Guild Wars 2

decent point antigw – yes, I’m talking primarily about the pve experience – I enjoy the pvp side of gw2, but it’s not a priority for me

I’m also talking about a particular playstyle during pve, that I mentioned above, but summarized, mostly boils down to…

I prefer hth over ranged, but can do both
I hate using guns (rifles and pistols)
I like up front, active playstyle (lots of hitting and dodging)
I would like at least moderate survivability (assuming reasonably well played)

I’m wondering what the endgame experience is like for Guardian, Thief and Warrior based on the above criteria, assuming anyone plays those classes like that near endgame (i.e. near lvl 80)

like several have said, specific tactics vary depending on each skill point encounter, but as some general advice…

depending on class, your tactic differs – with most of the skill challenges, I find that if I’m not able to tank and spank (stand close and hit with hth weapons), I can usually succeed by kiteing (that’s, picking a ranged weapon, and constantly moving out of hth range and shooting constantly, whittling down your opponent)

so, I recommend, pick a set of weapons with close combat AND a good, strong, ranged option – if you don’t have a close combat option, you’ll probably be all right, but every class I know of has at least one good strong ranged option, and you should make sure you have one equipped.

then, I recommend, fight till you’re about half health, using dodge and hth liberally – if you go down to half REALLY fast, next time round, probably just start and stay with ranged.

once you reach the point where you’re using ranged attacks, what you generally want to do, is wait till hand-to-hand enemies reach you – don’t run around constantly, because they’ll just keep chasing, and you usually move backwards slower than they can chase – but, when they actually reach hth range, they stop to attack, and then you can dodge or just run away, and usually avoid their attack

fire whenever you can, and make sure you keep a close eye on any skills that slow, knock-back, knock-down or immobilize your opponents.

if your enemies are ranged AND hth, continue to evade the hth guys as mentioned above, but prioritize killing the ranged guys first – this is made especially hard if, like me, the kitten system keeps re-picking targets for you, which I hate like a motherkitten.

anyway, that’s a quick spot of advice- again, can’t say for sure that it’ll help whatever particular skill challenge you’re having trouble with, but hopefully it’ll help

thanks for the couple of responses so far – I’m still struggling between Warrior, Guardian and Thief.

My warrior is…surprisingly…fragile. I did not expect that. I’ve been moving through the warrior forums looking for advice on survivable builds, and although several people mention survivable warriors, they don’t seem to go into much detail about how – but based on inference, it sounds like warrior survivability hinges on killing your opponents very quickly, rather than actually taking damage well

so, I’ll be bouncing back and forth between my Guard, War and Thief, and we’ll see which one wins out in the end – again, if anyone can offer their gameplay experiences with these classes at the near-endgame level, I’d appreciate a heads-up!

Hey there folks – I’ve been playing GW2 since near launch, but very, VERY casually, so my highest pair of characters are lvl 36, and I’m currently struggling to decide on a “main” character – a character that I’ll focus my efforts on, leveling, crafting gear for, and etc

I enjoy playing alts, and this game is quite alt friendly, but it helps me…focus, I guess, if I pick one to prioritize

but, I’m bouncing between my three favorites, bouncing back and forth between their playstyles, survivability and offensive capability, and I’m wondering if people that have reached level cap can give me an idea of what to expect, so that I can better choose the class that’s most likely to give me the game experience I want by the time I hit endgame

my three contenders are Thief, Guardian, and Warrior. My criteria are…
SURVIVABILITY – so far, my thief seems to be the squishiest, not unexpectedly – my warrior is also, currently, surprisingly fragile at level 20, although that could be as much a low level and gear issue – my guardian, on the other hand, is almost disgustingly survivable, to the point where I find myself not even really trying to avoid incoming attacks most of the time

ACTION!! – I like very active character types, and that’s the kind of activity I’m looking for endgame. The Thief seems to be the most active by necessity – self heals are fairly limited, so I have to stay mobile to stay alive – but it’s hard staying that hyper all the time. My guardian is a little boring, honestly, to play, so far – I focus mostly greatsword and…no, pretty much just greatsword, and while I’ve tried all the other weapon setups, and they’re certainly versatile, the greatsword just seems to be so…reliable. My warrior I’m having a much harder time with, as he has so many different weapon combos – my current favorites are twin swords, and greatsword, with some longbow thrown in, but dual axes, and sword/axe + shield seem to work nicely as well – I even enjoy the hammer

I HATE tech, purely as an aesthetic thing, so I want a class, ultimately, that does it’s best activity without guns (pistols or rifles) – I can use them when I need to, or when I get bored and need a switch, but if pistol or rifle is a primary build choice for the class, I’d rather go with something else

so far, my guardian is the most reliable, but frankly, a little boring, to play

my thief was initially going to be my main, but with a painfully limited weapon/skill set, even more limited by my disgust with firearms in a fantasy setting, and the relative knife’s edge of survivability (great survivability as long as you’re on top of every stealth/dodge, dead when you miss a step), i’m leaning away from my thief at the moment

for awhile, the warrior sounded like the place to be, with a great range of weapon/skill sets, and all the heavy armor options like the guardian, but my current warrior doesn’t seem to hold up well under fire – course, like I said, he’s only lvl 20, and not geared particularly well, so that could be an issue

so, after all that, I’m wondering if anyone is willing to pass on, given the above interests, what my endgame experience might be like for the Thief, Guardian, and warrior, and if any of my above concerns carry over onto endgame, or get better with skills, traits and gear

please keep in mind that I am NEVER going to have the time or money to blow on top end gear – I’m gonna be going with the stuff that people can pick up with reasonably casual gameplay over time – so if a class needs top tier gear to fit my criteria, again, I might be better off going with something else

in the end, if no one can help, I’ll eventually figure it out on my own – but you could save me a significant amount of time and effort, if you’re willing to pass on some of your endgame experience, and I’d appreciate it greatly

thanks to anyone that takes the time to answer…constructively

given the very generic statements you made, I’d have to argue that’s not necessarily true.

Given multiple mobs, control powers that knock targets back, or slow or root them, should be exceptional at helping teams dps the remaining targets down faster, at least as far as single target classes are concerned. Take 4 mobs, “control” two of them by knocking them back into a corner, then root them, then slow them, take them essentially entirely out of the game for a good…what, 10, 15 seconds?

In the meantime, your team concentrates fire on 2 targets instead of 4

Now, if your team is composed of entirely AOE builds, of course this is counterproductive, and when it comes to bosses, MOST bosses in almost all MMO’s are immune/resistant to CC, which is why most CC classes/builds need to have a 2nd build to fall back on, but CC can be very valuable

UNFORTUNATELY…for crowd control to be anything more than marginally effective, you need a team of people prepared to take advantage of crowd control, which makes CC a very team-oriented build, which, sadly, isn’t a very rewarding build for PUGS and the like

So, in short, CC IS useful – it’s just a lot harder to take advantage of then DPS TILL DIE!!! which means most people tend to go with the easier, less screw-up-able non CC builds

but I’ve played with great CC builds in other games (sadly, I don’t see it much in GW2, so I’ve got a hard time gauging just how effective it can be, as I haven’t seen anyone really try yet) and a good CC player with a team prepared to take advantage of it can turn a hard fight into a cakewalk.

I honestly can’t remember which body I chose for my human female Elementalist, but I remember what my criteria were.

All my mage-ish characters are typically female – I dunno why, but it’s a fantasy archetype that I feel most comfortable with as female

I like my fantasy (genre) women to be attractive and obviously female, but not excessively proportioned (like many comic book characters are criticized for being)

Like some have said, I avoided most of the obvious musculature body types, and I wanted a bust for her that would be clearly female, but not excessive…

Unfortunately…since I was concerned that the smaller chests might get lost depending on what types of clothing the characters were allowed, I erred on the side of the larger busts – as it turned out, many of the female cosmetics (at least all the cloth stuff that elementalists get to wear) actually accentuate proportions, rather than…de-accentuating them?…whatever the word would be (I suppose I should have expected that, but I didn’t at the time really know what to expect)

so, I ended up with a female elementalist that in many of the available outfits, looks exactly as comic-book proportioned as I was attempting to avoid – only a couple of the make her look the way I thought she was going to look based on the paper-doll model

I’m starting to discover that this is not an uncommon problem with character creation “pages” – the page you make the character on, doesn’t reflect the normal lighting of the world, or doesn’t account for a large portion of the cosmetics available, and so it’s nearly impossible to gauge what you character will actually end up looking like during real play, vs what you get to see during the usually irrevocable character creating section

since you asked,

actually, the above two posts are only partly true, as far as concerns the problem – The enemies are displaying a relatively normal invulnerability and quickly regen to full health function of monsters that have been pulled outside their aggro radius and are returning to spawn…

…however, sometimes they seem to be activating this behavior even when they’re still right next to their spawn location. I’ve gotten it quite a few times as a thief going into stealth – the enemy appears to lose track of me, but, as I move to backstab position, they suddenly get a speed buff, run back to their original position, and almost totally reheal in a matter of seconds

it sounds like other conditions, like being near water for some people, are also triggering the “return to spawn” condition long before the target is reaching it’s actual aggro limit.

I regularly run my human male thief and my human male guardian

from time to time, during various grunts and exclamations (I’m getting more powerful all the time and etc…) my character’s voice seems to be the female version, and not the male – is anyone else noticing this

I used to think it might be that another character or another npc nearby just happened to be coincidentally exclaiming the same thing at the same time…but I’ve leveled up at least once purely by exploring a locale, and had what was almost certainly the female voice over for the level up exclamation

it happens so infrequently that I haven’t really nailed down a moment when it happens – I’ll try to pay more attention next time – but I’m wondering if anyone else is noticing this.

also, there are a couple of other considerations…

1. - ever been to a ren-faire? whether or not it’s strictly historically accurate, the general population (at least in America) is convinced that the vast majority of women in the medieval/renaissance period wore tight bodices to accentuate their bosoms – as such, it’s not entirely implausible that for whatever reason, the fashion around Divinity’s Reach focuses around women in tight bodices that…er…exaggerate…their actual bust sizes

1. - relative sizes and the character creation screen – the OP may have been talking about NPC’s, and there is a surprising degree of uniformity amongst them (women or men, we’re all surprisingly healthy humans with reasonable body weights – maybe we just eat really well as a society) but I know I ran into several problems designing my own characters, especially the women

even though there’s a height choosing slider, I’m not sure what the baseline is designed around, or if the baseline for different races is fixed, or is related to the baseline of the chosen race – as such, several of my female characters turned out to be far, far smaller than the 2 men I had originally created, even though I chose the same point on the slider

the same thing happened with their busts – I wanted some degree of definition to their busts, so I avoided the very flat chested options, and settled in the end on the largest bust option, as at the time, in reference to the other options at hand, it appeared to be closest to what I envisioned…

but apparently, there was some…clothing…adjustment being made on her actual dimensions, because once I started playing the game, depending on which clothes I put her in, her bust size changed significantly, to the point where in certain clothing options she seemed almost comically large, which, quite frankly, was something I didn’t want

I currently blame the character design tool as having no available baseline comparison, and even the underwear model appears to be suffering from a certain degree of push-up…er…feature…I guess…you would call it…that was artificially altering her apparent size

I’m really, really hoping at some point there’s a character re-design tool made available – and I wouldn’t mind being able to compare characters to other characters or available npc’s to get some sort of relative baseline/context

I’ve been thinking about tracking events and guild news and such, and realize that I want to restrict my searches to whatever world I happen to have created my characters in (Tarnished Coast)

while we have some decently divided forum sections, I think it might be helpful both to guild recruiting and general player-run event running, if we had another section of forums that were world specific

just a thought…

I’d like to see a strong re-design of the Thief UI – I’d like to see more strongly differentiated, and easier to see, icons for “steal” and “stolen” skills – I’d also like a far stronger color differentiation for our quantity of initiative, and whether any of our skills can be used based on initiative cost

in short, right now, most of our skills are grey with spots of red – if a skill is ineligible for use, it’s the same grey icon with the red bits now purplish, with some random white text letter written in the corner – in short, out of the corner of my eye (since most of the time I’m “watching the road” so to speak) I can’t tell the difference

most of the time I also have no idea how much initiative I have – I can kinda track my initiative thru my initial rotation because I can do the math in my head, but after that…nuthin’

obviously, I’d like to see a much larger range of weapons and weapon skills…

twin swords – not entirely unreasonable
falchion and scimitars – one large 2 handed curved sword (so we get a fast, short range 2-hander and skills for that sort of thing – some multi-target light bleeds, maybe a whirly skill) and scimitars (some curved swords, bigger than daggers, maybe not as big as longswords, again, fast, light damage dealers with some bleeds or reflects or some such)
spear (1-handed and 2-handed)
maybe an off-hand “thieve’s tools” or some such – a bag of special effects – fire, smoke, blinds, poison – stuff like that

just to be fair, I’m not entirely certain he was complaining about the system being unfair – and I see at least part of his point…

cooldowns are not only a limiting factor, but often force other classes to use all their other skills in order to maximize outgoing effects (dmg, healing, support, etc) – in short, cooldowns are sort of a forced versatility factor – this, combined with other classes relatively large range of diverse weapon setups, allows other classes to experience a far greater range of powers/effects

the idea of initiative is intriguing – by allowing theives to bypass cooldowns, they can spike damage using their skills far faster than any other class – then, when they run out of initiative, we have a variety of utility skills/trait lines that allow us to, presumably, evade out of combat, replenish initiative, and then fly back into combat

now, what I head from at least part of the OP, was that given the theif’s relatively small range of weapons, we already have a very limited range of powers to experience – having a large range of powers isn’t just about utility, it’s also about keeping the experience of playing the class interesting – we are already limited in the range of powers we have

then, you combine that with the initiative system – the initiative system essentially encourages us to spike powers very quickly, then encourages us to slot powers that allow us to escape, replenish, and jump back in the fight – combine this with our relatively limited power selections, and you get the “feeling” that we are essentially being forced, via the initiative mechanic, to spec along the lines of massive spike damage revolving around the cheapest, quickest damaging skill we can find, then picking all those powers/traits that allow us to replenish so we can do it over, and over, and over again

now, this isn’t entirely true…we HAVE other options – but those other options are far more tactical, less reliable, and go strongly against the primary image of a thief in an MMO setting, that of dps frontliner – and for those of us that actually picked the thief just because we happen to like the dps frontliner acrobatic hit-and-fade double-dagger image, the above concern is fairly valid

I have to admit – in retrospect, I’m honestly not sure the initiative system really does what was intended – It was supposed to provide Thieves with an alternate mechanic, one that allowed them to pile on damage in a short time, I would assume, to make up for traditionally expected relatively low survivability – I’m just not sure it really did us any favors

I myself generally find myself building a rotation, and switching to other powers during particular circumstances, only to discover I haven’t got enough initiative, because quite frankly remembering how much initiative each skill costs in the middle of combat, and knowing what 5 points of initiative looks like on my measly little white diamond bar, and having my grey with red spots skills turn to grey with purple spots to indicate that I can’t use them, really sorta screws me, when I find myself trying to hit a skill, only to discover that it’s not doing anything, cuz I don’t have enough initiative, and not enough visual feedback to know that at a moments notice

I actually don’t mind the initiative system all that much – I’m just not sure it does something really great for us – it seems like an unnecessarily different mechanic, and at the very least, I’d like to see a much stronger visual feedback for skills and initiative with the thief.

I’m encountering one odd AI behavior that may be a bug, and one event that may be bugged

When killing the Ettin’s that have taken over Gort’s home, Gort talks about showing us a special treasure – he breaks open a rock wall, and a giant gleaming treasure chest opens up – and has nothing…gives nothing…is totally unselectable and rewards nothing

it’s possible it’s just meant as an animation, but if it was meant to provide a reward or some such, it doesn’t

Also, I’m having a frequent and annoying problem with stealth – often, when fighting PvE enemies, I’ll go into stealth, either by heal or Cloak and Dagger, and the enemy will “reset” rather than just lose track of me – in other words, they will behave as if I moved outside their aggro radius, gaining bonus speed as they move back to their starting point, invulnerability and rapid healing

obviously, these may not be bugs, but they seem to be, without any better information

actually, this question has been on my mind for awhile…

our “Shadow step”, as several posts have pointed out, seems to be a rather odd, and unnecessarily different way of traversing terrain. It doesn’t seem to do us a whole lot of good.

other classes have leaps, which accomplish effectively the same thing (although some would argue that mechanically the leapers are managing to avoid terrain that seems to be hanging up shadow step) but most of their “leaps” also qualify for combos – e.g. the “leap combo” – skills that include a leap also get to benefit from beginning in/passing through a combo field.

as far as I can remember, NONE of our shadow step skills get any kind of combo synergy, accomplish roughly the same effect as leap as far as crossing distance, possibly mechanically suffer disadvantages, but also offer no advantages – I’m not sure – maybe we can’t be interrupted in the middle of a shadowstep, perhaps, unlike leapers? I’m not sure – but for the moment, shadow-step seems to be a visually-different-but-otherwise-identical-to-leap effect with none of the benefits of leaping, and no seperate benefits of it’s own (and again, perhaps mechanical limitations beyond that)

if all that is true, it would make shadowstep an inferior leap, and I’m wondering if I’ve missed some sort of advantage it’s meant to give us, or if it really is just a sub-par leap with a thief-ey visual effect (in which case, I’d be just as happy, if not happier, with a traditional leap)

I’ve enjoyed stealing during later levels, although I’ll admit it took some effort to work it into my regular rotation. It’s a very…unusual skill, and takes some getting used to. When I started reading build guides and tied “Steal” to my initiative regen rotation, it got used more often

I actually prefer hth, so being less useful ranged seems less of an issue for me, but I don’t see it being particularly un-useful ranged, if paired with the right escape skills.

I will agree, however, that the powers you get from steal are very difficult to integrate with the current visual limitations. It would be very nice if there was some more distinctive (and easier to read) icons for what you’ve stolen. Perhaps a more structured color-coding, for AOEs, dmg skills, conditions, stealth – or at the very least a larger icon with more distinctively different icons (right now the tuft of hair and the spinning blade one are both on orange backgrounds with a hook-shaped or multi-hook shaped something or other)

I would also like to see, somewhere in our skills list or some such, a list of all the things that can be grabbed – if we could just have a checklist of the “stolen” items, we might not need different icons, as we could just learn what each one looks like, and read about their effects ahead of time instead of picking them up in the middle of battle and then having to hold on to them to read them

Hello there folks – So, I’ve pushed my Thief up to level 20, tried out a little bit of sPvP, I’m starting to figure out how the class works, checking the forums and the build planners and such – but I’d like to get some advice on what I’m looking at in the future of my Thief, so I can prepare for my role closer to endgame…

1 – Group Role – part of my favorite activity in every MMO is group content – Mostly “Dungeons”, although I found the sPvP to be entertaining as well. Based on our whole skills selection (both weapons and utilities) it’s seeming to me like our group “support” role is very, very limited. We have almost no boon granting powers (can get a few traits that’ll group buff, but that’s about it), we have maybe 1 or 2 skills that create fields (mostly stealth fields, almost no combo fields), all of our heal skills appear to be primarily solo

so, when I find myself grouping in Dungeon content, knowing the importance of cross-class synergy (using combo fields, buffing allies, exploiting momentary boons, conditions and combo fields, etc) – I’m expecting that my role will be one of primarily exploitation – other people in my group are going to set up the fields, the boons and the conditions, and I’m going to be expected to use that short gap of time to maximize the situation they gave me…

is that true? is that how it’s going to work? or am I missing something about the nature/ability of the Thief class in a group dungeon setting?

2 – Trait Lines – It’s really hard sometimes to pick out which traitlines I want – I’ve mostly settled on maxing out the trickery line, as I prefer a dagger/dagger + shortbow build (I HATE pistols…firearms of any kind in a fantasy setting, really – not a criticism of their utility, it’s just an aesthetic hate) I prefer close combat, which means most of my builds are built around my daggers (sword and dagger is fun, as well, but read further)

I’m also starting to realize the inherent…fragility…of my Thief in hand to hand, so I’ve been focusing on skills that allow me lots of hit-and-run options, which means condition damages and bleeds, lots of dodges and quick heals, which is why daggers end up being a little more appealing than sword/dagger. This is why I’m rather enjoying the trickery line – also, thanks to lots of forum discussion, I’m starting to realize the overall importance of initiative, so I’ve been chasing down those traits and powers that refresh my initiative as often as possible

But I’m really quite torn as to where to put my other max traitline – so far, I’ve played sPvP with the acrobatics traitline maxed out – and it seemed to do well (I tend to place in the upper 50% of my team consistently, and as that was on my first pvp day, I think I was doing all right), but I’m also curious about the utility of the stealth line (I find most stealth powers on the Thief to be frustratingly limited, but it sounds like there can be a lot of power/versatility in there), the deadly arts line (at first, being “Thief”, I assumed maxing out crit chance wasn’t a half-bad idea, but I’m having a hard time seeing it pan out with that line – but again, I could be missing something) and more…

so, I’m wondering if folks could give me a breakdown of their experiences with some of the other traitlines, maybe point out what I might be missing, or under-appreciating (like Mug – I assumed it was a relatively minor damage add-on to stealing, but lots of reports make it sound like it does a LOT of damage – is that worth picking up?)

sPVP/WvW – I’ve only tried out a couple of hours of sPvP – I’ve played years of Battlefield and other team-based competitive games, so I’m familiar with the basic strategies and whatnot – I seemed to do all right, but without an in-game VOIP, I’m finding coordinating with my teammates to be both very difficult and a little frustrating – besides just jabbering at them until someone (hopefully) responds in a positive fashion, any advice on nudging your teammates in the direction of strategy?

Also, I haven’t yet tried out WvW, and had a few questions – I know that sPvP auto-adjusts you to level 80 with a nice outfit of gear, full skills and whatnot – I seem to remember reading the WvW does not quite as much – If I attempt WvW at level 20, will it auto adjust me with extra skills and such? or just up my basic dmg/hp and such? will I be a raging liability to my team if I attempt it without a larger skill selection? or can I still be relatively useful, once I figure out all the basic in’s and outs of WvW?

4 – sPvP cannons – ran into a small, very specific problem in the heart of the mists – the cannons wouldn’t let me use them – I can load them up with cannon balls, but when I “use” the cannon, I get a no-skill bar – only the option to leave – am I missing a 2nd step? or am I bugged do you think?

anyway, those are my questions for the moment – if anyone can help clue me in, I’d be appreciative

I had a similar problem with this quest – Also as a thief, also at level – ended up dragging in a hunter friend of mine (2nd person made a huge difference)

I’m not sure the numbers were my problem – ancillary bandits, while challenging, could be dealt with – most of my problems (once I sorted out what was actually happening) was with Quinn, who also seemed to be relatively useless (I don’t recall my Logan ever coming out to fight) but primarily with Doc Howler – Oscill basically hit on the issue – based on Doc Howler’s attack rate and outgoing damage, and the relatively tight quarters of the fight environment, a Thief is at a substantial disadvantage, as we have no real way of interrupting the hailstorm of fire that character puts out – the blinding effect helped Oscill quite a bit, I also got doc to about 25-30% health by balancing fast heals, and lots of dodges/blade fury – but the unrelenting stream of ranged fire was a real disadvantage to a class with no interrupts and limited health/dodges

having a 2nd character up would have made a HUGE difference, but I was never able to keep Quinn up through the first wave of bandits, and Logan I don’t believe shows up until the 3rd wave (Doc howler shows up with the 2nd wave, as I recall)

with the number of bandits reduced, keeping Quinn up might be easier – thanks for that – but I still think it’s mostly Doc Howler and the particular class build of a Thief at level 10 that seems to be my biggest problem, at least…

well, I don’t personally use the general world chat for trade, but that’s mostly because I don’t trade much at all. In other MMO’s that I’ve played, the regional chat does get used, at least occasionally, for people selling or offering, and to be frank, it doesn’t usually bother me that much

for whatever reason, trading with a real person rather than a TP/AH posting can be more comforting for some folk, and often times when someone is posting in the world chat they’re offering really good deals, or even giving things away in a moment of generosity

however, I would agree that even though any single person using the channel might not bother me, hundreds using it for that purpose could easily invalidate the other uses of world chat – for that reason, most games have a trade chat that more or less mirrors the regional chat as far as extent, but can be turned off without turning off the rest of the region – I haven’t checked, so I don’t recall if GW2 has a separate trade channel or not, but if they don’t, they probably should

if it doesn’t have a separate trade channel, I’d probably recommend against reporting people for spamming just for any individual use, only because the statement on the reporting panel does indicate that the GM’s will not take kindly to abuse of the reporting system…which reporting people for posting trade with no other outlet could easily be seen as

now, if there IS a trade channel, reporting them for spamming might not be entirely out of line, but I wouldn’t take my opinion as GM fact by any means

Also, and I can’t be sure about this, but I don’t think the “events” scale at all – from what I’ve experienced, most of the events are deliberately set to accommodate large #‘s of people, so much so that if I find myself all alone in an event area, I sort of steer clear because I know I’m going to get overrun by encounters that were tuned for 4-6 people at least

however, and this is on one of the heavily populated servers, I find that if I just stick around and follow the event for awhile, more people will show up – I’ve finished several events more or less on level with only 3 of us present, so you don’t need that many people, but handling it alone is probably pretty dangerous

- you can access your bank AND your crafting bank from any crafting station, which is nice…BUT…you HAVE to have crafting mats in your personal inventory in order to be able to craft with them

- crafting those malign, vital and mighty sigils and using the discovery panel to work them into weapons yields far better equipment than the standard swords and armor

- crafting a weapon with sigils in the discovery panel requires not the finished weapon, but the two components that make the weapon + the sigil

I haven’t had a chance yet to play any of the dungeons, so keep that in mind while reading…

My favorite part of almost every MMO is the dedicated group content – I find it a tad disappointing that the first available pve dungeon is lvl 30 – seems like quite a long haul for landscape exploration before your first dedicated group content – but, since I know that the grouping content is what is ultimately going to lock me into the game or kill my interest, I’ve been following a lot of the chatter about dungeons, and here is the overall impression I’ve got listening to other folks testimonials, and the general design principles of GW2

group dungeons sound like they have been very, very hard to the first few companies that enter – many of the experiences sound like the ones some of you people have had – overwhelmingly dangerous – but, I also hear a lot of testimonials from folks that have weathered their way through the dungeons, and they speak quite highly of them, and I suspect this is why…

Guild Wars 2 combat just does not work according to traditional mmo staples. There’s no threat table, no distinctively locked class types, a lot more movement – skill effects like crowd control and stealth last for a very brief time (most last 3-5 seconds, if that much), and there’s a huge range of very short windows of very powerful skill synergy

and this is I think where the successful teams have finally learned to love the game, once they figure it out – from what I’ve seen, and what I’ve heard, a HUGE portion of the game unlocks when you coordinate your own skill usage with the combo fields and boons that are provided by other characters, or when you are the one providing those boons and fields to be exploited by other players

this means that other players have to know when a boon is up, which of their skills suddenly applies, and they have a very brief window in which to work (I think most of those fields are up for what? 5-8 seconds in most cases?) – I’ve heard a lot of build talk lately that usually revolves around building a character that is quite capable in single play – which of course means that a large company of people out there are ignoring the far less singly useful, far more group powerful skills – fury, if i remember correctly, is a boon that buffs crit chance by 20% something like that? some characters have skills that buff ALL THEIR NEABY ALLIES with fury for 5 seconds or some such…

My level 11 guardian has at least one, possibly 2 skills, that reduce incoming damage to allies by 33% for 5 seconds, or some such

my guess, and I’ll be the first person to admit it’s only a guess based on discussions about the design of GW2 and the various chatter I hear from folks, is that dungeons are going to continue to prove to be overwhelming until the community starts realizing that their builds for group play need to play to those seemingly small, seemingly brief group buffing skills, and they ALL start re-building along those lines

I suspect the reason we haven’t seen more complaints in PVP and W3 is that the vast majority of PVP players are still operating by the above guidelines – worried more about individual character efficiency than in the far more…fuzzy…group skill synergy

yeah, I think “synergy” is going to become the watchword of Guild Wars 2 – learning to coordinate those combo zones, those group wide boons, the combo finishers, learning to let go of a generation’s worth of previous MMO structure – when that finally happens, I think the face of GW2 is going to change significantly, and I hope, for the better

I don’t remember where I heard this, but somewhere, there was a discussion going on about the cost of leveling up crafting, especially in these early days of the game when folks are still figuring out how hard it is to actually gather/craft and such – as such, when the auction house is up, it sounds like your most reliable source of money might be in crafting mats for the near future

in short, because many people playing the game are still figuring out how hard crafting is, many of them don’t know what mats should be worth, so you can probably afford to sell high for awhile

when things stabilize, you’ll find more reliable ways of making money off the TP I’m sure

thank you both so far for quick responses – I’ll have to pay more attention to those range bars…I only recently noticed them at all

good call on the pending guild invite – it may just be that I keep cancelling the invite rather than refusing it – I’ll have to go delving through the social panel and see if I can coax it into revealing a few more of it’s secrets to me

I’ve been enjoying GW2 for the most part, and have managed to figure out many of the basic mechanics by a variety of reading tooltips and experimentation – but a few things are still evading me, and I’m wondering if some folk might be able to help nail a few tiny details down

weapon and utility skills – I’m having a hard time determining if I’m in range of my target – the 900 range, 1200 range numbers, while impressive sounding, mean almost nothing – I’ve noticed several of my skills have a tiny red bar down at the bottom of the button – is that by any chance an indicator that they are “in range” or not? or is that something else?

I’ve also noticed that some of my weapons skills will be pulsing/flashing – as they are usually attached to weapons that have a 2, 3 or 4 cycle (i.e. hit the button once it does one effect, hit it again it does a follow up second attack, etc) – I’ve been running under the assumption that the flashing means that it’s currently locked at some point in it’s cycle, but the flashing persists even after combat has ended, right up until my character sheath’s his/her weapon – does anyone have a better, more solid idea of what that flashing indicates, if anything?

Combos – so, I generally understand the two basic principles of combo’s – the combo "fields* like water, fire etc – and then the existence of combo finishers that, I presume, use the fields to get the combo effect (as noted by the firing arrows through a flame wall to get flaming arrow combo procs)

but I’m a tad confused about melee weapon combos – I have lots of combo abilities between my thief and guardian, but how exactly do you proc the melee combos? do I need to perform the combo moves within a field or through a field like most of the projectile combos work? or do I need to wait for target to have a condition on it, like flaming or frozen for the combos to work? Any more detailed guidelines on that process would be helpful

seems like EVERY time I log in with 2 of my characters, I get an auto-invite from some guild – I’m not sure how they tagged it, although I suspect I got friended or something and someone wrote up a little program to auto invite me every time they saw me log in – I want to report them, but I’m not sure who is sending me the invite, or what that report would fall under – spam, harrasment?

gold farmers – I have absolutely no compunctions about reporting them, but I’ve been torn – other games have a report category specifically for Gold Farmers, but GW2 only has spamming and scamming as the most likely categories – does it matter much? I’ve picked spamming as technically if they deliver goods based on their advertisements, I can’t really call it a scam – what have the rest of you been reporting them as? spam, scam or harassment?

thats all for now – any answers or insights to any of those questions would be appreciated