Rate the BMP missions

What do you think of the BMP missions and the BMP in general?

Here is my vote:

Saul's Story: My personal No. 1
It is great fun to play with Thommis, Hablion and especially Dorian, he just looks too funny.

The hide and sneak part was quite nice, I also noticed that the area where this takes place is in the green jungle area between the Verdant Cascades and Kryta. This could mean the Charr tried to invade over the Norn territory and not through the more southern Stone Summit part of the Shiverpeaks near Ascalon.

Then you destroy 4 Charr Warbands. Quite cool to slaughter tons of low level foes, but it quickly gets old. They can hardly harm you after all, and you have a 7 second recharge - 3.5 with the Mantra of Inscription - 80 Holy AoE damage nuke signet. This is a general problem of all 4 missions, hordes of low level foes versus incredibly powerful player skills.

The last boss killed me, the only time I died while playing the BMP, seems to be the hardest of all 4 missions to me because of the final encounter. Which does not mean much.

The cinematics were very cool, how Saul realized his mistake and his false gods was nicely told.



Togo's Story: Rank 2

The cinematics were really nice. Especially for the assassin guy. Not so cool were the skill selections. But it was at least more challenging than Saul's mission in general, the final boss was not really strong though.

The big gripe is the 8. skill on the bar. Basically, wait for it to recharge, wait till they kill Talon and then wipe the floor with all of them. Boom. Wonderful, makes Saul's uber signet of mass carnage look like a tactical weapon. I am not sure if this should really be an example for GW2 missions.



Gwen's Story: Rank 3

Not much fighting, and often I ran around rather helpless having no idea where to go. Also, having "FLEE" and "THROW ROCK" as skills for a PvE Mesmer made me chuckle.

But killing the Devourer by destroying the pillar and playing hide and seek had some appeal. Better than killing another horde of 1.000 lowlevel Charr that do not stand a chance. Not as much replay value as the other missions though.

Gwen running around in this white prisoner garb is also a sight to behold. No, not because Pedobear agrees but because it gives the whole thing a dramatic touch.



Turai's Story: Rank 4
The Battle of Jahai is depicted from a distance, I could not really immerse myself in it. So I fought the rear guard. The ultimately BEST thing about this mission is that you get a free r9 15-22 Turai Ossa Sword, basically an Eternal Blade that is not yet Eternal. I also like the shield skin very much, I might replace my gloom shields with them.

Turai seems to be a half-Jotun, he giant stomps the little undead guys and well... pure carnage. He reminds me of William Wallace, who is also a giant, shoots lightning from his eyes and whose farts knock down people, too. He walks a bit sluggish and slow for his size, the animation was not right imo.

At least he has to fight a little bit more because he does not have the same uber-nukes as Togo and Saul.

The final cutscene was very cool, though the battle with Palawa was not very exciting.



Discoveries: Very nice idea, did only Gwen's so far (finding Hideouts). A bit like the hidden Prophecies bonus missions.



Weapon Skins: THE reason for the BMP
An unlimited source of some of the better skins ingame. I really love the skins, but I am not sure if this is a good thing... what do you think? Turai's Sword also makes a great hero weapon.



General comment: The cinematics are great. As are the rewards. My gripe with the rewards is that you can get limitless numbers of these items, even if they are customized. Endgame items are limited to the one you get on your first completion, too.

Maybe one should be given the option to exchange the item for another one from the same collector in case you made a mistake, the endless supply of great skins is just too good. Now one must be really a snob to buy rare item skins, because the BMP provides quite a lot of supreme skin styles. As I mentioned above, I will replace all my Gloom Shields with Undead Shields.

The gameplay was storydriven (rather good stories, IMO), fun and diverse. The thing I did not like was the skills given to the player and the extreme mindlessness and low level and sheer masses of enemy mobs.

I do not expect smart enemies. But they should fight back a bit harder and require some more thought than in the BMP. This should not be a gameplay design example for GW2 -> if this is the case, I am gone. UBER HERO player vs tons of level 12 foes? Not really that cool, I say go back to Prophecies, 4-6 man parties vs a bit larger enemy mobs like in the Shiverpeaks, with higher or equal level and some more challenge. I.e. kill the healer, then the rest. This is all gone in the BMP, the mobs lack diversity. Even if this is for story reasons, it is bad.

The dozen of canthan guards charging you is great the first time you do it, after that it is really silly. Use the Togo Nuke (tm) and you are done.

The story driven parts of the mission where you had to do something else besides killing were great. I think Togo's mission would be much better if you did not have the nuke and stupid enemy numbers. So yay for the fun mission objectives, nay for the actual fighting!


My Verdict:

The reason you are playing this is to experience the story and the cinematics. After that, to get your favorite skin weapons/shields. It is really just a "bonus" experience. But more of this in a game with more content is for sure nice.

What is a bit sad is that the tactical game is lacking. PvE was always easy, but now it gets dumbed down totally, and hopefully this is only the case in this BMP, and not a hint of how GW2 will be. The cinematic cutscenes rock, the mission objectives rock, but the actual fighting needs to become better and not dumber, too.

I wouldn't bet on it.

Missions are quite well done, but have zero replay value.

This format would be good for quests though.

I know how you feel about replay here Antheus...

but honestly, it's free, and relatively entertaining.

On a monk with black kurzick 15k, chaos gloves white, black bandana, equip the mursaat sword and undead shield.

my monk has never looked so pretty

hmmm
I never thought about how the mesmer 'hero' is relying on playing dead, hiding and throwing rocks to get through PvE stuffz.
Now I am angry. RaWr

Well, bonus pack missions beat most other gws content simply by having much better stories and atmosphere. Its kinda back to old RPG. It really contrasts with other gw stuff.

Difficulty is ok for casual player i guess. Most of difficulty of hardest mission /Dalessios/ comes from fact that NPC ally has heal area which heals foes too. Kinda enemy healer you can't shutdown.

all good. Nice little freshener-upper. I like them all. Ty to the anet team.

(though did experience some sort of latency in Turai's mish)

I just love how much damg they all do compaired to how useless they all are in the present times.

That was caused by your comp, not your internet. Hopefully this will dispel once and for all people's want for "huge battles" on the Guild Wars engine.

Missions get collective 8/10, exceeded my expectations and the new skins are <3.

Absolutely love the new skins.

Missions are a nice break from normal play... I compare them to challenge missions (in Nightfall/EotN). A short mission that nets you a reward

The rewards are, IMHO,very nice.... I like new skins, be it items (BMP) or hero armor (NF/EotN).

The ONE thing that irked me a little was how nobody actually says anything in the FMVs. Most of the time it works OK; for the Gwen ending sequence it seems a little bit artificial, although it isn't *too* bad given the circumstances.

I can understand this decision though as voice actors aren't easy to get hold of. I am happy they chose to use at least a narrator, and to keep FMVs short to compensate... makes up for quite a lot.

I have to admit though, I was curious to find out how they'd VA the Tengu. Looks like I'll be waiting quite a lot longer to get an answer to that.

lol no...it wasn't 'my computer'.

dual core 3.0 ghz
8800gts
800 watt psu
2 gigs ballistix (dual channel)

lol crysis doesn't lag it..

/on topic. it (turai's) lagged right from the start.

Same here...

The Super SoJ they give you is your friend. It's a aoe interrupt fiesta.

I'm with Longasc, Saul's mission is definitely the best. Very closely followed by Togo's.

I also died on the first attempt at that last wave of Charr, with the Ele boss. On my second try I used the Mursaat as "Tanks" and let them take aggro first, it took a LONG time for them to die, they just took the Fire Storms thrown at them, by which time, we'd just about finished off the Charr.

That mission will get a lot of lovin'. I ADORE the Mursaat Skins.

I got to the last group of char with saul, noticed that I wasn't invincable like the rest of the mission, started retreating, watch entire party except the unseen get killed, used the healing command and the fall back shout and ended up with enitre party that went out and finished it.

I liked the BM very much, the first time you use those over powered skills are great, like the skins for bonuses. This might hurt the player market for a while, but upgrades might soar through the roof. 10/10 for something that was "free".

agreed. 10/10. This is a great gift and more than I had expected.

As for replayability? it's well worth replaying and I'll probably replay them a lot more than I replay normal missions. Why? because the rewards give you an incentive to replay them.

So, they're more replayable than normal missions and quests throughout the rest of the game (with the exception of dungeons).

The weapons are excellent. much more than I would ever have hoped for. They really have put a lot of thought and effort into this. Thank you Anet.

So far I've only done the Togo mission. I wanted to try one before I went to sleep last night so that was the one I chose. To be honest I got lucky to get it done first time and it really got my adrenaline going not having a party to support me. It was a fair challenge, not too hard for the average or new player to adjust to, and not too easy for a seasoned player. Perfect difficulty level for that mission at least

I can see this promoting the trade in weapon upgrades and inscriptions. I'm glad to see they're not giving perfect weapons for this and making people use resources to have the weapons they want. This should hopefully give the market a shake. Thankfully for me I have loads of storage filled with inscriptions and upgrades. This finally gives me a reason to use them

I love the new skins! I will have all my heroes set up with nothing but mursatt stuff as soon as possible. Meaning that I will have tons of trips thru sauls mission.

Overall I am amazed with the BMP. There is nothing that i didn't like about it.
Gwen is my favorite mission due to it being a big puzzle that you have to figure out as you go along. I think guild wars could use more quests/missions that work this way.

I am not really fond of the Togo mission because there is nothing worse than being forced to play a Rit. I play a rit worse than most people played assassins when they first came out so i find it annoying being forced into that role but there is no denying that I want that god mode nuke on all my skill bars! Personal issues with the rit aside, the mission itself is pretty good and is actually fun.

I think that Anet made alot of great decisions with the BMP. Top of the list is that everything is customized. Noone making 100K+XX for anything off of this thing. We got a ton of great looking skins and it isn't gonna cost us anything to fit out all our heroes and characters with them. Mod prices may go up some but only for a while i think.
Missions are fun and they kept them to a very reasonable time length for the more casual player that may not have alot of time to invest into a long mission, I personally could deal with them being longer but its good to see some shorter content now and then.
This is a great addition to the GW collection, now they just need to make more stories of other famous characters to add to it from time to time!

They are farmable. I was referring to replayability. Doing mission once or fifty times makes no difference. There are no additional challenges, no new discoveries (heh) to be made, no change in skills even. It's literally retracing the same steps over and over - a solo farm.

In the same way that 55 UW run has no replayability, neither do these missions. At very least, with UW, it's possible to do it with different skillsets, and different professions.

They are however farmable.

I'll replay them as many times as I want weapons from them.

It'll be a nice supply of "free" hero-weapons

*gasp*

Togo and Saul were definitely the best of the bunch. The wussy gwen one bothered me a bit, didnt really let you know wtf was going on. And the sneaking across the plains of 8000 char meh. The best weaps imo are the undead though, which makes Turai's the one I will repeat most

after u beat it for the first time, check your chat log... it will say that u unlocked explorer mode... which will allow u to try and complete hidden challanges which will result in more books (also sais that on wiki)

The only bad thing I have experienced was a MASSIVE lag spike to the tune of 3 fps when I got to the end of the Turai's mission. Once the cutscene hit it returned to normal.

That's because the Norn and the Charr aren't exactly enemies. Single Norn can take on a few warbands at once. Overall, the Charr had the military might to push through them, which the Norn were aware of, but it'd come at a great cost and their forces would be diminished too great to take on the armies of Kryta.

Sort of a looking the other way for both sides kind of deal.

I found this to be excellent at showing how the game is based on tactics in and out of combat. Although the last part, Distortion + Illusion of Haste and Play Dead if you get into trouble is all you really needed.

The animation was spot on. His slow paced jogging held firm with the ground and didn't show any signs of him sliding foward or slipping on mud. I figured he might have some Norn blood in him.

I run an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, Asus 8800 Ultra on a Gigabyte X38-DQ6 motherboard (1600Mhz FSB and 1066 RAM Bus) with 2GB of 800Mhz DDR2 RAM. I had horrible issues with framerate dropping to 9fps during Turai's mission. This is a definite problem on their end.

On a scale from 1[bad] to 10[great], I rate the missions at least 9
I love the story
Love the new scenery. Southern Cantha is gorgeous.
The characters are well designed. I liked the young Maser Togo
The items are beyond what we had expected.
I have an older PC : P4 3GHZ, 1GB DDR-Ram, Ati 9600XT. Didn't notice significantly dropped frame rates.

In short, thanks Anet. Excellent work.

Togo's mission was awesome and immensely beautiful, so that one gets a big thumbs up from me. Might be a little biased because I'm a Togo fan, though.

In terms of difficulty:

Gwen: -10 /10 (runrunrun1!!1)
Togo: 0/10
Turai: 0/10
Saul: 1/10 (if you don't target the ele boss in the last wave, you die from earth quake + firestorms) and protecting the villagers: annoying/10

Saul:
Took way too long and I don't enjoy spamming Signets, but that's just me. The hide-and-seek part was done nicely.

Togo:
All the information with the guys reminds me of Mortal Kombat xD The keeping council alive things were a bit hard with just one heal.

Turai Ossa:
The battle wasn't intense because I was at a distance. The mission itself is quite boring due to the massive amount of replaying (because we all know the Undead stuff > all). Got the timer bonus and keep missing the last spot for strategic view. I think I killed all the elite guards but didn't get the bonus :/

Gwen:
By far my most favorite. I replayed it around 5 times for items and unlocked all 3 bonus.

Conclusion: Some of these are great quest templates. One thing I do want to note is: Battle of Jahai, I bet if we were actually fighting with the masses of troops this mission might just be the best out of all due to massive and senseless slaughtering, kind of like Dynasty Warriors.

Saul = crap
Togo= best
Gwen= meh
Turai= Alright.

My name is Turai Ossa, and THIS IS SPARTAAAAA!

Bet you can't guess which one I like.

How would crysis not lag that machine? That's not that fast.

Anyways, I thought that gwen's "MGS" was a really cool idea. I hope they take a hint form these missions and make GW less about just fighting and more about many different ways of playing the game.

Were they worth 26 euros?

If by MGS you mean spam running skills and distortion, I understand

really? benchmark'06 gave me an (over) 11k mark.

as far as fast lol...you're kidding right?

I find the BMP to be rather borring. None of the missions are at all challenging, completed all of them in practically no time at all. Within 2 hours I had 6 "reward" weapons, which, while I will admit that most of them are very cool looking, I simply have little use for accept maybe as hero weapons. Frankly I was hoping for in-mission drops rather than easily gotten(pratically handed to you on a silver platter), customised post-mission rewards. A little challenge and reward for effort is what I wanted, along with some interesting story lines, which were also lacking in my oppinion, but I guess that was too much to hope for. Oh well, maybe next BMP?

/wootforsuccess!
only one i had trouble with was the togo one though:P
use the PBAoE at the wrong moment at the wrong time and its byebye togo:'(

It takes less than 10 min each bonus mission except for Saul's.

Challenge, it took you 2x the time to beat the BMP. Try harder.
Reward, uber looking weap =/= rewards?

I still can not beat Master Riyon in Togo's mission. For whatever reason I get him to about 1/4 health and I just die. So I dont know if that is the last bad guy or not. But I have completed the other ones.

I'd say the Saul one is easy as pie. "Flag" your allies and then use your special skill. Target the Charr nukers first and flank them while their busy fighting the murssat. EASY!!! I didn't die once. I might try it again not in stealth mode and see how hard it is.

The GWEN one was the first one I did so the format seemed a little odd at first, and made me think of Star Wars. Once I figured out what I was suppose to do with the Charr Ghosts and the Seige Devourer, it was just RUN, RUN LIKE HELL. I think that mission gets props for being the most RPG'ish of them all.

The Turi one made my computer freeze twice. Once when fighting the first group of grey giants and then at the hudge battle scene right before Joko. I was able to reconnect and my poor 4200+ was crying. Something is terribly wrong with that battle scene (but it is awesome). Fighting joko seemed anti-climatic and my son only said, and I qoute. "if this game wasn't rated PG his head would have come flying off". All around not too bad.

As more master togo, the mission probably seems the most polished. Perhaps more than the gwen one. Everything seems to work really well.

Yes I agree, so why the attitude?

Ever heard of taking a piss? Getting a snack? Spending 20 minutes of that time talking to my wife? The missions were a cake walk, and you appear to agree, wtf is up your ass tough guy?

How did it take me 2x to beat the BMP? BMP = not challenging at all, you expect me to "try harder" to accmplish something that takes no skill or effort allready? Are you on drugs or just stupid?
And no, "uber looking weapons" =/= rewards, they = crap that I will likely toss in the trash can.



.

Yeah... ahhh... Lets not get too emotional here. Obvously real life takes priority. I fail to see how your real life issues require you to be combative in your response.

K guys, here's why I said what I did. Whenever the battle was on screen, framerate was ~11fps. If I turned my character's view to look at the ground or in the other direction, it went back up to a nice ~40. If that's not caused by hardware I don't know what it could be.