Guild Wars 2

Hi guys,

Decided to get back into GW2 as I have some more free time coming up. I haven’t played in almost 3 years. I have 6 lvl80 characters with my guardian being my main. He has 3 legendary weapons and great gear at the time of leaving. Can anyone give me any info to help me get back in the game and fill in the gap. What do people do now? How has the skills changed? Personal story? Right now I do not have plans to get the expansion unless it goes on sale. Thanks!

Hey if anyone has any suggestions on this please hit me up, i am also returning. i play from launch to HoT, ive tried to get back into the game but it feels more like collecting things at this point. feel free to send a forum or in game msg!

Regarding collecting things, as someone said “Grind Wars 2: Heart of Farms”.

This may be helpful to you: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/wiki/newplayers

You just missed a bunch of half-price HoT sales. Since you have a bunch of L80s, I would recommend getting HoT.

I’ve returned recently, as well. The new HoT areas are fun, but I’d avoid Dry Top as much as possible. Skip to the Silverwastes – where completing the meta event is entertaining – and the HoT jungle maps.

PvE’s roughly the same except nobody runs dungeons at all anymore, fractals got reworked, and 10-man raids were added.

If you’re interested in PvP or WvW look for another game. Profession design and balance is terrible. Pro players have expressed written complaints numerous times. Almost everything skillful in nature has been systematically removed or nerfed into uselessness. Build diversity is even worse than it used to be. It’s that bad.

DeceiverX.8361:

If you’re interested in PvP or WvW look for another game. Profession design and balance is terrible. Pro players have expressed written complaints numerous times. Almost everything skillful in nature has been systematically removed or nerfed into uselessness. Build diversity is even worse than it used to be. It’s that bad.

Nah. It’s not that bad, disregard the melodrama. For those who have been away for several years, PvP has been totally revamped since you last played, and while it’s true that HoT power creep has caused many old builds to be obsolete, PvP and WvW are not the total disaster that Deceiver would have you believe.

Join up with an active WvW guild on your server and you’ll see that the game is still alive and well. Lots of roamers, lots of small groups flipping towers, and as always there are numerous zergs to follow along with if that’s your thing. Or start queueing up for PvP in the new league system (currently in season 5, though, so you have a bit of catching up to do in terms of achievements and progression if that’s your thing). Find a build you like and queue for ranked league matches, you’ll need to play 10 matches to get your actual ranking placement so that’s probably a good place to start.

If you go the PvP route, remember that during the initial 10 ranking matches, it might put you in some wildly unbalanced matches. This is bound to happen at least a few times during those starter matches, either you will be on a team that totally dominates the opposition or vice versa, but once you get into your actual placement on the leaderboard, matches tend to be considerably more balanced than in previous seasons.

If you’re after PvE play, as others have suggested, definitely pick up Heart of Thorns and start there. If you’ve been logging in regularly enough to have unlocked the Living World maps up to the release of HoT, I would absolutely recommend checking out Silverwastes. It’s a fun zone but you’ll hear a lot of negativity against it these days simply for the fact that most of us have played it into oblivion. SW is still one of the easiest maps to farm loot, though, and I actually still have fun just running the meta there from time to time.

Also, welcome back. If you get HoT, pursue gliding immediately. It will change your life in GW2.

If you plan to play Season 2 and Heart of Thorns..
I suggest you watch one of my new videos I uploaded called “Guild Wars 2 – Complete Season 1 Movie”

It’s a full complete Movie with all cutscenes and story lore of Season 1 for all who have missed it or wish to revisit the story before continuing the game with Season 2 in mind.

Credits go to all the original content creators.
The Credits start @ 5:22
Please Support their channel!!!

Here’s the link to the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE2AdoreNmY

oh kmon… most of the "roamers " u see in wvw are ppl that make dailyes (land claimer, caravan kills, npcs..etc) the wvw has fully turned into a mindless zerg hitting 1 skill mostly and then complain that they get 1shotted by gunflame warrs, hammer revs or cnd thieves
about spvp i cant talk since im not interested
if u want open world farming u need the expansion to go do the famous auric basin endless broken chest looting that anet seems to ignore patch fixing
dungeons are allmost dead from the moment they nerfed to the ground the rewards
the only serious content left is t4 fractals and raids
anything else…some ppl tend to do daily and gather wood and ore to craft theyr “daily gold income aka 1 deldrimor ingot and 1 spiritwood plank”

Well look at all the people….

For PvE we had

• LS season 2 (dry top 1/4, silverwastes 5/8) (200 gems/missed part, 1600 for full story)
• rework of fractals, multiple times
• nerf of dungeons (67% gold reward removal)
• buff of dungeons (20 added tokens, box with 5gold and 150 tokens of choice every 8 different paths) (most average ppl should be able to run dungeons in 2013 speedrun times…)
• added fractals. rework of agony resistance
• reworked trait systems, personal story
• new Lion’s Arch
• new maps: southsun cove, dry top, silverwastes
• silverwastes chest farm
• lvl 40 fractal farm
• Guild missions

HoT a.k.a. The Expansion

• masteries
• elite specialisations
• RAIDS
• maps: verdant brink, auric basin, tangled depths, dragon stand, bloodstone fen, ember bay, and the new ice map, bitterfrost frontier….
• easy farmable ascended trinkets
• Living story 1 to 3 (200 gems/missed part, ???? gems for full story)
• some new legendaries
• Guild halls, making guild banks extremely expensive… nice for medium andd bigger guilds
• introduction of berry farm, AB multiloot

in other game modes:

WvW:

• introduction of HotM,
• introduction of desert map,
• removal of part of the desert maps, and reinstateement of the old maps
• rework of WvW abilities

PvP

• introduction of some new maps….
• introduction of new amulets
• introduction of new runes
• introduction of new reward tracks
• introduction of several new scoring mechnsms, some ofwhich have been replaced again

Common

• Numerous balance patches..
• return of the same events during holidays..
• The enormous jump in price of leather.
• The fading of exotics in normal gaming, most ppl run full ascneded now.
• The complete change of all vanilla content to faceroll mode due to elite specs eing 10-25% more powerfull compard to vanilla, neccesiy for glass builds to effectively farm vanilla.

Some things are still the same: warrior, and elementalit are still mandatory in most game modes
Things radically different:

• guardian, is no longer used in PvE,
• revenant arose from the mists with HoT, and was nerfed and died and is now back in the mists.
• Ranger is now meta in compositions, the bearbow is no more. the druid buffer is mandatory. Condi ranger is now the most potent condi build (!)
• Mesmer returns to the meta comp as chronomancer giving cd reduction to the party and relects, pulls and quickness allow for much use even though DPS is rediculously low.
• Necro was okay and average, and normal in some raids, then nerfed and only used now in fractals: 1 ranger 4 necro’s is an old meta comp. It’s still used as a slow build, to kill some spawns while continously applying chill. It needs a good necroing to prevent it from going the same route as revenant.

• CONDI BUILDS ARE VIABLE,
  stacks have been released and went from 25 stacks to 1500 allowing condi builds to rise and find places in meta….
  Condi ranger, condi mesmer, condi warrior/berserker, condi engineer are good now and have uses, condi necro/reaper was destroyed by ppl with no idea how to balance games and is now laughed upon by all ppl, in all game modes, except maybe in fractals, where 4 necro groups epidemic through everything….
  As for your specifics:
• Expansion was on 50% reduction twice already.
• Base Guardian is only used in WvW as a F2P zerg build.
• PPL are getting LI’s for legendary armor, legendary backpacks, legendaries in common, and gearing all alts in Ascnededs, having less then ascneded weapons and trinkets is nowadays a sign of either lazyness of a new account.
• farming in common.
• Meta has shifted , mostly because HoT specilisations tend to be better then Vanilla builds with a few exceptions.

PaxTheGreatOne.9472, strange so many things added to the game yet…. feels like they did nothing.

lol that’s cause he’s adding everything over the 4 years of the game though. Like southsun cove was added a few months after launch lol. And he didnt mentioned Guild halls, mega servers, cross guild chat’s from what i can tell either lol.

To Op: Personally i find the game at it’s core hasnt changed. You still have to farm 24/7 if you want money to buy gems or items needed for legendary, been that way since launch. The expansion isnt worth the full price imo the HoT maps are not that fun, not til you’ve grinded your way to get about 60ish mastery points to take the masteries that start making those maps easier and more fun. I havent done raids so i can’t comment on them. WvW is basically the same still, slight changes to it for the better for most part. Same with pvp, they even added pvp seasons now and with the current revamp of it, even if you stink at pvp like me you can still progress to gain ascended armor/weapons with less effort/money then the 2 other formats, with the only “price” being waiting for the seasons.

So depending on why you left in the first place, you’ll probably just leave again lol. Personally i came back after some 1 or 2 years away from it when HoT came out, and even now i only play roughly 1-2 hours on it, mainly to do my dailies since you get 2g from it. The best part of gw and gw2 though is no monthly fee!! So even if you wanna take 5 years off you can still come back and play without repaying a dime. What i reccommend is play, just do it casually a few times a week will do or 30 minutes everyday.

drunkenpilot.9837:

Nah. It’s not that bad, disregard the melodrama. For those who have been away for several years, PvP has been totally revamped since you last played, and while it’s true that HoT power creep has caused many old builds to be obsolete, PvP and WvW are not the total disaster that Deceiver would have you believe.

i’d say pvp is in a terrible spot right now. A few days ago i spent a couple of hours fighting a player who had destroyed me in a match, in a personal arena. It was the most fun pvp experience i’ve had in this game.

What kills it in conquest mode? the spamming. Every skill now procs 2-3 effects, and the cooldowns are very short. This means that in a team fight all hell breaks lose and the team with the longest invulnerabilities or better resurrect skills wins the fight. Also, there’s so much area cc being thrown around that it gets really frustrating.

The fact you have to fight over nodes and run against the timer to cap them, means that you cannot fight strategically, you have to fully commit and destroy your oponent in seconds or be ready to be ganked by his teammates.

1v1 are actually fun, but there’s no game mode that takes advantage of a more strategic, less spamy pvp.

Oh, after 4 years we finally have .. the same old forum

Odin the exiled.5764:

lol that’s cause he’s adding everything over the 4 years of the game though. Like southsun cove was added a few months after launch lol. And he didnt mentioned Guild halls, mega servers, cross guild chat’s from what i can tell either lol.

Maybe. I have no perfect recollection of the order. I’ve been playing this game for almost 1600 days (1596) and some things tend to get vague. BUT I still find returning ppl who’ve never ever been on/near Karka island. (Guild missions tend to show me this, often.)

When people say that hardly anything has been added to the game, then they really mean “hardly anything that I personally care about has been added”

I play pvp, not world v world, and I only do pve once in a while. Hardly any pvp content has been added. A few maps, a reward track, some skins and finishers. That’s it.

Someone who only likes dungeons will say that barely anything has been added.
Someone who only likes fractals will say that hardly anything as been added.
Someone who only likes pvp will say that hardly anything has been added.
Someone who only likes events will say that hardly anything has been added.
Someone who only likes mini games will say that hardly anything has been added.

Most MMOs focus on only one aspect, and then ignore pretty much everything else. This game focuses on adding many different things. If you only play for one aspect, say dungeons, then this is not the game for you.

Naus the Gobbo.5172, thats because other mmo’s want to be good at something, and not have players raging cause change felt super incomplete, or borked the game even more.

^
And this game IS good at something.

It is good at giving you many different things to play.

If all the devs did was push out dungeons then everyone who loves dungeons would be really happy. But people like me who like to play pvp and only dip into the other aspects of the game would be left in the dust and feel neglected.