Guild Wars 2

I promise I’ll continue to read up on things but there’s a few bits and pieces that I’m missing.

Does pvp rank matter anymore (other than the conversion to transmutation charges)?

Also, I know I bought the phoenix light armor but I can’t find it on any of my toons or in my wardrobe. Is this something I need to file a ticket on? Will they be able to track it down or am I out of luck? I purchased it about the time it came out. I suppose it’s possible I accidentally deleted the toon it was on but I don’t think I did.

For gear, I like the new tab in the bank similar to the old pvp lockers that shows me all the gear. When I see something I don’t have that I want, where’s the best place to find where to get it? It’s too bad there isn’t an in-game tooltip that tells you that.

Have to say, the wardrobe changes are a huge plus for me. It took a tedious and expensive to use system that was not at all alt friendly and turned it around with a great interface and account-wide unlocks. Same for the account-wide dyes (I’m embarrassed to say I returned to something like 400-500 unidentified dyes thanks to all the duplicates I had on all my toons.)

I was playing RIFT until recently and I still miss the variety of things to do in RIFT, including artifact collecting and all the cool mounts but it has been getting creaky for some time with every major release causing lots of crashes and infrastructure problems (mail not working, chat not working for days, etc.) Plus while the world graphics are nice the character graphics are quite stale these days. The foolish AH fee changes pushed me over the edge.

I’m currently torn between returning to SWTOR (I like the stories) and GW2, dabbling with both. I love having lots of alts and both are very nice for multiple toons, although from what I’ve seen so far, GW2 seems a bit alt-friendlier now, although the SWTOR legacy system is nice. Great change from RIFT, where alt support was not apparently a concern for devs.

For those who’ve done both SWTOR and GW2, how does living story compare as a story thread? Have to say last time I played, I wasn’t too impressed with living story.

Server pop seems quite healthy on both.

Thanks for any comments.

Found the phoenix items- they were attached to some bound gear. Just had to get on the right toon.

Welcome back! Sadly gw2 isn’t really alt friendly now, because you may have noticed they changed the trait point system, and low level chars are considerably weaker, and forcing you to buy traits/ complete events to unlock them. Leveling is far more tedious than before, but the game has still a lot to offer at 80. I’m not aware of any way to know where to unlock the skins you miss, some are coming from dungeons, others are lootable, others are from WwW.. PvP rank matters as a token of your dedication to pvp, and you still unlock finishers based on your ranks. The living story here is far better than the first season, i didn’t play the last episode so can’t comment on that but the new map dry top is really nice. The wardrobe is indeed a good thing overall. Server pop is healthier due to megaservers, you’re actually playing with people from all servers when going into low populated maps. Didn’t play SWTOR so i can’t offer a comparison, but gw2 is still a fun game, especially in dungeons, but the WwW community is left apart, and there’s still bug fixes and QoL improvements to make it even better.

ascended armor is an annoying grind. Other people did the math and a full ascended set is basically 10% more effective exotics.

PvP rank
I’m not sure what it did before the update (hadn’t played PvP then) but now it’s basically a way of tracking how much PvP you’ve done. You get a chest every time you go up a rank and a new finisher every 10 ranks but that’s it.

Finding gear/skins you don’t have
Your best bet is to search the wiki. There’s a link at the top of this page, or in game you can type /wiki [item name] and it will open a new tab in your browser and search the wiki.

RIFT/SWTOR
Never played either so I can’t comment.

GW2 being alt-friendly
Compared to games I have played this one is very alt-friendly because all your gold, karma and other currencies and a lot of items are shared.

I was going to say I haven’t noticed the new trait system making levelling harder, but then I remembered that’s because I never bought trait manuals until I was sure I wanted to keep the character, so I’m used to playing without traits at all. Just having the bonuses to stats makes a difference for me, even if I haven’t unlocked anything for that slot.

I also wouldn’t bother getting ascended armor for an alt unless I had nothing else to do with the money/materials. Even on my main character I’ve only got a few ascended pieces. Unless you’re doing high level Fractals you don’t need it.

Thanks for all for the follow-up, much appreciated and very useful.

I don’t think the new trait system is going to bother me although I haven’t spent time on my lower level alts so maybe I’ll find it more of a nuisance. I like the quest for a trait, in principle, at least, although I could see how that could get old. The price to buy outright didn’t seem too horrible, in any case.

I do have a lot of toons (3 80s, 2 in the 60s and another 4 in the 20s and 30s). One thing I’ve come to appreciate when returning: since I don’t have to relearn a ton of abilities (or macros in other games), it’s actually a lot easier to pick up a toon I haven’t played in a long time. That ought to apply to switching between alts, as well.

I do love that almost everything is account-wide now. In other games, it would get to the point that I had so much collected on a primary toon (be it pets, mounts, achievements, pvp rank, artifact sets, etc.) that it wasn’t practical to switch to another toon as a main. That one toon would forever be my main, like it or not. Unless, of course, I was willing to regrind all that on a new toon, which I’m not in general.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever worry about ascended armor. I don’t tend to like working towards that sort of thing, mostly because most MMOs make it very grindy (not sure if GW2 is any different but I assume not.)

Thing is, if you ever do high level fractals or speedruns, ascended is required. And yeah, it’s grindy, just like every other game.

On the traits system:

If you find levelling to be a grind and you just want to get to endgame then the new trait system adds to the grind.

If you enjoy the idea of levelling your character, and gradually accumulating more skills by doing tasks then the new system is great.

I fall into the latter group of players.

Cormac.3871:

On the traits system:

If you find levelling to be a grind and you just want to get to endgame then the new trait system adds to the grind.

If you enjoy the idea of levelling your character, and gradually accumulating more skills by doing tasks then the new system is great.

I fall into the latter group of players.

As do I. I much prefer leveling to running things over and over again for end-game gear.

Also mix it up with pvp and like the reward tracks that are there now. When I left, it was partly with the realization that the only gear I wanted was for level 80 pvp rank (I was 30 at the time) and I didn’t really feel like grinding out 50 ranks for no other reason than some level 80 stuff that looked good. Plus, at the time, you could only use your pvp gear in pvp and the mists.

Thanks for the comments.