This month for MMO Co-Opportunities, we’ll be previewing the Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns expansion. Contained within will be my preliminary impressions of the expansion, based on my experience during the first beta weekend.
This past weekend I had the chance to participate in the Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns first beta weekend. I played Guild Wars 2 from beta to about a year after release, and this beta weekend was the first time in a long time that I’ve explored the game. The recent announcements about what the expansion adds to the game have excited me, so I was quite keen to jump into the beta.
I tried out the new Revenant profession as well as the new Guardian Elite Specialization, Dragonhunter. Most of my beta time, however, was focused on the Revenant. It took me a little while to get back into the flow of playing the game, but soon I was weapon swapping and using skills in a semi-confident fashion. The Revenant felt extremely promising, with a bunch of different playstyles available. Both veteran players and players who like to push the boundaries of a character’s capabilities will find a lot to enjoy in this profession, as swapping between two Legendary Stances provides a total of 8 healing/utility skills and 2 elite skills to pick from (up from 4 and 1 respectively). Revenants are also much less constrained by cooldowns, with many of their abilities being solely based on energy. This means that Revenants must master energy management rather than cooldown management, unlike other classes.
While I maxed out a lot of characters playing Guild Wars 2 previously, the Guardian wasn’t one of them. After trying out the Dragonhunter Guardian, however, I think this will cease to be the case. The Dragonhunter elite specialization gives the Guardian access to a longbow, which I find to be an amazing aesthetic. It also gives Guardians access to traps, which I think will also give the Guardian more interesting ways to play (some offensive, some defensive). Add in the new active components of their virtues and a new elite skill that vortexes enemies in and holds them there with a barrier, I’m definitely more interested in investigating the Guardian more.
Besides the new profession and elite specializations, I also explored part of the new Heart of Maguuma zone. The beta dropped me off right at the beginning of the expansion, where my NPC party and I had crash landed in the Maguuma Jungle. The Heart of Maguuma is vast, and pretty different than any other Guild Wars 2 zone I’ve previously encountered, with an immense feeling of height and depth to the map. At times I felt a mile above or below areas I had been to previously. I could also see clear similarities between the zone and the Maguuma Jungle zones found in Guild Wars 1, which I was happy to see.
I wasn’t able to mess too much with Masteries (a new advancement system that includes new ways to navigate terrain and reach new areas) this beta weekend. While I advanced some in one of the tracks, I didn’t gain enough mastery XP to unlock a new transportation mode. I’ll certainly be delving more into this on a later beta weekend.
Overall, my first impressions of the beta weekend were solid. I’d seen the game in action and played a tiny bit at PAX East this year, but my experience this weekend gave me a much better feeling. I’m looking forward to seeing (and playing) more! Thanks to Arenanet for providing the beta weekend key!