Personally don’t have a problem with the way masteries are implemented, there is nothing there that I really need to have now apart from the 1st level of gliding and mushroom bouncing, any further levels I’m more than happy just playing the game and letting them bars fill up as a side effect of something that I would be doing anyway. I think if you look at it that way instead of being something that you have to get it in the shortest amount of time possible you avoid a lot of frustration for yourself.
The thing that I would personally change is the amount of hero points required to unlock elite specs, as someone with a toon of every prof I can see that becoming a tad frustrating considering that I don’t really have more than 50 points spare on average on each one of them. I have thought of organizing hero point collection parties on the new maps to see if that will speed up the process, which if it works will finally give me a reason to actually group up with people in GW2, which is a welcome change as most of them aren’t soloable.
All things considered I’m actually quite happy with the expansion now that I finally got my head around the new maps.
I feel for you, sometimes I forget how it is to live in a poorer country. Being originally from Portugal I can relate to how everything is just so much more expensive compared to the 1st world countries.
On the upside you live in a wonderful country full of very good looking people, with a wonderful culture and amazing culture, while I spend most of the year enduring the wonderful British weather…
Espero que consigas poupar dinheiro suficiente para comprares a expansão, ou podes esperar uns meses e comprar quando estiver em saldos. Boa sorte
Not really accepting everything, but at +1000 hours played in my case, it works out at less than 5 pence per hour, unbeatable value for money for something that I really enjoy doing.
The money I’m paying for the expansion is equally justified in my opinion as again, I’ve spent more on a whim on Steam sales on games that I’ve barely played.
That’s just a random build I’ve created to allow you to look at the new chronomaster traits. “Time marches on” – You move 25% faster and movement impairing conditions are 25% shorter duration.
That website should also allow you to have a peak at our new well utilities and new elite skill, be advised that as it is still beta everything there is subject to change.
You’ve got Mesmer already which seems to fit perfectly with your playstyle and with chrono spec you get a permanent 25% speed boost as one of the traits. They remain super fun to play in PvP and you will love the it even more with chronomaster. I do tend to find it a bit underwhelming in PvE.
Engineer is quite fun as well, although scrapper is all about the hammer so you have to get up close and personal. You still have access to the kits/rifle/pistol if you want to stay ranged but give the hammer a try, I’ve loved it. They are really fun to play both in PvP/PvE, although not as relaxing as playing a Necro or Ranger.
Those are my two favourite profs and I’ve got one of each.
A – Elementalist has good ranged damage and is one of the top classes in the 3 aspects of the game. You can also go dagger/dagger if you feel like getting amongst the mobs. It shines in PVE.
B – Guardian is probably the easiest one for solo play, I’ve managed to get mine to 80 with only 3 deaths. It is also a very strong class in either PVE or PVP.
C – Ranger is the same as a WOW hunter, but from what I hear it’s not as welcome in dungeon groups. With the new elite spec they might become a lot more welcome as apparently it will be a healing spec, at this moment we do not have a great deal of details about it but if you are keen to try one there will be a beta weekend next weekend and you can create a beta level 80 character and try it out for yourself.
The only class that presents a little challenge in PVE in my opinion is the Mesmer as it is by far the slowest class of the all, this will also change with HOT as the elite spec finally will give mesmers a 25% speed increase trait. You might also find it hard to tag mobs in zergs with a Mesmer as we don’t have a lot of AoE damage. To balance all this PVE misery they are great to play in PVP in my opinion.
Against mesmer use hammer / GS and try and lock down. Play offensively and always try to predict where I’m moving when we pop our stealth. We take damage even while we’re invisible.
Your much likelier to win if you burst me down as I’ll always win if it’s down to attrition.
I think it’s disgusting that they prevented those “Other” from going into Hearth of the Mists – LA.
Just think of the thousands of gold that they could have saved if they were allowed access to that option.
Please moderate WvW section, the LFG post should be in LFG, no1 move them since like 2 weeks ago.
Just go to that post and click on the icon that looks like a little crawly person (allegedly that’s a flag). A panel will open and you can type a message there that goes directly to the moderator.
I only ever saw a ‘flag’ …now I cannot unsee the crawly person. :|
Thanks, Fleshy.
Same here!!!! Now I can’t stop laughing when I look at it… Thanks
I agree with lots of the things you’ve said. My first MMO was GW1 and so II was always used to the waypoint everywhere, content made to be enjoyed solo (with you team of henchmen), so GW2 doesn’t feel so much of a shock to me.
Meanwhile I did try other MMOs between GW1 and GW2 and I completely agree with your points. The fact that I can waypoint everywhere does make the world feel a lot smaller, and the fact that you can just waypoint next door whenever for some reason you die kinda takes the risk and reward part out of the equation. Everything feels easy and even if you die it doesn’t matter because there is no consequences to your actions. I miss having to be careful, I miss having the possibility of failure as a possible outcome.
I also agree that the lack of trinity doesn’t help with forming community bonds. In other games when you find a good healer or a good tank you make sure that you keep those people on your friends list for the next time you go into a dungeon, or alternatively if you are a healer or a tank you get other people asking you to play with them. That simply doesn’t happen in GW as without the trinity we are all equally unimportant and replaceable and anyway it is almost impossible to fail at clearing content. There is absolutely no incentive to create a bond with anyone as you can just pick up the next DPSer in line.
I do enjoy GW but I sure do miss the community feeling that you got from other games.
Thank you very much @Mystic for writing this guide, it is very kind of you for taking the time to help out the community by sharing your views and experience.
@Wanze – I’ve been following your posts since the old BLTP forum and always came out richer if not on gold at least in knowledge. Again I would like to send a heartfelt Thank you for everything that you’ve shared with the community.
No, heroes & henchmen were great in GW1, but this game hardly has any incentives to party up & build communities, it they ever introduced them that would be the death of the multiplayer aspect. If I want to play single player games there’s much better offerings out there
I did the event once, just once. I got 41 without any problems and not using any “special” methods.
Screenshot or it didn’t happen. At 40 seconds roughly per event and you didn’t tag and run? Right…. Even with tag and run it would be extremely difficult to reach those numbers.
Got it! The advice boils down to: do the bare minimum to get credit, and let the losers/n00bs who are not in the know do your work for you. That attitude is exactly what made me leave other MMO’s and come to GW2. I’m sure you’re glad that others finish the events so you can get those blooms for yourself. Thanks for the pro tip!
It’s good advise, you are free to use it or not. Anyone that thought about how this event was set up would have reached the conclusion fairly easily that this is the only way of getting maximum reward.
I don’t agree with the way that the event was setup up, but no amount of kittening will change it so just play it like it was designed to be played.
PS – I can confirm that you don’t need to damage the vine to get event completion, killing a. Couple of mobs is enough.
To get the 20 stacks necessary to get the15 blooms this is the only way to do it, so either the event was planned so that we would play this way or there just wouldn’t be a reward for hitting the 20 blooms.
It should have felt more like an invasion and not like some random mobs just popping up all across the map.
It would have been better if all of the little villages on the side of Maguma where occupied by the mordrem and we would have to fight to get them back. This should be done by stages, buffing the mobs so that they become impossible to kill before you complete the previous stages.
At the end of each stage you get loot chest like in SW so that even if you can’t stay around for the full event you would still some sort of reward.
I get that you guys don’t want the mobs to drop loot, fair enough, but at least let them drop blooms or whatever currency.
Scale the rewards to the mob, in that a normal mob only has a chance to drop them but when you get to champion mobs you are guaranteed to get a bloom or two.
Don’t promote selfish play by increasing rewards for the amount of tagged events, it doesn’t take a genius to quickly realise that that is the quickest way to maximize rewards, it’s an MMO we should be rewarded for playing together instead of this mentality of rushing everything.
It’s inadmissible that an event on a area for lower levels does not give XP. I was looking forward to participate and level some of my alts to 80 in preparation for HOT, ended up switching to one of my level 80s as they are faster, more powerful and there is literally no reason to use a lower level character.
You’ve always marketed this game as casual friendly, for someone that is only able to play a couple of hours a day it is impossible to get even the middle tier rewards, I’m reluctantly participating on this one as I’m on holidays, if I was on my normal schedule I would have just written all of this event of as pointless. Top tier rewards should be obtainable in a reasonable, read casual friendly, time frame. Increase the number of rewards available to keep people that play 24/7 happy.
What about when you have a stack of 250 exotic lucks you turn it into some NPC and he transforms you into a champion mob somewhere in the world.
You need to complete a set of different objectives in a 5 minute period for a chance of getting a exotic / precursor / ascended etc.
If the players already present in that map prevent you from completing that objective they get the chance of getting that drop.
Gratz on creating a tag and leave leachfest event, where everyone plays selfishly, new meta? oh man /facepalm
That’s not really his fault, it took me and I’m sure loads of other players a few minutes into the first event to realise that tagging and moving on was the most efficient way for maximizing the amount of stacks gained.
Whoever designed this event had a lot more time than us to reach the same conclusion but still left the design this way. So as far as I’m concern maybe this is exactly the way that they wanted us to play it, the other option is that whoever designed this is not very bright.
If was me designing it I would have restricted the event to just one area of the map and make us work towards some sort of final goal instead of this boring zerg fest.
If normal mobs had a chance to drop blooms, copper a guaranteed 1 bloom, silver 2 and gold mobs 3 it would also incentivise people to stick around.
Finally, no XP on kill / completion of event is completely idiotic on an event aimed at new players. And forget if you’re a casual player and can only play a couple hours a day, all of this running around to get a few essence of luck,….
This unfortunately just feels like it was not very well planned at all.
Rewards are fixed for me, got 35 blooms on the last event chain, but the mobs are still not giving any XP on death.
Not very happy as at the moment it’s pointless to bring a less than 80 character into the zerg.
Hope we get the XP from those missing events, I’ve spent the night doing events with my new engineer and got absolutely nothing to show for it.
I’m sure they will fix it so that we get the missing blooms but the missing XP would be nice as well especially if we are promoting these to the new players.
Or just drop the humans and norms. Charr in heavy armour > everyone else.
I understand the feeling, ideally one of every race and one of every class, unfortunately it’s just too hard to ignore the pure awesome of the Charr and Asura.
Without starting a flame war, I find it amusing to hear some people went to specific maps just to get x amount of evades. It’s such a key mechanic, and used by an experienced player across PVE, PVP and WvW equally. To hear that something as simple as that is a struggle is again, amusing
I didn’t say that I struggled… only that I went to the place where it was easiest / quickest to do them. Like when you had to rez x amount of players / NPCs the easiest place to complete that one was Metrical province as there were always plenty of bodies lying around in one of the labs.
The point was the old dailies, in my personal experience, were more of a chore that these new ones.
Have to disagree with you there, the old system was a pain in the backside. Having to dodge x amount of times, kill x amount of critters or rez x amount of players wasn’t in any way “playing the game” normally. I remember going specifically to some areas to either get ogres or moas as they were easier to dodge…
Now in PvP you literally just get them by playing the game, although it incentives you to maybe try a new prof, and the PvE ones are really easy although as you say they do involve some travelling around.
In fact, I usually go out of my way to go to a map where there is daily, as that means easy XP for my alts with so many people shouting about all the events and helping you complete them real quick.
Mind sharing with the rest of us the thought process that enabled you to reach that ground breaking discovery?
Fun and enjoyable is a very subjective term. While I don’t sit here in my chair doing my daily crafting in fits of giggles I find crafting more fun and enjoyable than TP flipping. That is my opinion an I’m pretty sure that there are plenty of people for which the opposite is true, as well as plenty of people that find neither one of those activities fun and enjoyable. Maybe you are one of those.
As for your assertion that you have to buy your mats from the TP, I fail to see what is the problem with it. Did the manufacturer of your shirt farmed the cotton? Does your local restaurant have a farm at the back where they raise the livestock and farm the vegetables? Very few industries work like that in the real world, I see no reason why it should work like that in game.
And as for your assertion that you can buy gear cheaper on the TP than it costs to craft it, you are only half right. What you mean is that you can buy SOME gear cheaper than you can craft it.
I certainly try and make sure that what I craft brings me some profit and I craft and sell goods every single day. Crafting is indeed profitable and the goods useful for someone, as you can easily find out by just searching the TP for craftable lvl80 epics. They do not give you any XP, so they are created because they are profitable.
Looking forward from hearing from you in more detail about what exactly is wrong with the system as it is at the moment, and more importantly what are your suggestions that would allow it to be better.
The argument can be made that if you gather all the materials yourself rather than buying them on the TP you can make a fair bit of money, but gather takes forever and doesn’t accommodate for quick gains.
Materials you gather yourself still have a value. If you sold the materials on the TP you would be bagging some coin, so those mats aren’t free.
I suppose 10g a day is possible but you would have to first have a great understanding of the market to identify everything that you could craft that would bring you a profit, and it would depend of what you craft as not everything has the sales volume that would justify the investment.
Some stuff you only craft with a 5% margin but you can sell loads of it. Some stuff you do 20-30% margins but doesn’t sell nearly as well. You have to decide what to craft and how much of each.
If you have a 100g initial investment it is perfectly possible to do 10g back every day, but you have to be clever about how you do it.
Crafting in GW2 has several benefits. As some have said you get 10 levels for each maxed out craft that you have.
As this is your first character you will probably find it hard to craft above your level as I imagine you don’t have a lot of mats in your bank that you gathered on your travels with your main.
It is still possible to craft all your armor / weapons all through your journey to level 80. I’ve done it on my guardian and warrior, and on both of them I had weaponsmith and armorsmith maxed out when they where in their middle 40s.
Do not believe people that say that crafting is useless / unprofitable. There are ways to make profit by crafting, although I admit that I’ve got very little experience with leatherworker or huntsman.
And if you go the extra mile and get the rare insignias that can be bought for karma at any master craftsman you will find that the armor and weapons you craft are generally better than any thing you can get from karma at the hearth guys.
Rare weapons + armor are also more likely to turn a profit on the TP.
Also, keep an eye open for karma specific recipes for the professions you have, as often they have interesting skins that usually sell well and for a profit on the TP.
That was essentially how I managed to level my professions and end up not paying anything to do it.
Once you reach level 80 there is a constant market for rare and epic weapons / armor, althoug not every type will be profitable to craft.
You will have to add up the cost of the materials (remember, even if you picked them up yourself they still have a value) and see if it is profitable to sell the crafted end product.
Not everything will be profitable, some stuff will be profitable some of the time, and a few rare things are profitable to craft all of the time. It is up to you to find out what those things are.
Did the TP give you false information? No it didn’t, it stated that there were x amount of items available in that range of prices.
YOU foolishly assumed that it was all the supply currently available in the market.
Your own fault and now you’re paying for it.
Why should it give you the information of the total amount of items currently in the market?
So it makes it easier of you to manipulate that particular market?
Apart from you and your friend would anyone have anything to gain if that information was made available to the public?
Not being able to see the total amount makes it harder to corner any market which is a good thing for all the other players.
By all means flip as many items as you like or craft in order to get some gold out of the TP, but this sort of manipulation doesn’t benefit anyone but yourself.
*Retailing reflects real world market mechanics, and involves some degree of risk
*Retailing may be able to help equalize supply and demand for some items; however, the bulk of the utility goes directly to the retailer
*Retailing does not add value to any item, and therefore the money made from such a transaction has little merit, other than perhaps acumen
*The profit made from Retailing an item comes directly at other players’ expenses
*There is no clearly defined line between watching market trends and purchasing materials/items which are intended for use when those items cost relatively less, and watching market trends in order to buy items relatively cheap for profit, other than intention
*Retailing is an easy way to make money for many players
tl;dr
What do you think about flipping?
Flipping or retailing is exactly the same activity as your local corner shop. You buy your product cheap from the suppliers (buy orders) and sell it cheaper than your competitors (sell orders).
There’s a term I’ve heard before. It’s called Armchair Quarterback. It means that someone thinks they are an expert because they watch football (real football, not soccer) every Sunday from their chair.
No, what you mean is american football. What you call soccer is what the rest of the world calls football.
Both armorsmith and weaponsmith are most expensive crafting profession so it isn’t best choice for new players. If you want to train crafting you have to make blue and green so your advice isn’t really helpfull. Recipe for rare items are nice but if you want to make money through them you have to have max rank and create weapons which is used for Mystic forge gamble, so again nothing for new player.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
You keep speaking of stuff that you have absolutely no idea about. Charr weapons can be crafted after obtaining karma recipe at Diessa Plateau, they can be crafted at a profit and are quite popular as a skin.
Bandit weapons are also quite popular and again can be crafted at a profit.
Are you starting to see a trend here?
It’s like this thoughtout all the levels of weaponsmith crafting.
What you are really saying is that you didn’t put any time in your crafting, just crafted whatever you had the mats for, and then found out that it was exactly the same things as eveyone else that where leveling crafting just for the xp.
Complete and utter nonsense!
Both armorsmith and weaponsmith not only are useful they provide profit opportunities at each step of the way!
Avoid crafting what everyone else is crafting (blues and greens), get all the karma recipes that you can gather along the way.
You have to invest some time into learning your market but that investment will be paid back many times.
Crafted Explorers and Valkyries usually trade at a loss or at a very low margin, so my guess is that the market for them isn’t as big. And powerful bloods have also been steadily increasing in price since the start of the event, which would lead me to believe that we are seeing a big increase in the quantities of crafted beserker’s for the sword, greatsword, staff and bows, and knight’s for the shield.
As an example, beserker greatswords have broken the 5g mark and very nearly broke 6g / unit. Their “natural” price is around 4g50s.
But why just Knights and not any other stat combos?
Slight oversight, Beserker’s and Apothecary’s Pearl Shells are also up, Apothecary’s by quite a bit having broken the 6g mark. Beserker seems a waste on a shield but i can see how apothecary would be appealing.
Still in my opinion a risky craft as I’m not familiar with karka shell prices or with the market for apothecary items.
Armored Scales are a component in crafting Knight’s Orichalcum Imbued Inscription which is a component in crafting Knight’s Pearl Shell, which is used as a base to apply the new Super Shield Skin.
If you see on spidy the Knight’s Pearl Shell has risen from the middle 4gs to the middle 5gs as the demand for it has increased. Naturally the scales will increase in price also.
The other types of Pearl Shells haven’t risen as much in price as the stats aren’t as appealing for a shield user.
Or I could really be making all this stuff up, as we all know that the TP is heavily manipulated and crafting is useless anyway.
