[GW2] My pros and cons

Last Updated on Tuesday, 7 August 2012 04:57 Written by Kadomi Tuesday, 7 August 2012 04:55

Note: when I started writing the majority of this post, I had just participated in BWE 3. It’s now a week later, and I had time to consider this game more clearly.

With release only a month away, the last weekend of July was the final opportunity for pre-purchase buyers to participate in beta testing. This was highly anticipated, because it was a first look at the two races of asura and sylvari. Not sure if the other starting zones saw much play, but Metrica Province was packed with people. Asura everywhere!

At the time I was still not super-sure about Guild Wars 2. It’s best argument for me right now is that there’s no subscription fee, and the box price should be alright for all the content that’s there. There’s a lot of PvE content. Zones are huge, reward exploration, and 80 levels are nothing to sneeze at. But it’s yet to reel me in and not let me go, and that’s what I am looking for in a game I want to commit to. I also got a chance to participate in the MoP beta, recently. Overall, I enjoyed the Mists of Pandaria beta quite a bit, more than the two previous GW2 weekends. I definitely enjoyed The Secret World in its free weekend a TON more than GW2. I also have way more fun playing some single-player games like Arkham City instead of GW2. That does not bode well for me.

Back to BWE3. As described above, I wasn’t expecting to be swept away. Especially with the amount of no-fun I had on my mesmer in BWE2. I rolled asura, and picked a warrior this time. Warrior was the first character I rolled in my first beta, then a charr, and I wasn’t thrilled because Plains of Ashford, the charr starter zone, was brutally difficult at the time. It was however different this time round. My warrior was quite fierce, and I do love the asura zone. Metrica Province is a weird love child of lush tropical jungles combined with steampunk technology that should make the WoW gnomes totally envious. The personal story is a step above the really lackluster human ones. The Inquest make great villains. They also increased the quality of the voice acting, with the most important female, Zojja, being voiced by Felicia Day. Whereas the flow in Queensdale last BWE was totally off for me and I found myself frustrated, the flow in Metrica Province was pretty much perfect. I never felt any gaps, and completed the zone at level 15.

The likeliest difference is that there was an incredible amount of dynamic events going on, due to the high number of people in the zone. They are the best source of experience, no contest. I also spent my time going for map completion and hunting down vistas in particular, and that might explain the smoother leveling curve.

Vistas were newly introduced this beta weekend. They’re kinda blatantly ripped right from Assassin’s Creed, which is a bonus in my book, because I love those games. It’s been my favorite to find Eagles marked on my map in AC, to climb towers and enjoy the grand vistas of Damascus, Venice or Rome. Vistas do the same in GW2. They’re glowy map symbols clearly marked on your minimap, and you have to find a way to get there. It usually involves light jumping or discovery of a path up there. Once there, you are rewarded with vista completion, which goes right into map completion, and a cutscene with a sweeping view of the area. Fun!

I also spotted my first jumping puzzle involving floating islands and asura gates. I heard good things about it, but couldn’t figure out how to get up onto the first floating island, and decided that this would be something best saved for release, if I was to continue playing.

Warrior was probably the most fun I had with a profession so far. It is not without concerns though. I know there’s debate of people missing the holy trinity, and people missing clearly defined roles. All I can say from personal experience is that I don’t miss the trinity as such, but I miss support roles. Sure, every profession has support roles, but you really don’t get a lot of guidance how to play, and this early in the game, I am sure most people are still mashing buttons 1-5 in order, and that’s about it. I miss strategic play. Inevitably every single dynamic event with a champion mob is a zerg fest with no strategy, no cunning, no planning. Everyone silently pew-pew-pews. The most you heard about events and people talking about them was when people asked for more people to show up at specific events, like the champion ooze. I might as well have played with NPCs.

Melee warriors are no fun to play in a zerg, at least not for me. Fighting a champion, you eat dirt as the first person. Or you run from wave to wave, and always come a bit too late because ranged are picking it off easily. Melee is fine when you’re doing hearts or are just exploring. For events I found myself switching to rifle and longbow. I never thought I would ever be playing a ranged warrior, but dang, well done! Rifle warriors do a lot of single target DPS, and longbows are all about fire AoE pew-pew. Mind you, I hear melee warriors are beasts in PvP, but I don’t PvP at all, so who am I to talk?

In this beta, I was in a tiny guild with Spinks and Arb, and it was quite fun to actually have green beige text. My trepidation with GW2 is that it’s really not that much fun to play solo. Just having guildies around made a difference. Enough of a difference? I do not know. Probably not. It might be different if I had any sort of interest in PvP whatsoever, but I absolutely don’t.

So, a week later, here’s my personal list of pros and cons of GW2:

Pros:

1. P2P – Buy the box once, play the game. I think a lot of people are drawn to this model, because it also means you can guilt-free drop the game for a while and play something else. As I am sure will happen when MoP drops a month after GW2 release.
2. Gorgeous world – it’s really a beautiful world that ArenaNet has created. It looks hand-drawn, and I do love the art style of the world. Vistas are lovely. It’s colorful (unless you end up in one of many snowy landscapes). When you walk around cities like Divinity’s Reach, Rata Sum or Lion’s Arch, I couldn’t help but feel that the cities in other games are pale shadows.
3. No trinity – Every MMO suffers from the requirement of having tanks, healers and DPS. Tanks and healers are always in low supplies, for good reason, and it seems like a dated model. It’s quite exciting to think this might be a working model where you can beat events regardless of what class is around.
4. Cool non-human races – Charr and Asura are interesting, and implemented very well. The sylvari seem to be done very nicely as well, but I only had little gametime playing one.
5. Exploration and adventure – my favorite gameplay in GW2 is that of exploration. You actively get encouraged to explore maps, getting a reward at 100% map completion. Maps are huge, and some skill challenges require some thinking and jumping to get there.
6. Interesting crafting – Crafters can efficiently level through gathering and crafting, and the game makes it very easy to use materials, with direct deposits from bag to bank, an account-wide bank, and material access right from the crafting stations.

Cons:

1. PvE gameplay – ultimately, PvE in GW2 is boring to me. HQs are not exactly the height of innovation, and the dynamic events don’t feel that amazing. I realize I might be quite alone with this perception. I am a goal-driven person, and I feel GW2′s PvE has no real motivation other than making it to the next required level for the personal story to advance. I have not found any event chain I found so exciting that I couldn’t stop playing. Dynamic events translated into zergs too many times for me during Beta Weekends. Also, what if the masses move on and people start late? I think some of the DEs are not easily soloable. Furthermore, the combat is not terribly exciting to me. There’s the initial excitement of learning new weapons, but once you found the weapon combination you like best, it’s 70-75 levels of pushing the same five buttons over and over again. Last but not least, the storytelling does not hold up compared to SWTOR and The Secret World. Heck, even WoW does better storytelling. It’s a shame, because I hear the Guild Wars novels aren’t that bad. I have completed the first three tiers of the personal story of the charr, and none of them were that compelling. The overall story with the Elder Dragons left me just about as cold as Deathwing left me in Cataclysm.
2. No trinity – I know, I listed it as pro up there, and it is. But I felt that support and control as alternatives were not really that obvious. If you ditch a trinity model, then maybe you should hold hands a bit and make it clearer how you play together in control or support roles. The tutorials leave much to be desired.
3. Lack of endgame – 80 levels is a lot of content to worry about endgame, but still. Eventually you will get to 80. And then? As PvE player I didn’t really see any other option for myself but 100% map completion in all zones, and dungeons. I haven’t played any dungeon, as the first one is only available at level 30. Exploration, dungeons and crafting? I don’t PvP, if I did, I’d probably be a lot more excited. Of course they might add more events as time progresses, but as I said above, none of the events left me saying ‘That was AWESOME!’
4. Unpleasant community – one of my biggest issue with GW2 is the hype. Supposedly the greatest game in existence, and hyped by ArenaNet with its design manifesto and players both, some of the most rabid fanboys have the habit of going ballistic in just about any blog that dares to criticize the game. It’s quite possible that this post will draw one of them too. I don’t care. The hype and the extreme rage of the fanboys are actually damaging. I am not alone in this perception, as I saw Siha post about it as well.
5. The light armor issue – I have posted about it before, and I can only stress how big of a deal this is to me. I find the absolutely disregard and radio silence from ArenaNet about negative opinions about the female humans and norns in light armor disheartening. I have tried to communicate this to them, but alas. I believe it would have been easy for them to fix the preview models quite easily, but they didn’t want to. I know people who switched races because they got tired of looking up a norn’s skirt. I am disappointed. If ArenaNet listens so well to suggestions, I guess they really don’t care about that segment of their playerbase. They did so well with medium armor, they did very well on charr and asura females, and okay on sylvari.

My cons outweigh the pros. I will do the logical and have decided that I will not buy Guild Wars 2. I am fine with that. I don’t begrudge the people who are really excited for it, but I will definitely say that I do not understand the crazy hype that’s even gotten to bloggers I respect a lot. I hope you all get to have tons of fun though, even if it’s not for me. You’re also welcome to convince me I have it wrong, but it won’t be easy. I have one big regret: I will miss the excitement and giddiness of starting a new MMO with the masses. There’s something very awesome about starting a new game at release, especially when it’s been hyped to oblivion. There will be so much chatter about it, and I know I will feel left out. I will just have to wait for my fantasy fix until Mists of Pandaria is released, my one last beacon of hope for WoW and its poisonous community.

Learn More

[GW2] Crafting in Tyria

Last Updated on Wednesday, 13 June 2012 12:49 Written by Kadomi Wednesday, 13 June 2012 02:30

My main goal for BWE2 hadn’t really been leveling, so maybe I should have curbed my frustrations about the leveling curve a bit. What I wanted to do instead was to delve a bit into crafting in Guild Wars 2, from what I have experienced so far. I am not exactly passionate about crafting in MMOs, but if a game has a crafting system, I try to use it and pick something I find appropriate for my character. Crafting hasn’t been mentioned in many blogs so far, as people focus on the big things in the game, WvWvW or the dynamic event system. Zubon at KTR posted that you could actually level to 80 as crafter, doing not much else. Interesting concept. But I am getting ahead of myself. I’ll nitpick my way through the crafting system, with tons of screenshot. Maybe it’ll help others understand the crafting concept, because at first I had issues with understanding how you actually advance. You can click on any screenshot for the full size version.

There’s a total of eight crafting disciplines in Guild Wars 2. I am not calling them professions, because that’s the term that’s used for what other games call classes. I get so easily confused here.

Anyhow, eight different crafts, here’s the run-down:

• Armorsmiths: heavy armor, inventory boxes and runes, which are stat bonuses for armor. Yup, bags are for the weak, real warriors lug around metal boxes!
• Artificers: magical weapons like staves, foci, scepters, tridents and sigils, the weapon equivalent to runes.
• Chefs: fooooood. Magical buff food. Not for the faint of heart because wow, there are a lot of cooking ingredients. Supposedly, each recipe is based on real dishes. Wowza.
• Huntsmen: ranged weapon like long and short bows, pistols, rifles, harpoon guns, etc. Additionally they craft off-hand items like torches and warhorns, and sigils.
• Jewelers: gems and other jewelry, and refining gems into better stones.
• Leatherworkers: medium armor, leather packs and runes. The leather version of the armorsmith.
• Tailors: light armor, bags and runes. The cloth version of the armorsmith.
• Weaponsmiths: the happy place for fans of any melee weapon, and the matching sigils. Also, shields. Can’t miss out on shields. I am channeling the WoW Kadomi here.

Not a bad spectrum of choices, if you ask me. You can learn a maximum of two crafting disciplines at a time. If you really like cooking, you can’t just take that on the side, like in WoW and Rift, it would be one of your dedicated two disciplines. The good thing is that if you decide to unlearn a crafting discipline and pick a new active one, you do not lose the progress you already made in the old one. You can switch back to it at any time. It also means, like Zubon pointed out, that you can max out any craft, drop it, and pick up the next one. Eventually, you could be the master of all eight crafts, on one character. Not bad, eh? If crafting’s your thing.

The first beta I was in, you were on your own when it came to crafting. There was zero guidance. In the recent incarnations, town criers approach you and are all ready to tell you everything you need to know about how to learn a craft. What crafts there are, where to locate the trainers, and where to locate the crafting stations. Off I went this BWE, and picked up tailoring and artifice on my mesmer. GW2 uses a method I am not very fond of. You can only ever craft at a matching crafting station. It irritated me in Rift, and it does a bit in GW2 because it’s inconvenient. It forces me to run back and forth in a town. It forces me to only craft when I hit a town with a crafting station. On the human map of Queensdale, the only crafting stations are in Divinity’s Reach and in Claypool. Maybe also in Beetletun. Of course you can always use the waypoints to quickly hit up those places.

All my examples are based on tailoring, from hereon out. Once you have picked up the craft from the trainer, the only reason you’ll ever have to speak to her again is to buy supplies. Once she’s initially trained you, you won’t be able to learn anything else from her. You get the basics from her, and the rest is up to you. You have no idea how many times I returned back to the trainer when I first messed with crafting, not understanding that there was nothing else to learn. It just doesn’t work that way. What you learn is how to make four forms of light armor: coat as chest piece, gloves, boots and leggings. Furthermore you learn how to make bags, and how to craft the individual components for the armor. As novice tailor, your basic materials to craft things are jute and rawhide leather. You get those items either as drops, either as scraps or from salvaging. The first thing I did as tailor was to turn some of my jute scraps into bolts of jute.

The great thing when you have craploads of materials: even if you have a hundred bolts to make, it takes very little time. After the first few, crafting production greatly speeds up. You won’t have time to make a cup of coffee and a sandwich like, say, in Rift. While you make stuff, the experience bar at the top moves and you gain crafting levels. Four bolts of jute took me into level 5. The maximum is 400, btw. Every 25 levels you learn more stuff automatically, without the aid of a trainer. In addition to gaining crafting experience, you also get experience points that affect your character level. You really can gain quite a bit of experience here. If I had spent more time crafting instead of roaming around like an idiot, I probably would have been less frustrated. Just as example: I also have a weaponsmith character of a bit higher level, and managed to get a full level on her via leveling weaponsmithing from 73 to 141.

As I mentioned earlier, for tailoring, but also huntsmen and armorsmithing you require loads of jute and leather, which you can acquire through killing mobs. Loads of centaurs, e.g. They often drop tiny saddlebags which are full of crafting materials. Artifice, like all the weapon crafts requires wood and copper. Those you can also salvage using salvage kits, and you can gather them. Gathering in Guild Wars 2 is interesting, and something I highly recommend for anyone, even those of you who have no intention of crafting whatsoever. Gathering is nice and easy experience, and you can make some money selling the raw goods to people who like to craft. All you need to buy is a tool appropriate for your current zone. They are sickles for cooking ingredients, axes for wood and mining picks for ores. The vendor-bought ones have 100 charges before you need to buy new tools. Of course it sucks when you run out in the middle of the wilderness, but it’s a moneysink that I can understand. It’s quite awesome that you have no competition for ore or trees in this game. If there’s a node of ore, it’s available to anyone who sees it. It won’t go away if someone else tries to mine it at the same time. There’s no competition. It’s quite liberating.

At the vendor you also buy the salvage kits. Salvage kits are similar to reverse engineering in SWTOR or the recycle process you had in Rift. You can salvage a -lot- of things. Basically any armor or weapon you find, but also specific salvage items for leather and cloth. The salvage kits have 25 charges each, before you need to buy a new set.

One of the absolutely most amazing things about crafting in GW2 is one that I hope every MMO with crafting will adopt in the near future. That’s how awesome I think it is. Crafting means you sacrifice bagspace. Your bags are full of ore, wood, leather and then also the fine crafting materials that mobs drop. In a blink the bags are full. But not in Guild Wars 2. It has the handy feature that you can right-click any crafting material, select ‘Deposit Collectible’ and it lands straight in your bank vault. Incredibly handy. The bank vault in Guild Wars 2 is shared between all your characters. You have a main bank window, and then something called Collectibles. In my example screenshot, I only have some wood in the bank, and some fine crafting materials, like Tiny Totem, Tiny Venom Sacs and Radiant Dust. IIRC, you can have a stack of 250 each in your bank.

If you love to alt it up, you can have your army of alts fill up your crafting vault at all times, without ever setting a foot in the bank. How handy. And yet…it could be so much better. My ideal bank system would combine GW2 and SWTOR. I love the latter for accessing your materials in the cargo hold when you send off your minions to craft for you. In Guild Wars 2 I still need to drag ass to the bank, get everything I deposited into it out again and lug it to the crafting stations. Imagine you could skip the part where you need to get your stuff out of the bank. *dreamy sigh*

Got some mats? Ready to get your crafting on? As novice tailor, you can make a total of 5 things as I mentioned above. Four pieces of armor with the Mighty prefix, which means it has +power on it as stat. In Tyria, might is connected with blood, and so you will always need a vial of level-appropriate blood to make it. Said blood is one of the fine crafting materials, farmable materials that drop off specific mobs. Vials of Weak Blood drop off harpies, bats and skale, e.g. Each piece of armor has three components. Two crafting components and a fine crafting material. In my example, I wanted to make some shiny new gloves.

The first time round that I tried crafting, I was rather confused. I made mighty pieces of armor until they were grey, and then I couldn’t make anything else and the trainer ignored my confused looks and didn’t teach me anything else. The crafting UI also had a discovery tab, but everything that I tried to combine didn’t work. I was stumped. Until I pondered why I can make insignia, and it took off from there. When you start out, you can craft three insignia: Festering, Mighty and Vital. Mighty we already got covered, so I went ahead with Festering. For a Festering insignia, you need a Tiny Venom Sac which drops off any poisonous creature, like spiders, and a bolt of jute. The crafting components for gloves are rawhide wristguard straps and jute wristguard padding. What if you combine them with a festering insignia?

Yay, Festering Embroidered Gloves. In addition to crafting something new, you also get a lot of crafting experience for discovery. Once you get to 25, you learn three more insignias. At 50 you learn three more insignias, and using those will create green gear. To mess with our heads, what would be green gear in any other game is blue in GW2, and what’s blue in other games is green here. Mindfuckery, I tell ya! Finally, once you get to 75, you will move up to the next crafting material, in the case of tailoring that would be wool and thin leather. In the beginning, you will need to experiment a lot because it’s not always clear from the names of the insignia what exactly they’ll be doing. At higher levels, you will get more exotic stats like +power and +magic find. Diablo just rang. Just saying.

In theory, crafted gear is supposed to be a lot better than what you find out there, but I found that if you regularly upgrade your gear with karma stuff, especially beyond the first zone, it will be quite a while until your crafted gear pulls ahead. It took me til about weaponsmithing 125 to finally get better weapons than what was already available as random drops or karma gear.

Dedicated crafters like to min-max, which is why powerleveling profession skills are such popular websites for major MMOs. Through experimentation, I found the best way to min-max is to simply craft refinement like bolts of jute and leather until they’re grey and no longer provide you with any experience. Then you make as many insignia/inscriptions as you have the mats for. Only then will you start working on discoveries. If you have no use for the gear you are making, salvage them, reuse the mats, discover more. Eventually you will break the 25 point mark that teaches you more things. Make the new insignias/inscriptions, and then repeat this process for the next step. Alternatively, you can also head to Lion’s Arch and toss four of your crafted items into the Mystic Forge, hoping that whatever comes out will be superior.

Is crafting in Guild Wars 2 fun? I think so. I like it can be used as leveling alternative. I love the storage system. Discoveries keep the system fairly exciting, because when you get a new insignia, initially you don’t know what will be coming out exactly (until the item databases and crafting sites have dissected the system). Could it be better? I think so. I am actually quite fond of the SWTOR crafts, and wish that the bank use of mats was available. I will definitely be crafting after release and am hoping the system has a few more surprises in store at the higher levels.

Did anyone else try the crafting? Loved it, hated it? As always, interested in other opinions.

Learn More

[GW2] Beta Weekend Event, Take 2

Last Updated on Monday, 11 June 2012 04:04 Written by Kadomi Monday, 11 June 2012 04:03

June 8 to 10 marked the highly anticipated second beta weekend for people who have pre-purchased Guild Wars 2. I know that just a few days prior to the event, a bunch of people I follow on G+ hopped onto the Guild Wars 2 train, because MMO players often follow the hive mind trend. It’s hip to drool over Guild Wars 2.

I didn’t have a lot of time to play this weekend, but I got some time in on Saturday and Sunday, getting my mesmer from the previous event from level 8 to level 13. I know, that’s piddly. The Queensdale map chat was full of people who played nonstop since the beta event started, and thus they were in their 30s. I don’t know, I don’t have that vigor for MMOs anymore, if I ever had it, and besides I find it pointless, because it just means that you will be bored that much earlier after release. Inevitably, zone chat was full of people mocking the folks in their 30s who were loud to proclaim that content isn’t spoiled for them at all, as most of them basically did nothing but PvP.

I’ll be honest with you guys, but this beta weekend I just didn’t have that much fun. I feel like a terrible pessimist but this consistent hype just makes me dislike aspects of the game more than it should. But seriously, people, it’s not that revolutionary a game. In fact, I found some things downright concerning. My biggest beef this weekend was the leveling curve. I understand that Guild Wars 2 is not your average MMO, and that I need to break the tropes of moving from quest hub to quest hub (or heart quest to heart quest in GW2) in order to level. Instead, I should fill my time with lots of exploration, crafting and lots of events, and live and breathe this world. I tried, I really did. I participated in any event I ran into, and that was a lot. I had moved to Whiteside Ridge to be able to hang out with Pewter, and this server was alive and kicking. Full, in fact, because Scary’s theory about which servers are popular seems to be very true. Events were spawning everywhere, and there were a lot of people participating in them. I found an event at a very unlikely spot in the southwestern corner of the Queensdale map, protecting beehives from angry bears, for example. Using the level recommendation of the personal storyline as guidance, I had to hit level 14 for the next step of joining the circus in Beetletun. Yet I was stuck at level 13, and that experience bar just wouldn’t move. I completed 16 out of 17 heart quests of the zone. The last one was level 15, and mobs two levels above me? Too much of a pain to even try. I had 95% map exploration, missing only one point of interest, and 2 skill challenges. I chopped every tree and mined every bit of ore I was able to find. I killed every random mob I could find, but at 6 experience points per mob, that did nothing for me. I randomly moved from waypoint to waypoint, to find events. I did a lot of events up to three times. In the end, I gave up at level 13.5 because it felt like a boring grind.

I know I could have gone to Divinity’s Reach and hopped into the Asura Gate to either the norn or charr starting zone, but that’s really beside the point. If a player is eager to enjoy all the sights of a zone, and participate in every quest and event you run into, you should not have to resort to traveling into other zones to advance. As PvE player, you should not have to fill experience gaps with PvP. I am sure they have time to tweak the numbers, but this time round, it just left me utterly frustrated.

On top of that it didn’t help that I am not really feeling the mesmer. I don’t have to, I only chose this class because a) I wanted to see the armor style first-hand after the horrors of the character creation screen and b) the profession did originally sound intriguing. Ultimately, I picked staff as weapon of choice, making her a ranged nuker. I did my level 10 personal quest with a greatsword and failed so many times that I actually proclaimed on Twitter that I’d rather mop the floors than continue playing. Which I did. My floors were grateful, I am sure. One of those things that annoys me about the mesmer is that the illusions are so…lame, I suppose. You can summon a maximum of three illusions or clones of yourself, and then your F1 to F4 abilities let you shatter your illusions to either damage, confuse, stun the mob or have you evade the next attacks. Sounds so great in theory. In practice, not so much. As ranged mesmer, all my illusions are ranged as well. Now, imagine the mob has like 25% health left, and I decide to shatter my illusions. It’s kinda pathetic to watch my illusions run towards the mob from their maximum range, taking their sweet time. More often than not, by the time they reach it, the mob’s already dead. It felt less than overwhelming. I participated in an event to kill a champion troll twice. Took about 10 minutes both times. I nuked my heart out, kept on the move, shattered my illusions every time I had the maximum number up, and buffed my allies with Chaos Storm every time it was available. Both times there were huge groups of people around, and both times my contribution to the event was labeled as bronze. A resounding meh, that’s what the mesmer gets from me. I did not unlock all weapon combinations, so maybe I am just doing it all wrong.

On the plus side, the servers seemed very stable to me, they added zone chat which was fun to read, and did a bunch of UI tweaks, compared to the previous beta. The best one is certainly the ability to deposit crafting materials in the bank from where ever you are. I’ll tell you more about that in my next post about GW2 crafting. I am on the fence about the changes to the skill system. I don’t mind the new tier system, but I have to agree that it made me take a lot of filler skills that I will likely never ever use. It’s definitely not the promised freedom, and now is closer to talent tree systems in WoW, Rift and SWTOR. Unlock a tier with five abilities that cost one skill point each, so you can get to the tier with the three point skills, etc.

Money was easier to get, I found, I had no problem affording my trait book at level 11. Costs ten silver, and without it you cannot start spending trait points. One of various moneysinks in the game. I wish you didn’t need to unlock it first, but that’s how things are at the moment.

It was good to see people being helpful about resurrecting folks. Besides, there are achievements for it, and you get experience for doing that. I surely went out of my way whenever I saw the symbol on my minimap that a dead player was in the area. I think when we did the champion wasp event at the sawmill, I got two combat rezzes.

All in all, people seemed friendly and very excited about the game. A lot of oldschool Guild Wars fans actually complained how different mesmers are now from what they used to be in Guild Wars 1. I have no idea, I never played it. All that excitement also led to me rolling my eyes a lot because the number one thing I kept reading in Queensdale chat was that people want the game released already, and their perception it’s ready. I am very sure that ArenaNet have the intention of delivering a game that will appeal to a majority of people. I think they’d be silly if they didn’t aim to sweep up some content-starved WoW players. In order to do that, the game needs to be in an extremely polished state and be truly accessible. They’re on a good road, but they’re clearly not there yet. I don’t mind that people are eager to play the game, and people in the beta did already shelf out the money for it, but seriously, it’s better to wait than to rush it.

Amongst all of my negativity, one thing truly pleased me: the more I leveled, the more I moved past the cheap lingerie model you start out as. It’s not the most flattering outfit in the world that I got, if you look at those hips, but it’s a good example that ArenaNet know how to make armor that looks good and yet isn’t a flesh show. If only the character creation screen would reflect this ability.

Learn More