Guild Wars 2

I played the original Guild Wars when it first came out years ago and never really liked it much, but then again about that time I was experiencing severe MMO burn out having played just about everything from The Realm – UO – WOW and then some.

I did recently try going back into Guild Wars and and play my account , but so far I still can’t because I’m waiting for Ncsoft to get my account back in order so I can play it?

Anyways I decided to buy this game and today I played it for the first time on the new PC I just built(AMD FX-6100, XFX Double D 2GB HD7850, 8GB Gskill Ram etc etc), and I love the way the game looks and feels to a point, but so far I find the controls very hard to get used to (and I’m using a G13 game pad), and trying to figure out what to do, when and where and I keep having this stupid window pop up telling me something about I can travel now or get back in the queue (and I didn’t even do anything to want to travel anywhere).

I’m also finding the targeting system hard to get used to (Playing an elementalist right now), the merchant is hard to figure out as well as some other things. The worst part for me so far is the way the quests are given. I find it hard to see what to do, where to do it and when they are done, then I can’t figure out what I get for a reward and how do I get that reward?

So if someone could give me a brief run down of how to play the game in a few easy words that would be great. I have been out of MMO’s for quite awhile, but I didn’t have this much trouble playing Rift(leveled 4 toons up to 60 then got bored) or Diablo III even though I know D III is not really an MMO.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m NOT putting guild Wars 2 down at all, I’m just looking for help trying to play the game while having fun doing so is all.

Thanks

Combat is very active. You’re required to actively dodge in-coming attacks from your enemy. The default dodge key is V, and you can also activate the double-tap feature, which lets you double-tap a direction key to dodge in that direction.

Skills are based on what weapons you currently have equipped. At level 7 (I believe?), you can actively swap weapons midcombat to a second weapon set, giving you twice the amount of abilities to use on the go.

As an elementalist however, you won’t gain access to mid-combat weapon swapping. Instead, you have attunements placed on your F1, F2, and so on keys. These greatly alter your playstyle and you should often switch between them midfight.

Guild Wars 2 separates itself from other MMOs in that it does not have a given linear questpath. You are never required to go anywhere you don’t want to go. If you desire, you can level from level 1 to 80 in the first zone without ever leaving.

The hearts you find on your map are “Renown Hearts”
These hearts are the closest thing to a linear questline you can find. It is a quest where you can do different things to complete it. For example, you can feed chickens, or kill worms – it will count towards completing the quest. You can usually read what you need to do in the top-right corner. There will often be a “bar” that fills slowly when you complete objectives.

Upon completing these, the questgivers will sell you things for “Karma”, a currency you recieve when you complete quests and events.

Dynamic Events are events that are triggered by a million different things. These events happen all over the world, and if nobody is there to save the day, the event will fail. Should the event fail, the event doesn’t actually end. Rather, it branches to an aftermath event.

Here’s an example:

A bandit raid is happening at the nearby town.
Nobody stops the bandits, and the bandits have now taken over the town (event failed)
A new event begins, where you must kill every bandit in the town, to drive them out.

If you had stopped the bandits in the first place, you might’ve been asked to follow them to their stronghold, so you could dispose of them.

There’s a lot to learn and a lot to grasp.

The queue that you speak of is an overflow queue. When the regular server is full it puts us into an overflow server and then when there is space in the regular server it pops up a message asking if you want to move to the regular server. There is also that popup that tells you that you’ve been put into the overflow queue.

Personally If I’m just playing by myself, no guildies or friends online with me then I just stay in the overflow server or where ever the game puts me.

Not sure what is difficult about the merchants to figure out, they seem pretty easy to me, sell, buy, buy back at the gold merchants, or sell, buy, buyback at the karma merchants. But maybe you are talking about a particular GW2 class type.

Don’t worry, it will take a few days to get used to. One thing you want to put in your mind right away is, regardless of how frantic it seems during combat, remain calm and think about what you are doing. You have two dodges available to you plus whatever abilities you have to control a fight with. Slow down, observe what is going on around you and react accordingly, rather than hapless button mashing.

Mobs often telegraph when they are about to hit you, learn to save dodges for that and only when its a move that is going to hurt bad.

Targeting is a little wierd but you wil lget used to it. You don’t even have to target anything, just point in a general direction and fire, your character will auto-target the closest thing in your line of sight. You may also tab target and mouse-click target. Again, targeting can get a little tricky in a large fight and you may wind up tab-targeting the wrong thing, so take it easy….migth be best to take the time to mouse-click an intended target rather than risking bringing in more mob aggro unintentionally.

The overflow system is a little annoying with the pop-ups, but it only happens on session change going to overflow and again when there is a spot available for you on your own realm. IT is important that these pop-ups exist because if you are in the middle of a dynamic event you may not necessarily want to be ported to your home server, where the event might not be taking place.

Quests are super easy. Pick a direction. Any direction. Go there. The UI will let you know if an available quest is nearby with all the information you need to know in the top left, and a quick look at the map tells you where you need to go and what you need to do.

I hope this helps ^_

The window that pops up is asking you if you want to travel to the main server.

There aren’t really any traditional quests, but rather there are dynamic events. Participate in those events and you will automatically earn rewards such as xp, coin and karma. You can complete heart quests (the hearts that appear on your map) if you’re looking for a more traditional feel to questing.

If you feel lost, you can talk to a scout, and they will show you where you can go for adventuring goodness. They show up as a spyglass on your map.

As for the targeting issues… Well, I can’t really help with that, sorry!

Anyways, I hope this helps!

There’s a lot keys you need to press so it’s understandable that it will take time to learn to fully control your character. Experiment with different key-mappings. Put some often used skills on mouse buttons, you can use things like shift + key to reduce the number of different keys you need to keep track off.

The travel popup comes from the fact that there’s overflow instances of the map if the main instance is full. If you end up in an overflow instance you will be automatically queued for the main instance and will be given that popup once there’s place for you on the main instance. Once you’re there you obviously won’t be bothered anymore, but you might choose to stay on the overflow server if you just were busy with some event (chain)

There’s two types of questing. The heart quests, these will automatically popup once you’re in the area of one. These quests are static and you do them on your own. You can also find these by talking to scouts, they’ve been introduced to you at the start of the game. Then there’s the events, these count of everyone participating in them. They either popup randomly, are a continuation of a previous event or are initiated by talking to some npc. Often npc’s will come running at players saying they need help with something if any of the players will decide that he wants to help such event is started. The randomly popping up type of events are things like bandits raiding a farm and you need to defend it if you’d want to do so. A continuation of that event might be clearing the bandits hide out after a successful defense or clearing the farm of said bandits when you failed to defend it. In any case the game will mention these if you’re close to an event and they will show up on your (mini)map. To participate you just have to run in and help with the event.

Besides this there’s ofcourse the storyline missions which you can play and further down the road from lvl 30 and onwards you can play dungeons, which are a lot harder and require team effort to succeed. You might also be the explorer type of person. You receive xp from visiting new places and completing the map. It’s great to sometimes just wander around and explore new awesome looking areas. There’s plenty hidden areas too.

Well one things for sure, the people in this game are a whole lot friendlier than I’m used to in an MMO, one of the things that always turned me off on WOW. Thanks to everyone who has replied to my first post, I sure do appreciate it!

If you haven’t checked out the manual that may help you also.

As was mentioned above, be sure to seek out the Scouts. Look for the spyglass on your map and them go interact with them. They will give you a lot of info about the area you are in, and what quests might be available.

Lots of great tips up there. Don’t give up! There is a learning curve for this game — I’ve felt it, too, when I first logged in. It took many of my friends a few days and a number of hours to get the feel for it. But once they did, they started commenting “Oh… I understand. I’m getting the hang of this!”

And that’s a great feeling!

I find it really rewarding to discover new things naturally, hone my skills and start to understand things like skills and traits. New games tend to have that overwhelming feeling for me in the beginning. And that’s even true for me, coming from many years of MMO playing, including GW1.

You’re not alone and you’re doing the right thing by sticking to it! Practice helps over time! (I’m still trying to get the dodging feature down, myself.)

Good luck!

As others are sayin, it’s overwhelming at first especially if you are looking for a GW1 like experience goin in.

Just stick with it you’ll be hooked and learnin before ya know it.

/wiki in game command helps alot also.

Yea there is a lot to learn for new players especially if you are use to other mmo’s. The combat I have been finding the hardest to learn. I am starting to get use to the combat.

The trickiest part of the game is picking which class to for as they are all good LOL.

I have no MMO experience whatsoever, and i no NO IDEA what im doing, there is stuff popping up everywhere.

I literally cant even work out how to fight. im pretty much just running around dying.

Those of you who need help should post what server you are in so that maybe someone who is from the same server who have see this thread could help you in game.

Those giving targeting information on elementalists need to step back and reevaluate your answers. With elementalists it tends to be a bit more than just target and attack as it is with some of the other professions I have played.

Alot of the skills for an elementalists are the click area spells. What I found out is nice is to go keyboard keys to cast the spell but then set in the options to make it cast at pointer. So you use your pointer and hit the corresponding key and it casts there without the need for the second click.

Also since your using area spells remember you want to cast just BEFORE where you will end up being. E.G. if I am auto casting my fireball and then I go to cast my lava font I always cast it just in front of where they will be running and not right on top of them. this gives them a few more seconds within the field and thus they take more damage.

Also remember that attunments mean alot when it comes to what role you want to play. I almost always play damage heavy and try and srike down foes before they get to me so I stay fire and I run with elemental summons (both lesser and greater) and I will summon them as fire to do the damage as well. once I take a few hits and see my burning down the enemy is not working (either too many at a time or too spread out) I then do a burning retreat and a quick attunement change to water to get a good couple area heals off before switching quickly to earth for more survivability and finishing off the battle.

The main thing to remember is with Elementalists its all about your attunements and how you best utilize them for your survival.

About the quests it took me awhile to figure it all out. You have the main quest line that is indicated with a green swirly. That green swirly will take you on your storyline quests. Outside of that the other quests you have are the heart quests. They ALWAYS have a radius around the heart giver and as long as you see that particular heart on the top right of the screen you know your in the general area to do the quests. Some heart quests you may need more information than just the area and if you do you can talk to the heart quest giver. When you finish the heart quests the rewards go into your mailbox so you have to then claim them from there. Storyline quest rewards come with a big popup on the screen and are items you select one of 3 items usually. Anything else is you participating in a dynamic evenet and you should see a medal at the end of the event on the right hand side and those reards go straight into your inventories gold reserves and there is no “pickup” for it. Hope this answers some of your questions. Good lluck in the game.

Since you’re familiar with MMOs (even if you’ve been away from them for a while), I think it would be beneficial to hit the options menu (gear icon at the upper left). Go through and re-arrange your movement buttons to ones you’re comfortable with and set a key for dodge. Next, have a look at all the check boxes; they’re fairly self-explanatory but just ask the map chat channel “/m” if you have questions. It helped me to look over options on chat, too – so I could see the chat channel command tags. You can also set chat to give you game info, which may help you figure out your skills in action.

One of the options is “fast targeting” which you may want to try. Instead of making you manually target something, fast targeting will drop your skill right at your feet. If you don’t mind being in the thick of things (and can dodge out quickly) then you might give this a try, even temporarily. I tried it on my elementalist, but didn’t like giving up the range of manually targeting. PvPer friends tell me fast targeting is the way to go for them, though.

Others have explained the quest hearts, but I’ll add a little more. You’ll find the hearts disappear when you leave the area. Just popping back into the area will make the heart reappear on the right, establishing how full your bar is. Hearts also disappear when finished, but you’ll get a mail filled with your coin rewards for completion. Opening the map will give you the status of how many hearts you’ve done, PoIs and vistas you’ve found. Mousing over hearts is a useful way to determine the level of an area, too.

This thread is really helpful, too: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/OMG-If-you-only-knew-this-tips-for-new-players

Good luck!

shazbham.6312:

I played the original Guild Wars when it first came out years ago and never really liked it much, but then again about that time I was experiencing severe MMO burn out having played just about everything from The Realm – UO – WOW and then some.

I did recently try going back into Guild Wars and and play my account , but so far I still can’t because I’m waiting for Ncsoft to get my account back in order so I can play it?

Anyways I decided to buy this game and today I played it for the first time on the new PC I just built(AMD FX-6100, XFX Double D 2GB HD7850, 8GB Gskill Ram etc etc), and I love the way the game looks and feels to a point, but so far I find the controls very hard to get used to (and I’m using a G13 game pad), and trying to figure out what to do, when and where and I keep having this stupid window pop up telling me something about I can travel now or get back in the queue (and I didn’t even do anything to want to travel anywhere).

I’m also finding the targeting system hard to get used to (Playing an elementalist right now), the merchant is hard to figure out as well as some other things. The worst part for me so far is the way the quests are given. I find it hard to see what to do, where to do it and when they are done, then I can’t figure out what I get for a reward and how do I get that reward?

So if someone could give me a brief run down of how to play the game in a few easy words that would be great. I have been out of MMO’s for quite awhile, but I didn’t have this much trouble playing Rift(leveled 4 toons up to 60 then got bored) or Diablo III even though I know D III is not really an MMO.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m NOT putting guild Wars 2 down at all, I’m just looking for help trying to play the game while having fun doing so is all.

Thanks

Hey, I didn’t want to bother reading all this since I’m at work, and I’m guessing this has already been said, but just in the small case it hasn’t, the #1 tip I can give you is to join a guild with great people.

Now everyone has their own personal preference, but I would personally recommend a small tight nit guild, as they are usually all friends and will be very helpful towards a newcomer.

If by chance you are on The Tarnished Coast server, Look up my main character Quicklen. I’d be glad to help.

It shouldn’t be difficult if you’ve played WASD MMORPGs or FPS games before. The targetting system is identical to GW, I don’t get why you’re having problems with that.

Anet should consider to write a proper manual for this game. The online tutorial does not cover even the basics… and trying to figure out whats going on by continuously asking the community of experiment by your own it is not right. it’s like you get a new car with a lot of new features but they only teach you how to turn it on !!

Yeah some of the controls take a while to get use to. The WASD controls or Arrow keys are fairly straight forward to pick up on. I find its easier to turn my character with the mouse then arrow keys. Just hold down I believe its the right mouse button and turn your character. It changes directions and the camera angle at the same time. It is annoying getting the hang of doing this while trying to kite a mob and toss grenades at them though.

As for targeting. I have to agree, alot of the targeting is difficult. I am probably missing a button or command as well, but when trying to find a mob in a DE that has 20-30 people attacking is sometimes impossible.

As for the Renown hearts (Quests). When you are near one on the map, you will see the quest dialog pop up in the top right corner of your screen. Will usually say something like Feed Chickens, Kill Spiders, Collect eggs ect. The more of those tasks you complete in the general area (If you go to far away from the NPC giving the “quest”, the quest will disappear from your log and you won’t get points until you are back in the area. Once you complete enough of the tasks (The bar will fill to completion), the NPC will e-mail you a reward which I believe is always a small cash payment. Also after the quest is completed, the NPC giving the quest will turn into a merchant where you can purchase different items with Karma (Currency for doing good deeds)

But take your time and have fun. I have noticed for the most part this game seems to have the friendliest people playing. Many people will drop what they are doing to run and revive you. When you revive someone you will usually get a Thank-you. And for the most part the chat window isn’t full is flames, although a few times I have seen (Not sure if trolls or general idiots) flaming the area with dumb thoughts like WoW was the first MMO, and that everything here is a poor copy of the original. I just laugh to myself, as I don’t know if they are baiting people, or are really that dumb .

GW2 deviates from a lot of the standard MMO motifs, and it can cause quite a bit of confusion until you finally start to recognize those differences.

Leveling —
Most games, it’s about questing/grinding as fast as you can. Leveling in GW2 is much more dynamic and varied. You also get XP from exploring (finding vistas, points of interests, etc.), completing zones, gathering, crafting, participating in dynamic events, etc. Unlike most games, the XP you get from these activities is not negligible. However, it’s hard to break away from that “Quest/Grind” mentality that’s been so deeply inculcated the last 10+ years.

Gathering —
Everyone can gather everything. There’s no gathering professions. Just buy the sickle/axe/pick from a merchant, equip it, and boom -- you can gather.

Quests —
You don’t “accept” quests or have a quest log in GW2. Rather, if there’s a quest in your area, it’ll automatically pop up on your screen and track your progress. If you move out of that quests’ area, it disappears from your UI -- but if you come back, your progress picks right back up where you were. Also, there’s no need to “turn in” your quest — once you complete the requirements, boom, you’re done. No need to revisit the NPC to turn it in. NOTE: Some quests do have drops you can turn-in which contribute to the quest’s progress, and many/all quest NPCs will turn into special vendors once you complete the quest, with items that you can purchase for Karma points.

Storyline —
This is an on-going “quest” that your character starts at level 1. Your progress in this quest is always displayed on your UI and map, accompanied by a green icon (looks like a sunburst or swirly).

Dynamic events —
These are indicated on your map by orange icons, usually inside of a giant orange circle to indicate the relevant location on the map. Once you’re within range, the “event” will pop up on your UI below your storyline and any active quest. Events in and of themselves are good XP -- but what makes them even better is that they typically overlap a quest area, so while participating in an event, you’ll often complete a quest too without even trying.

Crafting —
You have to visit the relevant crafting station in order to craft (i.e. for Tailoring, you much visit a Tailoring station). Crafting stations also grant you access to your bank via a tab. You’ll be granted a number of recipes to start off with, and will be given more as you level. However, a significant part of getting new recipes is via the “Discovery” tab. Here, you select different crafting items and see if they make a new item. There’s no “failing” to discover -- if the items you pick don’t make anything, it won’t let you craft.

Discovery (crafting) —
Discoveries can be confusing -- I was just throwing random items in there and getting frustrated that none of them could produce anything. It felt so random to me. Then I realized that it’s very simple. Say you’re a Tailor and you have the ability to craft Jute Headpiece Strap and Jute Headpiece Padding. Craft one of each, and toss them into the Discovery boxes. Now in the third box, add an Insignia or Rune. You’ll craft an all new headpiece with special attributes based on the Insignia or Rune you added. You’ll get the new item, and the recipe will be added to your list. Voila!

Attributes (Vitality/Toughness) & the ‘Glass Cannon’ Approach & min/max’ing —
In most MMOs, we’re accustomed to min/max’ing our stats. Typically, DPS classes go for all damage stats; tank classes go for all durability stats. Don’t do that in GW2. You need a balance. DPS classes in GW2 will take damage -- you must be able to absorb some damage. So don’t neglect those +Vitality (HP) or +Toughness (armor) stats.

Incoming Damage & Movement —
GW2 isn’t a “stand there and press 1-2-3” MMO. You’ll need to move around to avoid incoming damage. You’ll need to take advantage of the “Dodge” mechanic (press V or double tap a direction) to avoid incoming damage. Watch for visual queues that a mob is about to unleash a significant attack. In GW2, you don’t just stand there and soak up/heal through damage -- rather, you try to avoid it.

your problems can be solved by:

reading the “annoying boxes that pop up on your screen” and the tooltips

if my 8 year old niece figured it out without even reading, it’s not a hard game to pick up and get going in

the tutorial even tells you in detail how to do everything and in your launcher there is a video that is for new players