Tuesday, August 30, 2011

PAX: Guild Wars 2 Overview Part 2: Random GW2 Q&A


In this second installment, I am going to be going over a collection of questions sent to me by fellow players and the answers I found at PAX (or in the case of some, didn't find).  Some of them I'll be going more in depth during "Part 3: GW 2 PvP Thus Far" which I should have written in the next couple days.  Without further ado, let's get started.

1.  Does each norn animal form give a special benefit?  For example, does the snow leopard form give a stealth ability?

I've always wondered about this, and initially it was one of the reasons I wanted to play a Norn.  Unfortunately there's still no more information about racial skills yet.  The best information at PAX I could get my hands on about this is during the opening Norn playthroughs where I got a chance to be changed into one of each of the four forms by various shaman.  I got myself changed into a snow panther. Much to my dismay, but confirming old reports, the skill set of the snow panther didn't include any type of stealth abilities.  In fact, I only had access to fighting skills; no utility skills were available while in this animal form.  The good news is movement speed did seem to increase.  So if one could extrapolate that these shaman induced forms turn out to be similar or the same as the actual Norn racial skills, you might have increased movement speed.  This may just keep my hopes up, but we'll see.  My main reason for wanting stealth as a Norn is to really have a good way to get away or sneak up on other players.  Movement speed wouldn't be quite as good, but it would be better than nothing. 

2.  Any idea when we might start seeing a big presentation about WvWvW like we're seeing with structured pvp now? 

I cornered a few Arenanet representatives about this one and for the most part, the answer I received was "I can't answer that."  I expected that response, but since the idea of WvWvW was so near and dear to my heart, I had to ask.  I did find out at least....

3.  Is WvWvW going to be available at launch? Or is there a possibility that it will be delayed?

"Yes, if we've announced something at this stage, it will be in the game."  Thank goodness.  I was getting a tiny bit worried since nothing has really been released except one leaked WvW map.  Overall, all the Arenanet team members seem very excited about WvW anyways so that's also reassuring.

4. How awesome is the character customization screen?

A W E S O M E.  It was a little bit unfortunate that the Norn playable PAX demo didn't have as fleshed out of a character creation as the other races, but I did get to watch another player take a good 15 minutes playing with the Human version.  It was incredible.  It was like the Oblivion creation screen on roids.  Almost anything you wanted to be able to tweak you could.  For the Norn, I had a choice of tattoos, beard styles, height, skin tone, and hair types.  The Human version had that (minus the tats) and you could tweak facial expression, eyebrow size/shape/color, nose shape/size/position and skin age among others.  I was definitely very impressed.  I'm looking forward to spending at least 1/2 hr on character creation once the game releases and I'm not even that crazy about that sort of thing.

5. If there is no body blocking, will there be some equivalent and what will that be?

There's some collision.  I'll explain what I mean by this and going more over this subject in my next blog post.  The good news is there's no complete lack thereof like I had read from a few Guild Wars 2 articles.  I personally confirmed some collision in the PvE demo (over and over).  It was pretty tough to tell for sure one way or the other during the PvP matches, but from what I saw, I'd say the mechanic in PvP is the same as in PvE.  It's something incredibly important to me and increases the strategies (and fun imo) in PvP.






6. What known pets will rangers be able to have? Do they have to go through a taming process? Will Great Danes be a pet?

"Any pets we've shown during videos will be available to play with in the game."  I couldn't get a firm answer on how you got your pet, but if GW is any indication, you'll probably have to tame the animal.  And the dog is available.  I was corrected by one of the reps that the dog that's been in a lot of the Ranger videos is technically a Blood Hound, but if you want, you can just pretend it's a Great Dane.

Hall of Monuments7. How exactly do the Hall of Monuments "heirloom" items work? Are they only good for the first few levels or will they level up like in WoW?

"We don't know yet.  How would you like it to work?" I was actually surprised that I was asked in return by one of the developers.  My reply was that it'd be nice to have the item level up as you go, but for it to always be inferior to other items you could get at your level along the way.  That way, there's incentive for crafters to make superior items and max/min'ers to get the best weapons for PvP/PvE.  Likewise those of us that worked hard enough to get these items, wouldn't have to constantly spend time/money upgrading our items.  Now we'll see if they actually take my advice to heart, but don't hate me or send a curse my way if this is how they do end up making the HoM items.  No matter what they end up doing, the dev reminded me, you could use a transmutation stone to keep the artwork for your higher level gear if you decided to do so.

8. When it comes to pvp and such how big a role is aoe going to be (compared to single target dps)?

The answer of this is really subjective and I'll talk about it more in my Part 3 post, but from what I saw, Arenanet did a good job of balancing out aoe damage versus single target dps.  If there were a lot of enemies in a specific spot, use aoe.  If you needed to focus a single player, single target dps.  Typical stuff and PvP tended to play out how I expected it to.

9. How susceptible are players to focus fire?

Focus fire does help, but you can't get one shot.  I saw multiple 3 on 1 instances were the single player lived at least 5 seconds if not longer.  The more the single player used dodge effectively and obstructions such as corners or obstacles, the longer they could survive against poor odds.  Much better than I expected. 

10. Do the utility skills provide enough of an escape for you to stay alive if applied well or it a big frag fest?

Yes, they do help you escape.  No, it was not a big frag fest.  Now I can't speak to what will happen in WvW, but utility skills did help each player when used in the right situations. 

11. Will the Gear/Loot rewards in WvWvW gameplay be as good as in PvE game play?

"We don't know yet..." but assume they will be since it's Arenanet.  It would be bad business not to. I am not particularly worried about this.

12. Do they plan to have more than 1 map to fight over in the WvWvW campaign? If so, will the maps be different on each Server/Neutral Zone in WvWvW and will they be shuffled when they reset the server match ups after each campaign?

Great question.  Really liked this one myself.  However... "We don't know yet" is all I could find out.

13. Will there be a benefits/rewards system for Guilds? Any hints on what these will be?

Yes.  I mentioned it in my Part 1 and it has been briefly discussed elsewhere.  As a player you can help your guild earn influence which in turn can be used in your guild tech tree.  What exactly this tech tree is or what guild abilities you can get are all still very much in development.  As in they're making them right now as I type this.

14. What is the size limit for guilds in Guild Wars 2?

They don't know yet.  They're still designing their guild system.  The Arenanet representatives did let us know we can have multiple characters in multiple guilds however. 

15. Are you able to release any new information (maps, videos, screenshots, etc) about WvWvW?

"No."  ./smile  No worries.  I had to ask.


That's Part 2 folks.  Short and sweet.  Stay tuned for "Part 3: GW 2 PvP Thus Far."

3 comments:

  1. Nice questions, sucks that so many didn't get an answer, but it was a nice read, thanks for sharing.

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  2. I will blame you if HoM items turn out to be gimped like that, which they shouldn't be. We put in a lot of work to get them.

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  3. Cryssoberyl, I wouldn't be too worried. However, no matter what HoM items can't be the end all, be all weapons otherwise PvP/PvE players as well as crafters would have no "carrot" to strive for and that would seriously hurt GW2's success. Maybe the weapons wouldn't be "gimped" as you put it for levels 1-10, but they cannot reasonably be the best weapons at level 80 otherwise it would hurt the game as a whole.

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