Guild Wars 2

Rouven.7409:

Just a thought, what do people say about the Queensdale champ train? Except for spider they are all events, should be around 250 per champ – so about 1k per round?

1K sounds about right. Boar – oak – troll – bandit, plus wasp when it’s up.

SteepledHat.1345:

It costs like 4s to reset traits. Why would you ever pay the cost of a manual to reset. >.> Cheapest is 15s iirc.

I suppose you would buy a manual to take a trait reset with you into the field, so that you could save a trip to the NPC.

Anyway, I’m fairly certain they have been one-time-use at least since I’ve been playing (about five months). No very recent “stealth nerf” that I’m aware of.

JustTrogdor.7892:

I always thought once traits were selected they should be permanent and unchangeable. I’ve got some pretty bad traits of my own and I don’t think they will ever change. I’d pay a lot of RLM for an item that would do that. Of course my ex-girlfriend ran through my wallet pretty quick and despite her best efforts she couldn’t change my traits either.

You can change your traits any time simply by going to your class trainer. They will have an option to reset your trait points (this does cost a few silver, though, but no real money).

The only thing different about the gem store item is that you can now reset your traits ANYWHERE. as opposed to having to go to an NPC. But even so, unless you are in the middle of a fractal or dungeon, it’s not so hard to waypoint to a class trainer, switch up traits, and go back. The item has the same function as the repair canisters, banker golems, etc. It;s for convenience so that you don’t have to go to town.

eisberg.2379:

Can’t we buy the Training books from our class trainer, and use those to retrait anywhere? Of course cheaper to talk to the class trainer, but pay a premium to be able to retrait anywhere in the world. So I guess with this other option, it comes out to be cheaper to buy Gems with gold and then buy instant trait reset item.

I don’t think you can use these more than once on any one character. They merely unlock the higher-level trait lines.

I don’t see the trait reset item as being any more P2W than the temporary Black Lion Trader/banker/merchant/repair items we already have, really. All it does is take the function of an NPC and put it in a one-time use item.

The ability to SAVE trait sets/builds and simply swap between them is something I would definitely like, though.

Draco.2806:

Celestial.4381:

Assuming these are new standard hairstyles, the hair-changer kit will set you back about 13 G right now (250 gems). I’d much rather have cosmetic changes for free of course, but that’s roughly a night’s worth of farming. Not all that bad.

Jesus kitten-gobbling Christ.

Uh, yeah, my income’s not that great. I’ve earned maybe 50G over the lifetime of my account.

Well, I don’t really recommend JUST farming for income as it does get very boring. But some spots are better than others. You can definitely make around 2-3 gold a round doing a loop around northern Straits of Devastation. Just pick/mine/chop everything (especially the peppers and herbs), sell, and come back in an hour when the nodes reset for another couple of gold. Repeat this by however many characters you have that are high enough level to handle the mobs in that zone.

Then there’s the Frostgorge champ train, orichalcum/ancient wood farming, any zone that has mid-tier wood (which has gone up in price recently)…making a few gold a night isn’t too kittence you get the hang of it.

Draco.2806:

Good!

That’s the kind of attention to detail that an MMO really needs. Too bad I’ll never see them because makeover kits cost a kitten-ton of kittens.

Assuming these are new standard hairstyles, the hair-changer kit will set you back about 13 G right now (250 gems). I’d much rather have cosmetic changes for free of course, but that’s roughly a night’s worth of farming. Not all that bad.

Ahahaha, I love the female Asura “Princess Leia” side-buns with the ears sticking out

The female Human style with the flower is my fave, though.

Good work!

As someone who came to this game from other MMOs moreso than from the original Guild Wars (although I did play that game on and off for a bit), I will say that there are many gameplay and QoL features that make GW2 better for ME than a lot of other games I’ve played. So in that respect, I do think that this game has spoiled me :-P . I never read the much-bandied-about “Manifesto” and didn’t really follow any of the other pre-release hype, but regardless of whether or not the game is exactly what the developers promised it would be a year+ ago, I do enjoy it for what it is NOW. Not that I don’t think there are areas that could stand improvement, of course, but some games take a few years to reach their stride and again, we’re still just over a year in.

Mystic.5934:

I would also like to know what type of item gives what. bows and staves I know give wood while swords and daggers give metal, but what do the others give? specifically, the ones that require both materials to make (such as horn and pistol). is it just randomly either/or?

I’ve gotten both wood and ore (always just one or the other, though) from axes, hammers, pistols, rifles, maces, tridents, spears, and harpoon guns. Torches always give wood, I think. Focuses generally salvage as wood as well. Warhorns usually salvage as ore. Interestingly, shields usually salvage as ore, but every once in a while I get wood PLANKS from them!

I don’t think there ARE hard cut-offs…that’s the problem. I used to buy a lot of white weapons and armor on the cheap via buy orders and salvage them to supplement my crafting. Often I would salvage hundreds of items at a time. The general pattern I noticed was this:

- copper/jute/green wood would salvage from anything below about level 22
- iron salvaged from weapons/heavy armor from roughly level 22 all the way until roughly level 44/45; at these upper levels, sometimes platinum would drop instead
- platinum salvaged reliably from around level 48 up. I never bought gear to salvage for mithril (because it’s been very cheap for a while), but I’d think this metal would show up around level 60 or so
- as for the woods: this got to be frustrating because the level window in which I got Seasoned (tier 3) wood always seemed to be small. If I was lucky I would get it from level 32 weapons, but these often salvaged as Soft Wood as well. Level 36-44 weapons seemed to be the sweet spot for Seasoned Wood, above that you start getting Hard Wood. Elder Wood seems to start showing up in the upper 50s.
- I never did that much armor salvaging for cloth or leather. Whenever I needed a lot of Tailor/Leatherworker mats, I just buy-ordered containers (like Moldy Bags), which also drop fine mats in addition to cloth and leather scraps.

The main thing is that there seem to be item levels at which you might salvage either of two tiers of mats.

You can’t re-do any craft on a single character. Once you gain levels in one craft, even if you switch to another and then back, you will still have the levels you gained before the switch.

EnemyCrusher.7324:

Crafting isn’t required to get ascended weapons. You can obtain them via world bosses, champions, guild missions, or Fractals of the Mists, it’s just a very rare chance. I hope to see them available via WvW soon.

Even crafting itself is not that onerous provided you have enough gold, and how you earn that gold really IS up to you. When I think of the complaint “I can’t get this BiS gear the way I want” WRT other games, I think of “unless I grind this specific dungeon/raid over and over, I’ll never have access to this gear”. Crafting can be annoying, but it’s accessible enough to give the greatest number of players a realistic shot at getting the gear they want short of just slapping it all on a vendor for (X) gold per piece.

As for time-gating, it’s not really supposed to be fun, right? It’s a long-standing MMO tradition to keep us in the game longer.

Ekstra.5264:

good to know about the recipes, are they very expensive?

The recipes for rare/exotic inscriptions cost karma, and since that’s not as easy to come by now as it was in the past, it makes all the more sense to get all the recipes you want for a specific craft on one character, i.e. no need to double up.

AFAIK, there’s no downside to crafting an Ascended item with an alt. All of the materials used to make them are account-bound, as are the weapons themselves (they’re bind-on-equip, I believe). If you want to level up a craft that you haven’t started on any character yet, this may be the one you’d want to do with an alt.

When you switch out one craft for another, the cost to switch depends on the level you’ve gained in the craft you’re switching TO. The rate is 1 silver per 10 craft levels. or example, if you are switching to Artificer and you are at level 400 in that craft, you will pay 40s to switch. So, constantly switching back and forth CAN add up if you’re not careful, but it won’t break the bank if you do it a couple of times.

Hope this helps! :-)

EDIT: oh, and I haven’t seen much to indicate how Ascended armor crafting is going to differ from weapons. But between two characters, you should have your bases covered (three weapon crafts + Tailor), as far as not having to swap out crafts goes.

I’ve made about 100 G via crafting in the past week or so. Not an enormous sum, but enough to put towards some account upgrades I’ve been meaning to get.

My experience has been that as long as I stick to crafting several low-price but high-turnover items, and diversify what I craft and sell, I can make roughly 10-12 gold per day depending on how often I craft and post. I’ve tried selling higher priced rare gear, but that hasn’t brought in nearly as consistent a profit as the cheaper stuff. At that price point you’re better off putting in low buy orders and trying to flip existing TP items.

The key is willingness to be flexible. Keep an eye on sites like gw2spidy and see what you can craft for profit right now, but keep in mind that tomorrow or even a couple of hours from now, the market will change and different items will be the potential money makers. This isn’t something that’s out of the realm of the casuals, either ( I’m a fairly casual player myself).

Crafting is definitely not as lucrative in this game as it is in several others, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make money doing it. You just have to be smart about it.

Adding in Lion’s Arch/Ebonhawke pan-racial armor sets to compliment the existing weapon sets would be a good place to start.

Thing is, karma ISN’T so useless anymore now that karma rewards across the game have been nerfed, and for relatively new players who weren’t already sitting on a pile of karma from before the patch, every little bit counts now.

Anyway, what I’d like to see are some bonus rewards for completing an entire DE chain in one run. This might encourage players to keep playing in a single area for a while, instead of popping in to run an event or two and then leaving.

I’ve never leveled an Ele all that high, but one rule of thumb that I go by is that if I happen to hit a boring/frustrating stretch on a new profession (this has happened with a couple of my toons around the mid-levels), I bump up that toon by about 10-20 levels via crafting, then try again with the new skills and traits available by then. I also play around a bit with different builds to see if I’m missing out on something that could make my character more effective. All this inspired me to finally level my Engineer to cap, which is a very fun class but can also be frustrating to level and trait effectively.

BlueZone.4236:

For the average casual, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re still not in full exotic gear. Which is exactly why I said others need to make up for their deficiency.

Well, I can’t speak for other “average” casuals, but I’m a fairly casual player in that I pretty much just do open-world PvE, don’t really bother with dungeons or WvW, and I’m still able to outfit my 80s in full exotic sets when the time comes. All it takes is 15-20 gold per char. That’s a couple of days of crafting/TP flipping/farming/champ trains if I’m short, but it’s also not that hard to save up that much if you sell everything you come across and don’t splurge too much along the way.

I’m not trying to argue about whether it is or is not lame that some events are perceived to “require” full exotic gear across the group to complete (does anyone actually know if a full exotic group is required to beat Tequatl? Or can a competent group with some rares mixed in still do it?). I’m just saying that getting full exotics isn’t what I’d call a grind. And it’s certainly not totally out of reach of the “casuals”.

ilr.9675:

It’s not the fact that some JPs give more than others…..

It’s which JP’s give more. ….3 of the ones in Caledon give 6-9 while none of the ones in Orr give that many. Very inconsistent “what the heck?!?” headshaking there.

Haha, almost all of the JPs that give lots of Fragments are either Asura- or pirate-themed. Just what are they up to??

Ursan.7846:

You think getting full exotic gear requires some sort of “miraculous” grind?

One weekend of playing the TP for the gold, then another 15 minutes to buy all my gear.
’Twas the Ninth Circle of Heck.

I must admit, I’m a bit confused by the OP.

Is the fear that ANet will focus mainly on gem store content to the detriment of “expansion”-type updates? Or that instead of a few traditional big expansions we’ll be forced to buy a series of small, mediocre updates via microtransactions? Or that ANet will forgo significant new content altogether in favor of LS updates and gem store revenue?

I see no reason to believe that we won’t be getting major, permanent updates to the game at some point, ones that regardless of HOW they’re released (maybe not explicitly called an “expansion pack”, but delivering similar content), we’ll most likely have to pay for. Okay. In this game, I also don’t see much, if any, of the “play2win” sort of items that some other MMO cash shops get flack for introducing. So far it’s all fluff, space-saver/convenience items, and account upgrades such as name changes. It’s too bad if a long-offered mini set gets discontinued and you missed out on getting it (which, BTW, if you saved enough gold, you wouldn’t have to fork over a single dime for). But to me that’s not a game-breaking problem. I like minis fine, but that’s not really why I play this game. And judging by the very few people I’ve seen in game with minis actually deployed, it wouldn’t seem to be a game-breaking problem for many other people, either.

This is not just GW2/ANet trying to screw players over. This is the way that many MMOs have been heading for the past few years. LOTRO went F2P/cash shop a couple of years ago and saw a surge in player numbers, so I wouldn’t exactly say the business model was “kryptonite” for them. And they still release paid expansions on top of that. Even WoW, which still has a subscription model, has offered fluff items such as mounts and mini-pets, as well as name-changes and so forth, for money – and unlike this game, you can’t put in-game gold towards buying them (AFAIK).

I have no problem with ANet making some extra money selling fluff to players who are willing to pay for it. And I also appreciate the fact that I can pay for stuff like name changes, character slots, bank tabs, and so forth with in-game currency. I’ll gladly pay for an expac/major content update whenever it comes out, but in the meantime, I’m glad that they have a revenue stream that enables them to put money towards developing that new content.

Also, there were certainly a ton of people who were leveling Weaponsmith/Huntsman/Artificer right around the time of the last patch, and probably a lot of them had Darksteel ingots left over from leveling that they had no use for and started dumping on the TP. They could have been a little smarter when pricing their ingots, but just hitting “Match Lowest Seller” is easier.

As a couple other people mentioned, you don’t really need to worry about kitting out in full exotic (or better) gear until level 80. I’ve done the upgrade to exotic for a couple of my characters around level 65, and it didn’t make that much of a difference over yellows or greens as far as open-world PvE went.

As far as what zones to play in…really, anything at or below your current level will work! There’s no real “end-game” until you get at a high enough level to do Orr or Frostgorge (level 75-80). Actually, as you head for the Orr zones (starting with Straits of Devastation) you will notice that the usual renown hearts will start to disappear and instead you will have a lot more dynamic events to do, and many of these (especially in Orr proper) can be challenging. More dungeons will also open up as you level further. You can do WvW and PvP right now if you want. But there isn’t really anything that you “have” to do right now.

So I recommend just keep doing what you enjoy. Work on your map completion, and perhaps work on some maps in areas you haven’t explored yet (for example, if you’ve been mainly running around Kryta, try doing some of the Maguuma Jungle or Ascalon zones). If a world boss is up in your current zone, head over and try helping out. Try finding and running some jumping puzzles. Do some crafting if you want. The Queensdale champ train is mostly run by people hoping for some rare weapon skins to drop, from what I understand, but it’s not mandatory by any means.

Also, you might try over in the Warrior forum…they may have a “post a pic of your Warrior”-type thread going on, and if it’s like the similar thread in the Thief forum, there will be a lot of folks who like to experiment with mix-and-match armor pieces and dyes. You might see some ideas there.

I haven’t had a lot of time to play lately, so what I’ve been doing is crafting for profit (SHUDDER) by doing this:

1) search gw2spidy.com by craft for items that I can craft + sell at a profit with reasonably high turnover (i.e., demand is in the 100s or 1000s with lower supply)
2) buy supplies, craft a bunch of these items, and post them before I go to work
3) come home, collect earnings and craft/post another batch of currently profitable stuff, post it
4) in the morning, collect earnings from the previous night and start over

Not the most lucrative way of making money, but I can usually earn about 8-10G per day in profits by doing this. I made about 50G this past weekend via this method with a little more play time.

I dunno, I think that between containers (Moldy Bags, etc.), near-useless white armor, and salvageable hide/cloth scraps, leather and cloth drops are fine. I would maybe tweak the drop/salvage rates of a couple of tiers (the tier that uses cotton, for example…that type of cloth seems to always be in shorter supply for some reason). Also, the ability to salvage bags would be nice. There’s really nothing else to do with those 5-slot bags that drop from champs, after all.

The resources that I always have supply problems with are: 1) wood, for the plank processing issue that someone mentioned above, and 2) cooking ingredients that are only chance drops from herb nodes, such as Chili Peppers and Lemongrass.

Well, right now one option you have is to participate in the invasion events. I gained about 2.5 levels on an alt a few days ago from doing one invasion…almost 3 levels in 45 minutes (doing something other than crafting) isn’t too bad, IMO.

Occasionally you’ll see a yellow text announcement come up in the chat window that says something like “Scarlet’s minions are invading [whatever zone]”, and for the next 45 minutes that zone will have a series of group events wherein you fight tons and tons of enemies. The nice thing is that the invasions occasionally happen in some mid-level zones, such as Gendarran Fields (levels 25-35), Harathi Hinterlands (35-45), and so forth, so once you get all the exp you can out of the starter zones, you can start doing these.

EDIT: oh, and don’t forget to do your Personal Story quests. They aren’t too hard and they give a good amount of EXP, which is especially nice with the early ones.

Jewelcrafting is usually a good place to start because you can essentially supply it with a single type of gathering (mining), and unlike the other crafts that use ore, you don’t have to refine the ore with vendor mats like tin, primordium, or whatnot. Also, the prices of the jeweler-only metals used at the middle tiers (Silver and Gold) are fairly cheap right now.

Cooking is usually not too bad to level, although some mats can be overly pricey (Chili Peppers, for example). Also, many cooking mats can be bought with karma. Just gather whatever you come across out there, and find a good guide for leveling up efficiently.

Leatherworker and Tailor can be relatively inexpensive if you can get leather and cloth scraps on the cheap. Leather in particular is usually fairly inexpensive. Fine crafting materials can get pricey, though, depending on the tier. One way I’ve found to get around buying a lot of (potentially pricey) fine mats when leveling these crafts is to discover/craft bags or packs for part of each tier. This will require buying pricey vendor mats (Runes of Holding), but the good thing about bags and packs is that you can usually sell them for around a break-even price (or maybe even a slim profit) on the TP, and therefore recoup some of your costs.

All of the crafts that involve making weapons are expensive to level right now, mostly due to the high price of the various types of wood. One exception is Artificer, which you can level by discovering and crafting potions. But unlike crafted gear, which can actually be sold for over vendor price now (wasn’t always this way), crafted potions typically don’t sell for much at all, so in that way it’s a money sink.

Engineer seems like ALL utility to me at times because of how often I go for the kits. Elixir-spamming is great if you have the HGH trait (Might stack with elixir use), but it’s not necessarily the end-all be-all. I’ve tried a flamethrower build (with the Juggernaut trait), flamethrower/Elixir Gun, grenades (with Grenadier), and a condition build with pistols and they were all fun. I’m not a huge fan of turrets, but there is a trait line that beefs those up too. There are a couple of builds that really don’t shine until you can sink a full 30 points into a single trait line (this is where Grenades get fun, for example). I guess that’s one of Engi’s main issues, that leveling is more of a chore and the late game is really where you get down to business, but once you get there it can be pretty interesting.

I’m playing a Thief right now and it’s a lot of fun. There are a few builds that are all about condition stacking (especially bleeds), and others that deal more with stealth and crowd control. I run a condition build mostly, and I mostly don’t feel kitten if I don’t have 6 stacks of Might on me every single second. It’s more about mobility than raw power. Thief also has some interesting ranged skills via shortbow if you want some combat variety.

Compared to whatever else we COULD be doing to earn an Ascended weapon, getting enough crafting experience to make one doesn’t really seeem like so much of a hardship, IMO. Think of it this way: leveling crafting is very simple as long as you have enough gold to do so. How you earn that gold needed to level the craft is up to you. If you’d rather be running dungeons (which can be fairly lucrative anyway), or doing invasions, or whatever, then by all means, do that and just buy your way to 500.

Unlike many other games, you aren’t shackled to only two crafts on any character. You need not stick with the weapon-making one once you make your Ascended. If you’d rather not spend the silver to switch out one of your chosen crafts for a weapon-making one, then simply level up the new one on an alt. Ascended weapons as well as the materials used to make them are account bound IIRC.

I mean, I get that some people don’t like certain crafts or even crafting in general. But if we weren’t out farming mats to craft these weapons, in all likelihood we would be farming some other sort of token, or currency, or whatnot.

mXz.4512:

GreyMouser.1235:

Arenanet has already specifically said that mounts will not be added to the game. Period.

I hope they hold true to this. Adding mounts would just turn this into WoW.2, thus I’d be forced to abandon this. Never played wow, only seen it and aghast by every bit of it. This game’s perfectly fine without ’em.

Honestly, if mounts of all things were WoW’s biggest problem, it would be the best MMO ever.

I wouldn’t object to mounts in this game. Nice vanity item, would make travel a little less painful, and all that. Mounted COMBAT, on the other hand, would be something that I’d rather not have the devs try to tackle.

If excessive difficulty/level scaling issues were the main reasons for this game’s non-endgame zones being deserted, then what’s every other MMOs excuse? Every game I’ve played has had this same problem of the mid-level zones being deserted, and all except GW2 did things the “old fashioned” way where going back and doing lower-level content as a high-level player was trivially easy to the point of some people soloing group dungeons and the like.

If anything, the way that GW2 scales your character’s level to match the zone gives me MORE incentive to go back and complete the content in lower-level zones, because I’m not just facerolling everything for no reward. It’s not that I don’t ever have problems with doing the content this way (I really hate underwater combat with certain classes, for example, and in some high-level zones I tend to struggle with it). But often this just makes me find new approaches to playing my class. Either that or I level up a bit more (if not at cap) and try out new skills and traits (which BTW aren’t lost when your level is scaled down).

Especially for armor and weapon crafting, don’t forget to craft insignias/inscriptions when you receive the recipes for them (these recipes are automatically granted as you increase your crafting level). These are what you combine with the armor/weapon components to discover the statted armor/weapon recipes. This is also where you will use many of your fine (blue) crafting materials.

For example, if your craft is Leatherworker, by combining a Healing Jute Insignia (bolt of jute + tiny totems) with one Rawhide Glove Lining and one Rawhide Glove Strap in the discovery window, you will discover the recipe for Healing Seeker Gloves.

Hope this helps! :-)

I don’t really care. Having played several games with raid-centered endgame and a new uber gear tier (usually available ONLY to those who bothered with raiding) with each new raid/content update, this game just now adding a new tier of equipment (and piecemeal at that…no Ascended armor just yet) seems pretty to me by comparison.

I also like that Ascended access isn’t limited to one semi-niche group (raiders) the way some gear is in other games. And I understand that crafting isn’t everybody’s thing, but OTOH each toon has the ability to permanently level up ALL crafts and switch between them, so a character who started out without a weapon-making craft isn’t completely screwed right now, for example. I do understand dislike of the somewhat grindy aspect of gathering the mats needed for Ascended weps, because hey, there’s only so much farming I can stand (i.e. very little).

I am leveling a Thief right now. She’s currently level 71 and I’m using an approach similar to what minizero suggested above.

I run dagger/dagger and shortbow as my two active weapon sets. I usually start out encounters with SB, either using the explosive #2 skill or laying down a Poison field to have that condition running right off the bat, then as the enemies close in I switch to the daggers. D/D has some amazing Bleed stacking capability, especially thanks to Death Blossom, and with every wep. set you also have access to Caltrops (both the utility ’Trops and the on-dodge ones), which pile on even more Bleeds. Oh, and Steal (F1) is very useful for breaking stuns and for occasionally setting up combo fields, so use it when you can as well.

This is not a build that relies on a lot of stealth, so I have to really keep an eye on my health. Signet of Malice, with the passive of heal-on-damage dealt, works amazingly well in conjunction with DB, especially when I can hit multiple enemies. Multiple mobs CAN be tough to fight, but keep in mind that the Thief has a lot of AoE condition-inflicting skills, and using them together can take down crowds of enemies very quickly as long as you remember to dodge and keep an eye on your HP. I would also suggest investing in on-steal or on-dodge traits for getting some extra might, health, and initiative here and there for doing stuff you’d already be doing in battle.

Hope this helps! :-)

If you have laurels to burn, you can get 3 fine T6 mats per laurel from the Heavy Crafting Bags. Earning more laurels is a slow process, though, so I wouldn’t recommend this unless you already have a lot and don’t plan to use them on anything else (such as Ascended trinkets).

There are a couple of ways to get T6 mats via the Mystic Forge: either by “upgrading” T5 materials, or via the Mystic Clover recipe, which has about a 70% chance to give you T6 fine mats instead of Clovers.

I just gained three levels in a little under an hour, helping out with an invasion event. This isn’t really viable for lowbies, though.

If you don’t want to do a lot of open-world stuff, then I agree that personal story, city exploration, and crafting are all good ways of getting some levels fairly easily. City exploration is not as painful as open-world, as you have access to speed boosts in-city. Crafting for EXP can be pricey depending on the craft (try Chef, Jeweller, and Artificer first), so I usually space that out with other leveling methods if I’m short on gold.

I like both Engineer and Thief a lot. Engi has lots of useful and interesting skills…they are not the best at damage, but can be very helpful in group situations for the reasons that cpg mentioned. As much as I love the class, though, you have to do a little homework and figure out what the best build is for what you want to do; this is true of most classes but especially Engineer, in my experience. There are lots of builds and tips posted online.

Thief is a great solo class that, among other things, is terrific at condition (especially Bleed) stacking, which as you can imagine, sees the usefullness of that particular build diminished immensely in zergs. Not as much utility as Engi, though. Haven’t played Hunter enough to advise on them.

Yeah, there were a few skill points that gave me problems early on, too. What I generally did after a few unsuccessful tries was just move on, level up a bit, and try again later. Leveling is pretty fast in this game, and while you’ll be scaled down to the level of the zone when you return, by then you will have had access to new traits, skills, and better gear, which can make a big difference in tough encounters. Don’t frustrate yourself in the short term if a new, useful skill or trait is just a few levels away :-)

One thing to consider in the “should we have expansions versus (whatever)” issue is that, in the past few years, at least some games have started to move away from the whole concept of one big expansion every couple of years. It used to be that you’d wait patiently for the expansion to come out, then actually go to the store, buy a box, take it home, and install the expac via disks. Everything is moving toward downloading now, so there’s less motivation to release one huge chunk of content all at once as opposed to in somewhat smaller chunks on maybe a shorter interval.

LOTRO has been doing something like this. Since the last “in store” expansion of theirs, Mines of Moria, they’ve released two download-only full expacs (Rise of Isengard, Riders of Rohan), one “mini” expac (the Mirkwood zone, plus a few dungeons), and several other single-zone releases that more or less bridged the gap between the previous expac and the next. This is not a game that will be seeing any new races or classes than there were at launch, IMO, but major new mechanics (such as mounted combat) or group content (raids) generally have come with the big releases, while the smaller one-zone releases usually came with a small (5 level) increase in level cap. It’s a nice way of spreading out content, I think.

Another thing to consider is that the LS is what GW2 has where other games have things like seasonal holidays, temporary events to keep existing players logging in, but do not necessarily bring in too many new players. Granted, many of the LS have been more robust than usual MMO holiday “fluff” events, but OTOH no one is buying GW2 for the first time based on the content of one LS update. They might if that update included a new race or profession, since content like that actually has some replay value if you miss the two-week LS window.

TL; DR. “Expansion Packs”/major content updates and LS events need not be mutually exclusive, since they serve different purposes.

BTW, Sunstones WERE successfully updated. Instead of +Power and +MF, they are now +Precision and +Power. So hopefully the deal with Opals is just a bug and will be fixed soon. I can’t see them leaving opals with only two stats.

I wonder if anyone has actually tested whether Opals give +Power, and it’s just the tooltip that’s incorrect.

I was salvaging a pile of crafted jewelry yesterday, and I’m pretty sure that one of the pieces I broke down was an Opal trinket, and the tooltip for the (automatically) slotted masterwork Opal gem listed +Power as one of the stats. But ONLY for the slotted gem, the piece’s base stats didn’t list +Power.

As long as we get some new landmasses, a new profession or two, or perhaps a new race (Tengu, please?), I don’t particularly care how it’s packaged. LS is interesting and all, but if they cut the release cycle back down to once per month on those, I wouldn’t object.

But for all those worried that we may never see an “expansion”, or something equivalent to it, I think that LS updates mostly help retain existing players. Bringing in new ones at this point is more what expac-type content would do.

Selling crafting mats is a nice way to make money whle you are out and about doing other things. Go ahead and harvest everything you come across, and get to know which materials to look out for on the mini-map (for example, “herb” nodes in the Ascalon zones, even the lowbie ones, have a chance of dropping valuable Chili Peppers). Harvesting can also occasionally earn you Unidentified Dyes, which are always good sellers on the TP.

Profit via crafting is not as lucrative in this game as it is in some others, but there are some possibilities if you’re smart with it. Check out www.gw2spidy.com, pick your favorite crafting profession, and see what you can craft for profit at any given time. I have a few items that I craft batches of a couple of times a day, and it’s good for 1-2 gold here and there.

All of this won’t make you SUPER rich, necessarily, but I’m able to keep my toons in decent gear, runes, etc., splurge on some shinies like dyes and skins, and still have enough to spend on an account upgrade (bank space, char. slots, etc.) every so often. I hate zerg-fests, and serious TP flipping (which is how many of the wealthiest players got their gold) feels too much like a job to me, although some people do have fun doing it.