Guild Wars 2

Back in the day I used to see you around in the RP scene once in a while and you always seemed pretty cool. Best wishes. I hope things get better from here and I hope you’re able to really dive into HoT and have a great time.

I would far prefer Arbiter to Dragonhunter. It seems much more thematically appropriate and falls in line with the other profession names, that describe what characters’ skills do rather than what they are per se.

I’m also having this issue. I was kicked out of the game last night along with everyone else, went to bed. Came back today, getting this network error and error code.

Chad Taylor.3487:

Chad.9038:

We’ve been taking this performance issue very seriously and have spent the last few weeks trying to isolate the various causes you guys are experiencing.

Performance is very tricky because there are so many variables as to why the game could be running poorly, especially if it used to run fine. It hasn’t been affecting everybody and some of the folks experiencing issues have found them to be due to outside forces such as poor hardware cooling. We know this is a real issue from the things you guys have posted here and have been trying to find the root of the problem. Simply put, it’s been taking time to identify what the issues could be and trying to reproduce them in-house has proven quite elusive.

We’ve identified a number of serious issues some of which were introduced into the 9/9 build and have code changes on the way to address them. We don’t expect it to fix everyone’s performance problems but we certainly hope it will help the majority of you on this thread. I will follow up when the code changes go live and hope that you guys will report back as to whether they are making a difference or not.

I want to give props to you guys for helping each other out and providing helpful insight into this problem. I know it can be really frustrating, it is for us too so please bear with us. We sincerely want to make your playing experience the best we can.

Hey guys, I would appreciate it if you read the thread before commenting.

Unfortunately, my original post(above) was through my user account and not my work account so it doesn’t have the visibility it should. Please read it if you haven’t.

We are actively looking into performance issues and I have been providing updates on this thread regularly over the past couple weeks.

There seems to be some confusion about what our “fix” was. Disabling “High-Res Character Textures” was NOT it but did come in the same patch. The “fix” is not something expected to actually fix every bodies issues but rather address what many posters have been experiencing. That said, some of you have already reported back saying that it has helped and some of you have said it hasn’t made a difference.

We’ve continued looking into this issue beyond the latest changes and in doing so have found an audio issue that can affect the global performance of the game under certain conditions. This is where I asked that you try “-nosound” to see if it makes a difference and report back if it did. This was never a suggestion to actually fix your issue. Some players did this and reported a huge performance improvement and we can now justify shipping the code changes we’ve made in response. This is GOOD! This you all helping us help you.

Will there ever be an OPTION for those of us who had high-res character textures before and suddenly got locked out to try reenabling them for ourselves? I, personally, had ZERO FPS issues post 9/9 patch – in fact my FPS went up from 30-ish to more like 40-ish on average in most maps. This is with a dual core CPU (Intel Core i5 3230M 2.60 GHz). I’ve played with high res character textures enabled on this computer for about a year with literally zero issues. I am extremely annoyed that Anet is suddenly arbitrarily taking this option away from me even though it worked fine.

Seriously? But it always worked fine… The only things that have ever really affected FPS for me were shadows and culling… Anet, could you not?

What it says in the title: the “High res character textures” checkbox is greyed out and can’t be chosen. I have had this computer since January, always ran with high res character textures enabled with zero issues. I only noticed this going on today, so maybe it’s due to a recent patch, but I haven’t been actively playing that much lately so I’m not sure.

Things I’ve tried:
-Deleted local.dat
-Edited GFXSettings.Gw2.exe.xml to change the option to “true”

No effect.

My hardware:
-Windows 8.1 64-bit
-Intel Core i5 3230M 2.60 GHz
-Nvidia Geforce GTX 660M 2GB
-8 GB RAM

I looked around for related topics but couldn’t seem to find anything relevant (search still not working…)

Please, please, please give us back Greatest Fear and restore the late Personal Story steps to the order they’re supposed to go in.

How could you even consider making Source of Orr anything other than the finale of the Personal Story? It’s like showing the final episode of a TV show completely out of order. It’s ridiculous. It’s insulting and depressing to those of us who like or care about the story. It makes me feel like you guys, the developers at ArenaNet, actually don’t care about the story at all.

I’m not under the illusion that people are going to quit in droves over the Personal Story, but for me this is a dealbreaker, the last nail in the coffin. I feel like people like me, people who were here for the story and lore – roleplayers – are just flat out not wanted in this game.

Having to pay for each color separately completely defeats the purpose of why the community wanted colored tags to begin with. It will still be impossible to change tag color on the fly to coordinate. I don’t understand how anyone could think this was possibly a good idea.

So I’ve been playing since launch and I’ve run some dungeon paths in my time. I wouldn’t call myself very experienced, I know a few paths, I’m not terrible but I’m average. However, the more dungeons I do the more frustrated I get. It took me about 3 months to get to 80 the first time back in the day and start doing explorables, and it seemed by that time that people had the explorable paths min-maxed already. I’ve never gotten to go into a dungeon and actually explore, I’ve always had to follow the strictly-set path the rest of the group is on that will get us to the bosses and the loot quickest. (And no, I don’t go looking for speedruns, this just happens to be every single run I’ve ever been on.)

What I would really like is to spend hours just poking into all the nooks and crannies of the dungeon at my own pace and seeing all there is to see. Finally see the turkey room in AC, things like that. However, I can’t do that by myself without dying to the overpowered enemies. My friends just want their gold/tokens and don’t want to spend hours poring over every last room of the dungeons so I’m on my own. I guess I could try starting a LFG for this purpose, but I can’t imagine having much luck at bringing 4 complete strangers and all of us trying to figure out how to stick together as a group on the aimless, goal-less task of simply “seeing the whole dungeon”.

Do any more experienced dungeon runners have advice? One of these days I’d really just like to get to actually explore, as opposed to feeling like every dungeon run is basically a one-way theme park ride straight to the gold at the end.

As someone who literally did develop an RSI from playing GW2, all these things would be great…

It’s a wonderful game but man is it tough on the hands/wrists.

The biggest one for me is having to hold down right-click to move camera all the time. After a little while it aches very badly.

I’m really sad right now.

I hoped and hoped that all our fears about what could happen with megaservers were unfounded, that Anet had thought this one through and implemented it carefully. And now here we are. Not only have every single one of my fears come to pass, this is actually worse than what I was expecting.

Please, please say this is a bug. Please say it’s not sorting as intended and you’re going to fix it. And please fix it quickly. Because the situation as it stands is going to kill the entire RP community very, very fast.

runeblade.7514:

Twyll Blackleaf.9641:

runeblade.7514:

Aidan Savage.2078:

runeblade.7514:

So, how will the other RPer know which other players are RPers?

How do you find out now?

Then what would be the point of a RP tag system anymore?

The point would be to tell the computer. The system can measure “people who like to do world bosses” and group them together, because the game can tell if you’ve participated in a battle by seeing if you’ve damaged the boss, and then give you credit and loot accordingly. It can’t measure “people who like to RP” and group them together, though, because a computer just can’t distinguish between RP and out-of-character chatting.

If your computer CAN actually understand the intent of all the words you write… you might want to contact someone about that, because you’re putting us all in danger of a robot apocalypse if you keep an intelligent AI trapped in a personal computer. It’s probably building up rage and plotting against us. And I’d really rather not end up having no mouth and wanting to scream.

Then the computer will group me up with the RPers and then I can grief them.

I have the ability to grief 1v1 duels. RP tag system gives me more target audience to grief.

Most people grief easy targets. Low-hanging fruit. There are few who are dedicated enough to keep griefing others when they have to put significant effort into it.

In the system as it currently stands, if someone really wants to grief RPers, all they have to do is guest to Tarnished Coast or Piken Square and hang out at one of the RP hotspots being a jerk. It’s not strictly hard in any way, shape, or form. But the line of “significant effort” is drawn at different places for different people. Most players don’t bother to do that because guesting away from their own convenient social circle solely to troll people is just a tiny bit too much effort compared to other things they’d rather do. The small barrier to entry, the fact that RPers group together and griefers have to make a conscious choice to step outside their usual social circle for a bit to go grief, is a surprisingly large deterrent.

In a megaserver without an RP tag, it’s very possible (of course no one knows for sure yet exactly how it will work in practice) that small groups of RPers will find themselves in the middle of large groups of non-RPers from servers where RP is less known about or respected. This makes RPers the low-hanging fruit again. Nobody has to guest to go find them; they’re right there, easy targets for anybody who wants to passingly harrass them and move on.

In a megaserver with an RP tag, the server would know that X person wants to be sorted with RPers, so they’d be moved to a version of the map where the majority of people were respectful of RP. This would be a situation similar to the TC and PS we have now. (And possibly Drakkar Lake, sorry don’t mean to leave you guys out, I just don’t speak German ) People would have to deliberately shunt themselves off from their usual maps and usual friends, into maps full of RPers, if they wanted to grief. Many or most wouldn’t want to be bothered with the hassle.

I don’t want more combos. I just want the currently less-used combos (anything with Healing Power) to actually be worth something.

I joined this game because I was interested in the lore for roleplaying purposes.

I’ve made it my RP home.

I’m cautiously optimistic that ANet isn’t actually so completely thoughtless about the needs of RPers that you’d make it hard for us to even find each other, but I don’t completely know. You’ve taken a lot of other pretty big things away from us and implemented very little of any help to the RP community in return.

If this change goes through and scatters RPers to the four winds, if I can no longer show up at a time of day convenient for me and find non-guild walk-up RP the way I can now, if I get sorted with my guildies but we can’t run a planned RP event with another guild because the two guilds are stuck on different maps – I don’t see myself staying with Guild Wars 2. I am very worried and sad right now, because I honestly love this game and its lore and I’ve never fallen in love with an MMO the way I have with this one. But if that happens, at that point I will feel forced to pick up and try to move somewhere else that actually wants roleplayers’ money.

I’m only one person, of course, but I doubt I’ll be the only one if the worst comes to pass.

We haven’t gotten all the information about how this will work, though, so for now I’ll sit on my hands and wait. ANet, you’ve created a wonderful game. I will do my best to remain optimistic that you’ve indeed taken the needs of all your players into account with this system.

Personally, I would like to mention, I am willing to wait. Getting stuff like this fixed takes time for it to work through the bureaucracy, and changing features takes time – often quite a lot of time – to code. It is a bit frustrating to not get more definitive answers, but it’s only been a few days. So I would just like to add my voice as one of the people who’s very much willing to wait, if it means the end result will be the ability to still do all the things I do now with the items I paid real money for.

Unless they make all the champs into non-events, the Queensdale train will still reward experience and karma, so there will certainly still be people there.

I’m sorry, but this change is completely idiotic. If town clothes had been all-or-nothing sets with no mixing and matching when originally introduced, I would not have paid money for them at all.

Hello! I’m an experienced RPer (over 10 years) looking for a guild that fits the following:

• Takes roleplay and the lore seriously, but also spends significant time helping members with PvE goals, running dungeons (preferably not always speed runs) etc.
• A relaxed, calm, friendly environment that’s welcoming to new people.
• More casual than hardcore. I’d like to get involved with a group who’s serious about their RP but can turn it on and off and go do PvE stuff instead, and where members do their best to accommodate each other’s real life schedules.
• Not too big. I’m a little shy so I’d like to go somewhere that it will be easier to get to know people.
• Friendly to women and LGBTQ people.
• Okay with non-100% rep.

As far as guild settings I especially like serious and dark RP as well as romance, but I would be interested in a variety of different types of storyline, particularly if you find the theme of your guild to be on the more unusual side.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to send me a private message or whisper me in game as well as replying here.

BillFreist.1527:

Keep in mind that there are a few very different issues being mixed up here. “Skill Lag” as discussed in the original post here is referring directly to Game Server CPU usage. I want to ensure we are all on the same page, so here’s a little refresher […]

Thanks so much for this post, very infomative and useful. I’m really hoping you guys will add some way to reduce the number of effects/animations on skills — not only is it a contributor to this issue, but when there’s a big zerg all spamming skills in an area it really becomes almost completely impossible to see what’s going on…

1. Necromancer – especially minions.
2. Mesmer – leveling is really, really painful.
3. Ranger – pet mechanics need a major overhaul to stop interfering in PvE events.

Andele.1306:

mercury ranique.2170:

2: I’m a lot pro lbgt and find it marvelous that Areanet, specially as an american company, is promoting lbgt relations. But personally I think it should be balanced. At the moment there are 3 same sex relations, two of them are succesfull. As far as I know there have been 2 major different sex relations. One of them is very troublesome cause one is a Queen. The other ends brutally in ‘ships of the line’. What is the current stance on this? do you think it is time to make it more evenly balanced for a while?
’

From Visteri.3821s post:

“Sylvari same-sex pairings:
1. Caithe and Faolain
Dagdar and Eladus
3. Cymbel and Nia (Nia says they’re friends, but it seems like they have stronger feelings than that)
4. Roardina and one of the festival-goers

Non-sylvari same-sex pairings:
2. Marjory and Kasmeer
3. Linnea and a female player character
4. Fronis and her mate
Saldis and her girlfriend
Wjerd and Fibharr
Exiffa and her partner

Sylvari hetero pairings:
1. Morrigu and Leurent
Tiachren and Ysvelta
Gairwen and Evart
4. Variella and Hanar
Lintoina and Garrett
Leanuit and Santach
Erisdae and her partner
A citizen and his love in Ronan’s Bower
Two sylvari citizens in the Garden of Night

Non-sylvari hetero pairings:
1. Jennah and Logan
Kazz and Doxa
Tonn and Ceera
Ralena and Vassar
Snarl and Galina
2. Eir and Borje
Braham and Ottilia
Ottilia and Ebbe
Rox and Nonus
Peneloopee and Bloomanoo
Merri and Fel
Lyrica and Ewan
Lyrica and Oswald
Oswald and Zola
Oswald and Henrietta
Oswald and Estrella
Oswald and 4 other women
Fenn and Maisie
Rufus and his wife
Faren and Jasmina
Minister and Lady Wi
Deborah and Beirne
Elli and Zott
Senna and her partner
Caudecus and his wife
Doern and his wife
Forgal and his wife
Citizen that Faren hits on and her husband
Bartender in “Desperate Medicine” and his wife
Uptown Johnny and a female player character
3. Dwayna and Malchor
Cassie and Mepi
Wrelk and Broga
Jaden and Aaron
Remi and Trundle
Famke and Wjerd (unconfirmed)
Pier and Esmet
Levvi and Blingg
Harlow and Dotta
Kalle and Aldis
Eda and her husband
Myr and her husband
Kimber and her husband
Webb and his wife
Gareth and his wife
Traveling noble and her husband
Kevach and a female player character
Linnea and a male player character
4. Eir and Krennak (his dialogue suggests they had something)
Yngvi and Brynhildr
Aggren and Marcela
Gwen and Keiran
Althea and Rurik
Via and Feros
Knut and Gaerta
Bandito and Seraphette
Lord and Lady Marduke
Nellie and Caden
Dugh and Amaybel
Jorge and Bethsha
Diah and Jeb
Russ and Cicely
Welkin and Alicia
Gunther and Ine
Cobiah and Isaye
Tessa and Logan
Citizen in Rurikton and Tessa
Weyandt and at least 4 of the 12-ish people he married, if not all of them
Eliza and her husband
Arlo and his wife
Kol and his “woman”
Lyasa and her husband
Watchful Moon and his wife
Vollym and his wife
Dessa and her boyfriend
Brother-in-law of the citizen in District Promenade and his wife
Citizen who talks to the Priest of Lyssa in DR and the woman he loves
Noble in Ossan Quarter and his wife
Enthusiastically married couple in Ascalon Settlement
Refugee steadholder and her mate (unknown gender but they had children)
Guard formerly of Blue Ice Shining and his/her mate (unknown genders but they had children)
Everyone’s parents"

Man, seeing it spelled out like this just highlights how badly we need a few gay male couples. Prominent NPCs or just guys you hear talking as you run past them in a hub city, anything at all.

Xenon.4537:

cherrycola.3127:

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s just going to take a lot of repetition. I’d never heard of this might stacking thing before and I’ve never been asked to do it in a Marionette match either, and I’ve been running them repeatedly since event day one. And I had no idea about stacking for commanders to count until this event. There are a lot of PvE players out there who just don’t know about stuff that’s commonly done in WvW.

How long have you been playing? That just seems kind of crazy to me to have never heard of might stacking unless you deliberately never stepped one foot inside WvW, or have been playing for less than a month. No disrespect, it just goes to show that Anet probably needs to somehow do a better job of teaching the whole combo field mechanic to new players.

I did, in fact, deliberately never step one foot inside WvW from launch day because I don’t like PvP. Obviously I know what a combo field is, I wouldn’t be a very good ele if I didn’t, but it’s news to me that WvW players do a lot of standing on top of them to spam might on each other. Those of us who stick to PvE often don’t have reason to know stuff like this. OP wondered how to get people to go along with stuff like this and the answer is most likely to just keep telling them, because many of them probably don’t know.

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s just going to take a lot of repetition. I’d never heard of this might stacking thing before and I’ve never been asked to do it in a Marionette match either, and I’ve been running them repeatedly since event day one. And I had no idea about stacking for commanders to count until this event. There are a lot of PvE players out there who just don’t know about stuff that’s commonly done in WvW.

The plot thickens: I tried copypasting a period symbol into the chat box, and it displays/behaves completely as normal. So it’s just literally just pressing the period key in the chatbox that doesn’t work.

Running Windows 8.1 64-bit.
OS language, encoding language, keyboard language all set to US English.

As you can see, my period key works fine outside the game. I can even set the period key as a hotkey, and when I assign it, GW2 displays a period symbol. But for some reason when I press the period key while typing in the chatbox, absolutely nothing happens. When I press period+shift to produce a Greater Than symbol > it displays just fine.

I’m an RPer so this is a pretty essential piece of punctuation Any suggestions?

lol OP.

1.) I picked the server I’m on because it’s the RP server. Yes, I’m one of those players.
2.) WvW players can’t get me into WvW, and to be honest you don’t want me anyway. If I wanted to be there, I’d already be there.
3.) WvW buffs are nice but if you weren’t in there getting them then someone else would be, and if no one was at all, then I’d do without. I don’t owe you anything for providing bonuses I never asked anyone for, and neither do the rest of us.
4.) Nobody likes repair bills, but I’d suffer through them if I enjoyed competitive activities like WvW or PvP. I don’t, so I don’t participate.
5.) Don’t be asinine and don’t assume things about other players or their goals.
6.) I’m not on GoM but I’m pretty sure that people currently into WvW would prefer to get new players who want to be there, rather than players who are there out of some weird sense of obligation who may be resentful or not as motivated to do well.
7.) You know absolutely nothing about other people’s guilds, our goals, what would make each of us lauded in our community, or whether we even want recognition.

Not every guild is your guild, and not every play style is your play style. Some people are here to compete with others, and you have PvP and WvW. Meanwhile some of us are here because we like a cooperative game. We have PvE. Neither play style is more important than the other, so get over yourself.

Wayfinder.8452:

cherrycola.3127:

There is still lots of RP on TC, it’s just mostly kept out of high-population areas to avoid trolling and overflow. Divinity’s Reach is by far the most popular RP spot; for pickup RP try the Rurikton district, the Ossan district (especially the big unnamed bar which players refer to as the Golden Sun), and the Busted Flagon in the Western Commons. People also occasionally roleplay in hub cities like the Grove and out on world maps. The Queensdale hunting lodge is another popular spot that comes to mind. Personally my guild roleplays a lot in Ebonhawke.

You can check http://guildwars2roleplayers.com/ to find some of the other places RPers like to hang out.

I thought I was like well the only one really RPing on my server. I never saw anyone do it… I’m not hardcore about I just relax doing it.. That link… I got 1 more reason to keep playing now, I’m just sad that RPing in EU is kinda dead. I was in this server last night, around 8 pm, me and 3 other players 4 manned Behemoth it was pretty awesome!

Glad you find the link helpful

Is your home server an NA server? If you ever transfer to an EU server, you might try visiting Piken Square. It’s the unofficial home for European roleplayers.

schizandra.4587:

How does one RP in an MMO? This one in particular has a dearth of emotes. Do you just speak in-character in the chat? Don’t a lot of comments get lost on a popular server?

How people RP differs from game to game. In GW2 most people RP via /say (for dialogue) and /me (for actions and occasional dialogue). Sometimes folks use the few gesture emotes we have, /yes /no /shrug /kneel /sleep all that good stuff, but using emotes is not considered important particularly since we don’t have many. At very well-attended events where it gets impossible to follow the chat window, many people start putting both their dialogue and actions all into /say so others can read the chat bubbles above characters’ heads instead.

There is still lots of RP on TC, it’s just mostly kept out of high-population areas to avoid trolling and overflow. Divinity’s Reach is by far the most popular RP spot; for pickup RP try the Rurikton district, the Ossan district (especially the big unnamed bar which players refer to as the Golden Sun), and the Busted Flagon in the Western Commons. People also occasionally roleplay in hub cities like the Grove and out on world maps. The Queensdale hunting lodge is another popular spot that comes to mind. Personally my guild roleplays a lot in Ebonhawke.

You can check http://guildwars2roleplayers.com/ to find some of the other places RPers like to hang out.

fellyn.5083:

All I know is that several times on these forums there have been several “is there an official pve server” threads and every time people have said go to TC.

And I’m sure that those few people definitely speak for our entire server.

fellyn.5083:

Another thread about this? TC advertised themselves as the pve party server when guesting first came out. What exactly did you expect to happen?

You’ve said this in multiple threads and it’s simply not true. TC did not “advertise themselves”, a mere few people on Reddit — most of whom weren’t even from TC as I recall — thought TC should be used for this purpose. Of those of us who call the server our home, many, myself included, definitely cringed at that post.

Personally I’m happy to play with respectful guesters, but I wish people would stop behaving like TC has been talking itself up as the best server for PvE when it’s everyone else who decided they should pile in here.

I’m not sure exactly when this happened, but I’m very concerned.

I had a set of two transmuted armor pieces (basic acolyte gear look, level 70s~ stats), a chest and pants, in an invisible bag in my inventory. I also have a full 6-piece set of temple karma armor (Archon Garb of Dwayna), which was not in the invisible bag, but elsewhere in my inventory.

The last time I used the two transmuted pieces was last night. My character wore them briefly, then I went to the Hero panel and switched back to a third set of armor (not the Archon). Then I spent a couple hours in a dungeon. After finishing that, I cleaned out the loot in my inventory and went to bed.

Today, for some reason, upon logging on I’ve found my two transmuted pieces are missing. They’re not in their spot in the invisible bag, nor are they anywhere else in my inventory. They’re not in my bank and they’re not in my guild bank. I did not destroy them or sell them or salvage them, all I did was swap them out for different armor.

And for some reason, the Archon armor chest and Archon pants are sitting in the slots in my invisible bag where the transmuted items should be, even though there’s plenty of space elsewhere in the inventory that they could have been sorted into when I clicked ‘compact’.

There were also two Bags of Wondrous Goods in my inventory, which I could have sworn I’d already opened last night, making me wonder if I’d suffered a partial rollback of some kind. But I’m not 100% sure that I remember opening them, and if I’d been rolled back by such a short time (everything else in my inventory appears to be intact, including gold), then the two transmuted items should still be there — I’ve had them for months.

I’m not sure what has happened here and I’m very confused and worried for my account. I don’t believe I’ve been hacked as I’m careful with my account, use two-factor authentication and I saw no other abnormalities, but in that case — how could these two items have just disappeared? I’m given to understand that ArenaNet doesn’t return lost items, and I don’t mind having to eat the loss once, but I’m worried this might happen again with something more valuable or important…

Thank you! I may take you up on it sometime

It just seems like most guilds who focus on dungeons probably aren’t interested in carrying someone like me. I wouldn’t want to bother them with joining up as a noob player who’s just trying to get through the story.

So I consider myself a casual, “average” player. I’m competent at open world PvE with my class (elementalist) but I don’t have crazy skills or amazing reflexes, I don’t have hardcore friends/guild to group with, high-tension situations stress me out and are not fun, and I don’t have large blocks of uninterrupted time where I can just hang out in GW2.

All of this makes me not a good dungeon runner. This wouldn’t be a problem normally, I would just avoid dungeons and let people who find them fun do their thing. But there’s a large chunk of storyline in the dungeons, and one of the main reasons I got this game was for the storyline. I know a lot of people don’t like it, but I’ve enjoyed it so far and I’d really like to see the rest of how the story plays out in each dungeon.

So far (since August) I’ve somehow managed to run all the story dungeons up to Twilight Arbor with one friend plus pickup members, but I marvel at people on the forums, Reddit, etc saying they can run a dungeon in 15 minutes because I’ve never been on a story run that took less than two or three hours. (One of those hours might easily be spent on trying to find a pickup group, depending on the dungeon.)

I’m okay with dungeons being hard, and I’m okay with dying and high repair costs, because that’s the price you pay if you make a mistake in this game. But I just wish story dungeons weren’t such long, painful, tension-fraught events that I generally only manage to schedule one per month. I want to see the end of the story.

Do you have any tips for a casual player like me to just be able to get the story over with?

Thanks guys.

Personally, Elementalist is my favorite class in the game, but which caster class you’ll like best would depend a lot on your play style. All three of these classes deal good damage, bring good utility to dungeons and are generally useful to groups as well as standing well on their own. I have characters of all three classes and haven’t noticed much difference in the speed of leveling.

So, given that all these things are pretty much the same, let me share with you some of the prominent characteristics of each class:

Elementalist: Extremely versatile due to the attunement system, meaning that each weapon has four entirely different skill sets depending on your element. To be an effective ele, though, you’ll need to learn all of these — you don’t have to do it right away, but by 80 you’ll want to know how to use your skills in all four elements and be able to rapid-fire cast them to maximize your combos, boons, and general damage. It’s really fun and fast-paced but may be too complicated for some.

The most popular play style for ele by far is dagger/dagger, which is melee range. D/d eles are very agile and mobile, kiting is often a must, and I’m told that in some ways it plays similarly to thief. Personally I play staff support ele, which is long range. Even as a support build I do good damage; I enjoy keeping boons and healing stacked on my party while applying burn, bleed, and other conditions on the enemy. Other weapons the ele can use are mid-range scepter and focus; I don’t know much about these, but focus is popular in WvW for its projectile-blocking abilities.

Necromancer: The highlight of this class is that of the casters it’s probably the most durable — Necro not only has the highest base HP of all three, but it comes with a second health pool in the form of the Death Shroud, which also possesses some powerful attacks. There are several viable ways to play necro — they have lots of skills and traits that can apply conditions, heal conditions, turn conditions into boons and vice versa, etc., so condition damage builds are very popular; personally I favor a dagger/dagger power and lifesteal-based build which can mow through enemies fairly fast. Staff is also a very popular necro weapon which supplies a number of AoE effects, fear, and bleed. One unique mechanic of the class is the undead minions; they’re buggy at times but can effectively tank and some do decent damage, so if you’re attracted to the idea of a caster with pets they might be worth a try.

Mesmer: Less familiar with this class so I can’t speak in detail but… here the class mechanic of course is the clones — these are mostly used as a distraction and an offensive weapon and can’t tank for you for very long, so again being mobile and avoiding the enemy is a must because you are quite squishy. Your character will be teleported to and fro over the battlefield by many of the clone-producing skills; personally I find this really disorienting, but if you play and enjoy thief you may be more used to the rapid-fire movement. In any prolonged battle you will be trying to up your number of clones as much as possible so you can shatter them to damage or debuff the enemy. Staff and Greatsword, both long range weapons, are popular choices; in my personal experience staff offers more defensive options and will help keep you alive better.

I hope this helps at least a little in making your decision!

Edit: also as far as races, personally I think they’re all great! It really doesn’t matter which ones you pick, so just go with whatever you personally like the best. My main is a human, but I found the sylvari most fun in the character creator because they have so much color and variety. (And heck, they glow in the dark!)

Jaskra.6940:

cherrycola.3127:

Sad to see ArenaNet going back on promises and preventing the many, many people who have cross-region ties from enjoying the game with their friends.

I really feel you should rethink releasing this feature until you can release it in a properly completed state.

Yeah, well, you can blame the people who abused the weekly transfers for WvWvW purposes. It’s always the jerks that ruin it for the many.

I can blame them for no NA-EU guesting? I don’t think that has much to do with WvW cheaters. It has a lot more to do with ANet, for whatever reason, dropping the ball.

Maybe there are technical reasons, maybe there are time/deadline reasons, I don’t know. But the fact is that this is not the guesting that the Guild Wars 2 community was promised, it’s not complete, and it’s going to make the game a lot less fun for a lot of people.

Sad to see ArenaNet going back on promises and preventing the many, many people who have cross-region ties from enjoying the game with their friends.

I really feel you should rethink releasing this feature until you can release it in a properly completed state.

I use 1 to 9, why not? They’re in a convenient location on my keyboard. I suspect Anet would have set up the game the way it is assuming that many people are using the default keybindings, which is sound from a programming standpoint; the average user rarely ever actually changes things from the defaults.

At any rate, you can have two sets of keybindings, so you could always use the second set to temporarily bind 1-9 for this event.

Okay, so I understand minis are apparently account bound, but here’s my dilemma: A friend of mine who loves quaggans absolutely to death is going to be away for the coming month and won’t have the opportunity to participate in the holiday events at all. Are all the crafting materials account bound as well? Is there any way I could collect the materials for my friend and give those to her so she could craft a quaggan at the Mystic Forge herself? I wish they were in the gem store so I could just buy her one

Thanks in advance.

If I’m not mistaken, sometime around the BWEs Stormbluff Isle was declared the unofficial “overflow server” for RPers if TC filled up, but it seems to have been forgotten about. Maybe we should just go back to that plan.

RoRo.8270:

you keep getting further with the more attempts you make

I don’t think so? I got restarted at the beginning every time, and unfortunately practice did not make perfect either.

If it’s true that getting this isn’t linked to getting the Halloween meta-achievement, though, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with leaving it as a challenging bonus for people with better reflexes than me.

I’m really sad about this one. I like jumping puzzles, but there’s no way I can do one on a timer.

I think it’s mostly just made of sugar? The regular kind doesn’t have much of a flavor besides being sweet, and yeah the texture is a little waxy. The flavored kinds they’ve started making recently are okay, but it’s definitely far from my favorite Halloween candy.

The main reason you can buy 5lb bags is to share it in a big bowl at parties, to give out to trick-or-treaters, etc. Or I guess you could eat it all yourself but ew. (disclaimer: I don’t know if you can actually buy 5lb bags, but probably like 2lb are out there)

Chazzdaddy.7819:

Im trying to participate in the event but cant find my way to lions arch. At lvl 22 am i screwed on this since im not a higher lvl or is there a way to get to lions arch. Sorry for the noobness but I am new to this game and still dont know my way around good yet.

You should be able to get to Lion’s Arch through an Asura Gate in your race’s home city

Syrup.9852:

Server: Tarnished Coast
Area: Gendarran Fields
NPC: Klakka the Brainy Pirate, skill challenge target is missing.

Seconding. This has been bugged for days.