Yeah servers are all down for 30 minutes. Every server is practically full if not overflowing. I kept getting overflow server for Queensdale (human starter area).
So some quick thoughts:
PVE: Very adventurous and chaotic and shit just happens. After the prologue part, I visit a scout who marks out some farms and farmers who need help all about the map. I walk up to the first farm and there's some worms attacking, with players already there. I begin feeding the cows and watering the plants when a giant Worm Queen appears. I switch to fighting the Queen and it goes down pretty fast. There are 10-30 people around me at this time. After the queen goes down, most everyone has gotten full credit, so people starting spreading out. I look at a map and decide to go to a farm down the road. When I get there, the farmer comes running out asking me to help deal with some bandits who are rustling his Moa Birds. (No text, just voice acted message.) I start checking bushes, some have bandits and others have moa birds hiding. I die when I pull two bandits. Actually, I died at the farm and the prologue too. Not fully dead, but "Fight to Survive" mode. The "downed state". Anyways, a ranger helps me and rezzes me up. I see two others go into this cave nearby, I follow them in. Inside the cave is the bandit hideout where the Moa Bird thieves are coming from. A group of us start taking down the bandits. I see a fenced in area full of Moa Birds, think "jackpot!" and jump in. I get owned by five bandit mobs. I respawn and come back. By then, more people have found the cave and are taking care of the bandits that attacked me. They finish them off and set the Moa Birds free. As with everything else, because I took part in it, I get credit even though I was the sacrificial lamb at first. Then we delve deeper into the cave, start climbing a spiral staircase and fighting some bats. At this point, I see the [GAF] guild tag and realize this is the gaffers crew. So I join up with them, we ascend the staircase inside the caverns and finally come across the bandit HQs. There's a bandit boss there, we fight him, and I go down a couple times until I find a sweet spot behind him. I should note that at this point I was a Mesmer without a casting weapon, so I have been playing as a melee clothie. By now, I've begun learning to use my distortion skill and dodge better and am dying far less often. We finish off the boss, and his prisoner offers us goods for sale. We also all get a reward for finishing this event that began outside at a Moa ranch and then ended up deep inside a cave. Someone gives me a staff, and I continue on with the GAF crew.
By this time, our group is like a 25-30 man zerg. I switch to the staff and we head towards an apple orchard down the way. Spiders pop out and I begin using my staff. My staff is great for large group combat and support. My main attack does damage, applies negative conditions to foes and gives my allies buffs(boons). By now, we've all stopped dying constantly. But back at the farm we just saved, some bandits have appeared for revenge and are attacking the farmer. We split between the orchard and helping the farmer, taking out about 10 waves of bandits. Get rewarded for that, go back to the apple orchard. More spiders have spawned and the thing has drastically scaled up. We have two spider events going at once. One of the events leads to a giant spider queen appearing and we zerg it down in a flurry of particle effects. By now, I had learned all my staff skills and pop Chaos Storm. I get tons of aoe damage and am buffing all the players tanking. We down the spider and disperse again.
I end up going to the river and tell everyone "hey there's an event over here". Unfortunately the chats are a bugged and guild chat and party chat were not accepting my messages. Either way, theres still 20-30 some people over here. There's a dam being attacked by harpies and earth elementals. The harpies are poking holes in the dam. I start plugging the holes when some harpies jump me and kick my ass. This area is a couple levels higher than me, so I wander back down to the river and start opening crab cages for a fisherman. Drakes begin attacking me, but I can handle those guys. The fisherman event was going sort of slow, so I head over to an area where my map is marking a downed player. This is a neat feature where any downed or dead players show on the map so you can go over and rez them. So i head that direction.
When I get there, I realize I'm back at the first farm,but now the farm is getting attacked by waves of Bandits who are setting the bales of hay on fire. I rez the guy on my map and then jump into the fray. Having learned my dodge and all better, I do far better at this event. I switch to put on a torch I just leveled up enough to use. I'm now sword/torch, which is like a magical thief. When I learn my fourth skilll, it's a stealth skill that makes me vanish in a puff of smoke that blinds my enemies then reappear in a burst of fire that burns foes. When we defeat the waves of bandits, the farmer yells "I thank you, my cows thank you. Everyone who eats beef or drinks milk thanks you!" I go to the farmer and buy some karma stuff off of her.
Now I return to the river and realize that the others had spawned a new event where a giant Drake appears to protect its nest of drake eggs. This is easily the toughest boss so far and it doesn't go down quickly despite the huge zerg. I switch back to staff and do support/damage. After that, I finish off the fisherman's event and then the dam event, which I now realize was two separate events going on at once.
There was never any real stop between all of these things. I kind of went around in a path I chose myself and found stuff going on. By the end, I had gone from level 2 to level 6.
PvP: Structured PvP was hard at first. I had a built planned out and went straight to the build, but I wasn't used to having all my skills and an elite skill. I also didn't have as much defense and using mantras (which my build is based off of) requires a bit more work than using more direct skills. I got my butt handed to me a lot.
The next PvP I tried was the WvWvW. One server was totally dominating the entire map, as that server had planned to do nothing but PvP while the rest of us were PVEing it up. I ended up enjoying WvWvW alot inspite of that, and since I was stuck with the skills and weapon I had earned from PVE, I was more familiar with the build I was using. I also just unlocked weapon swapping and that gave me more ability to handle situations. By the end of WubWub, I was handling myself just fine and stacking conditions on the red team to help push them back. I was getting better at using my stealth and illusions to survive as well.
I returned to Conquest PvP later and used a different build that was somewhat similiar. I did far better this time and brought more stealth and defensive tools. I was able to handle 2 on 1 fights for prolonged periods without getting face smashed by the uneven odds.
Beta Issues:
Servers are getting hammered harder than I think ANet was truly ready for. Every server is full and overflowing and there was routine lag spikes. When I returned to PVE, I struggled to finish a new event because my skills weren't going off. As mentioned, there's bugs with chat right now. When I relogged, it fixed my party and guild chat, but rodi and CG couldn't see my party messages to them and I didn't see their whispers to me. Some people have had performance issues, but my settings aren't maxed but mostly on high with no FSAA and it runs fine. It's mostly the server lag that janks stuff up. WvWvW was running smoother than the PVE starter area, which causes me to believe its a population load issue.
Also, as I feared, there's issues with AI and the Mesmer illusions. If you summon an illusion on a siege door or a enemy that runs out of range, the illusion will just stand there not attacking or pursuing. You can't even use your distortion shatter on them to get use out of them.
Combat:
Quick, very quick. You can die fast and you attack fast. After a few hours I got use to activating skills while dodging at the same time. Sometimes this would cause issues where skills wouldn't activate. I think this may be lag caused as well. Using mantras in PVP didn't work correctly nor did my "Activate mantra twice" trait work correctly all the time.
Graphics:
Art so purdy. Lion's Arch is real neat and has a clockwork fountain in the middle with clockwork noises and horn sounds. I wandered around and found a bar in Lion's Arch that was inside the carcass of a shipwreck that had landed atop a precipice. Divinity's Reach is massive. The scale is just nuts. I think I've explored like 15% of it. I realized I couldn't find the bankers because they were on an upper level above me. I just figured something that high up was decoration art and not really a place with stuff in it.
