Guild Wars 2

I know what’s coming, “don’t boost your first character and level it up so you can learn the game etc…” but I couldn’t help it, scrapper was the only profession that really got me hooked and playing something else just felt meaningless so… I went ahead and boosted an engineer. Right now I’m just doing a generic grenade engi build and I kinda have the hang of switching between 4 kits and my base weapon (holy sh** my fingers) but I’m having trouble getting the hero points I need to get to the scrapper.

I tried grinding in WvW but it seemed a bit slow, I tried doing the hp missions in the HoT map but they all seem to require certain skills (like the jumping mushroom thing) and to get them I had to clear the HoT story but I do like no dmg to the mobs and can only handle 1-2 at a time just in the open world, I barely managed to get glider basics.

Is the combat supposed to be this difficult when soloing or do I just suck at rotations? Is my free gear from the boost not good enough? (it is soldier tanky stuff) Tried to go to that city beside the guild hall since it had some hp missions but it’s walled off atm so… I’m stuck at this point and there’s no way I’m getting 220 (barely got 30) hero points from the main map 1 at a time.

Can anyone give me some tips on what I’m doing wrong or what the best course of action would be?
Thanks for reading!

Find a guild that is friendly to newer players.

Log in every day for the laurels, do your dailies for the 2 gold.

Combat here is more about managing active defenses to actively avoid damage than using armor to sink it. Dodges, blocks, blinds, invulns used appropriately are your friend.
More offensive stats will help you kill things more quickly; play around with build, gear options to figure out if a power based build or a condition based build will suit your playstyle better.

To gain mastery xp more quickly always run food/utility buffs, and boosters if available.

Find something that you enjoy doing, because that is likely what you will be doing after you’ve unlocked your scrapper.

Welcome to Guild Wars 2, and have fun.

No, but you have jumped straight into one of the hardest areas of the game without understanding the character you have. Engineers in any form have a larger learning curve than some of the other professions, so I’d advise taking your level 80 character to some of the core maps and just mess around until you get used to a build that suits you.

Currently you are aiming for a Scrapper without really knowing about your current traits and skills. Doing core map will alleviate that and you will find it will suddenly just click (as it did with me). You will also earn hero points to unlock Scrapper w/o needing to go to HoT.

Soldiers stats are fine for now – they are good for keeping you alive whilst you learn, but eventually you will ditch it (I’m using a combo of Berserker and Wanderer and he obliterates mobs in HoT now).

tldr: Mess around in core maps to learn class then unlock Scrapper and a chunk of skills/traits from core hero points.

May I suggest slowing down? Get back into Central Tyria, explore the many areas and acquire hero points littered around the place. That will get your foot into the door and starting your path as a Scrapper. There are 189 hero points scattered in the core area across its many zones. Not only that, but you’ll come across many places you might want to revisit should you start working on world bosses for good loot.

I’ve walked the same walk and I can tell you honestly that starting knee-deep is not the way to go. So go back to the starting zones (Metrica / Caledon Forest / Queensdale / Wayfarer Foothills / Plains of Ashford) and just explore to your full content, helping out with events whenever you can for coin and karma.

Basically: anywhere that’s not west of Silverwastes should be your primary focus for getting your hero points for now. Getting a foothold as an Engineer is a little rough, but if you run Explosives as one of your specs you have a good starting base for your grenade kit.

There’s a reason players suggest you park a boosted L80 and level up a character naturally. You just bumped into it.

Take your time learning the game/Profession/build; it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

Welcome to Tyria, and good luck.

Also, a boosted Lv.80 often comes equipped with gear that is often undesirable (my Guardian was full-decked Soldier’s gear, which isn’t feasable), so you might want to put that in park, what Inculpatus cedo said, while you build up a fresh character.

Directly boosting to Lv.80 bypasses the levelup perks you would’ve gotten just by leveling alone.

The mindset for this game’s combat is significantly different from the EQ-standard of skill rotations. The active combat system (while still on the stream lined side) demands the player understand “conditional modifiers”, as this forms the basis of how the game’s Trait system and power scaling is accomplished. If you look at the traits, the strongest ones will play directly on game mechanic…. and its the ability to string these together that make this game a little difficult for new players from the WoW scene to understand.

The key difference between this game and WoW, is how WoW puts emphasis on Sustained everything; where as active combat games (GW, Terra, etc) put more emphasis on timing. Almost everything in GW2 revolves around near split second timing, as many skills have very short windows of opportunity, with limited uses per cycle.

Core Tyria is actually a massive newbie zone, now that even the Core class specs are almost as powerful as the Elite specs. Silverwaste is actually the Litmus test for HOT maps…. since its a cake walk for any player who understands a hand full of basic mechanics; but is utterly devastating to players who don’t know how to deal with CCs used against them.

That more then anything else is why Boosting is a bad idea for new players. Without knowledge of how a class’s defensive abilities operate, even the relatively less threatening soft CCs can crush them in short order. In fact… when Silverwaste and Drytop were first introduced, that was the exact problem people had with surviving the feral Mordrem. Those were the first mobs to heavily utilize CCs- and in-line defense traits/utilities were hard to fit in a build without giving up significant damage potential. They were tough enough to survive the typical alpha bursting many players were spec’d for, and could dish out enough damage to overwhelm a sustained defense…. that left the only option as damage avoidance. And even to this day, dodge roll and mobility skill are the only reliable avoidance strategies in Silverwaste. Oddly enough, the Mordrem guard are actually easier to deal with, since each one has a type of CC that can effectively shut them down. Compare that to the Feral Mordrem, which are only slowed down by CCs, and can recover from them quickly