Guild Wars 2

1. I haven’t played in probably 2 years and the expansion doesn’t seem to add levels, just mastery I believe? If I just want to pvp do I need HoT?

2. Is it like wow where there is pvp gear you can earn via marks or whatever the currency is?

3. Can I just jump into a HOt area with weak gear or does that not matter?

4. People on the fourms talk about megaservers so people can play together, but people then complain about nobody to group with. Can somebody explain more?

Also just curious if people enjoy leveling a new character or go right to using the booster?

1 — you don’t need HoT to PvP though you do need it to use the elite specs in PvP.

2 — in sPvP everyone has full gear access. I think it’s done by trinkets in which you choose your stats and can reset between matches. Everyone also has full trait and skill access. There is no gear power difference from player to player (though I suppose some player choices of stats and weapons are considered sub-prime by other players, but every player has the same choices as the others).

3 — Depends on your skill with your profession. Some people like to explore HoT with level 2 alts (entering via the guild hall). You do need HoT to enter HoT maps, of course. Gear with some survival stats on it will help you immensely while you learn the new mob tactics and tells.

4 — The forums are not a hive mind. Some people have trouble finding others to play specific content with them at the specific time they want to. That’s their complaint about not finding others. Or maybe they’re complaining about finding a dead map because the nature of the HoT map metas is that you need to proactively join the taxi squads to get onto an organized map working on the meta.

But there is in fact a mega server that mixes everyone in a region into maps heedless of their home server, with some hierarchical weight given to home server, guild, friends, and party to help influence those sets ending up on the same map.

Addendum — very much individual choice. I almost never tome up an alt unless I already have several of that profession and just have a character concept I’m making. I only used the booster to clear the shared slot, and did it on a second Revenant that now lives in the flax farm in Verdant Brink. My first rev I made a point of manually leveling so as to learn the class better, and likely my second should have gotten the same treatment except for my needing to get that slot open and not actually enjoying rev that much but having plenty of the other professions.

I would say not to jump to 80 when you don’t know the profession well yet, but others will tell you leveling is the most boring thing in the universe. You can test it out a bit, both by doing the 80 boost multiple times but never finalizing it and by going to PvP (where you will have slightly different builds, I understand, but the profession basics will remain constant) to play at 80.

Thank you for the response. Would you say then if u pvp u don’t have to grind for gear then? I assume the way you get new gear is by pve type things?

Also ate professions important to level up or can u typically just buy what u need?

You are auto-leveled to 80 when you go into sPvP (arena style “structured” pvp). If the only thing you ever do in the game is sPvP you don’t need to do more than get out of the starter tutorial. All gear is provided at no cost, as the aim is to pit skill against skill rather than gear against gear. You can even get new skins for the gear by choosing reward tracks to progress in PvP.

Now, WvW (world v world, mass siege-style warfare) is another story. You’re upleveled there to 80, but you use your PvE gear which doesn’t get any better nor do you get all the traits if you haven’t unlocked them. So actual 80’s may steam roll you even if they aren’t as skilled. (I think you do at least get to pick a different build while in WvW to fit different game play needs, but I’m not 100% sure on that).

By “professions” I think you mean crafts? GW2 has its own vocabulary in which “profession” means what WoW calls a “class.” Up through exotics you can generally buy the gear a lot more cheaply than you can craft it, barring some stat combos that are account bound when crafted. The next tier is Ascended, which you can do most of the game without a single piece of just fine, but unless you get some very lucky drops of ascended gear boxes — I think in years of play I’ve gotten maybe five if that — you’ll have to max out the relevant crafting skill to make the gear.

So it’s safe to say that unless u want to do pve content or world pvp gear isn’t an issue. However I will say that without the expansion I cant get all the earn skills and such so I may be at a disadvantage. I assume the gear u can get is either by crafting it or raiding/ dungeons. Can u get gear any other way?

It drops off mobs, you can buy exotic armor for karma, there are fractals (which are dungeon-like but with a different reward structure), and you can just gather all the mats you see in the world and sell them for coin and then buy gear on the Trading Post.

Is that the only way u earn gear is by crafting or karma?

You can acquire gear in many ways:

Dropped by foes as loot
Purchased from an NPC such as Armorsmiths, Merchants, Renown Hearts,…
Crafting armor as an armorsmith, leatherworker, or tailor
As a reward for completing certain steps of your personal story
Purchased from other players via the Trading Post
As a reward for completing some Collections
As a reward for completing some Living Story episodes
Purchased with Laurels
Purchased with tokens from Dungeons, etc.

There may be other ways to acquire gear, as well.

1) You don’t need HoT for PvP (masteries don’t affect it), but having access to elite specialisations is helpful.

2) PvP doesn’t use gear at all. You need to have something equipped in each slot (and which weapons you choose are fairly important because those determine which attack skills you have), but the stats don’t matter at all. Instead as soon as you enter the PvP maps the stats on all your equipment are automatically converted to level 80 exotics, with the stat combination determined by which amulet you choose via the PvP build menu (which appears at the top of the screen in the middle in PvP areas).

You can still earn new weapons and armour through PvP, but the stats will only matter when you go back to PvE.

3) All HoT maps are designed for level 80 characters, so you’ll need to be level 80. Ideally you need exotic (orange text) gear. But even in PvE it doesn’t make as much of a difference as it does in some games so you can use anything, it will just be a bit harder to survive fights.

4) Megaservers mean that all servers in a region (NA or EU) share the maps. So you can meet people from all the other servers, not just your own. You can also form groups with people from any server in your region.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean people will be looking for a group for the content you want to do at the same time you are. For certain things (like people willing to teach raiding, or attempt difficult story achievements) it can be tricky to find people to help you. The best way around this is to join a helpful guild.

5) I like levelling personally, but other people hate it and use anything they can to shorten or skip the process. There’s no right or wrong way to do it, although I don’t recommend boosting your first character straight to level 80 because you’ll miss out on a lot of the things that teach you about the game.

Obtaining gear

There’s a few things you should know about this, particularly if you’re used to other MMOs.

Firstly in GW2 there are only 6 rarity tiers (common/white, fine/blue, masterwork/green, rare/yellow, exotic/orange and ascended/pink). All equipment with the same level requirement and rarity is equally good. So a crafted exotic helm is the same as one from a dungeon or an achievement.

Of course there are different stat combinations but these are also fairly standardised with most available in a few different ways. You can find info on all the different options here: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Prefix

At level 80 the only tiers really worth worrying about are exotic and ascended, because exotics are easy to get so most people don’t bother using anything below that. Inculpatus has listed many of the methods, and it’s worth remembering that because it’s all equally good you can mix and match pieces too. For example you could buy some crafted pieces with gold, others with karma and others with dungeon tokens and although they’d all look different (that can be fixed with the wardrobe) you’d end up with a complete, matching set.

The most important thing to think about is which stats you want, which will depend on your build.

BTW you’ll notice I haven’t mentioned ascended, which is the highest tier. That’s because it’s intentionally a lot harder to get than exotics, and not required for the vast majority of the game (only really needed for high level Fractals, but recommended for raids too). The only reliable way to get it is by crafting (which is a slow process because it uses a lot of components which can only be crafted once a day), but you can occasionally get it as a rare drop in certain places, mainly raids, Fractals and World vs. World.

Which is not to say you shouldn’t get it eventually, but there’s no need to worry about it now.

(There’s also a 7th sort-of tier: legendaries. These are very long-term goals, and they’re not actually any better than ascended – the stats are identical. The only difference is they have flashier skins. So it’s something you may want to think about eventually but not anything to worry about when gearing your characters.)

Thank you guys very much for the detail. So what I took away is I don’t really need profession as I can just buy my gear. Do u know what a piece may cost in gold? I’m leveling a warrior now which it seems pointless to do but I already have a level 80 necromaner from 3 years ago, so I may auto bump it but I’m sure I could just breeze through to 80 also. So when ur 80 u can pvp/wpvp, raid/dungeon or the mastery type things is that correct ?

The price on the TP will be wildly different depending on your preferred stats. Many players advocate for equipping 100% berserker (which makes you very squishy but also maxes your dps, per their comments) and that has been “meta” enough for years that berserker stat items go for far more. With any stat combo, one trick is to sort the TP by price, then scan over the lowest priced named items like “Zho’s Mantle” to find the ones that have those stats. People tend to filter out by “Berserkers” which won’t reveal the named ones so those go for a lot less. I don’t personally go full out Berserkers but that named items method works on pretty much all the stats.

You can do anything in the game at 80 (you’ll need some specialized gear for raids or high end fractals). You can do dungeons starting around level 30 (they stair-step each 5 levels from Story/Explorable to the next tier dungeon Story/Explorable), though you’ll want to avoid joining PuG groups that don’t specifically say all welcome in their listing lest you run into someone angry at you for daring to do the dungeon at level.

Mastery is in fact restricted to level 80 and requires HoT. However once you learn various masteries they are account wide and apply to any alt, even a raw level 2. You don’t have to grind them out per character.

Crafting (again, “profession” in this game is warrior, necro, etc) is something to hold off on. Gather your resources, sure, but possibly list them on the TP to make solid coin until you are ready to spend the effort on raising a crafting skill so as to make the items you want that are account bound.

You can use the trading post (O) and select the bottom tab of the three. In there you can search for armor, limiting it to class, level, rarity (exotic for example) as well as up to three stats that armor affects. Externally to the game you could use websites like GW2BLTC, select Trading Post and through options to narrow it down.