Another week­end, another beta event. Guild Wars 2 con­tin­ues its path towards that still indef­i­nite launch day, and from the cur­rent expe­ri­ence it just might launch smooth as but­ter. Let me give you a run down of what I expe­ri­enced dur­ing these three days.

Pro­fes­sions

From the copi­ous amount of arti­cles, posts, and videos of every class I savored before I had any chance to play the game, I had picked the prob­a­ble first three classes I will play for release. In order: Charr Ele­men­tal­ist, Norn Ranger and Human Mes­mer. Play­ing the Ele­men­tal­ist until around level 20 last beta I con­firmed my love for the class, and assumed every­thing would remain on this order. Now… I’m not as sure anymore.

The Ranger was actu­ally the first pro­fes­sion I cre­ated last event, but only this time I gave a more detailed look into it, spe­cially test­ing all weapons avail­able to it. Just like with the Ele­men­tal­ist, all weapons feel very ver­sa­tile and with very dif­fer­ent func­tions. All but one: the greatsword. That weapon is amaz­ing.

If you didn’t play with the greatsword, you haven’t seen the Ranger

Never I felt so agile as I did while play­ing with this weapon. The Swoop skill, a high-speed, high-damage and low-cooldown charge attack keeps you mov­ing quickly between packs of mobs, and the first multi-skill Slash/Slice/Power Stab clears large groups with wide slashes, mak­ing this one of the best melee weapons/profession com­bi­na­tions on the game. Trust me: if you didn’t play with the greatsword, you haven’t seen the Ranger. I’m really con­sid­er­ing chang­ing it to be my main char­ac­ter once the game comes out.

But even if I have a new-found love for the ranger, the pro­fes­sion I played the most is surely the Ele­men­tal­ist. The flex­i­bil­ity of this class is unpar­al­leled, so while I may not play it as my first class, it’s still one of my absolute favorites. I just might switch between both. Argh, choices!

Addi­tion­ally, I also played until level 12 with the Guardian, and I quite enjoyed the class. I’m really into the heav­ier weapons on Guild Wars 2, and here it’s no excep­tion: the ham­mer is a joy to wield, and have very sat­is­fy­ing ani­ma­tions that fully con­vey the weight and power of the weapon. It’s a resilient pro­fes­sion with enough DPS for very high sur­viv­abil­ity, and a great num­ber of sup­port skills to make him a pow­er­ful addi­tion to any group.

Con­sid­er­ing I also played with the Necro­mancer and the Mes­mer last beta, I am now only miss­ing the War­rior, Engi­neer and the Thief. Well, I should remove the thief from this list. I cre­ated it before my guardian, and… well, hated it. The ini­tia­tive mechanic goes against the removal of energy from all other pro­fes­sions, and sim­ply doesn’t feel right on a game where every­one else is just man­ag­ing cooldowns.

Dun­geons

Ascalon­ian Catacombs

This being the only “proper” dun­geon avail­able dur­ing this beta, the final boss King Adel­bern was very high on my hit list. After lev­el­ing with the Ele­men­tal­ist as fast as I could on the first two days, I man­aged to find a group of ran­dom but friendly strangers so I could have my first run on Ascalon­ian Cat­a­combs. Boy, I was not ready for that.

Right after open­ing the first door, the first group of mobs can be bru­tal when you come from the lev­el­ing expe­ri­ence and jump head-first to every enemy you see. It took us a few attempts until find­ing the right bal­ance, but we kept push­ing through. Wipes? Yes, we wiped. A lot. But just like every­thing else about the game, wip­ing was designed on Guild Wars 2 to be part of the expe­ri­ence, not a ter­ri­ble pun­ish­ment for fail­ure. Ral­ly­ing after kills, reviv­ing other play­ers, even the pres­ence of way­points inside the dun­geon make fail­ure a learn­ing process, which I really enjoyed.

I also appre­ci­ated the (I think) new addi­tion for this beta: an anvil at the entrance you can use to repair your equip­ment, mak­ing it so you never need to feel too frus­trated for dying in a sin­gle hit for some of the strongest enemies.

World ver­sus World Jump Puzzle

Not an instanced dun­geon, but I think the denom­i­na­tion still stands. Can I just say one thing? I love jump puz­zles done right, and I’m pleased with how Guild Wars 2 imple­ments them. They are hard, frus­trat­ing, and some­times not reward­ing at the end, but it really is one of those cases of “the jour­ney is more impor­tant than the destination”.

This dun­geon has an inter­est­ing con­cept, where the traps present are (mostly) not trig­gered by your pres­ence, but by other play­ers. These can be used as a tool to stop your progress, which makes per­fect sense con­sid­er­ing this dun­geon is inside the PvP envi­ron­ment. These traps are not really that hard, but get­ting hit just as you are about to make a hard jump will make you slightly slower, so it’s still an inter­est­ing tool to harass your opponents.

If you have any inter­est on giv­ing this a try, I really rec­om­mend get­ting in there and try­ing to dis­cover by your­self how to do it. But if you really like to spoil the plea­sure of dis­cov­ery, or just isn’t inter­ested on going there at all but still want to know what the fuss is all about, I rec­om­mend this video by NomaD that shows a very well done, even if not flaw­less run through the entire thing in less than 15 min­utes. It took me around one hour for my full run; some of the puz­zles are really hard to dis­cover for the first time, and even then can be tricky to execute.

Craft­ing / Gathering

I gave another chance to the craft­ing sys­tem as well, and it’s really grow­ing on me. Once I started mak­ing my first items, the con­cept clicked and I noticed how the sup­pos­edly “ran­dom” sys­tem is not really ran­dom at all. A lot of exper­i­men­ta­tion will indeed be required, but the mate­ri­als used for craft­ing make a lot of sense, so with prac­tice you’ll be able to iden­tify what type of result you can get out of the stuff you have in hands.

It all adds up nicely: craft­ing pro­duces some pretty spiffy items you actu­ally want to use; gath­er­ing is non-competitive and plen­ti­ful, and almost a neces­sity for every­one, even those that are not going to craft any­thing because it’s some­thing to sell for gold, and gath­er­ing drops upgrades for your weapons and armor you can’t find any­where else; gath­ered mats also take lit­tle bag space since you can right-click them and send to the bank from any­where in the world. It’s a great com­bi­na­tion that moti­vates me to delve deeper into this aspect of the game.

Clos­ing Event

Are­naNet really ramped up things this time around. With some really epic bosses, the pres­ence of  impor­tant NPCs such as Ryt­lock and Eir, and cool new mechan­ics, the final event was many steps ahead of the pre­vi­ous BWE. Check it out.

There were some com­ments on chat about sights of The Shat­terer, the dragon lieu­tenant of Kralkator­rik, but I didn’t get to see it. I also didn’t cap­tured a lot of the cursed play­ers, but you can see some at the end of the video. It’s a very cool mechanic and made the event much more spe­cial because of it.

More than any­thing, I was impressed with the game’s per­for­mance: I did lower my graph­ics one notch since I was record­ing the video above and I wanted bet­ter fram­er­ate, but with graphic set­tings above medium I still had solid 30 frames per sec­ond most of the time, even dur­ing the major com­bats with dozens of play­ers and more par­ti­cle effects than my semi-lousy GeForce GTS 250 should be able to han­dle. We threw every­thing we could at the game, and it han­dled like a champ.