Guild Wars 2

I honestly can’t remember the last time I logged into the world of Tyria, but I do know that it has a been a very long time. I remember I hit 80 with my 2 handed warrior, and then I was like “what now?” I remember wrecking The Shatterer, Jormag, and Tequatl(?) and then running dungeons on the daily, but somewhere along the line, I fell off and just didn’t want to play as much.

However, I never stopped following the game…

With the coming of HoT and the other patches and whatnot, I have been wanting to get back into it and start fresh, new alt, new play style etc. I guess my big question here is besides fixes to balance and WvW what has changed and what has stayed the same? another question is that when I do hop back on, are there any guilds out there that can hook me up with a rundown on anything new I have been missing out on? If there are, feel free to message me, I would highly appreciate it.

If you want to start over with a new character, bear in mind the following changes:

1. The “New Player Experience” (NPE) changes the pace in which you unlock weapon skills, the ability to dodge, gathering, crafting, weapon swaps, etc. Stat increases, skill points and trait points are also awarded at different moments. There are now rewards on levelup, including (sometimes) items.

2. Traits no longer require manuals to unlock, and will be first awarded at level 30, rather than level 11. Also, the system has been condensed: blocks of 5 trait points have been fused to cost 1 trait point, and the total number of trait points at level 80 has been reduced from 70 to 14. This means you can still assign exactly as many traits as before, but only in blocks of 5.

3. Traits can now be freely reassigned anytime you are out of combat.

4. Major traits must now be unlocked on new characters. Check the traits panel for what needs to be done to unlock each trait. New Grandmaster traits have been added. Existing characters must unlock these new traits to use them. Traits can also be unlocked by spending skill points at a profession trainer.

NOTE: The changes to traits and how to unlock them is very likely to change when Heart of Thorns is released.

5. The Personal Story has been rearranged. You will now unlock a full chapter of story progression every 10 levels. The rewards have also been changed.
Note that the later parts of the story have been put in a different order (and one storyline was even removed), and there has been negative player feedback about this. Developers have announced that this order change will be reverted in the (hopefully near) future.

6. Check out the wardrobe feature in your Hero Screen and bank. You can now unlock armor skins, and use transmutation charges (which replace transmutation stones) to change the skins on your current equipment to any previously unlocked skin.

7. Two new zones have been added: Dry Top and The Silverwastes. They are mostly aimed at large zone-wide meta-events that require some amount of player cooperation, but you can explore them solo as well. Many achievements can be attained there. The Silverwastes also contains the most elaborate jumping puzzle to date.

8. Living Story Season 2 can be unlocked by paying gems. This is new content that mostly takes place in the 2 new zones. They provide story instances with additional challenges and achievements after you complete them once, reminiscent of missions in Guild Wars 1.

9. Collection achievements: collect certain categories of items, and receive a reward upon completing the collection. This ranges from merely funny to useful and occasionally significant rewards.

10. The daily rewards now work differently. Check it out.

11. There are daily rewards just for logging in. Some of these may be quite useful, depending on what you need.

Jornophelanthas.1475:

If you want to start over with a new character, bear in mind the following changes:

1. The “New Player Experience” (NPE) changes the pace in which you unlock weapon skills, the ability to dodge, gathering, crafting, weapon swaps, etc. Stat increases, skill points and trait points are also awarded at different moments. There are now rewards on levelup, including (sometimes) items.

snip

Dodge, gathering and crafting are all available at level 1/2. Information about them is not given out until you reach certain levels.

To be more specific, gathering nodes, skill challenges and vistas do not appear on the minimap before you reach a certain level. You can still interact with them as you encounter them, though. Gathering nodes have been removed from level 1-5 areas (near the city entrances).
Every starting zone now has a small dodging tutorial added (with a minor reward).

Side note: Since the OP already has a level 80 character, they will see the vistas and POIs just fine with new toons. As soon as one character on your account has a high enough level, that restriction is removed from all characters.

Confusing as hell when you play with a brand new player, try to show them a vista and they claim they can’t see it while you can’t figure out why -.-