Guild Wars 2

Thank you so much Paige, I’ll be having a look to the links. You just made my day

@Inculpatus: Thank you for the replay. I’ll be checking old Guild Wars 2 videos and trying to reach those news blogs.

@Paige: If I find anything worth sharing, I’ll be letting you know. Wish you the best of lucks if you also decide to investigate and try it out.

For a long time I’ve been wanting to learn and create digital art similar to that of Guild Wars 2 paintings. Yet, I’m not sure where to start, what tools to have, which brushes, and so on.

I’ll be thrilled and amazed if I learn and eventually create drawings similar as those placed in the attachments

Can anyone help me out on pointing out where to start, if there is any online tutorial/course I can join to learn, activities, places where I can download resources, to whom I can approach and general ideas/tips? Have been searching for a couple of days now, sadly I haven’t found anything close to what I’m trying to achieve.

I’ll be more than grateful with the support given and thank you in advance for the replies.

Disclaimer: Wasn’t sure were this topic could fell under nor found posts related to this subject. Sorry for the inconvenience this could’ve brought

DeamonSamurai.6504:

Now if they ever get Blade & Soul to NA, I’d drop GW2 instantly.

I’m in the same boat. Even if it is a P2P game and only play it Sundays. Had the luck to play it for a month or so in a private server, absolutely love it. <3

You can’t, as far as I’m aware.

You need 2 NPC that only appear during wintersday. One will sell you special items and the other you have to slowly defeat him, it takes 3 days to do so. Since neither is available, the first part of the quest is not doable.

Guess that the second part, doing the fetch, can be done outside of wintersday. But not sure if you have to be inside that period to actually get the reward.

To keep it short, if you never did the first part, than its a no, it’s not possible. If you finish the part of defeating the guy that stole the presents, it might be a maybe you can finish it.

Hope I’m not too late, but in my personal opinion regarding character progression is rather personal goals.

Think of something you wish to acquire, and work on it.

Want map completion, do it part of your character progression. It works if you place yourself personal timers, lets say, if a “big” map it took you an hour to complete, now to complete a “big” map in less than the hour.

While I did the ascended armor, I gave myself the goal to do it in a month crafting. It did help a lot to get a high goal, knowing there is a “turn in date”, and constantly trying to improve my way to get the materials/farming them.

Think it works, but can’t prove it, to work on more than a thing at a time but that they give synergy between themselves. Currently testing it doing PvP. I want to achieve dragon rank. But it sounds like a big goal, so I ended up dividing it in small task. Currently is-> get full Arah armour via PvP for my ele that I’m leveling. It sounds more plausible and it directly impacts my main goal. This last idea I place is a beast of itself and it would required an entire entry by itself. So I’m placing the basic concept.

Hope this helps you out. Your end game and character progression is dictated by you and your times. Enjoy the game and have fun.

My personal opinion:

Q: I am from EU, which server is recommended to start on?
A: It makes no difference which server you are with the implementation of Mega-Servers. Now we are all “technically in one server”. If you are planning on doing a lot of WvW, it does matter. Here is a useful link to see server ranks in WvW.

https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/eu/wvwmain

Q:Which class is easiest to play as new player?
A:Depends on your play style. I’ll recommend doing the next thing. Grab a series a characters and level them to either 20→30. That will give you the most basic concept of each profession. You can also go into PvP, which unlocks all traits and skills. Have some matches and watch videos on how to use the profession.

My personal favourite profession is thief (a monster in pve and awesome for pvp), follow up my mesmer (used her a lot in pvp).

But saying which profession is easy for new players, would depend more in your skills, I guess xD. Guess that hard professions can be elementalists and engineers, since they have a different dynamic regarding how their skills work. But they aren’t so complex that you should stay away from them. They just have a bigger learning curve. All professions have around the same learning curve.

Q: Also i bought Heroic Edition and it says i get Suit of Legacy Armour, now is that for one character or account wide?
A: It is account wide.

I tend to only play on weekends and mostly only on Sunday. Gotta say, the fight wasn’t frustrating as you make it sound. It was challenging but not frustrating. But I can see the issue of having a long fight if you weren’t able to understand game mechanics.

About the buffs/fire you needed: It appears in white AoEs, which is pretty much the basic colour for any friendly AoE which you can interact and make combos fields from. Don’t want game developers to dumb down a basic concept that you had to be acquainted this far into the game. The NPCs would should it out when they were about to throw it. Where you had to go, once again, was in a white/transparent bubble. Again, basic mechanic you should be really familiar to this point. On top of it, the gear signs where placed on each area that still wasn’t clear out. The boss itself, would show AoE mark after AoE mark, so it wasn’t a matter of skill but just anticipate and move around.

It did take me a while to see the small black enemies that kept putting out the fires. They can be lost with all the AoEs popping up and the flour bombs. But still, was easy to see them after a while and understand with simple logic that you had to have the buff to kill them. Since you’ve been using that mechanic to harm the champion so far.

I won’t say: you are a noob. I would instead say: don’t make an angry rant when most can be sum up to not understanding basic combat mechanics.

About the lore, from what you said, I can easily assume you skip through most of it.
To bring done Zhaitan so “easily” we had to:
a) Weeken his forces
b) Destroy his food supply
c) Destroy his “scouts” of the world (Eyes of Zhaitan)
d) Steal / destroy all strong magical items that could increase his power
e) Cripple him as much as possible
f) Learned about him
g) Get some minor-races involve

For the new dragon, we pretty much bypassed it all. We didn’t cut food supply, his minions supply, any items that buffed him wasn’t touched (we just kinda talked about the WP, but it ended in: we got to experiment more), and so on. Since he was just awakening, we went head on before he fully awoke. Big mistake in the end.

It is a hard fight, but not frustrating. Lore wise, read more or re-do it. About checking wiki or other site, I do get it shouldn’t be done, but it is way to much information to keep it in-game only. I rather break a little of immersion than having to heard 20mins worth of dialogue of NPCs treating me like a little kid.

I doubt we will ever see race change. Here is the reason whys (at least, from what I see)

1. The first quarter or so of the story is based on what race you chose. On later chapters, some NPCs are race lock. So in order to have race change: are you willing to have your PS restarted? Will you want it to simply be deleted and act as if nothing happened? They will also have to make you re-do the story customization from the character creator.

2. Cultural armor: They will have to do all logical steps to change one armor race lock to another. But do they have to lock the previous skins and unlock the new ones in automatic? Since in theory your Norn would never buy Asuran armor. Things might get complicated if you have the skin on top account bound armors. Do they change it to the basic skin? Change to the new race armor looks but risk that it might affect any other character you have that might use the same armor?

Pretty sure there are more things I’m missing or over seeing, but those come to me right now.

About the rest of the rant:

GW2 != GW1. Would recommend you to look it as 2 different games, since that is what they are. It’s like ranting why Witcher or Dragon Age don’t act the same as the very first on the series.

About having new skills, it was a nightmare to balance. Remember how every other week a new update had to be implemented to keep balancing. Every week or so I had to check if I had to change all my builds.

Guild Halls, even though it was something I also wanted, don’t remember them being a big core part of the game. It was a nice hub to organize events, meet guildies and had conveniently all needed merchants in arms reach. Aside of that, it was more of a commodity rather than a absolute need feature. Of course, I wasn’t in a guild that did GvG that much, so not sure how much I could’ve missed.

About the xpack price, well, they will set the price according to what they think is worth it. Also, why is too late? What is too late about the xpac?

About gem store: they have to earn money some way. So I wouldn’t really complaint about being greedy. You can get all gem store items without spending a single cent, so I’m not sure why it is a greedy gem store. I’ve played games where there version of cash shop was literally that. No way to get those items, besides spending some money, and they were needed to craft high level weapons and armors. Luckily, our cash(gem) store is cosmetic only.

Before I begin, stay away from Edge of the Mist (EoTM for short). Yes, it will level you up fast, but at the cost of being under-geared, getting used to play as part of a Zerg and not truly understanding your profession. Above all, you are missing a lot of fun things that shine when you are doing things for the first time around at low level.

About debating between thief or mesmer…. stay with the warrior. You already started working on him/her. They are all fun to level and toy around (so far, in my personal opinion, eng was the most fun of the bunch). But if you want to go with a new profession, just toy around for 10-20 levels, and see which one felt better and stay with it.

About end game for characters, they all have a place and role, so there is no real “bad” choice or left out class (unless you want to go all pro-player, speed clear freak and such. If that is the case, some profession aren’t even picked and others are held in a pedestal. But that is another story). All can fill any role, just with its own style and mechanics. If you are planning of casual planning, with any profession you pick you are more than OK for late game.

Being honest, if you want to take full advantage of the game (PvE wise) do as much events as you can, explore as much if not all of every map (you get a nice achievement if you do full map completion). Check every vista (don’t skipped them), try to find out as much of the lore (in-game and out-of-game), place attention to details. Enjoy the story, I really dig the story once the pact is getting formed.

Don’t forget to craft, I know players that don’t like it, but it will keep you really well equipped, you can make some money out of it, and if you ever plan on getting ascended gear, better start from the very beginning than trying to level up crafting in 1 go. Plus, if you farm at least 40-30% of the requirements for every recipe, you will be saving BIG time than buying it directly from trading post. I recently did a berzerker armor for my necro lvl 80, ended up costing me 18gold to craft, checked how much it cost to buy all equipment and it was around 35gold. Pretty much saved half the money (could’ve spent 0 cash if I had fully farmed every material).

Hope you have fun in the game as much as I do

FYI: If you do dungeons, enter the ones groups that don’t have any requirements and be upfront of being new to it. Helps other players explain to you and do it at a much easier to digest pace. But please hear what they are telling you, have nightmares of players that don’t follow the explanation I’ve giving them

is this for real?

Being honest, we need a new campaign and not an expansion.

For those are are saying that Factions and Nightfalls are expansions, they are not, stop calling them expansions, stop calling yourself a GW1 player if you call them expansion, they are campaigns. Please, stop it, it hurts my heart when they are called expansion. Just stop it:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Campaign

Under ANet, they only delivered 2 expansion: EoTN and Bonus missions, being honest, as an old player that had fun of playing it all, EoTN does feel like LW. I would even say that LW took me more time to complete (from season 1 and 2) than all EoTN. The only difference is that EoTN had a beginning and end when it was delivered. It took me a couple of hours to finish the full story in EoTN. First time around it took me no more than a weekend.

Now, regarding campaigns, they might or might not solve it. It all depends on how they deliver. Pretty sure that a couple of months later, if they ever release a new campaign, we will be having this topics all over again. How they didn’t add A or B, how they added C and D which “me and my RLF friends” hated or is out of place, how I was expecting a unicorn to appear halfway through the story but got a kitten iguana, etc. I won’t deny it would be a refresh start to the series. Seeing more places that I once love and liked. Being amazed on what 250 years did to the other continents. You know: How bad did Elona get since Palo; what has happen to our lovely luxon turtle tanks; Did Koss have children? and so on.

Being honest, anything they give us is a short term solution (expansion, campaign, the unicorn). I personally feel LW is a good solution for the long term, since it gives us constant updates. I GET IT, they might be short (and boy were the last 2 short), but at least I know that in 2 weeks I will have something new to do (except for their breaks).

Would I want a BTP campaign instead of LW? Yes. Do you want a year to 3 of silence and only bug patches in exchange of LW? No. Want 100thousand dollars? Yes, but it has nothing to do with the subject. Would I prefer a LW that eventually gave a campaign or expansion worth of material? Yes, like the idea of it being interactive.

Angry commenter: “OMG, but I want it now, it’s not real content since it isn’t long. It’s not complete ‘cause it doesn’t have an ending. OMG the cliffhangers sucks”. Bet you must hate any TV. series, books series, game series or movie sagas. They let you with constant cliffhangers. Tend to not respect source material. Have huge plot holes between parts. Multiple plot twist to the point that I think that it becomes laughable (especially in animes/mangas). They make you wait more than what LW makes you wait to know what happens next. Yep, sounds like a nightmare if you are having such an issue with following the LW.

So yeah, I understand LW it doesn’t feel like an expansion/campaign since we are getting small parts.
As a side note, read someone said: We’ve only seen 1 dragon barely going for the second in 2 years. Do me a favor and understand lore and context.
a) Dragons are meant to be the biggest thread we can face (from our point of view).
b) They are just awakening.
c) They must feel like a huge threat, something that should take more than a year to overcome.
d) Zhaitan’s boss battle sucked, but at least seeing in a bigger context, it does make sense that we needed the ultimate airship with top kitten nal to bring him down rather than having 5 random people poking their way to victory. They should’ve made it more interactive though.
e) Each dragon should be a campaign worth of material, not a LW season worth of material (unless that season took around 2~3 years to complete, with at least a year hindering/weakening the dragon, which seems to be the case… so far).

TL:DR → I love chipotle and keep being sexy.

They should add a pool of mini-leaders, instead of only Queen Jennah, which drops varies with your race. Lets say, your character is a human, you are most likely to get Queen Jennah, norn you are most likely to get Whitebeard and so on. Have those minis also available with myst crafting.

Have them rotate, if you were most likely to get in the first year Queen Jennah, have the next year most likely any other leader except Queen Jennah. Either that or have at random (or pick from a random pool?) a mini rarity rare+ from all sets excluding the special or festival only minis.

Skill point scroll, should stay as there are (or get more scrolls the older the character is? 1 year = 0 scrolls, 2 years = 1 scrolls and so on having a cap of 5).

Have a change in Experience Scroll, instead of making the character instantly lvl 20, have it to 30 (since it’s now until 30 when you get your first trait, feel it would be better). Or have the same mechanic I place before with skill point scrolls but with tomes of knowledge, something like: ((your years – 1) * 2) + (your year + 3).
1 year = 4 tomes, 2 years = 7 tomes, and so on. Having it cap at either 20 or 30 tomes you can get per character.

Birthday boosters are always welcome, so no issue there.

Having new titles as the older the character gets? Don’t mind, I’m ok with just having the veteran one. Don’t want to announce everywhere how old my character is xD.

Besides that, I’m happy we are getting things as a general. Loved the gun they give at the second birthday, it is fun using it and taking it out during dungeons :P

Lishtenbird.2814:

What came first, the chickenado or the eggynado?

You have me now doubting my own life.

They are planning to do raids, in fact, they did an entire thread about this:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Guilds-Raiding/first

Stiofan.6720:

Really hope they add these races to gw2
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Margonite
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Demon
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Skeleton
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Hopping_Vampire

I would like to be a Margonite. Seeing how, once Kormir became a God, many Margonite went under her wing. Being the personal story revolving on them doing there best or being what is putting at a certain hold Palawa Joko.

Plus it would be cool to see more land from the Realm of Torment and think of the wing like back we could have :P

I’ll stay with the second or last one. The last one had a better look to it.

TL:DR
-Pretty sure Cantha is not disappearing
-Give them time to fix cultural issues
-You are creating too much hype around it. It is destined to fail.
-First let ANet fixed current issues before demanding an entire new world.
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Actual thought:
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Being honest, before seeing Cantha/Factions back, I’ll like to see a more balance game.

Don’t get me wrong, I also loved the living chipotle out of Factions and want to see its version in GW2 (either as a small pick or a full expansion). From the 5 characters I used the most in GW1 (necro-monk-assassin-rit-derv) 3 where from Factions (monk-assassin-rit). Think that all my characters went through all the story of factions. I pretty much spent all my time in PvP helping the faction Luxon.

From what I was checking and with the interview with Josh Foreman, I don’t think Cantha is out of the game. They have to work around the problem with what is sensible for Asian’s culture. But that doesn’t equal that we aren’t seeing Cantha at all or that it’s going to be a water down version of it. We just got to see how they work around that issue. I mean, it took around 8 years or so to deliver GW2. We just got to be patient (and keep poking ANet for it :P)

Returning to my original statement, I would still prefer seeing dedicated content for end game (I got really excited with the Raid thread and the hiring of new staff to make it possible). Prefer the idea of finally balancing the defense vs attack events rewards. So we stop seeing people ignoring the defense/protect the building. Honestly, I like how the current living world is adding small bits of the map (if it was or wasn’t properly delivered is another story for another thread). I like to be part of a growing lore, instead of reading or hearing how ‘X’ NPC had to fight against ‘Y’ dark force, and we are just picking up the remnants of those battles or what was left incomplete.

Just as a side note, you are building way too much hype around Factions. By the time (whenever it might be) it comes out, I can safely bet that there will be thread after thread of how ANet didn’t delivered. People arguing how Factions v2 didn’t capture the essence of Factions v1. How Factions v2 isn’t a direct sequel to Factions v1. Pretty much, nip picking every corner of it, letdown because it wasn’t the HD version of Factions with new characters (instead of a new vision of it) and how it hacked the lore of it. IT IS DESTINED TO FAIL and the longer the thread gets, the more it will fail and feel like a disappointment.

I’m wishfully thinking that the living world is heading towards an entire expansion. Working for the next causes: 1) expanding the entire map of Tyria and 2) is a prelude to connect Tyria with either Cantha or Elona or both. Saying: “Hey, maybe in the next 2-3 chapters they might add a Tengu or another race as a helping NPC”. That NPC being the new playable race of the feature expansion back, maybe even being the new profession that we can pick up.

Being honest, just give them time. Let ANet overthink all the cultural and politically correctness that must be worked on. Let them also first finish completing our current GW2 before demanding an entire new continent. It has been only 2 years since its release, and pretty sure that all the people in these post don’t have every single thing from what is available in the game.

Feel free to correct me, tell me I’m wrong (or right ;D) or that they should at least say if they have plans in making Cantha and Elona.