Guild Wars 2

I’m level 74 and approaching 80 pretty quickly, and I’m wondering how I should gear at 80 and what to gear myself with.

I’m playing a warrior, and I have this build I want to use centered around dealing massive greatsword burst, and kiting/poking with a rifle/longbow till I can do it again. So naturally I want a set of armor with the ‘Berserker’ prefix for this kind of build. I’ve had my eye on the Berserker’s Draconic armor, but the armor is fairly expensive (A box costs 17g on my server.) I like the looks and the stats are what I want, but my question is HOW good are they actually? Are the stats provided by this set worth 17 gold? Is there something I could get that’s better that I could get with karma/less gold/dungeon currency?

I cannot stand, I CANNOT STAND underwater combat in this game. Whenever I enter a zone with more than 20% water I cringe and get discouraged from playing. And unfortunately because of the story I unwittingly built I’m in a lot of water zones.

Not only is the combat clunky and boring, but there’s 3 game breaking issues with it.(Things I assume to be bugs.) I’m in the Straits of Devastation right now. And I can’t progress in the watery areas (i.e; 60% of the zone.) Can’t do it. I’ll tell you why I can’t do it. Because mobs respawn after 35 seconds. Because 70% of the time when I’m fighting a mob they bug out, reset, and turn around and finish me, because I’m weakened from the 3 minute scrap I just had with that veteran, and it isn’t. And because when they bug out for some awesome $%^&ing reason it pulls every other mob in a 100 yard radius, and I get obliterated.

For example, there an underwater skillpoint here (Out of probably 6 or something) that I cannot get. CAN’T DO IT. Why? Because there’s a veteran Risen guarding it with an insane amount of health, summons minions, deals a quarter of my health in damage to me every time it hits me (As a warrior, with 17k health, building toughness and vitality primarily), and bugs out and resets every time I get him to about 20%. Lets not forget the fact all the crap around him respawns every 30 seconds to a minute, AND THAT HE SUMMONS HIS OWN kitten MINIONS.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS? I realize the game is new, bugs are to be expected. But what I’m experiencing with the underwater combat right now is inexcusable. If the mobs were intended to respawn every 30 seconds, making it impossible to 1v1 a veteran and win, whatever. Thanks for the challenge. But these issues with the resetting and getting aggro on everything within a mile of you are things that should have been fixed well before the game went live.

I found crafting to be alot more tedious in this game than in other MMOs that I’ve played. I’m playing a Norn Warrior with armorsmithing and weapon smithing as my crafting skills, and by the time I was done with the Wayfarer Foothills, both skills were only at about 20.

I stuck around in the zone for about 2 hours farming after that, and got both to about 35-40, when my progress came to almost a complete stop.

Not really wanting to waste my evening farming ore, I moved onto Snowden Drifts, where I was mining ore and collecting wood I was quite a long ways away from using.

I am now at level 25, and ready to move on to the next zone, with my professions still parked at 40.

Is this type of difficulty with crafting common? If not what am I doing wrong? Any pointers?

If so, do you have any tips for me to help me level my crafting skills faster? Or should I just forget about it for now and do it at a later level?