First Beta Weekend

[morgwath]

I REALLY enjoyed the first weekend. In fact I went ahead and stayed up till 2am CST until the servers went down. And as with Guildwars 1 beta weekends, Arenanet went out with a bang. About 2 hours before servers went done a system message said to meet in the Norn starting area for an event. So I sat around in there for awhile then with one hour left a new "event" started...[Group Event] The Great Critter Hunt. since we were in the starting area our levels were all knocked down lvl 3. And critters started attacking.

There were "Suspicious looking barrels" that you could bust open to reveal "salivating raccoons", and tougher lvl 8 "Veteran Vicious Pig" running around. Then everyone decided to climb to the top of the hill where you kill a giant Wyrm and low and behold a "Legendary White Bunny". EVERYONE in the zone crammed in and attacked that thing(there's a nice STRESS TEST for Arenanet).

Then I got curious if the harder part of the starting area had stuff, so i ported up further norther (lvl 10 stuff) and sure enough lvl 19"Champion Bloodthirsty Black Moa"'s were running around killing people. Large groups were attacking them left and right. After 40min of killing all these the server's went down.

So i took some photos in case anyone wanted to see. a lot of them are hard to make out cause of 20-30people all casting spells and stuff. You'll see my norn laying down a lot....those things were tough. Finally my armor broke and we had to clear out a couple moas so that we could res the armor repair guy.

I also had a couple screenshots of a HUGE event in the swamps(unrelated to the finale') that was fun. It was earlier on sunday. After a couple events there was a group event against a shadow behemoth. the thing was HUGE. I couldn't get it all in the screen.

And there are a couple screenshots of me and Loggahead fighting a Grawl shaman, and then one of my little thief next to his giant Norn.

Also got a couple where i used different tonics. one is me as a pink moa, and another as a white owl.

Here is the link to the screenshots:
s87.photobucket.com/albums/k149/josh_rose/GW2Beta/

[Loggahead]

Awesome! That was definitely a great weekend! The finale sounded crazy! Awesome pics! Come to think of it, I didn't take a single screenshot!? Really!? FAIL!

I had been wondering what was up with the swamp. Every time I went there it said that the swamp was dormant... sounded pretty foreboding if you asked me...

Had a great time playing co-op! I can't wait till we can rock GW as Smoke & Fire with time limits!

[morgwath]

the swamp was cool cause there were portals opened (fitting since the Temple of Ages is under there) and part of the quests there was to close them. But when you did an Aataxe (however you spell it, the big guys from the underworld) would pop out of it to fight. After the big group event the shadow behemoth dropped a giant chest full of loot. got a gem or two for armor and some other stuff (4-5 things total).

I found the entrance to an instance i believe at one point. I talked to some girl in...beetletun (i think) and she said to get 5 people and then go in. not sure what was there or if it was even playable in beta.

I really liked how you didn't have to be in a group to do "group" stuff. Just walk up and start helping out and you get credit for it. Also noticed that I would loot something and someone else who helped kill it would be able to loot it also. Same thing with mining nodes.

I really enjoyed playing the necro. the thief seemed cool but i didn't mess with it much. I played a guardian for the last bit, got him to lvl 10. He has SOO many weapon options (2h hammer, 2h sword, 1h sword, 1h mace, and for offhand, focus, torch, shield) all with their own skills/spells of course. The only thing about the guardian was that I looked and felt like a big tank with a few healing skills but then i found myself always dying. Think my necro took more hits than him.

[Loggahead]

In regards to the Guardian, I felt the same exact way about my warrior who I got up to 12. Notice when we took on the fire shaman that as soon as I broke out my hammer and went in for melee, I was insta-dead? I couldn't get a stun/knockdown or anything in before going down. I never quite figured out how melee works. With my warrior, if I ever took on more than 2 mobs, I would get ganked and couldn't heal myself fast enough.

I started reading and researching the beta forums and it seems unanimous that everyone is talking about melee broken and that all toons end up going ranged. This is especially a problem in big events. I noticed in big events that everyone stayed their distance and use raned attacks / spells to take down the mobs or bosses. Any time a melee class would go in, they'd go down almost instantly.

Not sure if we were all missing something or just not doing something correctly. However, when up close in melee in a big even like the shaman it was way too chaotic to see what was happening, much less react to it (like, dodge, etc.).

I'm curious to see how/if Arenanet responds to melee. It's funny you mentioned that without me baiting it out of you... Means you noticed too, and you probably did like me and chalked it up to not understanding the mechanics.