Guild Wars 2 June BWE

Last weekend was the second Beta Weekend Event for Guild Wars 2, so I spent most of the weekend playing it.

I already had a Charr thief I'd made for the last beta event, but I made a couple of other characters, a Norn engineer and a Human necromancer. I ended up mostly playing the engineer because I really enjoyed the class and the Norn starting area. The thing I've found so far is that each class allows for a fairly wide range of playstyles while each still keeps their own unique flavor. The engineer uses pistols, rifles and shields, and has a wide range of utility skills from turrets (some for healing and some for damage/control) to grenades to elixirs (providing buffs to the player and/or nearby players). I highly recommend playing quite a bit with different skill/weapon combinations because it really changes how the class plays.

I did some crafting - leatherworking and huntsman on my engineer. Leatherworking is pretty much what you would expect, crafting various forms of medium armor and inscriptions to buff said armor, while huntsman is mostly for ranged weapons. The crafting system is interesting - once you choose your crafting professions (you can have two) you gain some basic recipes. You skill up by crafting things and you learn new recipes through either (rarely) purchasing them from vendors or through discoveries. On the crafting interface there is a tab for recipes and another tab for the discoveries, where you select 3 or 4 components to craft something and 'discover' a new recipe. It's fairly obvious what items you need to craft for a discovery. For example, for a new pistol discovery I put an inscription and the pistol components together, which created an upgraded version of the pistol recipe I already knew. My only issue with it is that my huntsman skill progressed much more quickly than my leatherworking, because I had trouble getting enough leather to craft the things I needed to improve my skill. So while my huntsman crafting skill advanced ahead of my gear level, my leatherworking lagged pretty far behind. Still, overall I found the crafting system fairly enjoyable. It is grindy but not tediously so (at least for me).

I might post some more thoughts later, but for now, have some screenshots.

Podcasts

Anyone have any suggestions for good gaming or game dev podcasts? Looking for some aural inspiration to listen to while I do other things.

I'll make sure to post a follow-up on what I find.

Thanks!