Showing Posts For Imperator.3475:
Since this seems to be the thread for discussing these achievements, I will post here. I have been wanting to post about this for awhile now.
I just want to say how utterly obnoxious these time limited achievements are. First that they are time limited, but secondly, that a separate queue was not made so that those that wanted these achievements/to play these maps could not focus solely on these maps. You can’t play them in Ranked or Custom Arenas either. I loathe PVP as it is, and only play because the pvp dailies are easy enough for the daily while giving good PvE rewards. These maps are a breath of fresh air, I prefer them to all previous maps, but the time limited achievements really diminshes my enthusiasm for them.
I really, really, really hope that you do not keep introducing time-limited achievements for each subsequent map you release.
So you can better help me understand and compare, I built my rig back in 2012 I think, and had:
Intel i7 950 @ 3.07 GHz/3.06 GHz
6 GB Corsair XMS3 1600 MHz RAM (Triple Channel)
2 TB Seagate Barracuda Hard Drive
Nvidia GTX 460, then (and currently) GTX 760
My 2 TB hard drive finally crashed recently, so I got a couple new parts for my rig:
2×8gb Corsair Vengeance RAM
500GB EVO SSD Hard Drive
WOW is the different the SSD makes. I am now a believer. For anyone considering whether to get an SSD for your C:/ drive, do it. I don’t think I even needed to upgrade the RAM, although I did anyways. I understand now why people say 8 GBs of RAM is plenty. The old Hard Drive was definitely the bottleneck in my rig. Now I can really start to tell what the limitations are with my graphics card, whereas before I wasn’t sure if it was the RAM or Hard Drive (or processor).
But to get to my question, before upgrading I was thinking about just building a whole new PC, and in researching, I kept seeing people recommend Intel i5 processors, sometimes for budget PCs, but sometimes even for what appears to be top-tier builds.
Is the difference between the i5 and i7 much like some graphics cards, where the difference is almost unnoticeable, like in my research, I see that the performance difference between the Geforce GTX 960M 2 GB and 860M 2 GB is only 2%, whereas the difference between the 960m and the 940m is 128% improved performance with the 960m.
Using my Intel i7 950 as comparison, I presume newer i5 processors are still better than what I have now, would I be correct? And it seems to me that the only bottleneck still remaining for my PC is my graphics card, as my processor seems to handle everything just fine.
Thank you in advance
Thank you for the info, I thought that would be the case but I wanted to be sure.
If you create a character name that may be offensive, and it is reported and you are forced to change the name, are you able to choose a new name or are you assigned a name and stuck with it?
Thank you.
TL;DR – What size should the head be, and is it best to go with the slimmest but bustiest body for sexiest female look?
So, with the sale, I bought 6 slots, and because all 9 of my 1 of each profession characters are male, I now want to make females for the looks. I plan to make Human Warrior, Thief, and Mesmer, and Norn Warrior, Thief and Mesmer, and give them all sexy armor. Reason being those professions are either the fastest or most useful professions. Warrior can run around the map the fastest with sword/warhorn and greatsword plus swiftness skills and bull’s charge, Thief has stealth and a speed signet and teleport skills. Mesmer can portal people, very useful. I thought about making the heavies Revenants, but I would have to level them in HoT areas to unlock Herald for Perma-Swiftness, which would be obnoxious, since I already have 7 professions I still need to max.
So, I need advice on body and head size:
Should I make their heads as big as possible, or exactly middle of the bar?
Human Body
A B C D E
F G H K L
There are 10 body options for human female, two rows of 5. Bring up your own char creation to follow along. After playing with it, I think B may be the best, as it has big boobs, and hourglass figure, and the butt is not too big. C has too thin arms. I thought D was the best until I saw B. Originally I thought F was the best, because it has the biggest bust and hourglass figure, but the booty is huge, and in skirt armor, like the chainmail she starts out in, it really sticks out and looks ridiculous, although it looks fine when you back up and view it in the starting armor. The other issue with F is, because booty and hips, does it clip with some armor? I’m leaning toward B, but I wanted thoughts before I decide.
Norn Body
A B C
D F G
A and D are the same bigger body, D is just more muscular looking. F and C are the same body, with C being more muscular. While I appreciate the muscular look, I like the even skin tone of A and F, so those are the two options for me unless someone can offer a compelling reason for D or C. So the choice is between A, which is bigger and thicker, or F, which is slimmer.
Actually, I just compared A and F on the Mesmer, and the bigger size definitely looks worse with the starting Mesmer dress because of the thickness.
So I guess there wasn’t much to ask, except basically what is the best head size?
On a related note, if anyone is still checking this thread, what is the deal with Windows 10 currently? I have heard people say stick with Windows 7 if you have it. But considering that Windows 10 is a free upgrade until June or July 29, it seems to me I should upgrade all of my Windows 7 to 10 before it stops being free. Not gonna do it right now, but it will be interesting to watch the development of both the tech and Windows 10 in the next 6 months.
I am so pleased that my thread brought out such discussion, hopefully a bunch of people can be helped by this.
And shout out to Behellagh for explaining just how much more advanced the i7-4790k is to my processor, and the 1150 and the upcoming switch to 1151. That is the type of explanation and comparison people like me need.
So it sounds like I should wait until either the new standards come out this year to either buy state of the art or buy the current best at a discount.
Hiya all, I built a gaming rig back in 2011, I’ll list the components:
Case/Tower: Cooler Master HAF 932 High Air Flow ATX Full Tower Case Black
Motherboard: Gigabyte LGA1366 SATA3 ATI CrossFireX ATX Motherboard GA-X58A-UD3R
Processor: Intel Core i7 950 3.06GHz 8M L3 Cache LGA1366 Desktop Processor
RAM: Corsair 6 GB PC3-12800 1600MHz 240-Pin DDR3 Core i7 Triple Channel Memory Kit CMX6GX3M3A1600C9
Graphics Card: EVGA GeForce GTX460 SE 1 GB GDDR5 (Which I have since upgraded to a GeForce 760)
Power Supply: Corsair CMPSU-650TX 650-Watt TX Series 80 Plus Certified Power Supply
With two Seagate 2TB 7200rpm hard drives as C/ and D/, and with Windows 7 OS.
This build has served me well, especially with the GeForce 760, I can play Vanilla Skyrim on Ultra like a dream; Total War: Shogun 2 I can play at Ultra but speeding up battles causes the framerate to dip terribly, but I am not sure if it is the graphics card or the processor or ram that is causing it. With Guild Wars 2, I have realized that the long loading times for zones is probably due to not having an SSD, so I have realized the benefit of SSD for that.
First question: At this point, is there any point in building a whole new PC, or should I just upgrade components and if so which ones? I have questions for each component:
1) I have 6gb ram now, I have heard that 8 is plenty, but is there a benefit in going 16gb of RAM at this point, or even 32gb? Also what is the best type of RAM to get? As in DDR3-1600MHZ or DDR3-2400MHZ or something else, or is a new, faster type in the pipeline?
2) I’ve read that the Intel i7-4790K was the best processor for awhile, but I also saw someone write that one of the i5’s was almost as good for a much cheaper price (this was probably a year ago or so I think). Then I saw people recommending i5 processors when I was looking on the builds here. So my question is, what is the difference between i5 and i7, and if they can be very similar, how can I tell which are the best ones for the money?
3) Same question for graphics cards. Nvidia has treated me well so I’ll probably stick with them, but all the different ones can be confusing. 760, 860, 960, 970, etc. What is the best and most up-to-date way to figure out “what is the best GPU for the least amount of money?”
4) How much wattage is plenty for a power supply? I have a 650, seems to have done fine.
As to building a whole new PC, one of the reasons is that as much as I like the tower I have, I think it only has two USB 3.0 slots, whereas I imagine 2015/2016 cases are all USB 3.0 by now. Am I correct in that? I feel like my motherboard may have been mid transition, as mine is a LGA1366 while it looks like all the current ones are LGA1150. I don’t know what the difference is, but I feel like LGA1150 is now a standard, yes? Or let me put it this way, since this relates to a question about MBR vs GPT. Are the LGA1150 motherboards now designed so that hard drives can be formatted in GPT to utilize more than 2.2 TB of space (UEFI vs BIOS or something like that), or do you still need to have your C:/ drive be 2TB or less and be set to Master Boot Record? I feel like once GPT becomes standard that would be a good time to upgrade.
Final question: I found this 1TB SSD drive: http://www.amazon.com/Mushkin-MKNSSDRE1TB-Reactor-SATA-2-5inch/dp/B00PAFJJRA/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1451778543&sr=1-1&keywords=mushkin+ssd
Anyone know if that 1TB is all SSD or is it a hybrid SSD/HDD, and do you know this “Mushkin” brand and whether it is alright?
I wrote it in Word and posted it as it was written in Word without fixing since it was so late and I needed to sleep. I will have to come back to it.
Conclusion
Alright, I must stop and post this now or once HoT launches I probably will not get back to it until next year. However, I will be reading responses and will edit good comments and suggestions into my post, and if you find how I wrote a paragraph atrocious, if you rewrite it for me I am willing to copy and paste it over what I wrote.
If you believe this guide should be posted to other fan forums like GuildWars2Guru.com (the one I intended to post this to until I remembered the official forums) or others, let me know and I will try to get it posted there. Heck, if you ask and give me credit, I may just let you copy all of this and post it for me. I did this because I don’t want other to make inefficient and wasteful or terrible mistakes that many of us veterans did over the past 3 years.
If this guide helped you and you wish to show gratitude for writing this while on vacation with family and finishing with about an hour until launch after being up all day, I will not reject tokens of appreciation mailed to me.
Profession Summary
If you are going to buy extra slots to have one of each profession anyways, then I would say by all means do so. They can each be fun or useful in their own way. And the reality is that things change, so even if a profession is slow, buggy, weak or frustrating, it may not be in the future. If you have less slots, then you must be more picky to decide what professions best suit you and what you want to do.
NOTE: For many professions, buying Superior Runes of the Traveler alleviates having to devote utility skills or a trait to a speed boost, and I highly recommend them for Guardians and Mesmers. However, these are expensive and prevent running builds that require certain runes on your armor. This is why you may want to choose to work on professions like the Guardian and Mesmer later when you have the money to level them up fast and equip them with traveler runes. Also, I recommend not putting Traveler or other expensive runes on Ascended gear. Things are still fluid with the game, especially with the expansion, so I would be careful with such expensive decisions just yet.
Guide to Races
Note: The following statements are my preferences and opinions. Obviously many will disagree with me, but for those who share my tastes, I think this will be a good warning/guide for character creation.
Ah, choosing a race. Aesthetic preference vs aesthetic preference (such as liking female Norn and Humans and their sexy armor vs liking the cool looking male Human and Charr heavy armor) vs completionism. Choosing Sylvari, Act With Wisdom, Durman Priory as your Order and the Vigil’s Plan to march into Orr with tanks will give you a much more character connected personal story than otherwise. Choose Sylvari and Where Life Goes as your Ventari teaching will have you meet a character that foreshadows Heart of Thorns and who you may encounter again in the expansion, we will see. I think I have heard that Sylvari Ranger is a good combo for WvW due to immobilizing skills. Asura have a wearable suit that is apparently invulnerable until a player enters it, which can be exploited by having players stand behind it to avoid damage from bosses, etc. The Charr racial elite skill Warband Support is like the Thief’s elite skill Thieves Guild, therefore Warband Support would be a waste on a Charr Thief but might be helpful on a Charr Engineer that needs some cannon fodder to distract a boss while the Engineer wails on it. The problem is that these skills are generally designed by ArenaNet to be fluff and weaker than regular skills, and Anet can change them at any time, so it may not be wise to base your character around them, unless you have specifically researched what will be useful in a given context.
If you want to go for The Emperor’s New Wardrobe achievement, you will need one of each race. Each race has 3 different arcs based upon character creation. Each race’s arc to join an Order is different. Considering how many bottlenecks there are in the story where you can end up doing the same mission 8 times if you go through the story with every profession, having diversity in the early missions can be sanity saving.
But the real issue at hand is how each race looks in Heavy, Medium and Light armor. For example, Dark Templar armor (heavy) looks great on Humans, Sylvari, and Asura, but the helmet looks ridiculously small on Charr and Norn. I love Flame Legion heavy armor (Citadel of Flame) on Charr and Asura, but hate it on Human, Sylvari and Norn because it shows the neck too much for my liking. I ONLY like Inquest heavy armor (Crucible of Eternity) on Charr since Charr necks are typically exposed anyways; on other races I hate seeing the back of the neck exposed.
I made the mistake of giving my male Mesmer long hair. This screws up ALL of the masks because the hair clips. If you are make a character that you intend to wear Mesmer masks or the like, make sure that the hair style is the type that is out of the face.
I made the mistake of not giving my Male Sylvari the buffest body type. His arms look too scrawny in many heavy armors, unless the armor completely hides the body type.
My Charr Warrior’s pelvis clips through his CoF armor, which is a great looking armor. I believe this is because I chose the body type on the bottom left at character creation, the one that expands everything. What I would rather have is the one to the lower right, which buffs his upper torso but keeps his pelvis and waist small.
When making female Norn, Human and Sylvari alts to try out the different personal stories, I always make them the body figure that is most busty and curvy without being fat. This will make sexy armors maximum sexy.
For jumping puzzles, human height is generally considered the best. Tall Charr and Norn often have a hard time with certain jumping puzzles. Now if you made a short Charr or Norn, which I think are closer to human height, that may not be an issue.
Armor that looks terrible on males may look sexy on females, especially light armor. And there are quite a few armors that look bad on females but good on males.
My taste: For males, I like completely covered platemail or ninja look on my characters. I hate seeing skin. This is why I love the Phalanx skin and Balthazar outfit. On females, I do like the sexy, showing lots of skin look, as long as I got my gal’s look right and have dye to match her hair and skin tone.
Generally speaking from what I have seen, Male gender goes well with Heavy armor. There are heavy armor that look good on every male race in my opinion. Medium is much more difficult, the only Male Medium off the top of my head that I can say I like safely is Sneakthief. Even then, I hate the Sneakthief helm on Charr, but that is not a problem since I would replace it with the Grenth Hood which would make the character look great. For Light armor, honestly I would say go Female every time you make a Light armor character. I do not think I have found a single Light armor that looks good on every male across all races. Some characters I am not sure I can find one I can stand at all.
If I could go back to in time to remake my characters, knowing what I know now, here are the characters I would make:
Female Norn Warrior, Ranger and Elementalist (since they professions match my idea of Norn the best)
Female Human Guardian, Thief and Mesmer
Female Sylvari Necromancer (since I can make a female look good in light armor), Male Asura Engineer (since if nothing else I can have him wear Sneakthief armor), and Male Charr Revenant (I would have made a Male Human Warrior 3 years ago and kept a spot open for the Revenant)
With my extra character slots, I would make heavy armor Male Asura, Norn and possibly another Human, as either Warriors or Revenants depending on how much I end up liking the Revenant. I would do this because I love many of the heavy armors on males of these races, including their racial armors.
Guide to Professions
I am going to be as fair as I can be with this. I will divide the professions into 3 categories that I think many people could agree with, with a description of why they are in that category. Then I will examine each profession individually, listing the pros and cons of each. In the pros and cons I will qualify heavily what I said in the category section, because many professions may be very strong in one area of gameplay but very weak in another.
Easiest professions to learn and play – Warrior, Ranger, Necromancer
The Warrior and Necromancer have high base Vitality (health) and therefore can survive much easier in melee than squishier professions even without blocking or invulnerability skills. They can often facetank bosses or groups of trash mobs, even in Berserker armor and doing excellent damage. The Ranger can literally just sit at 1500 range and hit hard with his longbow while his pet tanks enemies. Conveniently there is one of these easy professions for each weight type, Heavy, Medium, and Light. These are the 3 I would recommend if you want laid back gameplay, where you don’t have to think too hard or interact too much with your keyboard. To drive home the point, these are professions you can run all signet builds on and be fine most of the time.
Middle, easy or difficult depending on context – Guardian and Thief
The Thief was my main character, the character I got 100% map completion on, in Masterwork gear I might add. Back before megaservers and the LFG tool, it was often difficult to find people to help kill a champion so that you could get the skill point (Hero Point now) it was guarding, get through enemies to a Point of Interest. The Thief allowed me to stealth and get what I needed without fighting. Also, from the beginning the Thief had a signet with 25% movement bonus, whereas at the start of the game, the movement signets on the other professions with them only granted a 10% movement buff. I remember a lot of people complaining about the squishy nature of the thief back then, and maybe even they still do. I would argue that they are not using Dagger/Pistol or even Sword/Pistol. Pistol skill 5 creates and field that blinds foes repeatedly, and Dagger/Pistol 3 teleports you to a target and blinds them. Between blinding and a high damage Berserker build, you should be able to kill most non-champions quite easily. Except for those bloody dredge (which are almost immune to blind). Besides that, the Thief has a lot of escape skills, but if it tells you anything, I almost always go full damage because I usually don’t have a problem.
The Guardian. The Guardian has four F1 skills, which makes it somewhat like the more difficult professions below. The thing is, most of the time you won’t need to use them. The Guardian is a heavy and has the armor to take some hits. The problem is, it doesn’t have the health. It is much more dangerous to run a pure DPS (damage per second) build in melee as a Guardian than it is as a Warrior. Maybe I am just not that good with the Guardian, but I often feel almost as squishy as I do on my Elementalist. However, apparently when it is built and played right, the Guardian can prove itself in the thick of it, and it can be one of the best party support professions there is. I saw one player comment in chat that playing through the game as a Guardian made the game too easy. So there is that. The easiness or difficulty of these two professions may depend heavily on the player.
Difficult, higher requirement of study, practice and skill – Mesmer, Engineer, Elementalist
Each of these profession are F1-F4 (or F5) professions. This means that in order to master them, you will need to master the abilities connected to their F1-F5 skills. It is highly advised to understand keybinding and rebind these keys to other keys or key combos (such as Ctrl + E, Ctrl + R, etc) that will be easier for you to hit quickly. This takes thought and practice, so if that sounds terrible to you, you probably want to avoid these professions. However, if the simple and straightforward gameplay of the Warrior bores you out of your mind, then these professions are probably for you. P.S. – Another way to think of these professions is that they shine as part of a great party or group. But solo, they can be frustrating, feeling like you have to put a lot more effort in to accomplish the same thing as a Warrior or Thief.
Mesmer – The Mesmer is a great utility character because of the Portal skill. If you get your Mesmer to the end of a jumping puzzle or hide inside of a keep in WvW, you can activate portal, jump down to where your comrades are and portal them up or in to where you were. Incredibly helpful for your guildmates or allies, and a great bargaining chip with another Mesmer, “I portal your characters up, you portal mine, deal?” The Mesmer is also very good with reflect skills, which is often what players will want you to bring a Mesmer for, to reflect big damage back on a boss. With an update it also became a great stealth character like the Thief due to the 100% stealth duration trait, but that was nerfed recently, which sucks. The Mesmer can be amazing in PVP and WvW, but other than its utility I find it to be frustrating in PVE. It either kills stuff slower than other professions, or too fast for your illusions to do much. And against bosses, where your illusions could have time to attack many times and prove their worth, the boss will often one shot them quickly. And the problem is the Mesmer relies on its illusions for dealing the most damage it can. The other issue is that clones and illusions often conflict with each other. If you shatter your skills, then your high damage illusions are not hitting hard repeatedly. And if you are not careful with your clone skills, you may overwrite your illusions with a clone. And it is very slow without Superior Runes of the Traveler. If know what to do, players will love you for bringing a Mesmer. But if you want to play a Mesmer like a Warrior or Ranger, you are probably not going to like it.
Engineer – The Engineer’s kits give it versatility and a great ability to respond to almost situation. The Engineer’s profession-specific mechanic is its toolbelt skills, which are given by what skills you equip in your utility slots. The Engineer can do crazy damage with the Grenade kit, but that is one of the reasons I don’t like it. Because Grenade skill 1 does not auto-attack, which means you have to press it every time. This gets old for me pretty quick. So I would rather play straight rifle DPS. The problem is, doing that, I might as well play a Ranger. The Engineer is often described as a profession you will love or hate, and that description is accurate. I have seen a well-played Engineer fully utilizing kit rotation to do some mad DPS on a boss.
Elementalist – If you always play with friends who hold aggro and keep the enemy still, then using staff, staying in Fire attunement and spamming staff skill 2 would skyrocket the Elementalist to the top of the list for easiest, most brain dead profession. It is also fun to nuke besiegers outside your tower in WvW. However, playing Dagger Elementalist is a completely different beast. For some content you can still camp one attunement, but swapping attunements in a rotation to gain boons and use all the skills available to you is probably how the Elementalist is meant to be played. The thing is, swapping attunements in a good rotation and responding situationally takes thought, skill and practice. So, if you love brain dead spam staff skill 2 gameplay, the Elementalist can be the best profession for you, IF you play with others who enable you to play that way. If you play solo most of the time, it won’t be as easy or fun, and you would be better off with a Warrior. But if you want a profession that rewards the effort you put into learning it, the Elementalist can reward you in spades.
NOTE: To save repeating this point, I will make it here. A pro of many professions are their “summons”, their pets, minions, clones, turrets, spirits etc, but this has also been a con. Summons have typically been super squishy, often making them useless in many game modes. ArenaNet is apparently making a change to summons such that unless they are directly targeted by an enemy, they take 95% less damage from un-targeted attacks that hit them, such as area-of-effect attacks. This may make them MUCH more useful than they have been in many game modes. Time will tell.
NOTE: Since I could say the same thing about all of these professions, I’ll just put this here. The Guardian, Mesmer, Elementalist and Engineer are professions that for many players require more effort to learn and practice to master, and/or they can be more difficult/slower/frustrating to level up. If you would enjoy the challenge of learning the profession while not having access to all of the skills and traits during the process, then these may be good first/primary characters that you do everything with first. You may not mind or even notice the lack of speed boost on the Guardian or Mesmer doing this. However, I will say that unless you have epic patience, leveling up these professions this way on subsequent runs may be rather tiresome, so you may prefer to level these up using Tomes of Knowledge.
Warrior
Pros – The Warrior and Thief are probably my favorite all-around characters in Guild Wars 2. The Warrior is a beast in combat, able to go full Berserker and signets and still survive a boss hit. And if not, going Knights or Soldiers gear will probably solve that problem. But also, the Warrior is probably the fastest character for map exploration. Using Sword/Warhon and Greatsword, with Bull’s Charge, Balanced Stance, and the elite skill Signet of Rage, you can maintain permanent swiftness and have multiple skills that leap or run you forward quickly. Turn off auto-target, and you won’t accidentally attack enemies or creatures, and so you can run and run and run without a care in the world, without having to stop and stand in a circle to gain your speed buff like the Guardian or the Thief. The Warrior is an excellent starter character to get you through the game. The Warrior has very high vitality (health), making it great for Knights, Cavalier and Clerics builds. The Warrior uses the largest variety of weapons. The Warrior is capable in all game modes. When tanking is possible, the Warrior can usually tank quite well. The Warrior can build for endurance regeneration and be one of the best at it, after perhaps the upcoming Daredevil elite specialization. Can bring banners to boost party stats, and with the banner regen trait, can provide regeneration to the party, which has probably saved many of the less skilled parties I have been in. Overall I highly recommend the Warrior as one of your characters.
Cons – Not a big boon generating character for the most part. Straightforward playstyle which may be boring for some people.
Ranger
Pros – The Ranger used to be a Newt, but it got better. The Ranger has been buffed significantly in the trait’s department after 3 years. Pet AI has been improved. Currently, the Ranger is great as a long-range DPS character, letting its pet tank enemies while it sits back and damages from 1500 range using the longbow. In WvW, I can solo capture even upgraded camps by letting my pet tank while I pick the enemies off. I typically have a much more difficult time solo capturing camps with my others characters. Only problem is that if an enemy player comes to defend the camp, I am usually screwed. Obviously Ranger has pets, which is fun. Frost spirit which can boost party DPS providing a decent way for the Ranger to supply team support.
Cons – Squishy unless built for survivability. Sword is obnoxious due to being stuck in the leap animation and be unable to dodge during it, and sword 2 jumping out then back into combat instead of into then out. Pets can be annoyingly unresponsive at times. Shortbow got nerfed so it feels like Longbow is the only good ranged build.
Necromancer
Pros – High vitality (health) like the Warrior, therefore it can be good with Knights and Cavaliers stats if you so desire them. A good condition damage character. Has minions which can be fun when they work (and if you play with a bunch of Necromancers. I hear that having 10-20 minion master necros running around WvW attacking towers is hilarious). Life Force is like a second health bar, and can save your rear cavity in many situations. With the recent changes to traits, there are now quite a few good traits and a bit more team support, like a team life siphon buff or the trait which causes Shroud skill 4 to teleport allies to you and heal them, and the trait that keeps them from bleeding out while they are affected by it. Axe range was recently buffed from 600 to 900, FINALLY giving the Necromancer a decent ranged DPS weapon. In WvW and PvP, staff marks can be fun and effective. After reading the cons below, remember that things change, and Anet may fix many of the cons in the future.
Cons – Considered the worst profession as far as team support. Every other profession can bring something really beneficial to the party. Warrior brings banners, Mesmer reflects, Thief stealths, Guardian can spam boons (especially Aegis), Engineers can provide a lot of healing and put conditions on enemies, Ranger brings spirits, Elementalists provide fire fields and healing and auras. Necromancers have some party support options through traits and wells, but generally every other profession brings more and/or better support, or specifically beneficial support like reflects and stealth. Most of the Necromancers weapons are single target (dagger used to be single target, but got buffed to two targets, still not great though), and the Scepter is really a condition weapon and therefore not great for Berserker builds, therefore the Necromancer was left with the 600 range Axe for ranged DPS for three bloody years. Many of its utility skills have really long recharges, and or are based on something like Fear which bosses are immune to. While a good condition character (one of the best), it is beaten by the Engineer, which sticks in the craw considering condition damage could be the one thing the Necromancer is best at.
Overall, the Necromancer can be a fun character to play for its mechanics and minions and flavor, and it can certainly get you through the game content, it just isn’t considered the best at anything useful to PvE or WvW, which is most of the playerbase, and therefore is disliked by min/maxer’s and players of elite content. Hopefully this will change sometime soon, so if you like the Necromancer, by all means make one and hope.
Guardian
Pros – The best provider of Aegis in the game so far, and perhaps protection as well, at least until the Revenant comes along. Great at providing boons to allies. Considering most weapons have been nerfed to only hit 3 targets instead of 5; the fact that the Guardian staff hits 5 enemies at 600 range means it is a great tagger in group content and WvW. The hammer provides protection, so a party can stack in the symbol and receive protection, which along with other boons and damage reduction may allow a party to face tank a boss and kill it faster and easier. Now that burning does not interfere with other burning anymore, Guardians are not limited to one per party and they synergize with Elementalists and other burning providers much better. Like the Mesmer, the Guardian has a number of reflect skills which can be invaluable in certain situations.
Cons – Really low health, which even on a heavy armor character is a big vulnerability. To compensate for the low health requires builds that mean you cannot bring maximum DPS, and going full DPS makes you very squishy. I personally hate that the Spirit Weapons have a duration and a downtime, I would much prefer that they function like Necromancer minions, at least in PvE, since I hate micro-managing or timing summons. A slow character due to not having a 25% speed boost signet or trait, requiring the Guardian to use two utility skills and even a weapon slot to maintain permanent swiftness (and using the staff to full benefit requires stopping and standing still), and even then it could use boon duration boosts to make the swiftness last longer to avoid slow downs.
Thief
Pros – Excellent melee DPS while being protected by almost constant blindness on enemies, allowing the Thief to slaughter enemies in melee despite having low health. Stealth is a very fun mechanic that allows the Thief do to play many fun and dirty tactics in all game modes. The Thief can often one-shot or very rapidly burn down other players in PvP and WvW, which can be very fun (for the Thief, not the other guy). Stealth makes the Thief the best character for harvesting nodes without interruption. Stealth also allows the Thief to explore and capture Hero Points without having to fight the enemies that sometimes defend them. This is one of the reasons why my Thief is the character I got 100% map completion on, since at the time we did not have megaservers and I played at off-times so finding help was difficult. With megaservers this shouldn’t be as much of an issue, but it may be for certain zones depending on what times you play, so this is still beneficial if you encounters problems completing things on the map without help. Stealth is great team support if you run it properly and dedicate yourself to staying alive and reviving teammates who get downed or defeated.
Cons – The Thief is a low health character. The Thief currently has no 1200 range weapon, which can seriously hamper such a low health character at times.
Mesmer
Pros – The Mesmer can be very good in PvP against inexperienced players who cannot distinguish betweens clones and the player. The Mesmer has multiple reflect skills which can make some content much quicker and easier. The Mesmer has some stealth skills like the Thief. The Mesmer has portal, which is excellent for moving scores of players long distances or allowing them to skip content.
Cons – Clones can conflict with phantasms, which I find really frustrating. Scepter spawns clones on the third attack, and I wish the Mesmer got a main-hand pistol that fired like a Star Trek phaser and which didn’t spawn clones to allow for main-hand/off-hand phantasm build. The problem is the phantasms are often a large component of your damage. In most content, either the trash mob enemy dies quickly leaving your phantasms recharging when you go to fight another trash mob, or the enemy is a boss and it destroys your phantasms too fast for them to stay up and get good damage in. This may change with the changes to how pets and minions take damage. The Mesmer, like the Guardian, is a slow character due to a lack of speed boost, although recently Anet FINALLY changed Focus skill 4 to allow you to get more swiftness from it if you already have swiftness on you. Also, I have heard that the Mesmer elite specialization will have a 25% speed boost trait.
Elementalist
Pros – So many skills available per weapon plus utilities. Great ability to respond to different situations by changing your attunement. When built right, I have had a very hard time killing Elementalists in PvP, often I cannot while solo. Elementalist rewards skill and proper build design. Downed skill 2 is wonderful, allowing you to mist away and survive when other professions would have died, especially in WvW.
Cons – Low health, can be very squishy. Cannot swap weapons, which I understand for the Elementalist but still hate. Unlike the Engineer whose kits stay active until put away, Conjure weapons run out of charges. I hate this, because if you are running daggers, sure you can run Frost Bow and stay back but your bow will disappear and you will have to pick up the second one, unless another play has picked yours up. Really hate that, and I do not like it that the Elementalist summons have a duration before they die, I would prefer they be like Necromancer minions. I also note that while it is normal for profession’s invulnerability and block skills to have long durations, typically 60 seconds, those Elementalist’s skills are 75 seconds. Maybe I suck at the Ele, but I don’t use conjures or arcane skills hardly ever, so that does not leave a lot of utility skills left.
Engineer
Pros – Great ability to respond to situation through kits. Rifle 5 allows you to jump distances in a manner other professions don’t get. Can be one of the best condition damage characters in the game using grenades, and I have seen the Engineer do crazy damage by rotating through kits with the right build. Gets to use a Flame Thrower and Grenades. Has toolbelt skills based upon your utility skills providing more tools to fight with.
Cons – Cannot swap weapons. Grenade and Mortar require pressing 1 constantly (this appears to be able to change with action mode, but in the past it was absolutely obnoxious having to tap tap tap your 1 key until you wore it out). The Tool Kit has always felt slow and lacking in oomph for me, so I have never liked melee on the Engineer, which means it has been a ranged character for me.
Revenant
Pros – Based on the betas, I love the Herald elite specialization. Permanent protection (uses all your energy regen so would only be able to upkeep just that) or swiftness, fury, regeneration and/or might for both you AND your fellow players. Any of those can be HUGE for you and your party. Revenant has a trait that doubles the effectiveness of Fury from 20% to 40% while you have Fury on you, which is awesome. Amazing party support potential. The Fury boosting trait may allow the Revenant to run other stats besides Berserker while still dishing out lots of critical hits.
Cons – Don’t like that your energy drops back to 50 when combat ends, I feel like if you get it up to 100 it should stay there until you use it. I feel like the energy use from weapons can too often conflict with your utilities for the other specializations other than Herald. But otherwise too soon to comment.
Guide to Infusions for Fractals
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Agony_Resistance
Now I’ll explain why I told you not to put a Utility Infusion in your Ascended Utility Amulet. Besides the fact that those infusions cost quite a few laurels on their own for potentially limited benefit, you will want to put a Versatile Simple Infusion in your amulet. Why? Because for pretty much every Ascended Backpiece, the cost of infusing the backpiece is quite high, and if you are using a crafted exotic backpiece, you will not be able to infuse it. This is not a problem though, if you put the versatile infusion in your amulet. Because with a +5 infusion in your amulet and backpiece, that is +10 Agony Resistance (AR). That will allow you to easily do Fractal scale 10-19. This will also give you time to get your Ascended Rings and accessories. Ideally you will have 25 AR for Fractals 20-29, but you can probably get by with 20 AR, which can be provided by infusions in either your accessories or rings. Since if you install versatile infusions into your rings before you upgrade your rings to Infused Rings (so that you can add Agony Infusions to them), you will lose those infusions when you infuse the rings (a loss of 150 fractal relics that could have gone toward the fractal capacitor), you could instead put the infusion in the accessories, which at this time cannot be upgraded to take Agony Infusions, thereby giving you time to get Infused Rings. Then, once you get Infused Rings, you can put versatile simple infusions and +5 Agony Infusions into them, thereby providing +10 AR each, or +20 AR, which brings your total AR to 40. 40 AR allows you to easily handle agony up to Fractal level 39. After that, you will want Ascended armor to get up to 55 AR and then 70 AR (I recommend not bothering with infusing Ascended weapons since you will have to infuse all the weapons you might possibly use. Much easier to just get the armor).
Gemstore Upgrades to Purchase and Whether to Level Crafting.
It has been forever, but I think you start out with 1 bank tab, and you only get 250 storage for your crafting materials per material in your crafting material storage tab. This is very little space even for minimalists, especially back before they created the account wallet and put tokens and bandit crests and such in the wallet. Today it is much better if you plan on keeping very little extra besides what you need to play the game. But it is abdominal if you are a hoarder that saves everything and stocks materials in case the price rises. So, if you plan on really investing time in this game, I would recommend getting at least a few more bank tabs. If you bought the Heart of Thorns edition that gives 4000 gems, honestly you could probably spend them all just on bank tabs (although if you are new, I might hold off as long as possible to see if there is a sale on bank tabs. They have had a couple such sales in the past, jump on those sales when they occur). I do not recommend buying bag slots for characters, especially at the beginning when you might change your mind about a character and delete, since bag slots are per character. Getting the material storage expander really depends on you. If you stock materials it is great, since it goes up to 1500. I would personally get all 11 bank tabs before I would start on getting the material storage since you can always store materials in your bank, but it really depends on whether you intend to hold onto materials or sell them.
The “Additional Crafting License” is a tough one. First, if you do not intend to get into crafting, this is worthless to you. But if you intend to level all of your crafting disciplines, this could be beneficial to minimize the number of characters you have to log-in to in order to access what you want. The way I did it before this was available was I put Weapon and Armorsmithing an one of my Heavy characters, Huntsman and Leatherwork on a Medium character, Artificer and Tailor on a Light character, and Jeweler and Cook on a 4th character. I did this all on alts in order to help level them as well. But it can be a bit annoying to have to switch between 4 characters. It would certainly be easier to have all weapon-crafting on one character and all armor-crafting on another, and Jeweler and cook on a third, or even split jeweler and cook between the weapon and armor-crafters in order to only have 2 crafting characters.
This is why I recommend completely waiting to do any crafting whatsoever until you have read the crafting guides out there (just google GW2 crafting guide) and fully understand what it will require, before starting, and whether you want those crafting licenses and which characters you want to craft with. Because I guarantee that once you reach 500 crafting in a discipline with a character, you will definitely not want to delete that character, unless you are an insane masochist. The only exception to this would be cooking, since cooking is cheap to level and has the benefit of providing a great backpiece.
Then there are the character slots. Assuming you are a new player with a new account, with Heart of Thorns you will get 6 character slots. Which means that in order to have all 9 characters, you will need to buy 3 slots, 4 if you want to have an extra slot for Black Lion key farming or experiencing all of the different personal storylines or getting a certain type of material that requires your character to be a certain level for it to drop (such as linen farming). Obviously you can choose to make less characters, the question being how many. If you only want 5 characters, great, that leaves an open slot that you can use to quickly create a character to do a pvp daily and then delete it. If you want 6 characters, then you must decide whether you want to buy another slot in order to have an open slot available.
The final gemstore purchase I might recommend would be the Balthazar (or some other) outfit. Outfits are a skin that cover over your actual armor. The benefit of this, besides being able to change a look without having to use transmutation stones or store more armor, is that if you hate how your armor looks its stats work for you, you can put on the outfit so you don’t have to look at your ugly armor. I generally almost all light armor and much of medium, and I love the Balthazar outfit, so it allows me not to have to look at the ugly armor on my characters until ArenaNet creates better skins for those armor weights, if that ever happens. So if you don’t want to get caught up in skin hunting and hoarding, outfits (if there are any you like) might be a good purchase for you.
Inventory Bags
Hopefully you bought 8 slot bags or boxes at your earliest levels, but now you need more space. The next best would be Darksteel Boxes, which can be had for about 1.3-1.5 gold on the TP. However, I recommend the Halloween Pail. The Halloween Pail is a 20 slot bag that is account bound (as opposed to crafted bags and boxes which you can sell on the TP if you are done with them), which requires 3 Candy Corn Cobs. You can buy the Candy Corn Cobs on the TP as of this writing for 1.6 gold for a buy order or 2.9 gold to buy directly. I bought them in the past for as little as 1.3 gold. Candy Corn Cobs can made using 1,000 pieces of candy corn, which costs about 2 gold currently. That is why a buy order for Candy Corn Cobs will usually save you money. The reason Halloween Pails are so great is because they could be crafted for not even 4 gold awhile back and even now at most should only cost 6 gold, whereas 20 slot bags normally cost 10 gold+. And with Halloween returning soon, the price will probably drop again with the huge influx of pieces of candy corn.
Level 80 Gearing
Cutting straight to the point, the META for Guild Wars 2 stats has been Berserker gear for the last 3 years (unless you were a condition build, in which case it was Rampager’s and now it is Sinister). This may change with Heart of Thorns, but for the vanilla game, most people want you to wear Berserker gear, since it does the most damage (Power is the primary stat which increases base damage, is has the precision to increase your critical chance, and Ferocity to make those critical hits hurt more). You tend to kill stuff a lot faster in Zerker gear than in any other gear, as long as you stay alive. But if you are not good enough to stay alive, other armor may be better for you. Here is the run down:
If you are a character with high vitality (health), such as Warrior and Necromancer, Knight’s armor can be a good alternative to Berserker. Knight’s has power/precision/Toughness (tough is primary), so if fully decked out, one should be able to take some hits and stay up while longer while still dishing out respectable damage. Soldier’s (Power/toughness/vitality) would probably be better for Guardians and Elementalists that have terribly low health.
But since this has been discussed to death, I will jump straight to the benefit of this guide, which is how to get these armors. I’ll let you research what is best for you.
DAILY PVP and DUNGEON TRACKS!
I told you to do the dungeon story modes so that it would unlock each dungeon track in SPVP. Besides logging in to get your log-in reward, also try to do all of the PVP dailies. The PVP dailies would be a good reason to have created additional characters even if you haven’t leveled them yet, in order to get that reward for winning a match with that character for the daily. Don’t worry, PVP gives you everything you need to compete, including a weapon and armorsmith that will sell you everything you need to run any setup. But you really don’t need much, because there are servers that other players have created called DAILY servers. These servers are designed to try and get everyone a win by using the volunteer system to move a player from the winning team to the losing (while still giving them a win) and allowing a spectator to join the winning team. These servers typically allow 10 vs 10 instead of the standard 5 vs 5. Some servers even have hosts who will move everyone on the losing team over to the winning team near the end of the match to guarantee everyone a win. Hopefully this guide becomes a standard that many people will learn from, and since ignorance of how volunteering works drives me insane, I want to make sure everyone understands how it works.
Let’s say Blue is the designated winning team and red the losing team. First, try to as many people onto each team as possible. Don’t be selfish. You can wait a few seconds and click on the join Blue button repeatedly hoping that someone else will join Red so you can get on Blue, but if no one does, be selfless and join Red so that another person can join Blue. This is fine since once enough people are on each team, if the Blue team only has one more player than Red, then you can spectate, which will cause a +2 imbalance between the teams, example, Blue has 8 players while Red has only 6. After a few seconds, this will cause the volunteer button to appear for players on the Blue team. When that button appears, you should always click on it and volunteer! If you volunteer and get moved over, you are guaranteed a win. After 20 seconds, one person from the winning team will be moved over to the losing, thereby balancing the teams, and allowing a spectator to join the winning team. NOTE: Even if you get onto the winning team, make sure you get a score of at least 5 or more in order to have the win count and be rewarded. If you finish a match with 0, the match does not count and you get nothing.
Also, this next point is very important! The losing team MUST be down 2, or 4, or 6, whatever, it has to be an EVEN number for it to work right so that a spectator can join the winning team after a player is moved over. If the losing team is down by 3, volunteer will move a player or 2 over, but the winning team will still be ahead by one, preventing a spectator from joining the winning team. So, if losing team is down three, then either a player on the losing team needs to spectate, or a spectator needs to join the losing team to make the number even. If no one else volunteers, you may need to be the one to do it, otherwise that volunteer countdown will be wasted. Sometimes it pays to be selfless, because the sooner you get another spectator on the winning team, the sooner you can spectate again and force another volunteer countdown.
Volunteer works in these daily rooms and standard custom arenas (which reward 500 reward points for a win, 200 for a loss, IF the match goes on long enough to get full points, which I believe is 7 minutes). Volunteer does not work for unranked and ranked arenas, which reward 1500 for a win and 500 for a loss. You can only earn TWO full bars on the dungeon track a day using custom arenas (there are 8 bars, so it would take 4 days to complete a full dungeon track not counting the daily pvp rewards). You can earn unlimited pvp reward points from unranked and ranked arenas.
Now, for why dungeon tracks are so important. Completing a full dungeon track rewards 3 weapon boxes and 1 armor box, along with 240 dungeon tokens for that dungeon. So after doing a track SIX times, you should have 6 armor boxes, 18 weapon boxes, and 1440 tokens, plus 180 tokens for completing all three explorable paths of that dungeon (240 for the 4 Arah paths), = 1620 (or 1680 for Arah). There are 18 armor pieces and 19 weapons. Chest pieces cost 330 tokens, Leggings cost 300, Shoulders cost 240, and Helms, Gloves and Boots cost 180 tokens each, for a total of 1380. If you use an armor box for the chest and one for the leggings, that saves you 630 tokens, so 750 for the remaining armor pieces. 1620-750=870. Which means you can fully unlock two complete sets of that dungeon armor and the chest and leggings for the third, and 18 of the 19 weapons, without having to do any extra dungeon runs. Two-handed weapons cost 390 tokens, Main-hand weapons cost 300 and Off-hand weapons cost 210. You should have 120 (or 180 for Arah) left over after all that. 2 explorable runs will let you get that final weapon if you saved an Off-hand weapon to be your last unlock. If you further do all three paths of a dungeon for 4 days you will have enough tokens to finish the collection. Or just do the dungeon track 1-2 more times.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dungeon_armor
Each dungeon has 3 different stats it offers. The main ones most players will care about will be Berserkers, Soldiers, and Rampagers, each of those stats have at least 3 dungeons that provide them (Rampagers has 5, Knights has 2). The reason why that is great is because let us say you choose to create 9 characters, 1 of each profession (assuming you have Heart of Thorns and therefore the Revenant), and you want to outfit them in Berserker gear. By doing the Citadel of Flame, Crucible of Eternity and The Ruined City of Arah tracks 6 times each, and while running the dungeons a few more times while doing the pvp tracks, you should be able to fully outfit all 9 of your characters for FREE, no gold required (except for different runes and sigils and trinkets, but even that can be cheap or had without spending gold).
If you are anxious about what stat to pick for your exotic, outfit your character with a full set of Masterwork or Rare armor and weapons of that stat, with Masterwork trinkets of that stat with gems or crests of that or a similar stat. For example, Masterwork or Rare Soldier’s armor and weapons with Soldier’s Masterwork trinkets. At this point I want to emphasize upgrading trinkets. Soldier’s level 80 Masterwork amulet is only a little over 3 silver on the TP, but it does not have anything in the upgrade slot. You can then buy a Crest of the Soldier and place that crest in the amulet. Or, if you want more precision and toughness, you could use an Emerald Orb on the amulet. Some stats are exclusive to crests and others to gems. Orbs and Crests can be installed on all armor, weapons, and trinkets, while runes can only go on armor and sigils only on weapons. Runes will typically give you more of two stats if you have all 6, but orbs and crests give a third stat, so orbs and crests can be a good cheap and simple way to just upgrade your armor and trinkets and go. Also weapons, but I think a Major Sigil of Air and either Fire or Force on your weapons will do more damage than putting an orb or crest on them. I would not recommend buying expensive runes if you are only using Rare armor, such as Strength runes, but, if you really want to see how those runes work, you can get Rare armor and put the runes on them, and then salvage the runes with Black Lion kits for the 100% chance to recover runes, and get some Globs of Ectoplasm. But if you put cheap stuff on your rare armor, just salvage with a Master’s salvage kit. To sum up, it is a good idea to play in Rare armor and weapons with Masterwork trinkets at level 80 in order to get an idea of what gameplay is like using a certain stat, such as Berserkers, Knights or Soldiers. Heck, get them all on your first character and try out each one. The cost is trivial compared to the cost of exotics or ascended gear and the amount of gold you will make over time, and you can even get enough Globs of Ectoplasm back from salvaging the rare gear to cover the cost of what you spent on the gear. And Masterwork can just be salvaged for materials and luck when you are done with a Basic salvage kit.
Now why use Masterwork trinkets? Because I recommend going straight for ascended trinkets. Rare trinkets are not that much better than Masterwork, and Exotic trinkets can be quite a bit of gold for certain stats, and since I did most of the game the first two years in Masterwork armor and trinkets , I really don’t think they are worth it, especially with how quick you can get ascended.
Ascended Amulet – You can get Wynn’s Locket (for that matter, all ascended sinister trinkets except the backpiece) from completing Living Story season 2. You can buy more for 10 gold and 1,000 bandit crests. However, normally the only way to get ascended amulets is to buy them with laurels. If you do this, I recommend getting the amulet you want from the World versus World (WvW) laurel vendor, since it costs 10 less laurels to get while only requiring 250 WvW tokens. A GREAT trade. You can get tokens by doing the WvW dailies and especially from Edge of the Mists, which rewards a lot of tokens. I recommend getting the Utility Amulet in case you want to put a Utility Infusion on it, but DON”T BUY a Utility Infusion yet! Why? I’ll explain further down when I talk about backpieces.
Ascended Rings – You can get these rings using 10 Pristine Fractal Relics per ring. You get 1 Pristine relic for each tier in the fractals that you do once daily. You also get them from completing the Fractal dallies. Even if you only do level 1-9 fractals until you get both rings, it will only take you 20 days to get them, and much sooner if there are a bunch of fractal dailies that you complete. If you get your fractal level to 11 the first day and then do two fractal tiers a day, it will only take you at most 10 days and probably less. This is the best way since you will have to wait to save up enough laurels to get the amulet and rings anyways. But, if you have the laurels and REALLY cannot wait to get the Pristine or REALLY hate fractals but still want to have the ascended trinkets, you can buy the rings from a laurel merchant. Again, I HIGHLY recommend getting them from the WvW laurel vendor since they cost 10 fewer laurels there. Also note, that if you do higher level fractals, you have a chance to get rings and infused rings as drops from the final chest. This is random, but you may get lucky and eventually get what you need this way.
Ascended Accessories – These ones suck to get. You either have to buy them from the Laurel vendor (again, 10 less from the WvW one), BUT, they also cost 40 Globs of Ectoplasm, which at the average of 40 silver, is 16 gold. In comparison to how much wealth veteran players have that is probably nothing, but that sucks for a new players, especially when other ascended trinkets are almost free. Now you will get some for free from the living story, but I’m assuming you want certain stats like Berserkers. However, there is an alternate way to get these, Guild Missions. Now, this part will probably change with Heart of Thorns, so I will adjust later, but to give you the history, you can obtain 6 guild commendations per week if you are in a big guild that has all the missions and do all of them. It costs 12 commendations per ascended accessory, so you could get your trinkets in a month, less if your guild does missions at the beginning of the week. The thing that sucks about this is that most guilds do guild missions at certain times, which sucks if that conflicts with your schedule. Hopefully this is changing with Heart of Thorns.
Ascended Backpiece – This one can be a pain in the rear, but there are shortcuts as well. The Prototype Fractal Capacitor is the cheapest to get to the first tier of ascended in terms of gold, but not in terms of time. You have to save I think 1350 to get the Exotic backpiece and another 500 to get the thing that upgrades it to ascended, so 1850 total. This can take a while, especially if you are only doing lower level fractals. Then there are the mystic forge creations:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_ascended_trinkets
Scroll to the bottom for backpieces. Some have set stats, others have selectable stats. Generally you want one with a selectable stat, especially since many of these are less expensive, only costing 50 Ecto instead of 250. If you have more money than time or patience, these are a great way to quickly get an ascended backpiece. Then there is Mawdrey. This one is time consuming and really expensive because besides everything else, you have to level an armor-crafting discipline to 500. If you do this, I recommend Leatherworker since Elonian Leather Squares are much cheaper than the others. Seriously, 3 gold for those, whereas Bolts of Damask are 18 gold as of this writing. And you need 15 of them I believe. So, unless you REALLY want the skin or REALLY want Mawdrey 2 to eat your Bloodstone Dust, I do not recommend this route. As for the Tempered Spinal Blade Pack, it is currently very time consuming to get the shards you need, and very expensive if you want to get the colored version. You can get it, but at this point, especially for a new player, I do not recommend spending the time and effort on it, especially since hopefully ArenaNet will reintroduce Living Story season 1 at some point which will hopefully make it easier to get.
Now for the shortcut. ArenaNet made it so that each crafting discipline could craft Exotic backpieces. There are a bunch of steps to get to the final version, all with different skins, but I will focus on the final version. It will be level 78 with slightly better primary stat and slightly worse secondary tertiary stats than level 80 exotic backpieces, so it is by no means a poor choice of equipment. When crafted you get to select the stats you want for it. The only downside is that since it is not level 80, you cannot equip it with level 80 gems or crests. This is not too terrible, as you can equip it with a Brilliant Jewel, or if you don’t mind spending a little bit more to get the most benefit (albeit minor), an Embellished Brilliant Jewel. Also, I believe you cannot salvage these backpieces or put them in the mystic forge. What is unique about these exotic backpieces is that they have an infusion slot. So if you don’t have the gold or the patience to wait until you can get an ascended backpiece so you can infuse it in order to do higher level fractals, getting one of these crafted exotic backpieces is a shortcut. Unless you are going to level up all of the crafting disciplines anyways or desperately desire to unlock all of the crafted backpiece skins, I recommend just leveling the Cooking discipline. Why? Because it is the cheapest discipline to level (and it can actually be useful for crafting potions you can use), and also because the Ambrosial Chef’s Backpack is freaking cool looking and may be the cheapest backpiece of them all to craft on its own.
Gearing while Leveling and at Level 80
If this guide has so far not been amazingly helpful, this is where I hope that changes. Many new players probably will not understand the importance of trinkets, runes, gems and sigils, and how they significantly improve your damage or survivability, since they will not have access to or see such things at low levels. Having a character who has been equipped at the earliest level possible with a full set of armor, weapons and trinkets that have all been upgraded with runes, sigils and gems respectively, will make content that might have been reasonably challenging a total cakewalk. I will spell it out for you:
The Trading Post (TP) is your best friend. Gear goes, from worst to best, Basic (White) < Fine (Blue) < Masterwork (Green) < Rare (Yellow) < Exotic (Orange) < Ascended and Legendary (Pink and Purple, they have the same stats, not going over these at this point). There are many Weaponsmith and Armorsmith NPCs throughout the world that will sell white weapons and armor that match your level, but oftentimes you can find blue or even green gear cheaper on the TP, and even if not, the blue and green gear is better and usually worth the extra copper or silver. More importantly, on the TP you can find gear like trinkets that other players have been crafting for 3 years now which you otherwise would have to level crafting to obtain or get similar items from Karma merchants. Don’t waste your karma on such things, get them off the TP.
Example: At level 10, you can get copper rings and accessories. Get 2 Garnett Copper Rings and 2 Garnett Copper Studs (Power stat). At level 20 you can buy a Garnet Copper Amulet, although you get a Masterwork amulet from your level up reward at level 24, so that may be unnecessary. You can get Mighty armor at level 10, but it from my research it looks a lot more expensive than the Mighty armor you can buy at level 11. You will notice that gear at 10, 20, 30, etc, is often more expensive than at 33, 36, etc, but not always. Learn to use the TP. For example, under Buy, select armor, then Fine for rarity, and select level 21-51, and once you have done that, type STRONG in the search bar above that, to compare prices between different levels. Then you can compare Strong to Hearty or Honed, etc, to see how different stats are valued and at what levels. The price can vary from less than 2 silver to 45 silver. But I am getting off track.
See where you are in level after completing all of the cities. If you are below level 10, you can buy just enough armor and weapons are the level you are in order to do some of your personal story missions and the lower level areas of starting zones. If you are above level 10, you can choose what level of armor you want to buy which may save you some coin (so level 11 Mighty armor vs level 10 Mighty armor might make it worth it to get to level 11 before fully upgrading your armor and weapons). Note that as long as you don’t apply upgrades to your Fine (Blue) weapons and armor and trinkets, they will not be soul-bound (or even account-bound) and therefore you can move them to your other characters as they level or resell them on the TP when you are completely done with them to get your money back. You can get Masterwork (Green) gear from the TP too, but it will be soulbound to your character, which is ok if you intend to apply runes to it. I’ll explain in a sec. Don’t waste your money on Rare (Yellow) gear at low level unless it is really cheap, it’s not worth it.
Get those 4 trinkets at level 10, and get a full suit of armor and set of weapons at a level you can easily reach and afford. You get a crappy backpiece early on, but you won’t be able to replace it until at least level 35. You will get some better gear (such as a Rare Amulet and Breathing Device) from leveling up or story missions, and sometimes that will save you from having to upgrade that piece of equipment for a while, but you will often want to replace your gear at certain points. For example, you can get Fine trinkets at level 25 and 30, and then again at level 40 and 45 (different stats are at different levels). Carnelian Silver and Carnelian Gold (30 and 45 respectively) are what you want if you want Power and Precision.
You can buy Masterwork gear if you intend to upgrade your weapons and armor and then salvage them when you are finished with them. You won’t need to upgrade the trinkets at this point, but you can apply RUNES to ARMOR and you can apply SIGILS to WEAPONS. The Runes you will want for your armor are (1 of each):
Minor Rune of: Fire, Hoelbrak, the Pack, Strength, the Mesmer, and Vampirism.
When you reach level 39, you can apply Major Runes. Do the same thing with Major Runes, get 1 of each of those six, since that will max out your power (although I noticed that would only be 30 more power for using major over minor, and major runes are a lot more expensive. Your money, you decide if it is worth it)
For Sigils, the best for damage are Air, Fire, and Force. Getting major is definitely worth it over minor. I am not sure which is better at the Major level, Fire or Force, I will edit based on comments.
Upgrade your gear every 5-15 levels (weapons and armor probably need upgrading more often than trinkets). You should be able to finish the personal story and even exploration in Masterwork gear, heck even Fine gear, especially if you team up with other players.
Note that at level 80, if you buy Masterwork gear while waiting to get your Exotics (or more specifically, Masterwork trinkets), you may need to upgrade the trinkets with Orbs or Crests since they may not come with an upgrade already on it. Adding orbs or crests can add considerably to your damage or survivability at that level. I point this out since I ran around without upgrading my Masterwork trinkets for quite a while before I realized.
Guide to Your First Character
The problem with being a new player is that you are somewhat behind to VERY far behind everyone else. What I mean by this is, if your goal is achievement hunting and unlocking skins and getting up in pvp rank, etc, you are VERY far behind and it will take a while to catch up. This will become even more difficult as new content is released, forcing you to choose between catching up on old content or playing the new content with everyone else. I missed out on Super Adventure Box because I was trying to level all of my characters to level 80 at the same time instead of playing the living story. Don’t make that mistake. Now, if your goal is just to get to the point where you can keep up with everyone and the new content, then that is quite easy, and why I have made this guide for you. Just pay attention, and let me guide you along the efficient path. Here we go:
Pick ONE profession to be your main to start. I will go over the pros and cons of each in the professions section below. You can create a bunch of characters to reserve names and whatnot, and even play around a bit on each in order to get a feel for them, but try to quickly decide which one will be your first to 80. Read further below when I talk about the pros and cons of each profession to find out what should be your first 80 based on what I describe about each profession and whether you think you will enjoy that.
NOTE: You can buy 8 slot bags or boxes on the Trading Post for like, 30 copper. This is a must-buy. I will describe how to get bigger bags under “Inventory Bags” further down.
NOTE: I recommend picking a crafting profession, cooking would be best, so that you can access crafting stations out in zones, which allow you to access your bank. However, DO NOT waste crafting materials on leveling any crafting profession on your first character. You will be leveling your first character to 80 through the content so you do not need to use crafting to level your first character, and by leaving the discipline at 0, you can change it back and forth for free if you decide you don’t want that discipline on that character. SAVE all of the crafting materials you find to either leveling crafting on a different character later or to sell on the Trading Post to make some (sometimes a lot of) money.
Get that character through the game to level 80, and do everything along the way. When you finish the starting area on character creation, you will be in your race’s starting zone just outside your race’s city facing away from the city gate. Immediately turn around and run into that city. Explore it completely. This will reward you with a good amount of experience that will help level up your character. And to help you with that, I give you this wonderful link:
http://www.postcount.net/index.php?pageid=tdwindex
That website has maps with the most efficient way to complete each map. This will become much more important when you create more characters and want to be more efficient. But if this is your first character, just take your time and enjoy exploration while it still has that new car feeling. Also, if you cannot figure out how to get to something, like a Vista or Point of Interest (PoI), the wiki and many guides will tell you how (note there is a way to toggle your mini-map to view the various levels of a map. If you can’t get to something, it may be below ground or above you).
After completing your home city, take the gate to Lion’s Arch (LA). Explore LA completely. Then go to each race’s city and explore it, you guessed it, completely. ArenaNet actually made it so that you get all of the WP’s right outside each race’s city unlocked upon character creation, so you can jump to any of them, but at this point it is better to save money by using the Asura Gates to get around.
Once you complete all of the cities, then pick a race’s starting zone and complete it, then do the rest of the starting zones. Along the way you should be able to do some of your personal story missions. Doing them will help you level up as well, so if you have trouble completing a higher level area of a starting zone, doing the lower level area of a different starting zone or doing your personal story will help you level up.
Continue this pattern of doing all of the areas that are the same level, 1-15, 15-25, 25-40, 40-50, etc. Completing all of the maps of a given level should enable you to do the next level of zones, especially if you are doing your personal story missions along the way as they become available.
Do the personal story all the way to the end. Do all of the dungeon story modes. Each story mode completed unlocks that dungeon track for PVP. < This is important for getting level 80 exotic gear to outfit your character(s) with. Get map completion for each zone, which will reward you with stuff for each zone, including exotics for completing the highest level zones.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Map_completion
Get 100% map completion will reward you with 2 Gifts of Exploration which you will need in order to craft legendary weapons. Save them even if you do not plan on crafting legendaries, because it would be terrible to delete them (or, if you don’t care about the Account Medal or Title and don’t want to use up a bank slot, save a Point of Interest or Vista in a lower level area to complete later. A lower level area because they just reward masterwork gear, and you want to complete all of the zones that reward exotics).
By this point you should definitely be level 80. Do all of the dungeon explorable modes now if you haven’t already (you might want to wait until you get exotic gear, although I did mine in masterwork, but many groups of players will hate you if you do that, so you probably want rare or exotic, and I will tell you how to get those the fastest so you don’t have to delay doing the dungeons). The reason to complete all of the story modes is so that you unlock those dungeon tracks in PVP so you don’t have to wait for a track to become available if you want to work on it or be rushed to do that track repeatedly while it is available. And the reason you want to complete all of the explorable paths is so that if you decide you want to do a path(s) over and over again, you will get credit in the Hobby Dungeon Explorer achievement. Every 5 paths completed will reward 5 achievement points, which will add up. I did tons of Citadel of Flame path 1 (CoF p1) runs before completing all paths, and missed out on tons of achievement points, and now I am sick of doing dungeon paths so it is difficult to do more. On that note, CoF p1 is quick and easy to do once you know it, and The Ruined City of Arah paths reward more gold that other paths, so they are worth getting good at. Look up other guides for them if you want to make money and farm dungeon tokens. I merely wanted to point out that if you do lots of paths, you will want to be getting the achievement points for Hobby Dungeon Explorer, which means do you need to do ALL of them first.
By focusing on one character and doing all of the PVE content, you will learn and enjoy the content without experiencing the tedium you will probably come to feel when you work on alternate characters (alts). This will also allow you to make mistakes that hopefully you will not repeat on your alts. It will also allow you to have at least one character that is ready to play new or high level content that will require a fully-geared level 80.
NOTE: If I posted this to the wrong area, please by all means move it for me. And hopefully if this guide is good enough (or with your help becomes good enough), maybe this could get a sticky someday.
NOTE: I completely missed the “players helping players” section on the forum. Heck, for more than two years I completely forgot/did not realize that the official forums existed, as I used GuildWars2Guru.com for my information and help. I think it may be a good idea for ArenaNet to look at how many players have the same mental block to the official site and how to correct that, perhaps by adding a message on a loading screen.
I am displeased with the lack of a good, concise and consolidated guide to Guild Wars 2 for new players or players who have played for a while but who have completely missed certain content or concepts. Sorry for not working on this sooner to those who got burned not knowing this stuff. If you find stuff that needs correction or should be added to this guide or if you can rewrite it better, I will edit my post appreciatively. If you think this guide sucks and want to deride it, before you do, I would ask you why have not made a better one yourself and saved me the effort.
I have worked on this over two weeks, and added stuff on the fly as I thought of it, so if it is not in the best order, apologies. If some parts of the guide aren’t useful to you, skip ahead because hopefully you will find something new or something that will cause you to recommend this guide to everyone who can use it.
Quick List of Essential Links
Awesome guide for choosing what stats to choose on dungeon gear to salvage inscriptions/insignias:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1vv3cd/share_all_the_salvage_data/
Guide to efficient map completions:
http://www.postcount.net/index.php?pageid=tdwindex
Guide to permanent rich ore locations:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1xffs0/permanent_rich_ore_locations_30_final_version/
Dulfy is a great website for finding guides and lists with pictures, and seeing black lion skins almost as soon as they are released:
http://dulfy.net/
Personal Story
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Personal_story
One of the biggest flaws of the wiki is that there is no link on the front page to get to the personal story article – you have to type “personal storyline” into the search bar to fine it. Then, you have to figure out how to view the mission arcs. I do not find it intuitive, so I want to make sure new players get some direction. If you want spoilers and to see how your choices play out, you can do so by reading the articles in each of the arcs.
See the following tutorials for more information on the racial storylines.
Asura characters begin with the tutorial Explosive Intellect.
Charr characters begin with the tutorial Fury of the Dead.
Human characters begin with the tutorial Defending Shaemoor.
Norn characters begin with the tutorial The Great Hunt.
Sylvari characters begin with the tutorial Fighting the Nightmare.
Click on the link for your respective race, which will bring you the article for the first mission. Down at the bottom, you will find the section that not only shows you the story arc you are on based on the choices you made at character creation, but also the other arcs as well, for both the two arcs (level 1-10 and 11-20) chosen by character creation as well as the 20-30 arc where you end up choosing your Order.
After that, at level 40, is Setting the Stage (a quick and easy non-fighting scene which rewards you with a Black Lion Chest Key at the end), after which is your first Order mission.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Setting_the_Stage
Down at the bottom will show you the Order arcs, for joining the order, helping out a minor race, and then the Battle for Claw Island.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Forging_the_Pact
This is the last link you will need, since it will show you all of the arcs that lead to the final personal story mission, Victory or Death.
NOTE: As long as you have three characters that each choose a different order, you can unlock all of the Order weapons and armor for each Order, and then transmute them onto your gear. I recommend doing one of each.
NOTE: Besides repetitiveness when you do it with more than 3 characters, the problem with the personal story is that ArenaNet tries to go for emotional impact with certain characters in the later missions, but unless you chose the right race and the right story arc at character creation to encounter those characters early on, their significance is lost upon you or significantly lessened because you will be saying to yourself, “who the heck is this?”
So, if you want to experience the emotional impact that ArenaNet was trying to accomplish with the personal story, I recommend for your first character, you choose Sylvari, then Act With Wisdom as The Teachings of Ventari you follow, then the Durmand Priory as your Order, and then in the mission Further into Orr, choose the Vigil’s Plan, where you march into Orr by land with the tanks.
General Tips
Things change! When GW2 was released, you could only change your traits at a trait trainer (so you were stuck with whatever build you were running unless you returned to a city), and it cost money to do so. This was obnoxious and should never have been in the game in the first place. You would think ArenaNet would have learned from GW1 when it was first released, when they required you to spend a skill point in order to change your stats. Wow was that a bad idea, but thankfully they changed it very quickly. It took a lot longer for them to change traits in GW2, but after what seemed like forever they finally did. We used to not have the account wallet or account wardrobe, so collecting skins or transmuting items was a monumental pain, but now we have them. It used to be that if you got an Ascended weapon or armor as a drop, you were stuck with the stats you got, so you could either store them hoping upon hope that they made a way for you to trade them, or sell them to a merchant. Then they made it so you could put them in the Mystic Forge with an inscription or insignia to change the stats. I kept a Cavalier Greatsword I got was so happy I did. Sucks for those people who got rid of theirs. They didn’t know what I know, that things change. This is why I have Ruby Orbs on my Ascended armor, because I refuse to put any expensive runes on that armor when ArenaNet could decide to change rune stats again. This is my warning to you. Be careful what you get rid of or install on your armor or weapons. Anet can change anything, so if you are the type to throw your TV out the window should all your efforts be undone with one change, I recommend carefully considering what you devote your time and gold and effort to. Research carefully and hold off on things you are uncertain of.
Try to Log-In Daily. You get 4 chances a month at a Black Lion Salvage Kit (BL kit). SAVE THESE! They are wonderful for using on exotics, ESPECIALLY exotics with expensive runes or sigils. Check the price of an exotic on the trading post, and look at the rune or sigil it has. Is the rune/sigil the same price or more expensive than the exotic? Then you can salvage the exotic with the BL kit in order to get the rune/sigil that you can sell, but also Globs of Ectoplasm and Dark Matter.
Also, the final reward (Day 28) gives you the option of choosing a bag of stuff. I humbly suggest that you ALWAYS CHOOSE THE LAURELS! You get 15 laurels from the bag, which, if you buy T6 bags from a laurel vendor, can get you 15 gold. Laurels are a much better choice than the ascended crafting materials, which you can craft or get in alternative ways. Seriously, ALWAYS choose the laurels.
Globs of Ectoplasm (Ecto) can be obtained from salvaging level 68 or higher Rare or Exotic equipment with Master’s or Black Lion salvage kits. It is foolish to use a lower level salvage kit on these items, and while BL kits may get you more Globs of Ectoplasm from rares, I would save the BL kits for exotics or items that have runes or sigils you want a 100% of getting when you salvage.
PAY ATTENTION: Karma armor cannot be salvaged, including the very karma expensive Temple Armor found in Orr. This means that if you put Super Runes of Strength on it (roughly 13 gold per rune last I checked, so 78 gold total), you cannot get them back unless you purchase the upgrade extractor from the gemstore for a ridiculous amount of gems. It can however, usually be put into the mystic forge to return ONE item that should be salvageable. This is often how people do things such as “Linen Farming”, by buying cheap karma armor, mystic forging 4 pieces into 1 and then salvaging that for the materials, which can then be used for crafting or making gold. Keep this in mind before buying the expensive Temple armor. Temple armor drops in Fractals of the Mists, so if you only care about the skins, you might run fractals for a bit to see how many skins you can unlock. Or if you want to equip some alt characters with decent gear that you will only put cheap orbs on since the character will be doing easy content, that is another option.
NOTE: WvW armor (armor purchased with gold and tokens, not the “skins” purchased purely with tokens) could NEITHER be salvaged OR put in the Mystic Forge. So your only option was to delete them if you no longer wanted them. This is apparently changing with HoT to apparently allowing salvaging that would return some tokens. This is better but not by much. Apparently Anet has added these skins to lower level karma merchants throughout the world, and I would say that would be a much better option for obtaining these skins if you want them. I would avoid wasting the gold and tokens on WvW armor.
NOTE: There are two tiers of skins you can buy for WvW tokens in the Eternal Battlegrounds. There are 4 sets of weapons for like 5-15 tokens, and 4 sets for something like 100 tokens. Armor skins are much less, 30 tokens at most for Fine rarity and 60 for Masterwork rarity.
NOTE: Tagging refers to doing enough damage to an enemy to get it to count when the enemy dies so that you get a drop from or the reward for killing it. This usually does not take much, if you hit it a few times and do a few thousand damage you should be fine. However, if you are attacking a champion along with over 50 other players, even in Berserker gear and trying to do the maximum amount of damage I could, sometimes I still did not get champion bag drops, and such sad occurrences would probably have been much more frequent if I had been running less damage boosting gear. This is one of the reasons Berserker gear is so pushed so hard, to help ensure that you do enough damage to get rewarded with loot.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Main_Page
^ That is the official wiki. Use it. You can type /wiki in your chat and it will lower GW2 to your desktop and bring up the wiki homepage.
These are just some key points since this stuff is covered by others extensively and I don’t want to bore the readers who came here for the good stuff.
In Options, under General Options, under User Interface, in the In-Game Clock box, are the options for off (it is off by default), local time, and server time. TURN SERVER TIME ON. Why? Because this will let you know when reset will happen or when guild events occur if your guild goes by server time. Daily Reset is at 12:00 a.m. server time, which is currently 7 p.m. US central time. My guild does guild missions on Saturdays at 1:30 a.m. server time, so 8:30 p.m. central time. I did not know about this for almost THREE years. This will save everyone a lot of time asking or answering questions concerning when stuff happens.
While you are in General Options, turn on Autoloot and AoE loot on interaction. That will make looting much easier.
I believe Double-Tap to Evade is on by default. This can screw you in jumping puzzles, so most people turn it off and bind the Evade command to a key. I bound mine to the Shift key. Note that you can change what key does what, such as the F1-F5 keys, which is very important for characters like the Elementalist and Mesmer. Look up other people’s guides or the wiki for how to do this.
Y brings up the Looking For Group tool. This can help you find people who want to do the same content as you, and people who can help you get achievements, etc.
Basically play around with the options, look up what it does if you don’t know, many other guides and the wiki talk about this stuff, seek and ye shall find.
Man that 45 char title limit is a kitten.
I’ve been making and running warrior characters thru to “Setting the Stage” in order to get the racial chest armor skin reward and a Vigil skin reward for free, with the bonus of getting 2 black lion chest keys for my efforts. I did one or two this weekend, possibly Monday. I had my final character I wanted to do it with ready to go, and then the patch dropped.
Does the patch count runs completed before the patch for this week, or am I safe to do the final run with this final character now and still get a BL key?
And to confirm, is the reset for the BL key reward on Friday at the same time as the WvW/week reset?
Thank you.
After testing out the Revenant in WvW and PvP, I completely do not understand why the Revenant only get one weapon set. Unless I missed something drastically or they are going to add/change Legendary Stances to change whether a weapon acts as a melee or range weapon, it seems completely absurd to me that the Revenant will be like the Engineer or Elementalist. I hate that mechanic on both those characters, particularly on the Elementalist since its utility options for range or melee are not permanent, but at least they have options and the Engineer can run tool kit to always have melee available while always having a ranged option. But from what I saw, the Revenant does not get that option, you are stuck in melee or range based on your weapon choice.
Unless something changes or is added, the Revenant might as well be known as the Hammerant, since that is the only weapon I would run since it is better to be stuck at range than in melee; or known as a Rangerant if they add other ranged weapons.
And what everyone else is saying, why do weapon skills use energy AND have recharges, Revs are weak on both the attack and defense, etc.
Do we know if the Shadow Dye Kit being sold on the gem store now will be there permanently, or is temporary? Obviously this is a question of whether I should buy a Shadow Abyss dye now or wait and see if the price drops. Thank you.
Well, unhappy is an understatement for how I feel right now. After all this time waiting, I finally decided to buy an Ascended Amulet and put a Karma Infusion in it in order to apply all of the Karma Boosters and get 100% karma boost, and then use all of the Karma consumables that I have been saving.
Then I saw that it does not work when I used a few drops. So I looked up to see if it was a bug, and found out about the Sept. 3rd update.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_updates/2013-09-03
Balance, Bug-Fixing, Polish
General
The amount of karma granted from consumable karma items has been increased. Karma boosts no longer affect the amount of karma gained from consumable items.
My question is, is this only temporary because they had a bug that was causing people not to not get the benefits of the boosters and did this until they could fix it, or is this a permanent change so that now Karma boosters are only useful for events.
Because if it is permanent, I WANT MY 10 LAURELS BACK!
This may need to be moved to the Game Bugs section, but I wanted to ask here first.
I have used a Black Lion Salvage Kit to salvage multiple rare piece of armor (all damaged) after I have upgraded to exotic from them. All that I can think of of the recent salvages I have done have not provided any ectos (they were all level 80 rares, damaged but not broken), way too many in a row for the Black Lion kit in my opinion.
I was wondering if the armor being damaged might have something to do with it?
I also heard that recently there was a bug where the BL kit was not salvaging any ectos, and Anet refunded people their kits. This was occurring for me during the time up to when I saw that announcement, and since then. The Black Lion kits I have are the ones you can get from the Daily Reward chest, I have not bought any.
Thank you in advance.
Wait, is it account-bound until equipped, or permanently account-bound?
Thanks for answering that. Another question I forgot it, I thought I read somewhere that Celestial armor is account-bound, is that incorrect?
From the “Looking Ahead: Guild Wars 2 in 2013” post:
“This new tier of crafting material, along with the new guaranteed material rewards mentioned earlier and some other materials we’ll introduce will be used to craft ascended weapons, armor, and more. These weapons and armor will also be able to be found as rare drops from locations in the world. Ascended weapons and armor will remain account-bound like other ascended gear.”
First, is the new Celestial Armor considered ascended armor (if not, then why would I bother working on Celestial gear when they are going to be coming out with Ascended gear soon?)?
Is it account-bound? Is there any way to screw up and make it soul-bound? I have avoided getting any ascended trinkets because I was worried about making them soulbound.
Are current Legendaries account-bound (I thought they were soulbound on equip)?
Final question that hopefully an ArenaNet staffer could answer: will you eventually just do away with soulbound entirely? Because as a player of GW1 from almost the beginning, I was HUGELY disappointed with the soulbound system, and I would love to see it eliminated. I have not spent any gems on armor and I refuse to until soulbind is removed from the game. I want to see GW2 improve and this is one area that I see as a major black spot. Or will it be that Ascended/Legendary gear will be the account-bound as a reward for the investment in it?
Thank you.