Guild Wars 2

I wrote this primer a long time ago. I’ll go through it and edit it some, since some of it may have changed, but the bulk of it is still pretty accurate. It’s really for people with no experience at all, just starting out, but I thought I’d share it anyway.

It’s really REALLY long. The bolded parts the the parts you need to know. Sort of a ;tldr of the whole thing.

http://gw2.dream-sequence.net/Wordpress/?page_id=8

I think you’ve obviously put a lot of effort into this. But you’re overcomplicating a lot of things.

For example: Someone who is just starting out and has absolutely no experience probably doesn’t need to know that much about Server’s/Worlds or how they differ from in other games.
Simply saying ‘Guild Wars 2 has two separate region locked servers; one for the US and one for Europe. Within each server is a number of ’Worlds’, these are account bound and in order to move your characters over to another World you must pay a Gem fee based on its population density’
Even then that is too long winded and unnecessary.

I would suggest that you go back through everything you’ve written and create a large bullet point list where you reduce everything to it’s simplest form. This will help you establish what information is important and from that list you can then better structure the primer and make it easier to read.

Just my personal opinion though

I’ve tried that, you know. When I first wrote it. People really didn’t get it. They didn’t understand the whole all your characters on one server thing, or why it existed. A lot of people would read stuff and say this is bullkitten, the company is just trying to milk people to get server transfers sort of thing.

But yeah, it’s quite long and rambling…it’s my style. I have no intention of pairing it down so it’s not mine…not at this point anyway. I want to change the factual inaccuracies first.

I’ve read some of what you wrote. There are some mistakes and some disagreeable points.

Here goes:

“Don’t be scared of other players. They can’t steal your kills, they can’t steal your loot and they can’t steal your gathering nodes. It’s just not possible. Everyone gets rewards for participating in kills and events. Everyone gets to farm the same node…it doesn’t vanish for you until you gather it.”

- It is not quite true here in certain situations. Take the Maw’s pre-events with the Shaman or the Elite guards. Most often, I find players can’t even land enough hits to kill these guys to get credits since they were killed so fast. A few months back, the Great Jungle Wurm meta events, the wurm died before it was even targetable by some. Steal kill is certainly possible in some cases.

“Instead of dying, when you reach zero health you’re placed into a downed state. Your skill bar is replaced by four new skills that allow you to keep fighting. Should you, or someone else in the vicinity, kill a nearby foe, you rally and can get back up.”

- Correction: “Should you, or someone else in the vicinity, kill a nearby foe – that you have tagged, by inflicting a certain unknown threshold of damage -, you rally and can get back up.”

“worlds will be matched up against other worlds, which are at roughly the same skill level”

- Comment: Check out Dragonbrand vs. Magumma vs. Stormbuff Isle this week. The score is reflection of anything but the same skill level.WvW score is more about coverage.

“[concerning PvE] you’ll find that your home world makes no difference at all … The only thing home world selection affects is your WvW experience”

- Comment: a lot of guilds do not accept members from other worlds due to possibility of spying. The social structure of people you play with PvE or anything has a lot of ties to your homeworld.

" the only way to do so [changing your homeworld] at this point, is to buy gems with real money and use them to pay for a world change."

- False. You can delete all your characters and change for free. Also you can only transfer once per 7 days and you cannot participate in your new home world WvW for another 7 days.

“choosing a race neither limits your profession choices, nor does it give you any sort of statistical advantage.”

- True but it affects your jumping puzzle rage. Each race also have unique elite skills that no other race have, though minor and probably no one uses those, but the difference is there

“there is no dedicated healing class in Guild Wars 2”

- True, but some professions heal better than others and some can heal multiple allies, for example elementalist, guardians, and to certain extent mesmer.

“In fact there’s no tank class in Guild Wars 2 either.”

- False. Warrior is a tank class. There is a difference between “every class can tank” vs “there is no class that can tank”. Logical fallacy here.

Stars.2179:

I’ve read some of what you wrote. There are some mistakes and some disagreeable points.

Here goes:

“Don’t be scared of other players. They can’t steal your kills, they can’t steal your loot and they can’t steal your gathering nodes. It’s just not possible. Everyone gets rewards for participating in kills and events. Everyone gets to farm the same node…it doesn’t vanish for you until you gather it.”

- It is not quite true here in certain situations. Take the Maw’s pre-events with the Shaman or the Elite guards. Most often, I find players can’t even land enough hits to kill these guys to get credits since they were killed so fast. A few months back, the Great Jungle Wurm meta events, the wurm died before it was even targetable by some. Steal kill is certainly possible in some cases.

“Instead of dying, when you reach zero health you’re placed into a downed state. Your skill bar is replaced by four new skills that allow you to keep fighting. Should you, or someone else in the vicinity, kill a nearby foe, you rally and can get back up.”

- Correction: “Should you, or someone else in the vicinity, kill a nearby foe – that you have tagged, by inflicting a certain unknown threshold of damage -, you rally and can get back up.”

“worlds will be matched up against other worlds, which are at roughly the same skill level”

- Comment: Check out Dragonbrand vs. Magumma vs. Stormbuff Isle this week. The score is reflection of anything but the same skill level.WvW score is more about coverage.

“[concerning PvE] you’ll find that your home world makes no difference at all … The only thing home world selection affects is your WvW experience”

- Comment: a lot of guilds do not accept members from other worlds due to possibility of spying. The social structure of people you play with PvE or anything has a lot of ties to your homeworld.

" the only way to do so [changing your homeworld] at this point, is to buy gems with real money and use them to pay for a world change."

- False. You can delete all your characters and change for free. Also you can only transfer once per 7 days and you cannot participate in your new home world WvW for another 7 days.

“choosing a race neither limits your profession choices, nor does it give you any sort of statistical advantage.”

- True but it affects your jumping puzzle rage. Each race also have unique elite skills that no other race have, though minor and probably no one uses those, but the difference is there

“there is no dedicated healing class in Guild Wars 2”

- True, but some professions heal better than others and some can heal multiple allies, for example elementalist, guardians, and to certain extent mesmer.

“In fact there’s no tank class in Guild Wars 2 either.”

- False. Warrior is a tank class. There is a difference between “every class can tank” vs “there is no class that can tank”. Logical fallacy here.

All valid points and precisely the type of stuff not found in most guides for reasons. If you put every single exception to every single rule in the guide, it would be 20 times longer than it is. It’s a beginners guide. An introduction. Some of stuff you say might indeed be added, but how much do you really want to swamp a new person with. That’s why it’s paced the way it is.

A new person doesn’t know about the maw at all. It doesn’t even PAY to do the maw until you’re level 40, by which point you probably have learned something.

The idea of a primer is to give the information you need up front, not every single spec of information available about everything. It’s like history in school or science. When they teach you history you don’t learn all the stuff, you learn the overview, which is often incorrect. The same with classical physics. The stuff you learn up front, much of it, is conditional..but you don’t know enough to appreciate the conditions.

As a primer, this works wonders. As for the exceptions, people will learn those as they learn the game.