Post PAX Perceptions

Run Away!!!

After reading interview after interview, watching video after video, reading article after article, and stuffing myself on all of the new knowledge  from PAX, I must say, I’m exhausted. While Hunter and Nicholas and others continue to analyze the information from PAX, I am content to wait for people to update the wiki with new info about skills and traits and such. I’m also a short skip away from speculating further about professions 7 (mesmer) and 8 (who knows). I do have some thoughts on all of the PAX info though. FYI, I did not visit PAX. I sat at home and hit F5 on the GW2Guru thread like everyone else.

First of all, I am tired of watching guardian and thief videos. They are fantastic to watch and I’m excited to try out the guardian now that I’ve seen more of what they can do. I’m also up to the challenge of playing a thief. I’m just tired of watching essentially the same two videos. I know these guys are the new kids on the block, but there was some interesting information about the other 4 professions that was overlooked due to the zeal with which people created and posted videos of these two professions.

I got to see the warrior wield a greatsword for a little while, which was nice. It looks like a devastating weapon for sure. I also got to see a ranger video that  was well done, though for some reason the player wasn’t using a pet. Both of these videos can be seen on GuildWars2Live.com.

What really disappointed me was I never found a clear video of a necro wielding a staff or of the elementalist using air attunement. These are two of the professions I am most interested in playing and I was hoping to get more info about them. Also, apparently there have been changes made to the necro’s death shroud skills (namely, Shadow Fiend was removed). Thankfully, I found the new skill for that on the wiki (Dark Path if you’re interested). Only a handful of the air spells have been posted on wiki and I haven’t seen any video of them in action. /pout

Crafting UI from GW2

As for crafting, I saw several videos that included people acquiring materials during play. It really was as simple as walking up to the resource, interacting with it for about 5 seconds, and moving on with your business. The crafting UI was available for interaction and viewing, but actual trufax crafting wasn’t available due to the lack of workbenches in the demo. Still, I’m excited about the crafting system as a whole and it looks pretty user friendly and non-punishing. I have zero experience with crafting from other games, so I’m really looking forward to exploring it.

On a final note, or should I say ANet teaser: Aquatic Weapons.

That pretty much sums up my take from PAX East. I’m looking forward to hearing what Izzie at Talk Tyria and Ravious at Kill Ten Rats have to say about their experiences at PAX. If you haven’t seen them, you can watch a video of them with several other GW Fans and bloggers at the meet and greet on GW2Live.

EDIT: New gameplay videos were added for ele, necro, ranger, and warrior on the PAX thread. My evening is planned out for me!

Warriors and Dervishes

Well, I vanquished Silverwood today with a team of 3 warriors. I ran a Build that focused on Cultist’s Fervor [elite], Order of Pain, Dark Fury, and Blood Bond with PvE skills, regen, and condition removal to round it out. My warriors were as follows:

Goren – Hammer Warrior

Earth Shaker [elite], Crushing Blow, Hammer Bash, Bull’s Strike, Flail, Enraging Charge, “For Great Justice!”, and a rez.

Koss – Axe Warrior

Warrior’s Endurance [elite], Cyclone Chop, Power Attack, Distracting Blow, Dismember, Executioner’s Strike, Flail, and a rez.

Jora – Sword Warrior

Hundred Blades [elite], Deadly Riposte, Riposte, Sun and Moon Slash, Steelfang Slash, “To The Limit!”, “For Great Justice!”, and a rez.

The warrior gang and me in my blood magic getup.

I have to say, I liked the builds, but they weren’t terribly effective in this situation. Silverwood is full of centaurs and mostly centaur warriors. Spells work great against warriors, not other warriors. In addition, I had to do a whole lot of targeting with these heroes since, as you might expect, they all wanted to rush in and attack the nearest target. This was great if that target needed a good butt whooping, but in most cases it allowed bad guys to approach the monk and me and cut us down in short order.

I got the rhythm down of sending Goren after the guys who came after me or after the meddlesome casters, letting knockdown do it’s job. Jora engaged the warriors one on one and had pretty high survivability with her riposte and blocking abilities. Koss pulled double duty with groups and all around damage dealing. Halfway through I wished I’d have brought more crippling capabilities.

It took twice as long as I expected to vanquish this area due to crappy healing/support (my fault) and bad pulls. Also, I may have been watching television at the time.

All in all I was happy with these warriors, but I think they are better to supplement a group that has some strong healing rather than as a fighting force by themselves. Maybe when we are able to outfit our entire parties with heroes I’ll group them with healing heroes and see how well they do.

As for dervishes, well, everything was going well until the dervish update. I had all 3 of my dervishes ready to go with builds from PvX wiki and watched them get cut down in HM since they were no longer balanced. I’m currently doing my research on the new update and will reskill my dervs and prolly reequip them as well. We’ll see what comes of them when I take them out into Mamnoon Lagoon and Sage Lands later on.