Guild Wars 2

Start by checking your skills (well, once you’ve played around with weapons and such) for anything labelled as a combo field or combo finisher. Combos are one really easy way to start playing with synergy. It will depend what weapon sets you all use, but I’m certain you’ll be able to find some cool ones – basically use a finisher in any field, and get an added benefit.

For example if you thief lays down a darkness field, and your ranger shoots through it, the ranger’s arrows may inflict blindness in addition to their usual effects.

You can definitely get to 80 without a guild, but you won’t necessarily be doing that solo – ideally, you’ll run into random people while out in the world and play with them for however long is convenient, then split off and go your separate ways.

If you need help with something in PvE (for example if you want to clear a map but there’s a nasty boss between you and an objective), just ask in map chat if anyone wants to come and help you with it.

Agreeing with those above, all professions have some support options and you can specialise for them. Elementalists can take a back-row healer role with a staff and an emphasis on water attunement, and guardians are good and dishing out healing and boons while in the midst of things and/or tanking – those are the two most obvious for me. There are other good options though.

As a general guide, weapons tend to have fairly similar role specialities across professions. Anyone who can use a staff, staff is probably their best support option. Warhorns are often buffs (or debuffs) of some kind. By contrast, greatsword is pretty much always your big damage option if you have it. Any class can go support with the right weapon and the right trait lines.

They’re taking a bit more of an explore-and-find-out approach this time around. There’s minimal level requirement since one of the zones for it right now is a starter area – just head to Wayfarer Foothills or Diessa Plateau and follow the main road out of either Hoelbrak or the Citadel looking for refugees to help. There are some dynamic events happening occasionally along the way.

You probably got a mail about the new heralds in the capital cities and Lion’s Arch? They’re your hint guides. When in doubt, find one and ask them what’s going on, and they should point you toward the latest content.

Well, the Pale Tree was there for a long time…

A more socially acceptable answer might be that some of the humans of Ventari’s sanctuary were buried near her after they died, and she absorbed anatomical knowledge from their corpses decomposing into her, in some way.

I have done in-game RP on the side in GW1 and GW2, and we usually assume that our characters are around at the same time as events in the game, but we’re not the heroes who are doing all the main story stuff (because, you know, we can’t all be when we have multiple characters). Doing that can be fun because you can weave in references to story events happening elsewhere, or throw in NPCs from the game. Then again, with the amount of history we have for Tyria you can do that in almost any time period, including NPCs when they are younger/older than in the game.

If you’ve got a strong story of your own that you want to do, though, you might prefer to choose a period outside of the games so that it’s believable that this story happened, we just never heard about it. As Konig says, the less we know in lore, the more freedom you have to fill in the gaps.

Hope the campaign goes well if you run it! I admit, I’ve been playing a lot of Pathfinder lately and playing with ideas about how to translate the GW2 races into Pathfinder racial traits for a similar thing

Because of the lack of focus on the trinity, I don’t think there’s any class (or role, even) which is in especially short supply. I’d say your best bet is to just make something that seems cool to you, and learn how to use it. I’m sure you’ll find plenty to do with it whatever it is!

It’s really up to you, but given how much of the appeal of legendaries is in the visuals, personally I’d go for what looks cooler. I’m sure you can find something neat for your asura that will suit her, even if it’s not as rare and fancy.

Congrats on the legendary, by the way

Yeah, there are plenty of other, more viable ways to look at Logan and Rytlock’s very special relationship, but the yaoi fan-ship is definitely the most fun version :P

The Black Lion Company is on to something here, obviously. Cute girls to model new products and make them seem more desirable. They’ll have to appeal to all races though, naturally – I can’t wait to see a sexily posed charr with a new rifle model, or something :P (Maybe charr go in more for kitten than cute, heh).

As long as they stop before they reach Lion’s Arch Idol.

1) More weapon options perhaps, but five skills tied to a weapon is a pretty core mechanic, and I’m sure they thought it through and discussed it plenty during their five years of development time… so I wouldn’t expect to see it change.

2) GvG is not in the game because guilds are not the same thing in this game as they were in Guild Wars. They’re not exclusive teams. WvW is an evolution of the concept to encourage more co-operation within a server than competition – again, design decision, not accident.

3) There’s actually no reason to kill Trahearne other than for vindictive players to get some kind of enjoyment out of it. If they decide to drop him, it would make sense for him to stick to Orr, his speciality, and let someone with the right expertise handle the next dragon. Who knows? I don’t mind him.

I haven’t had a run around the Orrian maps since the patch (yet!), but reading through the changes listed it sounds like they’ve given the whole area a pretty thorough going-over. I would guess that yes, they have listened

gek.6041:

So I figured grinding would be the best way to attain that required level,

This is where you went wrong. People will say that you can (or even should) still grind in GW2, and they’ll be right – but grinding, in the sense of just running around killing the same stuff, is rarely the best way to level up.

Heading through the asura gates (there’ll be one to Lion’s Arch in your race’s capital city) to try another race’s starting area is a good option. Also keep an eye out for dynamic events wherever you are – they give much better exp than hearts, hearts are more of a vague outlines of places to go.

Explore! Points of interest, vistas etc give exp when you activate them. And when you’re of a level to do it, 100% clear the zone you’re in, you’ll get a nice bonus.

One great trick is bonus experience – the longer a mob has been alive in the world, the more bonus exp it will give when killed. This means that killing stuff as it respawns won’t get you much, but going off the beaten track to somewhere players rarely go can earn you a lot of extra exp. Also try killing creatures that aren’t automatically hostile (like moas!) – they’re not killed often so can have good bonuses built up.

If you’re into crafting, or even considering it, do some – crafting progress earns you regular exp as well. Even gathering ore, herbs etc gives you a little exp each time.

Hopefully this gives you a few ideas to start with. Give GW2 some time; while it’s not the game for everyone (no game is), there may come a time when it clicks and you get the hang of it, and it can be more enjoyable then!

The quest you linked makes it sound more like a personal symbol than a family crest to me (even Sarah’s dialogue sort of sounds like she designed it just for Gwen), but that’s interpretation, it could be either way.

It depends on race for me. Lore-wise, as a general guide, sylvari often have Celtic-derived names and only a single word, humans can have a mixture depending on their ethnic heritage and (by GW1 tradition) tend to have surnames, and asura have single word names, rarely more than two syllables, and often with double consonants. You can use that as a guide if you want to, it depends on the kinds of names you go for.

A distantly Canthan (i.e. Asian-looking) human necromancer with a Japanese name would work, either gender. Asura necros are fun, my friend has one who is female with pigtails but looks pretty creepy, with narrowed eyes. Asura names also let you use puns very easily if you’re that way inclined (naturally I can’t think of any good necro ones right now). Or sylvari necro, again either gender, could be very cool – sylvari lets you play around with colour combinations, blacks and sickly browns or winter-themed blues, lots and lots of flexibility. Plus freakishly coloured eyes.

I can’t think of any fantastic name suggestions right now, but if you narrow down what you want I’ll give it a go!

The name ‘Meteorlogicus’ would seem to refer more to the weather as experienced on Tyria than to astronomy, and finding an astronomical point of reference is tough given that the shaft looks to me like it portrays clouds over the planet. What does that make the other globes? Maybe moons, maybe other planets which are actually a lot further out than they seem here… but I agree with Konig, it’s hard to gleen much when the shape seems pretty stylized.

Domian Blackheart.7514:

And let’s not forget personal back story. My all of my characters have an involved back story that would help to account for part of the status they achieved by level two. This back story provides not only a certain social status to the characters, but also a deep responsibility to the peoples of their lands.

If we’re getting into personal backstory, most of my characters aren’t heroes in the sense that the games makes them – but that’s because I have eight characters, and even when only two of them are humans that’s still two Heroes of Shaemoor. Add in guildmates who also roleplay and it gets messy fast!

But yes, it’s often more satisfying to develop your own ideas about your character and why/how they would do things, if the game seems to leave gaps

Given what I remember about Gwen’s mother before the Searing, it doesn’t seem like she was from a noble line – certainly I always got the impression that they were countryside commoners, in which case it would seem weirdly pretentious to have a family crest at all. Of course, she did eventually become quite the leader among the Ebon Vanguard, and she may have acquired a crest for herself in later years. If that were the case, the Thackeray line would have it thereafter.

Jornophelanthas.1475:

…
Finally, there is a new patch going live in less than 12 hours. Read up on the patch notes, because it has been announced that there will be a new reward system for playing PvE.

This is what I was going to say – the Jan update goes up today, and as well as a bunch of game updates it should also have event stuff. If you want to get back into things, perhaps just play through whatever gets added then in order to get back into your guardian? (I believe event stuff will be in fairly low-level areas, so easy-going!).

The the Jan update is supposed to be a prelude continued in February, so that will give you some kind of structure to start with, plus the rest of the game around that.

It seems plausible that the Eye of the North was under some kind of magical protection that preserved it before we got there in GW1, but that protection has been broken at some point in the intervening time (Jormag, indeed, being the most likely candidate). That would make the decaying of the Eye extra significant, if it was previously impervious to the elements. Who knows?

Oglaf.1074:

FlamingFoxx.1305:

If Caithe and Faolin were male then they wouldn’t have hesitated to do the exact same thing.

Yes, they would. There is a reason why Caithe was made a “female” and not a “male”. As I mentioned in my previous post, the professional whiners of the religious right-wing are often willing to let lesbians slip by.

Actually, I think Caithe is female because if you count Snaff into Destiny’s Edge, then you get an even split between males (Logan, Rytlock, Snaff) and females (Eir, Caithe, Zojja). While the ‘gay men is wrong’ angle almost certainly did have an impact, I don’t think you can pin the whole thing on that.

I’m certain I’ve heard NPCs refer to male-male sylvari couples, but I can’t recall an example off the top of my head. My head’s too full of the tragic (male-male) romance backstory one of my roleplaying friends came up with her her character!

I recently explored Malchor’s Leap and have been reading up on him, his sculptures and his fate with great interest. I’m just wondering if we have any evidence of when he lived and, more importantly, died?

It seems that the details are understandably quite fuzzy for a lot of things around that time, and I wasn’t able to find anything specific. I ask because I’m curious about how Malchor’s death fits in with the gift of magic and the subsequent Exodus of the Gods – it seems like if these things happened in close succession, Malchor’s death could have contributed to the decision to leave (because the gods’ presence in Tyria seemed to be hurting more than helping humanity). If Malchor is indeed the father of Grenth, though, it might have been significantly before that, depending on the timing of – well, everything else. Any suggestions?

Well objectively some people at ArenaNet thought it would be cool to reference Russian communism when they were thinking about how the dredge turned out :P

But lore-wise, I think it makes sense. Freed from the people who enslaved them, they would all of a sudden be in charge of their own society. They would be determined to build a better, fairer society, nothing like the atrocities committed against them by outsiders (because naturally, they were better people). Equality for all and all work for the communal good rather than for any individuals all support that view, and fit as a reaction against how they lived before (their work exploited for the benefit of others).

As Narcemus says there are the beginnings of a dredge rebellion in the game, where some dredge want to rise up against those of their own kind of who the rebels see as exploiting dredge just as badly as the old masters. That comes out of history too – the collective good is a great idea, but as soon as certain people start benefiting more than others and control starts to may off, it gets messy.

There was some discussion of this in this thread, and I kind of answered in my post here. Basically, they have been slaves in the past and because of the mistreatment they (repeatedly) encountered, they have become very hostile toward other races. Combine this with a strong emphasis on the value of freedom and self-determination (makes sense for ex-slaves) and you get an insular, self-sufficient communist state – it actually makes pretty good sense given their history.

Someone pointed me toward this map recently, which has major landmarks from the GW1 map overlaid on the GW2 map. It might give you some places to start looking, because there are actually a large number of ruins and references, great and small. Konig’s list is pretty good (more than I could remember off the top of my head). As well as major sites like the remnants of the Henge of Denravi and Droknar’s Forge, there are oddly specific sites like the excavated tomb of Kilnn Testibrie, who you may remember from the bonus for the very first mission in Prophecies (just looked that up and it’s in Iron Marches).

Do some exploring and note the names of points of interest, there’s a lot out there.

It’s different with different races, but I actually liked the way that you are a hero by level two, but there’s a nice progression in scale. After your participation in the tutorial (something you often just happen to be there for, but you acquit yourself impressively in) you are something of a local hero, earning the title you’re referred to by (Hero of Shaemoor, Slayer, etc). Still, I think if we hadn’t done anything else, the whole ‘Hero of Shaemoor’ thing would have blown over in a week or two. It just happens to be the case that something from your past comes up right afterwards, and you draw enough attention to get involved with the orders, and it spirals from there.

A lot of it is believably a matter of the PC being a very capable person who was lucky enough to be somewhere where a) their talents were put to good use, and b) some important people were there to notice it. I’ll admit the Ghostbore Musket plot seemed a little odd to me at times, but the racial enemies (Flame Legion, Inquest, Nightmare etc) are shown to interfere with everyday stuff fairly often.

You will most likely have received it because there was an error when the game first launched, not everyone who should have had one did have one. To remedy this they mailed them out to people. You probably got the mail by accident even though you hadn’t linked a GW1 account. Sadly without Eye of the North it won’t really get you anything.

Mercury’s suggestion is interesting, though!

Yeah, to make a suggestion for you we’d need to know what kind of playstyle you’d like. What do you like doing lots of? Taking damage and not having to care? Dealing damage? Dodging and moving? Crowd control? Certain professions have strengths in certain areas.

Otherwise, really, just pick something you think is cool. Some professions take longer to learn than others, but whatever you pick, if you stick with it and play it intensively you will learn as you go, and get better with it.

It depends on what you need. Rarer items will give you nicer materials, but if you need gold more than mats you might choose to sell them. If you’re crafting you might need specific things, for example I salvage cloth armour pieces a lot because I do tailoring and the materials are useful to me (and hard-ish to find otherwise).

If you’re not using materials right now, you might like to hoard them for sometime in the future or accumulate them then sell them on the trading post. Otherwise, just sell stuff if you like.

I can’t comment on your computer, but it sounds like you’re coming at GW2 from a good perspective – as long as you’re prepared for it to be different, you’ll be fine! I’m not saying it’s dramatically, totally different either, but some of the small differences can have quite big effects.

Feel free to try out multiple classes and play them through to level 10 or so to get a feel for what they can do – but be aware that after that, there’ll still be lots for a character to develop. The longer you play a class, the more you’ll understand what can be done with it (that’s the same everywhere I guess). One thing you can do is go to the ‘lobby’ for structured PvP, where you can try out a build as if your character was at the level cap, and play around with skills and traits if it helps you decide what you want to play.

Other than that, hmm… go with the flow, don’t rush too much, reaching the cap is not something you have to do straight away. It’s also not that hard – you get exp for a lot of things, not just killing monsters. Hearts are the most quest-like things, but dynamic events give more exp. 100% clearing zones will get you a good chunk of exp. But mostly, GW2 fans will always tell you to just do what you find fun!

Hope you enjoy the game

I don’t think we’ve ever seen evidence of asura above ground anywhere but Tyria, but it’s a possibility I suppose. Of course if no asura came above ground in Cantha or Elona before, it’s entirely possible that any tunnels and the gate network are destroyed now with the rise of Primordus etc, which would cut the asura off from those continents as much as anyone else.

‘NSARCH’ could be part of [LIO]N’S ARCH, potentially?

Panda Shepard.1248:

It was pretty disappointing to find out you guys didn’t see Orr in the first game. I guess it does create a more mysterious feel to the place though. Maybe it’s a different feel to those who heard about it in the first game than to those of us just hearing about it for the first time in GW2.

Coming at it from the other side, imagine how excited some of us GW1 players were at the prospect of Orr – the place where the gods once dwelled among humans, sunk forever beneath the waves before the time we got to run around Tyria – being explorable in GW2! Since the human gods were the gods of Tyria in GW1, the prospect of actually seeing Arah itself was pretty awesome. Orr was practically mythical in GW1 even though the Cataclysm was fairly recent. I have friends who still squee over every ruined cathedral and reference we uncover in the Orr maps in GW2.

I got pretty excited about the Vizier’s Tower, too There are a lot of treats for GW1 players around the place (particularly the charr/Ascalon maps as well as Orr), so I hope some of the people who never played GW1 enjoy finding the meaning of those references from the opposite angle!

BuddhaKeks.4857:

Look at the Elder Scrolls. The same gods have many different names, depending on the province you are. Example: Lorkhan/Shor/Sheor/Shezarr/Sep. All the same entity, yet several different names. It would make sense for the Quaggan to use a different name, that is easier for them to pronounce in there language.

It would also make sense for the quaggan to have their own goddess, Mellagan, and then to find a sunkern statue of Melandru and associate it with Mellagan because of similar imagery. It could be a case of ‘close enough’ or just become a local way of depicting her, kind of like how Lyssa is depicted differently in Tyria and Elona. The quaggan will have left behind any temples and statues dedicated to Mellagan in the homelands that they fled.

So in my opinion, it works either way. We just don’t know. It would be strange for the quaggan to worship a humanoid goddess if that’s how they always depicted her, but the statue in Gendarran Fields is quite obviously of human design.

Another link, there’s a small amount of info about the ‘guild wars’ as referred to in GW1.

Stuff to know about guilds in GW2… you join with an account not a character (so all your characters are in any guild you join automatically), you can be in more than one at a time, and choose to represent one of your guilds when you play. Whichever you represent, you earn influence for them while you play and you can access their guild chat.

Guilds are good for finding people to play with, co-ordinating dungeons and WvW and such, making friends… basically making your game more social. Different groups will focus on different things, and you may even like to join multiple for different occasions.

I was going to say that each class takes a while to get a feel for, and although playing to level 11 will mean you start getting trait points (and can think about doing some more interesting things with your character), more levels will always lead to a better understanding of what you can do. Before level ten or so, every character’s going to be fairly basic and straightforward – and the more you play the tutorial stuff, the more it will bore you, making things worse!

However, SpyderArachnid’s advice about possible being burned out is also something to consider. Remember, Guild Wars 2 is a one-time purchase; you’ve got it now, it will wait for you. If you leave it now and come back in a few months, there’ll be changes made and new stuff, and you can see how you feel then. Nothing lost by waiting!

Uninite.4637:

That wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that almost all of the quests in the zones is either defend this area, or defend these guards, or defend this courier, or kill all of these monsters.

That’s quite a few different things, actually. Ok, some similarities, sure, but given that combat is the centre of the game what do you want instead?

The best advice I can offer is either to switch professions, as has been suggested, or try a different zone. Some have more variety in their events etc. than others. If you’re around level 20-25 and human you’re likely to be in Kessex Hills, which has a number of champion bosses which come up regularly, but nothing’s stopping you checking out Diessa Plateau, Bisban Wildlands etc. if that doesn’t work for you.

In World of Warcraft it atleast was interesting to combat mobs, and was just a thing I would do while watching videos on youtube or a movie on my pc.
So how do I stop getting bored of the game?

You preferred the combat when you could do it while paying attention to something else at the same time? Each to their own, but I would say that must have been less engaging, surely?

Son of Elias.5420:

That would be true, except the Quaggan quite pointedly say that they do not worship Melandru under a different name.

I have not yet formed my opinion on this matter, but for the record I refer you above to my post re. what people believe or say about their own religion is not necessarily the same as what is going on with the real entities in question (given that they are real entities, in Tyria’s cases).

Advent.6193:

What I don’t get:
It isn’t as if they (ANet) couldn’t have used a “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” routine. Let’s be honest here, most of the “evil” factions would bleeding WELL have a reason to keep our boy Zhaitan slapped down.

Having all player characters be good, even heroically good, was a design decision. ArenaNet decided to go that way, after considering the alternatives. So sadly you’re stuck with it in-game, and it will be a consistent feature of your character’s story.

Of course, if you want to write fan fictions and/or roleplay, go right ahead. I have to admit that even though I wouldn’t call any of my characters evil, I had way too much fun writing an account of a Nightmare Court revel…

I don’t know about Eternal Battlegrounds (everything’s a little fuzzy in the Mists, history-wise), but yours is a broad question. Some jumping puzzles are natural features which you just happen to be able to get up. Some are quite clearly part of ruins that have a lot of story behind them. Each is going to be individual.

Greyalis.2309:

I bet they will either implement horse mounts inside of these two zones, or some sort of event involving riding said horse mounts.

a) as stated by others, ArenaNet have said they are not adding mounts.
b) one piece of concept art should not be read as signifying whole mechanical features, especially when said concept is vague and not clearly related to specific things in-game.
c) these updates are, for the most part, being created as we go. Mounts are not something they could implement on a whim, I’m pretty sure. That would be a feature, and one I am certain we would hear about in the summaries of upcoming features – not just something thrown into an event.

In conclusion, no.

SimpleCrow, one problem here is that you are assuming that sylvari beliefs about themselves have anything to do with their actual nature. No, I’m not advocating for that theory about the Pale Tree – but those of us who knew the Five, later the Six Gods of the humans in GW1 have been burned before by accepting racial beliefs as truth!

Tixx’s airship was presumably designed for over-land flights. That means you can set down and refuel, fix things or whatever, more or less whenever you like. Flying across a major ocean, you need to be a lot more self-sufficient. Plus, although Gaudrath is…probably…wrong about what they use to fuel the airships, whatever they use they’d likely need a lot of it (and fuel weighs a vessel down!).

Plus, in line with what Mystic Starfish said, I’m not sure Cantha would take kindly to the Pact visiting. More importantly though, why would we visit Cantha? I don’t think there’s anything we want or need in trade, especially with this new alliance and splicing of racial technologies. Tyria has its own problems.

Firstly, you may already be aware, but world transfers will cease to be free on January 28th, with the Jan update and the addition of guesting – so if you plan to move, be sure to do it soon!

Secondly, I hear good things about Operation Union.

My money is on Flame and Frost being the beginning of a Jormag arc, but probably over some months. It would make sense to escalate things, slowly bringing us closer as the problems become more dire. Starting in Wayfarer Foothills and Diessa Plateau makes it accessible to lower-level characters (such as people who started playing after Christmas), but also means that if it’s Jormag, his influence is reaching very far south – practically to Hoelbrak and the Black Citadel! – and it’s definitely time to do something about it. From there we can perhaps move north and take the fight to him.

That gives them time to construct some kind of story arc for it, rather than giving the sense that we could kill Zhaitan one week, kill Jormag the next, and turn around and shout “NEXT!” to Kralkatorrik :P

Besides which, it’s one bit of concept art. Not worth leaping to dramatic conclusions over.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I’ve actually speculated that the sylvari are soulless for a while. We never once see a sylvari spirit – but we do see charr, asura, human, norn, and other non-major races having souls. It’s very interesting to consider.

I would suggest that, like many things to do with sylvari, it depends on what exactly the Dream is. If they don’t have souls in the conventional sense, then their share of the Dream would sort of be what animates them. It seems likely that sylvari ‘spirit’ would “return to the Dream,” but we really don’t know what that means in contrast to the Mists or whatever.

It would be neat if sylvari were reincarnated (souls go back to the Dream and are reborn from the Tree again), though I don’t know how we would find out if that were true.

I seriously doubt it was an error. The list isn’t necessarily the biggest and badest bosses in the game, nor the most difficult, nor the most popular. For all we know they added her to the list precisely because her meta-event was less popular than Ulgoth’s one in Harathi Hinterlands (which is run almost constantly as I understand it!), and they wanted to give people a reason to go and do this one.

Ledha is right, almost everything we know, you can learn from lurking around Garenhoff and asking or listening to the villagers. They have a number of misgivings about the place, but very little solid information – except that the elementals that protect the town from from the wizard in the castle, and they have been safe and obedient… so far.

The Wizard’s Tower is one of those things I’m kind of expecting to be the focus on an event update one day down the line. I hope that they let us in there one day, but who knows?

I somehow got the impression that she had history with Lion’s Arch’s Captain’s Council, but now that I go back over NPC dialogue, Peter the Lost’s reference is the only one I could find. At any rate, she’s a pirate captain of some notoriety, and not entirely popular even among other pirates it seems.

I don’t think she’s super important to the lore, although there’s still time for ArenaNet to do something with her. The boss achievements only relate to a handful of the bosses in the world, though – she was just one of the lucky ones who got picked, I guess, or someone at ArenaNet thought that her fight was particularly difficult or particularly worth doing.