Guild Wars 2

Any idea why the wood (ancient and elder) spiked a lot more than the metal (ori and mithril) did?
EDIT: My guess would be people are bee-lining for weaponsmith stuff, but is there something else I’m missing?

…actually I have no idea because I thought everyone going nuts over greatswords would’ve driven metal up more…

laokoko.7403:

How did you guess tier 4 material will go up in price?

At the moment I’m guessing T4 is higher because of the Crown Pavillion farming. Most people farm with L80s, so NO T4 drops at all. I also notice an increase in demand for all T2-4 mats when the patch went live, so my guess is a bunch of people wanted to craft-level up some alts to take part in the farming.

@OP: I’m actually not seeing market-wide inflation that you need to invest to maintain against. I’ve seen a slight increase for T2-T4 crafted stuff because of the banning of the gather-bots (and currently because Crown Pavillion mainly injects T5 and T6 fines/rares), but equipping a level 80 with rares seems to be about the same cost as it was since ANet released the world event guaranteed rare drops.

It’s also harder to predict because ANet likes throwing in recipes and things with the specific intent of balancing the market. Now if you can predict that pattern you stand to make quite a bit… I can’t ATM :P

@Null, Aarku: If you did tell someone about something that was profitable and was “ruined”, did you ever check back in a month or so? I find the people who blindly follow suggestions “rage-quit” that trading post game and it starts to work again.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I’d rather say Anet implements better rewards not for grinding, but for doing a variety of different content and rewarding exploration. …

^ I love the way you word this, as subtle as it may be. Reward people for not grinding rather than punishing them for grinding. So far ANet’s been about having some “base” reward that drops if whatever you’re doing seems like a grind. How about the opposite, where you have a “base” reward that increases when you don’t grind?

Yes it’s true that it may seem like a “grind” to change your farming cycle to include many unique events, but I’d much rather have that then beating up the same centaurs over and over again (Overlord’s Waypoint chain, Ulgoth chain).

Seconded!
I’d rather see usability and performance fixes than more living world content if that’s what it takes. Your enemy should never be the user interface.
A customizable “friend/foe” colors would be great. That’s a feature that’s been around since Age of Empires II and would be good here.

If there was some etiquette against undercutting that was actually enforced/followed, then people would make quite a bit of coin by buying out a whole ton of an item to artificially raise the price. This would happen quite a bit more in some of the less popular “chef” materials and components: lemongrass is an example I saw before.

I have a few examples of crafting mats that didn’t sell in my screenshot – all “match lowest seller” postings a while back.

I’m not too sure about the idea in its whole because you’d just end up with another farming spot that involves a bunch of mob-skipping. If it’s open world people would just leave characters parked near them and ruin the idea that way (like a jumping puzzle), and if it’s instanced then you’ve just made another dungeon. If what you wanted is the latter, then crafting materials involving dungeon tokens would be better because I’d hate to see how many people would get kicked out of impatient dungeon groups for trying to gather. (I’m 50/50 with good and horrible dungeon experiences BTW)

I do like parts of your idea that can be developed separately:

1. One part of your idea I do like is more themes and varieties for the nodes. Right now only vegetable (sickle) nodes are really unique, while Orrian metals and ugly trees give you the same stuff as Frostgorge’s metals and ugly trees.
2. A “truly” explorable high-end area! Rather than the dungeons right now where “explorable” is actually just being led by the nose by NPCs to get the golden chest at the end, just have some high end area where putting together a group and clearing the thing to get shinies that are deposited all over the instance is the goal.

Doesn’t dungeon token redemption have a “dumb” confirmation screen though?
(I don’t remember because I don’t redeem tokens enough times.)

I’m just pushing alternative ideas against lag or bad mouse clicks (easier than you may think if you have a high sensitivity mouse or otherwise) that are not the silly “Are you sure you want to purchase ____?” screen that annoyed me like crazy when I was trying to get a mass amount of Dragon Festival food from the merchants during that event. Over-buying on the TP is definitely an issue that flippers exploit (e.g. one of the video guides, long before this patch, say that’s one source of “income”).

Anyway, this is just an idea – not something for myself, because my most common mistake is misinterpreting an item, something not solved by any number of “dumb” confirmations :P One time I bought the wrong type of Karma armor, so there went 48000 Karma into the Mystic Toilet™ with 3 other exotics to redeem something from it. Other times I put the wrong sell price while flipping.

With the account-wide gold wallet, there seems to already be issues with accidental “buy instantly” of expensive items on the trading post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/new-wallet-wth-is-this/first#post2578764

Players should have to enter a quantity before doing a “buy instantly” on the trading post to prevent this. A simple idea would be to initialize the quantity box on the “buy” screen to 0 or blank, so you can’t buy something just from butter fingers pressing the button.

This shouldn’t be too intrusive because the only real case where someone would “buy instantly” exactly one of a lot of items is if they were buying a set of equipment for their own character, something that doesn’t occur that often compared to other trading post activities. Even then, most of the clicking would be to find the items they want. Trading post flipping almost never uses “buy instantly” for one item (either you buy many or you place a custom order), and crafters just about always need more than one of something. Even if you’re doing “discovery” crafting only you’d buy multiple crafting components to combine them in different ways (e.g. 4 berserker and 4 cleric inscriptions to make 2x staff, 2x trident, 2x focus, 2x scepter).

I think it should be harmless enough to not place a “1” beside “How many do you need?” on the trading post.

As a trading post flipper a confirmation to buy on the trading post would drive me crazy. A better option would be to make the quantity field start out blank (thus having the buy button greyed out), so you would have to enter a quantity before buying something. I don’t think there’s any trading post activities that make you go down the list and doing a “buy instantly” for exactly one of a whole bunch of things, so it won’t be intrusive at all. Even if you wanted to outfit a character you’d likely want quantities (e.g. 2 daggers, 6 runes, maybe 1 of each armor).

Since that above idea is probably never to be implemented, my advice to you would be to avoid the “buy instantly” screen whenever possible. When browsing items, I just go straight to the preview (right-click right from search results), and whenever I select an item, I instinctively click on “place custom order” so I’m at the buy orders page. Pressing the wrong button there would just place an order of merchant value + 1 on the order which you in most cases could take back or have minimal loss.

I’ve seen a screenshot of someone transumting a Mad Memories skin http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mad_Memories:_Complete_Edition onto an ascended back piece if that’s what you’re talking about.
I haven’t tried the same myself though.

I’d buy a power metre before worrying about consumption – modern computers don’t take up that much power at all, heat or not. Most CPUs don’t go beyond 100W. (Find the review for your video card and they’ll usually show power consumption.)

Also computers are designed to failsafe before blowing up unless you have substandard parts (e.g. power supply that costs less than a cheap bottle of wine).

If you do experience slow downs or crashing, I’d first check that your cooler isn’t clogged with dust. I had a full day LAN party at a friend’s house at about those same ambient temperatures with no problems. Don’t try to fix “hardware” problems with software workarounds especially if you do anything important on that same computer (e.g. keeping documents or other stuff you don’t want to lose).

From simplest to most complicated I’d rate the classes I’ve played for a few levels as:

SIMPLEST
Ranger
Guardian
Thief
Mesmer
Elementalist
MOST COMPLEX

Note however that I call “complex” the idea when base notions of the class come from major traits and combo fields. For instance to get a defensive “buff” on a Ranger there’s Signet of Stone, or on the Guardian there’s a nice selection of shouts, while on Mesmer and Elementalist you’re looking at either traits or laying down and activating your own combo fields (or having a partner that knows what to do with your fields).

@Khisanth
I guess you’re right that all characters can play the same at the most basic levels, but I recommend not trying to spread that idea that much
Try to kill a (not veteran) Earth Elemental with the guardian’s mace, an Ele attuned to water (any weapon), or a Mesmer’s scepter with only the first two weapon skills. That would be slow and boring :P

I play on US servers (Jade Quarry), but it’d be hard to find any server that has all areas populated just because the player base has migrated to either endgame or speed-leveling content. In PvE, if your server is active at the time you’re on, you’ll normally find people in the human and Norn starting areas (because of their high frequency of events), Kessex Hills (for the event chain around Overlord Waypoint), and wherever the living story leads you.

I don’t play sPvP but I like Elementalist for WvW because you can blindly spam staff AOE while defending to quickly rack up player kills for the daily/monthly, plus all of the speed boost and stun break to be able to move around the map. That said, I’d try dusting off your Mesmer because that class too gives you a lot of options.

That’s exactly it: The processor has a “base” clock speed of 1.5 GHz but will automatically clock to 2.4 GHz if heat and power allows. Essentially some workloads use less parts of the processor than others and therefore the processor can up its clockspeed for these workloads without exceeding the power limits that the manufacturer set up.
You can read about Turbo core here: http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_a6_3500_apu_review,4.html

Even if you did manage to overclock that computer (overclocking is usually locked out completely on laptops for good reason), you’d likely just hit your overclock speed for 1 second and then the CPU will fall back to the base clock because it got too hot. From someone who tried to overclock a laptop back in 2006 (for GW1) and switched to a desktop, I’ll tell you that your time is better spent working for a higher performing machine than overclocking a laptop that isn’t meant for overclocking in an attempt to make a game perform better. That includes if you have to look for a job to get more money.

As for your question about drivers, just get the newest video card and sound card drivers for your laptop. The sound ones are usually found on the support page of the computer (Lenovo for you?) while video card drivers can be on the support page, or you can try newer ones directly from AMD’s web site. See: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

From what I’ve seen, ANet wants to keep the value of a lot of stuff stable, although some patches take less time than others. For instance it looks like they don’t want to make any T6 fine mats cost much more than Glob of Ectoplasm, which is why they added the salvage ecto to dust thing. You can see the same balancing attempt with Flame&Frost with a whole lot of recipes taking unreasonable quantities of stuff that had the TP price crash to vendor value. The one I haven’t seen touched yet is silk and thick leather, but with this history it’s not too much of a gamble to say they’ll do the same here too.

In my opinion, if you’re “greedy” and want to maximize your gold, farm whatever makes the most gold for you. For instance. one of my guildies leaves 4 alts logged out beside any place where two Orichalcum can be found next to each other. At least for the short amount of time you’re gathering that Ori, the amount earned per unit time beats CoF Path 1 speed clears (although you then have to wait for nodes to respawn). That’s fine for him because he only logs on about an hour a day.

There is a small technical difference between farming gold (e.g. doing stuff for the reward chest that gives 50s and selling a whole bunch of junk to vendor) and farming stuff to sell on the TP for gold. The former ADDS gold to the economy while the latter REMOVES gold. At this moment in time I doubt it makes much of a difference for an individual trying to get gold however.

With Risen knowing your enemy is a really good thing. The generic Risen (human, Charr, Norn, Asura) come in three varieties:
Thrall – Moves quickly, most of damage comes from poison: To get away from these you have to run really far away or use cripples.
Brute – VERY SLOW but if they ever hit you, you’ll be knocked down: They also do more melee damage than the Thrall. Keep moving and you’ll almost never get hit by them.
Plaguebearer – Runs up to your face and explodes, taking out half your health and putting 4 conditions on you: They’re pretty easy to spot because they have a green aura around them, and they stop moving and have a charging up glow right before they explode. Try to get the timing down between when they stop moving and when they explode, so you can do a dodge roll right as they explode. If you’re too lazy to do this there’s also the ranger skills Shortbow #3, Sword #2, or Lightning Reflexes that almost guarantee you get out of range of said explosion without having to time it or anything.

Notice one thing about all these Risen? NO RANGED attacks. With a Ranger, pick up an axe in your main hand and run around them in circles throwing the axe at them just outside of melee range. The fact that there’s a lot of them will actually make you do MORE damage with a main-hand axe because of the bouncing effect.
Risen do start to get ranged at higher levels, but these ranged ones also have different names (Krait, Corrupter, Pirate, Noble, etc).

Yep I got a character slot as well, from my stockpile of gems I got by putting about half my TP profits into gold→gems. (Thanks to whoever’s forum post I saw a month ago talking about this idea.)

It seems EVERYTHING in the BLTC is about exploiting the impatient, including the gem exchange.

Yep, we’re called alt-o-holics!

I want to see more interesting underwater content before any weapons are added. Most of your time underwater is spent prodding at very large bosses that clip through everything because they’re so large. See how clunky a battle with an oversized fish is compared to a battle with an equally large mobile boss on land (e.g. CoF P1 boss).

The underwater experience is also quite underwhelming depending on the class you play. I hate bringing my Guardian underwater because of the low damage attacks (most DPS seems to come from static fields that even dumb mobs get out of the way of if they’re not sinking). On the other hand my Mesmer seems a lot better underwater with more damage, an actual melee, and the same ability to sink or pull.

You also need an underwater town or staging area for people to show off their underwater weapons.

I’ll definitely buy an expansion the same way I did in GW1. To hook people like me it’d be useful if the expansion added stuff like bank or character slots (or came with 1000 gems or so for activating the expansion), so there’s value even if you don’t dive into the expansion’s content.

Now the question is will I actually play the expansion content. I played Factions from release until I ran into the Kurzick/Luxon junk (and only completed it 2 years later). I never actually leveled a character through Istan in Nightfall, taking again years to complete the campaign. I only finished EoTN in normal mode. (The silly me bought all these expansions the week of release as well.) For Nightfall, I was actually too lazy to play through the content to get hero skills, so I bought up the PvP skill pack which also unlocked said skills on my heroes.

It looks like someone bought out a lot of them on Tuesday (supply went from 1143 to 598 in an instant according to TP trackers). Also for most of the week someone’s been buying a lot of them faster than the stock has been getting replenished, driving prices up.

Last activity / last represent is definitely long past due. Other ideas would be:

• Per member, Time since last partied up with guild (don’t try storing what the party did because the database would get huge): This is to weed out “lone wolf” or people who spend most of their time with another guild and switch back to feed off guild bonuses.
• Whole guild stats:
• Average influence / day, week: to plan if guild can afford constant use of upgrades
• Counter for PvE events, Dungeon runs, WvW events in the last month: for officers to see what members like doing, and for members to see what kind of guild it is

Of course there’ll be the idea that people who are shopping for a guild can get turned away because of undesirable numbers, but this practice should be pretty limited.

I disagree with automatic promotion, because if a guild member gets hacked they’ll automatically rise up from being a bot and possibly get the guild’s bank cleaned out or other nasty stuff like that. This would also cause havoc in big guilds because someone may decide after grinding 200 DEs and getting auto-promoted that they’ll kick everyone.

I say good idea, as long as you can equip the right gathering tools and you don’t die too often. Even with the gear drops down-scaled (which may actually net you more coin at certain levels), you can’t do much better if you want to make in-game coin while you level.
Another thing is the mobs have combat mechanics that you actually have to care about (Karka projectile attacks, reef drake confusion), so it’s a good place to try your character’s abilities, second only to dungeons and roaming in WvW (which is completely different).

One con as Electro noted is you don’t get much other map completion, which would be a big disadvantage if you do Guild Bounty or Trek on that character.

My guildies found the cat tonic helpful on Norn for jump puzzles as the cat is one of the only transforms that can jump. (Although I don’t have any problems with “medium” sized Sylvari and Human myself.)

For non-cosmetic stuff, my vote goes to Ascended amulet. All of the other stuff can be obtained from methods much easier to obtain than Laurels.

Endorphin.1382:

Anyone know what’s the easiest way to get Exotics?

I’ll refer you to what’s now one of my favourite Wiki pages for gear: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Equipment_acquisition_by_stats

The difficulty of getting exotic gear depends on the stats and equipment type. For most armor and some trinkets, Karma is probably the easiest method, provided that you do the daily and monthly achievements. After that, it’s a toss-up between dungeon tokens and crafting, assuming you have level 400 crafts (or trustworthy friends/guildies that can craft for you). Most exotics are overpriced if you get them directly from the trading post. For me crafting is easier than getting dungeon tokens because I can’t do the same thing over and over.

That said, if you’re like me you’ll be experimenting with builds and you’re better off sticking with Masterwork or Rare equipment and replacing it piece by piece with exotics.

As mentioned, don’t get hit with the projectile reflect and the young Karka just becomes a weak melee enemy (although with a higher HP pool).

The Veteran Young Karka is close to having so much HP you’re better off running away if you want to solo (especially because they’re positioned near other nasties that could aggro). The Veteran (not young) Karka has so much HP you’ll get bored or killed trying to solo it :P If you really have to fight a Veteran Karka, run up on rocks or something so it doesn’t hit you with the rolling attack.

Kill mobs that drop bags and salvage items (humanoid or centaur mobs usually) if you want to get a specific level of fine crafting material, leather, or cloth. Bags and salvage items (e.g. leather strap, patch of fur) are always at the level of the mob and not your level.

You won’t get much luck from weapons and armour as that is scaled to your characters level most of the time.

+1 to this – it took me 4 months of playing before I noticed a day to night cycle shift, and that was from someone’s legendary changing colour. Is Tyria set in a binary star system where you get a bright star and a dim one? That’s how “night” feels to me in this game.

You can take it another step by making the mobs change at night, like the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. horror survival game series and the Fallout games.
EDIT: I wouldn’t mind a horror-survival either where it’s SO dark you get melee’d out of nowhere if you don’t have a light source.

Hopefully this isn’t just because of people with horrible contrast and gamma settings on their monitors – if it is, I suggest a tool-tip on the first night or dungeon they see:
“Are things too dark? Tune your brightness and contrast until you can see the difference between these two graphics.”

• For WvW, there’s no way, unless he’s on a neighbouring server and he will be your opponent :P
• For open-world PvE, if he gets put into an overflow you can join HIS overflow (party up with them, right-click on their name, and click “Join in <insert area name here>”). There’s also having all of you guesting into another server as already suggested.
• For instanced PvE, no transferring is required: Just party up with all your characters in the same area as dungeon entrance, and everyone is put in the same instance upon entry.

Having the “little” body is useful for jumping puzzles or certain close-in encounters, because the Norn (and Charr) cameras can get a bit messy if you happen to be in an area with a low ceiling. The other note is that Norn characters look like they’re running in slow motion to some unless they have a speed boost, so that may distract you as well. Assuming you only have that one character, I recommend trying a Norn guardian and play around with that for a bit to see if you’ll get any remorse for choosing Norn – you’ll have access to all the same armour and all weapons except axe, rifle, and bow.

The armor visuals is always a personal preference thing that I won’t even try to discuss.

To add to this, any crafting material related drops (salvage items, bags, fine crafting mats) are always scaled to the level of the mob rather than your level. For instance you’ll never see a Vial of Powerful Blood from a level 8 troll but you can get Weak Blood.
(Of course that same level 8 troll could drop a lvl 80 sword that salvages for Orichalcum if you kill it with a level 80 character.)

If you don’t die often you can just wait until most of your armor is broken before you update your armor. That’s how I know when to update my elementalist’s armor. There’s quite a few cases where replacing the armor isn’t much more than repairing outdated armor. Remember broken armor can still be salvaged or sold to a vendor (not trading post) for the same price as if it wasn’t broken!

TenClub.7659:

But if that was truly the case how did level 35’s do this when the game first came out?

The dungeon was different when the game came out. One of the largest changes was that before, you could go to a waypoint IMMEDIATELY after you died, which was a lot friendlier to new players because essentially you could continually retry a boss without it resetting health unless everyone died. Many dungeon runs had this “death-train”, where members would run in, put in some auto-attack, die, and rinse-and-repeat until the boss was dead.

Despite being a necessary change to make dungeons more interesting and to let players know of the game mechanics, the end of the death train also meant the end of completely disorganized dungeon groups that could still complete a dungeon.

Vik Flagge.8324:

Simply put, regardless of player skill level, a sub-80 character does not have the UTILITY SKILLS and TRAIT SKILLS/POINTS to contribute.

I suppose we differ here. I’d much rather have a level 35 that knows their character and the mechanics than a level 80 that can’t dodge or doesn’t know what a red circle is, regardless of traits. Remember the elite skill unlocks at level 30, so as long as the character did a healthy deal of skill point challenges, they’ll have a set they could use. Such a character would also be more helpful than someone who crafted or button-mashed in a DE farm all the way to level 80.

Some quick stuff from wiki to support the skill point thing:
If someone crafted to 80 they’d have access to 75 skill points.
If someone got to level 35 by clearing all the skill point challenges from starter areas they’d have 30 (levels) +~35 (skill point challenges)=~65 skill points

In either case you should have enough to get a set of utility skills that would prove useful. I guess the problem is the game cannot measure how well a player actually communicates or plays, so people instead revert to looking for level 80s, because they’re relatively easy to find at this point in the game’s lifetime.

Thanks for sharing! I’d love to try this some day. I could see this being a ton of fun in AC because the pets may be able to clear more stuff than players in the spider queen encounter, or maybe even do graveling mounds because they’d only aggro stuff that was hit while they were actually attacking.

At least half of my guild avoids pick-up-group (PuG) for dungeons for this reason – not just kicking, although one of my guildies was kicked in a similar manner WITH A LEVEL 80 because they were a Necromancer and the naive “pros” think that’s a bad thing. I myself refuse to run anything other than CoF Path 1 with PuGs, and that’s because my guildies already trained me to do an effective clear with it.

A lot of the “pros” that do this kicking and whatnot are actually pretty bad themselves from what I’ve seen. In a couple of my dungeon runs, the person swearing the most into the chat box is also the person contributing the least. Also a level 35 with up-to-date gear can actually perform better numerically than a level 80 with bad gear with scaling, but you won’t be able to explain that to most groups.

It’s crazy but really you have to weed out these acidic personalities by trying to strike up conversation before the dungeon run, or avoid PuG dungeons altogether. You can also record the names of PuGs with friends list or screen capture.

This thread will inevitably get a reply with a user claiming to have no problems with PuGs, but just like getting a Porous Bone vs an exotic item in Orr, it’s random.

You don’t have friends or guildies to help out? The issue with personal story is the reward is too small (even for completing the entire story!) so it’s not interesting for PuGs.

I do remember that personal story quest – I completed it on my Ranger at level 80 with rare magic find armor (so you don’t need exotic but Masterwork at least would definitely help). If you want to try to solo it, you’ll want to build your character to fight a prolonged battle (prioritize healing and toughness over damage). This doesn’t necessarily mean Cleric armor – just have some way to stay alive while your self-heal is recharging so you can survive the risen waves.
If your character build relies on killing the enemy before you succumb to all the damage (e.g. a Berserker Warrior’s build), then you’ll have a problem.

Focus on leveling up your character rather than getting money if your goal is just the Grandmaster book – Master Traits are good enough while leveling anyway, and your traits are reset when you get the next book anyway.

My advice is to make money (coin), do whatever you can to not lose money. Don’t use waypoints too much, try to get all the stuff you can with Karma, etc. Go exploring in areas with Renown Hearts of level 35-70 that involve combat, and complete those Hearts. That should net you good XP and gold, from selling of T3 and T4 crafting materials (e.g. Vial of Blood, Vial of Thick Blood).

Thanks for posting the drop rate results!

FallenTear.3710:

Can I use any soft for " clicking " ?
I mean how terrible for this while open exotic kama n bag =.=

If you have a “gaming” type of keyboard or mouse you can program a macro to spam the left mouse button. You can set a macro that’s a single left-click and set it to repeat. (Looks like Razer and Logitech have that option, I’m sure others would too.)

To UN-thread jack, here’s a few other side-effects that I can think of (I agree with the ones in the OP):
4. Decreased demand for Zerk-Warrior gear (Berserker armor and weapons).
5. Increased demand for whatever gear people think of for the next repetitive farm: If it’s open-world, that probably means magic find gear. If it’s another dungeon, disregard #4 because it will probably be Berserker gear again.
6. Increased supply for whatever comes out of the new farm. If it goes back to Orr, that probably means T6 mats will go down in price due to Heavy Moldy Bag drops for instance.

One thing is for sure – there will be a new farm. Judging from the CoF P1 mentality, the farm will have to be profitable and easy-to-access for the impatient. That second property is why I don’t believe a naturally long or difficult instance like Fractals or dungeons with minimal skipping can be the next farm. If the chance of failing due to a bad group is higher, then the farming types would rage-quit before the run can be completed.

It’s no doubt a problem, although ANet seems to be waiting on this one. They are introducing new recipes to address surplus Chef stuff, so there’ll obviously be new recipes that involve silk and thick leather introduced. Whether those recipes will actually be used by the player base is another question altogether.

I think downgrade recipes have to be approached carefully as well, because you’ll depopulate the lower level zones, especially the ones that don’t have other popular stuff around.

As for people getting rid of stuff at vendor +1 (and at a loss compared to just straight vendoring it), most of it is from people who don’t know, but some of it is players who want to empty their inventory without a merchant around (e.g. dungeon farming). I saw a CoF P1 video where the author did that after a run, to “sell instantly” his entire inventory.

@Risingashes – That would also work (essentially removing a “price floor” set by the vendor), but then it would be strange because linen would vendor for more than silk. There’s also the possibility that this can go all the way down to 1c like a lot of chef stuff does, but I don’t know if the excess is that great.

22 Stretched Rawhide Leather Square for 20c a piece, 4 months ago
(That was probably just a meet lowest seller thing back when I posted it – I wasn’t playing the TP that much back then.)

You’ll pretty much max the game with that computer, at least on a conventional monitor (not the “3D” monitor or multi display). I have a little less GPU (660 Ti) and about the same CPU (2500k overclocked) as what you’re getting and I was fine in WvW zergs with almost maxed 1920×1080 graphics (no AA).

I’m in agreement with the post right above me that 32GiB RAM is overkill unless you have a need for it (e.g. 3D art / design, simulation, photo editing, etc). I run small virtual machines (little Linux instances) while I program on my computer and 8GiB is still enough for that use.

What I’m not seeing in there is POWER SUPPLY! Make sure you get a good one or all those nice components will go up in smoke along with the power supply. You’ll also want to have nice cooling in the case for the 7970 or it will sound like a jet engine or just plain overheat. I’d say a well-placed 120mm intake and 120mm exhaust at least (or more / bigger fans if you want to turn the speed down on the fans).

I leveled my Guardian with magic find armor – I really didn’t notice a difference. (Then again, it would be very hard to prove it since you’d have to level 2 characters in the same way except for the gear.) I always use magic find food while leveling (the level-appropriate +power, +MF), although that’s mainly for the XP bonus.

This is especially true for having a level 80 already: Spec your character to level faster (either higher attack or defense if you die alot). Use the saved time by being able to complete lowbie stuff faster to sit a level 80 at a world event and sell off the rare you get.

Ninja’d but I’m pretty much in agreement with the above poster.

JustTrogdor.7892:

I’ve been holding off taking a character past L11 to make sure I want to put the time into the character.

Some character classes need to be taken to level 30 before really showing their effectiveness (traits). For instance a Mesmer with no traits is one of the squishiest classes in the game, but I can trait my level 80 Mesmer to be the last one standing in dungeons while still doing damage the whole time.

JustTrogdor.7892:

I am a bit of a loner and like to solo a lot. Will this work out past early levels given my great sword weapon set?

That’s how I leveled. As I mentioned in the other post, walk into the middle of some mobs, 5-5-4-3-2 and use other skills if the stuff you’re slashing isn’t dead yet. My Guardian is now at level 80 and I still do that.

JustTrogdor.7892:

However I would like to try WvW. Do guardians have to be able to fly around in circles while pressing every attack key without having to look which ones they are pressing?

It will come with experience. Find a combination of skills that you like (it may even be one skill) and think of when you’ll want to use it. Then practice that combination a few times. When you’re comfortable with that combination, try another one. (Like that 5-5-4-3-2 Greatsword combo I do against weak enemies.)

My “Get the !@#$ out of there” sequence for my guardian is something along the lines of:
1. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Virtue_of_Justice
2. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Virtue_of_Resolve
3. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/%22Stand_Your_Ground!%22
4. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Renewed_Focus
(Those are steps, not the keys I use.)

If it feels really awkward to activate skills, then you can consider changing your controls. For instance, I have the following keys remapped from default:
Z – Heal
X – Utility skill 1
C – Utility skill 2
V – Utility skill 3
Therefore I’m not reaching over to 6,7,8 when I want to fire off shouts and things. This obviously isn’t the only way – I’ve seen some combinations with SHIFT, XBOX 360 controllers, etc.

JustTrogdor.7892:

What do I have to look forward to playing a guardian as opposed to other classes?
(…)
What should I focus my weapon and armor upgrades on (I didn’t even know they existed until today lol)?

For solo play, the Guardian is much more “forgiving”. I think you must’ve already found that out that you have a few more options to save yourself from being squished than say… a low level Elementalist running with daggers. My Guardian stayed pretty much the same experience (for solo) between level 15 and level 80. It does however get a lot more group support skills – these skills aren’t that powerful on just yourself but they’re life-savers for groups. My Mesmer’s best friend is a support character (like the Guardian in my guild) when I’m trying to go all-out attack.

You’ll very likely dislike the Guardian’s ranged and underwater options. If you’re reduced to fighting ranged you’ll be bored out of your mind firing off those scepter shots. The Guardian’s ranged and underwater attacks are essentially there just to give you something to do while all your “support” skills are recharging. If you’re at range with a group, you’re better off spamming off all your support stuff (shouts, condition removal, projectile reflect, might, etc) to help your friends do more damage. If you’re the main damage dealer at range, expect it to be a long fight!

The weak ranged damage applies to WvW as well, but Guardian counters that by having some of the best skills to block projectiles in the game. You can also fight melee in WvW to avoid the weak ranged altogether – my favourite is annoying the !@#$ out of my opponents by knocking them down and immobilizing them with a hammer / staff combo.

As for speed boosts, the Guardian is still “faster” than a Mesmer on land so it isn’t that bad.

You can just ignore crafting as you like – you’ll find most Masterwork (green) items sell for cheaper than the stuff required to craft them, with some exceptions like Strong chest pieces. As for what to upgrade first, check this wiki page:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Equipment
Note how the strongest bonuses come from weapons, chest armour, leg armour, and your Amulet. Upgrade those first. You end up throwing out your gear quickly while leveling, so I usually just got the cheapest stuff with no regard for what kind of bonuses until level 80.

JustTrogdor.7892:

So basically, I want…

It sounds like you’ll have fun with your guardian then, since you’ve just listed its strong points! As for the WvW part, it doesn’t matter what class you play – your head will spin if you’re caught up in a laggy battle anyway :P

It’s not like other classes can do their full damage to the boss either – the Guardian in our group was reduced to pew-pewing the with the scepter auto-attack because the teleports and fire shield were too frequent to get a full dose of Smite. Ranger pets would get murdered by the flaming AOE, no one can get a full melee burst on that boss, etc. The Berserker would be very painful for a dagger elementalist too. I went Scepter/Pistol, Staff in that battle so Duelist and Warlock got something off before getting killed.

In the other encounters of that dungeon I had no problem using clones (at least not more than any other dungeon) – projectile reflect kept away most of that nasty flaming stuff so I could shatter or have the pistol phantasm get a full burst going before it had to go.

I couldn’t get a proper 3-clone shatter off on the boss either, but I wouldn’t invul. clones or else they’ll get overpowered with regards to minions, pets, spirit weapons, etc. Despite the HP buffs, ranger spirits are still more vulnerable than clones to getting killed by AOE before you can get some use out of them.

You’ll also want to give the local sticky a once-over:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/OMG-If-you-only-knew-this-tips-for-new-players

- Tip #1, #6, and #33 have been quite useful for me

You really need to “prepare” before jumping into melee by knowing what the enemies will do to you once you’re in their face, and by knowing when to get OUT of melee.

Also NO character will last very long in melee against damaging foes without help from boons like protection or retailiation, or allies’ healing. It’s designed this way because this game is against the “tank” part of the trinity. (Unlike the perma-shadow form Assassin or 55-hp Monk in GW1.) There’s also foes that are designed to NOT be melee’d continuously (Most Champions, Veteran risen preserver, Flame Legion Igniter, etc) so you’re best off being ranged against them.

EDIT: A rule-of-thumb is you can more easily melee enemies that look like they’re ranged fighters (archers, riflemen, anything else that always shoots), but be careful if you melee enemies that look like they’re melee (the big sword or hammer is a giveaway).

If you’re running solo you usually want to jump in, get a burst off with your melee, and then kite (run around in circles or walk backwards) with ranged weapons while your heals or melee burst recharges. For guardian, my solo melee burst with greatsword is 5-5-4-3-2 (pull, retaliation, blind, damage) with a shout or virtue thrown in there depending on situation. Against weak mobs it works quite well, but again you have to know what’s too strong for you to engage.

I won’t call it the “best encounter” as it was quite punishing for a story mode encounter, but I’ll give it best introduced encounter. For once the bosses use something that has been seen before!

In other bosses that I saw so far in dungeons (and guild bounties!), it’s been:
“What’s that boss doing?”
<splat, rez>
“Okay… so that attack does…”
<dodge, dodge, splat, rez>
“AARGH now it does…”
<splat>
<insert profanity here>

“Oh! They’re using the same stuff that I saw before. Now how do I…”
<splat>
“Okay now I get it! Cool!”
<win>

Please continue to do this where some of the mechanics are introduced beforehand, specifically:

(bah spoiler tag’s not working properly you’ll figure it out)