Hugbees

These are my thoughts after playing the Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event 3. While I don't feel this is a false statement to make, I won't just go throwing it around without backing it up. If you remember one of my previous blog posts:

http://www.aureusknights.com/entry.p...omotes-PLAYING

I made a lot of points about the game, that were my expectations based on what I've heard from ANet and other players. I'm going to give you the breakdown of these based on my experience.

"To begin, I love how there is no more holy trinity" - This held up for me. I didn't find myself having to heal people low with health or constantly having to revive them. (BUT I CHOSE TO! ) I could dish out the damage as my Elementalist and then cast a healing spring. I could choose to go staff and throw out heals with my Guardian then go back with my Hammer and wreck face while still adding a supporting element with my attacks. I could sneak out of combat as my Thief to go revive someone who was down. I felt like I could play how I wanted during combat at any time, and it was awesome!

"It also helps that your level scales down to fit the area that you're in, and even a level 60 doing level 20 content can still benefit from gold and karma rewards." - This worked out too, though I do question how it will affect gear. In any case, I was a level 9 grouping with my level 4 friend in his starting area and the enemies were beating me up and giving me a challenge. It didn't feel like I was running him through the quests or that I was killing much faster than him at all. It pretty much boiled down to this other statement I said: "It's also great for both the down scaled player and the group because the group can do a challenging run of a dungeon without feeling like they getting run through while the down scaled player can revisit content or even explore lower level content for the first time and have it feel he's progressing and not just breezing through it all." I am a tad concerned for really high levels going into starter areas but I'm sure it works out just fine.

The fact that leveling up can be done anywhere with no penalty for leveling in lower level areas mean you can either visit all of the races starting areas, progress in only your own race's area, mix and match, or even pvp your way up to 80. The game allows you to not just complete all of the quests, but play the quests. - After making my Elementalist, I went on to play other characters. When my friend Socran logged in, he wanted to play with my Elementalist so without even doing the first quest I hopped on over to Divinity's Reach and did nothing but quest with him and got up to level 8 purely doing human quests. Now I couldn't do my own personal quests there, but I could help him do his if he wanted to do them.

All races can be all classes. - This was indeed the case, and I'm glad to see how many combinations I saw. They did a good job making each ace feel appropriate as every class.

With Guild Wars 2, enemy attacks are choreographed (and recently, they made them more so than ever to help out melee characters, because ANet listens.) - I do enjoy the red rings that appear around you for you to get out of, though it was hard to see certain attacks with particle effect after particle effect going off. By the third day of BWE3 though, I was getting better at seeing those things more so perhaps it was just my newbishness getting in the way.

One thing Metro pointed out in the comments, that I didn't mention before was "the game world is alive and dynamic." and it really is. I like how events will just happen as you walk by, NPCs will come to you and tell you about something going on and then you follow him (which bugged out quite often sadly, but beta is beta /Totalbiscuit) and it made everything feel more alive.

One thing I should have mentioned before was how easy it is to just go out and play. You can fight enemies without having to group up, so if someone is fighting you can jump in and help without taking their kill or loot. I didn't feel like I was going to be disrupting anyone else for attacking their targets or anything. It was great!

So all in all, this game met my expectations and even a bit more so than that. I discovered things I didn't even know were in the game and there are probably way more things to find at launch. There are about 30 some days until the headstart, and I'm confident that ANet will fix the bugs and further polish the game for launch!