Guild Wars 2

Greetings and salutations, everyone.

I’m afraid I might be repeating a trend in these boards, or might be posting in the wrong place, but alas. The search button has been of no help whatsoever.

Well, straight to the point: I have been away from the game for far, far too long. I do believe the last Living World event I really took part in was the Super Adventure Box, back in April, 2013. It seems so long when I put it that way… But now I would love to get back in the game

Well, what I intend to know is: How much of the game changed? How far behind am I? I used to run an Engineer and a Necromancer, and both were very well equipped for the time, but I wonder how weak I am currently, with all the progress the game has undoubtedly faced.

I would mostly like to know what is the top gear for characters at the moment, how much lore do I have to go after and catch up to, how many balance changes took place (roughly, of course), this kind of thing. I remember people used to complain a lot in the specific class boards in this forum about balance “issues” and so forth. How are things now with the game and the community?

If anyone would be so kind as to tell me these things, I would be very, very happy. if I remember anything from this game it is how much I actually liked the community.

In advance I would like to apologize if my questions were any sort of trouble.

The setup of the game is you are not behind if you leave for a while. Your necro and Engi should be fine, if you run condi builds you might want to check out sinister recipes.
Also read https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates

- Still both well equipped. Unless you want to go for ascended gear which is marginally (and I do mean marginally) better.

- Top gear is ascended. But it’s not required for anything beyond high level fractals (and even then you can get away with mainly exotics as long as you have large enough infusions).

- Lore wise the new Living Story season is currently in full swing. You can buy episodes you’ve missed for 200 gems (either buying the gems with real money or in game gold) or just play through the episodes with a friend who has them unlocked.

- A few balance changes took place. Rangers got a nice buff, Ele’s and Warriors took a little hit to certain builds. Otherwise everything’s pretty happy.

- Community is still fine. For me anyway.

Hope this helps.

Thank you both very much! It sure makes me feel happy that I don’t have to grind for gear after being away for so long.

Nice to see Rangers got some love, I might resume leveling mine.
My engineer had a conditions build, so I’ll be reading about that.

I’d be fine just reading about the story so far, and the link provided with updates will sure be helpful concerning game content. I noticed in the main website there’s a page for each Living World content with videos, so that might help with catching up to the story.

Did we have many changes in Traits? I used to theorycraft a lot with my builds, if a lot changed I’d have to rework on all of them again.

Thank you a bunch for all the help provided thus far.

There was a large change to how traits are acquired in the april feature patch. Also 5 new grandmaster traits (1 per trait line) were introduced for each class. Some of them are quite cool others are a bit meh depending on taste.

You’ll also find a few small changes here and there – for example, the dagger auto chain now cleaves on necro. For the most part, the traits themselves haven’t been changed much – just little changes (only one that comes to mind is the new mesmer trait in illusions doing more with torment), but I can’t think of any that were on engi or necro off the top of my head.