Guild Wars 2

I wouldn’t mind it, but I’d want a way to turn it off.

Exploring is one of my favourite things to do in this game (and most others) and I love the idea of finding something I wasn’t expecting. But it’s a lot less fun if I’m told as soon as I enter the zone what’s there to find.

It was exciting the first time I saw Morgan’s Spiral and immediately thought “oh, that must be one of those jumping puzzles they’ve talked about!”, but it was even more exciting when I was just making my way up the map, poking into caves and gullies as I went and jumping about on rocks and I found this one cave which seemed deeper than the others, then I started climbing the rocks at the back for no particular reason, then I found a little hole….at first I thought I’d actually gotten out of the map, then I realised I’d stumbled into another jumping puzzle, one I had no idea was there at all.

Many of my best memories of jumping puzzles are of realising when I was already part way through that I’d stumbled into a puzzle. And I have many other great memories of thinking I’d found a puzzle and discovering it was actually a mini dungeon, or a little easter egg, or simply an out of the way area that’s used during certain storylines.

So whilst I can understand that what you’re asking for would be helpful for some people if it was mandatory it would be very disappointing to me.

You’re not denied access to any of the content. All 14 Fractals can come up when you’re doing it below level 10, so you can play and complete all of them without ascended gear or infusions.

The only thing you can’t get are the fractal weapons skins.

Lishtenbird.2814:

• 10 bucks for a set of armour or less than 10 bucks for a weapon skin is closer to a cup of coffee and can be paid by most people who’ve graduated from their school and can manage their own money.

I think you need to find another coffee shop. I haven’t been to America for a while but I wouldn’t expect to pay £6 (equivalent of $10 and about what most gem store skins cost) for one over here.

Also there’s a big difference between what someone can afford to pay and what they consider to be a reasonable use of their money. It’s a pretty big part of the ability to manage your own money.

I could afford to pay $10 for a coffee, but I never would when I can get one for less than 1/2 that. Likewise I could afford to pay $10 for a gem store skin but I wouldn’t when I can get lots of nice ones in-game completely free.

Just for fun I set myself the challenge of putting together GW2’s most prestigious costume – all the rarest, hardest to obtain skins and most expensive dyes together. Surely a thing of glory to behold!

My attempt is below and since a lot has changed since I last tried this in 2014 and I think there’s many more options now I’d love to hear your thoughts and maybe even see some alternate takes on it.

Featured in my attempt is:

• Celebration Hat (free give-away during the headstart weekend)
• Glorious Hero’s Shoulderguards (place 1st in a PvP tournament)
• Perfected Envoy Jerkin (legendary armour)
• Fire God’s Vambraces (30 Hall of Monuments points)
• Mistforged Triumphant Hero’s Legguards (1900 WvW rank + purchase earlier versions)
• Invisible Boots (about 2,000-3,000 gold)
• Eternity (combine both other legendary greatswords)
• Warbringer (legendary WvW backpack)

Dyes are Permafrost, Shadow Abyss, Scorched and Bloody Red with a combined price of about 1,550g (and that’s using buy orders).

The fact that you can’t cook with bloodstone dust has been a running joke in the game for years. It’s mentioned in Season 2 and there’s actually a whole Wintersday event chain where you poison a grawl with bloodstone dust food.

It’s usually taken as proof that level 500 cooking is not coming.

My original post was deleted too. So here’s an abridged version:

I’ve not seen any toxicity from free players, but I have seen some directed towards anyone who might be new, just in case they’re playing on a free account. Somewhat amusingly I went out of my way to try and make it obvious my new Mesmer is an alt and not a new account (HoM skins, Abyss and Celestial dyes, Faithful title & Liadri mini) and I’ve still had people giving me “helpful” advice which basically amounts to asking me to stay away from them and anyone like them until I’m at level 80.

But I think what the OP experienced is just the usual idiots that have been in the game since launch (and in every other game). Without more information there’s no way to tell if they were annoyed with you for some reason and just waiting until the end to kick you, just didn’t want to do more paths and were really bad at explaining it or had some other reason, but I think all you can do is report them, move on and hope you don’t end up in a group with them again.

Wow, it’s like my email spam folder has broken into the forum.

I’d like to see Mad Memories come back too.

I have the first version, but I missed out on the complete version because my main character was only about level 30 and couldn’t survive in the maps I needed to go to. My guild offered to carry me through it but I stupidly assumed GW2 Halloween would work like GW1 Halloween, with the same events every year so I told them I’d do it myself the next year.

I kind of wish I’d accepted their help, but it still wouldn’t be the same as actually completing the scavenger hunt myself. There’s no prestige in an item that was handed to you for zero effort. Like the wizard’kitten, I like it because it’s a cool skin but there’s nothing impressive about having it, no one’s going to be impressed that at some point in the past you pressed a button on the TP.

That’s why I don’t see the point of limited time items. Even the ones that require some effort from the player usually can’t be anything really special because people have to be able to do it in the short time available. Even the Season 1 meta-achievement rewards usually come down to “Press F 500 times on different things and kill 200 themed enemies”, not anything anyone would actually be proud of or that you couldn’t have done in any other random week of the year.

But more importantly a lot of these, Mad Memories in particular, are very unique skins. Which means many people who have them will never use them because they don’t suit their characters and other people could do something really amazing with them but can’t because they can’t access them.

I very rarely stop to admire someone’s character because they have a single specific item, as I said the majority of “special” ones in this game aren’t really a big achievement to get. But I love seeing how people combine them, there’s some amazing looks players can put together and that I will stop and appreciate. But they can’t do that if the skins are inaccessible.

It’s definitely still possible.

I’m not completely sure how you do it (I did it the other way around, linked them while creating my GW2 account) but I think you need to create the GW1 account first, then you just need to go to the My Account page on the website (there’s a link at the top of this page, below your username) and click ‘Link Accounts’ and then it should have instructions. I’d also suggest using the same email address when you create your GW1 account.

Edit: Just got my husband to check it using his (unlinked) account.

1) Create your GW1 account
2) Go to the My Account page (link at the top of the page, below your username)
3) Select ‘Link Accounts’ from the options on the left
4) Put in the email and password you used for your GW1 account.

Once they’re linked both will use the same email and password, if you change one it changes both.

This might not be a comprehensive answer, but here’s a couple of things that stood out to me reading your post:

1) GW2 doesn’t follow a traditional levelling curve. It takes just as long to go from level 2 to level 3 as 79 – 80. Which means that although the early levels can seem slow compared to other games later on it will seem quite quick.

2) Make sure you’re doing the dynamic events – which show up on the map and on screen in orange – as well as heart quests. They make up the majority of PvE content (in high level zones there are no hearts at all) and also give a lot of XP and items. You can drop in and drop out of them at any time and you’ll be rewarded for your participation so don’t worry if you miss the start or can’t stick around the entire time, just do the bit you can.

3) When an event finishes stay around and listen to the NPCs. A lot of events chain together – when one ends there will be a short dialogue and then another one will start up. Just like the game doesn’t have traditional quests that wait for you to be ready to join in (except the personal story) it also doesn’t have traditional chains. You won’t have an NPC telling you directly that there’s something else to do, but there are storylines to the events.

For a good example head to Wayfarer Foothills, the norn starting area, and go to the top of the ridge above the skill point that’s just north of the entrance. Find the bunny acolytes, talk to them, do the events as they show up and listen to the dialogue in between. It’s a short chain of easy events but it’s a good example of how the chains work.

Having tried the new levelling system on a few different professions now the thing that bothers me most is that it affects different professions in different ways, which could give new players a false impression of how they compare to each other and be extremely frustrating for veterans going without essential class mechanics.

For example on a a warrior not having your adrenaline attacks right away is annoying but not a big issue, it’s just one attack (a powerful one admittedly). You still have plenty of skills to experiment with by switching weapons.

Whereas for a ranger not having access to your pet controls is extremely frustrating. Pets don’t draw aggro themselves anymore but they attack anything that hits you. Even after the enemy has broken aggro and gone away if they hit you and are still alive you pet will chase after them. And in combat they seem to attack whatever hit you first, not the enemy you necessarily want to take down first, which (especially at low levels where you have no utilities or traits) is a big chunk of your damage going in the wrong direction.

And then there’s engineers…they’re stuck with the same 2 weapons until level 13 at least because all your other skills, including the profession mechanic, require utilities. That’s if you know to go and find a skill point challenge and use it to unlock the grenade kit. You don’t actually get given skill points from levelling up until level 20. And you won’t unlock all their profession skills until level 35.

I’ve heard similar complaints about mesmers but I haven’t actually tried one so I can’t comment on them myself.

It just feels very…arbitrary. Since I don’t believe for a second that everyone at Anet plays a warrior, including the entire QA department, I can’t believe that this disparity didn’t come up during testing and I can’t understand why it wasn’t changed.

It really depends on the jump. Like other people have said some of them you need to do in just the right place, or at just the right angle. Others you might need to push one button just before the other.

It’s often a matter of trial and error. Although as you get more practice you’ll find it easier to gauge a jump before you try.

Ranger.

I don’t care what anyone else says, it’s what I enjoy playing and frequently what I have the easiest time with.

On the first day I made a ranger, elementalist, engineer and thief and I added a guardian not long after. (Having experimented with them all in the betas.) At first I played them all equally but the ranger quickly became my favourite. Which I kind of expected, it was the same in GW1 as well.

LucidJay.7803:

The sheer amount of lose in this thread is staggering.

Personally I think the attitudes displayed here are a lot better than what we usually get.

GW2 is a big game with a wide variety of different content, especially when you factor in the temporary monthly updates. It’s very unlikely it’d all appeal to everyone.

Recognising that (and that there’s a difference between content you don’t like and bad content) and choosing to skip the parts you’re not interested in is the mature way to handle that. What we usually see on this forum is people claiming that no one likes the new update, all the content is boring and terrible and a sure sign that the game as a whole is doomed and demanding that it be removed ASAP and replaced with their personal favourite content type.

The strange thing to me is that it seems to be more common with temporary content than permanent stuff. People are quite happy to simply ignore entire game modes, PvP or WvW for example, and accept that they will still get updates and other attention from the developers. But if they add a self-contained, entirely optional, temporary version of something already in the game (in this case jumping puzzles, previously things like PvP matches, dungeons, mini-games etc.) people are furious.

I agree. For one thing it seriously limits the variety in the male armor. They’re all basically the same shape with different patterns on top. Different amounts and areas of coverage would give a lot more variety.

It’s also nice for showing off norn tattoos, sylvari glow and charr fur patterns. (Although humans and asura should have the same options too of course.)

As I’ve said before in various topics I think every race/gender/profession combination should have a full selection to choose from – everything from barely enough to maintain the game’s content rating to full head to toe coverage in multiple layers.

(I almost typed covered in multiple players but that would be something quite different, and almost certainly affect the content rating.)

Bomber.3872:

papry.8096:

Danikat.8537:

Refund update:

According to my support ticket you have to have owned a duplicate item (in my case a mining pick) for less than 6 months to get a refund.

I don’t know what the exact cut-off point is, but I bought a 2nd one at the start of August and I’ve just been told that was too long ago.

Thank you for the update but that is still ridiculous: most mining pick & recyclomatic I have are more than 6 months old.

That refund is unacceptable.

I just saw the post above. If the thing with 6 month is true, it would mean that the GM I got didn’t know this / didn’t really check my account. It would be great if some dev could say something about this or check my ticket (number 2047273).

I don’t know at which time I bought all my things, I don’t even know the exact number, but I know for sure that I bought around 10 of my watchwork mining picks during the September 4 – September 5 2015 anniversary sale. (but like I wrote earlier, support says: no refund at all)

To clarify I didn’t say any item less than 6 months old would be refunded, only that I was refused a refund on an item that is almost exactly 6 months old so anyone else who has had items for 6 months or longer is unlikely to get a refund.

As I said I don’t know what the actual cut-off point is.

One person quoted a message saying 24 hours, but then someone else on this forum got a refund on items they purchased 3 days ago.

I suspect they don’t actually have a policy in place for this yet and it’s all down to the GM who happens to look at your ticket, and maybe what kind of mood they’re in at the time.

It would be extremely helpful to have some clarification instead of Gaile and the other forum GMs encouraging us to contact Support and Support rejecting almost all the tickets.

I thought this would be negative too.

But now I know what it’s about I completely agree. I actually like the personal story (no it’s not the most amazing writing, even within a game, but I still found it enjoyable) and I really like this instance. The ending to it is really wonderful and the music is perfect.

I also like the impact of having everyone we’ve met throughout the invasion of Orr (and before in some cases) there to share the moment.

The one thing that bothers me is that Season 2/HoT has put a whole new spin on it.

I’ve played two other MMOs which have test servers – Ultima Online and Elder Scrolls Online. Both have about the same amount of bugs that make it through to the Live servers.

In my experience the majority of people who play on public test servers aren’t actually interested in hunting down bugs, or even giving constructive feedback on balance changes. Mostly they’re interested in fooling around with the new content, or learning how to do it before it’s released so they can claim ‘first’ clear/kill/whatever or playing around with tools provided to facilitate testing (ESO for example allows you to make max level characters with a whole selection of end-game gear to choose from).

Sure it might occasionally generate useful feedback, but I doubt it’s really worth the time and effort the devs have to put into it.

I assume it will be possible to glide in PoF maps. They added gliding to the base game so it’d be very odd to remove it from the new zones.

But yeah, you’ll need HoT to be able to glide and they’ve said you don’t need HoT to play the new expansion, so I assume there won’t be anywhere that needs gliding to access.

But just like in core Tyria there will probably be several places it makes things easier. (And maybe some places where it’s disabled.)

I like it, it reminds me of the norn ranger armor from GW1.

Shame it’s an outfit. As separate pieces it could be really cool, but as a one piece set and with limited dye options it’s not worth getting.

Sigiran.4195:

Finally, I’m in the game. But I’m not going to say “thank you” ArenaNet because it was their mistake. And I think if this was not a game, but, for example, banking software, they would have been fired without a chance to find a job of programmer again.

Really? Is that how it works in your industry? If you make a mistake that causes your product or service to be inaccessible for 8 hours you lose your job and can never work in the same field ever again?

The only time I’ve heard of that happening was for something really drastic, like stealing money from the company or doing something else which is illegal. (And even then it depends on the situation – for example I know of someone who accidentally disturbed a protected species whilst employed to protect them, it could have lead to that years young being abandoned by their parents – they got a written warning but kept their job.)

My boss has a saying for these situations: “No one’s going to die and nothing will catch on fire.”

It’s not ideal, but it’s hardly the end of the world.

I agree it would be nice to have more options for male armour.

I was really disappointed when I started looking for something for my charr thief – I’d spent ages deciding on a fur pattern and colours for him and I wanted it visible, but the best I could get was the Order of Whispers coat which has 1 bare arm, 1 arm partly covered and a random opening in the back.

It’s the same with my norns tattoos and sylvari bioluminescence. On female characters we have plenty of opportunities to show it off, but on males it’s difficult to find anything that doesn’t cover everything except the face and hands (and that’s only because we can hide those pieces).

It doesn’t need to be sexual – I’d be happy with sleeveless tops and shorts or the random ‘windows’ so many female sets have.

I agree, but I’ve been hesitant to post about it because I know it’s been done to fix a long-standing issue (which has frustrated me too).

I just wish they could have fixed the sticking issue without changing the animation, or at least without changing it so much. My (human) ranger has gone from looking like some kind of hyperactive ninja to looking like…well me, in real life, trying to use a sword. She looks like she’s just flailing it around and hoping the enemy happens to be in the way when she does.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy that we’re not stuck to our targets any more, I just wish it didn’t come with the trade-off of such a bland animation.

I think it’s also worth considering the world you’re trying to immerse yourself in. Fantasy worlds aren’t just about a lack of modern technology, it’s also (arguably more) about what’s been added.

Magic is extremely common in Tyria, even non-magicians are likely to know at least a few simple spells and/or have magical items. Likewise holographic technology is well established and common, and for small holograms the projectors can be tiny. I have absolutely no doubt that if the same was true in real-life both magical effects and holograms would be incorporated into clothing just like plastics, lazer printing and other modern technologies are in real life.

And whilst people in real life might not typically go into battle wearing bunny ears they can and do fight in all kinds of silly and impractical hats and throughout large parts of history the majority of people fought in their every day clothes because they couldn’t afford anything else and weren’t part of a standing army so they didn’t have armour or uniforms provided to them.

Edit: More generally if you think people wouldn’t wear something because it’s impractical I can only assume you’re male and haven’t spent much time discussing clothes with women. I spent 99% of my time in jeans and a black t-shirt and even I have 2 pairs of shoes which hurt if I wear them for more than a few hours but look amazing and various silly froofy dresses I have to wear for special occasions because apparently jeans are not ‘formal enough’.

Of course. Cats make everything better.

I can’t see how it could be anything else. Unless it was inspired by one of the numerous references to it, in which case they should probably just say it was inspired by the poem. Although the staff itself might be a reference to the Raven Staff from GW1.

I like it. It’s one of my favourite poems, the first one I liked which wasn’t written for kids (I have to admit The Simpsons introduced me to it) and the staff looks pretty cool.

I think it will go well with my rangers pet raven Quoth. Although Quoth, being a reference to the Discworld raven of the same name, obviously disapproves of the continued association between his species and the ‘N word’.

I’ve never used it but it looks ok (from the name I was fully expecting it to be one of these places that sells cracked CD keys to use with pirated games, in-game gold and all kinds of other illegal things) and a very quick google search didn’t turn up any negative reports.

Also they’re selling HoT for £23.99 which is only slightly less than Amazon’s £24.85 and the amazon listing is definitely ok.

I’d recommend doing your own research if you’re unsure, and/or using Paypal for an extra layer of protection, but at first glance it looks ok to me.

Also as a general observation I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find perfectly legal copies of HoT sold by reputable retailers for a lot less than the original price. I’ve worked a number of retail jobs in the past, including a video game store for several years, and their prices are often determined partially, or entirely, by a computer system that only knows how many copies of an item they have in stock and how many they sell each week/month. Used properly it gives them an accurate guide to how items with a short shelf-life (like games) depreciate.

But it’s often left entirely to it’s own devices, or relied on too heavily which leads to some weird effects. For example I once picked up a Lord of the Rings Online Collectors Edition (which was about 2 years old at this point) for £0.20 simply because we’d had 1 copy left which got lost on the back of a high shelf. As far as the computer was concerned we had one in stock and it just wasn’t selling so it just kept dropping the price, and no one could be bothered to edit it in the system for 1 item.

The problem with insisting that every chest, or even 10 chests or whatever amount higher than it is now should drop ‘something good’ is that what people usually mean by that is something they can sell on the TP for a lot of gold.

And those items are only worth a lot of gold because they’re rare. As soon as you raise the drop rate you raise the number available and so lower the value, which means you’re in an event worse position than now because the ‘bad’ items are still bad and now the ‘good’ items are bad drops too and there’s no chance of getting lucky.

It never even occured to me that this could be seen as a political correctness thing.

I just assumed it was to clarify when you got the buff. Outmanned can be interpreted a lot of different ways (although I suspect it has it’s origins in exactly this situation, just in real life battles). In particular it can mean you’re scared or panicked, or simply that your opponent is better than you.

Outnumbered is much clearer and saves people having to look up why they’ve got it.

(Although I’d also be in favour of renaming it the ‘kittened’ buff, especially if it actually said kitten and not whatever was censored to make it say that.)

BrotherBelial.3094:

They are not going to make one when there is the shared inventory slots. Just saying.

People used to say they wouldn’t give us a wallet to store currencies in because they sell bank tabs and bag slots, but they did.

Of course Anet want to make a profit from the game, but I don’t think that’s the sole driving force behind every decision. Especially since in the long run keeping players happy and therefore more inclined to keep playing is more profitable.

I actually don’t mind inventory management, but when I start feeling like I spend more time going to the bank to swap items around than actually playing it gets annoying and other games start to seem more appealing because I can have more fun there.

I thought it was quite appropriate. It might not be a great line but it’s in character for Marjory – she was trying to be dramatic and spice up Kasmeer’s fairly direct description of events.

Personally I think all in-game items should be available to everyone. Not cheap, quick or easy to get necessarily but it should be possible. For example it’s possible for anyone to get a legendary. It’s very expensive however you do it and will likely take a long time but you can do it.

Whereas something like Mr. Sparkles or the in-game t-shirt is completely impossible for most players to get because they weren’t in the right place during the very narrow window it was available. (Or in some cases were there, asked a staff member about special rewards and were told there were none, or they had all gone or they were being saved for later on/the next day.)

IMO this actually doesn’t go far enough because further on down the line the same problem will come up – players who didn’t know about this offer or weren’t able to afford it at the time (or weren’t playing at the time) will have missed out. Hopefully they’ll do things like this every so often so if someone wants one it’s just a matter of time and looking out for it.

I would not want to play the game you want.

I much prefer what we’ve got now, and I actually enjoy the open-world areas, they’re my favourite part of the game.

The problem with calling them Destiny’s Edge is they’re not Destiny’s Edge and that guild may still exist. It’s a bit uncertain after HoT, but not to the point where it would be ok for a bunch of kids to come along and appropriate the name.

It happens on all games forums. People who are happy spend most of their time playing, people who aren’t happy come to the forum to complain.

There were similar complaints before the last feature pack, and in between when we only got Living Story releases there were complaints that Anet had abandoned or forgotten about PvP and WvW and there were never any updates for either.

As for me personally I’m very happy with the game. I still play pretty much every day. If that wasn’t the case I wouldn’t be here because I would have moved on to something new.

It’s definitely worth putting the sliders back to the middle if you want to preview the new faces. (Remember unless you click to confirm the changes and have a total makeover kit nothing will be saved.)

When I first previewed them they all looked a bit weird, then I remembered I’d put several sliders (most notably eye angle) right to one extreme on my human character to get the look I wanted. I think it looks great with the face I used, but it looks really weird with others. Putting the sliders back to the middle made a huge difference.

Those red triangles are vistas.

The XP you get when you visit a new area is either for uncovering a section of the map or for finding a point of interest (small yellow square icons).

Vistas work a bit differently – you need to find a map icon in the game world, and then press F to view a short scenic ‘cut scene’ (which is actually in real-time so you’ll see things like other players and monsters in it).

The object will be at the point marked by the red triangles but often hard to reach. They’re often on top of an object and require a bit of jumping to reach, but can also be underneath something (or both, on a ledge in a cave for example). The wiki has guides for some of the hardest to reach ones.

(By the way typing all in caps makes your posts very hard to read, and it can seem like you’re shouting.)

I think it’s difficult because it comes down to personal taste.

I think Bolt is a flickering mess and my Chaos sword looks much better. At least one of my friends thinks I could not possibly be more wrong and the chaos weapons are one of the ‘laziest’ sets of skins ever made and shouldn’t even be black lion skins. Likewise I actually think Ascension looks better than the crystal wings.

It might well be that people at Anet think the Ascension (and the Fractal one) look far better than the crystal wings and it never occurred to them there could be a problem.

Or it could be simply that they hadn’t come up with the design for the crystal wings when they made the Ascension. What are they supposed to do in that case? Never put a cool design into the game in case some people think it’s better than a legendary? Hold it back indefinitely until there’s an opportunity to make another legendary backpack?

The point is there already is an ascended only skin – the one the scepter came with. If they had made another, separate, skin there’s no guarantee you’d like that one either.

Besides being able to transmute any skin over any item (of the same type) is a big part this being ‘a cosmetic game’. In most games if you want the best stats you have to have the skin that goes with it. In this game you can have the best stats and make your character look however you want.

If I prefer low level crafted armor to temple exotics I can transmute them (and did), if you don’t like your ascended scepter you can transmute it.

If you want particular people to know you have an ascended weapon you can ping it in chat. If you want everyone to know you can reassure yourself with the knowledge that they don’t care.

How about the fact that the same people who would be making those armour sets are needed to make all kinds of other art assets? Any time they’re making armour sets they’re not doing other things so the parts of the game that work would go towards get held up.

It’s the same in any job. For example I recently had to make a display to advertise a new magazine. What I wanted to do, and what would have made the best display, was to take articles from that magazine and edit them into posters – make the headlines and pictures bigger and edit the text down to just the key points so it could be read quickly as people were passing. I’m perfectly capable of doing that, but it would have taken a lot of time and it was only one of (literally) about 50 things I needed to do that week, and not remotely the most important.

So instead I just printed a copy of the magazine single-sided and pinned the pages up exactly as they are. It’s not as good as it could have been but it’s good enough and it meant I was able to get a lot of other things done as well.

Lilith Ajit.6173:

I’m a pretty diehard fangirl. I’ll stick around if they introduce this, because it would probably save me money <3

I don’t really understand why people care about it. If you don’t want the perks …. don’t pay for it? I don’t know. If there’s something on the store I don’t care for, I don’t buy it. I don’t complain and say “I’m leaving the game because you introduced optional items that I don’t want!”

I’m not trying to be a jerk or anything. I just really want to know how this affects people so much.

I don’t like microtransactions in general. GW2 is currently the sole exception because IMO they’ve done a very good job of sticking to selling things no one needs (but lots of people want).

I do buy gems with real money to get things I want from the gem store, but it’s very important to me that none of it is needed to play the game and it won’t affect my ability to play any of the content if I don’t.

From what I’ve heard about it the VIP system is the complete opposite of that. If you don’t pay for it you are very definitely a second tier player and will suffer as a result. Gem store prices are much higher, you have to pay to identify dyes, you can’t ressurect other players (or possibly there are limitations on who/how often, I’ve heard mixed things on this), can’t join friends who are in a different copy of the map, your bank and bag space is much more restricted, you get less traits, less skill points (not really an issue admittedly) and possibly even some skills are VIP exclusive.

Sadly no, you will have to recreate the character if you want to change it.

If it helps the only difference it makes is which priest is standing in your home instance.

Having said that I understand why you’d want to change it. I recreated my sylvari entirely to switch which cycle she was born into, which is a similarly minor choice.

BTW If you do decide to re-make the character make sure you put anything that’s not soulbound into the bank, that way you can use it on another character. And anything that is soulbound check with a merchant to see if you can sell it, most things you can’t but sometimes you can. Not for much but if it’s just going to be deleted you may as well.

I don’t know if this works in GW2 but in GW1 I found the simple solution to the problem was to make up a name for my build.

In that game the skills you chose were the main aspect of your build and groups would often ask you to share your skill bar in chat so they could decide whether they thought it looked good or not.

Honestly 9 times out of 10 the people making the call had no real idea what they were doing. If I told them I made the build up myself, I’ve used it in this dungeon/mission/whatever many times before and it works they’d kick me. If I told them I can’t remember what site I got it from but it’s called [whatever I felt like calling it at the time] (‘DOT + Profession name’ was a common form, or AoE + profession name) they’d accept it, no questions asked.

(Or if they were particularly observant I’d have to explain one detail, like I had a fiery bow string to go with Mark of Rodgort or yes, Dervishes do have AoE skills.)

As far as I remember the most you’ll get is 2 ‘layers’ – for example a champion bag with a bag of materials inside it.

There’s 2 reasons for it:

1) Increasing the amount of drops you can get without filling up your inventory when you don’t have time to clear it. Instead of getting 3 items from a champion you’ll get a champion bag with 3 items inside it (disclaimer: I don’t actually know how many items drop from champ bags, I think it varies). That means you can collect 3 times as many drops before your inventory is full. In practice it’s even more because you’ll probably get several of the same type of bag and they stack. And then you can wait until it’s convenient for you to deal with the contents before you open the bags, instead of having to stop in the middle of something because your inventory is full.

2) It simplifies loot tables for Anet which makes drops easier to monitor. For example instead of having 8 kinds of crafting materials in an enemy’s loot table they can have 1 crafting material bag, and then a separate loot table for that bag with the 8 materials in it. This won’t directly affect us, but it makes a big difference to how things are done behind the scenes. For example making it easier to update loot tables because they just edit the 1 bag instead of 10+ enemies that drop it.

Honestly I would strongly recommend letting her choose her own profession.

The worst piece of gaming advice I ever received was to always pick a basic fighter class in RPGs and only play something else once you’ve finished the game with that. I find it really boring and if I’m forced to play a ‘simple’ class I’m more likely to never finish the game at all.

I had to remind myself of that when I got my husband to play GW2. He’s not the best RPG player and I know he prefers to just play through the story than figure out challenging combat, so even though I know I’d hate it I was extremely tempted to push him to play a warrior or guardian and had to literally bite my tongue when he picked out a Mesmer and an elementalist instead. But I’m glad I did, because he found both really fun and that more than made up for the extra challenge.

At least it’s GW2 where you can play right up until the update is ready and then as soon as you’ve downloaded it.

If this was any other MMO the servers would have been offline for several hours while the update was loaded onto the server and then you’d start downloading it and have to wait until it was complete to play.

And that’s not an exceptional situation for emergency updates, it’s the same process they go through for every single update, sometimes several times a week.

I understand it’s frustrating for people who only play GW2 but if players of my other MMO were only offline for the time it took them to download the update, even if it was an hour, they’d think it was the best patch ever.

Apparently it’s something to do with latency between the two server groups (which are in different real-world locations thousands of miles apart). There have been some pretty detailed answers on this in the past.

But the short answer is it’s highly unlikely to ever happen.

I agree.

It’s not a coincidence at all that I have only 1 male light armoured character (and he’s an asuran), the lack of variety and in particular less conservative choices is very frustrating.

I’m not asking for half naked men everywhere, even just the option for bare arms would be nice (that’s arms plural, not 2/3 of one arm), or an open back or sides like some of the female armour has. We’ve got norn with cool tattoos, charr with beautiful fur patterns and sylvari with interesting bioluminescence effects but to be able to see any of that you basically have to pick a female character.

It also seems odd that the one area where there is a semi-decent range of revealing male clothing is heavy armor, which is supposed to provide the most protection.

I really don’t believe the changes to the story were intended to make it less confusing. If so it was a big mistake because there are a lot more plot holes now.

The most glaring I’ve found so far is that during The Source of Orr Elli talks about Zott’s death, then later on he appears in story quests alongside her and neither of them make any comment on his sudden reappearance.

Alternatively there’s my husbands suggestion: The got Quentin Tarantino in to re-do the story.

Becka Williams.4978:

Since bloodstone dust cannot be sold, it doesn’t matter how much of it floods into the game. Thus it will never be nerfed.

They added the wallet which solved the problem of all the various currencies taking up bank/bag space, even though those are account bound and cannot be sold. They might come up with a similar fix for dust. I don’t think anyone would mind what they do exactly, as long as they get it out of our inventories/banks.

Even if it wasn’t worth anything on the TP making it tradable would be a big help for me because then I could put it into my storage guild bank instead.