Guild Wars 2

Yesterday in about 3 cycles of Auric Basin I got ~900 of that map’s currency, net, which means I got slightly more than that because I remember spending some here and there.

If I’m still playing GW2 when the next xpac is announced then I’ll probably prepurchase it as well. HoT hasn’t been perfect (looking at you, TD meta), but by and large it’s been a great way to put some life back in the game. If the next xpac is more content-driven as opposed to systems-driven then I’d be even happier to get it.

But Star Citizen will probably be released around that time, and I KNOW I’ll be spending a lot of time in that universe, so GW2 is going to have some competition.

I’ve just been messing around with the daredevil recently. Guardian was always my main (and still is), and thief was just an afterthought, so I was surprised when I started having a lot of fun with this build. It also has a budget set of runes so it’s cheap to try.

Note: I’m positive this build isn’t optimized for ANYTHING. It just suits a fun playstyle.

Weapons: staff and double pistol. For sigils, go for the usual damage dealing ones (Fire, Air, bloodlust, whatever)
Armor: Berserker with 5 superior runes of infiltration and 1 superior rune of something cheap to get you +25 power
Trinkets: half zerk, half more defensive (like knight’s and soldier’s) for some extra vit.

Trait lines:
Critical Strikes
Acrobatics
Daredevil

Skills: signet of malice (this is the important one), palm strike, a stunbreak (your choice), whatever you want here (but if you need something extra for break bars, use scorpion wire), and thieves’ guild

I don’t remember exactly how I’ve set up each trait line (because I’m at work right now), but I’ve got just about anything that says “deal X% more damage when ____”. I also get healed when I crit and I get endurance when I use initiative. The daredevil grandmaster trait is the one that halves damage taken after dodging.

The basic playstyle is to jump right into the middle of combat, keep your initiative from maxing (another trait gives you extra damage that way), and dodge dodge dodge. When you’re low on health, get out of combat and go to pistol 3. You’ll be doing so much crit damage that after a few seconds you’ll have most of your life back. Then just hop back in with the staff.

I’ve found my survivability to be fairly good. Staff 3 breaks immob, which is your biggest enemy, and staff 4 is a blind which can be spammed when your pistols are on cd. Keep up the blinds! Pistol 5 is wonderful for that.

Anyway, it’s a fun build and I thought someone might enjoy it.

I’m very happy with the expansion. It took a little bit of getting used to, but now that I understand the theory behind the design of the new areas I think I can say that everyone was done very well.

A few things could stand to be tweaked (like TD meta difficulty), but that’s par for the course.

I feel like TD’s reputation killed it more thoroughly than anything else. It started off like a lot of other metas did at first: the first few days were full of failures, and then someone figured out how to do it, but it was hard. Now, can you tell me that isn’t the same description that raids got? Of course you can’t.

But the main reason why TD is deserted is because the rewards don’t justify the effort. I’ve never tried TD’s meta before for two reasons: first, only one of my characters has actually gotten to TD, and second, VB and AB are a lot more fun, the maps are easier to get around in, and the metas are easier. If people had stuck to playing TD’s meta, I’m sure they would have figured it out, or at least gotten it to the point of pre-condi changes silverwastes, where vw would fail occasionally, but was still quite doable.

I’m going to start hanging out there more just because I’m slowly wrapping up my exploration of VB and AB with my other characters, and hopefully it’ll slowly become more populated as more casual players start getting to that zone. But with raids to distract the hardcore crowd, I don’t see TD coming back strong any time soon.

Just play the game, make some money (farm or don’t farm, do whatever) and then buy them off the TP. If you ever find yourself not enjoying the game, play it differently.

I was surprised that precursor crafting was so expensive, but it’s ok with me. The hardest part of getting a legendary weapon was always getting the precursor, and they kept it that way. Before HoT, I got the three major components together for both Sunrise and Twilight: two gifts of mastery, two gifts of fortune, and one legend specific gift for each sword. It was absolutely easier to do all of that than it was to get the 100+ deldrimor steel ingots that I need to get through stage 2 of Dawn. But that’s ok with me. If I grind hard for it I know I’ll burn out, but if I alternate my time between hitting all of the rich mining nodes and actually enjoying the game, it becomes much more bearable.

Just be patient and enjoy the game, and eventually you’ll have the money/resources to get what you want. But pick and choose your battles wisely. I straight up bought all of the pvp and wvw specific tokens because I don’t enjoy those game modes as much and pve, and the grind for those would have sucked the joy out of the game if I’d had to do it the hard way.

Precursor crafting needs some drops, but the elite specs all have skins for weapons that have their own collections. I know Golem Mk II drops something for the engi elite spec. Perhaps those items are for a different class.

Playing the game and being patient is the best way to level them up currently.

Or you can try to figure out what the “spider farm” is that some people have been talking about…

Star Ace.5207:

That said, I plan to use the Mentor one when I am doing a map and want to actually help others, which is something I enjoy doing. I won’t attach any prestigious value to that, and thank ANet for giving bith old and new players this option.

I know ANet tends to listen “too much” to players, but hopefully they ignore the, IMO, unfounded criticism of the mentor tag-anyone using it inappropriately will just be mocking/fooling himself/herself.

This, 100%. I only put up my tag when in lower level maps, and already I’ve had people ask me several questions because they saw my tag. I enjoy being helpful, and I think this tag is a great mechanism for that.

Yes, there will occasionally be some abuse, but I haven’t seen any cases of it yet. I also haven’t seen anything that leads me to believe that it will be any worse than commander tag abuse that happens every so often.

My wife looked at this and said “people on the forums have claimed they did it with 3…or maybe 4.”

So I guess this is more confirmation that even less than a full party is enough if you get good spawn locations.

The precursor crafting wasn’t created to give you a cheaper way of getting a precursor (though for many precursors it certainly does), just a way that drastically reduces the amount of RNG. Now you don’t have to rely on yourself or others finding the precursor for you — you can go get it yourself.

For some precursors it will likely work out to be more money and time to craft it rather than buy it. It certainly seems like Dawn and Dusk will be very close in price to the TP, as will some of the other two-handed weapons. However, when designing the system a dev said that they looked at the TP to determine the cost and complexity of the precursor hunt for each type of precursor (two hand, main hand, off hand, aquatic). This is why, if you’re picked up the books for the underwater precursors, you’ll see that they are a lot shorter (6-8 events vs 14+) and the costs for materials are much lower.

I think this is more a problem with your expectations of precursor crafting than a problem with how it was implemented. I’m working on both Dawn and Dusk right now and I can say that while I was at first a bit surprised at how expensive crafting Dawn I was going to be, I’m over it. It’ll be more fun this way knowing that I worked for it, and that’s fine by me.

I can get to my character select screen but cannot load into any maps. This is a new problem for me as of the most recent patch. I get the following error:

Network Error
1083:5:7:1595:101

The crafting station should show you a new section called “Legendary something” where you have a recipe for a legendary inscription and the Lover I itself. For me, all of the new recipes appeared right next to each other. I was doing the Dawn I pre, so if you can’t see anything, it might be a bug. They’ve already identified a blocker towards finishing the Twilight I achievement at all.

I had expected the precursor hunt to be a time-sink, but not a money sink. The crafting requirements for Dawn I are insanely high, but you know what? I can be very patient, and I can sit back and enjoy the time that it’s going to take me (even with the time gating) to get all of my materials in line. And in the meantime, I won’t mind it at all if I have to play parts of the game that I don’t normally frequent (PvP and WvW). Who knows, I may even begin to like it.

It’s all in how you frame the situation in your mind.

I just went through this tonight with Dawn. There is a new crafting category called “Legendary Somethingorother.” All the recipe stuff is under that. Don’t look for it to be mixed in with the other weapons they way everything used to be.

My computer will regularly crash and/or disconnect under heavy graphics load. Yesterday I crashed/dc’d 3 times during the same teq fight, and tonight I crashed once during karka queen. Crashes are very rare when under low graphics load, such as in fractals or open world exploring.

64 bit system, brand new as of January, nvidia 970 gtx

I had no problem with any of the Sunrise I events. My only issue so far has been with the Modniir reward for Twilight I, which the dev addressed above has something wrong with it.

For the person complaining about the quaggan rescue not working, I went to Viathan lake earlier tonight and found that event had been triggered, but no one was doing it, so I just swam in and completed it. I’m not sure what it’s trigger is, but the event does work.

8, all 80 except my necro who I only use to open bags because I HATE HIM WITH A BURNING PASSION. He was the first character I created too…

I’ve got an empty slot for a rev, when the time comes.

The general rule of thumb is that if you do any damage to the vine itself, you’ll get credit.

For the catapult events, oftentimes people will get on a cata for 1-2 shots before leaving. Just pick a cata and stand next to it if all of them are in use and usually you’ll be able to snag it when they leave.

I assume this is the Goons?

Vova, what you should be doing is farming for all of the other mats you need for bifrost, but NOT the precursor. Get yourself the gift of bifrost, gift of fortune, and gift of mastery, and then wait for HoT to come out. Once it’s out, you’ll be able to craft the Legend.

I don’t think there’s any way that the recipes for the current legendaries will change. However, I do appreciate the point raised earlier that there are a lot of new currencies in the game, and with the addition of the new HoT maps there will likely be one or two more. I think we should expect the recipes for the new legendaries to have the following:

1. A slightly altered gift of exploration to reflect an exploration of old and new maps.
2. A gift of mastery with an additional requirement for 500 fractal relics. I’m not sure where they’ll add this, but I can’t imagine it not being included somewhere.
3. A gift of fortune that is completely unchanged. That’s where the majority of the grind for a legendary is (for most legendaries, at least), and I think it’s working as intended.
4. New items to collect in HoT maps exclusively that are added to the Gift of <Legendary Name Here> or sub-gifts whose recipes are purchased from Miyani.

I can also see new currencies and items being required for the precursor crafting in addition to all the crazy quests/scavenger hunt activities that we’ll have to do. But so long as RNG is kept (mostly) out of the process, I’ll be happy.

AzureSky.3175:

6. Tie Legendary Stances to their respective weapons (so swapping stances auto-swaps your weapon, or swapping weapons auto-swaps your stance)

This is by far my favorite idea. I can’t imagine any stance other than Ventari wanting to use the staff, so bringing up a staff when you switch to Ventari makes a lot of sense to me. Likewise, I think malyx and the hammer go really well together.

Revenant needs a way to switch between melee and range in the middle of combat, and I think the above option is the only one which does this easily and in a way that makes logical sense.

Believe it or not, this exact thing happened to a guild mate of mine. I think Anet should just be nice and grant precursors to the main account. Otherwise it’s just a punch in the gut.

You can get them at the festival vendor in LA in the top left corner, but it states very clearly that it is a one time use reskin of an existing backpiece. I don’t know what achievement you’re referring to, but if it gave you the same item, then that’s why it doesn’t appear in your wardrobe. One time use.

Tamasan.6457:

I am agreeing with you intellectually and logically.

But emotions and feelings aren’t always based on logic. And this just feels bad.

I agree 100% with this. My first reaction on reading the news was “yay, now I can get into a beta test” only to be followed up with “crap, guess maybe not.”

It’s fair, but it doesn’t feel right.

You’ll get instanced missions just like the personal story that your characters all have access to when created.

The main reason for unlocking LS is that you can get access to unique materials used for crafting items like Mawdrey and the set of bioluminescent armor. The story and missions themselves are pretty good too. I’d do it, if I were you.

Why not just go to the crafting area and buy your salvage kits from the master craftsmen? I find it easy to WP in, hit the crafting area for my bank/merch/crafting needs, and then head just a touch south to the TP. No big deal at all.

Check out this post from the devs. It explains everything pretty well.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a-legendary-journey/

^^

Weapons in this game are pretty well divorced from what they can do when you’re holding them. Let’s wait and see what the skills accompanying the weapon are before we pass judgement on the whole elite spec.

Looking at the positive side, if they manage to make the warhorn really useful then people will have some incentive to make legendary warhorns. As it stands how, I’m not sure that many people do.

I just logged on here to post the same thing. It’s nearly impossible to spot the icon on the minimap anywhere in ascalon, and the difference between the icon for completed and uncompleted points are miniscule.

I also want to bring up the new wallet. While the list format is a fine idea, it’s too transparent on the right-hand side, and I constantly have to move it around to read all of the numbers. It’s also too wide on my screen, and I can’t seem to change it. It makes it more difficult to read than when you could simply mouse over the money readout in the inventory window and have a quick popup telling you how much of each currency you had.

I think additional changes need to be made:

Boss kill speed was generally fine before the condi changes. (I say generally because I think jormag regularly took too long and Fire Ele was always too fast.) After the condi changes, everything was too fast.

I agree with increasing the length of boss fights back to where they were before condi while also making both condi and non-condi builds viable. Adding hp and allowing crits is a good idea, but it hasn’t been executed properly yet.

For starters, crits should be accessible from anywhere. Condi is accessible from anywhere, so we should have a level playing field for doing damage that is build-neutral. As others have said, getting into melee with certain bosses (jormag, golem) is a bad idea.

Secondly, one of the main issues with boss fights is that they can feel grindy. A grind is mindlessly doing something repeatedly for an extended period of time. I doubt anyone really enjoyed shatterer or golem before condi patch because you just stood in one place and autoattacked until the boss was dead. Any patch which increases mindless autoattack isn’t fun. We need bosses that require thought to fight. Not a lot of thought, but something more than stand in one spot and autoattack. I love the teq fight because you have to be mentally engaged, and I think teq is better done than any other world boss because of it.

tl;dr:
Extend crits to everywhere and give the bosses an ability to nuke stationary 11111ers. Reduce hp as needed so that kill times come back down to where they were before condi.

Adding 800 gems to the standard and deluxe packages is the best option I’ve heard out of all the ranting on the internet. I sincerely hope they go with this option, and if they do, I’ll buy the standard package immediately.

They open up beta events very rarely, and only for a few hours at a time. Currently there are no beta events running. Check the forum regularly to find announcements of upcoming beta events. As far as I know, none have been announced for the near future.

There’s a decent amount of content in this expansion, and I know that inflation has been happening to game prices as the cost of development increases.

But to sell an expansion without a character slot is a slap in the face. In order to enjoy one of the key features of the expansion, we’re being forced to spend extra money. That’s my major problem with the standard package. I understand bundling the core game and I understand the price, but for me, $50 needs to include one character slot.

I was going to buy it tonight, but the moment I saw the lack of a character slot in the standard package, I held back. No money for you until you right this wrong. Throw in the character slot for the standard package and I’ll spend the $50 gladly.

I’m ok with $50 for HOT, but for the love of god, it should really come with a character slot. There’s a new class, so all existing players are going to want to create a new character. It’s only logical.

If you’re looking to craft Mawdrey or legendaries, then having a max level jeweler is necessary. However, if all you’re focusing on is trinkets, then you’re correct that the best trinkets out there are the ascended ones you can get from vendors.

This will only happen if you are selling Arah. Easy solution: stop selling Arah. No one’s going to do anything to stop this from happening to you because selling dungeon paths was never supposed to be part of the game in the first place.

So perhaps I should be going about getting linen by gold farming from dungeons and then just buying the scrap on the TP, but I was up in iron hills killing mobs to get armor drops, which I then planned to salvage for the linen scrap. But all of the armor drops were level 75+. I was under the impression that the armor dropped would be commensurate with the level of the area, not the level of my character. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a better way to farm linen scrap?

All help appreciated. Thanks.

The giant destroyer troll at the end of the Zuhl jumping puzzle in Timberline started the fight with a buff that made him invincible (I think it was called “Determined”), and even though we moved him through the lava fonts, nothing would remove it.