Guild Wars 2

I’m a bit of a completionist/achievement kitten, and I have to say, Living story made me lose interest in the game. What I loved at the start of the game is that I could just pick whatever I could do and do it at my own pace. With living story, I can’t do that anymore. Because it’s only temporary, it feels forced, like I have to do it or I’ll miss it all.
I missed everything except the end of the karka event, I missed the conclusion of the molten alliance, and I missed pretty much everything after that.
Actually, I actively avoided it. I dislike not being able to just do everything at my own pace, and now I don’t really have much to do anymore. So yeah, I’d say living story got me off the game. If it had been permanent content, I wouldn’t have had any problem with it.

So…

1. Is the Living story causing more harm than good, within the guild wars 2 community?
I don’t know about the community, but I personally got turned off of gw by it.
2. If you were/are joining the game now, does it put you off that you can never gain 100%?
As a completionist, yes, I dislike not being able to catch up on achievements I missed.
3. Do you feel that Living story should be permanently re-playable for the achievements?
Yes. Absolutely. Oh god yes. I would instantly come back to the game if that happened.
4. Do you give Living story a Thumbs up or a Thumbs down, and why?
As it is, Thumbs down. Make it re-playable and it’d be a definite Thumbs up.

A single staff elementalist can destroy a burrow with meteor shower+lava font+ some fire autoattacking in roughly 10 seconds. I wasn’t even specced into damage (only 5 trait points in fire) for that.
The place requires a lot of coordination, but with 2 eles nuking the burrows we managed.

I honestly don’t see the problem with Transmutation. You can hand-pick which things you want from both armours, how is this not great?

To be honest I’m a bit surprised it wasn’t done this way to start. Gw1 already said on each customised item who it was customised for, and adding a name can make placing soulbound items on the bank a lot easier.
For instance I have a bunch of blueprints from WvW, but I don’t want them on my character while I’m in PvE since it takes up space, so I put them on the bank. If I do this for several characters though, it gets very confusing which blueprints are soulbound to which character.

If fun isn’t why you play, why do you play at all then?

Seriously though, rewards are the normal money/exp/karma and WvW score bonuses. Then there’s the badge armour which I believe has a unique skin, and GW2 continues the trend that rare or hard to get stuff you work for a lot doesn’t make you more powerful but gives you special looks.

The carrot on the stick is not in guild wars 2 because it doesn’t have to be. Unlike WoW or similar carrot-on-stick MMO’s, gw2 doesn’t have a subscription fee so they don’t need to make people grind for months to attain some goal in order to make money. They make money from people that have fun in the game and think it’s worth putting money into for small bonuses.

And even in WvW, there’s so much to do. You can go out solo and cap sentries (or gank other loners, but that hardly serves any purpose), go in with a party or a small group of randoms and go for camps, go into a random zerg and cap kitten, or actually organise things with a guild etc.

Hmmm, that sounds more like nightmare court stuff :P

I’ve been experiencing very different things. Then again, I do fully spec into earth. In sPvP I can usually hold my own against several opponents while whittling down glass cannons that can’t get me down.

Yeah, for some reason Tornado/whirlpool doesn’t work underwater in PvE, only in sPvP.
This means that eles don’t get any elite underwater, and sylvari (and human too or so I’m told) just don’t have ANY underwater elite.

for my staff build I go 20 into arcane, to get the staff AoE increase. The first major trait goes to the “boon on attunement” one, which is immensely helpful.
For the rest it depends on what I’m doing. sPvP I got specced 30 into earth and the remaining 20 in fire and water iirc, not too sure about those last ones.

Lokai.7850:

2: Craft items everyone needs and are a couple that are super easy to make money off of. Tailoring and Jewelcrafting are easy, bags and gems that people slot even normal jute bags sell for around 50 copper on my server, and sell fairly consistently for 10 jute(20 scraps) thats not a bad deal.

You do realise that 2 scraps of jute sell for as much as that bag you made? And even higher level bags (and by higher level I just mean 10 slot, can’t make better ones myself just yet) seem to lose money, since people try to buy for lower than the cost of the rune of holding itself, and if you manage to sell a bag above it you still lose money from the wool…

As an ele I mostly play as a support with staff. Very helpful for both large PvE events and WvW.

Utility skills: personally I love cantrips, they’re very useful for survivability, and arcane wave I love for being a blast finisher for my own combo fields.
You get quite a lot of skill points though, by lvl 47 I got all the skills I want and I’ve just been spending all my skill points to unlock all the rest. Don’t be afraid to experiment.

As for traits: don’t be afraid to experiment either. Every time you get a new trait tier/book your traits are reset and you can re-assign. Also, trainers provide trait respeccing for hardly any cash. I think a friend of mine said it was 2 silver when he was lvl 70.
Arcane is a very useful trait tree imo, giving and extending boons, Water and Earth are very useful for survivability too, and I especially like the first minor trait in water which gives passive healing when in water attunement to you and all nearby allies. With one of the arcane minor traits it also lasts some time after you switch out of water again.