Another Guild Wars 2 Stress Test Happened Last Night, So How Was It?

As we reported last week, ArenaNet — developers of Guild Wars 2 – is running weekly stress tests to gear up for the August 28 launch. Yesterday’s stress test was the latest, so is there new stuff?

Asura in Guild Wars 2 are awesome. Here’s why

I’d advise players wanting to play Guild Wars 2 pre-release to pre-purchase the game, because developers AresaNet is running weekly stress tests. Then usually between an hour and four hours long, but you can get a taste of what the fuss is all about.

Unless you’re like me and you just want to try out new races-class combinations. And that’s what I did: I tried out an asura (new), and an engineer (old). The reason is because I played as Asura during the final beta weekend as elementalist, but found the class complex. Too complex for my liking; there’s 32 skills in total, because Elementalists have four attunements: fire, earth, air, and water.

So Engineer is still as fun as ever. I can run around, dodge enemies, fire off my pistols — yes I dual wielded pistols because I’m awesome — and stick enemies in glue so they’re crippled and move 50% slower than normal. That’s as far as I got in the four-hour period.

MMOGs Have Never Been This Fun

Asura, though, I fell in love with. The race’s opening event — each race has a group event masked as a tutorial, and requires you to fight things — had me fighting rampaging robots. With the mechanical mishaps out of the way, the final encounter — a boss battle that every race has — is a giant pair of hands. Sounds lame, but in actuality it was awesome. I got knocked around by a circular sweeping hand movement, though ultimately wasn’t in too much trouble.

Then I entered the starting area proper, Metricia Province. What you’ll know about asura is they like to build giant structures. And you’ll be climbing the giant structures (especially if you’re hunting for Vistas). I didn’t do any of the personal story outside of the first couple of cutscenes. I explored, did a couple of dynamic events — saving a laboratory from an invading group, and killing lots of bugs while an NPC collected ingredients — and discovered Points of Interest.