Guild Wars 2

Thank you everyone, you have been very helpful

Hello everyone,

I recently bought HoT, after a while I was not playing. I had all characters at 80 during the original game which I played for quite a while.

I decided to start with a thief my new experience in HoT content, just as I started with a thief at launch.
I had enough points to unlock pretty much everything, but the full Daredevil tree which I’m working on right now, staff by the way is a very fun weapon.

I’m running around with Staff and P/P for doing open world, which honestly is my main activity in game, I’m an explorer and I like to try soloing everything (and often failing ). I’m not a PvPer so I don’t usually bother doing anything in sPvP or WvW, I prefer to stick to PvE.

I would like to ask you a few questions:

1 – I unlocked gliding and shroom super jumping, is there a preferred order of other things I should work on or should I just wing it?

2 – I have a few full exotic sets, zerker, carrion, knight/soldier, etc., so I’m doing okay, but how do I obtain ascended weapons? Do I need to craft them? I hoarded materials for years, everything is at the stash cap, meaning that I cannot store anything anymore. It shouldn’t be too terrible to get all materials, even if I’m very scarce in liquid wealth (gold), but if I can farm it I can make it I guess. Oh, I’m a Huntsman if that helps identifying what I have to do.

3 – How can I grind some gold? Not looking forward to make thousands, but say a couple hundreds maybe? Which is the best way?

4 – I heard someone say legendaries can be crafted now, is that true? I think it may be referring to precursors, but I’m not sure. If it’s possible, how can I work on one?

5 – Is there an experienced thief that can give a few tips on open world or general pve builds? Eventually for raiding in the future as well. A link to some website is also equally welcome, I’ve been really out of this game for too long and I have to find my ground again.

The biggest issues this game has are these, in my opinion:

- Loot should be looted and not bought with currency: it doesn’t make sense, it’s quite silly and it’s boring. You do your job x times/day and get paid. I do that in real life, don’t want to do it here.

- Lack of roles makes a boring metagame. I can’t tank, I can’t heal, I just get to do two things: dodge and dps. Yeah “support” too, hahaha.

- Large imbalance in classes/traits, too few combinations are really playable, some weapons are horrible, some traits are placed randomly in the trees. Some classes need some serious work.

- The world is a beauty, exploring it was really fun, but dungeons/events are lackluster. I can’t wrap my head around champion “trains”, I guess nothing has to make sense anymore in a fantasy game, everything is about farming at maximum speed.

I don’t think this game is “fixable” as it’d require a lot of work and probably would annoy just as many customers as it’d make happy. I enjoy it mildly, I swap classes very often for variety, but I’m still waiting to see if anyone is going to make a new MMO that doesn’t stink, after so many years I lost all hopes.

The reality is that most players take the easy route and with no way to measure one’s contribution, paired with the “I play how I want” mentality, makes at times dungeon runs undoable or extremely painful.
The ranger class is good enough to do the PvE content currently in game, it may suck for some of the content, but in the end it’s a burden on the player to perform adequately, not just the class.

I play ranger, thief, warrior, mesmer, in dungeons, building up an engineer because it’s a load of fun and it can be very effective. From my experience (and I date my MMO experience back to 1999) ranger is not top of the line, but it’s a good class to have along. Of course the difference between a ranger that stacks 25 mights on his pet at the start of a fight charging in with s/w and a shortbow ranger with a bear pet is quite large, as it should be, pretty much like a GS only warrior that misses half of the times with 100b and an a/m + gs warrior that does a proper rotation.

I’m not one to tell people how they have to play, but after I give them a bit of time to figure out things, if stuff doesn’t die, I say my thanks and take my leave. I can fail for a dozen minutes, because in a way, having a less than stellar group can be fun as well, but not wiping for more than half an hour without even the hint of progress in understanding what’s going on.

In short: I like playing ranger, if I’m given a fair chance, people are usually happy to have me around, I bring nice stuff, such as my frost spirit, my healing spring to help melee people with health and conditions, my good dps and a couple good buffs as well. When required I can have stability for an eternity and a half.
It’s not a perfect class, but as soon as pets will take 90% reduced damage from AE attacks (it’ll happen sooner or later, even Blizzard had to suck it up), it’ll be almost there.

Oh, while I just dabble in the non PvE content, bunker rangers seem good at sPvP/WvW.

You deleted a mesmer, you deserve pain and suffering. Anyway good luck on getting it somehow restored.

Never happened before, but I’m in the club as well, errors! errors everywhere!
Oh well, will check another time.

The cheaper way is to make a copy of the whole GW2 folder (remember screenshots are stored elsewhere, usually under some Documents sub-folder).

When that’s done, download the installer, let it run and pick the installation folder, etc.
Once you’re downloading game files, stop the patcher, and locate the installation folder, then overwrite all your files from the previously saved folder.

At this point all you have to download will be new patches and not the whole client.

Hope this helps.

BrimstoneAshe.5043:

I’m somewhat new to GW2, but not new to MMOs. I’ve played many of them. I’m reading the thread here and something just don’t seem to click with me. Such as:

“Why should I group? There’s no incentive.”

I would answer, why shouldn’t you? There’s no penalty.

…. snip….

Perfectly stated. You reflect pretty much my opinion.

GW2 needs only two things to please me further: champions and dungeon bosses dropping something worth the time spent killing them and a truckload of bug fixes.

I, for one, wouldn’t enjoy raiding, in fact I’m quite sick of it, given that I raided for the last 12-13 years and have seen it going from epic massive battles (EQ) to Dance-Dance-Revolution-10-people-coordinated-ballets ala WotLK/Cata-WoW.

Raids are in game already, called Dynamic Events.
Instanced Raids with gear grind, tier after tier? Give me a break, please, every other game does this already.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQNAsaVlUmCO3ey5E95Ey2jKMn4J/DkVPjryqA;TgAg2CroIyQkgIrYOikEB

copy/paste link in a new tab or window.

As I said I like to live and don’t like to die often, so I trait a lot towards vitality, dodging (I’m dodging REALLY often!) and surviving, mobs go down easily nonetheless.
Armor is generally power/precision/crit dmg. oriented (berserker at higher levels), but again I favor valkyrie trinkets (power+vitality+crit dmg) for extra hit points.

Thieves are quite fragile, boosting vitality is a step towards a smaller daily repair cost, as it helps against those large hits or accidental wrong moves, but in the end dodging and running/blinding appropriately is what keeps you alive. I like an HP buffer, others may favor more toughness or a mix of the two.

As you see I love having some traits helping with initiative regen, I don’t like being starved for too long (but which thief does after all?).

I enjoyed a lot the D/D condition spec, with caltrops and all that jazz, but in the end, for my playing style, S/P with SB was the best past level 50 or thereabout, where mobs use a load of knockdowns, conditions and so on.

Infiltrator’s strike is just that good if you don’t dodge an attack or are suddenly swarmed by enemies.

Complementing the set, HiS for healing (SoM is also good if you AE stuff with the SB or love pistol whip really much), Signet of Agility mainly for the condition removal, shadow refuge, because I prefer to retreat than to die and I can save random strangers around the world with it, Signet of Shadows, because I’m always in a hurry (and running fast is awesome for levelling), with Thieves Guild as elite, to burst down veterans or help me deal with large pulls or special mobs.

I usually have a Major sigil of Fire for both the SB and the /P, lots of AE damage procs help.

Hope this was helpful, cheers.

I wouldn’t mind a PvE survivability buff. I never PvP, so I truly don’t care about it, one way or another, I just hate seeing mobs in dungeon literally one shot me, while with my ranger or warrior, for example, I can take a few hits (not many, that’s granted, but certainly more than one).
I’m not even 80 yet, so I have no idea about end game, oh wait, there is none, let’s say fully exotic/traited thief, but survivability needs to be bumped up, either with more hp (moved to medium hp classes) or though some serious armor/vitality bonus in traits (I spec with many points in the +vit line and some in +tough one.

Weapons:

- D is a very good weapon, it has although very high initiave costs for some skills and Danicing Dagger is not really good anymore, I’d bump it up by 20-25%, partially stepping back on the recent nerf to it.

- P is lackluster, but really nice to play in terms of “coolness factor”. A bit more damage, changing body shot to some different effect (cripple maybe?), headshot cost lowered by 1 initiative, and black powder… well, it’s ok if it’s not the end of the world, but it could use some sinergy with a P/P build maybe.

- S is a weapon i really like, all skills have something interesting to offer. I just wish PW damage to go back up to release day, nerf the heck out of it in PvP.

- SB is awesome, don’t touch it, unless you want to put all skills at the 1200 range of course

I wouldn’t mind also to have a few utilities reworked, namely traps.

Delolith.9645:

Miele.6537:

Nobody plays games to be tortured, and yet that is exactly what the end of game of every MMO that copies WoW does.

You are very wrong. I can say that after 13 years of playing MMOs, the only things that I remember from the previous games I have been in are the good times during hardships.

Hardships bond you with the game than rather being a filler to your free time that you could also spend just staring blankly to TV or just a white painted wall….

That is exactly why I think so fondly of EQ1….not just because it was my first one…but due to the hardships the game had. For example WoW was my second one and yet I have no fond memories of that game when I left back in 2006 rather games that proved to be harder (in every possible way, yes even grindwise) and challenging after it. It has nothing with which game was first, which second etc.

To make it simple, I can still remember the first time I managed to buy a Jagged band or a BIBS in Feymart by shouting in the zone. Even that was difficult and wasn’t a one button purchase but required quite a bit of a bargaining. I can tell you that after trading over 600g of things in GW2 I cannot even remember what the hell I have traded.

Hardships bond people with what they are spending their time on. If you think people don’t want hardships then you are probably an FPS player or a WoW generationer. Sorry for the generalization beforehand….but I try to make a point.

I wasn’t against hardships per se, I quoted a comment I agreed with, where raiding in a specific game (which was inspired certainly by EQ) didn’t give you anything, but what you needed to face the next raid in line. In EQ I remember that raiding gave you an edge in doing relevant content, either with less people or with higher efficiency.

EQ was unique in having loot that lasted years, not mere hours of gameplay and heading to a dungeon, say Sebilis, to get that loot, with raid gear was considerably easier, made players feel more powerful and yelded more chances at loot in a given timeframe, or camps could be tackled with less people (e.g.: Crypt-Emp with 3 or 4 players or similar feats).

In WoW raiding gear, except for vanilla-age PvP, gave you…. 15 minutes faster daily grinding? Yay? That was the idea behind my post. Sorry if I haven’t been quite clear about that.

P.S.: I love WoW, loved it and will love it again probably. I’m a crazy with an account full of 85s (didn’t buy the last xpack yet), but I admit that I’d like to stick more to a character and do many crazy “relevant” things with it than just rolling alts after alts. to pass time.

I had to think for a while before posting something, maybe what I write will spring up some discussion.
Disclaimer: I’m not overly concerned with vertical or horizontal gear progression, level cap increase or what A-Net has planned for GW2. After 13 years of MMO’ing around (EQ, EQ2, WoW and others less lasting experiments), having been a “hardcore” player as well as a “super-casual” player, depending on age and free time at disposal, I honestly don’t care anymore, I just apply a simple rule “If I’m not having fun, I stop playing”. I’m approaching the age of 40, still a gamer at heart, but I see things in a different way nowadays from most youngsters, in terms of commitment, fanboism and all that jazz.

I quote an extract from a person who posted this on another board some time ago, while talking about another game (yep, it’s WoW), but I think it can be applied to every game in this genre, more or less. It has been a hot topic of discussion among my friends for a while.

While GW2 could be actually excluding itself from this dissertation, thanks mostly to the existence of WvWvW and maybe, just maybe high level DE (but that’s stretching it quite thin), in a way I think it can still be included in this discussion.

Here it is:

[i]_The biggest problem with MMOs today is that the incentive to chase the carrot has been cut.

This is a result of the decision by WoW and its clones to reverse the motivational link between character progression and play style progression.

In WoW and every one of its clones, raiding is the end, not a means to the end. Your goal in WoW is not to increase your character’s capabilities, but to raid harder content.

The implication of this design decision is that you are never able to exploit the rewards you gain from raiding, because there is nothing to do with your character except to raid harder content, and harder content, by virtue of being harder, makes you feel weaker.

For those who enjoy the challenge of raiding and for whom the feeling of having defeated challenging encounters that others have not is a rewarding pursuit, that’s a sufficient incentive.

For every one else, it is not, and the transparency of WoW’s carrot lies in this – the sole incentive of raiding 3-4 hours a day in WoW is to get +betterer on your character sheet. The +betterer does nothing for you aside from opening up harder raid content that then pussifies your character, resulting in an experience that is equivalent to going in circles – you start off getting owned, then you gear up and obtain parity, and then the game throws you into the next tier and you get owned again.

It is a sadistic exercise in endlessly torturing the player, whereby the only reward is that you get to say that you’ve gone through more tortures than the other guy.

Nobody plays games to be tortured, and yet that is exactly what the end of game of every MMO that copies WoW does. Instead of asking the question – why do players want to raid and, better yet, why do they want to game – MMO developers today assume that players are willing to put themselves through whatever hardships they throw in order to get +betterer on their character sheets, ignoring the concept that nobody gives a kitten about whether they have +10000 betterer – it’s what you’re able to do with it that matters.

This is the first thing that has to change._[/i]

I’m an old MMO player and a not too old (!) person. This topic made me post for the first time on the boards as I have usually little interest to argue about things game related.

I’m 100% against any stat increase from the current tier of exotic gear. I could understand a legendary weapon with a minuscule bonus (even if I think the way to get it is quite debatable), but more powerful gear?
What’s the point? I hardly know what stats my armor gives me, only their combination is interesting to enhance a certain aspect of my character.
Every other game has the gear treadmill and every other game had me playing it only until I was max level and then quit.
I refuse to partecipate. I won’t do anything dramatic like deleting my characters or crap like that, you’ll just stop getting some money from me every month (and I even said I wouldn’t spend any in this game, boy I was funny!). I’ll always support a game I approve, but I’ll stop right away to send my hard earned cash in your direction if this comes to life.

GW2 is an amazing game, it has its issues, it needs more polishing/balancing, but kitten it looks good, it’s very playable, enjoyable, has a bit of a skill curve and has fun PvE that keeps me on my toes instead of making me fall asleep. You got it right in terms of combat and pretty much everything else (except I don’t like Sylvari too much, but I can live with that :P).
Don’t ruin it. I ask you kindly to reconsider your course of action.
Whatever you do, you’ll never retain the MMO locusts, as another poster so eloquently stated.

Hopefully waiting for a statement in this direction.