More Guild Wars 2

So, unlike last week's stress test where I was asleep during it, this week I was actually awake and played most of it.

It began rather roughly, with the servers constantly going up and down.  After about an hour things stabilized and I was actually able to play.  Being that it was a four hour stress test and an hour of it was already gone, I decided to focus on doing the jumping puzzles.  I took my ranger to the Charr one, which I'd heard the general location of after the last beta event, and after a bit of exploring I found it.

Now, it's important to note that prior to this, the only jumping puzzle I'd done was the Asura one.  So, I was expecting the Charr one to be about that long and maybe as difficult.  But no, the Charr one is relatively short and easy, and after I stopped derping and missing jumps and having to repeat the same part over and over again, I made it to the boss at the end.  He'd already stomped me once solo (I'd forgotten that I was downlevelled to 13 from 17, so I was like "he's only level 12, I should be beating his ass into the ground!"), but the second time I had the aid of another player, and this time we did the stomping.

There's a small chest there, but it's not over yet.  There's a note on the ground that hints at a pressure plate further upwards.  Along one of the walls is another series of platforms that eventually leads up to the pressure plate.  That opens a door that takes you to the actual reward chest.  That's it.  It's that short.  A third player joined us, grabbed the reward chest, and then as we were jumping around being idiots celebrating the cave started raining rocks down and killed all three of us.  lol

Anyway, a bit has been added since the last beta weekend.  When you hover your mouse on a skill that has a chain, where it turns into another skill after you use the first one, you can now see the entire chain and be able to better understand its properties.  Also, you can now do Ctrl + right click on a skill to make that skill your autofire skill.  Which is pretty amazing.  Say you only want to do two steps of your chain in skill slot 1, then follow up with skill 2.  Set skill 2 to your autoattack, then hit with skill 1 twice and let the autoattack kick in.  There you go.  Also, you can set it to your self-heal if you want, and automatically use your self-heal every time it recharges, which could be handy in the heat of combat.  Aside from tactical situations like that, though, you're better off leaving skill 1 as your autoattack since it doesn't have a recharge and everything else does.

Also, two more vistas were added to Lion's Arch.  One of them was balls easy, you just run up to it and grab it.  The other was a bit tricky, because you have to poke around and run through some bushes on two occasions to find the path to it.  Then there's a rather tricky exit, which I never quite got and kept dying of fall damage.

The rest of my time I spent in the level 15 Charr area, because that's where I actually needed to be so I wouldn't be downlevelled.  I killed some shit and helped a few NPCs out, got a vista, and then...  it was time for dinner.  But it was also half an hour left in the stress test, so I didn't feel too bad about quitting early.  Also, they put up an announcement saying "hey guys half an hour to go", reminding us that it ended at 4PM Pacific time, but they completely misspelled "Pacific".  They spelled it "Pacfici".  lol