Guild Wars 2

Wolfheart.1879:

Unhappy Birthday, Traits System. I’ll raise a glass for your removal.

As will I; may it not see a second birthday!

Literally all Anet has to do to convert me from an ex-player to a returning player is fix this trait system already. I’ve been spending time in Rift, but quickly rediscovered why I left the first time (GW2 is not the only game with just 1-2 issues that completely kill my enjoyment…). Time to see if LOTRO has come up with a reason for me to come back recently, I guess. Or there’s always my library of single-player games from past Steam sales.

My main interest is fractals, so I’m looking for the following:

1. a guild or group that runs fractals regularly
2. at compatible hours (start times in the range 9pm-midnight Pacific time during the week, and/or most times on weekends)
3. willing to run at lower tiers (as of this writing my reward level is 15, AR 20)

By “regularly” I do mean with very specific scheduled start times – I have almost nothing left that I care to do solo in this game, so at the moment I just log in, do dailies, and if I haven’t found a fractal or dungeon group in my main guild by then, log out. Typically 15-30 min./night. So scheduled runs like is typical in other MMOs would be very nice in my situation.

The flip side of #3 is that I am perfectly willing to run scale 1-9 if there are even newer players in the group who need to get their AR up to 10. I’ve been pressured to do scales above my AR (stupidly to boot – my guildmates setting my first fractal run to scale 10 gave them no benefit on loot, so all that accomplished was autokilling me at every agony check…) and would not want anyone else to go through it.

Currently I would say that I am moderately experienced at fractals (not highly experienced though). I’ve seen them all, know most of them reasonably well, but there are a few that I’ve only done once or a few times where I still need practice on some mechanics. And I’m not at all sure I’ve seen them all at scale 11+ where new mechanics are added.

This is probably too specific a request to get anywhere in this forum, but it’s worth a shot…

The trait system can turn new players into ex-players much faster than Anet can be bothered to fix it, apparently. I’ve been playing for 3.5 months and no longer have any solo content I care to do while waiting for guildmates to become available for fractal/dungeon runs each night. In a normal MMO, this would be where alts come in and I’d stay busy for a very long time. Sadly, since alts have been non-viable for 11 months, I just log out after my dailies unless I find a fractal or dungeon group in that brief period of time. I’ve thought about sucking it up and doing the scavenger hunt a second time, but every time I do I just shudder and log out.

In theory a successful fix to the trait system would be a necessary condition for me to consider buying HoT. In practice, I’ll probably be playing another game whenever HoT releases and won’t even know that it came out, let alone whether traits were finally fixed.

Hard to believe Anet let this disaster remain in place for so long.

A couple of minor suggestions from a new player’s perspective:

1. Better rewards for experienced players helping out in low difficulty scale runs would be nice, so that they’re more willing to do so. Perhaps give them bonus gold (50s-1g?) per tier that their reward level exceeds the difficulty scale? To some extent the dailies serve this role, but that’s unpredictable and only happens a couple times a week.
2. Unifying the agony tiers with the reward tiers would avoid a lot of confusion. People don’t seem to understand that scale 10 doesn’t give any better rewards than scale 1-9. Assuming the wiki is correct.

The problem I’ve had trying to get into fractals is that the experienced players understandably try to maximize their chances of getting loot, and as item #2 indicates they often do so incorrectly. Setting someone’s first run to scale 10, or saying “oh, you have AR10 now, great, let’s set this run to 20!” for example. Those are both totally doable, but getting autokilled by unavoidable agony is not a good introduction for the new guy…

This is a good idea, pretty much how Rift does it if I remember correctly. Though I’d restate “The Problem” as “It’s very hard to find the right guild(s) in this game.”

Map chat recruitment is obviously not the way to go, and the existing Looking For forum here is guaranteed to have very low signal to noise by the way it’s designed. To repeat a suggestion from a while back – that forum needs to be split into two or four forums: either “[NA] Looking For” and “[EU] Looking For”, or “[NA] LFGuild”, “[EU] LFGuild”, “[NA] Guild Recruitment”, and “[EU] Guild Recruitment”. Combining both megaservers in the same forum just leads to endless bumping, with the majority of posts being completely irrelevant to any given reader.

I was eventually able to find a suitable guild, but it took an external site of dubious completeness and accuracy to do so. The extremely limited (forum) or non-existent (in-game) tools Anet provides were of absolutely no help, which is uniquely bad among the MMOs I’ve played…

P.S. I would also like to suggest that there be a Suggestions forum for stuff like this! Pretty sure this is going to sink like a rock in the GW2 Discussions forum.

Vayne.8563:

I’m sorry but this is just bad info. You can buy ranks in WvW with laurels and badges of honor, without doing any WvW at all. You never have to WvW even a little for a gift of battle or level 14, because you get so many badges of honor with achievement point chests (and laurels aren’t that hard to come by either).

Ah, you’re talking about http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Taste_of_Liquid_World_Experience
apparently. I’d never noticed that before – only visited the WvW laurel vendor for my first ring (didn’t realize I had WvW badges back when I got my amulet) and assumed they just carried the same stuff at slightly different prices from the regular laurel merchents. You’re right, the math does work out for this easily bumping one to rank 14 pretty much at will. Thank you, that’s good to know!

Punkinkatt, speaking as a very similar player to yourself (100% PVE, only doing PVP content like WVW grudgingly due to the gating mechanisms in this game), I’d advise that you consider what you’re trying to gain by map completion. If it’s just the gold star and Been There Done That title, by all means, keep at it. With care, odd playing hours, and as many weeks as needed for your server to rotate through all three colors, you’ll get there.

However if your goal is a legendary, I’d advise giving up now and never going back. Legendaries also require the Gift of Battle = WVW rank 14. That’s about five months of doing the easy Master of Ruins/Land Claimer type dailies. During which time you will inevitably get ganked periodically by groups you never see coming. Totally not worth it.

It’s not really much of a loss anyway, ascended weapons are just as good and vastly easier to get (though still quite grindy; such is the nature of GW2).

Jerus.4350:

PST > EST!

Seconded! I’ve been looking for low level fractal runs for quite some time (my guild very rarely does fractals, and would only go as low as level 10 the one time they’ve done so – quite agonizing, pun intended, for a new player), so if something like this ever happens at a time I can attend I would love to join.

Could there be a future Fractals for Beginners event on a weekend, perhaps?

I’m also a new player, so here are my lessons learned.

Regarding the back item, crafted is the way to go unless you aim for ascended. The latter are enormously expensive to make – 250 Vials of Powerful Blood for the Quiver of Swift Flight for example. If you have most of LS season 2 unlocked apparently Mawdrey is a fairly doable ascended back, but I’m guessing you’d have to spend a few hundred gems to unlock the necessary episodes.

Anyway, chef is not too painful to get to 400, especially if you’ve done many of the hearts that let you get ingredients with karma. The reason not to get the guild exotic backpack is that for some reason the crafted exotic backs have much better stats despite only being level 78 instead of level 80. Even accounting for the lower tier gem in the upgrade slot the crafted back comes out ahead – it’s actually not far short of the ascended backs.

Armor – Temple of Grenth in Cursed Shore is by far the quickest and easiest way to get berserker armor (if you want other stats, see the wiki for which temple to aim for). You should have enough karma for at least two pieces when you hit 80, and if you do Tequatl you get a lot of karma each day. Definitely do dungeons too, but unless you’re in a very active guild and play at a very active time of day, temples will get you more armor pieces much faster. Also note that temple armor is the same price for every slot, while dungeon token armor is cheaper for the gloves, boots, shoulders, and helm. So start with temple chest and legs, and see what of the other four you can fill with CoF or CoE (I ended up with 4 temple pieces plus CoF gloves and CoE helm).

I never really understood the concern about not being able to salvage temple armor – as I see it the only reason one would want to is if you grind crafting to 500 and make yourself ascended armor. And if you can do that, buying a second set of armor runes is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of grinding crafting that much.

Weapon – should be your first priority to get to exotic quality. Either buy off the TP, or look at the mystic forge recipes if you can spare 50 skill points. Also be warned that many of the “pearl” line of weapons, which are the basic crafted level 80 exotics, look ridiculously bad. I don’t normally care much about item skins, but even I looked at the Pearl Broadsword and said “Nope! Mystic Claymore it is then!”

If your guild doesn’t do guild missions much, or doesn’t do all of them, these guys are fantastically helpful and a great way to ensure your 6 commendations/week:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/events/GW2-Community-Missions-Tequatl-Events/

Rare items are pretty cheap to get as placeholders when you’re just starting. It will take a total of four weeks to get both ascended accessories, and probably at least as long to get ascended rings (nominally 20 days, but good luck finding a low level fractal group every day). So rares in 2-4 of those slots make sense. If you want to punt on the back piece, the personal story will give you a level 80 rare back.

I got my amulet about five minutes after hitting 80, and have my first accessory via commendations as well. And my crafted backpack has an infusion slot too, not that I can put anything in any infusion slot yet.

You guys seem to be talking about gear acquisition in the platonic ideal of GW2, where one can always find whatever group one needs to run anything at any time. That is very much not the reality of this or any other MMO, at least for me. A vaguely realistic estimate of how quickly I can get a ring from fractals is about five weeks, figuring a very optimistic once/week and hoping for favorable timing with dailies (could be that the daily was why people finally wanted to run one last night, not sure). PUGging does not seem possible since I’ve never seen anything listed in the 1-9 category; probably not content at all suited to PUGs either, at least as a new player.

I’m also still not clear on what laurels need to be saved for. Sure, they’re time gated, but so what? Like I said, I have the amulet, and from what I’ve seen rings are the only other useful item one can acquire with laurels. Is the idea that one normally converts laurels to gold in some way, as Thaddeus alludes to?

We did a level 10 run last night – I gather that way the experienced players still have a reasonable chance at decent rewards or something. Unfortunately it looks like at least one more run of being auto-killed whenever agony comes into play before I can get a Versatile Simple Infusion and start getting some AR. I gather the system worked more smoothly back at the beginning when everyone could do a bunch of level 1-9 before hitting 10+… I’m working on my passion fruit and karka shell supply but the enormous cost in Powerful Blood, Ancient Bone, etc. is the real limiting factor on the mystic forge infusion options.

I’ve seen people say that one should not waste laurels on rings since they’re easier to get in fractals. But I just did my first fractal run today (was quite fun and interesting, I wish people did these more), and it looks like it takes ten runs per ring, or slightly less with dailies like today’s. That doesn’t strike me as a whole lot better than spending the 35 laurels… Or, looking at the wiki, 25 laurels + 250 “Badges of Honor” which for some reason I actually have despite never doing WvW.

Is there something laurel-exclusive and more important than rings that one should be saving for? I strongly dislike this game’s crafting system, so it will be a long time if ever before I need to worry about ascended crafting. And I don’t see myself spending 75 laurels on a cat mini.

I’d like to do Arah Story Mode (well, all the dungeons Story Mode at some point) to finish the personal story as well.

How PUGable are the Story Modes of dungeons? After years in other MMOs I’m strongly PUG-averse (and I gather PUGs here offer toxicity on top of the usual issues, since apparently there’s a “vote-kick” mechanism…) but there may be no other choice. I might be able to do Arah SM in guild since there seem to be a lot of us who need it, the trick will be scheduling. Getting the other Story Modes done appears to be PUG or nothing though.

I take it the rewards for Story Mode dungeons are poor/nonexistant, or the time to run them is very long such that reward/time is terrible? It sounds like they’re de facto once per character content, whether or not that was Anet’s intent (for obvious game design reasons I presume it wasn’t).

I’m puzzled at how guild influence has been working for the past several days. I used to get 10 influence per character per day as I logged each one in, back when my only guild was my personal bank guild. Since joining a real guild my main has repped that guild, so naturally I’m not getting the 10 influence from him. For a while I still got 10/day from the other four, but more recently my guild history log shows “2 members logged in … for 20 influence” every second day. Despite the fact that I still have my four alts repping my personal guild, and I make sure to log each of them in every single day. What’s up with that?

Looking at the wiki, apparently weird things can happen if the characters are all in the same zone, but my alts are parked in LA, Ebonhawke, Hoelbrak, and Black Citadel respectively, so that shouldn’t be an issue. I guess I’m encountering the “It is also possible that the account will not generate any attendance influence on a given day.” Which doesn’t tell me anything about whether I can get back to the full 40 influence/day that I expect for logging in four characters every day…

Thanks Ojimaru. Sounds like crafting in this game was designed to be endgame content, which explains a lot actually. I still think it’s a terrible crafting system, but at least the motivation behind it is now clearer to me…

Still no luck finding a guild. Is there a way to effectively research guilds in-game? For example back in LOTRO I could look at the social panel looking at all non-anonymous level capped characters, sort by guild, and get a very good idea of what guilds are active at my playing times. Including a sense of what they’re up to, if I see a bunch of names with group icons all in the same instance for example. My memory of Rift is a little fuzzier since I spent far less time there, but I think one could do essentially the same thing there. Plus Rift had in-game guild search tools, sort of like a simpler version of http://gw2.guildex.org/guilds/. The only in-game guild searching option I’m aware of is “sit in Lion’s Arch and keep an eye out for recruitment ads in map chat”, which so far hasn’t been any more effective than the “looking for” forum or that gw2.guildex.org site.

Is there a more accurate and up to date version of that guildex.org site somewhere? Or instead of a server community site like AdaephonDelat linked, perhaps a “NA megaserver” community site to help hunt for PVE guilds? As one would expect, a specfic server’s site is mostly going to be about WvW since that’s the only remaining meaning a “server” has anymore. Google isn’t finding anything useful for me so far.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I can make the gold to work with the costs, and I still think the cost is pretty bad. The SP can be gotten around, sure, especially if you’re running map completions or champ trains enough to have barrels of scrolls.

The alternative costs are . . . a bit crazy. Added to one of them having a very specific unlock (Take the Gates of Arah . . . not defend, but take them) and you have a problem. Especially since any trip I make to Cursed Shore, that’s been left in the defense mode for ages.

A lot of the unlocks are crazy, from what I’ve seen. I’ve heard nobody ever does that grub in WvW (and I wouldn’t do any of the WvW unlocks, regardless); Fields of Ruin map chat always seems to be informing people that the Foulbear chieftain event chain is broken, which if true means purchase is the only unlock method for that one. I’ve heard that dredge commissar is busted too. The Foulbear thing was the last straw for me that established my “retire alts at 30” policy, since that was next on my list for my guardian…

And then there’s the wildly disproportionate unlocks, even at the same level. Reach the chest in a simple almost-soloable bandit cave in Kessex Hills, vs. do a group puzzle dungeon in Diessa Plateau (that the telescope icon points you to the wrong place for, since the entrance portal is quite a ways away). Or your Gates of Arah example, compared to simply finding the wrecked ship on the beach a bit south of there, or running up the “source of Orr” passage in the real world instead of the personal story instance. So inconsistent…

My goal is to do dungeons and fractals, when/if I can find a guild with the right schedule and play style. Sorry, I guess I neglected to mention that in the OP since there’s not a lot else I can do on that front, other than periodically bump my “looking for” thread.

Silverwastes for gold you say? That sounds useful indeed!

That Guild mission forum looks useful, too bad they killed it… What do you mean by “your server community website”? I look in the “looking for” part of this forum pretty often, if that’s what you mean.

Are Tequatl and Triple Trouble (not familiar with that one) feasible for the usual zerg mass one sees at other world bosses? I had gotten the impression that Teq was basically this game’s version of what would be a lair raid in other MMOs – just the one boss, but requiring actual coordination and communication, and thus probably a guild group. The world bosses in the dailies seem to be at the very basic level of “has red name – kill it!”

I will look into those external Orr tracking sites, thanks!

PookieDaWombat.6209:

Worblehat.8697:

Astral Projections.7320:

Experienced players may have an excess, but new players need them to buy skills as well as traits. I remember when starting out, having to accumulate skill points before I could get an utility skill. It would have been doubly painful to have to save up for traits as well.

For experienced players, a legendary requires 200 skill points. People may be saving up for that. Many use skill points to make gold by promoting items in the mystic forge and no longer have excess skill points for that reason or don’t want to give up that income. If you make ascended gear, it takes 20 skill points per piece. A number of mystic forged weapons (with unique skins) take 50 sps.

I am a new player myself, and had no trouble unlocking all my actual skills, plus saving up a huge excess in case I needed to buy traits. There are still tons of traits I don’t have (after nearly a week at 80, I think I’m at 16/30 blue, 8/20 green, and 5/15 yellow) but nothing that looks so critical to have that I’d spend the gold on it. So I ended up making the Mystic Claymore as my level 80 weapon since it saved me about 3g over buying a crafted sword (not to mention that those pearl greatswords look terrible). And I still have a ton of SP left over, though at least it’s back down under 100 again.

But crafting ascended gear is not even on my horizon, and the only thing I’ll ever do with a legendary precursor is sell it, so I think that explains the difference in opinion on which cost is more egregious. I like the arm and a leg phrasing. Thanks for the explanation!

And now:
Come back after you’ve made your 3rd toon and leveled them and gotten their traits. Come back after you’ve tried to have a toon with the ability and flexibility to change builds on the fly with fully complimenting armor sets and weapon sets.
Come back after running all those toons in something like WvW were changing builds for a given situation is almost necessary at times.

Let us know how well you’re doing on skill points, gold, and build choices then and realize that many of us have way more alts than that, with many being made after the trait update. These are things you don’t realize at the moment.

Come back once you understand the conversation you’re jumping into.

For some reason you seem to believe I’m defending the trait system somehow. I defy you to find the slightest shred of evidence for that. Go ahead and look in this very thread, I’m on record a few pages back agreeing with everyone else that it’s a terrible system.

All I did was ask a very simple question about why everyone else felt the SP part of the unlock costs was the worst part, while I consider the gold cost to be worse. Astral Projections and naiasonod understood that perfectly well and gave clear and helpful answers. I’m upset at the prospect of losing an arm, the rest of you are more upset at the prospect of losing a leg, either way it’s ridiculous.

For the record, my alts retire at 30 since I have no interest in doing the trait scavenger hunt a second (or fifth) time. Couldn’t care less about WvW, so whatever.

1. Is there any way to tell the status of an Orr temple without actually going to the appropriate map? Of the temple traits, I’m still missing Lyssa and Grenth since those temples were always open when I was map-completing those zones and getting the other yellow traits nearby. Would be nice if I could see if one was closed while I was still standing in Lion’s Arch deciding what I wanted to do that evening.

2. I saw the following in another thread:

Hint: If you don’t have a guild that does Guild Missions, plenty of Guilds out there accept ‘guests’ to their missions, try a big community guild!

What guilds would these be? The “looking for” forum is severely deficient, but I don’t recall ever seeing anything like that.

3. General question about guilds – I see some (particularly the ones that advertise in LA map chat) have 100% rep requirements. Why would anyone join such guilds? I assume almost everyone has their own personal banking guild – I know I couldn’t live without mine. Or when these guilds say “100% rep” do they mean “rep whenever you’re not standing right in front of the guild bank using your personal banking guild”?

4. Advice on what to do next? I’ve hunted down the traits I can see myself potentially using (plus many that just happened to be along the way). I’ll probably gather many of the remaining traits someday just out of completionism, but that’s not terribly compelling. Tried visiting Southsun Cove tonight, but that really truly sucked. “You can’t get there from here” geography, plus enormous armies of those karka things at lots of chokepoints… ugh, not fun. Fortunately the Karka Queen trait is not a useful one (I was there for that event, swimming around trying to figure out how the heck one gets up to that plateau while watching her health bar diminish to nothing).

Are Dry Top and/or Silverwastes useful places to go? No traits are hidden there, so is there any benefit from doing those zones other than just seeing the content and perhaps getting lucky with the map completion rewards? Assuming they have map completion rewards – the wiki says Southsun Cove does not, but I didn’t see that disclaimer on the DT or Silverwastes pages.

I’ve tried a bit of the LS, but I’m not sure how seriously to take it since I haven’t the foggiest idea what’s going on, who most of the NPCs are, and apparently I’m not terribly good at being Caithe. Doesn’t look like it offers anything much for loot, according to the wiki.

Could level my alts, but they’re all near the level 30 “soft cap” the trait system imposes. I did trait-hunting on one character, I’m not particularly inclined to do it again… Hopefully the trait system will be fixed someday such that bringing them to 80 becomes a more reasonable prospect.

Bump.

Are there west coast guilds in this game?

Gear and traits should now both be dungeon-ready. Gear is mostly Rare berserker, with two Grenth temple berserker exotic armor pieces, a berserker ascended amulet, and a pair of Rare soldier accessories. Weapon is berserker exotic finally. I know that’s not up to snuff by speed-run standards, but like I said that’s not what I’m looking for. Hoping to do dungeons to get the rest of my gear up to Exotic, and apparently there are “guild missions” that are a good way to upgrade accessories.

What do you mean “escape completely” with the elite? It’s nice, but doesn’t put you out of combat. I tried using it to buy time to get some distance and recover some health but it didn’t really accomplish much. Just delayed the inevitable by 8s, or whatever the stealth duration is.

I just started the LS and am having trouble with the end of this quest. Is there a way to cosh Vorpp, or is the intent that Caithe fights off the entire room? I’ve managed to de-shield Vorpp twice, but he doesn’t face inwards long enough for the cosh, and the guards nearby always cover the area inside the ring of shield generators so I can’t wait and cosh him when he faces outwards.

Fighting the room so far has not worked, though part of it is the wildly unfamiliar skill set. Thanks Donari for your first post, that definitely helped (killed a couple of agents the second time around).

Perhaps the strategy is to systematically cosh the guards first, then hit the appropriate generator, stand between Vorpp and the prisoners and wait for him to turn to face outwards? I don’t recall if the guards have coverage gaps that would allow one to be coshed though.

Also strongly supported. As I pointed out in another thread, this forum by design has a signal to noise ratio less than 1 for all players, since NA and EU are completely separate (technically that could allow for S/N=1, but actual players and guilds are a bit more particular than “anything on the correct megaserver”).

Is there an officially sanctioned method of making suggestions like this? I don’t see a “Suggestions” forum. Not sure Anet people read this forum, and in any case this thread will be buried on page 3 again in another day or two. Looks like there used to be a Suggestions forum but it got killed in the revamp for some reason.

Astral Projections.7320:

Experienced players may have an excess, but new players need them to buy skills as well as traits. I remember when starting out, having to accumulate skill points before I could get an utility skill. It would have been doubly painful to have to save up for traits as well.

For experienced players, a legendary requires 200 skill points. People may be saving up for that. Many use skill points to make gold by promoting items in the mystic forge and no longer have excess skill points for that reason or don’t want to give up that income. If you make ascended gear, it takes 20 skill points per piece. A number of mystic forged weapons (with unique skins) take 50 sps.

I am a new player myself, and had no trouble unlocking all my actual skills, plus saving up a huge excess in case I needed to buy traits. There are still tons of traits I don’t have (after nearly a week at 80, I think I’m at 16/30 blue, 8/20 green, and 5/15 yellow) but nothing that looks so critical to have that I’d spend the gold on it. So I ended up making the Mystic Claymore as my level 80 weapon since it saved me about 3g over buying a crafted sword (not to mention that those pearl greatswords look terrible). And I still have a ton of SP left over, though at least it’s back down under 100 again.

But crafting ascended gear is not even on my horizon, and the only thing I’ll ever do with a legendary precursor is sell it, so I think that explains the difference in opinion on which cost is more egregious. I like the arm and a leg phrasing. Thanks for the explanation!

JustTrogdor.7892:

The OP asked were to post such messages. I answered the question. If you don’t like the way it works perhaps you should start a thread about it.

There already is one:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/lookingfor/Request-Impoved-Guild-Recruitment-Forum
Created two days ago, currently on page 3.

And I completely agree, the “looking for” forum is structurally useless. For any given user, the signal to noise cannot exceed 1, and since real gamers are not idealized frictionless spheres, S/N<1 for actual users. NA players have no interest in EU guilds and vice versa.

At a minimum, there need to be two “looking for” forums (NA, EU). Ideally there should be four, NA-LFGuild, EU-LFGuild, NA-Guild recruitment, EU-Guild recruitment.

Julischka Bean.7491:

or at least reduce the amount of skillpoints necessary for unlocking.

Apologies for the tangent, but why are SP the part people complain about? For me it’s the gold cost that’s prohibitive. I have more SP than I can ever possibly use, and get more all the time whenever my 80 “levels” (not to mention those from exploring maps I haven’t completed yet).

I’d think that experienced players wouldn’t have much problem with either part of the cost (aside from the historical anger that the cost used to be over 10x cheaper) – and they’re probably what the costs were designed around. Is there some other important SP sink that level 80s need to save for?

Is there a way to customize the UI so that dailies don’t show at all?

It’s perfectly correct that one doesn’t have to do the dailies, and indeed I often don’t, particularly since hitting 80. But I think there would be much less complaining if there was a way to make them go away, rather than having that big purple box intruding on your peripheral vision for the entire time you’re logged in. I looked in the options panel but all I could find was a way to alter or disable the little arrow thing pointing towards the nearest unexplored map area/poi/vista/personal story etc.

It would also be nice if the dailies could be coded to check whether an account is even capable of doing them. For example, someone whose first character hit 80 a couple days ago, and is still working on unlocking key traits, acquiring decent gear, and looking for a guild is in no position to be doing fractals, let alone the higher tier fractal from the second fractal daily. I’d like to do fractals someday, but I’ll need more/better traits and gear plus a guild before that’s feasible.

LadyHawk.5319:

Similar question but different leveling path. I am new to the game as well. I have a lvl 44 ranger (and an 18 elementalist I am tinkering with). I have only quested in all the starter zones (did storyline quests, some crafting). Where to next? Have not done any dungeons. Not sure how easy it will be for a ranger (not a huntard – I do know how to play the class in a group lol) who is not lvl 80 to get into a group. But I am not sure what the best path is. I do not mind the journey of questing, esp. a new game. Should I quest all the 15-25 zones, etc or just complete zone totally now (e.g., my racial zone) and later complete all the others for points, bonuses, etc? What is the "normal’ path for a newbie? Thanx

For what it’s worth, my leveling path was driven entirely by the wiki (or traits panel, if you prefer that interface). Look at the traits, figure out which ones you want, and which ones happen to be near-ish to traits you want. That determines what zone to focus on in a given level range. For my warrior, that meant Gendarran Fields and Harathi Hinterlands; an initial look at my guardian suggests more of a focus on the Ascalon zones. No idea what a ranger would prefer. Any zone in your level range will give a trait for 100% completion, at least. People often call out the event champions that give the other traits, so keep an eye on map chat.

A quick detour to Kessex Hills to hit the bandit cave in Earthlord’s Gap would be worthwhile as well – that’s the lowest level method of trait acquisition. There’s also a trait in Diessa Plateau, but it’s very involved. Pretty neat if there are enough people to complete it, but not something one can count on happening.

Thanks, I was barely able to get through it with a rifle (it listed substantially higher damage than the lower level longbow, so that seemed to be the logical one to choose). I hadn’t seen RoseofGilead’s post at the time but that’s basically what I did, since shooting the boss by myself did essentially zero net damage. Didn’t bother with the couriers having seen how fast they respawn on my first attempt. Rifle was adequate to take down the guards faster than they could respawn, at least, so I did get that second phase, and the two charr managed to stay up after that. The three of us could do positive net damage so after that it was just a matter of grinding out the kill. Yay, my rifle kill achievement incremented by a large percentage… (didn’t check, it’s probably up to around 7/100 now)

Re: changing weapons in combat as Pokecenter suggested, I did not get the out of combat state at any time during my initial attempt, despite running all the way back to the front door to see if I could leave the instance that way (apparently not – had to log out and log back in again to abort that attempt). Which makes the NPC comment about switching to ranged weapons very frustrating since it happens after the last point at which one could do so if one doesn’t normally carry a ranged weapon in the secondary weapon slot.

Server preference: NA; as I understand the megaserver system, the specific server is irrelevant. I’m on Ferguson’s Crossing in case that does matter.
Play Type Preference: PvE
Player Style: Casual, might become more Hardcore with experience.
Active Time: 8pm-midnight Pacific during the week, plus most weekends

I’m new to GW2, just hit 80 yesterday, but experienced in other MMOs (primarily LOTRO). Currently looking to gear up, do dungeons, fractals, hunt down at least some of the traits I don’t yet have, and whatever else one does at 80 in PVE. I’m quite certain there’s still a lot about this game I’ve never even heard of, so a helpful community I can ask would be great!

One caveat is that the “dungeon speed run” thing some people seem to like to do is a bit baffling to me, so that’s not really what I’m aiming for. I’ve always preferred to just do the instance, have fun, and it takes as long as it takes. Sounds like GW2 dungeons are a bit short compared to most in LOTRO and Rift anyway, though I could be misinformed there. Also as a new player my gear will (a) suck, at least for a little while, and (b) I’ve seen arguments that new folks should include some soldier’s gear for survivability rather than going full berserker gear. Fair warning there; hopefully there are guilds that don’t mind new players.

I do have my own personal bank vault guild, so the “100% rep requirement” that I see in some guild threads could be an issue. Presumably most people have their own personal guilds so this must be a pretty common concern. Seems like having my alts rep my bank guild (I’m sure I’ll want the vault size upgrades someday) and my level 80 rep a real guild with other players in it would be the logical approach to take.

I’m on the NA servers.

Are you saying that the way to go is just focus on the boss and ignore all the guards? Does that actually out-damage all the regeneration it gets from the courier deliveries? I tried running in and aoeing the guards; retreated behind a pillar, killed off the couriers, saw them respawn, and then tried sniping with greatsword-4 and those rocks on the ground, neither of which appeared to do any significant damage.

I think I have a couple of traits unlocked that affect longbows, though the actual longbow is something like level 65 rare, so not that great against level 80 mobs I’d think… Rifle is a level 77 blue I think (you can tell how much I use ranged weapons…). Looks like warriors get one trait that affects rifles and I don’t think I have it.

Thanks! For some reason I thought mystic coins were account bound, but you’re right, they’re easily available on the TP. Good to know.

Legendaries are a non-issue for me, since from what I’ve read those require 100% map completion, and map completion includes WvW which I have zero interest in. Literally my only concern about legendaries is that if I somehow got a precursor in the near future, I don’t yet have enough gold pay the posting fee to post it on the TP at the prices I saw.

I do plan to mix soldiers armor with berserker; I’ve read the latter is demanded in dungeons, but extra vit/toughness certainly helps in the open world, and is just as good as berserker for those world boss dailies we often see, since apparently world bosses are immune to crits. Medium term goal would be to have a full set of berserker, with about half a set of soldiers gear for swapping. My main character is a warrior, if that matters.

Crafting gear is not on the table for new players. The crafting system in this game is terrible. There’s no way a new player will be able to craft anything useful until long after hitting 80. If ever – I’ve enjoyed crafting in other MMOs but I’m not entirely sure it’s worth the bother in this game. I guess I’ll see what the TP has for back pieces. My current t2 crafted (+4 power +3 precision, woo!) is obviously inadequate. I was thinking of going with the green back piece from near the end of the level 80 personal story (if the wiki is accurate), but I’m not sure I’ll get that far either thanks to that Mouth of Zhaitan in Estate of Decay…

I am interested in doing fractals, but my sense of the GW2 endgame is that fractals are a step beyond the regular dungeons, so presumably exotic rings or ascended via laurels would be the way to go to start with.

Didn’t know guild missions existed or had relevance for gear – thanks! I need to find a real guild (i.e. not my personal extra bank space guild) anyway for dungeons.

Is there a viable way to defeat the mouth of Zhaitan? The information on the wiki is wrong, unfortunately. Killing the couriers does nothing because both respawn quickly. The friendly NPCs die very quickly, so the “while your allies are alive” bit is moot. And he was doing his shockwave attack against them, as well. Maybe killing the spectral guards might revive the NPCs, but if so only if one kills all of them before any respawn. And again the respawns are fast enough to make this impractical – the fewest I saw was three.

I’m just not seeing how this fight is doable. Granted it would help to actually have a ranged weapon equipped (I don’t, normally, and there’s no out-of-combat time to equip one of the ones in my backpack after the NPC suggests ranged weapons), but ducking around pillars to fire a few shots from a longbow or rifle doesn’t seem like it would be enough deadlier than ducking around pillars to throw a greatsword or a rock to make a difference…

Is this part of the story intended for a group? A friend told me that it is possible to do story instances with more than one person, though I’m not entirely sure how.

Is there any way to back up and choose Starving the Beast instead? Also, is it worth continuing to the end of the level 80 part of the story? The severe lack of making sense is already a problem. As best I can tell the level 80 story seems to happen between The Battle for Fort Trinity and Against the Corruption in the level 70 story – very strange.

I was about to start a similar thread, so I’m glad I saw this. I’m a new player who just hit 80, so I’m wondering what the best way to gear up is.

Is there any catch-22 in this game such that you need to already be (somewhat) geared to run the instances (dungeons) that earn you your gear? From the posts above it looks like dungeons, primarily CoF/CoE/Arah, are the preferred source of armor. But based on past MMO experience I wouldn’t think that a fresh 80 in assorted leveling drops, some of them massively out of date (my rings are rare level 47 and 53 drops from some of the first world bosses after the new dailies alerted me to the existence of world bosses…), would be particularly welcome in any group. What would be a sensible threshold for a character to be considered dungeon-ready in this game? And do I understand correctly that completion of story mode is not required to participate in an exploration mode dungeon, as long as the group leader has completed story mode? I’d like to complete the story modes, but I gather those don’t happen much these days.

Should I be spending laurels and/or mystic coins to gear up? I notice that the laurel vendor has ascended amulets and rings; is that why people obsess over laurel acquisition rates, or are they saving/using laurels on other things entirely? It seems odd that I can apparently get a best in slot amulet or ring literally ten minutes after hitting 80. And according to the wiki, I could spend a bit of gold on the TP to get orichalcum greatsword blades and hilts and spend some mystic coins to get the http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_Claymore. Or would it be nuts to burn 20 mystic coins to save 3-4g, which appears to be the price difference between the blades/hilts and the cheapest exotic berserker stat greatsword on the TP? From browsing the wiki I get the sense that the primary use for mystic coins is for those agony resistance infusions for ascended gear. Which is a non-issue for a new 80 like me, but mystic coin acquisition rate is even slower than laurels (I think – looks like 20/month, unless I’m missing something) so perhaps I ought not to spend them lightly.

Do people successfully open the Temple of Grenth with any regularity? Looks like I could get 2-3 pieces of gear there with karma. But so far I’ve only gotten as far as Straits of Devastation and seen two attempts at Balthazar, one successful, so I don’t have a good sense of whether the temple karma vendors should be considered plausibly available or not, or to what extent that varies from temple to temple.

Bellizare.5816:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

Vayne.8563:

if it helps some new people so be it.

Does it though? Does it really help new players? If it even confuses veteran players like me and make it harder for us then how the heck is this supposed to help new players?

I don’t know many new players, but I know one, and I know he is super confused with the NPE. He just couldn’t understand how/why he had so much trouble defeating a lvl 9 bandit as a level 9 guardian. He started blaming himself. I told him it wasn’t his fault and I told him about the “thresholds” and that at lvl 9 you’re really just lvl 4. Then he was even more confused.

I would really like to hear input from other new players who started playing after the NPE. I don’t think the NPE achieved what Anet hoped it would achieve.

I was just thinking on this. New players can not relate to the changes, as they are new players.

They have no clear idea of how seriously nerfed their gaming experience is. If they did, they would most likely quit in despair.

On the other hand, “vets” know exactly what has been lost in the whole leveling process. Our input here seems to revolve around how to avoid NPE and traits changes, by using our accumulated wealth and privileges. (Which kind of indicates to me that experienced players actually don’t really like the changes).

So, help every new player you find. They really need it.

I’ve been playing for about a month now, so like Bellizare says, this is the only GW2 I’ve ever seen.

For what it’s worth, NPE per se wasn’t that big a deal to me. The first few levels were annoyingly limited (oh, there are things called skill challenges and vistas? Better retrace my steps and do the ones I didn’t know existed when I was near them…). But by the mid to high teens enough of a character is unlocked that it starts to seem like a reasonable game. And for alts, at least those initial annoyingly limited levels pass very quickly, and one can see and do the skill points and vistas on those characters from the start.

The difficulty does feel jumpy sometimes with the concentrated stat increases (I gather it used to be +a little bit every level, instead of the current +a lot every six levels?). It’s no coincidence that level 9 keeps coming up, since there’s a stat increase at level 10 and characters thus may be a bit weaker than they should be at 9. I had the same problem on my mesmer and elementalist, some tough times at 9, come back a level or two later and smoke those same mobs that had been stomping me. But nothing wrong with having a challenge; at worst in cases like that you just come back a bit later.

I’ve read something about the old method of unlocking weapon skills on a per-weapon basis by (shockingly) actually using the weapon. That sounds pretty neat to me; more interesting than the current system. Now by the time I actually have access to multiple weapon choices, I just look over the weapon section of my skills panel, work out which one(s) suit me best, and move on from there. Not having weapon choices is of course another facet of the “very early levels are annoyingly limited” complaint.

On the other hand the trait system is just horrible; a potentially interesting idea with just about the worst possible implementation. Might not be game-breaking, but definitely alt-killing. I consider my alts to have a de facto level cap around 30 – I might make an exception for my guardian since I’m finding I like that class a lot, but the rest will languish around 30ish until/unless Anet fixes the trait system. Which from what I’ve seen in the huge trait thread seems unlikely after this much time.

But April 2014 trait revamp != Sept. 2014 NPE change, so that’s not particularly relevant here.

SarahWitter.2317:

The BLTC is up and running again.

No, it isn’t. BLTC is visible again, no longer showing down for maintenance. However attempting to sell anything gets the red “ERROR: An error has occurred” screen.

I just tried logging out and logging back in again, but that did not get around the error.

Shaaba.5672:

The world bosses are on a timer that casuals or new players won’t know about unless they research it. It’s a specific event they may not even know about if they haven’t leveled up in a map that has it. If Anet is going to put this in rotation, I think they should actually give some in-game info about the event. Have something you can click on to show you where the event takes place (like the mordrem parts do) and a timer for that event. They can make it vague if they want, but some direction should be provided.

example – zoom the map to the nearest POI and have a message overlay that gives the time rounded to the quarter hour.

Exactly!

In answer to the question earlier in the thread about “who doesn’t know about the timer?” – new players, like myself. I didn’t even know world bosses existed until the first round of the new dailies. Apparently I came to the Caledon Forest Worm a few minutes after people killed it, since there was a big worm corpse lying there in the swamp with lots of people standing around. I (and many others) waited … and waited … and waited… I ran around a bit to tag local waypoints etc. but we never did see the worm spawn so we could kill it. I gather it’s a two hour timer?

There may be other games where major events are on a schedule like that, but if so I’ve never played them. LOTRO doesn’t have world events at all, and Rift events (AFAIK) trigger when player density is high enough, and the specific zone event is random. So it’s not like the concept of “you have to be at this spot at 8:15pm, 10:15pm, 12:15am, etc. in order to kill this boss” would be something to expect from other gaming experience.

From a new player’s perspective, the world boss daily could have been successful at getting people to do new things. I’d love to, and now that I have at least an idea of how this apparently works hopefully I will soon, but the complete lack of any information whatsoever just left people standing around until they got bored. Which is not good gameplay.

For what it’s worth, more feedback from a new player. I didn’t even know about traits until level 28 when I unlocked one. A group of us were tearing through the caves in the NW part of Lornar’s Pass, so the last thing we fought was the champion ice worm under Durmand Priory. Time to alt-tab out to research what traits were all about. That drastically altered my play since then; I’d planned on doing Lornar’s Pass, but it turned out that the Gendarran Fields had traits more relevant to what I want than LP does. Ditto Harathi Hinterlands compared to the other level 40ish zones. I also had to make a major detour to that bandit cave in Kessex Fields to grab that trait.

On the plus side, the ones I’ve picked up so far (just hit 40) should be enough until level 60, if I understand this stuff correctly. And as other new players have noted, for one’s first character the system isn’t too terrible. It would be nice if there were more options like people have proposed in this thread (I’ve only read the last ten pages, but there were plenty of good ideas to choose from).

On the other hand, I’m probably an atypical newbie. I’m a completionist, so those full map completion traits are no hardship; the only issue is pushing me into a path of zones that I would not otherwise have chosen. It’s not at all clear to me why my asura is fighting centaurs, for example, aside from the gameplay reason “because that’s what the hearts ask for”. Completionism also means lots of skill points, and I’ve already unlocked every skill I can imagine using. Would be nice to get them all, but thanks to this thread and the wiki I now know that I need to save up for the traits that I won’t be able to get via gameplay (those WvW unlocks, at the very least). I’m actually more concerned by the gold cost than the skill point cost at this point. That possibly apocryphal “new player friend” mentioned a few pages ago claiming 10g at level 20 is nonsense; I have a bit over 3g at level 40.

Using the wiki to carefully plan where I go and what I do in game, hoarding skill points, and trying to accumulate as much gold as I can, I should be OK on my first character. The gold sink probably means he won’t be able to do any crafting, but then again this game’s crafting system is atrocious anyway so that’s not as big a loss as it could be. The real problem is my alts, some of which I haven’t even made yet. Trait-hunting becomes substantially less plausible the second, third, etc. times through. Maybe another class I’m interested in will happen to favor traits from zones my warrior doesn’t have a pressing need to visit…

From the sound of it, I would have greatly preferred the pre-April original trait system. It’s also annoying that my ability to build my character is so dependent on the luck factor of how many other players are nearby – so far, most trait unlocks are not soloable, aside from the map completion ones (which would be the most painful to redo on alts). All the proposals I’ve seen in this thread, from account unlocks, to generic picking the trait you want whenever you earn an unlock, to a LOTRO-style “use class ability X a large number of times” revamp, would all be a great improvement over the present system. Hopefully they’ll fix it someday, though I understand the pessimism I’ve been reading here.

Fyrebrand.4859:

For example, I really don’t understand people who complain about GW2’s crafting. It gives you a serious XP boost, and keeps you rolling in excellent gear while leveling. You can put any stats you want into your gear. You don’t have to level a “gathering skill” of any kind, and can insert easily-found jewels/crests/runes/sigils into your gear at any time regardless of crafting proficiency. Salvaging unneeded gear even gives you back materials to put toward your crafting. And odds are, the game must have thrown at least one crafting or gathering booster at you by this point. If you use those even remotely intelligently, it will be a huge help. And while it’s not an ideal solution, you can invest some laurels to purchase those crafting material bags for various tiers. And if you want to switch crafting disciplines, you can do so at any time.

Almost all of these points are completely foreign concepts, in any other MMORPG. And while getting the needed materials can cost time/gold in GW2, it is nowhere near the abyssmal level of grind found in any other game. Unless they’re talking about Ascended or Legendary stuff, I just shake my head in disbelief every time somebody complains about “grind” in this game’s crafting or leveling. But even for those, at least they are account-bound and not really needed for anything.

You’re kidding, right? I’m a new GW2 player and so far my primary disappointment is that crafting is utterly useless while leveling. By the time I finished Metrica Province with my warrior, I had accumulated enough mats to level my weaponsmithing and armorsmithing to 11 and 7 respectively. At which point I started Brisban Wildlands and lost access to copper nodes, and what little light armor dropped from mobs tended to salvage to wool scraps instead of jute scraps.

bolam.6294 is absolutely right about crafting; as best I can tell it’s only relevant to max level characters with the wealth to buy truckloads of mats of the TP, and it’s only useful for creating these ascended gear pieces people talk about. In other games, yes, you can craft your own gear while leveling. Not here, not even close. My warrior has spent about half his time running with a hammer, simply because what I had (personal story reward, I think) was greatly superior to any greatsword I’d found, let alone the greatsword one can craft with starting skill level.

Comparison to other MMOs – lack of gathering skills is nice. When/if I make an alt to do cooking, all those onions, carrots, etc. should come in handy. But other MMOs have something approaching a balance between mat supply while leveling through a zone and the amount of crafting needed to advance to the next tier of mats. GW2 is the one with the abysmal crafting grind. It’s a big market so no doubt there are worse, but not the ones I’ve played (4 years of LOTRO, couple months of Rift – which does have both salvaging and runes to add to existing gear, btw).

On a positive note, I do like how processing a large stack is only marginally more time consuming than making a single such piece. Most of that weaponsmith-11 came from converting logs to planks, which would have required going afk for a while in other MMOs.