Hello everyone and welcome to your weekly instalment of the Tyrian Chronicle.
I’m taking over this week for our fantastic Liore who is busy off getting married. So as excuses go that one is kind of amazing and I hope everyone will join me in wishing her the best of luck and a wonderful day.
So regarding Guild Wars 2, what is going on out there in the heart of the Maguuma jungle? This weekend was to see us testing out the raid system and some people did manage to do just that. I, myself, missed out because the party system very rapidly …well.. broke. ArenaNet did battle bravely against the bugs but sadly it wasn’t to be. If you really simply must see some raid content, I suggest you try Jebro embedded below.
What did I get up to myself? This weekend let players get their hands on the Engineer elite specialization, the Scrapper, and the Ranger elite, the Druid. So stick waving friend to all animals who can burst into a Celestial form for massive healing and utility or hammer time? Clearly it was the far superior and engaging hammer time with the Scrapper.
I understand where ArenaNet is coming from with the elite specializations that they are creating. I wonder if there is an upper limit to exactly how many different things they can add to a class before everyone ends up able to do all things. Either way that future is still a bit distant, so for now the weekend was given over to retesting some of the other elite specs to see how I feel about them and finally getting my hands on the Scrapper. I already have an Engineer as my main and like any proper Charr he’s got a flamethrower to show everything on Tyria exactly what is thought of them. “Kindling” mostly.
I’ve been through all the specs multiple times now and I have to say Scrapper surprised me. By itself in the beta, sporting all the exotic gear I could possibly want with stats I could choose, I actually found it a bit lackluster. The hammer was okay rather than earth shattering. The drones were kind of cute but not nearly as long lived as I would have liked. Yes it’s fun watching a lunatic burst bot fly aggressively at something with its payload of grenades before exploding over the scenery… but it wasn’t engaging me. Drones are a nice idea but playing through the options they seemed more like okay tools to occasionally use than anything that might replace a kit or turret. I blame the limited beta weekend for my thinking here.
The flaw wasn’t with the spec, it was with me doing nothing but mashing the skills to see what they did and being unimpressed when there wasn’t any flow to anything. After I recreated my main, tweaked a few traits and put Flamethrower back where it belonged, then Scrapper started to sing. The idea behind all of these specs is to give classes another option, fill in a gap they may have been missing in some cases or build off ideas. Did I really need a melee Engineer that badly? After all I have Tool Kit, I can just beat things with a wrench. When I stopped trying to take all the new options added and make them work as a whole, but instead added them into what I already enjoyed doing, then they opened up. Every class I’ve tried has ended up panning out like that except for the Mesmer elite, Chronomancer. Chronomancer is my new favorite thing ever and I adore the wells.
My Engineer will gleefully be taking up a hammer and going wild in the jungle. How can I not want to? Shredder bot makes my various fields more fun. Flamethrower and hammer just seem to compliment each other wonderfully, even before you make sure to introduce Mass Momentum and Juggernaut to one another.
Other Beta weekend improvements came through quite obviously last weekend. The Guardians elite, Dragonhunter, went from something that was a bit boring to a build that really felt like it had a good use. Reaper and Chronomancer both continued to be utterly engaging. Everything else for me broke down like the Scrapper, when I worked additions into the builds I already enjoyed, it came together in a far more enjoyable way than if I just stuck to all of the new shiny toys.
Of course not everything can be sweetness and light. Scrapper for me found its moment when I tried it with what I intended to play. It worked for me in the jungle fighting off the attacks on encampments through the night, or chasing down the event lines during the day. Druid on the other hand was robbed of its moment to shine. In the absence of raids, it just felt … boring. Partly I put this down to different expectations. Druid, as we are getting in the Heart of Thorns, follows the balance between night and day. It’s reflected in all of the skills and the theme of the whole elite. Where the original launch trailer in January teased a hammer wielding Engineer charging into battle with gyrobots, we got … exactly that. Where the trailer teased a Ranger bursting out a line of vines while their pet charged into combat and implied a greater link to nature … we got someone who fires laser beams from a stick. The vine burst does still exist but I wonder what might have been left on the design room floor between the original trailer and the reality of Druid.
Maybe I would be singing a completely different tune if I had had the opportunity of a raid. Maybe if I was getting beaten into a paste the visually excellent blasts from the Celestial form might have made me change my tune, but the staff wielding Ranger and lack of raids meant that I never got the moment when it all clicked for me. Hopefully we’ll see another Beta weekend to test raids before the launch in two weeks time but it is unlikely.
Then again if I could ask for any one thing from ArenaNet, it wouldn’t be another Beta weekend… it’d be the return of BristleZilla.
Bow before his might!
