What day and time do the beta weekends usually start? I just got the beta key and my daughter wants to try it out.
If you were going to have a second game to play with another family member what would be a good combo? And same question if it was three family members playing together (3 copies of the game etc)?
KevinC
1702
Beta weekend events only happen on specific weekends, typically every month or so. The June BWE just finished last week, so don’t expect another BWE until sometime in July. They usually start at noon PDT on Fridays and run until midnight Sunday.
When you ask for combos, are you referring to classes? With the break away from the Holy Trinity and given the flexibility of each class, I’d say that’s a difficult question to answer decisively and more a matter of playstyle preference of the players involved. You can make a beefy warrior or a ranged warrior or a warrior who supports the group with banners/shouts… and a lot of that can be changed on the fly with a weapon swap. The classes are very flexible and versatile and I haven’t played enough to be able to say “Class X and Class Y make a good combo”. I played with a friend during BWE1 and we had a lot of fun with every class combo we tried!
Friday at 12PM PST or 3PM EST. BWE 3 will probably be the first weekend of July.
JM1
1704
Any class can work really well with any other class. 3 people of the same class can work really well together, too. There’s a lot of inherent flexibility in the design.
I spent a lot of my time playing my ranger alongside another ranger. We were pretty different, enough so that you’d never confuse the two of us from our playstyles.
Arenanet sure has been busy updating the client. Apparently 1.5GB and around 10,000 files have been patched since yesterday.
/me thinks they’re up to something.
Thank you for all the input.
My daughter usually liked playing a healer type in other MMOs. She is planning on trying out an engineer.
walTer
1707
Gamestop has June 26th as a release date now…not sure if that is new or a hold over from the previous made up release date.
I know it is not ready but I do wish it were.
Guardian is closest to a pure healer, fwiw.
Phred
1709
I seem to be alone in looking at 5 character slots and 5 races and expecting that each race’s area would have enough content to level you so you can raise one class/race per area and have to go off and do content you’ve already done on another race then.
There’s a dev quote I read somewhere that they expect players to do at least one of the side leveling methods (crafting, pvp, exploring) if they’re going to keep up without any grinding. Far too lazy to try and find it though.
I think if you intend to only do one races content with each character, with absolutely no crafting, and no exploring, and no pvp, you are very definitely in the minority though. I really wouldn’t expect them to balance the game around that as everyone who does want to do more than that would level far too quickly. You can argue that the downleveling makes that not matter, but it’s really not the same. I spent plenty of time downleveled, but it doesn’t take away the extra skills and weapon unlocks etc that you have. A level 18 downleveled to 4 is just not the same as a true level 4.
They certainly can’t remove the xp from pvp considering the number of very vocal people who want to level that way, with as little pve as possible. Indeed I believe they’ve said they’re looking to bring up xp rate from pvp, and they’ve started to include skill points challenges in WvW as well. They’ve already stated you can reach max level strictly by crafting if you max every crafting skill. And if they take out xp for exploring and completing zones I’ll be very sad.
KevinC
1711
A water attuned Elementalist felt the most like a healer to me.
JM1
1712
Yeah, a Guardian just feels like a support character some of the time. It’s still an ass-kicking machine when it feels like it.
Phred
1713
You are confusing me with another poster. I never said I don’t explore or craft as I do. I don’t really see it as exploring when talking to scouts plasters big go here hearts everywhere though but I digress. However, at least in the early stages, some of the areas are a bit under-content. The human one in particular. If a few more world quests would start up I think it would be a lot better but even knowing where they mostly are I was unable to keep a second character caught up and was getting my ass kicked because all the hearts near my level were gone. This is much less of a problem in the Norn and charr areas.
KevinC
1714
Exploring, in terms of xp, is not uncovering hearts. It’s opening waypoints and points of interest.
Here’s an awesome video detailing why there’s plenty of things to do to justify the leveling rate.
The real reason people are whining about it is simply because it isn’t being conveyed properly in the game. This is something Arenanet should be working on going forward.
People are finishing the renown hearts and exploring the zone in its entirety and seeing they’re 3 or 4 levels short of being enough to go to the next zone. It is not because the zone doesn’t have enough content; it’s because the player is convinced that they have.
Many also are still living in a WoW mindset of not EVER going back to a place they previously visited because it gives no benefit to them when that is simply not true and rather should be encouraged. I had a level 20 character gaining good experience and loot from level 10 dynamic events. And due to the nature of dynamic events, a player isn’t going to see everything their first time through a zone.
So, leveling appropriately consists of fully exploring the zone, finishing all the renown hearts, and completing most of the dynamic events. Essentially, Guild Wars 2 is rewarding you for backtracking whereas in other MMOs you would have a “been there, done that” feeling with no rewards involved.
So they need to improve the user interface.
Reldan
1717
Actually I think it’s more of a player education kind of thing. The things that are worth experience are laid out in the UI, but I don’t think there’s anything that really tells you what you ought to be doing because I think they want you to figure it out for yourself (which is refreshing, and apparently works better on some people than on others).
In the full game it sounds like there will be five separate starting zones, and it’s pretty trivial to travel your character to a different one and run some events/hearts there for more XP. This assumes you don’t want to craft/explore/WvW as other perfectly valid ways to bolster the XP gain and prefer to just do events.
Scouts show you all the hearts only in the next couple of zones. Later on, I’ve found some hearts that have never been revealed by scouts.
In addition, those hearts are not the only thing to look for when exploring. There are dynamic events in remote or hidden areas, there are bosses, “quests”, chests with loot, etc.
Take the human zone you mentioned, for example. In the very first zone, there is a heart in the bottom left corner. You get there and you are supposed to fight off bandits waves, find some birds in the bushes and so on. You could do that for a few minutes, complete the heart and move to the next one. Or you could go into the cave nearby, fight a bunch of bandits there, kill their leader for a very nice chunk of exp and some very nice loot (he is very tough though, you need several people to help you), explore the rest of the cave, mine some copper, IIRC harvest some mushrooms, etc. Just hanging out in that area brought me probably almost a level worth of exp.
Dynamic nature of the events can screw one up a bit, if you get unlucky and miss all the events, but only in the short term, if you keep exploring you will encounter dynamic events and it will average out.
I leveled up 4 human characters into their teens IIRC, only used one of them in PvP and never ever moved any of them into other races’ areas. They leveled up just fine without any grinding.
It actually took me a while before realizing that renown hearts and dynamic events were two entirely different systems. Apart from the unique quest available at each renown heart, they also serve to direct players to where dynamic events may spawn. But that does not necessarily mean a dynamic event will always be available there. Some dynamic events also happen off the beaten track so to speak, away from the renown hearts. So, it’s really no surprise that there are problems with the leveling speed when the leveling systems aren’t properly and sufficiently explained in game.
Jeez, what happened to just playing the game, why does the game need to “sufficiently and properly” explain how to level up as fast as possible?
Do we really need a big blinking red dot on the map “Dynamic event is in progress here”?
