Guild Wars 2

Here you go

It’s possible that an American might not be familiar with regional accents.

I know that the first time I met someone from outside my own village, I had a hard time understanding them.

Only the Mesmer is really restricted to Traveler Runes.
For us it’s pretty well mandatory in WvW. There’s no other way to keep up with the rest of the zerg.

You probably can’t even do that.

Don’t worry about it. It’s not real.

I’ve been in the game about a year, never worried about the gold or the legendaries or any of the other stuff. I’ve got about 500g in my inventory right now. I guess I could buy stuff with it, but why bother? None of it’s real.

WvW ftw.

Looks to me like a perfectly legitimate position (providing it’s accessible to attackers- and I think it probably is because you’re not showing the ‘determined’ buff).

TBH treb is a clumsy weapon to use against ground troops except in very confined spaces. If I were attacking the camp it wouldn’t cause me to lose any sleep. That camp is rarely taken just for the sake of the supply in it and never held for any length of time by invaders.

An excellent suggestion – but make it only valid on siege that’s below say 30 mins on the timer. Otherwise only nearby siege will be refreshed and it’s open to abuse.

RL comes without a manual too.

Really poor job by (insert supreme deity of choice).

^^ This really depends on your server and time-of-day.

If your server is not suffering from queues in WvW it really isn’t a problem. Basically, if you don’t get queued to enter, it’s probably OK.

Anyway, you’ll only be there for a couple of minutes, unlike the guild groups that spend hours standing around the spawn points waiting for the rest of their force to turn up.

OTOH. You’ll be missing a fun part of the game if you don’t at least take a look at WvW. Hint: Follow the blue dorito.

You can gain yourself some ‘free’ XP by exploring cities. (Nothing to fight). There are waypoints, vistas and ‘Points of Interest’ – all of these give XP.

There are 5 cities (not counting Ebonhawke), one for each race and one central hub, Lion’s Arch, also a city.
Each one of these (bar LA) has a nearby starter zone for that race where you can go and tackle level 1-4 enemies and tasks.

No need at all to take on anything more difficult than your own level.

Ranger is probably the weakest class in WvW so it’s no surprise you get killed.

Despite what many people try to suggest, running with the zerg is not some sort of cowardly, underhand trick, it’s actually the point of the game.

Actually killing isn’t important. What you want to look for is control. If you can stop or disable opponents, your zerg-mates will kill them for you. That gives you the freedom to spec for toughness and vitality, which will keep you alive. You still get the loot bags whether you land the killing blow or not.
One of my characters is a Guardian. He hits like a soggy lettuce leaf but is virtually unstoppable and chills or immobilises everything that comes within a mile. He makes a wonderful spearhead.

Necro or Ele sound like your best choices though.

You want Guardian DPS?

This Guardian build by legion has insanely high DPS. be sure to watch to the end because the correct ‘rotation’ is vital.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work in WvW because the sceptre attack is too easily countered. Mobs are too stupid to get out of the way however.

It’s probably (almost certainly?) the highest DPS by any class in the game.

I’ve played both. Mostly I play in WvW so I’m biased in that direction.

It really depends what you want to do. Staff ele is a good ranged class with a lot of useful skills. Most of them are ground targeted, which I find clumsy and it doesn’t suit my style of play. I like to move around a lot. Staff ele feels stiff, almost rooted.
D/D ele is a sort-of melee class. It’s fun to play, feels fluid and fast, does a fair amount of damage but it IS relatively squishy compared to say a warrior.

Mesmer is my favourite. The out-of-combat speed problem is easily fixed by traveller runes, which frees you from the constant need of all classes for constant swiftness buffs. In combat, I think only a thief has more mobility.
It’s very difficult to hit a mesmer when played properly so you can get away with Berserker gear, even in WvW. That gives you a lot of striking power. Using Phantasms lets you set a seriously damaging ‘pet’ loose on an opponent, which is quite capable of killing someone unattended while you take on another. Clones and stealth skills will let you move around the field unmolested, picking suitable targets as you please.

In fact, as a Mesmer, my favourite food is Elementalist.

Cheer up, the chances of being red next time are 2:1 against.

Don’t sell anything to a vendor (merchant) until you are SURE you can’t get a better price from the Lion Trading Post.

Some of the stuff you get even in the starter zones is seriously valuable. The vendor will offer you a few coppers for it.

The matchup forum was a poisonous brew of trolling, accusation and personal abuse.

Anet did the right thing in closing it down and it was a mistake to even give the impression of endorsing the bandwagon site that’s trying to make a bit of revenue by hosting a version of it.

Well, trying to be gentle about this – but..
well, Anet aren’t interested.

LordByron.8369:

Map jumps aggravated the issue…..its quite annoying….
Totally destroyed any non zerg tactic even out of prime time..

If you look at the map, you’ll see it isn’t four separate maps, it’s one big one. Server limitations forced Anet to zone it into four instances but it doesn’t change that fact.

It’s just the same as the main world map where no-one complains that it’s possible to move from Tyria to Ascalon.

The only real issue is that server queues make movement across the zones difficult sometimes.

Bombsaway.7198:

Also, while I like a zerg fight what is the ideal size of a zerg for fun?
When is it so big that it is silly or that many classes no longer scale?
For me 12-20 per side is about right.
Again, this is for a zerg versus a havoc party or gvg roam.

Last night, my guild fought a 3-hour running battle over redvale, redlake and hills against the Vizunah zerg.

It was epic.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and empty my loot bags.

Yes.

The mystic fountain stuff is OK for those people who like to gamble and the slow process probably gives the poor fools a thrill of anticipation – but when it comes to a stricly utilitarian process like upgrading siege, it’s pointless.

In fact, it would be better if we were to drop the logs and mithril nonsense too – that’s an equally pointless bit of theatre. Just let us convert a stack of siege at a cost of points and gold if you like. Maybe trade them at the siege merchant.
Then we can get on with the actual killing bit , which is all we’re interested in.

I’ve seen maybe a half-dozen people speed-hacking in WvW in the last year, compare that to maybe a couple of hundred in the same period playing WoW.

Same with gold sellers – who pop up and promptly vanish – oh and one guy I reported for a racist nametag – he disappeared in minutes never to return.

I think Anet do quite a good job on this stuff where they can.

As for ‘anyone’ – of course. Someone, somewhere is bound to have chosen the most useless traits.

No.

Rouven.7409:

Make it an achievement. Call it: “I was minding my own business when…”

There was something like that in WoW.

The big bad dragon would randomly kill players in the world – you got an Achie for it.

Hmmmm… can’t remember his name – was it Deathwing?

I’m proud to be a Mesmer. (when I play it) I love the damage I can do to the backliners. I love the damage I can do to melee.
I love the fact that I’m (almost) unstoppable and unkillable in a zerg-fight. I love the fact that I can reset the fight any time I please.

Veil and portal? I have them occasionally when someone needs my help – but I don’t regard them as anyone else’s utility. I take orders from no-one.

P.S. I find clones are useful only when traited to inflict conditions when killed. Other than that their purpose is to confuse the enemy and cover my position. The shatter mechanic is a nice little bonus if you catch someone close to a couple of clones but it’s not bread-and-butter to me. Phantasms on the other hand are REAL killers if you use them correctly.

I keep opening my ‘Rank and Abilities’ folder just to check I wasn’t dreaming.

Sometimes you’re better off just wearing a blindfold and using ‘The Force’.

This is why I don’t bother with PvE.

What sort of challenge is fighting fake monsters that just attack you face on with no subtlety, no avoidance, just massive hitting power and ludicrously large health pools?

Now I hear it’s a one-shot death for everyone in the zone whether you’re doing the event or not?

lmao.

Oh, you mean scrapping!

I run because there’s no point staying around to fight. The mobs rarely have any loot worth the effort. They hit hard and there are too many of them. It just isn’t worth it.

Something that should just be a bit of fun has been made into a fruitless pain. Most times I simply ignore these boxes.

Piken isn’t roleplay – I don’t know where people get that from. I’ve never met anyone ‘being weird’.

The game is designed without the ‘holy trinity’ of Healer Tank DPS, All classes (professions) are more-or-less able to do all three. Choosing a profession is more a matter of personal choice about play style. Within limits you can then make it as tanky, heal-ly or DPS-y as you like.

Not a problem to my Guardian.
Pop stability, pick up the gifts and run like kitten!

OTOH, it’s no fun at all on classes with no stability. Poor design IMO.

Yeah, Rata Sum is confusing. all the different levels makes it hard to read the map.

I would seriously suggest you leave the Asura territory and head to the Human city of Divinity’s Reach. It’s much more conventional and the local countryside will probably make you feel more at home

On the top level of Rata Sum there are 3 ‘sets’ of Asura gates. The northern-most one includes a gate to ’Lion’s Arch’ this is THE major hub of the game. You will be spending a lot of time there one way or another.

If you step through the Lion’s Arch gate, you will arrive at a travel hub, surrounded by gates to each one of the race main cities. You can take your choice which you select but the Human one (Divinity’s Reach) is the most conventional. Once you get there head directly south and leave the city for Queensdale. Or you can hang around and explore a bit – your choice.

As for being lost and broke – welcome to real life. It’s no big deal. Just kill stuff and loot it. Or take any work that someone offers you.
Now, whatever you do, don’t sell your stuff to merchants – they will rip you off something rotten if they can. Learn to use the Trading Post (The Lion Head icon on your game menu bar – top-left of the screen). Some of the stuff you get is pure junk. It even says so on the tool-tip. That, you can sell to merchants.
You’ll be surprised how easy it is to make a reasonable living just travelling around doing odd-jobs for local farmers etc.

Don’t be in a hurry to level. This game is different from WoW. It isn’t all about grinding levels so that you can play end-game content. It’s hard to break that habit and many people never do but the game is all around you. Notice how many level 80’s there are running around Queensdale? They are all there for a reason.

Relax, explore, let the game-world take you where it will.
And if you’re into large-scale PvP at all, there is a big treat in store.

The way mine works (and has always worked) is this :-

When I press the mouse button down and start to move the mouse, the cursor disappears.
When I stop moving and release the mouse button, the cursor reappears in the same place.

This has always seemed perfectly reasonable since I don’t want the cursor to wander about when I am simply turning the character or looking round. (Actually, I’d prefer it didn’t vanish but simply stayed visible in the same place.)

If yours did something different, it sounds like there was something wrong that just got fixed.

NornBearPig.9814:

…snip…
The second (WvW) is intertwined with PvE leveling and gear progression but you can also level up and obtain gear in WvW. You can enter WvW almost immidiately after character creation, but you will be very weak and die quickly. Technically you can go from 1-80 without ever setting foot in PvE – however I don’t recommend this as it will be slower, less rewards, and you will miss out on important things like skill points. WvW is a large scale battleground where hundreds of players clash over towers and keeps.

Whoa! don’t rubbish WvW for levelling! (I know you don’t mean to )

I level my toons through WvW for preference every time.
The level disadvantage isn’t as great as all that. You just need to make sure your gear is up-to-level and you can do that by buying the WvW karma gear from the vendor in Citadel. Then both it and you get up-levelled to 80 while in WvW. That just leaves your traits being a bit weak.
Providing you stick with the karma-train you will be fine.
I start WvW levelling about lvl10

As for it being slower – I’m not sure if it is – but anyway, who cares? WvW is fun in the way that PvE simply isn’t.
Skill points are not an issue either – there are skill points to take if you want and after dealing with human opponents, taking a few veterans down solo in PvE to get a skill point is a piece of kitten.

The ONLY negatives are that you won’t get much map completion, there’s not a lot of ‘gold’ in it and ‘achievements’ are heavily biased towards PvE. Personally, I can live with it.

There wouldn’t be much point to clones if the enemy could just hold target on you all the time.
The very short periods of stealth allowed to the Mesmer are just there to break the target lock and give the clones a chance to confuse you.

As for clone damage: Clones are slow and clumsy. They need to get to melee range to hit you and they only have a few seconds life once they are commanded to ‘kill’. Just evade them.
Phantasms are a different matter – but they are easy to identify because they’re pink and transparent.

I rolled a Mes because I found them difficult to fight and wanted to find out their weaknesses. I suggest you do the same.

OK – that makes more sense if you used the ‘copper fed salvage-o-matic’. (Which still costs 800 gems/money that you could have just turned into gold – about 45 gold in fact)

But still. I’ve NEVER been able to recover materials from an item worth more than TP prices. The salvage struggles to reach vendor price.

In fact, recently some of the 60c vendor price blues have been selling on the TP at up to 3 silver each. Kitten knows who’s buying them at that price but I’m more than happy to sell them.

Iris Ng.9845:

I buy 2 gold worth of blue light armors (level 60-80) every night and salvage them for materials and essence of luck. Re-sell the fabric mat for profit and keep the essence of luck. I use the gem store kit.

I don’t understand.
The gem store kit costs 300 gems – which is currently worth about 14 gold.

It has 25 uses so each blue you salvage costs at least 56 silver to process. You manage to recover more than 56s worth of materials from each blue (worth anout 1s each)?

I have 48% magic find. In my experience, salvaging appears to be an utter waste of gold. Even using Black Lion kits I almost never salvage anything worth as much as even vendor prices.

On reading this thread I gave it another go. I bought a Master kit and salvaged a half-dozen greens, each worth about 2s plus the 60c or so for the kit use. Basically I got junk. A bit of mithril, a few logs, minor runes, sigils and some leather in all worth about 4s. That’s a loss of about 8s.
5 or 6 essence of luck also – which made no visible difference to my magic find when consumed.

End of experiment.

Abbadon.7958:

you guys are awesome. so much better than wow players. you ask them questions and all you get is “noob, just kill yourself”. Can you level your character through PVP?

People are a lot more friendly in GW2. Mainly because there’s no competition over kills or resource nodes.
And yes – you can level through WvW. It’s my preferred method because I don’t see WvW as a grind unlike PvE. You get uplevelled to 80 and your gear is uplevel too – but only if it’s the right level for your character to start with.
Maybe for a first character it’s a touch ambitious – but if you are an experienced WoW battleground player it should come easy. It’s much like an immense Arathi Basin with castles.

Abbadon.7958:

Is there PVP gear like wow?

There is gear available specifically for WvW (not many people seem to be aware of it). It’s also usable for PvE unlike the sPvP stuff. It’s bought for karma, which is nice because it’s easier to get karma than gold.

Go to your server borderland, you’ll arrive in a big hall. At the other end of the hall are several vendors. One of them is the karma vendor. He’s the guy you want. He will sell you a new set of gear every few levels as you outgrow your old gear.

If you decide to try WvW levelling, get the aforementioned gear, make sure you have everything as tweaked as possible then look for the Commander. He has a blue icon over his head (and on the map). Stick to him like glue and do everything he says.
Let people know you’re new. They will want to help (mostly – there are idiots of course – just ignore them.)

One final point – Teamspeak or Ventrilo are often used in WvW. That makes communication a lot easier. If you are listening in at least you’ll know what is happening and why.

Oh – and one final, final point. Look for a WvW oriented guild. (Check the player name tags around you – especially the commanders)

{Edit} P.S Stay away from crafting – it’s a heavy gold sink.

You need to be good to get away with it and you’ll get a lot of stick from people who don’t understand it’s even possible.

Ranged class obviously. Any class that relies on dodging, speed and evasion to stay alive basically doesn’t need armour.

Start with PVT gear and swap pieces over as you get more confident with it.

Yes.

15 chars.

You can also buy WvW gear from the karma trader in your Borderland’s Citadel (by the Laurel vendor).

It’s cheap and effective gear that can be used in PvE or WvW.

Also – this list is useful.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_karma_merchant_items

My own twopennyworthL-

I use a naga razer mouse with strafe and fwd buttons bound to the thumb-pad. (no backpedal at all) Dodge is on the middle button.
That puts all movement control on the right hand and the left is free for skills. (apart from jump which I left on the spacebar – it just feels so natural to hit that with the left thumb)

The skills are bound so that I never need to move my left hand from a fixed position (I have a bit of rough stickytape on the key under my index finger so that I can feel I haven’t accidentally moved position)

Reading between the lines, I guess you really want to WvW?

Armour does make a difference in WvW but it’s possible to make yourself competitive by using the special WvW karma gear on sale in your borderland’s Citadel. (Near the laurel vendor at the far end of the hall from the Asura gates).
That gear needs to be replaced every ten levels or so with the next grade. It’s important to keep it up-to-level because the gear upscaling on your character depends on it being appropriate.

That said. Thief is not a good character to start with. You need something that will let you join the karma train. Warrior, Guardian, Ele, Mesmer, Necro are the most common classes to pick – in that order more-or-less.

If you like WvW, that’s a reasonably fast way and it’s arguably more fun that PvE to many people.

You can store a limited amount of stuff in the bank.

There is a bank in Lion’s Arch at the Trader’s forum. (You can also access your bank account from any crafting station)

phantomlord.3417:

Get off the wall and come open field fight

This. ^^
We only want you to come out and play.

I’d be happy if I could just see what’s going on without all the particle effects blasting my monitor into snow-blindness.

This horse looks to be dead.