And then there's also that there are split EU and US servers. (And those lucky EU people have their servers better-named)
I, along with the aforementioned Deadly Betties, am currently planning on the Kaineng server, unless something we don't know about happens between now and launch (such as the launch servers having completely different names from the Beta servers, or something).
For anyone who doesn't know, there's going to be a stress test day on Monday the 14th, 11AM to 6PM Pacific Time (GMT -7)
So the beta weekend is starting in an hour, if anyone else is in and wants to play together, I'll be on Fort Aspenwood. Same name in game probably, on my first character.
I escaped from the Heart of the Mists! Future warning: don't go near the siege master or testing golems, stay in the intial lobby and your characters won't be unusable due to freezing. Any that are stuck, set your graphics to max, set it to windowed and make the window as small as possible and try to run out of the area.
I'm on Divinity Coast, by the way. Fort Aspen was full when I tried to create a character. Game is freaking amazing so far.
Just killed a bunch of stuff in the Mafic Core and died horribly to the Champion enemy there. The event to close the fissure is insane solo, especially since I was two levels below. Seriously I was fighting off about four destroyers at a time, while trying to close the fissure, and I never was out of combat.
Yessss, best news to wake up to. Another weekend on the 20-22 July too. Yesterday in the stress test I basically only did sPvP, it was a blast.
As birthday presents go, I'll admit, I have had worse. Also, how did you even manage to--oh, sPvP. Okay. Yeah, WvW is kind of bad, IMO, if you don't already have a clan, since nobody actually does that squad stuff.
Well, while it will definitely be better to be in a guild for WvW, it doesn't really matter if you are or not. In the last beta weekend I did a lot of it solo and with a friend, it's perfectly fine to both stick with the big groups or go on your own. Unless you get ambushed you can usually see enemies from far away so there isn't really much risk to it. I really like both WvW and sPvP and will do both at launch. They're pretty different.
My problem with WvW is that the enemy players can also see you from far away, and have a disproportionate tendency to be the kind of trolls who will follow you across half the map (well, 1/5 of the map, but remember, these maps are freaking huge) just to kill you, ignoring any and all other objectives to do so. Which gets incredibly annoying when you're a solo player, run up to see if you can help defend one of your points against a siege, and then the entire siege front abandons the attack and chases after you. I gave up when this happened three times in a row, and I'd been unable to contribute to the war effort at all other than walking next to single Dolyaks that nobody was bothering. Granted, this was in the first public beta weekend, so things may have changed a bit since then.
Ah, you might be right, I didn't notice that (though I only started playing in the second weekend) at all. Most of what I did was run to where the clashes were happening, and a little solo exploring. In fact, had a fun adventure once when doing that. I was following a group of maybe 3-4 people seeing if I could maybe 1v1 someone. So I follow them, they cross a bridge, I get on the bridge, wait for them to get farther so they wouldn't see me. Not paying attention, I suddenly get ambushed by 5 people from behind in the middle of the bridge. Roll in the middle of the group, drop a smoke bomb (I was a thief), use the 3 seconds of stealth to jump on the ledge and jump way down into the river they lost track of me as I swam towards the bottom of the river.
I find it kind of interesting what unique roles can emerge for classes in WvW. For instance you generally have at least one mesmer who sets up portals. Projectile blocking and reflecting (mostly guardian here) can be used well for defense. I remember seeing in a video a guardian straight up blocking a catapult shot with the fourth shield skill. And then there's fields, even with the player number nerf (only 5 can combo with each field) I could see fire eles as being rather useful with archers, they could even go a strong cond damage build and add strong burning to everything with those. Speaking of archers The ranger can get the longest ranged attacks at 1500 units, with the trait on the longbow, which is definitely good for defense. That's rather interesting and useful. I just like how much more interesting a lot of skills become in WvW.
If anybody is interested in trying the game but don't want to prepurchase, Curse is giving out 20k keys for the third and last beta weekend. http://www.curse.com/betas/guild-wars-2
If anyone's going to play this weekend, it's starting soon and I will be on the Maguuma server. Characters from the last are wiped.
I'm gonna be playing on Tarnished Coast just to take in all the roleplay going on. Wizardlands was actually awesomely timed as a way of holding me over. Not that I ever really quit DoD.
Anyone who doesn't know, there's a stress test today from 12 PDT to 4 (it'll probably start a bit earlier so spam the login button if you want).
I'm going to be so playing the hell out of that. I want to do the Metrica jumping puzzle everyone's talking about.
