOs.

A level 10 group quest with a SERIOUSLY 'broken' OP ranger NPC whose hail of arrows would one shot anyone in the vicinity of the red ground effect circle. Except you have 0 seconds between seeing the red circle and getting whacked by the damage, so you can't even dodge out of it. To make matters more interesting, the tunnel that we are chokepointed at has falling rocks. Falling rocks that do serious damage and knock you down. Mass carnage.

I still have no idea how we managed to push through it, but the two times I saw it, I think it was both critical mass of 10-15 players and a heckalot of condition spammage from any profession that could - knockdowns, slows, dazes, the works. Anything that stopped the killer rain of arrows.

Personal Story
Seemed quite nice. Eventually will be fully voiced, I think. Characters have that old Guild Wars appeal. Plot was decent. Your friendly NPC differs depending on the 'best friend' question you answered in character creation, so I could get an egomaniacal male Warrior, a shady male Thief, a slower-on-the-uptake male Guardian, a steady female Elementalist, or an innovative female Engineer. I got the warrior for my Guardian cos I wanted someone in melee that I could support. Also from an RP aspect, it seemed appropriate to humor a hot shot.

This was one of the more amusing exchanges - We sniffed out (haha, Charr) a bunch of explosives that were loaded onto some pack animals by saboteurs. Alas, our method of defusing them was Blood Legion direct, rather than Iron Legion... we kinda just smacked them on the rump and let them run a safe distance away before.... BOOM.

The aftermath:









Vanity Shots
Just wandering the world and wanting something to remember her by.

1) Near the ruins of Ascalon city with lots of ghosts, a chance pair-up with another player that looked like something out of a buddy movie.

(And my sword was hawt. Some random player told me in local "that sword is epic" and I had to agree. Titan weapons, er, greatsword, for the win.)

 2) Being reminded that my sword is hawt, so I had to pose for it to remind myself further. The Charr combat crouch is awesome with that sword.

There was also a steam sword before this, which was like a chainsword out of the Warhammer 40k universe. It made an evil revving sawing sound when I attacked.

3) Complete serendipity. While stuck trying to decide on a suitably Charr surname, I figured Somethingbane was always a good fantasy warrior bet, and since Charr hate the Flame legion, Blazebane was it.

Now, Charr from the same warband always seem to keep one part of the surname the same, so you could have a Burn warband and Charr with the surname of Burnwhite, Burnsteel, Burnfast, etc.

Imagine my glee when I found Charr with the Bane name, and even better, they were a dynamic event, in which the three of them would patrol off to the nearby ghost-infested ruins and wreck havoc. So I joined in and kept pace and formation. It was ridiculously fun and cool to pretend like I was part of the same warband.

4) This was a nice touch. A voting feature where different people can pick different options to influence the course of dynamic events. This one controled the type of enemies we fought. There was another that would send an NPC on a path either north or northwest, presumably triggering different dynamic events.


Cities
My god, the size of the cities. Silly me, I didn't take any screenshots of the Charr's Black Citadel - it rivals Ogrimmar, imo, though it is fairly ugly in an industrial cartoony way. It is also very vertical and the staircases and lifts were making me completely lost. Still haven't explored all of it.

The human city of Divinity's Reach though... Wow. Whyever would they want Ascalon back? I felt like a rural country bumpkin Charr when I visited.

The camera angle was absolutely insufficient to cover the scope and scale of it. Literally so tall and vertical, you could jump down and die if you wanted to. Here's me risking life and limb by running along the ledge instead of the pavement like normal humans. And yes, Charr run on fours like a cat when they aren't toting weapons in bipedal combat mode, it is uber cool. Better than the worgen animation.

The Divinity's Reach map says it better than any screenshot in one location could:

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Words fail.

PvP
I eventually tore myself away from the PvE today long enough to at least -try- out PvP. Basic PvP has one mode - conquest - a territory control sort of objective game. It's passably decent, though probably not at all properly balanced yet.

My starter PvP traits/skills were set for a mace/shield and two-handed staff combo. It was meant as a sort of melee support / aoe dps-support blend, imo, but a) I wasn't used to those, b) it is impossible to hit players running around like headless chickens with the mace/shield that has no leap/teleports/knockdowns or immobilizes and c) it is impossible to support players running around like headless chickens with the wimpiest set of maybe-heals ever. I felt useless, I -was- useless, and I lost game after game.

I eventually got distressed enough to google up the answer to "Where the hell can I get other weapons in PvP so that I can equip better weapon skills?" Turns out, a fairly unobtrusive NPC in the corner was holding the free PvP weapons.

I swopped to a more offensive greatsword and sceptre/focus combination. The greatsword deals fairly nasty crits in close range, but it's hard to get in close range, so it has a leap, as well as a chain-pull skill. The sceptre deals decent medium-range damage, has a mini-ground-aoe that can be traited for health regen, and an immobilize. The focus had a line-based ball that helped allies/damage foes (not easy to aim) and a shield that absorbs four hits or it explodes into groovy aoe damage.

Throw in a health regen/aegis-y shout, a knockdown signet, and a runspeed shout, and suddenly in my next few games, I was topping the charts. The Guardian seemed a little OP on health this beta, it is very hard to kill a Guardian 1 vs 1 because you have so much godawful health and ability to heal up (sorta like WAR's warrior monks), and with me being so offensive, I was winning most 1 vs 1 fights - though it took me a while to whittle them down. Couple that with a runspeed shout, and I was capping the uncontested points. If a lone guy showed up, no problem. 2 or more, then start running like hell and delaying tactics if one couldn't run. It takes forever to kill a Guardian, so that's time 2-3 players are tied up and you hope to god the rest of your team is doing something useful in the meantime.

In the end, one of the toughest fights I ended up on was where there were 2-3 Guardians per team. Utter chaos. Especially with a mesmer that was cooperating with them (mesmers create a ton of illusionary clones in GW2), and a ranger who was picking people off in peace, thanks to the utter chaos.

Conclusion: It was okay. I feel there needs to be more in order to get the competitive PvPers interested though, -more maps (there were only two cycling), different objective-based games, possibly even more skills - but maybe they'll add those in later.

WvWvW
I almost didn't get to try this feature out. The portal to get in had a queue. A damnably long one from how long I waited. Pure chance that it triggered just as I was about to map out to PvE and give up.

Man, I would have missed out. This is Warhammer RvR done right, imo.

Here's the map overview. The first thing that is very obvious. There are three teams. Or rather, three worlds fighting it out. Green, Red and Blue.

An overpopulated world server has its advantages. I was on the Darkhaven server, and we were the Green team. Horribly dominating, as you can see.

The second thing that is less obvious. There are four maps to fight on. Eternal Battlegrounds is the one where you expect everyone to clash on. Each world has their own color Borderlands to fight and guard.

Now this was apparently lost on worlds Blue and Red, or maybe they didn't have the numbers or the guild organisation to defeat the keep lord once taken. This is important because holding certain locations give you "supply" as a resource.

"Supply" is used for repairing walls and gates of forts and towers and keeps, and also for building some disgustingly overpowered siege weaponry. Each player can haul only 10 supply from location to location, and there's quite a lot of running in this map. Supply camps offer supply caravans that slowly move 35 resource (option to upgrade later when people are rich and have more money) from camp to keep. (And yes, they can be attacked, and defended.)

You literally can and probably have to lay siege to the big keeps in order to take them. I can just envision now, the smaller guilds will be running around whacking supply camps, being guerillas, etc. Big PUG zergs will form naturally, forming offensive lines and fronts, pushing and shoving back and forth.

In the map, you'll notice, red and green were fighting in the north, and green and blue were fighting in the southeast, via the orange crossed sword indicators. The stronger you are, the more you'll end up fighting battles on multiple fronts and spreading out your army... Natural balance at work.

It should be very interesting once the commanders start being rich enough to actually buy their access to the region channel to order people around from location to location. Ditto once people start being rich enough to afford the various siege weapons. Mostly we were using a lot of cheap arrow carts - which decimate infantry via rain of arrows.

An interesting tactic they did was to rename all those in the opposing teams as Blue Invaders, Red Invaders, etc. One, it depersonalizes them, making them seem more like mobs, rather than scary players for the PvE inclined. Two, you can't spike down so easily an army one by one if there's no name to target by.

Attacking a gate. An arrow cart is being controled by the guy on my left, raining death on the crowd in the gate. (And no doubt, vice versa on our zerg as well. Which is why I'm not IN there.)

Wall defence. Did I mention these maps are BIG? Seriously, so much bigger than even the Tier 4 keeps in Warhammer. It feels very much better as a result. 

 Attacking again. Big old siege golem someone managed to afford. I think it's a suit you can actually enter in and stomp around. It sucks up a heck load of damage. I think 25 of us were aiming at it trying to break it down, and only got it to halfway. Fortunately it dumps out its driver at the halfway mark, I think, so it was disabled in the end. (Until the next time some guy managed to climb in and drive again.)

Defence shot. This is the big keep in the middle. It is BIG. Catapult and cannon and yes, pitch-filled cauldron in the background.
 

Re-taking one of our supply camps from Blue. They snuck into our Green Borderlands world to grab one of these. We weren't going to let them have it now, were we? It was a brutal brutal fight, took forever to overwhelm them and re-take it back. There was a guild called [BEAR] that was holding onto it quite tenaciously - about 5-6 of them, working together quite well. Swamped by numbers in the end.
 

 Rain of arrows! Rain of arrows!

Why yes, that is a trebuchet.

Why yes, it is firing a dead cow.

It makes a fun poison cloud mist below. I like to think that it is very disorientating and will make any enemy players choose to get the hell out of that area.

The catapults and trebuchets have an interesting firing mechanism. You actually have to turn them with keys 1 and 3 bit by bit. And key number 2 actually fires the shot - but it has to be held down a certain time in order for it to fire a certain distance.

So you literally have to adjust it and use previous shots to guide your estimates. A spotter would also come in very handy, as there is no way I can see the enemy from where I am. I just have to guess where the front is, via my team's zerg when I can see them, and estimate a little further back is the enemy zerg. Possibly along the road... and lob a test shot to see. If I see damage numbers or a combat log message, then.. success!