GW2 Final BWE

It comes as welcome news today that for the final Beta Weekend Event the Asura and Sylvari will be playable races. Of course, this isn't a huge surprise given that Guild Wars 2 is set to be released a little over a month later so having these races polished up would be a generally good idea.

The Sylvari were what captivated me about GW2 from the very start. I'd already been sold on Guild Wars from the beginning, so I was planning on buying GW2 from the first mention of its development. I bought all the magazines to get the special mini pets and read up on any new sliver of information I could get my hands on. So every time they mentioned this elusive Sylvair I couldn't stop but wonder how this race would pan out, and I have to say I couldn't be more pleased with the way ArenaNet developed them.

I've played my fair share of fantasy games so having this totally unique race pop up is huge. They're totally awesome and there's nothing quite like them in any other universe out there. If you haven't had a chance too yet I'd highly recommend you go through the older ArenaNet blogs about the Sylvari. There's a lot of good information there. And if you're not planning on playing a Sylvari then read up all the more, afterall you should probably get to know your new neighbors. They sound pretty nice.

GW2 Stress Test and Announcement

First and foremost you should all know by now that Guild Wars 2 will be released on August 28th! The best part of that news is that everyone who pre-purchased the game gets a 3-day head start, which means you can start playing it on the 25th and get a weekend in before everyone else does. Awesome! The wait is almost finally over!

I've also been super glad that during the 2 months we have left of waiting we're getting all these stress tests, and beta weekends, which are super fun and they've let me really figure out what to do under different playing circumstances. During the stress test yesterday I only had a few hours to play, and I had already completed a lot of the content I intended to so what was I to do for a couple hours?

First of all, I turned myself into a deer. I mean why not?

Then I played around on my warrior and killed some bandits with the help of Logan Thackeray. The thing I really enjoy about playing a warrior is that combat feels especially visceral. While I do definitely enjoy the combat system with Mesmers, there's always a soft spot in my heart for getting up close and personal with my foes. Smashing them in the face with large objects never gets old.

After that we all found out that there would be a repeat of the last BWE final event, in which Dragon Branded minions invaded the Plains of Ashford. During the last BWE I didn't get a chance to play in this little event so it was especially fun for me to experience for the first time. I definitely did my fair share of zerging waypoints and making sure that nothing survived our onslaught. 

Of course, eventually I got turned and had a party with my new friends. 

Now we only have some speculation left to do. The last BWE is July 20-22, so what do you think they'll let us play? I'm hoping the Sylvari and Asura are finally available. It would be awesome to finally see Rata Sum and The Grove in all their glory!

GW2 Video Reception!

As you may have read earlier, I put together a time lapse video during the last Beta Weekend. (If you don't know, well then you should go check it out because apparently the whole internet is talking about it!)

Wow! First off I couldn't be more happy with some of the comments I'm getting. You people are amazing! And secondly, 16,200 views in 4 days is no laughing matter! I had an idea that people would like what I was putting together, but this goes way beyond what I could have imagined. So thank you to everyone who's watched, reposted, shared, talked about, or in any other way contributed to spreading my video around the internet. You are all gentlemen (or women) and scholars. I salute you.

Also, I figured I'd take this opportunity to answer a few questions that keep popping up.

How do you hide your character in a screenshot?
Hopefully ArenaNet will change this and allow for a first person view mode, but if they don't it's actually quite simple. 1) Type /sleep. 2) Zoom in the camera a little. 3) Your character should now be hidden. If your character is still in the screenshot you may have to play with the viewing angle a little so they are hidden, but it shouldn't take much. I've found that using a Human works best since out of all the races right now they're the smallest and the Charr's horns have a nasty habit of getting into your screenshots regardless what you do to hide them.

How did you take that many screenshots!?
I used a handy program called chronolapse. It's super easy to setup and you can set it to take a screenshot at whatever time interval you want. Then you set a folder you want it to save the screenshots to and voila! There you have it! 10,000 screenshots, every 3 seconds, all saved in one place!

On the usability side I did find out that in order for chronolapse to actually work right you have to set Guild Wars 2 to "Fullscreen Windowed" mode, under screen resolution, otherwise for whatever reason chronolapse will just take screenshots of your desktop, which is very much not what I want everyone looking at. Also, once I had taken all the screenshots I did reorganize them so that each location was separated into it's own folder, this made for putting the final video together a lot easier since I could edit each segment individually instead of having to cut up one clip a bunch (23 to be exact) times.

Why did you take screenshots instead of video?
The short answer is: I wanted to save disc space. 10,000 screenshots comes out to about 2GB, whereas 8hours of uncompressed 1080p video is on the upwards of 1.4 TERABYTES!

The long answer is: If I'm taking 1080p video at 30fps and then speeding it up to the rate at which I made the time lapse I would effectively be cutting 89 of every 90 frames out of the videos. That's a lot of wasted footage. If you do the math, 8 hours of video is 864,000 frames and I would only be actually using 10,000 of those. So instead of wasting all those (854,000) frames, I chose to cut out the middle man and just go straight for the screenshots. This speeds up the editing process, since I'm using smaller file sizes (2GB of screenshots instead of 1.4TB of videos), and I don't have all this extra footage wasting my disc space that will eventually just end up on the cutting room floor.

Where is this Sylvari area?
It's in the southwest corner of Kessex Hills. Lychcroft Mere.

In the end all I have to say to everyone is:

Thank you for your support and yes I will definitely be making more videos down the road.

GW2 Making Improvements

Before the June Beta Weekend Event ArenaNet went through a list of the changes they were making. Many of those changes were really easy to understand and generally straightforward, but the one change "UI Improvements" was pretty general. In the end it ended up being a lot of little updates that caused some gigantic improvements.

The first thing I noticed was the updates made to combat text notifiers, most notably being the new feedback for confusion damage. As you probably know by now, I play a Mesmer and confusion is a condition almost entirely unique to Mesmers. In the previous BWE, and subsequent Stress Test, I had actively been trying to figure out what exactly confusion did. Does it do a lot of damage? Was it worth it? Should I put more effort into building up stacks of confusion? How worthwhile is Cry of Frustration anyway? I would dig through the combat log to see what confusion was doing and most of the time it was more work than it was worth to track down one tick of confusion damage in the multitude of notifications flooding my combat log.

Now with this new update it's obvious. Confusion actually has it's own unique damage notifier. You can see it in the screenshot above. It's super easy to see how much damage its doing, and how often. Other combat notifiers that are especially awesome now are the new critical hit text and the revised notifiers for combo field combos. 

If anyone combos with your combo field a heart will show up over their character. Not only does it show that they've made a combo it also says what condition they caused, if they caused one. This makes combat a lot more fun, and if you're a class that generates a lot of combo field opportunities you get some great positive feedback. You can actually see if your support is working effectively.

The other big change, which is really subtle, is the update to the condition and boon notifiers. Now there's this little white stroke that decreases around the condition or boon flag. It's super subtle and that's ok. Even this little change goes miles to show some more minute information that can be extremely important if you need to know when to start stacking cripples back onto your foes. Even in the WvWvW combat I participated in above you can obviously see what's going on at a glance. It's awesome.

This last one I got a lot of joy from. The new 'map completion' notifier.

Previously the notification came in the form of a letter, the same way you get from filling out an NPC Heart anywhere else in the map. I love the treasure chest, it's so satisfying. I feel like I've truly accomplished something and having this unique chest popping up really brings me back to completing a dungeon in GW:EotN, super fun. If you haven't gotten the chance to complete a map yet I highly recommend it. The rewards are great, 52 silver, a sword, a set of shoulders, a mystic key, some cloth, and 2,500xp. I know I for one am going to be striving for 100% map completion once GW2 launches. This is the first time I actually feel encouraged to go for it! I'll get more than just an achievement!

GW2: The Beauty of Tyria

For this Beta Weekend Event I decided to do something a little bit different.

I made a time lapse showcasing Tyria, and how amazing the land is to look at. I realized that I'll have plenty of time to play the game later, and since all this effort to level up and build my characters will eventually be wiped it made since to take a more casual approach to enjoying the BWE. This way I could have something of value to take away from the BWE that's more than just a couple screenshots, or some shiny new shoulders. And you can enjoy it too.

The one thing I didn't think about, but got a good kick out of once I started putting together all of my footage, is how often people would unsuspectingly photobomb my video. In the actual video you hardly notice them, but some of them are quite funny if you take them completely out of context.

GW2 Gearing up for BWE2

Now that ArenaNet has posted what we'll be able to see and do in this coming Beta Weekend Event the question arises as to what will you ACTUALLY do?

With all this new content you could spend the entire weekend crafting, exploring and fighting bandits without even stepping foot into the new PvP content. Likewise, it's entirely possible for you to spend your entire time locked in brutal combat with the newly added sPvP tournament mode. Will your team be victorious, or will you be crushed by your foes? But perhaps, it fits your fancy to go look into the explorable Ascalon Catacombs and spend all your time vanquishing the newly formed ghosts of olde?

I know I for one haven't spent nearly enough time with sPvP and WvWvW content so I'm definitely going to make sure to at least do a tournament or two, and find out what this Dark Room they speak of has to offer. I do love tricks and traps. Also, I've finally gotten my rig set up for recording video (sorry no streaming yet) so I've definitely got some plans for a steady flow of content after the beta has run its course. Expect glorious screenshots and battle reports at the very least!

Which means if you've got any ideas on what you'd like to see feel free to let me know! My Mesmer would be more than happy to risk life and limb for you.

GW2 The BWE Downtime Game

As many of you have already read this morning ArenaNet announced that the next BWE will be from June 8th-11th and there's some interesting bits in there that should be of interest to you. Particularly all your characters will be kept.

I find this to be great news because after spending 30+ hrs building up a Mesmer over the course of the last BWE and Stress Test I would hate to have to do it all over again. Of course I totally would do it all over again, and probably take the opportunity to explore some different options starting out. Maybe go through the Charr story instead. I really fell in love with their starting area when I was exploring around and just having fun. Their dynamic events have a particular flavor to them that's really fun and unique. You're definitely not going to find little human kids running around commenting on how badass they are when you kill ghosts for them.

With that in mind, I can't wait to see what the Asura and Sylvari zones have to offer. I've been gripped by the Sylvari lore since they were first announced and was planning on making one even before they became even more awesome. I just hope we don't have to wait too long to get a chance to see what they have to offer. And all this waiting has really gotten me thinking what to do in all this GW2 downtime? I'm not going to pony up for Diablo 3 right now because, well frankly I don't have the money, but that's besides the point. I know that once GW2 launches I'm just going to shelve everything else anyway so I don't really think it's a great idea to go and buy a bunch of stuff potentially months before you stop playing it entirely.

So I've been picking up hobbies, like blogging, for example, and I've been watching SC2 streams over at TeamLiquid. As well as chugging through the Brutal campaign in SC2. Sometimes that campaign just feels like you're smashing your head into a brick wall. It's like a test in how much of a masochist you are. Honestly, I don't think it's really worth it, but it's something to keep me entertained in the meantime. I'm also going through and finishing up Playthrough #2 of Borderlands. I've built up a SMG Siren to the point that almost nothing poses much of a threat though, so it's really more to get some kind of FPS kick than anything else. There's a few Achievements I have left to get, but the Underdome is retarded and I don't really feel like spending 16hrs of arena grinding to get 4 more achievements.

Vanilla GuildWars has always had a special interest for me so I log back in there from time to time, but given that I've already gotten 40/50 in my HoM I've almost entirely retired my character to playing dollhouse with all the armor sets I've collected and screwing around in Random Arenas from time to time. And with the gargantuan time commitment I'd have to invest in order to get another 5 HoM points it's one of those things that I'm really not interested in anymore.

What have you been doing in this downtime? Are you still working on finishing up your HoM? Or is there something entirely different that's been keeping your attention? I hear a lot of people have been logging back into old favorites to pass the time.