Overwatch Beta: First Impressions

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

WTF.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA.

Ok, I know this is obviously a bot game vs AI, but….

WTF.

I have shit accuracy. I am a total noob. I’m not familiar with the map at all.

How the hell does this happen?

Then I went to play an actual game with players.

First round: Went via some side route or other (as inferred from seeing other players charge up a central path toward the objective.)

Managed to be fast enough to overtake the objective by a half metre, set up in an unobtrusive corner slightly behind the presumable viewpoint of the opposing team staring straight ahead at the spawn objective.

They had no chance at all.

First round won.

Second round: One or two opposing team players switched to Reinhardt. The frontal barrier shield puzzled me a bit and I spent a little way too long a time dicking around out of turret form trying to reposition and figure out how to get around behind them and failing and totally ignoring the team fight and objective, while the opposing team sat on it.

Second round lost.

Final round: Decided not to play Reinhardt’s game any longer. Remembered during trying out all the heroes’ skills on the practice map that the frontal shield only has 2000 health. Turreted up a nice long distance away, held down the left mouse button while aiming in the general vicinity of the big blue glowing rectangle thing sitting on the spawn.

Another Bastion on my team did the same thing. Two Reinhardts on the opposing team = no more shield, then dead.

Our team moved in onto the capture point. I de-turreted and went around the sides again, looking for a nice angle on a completely unfamiliar map. Found a cute side room whose only entry seemed to be nearer our team than theirs. Had a decent enough side view of the capture point. Finished off about 3-4 people that were dumb enough to move into my sight line aka on the capture point, while the other five members of my team destroyed those that didn’t dare get on said capture point for obvious reasons.

After that game, I uninstalled Overwatch.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. It’s got that super well-polished Blizzard look all over it.

I was deeply impressed by the very guided tutorial, which really assumes the person playing it is completely new to FPSes and may need some adjustment time with getting familiar with the controls and so on.

After that, you get to play around in a little private Practice Range map to shoot bots (literally robots) and have friendly bots to test out all your skills on. You learn about Hero Swapping and have all the time in the world to try out every Hero’s skill in blissful peace and quiet.

(Albeit, the map closed on me once because I stayed too long, and I had to start it again.)

This is worlds apart from trying to learn MOBA hero skills from either watching a video or having to be in a serious business game lasting 45 minutes where your teammates will rip you apart for being noobtastic.

Then you can ramp up to something less potentially hostile and 100% cooperative by going up as a player team against a set of bots, or Practice vs AI.

Which I think it is a GREAT idea… except a little HAHAHAHAHAHAHA WTF HAHAHAHA in practice. See above.

I suppose they were easy bots or something. Who knows. I was yolo solo-queuing by just hitting the Practice vs AI button.

After which, I presume it’s vs other players time, and/or ramping up AI difficulty in some way that wasn’t obvious on first glance.

Given how lethal every hero appears to be capable of being, I suppose Blizzard decided to err on the side of generosity by ramping up the chance that everyone will get at least partial “wins” by scoring some kills here and there, even if their team loses.

However, this may be at odds with the snowball mechanic of MOBAs or some such. Apparently, it’s less fun to be on the losing team’s side because you end up with one or two men down, and promptly keep losing from being outgunned and outflanked or whatever.

I dunno. I was busy playing Bastion.

Now, I’m -sure- Bastion has counters, as more skilled players would tell you. I’ve been a TF engineer, my turret and I have been outplayed countless times by skillful medics.

Apparently the Widowmaker can snipe Bastion to death from really far away (presuming not noob player with good aim), Genji can reflect a Bastion to autokill themselves (counter = recognize a Genji and don’t freaking shoot until the skill is over), etc.

I’ve been on the receiving end of a Reinhardt charge and pinned against the wall and shotgunned to death (during the lost round in which my positioning was very very bad.) Not fun.

I hear Roadhog can do a Pudge and meathook a turreted Bastion into his waiting arms of insta-death.

Is it going to take a little while for newbie players to realize this? Yep.

Is it still going to be possible for a thinking Bastion or Torbjorn to outwit many of the casual players out there? I’m guessing, YEP.

Is Blizzard going to nerf Bastion a teeny bit more because it seems quite ludicrously OP compared to other heroes? A qualified maybe-yep.

(I heard some guy on Reddit went up against a pre-made team of 4 Bastions and 2 Reinhardts. I laughed my ass off on reading that team composition.)

Is Bastion still going to be playable and enjoyable post-nerf? Is it possible to learn a bunch of other heroes to counter Bastion? Is it still going to be possible to play and position Bastion skillfully to out-counter the counterers? Probably all of the above, yep.

But you know, I realize that I don’t have the patience nor the time for it, personally.

It feels a little like I’ve done this before, with Team Fortress, and TF has a bit more of that jump-in, jump-out, soloqueue, play your own minigame fun, as opposed to the small team, very objective-focused, MOBA-like teamfight style of Overwatch, where team synergies are likely what you’d want to focus on at higher levels of play.

If you had a team of friends to get together and knock out a few rounds while voice coordinated, sure, yeah, it’s probably a little more fun like that. (Then again, MANY other games would be a little more fun like that.)

I’m especially NOT paying $40 USD or more for the privilege of jumping in to casual play a few rounds here and there for kicks.

$20 USD, maybe. I’d buy it if/when it ever goes on half-price or free to play.

I mean, TF2 is free to play. Dota 2 is free to play. League of Legends is free to play. That’s their competition right there.

It’s a little bit of a shame because the polish could knock your socks off, the heroes all feel pretty unique and cute; if you were a play-all-the-things player, you’d have a really fun learning curve mastering each hero; many of the heroes all feel like they’ve stolen a little bit from MOBAs or other FPSes here and there (a pudge meathook, an enigma black hole pull, dwarf turret playbook is nearly a dead ringer for the TF engineer, etc.) and it’ll be interesting to see how players put them together in new and surprising ways…

… but um… there’s probably still a few more balancing passes and iterations to go in order to make sure that a few heroes aren’t overwhelmingly favored over everything else…

…and ultimately, it’s me. I’m playing too many other games, most of them free or already with initial outlays paid for, to have 1-3 hours a night to commit to Overwatch. So… why should I pay $40 USD for a game I have no time to play just yet?

Does not compute.

I’d give one thing to Blizzard though. They got me to download the Battle.net Launcher. It is a super-slick well-polished affair like pretty much all their other games. Which are conveniently displayed in super-slick fashion in a vertical row screaming “Play Me For Free” or “Try It For Free.”

I already downloaded Diablo 3 to give it a spin. Cute. Also another thing I actually have no time to sit through a long story for, but maaaybe, if it ever goes on 50% sale ever ever again.

I have been waiting for a cheaper Starcraft 2 for eons. All three of the chapters are finally out now. Some kind of battlechest bundle can’t be much farther away. Maybe 2017 or 2018… In the meantime, I could actually ‘try it for free.’

No doubt, I will take Heroes of the Storm out for a free spin too at some point.

(Already messed around with Hearthstone on the Android phone. Meh. It’s a card game. It makes money off selling the promise of power/options in card packs. Standard schtick.)

So the only thing I probably WILL be keeping for now is the launcher and the Battle.net account. The rest can wait for another day, far far ahead in the future. That’s probably already a win in Blizzard’s book.

GW2: Beta Weekend Quick Thoughts and Screenshots

Figures, it’s beta weekend and what do I do?

I roll up a warrior, take a quick glance at the Berserker elite spec, decide it looks too confusing and too condition-based for me to bother trying to craft a build for it (dealing with all those items that pop out of the chest is so annoying), then just recreate my standard variant of PS/EA zerker with quick breathing warhorn and go walk around the new map.

After following a few event chains in a big circle and thinking that:

a) most of it feels relatively great and/or acceptable, with funny character stories (the quaggans are a dear, the nobles are a hoot),

b) there aren’t currently enough events on show to really level Masteries quickly – I’m just past the first glider unlock and bouncing mushrooms, and that was with 1/3 of the bar cheated from bringing in the reward chest from racial city exploration into the jungle

c) the Mordrem and hylek waves are really overdoing/overstaying their welcome by one or two waves too many

d) the big fat Xocotl Crusher mobs / event probably needs a serious relook at his breakbar, current amount of hp amd how it scales

In a zerg of 40+ when the beta hordes first descended, the breakbar melted super-quickly, probably because there were at least a few people testing out an elite spec that automatically applied some forms of cc, and his hp felt tanky and decidedly higher than most mobs, but not annoyingly so.

In a group of under 10 a day or two later, not only was breaking the breakbar like pulling teeth (though one can easily excuse this to players not learning yet, including timing dodges to when he draws back his weapon), -after- the breakbar was broken, it took -forever- to bring down his hp (and the breakbar managed to come back up twice.)

e) the delay on pulling up the glider is back a tinge, which is awkward, I preferred the smoother feeling of the last beta version of the glider pull out

I also realized that given the slow pace of Mastery leveling in this part of the jungle, and reluctance to repetively follow an event chain over and over again, what I really would rather end up doing was climbing up to high places and taking screenshots.

Day versus night in the jungle, pretty well done.

It all looks a lot better from afar than deep in the bushes, I have to say.

With the odd exception or two.

GW2: Heart of Thorns Beta Screenshots

Masteries are now in a more readable UI.

One has to select a mastery that one wants to level up, and earn experience towards that goal. Seems to be an alternate advancement system for those who love the leveling aspect of an MMO. Presumably after you unlock it with experience, you can then spend a mastery point to purchase it.

I got to within an inch of gliderhood but unfortunately didn’t quite get it before the first beta closed. Let’s see if they save character progress in between each stage.

Much more of the Verdant Brink map was opened up, though only a few areas were heavily populated by Mordrem so far.

Map has a day/night zone cycle, day apparently set to 75 minutes and night at 45 minutes or thereabouts. I logged in to about 15 minutes of day, and then it quickly switched to night.

There seems to be an overall zone goal of holding/defending Rally Points, escorting Pact Soldiers to said Rally Points and bringing Pact Supplies to build up each Rally Point to eventually unlock more (unknown) stuff. So far only one or two Rally Points got defended consistently, so there will be more to do when it finally launches, I’m sure. I’m looking forward to more organized attempts at this zone goal.

(A beta map is naturally not a place for massive map coordination and organization, everyone’s squirreling off to see the new things, and about 85% of the people were Revenants unfamiliar with their skills and all that.)

After a first hour of intense battlefield Mordrem fighting, I found myself getting tired of the endless war going nowhere (need my organization fix) and wandered off to the quieter and probably still unbuilt areas.

I do hope that the designers don’t forget in their excitement over playing with complex and sophisticated dynamic event chains to look after the little guys, the solo explorers and casual levelers that need a calmer exploration fix from time to time, those surprisingly numerous players who enjoy and miss the feeling of leveling in their starter and intermediate leveling zones – more pastoral surroundings, less tightly packed and threatening mob densities.

Personally, I do suspect we will still have some of these areas, even in the Heart of Maguuma. Even the Silverwastes has its peaceful jumping puzzle, to take a breather from the constant combat chains.

From my short glance at the zone and the spaces and scenery therein, there seems to be a goal to pack a lot into it – something for groups (PUG or organized), something for achievement-oriented soloists, something for explorer-oriented soloists and so on.

But I dunno, I have no words to argue or defend the Vision that others seem to hate so much.

If you like it, you like it. If you don’t, you don’t.

So instead, I will just post the screenshots that -I- had fun taking.

I remembered to take a PURPLE one for Eri’s theory of depressing endgame maps.

I think this one is GW2’s claim to a Skyrim look-alike. The treetop textures, the lighting, the photo-realism just kinda blew me away.

I have… no words to describe the Itzel stare.

More of those Maguuma Wastes-style ruins we’ve all come to know and love in Dry Top and Silverwastes. Dying to know more about the origins or creators of these structures.

They weren’t kidding about the verticality of this zone. (I briefly considered spectral walking my way down – I played a necro rather than a revenant this time around – then in a brief fit of sanity, managed to find the NPC that teleported you into the pit.

Apparently it’s one of those new soloable “Adventures,” which usually challenge you to achieve some sort of task, except that it was either nonfunctional because it wasn’t done yet, or because we hadn’t unlocked the Rally Point that would unlock it, or I was just missing the whole point of what one had to do for the event.)

The cloudy ominous drop that awaits clumsy glider-less travelers.

There were some nearly empty caves under the Wyvern Cliffs, save for a few new Mushroom mobs, which were quite cute, in a nightmarish Mario Goomba sort of way.

And then I crawled through one snaking tunnel and went down another and stumbled into the as yet unpopulated Temple of Ameyalli. (Ameyalii possibly being to the hylek as Mellaggan is to the quaggan, an interpretation of the human god Melandru. Or maybe not and she’s just an unconnected animistic goddess of nature. Who knows, at this point.)

One moment of perfect beauty.

That’s all this explorer soul needed.

GW2: Sinister Necromancer Nights in the Silverwastes

I’ll fess up.

The first thing that ran through my mind when I heard the news wasn’t “OMG, gotta grind Silverwastes for a HoT beta invite!”

It was more like, “YES! Moar champion chests! Good excuse to revisit the Silverwastes since everyone will be piling back in!”

Like Bhagpuss, I don’t feel really fired up over whether I get into this beta or not – a somewhat strange state of affairs, considering that Path of Exile over yonder is also in closed beta for their Awakening expansion and GW2’s over here prepping for HoT, but I suspect there’s an air of inevitability to it.

I -know- without question that I am -obviously- going to be shelling out for the Heart of Thorns expansion, so -eventually- it is going to get played either way.

Ditto Path of Exile’s expansion, it’s going to be a free update and I’m not a super pro PoE player that can offer valuable feedback or bug reporting, so it’s not going to hurt me to experience it when it’s ready… when it’s done.

—

However, the announcement was a good excuse for me to break out of my habitual GW2 rut and give a little thought and effort towards one of the many “should do someday” ideas on my GW2 endgame list.

Namely, test out sinister gear.

I -could- just bring my tried and trusty zerk guardian with the sword and scepter pewpew into the Silverwastes, but the minor issue with that, besides being boring since I farmed Silverwastes for months with that playstyle, is that his inventory bags runneth over. It’s a struggle to free up 5-10 slots because of all the fun tonics, extra gear, Ascended materials that don’t fit in the bank anymore, leftover seasonal rewards, and a bunch of soulbound consumables that I bought with the pure intentions of practising Arah dungeon solos (and of course, never got around to it.)

The solution thus becomes: bring an alt.

Sifting through the characters that I’d been intending to test sinister gear on, the ranger is still underleveled, the thief’s playstyle I still can’t really wrap my head around (plus it’s kinda dangerous to melee Mordrem on a squishy you’re not used to playing) and my gaze naturally falls on the necromancer.

Here’s a number of birds slain with one stone. He’s a sylvari necro, and we want to play at least one sylvari through HoT because their story is apparently going to diverge some from the other races. Getting him Mordrem-ready and me used to the playstyle would help that goal.

Mordrem are best fought at range. Necros have comparatively decent range attacks beyond their one stabby stabby melee dagger.

The idea of being able to switch between condi, which would melt Mordrem husks, and power/precision, which should enable the more fun zerk necro options like death shroud life blasts, lichform autoattacking, and wells, is extremely appealing.

In theory, anyway.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t take that long to put together a set of experimental sinister gear.

I’d already been hoarding the Ascended trinkets from the Living Story in my bank, so it was just a matter of filtering “Ascended” and pulling out the stuff with the right stats. (The back I leave as zerker, since I had a zerker backpiece anyway.)

 

I’d been charging up charged quartz for over a month and racked up some 40 of them before I stopped. Exotic sinister gear was just a matter of getting my Tailor logged on, buying a ton of Gossamer thread and clicking a couple buttons to craft the armor pieces.

Runes were a bit more of an issue.

The one sinister necro build available for reference is DnT’s Brazil’s. He uses Runes of the Aristocracy, which gives condition damage and additional might duration. It makes sense for that build because it’s meant for soloing dungeons, with a major trait synergy of signets giving might. It can actually produce 25 stacks of might on its own, which is pretty sick.

In this case, I’m envisioning more of an open world flexible build – I want swiftness, I want to be able to throw wells and play with lichform and deathshroud because FUN, and I want to be able to kill things from range using either power or condi as I please.

After scanning a Trading Post’s worth of Superior Runes and eliminating super-expensive runes for reasons of poverty, I end up settling for the super-cheap Superior Rune of the Adventurer – condition damage + some power (that sorta fits the whole sinister theme there) + a bit of extra endurance on using a heal skill, which can’t hurt, given a necromancer’s lack of vigor for dodges.

Weapon-wise, I knew I definitely wanted and needed scepter/dagger to be one of them. That is the quintessential necro weapon set for inflicting bleeds.

Dagger/ I eliminated, since I didn’t feel brave enough to go up and stab Mordrem in melee range.

I brooded over staff for a while, then decided to drop it in favor of an axe. Necro staff has always struck me as more of an AoE control-ish sort of weapon, if I was going to autoattack with staff, I may as well drop into death shroud and spam 1, eh? Envisioning Silverwastes, there didn’t seem to be too many opportunities for AoE spam over systematically taking down one Mordrem at a time.

Necro axe on the other hand is a very nice mid range weapon, that can key in on whatever you target, regardless of whatever else in between you and it. It’s a power-based weapon, with a nice damage life-force sucking channeled attack on button 2.

This was the initial experimental build.

6 in Spite went without saying, who wouldn’t want +300 Power and +30% condition duration? I wasn’t going to run signets, so the next best seemed to be VI Reaper’s Might for some might while pewpewing in death shroud. I’m using an axe, so VIII Axe Training for the damage increase and reduced recharge. XII Close to Death because 20% extra damage once a mob drops past 50% health? Yum.

6 in Curses for +300 condition damage (whee) and +300 precision (yay.) II Hemophilia for increased bleed duration (yep, this is our main damage once we go into condi mode), VI Focused Rituals because I want to play with ground-targeted wells, dangit, and the new trait specialization stuff ain’t here yet. XI Lingering Curse to boost conditions dealt with scepter, which oh so happens to be our condi inflictor weapon.

2 points left and I found myself not quite sure of the best place to put these. I gave them a try in Soul Reaping at first, for additional Ferocity, and I figured if I was going to be pewpewing with death shroud, I may as well let Life Blast pierce with VI Unyielding Blast.

Taking the build for a spin in the Silverwastes, it wasn’t half bad.

(In fact, given how the copper husk beelined for me after it had dropped to 1/3 health, and kept thumping me into kingdom come despite sitting on the ridge, I have to surmise that the build might have been dealing a substantial amount of damage. Or maybe it was the extra toughness on my weapons helping to attract aggro.)

I left my weapons as rabid scepter/dagger since I was using Tequatl Ascended weapons and used an exotic zerker axe/warhorn that I also already had.

I had a pretty large number of options for dealing damage – condi scepter/dagger, power axe, power deathshroud, power wells for AoE, and power lichform.

The only thing that got a bit annoying was terragriffs knocking me over (I suspect I’m too used to letting guardian aegis block the initial charge attack) despite rolling what seemed a pretty decent distance away, and needing to stunbreak with spectral walk…

…and I didn’t feel quite as sturdy as my old rabid build. Somehow, I kept finishing up my fights with about half to one third health remaining, and maybe half of deathshroud life force left. Also, I had a tendency to keep falling over during the Vinewrath corridor fights if I missed seeing something that might run me over.

So… enter the revised build to be stress tested further tomorrow.

I’ve not really used Signet of Vamprism very much, but it seems interesting with this build. Left on passive, it heals me a bit when I get hit by anything, so small attacks should sting less. If I take a large hit that dents my health bar, I can activate it for a heal, and mark a mob for life siphoning (which apparently scales with power – and sinister gear has power!)

I found that I wasn’t really utilizing the pierce feature of life blast much, so I swapped 2 points over to Blood Magic instead, with a little extra vitality and healing power. V Vampiric Precision is another experiment, since sinister gear has decent enough crit ability and I’m using either scepter or axe, both autoattacks that are fairly fast, hopefully producing a decent enough trickle of small heals that keep me more topped up than the previous build.

Just running around the regular Silverwastes events, it feels a little more resilient than the first build, which is promising.

P.S. I am not claiming that this is the end-all and be-all of builds out there.

I’m just sharing my design thoughts on how I personally go about making and testing experimental builds that fulfill a certain goal I have in mind (in this case: kill Mordrem, switch flexibly between power and condi, don’t die.)

I generally let other people do the min-max number calculations and settle for a more fuzzy in-game measure of ‘feels good to play, kills comparably fast or faster than other people around me, doesn’t squish and keep dying.’

Listmas 2014: Random Things You Can Do in Don’t Starve Together

1) Die promptly to darkness due to Steam chatting with a friend.

2) Resurrect as a lonely ghost and go exploring.

3) Discover you can turn pigs into werepigs. Including guardian pigs. Who will promptly fight each other.

4) Give in to your inner pyromaniac by haunting trees.

5) Admire the fruits of your ghostly labor. Just a perfectly, totally normal tree carcass on the left there.

6) View the aftermath of mating beefalo herd + frog ponds as not a bonanza, but just enough to feed all the hungry mouths at home for a few days.

7) Spectate a beefalo shaving attempt gone horribly wrong, knowing you had no hand in it this time!

A big thank you to Syl and her friends for hosting the server and graciously welcoming the lil’ robot onto their world.

(Disclaimer: Experimental ghostly antics were explored with a PUG server, though with the amount of -intentional- forest fires started, who’d really notice one more?)