1961

It sounds like you’re trying to play this like a standard Diku MMO and it’s not. You do not target friendly players and manage their healthbars - everyone has their own self-heals and a responsibility to take care of themselves. If you would like to contribute in a support role, equip and utilize your boons. Heals, in most cases, are AE targeted. Watch the screen, not the healthbars, to see where the AE heals are needed. Did a group of players just get smashed by a giant hammer or a meteor? Toss an AE heal there.

Other ways you can contribute to a group is the use of fields and combo effects. Do you see some rangers and rifle wielding warriors/engineers shooting at the enemy? Throw down a wall of fire or other effect in front of them to ignite their projectiles. Is someone trying to run away from a pack of mobs or a boss? Give them a swiftness boon, cripple the enemies, or use knockbacks if you have it.

Try to approach combat more from a FPS perspective than a Diku perspective. Not in the terms of skillset, but in terms of what you look for to understand what’s going on. They (ArenaNet) want you paying attention to the actual action on the screen, not healthbars, combat log messages, etc. This can oftentimes lead to a much more chaotic experience, but if you stick with it you start being able to visually tell what’s going on.

Regarding Dynamic Events in general, keep in mind a few things: With a BWE or the release, there’s going to be an insane amount of people crammed into the newbie areas. I’m sure the newbie zone dynamic events aren’t designed to require a whole lot of skilled group coordination to complete as well, as the majority of people in those zones are trying to get their feet wet and just a handle on the game. It’s pretty difficult for a lot of people to break out of the typical MMO mindset of standing in front a creature and trading blows with it. Having to position yourself intelligently, dodge incoming blows, and learning the various classes and weapon loadouts on TOP of having to coordinate with a large group would probably be overwhelming all right at the first.

Anyway, that’s just my two cents from my own experience with the game.

1962

Awesome post, sir. Go get ArenaNet to go make this required reading before playing the game. Even though I know I’m not supposed to approach this in the Diku mindset, apparently it is a very hard habit to break (I’ve actually been playing MUDs since '93… so I’m also old). Despite knowing, it took your post for the lightbulb to at least mildly flicker. You are entirely right - I was missing the fact that buffs/heals aren’t targeted, but rather AoE or self-cast and that the focus is on the environment and action, and not on a specific player. There is a LOT happening on the screen, and I haven’t played enough to learn to adapt to it yet or be that environmentally aware. I’m also likely not yet cognizant of when the buffs/heals are being sent my way in return, either, making it feel much more sterile than maybe it really is.

Part of this is likely being in a starter area, where we are all doing it wrong.

1963

Doesn’t that mean you can’t do your story quest?

1964

You can still do them, you’d just have to travel back to the human zones. It’s not like that’s really hard or inconvenient to do though.

1965

I suppose that’s true, since you can instant-travel to any marker at any time. It just seems a bit disjointed, since staying in your homeland you naturally get into a pattern of personal story quest, get a level or two, personal story, repeat.

1966

The game is unplayable for me unfortunately. Now I’m getting dropped within a minute of getting in. It keeps telling me I’ve lost connection, but my internet connection is still good.

Not sure what to think about this but it’s unlikely I’ll buy it if I can’t even get it give me more than a five minute play session during the last beta weekend. I’ll have to wait for a free trail account to try again. Disappointing.

1967

I’ve had random disconnections and crashes too, which didn’t happen with previous BWEs. Not sure what’s going on there except that the servers are getting hammered.

I’ll be more disappointed if they can’t get this thing better optimized by release. It still runs like utter crap in big battles and sieges in WvW. I love the hell out of this game, but my fun factor will take a hit if I’m always running at 10fps when any kind of real action breaks out.

1968

Yeah, I see what you’re saying. I definitely want to play alts, so I might as well have one for each race and fully experience the game from all perspectives anyway. :D

1969

I bet they are getting hammered. What that says to me is I don’t want to be playing at release.

I did just get in a longer session, about 15-20 minutes. It dropped me again finally. There’s just no way I can justify buying this game unless I’m assured of better performance. I’ll have to wait for a free trial. I do like what I’ve seen so far at least.

1970

Is it me or are the Ranger’s pets mostly worthless?

1971

Yeah, they need work. Keep in mind you can train more than one pet and then when one dies, you can cycle him out for a fresh pet while the other pet rests up.

1972

Is it GPU accelerated yet?

1973

The ranger class overall seems pretty weak.

1974

seems like it, it’s super, super smooth for me even with everything on max in crowded areas. Certainly was not before.

1975

try not to think of your pet as anything other than extra damage. Don’t pull with it either, they don’t really tank. This isn’t WoW style ranger/hunter.

1976

I haven’t really poked around too much so can anyone explain how a ranger trains a second pet? I moused over various icons in the UI but didn’t see anything obvious although I’m sure it is. But every time I started to look around for it something came up and I’d end up playing around for another hour until I thought to look it up again…

1977

One issue with the way the game is designed is that the focus on action, positioning, and reaction makes any noticeable lag kill a lot of the fun for many classes. On the bright side, I’ve played in several battles, some even fairly large, with hardly any lag at all. This at least gives me faith that they’ve capable of it. Sadly, this weekend there have been plenty of times where the exact opposite was true and the game really suffers for it.

1978

Yeah, I stopped using them for that early on. I’ve just gotten tired of “rezzing” my cat pretty much every fight where there is more than 2 enemies.

No problems running the game. I went about 3-4 hours straight earlier this afternoon before quitting. AMD X4 955, 8gb ram and an ATI 5850 card (with old 11.9 drivers).

1979

To get more pets, you need to find a “Juvenile” of the type to tame. Not sure exactly how it works after that. I saw my friend do it.

As for stability, I had a couple crashes mainly when other people did, otherwise it was quite stable and smooth. My friend I was playing with also did not have any problems except when the server did.

1980

I dunno , but the engie turret you can drop really sucks also, most of the time it seems to fire at the ground. :|