I’ve been light on the GW2 posts recently. In fact, I’ve been light on posts in general, as I’ve been working a full-time English cover job at a local secondary school and haven’t really been in the right mood/frame of mind to blog. The three unfinished posts about completely disparate things in my draft folder can attest to this.

(Posts on Torchlight 2, more Diablo 3, thoughts on the announced RIFT expansion, and my impressions of the newly-released E3 screenshots and concept art of Final Fantasy XIV v2.0 coming soon to a blog near you!)

With the second beta weekend event looming, a damned interesting Reddit AMA with GW2 devs this evening, a ‘Big Beta Weekend Preview‘ blogpost from ANet on Tuesday 5th, as well as today’s info on world servers, I figure I’d get some of my thoughts down on the changes and info given over the last week, as well as my own plans for the second beta event.

The Big Changes

The addition of local chat and local chat bubbles adds a bit more life to areas within the immediate vicinity, and allows me to spot when someone I’ve just passed actually says something to me rather than it getting buried in the chat log.

Subtle UI changes like the moving of the dodge bar and the addition of cooldown ‘rings’ around boon/condition icons help once again provide a superlative visual feedback system that allows me to (mostly) focus on the middle of the screen rather than on my skill bar. The change to the map shape from circle to square seems a bit weird in my opinion, as I’m used to circular maps, but I guess Guild Wars had a square map too…

I’m intrigued by what Jon Peters likes to call “the sense of hitting“, especially in light of my criticisms of The Secret World‘s combat. Guild Wars 2‘s combat already feels amazing, so if they can make it even more visceral…

Being able to customise your key bindings is obviously a biggie for a lot of people, including myself. I can finally bind keys with modifiers, giving my poor stretchy fingers a bit of a rest (especially after playing ARPGs for the last couple of weeks) — I may even be able to use my Guardian’s virtues properly now, as I can rebind them from F1-3 where I kept missing them.

One of the more controversial changes is the way Utility and Elite skills are now tiered. I must confess, since I’ve been working so much the last week or so, I’ve missed any real community nerdraging over this change, but I’ve seen it mentioned a few times in passing.

I’m not overly concerned with the changes myself.

I read on the Reddit AMA this evening that the change was facilitated to allow players time to adjust and experiment with the full range of skills, not grabbing a handful they really wanted and never touching the others. I actually quite like this change, I think, mainly because when I was picking skills for my Guardian I had to force myself to choose a range of skills for testing purposes: I’d have just gone with all the Spirit Weapons otherwise. As it was, I found quite a few uses for skills I’ve have never considered taking, so having to spend a set number of skill points in a tier to unlock the next tier of skills is, I think, fine by me. I’ll feed back on that after the beta weekend.

There are undoubtedly many more changes between BWE1 and BWE2′s game clients — it’s certainly downloaded a good chunk of data this last week. I’m hoping we’ll get something in the way of patch notes so we can really see the nitty gritty changes, but if we don’t I’ll at least have the fun of exploring those as well as exploring Tyria.

My Plans for BWE2

The Beta Weekend Preview post told us we get to keep our characters from BWE1. I have oddly mixed feelings about this, as I have this strange disliking for deleting characters. But I think I will. I’m gonna dump the stuff off my Guardian (including his bags) into the shared stash so I can kit out other characters, then delete everyone (except maybe the Necro because she can make bags).

I’ll then create a thief, a ranger, and whichever other professions I’ve not tried yet… In fact, it might just be them. My main focus this weekend will be on seeing how the Necromancer has changed, however. I’ve come back to the idea that Necro should be my primary character, despite having silly amounts of fun on the Guardian last time.

The fact that I still can’t decide is a real testament to the variety of play styles presented by these different Professions.

I also plan on trying out the new Mystic Forge in Lion’s Arch, as well as actually exploring Lion’s Arch properly. My only experience with the city last time around was falling off the edge of the Asura Gate platform and into the water, then having to swim round and find a ramp up so I could head to the other Gate I was trying to find in the first place.

Hopefully the game will run a tad smoother in the big cities this time around. The Reddit AMA certainly suggests that some optimisation has been done, including where multiple cores on CPUs are concerned, but it’s an ongoing process so I’m not expecting miracles. And, to be honest, it didn’t run badly last time.

I’m also going to check out the Cash Shop this time around. I had a cursory glance at it in the last BWE and was unsurprised when it turned out to not be game breaking or P2W. According to the Beta Weekend Preview post, there have been some changes in terms of the cash shop layout and what it sells, so I’ll definitely be taking notes and feeding back on that too.

Due to real life commitments, I’m not going to be around for the actual start of the beta since it starts at 8pm BST on Friday and I’m going out for a birthday pissup that night, so my first experience of the BWE2 gameplay is likely to be through a haze of inebriation. But thats fine. Even while drunk I probably have better hand-eye coordination than the average [MW3/BF3/TERA] player.

Yeah, I went there.

I can’t remember what world I was on last time — I think it was Vabbi but I’m not sure — but hopefully I’ll see some of you in game!

~Demajen

PS. You may have noticed already, but if not, I did a guest post for GWOnline this week, where I talk about Community, the Internet, and Guild Wars 2. Check it out at GWOnline.net »

PPS. That jibe about MW3/BF3/TERA players was a joke… My twitch gaming skills suck. Badly. They are to blame for me never PvPing.