Guild Wars 2

Yeah reading the ama quite a few people mentioned that when given an easier option people were dropping the hard mode and just doing easy and it caused a divide in the community. I guess that if it was something so uniform then people who enjoy the social aspects of raids must be a tiny minority although there is a big chance that a lot of that is hyperbole. There are also people in that thread who say without it they would never have raided though which again could be hyperbole because maybe they never tried harder modes.

Someone mentioned that lfr negatively trains you because you expect to be able to do hard without wiping, I’m not sure if I buy that. Yes maybe the first few times you would notice that but after a while you’re going to learn that wipes are a part of a harder difficulty as it’s a consistent theme. It’s kinda like saying people in gw2 are negatively trained because they don’t wipe on any other boss.

The ama shows me that inclusion is negative towards the in crowd but hugely beneficial to the out crowd, at least with WoW. I guess at the end of the day you have to decide which group you’re going to support

I still don’t understand what about having the option to run lfr impacts your social experience. Lfr surely has far worse rewards right? If you were already doing hard mode and were getting better loot, better content, a more social experience etc why would you suddenly throw that away and lfr then quit? I just find it absurd when I see groups for fractals of all levels!

Surely the entire basis of lfr is a training mode for people to get some experience of the raiding content to then move up to the harder modes of its for people who find even very easy on a game a legitimate challenge and if they were trying to blag their way into your hard mode groups it would cause the whole everyone in my team sucks/ li fakers rage you see here

Interesting. What exactly about an easy mode on wow was problematic for you? Could you not just ignore it completely and just run the old hard difficulty? Or was it because raids felt that they had lost their exclusivity? I’m curious because no one seems to think that fractals are a bad system

If raids were as hard as Arah there wouldn’t be a problem I did Arah the other day making an everyone welcome group. There was one wipe but after that everyone tried harder and we got through it fine. Its unfair that people keep conflating the two.

Raids don’t tend to have everyone welcome groups. You can make one as I have done but I don’t often see them. Far far far more common is hundreds and hundreds of LI and very very occasionally you see “training”.

People say they want challenging content then they say hundreds of kills only please. I expect they do that to try and get through it as easily as possible. Bit of a contradiction no?

Well here’s how I feel about it.

There are a group of players who want hard content and they have hard content and they are happy. They should get what they want and there is nothing here that needs or should be changed.
There is a section of players who want nothing to do with the raids and they aren’t forced to do the raids and they don’t care enough to have any kind of discussion about it.
Then there are players who want to raid but they’re not at the standard for it. There may be some cross over with the second group here because they came to the conclusion that raids would not be for them because of their difficulty.

For that 3rd group we’ve discusses at length the issues they have in this and other forum topics and there are 2 major points.

1. It’s impossible to get a group.
2. The difficulty of the encounters is too high.

As for point 1. If all the people who feel that way were willing to group with each other then it would be a problem solved. I’m currently in the process of gearing my character and when I have done I’m going to create a thread inviting people who feel raids are too hard because I want to either fight through it with them together. Or if there really is a place in it that’s objectively too hard then we can be a bit more specific to arena net as right now the topics have been extremely vague. However, I am not sure how successful I am going to be in that endeavour. When people say they can’t do the raids because they are too hard me saying hey come join a static with me is probably going to cause them to say, “No! Were you not listening to us??? The content is literally impossible and setting up a group isn’t going to change that. I refuse to touch it until Anet do something!”. And to be honest, if that is their position I can’t blame them…I really don’t know how we’re going to fix this but I guess all I can try to do is help the situation slightly by having a group that isn’t going to force a specific meta build and isn’t going to force hundreds upon hundreds of LI.

Raids are something I’m not convinced is good for the health of an MMO. If you google something like “Raids made me quit” you’ll see that they’ve caused problems in pretty much every mmo ever made and I’m wondering if there’s something fundamentally broken about the concept. But I’m not going to be able to be more specific about that if I’ve not really tried multiple times to enter the raid and have no idea which specific parts need pin pointing.

When people say they have come from other raids in MMOs I would be curious to find out how the base games difficulty curve matches up with the raiding content. It may be that we are looking at the difficulty level in the wrong direction here. Something that Guild Wars 2 is absolutely horrible at is communicating how skilled a player you are. For instance I decided to take some meta exotic gear on a character and go do some of the season 2 bosses and just literally do nothing more than hold the 1 key down and be semi competent on my dodges. Most of the time I either killed the boss or the boss was extremely low before I died at which point I could finish them off in the downed state and rally.
What am I supposed to take away from this? Should I feel awesome at the game for soloing these bosses? You could argue that its reinforcing me to play badly but if I’m clearing content like this then how is it communicating to me at any point that I am playing badly?
Going through fractals 1 to 100 is a difficulty curve and perhaps you’re expected to have done that before taking on the raids, this is something that is often communicated to people on this forum. However its not really very well communicated in game. Also I have spoken to people who say that you should raid first because its a quick way of getting the ascended you need to do the fractals. It’s…a little backwards but if it really is that efficient a way then perhaps they do have a bit of a point.
Perhaps the developers need to add a little bit more hard solo content so that people find the room to improve themselves, rather than being told over and over and over by the content that they are amazing at this game by being able to clear absolutely everything with little to no effort. If you go on a league of legends community you will often see people blaming their team and not themselves and perhaps we have something like this going on now. Both from the high level people and the people who are asking for hundreds upon hundreds of LI (must get a more experienced team syndrome).
I’m not entirely sure that an easy mode would completely fix all of this but it could potentially help a little bit. Although I am starting to see that it’s a lot of work for little pay off.
I dunno, call me a bit of an SJW if you must but I just feel that there’s something a little bit sucky about the fact that there is content that some people may never ever get to experience, but I guess that’s just part of the genre and its far worse in other mmos.

AP was an awful gating system and that’s probably why you never see it anymore. The problem it had is you could grind completely unrelated content to bring it up. I suppose though that comparative to li, you didn’t have to go into arah to get the first ap point in the first place.

Is Arah a fair comparison?

I’ve done Arah several times, its one of my favourite locations in the game and if I mention it in guild chat it doesn’t immediately start an argument. Also the tokens go directly into your wallet so there’s none of this 200+ LI or gtfo stuff going on with it.

To be fair there is a difference between content that you decide not to do and content that other people decide you can’t do. Suppose for whatever reason even after “gitting gud” that person is still not at the standard for raids. Even though they really want to do the raid they might not be able to do so if no team will ever accept them. If you decide that easy content is beneath you then the only person who’s restricting you is yourself.

Alright that’s a fair point I’ll give you that it isn’t new with raids I remember dungeons being zerk only.

However a complaint I’ve heard people say a lot is “random builds” and “random gear”. As for traits I really really really wish that anet would add the system they had in gw1 when you could 1 click a build and save/share it with people. Although if all the traits were at least somewhat balanced with each other then you might be missing out on a bit of synergy but it seems with the “random build” complaint that you can really kitten yourself if you don’t know what you’re doing and I’m hearing complaints on the other side that a potentially legitimate strategy on their side is being disregarded as it isn’t meta.

I know I’m contradicting my original position here a lot but I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people and thinking about this.

I’m still not completely convinced that a story mode would be a bad idea. It would undoubtedly slow development and it may put some people off doing a harder mode and here’s why:

One of the most disappointing fights in the game for me is the zhaitan fight at the end of the personal story and I’m not going to go into it because it’s been talked about to death. If they decided to make a hard version of that fight I’m really not sure that I would go and do that because it just feels so flawed that tweaking the difficulty wouldn’t be enough to fix it. From a lore point of view the way it ended mixed with the name of the guardians elite specialisation has really changed the way I feel about the elder dragons now and I’m not as invested in the HoT storyline because of it.

Story telling in a video game requires experience, it’s keen esthetic. It’s not the same as reading a book. However a book can tell you something. Not being at the skill level to raid but being able to experience the story has its own mistique about it knowing that there’s something in this game you can’t just auto attack to death is…. well it’s interesting, I don’t know if it’s a good or a bad feeling.

Technically having a story mode that’s independent doesn’t change the above, and it is a position I stand by. But I think if they’re going to do it and it ends up half kitten d am I going to be in the position I would theoretically be in if they added zhaitan hard mode? True, in my mind, the flaws in that fight aren’t to do with difficulty, at least exclusively. But if it was harder originally you would have experienced something you had to overcome.

I think when it comes to builds there needs to be work done on both sides. Perhaps raiders are too ridgedly attached to the meta and could ease up on builds that are at least realistic in what they try to do and arena net need to really consider why we have things in this game that are objectively terrible and either buff or remove them. There’s freedom of choice and there’s noob traps… sometimes I feel it’s the second. The problem with builds I find is that in gw2 it’s a lot of effort to change your stats when you compare it to gw1, this sounds eased up a lot with legendary armour but it’s the catch 22 if you want it to start raiding! It’s a gigantic pain in the butt if you later find out that what your wearing and what you’ve worked towards is bad or has been nerfed but it’s also not impossible to go and get the gear…. theoretically at least, slightly off meta will be insanely cheaper than meta but if it’s not enough for the average raid group then I can see why you might feel screwed.

I don’t know. Perhaps the solution isn’t as simple as I originally thought it was….

If you do what I did and ask someone to open a completed instance then you can experience the story and cut scenes. In fact you get to experience potentially MORE of the story then if you went into a normal raid. People who play this game are typically impatient and ever since gw1 people have been ratty about people who don’t skip cutscenes so the idea of them letting you go off the optimal path to read the paper scraps is laughable. I’m not saying nobody would let you do it but it’s a much more relaxed environment to allow you to do it.

In terms of rewards there are actually some you can get. I got some green weapons and medallions and empyreal fragments. There’s also a vista and hot mastery point to grab you don’t get a yellow but it’s already more than enough reward in my opinion and it should be for you if you really want the story. Go to silver wastes and get 3 yellows in the same time instead.

All that’s missing really is the encounters but easy mode versions would just be a chore imo because they’ll probably just make them Tanky but no damage so you have to spend ages auto attacking with no threat of dying much like the world bosses. That might be fun for some people but there’s so much of that everywhere else. I can sympathise with people who actually do want the story as it’s pretty important closure stuff from a gw1 perspective but I feel you’re harming the case talking about rewards because it’s just bolstering the stereotype these people are quite rightly fighting against!

Crinn.7864:

MerlinGamer.7410:

So today I went into the completed raid instances again today, I spent a good 2 hours walking around, looking at all the areas, reading every last little scrap of lore. My friend adverised the group as “FREE LORE- Come experience the story of <raid> – completed instance – all welcome”. For the first wing nobody came, but the 2nd 3rd and 4th people did come and we saw maybe 20 different people total.

Are you sure they where there for the story and not just to do the parts of Legendary Armor collections that can be done in a cleared instance?

Ahh well one guy did run in a very specific direction and did something and left in wing 2, maybe that’s what he was doing I did wonder if there was something like that. However the rest of us followed the commander as they explained everything and spoke to the NPCs. I was tempted to ask them if they had raided before but I didn’t want to start an argument.

Edit:
I can’t speak for others but I’ll try and explain why I WAS salty about the whole raiding thing:
I’ve loved Guild Wars since the first one, quite possibly more than I like this one. If you haven’t played it the White Mantle where a large part of the flame seeker prophecies (the base game) and they were also a huge part of the final content update called Guild Wars Beyond which was supposed to be a bridging piece for leading into the sequel. It was….very disappointing to find out that if you wanted to carry on that story line it was inaccessible without a gigantic amount of effort (and if you listen to some people which I was doing completely impossible: sucks to be us we’ve just missed the boat, season 1 all over again etc). But I’m extremely happy that I’ve got to carry on that story line now and have a look at the maps.

Earlier in this thread:

MerlinGamer.7410:

MerlinGamer.7410:

If a larger percentage of the community could experience and got into the concept of raiding then the developers would have more of an excuse to devote more time to raids, so it would likely create more raid content, not less.

If that’s supposed to happen, the easymode crowd first would have to find a consensus on what they actually want. So far, I’ve seen a crapton of different and sometimes contradictory concepts (some more stupid, some a little bit less), of which each would appeal only to a small subsection of the easymode crowd. At the current state, I see no reason to believe we’d see more raid content if they added another mode.

I didn’t quite understand what you meant when you said that. I thought that everyone who wanted the “story mode” had the same reasons that I did for wanting that and that was the “consensus”. But something that’s come up a lot is people saying that they wouldn’t be happy with just a story mode they want the reward for less effort. That’s honestly not how I feel at all. If I’m being completely honest I don’t even like the look of the Legendary armour that much! (although I think it would probably grow on me).

So today I went into the completed raid instances again today, I spent a good 2 hours walking around, looking at all the areas, reading every last little scrap of lore. My friend adverised the group as “FREE LORE- Come experience the story of <raid> – completed instance – all welcome”. For the first wing nobody came, but the 2nd 3rd and 4th people did come and we saw maybe 20 different people total.

I am extremely happy with what arena net have done here. I really honestly do not care about the LI or loot at all and have only cared about the lore and the fact that there is pretty much already a “story mode” is completely awesome and I really wish they had communicated it a bit better to me. Had I’d known that this existed I don’t know if I would have been quite as sympathetic with the OP’s position.

If you are an advocate of an easier mode for the lore and haven’t done this I implore you to go and do it. It’s very interesting, especially if you can have whoever opened it tell you a little bit about the boss as well and fill in any gaps that are missing from the mobs not actually being there. This is satisfactory to me and hopefully it is for you as well if you are being honest when you say all you care about is the lore.

People who are against an easy mode, please don’t assume that we necessarily already know about the cleared instance thing. I didn’t when I originally posted in this topic and nobody here mentioned it.

My point is its EVERYWHERE now, guild chat, map chat, forum topics. Nothing about rose tinted glasses. Perhaps it was in very very very niche specific forum topics but you have to agree the frequency of it has gone through the roof!

I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had people attacking you over an open discussion but at the same time I don’t find it surprising sadly.

Before raids came along I don’t recall a single person ever using the word “elitist” once and now I hear it several times a day. I also never saw anyone criticise someone else’s DPS or demand that people share their personal counter information. I think it is important that the hardcore player base gets some content they can enjoy as well but raids have brought so much toxicity into this game and I am wondering if it would have been better without them.

I’ll tell you one thing, this has certainly put me off ever trying a game like WoW where the raids aren’t optional.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and there seems to be many many many more voices saying that this would be a bad thing rather than a good thing. I’m… I’m not sure if I’m 100% convinced but I think there must be something there.
I don’t know if the easy mode people are dwindling because they are quitting the game or if they really have moved on.

A few years ago the biggest complaint about gw2 was there’s no end game. Perhaps this is people coming from other MMOs were end game and raids are synonymous with each other. To raids aren’t the main end game or guild wars 2 isn’t a raiding mmo which could jade new players need to realise that you can only say that with internal knowledge.

The most active forum by far is this one, granted it serves 3 game types but the majority of posts are raid related. Reddit is similar there’s always going to be raids on the front page. Unspecialised guilds that welcome anyone talk about raiding all the time which colours people’s expectations when they level up.

People are finding themselves in a situation where they’ve been fed all this information about the end game and are then being told for whatever reason sorry but we’re not going to let you do it either because the raid team is already established by now or if pugging it they don’t have the hundreds of lis needed. Of course all sympathy does go out the window when they could just make an everyone welcome group like I did. We didn’t manage the encounter but I did at least prove to myself that it isn’t actually completely impossible to put with 0li which is a claim I’ve heard and nausium.

I do think though that people who make groups should ease up just a little bit on the li requirements. I’ve seen 600 before, are you honestly telling me that there’s a huge difference between someone who has run the raid 500 times to someone who has run 600 times? Surely after a while you’re just going through the motions. What makes it particularly insulting is people with that level of li are the people who say that raids are too easy, so easy that you need hyper levels of experience to join, it doesn’t add up!

Raids are shrodingers difficulty. Simultaneously impossible to do if you haven’t already done it over and over and over and so easy that you can do it in blues. But screw those people who try to do it in greens!

Maybe this is something that only makes sense if you are a raider yourself, maybe it’s impossible to really fathom any of this if you’re on the outside. I’ll give you that. Although I would like to say this.

I’m coming round to the raider point of view because someone showed me a completed instance today and it’s really exactly what I wanted in terms of a story mode. Okay reading or watching a video is never the same as experiencing it but if an easy mode made the mechanics pointless all I’ve done is saved myself 10 minutes of beating on something that poses no threat back (a microcosm of pretty much the rest of gw2). However I wasn’t ever really told about this, maybe I’m just ignorant and maybe everyone who is asking for a story mode already knew about this and wants the 10 minute beat down thing but I suspect I’m not the only one. It was enough to satisfy me and actually quite well done but perhaps poorly communicated that it was there to begin with.

I have always been more interested in the lore than the rewards and I’ve heard the anamosity towards people who want the reward for no effort, I always thought it was a strawman but…. you can see the story, you can make a group with no requirements, you can form/join a guild…idk…is it necessarily laziness or poor communication?

Vinceman.4572:

Nah, that’s a wrong assumption.

Quite possibly although its the same blanket logic being used against me.

I’m really seeing very little evidence that raids aren’t just kitten stuff:
We can’t possibly have an easier version of the same name! I did it before it had an easy version and because it was so elite and exclusive I had a couple of extra inches, now they’re gone

But as I said earlier raids are pretty much the most polarising thing in this game. I really honestly can’t see Sly’s view point and he probably can’t see mine so I’m happy to just agree to disagree at this point really. Arena.net can do what they like! Although I think there clearly is a demand for something like the OPs original point.

So long!

The raid team could be working on non raid stuff so the fact that there is a raid team does slow down other content releases. Tweaking a few numbers in a LUA script will take considerably less time than making a cut scene and its going to move some artists/designers off other projects. Raids wouldn’t be commandeered at all, they’re preserved in the hard mode.

I’ve been playing guild wars since the flame seeker prophecies. Something Arena net have always done is taken content that has been historically difficult and over time made it easier, either through reducing the damage enemies to (like thunder head keep) or by releasing overpowered PVE only skills (something that could happen potentially with elite specialisations and according to some has already happened). What the OP is asking for is something that could potentially stop that from ever happening as the hard mode stuff would be preserved.

So far the only objections to this idea that you’ve been able to raise is:
1) It would take a bit longer to develop which is questionable.
2) An easier raid would make the term raid no longer mean the hardest content in the game which is just a linguistic semantic and as I have asked before does the fact that there is both a level 1 and a level 100 fractal that are completely exclusive from each other somehow have some form of negative effect on fractals.
3) The original design for raids target audience would change, even though it doesn’t change at all for hard mode and all kinds of other parts of guild wars 2 have changed from their original design to the betterment of the game and if they couldn’t it would be catastrophically harmful.

Forgive me but I’m not convinced about why this is a bad idea.

If a larger percentage of the community could experience and got into the concept of raiding then the developers would have more of an excuse to devote more time to raids, so it would likely create more raid content, not less.

Hi Sly.

I understand that raids are designed at a target audience and in the OPs post he isn’t saying that raids need to be changed at all. He’s asking for a separate mode where the original raid and design goal is completely maintained and preserved. If the objection is that it shares the same name would it be alright to make an easy mode of a raid and call it something different like a Foray? I don’t remember at any point saying that raids should be removed, that’s ridiculous! PVP isn’t really a fair comparison either. It has different difficulty levels and match making. It is available to the best players in the game and the worst.

I think this is a good idea, and I really don’t understand the objections.

The OP is asking for a completely separate mode with separate rewards. Your raiding experience will not be changed at all as you can just click on hard mode. If the original point was to nerf the difficulty across the board of raids then I would be with you in objecting but I don’t see the harm of a completely separate box that aims to be more inclusive.
If you buy an expansion pack then you are paying for the development cycle of that expansion pack. If part of that development cycle is based on raids then you are getting a worse deal on that pack if you are someone who doesn’t raid then someone who can enjoy all the content.

There are going to be people in this game who will never qualify for raids, the reasons are numerous:
They’re too lazy to learn their class (100% of all people if you ask the average raider)
They have bad hardware/laggy internet.
They’re not playing guild wars 2 as their main game and therefore have less practice than someone who plays this full time.
They may have some form of disability that makes playing the game much much much harder than it would someone without that disability.
They might have honestly tried as hard as they possibly can and are just not at the required skill level despite that.
They may value role playing or fun over the math™ when gearing their character (unlike a table top RPG MMOs seem to punish role play instead of reward it).

I understand that if you want to do raiding content you don’t want to play with these people and that’s fine. It’s your group after all and you can invite who you want. But because everyone who raids thinks this way it means if you’re one of these people you are unlikely to ever get to do the raids.

Currently there is no easy way of experiencing a raid to completion. If you want to raid now then you kinda have to set up a guild and lead it yourself. This is of course not impossible but it requires a lot of time and effort on your part for something that you might later find out really wasn’t for you in the first place. It’s also something that gets harder and harder as the pool of people who haven’t raided before and want to is getting shallower and shallower as time goes on.
Most of the pug groups that you can join are expecting hundreds upon hundreds of kills even on the first boss of the first raid.
You can try to start a pug yourself, (something I did once, and it actually worked out which was pretty awesome although we didn’t manage to get the kill). Perhaps given time you would eventually succeed this way, I really don’t know.

Fractals has a level 100 mode, does the knowledge of the fact that some people are running level 1 fractals somehow ruin the fact that you can do 100? If so why? I don’t get it!

People who raid say they like the difficulty but I think what they really like is the exclusivity. Whenever anyone asks for an easy mode people seem to get a bit anxious despite the fact that they could just stay on their hyper elite hard mode and ignore the easy mode and I don’t really get why…I’m kinda really put off by the idea of raiding in this game to be honest. I know forums contain the vocal minority and its unfair to tar everyone with the same brush but raids seem to be such a polarising toxic thing in this game. I know I’ve taken quite a negative stance in this post and I probably have insulted some people and I’m sorry about that. I just wish I understood your point of view on why allowing more people to experience something without taking anything away from you is necessarily bad

Are you also maybe fighting things with harder armour?

Well I do tend to crack all my greens and blues for the luck. I am not hurting for magic find at the moment and it is steadily increasing.

I suppose really after you’ve run all the dungeon paths you are comfortable with then its the best time to go and do the world events? Or is it more that the world events rarely (never?) fail, so it’s more reliable then finding a good team? Even if Ectos go as high as 40 silver, I can still buy 15 for 6 gold and have 4 gold change.

I’m not too worried about materials for crafting, I was looking at buying the exotic version of the beserker’s staff after seeing how crushingly expensive ascended is, and despite it being the most expensive of the crafted staffs to buy, it is still less than 75% of the cost of crafting it yourself, Artificers seem quite unlucky in that regard, with some staffs even going for less than 40% of the crafting cost. Of course, you can’t do this with ascended, but like I say, I’m still not sure if it is worth it.

Thanks for the help and thank you for the build! I really needed help with my traits and that seems to work splendidly, I went to southsun cove and found that I could solo level 80s with ease and didn’t have to switch between all the attunements trying to heal and find the damage. It’s amazing how much of your characters strength is having the right setup, I wish I had known that a year ago!

I spent a good 12 hours playing today on a massive binge and did some dungeon paths and a lot of the world events. I made about 10 gold and 14 ectos using this build, it’s helped me an awful lot, although something I’ve noticed is that I am doing a lot less than a lot of the other players, but maybe that will come later when my skills get better.
I have a question about that though, 14 ectos is only about 5 golds worth and in a similar amount of time I made 10 from this dungeon team, why do people bother with the world events if you can just run dungeons and buy ectos?

I was talking to a guildie about ascended today. I feel that it is a nice goal to go for but I worry that I am wasting my money. A guildie told me that it will cost about 80 gold to go from 400 to 500 and then a further 40 for each ascended weapon. Somehow, I don’t really see how I can make that money back using this, seeing as it is only a 5% increase, it means that I would have to earn roughly 2400 gold with this weapon before it makes its value back. I know that the ascended is entirely optional but I can’t really shake this little feeling that I’m doing it wrong if I’m not playing with the most optimised build.

Thank you for the reply, I do kind of understand how each element does something a little different but the problem I have is I’ve gone from very easy to super hard in one second and I just feel overwhelmed. I don’t even know which weapons I’m supposed to use any more. A lot of people rave about the daggers then some times they say use the sceptre and the dagger. All the guides are full of contradicting information or tell you to use the most expensive possible gear in the game with no offered alternatives.

I wish that the PVE hadn’t been so easy. At least in Guild Wars 1 there were points where you had to stop and improve so the overall difficulty was more gradual such as the crystal desert.

I think really I need to play a new class, one where there is a very solid build that I can master and guides that are in a similar vein rather than being binary opposites.

I took a long break from this game because I got very frustrated at the sudden ramp up of difficulty once you get to the end game.

I play as an Elementalist and I got through all of the personal story and 100% the world with quite possibly the stupidest build in the history of this game. I had random traits and was slowly killing things one at a time with Earth staff, slowly waiting for the bleed stacks to kill each enemy. I am absolutely convinced that you can do this game with literally any build if I managed with that.

Now that I am starting to play the dungeons and fractles I’ve had to obviously change my build, now I tend to run a staff in water mode and keep spamming my water skills, occasionally dropping an ice bow or a firey great sword. I’m following some cookie cutter build that I don’t understand fully because the elementalist traits are really confusing to me.

However, I don’t really feel that I am making all that much difference to the team, the water heals for very little compared to the damage output of the dungeon monsters, and although I think the removal of conditions is extremely useful I do get the feeling that these teams would be able to run it 4 man without me.

I spoke to a more experienced guildie and he says as an ele you should be reacting to the enviroment, watch your team, stand in to tank when you see the tank failing, heal when they need it, dps when they need it etc etc.

This is way way way out of my depth, I’m new to MMOs and I’d much rather have a single role that I could learn to master. I know the hype is “you can do anything” but I’m sure there must be more specialised roles out there. So what should I do? I could stick as an Ele but I don’t think I’ll have much fun, I’d rather play as something easier, then again maybe I should stick with it based on all the time I’ve invested

Many thanks

OP are you honestly playing the same game I am?

I very recently started playing a new character. You could argue that I am already benefiting from my account magic find (sitting at a rather measly 30% at time of writing, 20% higher than it was when starting to focus on this new character). I do have a wallet, but I haven’t dipped into it at all, everything I have spent on her has come from the money she has made. Yes there has been inflation but it hasn’t hurt me at all! Seriously, it hasn’t. I can cut down green wood with a copper pick and make an enormous return on it, far more than my main ever got on release. Crafting isn’t essential to level up. I am taking a very causal chilled out route where I 100% the low level areas in order, and I have so much experience that I will most likely be way into my 80th level, way before getting even close to Orr, although I do admit I have crafted a little, and by a little I mean I am level 5/500 due to daily awards. Just playing a couple hours a day for a month and I bet you anything you will catch up to at least 40% of the player base!

Hello

I have been playing Guild Wars 2 since the 3 day headstart. I had a long break in the middle but have recently come back and am once again playing this game as my only

game. I have 2 characters, one a level 80 Elemenatalist who has 100% the world and a level 61 Ranger. I have 2700 Achievement points and have recently got the Golden

I am not writing this to complain in any way. I absolutely adore this game and every point I am about to make either has a completely acceptable work around or I see

the reason why the system is like this which I will try to go into, however there are two areas in which I think this game could be somewhat changed and improved

from my point of view. Of the two the one I would like changed the most is the first one, the tool tips:

Tooltips
————

One of the biggest problems I have with experimenting with new trait builds is the lack of informative tool tips. For example:

Air Tree:

Electrical discharge: “strike your target with a bolt of lightning” What does this bolt of lighting do?
VIII: “Casts a boon based on attunment.” Which boons?

Water Tree:

Soothing Mist: “Regenerate health when attuned to water” How much? Does healing power affect this?
Healing ripple: “Heal nearby enemies when attuning” Ditto

I don’t want to harp on this but I’m sure you get the idea. I know all this is possible to figure out through testing and through the wiki, but its a pain to alt tab

to find this out, I guess I just don’t want to have to rely on external sources.

The other problem is I don’t have a full understanding of how my stats are affecting my build. Should I be worried about losing 100 power by swapping out these stats?

How much does 100 power benefit me?
I would love it if the tool tips on the skills worked like the ones in League of Legends with AP, how it tells you the base and then tells you the amount added in a

different colour.

I understand why these facts may be left out of the already over populated tool tips. After all, skills like “static field” (Ele, staff, air magic) is already a huge

tool tip due to the complexity of it. But I don’t understand why this information isn’t somewhere in the game. Maybe this extra information would make the skill bar

confusing but why can’t we have all the intricate information on the skill section in the hero window?

sPVP
——

I love what Arena.net has done with this. As a hardcore Guild Wars 1 player I am absolutely thrilled to see that they maintained their stance on having the characters

all balanced at the same level, so you don’t get one shot by someone who has been playing much longer than you based on nothing but gear. This is by far the most

important philosophy of pvp and I wouldn’t have it any other way. However something thing I really liked in Guild Wars 1 was how there was cross over between the 2

modes. I liked that you could sell the sigils from HA and get fancy skins that you could take back into PvE. I understand fully why they haven’t done this for Guild

Wars 2. It is an effort to keep the PVE only people out of a completely competitive mode which I can fully understand. But it would be nice if there was some minor

reward that I could take back to PVE even if it is just a little bit of EXP. I think it would be freaking awesome to take a character from level 1 and take them all

the way to 80 in sPvP, even if it took twice as long. You could almost do this with Guild Wars 1 when they had the battle arenas spaced out in Ascalon, Yaks Bend,

crystal desert and finally Droknar’s forge. I like that steps have started to be made to combine the two, ala the bringing PVE skins into PVP and I think that is

wonderful. Its great that those who have worked to get a lovely skin can now bring them in and I understand why the other way isn’t possible due to the

relative ease of getting rarer skins.

tl;dr

Love the game but it would be great if tool tips could be more informative.

Ahh okay, well it turns out I’m in a T3 server. What would you define as under geared? Do you mean anything under the max?

by T1/T2/T3 do you mean it like white, blue, green, yellow items?

I do understand that I need to get some practice in more than anything else but I’m feeling quite self conscious about my gear. I am level 80 but I still am wearing greens such as my gloves and the trinkets, one yellow ring but the rest is green (other than the ascended amulet) I don’t know if Arena net take statistics of who goes in with what gear, I just want to make sure I have at least the average that everyone else has so I’m not losing on gear, just on skill. Do most people have everything at least yellow?

Thanks for the reply.

I know your stats are boosted in PVE and fractles but I don’t know about WvW.

Hi guys.

I am completely new to world vs world. I’ve gone in a few times and have a few of the absolute basic ideas: i.e. take the camps first as they are easy and zerg up and I expect to get more proficient as I get practice but I wonder if my character is ready. I’m playing as and Ele with a P/T/V set both with a max staff and max dual daggers.

I realize that your HP is scaled to that of a level 80 but are your stats as well? Most of my gear is exotic now apart from my gloves the trinkets and rings but should I be staying in PVE until I have the max gear?
I often worry that I am very behind in terms of gear as I don’t have any ascended stuff as of yet (other than an amulet) and I wonder if the majority of players tend to have all the best gear.

Thanks for such a detailed reply.

Running AC sounds like a good idea, I was wondering what I should be doing now I’ve hit 80! I’ve been fighting the weaker monsters a lot lately as I’ve been going for the 100% world completion and I’ve been going to starting areas (I’m at 56% now). I tend to die a lot in Orr as there are a lot of sticky situations.
I think you’re right about memorising all the skills, it will take some time but it needs to be done, I have nearly bought every skill for her now, I am just missing the 2 wolf elite but I’m only 2 or 3 sp away.

I don’t stick in one element, however I only use fire and earth. I find air to be a little weak with the way my traits are set up, I do use it to get about though; and I only use water when I know I’m going to die and need some last ditch attempt at healing up, this happens so rarely though.
I do want to work on my pattern though as it doesn’t trigger any combos at all, I don’t know if combos are all that good but even if they only help a little they’re better to have than not right?

Hi everyone.

So I’ve finally got to level 80. I’ve crafted decent silk armour and have a pretty good staff. I can kill 90-95% of the stuff in this game with very little effort. I’ve tried the dungeons a couple of times, but have failed and died a lot in them.

Using the staff I tend to start in fire and use the 3 (flame burst) as they are running towards me I put the 2 (lava font) between us for them to run though and switch up to earth, I try and time the 5 so they are trapped in the font and then keep casting the 2 until they bleed to death. I use the Glyph of elements elite and only cast it in earth mode when I’m in trouble and hope it will draw the agro for me. I really like the glyph of elemental harmony which I will cast in earth or water if I’m desperate for healing.

The support skills I’ve no idea what to use and tend to just ignore them entirely, also I’ve no idea what traits to use and my current build is most likely complete junk.

I’m still a huge noobie at this game and find it very confusing. I’ve tried fooling with the build calculators but it’s all Chinese to me at the moment. I’ve read the wiki several times but I still can’t tell if more health is better than more armour, more damage over vunrability, if might is worth it in the long run or if I have a better chance of dealing damage with conditions or with fireballs amongst other things.
How do you go about learning all these things? Is it just a case of reading the wiki over and over until it makes sense? I feel that I should play some sPVP at some point as it can be the ultimate build sand box but that feels even more complicated as I don’t know what items to buy off of the merchants making it even more confusing!

I’ve read an awful lot of posts on here and it seems most people favour daggers, should I start by scraping the staff?

Many thanks in advance!