Back from PAX: Guild Wars 2

Well, that was a fun trip and we finally got to try some Tyrian combat.

Correction: you got to try Tyrian combat. I got to do the rest of the work since there was a bit of a line and you called 'dibs' on going first.

Oh come on, that's not fair! We were both at PAX to check out some possibilities for places to move after we leave Azeroth. We had to hit everything we could, so it just made sense to split up the tasks and not have both of us trying the same thing at the same time. It would've been nice if you could've had a little hands-on time, but unfortunately it felt like every other adventurer in Azeroth was in line with me there.

I would have an easier time believing the sincerity of your words if not for your attitude after you finished trying it out. The sight of a giddy Tauren gushing over combat techniques and dodging is not a pretty one.

What? I had fun. It's important to enjoy one's work after all and I was certainly enjoying my time in Tyria.

I take it that means it was everything we've been hoping for?

Well, I wasn't able to try everything I wanted since I only had about 40 minutes before I got sent back, but what I was able to try was great. I chose to go in as a Charr warrior for obvious reasons. In that 40 minutes, I got to help fight back a ghost that possessed a giant statue (at level 1 no less!), help out at a forge and a junkyard by gathering tools and defending it from invaders, and help out at this lake thing by slaying giant lizards. There was also some giant thing that hurt like a truck that I took down with the help of some other adventurers wandering about. The last eight minutes or so centered around myself and a group of three or four other adventurers, all below level 4, trying to push our way into a cavern filled with fire turrets and level 6 Flame Legion Charr. It didn't end up going in our favor, but we managed to hold our own for quite a while.

Sounds thrilling. What about the weapons themselves? How did the new mechanics you mentioned work out?

They felt great. Switching weapons on the fly was quick and learning new techniques went fairly quickly. I think it was something like three or four minutes with my starter sword skill until I learned my second one and maybe six or seven for the next one. I didn't test the fourth and fifth techniques because I was trying other weapons, particularly the rifle. It's still not entirely natural to me to fight at ranged, but I was starting to get the hang of it during our epic struggle to enter the cavern.

Dodging is going to take some getting used to. It's easy enough to do, but you can only dodge so often until you need to let your energy regenerate. It's fairly quick, but it does mean that you need to pick those moments when you need to move.

Since you mentioned swapping weapons, did you get the chance to look at equipment?

Indeed and compared to what we've been working with all these years in Azeroth, it'll be a nice change of pace. You've got four attributes to work with: Power makes all of your attacks hit harder, Precision increases your chance of getting a critical hit, Toughness reduces the damage you take from physical and magical attacks, and Vitality gives you more health. No haste or hit rating to cap, no dodge or parry to balance against one another - just four numbers to work with.

There were upgrade slots in most of the equipment I found, but I didn't have anything to put there so I can't give a first-hand impression, but I don't believe anything's changed since last week's crafting post so that should still be valid. I also didn't have any procs to play with, but since I was in the Charr starting area, that's to be expected. An associate of mine got the chance to try an Asura engineer in one of the later zones, so I might ask him if he can write something up when he's not busy.

Really? An Asura? He seriously chose one of those overglorified technomages over the Charr, the proven masters of engineering and war machines?

I know, I know, it's weird but it's what he wanted to try out. I certainly wasn't going to follow him in his madness, but to each their own. Now lemme think if I've forgotten anything...

Oh yeah! All those public quests I was working on? Pretty much every time I did something to further the goal, whether it was killing Flame Legion or just gathering tools for the forge, I earned some Karma. Now we already knew that there was going to be a currency for the events, but I didn't realize it was the same currency. I got quite a bit of karma from doing that event and the one with the lizards, then found my way over to the karma vendor by the forge. There was also one out in the fields that sold some armor I would've liked, but the one by the forge had all of the different weapons and honestly that was more important to me. I had to try out the rifle after all.

I think that's about everything from my short excursion into Tyria. Definitely looking forward to spending some more time there though. I did find a few other contenders that we'll be considering though, but those are for a later post. You have any luck, Med?

Indeed I did. While I may not have been able to try engineering in Tyria, I was able to get some time in with two other worlds that suited my tastes for all things technological.

Sounds good. We'll save those for next time since we've already run a bit long. Well, that and nobody's gonna want to ready about two different worlds in the same post. You want to tease people with something before we head out?

I believe I may have something to pique their interest until next time:

Azeroth vs. Tyria part 1: One Weapon's As Good As The Next, Right?

Last time I mentioned that the team was looking to leave Azeroth in search of greener pastures and grander treasures. I even mentioned that we had somewhere in particular picked out. Now that those basic details are out of the way, I figured it might be a good idea to start looking at some of the similarities and differences between our old home and our potential new one, in case any other Azerothians are looking for a change of scenery.

Given that I'm comparing two entire worlds, this isn't going to fit into one post. Well, technically it could, but that's less of a post and more of a dissertation and I know no one is going to sit through that mountain of text unless I break it up. Best to start simple, I think. Adventurers of all classes have to have their tools of the trade: swords, axes, guns, etc. You'd think that there shouldn't be a whole lot to talk about here, right?

To those of us from Azeroth, a weapon's a weapon and all that matters is if you know how to wield it and if it gives you more strength/agility/maximum damage/whatever random number your class and build was concerned with. Axe or sword, it didn't matter because the attack's the exact same for both. I always thought that was a bit odd that a sword swung the same as a mace or an axe, but that's just how it always worked. The closest we ever came to caring about weapon types was back when Arms warriors and Combat rogues had to spec for specific weapon styles. Even then it wasn't really all that involved, since all we were really doing was choosing between passive bonuses: a better chance to critically hit with axes or perhaps get the occasional free swing with a sword.

It was even simpler when it came to casters. As far as Medeleth and the other spellslingers were concerned, their weapons were annoying things they had to carry to bump up their spell power. A warlock with a staff cast his spells the same as one with a sword and book and, assuming they had the same bonuses, hit for exactly the same amount. Weapons were just eye candy to all of us and as long as we had something in that hand to do our jobs, it didn't matter what it was. That was Azeroth though; for Tyria, that attitude isn't going to cut it anymore.

Now the system as a whole is a lot more complicated than I'm going to lay out right here, but just to keep things simple, I'll focus on the basics; we'll go over the specifics later. For the moment, let's start with how we dealt with combat back in Azeroth. You'd have your long list of abilities available in your spellbook. Depending on your spec, you'd pick out the abilities that made sense for you to use, then you'd put them somewhere where it was easy to use them. Assuming that you were using whatever was agreed to be the most efficient build/rotation for your class, this meant that you pretty much picked the same abilities as every other person of your class doing that job. You'd have your single target skills, your AoE moves, your "oh crap!" buttons, etc. Pretty much everything you could possibly need during the fight needed to be available at a moment's notice. The standard-issue adventurer's HUD makes it easier to keep track of all of this stuff, but after a while it can get pretty cluttered, especially when you start to consider add-ons. I managed to keep mine fairly clean, but that took hours of work and a lot of extras to minimize wasted space and duplicate information. I couldn't do anything for all of those hotbars showing my abilities other than shrink their size a bit and hope I could still make out which button was which. When we move to Tyria however, that kind of heavy-duty HUD management should be a thing of the past.

This is the kind of mess I'd rather avoid

I can't comment on whether the add-on management will exist or not because, well, I don't know if they're allowed to modify their HUDs or not. What I do know is how many bars of buttons there will be on the screen:

One bar. 10 buttons.

That's it. At last count I think I have something like 48 buttons on my Azeroth HUD; Med's even worse at 60 just because of all of that engineering crap and warlock summoning stuff he keeps on his.

Now I know what you're thinking. You're looking at that and going, "So instead of having everything at my fingertips, I'm gonna have to dig into my spellbook whenever I need to switch from single target to AoE or whatever else I need to do. How is this helpful?". Remember when I was making a big deal earlier about how weapon types were going to matter in Tyria? Therein lies the secret.

Let's take that 10-button bar and break it into two sets of five. Looking at buttons 6-10, we've got a healing skill, an elite skill, and three utility skills. I'll talk about this three things at another time, but for now let's look at what we've got left: buttons 1 through 5, or as they're better known, your weapon skills.

To illustrate, let's say that you're a warrior and you've got a one-handed sword equipped. If you took a look at the abilities on your bar, you'd see some high mobility move and an emphasis on bleeds. This would be great when you need to bounce around the battlefield and the bleeds would be great since you could have one ticking away on multiple targets. This isn't perfect for all situations though. What if you ran into a big rock elemental by himself? Assuming rock can even bleed (don't look at me like I'm crazy - Kologarn can take damage from Deep Wounds and he was rock with a moustache), the mobility from the sword is kinda wasted if your target's slow and the bleed's less impressive if there's only one target taking damage from it. How can you improve your odds in this situation? Switching weapons, that's how!

If we switch over to an axe, now we've got access to some high spike damage in case the rock elemental has high armor. If we go with a mace, now we've got stuns in our arsenal. Assuming we can get the drop on the elemental, our warrior could even go with a rifle and decimate him from range. Yes, I know the idea of a ranged warrior sounds like heresy, but it's true. Things get even weirder though when we get to the casters.

We'll use an elementalist for the caster example (they're like mages, but they don't pick one element and pretend the others don't exist). Let's say this elementalist has two weapon sets: one with a dagger with a focus in his off-hand, and the other with just a staff. Were this Azeroth, these two would cast the exact same spells with the only differences being how hard the spells hit, how fast you cast them, etc. In Tyria however, your combat spells are in those first five buttons and because those are weapon-specific, your two weapon sets now serve different purposes. With the staff equipped, the elementalist will now have access to a set of long-range attacks, but he'll have to deal with longer cast times. If he switches to the dagger and focus, his dagger will give him a set of fast casting, medium range spells while the focus will fill in the remaining slots with powerful close range spells. For a little extra customization, the elementalist could even swap out his main hand dagger if he's planning on being stuck in close quarter combat or he could go dual daggers and be built for medium range destruction.

The idea of mixing main and offhand weapon types isn't just for casters. When I was talking about sword and axe techniques for the warrior only, those were one-handed weapons. The warrior could mix the two for bleeds and spike damage, he could go all-out if the situation calls for it, or he could toss a shield in his offhand for some defensive skills. There's also mixed weapon techniques for that middle button of the five, but those are for thieves only (damn greedy thieves).

Now I could go on about the ramifications of this for days, but I'll try and sum this up. Switching to a system where your weapon style matters does make it where you'll have to carry around multiple weapons, but honestly we've been doing that for ages already. I've had to dedicate two bags to spare gear for as long as I can remember. Plus with some of the other stuff I've seen, I might be getting some of that bag space back, so I can afford to hold onto a few spare weapons. We'll talk about that "other stuff" another day though, along with the other twenty things I couldn't fit into this mountain of text.