Guild Wars 2

So I’m a WoW vet and me and some friends want to go to try a new mmo with super competitive PvP (e.g. I’m currently #7th rogue “thief” in US in WoW) and while some are voting for like Black Desert etc I want to try gw2 cause I bought this game and the expansion when it was on sale but I never fully got to play the game.

I want to know how much does gw2 truly require to play competitive and all the costs. Example, Black Desert sure you can pay once that’s it and have access to entire game but you’ll be lacking without pets for combat etc unless you use real money

So in gw2 I already see things like extra character slots, bag space, and some outfits cosmetics. Asides that, can you fully play the whole personal story, wvw, and spvp competitive ranked and not pay for anything other than the expansion?

Essentially I dont want anything to pop later on and I’m pretty used to paying 15/month and having full access to EVERYTHING in game for sub fee.

Thank you

Edit: also, how much do you have to grind? Because part of the reason we’re trying to swap games is cause WoW is currently requiring to much grind for Pvp.

All I wanna do is PvP. So wow now requires you to level the character, okay.. I hate it but every mmo is like that… And it requires you to level your artifact weapon, which requires you to do PVE and I hate PVE cause I just wanna PVP, so they require you to spend about 8 hrs/week doing quests to level your artifact, then crafting for world pvp, and the system is so stupid I had to spend about 8 hrs week for 2 months before I could fully max level pvp. Like I’m just trying to play the pvp thats what’s fun and we’re having to be like those kids from south park for countless hours when you just want to play competitive not grind, you know?

If all you want to do is sPvP then you need nothing, don’t even need to level up a character. All equipment, weapons, traits are open for you from when you enter the game and you are on a level playing field with other players.
WvW you are better off leveling and opening HoT professions but that takes if focused only on that about 30 hours in game time, and all can be done inside the WvW maps.

Ye the pvp in GW2 is fair and everyone has the same acces to pretty much anything, except some amulets, sigils and runes. Which costs some gold. And all weapons can be bought from a vendor for free. And all weapons are on an equal level. So there is no possbiel way for anyone to be stronger stat wise. only other ways to build your stats.

Yargesh.4965:

If all you want to do is sPvP then you need nothing, don’t even need to level up a character. All equipment, weapons, traits are open for you from when you enter the game and you are on a level playing field with other players.
WvW you are better off leveling and opening HoT professions but that takes if focused only on that about 30 hours in game time, and all can be done inside the WvW maps.

That’s good and if we did try some casual PvE like that personal story which looks cool hadn’t seen mmo with that or raiding, are there any cost needed towards gear runes buffs for competitive raid etc?

Thanks again

Sure you’ll need. At least full exotics(obtained in WvW,vendor/Dungeons/Karma vendors in Orr/Crafted/Bought on TP). And then progress to get ascended weapons, then trinkets, and armor as the last. Ascended gear can be crafted, and is quite expensive. But it can alos be dropped or aquired from fractals (5 man pve grp content) the harder the scale the better cance of drops. The daily chests from each lvl there are 4 lvl’s get exponentially better drops. But gets harder as well. And don’t forget to get the required amount of Agony resist. It wil tell you how much for each scale.

Ps. some info in Fractals. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fractals_of_the_Mists

Rod.3087:

That’s good and if we did try some casual PvE like that personal story which looks cool hadn’t seen mmo with that or raiding, are there any cost needed towards gear runes buffs for competitive raid etc?

Thanks again

For PvE stuff: If you just want to play personal story, you can just use the gear you get as you level up or as you complete story chapters. That will get you through personal story and leveling just fine. However, raids require better gear. Ascended or Legendary armor and weapons (highest stats in the game) is almost required, but you could get by with Exotics (second-highest stats) with the right stats.

No gear will ever cost you real money, however, unless you choose to buy gems to convert to gold. All gear (from the lowest tier to the highest) can be crafted yourself. You can run dungeons to get tokens to buy exotic armor; you can also buy exotic gear with karma (another currency) from specific vendors in certain level 80 maps and specific vendors in WvW with Badges of Honor (wvw currency). As for ascended, you can get boxes of ascended armor or weapons from running higher level Fractals (shortened versions of dungeons which get more and more difficult as you get into the higher levels of them); you can also buy them with currency you earn in PvP. You can buy ascended trinkets, back items, amulets, and rings with Laurels or Guild Commendations; you can also get some by doing certain achievements.

Rod.3087:

That’s good and if we did try some casual PvE like that personal story which looks cool hadn’t seen mmo with that or raiding, are there any cost needed towards gear runes buffs for competitive raid etc?

Thanks again

The only content that requires pay to access is living world seasons 2 and 3. They were free for everyone on release but everyone who is late would have to buy them. Considering that living world season 2 is a story link between your personal story and Heart of Thorns story, you may want to have that. But it is just a story content (mainly) without any real bonuses to your character power.

Rod.3087:

So I’m a WoW vet and me and some friends want to go to try a new mmo with super competitive PvP […]

PvP is pretty dead, no real competition at all. Many PvP’ers including most top tier players left the game. There are no official tournaments anymore, just ranked PvP with terrible matchmaking due to low population. Of course you can still enjoy the game, and i don’t want to discourage you from playing it, but you should be aware that there is no competitive scene left, if that’s what you are looking for.

Edit: You can experience the story from LS 2+3 for free if you group up with somebody who has already unlocked the chapters. You just won’t get any rewards/achievements from doing it this way.

UmbraNoctis.1907:

Rod.3087:

So I’m a WoW vet and me and some friends want to go to try a new mmo with super competitive PvP […]

PvP is pretty dead, no real competition at all. Many PvP’ers including most top tier players left the game. There are no official tournaments anymore, just ranked PvP with terrible matchmaking due to low population. .

“Pretty dead” as in overall or just at top bracket of pvp its 2 to 3 teams queuing into each other back to back?

There is no TeamQ. You can only queue solo or duo. The issue isn’t so much that its always the same people on both sides, but more that there are often huge rating/skill differences between players within a match, which can be quite frustrating. And i guess that’s true for all tiers, though i can’t say it for sure for the lowest tiers. It is probably less of a problem at average MMR, because that’s where the majority of players sits (and where new players start). I’d give it a try, it doesn’t cost you anything if you already got the game and you will see if you like it or not. Just don’t expect too much when it comes to true competition.

Rod.3087:

“Pretty dead” as in overall or just at top bracket of pvp its 2 to 3 teams queuing into each other back to back?

Can’t say about pvp, don’t play it at all. But when I try to enter WvW (something like WoW battlegrounds, but server scale) in the evening I usually have to wait in a queue.

Rod.3087:

UmbraNoctis.1907:

Rod.3087:

So I’m a WoW vet and me and some friends want to go to try a new mmo with super competitive PvP […]

PvP is pretty dead, no real competition at all. Many PvP’ers including most top tier players left the game. There are no official tournaments anymore, just ranked PvP with terrible matchmaking due to low population. .

“Pretty dead” as in overall or just at top bracket of pvp its 2 to 3 teams queuing into each other back to back?

It’s “Pretty Dead” as defined by melodramatic forum community that has been insisting that PvP is dead for the last 4 years.

Ingame it’s perfectly healthy and a lot better than that crap from WoW.

When there are 400+ rating differences between players in a match at primetime and top 250 is the whole platinum division, then it surely looks healthy …

UmbraNoctis.1907:

When there are 400+ rating differences between players in a match at primetime and top 250 is the whole platinum division, then it surely looks healthy …

The entire plat division is in top 250 because the rating threshholds are really messed up.

Glicko2’s mean is 1200 and the curve is distributed in such a way as to put almost everyone sub 1600. Arenanet really screwed up with the divisions since literally every division except bronze is above the mean.

@OP please remember that you are on the forums, and the gw2 forums work the same as the WoW forums do – predictions of doom 24/7 ever since the game launched.

Last season only top plat + legendary were in the top250 and the threshholds didn’t change. The leaderbord alone proves, that there are a lot less players than last season. I mean, are there even legend players left besides sind and misha? Last season there where about 50 (EU only, idk about NA) and easily 1k or even more in platinum.
And even if casual PvP might be still ok, OP was writing about competitive PvP. And that’s definitely dead.

Crinn.7864:

Rod.3087:

UmbraNoctis.1907:

Rod.3087:

So I’m a WoW vet and me and some friends want to go to try a new mmo with super competitive PvP […]

PvP is pretty dead, no real competition at all. Many PvP’ers including most top tier players left the game. There are no official tournaments anymore, just ranked PvP with terrible matchmaking due to low population. .

“Pretty dead” as in overall or just at top bracket of pvp its 2 to 3 teams queuing into each other back to back?

It’s “Pretty Dead” as defined by melodramatic forum community that has been insisting that PvP is dead for the last 4 years.

Haha

You can always try perusing the PvP sub-forum. Though, it might be even more contentious.

Since you own the game, though, you can just hop into PvP and check it out for yourself – at no additional cost.

Welcome to Tyria, and good luck.

I’m not a big PvP’er myself, but I’ll try to answer things roughly in order:

I want to know how much does gw2 truly require to play competitive and all the costs.

If you mean real world money, then nothing once you have bought the expansion pack. No monthly subscriptions, nothing that gives you any actual advantages in a fight that can be bought for gold/$/Gems etc. GW2 has a policy that the “Gem store” is for cosmetic and convenience items. Stuff like more character slots, more bank storage, various miniatures (that does nothing of any benefit in game), Outfits/Costumes, endless gathering/Harvest tools, and the ever lovable Copper-Fed-Salvagematic.

For PvP specifically, the game is setup so that in PvP areas, you use the “PvP system”, so you don’t need to get anything at all, you can buy starter weapons from the merchants on the pvp map, setup your build etc and just go at it. Everything is equalized, so no one has any kind of numeric advantage over others. You can gather in-game gold and buy a couple of extra “Amulets” (Stat combinations), think that is pretty much it.

also, how much do you have to grind?

For just PvP, nothing at all. PvP sets you to the max level (80) while in PvP areas. Unlocks all class options, including specialization as long as you have the expansion-pack. You can pick up whatever weapons you want cheap at merchants on the pvp lobby itself.

(I’m actually not certain if you even need armor ? Never did try this, but do you even need armor in pvp or is your armor rating set automatically to the standard exotics level 80 baseline?)

Specifically, it doesn’t matter if you have a level 1 white greatsword or a legendary 80 greatsword. In PvP they get scaled to do the same stats, so the only thing that matters is that it is a “greatsword”.

PvP is specifically built like this so people can start the game and go right into PvP, and never have to leave unless they want to. (Just like GW1, where you coul dmake own PvP-characters, auto max level etc).

Hope this was of any help.

joneirikb.7506:

(I’m actually not certain if you even need armor ? Never did try this, but do you even need armor in pvp or is your armor rating set automatically to the standard exotics level 80 baseline?)

You have to wear a chest piece, pants and boots, otherwise your armor will be lowered.

The “competetive” cost of the game is literally the cost of the game (ie HoT, not GW2 vanilla if you find a dusty copy on a store shelf). Maybe 2 weeks of leveling to 80 and you can spar with the best of people in WvW, gearwise. Or an hour or so and jump into PvP, lol.

The true cost of the game however is maybe 2-3 times that. Because to be honest you will want extra characters and you will want a bigger bank and you will want higher stacks and you will want more bagslots on your characters and you will want to change your face/name… That’s how Anet gets you. Yes you can convert gold->gems of course but still. Lets assume you arent a no-lifer-trading-post-flipper with 10,000 gold. I consider it well worth it and it’s faaaaaaaaar from subscription costs, with no pressure to constantly play every month to get your moneys worth.

I bought game about 3 years ago, and expansion. Once I think for 2 years ago I bought a flute from the store. I have been in several GvG guilds, Several hardcore PvE guilds (solo run etc) I have solo arah p1-4 I have literally been through every competetive aspect of this game, never touched something like role playing and rarely done something like Guild Missions etc. around rank 700 wvw…..no aspect of the game required me to pay for it with real game, or “encouraged” me to do so in any way.

in short….PvP=Amulet/Gear is Free, everyone equal level (instantly to 80).
PvE=Open PvE…nobody gives a f*** tbh, Raids, if you are thief=cheap af, you can literally get the money in 1 day for full gear. For full asc it might require around a week or 2

WvW/GvG=Gear, open wvw, nobody cares……gvg each guild is different, but since you thief you basically only do zerker gear…same gear across all things

Dawdler.8521:

The true cost of the game however is maybe 2-3 times that. Because to be honest you will want extra characters and you will want a bigger bank and you will want higher stacks and you will want more bagslots on your characters and you will want to change your face/name…

I never spent money on any of that; I converted gold to gems, slowly and over time (trying to convert when the rates were low, and only spend gems for upgrades when costs were discounted). With “salvage all” and “deposit all”, you can do without inventory/storage expanders, as long as you devote a little of your time to having rules-of-thumb for managing your inventory — if you start to play, we can advise you on those (which, by the way, will change over time).

As others have said PvP in GW2 is very accessible for low gear players. You may have to spend a couple gold to unlock parts of your build but it won’t be more than 10g.

You can find competent builds here: http://metabattle.com/wiki/MetaBattle_Wiki.

You can access quick match at lvl 1 but you will need to progress to lvl 20 to access ranked. I’ve done a few hundred matches and it’s quite fun IMO. Be prepared for very salty chat as you can communicate with the enemy team during matches.

The other competitive gamemode is WvW. If you intend to try it out, think carefully when choosing your homeworld. The competitive English speaking EU servers are ‘Far Shiverpeaks’ ‘Piken Square’ ‘Gandara’ and an honourable Mention for ‘Desolation’.

I’ve put >500 hours into WvW and I love it. The skill lag is real though. In big fights you won’t be able to cast any skills or even change weapon. Just keep mashing 1 and pray.

In answer to your question about cost: Gw2 simply gives you what BDO charges you through the nose for either in terms of money or time. You start the game with ‘area loot’ where you loot all enemies in the area with one click. After HoT was introduced ‘Auto Loot’ became available through ‘masteries’ If you decide to do PvE you can unlock it in a about ten hours. In WvW you can unlock ‘Auto Loot’ at rank 20 if you keep your unlock points; this is also very fast.

Each character starts off with access to 100 inventory slots. You just need to buy 4 20 slot bags off the trading post and equip them. 100 slots is plenty. A new account has access to one bank tab of 30 slots. This is a major problem if you decide to invest any amount of time into the game.

Recommended Black lion Items.
If you do decide to invest some time into GW2. There are a number of items in the cash shop which are worth the money for the convenience they give.

1: Bank tab expansion (600 gems), you need a bare minimum of 3 total. so that’s 2 to buy, so 1200 gems.
2: Copper-Fed Salvage-o-Matic (800 gems). You should use to salvage any basic, green or blue items which the game throws at you shamelessly. This and 100 slots of inventory space is all you will ever need. You should put it in the one shared inventory slot that comes with new accounts. That way you can use it on all your alts.

IMO real cost: cost of the game+ 2000 gems.

He mistyped he meant Gankdara.

Super competitive pvp? Get out. Now.

Rod.3087:

So I’m a WoW vet and me and some friends want to go to try a new mmo with super competitive PvP (e.g. I’m currently #7th rogue “thief” in US in WoW) and while some are voting for like Black Desert etc I want to try gw2 cause I bought this game and the expansion when it was on sale but I never fully got to play the game.

I want to know how much does gw2 truly require to play competitive and all the costs. Example, Black Desert sure you can pay once that’s it and have access to entire game but you’ll be lacking without pets for combat etc unless you use real money

So in gw2 I already see things like extra character slots, bag space, and some outfits cosmetics. Asides that, can you fully play the whole personal story, wvw, and spvp competitive ranked and not pay for anything other than the expansion?

It really comes down to how much you want to pay. I would download the ftp to make sure nothing in the mechanics is a dealbreaker (for example, I bought ESO and THEN found out I needed to use a mouse constantly to move) before buying the game (bonus points if you hit one of the sales). At that point what you want to buy with real money (unlimited tools, more bag space, some skins, etc) kicks in. In hindsight I paid on average the cost of a wow subscription or less (with the advantage I could do 0 if funds were tight that month) the first year and now very rarely put in money (usually I buy anything with ingame gold now and it is not like I min/max farming) while still playing the game. It is not like everything I bought that first year went poof, but that would be the case with a sub game.

Hey guys I appreciate your feedback I do believe I will give gw2 a good shot, the main deal is I hate grinding pve as a pvp requirement, and gw2 pvp system solves that for me. I’m still gonna be finishing WoWs pvp season etc in meanwhile since I’ve got my team etc.

This is my channel if anyone is interested to see I mean what I mean and ty again guys

Twitch.tv/RodtvZ

Yes, as far as spvp goes you don’t need to grind or pay for a single thing to be on the very top of the competitive scene.
However, if you want a big and thriving competitive scene, gw2 might not be the game for you. There used to be quite a few esport events, but the dev have not announced anything esport related since the last world championship back in september 2016.
We do have however a competitive ranked season that was quite amazing last season. But because the is no esport events, quite a few (including the strongest and most influencial) top tier team/player left, combined with the fact that there is nothing for teams (as the ranked season is restricted to solo/duo queue) kinda destroyed a lot of the momentum from season 5. Which leads to a player population issue at the high end of the spvp scene hence why some might call spvp dead and i can’t really blame them because the last season gave us a lot of hope for the competitive scene and until now, there’s nothing happening except a few community-run tournaments here and there.

If you want to see what it’s like at the highest level of competition, i strongly advice you to check out sindrener’s stream or youtube, he’s currently ranked #1 or #2 and is the best thief in the game.

Rod.3087:

Hey guys I appreciate your feedback I do believe I will give gw2 a good shot,

Excellent! Hope you enjoy it as much as we have.

The price of playing hardcore is your soul.

Edit: jk, souls don’t exist

Some good advice in the thread, definately try the free to play version first if you are unsure if the game and its combat is something for you.

As far as cost, realise this:

- the majority of cost comes from convenience purchases (or cosmetic). More bank space, more inventory slots, Infinite salvage kits, unbreakable harvesting items, etc.

- there is a gold to gem exchange so theoretivally all these items are available vie ingame currency and can get farmed. There are also no pay-to-win features which require you to spend real money to get ahead (which are quite common in free to play games).

If we assumed the bare minimum cost for items if you do not want to spend ingame gold for conversion I’d say the following is realistic:

- base price of HoT
- 4 character slots to be able to have 1 of each class (9 classes and you start with 5 slots, 2 in the free to play version) = 4 × 800 = 3,200 gems

A more realistic approach would be the bare minimum convenience items (but realise these are NOT needed, they just enhance the exprience):

- 1 shared inventory slot (you get one for free when buying HoT if I remember correctly)
- 1 copper-fed-salvage-o-matic to put in the shared slot (800 gems)
- maybe some bank slots or extra bag slots for your main character (800 gems for bank slots, 400 gems per bag slot for 1 character)

That’s basically it. Anything else you buy will either be purely cosmetic or more convenience like space which reduces the amount of inventory management which is needed.

… why do people forget that everyone posting on these forums has purchased the game?

Sartharina.3542:

… why do people forget that everyone posting on these forums has purchased the game?

Because owning a forum account does not distinguish between owning vanilla GW2 and HoT. For purposes of cost, having to buy HoT to add to a vanilla account or to start from scratch is the same thing.

The second reason might be: because not everyone reading the forums owns a GW2 account.

I would suggest first trying out bdo and then if you are not satisfied with it take a look at gw2.

Sartharina.3542:

… why do people forget that everyone posting on these forums has purchased the game?

I think this person is referring to those suggesting the OP try the Play4Free version. Not necessary if the OP is posting (as they already own the game, and all the content [and more] included in the P4F version).

Sartharina.3542:

… why do people forget that everyone posting on these forums has purchased the game?

Actually, that would make us good ones to ask. How much have we spent? What would we tell potential purchasers are must-get items vs things like skins that they can wait on?

The real cost of GW2 (or any ‘useless’ activity like binge watching Netflix) is opportunity cost. The thousands of hours spend online could have been thousands of hours spent learning a musical instrument or computer programming.

Menadena.7482:

Sartharina.3542:

… why do people forget that everyone posting on these forums has purchased the game?

Actually, that would make us good ones to ask. How much have we spent? What would we tell potential purchasers are must-get items vs things like skins that they can wait on?

My question was aimed at those saying “Wait before buying the game, try the FtP version” (And it often pops up in other threads as well), when the OP clearly says he already bought HoT.

True, I was thinking of that as generic advice though to test for showstoppers before you had an investment in it. Like other people that would play with the OP but were not inworld yet. In general I would say you will wind up spending less than a subscription game. Yes, you will buy unlimited tools and such a lot your first year so pretty much on par with a sub game then but after that you already have what you need so significant expenses will only come with expansions. My major single expense has been character slots and I do not foresee leveling again until there is a new race and/or base profession.