Guild Wars 2

So, I bought GW2 on release day. I originally played a Mesmer with my buddy up to ~14, then I rerolled various times as he continued up to 35 and beyond. Less than a week later when I had gotten my Thief high enough to attempt AC story mode, we found a group and entered for our first dungeon run in GW2. We had no idea the hell we were in for…

I’m sure you all know the rest of that story – anyways, I quit and came back various times after that and the last time I played, I actually had a reasonable amount of fun but ended up not playing due to lack of time between school and 50 hour work weeks. I now have time to play and want to give it a shot, but the dungeons and mid/upper-level leveling content has me a bit worried.

It seems like in this game, I’m always fighting my way uphill. In the snow, without shoes or a coat. With a strap attached to a bus tied to my waist that I have to drag up with me. I know everyone hates these comparisons, but it feels similar to trying to play WoW to max level in level 30 gear.

Granted, I only have about 180 hours logged and a lot of it is from leveling low level characters, crafting or sitting in towns while I’m AFK. And, most of it is all split up so a lot of the knowledge and skills I may have gained were lost.

My question is, does it get better? I’ve played WoW from launch as well as various other MMO’s and the best way to put it is that in GW2, it feels like as I level up more, despite keeping gear up-to-date, I start to become undergeared and underpowered in comparison to the mobs. I understand the concept of dodging and such, but certainly as a melee there’s no way to entirely avoid damage, yet I feel like I’m often being downed in one or two hits that happen so quickly in succession that they’re unavoidable.

I suppose the other thing is that even when I do large upgrades to my entire set of gear,
I never really feel like I’m gaining much power – it almost feels like all the stats are entirely useless. I’ve played games where you definitely have to focus on the little boosts to provide one moderate boost and that’s all you get, but in GW2 it seems like you have to have a lot of huge boosts to provide one barely noticeable boost at all, lol.

Otherwise, the game looks like a lot of fun. I enjoy the scenery, and the videos of the new fights look really cool. I’d really love to check out the living story stuff as well, but if it always feels like this, I’m a bit afraid to give it much of a shot.

Am I somehow missing some major key things that make the game more fun and accessible to someone that wants to casually play without being destroyed, or do you pretty much just go along with the idea that anytime a mob breathes on you in GW2, you’re going to lose half of your HP, even if geared somewhat tanky?

these pics almost make me want to roll a necro :o they look so cool!

i definitely plan to do that, and do appreciate responses!

i’m having a lot of fun in the game again so far. i’m leveling up a thief (again) because i don’t really remember how to play thief, and also because i wanted to be asura. almost level 20, hope to be high enough to start dungeons sometime this weekend. i have saturday off so i think i’ll get quite a bit of playtime in then.

there’s some things i’m still confused about in the game, though. i know about combo fields and combo finishers — but, for example, i’ve been doing lots of group events: in the human starting area, i did the cave troll, oak, and wasp queen several times, and i’ve been basically farming the centaur events in kessex hills for a bit, starting at the bridge, then the three lieutenants, then the big champion. so, with all these people doing all of these events, and me playing a d/d condition thief, i find myself causing lots effects from using my bleed skill (i forget what it’s called but i believe it’s a whirling finisher…don’t shoot me if i’m wrong!) most or all of which are cleansing bolts, burning bolts and other “bolts”. i have no idea what these “bolts” are. i can only assume that they’re basically just projectiles that hit either friendly targets or enemy targets, but with so many people having so many spell effects going on, i can’t see exactly what is happening with these bolts, lol. how do they target things? if i get burning bolts, are those boltkittenting all enemies within, say, 15 yards or something? what about cleansing bolts?

anyway, hopefully this weekend and maybe tomorrow since i don’t work too much i’ll get some playtime in and be able to start doing other things. there’s a lot of really cool stuff in this game that i want to be able to explore and participate in. i like essentially all of the fundamental things in this game, i just need to learn mechanics and such so i can experience everything.

hey guys,

i’m patching up my game right now. i got this game on release but stopped playing after around level 35 or so on my thief, because i was so excited to get to the first dungeon and we all know how that one went.

i came back and played for a little bit a few months ago and got my mesmer up to around 30ish or so but had to quit due to not enough time for school. i also did another run of AC on my thief which went surprisingly smooth — so i tried to do another one, and it went pretty bad, again.

my interest in this game is mostly in PvE and to an extent, WvW. i’d like to learn to do the dungeons without being downed the entire time and such. i tried watching videos (strife’s?) but i don’t believe he goes through story mode for each one, at least not that he saw. i don’t really understand a lot of the mechanics of this game, i guess, in regards to the buffs/debuffs/combos/etc, as well as which attacks to avoid and how to avoid certain traps and whatnot. furthermore, i have not a single clue as to a good build pre-80 for doing dungeons, and i’m hoping to either play thief or mesmer, probably mesmer. use to be interested in d/d elementalist after daphoenix’s videos but it seems like they’re less popular than they once were, and upon trying to level one, i found myself frustrated pretty early because it takes so long to learn all the different combos and such since there are four different skill sets.

i’m on JQ and as i understand it, server transfers are not free anymore and i’m not interested in paying to move off, but i’d be interested in joining some of your runs soon, hopefully. i just have to figure out what i want to play first and on that note, i’d also like to chat with someone knowledgeable about the game/classes in regards to PvE so that i can get a feel for how each class is in PvE. for example, which are going to be more ranged or melee, which are going to be downed more, which are going to do more damage vs support via healing, condition removal, buffs or anything else that may be in this game that i don’t know about.

anyway, sorry for the long post, but if anyone is interested in helping me out it’d be very much appreciated. i really liked this game but it’s hard to learn when groups fall apart after the first wipe and no one in the group is willing to give advice to make it better.

thanks for the update, might try the same soon on my MBP and imac! may just stick with bootcamping the mbp though, low fps bugs me and i think it’ll be better for squeezing out every last bit of fps, but we shall see!

no one should be running a fight. it’s a group effort. you NEED the extra perspective from the other group members to win. an interesting thing in gw2 is that it’s almost entirely cooldown based, meaning that you can’t just have one person lead a fight. reason? that one person is not going to know when abilities are off cooldown and can be used again — especially when elementalists are involved, given that they have four sets of main abilities on top of their utility skills, along with the cooldowns related to swapping between all of those four utility skills.

in such a small group, they should know exactly who has what abilities and should know how to combo them together to maximum effect. this game doesn’t have that many different abilities, and there’s even fewer that are actually worth using in pvp/wvw, which makes it even easier to have all of the important combo fields/finishers memorized as well as their effects when used together. and, any player worth talking about has good enough awareness to know when other group members need a heal, a stealth, or anything of that nature.

the only time 1 person should be running a fight is in a proper zerg (not the garbage they fought), which is a numbers contest with minimal skill involved.

go watch some of the old wow arena videos that include the skype or vent calls, there is never just one person running a fight. sometimes there’s someone guiding a fight, but it’s never just one person.

a small group like this is not a zerg and shouldn’t be treated as such. a four man group in gw2 is more similar to fps gameplay than wvw zergs.

there’s a lot of flaws with your idea of how a group should be ran, but there IS a reason that all of the top teams in the world on any mmo with competitive small-scale pvp communicate like this group did.

Thanatos.2431:

The unwarrented chatter hurts my ears….

“I healing, i’m using my heal, i’m doing this i’m doing that…….”

If you were coordinated you would have 1 guy running the fight and using your spells together when it would be more effective.

I think you got lucky you found a group of lowbie pugs to woop up on…..

you just made it very clear that you’ve never done any type of competitive gameplay, ever.

post your results, i’m curious of the same thing for my macbook pro (13" late 2012)