Guild Wars 2

1) How populated is this game still? Does it seem arenanet is in a healthy revenue state? Worth dicing in to at such a late point in this games life cycle?

2) what are some of the most fun profession and weapon combos for just casual pve leveling?

Come back into the game to find out for yourself how populated it is. That’s my advice. You already own the game, play it to see.

You already own the game and there’s no subscription so you can always just log in and see for yourself how it’s doing.

But yes the population seems fine. Anet doesn’t announce actual numbers but there’s always people about in-game. Any time I decide I want to do one of the big meta-events there’s always people doing it, even the older ones like Silverwastes. For some of the most popular world bosses the advice is actually to turn up early because popular maps will fill up so fast.

Also I wouldn’t call this a late point in the game’s life cycle. MMOs aren’t like single-player games, the companies behind them don’t release one and then immediately start working on another which will eventually replace it. If everything goes well an MMO will keep going for ages. Some of the early ones are 20+ years old and still going, still getting new content too. So GW2, coming up on it’s 5th anniversary could be quite a young game.

At the moment we’re part-way through a cycle of what Anet calls the “Living Story” – small updates which come out every 2-3 months and add new maps, sometimes make changes to existing maps and develop the storyline. That’s building up to the next expansion which they’ve said they’re working on but haven’t officially announced yet, so we don’t know when it will come out or what it will be about but predictions are we’ll hear more, and possibly even see it released, before the end of the year.

(We also don’t know much about their revenue state because they’re a wholly owned subsidiary of another company and therefore not publicly traded. We know how much they pay to NCSoft each quarter, but we don’t know all the ins and outs of it – how much they actually made, how much went on costs or was saved for future development etc. But NCSoft’s share of the profits has been fairly stable year on year. You can find translations of the reports (or the original if you read Korean) online if you really want.)

As for a fun profession that’s really up to you. What one person finds fun another finds incredibly boring so my advice would be to try a few and see what you enjoy most. There’s no wrong decision, they’re all viable in PvE so whatever works for you is best.

1) The game is nicely populated. There’s an extended f2p trial version that pulls in people and the game now has megaservers in PvE (all PvE players in NA or EU all play on the same maps now instead of their separate servers).

2) that’s kind of individual. You’ll have to say what you like to even attempt to answer this question. In addition, with the HoT expansion, the game added a new elite specialization with a new trait line and a new weapon for each profession as well as a new heavy armor.

Depends what you want to do really. The PvP and WvW area’s are becoming more desolate every week. Lots of people that only played for PvP and WvW have left. PvE however, is still populated, even the newbie zones. Some of the older content like dungeons is no longer updated, but still played from time to time.

For most fun profession, depends what you like to play. For leveling i would go for power over condition damage, as raw direct damage is just much more effective. Warrior and double axes is not used alot, but I personally found it more fun then the overused GS.

Welcome back.

And tips?
- for non HoT users: go power builds, basically… exotics are normal “basic” gear.
- for HoT users: see qtfy.eu for builds, these will be the most powerfull builds with rotations, you can use any build you want for caual content however…
- if you like what you see get HoT when you have leveled 2 classes to 80 and like fractals.

Condition Dmg:
if you left before the condi rework (changing stack limits from 25 max to 1500) You’ll be in for a shock. problem is the MOST powerfull condition stat combo is locked behind HoT, the second most powerfull is locked behind the Living World Season 2 (it’s mostly (though not fully) obsolete when you have acces to HoT tough)

Masteries & Elite specialisations
New class sepcialisations are nice and will give acces to other builds. somebuilds non viable beefore are now quite powerfull
Masteries (Gliding, Autoloot, Legendary Gliding, Fractal Masteries and much more) can only be unloccked after you played HoT story
So this content is: Locked behind HoT

Raids….
The present endgame, for now the only way to gain essentials for the Legendary Armor(s)
-> Locked behind HoT

The vanilla game itself is still worth while, not dead, and absloutely breathtaking, but has not changed much since HoT dropped.

For casual play anything remotely synergetic will work, even in dungeons, this stops when doing lvl 50+ fractals or raids where Meta still tends to have a lot of blind and stubborn not easily adapting followers… (lvl 50+ fractals and raids tend to hold the old dungeon elite, the old x k AP or kick, has been replaced by the food and potions mandatory and the minimum LI groups), but this is not of importance to casuals anyways….

NCSOFT does document a game’s direct income outside of China, where it’s a royalty and is merged with other royalty payments from other games and simply listed as royalties in NCSOFT’s quarterly reports.

GW2 generates the majority of income from the NA/EU region, which is the only region it’s officially available. World wide, it’s dead last of the five games NCSOFT currently breaks out in their quarterly report (they just stopped reporting WildStar income). However that’s understandable as the other four games are available in Korea, Japan and Taiwan and those regions make up 89% of NCSOFT’s direct game income.

There were “issues” with the HoT roll out that adversely impacted WvW and PvP.

In PvP the HoT elite specializations quickly became the current meta requirements which many saw as being forced to buy the expansion to remain competitive. They’ve been adjusting the PvP ranking system every season as creative players show how it could be gamed.

In WvW the new desert borderlands were full of choke points that significantly slowed movement compared to the older alpine maps. The perodic Skyhammer like meta event that allowed the winner to instantly smash down keep gates of the losing servers forced servers to fall back to the borderlands to participate or retake if they lost. The population drop in WvW led to servers with low WvW populations teamed up with higher populated ones which reduced server pride a bit IMO.

However ANet have been making progress in cleaning up the mess starting last April. But it’s piecemeal, getting a little bit better with every WvW specific patch but that might not be fast enough for those remaining. The desert maps were adjusted to remove most of the needless choke points and the meta was removed. One desert map and two alpine maps are now used instead of just desert with servers rotated though the desert map every three weeks. They’ve been experimenting with the scoring system so night capping isn’t as much of an issue. But the damage done may have been too great to see a return to higher WvW populations and the unbundling of servers.

Populations in PvE are fine but that’s due to the megaserver system of not having a map instance per server but map instances base on population with “rules” about which instance you get dumped in based on party/squad, current guild or server. Allowing the gliding mastery to be used in the core Tyria (non-HoT) maps has made some of the zones feel fresh again.

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

- if you like what you see get HoT when you have leveled 2 classes to 80 and like fractals.

Maybe a silly question but why do you say you need to like Fractal to get HoT? What do they have in common?

Excelsior.

1) Yes, populated at every day or night time.

2) It’s like asking us what tastes better: Chocolate or Vanilla. Maybe you enjoy Green Apple?

I really enjoy my sub-optimal* and cheesy* P/P and D/D Thief/Daredevil.

[*] Unrelated Community nonsense opinion

You really should check what you like yourself. What do you play in other games? Or do you have to reflect your real-life attitude into the game (beefy warrior or fragile mage?). There are plenty of ways to figure out what you (would) enjoy, so we can’t help you on these totally subjective opinions.

Pineapple and Grapfruit pls.

In PvE, fractals gives a good idea of instanced content and the present (instanced) community IMHO, the 1-25 levels are starters, returning ppl 25-50 house the ppl doing casual fractals, 50-100 are the more hardcore players… 75+ will need HoT….

If you want to do high end content such as lvl 75- 100 fractals, raids and maybe later challenge modes you’ll need to experience some higher (25-50(+!)) level fractals 1st. Dungeons are in no way repesentative for this game’s instanced content any more… they still exist…but are so easy a run with 2 lvl 80’s is a guaranteed finish.

As for HoT you’ll find PvE worlds with a lot of teamplay, instanced content in raids/fractals and to a lesser extent in Living World, with the story requiring mastery levelling, and decent builds in general to survive on glass builds, and you’ll need enough dmg in cerain area’s not to be eaten alive. I have however ran the story on both bunkers and DPS or Condi builds… but all except a measily few of my builds are build for DPS 1st..

So in the end to get an idea of HoT levels , I’d check mid level fractals. All HoT content tends to be more difficult then vanilla anyways…

As for builds I use:

Warrior/Berserker

• PS Berserker (HoT PS warrior) (recent) META?
• PS Condi Berserker (HoT condi PS warrior) META
• DPS Hammer Berserker (HoT CC build) WvW

Guardian/Dragonhunter?

• DPS Dragonhunter (HoT DPS guardian) META
• Support Guardian/Dragonhunter (Vanilla support guardian) WvW
• Condi Guardian (Vanilla BurnGuardian)

Revenant/Herald?

• Support Herald (Revenant is HoT only) (a mule)

Ranger/Druid?

• DPS Druid ( HoT-only Ranger Healing specialisation) META
• Condi Ranger (Vanilla CondiRanger) META

Thief/Daredevil:

• P/P S/P Daredevil (HoT specialisation Thief)
• P/D Condi Daredevil (HoT specialisation Thief)

Engineer/Scrapper? (I have no feel for engineer, it’s a good class, I just suck at it)

• DPS Scrapper (HoT specialisation engineer) (a mule)

Elementalist/Tempest

• DPS Tempest (Staff or D/Wh Hot specilisation elementalist) META
• DPS Auramancer Tempest (Staff Hot specialisation elementalis healer) META
• Bunker Auramancer Tempest (Staff Hot specialisation elementalis healer) WvW META
• Condi Tempest (Sc/Wh Hot specialissation condition elementalist) fun build

Necromancer/Reaper:

• Hybridmancer Reaper ( HoT specialissation condition necromancer) META
• Condi Bunker Reaper ( HoT specialissation condition necromancer) WvW
• Support DPS Necromancer/Reaper (D/F & Staff support necromancer vanilla) (pre HoT WvW)

Mesmer/Chronomancer?

• Chrono(tank) Chronomancer (Hot specialisation mesmer support (bunker))META
• CondiMesmer (Vanilla PU Condi build) META

What gear?

Exotics, if you can afford aquiring them Ascnededs. Ascneded trinkets and main weapon(s) tend to be pretty normal requirements in instanced content. But it’s not needed for low level fractals and casual play in PvE…

For group content META builds tend to be used, the meta is not allways right, nor is it flexible, it just is…. and so dictated by the Meta:

• Generally for DPS builds ppl still use Berserker stats (power/precision/ferocity)

But since HoT introduced new stat combo’s.

• condition builds went from the pre HoT Sinister (Condition Dmg/precision/power) to Viper (Condition Dmg/Power/precision/expertise) Expertise being the stat giving condition duration. in cases where there is no need for condition duration (expertise) ppl will default back to sinister (e.g. burnguardian, and to a lesser externt condimesmer)

But if you play casual this really doesn’t need to matter, whan I play leasurely I take WvW builds to PvE…. I have a Mesmer chronotank (zerk/assassin or commanders or minstrel) and an auramancer Elementalist (minstrel) BOTH with 150 AR. My commander/(zerk or clerics) Guardian /dragonhunter support character tends to be in fractals once every now and then as well.

I started at launch and went hard until about a month or 2 after HoT came out. The dynamic has changed. Population is high, in the grinding areas. dungeons are dead, I have a hard time finding groups that don’t just speed run through all the enemies. its a different game now.

General dmg in content is approximately 25% higher then before… using speedrun food/weapons in dungeons 2 ppl in ascended gear can provide the same dps compared to the pre HoT exotic meta….. easily!

Using an optimal 5 ppl group comp –
(e.g. guardian, (condi-)PS warrior, DPS druid, chronomancer, and any DPS build (thief, guard, ele, condi ranger))
- will provide 25 might , 100% fury uptime, perma quickness, alacrity, empower allies, spotter, banners , and GotL, frost spirit and Symbol modifier for a total of :

• +1070 power, (might, banner, empower allies)
• +30% crit chance, (fury, spotter and banner)
• +170 ferocity, (banner)
• + 920 condition dmg, (might, banner)
• +10% dmg (symbol),
• another +10% dmg (GotL),
• another +10% dmg (frostpirit),
  +50% from broken breakbars….. Maybe even more…
  (and remember
• +10% from food,
• +10% from enemy type sigil
• and +5 % from force sigil or 10% from night sigil…)
  this is still not counting build specific modifiers… or the effecs of ascended armor in content originally meant for exotics…
  When prestacked the burst of wells and traps with symbols will be rediculous…

1.1^6=1.77 times the dmg based on food/sigils and AoE effects….
(If the target is broken this will rise to 2.65 tims the dmg…)
Using the old prestack the full dmg can be unleashed from hit 1….

Yes dmg and build have changed. However, except for GoTL, Alacrity and the perma quickness, most effects existed before HoT… big change is more ppl commiting to Meta, mechanics and rotations. IMHO….