Guild Wars 2

I come from WoW, so I’m no stranger to MMOs. Just made the transition yesterday. I have several questions. Though the last one (from my 1/4 day playing experience), is kind of a complaint yet also a question.

1. May I ask why isn’t time based off of server time? I actually do like this. Just curious.
2. Where do I go about crafting? I’m Level 7 currently (a Human Ranger) and been getting lots of mats, yet haven’t seen any crafting trainers. Are they in cities?
3. Three pet questions. First one, is it possible to name your pet in a later level? Does your pet age? And how do you tame a new pet?
4. What is the punishment for dying, if any (losing your stuff/XP loss/spirit run to your corpse/permadeath)?
5. Is there an AFK system?
6. I can’t seem to figure out how to go back to channel chat, where I saw what NPCs were saying in my chat window. Can’t figure out the controls.
7. How do professions work in this game?
8. Are addons allowed in this game? If no, that’s no problem. Just asking.

And the last one, the complaint/question. It’s in two parts:
Part One: The game claims to not be grindy. Yet why is it every “quest” (the heart thing), is a bar that you fill up, similar to an Apexis daily in Warlords of Draenor?
Part Two: Why is it I’m seeing quests shown by a Scout, that are a higher level than me, or getting so few quests after Level 5? How am I supposed to level, when there’s no quests? Feels a bit grindy. Again, I thought this game is against grinding. I know there’s these random events, but is there anything else?

1. I am not sure what you mean.

2. They are in cities and each starter zone has one too. The Crafting Crier starts to harass you at lvl 10. But you can start crafting at level 1 if you want to.

3. Pets remain the same. You can name them. I don’t think there is a level restriction. Push the Pawprint, there is a line above your pets picture to give it a name. You tame a new pet by walking up to it and intercting (F). Only Juveniles can be tamed.

4. Your armor takes damage and you may have to Waypoint. Waypointing costs a tiny bit, armor repair is free now.

5. You can mark yourself AFK. That means no-one can whisper you. It is best to AFK only in safe places or just go to char selection.

6. I cannot help without seeing what is wrong.

And…Part One: I have no idea what that Apexis is. These hearts have been the same for 2½ years. You fill a bar, but there are generally several choices as to what to do to fill it up. The hearts were added because players felt lost without some indicator where to go. Often events happen near them.

Part 2: Quests (I take it you mean hearts) are not the main XP source. The Dynamic Events are. You also gain XP for gathering stuff, killing stuff and simply walking to a new place.

1. Time is based off UTC time with reset happening at 0 UTC. This is so the reset happens every 24 hours no matter what. Some places observe DST, others don’t, and all the places that do don’t start and stop on the same days.

2. There are crafting stations in cities. There are also some in higher level zones. Cities are your best option since they’ll have a station for each craft. Non-city maps may not have every crafting station.

3. You can name your pet at any time. However, if you swap that pet out for another one, I believe the game forgets the name. Pets do not age. You tame a green named Juvenille _ by just walking up to it and hitting F.

4. You damage your armor and then break your armor. You lose the stat and sigil bonuses on armor when it breaks. Armor repair (including that of broken armor) is completely free. So you’re only punished for as long as you don’t go talk to a armor repair person or decide to buy new armor, whichever you decide to do first.

5. No AFK system, really. If you are AFK for too long it will take you to the character select screen. Do try to find a place not near where events pop up to AFK whenever possible, especially while on your ranger. Your pet will get you into combat and will make you count as participating and scale up the event accordingly.

6. Not sure what you’re really asking here. Some NPC text will show up in the Chat window, some will not.

7. Do you mean Professions as in Elementalist, Warrior, etc? GW2 technically calls those the Progressions. Or do you mean the Crafting Disciplines like Chef, Armorsmith, etc? Can’t really help here without knowing which you meant.

8. Add ons are not allowed. Only one exception has been given explicit approval by ANet. That exception is macros for playing music on the musical instruments and then only outside of the Wintersday festival activity of Bell Choir. And that is only because outside of Bell Choir, there is no reward at all given for playing of instruments. And the wording of the exception was that they were not going to punish those using it. Not that it was specifically allowed, just that they weren’t going to punish for using it.

Part 1/2 question. It’s a progress bar so that it lets you know how far you’ve gotten in completing that Heart. It also serves as a way for the game to keep track of your progress. So that you can go off and do other things and come back to finish it later without having to restart it.

The Scout shows hearts that are nearby and fit a specific story theme. Help the villagers, stop the Inquest, fight off the Risen, etc. You can start any quest of any level that you want, you are not locked out of starting quests that are above your level. The only lock out would be skill level for the ones that require combat. Though combat related hearts that are more around 5-10 levels higher or more, may just be too high to defeat due to combat mechanics.

And ANet did not want leveling up to just be doing quests. They originally did not have Hearts in the game. The hearts are placed in areas where Dynamic Events occur (the orange circles that pop up from time to time on the mini-map). Those give tons of XP. Crafting gives XP, gathering mats give XP, exploring the map gives XP.

Alright. To clarify some of your answers;
1. What I mean is game time. In WoW, the time of day is based on what time it is of the server. So if it’s 2am server time, it’s night.

4. Ah. I see it’s like WoW, but better. Excellent. But that brings up another question. In WoW, your gear (armor) takes damage through wear. Does it also do this in GW2?

6. Basically, during the tutorial quests, I was able to see what NPCs were saying in my chat window(ex: An NPC says “hi”, it showed up in my chat window). Now I’m not seeing it anymore, as I did something and I don’t know what.

7. I mean crafting professions (Armorsmith, etc…). Sorry for the confusion.

1. They wanted to make sure that all players, no matter what time they can play the game are able to see day and night. This is especially true due to some weapon skins have day/night cycles (Eternity comes to mind) and due to the Sylvari race glowing to some degree at night.

Part 1: Well, most hearts can be completed by killing things (I think there are likely only a handful of hearts across all maps that don’t), you just don’t know how many mobs.

Some hearts are also easier to complete depending on what cycle of the Dynamic Event chain the map is in. And some are also easier when Dynamic Events are actively happening in the area. So if you run into one that is remarkably slower than the others and it appears combat is a major part of the heart completion options (read the description), then it’s likely one that is helped by enemies controlling the area OR by a dynamic event occurring. Either wait 5-10 minutes or come back later on.

6. Some NPC text shows up in the chat, some don’t. Most of the NPC text out in the combat oriented maps don’t show up. You’ll get more of this in the racial cities and Lion’s Arch.

7. What were you specially wanting to craft, if anything? What weapon(s) are you liking with your Ranger so far? Ranger is a medium armor so if you are wanting to craft armor for the Ranger, you’ll want to level up Leatherworker.

So to start the Leatherworker craft, go up to a Leatherworker station (the icon is a brown hide) and talk to the Master Leatherworker. Then use the station to Discover recipes or make items.

This is the site I use to level up crafts: http://www.gw2crafts.net/ If you’re the kind of person to use guides.

1. There’s an option to use either local time or server time. Its under User Interface of the option menu.

2. There are a few crafting places out in the world, but for the most part, yes, they’re largely found in cities. The big major cities, that is, not the little outposts and towns you find in the open world. Each race has their own major city which is always connected to your starter zone (usually very close to where you started) along with a major “hub” city (Lion’s Arch) which connects to all the other cities via gate. Any of the racial cities or Lion’s Arch will be your primary means of crafting, storing items in the bank, using the Trading Post, ect.

3. Eventually you do get access to a pet management window, which lets you name pets, swap between various pets, view their stats / attacks, ect. They decided to disable it at lower levels to avoid “overloading” new players, though many don’t agree with that stance. I can’t tell you exactly when its unlocked as I leveled my Ranger long before they implemented that change, but I want to guess either level 10 or level 15. No, pet’s don’t age at all. As for taming new pets, you just find them in the open world, walk up to them and interact. But as with the above, you don’t tend to find them in the early world zones, again the same kind of thing with “overloading new players”.

4. When you die, one piece of your armor becomes damaged. Once all of your armor becomes damaged, then pieces will start breaking completely, which makes them unuseable (temporarily), meaning you lose your defense and stat bonuses from those broken pieces and they also disappear from your character visually. Any repair NPC can completely repair broken armor instantly, though, and its free (used to have to pay for it) so as long as you don’t go too long without repairs even frequent deaths aren’t too much of a hassle. The only actual “cost” to dying is the fee for waypointing, assuming a player doesn’t revive you.

5. Nope.

6. There are tabs at the top of the chat window. By default, the original (main) tab shows most non-combat related stuff, and there’s a combat tab you can flip to, and as with many other games you can create new tabs. The dropdown arrows next to each tab let you set which types of text are displayed in that tab. . If you press the little arrow to the left side of the chat window it’ll show all the tabs if they’re currently hidden, and of course pressing it again hides them to reduce clutter.

As far as individual chat “channels”, you have /say which is basically local chat to nearby players. /map is the map-wide chat. /party for groups. /whisper is the games private messaging system. /guild for talking to guildmates, /team for everyone on your side during competitive modes. You can switch between which mode you’re speaking in by just typing the command in the chat box then pressing space, and see which you’re talking in by what text it displays next to the chat bar (for example, you can type /map, then hit space, and the display next to the chat bar will change to map to tell you that whatever you type now goes into map chat).

7. Not exactly sure what you mean when you ask how they work. They’re permanent, chosen at character creation, there are no secondary professions or anything (though the upcoming expansion is going to add specializations, which are sub-classes of a sort). Profession determines your skills, armor, weapons, utilities, everything except the handful of racial skills.

You don’t really “take” quests in this game like you do other MMO’s. Rather than having one central NPC or location where you have to go to accept quests, then return to after completing them, you just find “heart quests” around the world organically. Go to a farm, and you might come across a quest related to helping the famers with pests or crops. But go a little further and you might come across a cave full of spiders that an NPC wants killed. Do those activities to fill the “bar” and once its full you get experience, world completion progress, and open up the quest-giver NPC as a vendor.

Its the same general idea of doing certain tasks to finish a quest, but incorporated into the world itself rather than being sent out from a central location with specific quests in hand.

The scouts basically just give you an idea of where you can go to find those heart quests (essentially an overview of nearby quests with some flavor dialogue), but they aren’t strictly necessary since heart quests are scattered around in such a way that you’ll be coming across them all the time just by exploring the various areas of the map.

There is no way I could ewxplain how crafting works better than the wiki. So, here is the link: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Crafting

If you don’t understand something, ask.

Benie.9312:

Alright. To clarify some of your answers;
1. What I mean is game time. In WoW, the time of day is based on what time it is of the server. So if it’s 2am server time, it’s night.

4. Ah. I see it’s like WoW, but better. Excellent. But that brings up another question. In WoW, your gear (armor) takes damage through wear. Does it also do this in GW2?

6. Basically, during the tutorial quests, I was able to see what NPCs were saying in my chat window(ex: An NPC says “hi”, it showed up in my chat window). Now I’m not seeing it anymore, as I did something and I don’t know what.

7. I mean crafting professions (Armorsmith, etc…). Sorry for the confusion.

GW2 Day/Night is every 2hrs. 5m Dawn > 70m Day > 5m Dusk > 40m Night. This is because there are different aesthetics/buffs/sigils/runes that work during day/night.

Armor is only damaged when you die completely, so if you’re downed and managed to rally you won’t need to repair your armor. There is a Downed Penalty for constant downs/deaths, if you don’t wait long enough between downs you’ll die faster. Its shown as an arrow next to your HP bar, it’ll go from grey > yellow > red > insta-death.

There’s a gear in the right corner of your chat, click it to toggle the NPC dialogue back on, you can create a new chat tab that only shows NPC dialogue so you can go back to it later.

Crafting: there are 3 weapon crafting professions, 3 armor crafting professions, 1 accessory profession and 1 cooking/buff profession. You’ll have to look up weapon you want and craft it. Armor is divided into 3: heavy/medium/light, pick the one your profession uses (rangers use medium). You can only have 2 active crafts at once, but u can reassign them and not lose that craft’s level/progress (you can also use gems to have more active professions)

Hi Benie,

Hope you’re managing to stay afloat in the sea of information you must be finding yourself in.

From what I can see most of your answers have been answered, but I’d like to add a couple of things:

1. When you die in PvE, don’t teleport to a waypoint too quickly. It costs you money, which you have precious little of in the beginning, and chances are a player in the vicinity will come by to resurrect you – for free. It’s one of the first things I encountered when I started out in the game, and one of the main reasons I stuck around.

2. There are lots of different ways to level up in this game. Yes, filling the hearts and killing things is one of the most obvious. But, you get XP for so many other things as well. Just wandering around the world earns you XP. Each waypoint, vista, point of interest you discover grants you experience points. Chopping trees, foraging for plants, mining ore, even resurrecting fellow players earns you experience (though I prefer to think people do this last one because it’s just the decent thing to do).

Above all else, remember to have fun!

The wiki is your friend.

1) http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Day_and_night

2) http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Crafting#Locations

3) Don’t know, not running a profession with pets.

4) If killed by a critter or a player in WvW, one piece of armor is damage. After all pieces are damage then one will break and it’s stats will no longer count. Armor can be repaired for free at blacksmiths throughout the world. Note falling to your death or cooking yourself in a pool of lava will not damage armor.

5) As in after some amount of inactivity you will be dumped back to the character select screen. But while in game you are fair game for any nasty that wanders or is kited by.

6) The little down arrow on the current chat tab drops down a selection box that you can tick which chat channels you want to see in that tab. Different default tabs have different options ticked. You might have switched to one by accident that didn’t have NPC chat enabled. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Chat_panel

7) Professions are this game’s classes. Crafting disciplines –
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Crafting

8) Add-ons aren’t generally allowed unless they are simple overlays. The UI the game has is the only UI you are going to get with it’s very minimal repositioning of some elements and size settings. While ANet looks away at macroing when it comes to playing instruments, any attempt to combine actions into single keystrokes or controlling multiple accounts simultaneously, such running all the characters in your party via 5 sessions, is against ToS and will be treated harshly with little chance of reversal.

As for Hearts, it’s true that it’s a format of do X of something to complete but often there is a choice of activities and you don’t need to complete it right then. The game remembers how much if any is done. As a matter of fact there isn’t a reason you have to do any of them except for XP. And once done with that character the heart unlocks and the “quest giver”, who you may never need to meet, turns into an NPC vendor who will buy your stuff and may sell unique items, as in available only from that NPC, for Karma, a “currency” you get for completing hearts and events.

As for not finding stuff to do, this game isn’t about leading you from one ? to another and then off the map to the next one. It’s about exploring the world on your own and finding the Dynamic Events that occur. Also just about everything you can do will give you XP other than standing about. Rezzing NPCs and other players, gathering mats from nodes (which may not be visible to you yet at your level), visiting Points of Interests, Vistas and Skill Point challenges (again may not be visible yet), unblurring areas of your current map. Critters gain XP bonuses the longer they have been in the world since they spawned, going off the beaten path and bonking them can be very rewarding XP wise. Crafting also gives XP.

Also the game will down level you so critters are still a challenge (less so as you get better gear) and they will reward you with level appropriate XP and item drops (mostly as type of bags/sacks and item quality is affected by the area’s level).

Edit: And welcome, remember to have fun. This isn’t a game where you rush to max level to get to interesting activities. And check out the OMG sticky at the top of this forum for useful bits of info.