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The beta starts Friday, and I really wanted to come up with something special for all of my followers as we head into the beta. I’ve done several posts before on being a good tester, things to help you enjoy the beta, not overdoing yourself in the beta, etc. But, I wanted something really different that could make the game even cooler for you. So, here goes:

With so many in the world, the odds are that you know a few Star Trek fans. Everyone loves to hate on them for being obsessive nerds, setting the stereotype for everyone everywhere. It’s not just knowing all the names of the major characters or all the plot lines. It’s knowing every minor character, half the episode numbers, every weapon and piece of technology, and even learning to speak Klingon. The odds of one of those few Star Trek fans you know being able to speak Klingon is pretty high. While you’re outwardly commenting on how nerdy they are, be honest for a moment: you secretly think that level of devotion is admirable and kind of cool. There are plenty of Lord of the Rings fans that are fluent in Elven. One of my friends can actually learned the Dragon language in Skyrim. We may not have a full language in Guild Wars 2, but we do have a alphabet in the lore that is heavily used.

New Krytan in the Lore

Similar to real world history, the invention of the printing press by the charr created a real need for literacy in Tyria. Afterall, what had been the of a common man learning to read when few would write? If all reading material has to be hand-written, there isn’t an overwhelming desire to put out anything that required more than one copy. Once the charr had invented the printing press, it was easy to mass produce written material. With this power in mind, the Durmand Priory set to teach the world how to read. They combined Old Ascalonian (pictured below, from the official GW wiki). and Old Krytan alphabets to produce the New Krytan alphabet, so that written communication may be universal throughout Tyria. Since its creation in 1105 AE, New Krytan has been spread by the Durmand Priory to all of the major races. While all of the major races have accepted it and learned to read it, some (mainly the asura) still largely reject New Krytan and continue to teach their own language and alphabet as well.

Teaching Yourself New Krytan

There’s likely a few of you that just read that section title and are thinking, “why would I want to learn New Krytan?” First off, it’s easy. Second, if you’re a really dedicated Guild Wars 2 fan, it’s a must. Lastly, there is a s**tload (yes, a standard unit of measurement) of signs, bottles, and other things in the game that are written in New Krytan. ArenaNet hasn’t published the alphabet for us. Instead, valiant GW2 fans have hunted through every screenshot and every part of the game available to us to finally come up with all of them. The alphabet is listed here on the official wiki. The first step in teaching yourself New Krytan is to simply write the alphabet out twice (or more if really necessary) on a piece of paper, like so:

Pay attention that you try to write as best as you can at the beginning, to train yourself with all of the nuances present with each character. Since I’ve been doing this for months, I’m a little sloppy, as you can see. Next, move the alphabet you just wrote somewhere that you can’t see it, and grab a new sheet of paper. Now, start writing out a few words with different variety of letters. Picking out a lot of different words and names in the lore is a good place to find a bunch of words with a good variety. Now that you have these words in mind, start writing them out. If you can’t remember a letter when you’re writing the word, leave it blank and keep going. After you’ve written all of your words, use your alphabet you wrote to fill them in. Do it again tomorrow, the exact same way. After you finish doing it for the second time, write out the alphabet completely blind. Check back on any letters you missed after getting to the end. By that point, you should be mostly set.

As I said before, writing is the easy part. Reading New Krytan takes a bit more. The best thing you can do is go looking around on forums and finding things people have written out in new Krytan. Reading what you wrote doesn’t help you, because you know what you wrote. Find things that you didn’t write out there (there’s quite a lot, believe it or not), and translate all of those. For an example, the above picture is the second part of what I tell you to do to learn to write (ignore the absent-minded ‘w’ in place of ‘u’ in ‘human’ and forgetting how to spell ‘Zhaitan’). At the beginning is a list of all of the races. Then follows the list of the different homes of each race. Afterwards are the list of all of the elder dragons, followed by the list of the members of Destiny’s Edge. You’ll have to figure out the last bit by yourself.

So, here’s big news on Gamebreaker TV earlier today: our skills and traits are now going to be tiered off. What does this mean? It means that your utility skills and major traits are divided into tiers. You now have to buy a certain number of one tier before you can move on to another tier. I’m not sure how this will work with major traits (do you have to pick lower ones first or simply spend so many trait points), but it’s certainly going to drive some people up the wall with the skills.

With the announcement of the beta next weekend, I’m going to do collapse the two remaining posts in the balance series into one article. Next week, then, I’ll have something special for the beta to give you all. Also, since next Friday we’ll already be in the beta, I’ll get that article out a day early so you won’t have to be conflicted between reading and playing. Today, we’re going to simultaneously build a balanced and offensive build. It’s really going to be the same build done two different ways. This way, you’ll also get to see how you can vary the play style of one idea dramatically using the same profession.

Picking a Profession

“…a thief, which many people think of as being highly offensive.”

When I originally made this build during the weekend, I had a very specific build in mind, and I made this a balanced build. The entire build revolves around a thief, which many people think of as being highly offensive. But, the build is based around whittling down the enemy so you can hit for a major finishing blow with Heartseeker. So, it’s safe to say we need to take a thief.

Picking a Weapon and Skills

“In short, the off-hand dagger is great offensively and defensively.

While the major part of the build is based around the main-hand dagger skill, I still had to figure out what I wanted on the rest of the build. Then I still needed to come up with a second weapon set as well. Looking through the other weapons, I really wanted to use the dagger for my off-hand as well. The 4 skill is a ranged cripple, which is incredibly useful to keep people from getting away and make it easier to get to people. Remembering how a thief’s 3 skill changes for both weapons equipped, the 3 skill for wielding two daggers is quite powerful as well with the bonus of hitting more than one target. Thinking defensively, the 5 skill also gives us a nice way to either open up an enemy or (more importantly) get out of trouble. In short, the off-hand dagger is great offensively and defensively. Now, for the offensive side of things, I’m going to use two sets of double daggers, and you’ll see why towards the end. For the balanced off set, I’m going to use a sword in the main hand and keep the dagger in the off hand. The sword gives us a good way to get into range on people but also a quick escape out of range and a nice evading attack for the 3 skills.

“Scorpion Wire: a gap closer that can disorient your enemy, too.”

The biggest possible pit-fall here is that we don’t have a ranged weapon. It means we’re going to need a lot of skills to get us in melee ranged and keep ourselves in melee ranged. The biggest thing I like about Heartseeker, the basis of this build, is that it’s also a leap. That’s automatically one gap closer. The sword set has a shadow step, which is even better. Remember that we already have the built-in shadow step to the Steal profession mechanic. This is nice, but we’ll still need more. My personal favorite utility skill for the thief is Scorpion Wire: a gap closer that can disorient your enemy, too. I’m also going to take Signet of Shadows. The passive 10% movement speed increase is noticeable when everything else runs out and you have to simply run someone down. There’s also the wonderful immobilizing component with the blinding as icing on the cake of a great skill. For the balanced build, I’m taking Skale Venom, to give us a bit more ability to open up for one big hit but also give us the defense of the weakness. In the offensive build, we’ll instead use Assassin Signet to be able to make one enormous hit possible. For both builds, we’re going to use Dagger Storm for a very powerful elite and Hide in Shadows for a very useful heal and stealth.

Picking Our Traits

“Even with identical weapons and skills, two builds can be totally different…”

Up to this point, with weapons and skills, the offensive and balanced versions of this build look very similar. Even with identical weapons and skills, two builds can be totally different depending on the traits. With the balanced build, we’re splitting out traits out to 30-0-20-10-10, giving us a relative balance in stats. Our Deadly Arts traits are to increase dagger damage, gain might when applying venoms, and cause vulnerability with critical hits. These work together to make us do more damage and also make our venom that much better at opening an opponent. For Shadow Arts, we’re taking the regeneration on stealth and initiative gain on stealth. In Acrobatics, we want the initiative gain on weapon swap. Lastly, in Trickery, we’re leaving caltrops behind as we dodge. Stealth is obviously a defensive mechanic, and we’re going to make a lot of use of it. But, we’re also making it an offensive ability by gaining us health every time we stealth (such as using our heal skill). Gaining initiative on weapon swap almost guarantees us the ability to use Heartseeker when we swap, as well as gives us more initiative in general. Lastly, caltrops can be timed well for a snare, given their crippling side.

“Instead of slowly whittling down our opponent, we’re now forcing them down…”

Now, when we look at the offensive side, we’re only going to be taking three of the same major traits. We’re going to run with 30-30-0-10-0, maxing out on power and critical attributes. We’re keeping the initiative gain on weapon swap from Acrobatics along with the dagger damage and critical hits cause vulnerability from Deadly Arts. Lastly, in Deadly Arts, we’re going to increase the damage of our dual skills, giving us better multi-target damage and better damage to get opponents into a threat range. In Critical Strikes, we’re going to reduce signet recharge times, cause more damage to targets under 25 percent health, and increase our dual skills’ critical change. Instead of slowly whittling down our opponent, we’re now forcing them down into a range where we can quickly finish them with a hard hit.

Kitting Out With Equipment

“The biggest difference… is the inclusion of toughness and vitality.”

Thankfully our weapons will pretty much be the same for sigils. The sword/dagger set is going to have a Sigil of Superior Energy and Sigil of Superior Hobbling, to help us stay alive longer while working our opponents down. The double dagger set in our balanced build and both of our double dagger sets for the offensive build are going to use a Sigil of Superior Intelligence and a Sigil of Superior Doom. This guarantees our Heartseekers to hit for that much more, and lets use put out more damage more often in the offensive build. Using the balanced build, I was able to hit for up to 4.9k once with a Heartseeker during the last beta, so think about doing that every ten seconds with the offensive build. The biggest difference in the armor stats between an offensive and balanced version of the same build is the inclusion of toughness and vitality. With the balanced build, I basically focused on Power, Vitality, and Toughness, in that general order. I used six Superior Runes of the Warrior to also get the faster weapon swaps. With the offensive build, we instead want six Superior Runes of the Eagle and a focus on Power, Precision, and Prowess. Since the offensive side is based more on critting and doing more damage to low health targets, the Eagle runes really work out the best.

Playing the Build

“The main difference between playing an offensive and balanced version of the same build is the pace.”

The basic idea behind both builds is the same: get the target to low health and hit them with an extra-strength Heartseeker to put them away. It’s a very basic idea that compounded and compounded the further into developing the build we went. In the balanced side, you’re very survivable. Your basic goal is to outlast your opponents. By keeping up the pressure while using defensive abilities, we’re sure to get them down to about 20 percent. Once they’re sub-20, they’re more-or-less in Heartseeker range. Unless they’re a very offensive-heavy build, the balanced side of this can get an opponent sub-20 while comfortably sitting at 40 percent or more. Shadow stepping and using stealth, along with the basic key of dodging, are instrumental both offensively and defensively to the success of the balanced build. On the offensive side of things, we’re looking a little different. We’re not going to outlast anyone, so it’s all about jumping on them hard and quick. Before you engage an enemy, swap weapons to activate your sigils. Get right on top of them by shadow stepping with Steal or pulling them to you with Scorpion Wire. Open hard and give them a chance to get away. Once they’re under 50 percent, you can start thinking about how many Heartseekers you have the initiative for and where to throw in a weapon swap in the finish. The main difference between playing an offensive and balanced version of the same build is the pace.

Trait graphic created using Luna Atra Skills Tool.

Hey guys! As promised, here’s a little article for you all that isn’t on PvP and isn’t at GW2 WvW, either. We’re on the cusp of getting another beta weekend, and I want everyone to be well-prepared. I wrote that post a while back about enjoying the beta, but I never wrote about how to actually help test. Now that we’ve all been in there once, it’s safe to say we’ve all gotten to have our good time in the game. What’s most important about these beta weekends is that we’re helping make the game better for everyone, including the people who haven’t pre-purchased yet. This means the better we do our job as beta testers, the more fun everyone gets to have from here on out. So, here are some things everyone should do.

1. Use the Forums

ANet doesn’t have the time to reply to every single thread, but they certainly read them all. Report the bugs you see. Report anything you think might not be working as intended. Give them other feedback, too. Make sure you tell them the things you think needed adjusting, and definitely make sure you tell them the things you thought were spot-on! Tell them anything you think should be added places, or anything you think should be scrapped.

2. Fill Out the Surveys

You’re doing a lot of things in the beta. You get a ton of these little surveys. Fill them out! Stop what you’re doing for a minute and think about them. Actually give some thought to the numbers. You don’t have to just hit 5’s down the line. Also, use the comments section on them, too. Sure, they’re limited, and you have to be precise. But, you can give them a much better impression of your opinion on 256 characters than you can in 4 or 5 numbers.

3. Repeat Some Stuff

It’s easy to tell what a bug is doing wrong. It’s not easy to tell what conditions create that bug. If you’re doing something you can repeat and you get a bug, then do it again almost as exact as you can. That way, you can report two situations rather than one, which can give ANet more information about the cause of the bug you experienced.

4. Consider Your Perspective

When you’re giving feedback that isn’t simply a bug report, think about your perspective, and include that in the feedback. If it’s your first time doing the dungeon, then acknowledge that your report is from someone running it for the first time. If you loaded the character and jumped straight into match in SPvP without doing a build first, include that before you talk about what you perceive as balance. Tell them a little about your own build if you’re getting outclassed. Tell them if it’s something within the first hour or something in the last hour.

5. Seek Bugs During Peak

Part of the beta weekend events is stress testing the servers. If you’re doing something smoothly when no one’s around, try doing it again when there’s a lot of people as well. This helps not only test scaling on events but also to test the servers’ ability to handle a lot of people doing the same thing at the same time.

6. Be Specific

When you’re giving them your bug reports and feedback, be as specific as possible. “Everything hits too hard” is not as specific as “this mob was hitting for this much this often” or “it seemed as though I was frequently getting hit for this much when I had this much health”. “I fell through the world near on the right side of the stairs going up near the top” is much better than “I fell through the world on the stairs.”

7. Give Only Relevant Opinions

When you’re giving feedback on how you liked something, your opinions are great. When you’re giving a bug report, stick to the facts. If something happened once but not the second time, report what you did each time and what was different. The odds of you being as good of a programmer as the folks at ANet are slim-to-none, so telling them “this happened because I did this instead” is not going to be very helpful because you’re just guessing at the reason.

8. Communicate With Others

If you’re experiencing something that you think isn’t intended, mention it to someone else as well. Someone in your guild might know that what you’re experiencing is exactly what’s supposed to happen. Maybe they’ll tell you that they experienced something totally opposite. Maybe what they experienced was a bug. Maybe they’ll think about it and go report it as well. MMOs are social games, and so should their betas be.

Last week, I talked about the value or lack of value of balancing offense and defense in your SPvP builds to begin this series. This week, it’s time to start talking about how to build all-defensive, all-offensive, and balanced builds. I thought I’d start us off with a defensive build this week. In all of the SPvP I did throughout the weekend, I saw a lot of offensive and balanced builds, but no one seemed to be running defensive builds. I’ll admit, it doesn’t feel as rewarding as killing foes all match long. But, it’s nice looking at that victory screen and knowing you’re such a big part of that lead in points.

Picking a Profession

“They all have their own bunch of defensive skills…”

Everyone automatically associates “defensive” in GW2 with “guardian”. It’s even in the name: guardian. It guards. It’s defensive. But, what about the other seven professions? They all have their own bunch of defensive skills in addition to their healing skills. But, when you look at most of them (e.g., the warrior, the engineer), they really don’t have enough options to make more than one pure-defensive build. Now, the elementalist is worth mentioning. With all of the skills that vary with your attunement and the earth/water attunements, you can make quite the defensive build with a lot of variability. But, for the sake of going with everyone’s first thought, we’ll use the guardian. This will somewhat mimic the actual guardian build I used.

Picking Weapons and Skills

“…which are the most defensive?”

Now that we’ve picked our class, we need our weapon and slot skills. There’s a ton to choose from, so which are the most defensive? Since we’re going for defensive, the shield comes to mind. What does the shield have for us? In addition to the extra armor while we’re wearing it, the shield has two incredibly useful skills. The 4 skill lets us give ourselves and allies Protection with the added benefit of damaging enemies. The 5 skill is the really powerful one that pushes back enemies and absorbs projectiles. The big radius on the 5 skill is also a huge plus. So, the shield is in. Now, we need a main hand with it. The scepter doesn’t have anything really defensive except for an immobilize skill. Similarly, the sword has mostly offensive skills except for one block skill. The mace, however, is really nice for us. It’s got a heal at the end of the auto attack chain, a symbol with Regeneration and Burning, and a useful whirl that can combo with the symbol to remove conditions as well as can Knockback enemies and give Protection to us and allies. The mace/shield combo is in. But, let’s look at a nice two-hander as well. The greatsword is too offensive, so its out. This leaves us with the staff and the hammer. The staff gives us a swiftness symbol, a potential healing orb, a condition-absorb with multiple boons, and a wall of you-can’t-move-here. The hammer gives us a little offensive power, a symbol with Protection at the end of the auto attack chain, an immobilize AoE, a launch, and a circle of you-can’t-move-here. We’ll go with the hammer, since it gives us a more stuff.

“All of our skills are working toward one goal.”

Now that we’ve got our weapons down, it’s time to pick out the rest of our skills. We’ve got five to pick from, so let’s do the easy ones first. For the elite, we can choose to go with Renewed Focus or Tome of Courage. Renewed Focus sounds powerful at first, but the 3:135 duration-to-recharge ratio makes the Tome of Courage a much more attractive skill.. Now for the healing skills, we get three options. Since you’re on your own a lot in SPvP, we’ll rule out Healing Breeze. We’re going to use Signet of Resolve over Shelter, because the signet heals almost as much with a much faster recharge and a potentially more useful secondary mechanic. For utility skills, we’re immediately going to take Wall of Reflection. It’s got a GREAT duration-to-recharge ratio, and reflecting mechanics are great for protecting you and hurting them at the same time. We’re also going to take Sanctuary, because it’s a powerful skill. It’s a circle of you-can’t-move-hear, plus it stops projectiles, and then it also heals allies inside. The duration-to-recharge ratio could be better, but I’m okay with that when all of that power lasts for a whopping ten seconds. If you notice, both Sanctuary and Wall of Reflection are Consecration skills. For the sake of making better use of Consecration-boosting traits, let’s take a third Consecration. This leaves us Hallowed Ground or Purging Flames. I personally like Purging Flames, because it can remove the same conditions Hallowed Ground prevents with half the recharge and the added functionality of burning enemies. All of our skills are working toward one goal.

Picking Traits

“…a lot of strong skills with big recharges, so anything that helps with that…”

Having a class and skill set is only half of making a build, so now we need traits. What kind of traits do we want? We’re obviously going to want to take a good bit of Valor and Honor to have more Toughness and Vitality. But, let’s look at our skills to get a better idea. We’ve got a lot of strong skills with big recharges, so anything that helps with that is a good thing (see note at bottom of article). Our utility skills are also all Consecrations, so we should look at things that help with those. This now puts us 10 points into Valor for a 20 percent recharge bonus on shield skills, 10 points into Honor for a 25 percent recharge bonus on our hammer skills, and 20 points into Virtues for a 20 percent recharge bonus on Consecrations as well as extended durations. Now, we have 30 more points to spend. Let’s do 10 of each into Valor and Honor, because we need more Toughness and Vitality. For Valor, let’s pick the 30 Toughness bonus to allies. Not only is it good for when we’re near allies, but it’s up more often on us than the 90 bonus while using a shield. For Honor, let’s pick the Shield of Absorption when you start reviving allies trait. Reviving allies can be really useful, especially when you can survive standing still for it. Better yet, Shield of Absorption is a powerful skill (the 5 skill on the shield), and getting to use it potentially much more often for free is a great thing. Now, we have 10 points left, and I’m going to put them into Virtues. At this point, I could take the extended duration on elite skills trait, but instead we’ll make our Consecrations ground-targeted. You’ll really be able to surprise your opponents when you can pop up your Sanctuary and Purging Flames anywhere around you.

Kitting Out With Equipment

“…we’re going to focus on anything with Vitality and Toughness…”

Now we have our build, but we still can’t go fight yet. We have to pick our equipment. Obviously, guardians wear heavy armor and we’re going to use a mace, shield, and hammer. But, we need to pick our sigils, runes, accessories, and jewels. Accessories and jewels are the easy parts, because we only have to pick raw stats without considering the other bonuses available to us. For this, we’re going to focus on anything with Vitality and Toughness, preferably with more of the former. Whenever we have the option after those three, we’ll want to pick Malice or Condition Damage. We don’t focus enough on boons or heals for Concetration and Healing to be useful, and most of what offensive ability we have is in burning. You’re not going to go on a rampage with this build, but at least having something you can use to help finish weak enemies is good. When it comes to runes, we’re going to go outfit all of our armor with Superior Runes of the Dolyak. It’s got more Toughness than Vitality, keeping the two roughly even between armor runes and accessories/jewels, as well as a constant health regeneration to add to our Virtue of Resolve. Lastly, we’re going to take a Sigil of Superior Energy on both our mace and hammer. This way, every time we switch weapons we get enough endurance for an entire extra dodge. Since putting two of them on the same weapon set is pointless (there’s an internal cooldown), we’ll pick a Sigil of Superior Hydromancy for the shield. Now, whenever you swap to the mace/shield set, you’ll also Chill nearby enemies. This slows down their attacks and their movements, letting you survive and control them more.

Playing the Build

“If an enemy is in the objective, literally shove them out and keep them out.”

The very last thing we need here is to go over the playstyle of the build we’ve now created. It’s going to be hard for anyone to actually kill you with all of the Toughness and Vitality you have and the surprising amount of dodging you’ll be able to do. But, you’re also not going to kill anyone on your own either. All standard SPvP advice applies, especially fighting only at/in objectives. You have a skill on both weapon sets to shove enemies away as well as one that triggers every time you start reviving a downed player. Then, you have a skill on the hammer as well as a utility skill that can restrict enemy movement. Use that to your advantage. Objectives are captured and held by occupying the capture area more than the enemy. If an enemy is in the objective, literally shove them out and keep them out. If you get hit with a lot of conditions, especially to kite you, use your Purging Flames to make it all go away. Use Wall of Reflection when enemies try to fight you at ranged, but try to make sure you catch their bigger skills with it when possible instead of simply wasting it against auto attacks. Save Tome of Courage for when things get real. It’s not going to save you from near death, but if you drop something long lasting like Sanctuary and then activate it when a bunch of enemies show up, it’ll certainly help you last longer. Otherwise, focus on staying alive and keeping the objectives the right color. When you see an enemy with low health, don’t hesitate to jump over and help get them down. If there are three enemies in the area, it’s much more useful to make that two than it is to keep pushing one or two of them away.

Recharge Rates

As a last bit, I want to explain how increasing recharge speed works. Take the original recharge length and divide it by the decimal form of 100% plus the increase rather than taking off that whatever percentage of it. That is, a 60-second recharge with a 25% increase in recharge speed recharges at 48 (60/1.25) seconds instead of 45 seconds. Here’s the recharge speed increase of this build’s major skills with their traits:

• Shield of Absorption - 33.3 seconds (6.7 sec. difference)
• Banish - 28 seconds (7 sec. difference)
• Ring of Warding - 36 seconds (9 sec. difference)
• Wall of Reflection - 25 seconds (5 sec. difference)
• Sanctuary - 100 seconds (20 sec. difference)
• Purging Flames - 33.3 seconds (6.7 sec. difference)

Skill and trait images created using the Luna Atra Skill Tool.

As a reminder, this will be going up on GW2 WvW, where I am now writing. If you haven’t done so, please check them out!

Everyone knows the phrase, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Its meaning is simple: don’t commit 100 percent in one direction. When making plans, you should always have a back-up in case things change. In investing, you should never invest all with one account or in just the stock market or certainly not in stocks of only one company, because companies go under every day and markets can crash. I’ve talked many times in the past about the importance of balance in PvE builds, but what about SPvP? Is balance necessary, or can you go significantly one-sided for damage or defense? This is going to be the first in a multi-part series to look at balancing offense and defense.

Surely some one-sided balance gets you to such a one-sided match?

Balance Chocies

When you’re balancing your build, there’s a big spectrum between a purely damage-oriented focus and a purely defense-oriented focus. But, there’s really three areas you can fall into: damage heavy, defense heavy, and balanced. You can take your character  all the way for damage, but what do you get for it? Is it worth it to be an unstoppable juggernaut if you don’t have the guns for stopping everyone else? Is the medium reall happy?

Balls to the Wall: All Damage

If you throw caution to the wind and run with a build based on completely overpowering your enemy, what are you actually doing? For starters, you’re basically ignoring any toughness, vitality, or healing for all of the other stats. You’re ignoring skills that keep you alive or keep the enemy away from you in complete favor of skills that hit hard, hit often, or keep the enemy near you. That really powerful shield on 5 doesn’t matter if that other weapon has a skill on 5 that will trash everything in sight.

“…watch the corpses create themselves around you.”

There are merits to being completely damage-based. It’s useful to clear out an area quickly. When everything you have is focused on putting out a lot of damage, it’s generally all front-heavy. You don’t have a high rate of damage over a long period of time. You’ve got big skills with relatively long cooldowns. All you have to do is hit all the big buttons and watch the corpses create themselves around you. By yourself and run up to an objective with a guard? It’s all yours. The only downside is that if something can live through or get out of those big skills, you’re a sitting duck. You can’t actually fight for a long time, so while you can clear an area to capture it, you can’t hold and defend it.

The Impenetrable Fortress: All Defense

To be untouchable, you have to look at all of the skills that keep you alive and keep enemies out. Unlike going all-out offense, you have to play the long game as well as the short game. Powerhouse builds will be able to pump out damage over a short period of time, so it’s important to have a big skill here or there to work against that. It’s equally important to have smaller skills to keep you going after that first wave or against builds that are less burst-oriented. Sure, this weapon’s 5 button makes you invulnerable for a few seconds, but is it worth not having the other weapon’s two skills with shorter cooldowns, even though they’re weaker?

“…expect yourself to last through any onslaught…”

The important thing about being defensive is that it isn’t all about shields and healing. Anything that keeps the enemies away from you also counts. A really defensive build can withstand or disrupt major spikes of damage from enemies, but can also take a beating for a while to outlast enemies with less damage. However, the lack of damage means that you won’t be killing much of anything. Don’t expect a fully defensive build to capture an occupied objective by itself, but expect yourself to last through any onslaught against your objective.

Best Of Both Worlds: Balanced

Sitting in the middle is the world of balance. It’s a nice place where you don’t have to work as hard since you don’t need to get all of the best skills in one way or the other, right? Wrong. Being balanced takes even more thought. You’ve gotta think of which way you want to lean and which skills you can afford to not have in either direction. You can have Obsidian Flesh, or you can have Meteor Shower. You can’t have both, so which is more important? You can pick Meteor Shower and then use Mist Form for an invulnerability, but then you’ve used a utility slot. It’s a lot to think about. You can’t have big buttons for everything, so which gets which focus? Elites are almost all one way or the other.

“…find skills that work both ways…”

If you go for a big attack skills with smaller defense skills, you’re going to have to find a way to make them use their big defensive abilities before you use your big attack, or you’re not going to have enough smaller attack skills to get past their smaller defense skills. You’ve also gotta worry about finding a way to escape their major offensive since you don’t have big stops. If you’re the other way around, you’re fine at taking the brunt of their attack, but you’ve gotta last until everything is back up. You’ve also gotta find a way to get them down without a major attack cooldown. The most useful thing you can do is find skills that work both ways, meaning skills that are just as useful offensively as defensively. Then, you can pick your elite to go with your lean or you can pick it to go against as an emergency when your smaller side isn’t cutting it. Either way, you’ll find yourself with the above dilemmas whether you’re assaulting an objective or defending one.

Unstoppable Force vs. Immovable Object: Who Wins?

Every time the Super Bowl has been between the NFL’s top defensive team and top offensive team, the defensive team has won. The same is true in GW2. If you took a team of all pure-damage builds against a team of all pure-defensive builds, the defensive team would win. But, why? No matter how many major skills you’ve got as an offensive build, they’ll have just as many major skills to stop yours. That’s where it all matters, because defensive skills are going to win out over offensive skills after the initial spike. You have to last until you can get your major skills off cooldown. They only have to last until your lack of healing and defense gives out to their basic offensive ability.

“…it’s whoever spends the most time holding objectives that wins…”

The problem is, however, you’re never going to get anywhere with a full team of defensive builds. If it’s all defensive against all balanced, you’re going to stalemate when the balanced team has enough defensive skills to ignore the defensive team’s basic attacks. Defense on defense is even more of a stalemate for the same reason. An offensive team against an offensive team will be a toss-up for who can kill each other the fastest. An offensive team against a balanced team will usually result in the offensive team losing, as it’s easier for the balanced team to skirt by the offensive team’s major assault than it is for the offensive team to skirt past the balance team’s steady attacks. A balanced team against a balanced team is as much of a toss up as the offensive match up. But, this doesn’t mean that being defensive is the best way to go. You need a balance even in your team.

Consider this: you have a team with two offensive builds, two balanced builds, and a defensive build. At any given time, your defensive player can hold one objective by themselves against one enemy, and force the need for two enemies to take it. The two offensive players should be able to clear out enemy objectives easily for balanced players to run in and hold them. Two balanced players should be able to hold out against at least two enemies. You have to be able to claim objectives to hold them, but it’s whoever spends the most time holding objectives that wins at the end of the day. If your team leans either way, lean defensively, but don’t ever ignore the potential of a power house build or two.

Next week, I’ll start looking at how I create a build for each type: offensive, defensive, and balanced.

So, there’s a pretty new PvP community site for both WvW and SPvP in GW2 that you should all check out. It’s called GW2 WvW, and they’re trying to come up with a large community driven by community-created content. Why am I telling you this? Aside from the fact that we’re all GW2 enthusiasts and that I hope all of you learn to enjoy PvP in the game as it’s a great system, I have an awesome announcement.

I’m going to begin writing with them on a regular basis. Before you freak out, I’m not stopping this at all. Everything I write that goes up on GW2 WvW will also get posted here, the same way I’ve posted before. Because there’s a slight delay once I write something and getting it to them and them getting it up, there will also be a slight advance for all of you here on Tumblr. You’ll be able to read my articles here before they go live on GW2 WvW. Also, there will still be some things I’ll write exclusively for you all that won’t make it up there. We’re still working out some details via email and Twitter on everything, so at the moment they’re getting up my old WvW Strategy and my recent SPvP Skills posts loaded up (with some edits). If all goes well, I’ll start writing an article each week with them, day to be determined (possibly Thursday, but we’ll see).

Again, PLEASE go check them out and get involved. They’re still new and small, but they’re growing. Please go be a part of that growth. They just launched forums, are posting a lot of videos from users, and have some fairly interesting articles thusfar. More important than you going and checking them out, though, is you helping spread the word for other people to check them out. They’re helping me reach more people, so we should help them reach more people. This is Tumblr. Everything is a reblog of a reblog. So, get the information out about their site! After you check them out, put up a post about them and get other people to reblog it when they check it out. Tweet it to all of your followers and ask them to RT you. Share them on Facebook. Do everything you do for me, and then some.

A while back, ArenaNet posted on the GW2 Facebook that with every 10,000 likes, leading up to 500,000, they would post a new bit of concept art. This morning, they hit the final 500,000 likes and posted the last of the five pictures. So, I’m relinking them here. As usual with any large pictures I post, the thumbnail links to the full size image.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to spend as much time in SPvP during the beta as I wanted. I plan on spending a few hours doing more later today during the stress test. In the (roughly) hour-and-a-half to two hours I did spend in SPvP, I noticed one thing: people are pretty bad. There was one ranger I specifically remember for being smart, but mostly a lot of really bad people. This might be you, or it might not. Either way, here’s a few bits of advice to help you get better.

Research

The most important part of SPvP is research. Knowing really is half the battle. Learn the maps well. You have to know the lay out, the secondary objectives, the short cuts, everything. In the downtime between betas and stress tests, read up on the other professions. Play multiple professions long enough to get the general gist. The more you know about each profession, the better suited you are to adapting to them. At the very least, give all of the skills a quick read. It takes a lot of time, but knowing more than the opponent is the most valuable advantage you can have.

Priorities

SPvP is objective-based. It’s a capture point, not kill count. Keep that in mind. Don’t fight everyone you run into all over the map. If you run past someone and they start trying to attack you, do what you can to just get away from them and keep going. Don’t fight back or you’ll end up wasting a good 30 seconds with nothing to show for it at the end. Get to the objective you’re after and fight there. When you get there, unless the enemy is sitting off at a range firing at you, don’t leave the objective zone if you can avoid it. If they’re melee, they need to be either just as close as to you as you need to be to them to fight (if you’re melee) or even closer (if you’re ranged). If they’re running around outside it and you’re not, you’re claiming or holding the objective while they waste their time.

Similarly, take skills with you that let you control who is or isn’t in the objective zones. At the end of the match, it doesn’t matter if your team has two hundred kills to two kills if the other team has more points. You don’t have to be a high damage character if you can force the other players out of the objective zones and keep them out. Skills that push or create impassable barriers are worth more than skills that can do a lot of damage in many situations. If you’re a lonely guardian with a hammer defending the clock tower (see image above), you do more to smack them out of the zone and drop a ring of warding in their way back up the stairs than you do chasing them around the room trying to kill them.

Run Away

He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day. Back when I used to play WoW, my favorite saying I picked up at Tankspot is “it’s easy to calculate the DPS of your corpse.” Think about it in terms of SPvP. The more time you spend hugging the floor, the less time you’re spending putting more points on the board for your team. If you’re about to go down and you don’t have your heal up, roll out and run away. Get behind cover. If you can buy yourself those few seconds before your heal is back, maybe even enough to get some auto-regeneration going on, you’ll be able to get back into the fight much faster than running back.

Very similarly, there are a lot of talents that can be taken to trigger a self-defense skill when you are downed. They’re often very useful for getting you out of harm’s way when you go down so that you can get back up and back into the fight. For example, the elementalist can automatically enter a mist form that makes it invulnerable for three seconds. The thief can automatically stealth and shadow step, even through floors and walls. These skills usually begin on cooldown, so the talents also bypass the cooldown. On my thief, I had one match where just that skill kept me from being finished for over a minute and let me even capture an objective all while downed.

Think Outside the Box

If you can see it, there’s almost always a way to get onto it. If someone is running somewhere, you can probably find a faster way to get get where they’re going. Keep an open mind to the environment. It can block you from attacks. It can keep enemies away from you. Just because there are roads and ramps build in doesn’t mean you should always use them. The ranger I mentioned earlier found a way, after the trebuchet opened the clock tower, to get up onto the broken wall. He could rain arrows down at us but could also knock us off the ramp when we tried to get to him as we rounded the corner.

Fight Smarter, Not Harder

As I said before, knowing more than your opponent gives you a huge advantage. Thinking smarter than your opponent is how you use that advantage. Doing stupid things is bad. Running head-first into a one-on-two is suicide. Leaving an objective the moment you capture it when you lost track of an enemy player is irresponsible. Learn when to hang back before fighting and when to stick around to fight a little more. On your own, you can make a huge difference in a SPvP match by out-thinking everyone else. You can’t, however, make a huge difference with a death-or-glory mentality.

Hey guys! It’s been a while since I wrote a full post for you all since I’ve been working nonstop with videos. Rest assured, I’m still going to be writing posts for you all! Today, I’m going to explain how combos work for everyone.

Combos

They’re generally referred to as “cross-profession combos”, but simply “combos” is a more accurate term. You don’t need two different professions to create combos. Really, you don’t even need two different characters. Combos trigger when two skills interact, and they cause various effects. First, you need a combo field. Most persistent AoE abilities with some sort of effect create a type of combo field. In the skill description it will list “Combo Field: <Type>”. Then, you need a certain kind of combo finisher that has to be used in or across the combo field. These, too, are labeled in their skill descriptions as “Combo Finisher: <Type>”. Each combination of types has a different result, though not all necessarily have a combination implemented as of the current build of the game.

As I said, most abilities that create a persistent AoE on the ground create combo fields. There’s no way to tell which circle on the ground is a combo field and which is just an AoE without actually knowing what skills they are. But, after long enough, you’ll learn which skills are and recognize them quickly. There are currently nine types of combo fields: dark, ethereal, fire, ice, light, lightning, poison, smoke, and water. Beyond that, there are four types of combo finishers: leaps, physical projectiles, blasts, and whirls. Leaps are skills that cause your character to perform a leap, whirls are all-directional melee attacks, blasts are explosive attacks, and physical projectiles are just that.

Offensive Uses

Perhaps the most obvious uses of combos are in doing more damage. Indeed, there are many combos that cause extra conditions. Physical projectiles and whirls finishing fire fields cause burning and fire damage to enemies. But, there are many offensive uses that are not strictly based on damage. Some combos instead cause other conditions. For example, a physical projectile through a lightning field causes vulnerability. Alternatively, you can also use other combos such as a blast in a fire field to give offensive boons like Might.

Supportive Uses

Much as you can use combos for less direct, offensive uses involving boons, you can use them to create many types of boons and other supportive uses. In fact, you can use combos to help create extra healing. Water fields combo with all four types of finishers to either heal nearby allies or heal allies near the attack or the attacked target. Light fields can also be used with physical projectils and whirls to remove conditions from allies. In addition to boons and outright healing, combos can also produce other, non-boon buffs for allies. Leaps with an ethereal, fire, or ice field give Chaos Armor, Fire Shield, or Frosty Armor buffs, respectively.

Recognizing and Creating Combos

Unless you’ve memorized every skill graphic in the game, you’re going to have to do a lot of learning by experimentation when it comes to groups. You can always tell when a combo is triggered, because the game actually displays “Combo!” on the screen. When you’re in a group, you can significantly improve the output of the group by actively creating combos. Some of these don’t require anyone else; you can help out just by creating your own combos. I mentioned the fire field and blast combo for Might earlier. If you’re an elementalist with a staff and Arcane Wave, you can run over to some of your party members, drop Lava Font (which has a short cooldown) on them, and then detonate Arcane Wave to give everyone Might. You, by yourself, have increased the output of the group. 

You’ll still need to create combos with your group members, though. That’s easy if you’re in a group with friends that you’ve set up. If you’re just in a pick-up group, though, you’ll have to work a little harder. It’s easier to notice what finishers your group is using and create fields for them. For example, if you’ve got an engineer and a ranger with you, drop Fire Wall or Burning Retreat in front of them to start creating a lot of Burning for the enemy. You’ll see the “Combo!” notification pop up on your group members when they trigger a combo with your fields. If you notice allies triggering a lot, figure out which kind of finishers they’re using and work with that. If that mace/shield guardian keeps triggering a combo, it’s probably with his whirl finisher. If you drop water field on top of him, he’ll start healing the front line. Lastly, look at your own combo finishers and simply start using them. When you see the notification, look at the affects nearby. You’ll know to keep using finishers with that particular graphic for its different effects. It takes a little thought, but creating combos even in pick-up groups is a great way to increase your effectiveness overall.

Alright, folks, here’s the post of my impressions from the Guild Wars 2 beta, as promised. At the end of each section, I’m also listing my video plans for the week, which will be updated to link to the videos as they go live. All pictures link to larger size images.

Overall

Overall, I thought the game was amazing. I knew I would love it before we got in, but I wasn’t prepared for just how amazing it was really going to be. I logged a total of 46 hours, 15 minutes over the course of the weekend. We lost a bit of time due to it being beta and things being down, and I had to sleep at least a couple hours each night, so I wasn’t able to get quite as much time in as I wanted (but then, I could have played all 60 and still not had enough). I’m not going to be able to enjoy any other game from now until this game goes live. If any other company wants me to like their game from here out, they’re going to have to do a lot to meet the expectations ArenaNet has given me for video games.

Now, this was a beta. Despite the fact that the game looks as finished as it does, plays as though it’s finished, and is as enjoyable as a finished game, it’s not finished at all. There are a lot of bugs here and there in general that caused some issues. Part of the issues everyone had was major server-side lag. This mostly cleared up after Friday night, but at the beginning of the beta when everyone was logging into the servers at once, it was brutal. Everyone also generally had a lot of frame rate issues. This is again because of the fact that it’s in beta. The game isn’t optimized almost at all yet. There’s a ton of particle effects in the game, and no way to tone them down. There was also a bug that kept it CPU-locked at low priority, so no matter how good your graphics card is and how much memory you’ve got, you weren’t going to get much use out of it unless your computer was running absolutely nothing else whatsoever. That obviously didn’t work for me as I had Fraps, Skype, and Virtual Audio Cable (so I could record the game without Fraps) in the background. I also had my laptop open beside me with the forums and a stream open here and there (mostly Gamebreaker TV’s stream or occasionally Lore’s stream).

So, I said that we had a little bit of time we couldn’t play during the beta. There were three time periods that we had trouble getting in throughout the beta. First off, our server was easily the most heavily populated in the beta, at least at first until some people transferred off. We were the first server to fill up by far as not only did the GBTV community roll on Darkhaven, but so did the GW2 Reddit and the biggest alliance in Guild Wars. So, in the early evening on Friday, we actually crashed the server. The server completely stopped and we were all running around in our own game while everyone else stood still. However, we could still chat because that’s handled separately on server-side. Later that night, they brought down the servers for about 30 minutes to implement some hot fixes that cleared up a LOT of the lag. On Saturday, we crashed the database server. This led to a lot of account-related issues and especially a lot of guild-related issues. A lot of people, despite still being in their guilds, could no longer see the guilds they were in. This really hit a lot of us in the GBTV guilds, so we had people having to get invited around the different overflow guilds so that everyone could see themselves in a guild.

Overall videos: I’ve got the impressions/wrap-up video on its way right now. Later this week I’ll have some general gameplay videos and a beginner’s guide to GW2.

Personal Story

The first thing you get to see when you open the game is the character creation that leads into the story. The character creator gives you a lot of choices aesthetically for a truly unique look, but it also gives you a lot of choices that define your character in terms of their profession and story. For anyone that’s been wondering how much these choices really affect your story, let me tell you that they completely define what content you see at the beginning. The story we got to see is mostly broken into two 10-level chunks. I’m going to use humans as an example here. If you watch the video series I posted by Scott Hawkes, you’ll get to see the first chunk of the human story if you chose to have grown up on the streets. You see that he meets his friend Quinn, who is in trouble with the bandits that are trying to poison the town, and you have to stop them.

I instead chose to have grown up in the nobility, and my first chunk was about uncovering the corrupt minister that was paying off the bandits to try to take out me and my noble friend. At the beginning, after the intro line, we threw a party in my honor since I saved Shaemoor from the centaurs. The bandits busted that and kidnapped my friend. Then we went on, kicked a lot of bandit backside, and brought the minister to trial. The minister refused a trial and challenged us to a trial by duel. We then learned that he was actually in the pocket of another corrupt minister.

Now, the other choice I had made in my creation was that I regretted never finding my sister’s killer. After helping me take out that other minister, Logan Thackery told me of an old Seraph unit that might still be alive, despite common knowledge that they had been completely decimated. It turns out that my sister was in that unit, and then it becomes personal. So, I went out to talk to this other Seraph captain that may have known stuff, and discovered he was hiding things. From here, we discovered that he, too, was being paid off by a minister. We also discovered that said minister had been set up by another minister (probably the same minister from the first chunk, but it didn’t say for sure). So, both chunks as nobility involved investigating the corruption of the minister(s) trying to get Queen Jennah dethroned. In the last bit of story we got to play, I found my sister in the bandit cave, and all was well.

While playing through all of this, there are more choices you end up making throughout that will continue to affect your story. But, you can see how the content changes based on the story you picked. It’s also reflected in the cut scenes. The cut scenes, by the way, work really well. The concept are behind the conversations has improved from the first time we saw them, and it no longer feels quite as out of place. There were a lot of bugs here that need to be worked out, such as the audio and video of the cut scenes not being in sync. Sometimes the audio would simply not play for one of the characters. In the intro cut scene for Ascalon Catacombs, Rytlock’s texture won’t load at all if you don’t have the high-res character textures box checked under graphics settings.  There was also one occasion where the voice acting was using an entirely different script from the one on the screen, which made it a little confusing.

I thought the story was fairly easy to play through (provided you pay attention and play well), even as I was getting into parts that were a couple levels above me. There were one or two areas that were considerably more challenging and almost made me have to go do other things to level in order to continue. But, that’s how I like it. The only two things, difficulty wise, that I think need adjustment in the story are the AI of some of the bosses that hammered Thackery but not me when he was present and making one or two of the instances a little better guided. The arrow that points you a path in one of them was actually backwards, which made it really confusing.

Personal story videos: I’ve got video for all three opening intros, but the norn one will be included in my beginner’s guide to GW2. I’m also working with the video for the last story instance of the beta for my human elementalist.

Renown Hearts

So, instead of the typical model of finding a person, picking up a quest or two, doing those quests, and returning to that person, Guild Wars 2 has implemented a totally different system of question. Your standard linear model follows more of the Personal Story style, whereas side quests take the form of renown hearts and dynamic events. The renown hearts are really nice, because they’re always there until you complete them. There is an NPC for each one, but you don’t actually have to talk to that NPC. When you enter the area of a renown heart, it pops up tells you what all you can do. If you talk to the NPC, they’ll clarify things a bit more for you. Instead of “kill ten rats”, you get a progress bar that you can fill with any combination of killing rats, hiding cheese from rats, putting rat poisoning in the food, and helping the villagers that were bitten by rats. Each renown heart has multiple ways you can fill the progress bar, letting you “quest” the way you want to. At the end, you automatically receive the reward without visiting the NPC. Then, the NPC is just there as a vendor of special items.

The renown hearts typically have a very wide area that you can participate in. If the NPC is standing at the entrance to a cave with a renown heart, you can usually do complete the heart throughout the whole inside of the cave as well as a large area outside of the cave. The game automatically tells you what you can do, and the NPC is marked on the map for a little bit of clarity. The renown hearts also always occur in the area immediately near the heart on the map, so there’s no “run across the mountains and kill these things that only grow in this tiny portion of the hillside and then come back to me” type of deal. It’s a really well-guided system that tells you what to do without holding your hand too much.

Renown hearts are also a great source of income in the game. You get experience and karma for each renown heart. You also get a chunk of gold mailed to your character from the NPC that scales with your level. At low levels, you’re getting around 30 copper or so for completing a heart. By the end of the first areas (around level 15), you’re getting about 70 copper or so per heart. By the end of the second areas (close to 25), the NPCs are mailing you over a silver for helping them. At low levels, a silver is a pretty good amount. Your lowest level salvage kit to turn junk items into crafting materials costs 32 copper. One silver can buy you three of those. I honestly don’t have anything I’d link changed specifically in the renown heart system.

Renown videos: I recorded my favorite renown heart of them all over the weekend as well as a few others, and I’ll be putting them up along with a general “what is a renown heart” video.

Dynamic Events

The dynamic event system was one of the most anticipated, but also hit-or-miss expected features in Guild Wars 2. By this, I mean that everyone was really wanting to see how it was done, but we also all knew that it would either really kill it or flop like Rift’s system. Let me say that it killed it. As you’re going through the world, they feel really natural. It’s not like suddenly an event pops up right beside you and then you’re wondering where it came from. The trigger point for events is (almost always) a good enough distance from you that when you trigger it, you’re far enough away for it to seem like it was just happening anyway.

There are a few main types of events that help with adjusting to each. There are a lot of “kill these things” events, which will usually be a lot of mobs in waves. There are a lot of “bring me these” events where you have to go into an area, kill things, and steal their stuff. There are also a lot of “kill the boss” events that involve one big enemy with often a lot of smaller enemies helping. Finally, there are a number of “protect the NPC” events where enemies come in waves to attack a particular NPC. It sounds generic, but there are a lot of other events with extra mechanics. Also, each event with similar mechanics are all implemented slightly different so it doesn’t feel like major copy pasta everywhere. Some of the events are also group events, which mean they’re a lot tougher.

Another big we’ve talked about in dynamic events are how they’ll change the area and lead from one to another. They’re not exaggerating at all. You do actually get to back the grawl into a cave, then steal their stuff, then deal with them trying to fight their way back out, and then kill the harpy they were worshiping after you cleared them out of the cave. The grawl really will be mostly gone for a good while after that until they start trying to fight their way back out to take back over. There are a lot of areas with things like this that involve opposing forces shifting back and forth based on the success or failure of each dynamic event. Also, the dynamic events will happen without you. If there’s one going on, and no one participates, it’ll keep going and fail. You’ll then have to deal with what happens after the Flame Legion take over the outpost unopposed.

I’ve really only got three complaints about the dynamic event system. I wish they would delay them a bit more after each other. Some of them are individual, repeatable events, and that’s fine. They’re a lot of things like protecting a caravan that can happen multiple times successively. However, it would be nice if there was a bit of a delay on the next caravan leaving. I understand that it may have been faster because it was a beta with a lot of people coming in at different points trying to see everything, so I’m not too bothered by it.

I’m also not really bothered by the issues some of the events have in scaling. A lot of them tend to be too easy to complete when you have a lot of people or fairly difficult if you’re by yourself. They could use more drastic scaling. However, this is beta. That’s the purpose of a beta: to find out how you need to rebalance things and work out all the kinks.

What I am bothered by is how adversely a couple of the dynamic events affect renown hearts. Many renown heart areas have a lot of dynamic events that will trigger around them, which is really cool since completing the event usually helps your heart progress. The problem is that I saw (I think) two event chains that hurt your ability to progress on a heart if they go a certain way. An example is the Flame Legion temple in the northeastern part of the Diessa Plateau. If the dynamic event chain ends with the Flame Legion being almost completely cleared from the area, you can’t go in there and kill the Flame Legion or ransack their camps for the renown heart because there are almost none left. However, you would trigger a really tough group event that would start the chain to undo that. Like I said, there were only two I remember seeing that did this, so it’s not a major concern.

Dynamic event videos: I’m going to be working on getting a video together that shows off a couple dynamic events as much as I have them recorded. Given their sudden nature, more of my footage was of renown hearts than dynamic events, but there’s some overlap in there.

Leveling Process/Experience

As a whole, I really enjoyed the leveling process. I thought it had a lot of incredibly interesting content to play through. It flowed really well. You can actually gain experience toward leveling from just about everything you do except for Structured PvP. All of WvW, rezzing downed/defeated players you come across, crafting things, discovering way points or points of interest, dynamic events, renown hearts, etc. give you experience.

Some of the guys I was in a guild with essentially did nothing but WvW to level all weekend, and it seemed like they had a pretty good rate of XP gain going on that kept them roughly on par, or maybe even a tiny bit ahead, of the gain rate for standard PvE. However, I thought standard PvE (personal story, renown hearts, and dynamic events), could stand to maybe have a 5-10% jump in XP rewards. I completed the 20 levels’ worth of personal story content by level 16, and that was including having done a decent number of renown hearts. We had PvE content ranging up to level 25 for three different races, but I essentially had to go through 95% of all three racial areas’ available experience just to get to 28 in this beta. Just doing all of your race’s area wouldn’t have gotten you to 25 by any means. So, I feel like they need to give you more experience, but not by a large margin. Also, dungeons give you hardly any experience for the amount of time you spend in them. I wasn’t expecting a level from it, but I was at least expecting a good deal more than it gave.

Structured PvP

At the end of the beta on Sunday night, I managed to get in about an hour and some change in Structured PvP. Everyone automatically has a level-80 version of their character stored specifically for SPvP whenever you want, so you can simply create a character and click to go to the lobby. From there, you can set up your toon many ways, as you have all weapon skills, slot skills, traits, etc. unlocked from the beginning. In the beta we had two maps available to us: Battle of Kyhlo and Forest of Niflhel.

Getting into SPvP is very easy to understand what’s going on. There’s a voice-over when the match begins that tells you the basic objective is capture-point, and there’s a display on the top of the screen that shows the time remaining, current score, and ownership of each point. Each map also has its own little things that make it more than a straight-up capture point. In Battle of Kyhlo, you actually have trebuchets that you can fire at main tower to kick the enemy out of it, which is REALLY cool to be on either side of. There are also little mini-bosses in Forest of Niflhel that give you extra points. Another nice thing about the objective is that it forces fighting across the entire map rather than in one or two choke points, even with the relatively decent size of the maps.

It takes a game or two to get into the swing of things, but you quickly start getting used to fighting other players instead of AI-driven mobs. It also only takes one or two games on each map to learn a lot of the layout. The maps aren’t too big, so it isn’t overwhelming. But, at the same time, they’re big enough that it isn’t just a stationary kill-fest. The maps are fully interactive so you can literally get onto everything you see as long as it’s within jumping distance. This means you can go completely parkour, jumping off the top of the clock tower onto a pipe down onto a roof to ambush the guy that just ran out the bottom to avoid dying. There was also one match where I fought against a ranger that, after the clock tower was blown open by the trebuchet, jumped up along the broken wall where he could rain arrows on us and then get the angle right if we tried to come up the ramp to him that he could knock us off the tower with a push back. It was actually a very clever use of tactics that forced us to have to not only work on a block to get even get to him, but also come up with a way to force him down once we got up there. In the end, I managed to dodge through his arrow at the right time before he could get another off and then use my shield skill to shove him off the wall into the room.

Most of the classes I got to see in SPvP were the ranger, thief, mesmer, warrior, and guardian. That was simply who I got matched against at that time and not at all indicative of the general representation or power of the elementalist, necromancer, or engineer classes. In fact, from what I got to play, everything felt relatively well balanced. But, I will say that the thief’s Heartseeker ability was maybe nerfed a little too much from the last beta, as even with an automatic critical and a 30 percent damage boost on the hit, I could only get up to 4k damage at the most if they were at low health. For the record, that’s an automatic critical and 30% damage boost to do roughly 20% of someone’s health, and that’s the most I could get it to if they were basically dying. I’d also like to see the guardian’s hammer do a tiny bit more (maybe 5% more) damage. Honestly though, that’s nitpicking. As a whole, I felt the classes I faced were incredibly well balanced. I honestly don’t have anything else to say against SPvP.

SPvP videos: I’ve already got a guardian and thief talk-through video, and I’m going to be working on a commentated video later this week.

Dub v Dub (WvW)

Sadly, I did not get to participate in the WvW scene very much. A lot of the guys in the guild I rolled with spent a lot of time in there, but I only spent about 45 minutes total in the weekend, simply because of how unoptimized the game is. It was impossible for me to get a manageable frame rate when I was in there, because the moment I got around a sizable group of people all using skills, the sheer amount of particle effects kept putting me into single digit FPS. However, the time that I did get to spend in there was a lot of fun, and it was really cool to see the sheer size of the maps (it took about five minutes to get from one end to the other while giving myself a ton of swiftness). From what I got to hear from them, siege engines became critical in going around and taking out keeps.

Now, one of the things everyone is concerned about in WvW is the server balance. At the very beginning of the weekend, Darkhaven was dominating. By dominating, I mean that we owned every point on every map, save for occasionally letting one of the other servers have a point or maybe two at most. I think we broke 90k points before the other two servers combined broke 16k. This was because we were the first server to fill, and we were basically able to capture everything before the other players got in there, so we could hold them in their own base. But, ANet did a great job of rebalancing the match-ups over the weekend. On Saturday, we ended up facing two other servers that were really huge, and we actually lost. Then, on Sunday, we were matched again with two more servers that were still beat my a comfortable margine, but it didn’t turn into a total landslide. I think they’re in a good place in being able to proactively keep things balanced. Sadly, due to the inability to get a good frame rate by any means, I did not manage to get any video of WvW, but it still kicked butt.

Crafting

The crafting system in wasn’t a total abandonment of the norm. However, I thought it improved on all of the right things to make it a really enjoyable experience. I loved the discovery system. Rather than a trainer teaching you every recipe you’ll ever need, they teach you how to make the basic parts and then you’re off on your own to discover all of the recipes out there. Getting the materials to make those parts was also really easy. Gathering nodes are all instanced per player. There is no competition for crafting resources as a result of this, which makes it a much less frustrating endeavor. Gathering from nodes also requires tools that have a limited use (they’re “stacked” to show their durability), which was an interesting twist. Also, you can get a ton of materials from salvaging junk and unused weapons you find in the game. The best part of crafting in Guild Wars 2 is the lack of need to make a ton of items just to level. As you get your discipline up to 25, you’ve got a few recipes that work for level five gear and you’re discovering recipes that make level ten gear. If you make a set at level five (which is very easy to get the materials for), and a set for level ten, you’ll be at 25 when you’re done. This references armor more than anything, though. Weapons still require a little bit more to be made in extra, and could use with a little extra XP gain to compensate for it. When you get to 25, you’re making gear for level fifteen. So, your crafting easily levels with you in the game.

Now, the crafting system isn’t perfect. The gathering part leaves a lot to be desired. It’s great that you have no competition, but each node gives you three of its resource. The nodes are spread out a good bit. It’s significantly faster to just salvage the things you find for materials than it is to ever actually look for the gathering nodes. It was also very difficult to figure out the gathering system at first. I’m not one for holding hands in MMORPGs, but you’ve got to at least put the information out there. When I first found a copper vein and tried to mine it, I was told I needed gathering tools. I went to Divinity’s Reach and checked all of the crafting discipline trainers, but none of them sold the tools. I asked in guild chat and was told they were on the general merchants. I checked, but none of the merchants had them either. It turns out that they were only one one or two merchants at the very beginning where you first enter the game, but nothing in the game actually told you that aside from other players. Still, I really enjoyed the system.

Crafting videos: I’ve got a general guide to crafting coming up in the week.

Microtransactions

It’s time to talk about what I believe was the single most controversial feature in Guild Wars 2 before the beta: the microtransaction system. So, the microtransaction system works by buying a currency called gems in the in-game store. In the beta, we were all given 2000 gems for free. You can then spend these gems on a LARGE variety of items. Some of them were account things like bag slots and bank tabs (character slots are also in the works, but not in the beta). You could also by packs of dyes for your character, packs of mini-pets, and items that would give you a temporary boost in karma, kill experience, or crafting experience.

These boost items were a point of major concern that they would give players an “unfair advantage” over players that didn’t spend money. It’s not totally unreasonable for that to be concern (just mostly), as many other game developers have ruined their games with these systems. But, ArenaNet has been running a microtransaction system for years without issue and have a system that you simply can’t pay to win with. First off, the experience boosts only increase your experience from kills, and they only last an hour. If you made a pie graph for the sources of your experience, the smallest chunk would be rezzing players, crafting items, and other menial things. Then next chunk would be discovering way points and points of interest. The third smallest chunk would be kills. The super majority of your experiences comes from completing renown hearts, participating in dynamic events, going through your personal story, playing WvW, etc. There’s also nothing to be gained in Guild Wars 2 for leveling faster than everyone else. It’s not a race to endgame like the other MMORPG’s out there.

The bigger concerns here were actually crafting experience and karma. The boosts for those also gave you an hour-long increase in the amount of each you gained. People argued that more karma meant more gear meant better than everyone else. These people really don’t understand the GW2 gear system, and it’s our job to educate them. All gear of any given level and rarity is equivalent. This means that every rare, level thirty piece of gear has the same amount of stats. The only difference is which stats are on an item. The biggest thing karma will get you are special little bonuses for your weapons and armor that really work in little small areas (such as damage vs. ghosts) or special crafting recipes. There’s nothing there to worry about. Similiarly, leveling crafting faster doesn’t do you any good since you’re not going to be making better gear than anyone else has, and that’s if you can even use the gear you’re making yet.

Since we were given so many free gems, I made extensive use of them and bought several experience boosts to help facilitate leveling my elementalist enough to go through the dungeon, play with the dye system, and open mystic chests. Mystic chests are items that you will find on creatures and occasionally as rewards throughout the game. To open them, you need to find a butler golem (rare drop) or a mystic key. Mystic keys also occasionally drop on creatures or appear as rewards, but you can also by them in the store. Opening these chests gives you one boost item, three of a random tonic, and a random tool (this can include things like an Instant Repair Canister). If you’ll actually use all of the boosts on your character, the mystic keys are cheaper than any of the boosts. So, you’re actually getting a deal when you buy a key to open the chest.

But, not everyone wants to spend their money on things like this. ArenaNet knows this, and they’ve given us all an option. You can, VERY EASILY, buy gems with your gold through the UI. I did this as well for a bit so I could have the demonstration footage, as I had a considerable surplus of gold (over the weekend, I easily raked in over two gold, but managed to spend most of it). This is actually the only thing I don’t like about the microtransaction system itself. I would have preferred it to be something you could do via the trading post rather than separate tab in the commerce pane. As it’s currently implemented, it gives you the price based on supply and demand, and I couldn’t actually change that. I could tell it how much I wanted to spend on gems, and it would then tell me how many gems I was getting for that much. I’d have rather been able to just post an offer in the trading post to buy X number of gems for Y gold.

Also, mentioning dyes in this section, you could actually buy dyes in packs of three. Additionally, you can buy plant food. This works in that you find colorful dye seeds out in the world. You then take them to a dye manufacturer who will turn them into a dye over the next 24 hours. This plant food (very cheap) makes the process instant. I didn’t mind this system in terms of the microtransactions. I only actually disliked the 24 hour period. I thought it was a bit unreasonable for the sheer rate at which you find dye seeds. Over the weekend, I probably found close to twenty of these buggers. You find them so much faster than you can even hope to produce them that it’s a little unreasonable, even with the microtransaction option present. Anyway, that’s only a qualm with the dye system. Don’t fear the microtransaction system, because it’s actually really well done.

Microtransaction videos: I’m going to have a full guide to the microtransaction system going up during the week.

Dungeon

Unfortunately, I only had time to get one run through Ascalon Catacombs, the level 30 dungeon, in the weekend. However, it was incredibly fun and one of the highlights of the weekends. I’m going to start off and say that it’s incredibly hard. The videos out there make it look a lot easier than it is. At the same time, I felt it was incredibly overtuned for a level 30 dungeon. The higher dungeons are supposed to get harder. If it gets any harder, there’ll be no way to finish them. Now, I went into the dungeon at level 28, so I was a little underleveled. I also didn’t have that much health for a level 28 as I had no Vitality from traits and only small amounts from gear, as those pieces of my gear were a couple levels below me. At the same time, I had around 2.5k-3k health. The other people in my group had around 3.5k-4k  I was getting one shot. They were getting two shot. Some of the bigger hits were just barely not one shotting them. It’s a bit much on the damage. Still, the challenge was enjoyable, and the story is nice.

Numbers aside, the boss mechanics were interesting, but in need of a little tuning. Master Ranger Nente is a hard fight. It’s not because he’s jumping from platform to platform on you. It’s not because he does a lot of damage. It’s because the platform you’re on is right against the wall, so it’s hard to face him without the camera getting right against you, backed up against the wall, preventing you from seeing the boss’s AoE circles. The Lovers were also really hard to manage keeping apart. We talked about it before we started the fight and tried to use our push back abilities and such to get them apart, and we managed for a tiny bit. But, they’re really hard to control. I’m sure with additional run throughs it would get better, as would the Master Ranger Nente fight, but it would still be nice if they were not quite so difficult to control since it’s the game’s first dungeon.

Aside from the fact that I was the only person in our group that didn’t find jack for usable loot in the dungeon, I thought the loot worked out really well. On the whole, I really like where they’re going with the dungeon. I just think that it’s in need of a little refinement. It’s probably better that we couldn’t get a boost at the moment. It meant that only the more hardcore players that worked hard would get to see it, so it would mean more to us when we got to experience it. That means we’d also be more likely to give meaningful feedback. Had everyone been able to do it, there probably would be a lot of general QQ without any sort of meaningful feed back.

Dungeon videos: The complete run of Ascalon Catacombs will be uploaded later this week.

User Interface

A good UI is one of the most frustrating things to adjust and get yourself to in an MMORPG. There’s always a lot you need to be able to put on your screen, but it has to be balanced with still being able to see your character and what else is happening around you. Every game runs into that issue. In Guild Wars 2, they’ve basically hit the nail on the head. They’ve found that happy medium between information and visibility. How? They got to the core of the problem: reducing the amount of information you need to see on your screen. The combat UI is very unintrusive, but at the same time it tells you everything you need to know and leaves the majority of your screen open to watch the fight. You rarely spend time watching any part of your UI in combat aside from a quick glance at a cooldown, the endurance bar, or your health. There are a lot of auditory queues in the game that also eliminate the need to constantly stare at your UI away from the action. They’ve done more than reach a happy medium; they’ve reached nirvana.

The non-combat UI was just as great. One of the things I really enjoyed the most was the guild pane. It did just as great of a job of giving you a lot of information without making it either too cluttered or too spread out. You could get a ton of information all on the one tab, then switch tabs for a lot more information. At no point, though, did it ever seem overwhelming. I only wish that we had been able to customize our guild emblems this beta. The hero pane that has all of your skills, traits, equipment, personal story journal, etc. was another really well put-together piece of UI. Honestly, I didn’t find a single thing about the stock UI that I really disliked.

The mail UI was really simple, but at the same time covered everything you needed. I’d only like to see functionality added to drag an item into any part of the message to attach it, rather than having to drag it to the individual attachment box, but it’s not a make-or-break type thing. More of a #firstworldproblems type of thing. I didn’t like that you couldn’t mail to your other charaters, until I found the bank and realized that it was account wide. The bank is actually really nice. Not only does it have a general “everything goes here tab”, but a tab for crafting materials, a tab for cooking ingredients, and a tab for mini-pets.

Perhaps my favorite part of the UI was the trading post. It’s in the same commerce pane as the microtransaction system, but it has its own four tabs in the pane. The first tab is the buy menu. It gives you a search option (with auto complete suggestions) and four listings. It shows you the highest priced items by highest seller, the most supplied items, the most demanded items, and the most searched items. It’s really nice, though I would like it if the highest-priced items was by the lowest price on each item. It’s not very relevant for a lot of the items to show the highest price, because there are always people that sell their item for a lot more than everyone else, hoping for it to eventually sell for bigger profit. Anyway, from there you click on an item, and it shows you how many of the item are available at each price and you chance choose how many you want. If the price you want isn’t avilable, you can simply place an order and the moment someone posts the item at your price, you’ll get it.

The second tab of the trading post is the tab for selling items. It shows you a list of everything in your inventory, and you can then click on an item you want to sell. It takes you to a similar menu as the buying an item menu, only instead of a list of orders, you can choose to match the highest buyer, lowest seller, your current lowest sale, or create a custom price of your own. If there’s an order for your price, you’ll get it immediately. The next tab shows you everything you have listed, and you can cancel outstanding orders and posts at any time. This much you can do anywhere in the world. The fourth tab shows you the profit or items you have made from your trades, which you can then open the menu again via a [Trading Post] NPC to collect your items and gold when you’re in town. It’s a really nice system that doesn’t go overboard like certain other games that might have taken place in space, but still gives you a lot more information and options than your standard auction house in an MMORPG.

UI videos: I’ve got a video on banking, a video on the trading post, and a video on the guild pane all coming this week.

Combat Controls

This is one of the things that you simply expect to be good in a game, are rarely surprised by anything exceptional being done, and absolutely hate a game when it sucks. Guild Wars 2 offers you a LOT of different buttons you can bind all over your keyboard, and also supports special gaming peripherals like the Razor Naga (if you don’t have this mouse, get it). Since I use my Naga, I had all of my skills on the my right hand while I moved, along with weapon swapping, switching targets, etc. Then, I was able to free up more space on my keyboard to move around some of the other buttons I like, find a nice spot for the dodge key, and move my profession abilities from the function keys to the number keys. The only complaint here is that we weren’t able to use modifiers. This is, however, something they have said they’re working on putting into the game. We haven’t had it in Guild Wars, but we didn’t need it with only eight skills and little real need for lightning reflexes. With the ten skills in Guild Wars 2, players without the Naga will really want to have modifiers to make it easier to fit the skills comfortably within reach of the left hand.

Other than the modifier issue, I had only one problem. There was a bug I experienced, where occasionally when I would tilt my camera up, it would zoom up to the sky. It wasn’t a big deal running around in the middle of nowhere, but in combat it sucked. But, the rest of the controls felt very smooth and intuitive. Now, not starting with dodge bound to a key is something they could probably change for the better, but it’s easy to find a good spot for it. Just pick a key that you can reach easily, because you’ll use it a lot. I thought it was very easy to get in and learn the controls, easier than many games I’ve played in the past. Dodging takes a little bit to get used to simply in timing it or remembering to use it in melee. The game plays really, really well.

Underwater Combat

Going underwater is another area that other MMORPGs tend to fail at. Miserably. A certain other MMORPG gave you an entire underwater leveling area with a wave effect over the screen that made it impossible to maintain any form of orientation. The combat’s often nothing different from the normal, except that you can’t tell where you are in relation to anything else. On top of that, you have to go back up before you drown and die. Throw literally all of that away.

First off, the underwater everything in Guild Wars 2 is done perfectly. ArenaNet may be the first developer to finally give us an acceptable underwater combat system in an MMORPG. It’s not disorienting at all. It only takes a few minutes to learn to judge distances front to back without the ground as a reference. The combat actually feels different as well. You even have special underwater weapons and skills that function very differently from those on your other weapons. Some of your general skills can’t be used under water, which adds to the different style. Also, your character automatically has a breather mask that lets you stay underwater forever. You only have to make it to the surface when you’re getting beat around and are about to die, as the drowned state replaces the downed state underwater.

Exploration

The last thing to talk about is everything ArenaNet has done for the explorationists. I know the word should be “explorers”, but “explorationists” feels better. Exploration is more than just running around exploring. There are a ton of rewards hidden out there. There are jumper puzzles and other little things hidden in the world. There are untold easter eggs out there. Exploration is almost its own gameplay format, which is why I like to use explorationist rather than explorers. Explorers will run around gather experience from all of the way points and points of interest. Explorationists will uncover all of the easter eggs, special puzzles, and other neat things that make the game so immense. Believe me, Guild Wars 2 will make sure that you never, ever run out of places to go.

Summary

I’m not going to say it’s going to kill a certain other major MMORPG out there, but GW2 is certainly going to take away a hefty number of players. Mike O’Brien said he wouldn’t be satisfied until his game was the top dog out there. He won’t have to wait long. I want to give a quick thanks to everyone that was in the Gamebreaker TV guild(s), especially the GBTV staff. They really helped make the weekend a special experience and were great hosts to us. I link them all the time on here, and for good reason. For MMORGP news, you should check them out all the time (after you read the GW2 stuff here, of course).

Okay guys, bear with me just a little bit. I’ve got a bunch of videos coming up. In fact, I recorded I think 350GB worth of video. I’m literally sorting it out right now, only taking a break to type this. I also snagged about 100 screens throughout the weekend, and can naturally pull more from some of the videos. I didn’t get to do everything I wanted for various reasons, but I’ll talk about that later. At the moment I’ve got premiere already encoding my beta summary video. Because I was rushed at the end of it, and it wasn’t even originally going to be a beta summary video and only turned into one by my rambling, I’m going to also have a long beta summary post as well. Tomorrow I may not get as much done as I want. I have to write the last five pages of an eight page paper tomorrow, and coordinate with my group for my group project. However, I will make sure at least some of the smaller videos get out. I’ve got a few that are short little things and a few that require virtually no editing because I did the commentary live as I recorded them. Anyways, I just wanted to let you guys know that I have a LOT coming this weekend and that this weekend was the best 46 logged hours of gaming my life has ever known. (Yes, I played 46 hours. I’d have hit 50 if not for the data server crash and the Darkhaven server crash the night before).

As I’m sorting, here are some things you can expect videos of:

Bank System

Trading Post System

Crafting System

Guild UI

End of Beta Ceremony

Tour of Lion’s Arch

Important Locations in All Four Major Cities

Two “What I’m Doing As I’m Doing It” SPvP Videos

One Casted PvP Video

Newbie’s Getting Started Guide

Multiple General Gameplay Videos

And More! I seriously don’t even remember what all I’ve recorded in the last two days. It’s been a lot. I will definitely be doing posts as well as videos. Just please bear with me as I get it all in. I wanna take a quick moment to give a thank you to Gamebreaker TV for hosting us in their guild this weekend. They were such swell guys and really helped make the whole experience better.

Here’s A Couple Presents Present (Click for Bigger):

I discovered the New Krytan letter for V, just an hour or so after the Wiki. The sign says: “WARNING!! CAVE TROLL”

Lion’s Arch was enormous and beautiful. Nice to see this live rather than ANet’s flyby.

Hey everyone! Right now, the servers are down for half-an-hour while they throw in some bug fixes and updates. So, I thought I’d take the moment to give you a little bit of what I’ve been doing, what we’re seeing, and what I think of it all.

So, what I’ve been up to thusfar, I immediately jumped in and got into the Darkhaven server with the Gamebreaker TV guild (Agreeance [YES]). So, my first character was my ele, who is now level 5, and my guardian who is now level 7. I’ve been playing the two of them nonstop since 2:50pm today (everything actually went live slightly before noon PDT). I’ve mostly been playing around in the personal story, with a little bit of crafting in there, a little bit of renown hearts, and then whatever dynamic events I’m coming across. I haven’t been hugging the floor as most as some people, but I’m still getting my fair share of time in with her. I’ve probably been getting defeated a little less than once per level thusfar.

Naturally, there are a lot of bugs and issues. This is beta afterall. We almost crashed the Darkhaven server earlier. I don’t think they’re even letting anyone else onto that server at the moment. We were the first server to fill, simply because not only is the whole GBTV crew over there, but so is the largest, most “hardcore” alliance in GW1 and all of the GW2 Reddit users. Needless to say, things are just a little laggy at the moment. Also, FPS is running a little low for everyone it seems. Part of this is that the game is not optimized yet. The other part of this is that the client seems to be CPU locked at low priority.

Other issues that I’ve been having is I’ve twice had my chest armor get deleted. Out of nowhere, I was suddenly without chest armor. It wasn’t broken; it was straight up deleted. This is why we’re beta testing, folks. I’m also seeing a lot of audio/video sync issues in cut scenes. Other than the general lag and low FPS, those are really the only issues I’m seeing in there at the moment. 

Now, one thing they’ve done that we weren’t expecting is that they opened up free server transfers for everyone through tomorrow as a result of the drastic imbalance in population. They’ve also given everyone 2000 free gems to use with the microtransaction store. They’re testing their service out, so you still have to put in card information, but it doesn’t charge you or even pre-authorize it. To get this, though, you still have to open up the gem store.

So, I really love this game so far. It feels like I’ve been waiting years for a game like this. I might even cry Sunday night when it ends. Who knows? I’m taking everything with a grain of salt since it’s beta, but the system feels pretty natural to me. There are a few things I’d like to see a little bit of tutorial thrown in for, but I’m sure we’ll get a little bit of that later when it goes live or in future betas. That said, this game is hard. Make no mistake, this is not a game for someone that wants to just roll their face across the keyboard and win. Like I said, I’ve died probably ten times thusfar today. Not gone down, but actually been defeated with my face against the floor ten times. Neither of my characters is even level ten yet. Also, as I said our server is incredibly imbalanced in population, we’re naturally destroying the others in a no-contest in WvW. You’ve seen videos from the last beta? That’s basically what we’re doing right now.

I’ve tried to record a little, but I’m going to mostly save all of my footage for tomorrow and Sunday when there will (hopefully) be less server-side issues and maybe a better running game client that isn’t stuck at low priority. If I have to guest over to another server with no population to get better lag and such for you all, I’ll do it. I’m going to make sure you get the coverage I promised.

One last thing before I finish my dinner and get back into the game as the servers go up, I’d like to give a huge thank you to the entire Gamebreaker TV crew for putting this guild together for us to all hang out in. They’ve been the nicest people to us all thusfar. It’s one thing to make a guild for all of their fans to be in, but it’s another to hang in that guild with us and talk to us and everything. They’re really just treating us wonderfully. Tomorrow, their stream goes live at 2pm PDT of us all going into some WvW and kicking more ass. I’ll record as much as I can on my side, but the stream will be live on Gamebreaker. See you guys later!

Hey all! If you’ve seen my previous post and were planning on joining me in the GW2 beta starting tomorrow, please note that I am changing servers!!! I will now be on the Darkhaven server. Sorry for the confusion. Gamebreaker TV has since announced that they will be on that server, and I am changing to join them. You should too! We can all join the GBTV guild that will be going on.

Anyway, my offer still stands to all of you. Join me on the Darkhaven server and hit me up throughout the beta. If I’m not in the middle of recording something, I’ll be more than happy to answer questions or otherwise chat while we’re live in the beta. The character I’ll be spending the most time on will be named Yoshi G W Two. If friend adding requires a different add for each character, I’ll post the list of characters as I make them. Otherwise, if it works like GW1, you can just add Yoshi G W Two to your list. See you all tomorrow!

Also, I just completely revamped the archives for the site. There’s now one archive link that takes you to the main archive with a list of links to the sub archives. It’s much more concise than having one archive with all the different topics and having separate video and news archives.

Hey everyone! So we’re about 38 hours away from the beta right now (so excited!!!), and I wanted to give you guys some advice. I already did a top ten things to keep in mind for the beta list, but those were ally tips for what to do in-game. These are going to be more tips about your health. Not all gamers are Cartman (MOM! BATHROOM!), but we still need to be wary of our health and our bodies. This applies especially when we’re going to be spending a lot of time in a given period playing games.

One more reminder: I’ll be on Sorrow’s Furnace mostly playing a character named Yoshi G W Two and will be available to chat during most of the beta.

Eat Well

Some people joke about you forgetting to eat, but no one forgets to eat. It’s more important to remember you take the time to actually eat more than Doritos all weekend. Now, I know that sitting and cooking a fancy meal takes time away from your playing the beta, and you’ll be tempted to now order Domino’s all weekend (if you want pizza, order real pizza, not Domino’s). Cook in advance! Right now, I’ve got a lot of beef marinating in the fridge so that I can sit down tomorrow and cook a couple pounds of bulgogi and several cups of jasmine rice. Not only is this one of my favorite foods in existence (thank you, Koreans), but it’s also easy to cook a lot of at a time and it doesn’t take too long. There are other dishes I cook that take as much time for one meal (for a couple people) as this ridiculous amount of food is going to take. Other things like Broccoli and corn reheat well and don’t take a long time to make a lot of food.

Get A Comfortable Chair

Almost everyone has a nice rolling desk chair at their computer, and those are good. But, you can always get yourself an extra little pillow or something to make it even better. Actually, because of the height of my desk, I have to add this little pillow to my chair to get myself at comfortable height for using my mouse. If your posterior starts hurting, you know you need to fix something.

Take Care Of Your Wrists

We’re gamers. We spend a lot of time using our fingers, their ligaments, and the muscles in our hands and forearms. Those of us that are also musicians, programmers, swordsmen, lacrosse players, or other such things also use our wrists and hands a lot in day-to-day life outside of gaming. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Tendinitis are not things you ever want to have to deal with. I only have an old sports injury in my wrist and even that hurts sometimes. Make sure you’re sitting high enough so that your wrists aren’t bent downward. If your keyboard has little legs on the underside to raise it up, use those. You want your wrists to be straight. The same goes for your mouse. If you start feeling numbness in any part of your hand, stop what you’re doing. Shake it out. Look at what you can fix about your set up.

Don’t Get Blinded

Your parents always tell you that staring at a computer screen is bad for your eyes, but that’s not quite how it is. It isn’t staring at the screen that’s bad, it’s doing so uninterrupted for a long time. It’s important to get up every so often (every two hours to three hours) and shift your focus to something distant. Stand outside for a couple minutes and look off in the distance. Look out of your window. You rarely see traditional farmers with glasses. Why? They’re constantly looking down at their equipment, out in front of them, and off down the field. Pretend you’re a farmer.

Take Care Of Other Things

If you’ve got pets, please remember to take care of them. If you’ve got to work, suck it up and lose those three hours before you get home on Friday. If you work all weekend, find a way to come down with the flu. Just kidding. The point is, make sure you get the rest of your life squared away too. It’s only a beta afterall. Launch will be something different.