I’m BACK! With the help of Leah Rivera from the Content Design Team at ArenaNet (Personal Story and Dynamic Events), I was able to either playtest or answer many of the questions you all had. If you can come with any other questions I might have randomly been able to answer for you in my 8 or so hours of playtesting these past two days, send me a PM or post it in this thread and we’ll see if somebody can help you out.
1. Strafe/run casting animations: It’s as you can expect; if you have a 180 degree view of something, you can fire a ranged or melee attack at it, like WoW to give an example. Moves that are determinate based on your current facing orientation, like Engineer Flamethrower’s 1-shot, are literally based on your frontal cone, meaning you DO have to S-walk if you want to move away from something and keep it in the cone.
2. Detailed ground targeting examination; Ground targeting feels like a dream. You can still pan the camera with right-click hold down, and movement is the same. Also, there are a few different ways to fire them off;
1) First, you can do the obvious and click the skill with the mouse, hover over the battlefield and left-click again
2) Second, you can press the hotkey for the skill (like 2 or 7), hover over the battle field and left-click to fire it off
3) Third, and in my opinion something EVERY game should have, you can press the hotkey for the move and the targeting circle is already placed where your mouse is, and pressing the hotkey button AGAIN will cause you to fire it there.
Using option 3, you can preset where you want a ground-targeted AoE to go before you press any hotkeys, and then double tap the hotkey to fire it exactly where you need it. But yes, camera panning and movement is still perfect while the targeting circle is available. Great question!
3. What’s up with energy?; In the demo, I asked Leah about energy, and she said essentially what we were expecting, that the game needed a long-term resource. When I showed her that the Energy Potions have like a 3 second cooldown and fill 60% of the bar she exclaimed “OH no, they definitely have a longer cooldown, that’s totally changed” so basically Energy isn’t as meaningless as I had first thought.
4. Gamepads?; Leah said there weren’t any plans for this, but was happy that I brought up your concern. I think this was one of the things she ended up writing down on her list of things to address to the dev team.
5. Did the Warrior mechanic change?; Nope. Still awesome.
6. How about Steal?; Steal now gives you a free Shadow Step to get to the target before Stealing! Shadow Step range is displayed in this crappy photo:http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/7889/photo596q.jpg
7. Test the Ranger!; The pets are kind of like WoW pets but a little dumber. It’s really hard to keep them alive when;
1) In the demo, they start at an evolution level of zero, and therefore don’t have any sweet benefits
2) Certain enemies like River Drake do a channeled fire move that eats pets alive unless you force them to run back to you. They have WoW-like commands like Attack My Target, Return To Me, Stay, etc., but they won’t be defensive or actively dodge anything.
3) Leah said that monster aggro is, for the most part proximity based, so your pet will make grand attempts to tank everything for you while Heal As One is hardly good enough to make this a reality, lol.
Ultimately for Ranger, I still like the weapon skills they have available, but the class really is about the pet, and without the pet being in tip-top shape we’re just not going to know much about them yet. Sorry 
8. I’ll leave Palmtree to answer the Engineer questions; he came to a lot of the same conclusions that I did
9. Health of Turrets; Rifle Turret- 1008 Health, Thumper Turret- 2008. I came to these conclusions by using the Detonate skills; a –X red number flashed across the screen for each other. Also, Rifle Turret shoots for about 163 at a fairly regular pace, 312ish when using the Automatic Shot move, and the Thumper Turret AoEs for about 110 at a sloooooooooow pace, and when you use the overdrive on it, it does the launch-back on the next pulse, meaning you can’t really drop it as a reactionary tool when people get next to it
10. Changes to Pets?; As before, didn’t see much
11. Test Glue Gun/Overcharge Shot and directional dynamics; All pop-back moves work like this: While you don’t necessarily have to be facing your target completely (as addressed in question #1), whenever you use a popback move like Glue Gun, Overcharge Shot, Retreating Shot, you will ALWAYS roll/jump backwards from the direction your facing, so you don’t always go AWAY from your target. This is cool because you have a lot of control over the popback.
12. Sorry Arkonn, I don’t have a good camera nor do I have 3 hands
13. Death Shroud abilities in detail; You got it! I didn’t really get damage values or anything because with Death Shroud having a limited duration it was annoying to datamine, but here’s what the moves DO:
Deathly Swarm – Does damage to up to 3 targets, and if hits, removes 3 conditions from you <- Basically ties in with Death Shroud being your panic button when you’re getting overwhelmed, as you don’t take real-world damage while in it, and this gives you a way of spamming your conditions off so you’re healthier when you come back into your body
Dark Path – Same old ground targeted blinding charge
Doom – The old 2s Fear ability, has a short cast time
Life Transfer – Gives you 5% of your Life Force meter (doesn’t drain life for your living character or anything like that) and is CHANNELED, so you can suck tons of Life Force out of a group of enemies as long as they stay near you and don’t interrupt you, keeping yourself in Death Shroud longer. Plus you probably just Blinded them so that buys you more time.
I probably should have gotten you the Downed moves, too, huh… crap. Well, they go downed like everybody else, and Death Shroud does NOT automatically activate when you hit 0 health.
14. Every skill tooltip ever!- You know, I really started to do this, On_Slaught, but I’m an idiot and my effing laptop died right when I got there because I forgot to charge it. I started with the Thief and got everything they could do down on paper, from traits to abilities to underwater moves and whatnot, but that whole deal took me 40 minutes. With 7 playable classes, it just wasn’t a feasible thing to do Sorry to disappoint but hopefully I can make Thief fans happy
15. Find out about Guardian 2handed skills; They didn’t have a Greatsword or Hammer available, but the Staff was usable, and the 2-skill didn’t have the fun Detonate ability any more. The spread on the 1 shot is gigantic though. Almost all of the Guardian moves are really big, blue and flashy as all hell, especially doing a setup like Sword/Shield. The Shield 4/5 moves are gorgeous, and Zealout’s Defense and even the 1-button attack are awesome to look at.
16. Underwater Engineer stuff (especially Flamethrower! Thanks to cuth! ); Sorry cuth, but nearly every kit is NOT usable underwater, and in the demo, I couldn’t use Rifle/Thumper Turret or anything either. I did find out, however, that when you drop into the water, not only do you switch weapons to Harpoon or Spear or whatever, but that your utilities and healing moves change, too, so basically you have a completely different underwater bar.
17. Try to jump off cliff and aim for face, also Thief underwater, Spear and Harpoon; Didn’t jump off any cliffs, but here’s the Thief Underwater moves:
Spear- Poison-Tip Strike- 43 damage, 3s Poison for 246 damage
Flanking Strike- 2I, 165 damage, swim fast around the target
Shadow Assault- 3I, basically a standstill and channel move where you hit over and over for like 243 a shot
And… What the hell? I didn’t write down the 4 and 5 moves?! Crap!
Harpoon Gun- Piercing Shot- 48 damage, 2s Bleed
Deluge- 2I, 4 attacks for 65 each
Escape- 3I, 202 damage, swim backwards
Disabling Shot- 3I, 156 damage, 5s Cripple
Smoke Shot- 4I, blind targets in a line dealing damage (I think it was like 200ish), then you can “detonate” the shot to Shadow Step to its location. It didn’t really have an animation and kind of didn’t work very well.
18. Object interaction via the F key or otherwise, and pickaxe models; Pressing the F key automatically turned you towards it, and starts you reviving or greeting or pickaxing anything. The Foraging/Logging items or whatever all have their own item slots in the inventory, so Leah somewhat confirmed that there will be different kinds of pickaxes, yes. Thanks, wouldn’t have thought to check that.
19. On_Slaught declaring me a hero and/or god for doing this; I’m sorry I failed you
20. Necromancer trait line, Thief trait line, hell everybody’s trait line; Vorsakan, I totally missed that part you were talking about I know that there weren’t any traits to slot into it, but I missed out on getting you the name of the line, my bad man. I would have known to check if my stupid laptop didn’t die, cuz I would have had WiFi to check the thread
21. Summon Water Elemental Elite; no elites available in the demo
22. Stealth mechanics and the damage flash, also, Sylvari/Asura? (in one of the DE’s I saw Asura NPCs, they look awesome  ); K, Stealth was kind of weird. It looked like you flashed when you took damage, but it also looked like you got broken out of stealth, too. I couldn’t “get poisoned and use Hide in Shadows” because Hide in Shadows gave me a “Can’t use that while in combat” Error message, and the Thief heal Shadow Refuge stealthed me, but monsters could still see me somehow and just hit me out of it. It was weird.
Also, YES TO SYLVARI AND ASURA:
Sylvari NPC: http://img580.imageshack.us/img580/453/photo594.jpg
Asura NPC: http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/9761/photo595b.jpg
And, I mentioned in passing to Leah that I was aware of Sylvari coming up at Gamescom. The first thing she said to me was, “Yeah, Sylvari AND Asura will be playable at Gamescom.” To which I said, “WHAAAAAT?! BOTH OF THEM?” She quickly fixed her statement and said she might be mistaken, and that only Sylvari will be ready. Lol.
23. I will test the crap out of Steal/Initiative; Check the Master of Shadows thread for my post here for the Thief Community; http://www.guildwars2guru.com/forum/...postcount=1424
24. Gmr Leon; I don’t know if I start anywhere near Divinity’s Reach or those places in this particular build, but if I do I’ll make a beeline on one of my plays to try and hit up Vigil Keep and Dominion of Winds, no promises there though ; I asked Leah about Divinity’s Reach and she said that it and Lion’s Arch weren’t approachable in the demo, but I was able to get to Vigil Keep through a waypoint. There wasn’t much of anything there, and since she’s a Personal Story and Dynamic Event gal I asked her what level the Durmand Priory/Vigil/Order of Whispers stuff starts and she wouldn’t tell me >
25. Naming conventions; For all those wondering, you cannot put capitals inside words, you can’t use periods or punctuation, and you can’t use funky letters like ä and whatnot. I asked Leah if they were gonna have people policing a name policy so we don’t see Charr Engineers named Fat Bong Rip running around, and she’s not sure on that one, lol. Also, no definitive stuff on name reservation yet, but she did say that the shop will have stuff like extra character slots and whatnot.
26. Options screen was very limited but I’ll look for key binding; As of right now, you cannot do things like SHIFT+Q or ALT+SPACEBAR for keybinding, but I told Leah that a lot of us love using those sorts of keybinds for our MMOs, mostly because it’s a left-hand comfort thing and gave her some examples of how it would make my life easier to play with them, and she wrote this down on her list Hopefully I had a hand in making that a reality, lol
27. Again I won’t have a lot of video, but MAYBE I can take a small crappy video and youtube it for you, Meyatoe; Well, I didn’t get a chance to video/pic it, but the casting animation for it is beast, and it lasts a while. You know, stuff like Wall of Deflection and Engineer Flamethrower Napalm Wall have really great effects, but better yet, the white rectangle that sits on the floor is a great indicator of what the move is actually doing. Looks real sharp.
28. Inventory slot information; i.e. miniatures, how many slots, bank slots, crafting, trash drops, looting; I told Leah that some of us loving carting around tons of miniatures and whatever, and cited WoW as a reference where you can store all of your Pets and Mounts in a separate tab so you can take it all with you, and I think she said she’d bring that up to the team. As far as inventory slots go, I had a “Starter Backpack” with 20 slots and 2 bags with 20 slots each. I guess as time goes on in the game we’ll get bigger bags and backpacks, so inventory space shouldn’t be that big of a deal, especially considering the only things we’ll need to cart around are lots of weapons anyway.
29. Chat interface/group interface, sorting, finding, chat rooms; I talked to her about chat channels and she put it on her list of things to address.
30. Shadow Step range/Infiltrator’s Arrow range; See the aforementioned screenshot about Steal, and yes Infiltrator’s Arrow is still very limited. I asked Leah “Whyyyy” and she said “Because it’s a shortbow! That’s all you get”. Lol.
Again a huge thanks to Leah Rivera for coming over, talking to me and answering my endless questions. She seemed excited that I was from Guru and was happy to answer any questions off the list and generally hang out and make comments on the game. I learned a lot more than I just posted here so PLEASE ask me more so I can put more out there.
Also, if you happen to randomly read this thread, madame, that was a Venti Sweetened Tazo Passion Fruit-Green Iced Tea Lemonade. Haha
Check the Thief thread in the next few days for new Initiative costs on all the moves (except Underwater Spear 4 and 5 because I’m an idiot, lol) and more thoughts on Steal and Initiative in general. |
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