Guild Wars 2

Hi, I am on the second last chapter of the HoT personal story – Bitter Harvest.

As I only play solo (not in a guild) and have never done a dungeon or fractal to gain any better weapons and gear than Exotic it may be that I will struggle to complete the last two parts of this story and may have to put it to one side and start Living World Season 3 (LW3) instead.

My question is can I partake in LW3 with only Exotic gear and expect to solo most or even all the content. I ask as it’s just not worth wasting money on LW3 if there is no hope of a reasonable solo experience.

Thank you for any response.

By the way: What’s with all this changing posts on preview and substituting kitten in place of perfectly spelt and scripted posts?

I have exotic gear, I got through LW3 fine with a ranger and engineer so far. The fight at the end is a bit tough, but that is more up to mechanics then gear, as by the time I figured it out ALL of my gear was broken but I still managed to finish it. Exotic should be enough for anything in LW2 as well though as legendaries and ascended really don’t add that much over exotics. If you would like any help, I am always willing to pitch in to help people get things done. I usually am on in the evenings (9:00 PM EST on NA servers)

The story isn’t all that difficult and I’ve done it in exotics with every class. I wouldn’t worry about it. You can solo all LS3 stories with exotics. All content that can be done solo can be done with exotics.

I’d get the episodes regardless for the ease of obtaining ascended trinkets and backpacks which provide the bulk of the increased stats.

Ascended is a very minor upgrade, the bulk of it being the weapons and accessories which are the easier to obtain pieces. In total, it’s roughly a 12% damage increase, where a set of armor by itself is only a 2% difference. You’d see a bigger change by using consumables.

Personally, I don’t bother gearing my alts, so they’re only wearing the rares the personal story provided. It doesn’t really matter what you’re equipped with, it’ll just take longer.

Temtu.1094:

By the way: What’s with all this changing posts on preview and substituting kitten in place of perfectly spelt and scripted posts?

If a series of characters matches a bad word, they’ll replace it with kitten. For example, isn’t_it is isn’kitten

Thank you all and especially Healix for his kitten explanation.

Regarding kitten I just sit and wonder sometimes at the idiocy of it all.
A site programmed not able to tell the difference between perfectly written English and rude oaths even when separated by a space.

I must be getting old.

Well, the censor program is trained to find any sequence of words that makes naughty words, and doesn’t want people to get around it by adding spaces or adding characters in between. I like that the censor at least uses a creative censorship method. It’s makes me calfing happy.

As people have said, exotic gear should be more than enough to get through all of the core living world content. However, beware the centaurs in Lake Doric; they have a kick you won’t believe. Other parts of the content might also be difficult, but not because of your gear.

Gear doesnt really matter what matters the most is personal skills (and in some cases the class u are using).

I’ve played through both the HoT story and all of Living World with a variety of characters with mostly exotic equipment. Gear in this game really doesn’t make that big of a difference, especially not in open world and story PvE.

If you find things getting too tough for you, my advice would be to pay a lot more attention to your personal skills and traits as well as fight mechanics than min-maxing your equipment. Selecting a decent stat set, rune set, and sigil for your equipment and trying to go exotic lvl 80 in all slots is more than enough. Skills, traits, and your ability to play your character make a lot more difference than optimized gear.

Exotic is absolutely fine for the Living Story, as other people have said ascended is a very minor upgrade. The only area where it’s actually required is high level Fractals – and that’s just because there’s a special mechanic there called Agony which drains your health constantly and the only way to block it is with Agony Resistance which can only be applied to ascended gear.

But if you did want to look at getting ascended at some point there are many ways you can do it without needing to play difficult group content. (And FYI dungeons don’t help you get ascended equipment – it doesn’t drop there and you can’t buy it with dungeon tokens.)

The simplest is to buy ascended rings, amulets and accessories from the laurel vendor with laurels and ectoplasm. (If you ever play WvW or have badges of honor from achievement chests you can get ascended trinkets slightly cheaper from the WvW laurel vendor.) A significant chunk of your stats come from your trinkets so that helps a lot.

Ascended weapons and armour can be crafted – you need level 500 crafting and it’s quite expensive but it’s something you can do solo. Or some achievements give you ascended pieces.

Oh and if you finish the HoT storyline you will get a rare weapon which can be upgraded to ascended by doing a couple of short collection achievements. (I think the choice is a sword, greatsword, dagger, shield or scepter.)

I’ve only ever gotten 1 ascended drop – which had useless stats for me – and I’ve never played high level Fractals which is where you’re most likely to get ascended drops – but I’m slowly upgrading all my main characters equipment to ascended. I got the trinkets from the laurel vendor, crafted a bow, chest and leg armour and I got the sword from the HoT collection and the Mawdrey backpack from the Living Story Season 2 collection. So now it’s “just” her torch, helm, shoulders, gloves and boots left to go.

I’ve finished HoT, and progressed through LS3 with characters that don’t even have full exotic (trinkets are subpar) – although admittedly my first characters through have a mix of exotics and ascended, so when I do go through with lesser equipment, I’m forewarned.

Generally speaking, my gut feeling is that the instances get harder, particularly the final instances of chapters 2, 3 and 4, than any of the HoT instances (gliding phases and bugs of the HoT finale notwithstanding, but gear won’t help you there). That said, the maps themselves are a lot easier to get around in, particularly if you have the relevant masteries.

As other posters have said. Exotic is perfectly fine. You can go for ascended if you want, if you have that completionist in you. Just bare in mind that for a full ascended, is pretty expensive. Work on trinkets (laurel vendor, ecto) then weapons. Armour will undoubtly take the longest.

I generally solo most of the open world content and for the most part I’ve found LW are soloable. Except the last fight in HoT. It mostly depends on your build. I play a hybrid (condi) engi, so it will be that much longer and slightly tougher. If you run a DPS build, then it shouldn’t take long – so long you avoid the tells / dodges. Use consumables (food / utilites) it really makes a difference in fights.

this set up is what i use
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNMQJAVRn0rC1sgVsAGsAUtgFMBD+muTLqNLrBQA4pytqqYlI9yA-TRSBQBA4QAYgLAQmU/5jK/a2DAoP6aYpSQks/g+OCAkC4z1WA-e

its pretty nice am very tanky do some nice con damage and nice healing
its for me a very easy build to run true ea HOT area

and for meta events i can keep some players save and heal them also

am more in the back running around heal players and build up some con stacks ad bosses

and ress players if they are down
only need to watch out for mord snipers they do tons off damage to me even with the high toughness and armor