Originally posted by Lord.Bachus
Was it just me, or was the majorrity of beta players just bashing buttons without having a clue about their skills (except for the damage part) The depth of the skill system is far beyound most players grasp.

I have to say I am one of those button smashing people. Although this time around I was starting to get the hang of how to do the combat. I was moving more and timing skill use. It takes time to break the habits learned in the last 14 years of online gaming.

It took me a couple hours to figure things out during teh first BWE.

First I tried a wow mentality, trying to think of a perfect damage rotation. I got killed a lot of didn't feel like I was doing much damage.

Then I tried a....we'll call it Diablo mentality. Find something powerful, spam it to death. The only death I spammed it to was my own, usually horribly fast.

Then I stopped and started thinking about status synergy. OK, this is an evasive move. This increases the damage the enemy takes, get that on them first...cripple that guy to give me a couple seconds to finish off this one...crap I have bleed on me, need to find a way to remove that...

I started living longer, doing more damage, and having a LOT more fun. The mashing stage will happen, but I think over time players will adapt.

Originally posted by Lord.Bachus
Was it just me, or was the majorrity of beta players just bashing buttons without having a clue about their skills (except for the damage part) The depth of the skill system is far beyound most players grasp.

People are used to blowing most skills on cooldown and when you haven't yet learned a game, a profession, the skills and their uses, it's no surprise that many people fall back on old habits.

I found that when learning a profession in GW2, it's actually better to leave your "1" skill on auto attack, focus on your environment and enemy, master movement and dodge timing, taking what additional moments you can spare to actually read the tooltips for your skills, only using them if they actually make sense. Start incorporating additional skills a bit at a time, learning when to use them, making note of when you "wasted" them with a poorly thought out button mash, mastering a certain weapon set before moving onto the next.

There are some skills that can often be used on cooldown, with out much being lost for the lack of careful timing, but some are pretty pointless to spam.

I think the way wepon skills unlock is a blessing and a curse, depending on the player. Achievers can be so focused on unlocking all their weapons they don't really start to learn any of them with any depth until all are unlocked. Others may take an approach to master one weapon, before unlocking another, only to find that they have to go back to less challenging opponents when it's time to unlock a new weapon. At first I thought the unlocks were to fast, not allowing enough time to learn one skill before unlocking another, now I think they are too slow and that you don't really start to learn a weapon until all the skills are unlocked.

In any event, there is a lot of depth here and things are different in so many ways from waht long time players in the genre are used to, that unlearning old habits just adds to the learning curve for GW2.

Thank goodness the game itself is so rewarding. Add these challanges and learning curve to a ho hum quest grind game and you'd probbly find people a lot less patient.

My biggest problem is not knowing  what the other players can do - often I burnt my knock /immobilizes and the other player used a similar skill or some escape mechanism.
Additionally in PvE some of the weapon skills can potentially be used on recharge for the damage part or work well together like the warrior rifle brutal shot followed by volley. And what exactly are you supposed to save skills like volley and hundred blades for? You use then whenever you can.
And PvE can be and is challenging, fighting 2 mobs without using your resources decently will get you killed. Fighting more than 2 mobs on your own, well, that can be tricky.
 

I personally don't care what others do too much during the betas. I have been playing a Warrior and when my heal still has not cooled down, and I'm low on health, I run. Cue "The Ballad of Brave Sir Robin"!  I bravely run away! 

The problem is though is the WoW players playing, and not learning from awesome forums like this one before hand. Unfortunatly, I think that if they aren't educated on using their skills correctly and they die a lot, they will become upset and quit playing. 

Originally posted by Amjoco

I personally don't care what others do too much during the betas. I have been playing a Warrior and when my heal still has not cooled down, and I'm low on health, I run. Cue "The Ballad of Brave Sir Robin"!  I bravely run away! 

The problem is though is the WoW players playing, and not learning from awesome forums like this one before hand. Unfortunatly, I think that if they aren't educated on using their skills correctly and they die a lot, they will become upset and quit playing. 

"I personally don't care what others do too much during the betas. I have been playing a Warrior and when my heal still has not cooled down, and I'm low on health, I run. Cue "The Ballad of Brave Sir Robin"! I bravely run away!

The problem is though is the WoW players playing, and not learning from awesome forums like this one before hand. Fortunatly, I think that if they aren't educated on using their skills correctly and they die a lot, they will become upset and quit playing. "

There we go, fixed the spelling error

Originally posted by Wolvards

Originally posted by Amjoco

I personally don't care what others do too much during the betas. I have been playing a Warrior and when my heal still has not cooled down, and I'm low on health, I run. Cue "The Ballad of Brave Sir Robin"!  I bravely run away! 

The problem is though is the WoW players playing, and not learning from awesome forums like this one before hand. Unfortunatly, I think that if they aren't educated on using their skills correctly and they die a lot, they will become upset and quit playing. 

 

"I personally don't care what others do too much during the betas. I have been playing a Warrior and when my heal still has not cooled down, and I'm low on health, I run. Cue "The Ballad of Brave Sir Robin"! I bravely run away!

The problem is though is the WoW players playing, and not learning from awesome forums like this one before hand. Fortunatly, I think that if they aren't educated on using their skills correctly and they die a lot, they will become upset and quit playing. "

 

There we go, fixed the spelling error

 

so clever yet so stupid at the same time

you still spelled it wrong....

I have no idea how to use the skills yet, I was trying to figure it out but got caught up, in the few hours that I did play in the Stress Test, with trying to do everything and see everything I could that I missed everything haha. In the next beta I am making a point to not just run around like a crazy person and learn how to play before I head out and try to take on the world. Everyone around me died alot and wasnt paying attention to all the aoe from the mobs in the DE's and just keeled over pretty fast.

It is great though that they made the game harder then most games, as you can't run around and collect 5 or 6 mobs get them beating on you and aoe them all in 3 hits like a hero, you have to take each battle as it is because one mob can kill you if you don't know what your doing lol.

Originally posted by Lord.Bachus
Was it just me, or was the majorrity of beta players just bashing buttons without having a clue about their skills (except for the damage part) The depth of the skill system is far beyound most players grasp.

I think some MMO's have let people become lazy button mashers, but GW2 will bring them back into line!

Its a brave decision by Anet to make the combat more compelling and by its nature harder than other tripe, but I believe its a decision that will pay off.  There are so many strategies each class can have its really awesome to finally have a current MMO with this kind of depth. Plus when you layer class strategy with WvW strategy it becomes an orgy of MMO/RTS/FPS awesomeness.

Guild Wars 2 Fanboys sure got the snob thing down...

Originally posted by Atlan99

Originally posted by Master10K

Originally posted by Atlan99

*snip*

I don't remember even a quarter of the abilities on my Operative or Powertech  in SWTOR. I could resubscribe tomorrow and still pwn face.

I don't know it just seems like people are trying to make the game sound more complicated than it is. If moving and using skill shots are hard then I guess this game is hard. I've played enough console games in my day that make GW2 seem like child's play in comparison.

Love to get into a match with you next beta. You on EU servers?

Darkhaven.

You would probably pwn me the first few times easy. I spent a majority of the first BWE in WvWvW. Spent the majority of the stress test trying to level a guardian.

A smarter way might be to just play the competitive PvP to find the class I like. 

Wasn't Darkhaven the server that the Gamebreaker.tv guild went in and dominated the entire WvW map. Wonder if I can join you in sPvP from different regional servers?

Well I probably will pawn you. Not because I've had more experience. On the contrary I've been most of my beta time in WvW with my Engineer. However after my stress test experience with the Necro, in sPvP, I guess I have inate PvP pawning skills that can be transfered from any PvP game.

Reading through the TSW forums, the one thing i can be glad about is never needing to deal with a "rotation" again.  GW2 replaces rotation with situation.  

Watching other people play in videos is painful sometimes. Some of my favorite videos, the videos I like to watch to get a feel for other elements besides gameplay, show how absolutely horrible people can be at playing the game.

There are some nice videos of solid gameplay out there, but I feel like the vast majority of videos have painfully hard to watch people behind the keyboard.

The OP is probably correct. As new player you start continuously unlocking skills for a while for your new looted/rewarded weapons. So when the combat becomes chaotic in a large event, it is not easy to keep track of your new learned skills. Not everyone takes their time to step back for a sec to read the weaponskill descriptions.

I've noticed that as new warrior you keep getting different weapontypes that are slightly better and are usable for your profession, so the unlocking of weaponskills keeps going on. Warrior can use almost every weapon type. In my first beta weekend, I just checked the weaponskills in hero window and chose 2 weapons based on that and just used those untill I got used to playing them. Then I moved onto unlocking the next. This was to prevent it from becoming too overwhelming.

Originally posted by Master10K

 

Wasn't Darkhaven the server that the Gamebreaker.tv guild went in and dominated the entire WvW map. Wonder if I can join you in sPvP from different regional servers?

 

Well I probably will pawn you. Not because I've had more experience. On the contrary I've been most of my beta time in WvW with my Engineer. However after my stress test experience with the Necro, in sPvP, I guess I have inate PvP pawning skills that can be transfered from any PvP game.

LoL. Was just playing it.

As far as Darkhaven, I heard about it on the Darkfall forums. I figured joining a server with a dedicated PvP community  would be a good idea. I had though Gamebreaker was on a different server. However looking at their forums it is possible their guild was indeed on our server. We did own the whole map this last stress test. The score was 60k+ to about 10k+ for the other servers.

The first WvWvW we won our first match up. Second we lost closely to a Euro server that got 30k lead while we were sleeping and we won the last pairing of WvWvW BWE.

Originally posted by dontadow

Reading through the TSW forums, the one thing i can be glad about is never needing to deal with a "rotation" again.  GW2 replaces rotation with situation.  

Or having the build 5 resources on the target before you can do anything meaningful to it.

As far as the OP goes, The stress test was the second time that most people actually got to play the game. You can't exactly expect most people to just jump in and know what they are doing. Once the game launches, I expect to see a lot less button mashing and more finesse from some people. Although the majority will still probably button mash, just like they do in other games.

Originally posted by Atlan99

Originally posted by Master10K

 

Wasn't Darkhaven the server that the Gamebreaker.tv guild went in and dominated the entire WvW map. Wonder if I can join you in sPvP from different regional servers?

 

Well I probably will pawn you. Not because I've had more experience. On the contrary I've been most of my beta time in WvW with my Engineer. However after my stress test experience with the Necro, in sPvP, I guess I have inate PvP pawning skills that can be transfered from any PvP game.

LoL. Was just playing it.

As far as Darkhaven, I heard about it on the Darkfall forums. I figured joining a server with a dedicated PvP community  would be a good idea. I had though Gamebreaker was on a different server. However looking at their forums it is possible their guild was indeed on our server. We did own the whole map this last stress test. The score was 60k+ to about 10k+ for the other servers.

The first WvWvW we won our first match up. Second we lost closely to a Euro server that got 30k lead while we were sleeping and we won the last pairing of WvWvW BWE.

I'm on Darkheaven too. We completely dominated WvWvW. We had the blue team hiding behind the invulnerability buff near their asura gate. It was pretty fun, even with low FPS and the occasional lag spike.