Guild Wars 2

It’s just a new level of immersion. You just got super fractal’d!

Was this an English class writing assignment?

^ I was just thinking that. So many people complained when they changed one part of their game, and then still more are arguing for points to break other parts of it.

Few people seem to be willing to understand the limitations and capabilities of the system we have and find the best ways to work with it. =T

If you give it a shot, you can find some interesting ways to play that break out of the traditional rpg notions. It can lead to some very interesting gameplay developments.

(Hint, this is how strategies like mesmer-portals, stacking, etc were thought up.)

I do the same, just wvw and occasionally pop out for story quests to get a nice chunk of exp.

Low levels might not help as much as high levels, but they are better than nothing. Even if they just follow the group and carry 10 supply, that’s quite helpful by itself.

I would argue you can find that on Eternal Battlegrounds Raincrow. The map is very close together so everything is kind of in the middle of the field. So much so that I think it is kind of silly, and don’t particularly like playing on that map. It is more fast paced I think though.

In theory veteran points, traveling yaks, and supply camps (maybe even jumping puzzle) are points of open field, no walls, combat. If you focus on these objectives you might find more of the style of combat you are looking for.

One nice thing about walls and tower/keep fighting is it can even out to some extent the number advantage, and give the group of smaller players an advantage if they are defending.

I am still a lower level warrior, but I run banner in dungeons as well, similar to Nadoka.
I would definitely recommend the the longbow over the rifle for a ranged weapon because you can drop the fire field. I usually drop the fire field, use longbow 3, and drop 2-3 banners (whatever is up) and then use for great justice. I can get a large number of stacks of might on my team with this combo, and then the banners also give them some nice effects. I also use sword / warhorn in my offhand, to cleanse and debuff.

In random pugs, this is so helpful since most groups have glass cannon solo builds with no defense / healing / condition removal. So even if I dont do spectacular damage, keeping the other 4 people alive makes the runs go way smoother.

For WvW and running around it’s not as useful (altough picking up the banner for aoe swiftness is also nice). In solo play it’s not that great. I just go 5 signet for PVE solo because then I can watch tv while I kill stuff.

What they are doing is anti-zerg play. A small coordinated group can take out undefended objectives on different borderlands much faster than you can move a large group of pubbies around to defend them. I assume it’s working if you are upset by it, which means it is a good strategy. If it isn’t working, then who cares.

If you are on a server with lower night time population against one with a large night time group, this happens a lot. You cant face them head on when they have 4-5x your numbers, but you can take things here and there and make them split up, or get frustrated, or at the very least, farm some money and karma, and get a few points in the process.

Don’t complain that they aren’t so stupid as to just face plant into your zerg and siege equipment.

Has anyone tried out the new speed of the nades? Is it enough to make it so we can reliably hit a moving target, or is it pretty much useless?

I play warrior sometimes when my fingers are sore from playing Engineer. Can 1-2 button my way to victory there. Then when my fingers are healed and I am bored of that, I come back to engineer :P

Ya I saw that thief got their pull boosted to 1200 range, is that what ours is at now? (Cant log on to check atm)

I am pretty sure if you use the rifle turret skill underwater it becomes harpoon turret.

Interesting. Since I wvw a lot I was thinking the power/tough/vit gear might not be too bad, because of how siege equipment takes damage. The long range aoe makes taking out siege a primary job. I was thinking of getting berserkers/rampagers before, but I think you convinced me to just be a little more tanky. In my experience having an engineer who can stay alive and disable the enemy with supply drops and nets and such, can help your team take people out. Probably wouldn’t be as good for roaming 1v1s and such, but I dont do that anyway unless I get jumped. Wonder how much if at all it will change my effectiveness at bombarding walls when we attack.

Dont even cross my mind. If they had the 2 week match ups and the bonuses could accumulate that much more it might get to a level where it’s a serious difference. Not sure do they count in the WvW area, or is it just a bonus when you are in the normal world? I assumed they apply everywhere, but maybe they are a kind of pve reward for when your server is doing well. I have no idea.

The way I usually do it for PVE is find a map about your level or maybe a bit below, and just try to complete the map and do any DEs you see. Having the objective to work on helps me forget to look at the exp bar. Can usually get 3-5 levels from completing a map. Many maps can be completed in a few hours, or one nights worth of gameplay.

For the different monsters types, remember the small critters count too. Like rabbits, rats, hawks and whatnot.

It would also be nice if the way vertical height was calculated into range was changed a bit. For example on the engineer’s mortar with 1400 range, being on top of a wall negates 700 of that from hieght, so you only have 700 left, which is basically only hitting people hugging the walls. It would be nice if you could actually hit targets that were 1400 range from the wall itself. When attacking it seems like much less of a problem. For example if I throw my grenades and they arc up and hit someone on top it’s no problem. Hard to say exactly how this works, but maybe I can test this out a bit more.

I guess I was imagining a portal in the wvw zone that leads to a small dungeon with some PVE mobs, and thought that would be kind of silly. I never played Darkness Falls, was that a DaoC thing? Im just weary of mixing pvp and pve content like that.

The reason is because I have seen in the past often the biggest carebear groups will just gather a huge number of people, and stomp over the smaller pvp crowd and then go do their dungeon. As it is currently, there are some smaller numbers in WvW, but everyone who is there wants to be there to PVP and siege things and defend them, so the fights are generally very good.

At least where I play we have a 50-60 man karma train of enemies that rolls through at the same time at like 3 am everyday and just wipes the whole map because no one can really stop those sheer numbers. They play until they capture everything or we get enough people to stop them and put up a decent fight. As soon as there is a decent fight they just log off and go to bed. Which sucks :T

Having some kind of large dungeon type thing where you can still attack the other teams is excellent fun though. If they want to try to do a PVE boss, and you can attack them and jump them, that can create a fun WvWvWvE situation with a lot of choas.

Doesn’t work. If the points are turned off for a map your enemy controls, you will never go there to cap the stuff back because it’s better off not counting. So you’ll never get rid of outmanned, and the spiral continues.

Please dont put a dungeon in there haha. Don, you just said you dont like PVP and are just there to finish your requirement. So it doesnt make sense for them to put PVE content in there as well. Just keep the new dungeons and zones as it is and that’s cool. Focus on gameplay mechanics related to PVP in the WvW maps.

For instance, people saying the wvw jumping puzzles are pve content, they are not. They are PVP jumping puzzles. Something you find in a dungeon is a big champion monster, that spawns a chest afterward. In a PVP map that would be something you can do, but where people can also attack you while you fight it. We already have that however!

So before suggesting dungeons in wvw maps, please remember you can already kill grub if you want to. Im not saying it’s good or bad, just that we already have that in the game.

Personally, it might be interesting if those fights had more outcome on the player fights. Right now, things like the quggans are mildly important, but dont help that much. If instead of a couple centaurs or qauggans that your NPCs can fight off, we had something like a large champion that can do strong damage against doors or walls, that would make a big difference.

Or can event where you have to do something to help build a siege golem, and it gives you a way to aquire one without spending the gold or supply (just your time to do the event, plus being able to find off the other team, or be ninja about it.) Might not be perfect but would add some depth. That said even if it was added I don’t know if I would do it.

Anyway, I think the reward is that it’s fun. I don’t really care about money, badges, ranks, and other silly things. I like WvW because working together with your server to fight off the other servers is just good fun.

I have to say, Dragonbrand, that night time Taiwan zerg is such a pain to deal with. At a time when we have maybe 10-15 people on that huge group can train all 3 maps. Frustrating, but really helps you guys keep the score close, and making sure both DH and Mag dont have any upgraded structures left come morning. They are like the night time cleaning crew haha.

Had great fights so far from both DH and DB, no orbs and no daily transfers does actually seem to help. I also think it settled down a bit with some going to the top tier servers because they want to win, and the true diehards staying on their own servers because they like to fight.

For me personally, winning is nice, and of course something to strive for, but the fighting is the fun part. We have had some great fights so lets keep it up!

I think a good number of new people are actually joining in WvW this week. When they see a more even three way split, they dont feel like they will be jumping into PvDoor or PvZerg. We’ve had to educate some newbies on how to do things in WvW, but thats ok, its been a fun learning experience.

A lot of you guys are discussing some serious lvl 80 engineer stuff, but she is talking about leveling up at level 35!

First off, pistols have a lot of condition damage so the firearms trait line will help add a lot of damage. If you are leveling up with your husband, you probably don’t need to worry as much about defense. Especially since you said he spec’d vitality already. I did all explosives and firearms traits leveling, with a little bit in exilirs for the boost at 75% health. The trait at the bottom for swiftness on kit equip is also pretty nice when you are running around.

Another important point is your kit weapons will always match your current level, so while leveling are often quite a bit more powerful than whatever pistol you happen to have equipped. I was often running around with some random lower level pistol (and armor, and jewels) at that level if I didn’t randomly get a better drop. Upgrading when you level that fast is pointless. So kits are absolutely great for maintaining weapon power while leveling.

Having played mostly engineer, but also quite a while on warrior, my thoughts are that it is pretty straightforward to set up those massive burst down combos on warrior, and it’s a bit harder on engineer. If you keep at it and learn the class more, you will figure out what you like to do, and can have a lot of fun doing it. For me, I unfortunately got bored with warrior even though it was easy to play. When the options are "swing sword’ and “swing sword more” its hard to keep interested. So try to just enjoy the game play without worrying about numbers. Throw some nades, drop a turret, blast them with fire, drink some strange liquid, or drop some bombs. These are all pretty fun things to do !

Ya, seriously worthless. i think I may have seen them go off one or two times, but they also do pityful damage, so I just think of them as decoration. Look! It’s something engineery!

If I got a grenade barrage centered on myself instead, that would be awesome.

It is definitely a bit wonky. If you are a keyboard turner you are even more screwed than normal with a flamethrower. I think other classes that have cone effect spells have the same problem as well however. I’ve seen elementalists run up to people and use a frost breath skill and just miss everything. Something they probably have to figure out with the game engine.

“Then, I pull my Orichalcum Pick.”

can even go to the tune of a certain Sublime song!

Awesome. I think that was the right idea.

When you aren’t familiar with the class it seems confusing, but once you play it for a while you will realize a lot of ways to combo things together that is very useful.

One of the easiest ones you can do is combo’ing a skill off the same skill! Which comes from the healing turret. About a second after you drop it, it will have a water field up, so hit detonate, and it will blast an AOE heal. This heals you for more, and can help heal up allies. It’s the only heal I use in WvW since its also a low cool down I can splash a decent amount of healing around without actually going to any special effort. Try it out

I absolutely love that monocle. Don’t think I’ll ever wear a different hat.

A quick hint for flame thrower and elixir gun fumigate is point your camera where you want it to go, and totally ignore the actual animation. When I started doing it this way I could circle strafe and still get all the hits in on those skills.

I also live in Japan, and Im on Maguuma. I’ve played with aussies, singaporeans and malaysians, so its an interesting mix. The problem with Australian times zones for me is they are starting to go to bed when I want to play. I find my playtime lines up a little better with the east coast US players which is a strong contingent on mags (after they recover from the hurricane >.< )

If you do come to Maguuma let me know!

Hearing all this makes me glad I’m on Maguuma. There are some really great commanders on there, and even when they are on a break other new people will join in and try their best from what they have learned before. I would like to keep doing WvW and practicing and maybe I can help out when the other people are asleep.

That said, a lot of these people don’t have blue badges, and a lot of people with the badges don’t command anything and just run around randomly. So, if you get the server community organized the blue badge doesn’t really mean so much. If the badge is the only thing people have to go on, it seems that could be a problem though.

I tried out some other servers and was pretty surprised at the atmosphere I found. One had a commander running a karma train taking camps and some towers with a small-medium group (not great, but not the worst thing in the world really), but a ton of people who were just fighting outside spawn (which I do think is one of the absolutely least productive things you can do) trash talking him for sucking and being a horrible commander. While they line hopped at spawn. >_>

So I can feel for those commanders who are actually trying to learn or get their server motivated in WvW and their own server is sitting there trash talking them. That sucks =/

Ya, cant really get behind the idea of bows. If you want that, go play a ranger :P We got guns and nades man!

A melee weapon would be nice to use with sheild. Chainsaw or chainsword would be ideal. Hammer might be cool too. If I could reskin tool kit, or they had it so that big gear shield was displayed even when not being used for a skill, that might be enough to fufill that wish though.

Fair enough. I will probably wait around for a week as i want to check things out for a bit to find a place I can be useful. The problem with being on in Oceanic times is there seems to only be a few places with any players. So it’s often zerg or barren wasteland. Doesnt seem to be any small, but roughly even, fights happening at night.

Even 2v1 numbers would be just fine, but on the smaller servers, you are lucky to get five people running around, until you catch the large server’s notice and 60 people come over to smash you.

I take it that isn’t the case during the NA primetime hours, am I wrong? Or are all games still silly mismatched most of the time?

I am an Oceanic player. I recently transfeered to Tarnished Coast when I saw their “we need oceanic players” thread. When I transfeered I saw they controlled the whole map, and I kind of felt like “What the puppy?”. But overall it is a nice place to be at night, and the PVE situation is nice there.

So my question is do you have any base group of oceanic time zone players to join up with, or are you trying to start from zero? If you have a good base already and just need help, I’d rather fight against the zerg than with it. If you basically have no organized groups at night I cant help you since me running around by myself gets old super fast.

Might help if you clarify the situation.

I agree with the events being way cooler than the heart quests. I think we need things like points of interest and vistas to encourage us to travel to the far corners of the map, but when there is a choice between kill 20 rats and help these guys set up mortars to assault this tower, the second one will always win.

Its possible the dynamic events seem more interesting is because they are allowed to have a concrete beginning middle and end, and connect with past and future events. While heart quests are static and have to always be able to be completed.

That said, some of them are interesting, like drinking beer and passing out and stuff. But they could just make that something you can just interact with and get some experience from (the first time of course, not repeatable). Would also kind of give some rewards to roleplaying. Reading lore and interacting with the world giving small bits of completion or experience actually sounds pretty fun. I have gone off on a horrible tangent, sorry!

Easy fix: When you get map completion the waypoints for that map are half price.

I resolved my issue with a fix another person posted. In our case it was due to using a crucial SSD. I updated the firmware for the SSD and it fixed the problem. I didn’t have any problems before October 15, but something happened with that small update that didn’t agree with my HD. THe new firmware cleared up the crashes thankfully. So if you happen to have a Crucial SSD Hard drive, try updating the firmware to the newest one.

You have to join a group. I was solo’ing for a while too and got almost nothing. Joined a group and was getting seriously about 10x the loot bags as I would have doing the same thing solo.

Same problem here, only happens in GW2, everything else runs like a boss and computer is always running cool, no overclocking. Someone in another thread suggested gw2 might be trying to write in protected memory and it borks up the OS. If that is in fact that case there is probably not much we can do other than wait for a fix.

I have been having this exact same problem. Sometimes 30 minutes in, sometimes 45 minutes in my computer locks up. It actually blue screened twice as well before locking up forcing a hard reboot. I will check out the fix posted above but would love it if they could undo whatever they did in their “performance update” until this gets resolved.

Also if you double tap the aoe skill it will cast it where ever the cursor is. So I guess just leave it in the middle of the screen and it will go there.

I have been loving Maguuma. While perhaps smaller that some of the giants, the player base there is a good group. We really have to work together and organize our stuff to fight the sea of sorrow zerg, and it has led to some really great fights and good wvw.

As for PVE, I see dungeon groups forming even at the lowest playtimes and I imagine during NA primetime it’s quite hopping. Even if my play times would line up better on SoS being oceanic myself, the community is just such a good crew over at Mag’s. Seems to be a nice balance of NA, Europeans, and Oceanics. So that’s my suggestion.

A mix of everything is important. I sometimes can sit down and get 3-4 levels just from crafting with the mats I saved from doing heart quests. Then I’ll do a couple personal story quests and get half to a whole level from just those 2, sometimes Ill hop in WvW with the zerg and get 3-4 levels in a couple hours there. Try to work on the daily and monthly achievements too as they give exp. If you are close to finishing a map, finishing it 100% gives another exp reward.

Also, thank you Licht for explaing why I sometimes get those random 1000 exp rewards. I thought it was because it was the first time I killed that kind of monster before. I was in a remote area however, and was racking up a lot of exp very quickly (I had the guild exp boost too, so it was impressive.)

Ohh, ya look for guild exp banners in Lions Arch, some kind guilds put them up near the portals or fountain sometimes

Before Orr I thought contested waypoints were a pretty cool thing. After fort trinity though it just got absurd. Every waypoint except 3 near fort trinity seem to always be contested (at least when I play). So, if I die I have to run across the entire zone, which resulted in me saying screw it and moving on to a different zone and not bothering to complete that one. Maybe I’ll try Orr again later, but it seems to just be totally not fun and not worth my time to claw my way through.

Well, a score may be fine, but the same mechanics that increase score should decrease power, not increase it. Holding an orb should give you more points at the location it’s at, but in return make you weaker, or the other two teams stronger.

Same as holding more resources on the maps. If you control more towers and more keeps your supply lines should be stretched thinner. Upgrading should cost more, they receive less supply per dolyak, or doors or walls should have less health when you start to control more and more places on the map.

Would make it more of a challenge when you think, “well if we try hard to take those last 2 keeps on the map it will increase our supply burden that much more and may not be worth it if we cant hold it, is there another place we can focus our efforts?” Or if you do have the people to capture everything, it at least gives the other teams a chance to take some of it back. Instead of just “Yay we got all 4 maps, 3 orbs, and it’s all 100% upgraded!, The other teams are screwed now, lets go PVE and log in again next week.” Should be an accomplishment to have that kind of control and be a hard fight to keep it.

I am an oceanic player living in Japan, and I was a bit worried at first about finding people to play with, but after hopping on WvWvW, I can say these are a good group of people. Its not a massive zerg like SoS, but I like that. In general good team work and good times on mumble. Of course we have some derps running around who aren’t in mumble and ruin certain plans, but it’s still good fun.

The PvE community in the middle of the night (us time) isn’t huge, but there always seem to be enough on the map to complete the large Des and take down the dragons. Instead of it being a massive zerg, quick-tag-everything-before-it-dies! fest, you actually have to work for it.

I started an Engineer but found it hard to play so rolled a warrior. The warrior out leveled the engineer quickly and did indeed feel powerful. But it was also pretty boring. Run up to a mob, spam a couple skills, go to another one. If I get in trouble I dont have a ton of options to go with, so just try not to get in a bad spot.

I soon switched back to the engineer and decided to at least get to 20 to give it a shot, and found it was really awesome. With warrior, once I learned all the weapon skills, I had a pretty good idea how it would go for a while. With engineer you dont have many weapon skills, so you have to unlock all those slot skills and figure out how they work, and what belt skill they give you and at first it is a bit confusing.

After you get all the slot skills and figure out how to use them, they are so kitten versatile. I love having so many control options and different escapes, or random things. For some people having so much to work with and learn is a big turn off, but for me it is good. I like having more things to work with and learn about. Spamming only 3-4 buttons for hours gets boring fast. Sounds like maybe elementalist fits this bill as well.

I have noticed it too. Sometimes if I’m running past something maybe its my finger lightly touching the mouse when I go to see it’s; name and I target it, then randomly my pistol shoots it. Im also an engineer.

Having finally hit 30 last night (ya I am still lowbie), I noticed some people trying to get a group together for Ascalonian Catacombs. I was really working towards getting 30 so I could try it out. Some thoughts:

- Holy cow, no group finder? We were all running between different maps shouting for group members for the dungeon, and it took about 90 min to find 5 people to do it. After playing other games I guess I am spoiled but this was frustrating. Reminds me of sitting in town in Lineage 2 for 2 hours trying to get a group together. Not so great.

- After we got in the dungeon we have a waypoint and repair anvil, and get to watch a nice movie. These features were all great. I was worried about having to run back from town after dying, but this way was quite convenient.

- As we started engaging the mobs we realize they are much harder than expected (I think for 4 of us it was our first ever dungeon in gw2), but actually we did fine. Killed stuff, rez’d people when needed and got tripped up a few times with what we were supposed to do next. Some of the traps got us, but just the first time.

- The first boss (lieutenant guy) was not bad, even with the army of ads in the beginning. The adds didn’t have nearly as much health as the normal monsters in the dungeon. Kind of confused, seems like the normal monsters should have had a little bit lower health in a range similar to the boss adds. Boss himself was cake.

- Then we got a ‘bonus’ event of a troll. (At least that is what it said). Ohh boy, a troll, and a bridge, just what we wanted. >_> So of course we try first to fight him on the bridge, and get stomped since there is no place to aviod his AOE. So we try to move him to where the boss fight was. He rubberbands back to his spawn and regens all his health. After a 10 minute fight. Everyone is pretty kitten demoralized. We try again. Even near the bridge that he seemed to spawn on, he rubberbands and full heals. I fear some members of the group may have started slashing their wrists at this point. I suggest we take him forward into the room on the other side of the bridge. We go in there to fight him and 2 archers run over (The high health, take everything we have to just focus on them kind), and the trolls and the archers curb stomp us. 2 people are pretty much fed up, 1 person says F this and logs out. Me and the other guy realize there is no way to refill the group now, so are forced to stop.

So, first lowbie dungeon on story mode (this is easier than explore right?), after 3 hours we cant even make it to the second boss. I am not saying the monsters were too hard or too easy, but it is sad that we couldn’t get through it.

TLDR: I’m not saying every dungeon should be easy, but it would be nice if at least the first one introduced some of the concepts in a way that didn’t make half the group ragequit.

I just started the game in the last week or so and I find it to be pretty well populated. Not packed, but events usually have 3-4 people. I rarely have solo’d one. Sometimes a larger group of 10-15 shows up. For me it’s just about right. Not a post launch zergfest and not “this game is 3 years old and it’s a ghost town”.