Guild Wars 2

I mostly run with the long bow. In normal PvE it works well. Most 1 or 2 enemy fights my pet will take all the aggro and I just light them up from a distance. Group Events I’m usually good with the longbow as well as I can put down a lot of damage from a long distance without being in range of the boss’s attacks. Also Barrage is nice for large groups of enemies. Point blank shot is nice for getting enemies away from you or knocking them back into some AoE. I’ve also got this trait that allows my arrows to penetrate which does wonders. Generally I can aim for the furthest enemy and my arrows will hit everything in between so that nearly all the enemies die at the same time. Very useful imo.

But lately in my personal story quests (which I’ve been doing solo) I’ve had trouble sticking with the longbow. The enemies often ignore my pet and come right at me. There’s only so much I can do to keep them away so I’ve been switching to short bow for those kind of fights since I’m much more mobile. Adding the condition damage you get with shortbow is really nice and the number 3 skill makes you jump back and gives you swiftness so it’s great when you’re in a pickle. All shortbow skills seem to recharge much faster so I feel more able to react to multiple enemies trying to close the gap on me.

Haven’t played elementalist yet but you can see which skills can be used underwater when you’re looking at all your skills. When a skill cannot be used underwater it has a little water drop symbol with an X through it. If all the elite skills have that on them then the ele does not have an underwater elite. If that’s true that seems really bad since not having the extra skill is a bit of a kitten of your character.

Discovery generally works like this. You have the basic recipes to make all the armor pieces. So what I do is create the pieces (ex: boot soles and boot upper) then make an insignia (like Malign Jute Insignia) and then you go to your discovery tab and you put each of those pieces into the slots and it will say “This looks like something. Press craft to discover the recipe.” or something along those lines. Press Craft and it will create the item and show you the recipe. You then will have that recipe in your Production tab. You can make the same kind of boots with all the different insignia types to discover all the boot recipes. Then you can do gloves, helms, coats, leggings.

Discovery mode gets you a lot more xp than just produces what you already know. So it is the key to leveling up your crafting.

So far I’ve been using a spider and a devourer. They both have ranged attacks which can keep them out of harms way a lot. The biggest issue is they never move when being beaten up or being in AoE. As others said you can manually call them back to you which I sometimes do.

I’ve done it a few times while trying to loot. As many others have said it can be annoying that the loot and interact/pickup/talk button is all the same button since in close quarters you end up doing the wrong action pretty often.

you can buy more slots using gems.
Aren’t there 8 professions so you’d need 16 not 18 slots.
Don’t know of a limit. I haven’t bought any yet.

I am in no way wealthy in game but I was making a good living on selling copper ore. In the starter areas it’s really prevalent and I was getting 20c a piece. Higher tier stuff was selling for probably half that price so it was worth it to just buy a copper pick and run around the starter zones mining stuff. It also helped that I was working on map completion for those zones so it wasn’t just farming materials. Also I don’t cook and I don’t really plan on it so I’ve been selling ingredients. Some don’t sell at all (mushrooms, lettuce, etc.) but others were selling for a decent amount. I think yams were 1s 35c or something like that.

I remember that quest. As a generally longbow ranger I also found it a little unnerving to have to resort to melee combat. I do recall spamming the lightning skill (skill 2 i think) cause it was ranged and would bounce between enemies. So basically I would do a lot of that and kite like hell when they were swarming me. Thankfully I had snares to help me out with keeping them off me.

But I am noticing that some of the story quests aren’t that easy to solo anymore. I’m not in the level 55 range and the last couple of quests I’ve been barely alive at any moment and having to constantly move to the point where I can barely use a longbow and have to resort to shortbow or axes. The Risen are a pain in the neck in the last few missions I’ve had to do.

It’s all about gauging if you need the extra help and if you’re going to be hurting without the passive ability while it’s in cooldown. Like some of the others said it might not be worth it to just use it against a single monster or too early in a battle where the extra power could have helped if you waited a bit longer. I’d probably use it if I was mobbed and wanted to dispatch the enemies as quickly as possible to ensure my survival. Wouldn’t waste it on a single enemy cause if you aggro some more before it recharges it could hurt you.

Haven’t done Warrior yet but I really enjoy my Guardian. Greatsword is really great for taking out mobs of enemies. It has a leap skill to close the gap, a pull skill which pulls like 4 or 5 enemies to you. A spinning AoE attack that hits everything next to you and some stuff a little further out. First skill also has a wide sweeping motion which often hits most enemies next to you.

For ranged options it doesn’t have much. Scepter is really your only option and it’s what I tend to use in WvW. I don’t think it has nearly the range of the rifle or longbow the warrior has. I also really like the torch because the fire breathing skill does pretty good damage and looks awesome. Staff is pretty fun to use in WvW cause you fall into more of a support role which I usually hate but I ended up really enjoying.

I’m only on level 20 with my guardian so I haven’t had to experience of using too many utility skills but they’ve got some good ones that remove conditions and apply boons which I find to help me survive when I should be going down. Also the Aegis virtue has saved me a few times by blocking what would have been a deathblow and allowed me to heal up.

Definitely want to try out a warrior as well. I saw a warrior absolutely destroying things with his greatsword today. Enemies that were taking me a while to kill (on my ranger) he was felling in about 3 or 4 hits. He was also a higher level than me but was scaled down to the same level as me.