Guild Wars 2

I stopped playing Guild Wars about a year ago because I had multiple characters at max level and the only way left for me to “progress” was to grind for gold, which basically involved going to a high level zone and killing the same mobs over and over for crafting items…which was painfully boring.

Has the end game changed at all, can I unlock new gear cosmetics or stuff with better stats by doing something else? Or is it still just a gold grind?

Just to get this out of the way…I’m not looking for suggestions for what else I can do in the game. I got 100% on two characters, I did all the jumping puzzles and I saw all the dragon fights and stuff…I’m done with that part of the game. I’m specifically asking if there’s any new end game PvE content or is the only way to get high end items is by farming sparks in Malchors Leap for gold like it used to be.

yes, they have changed the end game. now it’s endless mega events – different one every 2 weeks. It’s pretty much the same thing at each one, but at least the scenery changes. currently, check out the west side of Divinity’s Reach near the WP, and there’s a Living Story update for which zone Scarlet is currently invading (many events in the same zone, kill lots of things, grab lots of loot, zerg boss fight)
yes, there are new cosmetics, some are free, some are costly, some are grind-friendly

Yeah, nevermind. I just finished downloading and the people I was planning to try the game with are all on different servers and I see they’ve added a ludicrously expensive transfer fee.

Good job on that ArenaNet…way to let everyone server hop for months and then lock them all onto a random server. It’s so welcoming for returning players…they’ll definitely all give you 25 bucks, they definitely wont just decide to play something else instead.

Pay with gems (from gold)?

Edit: Or use the guesting feature.

I stopped playing the game because I was bored of gold farming…how long would it realistically take to get 1800 gems from gold?

100 gems currently costs ~5.1 gold, so 92 gold to transfer. currently, people farm invasion champions and are reporting up to 10 gold in 45 minutes, so it’ll probably take 10-15 hours (there is one 45-minute invasion each hour).
Unfortunately for those that took vacations, they announced they would add the transfer fee, gave everyone like 2 weeks to get to the server of their choice for free, enabled the transfer fee. this was back in like feb. I feel they primarily did this because people were abusing server transfers (there was a rich ori node in Southsun, always in the same spot. People would park all 8 of their alts there, be in server A, mine 10 ori on all characters, move to server B, mine 10 ori on all characters, move to server C, etc. 24 servers x 8 alts x 10 ori ore = 1,920 ori ore in 1 hour per day = ~60 gold on the TP) Of course, they removed that rich node a few weeks after adding the transfer fee; guess they liked the idea of people buying gems too much to go back to free transfers.

guesting helps, but would be very annoying as a replacement for transfer. you can guest to two different servers of your choice every 24 hours. just can’t WvW, but otherwise you can be in that server’s zones. every time you go back to character select screen, you need to re-select the server you are guesting onto.
also, a lot of things work cross-server, such as dungeons. again, a small consolation.

Another option, albeit not a good one if you have completed as much as you have, is delete all your toons and you can transfer for free. Bank, currency and achievements remain. It was a good option for me as I only had one level 50 and nothing else and I wanted to reroll anyways.

Also you can guest on other servers as mentioned above. If you dont do WvW with your friends then that is a solid option.

Gem prices can change but I have 200 gems and they can be sold for about 7g50s atm. Buying them is more than that, but that might give you a rough idea.