You should buy soon and get the 3-day head start. That way you won't have to worry about making all of the characters you want to use reserved names for at once. I'm really loving the game so far. I'll put up a post soon once I organize my thoughts. Also, I'm playing on the server "Tarnished Coast". You can guest on other servers, but it'll just be easier if we join the same server.
Meanwhile, more pictures! I would have had them up sooner, but I had to file a support ticket to reclaim my photobucket account (the uploads on sm boards aren't very helpful), so I waited.
I started a charr necromancer, but I didn't play very much with it, so this is the only screen shot I have from it. You can see remnants of the great wall along with some new steelworks built by the charr.
A combat shot for you all (finally). This is my sylvari ranger executing one of my favorite combos - Flame Trap followed by Whirling Defense shoots flames everywhere. You can even see a couple of other combos going off of my Flame Trap. My pet sylvan hound leapt into the field, which game him a fire shield, which burns foes, and it looks like someone shot an arrow through the field and got a burning arrow.
My guildmate and I went back to the jumping puzzle I showed you earlier and managed to finish it. He did a lot of them this weekend and got really good at spotting the paths through them. We got an achievement and chest reward when we finished.
A place we found after that jumping puzzle.
These next three shots are from a jumping puzzle in Kryta. This one had some tricky jumps, but it was super fun. We actually saw an entire guild working on it together.
Clearly, jumping puzzles are hazardous to your health, as I revive someone who feel a little far on this one. Also, my sylvan hound can sit on vertical surfaces apparently.
We came out of that jumping puzzle by a village called Wizard's Fief which was near a floating fortress. It looked pretty badass. This area is located right around where the Villainy of Galrath quest (that super long one worth 4k xp) takes place in GW1. I took this during a Vista cinematic of the area.
We stopped to pose for a few pictures, because we thought this place was pretty awesome.
Working on another jumping puzzle in Asura territory. We didn't finish because the Beta finale was about to start.
So then we waited...
Unfortunately the beta finale was kind of a let down this weekend. They did a battle royale/hunger games themed team-based elimination match, where we all had shotguns and limited ammo, meanwhile our health slowly declined unless we could eat rations. Unfortunately they didn't think it through well enough, because after 15 minutes they enabled a death penalty, which meant when you died you came back as a little robot that pooped ammo and could activate shields, which was really, really boring. My guild mate said that the June beta ended with a battle against zombies, but once you died, you became a zombie and fought against the remaining players, which sounds infinitely more awesome than this beta's finale.
That's all for now!