Note: this post is going to be rambly-super-fanboy-squee-time.  I might make a few insightful observations here and there, but it’s mostly gushing.  You have been warned.

The first Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event hit this past weekend and I was able to take part since I prepurchased.  I already knew I was going to love the game: that was a given.  Everything ArenaNet has said and everything that the press beta coverage has said has confirmed this.  After playing the game myself, I come to you now in awe.  GW2 has met and far exceeded my already soaring expectations.

Let’s just start where I started.  I figured that my first character should be an Engineer, mostly because I wasn’t as familiar with it as some of the other professions and it seemed interesting.  Enter Hugedar the Learned, the Norn Engineer.

Honestly, I did not expect to have as much fun with Engineer as I did.  Engies get very few weapons (pistol, rifle, and shield) and are unable to swap at all, but they make up for this with kits.  The wiki can tell you the specifics but basically kits are weapon swaps unlocked with skill points.  My weapon of choice was rifle since it had good damage, an immobilize skill, and some mobility.  The first kit I unlocked was flamethrower, and my GOD is it exhilarating.

It has good damage skills that hit multiple targets, but it also has knockback and a pulling move.  I had this neat little combo where I’d throw down a line of fire, drag a monster through it, then knock them back through it.  I think this screenshot shows that combo in action, though it’s hard to tell.  Definitely a fun crowd control weapon.

Aside from damage, it felt like a decent support class.  My default healing skill also grants me a few defensive boons, and if I use the tool belt version, I can throw it on the ground to provide those boons to allies.  Later I unlocked another elixir skill that granted offensive boons and styled myself somewhat of a buffer.  Though a lot of the time people would run away just as I was throwing an elixir down.  Hey, if they miss out on Might, Frenzy, and Swiftness, that’s all on them.

My next kit was the grenade kit, and boy is that another fun one.  Every skill on that bar is a ground targeted AoE, even skill #1.  That became my damage/CC kit of choice for the rest of the beta: throw down a chill grenade to slow movement, then use the tool belt skill to lob several grenades at once, use the blind grenade into a mob.  SUPER fun.

I better move on: I could talk forever about the profession, but let’s jump into crafting.  This was a surprising facet of gameplay that was at first a little hard to get into.  I didn’t understand how the discovery mode worked, but with insight from my roommate I latched onto it pretty quick.

You start off with a few basic recipes: turn your logs into planks, turn your copper into bronze, then use those to make a harpoon.  Make a rifle stock out of wood and combine that with your harpoon to make a speargun.  You get a decent amount of experience for crafting your components, and lots of experience for making something for the first time.  They gave me a recipe for Mighty weapons (+Power) and a few inscriptions which can be used to make weapons with other stat ups in Discovery mode.  Discovery mode is awesome: first of all, it’s not as trial-and-error as it sounds.  You have four slots to drop mats into.  Once you start dropping in mats, other mats in your inventory gray out so you know they aren’t compatible.  After a few successful discoveries I noticed a pattern and was able to learn new recipes very quickly.  I took Huntsman (pictured) so I could make my own weapons, and I picked Jeweler so I could make rings which up until then I hadn’t found as drops yet.  I ended up taking Jeweler the furthest because my crafted weapons at the time weren’t keeping up with the dropped gear I was finding while the rings and earrings I was making were filling empty gear slots.

Let’s see, what else… The dynamic event system was just as dynamic as promised.  I would be wandering around working on a renown heart when suddenly an event would start.  Something would be attacking the area or an NPC would head into a cave and request support.  I’d usually join in because they also contribute to the renown heart if they’re in the same area.  The success or failure of an event has an effect on the next event that occurs in that area: for example, there was an event to defend cattle from waves of harpies.  If all the cattle are killed, the next event involves you protecting a shipment of new cattle.  At certain stages events culminate in a Group Event that, as its name implies, requires a lot more people to take down.  Like this one:

This event took place in the Norn area.  Some shaman was attempting to control a giant ice elemental and the players were tasked with taking the shaman down.  The shaman was no joke either: he hit hard and there were tons of AoEs appearing.  You had better dodge out of those red circles because otherwise you were downed.  There was another group even even more diabolical: the giant besieging the town of Nageling.

This guy was a piece of work.  By the time me and a friend had gotten there, all the NPCs had been killed.  The two of us were absolutely no match for this guy.  He took nearly no damage from our attacks and he kept using this AoE damage move that instantly downed us.  A few other players ended up joining the fight and we started doing a little better.  Throughout the fight I found myself chipping away at the giant’s health bar, throwing my chill grenades, using my elixir gun to keep it vulnerable, and reviving allies.  The giant kept switching its focus, stomping on hapless players, and using a fear ability that made everyone run away which really got aggravating when trying to revive people.  Finally after an hour (by the way, the most action-packed hour ever) we managed to take it down, but JEEZ.  This was the hardest open world event we saw.  The giant showed up a few more times but we said “screw that.”  You need at LEAST eight people to even attempt that event.

Before we called it quits on Sunday, my friends and I tried some World Vs World.  The maps are huge and extremely detailed, and there’s even some regular PvEish stuff you can do there like gathering resources and even fighting normal mobs.  We came upon this keep controlled by the blue server and they had it incredibly well defended.

There were guys lining the walls raining fire and arrows down on us like crazy.  We ended up ditching that assault to steal one of Blue’s supply camps.  The only defenders were NPCs: not to say that they were pushovers, but with the ten or so of us wailing on them we managed to take the point.  I noticed a pattern with some of the other people on our side though: once we’d take a supply camp, they’d immediately leave and try to assault the nearest keep, which would get them all killed and lead the other team straight back to us to retake the point.  My group was busy upgrading the camp with more guards and siege equipment, but we didn’t get far before we were wiped out.  We never did manage to take a fort, but we settled for sabotaging supply dolyaks and just exploring the MASSIVELY MASSIVE map.  Seriously, this place was huge.

Now after all of that, and with all of these beautiful screenshots, it’s hard to believe that this was a BETA test.  As in, the game isn’t out yet.  It looks insanely polished from a audio/visual perspective as well as a gameplay one, but I am prepared to talk about some of the issues I noticed.  To be honest there weren’t a ton.  I did get randomly kicked off a few times, and the servers were taken down for about an hour on Saturday night (by the way, most agonizingly slow hour ever).  One of the skill challenge NPCs became untargettable once dead and didn’t give the skill point.  And of course the client wasn’t fully optimized so there were framerate issues in heavy activity areas.  But there were two major issues that need to be addressed before launch, one of which prevented me from receiving mail after a certain point.  It sucked because my roommate crafted me some bigger bags and I was hurting for inventory space.  The other big issue was with gem store: I bought a bank tab but it didn’t show up in my bank window, even after restarting the client.

Despite these issues, I am 1000% confident that ArenaNet will do everything they can to make the next beta event smoother and continue to do so until release.  They’ve done a truly remarkable job with Guild Wars 2.  It is an amazing game and it totally lives up to the hype.  This post only scratches the surface of my experiences this weekend: there was just so much to do and see!  Never have I been this excited for a game, nor do I think any other game will capture my interest this much.  These past three days just flew by, and I’m twitching in anticipation for the next Beta Weekend Event.  It hasn’t been announced yet, but they did say they planned on having one a month.  So until next time, this is Hugedar the Learned, logging out!