Any surprises from BWE?

reets

New Member
Just wondering if anyone had any good or bad surprises come from the BWE's.

For me personally, this last BWE I tried out Mesmer and Guardian. Mesmer seemed to start out good but I felt the damage didn't scale well and it was hard to kill stuff once I got closer to level 10. Tried a few different weapon skill sets and none seemed to help.

On the other hard, I was greatly surprised by the Guardian. Normally I don't like playing melee classes but wanted to give most profs a far chance. I thoroughly enjoyed playing the Guardian and on top of that, almost all of the weapon skill sets I used were fun in their own way.

For the first time ever, a melee class will be one of the first characters I create :) Ranger and Guardian will be my first 2 characters.
 
Just wondering if anyone had any good or bad surprises come from the BWE's.

For me personally, this last BWE I tried out Mesmer and Guardian. Mesmer seemed to start out good but I felt the damage didn't scale well and it was hard to kill stuff once I got closer to level 10. Tried a few different weapon skill sets and none seemed to help.

On the other hard, I was greatly surprised by the Guardian. Normally I don't like playing melee classes but wanted to give most profs a far chance. I thoroughly enjoyed playing the Guardian and on top of that, almost all of the weapon skill sets I used were fun in their own way.

For the first time ever, a melee class will be one of the first characters I create :) Ranger and Guardian will be my first 2 characters.

I had a very similar experience. I made myself play professions I'm normally not very fond of. (Warrior, Engineer, Mesmer)

The Warrior is now one of my favorite professions and I'll probably roll one first. This from a GW1 Elementalist.

warrior.jpg


I can't wait for this game to release. :D
 
OH!

I almost forgot. I'm not sure if anyone here use to listen to the old Guildcast or use to read Massively's Guild Wars 1&2 blogs but Rubi Bayer was recently hired on at Anet and she had mentioned a few times how she would love to be in GW2. Well, she made it in!

I ran across her short red haired asuran character (voiced by her too) in Splorge Metamystics Lab in the Asuran starter zone. :D
 
Trying to keep up with the quest changes kept me surprised all the time. Fun when you thought you knew where it was going, and all of a sudden it went elsewhere. I did have one negative surprise, a lot of blue artifacting in Divinity's Reach and more specifically in Queen Jenna's throne room. It was not just me, several people in the guild ran into it, I even tried ratcheting down my video settings in case it was my card, but no go. Oh well, beta is as beta does.
 
I'm with ya Reets, I normally stay away from melee characters in most games I play but I knew I wanted to continue my monk from GW1, so Guardian was the logical choice. Played it the first two BWE and absolutely loved it. This weekend I tried out the warrior and was pleasantly surprised at how much fun that was as well!!

Elhanan, how do you feel about the GW2 ele? Since you played it in GW1. I rolled one this BWE and think it'll be my second main. So much fun! And I only unlocked a quarter of the weapons skills.
 
I tried Shortbow Thief, Longbow Ranger, and Longbow Warrior during BWE3.

The thief has definitely been improved, but the shortbow seemed a bit underpowered. Thief melee, however, was quite good.

Ranger pet AI worked very well in PvE. I had no problems with pet AI at any time.

Longbow Warrior has been improved. However, after checking the build and numbers, longbow warrior is still underpowered and the skills for longbow don't really sync well with the "burning" condition design. Longbow warrior works fair in PvE (when AI doesn't 'recognize' that the ground is burning under it), but I think a PvP environment would really be problematic (players move out of AoE too quickly). Longbow warriors have limited CC ability (crowd control) with a long cooldown.

I'll continue to work with builds, but I hope Arenanet continues to improve the longbow warrior before release.
 
Tried out thief mostly, and really enjoyed either pistols or daggers. Shortbow just didn't feel right - I like being able to put out fast bursts of attacks, and shortbow was sluggish compared to the other two.

I also managed to get far enough along that I started getting some decent low-level weapons (greens). Having that little bit of extra punch was very nice.

I only tried a little bit of wvw. First, I got lost trying to find my way out of the main castle, then ran for about 10 minutes trying to find other people out attacking something. Then I had to leave for a minute to heat up a bottle for my daughter, and came back to find my lifeless body lying on the snow.
 
I'm with ya Reets, I normally stay away from melee characters in most games I play but I knew I wanted to continue my monk from GW1, so Guardian was the logical choice. Played it the first two BWE and absolutely loved it. This weekend I tried out the warrior and was pleasantly surprised at how much fun that was as well!!

Elhanan, how do you feel about the GW2 ele? Since you played it in GW1. I rolled one this BWE and think it'll be my second main. So much fun! And I only unlocked a quarter of the weapons skills.

I really enjoyed it. My wife (Valora Maris aka Angie) didn't like it at all though.

She tried it again after we got off WvW and made some good combos but I'm not sure she's sold. It will def. be my #2.
 
I always start with a mage/wizard type class in each MMO but was sadly disappointed in Elementalist. Maybe I didn't get the right weapon or something with a decent combo of skills.

Elhanan: Was there any specific weapon(s) that gave you a particular combo of skills that you really liked?
 
Double Dagger was fun and very action based, but was a little too close to enemies for my comfort. I ended up getting very comfortable with the Staff. It is more inline with a "control" character that I like rolling.

I ended up oping for defensive utilities to help my ele stay alive longer. GW2 seems to have lots of surprises around every corner so I like having my "D" top notch even when playing a profession so offence oriented. That gives a level of comfort to a solo or very small group player (and helps when you aren't sure you can trust random people in PvE)

As far as the Warrior is concerned, Axe/Shield (Bow secondary) was my favorite BY FAR. Especially with an Ele or Mesmer team mate for a nice combo.
 
Last edited:
I was very surprised to find myself hooked by the Sylvari. I love the Arthurian/Celtic vibe to the storyline, the silly accents, and of course the awesome looking character models. i was sure my main was going to be Asura, but now I'm pretty sure I'll start with a Sylvari Guardian.

I didn't get mumble installed in time, so I didn't really get to connect with you guys this BWE. Guild chat was pretty quiet. I should be able to get Mumble running and find me a headset before headstart.
 
Hey, just as a reference point, I meant to check and see how much influence we earned in a weekend. Did anybody see?
 
Yea we cranked out influence! At just before the finale we had about 4,500, and that's not including the Influence I spent to upgrade a few things. Unfortunately I was only able to unlock Politics level 1 and Guild Emblem Template before the weekend ended. And even then we only had an emblem for all of 2 hours. It looks like we will have more of a time problem than an influence problem. It just takes days (literally) to unlock stuff. The only time I think we might need influence is when we use a lot of "consumable" upgrades (IE. +5% exp in PvE, +5% Karma in PvP, etc).
 
I don't see where it explicitly says, but are the politics levels what opens up additional guild member slots, or is that some other thing?

Another thing I saw, and this was on the internal forums that are now closed, was mention of alliances. Basically, the notion that although the overall guild cap was larger, some alliances with the 1000 active members wanted to gain together, and a dev said that alliances were being discussed as a feature to add in the future, mostly based on how things population-wise start to shake out.
 
From looking at the influence we will need to focus on politics and the guild bank for sure. Those will take a lot to be able to have a max guild bank. If we take and max out the levels of each thing then the rest will be easy to get.
 
I agree with cadeyrn and shamgar. I think getting the Workshop first would be a good idea and it's easy to get and then work on Politics. Just my opinion :)
 
Back
Top