I hated not being able to play with my friends, other than that I had a great time. The end of beta event was underwhelming compared to last beta.

My favorite enemy was the Champion Svanir Marauder, because he actually had decent boss mechanics, though sometimes he would rush out range so far that he dropped combat and would regen a bit.

Did drop down to 1-5 fps during the rabbit event.

As far as pvp goes, Guardian seemed to be top tier with altruistic healing builds, and Ele seemed to be a free kill, but the Ele does excel at map control, far beyond any other profession due to perma swiftness. Managed to go 16+ wins without a loss as a Guardian and stopped after getting rank one, ended up wasting 500 glory on starter gear and bought a crappy looking staff for my Ele, in the back of my mind I know I should've bought the greatsword for my Guardian.

On the other hand, Elementalist's are great for PvE, due to their shear damage output which allows for them to instagib any trash mobs.

I may have been able to hit 40, but there really wasn't any point as much of the content was sealed off.

In my opinion they could've done better with the beta, all the lag and not being able to play with your friends really blew, hopefully there will a complete overhaul on the sharding system, or maybe even allow for districts to be brought back.

Also here are some SS's from the last few moments on Yak's Bend.

http://imgur.com/a/PpDu9

Time to watch some game of thrones.

One of the best MMO's i've played so far. Only one thing i diden't like, and can be a turn off for the melee classes. Everytime they swing, there's a trail wave following the sword/hammer/axe Maybe i just need to get used to it. Other than that i had a blast. The environment were amazing. I loved running around and do whatever. Oh there's some people over there, let's see whats going on. In this game you wanna help players.

I stayed in the level 1-3 area cous i dide'nt wanna see to much, before the release. Overall an amazing game, and can't wait to explore with my brother :-)

Originally posted by Thodra

I loved running around and do whatever. Oh there's some people over there, let's see whats going on.

Thise made me chuckle lol.

You are right, the game rewards you for being nosey!

Hadn't thought of it like that :)

What i dislike:

- Grind to leveling up is insane and boring, most of time the exp requirement for the next hub is so high that you are forced to repeat more times the same hub chain quest before move

- Combat too fast and confused

- Everyone spam aoes and use ranged weapons (spamming 1-2-3-4-5), even melee classes

- Melee is useless, if you go melee in a battle you get most of the times oneshotted and you don't know who hit you, range is the way

The combat system of Tera (i use this game only as example, i'm not playing it at the moment) is 100 times better, is more slow, is not confused, you know what happening around you and you have the time to think what to do, and you aren't forced to spam aoes and use range weapons to have a chance.

I'm not impressed by this game, i don't know if it work as intended but if the things stay like now i will drop the game because i don't find it fun at all.

     Im still realing from how much i enjoyed it as well. The cities really blew me away. There was one point where i was in lions arch and i was listening to these 2 skrit talking and the male one was telling the female one about this place where the city guards never go. The female one told the male one not to go and he started walking into the water anyway. I dont know why but i wanted to see if the npc was just going to fade away into the water, so i swam underneath the water after it and found myself in the sewers, still following it. I kept going through these sewers and it led me to this hidden part of the map that was in fact the secret headquarters for the Order of Whispers. Turns out that its also connected right behind a bar but there is a golem bouncer barring your way past. Only reason i was able to figure it out is because i had already been to that bar and recognized the golem. It's name is Captain Smash.

     Also got to see Old Lion's Arch under the water. It was very bittersweet seeing Lions Arch underwater like that but i liked how they kept the structure of old lions arch intact.

     The in town/city voice dialog is great too. Does so much to add atmosphere, it actually feels alve. The towns are also huge. I cant think of a single game that has a city as vast in any other game. Divinity's reach is about 3-4 times the size of the capitol cities in aion and at least twice the size of warhammers. And the major cities are just beautiful in different ways. I actually wasnt expecting much from Holebrak (norn capital) but i really had to change my opinion quick. All the ice sculptures blew me away. Was just pretty.

The good:

Seemless, painless interaction with a community to tackle tough mobs and objectives. Hell, I'd say 80-90% of my time was spent in a scrum of random players having a blast. It actually made me feel playing solo was a pointless, fruitless activity.

Fun, fast-paced combat system. Almost on par with WoW, will have the ability to surpass it with tweaks and fine tuning. Casting on the run was great, I love the mobility and freedom you are given.

Perfect starting areas, vast, deep city zones. Could spend hours exploring urban areas and still not see it all. Lions Arch is breathtaking.

Underwater combat and exploration that is not only painless but enjoyable. Never liked it in any other game untill now.

Excellent pvp matching system. You always have a chance as it is less about gear and more about skill and co-operative.

Guild research projects are a great touch. Cant wait to build a guild catapult!

The Bad:

Minor quibbles, but godamn I couldn't keep a ranger pet alive for more than a hit or two against a challenging mob. They charge in stupid and sponge damage and die. They seem little more than cosmetic pets. I'm probably doing it wrong.

Grouping is exceedingly painful, often impossible. Never was able to play with my wife or guildies due to being stuck in overflow.

And on that topic, I hate having a "Home Server". Seems like a crappy attempt at getting you to shell out for real $ if your server selection turns out to be a bad choice. Stuck on a server that is full or worse? Too bad. (yes I know you can guest on other servers.) 

Only 5 characer slots? Good thing I'm focusing on a main, because my original intent was to have one of each class. That appears undoable unless again, spend $$$.

The Ugly:

No way to stopcast or am I missing something? No macros? UI customization appears lacking. Chat and dialog options lacking. Some animations need tightening. 

Overall, a fantasitc preview and a fun, albeit rocky, taste of what is to come. Can't wait for more reveals and excited to try out the remaining races. Will hopefully spend more time crafting and dungeoning in subsequent weekends.

Originally posted by Vesavius

Originally posted by Thodra

I loved running around and do whatever. Oh there's some people over there, let's see whats going on.

 

Thise made me chuckle lol.

You are right, the game rewards you for being nosey!

Hadn't thought of it like that :)

That's how i felt sometimes. And i liked it. You don't have to follow a quest, you can just run around and descover :-)

Originally posted by jamielikesyo

The good:

Seemless, painless interaction with a community to tackle tough mobs and objectives. Hell, I'd say 80-90% of my time was spent in a scrum of random players having a blast. It actually made me feel playing solo was a pointless, fruitless activity.

Fun, fast-paced combat system. Almost on par with WoW, will have the ability to surpass it with tweaks and fine tuning. Casting on the run was great, I love the mobility and freedom you are given.

Perfect starting areas, vast, deep city zones. Could spend hours exploring urban areas and still not see it all. Lions Arch is breathtaking.

Underwater combat and exploration that is not only painless but enjoyable. Never liked it in any other game untill now.

Excellent pvp matching system. You always have a chance as it is less about gear and more about skill and co-operative.

Guild research projects are a great touch. Cant wait to build a guild catapult!

 

The Bad:

Minor quibbles, but godamn I couldn't keep a ranger pet alive for more than a hit or two against a challenging mob. They charge in stupid and sponge damage and die. They seem little more than cosmetic pets. I'm probably doing it wrong.

Grouping is exceedingly painful, often impossible. Never was able to play with my wife or guildies due to being stuck in overflow.

And on that topic, I hate having a "Home Server". Seems like a crappy attempt at getting you to shell out for real $ if your server selection turns out to be a bad choice. Stuck on a server that is full or worse? Too bad. (yes I know you can guest on other servers.) 

Only 5 characer slots? Good thing I'm focusing on a main, because my original intent was to have one of each class. That appears undoable unless again, spend $$$.

 

The Ugly:

No way to stopcast or am I missing something? No macros? UI customization appears lacking. Chat and dialog options lacking. Some animations need tightening. 

 

Overall, a fantasitc preview and a fun, albeit rocky, taste of what is to come. Can't wait for more reveals and excited to try out the remaining races. Will hopefully spend more time crafting and dungeoning in subsequent weekends.

You can buy additional charater slots in the cahs shop i dont think ti will eb that expensive (definitly less than a monthly fee)

Homeworld is there so people dont switch to the winning WvW server every week or so

Yes pets die to fast but when you get a 2nd pet you can swith them out when they die and when u switch back to the dead one it full HP again so you dont need to revive it after every fight, Your heal also heals the pet a little bit aswell so you can heal it that way.

Should be less and less overflow as beta events go by (population spreading out)

I made it to level 14 with my Mesmer being a dad doesnt leave alot of time for gaming. I think the game is beatiful, its mechanics are solid and can only get better, most people on the beta forums were constructive and willing to better the game and I am sure the next event will have a much better build of the game. The mesmer in particular is a really great class to play with original mechanics, fun in both PVE and PVP although I did feel a little op during battlegrounds but it could just be that most people didnt really know what they were doing. I want to try out a few more classes for future events but Mesmer is definately a class I am looking forward to play come release.

The game run beatifully on my 2500k with a 6970 dektop but it also run comfortably on my i5-2430 with a 540m laptop, granted   for World vs World I will definately stick to my desktop but PVE as well as battlegrounds I had no problems running on my laptop. I am definately looking forward to the next beta event and hopefully we will learn of a release day in the meantime and cannot believe the content this game is offering for 50 euros, I feel it's a steal and can see myself spending years in Tyria :D

First of all, I've been playing pretty much only as a warrior, so can't really speak for the other professions.

Okay, so I started with PvE. The personal story only lasted till lvl 20, so I was done with that at lvl 15. I think the difficulty of the personal story was pretty good. I didn't get downed that much, but I got very close often enough. Also got defeated a couple of times. The story was also very fun. It was mostly 2 big parts so far, based on 2 of the questions at character creation. For example, as human you could pick commoner and lost sister, then you'd first help your friends at the bar, and later you'd look for your sister.

Open world PvE could be fun too, although it was often very easy. Most melee mobs were just soooo easy to kite. Even the melee bosses. You could solo the melee bosses really. And I think I've only seen 1 ranged boss (which kicked my ass pretty hard when I tried to solo her). It's even worse if you're with too many other players though. Just a big zergfest.

I think that in PvE there are definitely weapons that are better than others. As warrior the best set of weapons would probably be greatsword+rifle.

The greatsword does by far the most damage, both single target and AoE. It also grants a lot of mobility. You had Bladetrail, which was a whirlwind spin over a set distance. And there was Rush, which made you sprint a pretty big distance, followed by a melee attack. You could also throw your greatsword as a boomerang, which slows and damages the enemies it hits. Lastly there was Hundred Blades, the ultimate AoE damage ability. It roots you in place for a second or 2, while delivering many many melee slashes very fast.

The rifle was a single target ranged weapon. It had pretty simple abilities: A slow, some rapid firing ability, a vulnerability shot and a melee-range knockback. It was pretty much made for kiting and damaging a single target. Perfect for soloing melee bosses.

Also a note on the spear, an underwater weapon. It seemed pretty dull at first (low melee damage, a pull and a block), until I unlocked the fifth skill. A whirlwind attack similar to Bladetrail. However, if you had a target selected, you'd get body-blocked while using it. Thus staying in range of your enemy the whole duration. It did HUGE damage. More than enough to kill any regular enemy. Having all your enemies packed together = instant win. This will probably get fixed later.

My healing skill was simply the one with the shortest cooldown, which also removed conditions. My utility skills were Endure Pain, "For Great Justice" and either the signet for power or the one for endurance (dodging). Endure Pain was very useful to pop during Hundred Blades, so I wouldn't take damage while dealing a lot. "FGJ!" was just an AoE buff for power and precision. The power portion of it lasted as long as the cooldown. I usually didn't activate the signets, just kept em for the stats they gave.

While PvEing, at first I almost always used only the rifle. After a while though, at about lvl 18, I started to get pretty good with melee. Didn't take long before I hardly used my rifle anymore. The greatsword just does so much more damage than any ranged weapon can ever do, while still being able to take close to no damage using Endure Pain, Bladetrail and the weapon-throwing ability. Did still need the rifle for melee bosses though. Often their melee attacks were 1-shotters. It was just too dangerous.

I didn't PvP that much. I usually get bored with it pretty quickly as it's always the same thing over and over again (and I'm not really a PvP person anyways). Also WvW seemed pretty bland as it was mostly a zergfest on the fortress in the middle. In structured PvP there are only 2 maps, so after about 10 matches I had seen most of that too.

I did have fun though noticing how hard some people failed in structured PvP :P Like using a ranged weapon at me when I'm using a greatsword, but not even trying to kite me. Also had fun using Hundred Blades on someone while they did something similar to me, but with me popping Endure Pain, completely wasting their massive damage skill while getting full effect from my own.

I thought the thieves and mesmers were extremely annoying. They kept disappearing, and I'd have to go look for them. And in the case of the mesmers, I had to look for them while wading through a sea of completely identical clones. Luckily they were usually not smart enough to act like they're clones, making them easier to find.

So in the end, I did think structured PvP was a lot of fun, but only for a couple of matches. Then I'd want to do something else for a while again.

Now crafting. Gathering was not that bad this way. You didn't have to compete with others, and there was plenty around to never really have to look for it. However, you needed gathering tools, which were consumables. So you'd have to buy those every once in a while. And the vendors weren't always that easy to find. You also could use salvaging to turn salvage items and armor and weapons you won't use into materials.

Something I thought was weird was that as soon as you start playing in a 15-25 zone, you'd get the next tier of gathering nodes. For example, iron instead of copper. However, you can't use iron until you start making lvl 25 armor/weapons. So you still need copper for another 10 lvls. Which is almost nowhere to find in those zones. You'd only have salvaging left to get copper.

The crafting itself was pretty cool too. If you had to mass produce something (like bronze bars) it would speed up the process a lot. And after you had made some parts you needed to put them together, because you didn't have the recipe for the final items until you made them yourself. It was pretty obvious though. You had the cloth part of an item, the metal part of the item and some stats item.

Which stats item you used also decided the lvl of the item. Bronze items could be lvl 5-20 depending purely on which stats item you used with it. Just using something like small claws gave a lvl 5 item. Creating an insignia using those claws and some cloth however, and then using that for the final item produced a lvl 10 item.

I made use of the cash shop, but only by trading my 10 silver for 125 gems. Used those for a couple of transmutation stones. Didn't like the looks of my armor, so I switched it around at lvl 20, right after crafting a full set of lvl 20 Masterwork (green quality) armor. If you're wondering what the quality colors were, in order from best to worst: Red>Orange>Yellow>Green>Blue>White. And there was also purple for transmuted items.
I never saw anything better than green, having played till lvl 25.

Last but not least: the looks. It looked awesome. Everything looked very detailed. If you zoomed in on your armor with the right graphics settings (high shaders, shadows and textures, everything else can be low) you could actually see all the little metal pieces. And they were shiny. It looked pretty realistic. Also the huge cities, forests, seas and lakes were just absolutely beautiful. It's a shame though that I couldn't get any good high-res screenshots of water, it was kinda bugged out.

I think I played 24 hours straight, twice, with about 8 hours sleep in between. And I still want more. I can't wait to see explore mode dungeons. I want to see how tough that really is.

Some pictures of my norn warrior: Aryana Dragonheart
I would have taken more but time flew by so quickly :(
Also note that in-game it looked even better.

Originally posted by kujii
Never once in hours of play was I ever able to group with anyone I bought the game to play with....disappointing.  I have never had this in any "mmo."  Gems system wasn't working at all for me...never got the "2000 gems."  Server transfers...not working.  Wvw...full couldn't get in.  The inability to group with all of us who were so excited to play was really a let down.  We all agreed the game looks fun and has potential, but is one of the buggiest betas I have been in out of many.   From the publishers reviews and videos we were expecting to experience a better, further along  game. 

really all that happend to you and all the people you played with because I got the 2000 gems and opened bag slots and got keys for the chest, also I transfered servers and had 4 of my guild members transfer. Oh and not sure if you know this or not but you could have sent them a guild invite even with them on a diffrent server. Sorry you and all your friends had this problem but besides the lag and server drops I didn't have many issue's at all. Made it to lvl 18 and WvW a lot and finished the story line up to lvl 19 because thats as far as it would let me go.

Originally posted by kdchan

What i dislike Grind to leveling up i... BLAH BLAH BLAH... weapons to have a chance.  I'm not impressed by this game, i don't know if it work as intended but if the things stay like now i will drop the game because i don't find it fun at all.

Was kdchan playing the same game as the rest of us?

---

Originally posted by Elifia
I didn't PvP that much. I usually get bored with it pretty quickly as it's always the same thing over and over again (and I'm not really a PvP person anyways).

---

Originally posted by wormywyrm

Originally posted by kdchan

What i dislike Grind to leveling up i... BLAH BLAH BLAH... weapons to have a chance.  I'm not impressed by this game, i don't know if it work as intended but if the things stay like now i will drop the game because i don't find it fun at all.

Was kdchan playing the same game as the rest of us?

Maybe he was playing Tera by mistake.

Note: just joking, dont kill me.

I tried all the races avaible i must say i did pretty well with Norh Warrior, the game is amazing the graphics are superb and its so much fun you don´t even know your grinding because the game makes you do stuff that in your mind its a goal so it isn´t grinding.

One thing tho is that all of us have to have somekind of Ranged Weapon i per example had to use rifle because i was getting owned by veterans so fast on melee.

Pvp is the best i´v seen the 5 vs 5 and the WvW is just so much fun and competetive.

So from 0 to 5 i give this game a 4.5 they need to tune some animations that feel clunky and they also need to not make us doing the heart quests all over again its anoying seriusly.

It felt natural playing the game, logging in.

I was saying to my friend: "I'm playing this game as if I could log in every day, and I keep forgetting it's a beta weekend an I won't be able to log in tomorrow. Damn.".

Clearly a MMO I see myself stick to for quite some time, and with a bit of ironing here and there it should be awesome. I can't wait for the release.

I had a great time, and I LOVE this game!

I can't wait for release. It plays so smooth and natural for me....

No, I'm not describing a beer.