My first impressions of BWE2

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I've wanted to write a semi-review for a long time. First some background: I have played GW1 mostly PvE, spent around 1.500 hours, looked forward to GW2 since the day it was announced, watched every stream and whatnot. This is my first opportunity at playing the game.

At the moment I've clocked /age 8 hours, played PvE only, lvl 15 around 90% completion of Wayfarer Foothills (Norn starter area) and around 60% done through Plains of Ascalon (Charr starter area). I am playing a ranger.

Performance: I had to tune down settings to Balanced to make it smooth on my Phenom X4 3.4GHz, 4GB RAM, Radeon 6850. On maxed settings it's a bit sluggish.

Good things:
- I like the whole dynamic events system, much more fun than normal MMO questing
- Leveling pace is very good, I hit a level every 30 minutes and not a single grind, only doing the "heart" quests
- Combat, when it works, is very fun. Mobs hit very hard on any level, bosses can easily oneshot you, it's important to dodge as much as possible.
- Cute character customization, I spent 5 minutes on my character but I am very happy with how she turned out
- Graphics are great, remind me of GW1, landscapes are lovely
- They use a lot of recycled music from GW1, nice nostalgia there

Bad things:
- I get a feeling ranger is underpowered for PvE. My skillset no matter the weapon consists of huge amount of cripples, which aren't really worth it in PvE (exception: kiting bosses). With weapons like sword or greatsword I can jump around the battlefield, being hard to hit, but I don't feel like I'm doing much damage. Oh and pet is useless, for lowlevel fights he can hold his own, but any veteran/boss and he drops in few hits. Also, he's a great AoE magnet.
- Bosses have too much HP. Boss fight can take 10 minutes of constant skill activation on cooldown, without much challenge, just boring and time-consuming. I'd rather have more mobs but weaker.
- Voiceovers in personal story cinematics - I can read much faster than the voice actor, so after the first cinematic I am just pressing next-next-next-next. Oh, and voiceacting in main cities is too repetitive, some NPCs can say the same thing 5 times during 30 seconds.
- Personal storyline - not a huge fan of it after all. Dynamic events are fun and teambased, then suddenly you are pushed into instance where all you do is follow a NPC, then maybe kill some boss. I didn't feel really excited by it.
- Dynamic events aren't fun without people around. Many events and skillpoints are only possible to be reached by a team, and sometimes it's hard to find one, although a good guild will alleviate that easily.
- Weird movement animations - especially strafing, I am used to characters sidestepping when strafing, while in GW2 your character rotates to direction of movement and turns his head towards the "forward" direction, looks kinda weird to me
- Latency can be noticed with stuff like dodging

All in all, I like the way the game looks and plays and I will be definitely preordering it (if not prepurchasing). I'll probably hit few levels and then stop playing altogether the beta, I don't want too many spoilers. Unless I suddenly figure out a way to play the ranger, I'll probably change profession, because it doesn't fit my playstyle at all.

[Deleted]

Already a thread for first impressions.

[Deleted]

Could someone move?