Guild Wars 2

People get them for sticking the mystic toilet and forging a higher level rare then salvaging for ectos.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_forge#Equipment

This entry may enlighten you as to why people buy low level rares

if it’s posted by that_shaman on reddit then it was datamined.

Good luck on your business. You won’t be getting mine though

The backlash would be untenable for Anet. There will be the cries of “but they got theirs for 1g each! Why do we have to pay <insert higher value here>?!” QQ!

If Anet had done this to begin with, then the prestige of legendary items would be understandable but as it is now, anyone can raise the 100g in a short time with little effort to obtain those runestones

To be fair to Filaha, I have previously tossed the idea in my head of a sort of trading post in the sense that people post items up, much like a classified section of a newspaper, and ask to trade for certain other items. There would of course be a fee for the use of this option. As a percentage fee can’t be applied to a item(s) for item(s) swap, the fee would have to be a flat rate, set to a value that ensures a sufficient gold sink but low enough to be a viable alternative to the main trading post.

Many posters have posted objections to a direct p2p trading system, which given the issues, scams, spam, etc in numerous other game environments is understandable. But I certainly do believe that an indirect anonymous p2p system routed through the BLTC could be viable.

As an example, for some players the price disparity between T6 materials means that selling off surplus of one type will mean that they will not get back the same quantity of the another type. Crystalline dust, for example, is worth more because of its rarity so you could sell of a batch and get back a higher quantity of blood or fangs, but obviously this doesn’t work in reverse. For some players who are just wanting to get enough mats for a legendary it would be beneficial to have a facility where, for a fee, they could trade an amount of one material in return for a like amount of another material. In this situation, both players win and the gold sinking isn’t compromised.

The BLTC provides a secure facility to do gold for item trading, there’s no reason to indicate that an item-for-item trade run through the same facility couldn’t work and retain the same safety and security.

They’re …ok? The fact that they’re a featureless white all over is a little meh. I’ve liked the krytan sword from early on but with the featureless look of the chaos sword, I’m going to stick with my fractal sword

rabidsmiles.5926:

I am having this same debate with myself. I have a good chunk of the mats but I am still about 200g away from being ‘safe’ to buy the precursor (don’t want to spend all of my gold at one time). I find it hard to trade in those t6 mats because I know I have to farm those again and it’s not fun. I am holding onto the t5 mats and converting the harder to acquire t6 but that crystalline dust hurts.

I think for me, because it’ easier to farm gold than it is to farm t6 mats, I am holding onto the mats and just farming my brain out at the karkas/FGS.

Salvage globs of ecto for dust. Up convert incandescent dust to crystalline. Up convert the lower tiers to incandescent.

Fay.8167:

Thanks. I’ll focus on getting precursor first.

Yes, I have other things to sell (lower fine mats, not needed cores/lodestones, gemstones etc), but still I’ll have to sell part of T6 stockpile. Anyway, thanks again for advice.

Also, it is cheaper to convert cores to lodestones than it is to buy the lodestones out right. I remember this pain when I was going for my Bolt. Right at the end two incredibly generous guild mates dropped the remainder of T6 mats and dust on me as a gift for me to make the first legendary in our guild. That was last year some time.

Although it is appreciable that a lot of people think about these things, what is overlooked here is that the zerk gear mentality isn’t a GW2 community demand. It’s a community response to what is missing; solid mob AI that synergise themselves appropriately to produce the sorts of encounters that require mixed or more defensive gear. Rather than nerfing the gear, the AI needs improving (difficult ask, but it is what it is) to the point that penalises reliance on zerk gear. This isn’t to say, “moar mob hp!”, but better mob mechanics.

Hard core survival mode. If anyone has played Dawn of War 2 Last stand mode, you’ll know what I’m talking about

Taygus.4571:

Azrael.4960:

Shame that the blueprint is account bound. I’ve got 3 in my bank. I will probably need 2 since I’ve been thinking of making the red and blue ones just to complete the set.

If you have the watchwork sprocket node in your home instance, you can get blades from that as well

the blue print is only acc.bound when all 4 pieces are combined. The 4 pieces are still relatively cheap on the tp/

Yeh, that’s what I was talking about. I’ve got 3 combined ones. I just need 7 each of the green and red cores now

Having commanded a number of EU Tequatl runs, but have since gotten somewhat bored of it all, my fellow commanders and I are usually not too fussed about a few extra non participants mapping about the place. Ever since the fixes to the various problems in that event, pretty much every run I commanded have been completed with about 7:30 left on the clock. Mind you this is with 3 other random commanders and a field full of pugs.

This I boil down to experience. It’s getting to the stage that anyone who did those events with the big guilds has gained enough experience and confidence that they’re spreading the knowledge. I used to join runs hosted by organised guild runs and gained enough knowledge to try it myself. When I commanded, I would always ask how many people were new to the run and very rarely would I get more than 1 or 2 newbies. The first few times, we commanders would broadcast a request for mappers to relog, but after a while even without the full 150 players it didn’t take much longer to complete the event. In fact, if people aren’t going to relog and aren’t going to join in I’d prefer that they go about their business than unnecessarily scale up the fight because they’re AFK or some such

This brings to mind the “That’s illogical for reasons stated above” or the infinite variations thereof.

@Filaha, every server in the EU shares a single linked market. I believe the NA is linked to the EU market as well (can someone confirm that?). China is on its own set of servers. Thus every player in the EU has access to every item that all other players put up in the TP. The single biggest advantage of the TP is that you have enormous numbers of players competing to sell stuff. Competition keeps price fluctuations, not necessarily prices themselves, low. There’ll be outlier spikes here and there but for the most part, as long as supply is stable the prices won’t drift too much.

Now lets compare this to a p2p trading system. Having played Gw1 I, and I’m sure many other posters here, can tell you that market fluctuations were wild simply because you could go from district to district and sell your wares and people would pay. It was a sellers dream because you could literally charge any price and because there was no centralised repository of prices, buyers could only go on what they felt the item was worth. There was a lot of bartering for sure which is neat but uncontrolled. I did a lot of trading back then buying stuff in one town then moving on to another town and selling it for profit. I raked in a couple hundred thousand gold doing that for a while. The problem GW1 was the p2p trading system. The “market” was limited to what you saw in the town/district you happened to enter. So unlike the millions of items the TP has to offer, you could only see barely a snap shot of the market. Imagine GW2 where the only items available were only those that were with players in the area you were in. No one is going to have 100 Dusks on them. If they were the only person in LA with Dusk, they could charge a much higher price than if they had to compete with others on a trading post.

Shame that the blueprint is account bound. I’ve got 3 in my bank. I will probably need 2 since I’ve been thinking of making the red and blue ones just to complete the set.

If you have the watchwork sprocket node in your home instance, you can get blades from that as well

Also, remember that T5 mats can be up converted to T6, and it would actually be easier to acquire those for conversion so if you have sufficient kitten mats such that you can get Zap then definitely go for it.

If you have a mouse with back/forward nav buttons. I highly recommend binding a dodge to one and a skill slot to another. I bound Mouse 3 as dodge and Mouse 4 to slot 7. With my ranger, I slot lightning reflexes there and my reaction time is fast enough that that has saved me so many times. I do the same with Shake it off for my warr and that’s saved me from being knocked off cliffs and platforms many a time.

The change to adrenalin brings it back in line with the old GW1 days. Building adrenalin took a lot of management. To charge up one of the more powerful skills took 10 melee hits and missing an attack burned all that adrenalin. It also meant that the follow up chains were badly disrupted.

In GW2, I’ve always found that the adrenalin management was brainless. Build it up and away you go. No thinking required and that to me took away a lot of the intricacy.

I do believe that Axe/Axe now is more viable than before, especially with the increased adrenalin decay. Axe 5, when traiting for adrenalin on axe crits, will build up adrenalin in a real hurry meaning eviscerate spam is as easy as before. With the damage buff, this also boosts the DPS nicely. I would definitely consider revisiting a 4/6/0/0/4 dual axe build

It’s ironic that you’ll generally have much faster and smoother runs at the high levels of fractals than at the low levels. Mainly because of experience. The high level players know all the strategies to deal with pretty much any situation where as the low level players often are ones who are getting started and are finding their feet

As an example, I did a 49 fractal run ending in Mai Trin. We got through the whole run in a little more than an hour with no wipes at the end. Compared to a lowbie 19 that I spent ages on at Mai Trin constantly wiping with the pugs because they were terrified by her attacks. >.>

Probably, or better still, put in a sensible buy offer. The sell offers are always overinflated prices that sit there for days or months on end waiting to snare that unwitting buyer. Post up a buy offer and someone who wants to sell it will sell it rather than wait.

Tom Yzf.5872:

^ and double points if you can knockback the golem into one of your teammates downing them.

This! I did that to one of my guildies. We both had to stop a moment cos, well, we were laughing too hard. Then I had to res her. :p

Hmmm depending on the PUG, I’d normally mix it up. With some pugs I’ll melee and if I’m on my A-game, I’ll manage to dodge every one of his shockwaves even while at melee range. Berserker’s tell before the shockwaves come is huge. All you have to do is time it right so that when he reaches the top of his jump you start your jump. Also, as a warrior, using axe and sword here is much better than greatsword because of the speed of your attacks. You can get a lot more hits in with the Dual agility trait so that even though GS does more damage, your average DPS will be higher with axe sword. If I miss a shockwave or I get hit, I just back off and longbow him for a while until healsig gets me back up and I melee him again. It just takes practice. Hell, I’ve even solo’d him like this. However, when you take him down and it’s “double the tech” time, switch in a second axe instead. The dredge isn’t anywhere near as tough and you don’t really need a block.

uberkingkong.8041:

Look at it this way, most things require 3 silks, when you compare it to ores, most things cost 2 ores. Silk is very easily obtained too, just salvage light armor gear.

The problem that people see is that ore, unlike silk, comes from a solidly reliable source, nodes. Silk on the other hand comes only from armour and that is far more variable. RNGesus might just throw a mountain of cotton or linen at you instead. I’ve never been short of silk as fractals drops armours like there’s no tomorrow, but not everyone frequents fractals and the regularity of armour drops in open world just doesn’t match up

I rarely gear my chars with crafting. I’ve mostly used dungeon tokens, then applied skins and runes as I please. At the point when I had 3 lvl80s to gear, I had enough to gear all of them out with a full set of dungeon armour. I get exotic weapons from dungeon vendors as well. In the long run, that’s a cheaper way to do it and also nets you gold from doing the runs.

Pro-tip. Always, and I mean always disable auto attack on Ranger sword. Sure, it might be a bit tedious having to hit 1 all the time to attack, but disabling auto attack on sword is a must. There is a window in which you can continue the attack chain, so learn the timings. I almost never have a problem with the chain, except when my ranger pounces into a Knock down or an AOE, but that’s the risk of using the highest single target dps weapon for a ranger.
If you’re sticking to auto attack on sword 1, then sorry that’s a rookie mistake. If you’re doing harpies with sword, that’s just suicide. Swap to Greatsword when you’re fighting harpies because GS 4 does not trigger on their rapid fire (it’s the same as warrior off hand sword riposte) or you can interrupt them with 5.

Rapid fire channel can be broken by lightning reflexes or using another skill, I usually use point blank shot. The problem with RF is that you can move while using it so the only way to break it is use another skill. Since wurms can’t be knocked back, Point blank shot doesn’t work. Another trick is button mapping. I mapped mouse 3 to dodge and mouse 4 to activate skill slot 7. I always put a stun breaker, lightning reflexes in this case, into that slot and not having to double tap to dodge is a life saver.

@Amnariel. Rush can be so unreliable that you really only should use it in 2 situations.
1. Whirlwind attack to close or at point blank range, maybe for an evade, throw the greatsword and then rush. The range of the greatsword throw and the time of the animation is about right that you will arrive at your target at the same time as the sword is coming back, thus putting in a really nice spike of damage on the target. This is significantly better than trying to use Rush for closing.
2. The single target damage of Rush, when it crits can be awesome, easily 7-8k damage. So it makes for a great in between skill while waiting for hundred blades to recharge.

This doesn’t fully get around the issues with targets that rush doesn’t work on, but it vastly improves the reliability.

Yep, they’re bound to the armour. I’ve got 3 sets on my warrior and they’ve all got the colours I set on them

You might find that purples go really well with ley line blue. I’ve only got the staff, which is on my necro, as I don’t like any of the others. It works very well with Midnight purple. Midnight Ice, a very deep blue, also goes quite nicely. The contrast works really well because of the neutral bone colour of the weapon.

I’m using a few pieces from the Primitive set. I’ll post a screen shot later

People play fractals because on average they’re more interesting and challenging than regular dungeons. It’s not quite as bad a grind as it seems as once you get into it, the relics come flying in. Take me, as an example, I played it quite regularly, but not nearly at the level of grinding or farming. I’ve harvested enough relics to make 3 ascended capacitors. That’s a bit over 5.5k relics spent and I still have about 3k or so left. The problem is that there isn’t much else worth spending them on once you have the infusions or Gift of Ascension.

I will say though, it is by far the cheapest way of getting 20 slot boxes. It takes 150 relics to buy a uncommon fractal equipment box and you can make most of that with 1 run at a high level fractal. Doing a run at 41-45 and another between kitten will bring in over 200 relics if you convert the Pristine fractal relics as well. Pristine relics are ok, if you are looking to get a ring with particular stats and you haven’t gotten them as a drop, but once you have the rings you need, it’s not really worth keeping them so just convert away.

Once you really get into Fractals, if you enjoy them, rings start falling from the sky and you’ll never be short of them. I have a mule character that carries nothing but rings, in the vain hope that Anet will let us do something with them.

One thing I love about the thief is thematic. Many people who play it go for the mechanics. The stealthing, smoke screens etc. I completed world exploration on my thief some time back using rotations of different weapons and Sword/Dagger is an elegant combat style, although nowhere near as effective as Sword/pistol

You could also trait to gain stealth upon shadow step, which synergises with the flank and rear attacks of your main hand weapons. Sword grants a daze or a stun depending on where you hit your target, Dagger has the mighty backstab, etc etc Chaining stealth attacks to maximise on these skills requires good timing and watching your Revealed debuff.

Building around stealth can also be a thief’s lifeline. There are many traits that benefit from a defensive stand point.

In WvW, you could build towards a solo roamer thief which can be full zerk to make use of your PVE equipment but also gives you great scope to play with your build. You could have full Dire gear for condition damage, which is something that is normally useless for zerg fighting but for single target fighting can be very helpful. A good thief is hard to kill in wvw but they’re pretty much made of paper and go down like papier mache if they can’t burst down a target, so it’s quite challenging to play.

Signet of Rage and Warbanner should be your first two elites. Tbh, for a warrior, if you use anything else but SoR and Warbanner it’s a waste of your elite slot.

Signet of Rage is popular because it synergises with Deep Strike trait. With Signet mastery, the recharge comes down to 48s. In general, SoR grants the one thing that most other classes don’t have. A very short recharge speed buff. Stacked on with other speed buffs from other players, like the Mesmer speed AoE or that Guardian symbol, you can have near perma swiftness. No other class has that.

BlueZone.4236:

Yet here we are with champ farming, EotM karma train, black lion key farming, as well…
I don’t think failing events counts as an exploit.

Anet actually came out with a comment about key farming some time ago. They’re perfectly ok with it as, according to them, it’s the players’ time and they’re not gaining anything over other players for the same time spent. While a key famer gets 3-4 keys an hour in the hopes of getting BL scraps or whatever, other players are farming towards their legendary. That’s an example.

I made Bolt be cause I liked the lightning effect. It’s about the only one that I actually like. All the others have annoying particle effects

2 Precursors

Zap at Ancient Karka Queen boss chest during the special weekend event in Nov 2012.

Leaf of Kudzu. Dropped from random mob in a 49 fractal earlier this year.

While we’re on the topic of cultural foods that are bad for you. I wonder if they added in deep fried lard to the Chinese version of Chef. That is literally small pieces of pork fat that are deep fried twice in peanut oil. It’s served as a garnish on some Malaysian and Singaporean rice or noodle dishes. It’s a heart attack in pellet form

Warrior and Necros are pretty much the best options if you want to have both tankiness AND damage output.

Both have very high HP pools to being with and both come with skills that mitigate an enormous amount of damage. Defiant Stance and Endure Pain nullify all attack damage, while Defiant Stance also soaks up damage from conditions and enemy buffs like retaliation. They can be traited to give you up to 9 seconds of invulnerability. You could also trait into Defy Pain which pops Endure Pain when you drop below 25%, taking your invulnerability period up to 14 seconds but this requires investing deeply into Tactics.

Necros have Deathshroud, Plague, Lich Form all of which makes them very hardy. Not completely invulnerable but with the right traiting and kit it can be very difficult to kill a necro. Pure condition damage builds are fun and with Dire or Rabid gear, you’ll be quite hard to kill. They take a lot longer to kill things but are fun to play if only for something different from all the pure damage builds out there. I’ve also toyed with a WvW zerg support build using Knights gear and cavalier trinkets. VERY tough and inflicts a great deal of pain to enemy zergs. With that build up, you can easily get to 3k toughness while still having semi decent damage output for taking down enemies after the front line bashes through. Don’t use that build much any more as WvW is so stale I hardly play it. Necros are very hardy against conditions. They can soak it up for healing, draw them from allies and throw them back at enemies, then spread them every, inflict conditions on themselves then transfer them to enemies. I really like playing the necro and they’re really quite a nicely rounded class.

Draknar.5748:

Because of the scaling, it’s actually faster if only a small group goes to do the pre events. Take the Shatterer for example. If 20+ people went to do the gathering portion, it would take forever. Also, there are significantly more ghost spawns that drop siege parts as well as randomly spawning siege parts.

The best is to have a group of 5 or so to knock out the pre-events while everyone else waits.

Actually that’s incorrect. The siege part gathering event has been changed, in a ninja update, to only require the gathering of 50 parts.

One of the odd things I hear a lot is that the NA Pug scene has more of this than the EU servers. You could probably put this down to the higher multiculturalism. The sheer number of threads about pug toxicity in NA is quite telling. Replies almost always boil down to “form your own party” or “join a guild that suits your play style”. This isn’t a criticism btw as it’s generally good advice.

Even though, I’m a good enough player to do so, I invariably avoid LFG’s that require
1. AP limit
2. AP limit AND zerker

Fractals tends to be more of a lottery but on the whole, high level fractals have largely run smoothly for me. I don’t do 50 very much mainly because the loot is about the same in 49 and although it’s challenging, reward vs. risk ratio is so low there’s no real point to it

You already get this

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gnarled_Walking_Staff

These actually fit in with the Asian culture more so than it would in Europe or NA. If you ever get a chance to see ancient chinese portraits of scholars from about 1000-1500 years ago you will see some carrying odd looking back packs that were fashioned out of a bamboo frame and cloth. They basically look like a laundry basket with a cover and were the standard carrying packs for herbalists, scholars and artisans. Harder wearing types made of reeds and woven grass were used by farmers, smiths and laborers to carry tools and implements. In Japan, travelling doctors were identified by the cube shaped wooden box.
Many of the more western styles are reminiscent of the old 17th-18th explorers who set out to discover Canada, the US or even the Arctic and Antarctic.
If GW2 had a more intricate merchant style of play then some of these back packs wouldn’t be so odd, but it doesn’t

That being said, the sorts of back items I would like to see would be more suitable to martial professions. We’ve already got quivers but why not one that shows paired swords? How about a bandoleer?

Mordremoth arrives and stomps Rata Sum flat

It’s very situation specific.

Warrior – main hand sword is generally more PVP oriented mainly because it is condition damage specific. Off hand sword is very useful in single target combat, such as fractal bosses, like Legendary Archdiviner and Mossman, or even in encounters against single high HP targets. I’ve even used it against harpies in Fractals because the block/counter is not triggered by their rapid fire.

Thief – General PVE and even some PVP. Thief isn’t quite my specialty but I do love using the sword on thieves because of the animation. Swords are the only weapon that cleave for thieves so it’s a PVE staple.

Ranger – Highest single target DPS weapon that you can get for Rangers. Has issues if you keep auto target on though because of the attack chain.

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

Wethospu.6437:

Could you explain how skipping leads to DPS centric play? How damage helps with skipping?

In GW2 the trash mobs are just that, trash. They don’t offer any variation in the required tactics or builds within the dungeon. In other MMO’s I’ve played trash mobs are a real threat and often require specialist tactics to kill.

Now, since the mobs don’t offer (reward, build or challenge) anything different people skip them and so by skipping them, it only adds to the DPS centric nature of PvE as there is nothing in the encounter to dilute the DPS centric nature

It’s like putting milk in coffee, you can put milk in or not(skip trash of not) but it’s still coffee.

Think that makes sense and I did say it was off the top of my head

that pretty much sums it up. Not to mention the aggro mechanic means that it’s easy to break combat. Anyone who has played GW1 will remember the aggro circle and how important it was to pull carefully in dungeons because the trash mobs will completely destroy you if you over aggro. Slaver’s Exile is a prime example of required careful pulling and aggro control. Apart from the fact that the mobs also came with resurrection skills it meant that selective targeting of mobs was even more critical. Slaver’s Exile is a more extreme example. The regular dungeons were still challenging especially on hard mode.

GW2 has nothing like that. Trash mobs will do just that, mob you and burn you down through attrition not through any sort of slick skill usage that has to be prepared for. Hard mode is non existent except if you aggro everything in sight. Mob AI is deficient. The list of everything wrong with dungeons is huge

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Brother Grimm.5176:

This would not be possible if the Precursor is trade-able (nor should any Legendary generated from this “freebie” be trade-able).

To be honest, it would need to be a different set of Legendaries than the originals to keep form devaluing the existing Legendary’s. Just my 2 coppers.

I did alter the OP suggesting that the precursor gained would be account bound, but I fail to see how it would “devalue” the originals at all. 10k or 15k AP is not easy to get: there’s a ton of work that goes into it, so it in no way would devalue the experience. What it would do is offer a set goal that you can actually work toward for earning your legendary. In no way easy or quick, however.

AP is drop dead easy to get. It only requires time. I’m at 10k AP and that’s from just doing no more than 4 maybe 5 hrs most days. If Anet made AP into a requisite for a precursor that would be a bad idea. Grinding AP requires little more than being camped on the PC every day. However, if they made it like my suggestion above, by tying it to Guild commendations which actually requires effort then it would be worthwhile. You’re being rewarded for completing content.

Add it to Guild commendation trader, for 150 guild commendations and 20g. Account bound precursor of choice. Participating in that many weeks of guild activity is more than reward enough. That’s a minimum 25 weeks of guild events if your guild does all of them. Some people have gone years without ever getting a precursor drop. Some grind it out of the MF so why shouldn’t it awardable from guild events? You only get 1 set of commendations per event type a week anyway so this would encourage very active guild representation. This would give players access to a minimum 2 precursors a year without breaking the bank.

So basically give players another way to be lazy? as if players don’t have enough to help them power through most content anyway?

syndicates.9826:

Azrael.4960:

Sorry to say that Anet doesn’t have to do diddly squat. Some people got a refund some people didn’t. Only moderators read the forums and only then to delete posts or lock threads. Rather than go on and on about it in the forums, you’d be better off spending the same effort submitting tickets.

(Personally though, I don’t think you really deserve a refund, but that’s not what this thread is about so that’s a discussion for another thread and another day)

Whether we deserve it or not is not the case here. It’s a matter of why are some players being treated unequal than some in this specific case. They are not disclosing any information even though one of the players that were reimbursed shared the exact same situation as I have.

Please read the comment in parentheses. I already said it a discussion for another thread on another day.

Back on the topic, Anet has never been consistent in how situations that lie outside of the TOS and their rules are dealt with. To be frank, I think it comes down to whichever customer support officer you wind up with

Sorry to say that Anet doesn’t have to do diddly squat. Some people got a refund some people didn’t. Only moderators read the forums and only then to delete posts or lock threads. Rather than go on and on about it in the forums, you’d be better off spending the same effort submitting tickets.

(Personally though, I don’t think you really deserve a refund, but that’s not what this thread is about so that’s a discussion for another thread and another day)

A Necro carries a lot of stigma because they don’t pack the party support to help blitz through content, but in solo PVE (non zerg content) a necro is more than viable. I’ve been playing my necro a lot after getting a little worn out from playing my warr, ranger and thief (all well kitted out).

In terms of survivability, Necro’s are very hard to kill. The ability to have, effectively, 3 health pools from Death shroud plus plague or lich form make them one of the tankiest professions.

Necro support abilities revolve around their wells but also abilities to either pull or transfer conditions make them great condition support. Warriors and guardians also have powerful condition support with their shouts but only Necros are able to turn them into offense as well as defense. Whether it be sending them to enemies and spreading them or pulling them onto themselves and gaining a huge boost in healing.

Eles are very tricky to play, you really need to master the attunement swapping to be effective. I personally don’t like playing eles much, tried it and it just didn’t click with me. Their support abilities are second to none. The ability to punch out perma-25 stacks of might is second to none. Phalanx strength warrior builds can do it but sacrifice a lot of personal DPS. Water fields for healing are also part of their specialty. Generally very fragile

Mesmer reflect fields, time warp, mass stealth, portal abilities are invaluable. Very fragile though

Engis also get a bad rap like the necros and I haven’t played one myself so I don’t have much to say about them.

Rangers are another class with a bad rap, but played with skill, which the vast majority of ranger players don’t have, they’re an amazingly versatile class. Their spirits, though fragile, make for great support. They can bring various fields for combos like fire, water and poison. Very tanky with the right gear but still with good damage output.

TLDR, if you’re up for a challenge with a slant towards party support and versatility try Ele or Mesmer. Want even more challenge and gain a slant towards tankiness in pve but less party support, learn how to master a ranger. For strongly pve oriented with less party support, go engi or necro

My sincere condolences for your loss.

Greens blues or yellows until you hit 80. Spending gold on armour and weapons otherwise is a waste. The other option is to craft it yourself. You’ll generally have enough materials from PVE to make a couple of sets.

If you’re not confident the first time doing it, pull only a couple of guards at a time. Usually Warr and the Thief will aggro you although at times the entire camp will come at you. If that happens, back away out of their aggro range until most have run back, then get aggro on a couple. If the warr and thief aggro, take down the thief first, the chain blinds are a nuisance. The warr has a stun and a heal but other wise your warr will have no problem taking him down. Circle round and repeat with the other pair of guards. Once you’ve got that take down the camp master. He doesn’t hit that hard as long as he doesn’t have Righteous Indignation active.

I usually go camp capping or scouting because the lag fest that is a blob fight is just too annoying.

I doubt it. It would probably be more like a bundle that grants a passive boost while you’re moving, much like an engineer bundle.