Guild Wars 2

Hi all,

I’ve come back to Guild Wars 2 after a really long time out, in anticipation of Heart of Thorns, and a lot seems to have happened whilst I was away.

I see many of my armour pieces, bits of equipment, other stuff (like town clothes) have changed in terms of what they do/how they work, as well as what appear to be huge revisions to how skills and builds work.

Back then, I ran a high precision build that could produce large numbers of crits and shatters, but I’m unsure if this is still viable. I see condition mesmer isn’t viable anymore, which used to be quite popular with staff users.

Just to give me a chance to get back into things, can someone just relate to me a decent build for standard PvE? Not dungeons, not WvW… Just something that can get me through normal encounters/dynamic events/story quests? It’d be a big help. Then I can just pick other stuff up as I play.

For the record, I quite like Sword and Focus (obviously as Focus gives a speed boost, which is useful for getting around in generic PvE).

As it is, I’m not even fully equipped to leave Lion’s Arch!

Gudy.3607:

Nah, that event will run the whole weekend.

Thanks for telling me that. I was concerned it might be like that time we had the invasion by the Karka, which though it had elements that went on a while, was mainly a short-term thing.

Got up this morning to see an email about a cool new event for Guild Wars 2. Cool, I thought, then…

[img]http://41.media.tumblr.com/6ea5eef22881e4d2f05f8f7847f0bba1/tumblr_nui29pEyQS1rw24i4o1_1280.jpg[/img]

Is it too late to take part? If so, was this invasion just for people in American timezones?

Yeah, just to explain a little better, that’s the Eye Of The North from Guild Wars 1/where players who have heritage items go to claim them in GW2. There’s an item which when used teleports the player there, and when they “leave the instance” they go back to where they were previously stood elsewhere in the world.

It’s very small, and you can’t exit from the location – the only door is blocked up.

mercury ranique.2170:

itwill go live in the afternoon (seatle time), so thats starts at 9pm CET, not midnight

If it goes live right at the start of the afternoon. Conversely, 4:45 could be argued to be late afternoon, and that’d be near midnight.

My question seems to have been answered though, thanks all!

Now that the event has been delayed to the middle of the night EU time, we could do with knowing something. I know it might spoil some elements of what ANet have planned, but it matters.

The key thing is, the event, is it going to be like the Karka invasion? Like something which happens, and then is over and done with? As it’s now been put at an inhospitable time for us Euro players, we kinda need to know whether we should consider staying up to the early hours, or just see what has happened tomorrow. Will we lose out by doing this?

I did some of the early stuff, like Flame and Frost, but haven’t played most of it. Has anyone written a decent “story so far” guide to it? That would explain what’s going to happen tomorrow?

Due to a surprising turn of events, I have tomorrow off work, so I’m probably going to spend a fair bit of it in Guild Wars 2.

When is all of this stuff going down, UK time?

BroScientist’s explanation is a bit convoluted; as a long time Planetside player, I’ll explain a bit more.

Every base in Planetside was connected by a series of lines that formed like a “web” or “lattice”. Where these lines intersected, you had bases, towers etc.

In order to take a base, you had to own a base connected to the one you wanted to take. This meant you couldn’t go really far behind enemy lines and take a base, even if you had an army of players, because it simply wouldn’t work.

Additionally, bases that were connected to other bases on the lattice conferred bonuses – for example, if a base had shielding, bases adjacent to that base on the lattice had shielding too.

The idea behind this was to prevent the battles in Planetside being a free-for-all, and caused the action to “bottleneck” on the continents on battlelines between bases that tended to run perpendicular to the lattice lines. It was actually quite a clever system.

However, as Churros has said, WvW maps are too small. A borderland only has what, 7 “bases” (not including camps)? A continent in Planetside 1 had many more, perhaps 12-15. If you had a lattice system in a borderlands I suspect it would make them far too easy to defend, or breaking a siege would become even more difficult. Currently, if your borderland has been overrun, your force can realistically attack one of 5 targets (the closest 3 camps and 2 towers) but in a lattice, this might be reduced to 2 or 3.

The one advantage it would offer would be that it’d give an impression, without needing as much prompting from commanders, for PUG players to decide where to go – as there’d be inherently less choice, so a guess at the one or two valid choices would usually be right. Still, I’m not confident it’d give an optimal result.

Xavori.3768:

@skotie,
Let’s say a dungeon champ has 500,000 hit points. And the party looks like this:
1 – 5000 DPS
2 – 7500 DPS
3 – 5000 DPS
4 – 5000 DPS
5 – 5000 DPS

The party does 27,500 DPS. It will take that party around 18-19 seconds to kill the champ. And everyone will get the same chance at reward EVEN THOUGH player 2 did more damage than anyone else in the group. In other words, unequal effort but equal chance at reward. In this scenario, what motivation does player 2 really have to put forth that extra effort be it from better skill, all exotic equipment, whatever?

Seriously? Ugh.

It’s not a job! It’s a game and it’s meant to be fun! Player 2 should be putting in “that extra effort” because they enjoy doing that, and enjoy playing the game. Why care if other people are doing slightless less DPS than you? People who talk like this are all the same; you seem to talk as though you’re hating every second of playing the game and will only be happy at the end of the process.

People with these sorts of opinions are the reason ANet DIDN’T include detailed stat breakdowns in the game. They didn’t do that by accident, it was on purpose.

Mechanix.5719:

tbh the whole MF thing is kinda funny id rather they leave MF and just add a preview option for armor, MF is just a thing for bad players to blame so they don’t have to hurt their precious egos and the “Confessions of a MF leecher” kinda made me laugh how do we know its not someone who hates MF and has just made a post claiming to be a MFer? i run MF alot in dungeons with my guild and i certainly do not get a extra 60% loot over them. Id take a Competent MFer over some newb who runs full zerker gear anyday

Please ANet, DON’T add an “inspect” option. Let people use what armour they want if that’s your design for the game. People will start to exclude people from groups and like in other MMOs, it eventually becomes about elitist people that judge people based entirely on whether they have the right 5 superior runes and not simply by how they play, or how articulately they chat.

Meret.5943:

Kutai.4971:

Yeah. I always thought the idea in GW1 was that enemies could only ever be single-class, whereas players could be multiclass – so the skill in defeating enemies came from using that to your advantage. That was certainly one of the concepts.

No, in EotN they had enemies with primary and secondary. They were a very good challenge, especially until you got to know them, because you wouldn’t know what they were going to pull out of their hat sometimes.

Yeah, you’re right – but of course, EotN came out comparatively late in GW1’s life. I’d still say that overall, it was generally the case that GW1’s enemies were single class and that was part of the fun, using your inherent advantage over the enemies.

BrokenSymmetry.2593:

Kutai.4971:

One of the things I dislike about GW2 that I loved about GW1 was how the class/enemy system worked, namely that enemies would “play by the same rules” as players. For example, if you saw a wolf, and he was level 5, and he used a warrior skill, you knew immediately that wolf was a level 5 warrior, and would have comparable health and skills to a warrior at level 5.

Yes, this is a great point. The enemies “playing by the same rules”, and for the most part using the same skills, was really well-done in GW1. Also, in the laster expansions ArenaNet got really good at smartly composing groups of enemies of different classes (and not just 12 ice imps in a group), which made fighting these groups a lot of fun. That’s all gone in GW2.

Yeah. I always thought the idea in GW1 was that enemies could only ever be single-class, whereas players could be multiclass – so the skill in defeating enemies came from using that to your advantage. That was certainly one of the concepts.

Not that I’m coming down on GW2 for not being multiclass – just that this idea of working to the same cribsheet as the enemies was really fun, and it made GW2 very different to other MMOs like WoW.

Hawkmoon.5849:

This might be just my opinion, but I would disagree with removing vulnerability and adding poison to the staff attack.

Vulnerability makes my target take more damage… from all sources (and by sources, I mean people beating on your target). This means everyone in my party is essentially dealing more damage. This is a bad thing…. how, exactly? The four other people in your party are probably doing considerably more DPS than a stack of poison would, yeah?

I think there needs to be some understanding, here: Mesmers are not Warriors. This is not a powerhouse DPS class. I loved my Mesmer in GW1, and I’m having a blast with one in GW2. It’s hilarious watching heavy armor classes around me in events get ROFLStomp’d, as I teleport and dodge and stealth and drop a bajillion clones… essentially, I have a crazy amount of survivability that other classes lack.

I think Mesmers might be lacking in damage, but they make up for it with a host of other abilities.

Again, just my two coppers worth.

I agree with this. I feel as though the system that governs Honor Badge drops might need to take more of this into account though, because I’ve had evenings on WvW where I’ve known my Mesmer conditions have done a lot for our group, but my friends end up with loads and I end up with hardly any.

Maybe the extra damage my allies cause by vulnerability should instead be regarded as my damage? And so on with other conditions.

Actually, I have one, after thinking following my earlier posts.

One of the things I dislike about GW2 that I loved about GW1 was how the class/enemy system worked, namely that enemies would “play by the same rules” as players. For example, if you saw a wolf, and he was level 5, and he used a warrior skill, you knew immediately that wolf was a level 5 warrior, and would have comparable health and skills to a warrior at level 5.

Given, enemies had some advantages, like monster skills, and the miniboss enemies that shrugged off conditions easier than regular enemies – but even so, you knew if a player had X health at level 20, and you were fighting an enemy at level 25, the enemy’s health pool would be comparable to yours.

Some of the human (or human-esque) enemies in GW2 have enormous health pools. Consider some of the enemies in the TA dungeon. I find wailing on a human sized enemy for 10 minutes with a party of 5 a little bizarre. It’s different when it’s some massive dragon, but not when it’s an individual guy.

I do actually agree with a lot of this.

Comparing GW2’s dungeons to GW1’s story missions, I think ANet made a few mistakes with how they pitched their difficulty.

GW1 had two difficulty settings; I think they had specific names but let’s just call them “normal” and “hard”. The hard difficulty was quite difficult, requiring good coordinated teamplay to succeed (it was practically impossible with PUGs). However, the “normal” difficulty was fine with PUGs provided each individual player played pretty well.

Compare this with Twilight Arbor. I have no idea what they were thinking with some of those bosses in Story Mode. There are two problems with it.

Firstly, is it really believed you could do that dungeon with PUGs at the suggested initial level without anyone dying once? Seriously? Even on a second/third run? You don’t feel like an awesome fantasy hero running back from the checkpoint to “grind out” the enemies.

Secondly, and this is more of a “GW1 player” problem here, but the enemies are all human-sized, yet they have enormous health pools, meaning your party needs to wail on them for like 5 minutes to bring them down. I still think it looks ridiculous. It highlights one of the problems that GW2 has over GW1, that the enemies in GW1 “played by the same rules” as the players in terms of armour, levels etc (or at least they weren’t enormously different). Think about human bosses in GW1 like Galrath; he didn’t have a health pool 100x that of a player.

In my case, I think the story version of each dungeon should have been much easier, at least avoiding some of the bottlenecks, with the explorable version then being savagely difficult to reward those players who want that challenge.

Oh, one more thing. GW1’s story felt like YOU were awesome, doing amazing things.

GW2’s story (human/whispers) seems to be me taking part in OTHER PEOPLE’s stories. Am I the only person who thinks this? That the NPCs are the main characters in this grand story and I’m kinda just “there”?

digiowl.9620:

It’s just that people seems to have enough trouble scrounging together one viable set as it is. Expecting them to build 2+ sets may well find them abandoning the game altogether.

That only applies to those of you who are dead set on having the absolute best of everything; I spent less than 2 gold on my most recent armourset at level 80 for my Mesmer, and it’s perfectly “viable”, but then I don’t need to have the very top tier of stuff; I’m fine with 97% of my possible stats even if some people need 100%.

Generally, I think GW2 is very good, and this is coming from someone who played Guild Wars 1 on and off throughout its entire active lifespan.

I know some have said “it doesn’t feel enough like GW1” but I look at it from a different perspective – I’m really happy GW2 is a proper sequel and not a rehash or simply a tarted up expansion. I love the open world content, the dynamic events and the Mesmer class (the only one I’ve put much time into so far).

However, story content in GW2 is much poorer than that in GW1. The story missions are much worse than GW1’s, the overall story and characters are nowhere near as compelling, and the dungeons I’ve played so far in GW2 (AC, CM and TA) haven’t really interested me either.

I also hate paying to change traits. Being able to change your character whenever you wanted (without ridiculous WoW-esque respec costs) was one of the core cool things about GW1. GW2’s fees to respec are small, they should just be taken out of the game entirely. It’s a redundant and disliked feature.

I think if you want to define quite rigorously what kit other people in your party are using, you should join a dungeon running guild and get a party together regularly who you know and can trust to play by the same rules as you do.

If you go with PUGs, you should accept that you don’t get a say in the equipment they’re using and just get on with it, or ask for magic find to be removed from the game – but don’t blame others for trying to get the most they can out of the game. Complaining about the very existence of Magic Find is far more productive.

(for the record, I don’t run dungeons – largely because some of the ruthless analytics some people would be keen to do with the figures, should they be available, kills it for me. You should be doing it because you enjoy doing it; not because you’re trying to max out efficiency for every second you drag yourself over broken glass. If you feel you’re doing that, you should probably go do something else!!)

digiowl.9620:

Thing is that with the attribute numbers on gear, switching builds may well require switching out the whole wardrobe…

So? I don’t see that as a problem. The different selected builds would hypothetically switch everything; traits, slot skills, weapons, armour and accessories. Simple enough.

It would be nice if we could purchase these slots, having maybe 2-3 for each mode, that you could only switch between in major cities (you don’t want it to become expected faire that people have multiple builds for one dungeon!). However, failing that, as a minimum I would like to have my build in WvW separated from my PvE build, because the two builds have practically nothing in common.

Kromica.2831:

I would at least like to see a dual spec so I don’t have to change every time I decide to WvW a bit.

Yeah, I certainly think we need this. It’d be nice if your slot skill/trait build in WvW was independent of your PvE build in the same way as SPvP is.

Given, that wouldn’t fix everything, but it’d be a step in the right direction.

One of my favourite innovations in Guild Wars 1 was that the “attributes” system allowed players to switch around their build (and what in GW2 or in most MMOs get called Traits or Talents or whatever) without any payment or penalties etc. whereas many other games punished you for this, either by charging increasing amounts of in-game cash, or, in the case of some games, making such choices totally permanent.

(I’m aware that GW1 originally had this system called “respec points” or similar but that was removed from the game very early on)

In GW2, admittedly, you can respec quite cheaply (in the grand scheme of things) but it would be nice to have four or five “slots” of builds (so armour/weapon set, slot skills and traits) and be able to swap between them at will.

This applies doubly so to those of us who play both WvW and PvE, because the builds for things like open world PvE, dungeons and WvW can be so drastically different (for a Mesmer anyway).

Have the devs given any impression that something like this is in the pipeline?

I know some players get cynical about anything that costs money in-game (due to money being a purchaseable resource) but I don’t think this is a case of ArenaNet being greedy; the amount it costs to respec are tiny in the grand scheme of things (compared to armour repairs, for example) so it wouldn’t really affect the economy.

Sadly, whilst I don’t know the back-end of GW2, I can tell you this wouldn’t help. The “information” the servers are struggling to send/your machine is struggling to interpret are simply the position, direction and current actions of the other players.

Even if they were low detail actors, shadows or something similar, it probably wouldn’t work better than it does now. I mean right now, enemy players appear as generic “invader” models for this very reason.

I agree with this wholheartedly. I have no problem with French players playing on German servers, or Spanish players playing on English servers – but being on a server populated by many who don’t speak your language is inconvenient at times.

If they label servers [ENG] and I’m on one, I won’t kick off if I see a player speaking in Spanish – but it’s handy to know that English-speaking players will gravitate towards the server I’m on.

Currently, the Staff both has its clone generating skill as #2 on the bar – so does the Greatsword.

However, the Staff’s phantasm skill is #3, Greatsword’s is #4, and Sword offhand is #5 (for example).

Could this be swapped around so that all Mesmer weaponsets do the following?

1. Primary Attack
2. Clone skill
3. Other attack
4. Other attack/CC move etc.
5. Phantasm skill

This would require:
Staff – Swap 3&5
Greatsword – Swap 4&5
Sword – Swap 2&3
Sceptre – Fine
Offhand sword – Fine
Offhand pistol – Swap 4&5
Offhand focus – Fine
Torch – Fine

I know this will be unpopular with some people, but I can’t help feel that in the long run it’d be a good thing.

I’ve posted on here before about getting into WvW, and I’m getting to the point where I do quite enjoy it – the only problem I’m having is that I can never seem to kill anyone!

I mean sure, when I’m in a zerg, I add my damage to other people’s, but I rarely feel as though I’m the person who actually kills enemies. I just feel like I’ve tagged them before some Warrior comes over and actually does the necessary damage.

Today, in WvW, it was pretty quiet in one of the other borderlands so I tried to get in 1v1 and 1v2 fights with other players, to see how effective I was.

In terms of staying alive, I do pretty well. I’m pretty skilled at using blink, decoy, and summoning clones to keep people guessing – but this just means I can survive and eventually run away!

Case in point, I just had a situation where a group of people saw off an enemy force attacking a camp, and I saw a warrior with 1/2 health starting to run away. I ran after him and was in range plenty, but I just couldn’t kill him! He’s running away and not hitting me, and I got to wail on him for like 20 seconds – why can’t I do the damage I need to do? Suffice to say, he got away fine, when I feel annoyed because I feel that’s a wasted chance for a kill.

I just never seem to be able to land enough damage.

Can anyone give me some advice? I’m a level 53 Mesmer.

Well, it’s a matter of personal taste, but I don’t like that Shadow armour at all. It looks like something a shaman or a necromancer would wear.

Although I don’t like your phantasm idea, I do feel that something needs to be done about Confusion in PvE. Similar stuff to it in Guild Wars 1 (like the Mesmer skill “Empathy”) were far more useful in PvE than in Guild Wars 2, because the enemies in GW2 attack too slowly. Personally I never use it in PvE and I’m surprised anyone does, because frequently you’ll shatter all three phantasms and the condition will wear off before the enemy attacks, even once!

Not so sure about doubling the damage, but it would be a solution of sorts.

Those who are talking about the focus, too, should remember that skill 4 is pretty good, both in combat and for speeding you up when you’re just trying to get around too.

The male scholar light armour in the game is genuinely poor, whereas it’s clear that a lot more work has gone into the female armour.

If that bothers you, switch class – personally I’m hoping they put in the ability to change your appearance/gender using gems quite soon, as I’ll definitely switch gender. Some of the male scholar armour sets are incredibly poor. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen female Mesmers and asked what armour they’re wearing (because it looks awesome) and they reply that they’re wearing really basic (or even starting) armour.

Can someone explain to me how the GS was buffed?

I haven’t used it since disliking it at launch, so I’m interested to hear the changes.

I suppose that’s true, but I would argue making the male armours for scholars look as good at low levels was a pretty important feature too, and that doesn’t seem to have happened. I’m really disappointed with the Mesmer armour I’ve seen; GW1’s was all regency-esque formal clothing. It was very understated and stylish. GW2’s is comparatively poor; I’m convinced it’s because they haven’t made unique armour art for all the scholar classes, which bluntly I believe is a mistake.

I understand most of that. What I don’t get is why people find it “fun”, I guess. In my case, I often get kills and I often get killed – but I never feel as though I, the player, really contributed much to the outcome. It just seems as though the winner is always the team which has more people in a given location, and as you have very little control over that (because it seems on my server, Desolation, everyone just runs around seemingly at random whilst our locations all belong to BOTH other teams who seemingly fight each other on our territory better than we fight either of them) I don’t “get it”.

If I didn’t have to pay for armour repairs in WvW, I’d give it a few evenings to try and see if there was more to it – but I’m not prepared to sink the kind of cash necessary to get up to speed (or be totally terrified of dying and as a result seemingly not do anything!).

Can anyone offer some advice? People seem to really like it so I can’t help but think I’m missing something very important.

So, just had my first go on WvW and it was quite frustrating. Ran to a large battle near a base or something, couldn’t seem to do anything. Ran to somewhere quiet to try and do something there; straight into a massive group of enemies and died again.

Anyway, rather than rage about it, I’m assuming that there’s actually something to WvW that I’m currently not getting, and I’m OK with that, being a beginner.

So I ask, what do I do? Spawning for the first few times, what should a beginner do in WvW? People don’t seem to party up or anything, which seems strange because I’m unsure of what they expect to accomplish on their own.

I’m a Mesmer, level 41, if that helps.

Hi all, hopefully I can get some kind of answer here.

Are there any plans (ideally soon) to allow players to change their in-game appearance and even gender, perhaps even paying gems to do so? This was possible in Guild Wars 1.

As a Mesmer I’m dissatisfied with the state of the male armours – to be honest I think the female ones look far, far better and appear to have had much more time spent on their design – so I want to switch to a female avatar.

I really hope this is coming, and it’ll be days, not weeks or months. I would readily pay a small amount to do it right now.

Actually, I would say in general that male armour is underwhelming in the game for scholar classes too – whereas clearly more time has been put into the female armour. I had hoped ArenaNet would have changed this policy since Elementalist had the same issue in Guild Wars 1, but it doesn’t appear as though they have.

I really hope they give the ability to pay for a gender/appearance switch.

The mesmer off-hand sword skill “Illusionary Riposte” is meant to have a cooldown time of 12 sections.

The mesmer train “Blade Training” is meant to reduce the recharge of sword skills by 20%.

However, when I take the trait and use the skill, the cooldown time is visibly over 14 seconds. This suggests that instead of reducing the cooldown, “Blade Training” is ADDING 20% to it.

You’re right – but technically, I think the problem is that there should be a channel of water that goes over the top of the wheel, and drops water DOWN onto the wheel. These are called “overshot” wheels and use gravity to help move the wheel; they’re more effective than the standard “undershot” wheel.

So it’s probably that the original design had this channel, and the current design has it missing – mainly because of that water particle effect.