I managed to get some play time in Guild Wars 2 today before succumbing to the 95% load screen hang; Having to Ctrl+alt+del out of the game and then having to restart the comp to recover wore me out after the fifth time. Definitely performance issues during this event, but that’s the whole point of today. WvW was very, very laggy with massive framerate issues — everyone on ventrilo was complaining about it and I was getting < 10 FPS.
Found a Class I Love!
During the few hours I played around I tried an Elementalist for the first time and fell completely in love with the class. I felt like a bender from Avatar with the four different elemental schools. I could switch to fire, water, and air with one more school locked which I assume was earth. Switching to the different schools gave me different abilities for each element. Switching weapons gave me additional different abilities. I tried three different weapons, with three different school, giving me more abilities to mess around with than any other GW2 class I’ve tried.
I managed to play a little bit of WvW before I simply couldn’t handle the framerate issues anymore. The Elementalist is really fun to play because I can target my AOE’s everywhere. Using my water staff attacks/heals was useful to my team. The air speed buff was great utility. I felt useful and had fun, which is all I can ask for in a class.
I’m afraid of Elementalist being overplayed… but I was reminded that GW2 has no raids, individual loot, and little need of balancing classes within a guild. I can play whatever I want as long as I can get past the psychological effect of seeing my class everywhere.
Game Breaking Overflow
Overflow is still terrible. Randomly being separated from my friends with no control over how I get back to them is unacceptable and game breaking. ArenaNet must fix it so that group members can transfer to the same instance their group leader is in, or some other solution of bringing people together.
WvW Fun
Despite the lag, my friends and I went to the Eternal Battleground (center zone of the WvW) and contested the big keep in the center. We took down the outer door, inner door, then had a massive battle against the red server on the ground floor. We ended up being wiped, all 50 of our server there, because half our server went up the stairs to fight the boss and the other stayed on the floor. It didn’t take long before we were overwhelmed and wiped. Tons of fun!
I really liked the Elementalist. I also enjoyed the Enginner but his abilities didnt seem to scale as well as the eles did.
I am definatly playing an Elementalist at launch, but then again, I knew that two years ago…
They are going to fix the overflow. There were no fixes in this version of the game. This is a stress test.
ha! 🙂 i played Ele last 2 tests – BWE and Stress!
I love it for WvW! I’m playing staff-Ele. It’s fun raining fire from afar but what i like most is how versatile it is mobility wise.
You go in Air attunement and hit 4 to speed buff, then u can run or chase with it. I use teleport for one of my utility skills (which is very similar to Flash in LoL, practically the same) so that’s complementing the speedbuff when off cd.
And in Water – the 4th skill is frozen ground which has brought many a deaths today to our enemies in WvW 😀
I like sprinting after them, then flashing ahead and then freezing them so they can be killed by my allies. In Air attunement there’s the 3rd skill which pushes back. It takes some mastery but you can learn to push an enemy back to the chasers if you flash in front of them first.
I see that people learn in WvW too – today many were smart enough to buy siege weapons, especially rams and arrowcarts. Now only if they could fix more of the glitches and performance issues.
This was my first chance to play since I didn’t get to play the first BWE. All I can say is WvW is for real. It will be up to the playerbase, but Arenanet has given us a magnificent playground for open world rvr. I was so impressed with the zones. I loved coming up invaders without knowing they were around the corner. So fun. First time I’ve felt that DAOC feeling since DAOC.
I had the 95% bug but tabbed out & closed the game. Things worked fine after that. I would say I like the thief best so far, still need to try the elementalist & a few other classes.
I faced the 95% bug as well, but only when trying to load the personal instance, so it wasn’t so bad to me. In my experience the game ran smooth as butter even with graphics all the way to maximum quality, and my computer is not exactly top-shelf material (i5-2500 @ 3.3GHz, nVidia GTS-250, 16Gb RAM… okay this last one is top shelf, but I do work with Photoshop). No lag, 40FPS, it just works.
And yeah, I picked the Elementalist for my main even before the last two classes had been announced, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s fun non-stop without worrying about weird mechanics. I love it.
No lag at all in either WvW with 30+ on screen at once, or doing world events with a dozen or so players and multiple NPC’s/spell effects – all at 1680×1050 and max quality video settings. Which is totally opposite from the weekend BWE experience. No idea why, but was loving it. Frame rates dipped into the high teens at times, but not in WvW fortunately – cities while panning around and lots of players on screen. I wonder when they are going to optimize the game so it works more off the GPU then the CPU?
That’s ridiculous that you’re not getting sluggish FPS. 10 of us talking on ventrilo all had massive ridiculous slowdown and we have decent rigs.
Was talking on Mumble the whole time too with other guildies who were playing on Crystal Desert (I was on Jade Quarry). But what you describe seems to be what happened with the first BWE – some had a smooth as butter experience, others (me) had a ton of lag.
This was my first chance to play as well and I pretty much went straight to WvW to check it out. I didn’t play enough to see if WvW was worth doing beyond just doing it for fun. Obviously that should be plenty motivation but if I don’t get much for it for my character then eventually, in the long term, there may not be enough reason to go to WvW. At the low level I am interested in experience to level and it seemed like I didn’t get much but I am not sure.
I had no problem installing the game and I had no performance issues whatsoever. There was no lag and FPS was high enough to play comfortably. Of course, I played mostly right at the stat of the stress test.
I tried what is usually my favorite class: the thief. However, I didn’t know much about it beforehand. I must say I was initially disappointed with the class. The lack of a stealth button and the sneak in and attack option with surprise was not what I was looking for. I can’t say at all that the class at a whole is disappointing because it may actually be awesome as a Melee DPS option that uses stealth effectively during the battle. I am curious about that. However, if I can’t sneak in and make a surprise attack or if I can’t stealth and get away after an attack then I probably would rather play a different type of class. The elementalist seems like a good option to try…
I admit, the Elementalist is going to be the one to watch.
The last thing we want to see is another WAR debacle, when the other team would just SPAM bright wizards till the cows came home.
The class seems to have a truck load of options and utility. I’d hate to see it nerfed, because no one can be bothered playing anything else 😉
Still, early days. Hopefully if WvW balance becomes an issue, it’ll be addressed in short order.
Can’t *wait* to get into GW2 proper 🙂
I also thoroughly enjoyed the elementalist. It can be quite chaotic and hectic switching between attunements…but I like that. It definitely rewards who players who think fast and react fast.
But I’m also worried at how popular the class is. I really hate playing ‘popular’ classes, for a variety of reasons. I like to be unique, I like to bring things to the table that other people don’t, and I worry that an overplayed class tends to get nerfed. There’s really nothing I can do about that though.
I was messing w/ more Mesmer. definitely need to use Shatter waay more.
but when I entered battle gorund.. no lag… was fighting at choke point on a bridge w/ tons of particle effects.
recently upgraded to GTX560TI…still using P Core 2 Quard Q6600 2.4GHz 4GB RAM (waiting on Ivy Bridge)
I did crashed twice. and bugged the non responsive underwater phantasm.
Elemental was next on my list.
Itll be interesting to see what they do with the ele.
Me and 5 of my mates who played had no issues at all with FPS (BWE and stress).
Thank god they are fixing the overflow though, cause the partysplitting was gamebreaking
Ahh good to see so many Elems about, will have a field day wiping your innards off from my Thief’s boots. 🙂
I also enjoy the sentimentalist, it’s very much a utility caster AOE spammer.
However, I also like the thief and guardian. I have no idea what I’m going to start with as my main.
WvWvW was very laggy in large groups I have no idea how arenanet is going to handle this. Players have different systems and service providers, so how you you optimize the back end servers to handle the array?
sentimentalist? is it a pun or a joke? 🙂
…or some form of auto-correct? (http://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/category/best-of-dyac/)
I think it is a good sign that people think that their class will be most popular as I have also heard this for the Ranger and Necromancer. People must enjoy a variety of classes offered.
I can see myself playing an Ele as one of my toons, as my experiences have been positive also. I felt the Necro had better survivability though.
The only one that I have heard negative things about in PvP is the Engineer, which I would be surprised if it didn’t get a buff prior to launch given the number of concerned GW2 forum posts. I felt underpowered in instanced PvP battlegrounds with my Eng.
I also had lag issues, which was shared by people in my instances as they complained about it in chat. I also had the 95% lock-up bug, to which I lost one toon in perpetual loading screen limbo, as restarting the game just brought me back to the same place.
I imagine they will get the lag issues cleaned up. If they don’t it really wouldn’t matter how unique their mechanics are; lag issues was what got me to leave WAR in the end…
I play the ‘mage’ class in every game and I have to agree, the elementalist is by far the most uniquely and soundly designed ‘mage’ I’ve ever played. It’s got the on-demand twitch gameplay that I love, while still demanding a healthy amount of player-based skill. It definitely seems to me that reducing the attunement cooldown will be the most sought stat in the game for Elems, because it’s all about the attunement switching.
Again I had no lag whatsoever, frame rate or latency. Well, one 5 second lag spike in five hours. I didn’t do any WvW this time, though, apart from the first ten minutes, since I was in the Eternal Battleground when I logged in. I checked my settings after the conversation last time and I do have most things on high.
Given that I’m playing on Yak’s Bend from the other side of the Atlantic I’m pretty pleased with performance. I would think ArenaNet must be concerned if people are having such widely varying experiences, but then that’s what stress tests and betas are for.
Also perhaps worth mentioning, I get FAR worse latency in the original Guild Wars and always have done. It’s frequently literally unplayable and I have to stop and wait for it to pass. I believe I’m playing on a European server there, although I never quite figured out how that works in GW1.
No Raids? Just in beta? or….?
@bob: There are no raids at all in the game.
And thank god (and ArenaNet) for that! 😛
Thats retarded? I mean do you think they will add raids? Raids are such a big part to any mmo im confused on why they are opting to not have them…
Depends on what you mean about raids.
If you mean content for large amounts of people, then there already is ingame. Events scale to how many participants there are and the bigger highlvl events are supposed to take a good amount of people and coordination to do. These are out in the open world however.
If you mean dungeons that require more than 5 people then you will most likely never see it.
Furthermore, if you mean tiered raid content for large groups that has you grinding one tier of gear so you can move on to the next tier of gear to prepare for the next tier of gear for the next dungeon etc etc etc, then you will never see it in GW2, it’s against ArenaNets “no grinding policy”.
To clarify, there WILL be grinding in GW2, it’s just not gonna be huge grind to gain power via increased stats on gear. The grind will be unlocking armor with different models and/or armor that complements your spec better etc. To use WoW terms, you would grind for gear with the exact same itemlevel but with a stat allocation that suits your build better. Say for instance a chest piece with +12 strength and +12 vitality instead of one with +6 str +6 vit +6 whatever and +6 whatever.
I am glad there aren’t any raids; the raid grind monotony drove me away from WoW.
I dont care for the grind or the waiting for raids to reset. However, you all know how good it feels when you finally down that boss not for the gear but just the pure feeling of accomplishment. Idk, i just bought gw2 so obviously I dont mind… But I am a huge fan of raids.
@bob:
I do like downing World Bosses!
Killing bosses = AWESOME.
Killing bosses for gear just so we can have enough stats to go kill another boss = crap.
GW2 will have bosses to kill, but it won’t have raid progression.
Keen,
Little trick that I find useful is to use Ctrl + Shift + Esc 🙂
Also, I’m glad you are making headway on what class you want to play for release. I’m still torn between ranger and perhaps warrior. I expect I will find out within the next few BWE’s. I haven’t talked to you in a while, but I started a gw2 pvp fansite that you may be interested in. It’s centered around GW2 WvW and you can find it here: http://gw2wvw.com/main/ Feel free to check it out and if you would like to write any articles/guides you have my email 🙂
Since my current rig is way outdated for this(so I might buy something new for release if I decide to buy..)
Elementalist and other AOE. Does the damage decrease with range from the centre?
This si the only way that double problem of encouraging people to the spread out(anti stacking) and giving smaller groups chance vs larger zeros can really be solved imo
I’ve never felt good about downing a boss, ever, so no I don’t know that bob. 😛