Guild Wars 2 and GWJ: Launch Date And Final Beta Weekend

Scratched wrote:

Actually, one thing about the stolen skill may not be so much that it's random, as much as in the middle of a fight you'll need to mouse-over the skill and read the tooltip to know what it does, and think on your feet for how to work it into current fight and have it be useful.

That's my biggest complaint with it. In the middle of a fight, I don't have time to mouse over the skill and read the tool-tip. Of course, months down the road I might have them all memorized, but until then it's almost useless.

I might start treating it as a skill to use in the next fight. That way I open up with a stolen skill and then steal towards the end of the fight to get a skill to use in the next fight.

Three BWEs later with a ton of playing each time, I can memorize the skills off a weapon, but I still kinda cruise control and spam sometimes.

Like I can switch to air attunement and my brain will know what 5 abilities I have at my disposal, but knowing what would be a good choice to follow up as a next attunement is, or what I should have attuned before air - I still do poorly. Combine that with the buffs that do different things based on what attunement you were in when you cast them.

Basically there's a lot of details and depth to a simplistic looking system with relatively few skills compared to other MMOs, and it's really neat.

mooosicle wrote:

Three BWEs later with a ton of playing each time, I can memorize the skills off a weapon, but I still kinda cruise control and spam sometimes.

Like I can switch to air attunement and my brain will know what 5 abilities I have at my disposal, but knowing what would be a good choice to follow up as a next attunement is, or what I should have attuned before air - I still do poorly. Combine that with the buffs that do different things based on what attunement you were in when you cast them.

Basically there's a lot of details and depth to a simplistic looking system with relatively few skills compared to other MMOs, and it's really neat.

Same.

I still dont have a complete grasp on the combo system.

ranalin wrote:

I still dont have a complete grasp on the combo system.

When certain abilities are used through a field, stuff happens: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combo

Scratched wrote:
ranalin wrote:

I still dont have a complete grasp on the combo system.

When certain abilities are used through a field, stuff happens: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combo

I know what they are jsut not able to reliably make them happen when i want.

ranalin wrote:
Scratched wrote:
ranalin wrote:

I still dont have a complete grasp on the combo system.

When certain abilities are used through a field, stuff happens: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Combo

I know what they are jsut not able to reliably make them happen when i want.

That's the thing, will people doing a fight set them down strategically to aid other people, or just do direct damage and anything that combos is a happy accident.

Until you could play asura and sylvari, I played norn females almost exclusively. For some reason, the caster classes seemed odd with them. (not unlike a bull in a china shop) I think they just don't read sly enough to be mesmers or darkly curious enough to be necros. And thematically I guess they would fit with earth and water based elementalists.

I really did like the human area quests and stories aside from the parts dealing with centaurs. I think they are a notch up on the often-seen-before shamanistic norn areas.

It is funny that I have seen the asura compared to gnomes a few times but I think they fall in line with goblins more. This is the race I am going to play the most I feel. They are just so damn adorable, are totally wicked with 2 handed weapons, and have lots of comedic personality. (strafing, and dodging are hilarious) I've figured out that making the body size at the tallest setting (they are still much smaller than other races) helps with their camera issues. I do not really enjoy their starter areas so I will probably make my way to the human or norn areas and then jump back for the storyline quests.

I also don't totally understand conditions & boons. Most times they only last a few seconds which is barely enough time to register (mouse over) what the condition/boon is.

I think the conditions & boons are also very class based. Seems it would be more important to a Mesmer than it would be for an Engineer.

re: combos -

I see the majority of people just laying the fields and rings down without any regard to combo strategy. In those cases, I often find myself dodging into place to make use of it.

Other than fire, I don't really know what most of the combos go with what field but I know it does something interesting so I use it.

I think the same goes for things like necro marks or elementalist sigils. there are times where I try to place aoe quickness/fury/regen boons near allies only to have them move out of the way. These marks/sigils are much smaller than the rings and fields so the coordination has to be tighter. (which will happen with set teams on voice as people progress further into the game)

emyln wrote:

I also don't totally understand conditions & boons. Most times they only last a few seconds which is barely enough time to register (mouse over) what the condition/boon is.

It's pretty much what they call a buff/debuff. I'm sure over time I'll come to recognise the icons, especially when they get UI scaling working :\. It's going to be better than GW1 where each type of debuff (slowing, bleed, decreased health cap, etc) could have a range of icons depending on what skill caused it.

One thing I think will be interesting is the great (by design) difference in character size. In the BWEs unless you travelled around, you were 99% playing with other characters of similar size. As the live game goes on, there's going to be a greater mix, and Norn stepping on Asura. That's going to be interesting to watch, and I'm not sure how tall I want to be in that mix yet.

BWE#3 was also first time I went 30 points into Arcane trait line for elementalist, and got Evasive Arcana, which gives you a different spell when you dodge based on which attunement you are in, with 10s cooldown on each elemental spell.

Three of the four spells are really frigging good spells.

Fire = least strategic one imo, aoe burn

Air = updraft which knocks everyone back and gives swiftness. You can offensively roll into a interrupt, roll defensively to knock a melee opponent down

Water = area heal for ~ 1400 at L80 and 1 condition removal

Earth = shockwave which immobilizes and bleeds in a line

God, eles are just way too frigging cool.

Ya this was the first time i was actively trying to set-up combos.

Thieves(along with Eles) are probably the ones with the most self-combo capabilities, I had tons of fun triggering a smoke or dark field and then unloading my pistols at enemies.

However there's an ongoing issue with how stealth works with abilities...in the first two bwe, you would have a trigger put you in stealth in the middle of you using your skills and as soon as the skill went off your stealth would fall off. So this bwe they tried the opposite scenario where going into stealth automatically cancel any skill you were in the middle of activating/performing so that you don't break stealth.

both of these approaches are problematic and im hoping they come up with a decent solution for this because it makes some of the best thief moves and combos somewhat unusable.

case in point: Shadow Refuge(dark field) + Unload(projectiles, combo with dark to create lifesteal hits). This should be one of the thief's strongest combos and it's biggest healing potential, but because refuge is a pulse it reapplies stealth every second and keeps interrupting your skills.

Falchion wrote:
jdzappa wrote:

On the other, the norn female guardian is full of flight of the valkyries win. Do any of the other guardian players have thoughts?

I rolled a Norn female guardian to try out the class as well and what I saw was: 9 foot tall blonde knockout, clad fully in chainmail, leaping through the air to skewer a fool before spinning a whirlwind of death with a 2 handed greatsword the size of a human. oooh yeah. I'm keeping this one.

I concur. I played a female norn guardian throughout BWE1 and had the same impression. Big badass barbarian chick that you do not want to mess with. So awesome.

Also I want to play a norn just because I love snowy zones in MMOs, and for some reason I just can not find a male norn look that I like, at all. They all look like deformed retired pro-wrestlers.

GrandmaFunk wrote:

Ya this was the first time i was actively trying to set-up combos.

Thieves(along with Eles) are probably the ones with the most self-combo capabilities, I had tons of fun triggering a smoke or dark field and then unloading my pistols at enemies.

However there's an ongoing issue with how stealth works with abilities...in the first two bwe, you would have a trigger put you in stealth in the middle of you using your skills and as soon as the skill went off your stealth would fall off. So this bwe they tried the opposite scenario where going into stealth automatically cancel any skill you were in the middle of activating/performing so that you don't break stealth.

both of these approaches are problematic and im hoping they come up with a decent solution for this because it makes some of the best thief moves and combos somewhat unusable.

case in point: Shadow Refuge(dark field) + Unload(projectiles, combo with dark to create lifesteal hits). This should be one of the thief's strongest combos and it's biggest healing potential, but because refuge is a pulse it reapplies stealth every second and keeps interrupting your skills.

I don't understand combos. I was told that I did a few, but I had no idea what I did! I'll have to go out into the interwebs and find more info on these phenomena.

You can wiki it, but if you are just curious if your current skills have any combo ability, just hover your tooltip over it

It'll say something like
Exploding arrow
12-25 damage
Combo Finisher:Blast

or

Poison Cloud
12-25 damage
Combo Field - Poison

Throw down poison cloud, fire exploding arrow at it, ta-da you have an combo field. Text appears that says something like "Combo Field - weakness", indicating that is what was the end result.

I think I have come up with another stumbling block for GW2. When you are learning the game, as little as 5 people in the same area as you can be overwhelming. That is a drawback of dynamic quests, that someone who just maybe wanted to kill an elemental or 2 and stomp some sand worm holes can be instantly thrust into a multi-wave invasion. And all of their current easily manageable collection quest objectives will be thrust aside for numerous kill tasks they are under-prepared for.

And this will be sustained until the newbie launch population thins out a bit. The opening mission (tutorial?) helps this somewhat but really kinda shovels you through to a scripted titanic boss fight. (where it seems like you are forced to die/rally at least once)

See, that's one of the things I like about the dynamic events. I'm sick to death of fetch quests and kill quests, so I'm really happy when that gets interrupted by an invasion or a giant monster crab or whatever. The regular heart objectives are just stuff to do when there's no event going on.

The other thing about DEs, or at least the lowbie ones I've seen, is that you don't have to do them. One of the things in the manifesto was to play how you wanted (within sensible limits I guess), and there's plenty to do.

Well but lets be realistic, a lot of times they spill over into other content. And other times, they are enticing, "what is everyone doing over there?"

I am not saying it will break the game but it has the ability to make the newb learning curve longer and seem more unstable.

I'm not sure they're that disruptive, most of the newbie area events are around 5 minutes. Below L10 you can do pretty well by facerolling, so I don't think the newbie player's world will be shattered by either getting involved in an event or running away for 20s to a safer spot. Sure they'll interrupt the exact thing you were doing at that moment, but I'm inclined to say "deal with it", or "it's training you to deal with it". The GW2 world isn't static and controllable, but also it's not totally unpredictable, watching events unfold can prepare you for things going wrong (and train you not to AFK just anywhere).

[EPIC SKIM]

As someone who has never played Guild Wars 1 and doesn't care too much for PvP play, but loves epic fantasy MMOs featuring primarily PvE (WoW, DDO, LOTRO, etc), is there any reason for me to pay attention to GW2? Is there anything here for me?

Yes. I hesitate to say that DDO is more complex than GW2 but GW2 is more of an open world with dynamic events, personal story instances and is less of a dungeon crawl.

Hmm. I may need to put this on my radar, then. I'm giving the GW1 free trial a shot now -- still downloading...

merphle wrote:

[EPIC SKIM]

As someone who has never played Guild Wars 1 and doesn't care too much for PvP play, but loves epic fantasy MMOs featuring primarily PvE (WoW, DDO, LOTRO, etc), is there any reason for me to pay attention to GW2? Is there anything here for me?

I'm in a similar position to you, and i've been completely sold on GW2 for a few reasons:

You're always scaled down to the area's level, so world content doesn't go obsolete
There is no holy trinity which makes forming up for dungeon runs easier (but also makes them more of a challenge because you can't have anybody just standing back and spamming a DPS rotation)
Personalized story leading you through the world
Your skill bar is limited to 10 slots, which i love as a former WoW & Lotro player because it would sometimes feel like the entire bottom third of my screen was smothered in hotkeys
There is gear and it does provide stat bonuses, but they cap out pretty easily so there's no such thing as gearscore or whatnot
It's really pretty

I'm sure others will fill in other aspects i've missed

merphle wrote:

Hmm. I may need to put this on my radar, then. I'm giving the GW1 free trial a shot now -- still downloading...

Just so you know GW1 plays completely different then GW2 so if you are trying one to see if you like the other it is not a fair comparison.

Arovin wrote:
merphle wrote:

Hmm. I may need to put this on my radar, then. I'm giving the GW1 free trial a shot now -- still downloading...

Just so you know GW1 plays completely different then GW2 so if you are trying one to see if you like the other it is not a fair comparison.

Oh. Well that ruins that idea...

What would be a better comparison, then? Or should I just go watch some youtube gameplay videos?

I would recommend watching either TotalBiscut's press beta coverage or dive into WoodenPotatoes' daily coverage of the game on Youtube.

WP's lore videos are a great way to catch up on the story from GW1.

As someone who never played the first game but has played all of the MMOs you mentioned, plus pretty much every other one since UO, I would guess that you will like the game. The world design is top notch, and Arenanet has just crammed the game full of player friendly features.

I personally thought the Yogscast Guild Wars 2 videos were a good look. (They are apparently big for minecraft videos)

It gives a pretty good look and entertaining insight into how the classes operate

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke25Z...

Someone did a comparison of all races, genders and the largest and smallest you can make those characters: http://i.imgur.com/kIo9z.jpg

Scratched wrote:

Someone did a comparison of all races, genders and the largest and smallest you can make those characters: http://i.imgur.com/kIo9z.jpg

Now that's neat to see. I got to play some, took a toon of each race to level 5 or so, each a diff class to see what they were like. I didn't click with the necro, probably needs to go higher level before I get it. I liked everything else and am no closer to knowing what I want to play. My GW main was first a warrior then when Factions came, I rolled a 'Sin and never looked back. I also took a dervish through all 3 campaigns too.

When I tried Mesmer in GW2, I had a good time. And I don't typically like casters at all. Release can't come soon enough!