GW2 – Path Of Fire Demo, Take Two

This morning I tried the Path of Fire demo again, and it went much better. Thanks for the encouraging comments on my last whiny post. :)

In fact, the second time through, I got all the way through the burning village and killed the two Veteran Forged Warhounds without dying. Then … the client disconnected.

That was disappointing, to say the least.

So I had to go through it a third time. I got through it all again without dying. I put out all the fires in the village, got the Raptor mount, met what’s-her-name and what’s-his-name, and got out into the city. (I actually saw the city before, because if you rage-quit the episode like I did yesterday, it drops you into the city.)

I really only did three things differently to get through the combat: 1) I actually bound Dodge to the key I expected it to be on, 2) I kept moving constantly, and 3) I hit every ability on the hotbar as soon as it came off of cooldown.

Just doing those three things I managed to stay relatively damage-free for most of the fighting. (I stuck with the scepter, too.) I had spent too much time playing more “traditional” MMORPGs and forgot that playing GW2 is basically like playing a shooter from a third-person viewpoint. If you stand still for any reason, you’re going to die in seconds.

Anyway, the new city looks nice, although there’s a very noticeable drop in frame rate. GW2 is not a game that appears to be rendering a lot of high-end graphics, but it certainly chugs like it is.

Mounts are one of the major selling points of this expansion. I can say that the Raptor is neat, the jumping is neat (if somewhat imprecise and frustrating), and the tail swipe is neat. I don’t see it fundamentally changing the game in any way, though, except that it will allow the developers to add different kinds of jumping puzzles. So … yay?

Other than the mounts, I just saw more of the same GW2 continuing into a desert zone. I’m starting to rethink whether $30 is cheap enough to buy this expansion. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it, but I feel like I should work on finishing Heart of Thorns and the Living Story Season 3 before I think about venturing into the Crystal Desert.