Guild Wars 2

Now that lots more info seems to be trickling out about the game, there should be a thread for it, yes?

There's a nice preview over at Game Informer (not by our friend Adam B though!) that goes over some of the neat features that the game has with regards to the story.

I also heard they have a really awesome system to handle server queues: When your server is full, you can choose to level on an "overflow server," keeping your progress and everything, and when a spot opens up, you're transferred on the fly to your home server. Sounds like a great idea to me.

Courtesy of Reldan, here's a google docs spreadsheet of user IDs and servers! But if you don't feel like clicking on that, Jade Quarry and Dragonstone as the backup server.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnhpbaFmRkWVdEhpU0pWM19lVGlsSk5rSzFjazd2UXc

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That's about as elegant a solution as you can get without going the single shard route. Nice.

Everyone around the office who played in the press beta this weekend is embarrassingly enthusiastic for GW2.

This is one of those games that has been around so long that I'm sort of preemptively bored with it. Is there a date on it yet? Because when there's a date I'll feel safe reengaging the anticipation.

Sometime this year.

I am very excited for Guild Wars 2. I have nothing more substantial to add beyond WANT right now, though.

Is or will be GW2 "mostly" soloable? I think what killed GW for me was that I couldn't get past the snowy mountains without a group, and I'm just far too irregular with my time and my interest to depend upon anything but a POG. Or have better solo classes? I was just so disappointed that the awesome ranger was mostly just a ranged disabler.

I dunno...the POGs in the first game were pretty good. I did have that sweet Prince Rurik slammer, though, so that could be coloring my memories.

Tom has a bunch of impressions up at the other place that might be informative. Sounds like other people are actually more involved with your game in this one.

I know that every class has healing abilities, and a rez. They're supposed to be doing away with the holy triad of tank/healer/dps, which is one of the things that makes me interested in the game.

Here's some info on the self-rez ability, which seems pretty cool.

GW2 has gone further than most MMOs do without losing its potential to be awesome.

I know I'm getting this Day 1 so I'm trying to avoid coverage for now. I guess when the release gets close I'll try to figure out what I want to play but I think it's going to be Mesmer.

The combat system apparently draws a lot of inspiration from Left 4 Dead, in terms of how you interact with and support other players proactively rather than re-actively.

So, you won't be watching red bars or something, you'll be actively slamming enemies away or throwing up giant mystical shield bubbles that block incoming projectiles or knocking enemies over or stuff. Or, you know, manipulating their ability to tell the difference between reality and mindscrew, thanks to the Mesmer's ability to create actual physical illusions and phantasms. And if someone goes down, you walk over and help them back up.

There are healing abilities and buff abilities still, but they moved away from targeting a specific object to targeting a specific location. And they're evenly distributed through the various classes rather than locked onto a single a class. Which is good, because no one wants to just be a buff bitch.


There's a lot of debate about the combat system as it applies to pvp, but I'm firmly on the side of this being the superior system, sight unseen.

I was pretty hyped for this game, until I saw this:

Look at how bland and cramped that dungeon is. Look at all the explosions and color. I can't make out what's going on sometimes.

I read someone's impression of the rvr style pvp they have going. It sounds pretty close to DAoC's, but there are long travel times between locations, keep sieges take forever, and there's massive fps lag when the zerg shows up, making it easy for them to roll over you before you can react. Assuming they don't plan on a summer release, there should be plenty of time to fix these things.

Video two makes way more sense. Also I don't think the game really looks or works right when it's a many on one thing as with the ghosts in the first video, but in the second one there's a mass fight and it makes tons of sense because he finally looks at his skills for a sec. Not that he knows how to use them (I was practically shouting HIT 6 for large chunks of the video), but they're nifty and I'm excited.

Also saw characters stepping on one another which is a bad bad bad thing that they'll hopefully ditch soon. Can't have people occluding one another in a game that's all about spacing and position.

Yeah, videos 2 and 3 were much better. I think if they're going to make an enemy that takes that much damage, it needs to be bigger, because you just can't tell what the heck is going on.

I'm pretty sure that just having collision detection and a z-axis count as achievements in the Guild Wars universe. I suspect they'll need a little while to get the fiddly bits of combat down right if they're actually going to do what it looks like they're planning to with it.

Arbitrary ground point targeting is good, though. Not perfect, as one of my least favorite things in the universe to do in WoW was targeting effects on the field and I'm pretty sure I'm the Doria of the group not just because of my liberated, quasi-Hebrew sexuality, but also because I'd ultimately rather be the guy getting yelled at for doing it wrong than the guy yelling at the other guy for doing it wrong. So they'll have some ground to cover, but better than the original, where it was downright impossible for as long as I played (yet another reason Elementalists got no play in GvG - otherwise, they might have been able to do some cool terrain shaping with all those AoEs). Maybe it'll turn Monking into an activity not entirely unlike Ritualisting, which I always liked better anyway, even after they nerfed the hell out of my broke-ass Shelter spirit.

... what?

I, uh, also don't get why you'd want classes to be more like the Ritualist. Let's see, there's weapon buffs, which were pretty cool, urns which took away a massive chunk of your stats from losing your weapons and had marginal effects in tiny PBAEs, and spirits, which were overpowered for several reasons, including collision and not caring about LOS.

You know what would have been awesome? If the Ritualist spirits chased after friends/enemies instead of being static (so they're basically aura-projectiles) and urns were ground-target grenades, basically, which had some sort of on-hit effect and some sort of persistent effect.

But Rits spamming spirits is like the anti-fun. Even Ranger spirit spammers at least packed an interrupt on a low CD. :(

I don't think there will be a Monk kind of class, anyway. Isn't that the point of putting heals and support skills on every class?

Fucking Rits. I can't stand spirit spammers.

Maybe changed that after I left. It was a few months after Eye of the North when I hung up the original, but the whole time I was there, there was absolutely no persuasive reason to play an Elementalist in GvG over, say, a Warrior, because the Warrior's DPS made the Elementalist look like he was throwing pillows and blowing kisses. I think that briefly changed for a while with Searing Flames or whatever the one epic that every Ele had to take forever with Nightfall came out, but even then it wasn't quite even. I fully admit that I might have no clue what I'm talking about, though. It's been a while and we only made it onto the ladders a couple of times, so it's not like whichever guild I was with at the time was the frog's knuckles.

Warriors were always the best choice for steady outputting of DPS, but there were a number of strong Guilds that ran Fire Elementalists (particularly [Rift] and [AIDS]), and just about every single balanced team was packing a Water Elementalist. Yeah, for pure DPS, it's not the strongest (though actually, Mind Blast Fire with Fireball and double Rodgort's was amazing), but... DPS wasn't the only thing in GVG. Fire dealt a massive amount of AoE burst that would apply pressure and disguise your spike target, Ward against Foes was one of the most powerful skills in the arena, Water Trident was incredible, as was Deep Freeze. You could shut down a flag runner, punish people when the enemy team had to retreat, blast the enemy with DF so they can't chase you...

Elementalists were actually in the same place that Rangers were: They had immense utility (movement speed buffs and slows, interrupts vs knockdowns, degen vs damage) and while neither of them was a replacement for your team's Warrior (or even two), pretty much every competitive GvG team was running either an Elementalist (Water Trident, Deep Freeze, Ward Vs Foes, Windborne Speed, Gale) or a Ranger (Cripshot, apply poison, savage shot, healing ointment or w/e) as a flag runner.

Anyway, point is, just like Mesmers, Rangers, and Necromancers, just because an Elementalist didn't put out Warrior-level pressure and DPS didn't mean that he wasn't very useful in GvG.

This is the GW2 thread, not the GW1 thread. You want your wankery about 1, you take it there durr.

So like I was saying, I'm hoping that they keep the abilities mobile, or if static, at least very much limited in either size or power. :)

Also, I don't mind if there're clear "This guy has the best defensive stuff, this guy deals the most DPS, this guy spikes the hardest", as long as everyone viably has a role.

Ok, well, it looks great. But do i misunderstand or are there only one "class" now for players, or do players still "dual" class naturally?

Nice. Although GW2 treads veeerrryyy closely to Asian style games that i'm not interested in, it look like the most interesting Western MMO coming out of any announced.

I think their only style in that regard now is in the art design. If you read the GI article I mentioned in my first post, it talks about how they're changing up the questing -- it looks like they're heavily borrowing from WAR and Rift, with open ended world quest event type things.

AIUI, you have but one class -- but you kind of subclass with the weapons that you use. Each weapon type has skills associated with it, which you unlock by using that weapon, and you can switch weapons at any time. So like if you're a warrior (or whatever the big melee basher is called in GW2), you have a pretty different skillset based on whether you're dual wielding, sword-and-board, 2H, etc.

Today's news: beta signup is live today: https://beta.guildwars2.com/

Apparently it's already down from the millions of sweaty nerds simlutaneously F5ing the shit out of it.

I think this game is gonna do pretty well.

Yep, it's throwing a 403 - Access denied error. They may have taken the signup page down temporarily because their servers were exploding.

"The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred."

And now it worked just fine.

Unfortunately it wants machine specs. So I can't sign up until later. FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.

If only I hadn't been lazy, and installed log-me-in on my desktop PC as I had intended for so many months!

Yeah, I'm at work so I can't sign up. Wonderful.

You've got until Friday, per RPS.

That stupid scanner keeps getting stuck at processiong results. If my hype hasn't worn off yet, it is now.

Why won't they just accept a dxdiag form, like the good old days?

No problems with the tool or getting signed up. Keeping my fingers crossed!

Here's a pretty decent video explaining the weapon abilities.

Signed up last night. Here's hoping!

Hopefully they'll do a preorder with a big open beta.

I love the idea of the skill deck as partially controlled by the developer through the weapons, and I'm a huge fan of the concept of proactive defense through visual cues rather than reactive defense through redbar cues. Whole game seems to focus around nudging players into good play with rewards and immediately comprehensible UI information rather than just dumping tools on their lap and telling them to go read a wiki or something. Which is awesome.

I don't think their splitting mechanisms in world pvp will work as well as they hope. There's just no real incentive to split up when dominating the enemy en masse is a faster way to secure objectives what with the lack of counter capping. Especially without a formal grouping mechanism for forming ad hoc warbands that then hare off to wherever the noisiest person declares is best. Maybe the hope is that guilds will split themselves up so that they can grab turf to put their flag on? Doesn't seem all that compelling a reason, especially when they can flag it and move back to the main group. I wonder what sort of rewards guilds will get for holding various objectives, and if there's a point for them personally to do it or if it's just a "greater good" sort of thing.