Guild Wars 2

I really like the bat wings. Partially because ages ago I made a role-playing character who was basically my standard RNG character but with bat wings and cat ears (there was a reason for it, but it’s a long and very weird story) so I like being able to give her ‘back’ her wings.

But also because it’s a nice glider. I like the way the animation starts (it works especially well with the backpack, it looks like they’re actually unfolding into the glider) and I think it looks really cool without being too flashy.

I also like the HoT themed glider that came with the Deluxe Edition. It took me ages to realise it’s actually the HoT logo and not just green swirls, but it looks cool either way and it’s perfect for 2 of my characters and pretty good for 2 others.

I like the raven spirit glider too, even if it is freaking huge. It can be tricky to dye but with the right colours the way they combine is fantastic. Plus my revanant is a norn devotee of Raven so I had to get it for him.

Bunter.3795:

There is such a button. You have a light bulb symbol. Click that and it changes from day to night. I use it all the time for my sylvari characters so I can see their bioluminescence glow which only shows at night.

This. It’s the one on the right of the 3 above ‘Body Features’.

There isn’t much of a difference – except when you’re making a sylvari (because then they start glowing) – but that’s because there’s not much difference between the light levels in-game either. At night everything is duller, but not much darker.

I have 10 character slots – 9 used for permanent characters and 1 used for random alts as and when I feel like making them.

Apart from my main character I tend to go through phases where I’ll focus on 1-3 of them. So in any given week (or month) I might have only logged into a couple, but if you look at each one’s total playtime relative to their age it’s about equal.

But even if I’m not playing them right now I like having them there because then I’ve got the option. I’ve got 1 of each profession (and 1-2 of each race) so I can play whichever I feel like. And if I want a different combination (like a charr female engineer) I’ve got that 10th slot, combined with enough scrolls/tomes of XP to get them to whatever level I need them at.

So it sounds like if there is an animation already it could do with being made clearer. Although I suppose you’d still have to learn to recognise it before it’d mean anything.

Maybe next time something like this happens I’ll try typing “I am using a revive orb” in both say and map chat right at the start.

Khisanth.2948:

Tanner Blackfeather.6509:

No the weapon is still the same. You will not get those upgrades back when you make the legendary, however.

Agony Infusions can be extracted for 24s

But you have to remember to extract them before making the legendary.

Any upgrades which are on the precursor when it’s put in the Mystic Forge do not carry over to the finished legendary – they’re destroyed in the process. So you either need to extract them or buy replacements.

What is it supposed to do? As far as I remember since launch it’s never actually done anything. I thought it was never fully implemented.

But then people sometimes recommend I use it when I’m stuck in the scenery or fall into kitten it’s impossible to climb out of or something, so they’re clearly expecting some result.

I spent a lot of time googling this yesterday and it seems there’s 3 different ways people will use the term ‘natural hair’.

1) Specifically referring to black people’s natural hair, which will form tiny curls. In this instance it’s considered natural even if it’s cut, braided, washed and otherwise treated with commercial or home-made products to clean and style it. Anything except artificially straitening it is considered to be keeping it natural.

2) Any hair type, regardless of the persons race or skin colour, which has not been artificially straightened, curled, or otherwise altered. The ‘style’ you get if you wash your hair (so it doesn’t have any styling products in it) and then just let it dry is your natural hair. This is the definition I was familiar with before reading about the other two and thought we were using here. (Hence the OP specifying “natural-looking hairstyles for black characters”.)

There isn’t an exact definition for this one. Some people would say cutting it straight to keep it to a desired length is still keeping it natural, but if you cut it into layers or a specific style then it’s not. Some people only count using heated tongs to straighten or curl it. Some think cutting it is ok but gelling or spraying it to keep it in place is not. And so on.

3) Natural hair care. This means not using commercial hair care products, including shampoo and conditioner and again can apply to anyone regardless of their hair type, race or skin colour. Some people literally won’t wash it with anything except water (or maybe soap) others use home made or “natural” products (often mild bleaching agents) with familiar names like vinegar or baking soda. From my brief reading there was a lot of inconsistency in what you do with your hair after washing it. Some people also avoid styling products like hair gel, but may use heated tongs to style it, some will quite happily use commercial styling products, they just don’t like commercial shampoo. I assume preferences on cutting it or braiding it into different styles also vary.

This would probably be the one people were referring to when they said natural hair looks oily and disgusting. Although on the occasions when I’ve had to wash my hair with nothing but water because I was in the middle of nowhere it goes the other way and gets really dry and frizzy. But I suppose it depends on your hair type.

There can be some cross-over between these. For example when my brother had dreadlocks he had to stop using normal shampoo and conditioner because that’s designed to stop hair tangling, which is how it forms dreadlocks. He still washed it, but with a special dreadlock shampoo that wouldn’t undo the dreads.

But I think in this topic the OP was specifically using the first definition – stating that all of the styles human female characters can choose from (I checked and its the same for the Make-over Kit exclusives) are for straight or wavy hair, so black characters would have to be artificially straightening their hair. There should be options for curly or afro hair as well.

According to the forum clock you posted this at about 12:10am in the UK. Which means it was 1 or 2 in the morning in mainland Europe. Even on a Friday night most people are asleep (or not at home) at that time.

In my experience Silverwastes population crashes after 11pm UK-time (and that time seems to stay the same regardless of whether we’re on GMT or BST). You’re highly unlikely to find an active meta-event map after that.

But weeknight evenings and pretty much all day (well from about 7am onwards, don’t think I’ve been on before then) on weekends there are active maps. You will need to use the LFG tool to find them rather than hoping to simply load into one straight away, but they’re there.

The Inquest are united not so much by a common goal as a common methodology. Specifically the idea that they should be allowed to do whatever they want to whoever they want in order to complete their research with absolutely no regard for the consequences beyond what they learn and create.

They continued the process of kidnapping sylvari for horrible experiments to learn about their biology long after the rest of the asura recognised them as a sentient (if clearly intellectually inferior) race deserving of ethical treatment.

If they want information someone else has they’re likely to just steal it, or kill them and then steal it (or steal it, frame the other person for having stolen it from them and then kill them).

If an experiment explodes or pollutes the surrounding area or warps the very fabric of reality then…oh well, that’s what happens, at least they got some good data from it.

Rodgort was a man
I mean, he was a dragon man
Or maybe he was just a dragon
But he was still Rodgort!

Burninating the countryside,
Burninating the peasants
Burninating all the peoples
And their thatched-roof cottages!

When all the land is in ruins
And burnination has forsaken the countryside
Only one guy will remain
My money’s on
Rodgort!

And the Rodgort comes in the night!

I can’t be the only one who was thinking that while reading this topic right? It’s kind of surprising how closely the song fits the theories in this topic.

I suspect the reason there’s not a lot of natural hair styles in general is that there’s probably not a lot of variety for them. It’d basically be loose with varying degrees of straightness and length.

The one on the right hand side of the second row looks like a shorter version of my hair in real-life (only with less frizz) and literally all I do is wash it and brush it so it’s not too tangled. It’s down to my waist and I get it trimmed about every 6-9 months when I notice the ends are really uneven. (You can get away with less frequent hair cuts with long hair because an extra couple of inches isn’t noticeable – most people don’t notice when I cut it.)

People always ask me why I don’t do more with it (my options are basically loose, pony tail or plait) but I can never think of anything that wouldn’t take ages, and I have no interest in spending forever doing my hair. I had some small braids down the sides and 2 meeting in the middle with some shiny things braided in for my wedding, but for every day I cannot be bothered.

But the lack of less styled hair generally is quite different to the total absence of any black/curly hairstyles – whether natural or styled.

I have to admit I didn’t notice until the OP pointed it out (I only have 1 human character and she has very straight hair, maybe one of her Mary Sue features), but it is pretty bad that there’s no options for black characters that wouldn’t require them to artificially straighten their hair.

Seconded. A mini rabbit would be fantastic.

Zedek.8932:

“Speed watching” (TV series at 2x speed because they ain’t got time), every 5-liner needs a “TL;DR” and such.

I had never heard of that before so I googled it. Now I kind of wish I still hadn’t heard of it.

What ever happened to doing things for the experience, for the sake of doing it instead of getting it over with as quickly as possible? What’s the appeal of spending less time having fun?

I mean I understand not having enough hours in the day for all the things you want to do, but if you’re always rushing through things are you even getting the best use of the time you do have?

Is there any way for another player to see that you’re using a revive orb?

The reason I ask is I was just doing the Destroyer Lieutenant fight in Draconis Mons and on two occasions I died (my fault, I wasn’t fully paying attention). Since it’s a long way from any of the waypoints and I had 14 revive orbs I rarely use I decided to revive myself instead of going to a waypoint.

But of course that involves lying dead for several seconds between activating the orb and being revived. In that time I had to tell a few people to stop reviving me because I didn’t want them to waste their time, and got a few less than civil comments from other people who clearly assumed I was too stupid or lazy to go to a waypoint and was waiting for someone to revive me in the middle of the fight. (And yes that was in spite of posting in /say to stop reviving me.)

I know you can see an animation of the orb working when you use one, but I can’t remember seeing it for anyone else and I’m wondering if there’s any way to tell if another person is using an orb.

If not maybe it’s something Anet could consider adding? I think it’d be helpful, especially in situations like this where reviving someone who is already using an orb could have negative consequences (putting yourself at risk and making the fight take longer when it’s on a timer).

There definitely are people out there who just play for fun. On numerous occasions I’ve made some comment about not knowing how to do dungeons or not having the right equipment for raiding and my guild has told me to come along anyway and we’ll see what happens, and it ends up being a lot of fun even if it’s not the most “efficient” run.

I’m in a bit of a weird place though. I’m definitely willing and able to just play and have fun without worrying about the numbers and most of the time that is exactly what I do. But sometimes I find the numbers fun too. I can literally spend an entire evening theory crafting a build for one of my characters. I’m not even playing the game exactly – it sometimes involves a spreadsheet (complete with formulae), the game is just open for reference. But I find it fun. I can get really excited about the builds I put together.

Even there though I’m doing it “wrong”. I don’t follow, or even pay attention to the meta-game, I haven’t got a clue what builds are popular and I’m not trying to replicate them or improve on them. I’m just making something that interests me. For example my ranger is currently using a mix of sinister and rabid stats chosen to give a baseline of 50% critical chance, about 1,500 condition damage, power and toughness (it ended up at 1,548, 1,543 and 1,509 respectively) for no reason other than those numbers seemed good to me. But it seems to work well enough for me.

It might help that I have 9 permanent characters and regularly make (and delete) others. So even though my ranger has been using The Dreamer for years I still get to use a lot of different weapons and put together different looks for my characters.

I can imagine it’d get boring faster if you only have 1 or 2 characters.

Ultimately it’s your character and your legendary. There’s no harm in transmuting it so there’s no reason not to do it if you want to.

Urgh, please no.

I much prefer the legendary armour in-game to the suggested alternative, which looks like one of those attempts to reboot a superheroes cartoon spandex into something ‘dark’ and ‘serious’….then adds some random spikes for combat mode.

I appreciate a lot of people don’t like the long coats on medium armour, but did you really expect anything else for the legendary? Admittedly it’s a bit clunky for my ranger, but with the shoulders and gloves hidden it’s much better. And it’d be perfect for my thief.

Not so far.

My first legendary was The Dreamer. I made it about 3 years ago and even now every so often I find myself smiling at the absurdity of shooting unicorns at people.

The weapon itself is an issue sometimes, when I want to put the character in darker colours. But she also wears the Fire Gods Vambraces (which could be awkward given recent events) and I have a tendency to put other ‘silly’ things on her, like quaggan backpacks so most of the time it’s not a problem. And whatever she’s wearing her main colour is purple so it sort-of fits.

My 2nd is The Bifrost (yes I like rainbows) and that’s still quite new, I finished it shortly before Christmas but part of the reason there was a big gap between the two is I wanted to be sure I wanted it. I’ve admired it whenever I saw it so I don’t think it’ll be a problem.

I often use them on low level characters. Especially now they don’t cost skill points to unlock and you can use a whole traitline right from level 21. Around level 16 I start saving my hero points to spend on traits so the racial skills give some nice variety.

Although I don’t use the elites as much because I tend to go for the Mistfire Wolf. Partially because it’s fun and partially because I sort-of paid for it (wasn’t the reason I got the deluxe edition but it was included in the price) so I feel like I should use it.

Bear in mind the Trading Post is game-wide. All the servers from both regions share the same TP. (China has their own one however because they have a slightly different version of the game.) So activity you’re seeing is from all the players all over the world. It’s not totally out of the question that what looks like a bot because it’s too fast for 1 person to do it is actually 2 separate people, or 3 or 4, even on items that are rarely traded.

(And yes real players will do that. I’ve sometimes stuck an item up with a large mark-down because I don’t want to settle for the ‘sell instantly’ price, but I don’t want to wait ages either and the markdown isn’t significant for me – not because I have millions of gold and don’t care but just because I’m not that strict on how much I sell stuff for, 1g either way on a 20g item isn’t a big deal. Other times I’ll just match whatever the lowest price is because it’s easier than trawling through graphs and sales data trying to determine an ideal price.)

It could also be a bot – but since there’s no way to know who is creating buy and sell orders there’s no way to tell if they’re all from the same person or not.

Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t report activity you find suspicious – Anet can investigate and if it is a bot they can take action – just that you shouldn’t expect this kind of thing to completely stop, or take it as a sign that they don’t stop people using bots.

Also more generally remember that the Trading Post is not an auction system. If someone ‘outbids’ you that doesn’t mean they’ve won and you’ve lost and will never get the item. It just means they’ll get the next one to sell…and you’ll get the one after that. So unless you really need a quick sale there’s usually no need to re-list something just because someone else is offering a better price. I’ve seen my offer drop to 5th place or even lower in the list, gone to bed and woken up the next day to find I’ve got it.

This thread seems to be making the assumption that Balthazar’s father was a good guy and that regardless of who killed him it was wrong to do so. What if he wasn’t? What if he was more like Menzies? A god of fire and war who was interested only in mass destruction for the sake of it.

Or simply a god of murder, (like Bhaal in Baldur’s Gate). Maybe Balthazar took what he taught him and invented the concept of war by organising a force to stop him?

I mean the only other thing we know about that point in history is that the gods lead the humans through the Mists to Tyria and then stayed here – the humans forever (or at least until present day) the gods for at least a few hundred years until the Exodus and then they only went as far as The Mists – I don’t think they went back to where they came from.

Maybe they were leading a band of desperate refugees away from a world which had been totally destroyed and at the last moment Balthazar’s father showed up to stop or destroy them and he had to kill him or he’d have followed them through and started over with Tyria.

Obviously that’s pure speculation, but moving your people to a new dimension with no way back where they came from seems like a pretty drastic move even for beings capable of travelling between worlds. It’s not something you do just because you’ve heard the weather will be nice this weekend. So there must have been some reason for it and it seems likely to me that the two factors – mass human and god migration and Balthazar carrying his father’s head – would be related.

Grimwolf.7163:

Wait, is this an issue with female characters? Male humans have lots of those hairstyles. I can think of like 4 off the top of my head.

Yeah, it is. Female humans only have straight or wavy hair. Lots of different styles but all for the same type of hair. You can see all the default options here: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Human_female_hair_styles.jpg

Did the 3 hour movie mention how much of Season 1 consisted of scrambling to complete achievements that boiled down to “find object, press F, repeat another 49 times”? Or “kill 500 of this weeks novelty enemy”?

Or the fact that a lot of the story only really worked in retrospect. At the time there was a lot of complaining about it. At first the claim was that Anet had totally forgotten about the dragons because the story was just 2 weeks of fighting one random group who appeared for no reason, then 2 weeks fighting another random group, then a festival that’s never been mentioned in lore before, then another random group…

Then they introduced Scarlet and people were angry that all this mess was supposedly the fault of one random blatant Mary Sue and still had nothing to do with dragons and claimed it was a half-hearted attempt to shoe-horn some continuity in at the end.

It was only right at the very end that we found out actually it was all one long build-up to introducing a new dragon (which made people angry that we weren’t going after the ones who were already around). In retrospect, viewed through that perspective it makes sense, but at the time no one knew anything we were doing one month had any relation to what we did the next month.

Sure some of the meta-events were fun, like the Marionette fight. But as other people said the Vinewrath was said to be very similar when Silverwastes was first released, but the fact that it’s permanent means it got to the point where almost everyone knew what to do and there was no challenge to it.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked Season 1 (except for being temporary), but I liked Season 2 and 3 as well. I think if you haven’t enjoyed any of the permanent Living Story you wouldn’t have found Season 1 any better. Different in some ways, but it wasn’t some magical time when everything in GW2 was amazing and everyone loved it.

We know that killing Zhaitan and cleansing Orr didn’t take care of all the undead, because the revised Tequatl fight was worked into the story and the explanation was that after Zhaitans death its remaining champions mysteriously got stronger. (There already was lore that all the dragon champions are not unique individuals but a series of different enemies.)

The theory at the time was that they had absorbed Zhaitans power, and now we know dragons will take magic from each other that seems highly likely.

Which makes me wonder about the theory that since Zhaitan, Jormag, Kralkatorrik and Mordremoth all have champions that look like smaller dragons (Tequatl, The Claw, The Shatterer and the Shadow of the Dragon respectively) maybe they’re called Elder Dragons because they are the oldest/biggest/strongest of a whole race of dragons and all killing one does is leave the position open for another. Maybe in time one of Zhaitans champions will become the new Elder dragon of death magic.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Besides there being no “food crash,” there was another food that spiked in price just as seaweed salad dropped.

In any case, we do not know why ANet decided that sigil swapping would have to wait. Obviously, it wasn’t something obvious, otherwise (a) we would have figured it out ourselves and (b) they would have not been surprised by it (as they said that they were when working on implementation). It might not be the sigil market, but instead something that feeds into the sigil market (or vice versa) or it might be something other than “just” the market.

It could also be something ‘behind the scenes’.

If Anet is anything like places I’ve worked it could be as simple as the people designing legendary armour thought rune swapping was a good idea so they added it in, but legendary weapons are made by completely different people and they didn’t know about the rune swapping and so didn’t think about adding sigil swapping.

Moonyeti.3296:

Danikat.8537:

Hopefully this is something we’ll see in future, especially now they’re consistently adding new maps to the world.

I think it makes perfect sense that we’ve not seen any change in the majority of Orr yet. Even if people continued working to actively clear the undead and encourage new growth (possibly involving importing soil and plants from elsewhere) it would take years, if not decades, to change even small areas. If they simply left the few plants Traherene created to spread, and waited for stuff to spread across from the mainland, seeds to arrive on the wind etc. it could take even longer. Either way I think we’re looking at a few hundred years before Orr is back to ‘normal’. (And even then it wouldn’t be exactly like it was before – some species, like the Orrian gorilla, are probably gone forever.)

But it would be nice to see some progress at least. Maybe small protected areas with grass and shrubs, or even some small trees, and NPCs monitoring them.

It takes an amazingly short time for plant life to recolonize an area, even when left to it’s own natural pace. No way it would take decades even if left alone. But to your other point, yeah, the ‘original’ Orr will never return, any new plants would be seeded from elsewhere and any animals extinct are not coming back, short of some magical intervention.

It depends on a lot of factors. If you’re talking about a bare patch of fertile soil surrounded by plants then sure it might be a matter of weeks (unless it’s the dead of winter of course). But this is an entire peninsula which is completely and totally dead. It was underwater for hundreds of years – which would have killed any land plants – and then raised from the sea for at least a few decades – which would kill any aquatic life. On top of that there’s the dragon corruption, which tends to drive out or corrupt anything it encounters, and the magic (which is Tyria’s energy) being drained.

It’s hard to tell with the way they do textures in the game but I’m not even sure there’s any soil there. So we’re looking at primary succession, over an area of probably a few hundred square miles.

Here’s an example of primary succession I just found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surtsey

Short version: 1964-5 a new volcanic island emerges from the sea just off the coast of Iceland. In 1967 the first mosses were found there, and it took until 1998 (33 years later) for the first bush to appear. By 2008 it had 30 established species, compared to 490 on Iceland.

Now Orr has some advantages over that island. Firstly it’s climate is sub-tropical, if not tropical (I’m not sure we know exactly where Tyria’s equator is) and it’s a peninsula rather than an island so species which have a hard time crossing the sea can get there. But on the other hand it’s a much bigger area, with a wider range of topography so it’s unlikely the same species could populate the entire area.

So I’m standing by my statement that it would take decades to get a self-perpetuating ecosystem going. There are many things that can be done to speed up that process (thankfully or I wouldn’t have a job) but even with an intensive effort by a large, experienced team the most I’d expect to see after 5 years is the very first signs of life re-establishing itself.

And on top of that there’s the dragon corruption. We know next to nothing about how that works. We know Tyria can recover from it, because we know the dragons rose once before, absorbed all the magic they could and then went back to sleep and other life survived. But we don’t know how long it took or if the corruption had any lasting effects. For all we know it’s comparable to earth before and after the dinosaurs went extinct.

I don’t have any actual numbers of course, but I suspect people who regularly swap the sigil on their legendary weapon are a tiny minority. Most people I know in-game just stick with one build, or use different weapons in different situations.

If anything I suspect the introduction of sigil swapping would get more people to try it, and therefore increase sigil sales.

Hopefully this is something we’ll see in future, especially now they’re consistently adding new maps to the world.

I think it makes perfect sense that we’ve not seen any change in the majority of Orr yet. Even if people continued working to actively clear the undead and encourage new growth (possibly involving importing soil and plants from elsewhere) it would take years, if not decades, to change even small areas. If they simply left the few plants Traherene created to spread, and waited for stuff to spread across from the mainland, seeds to arrive on the wind etc. it could take even longer. Either way I think we’re looking at a few hundred years before Orr is back to ‘normal’. (And even then it wouldn’t be exactly like it was before – some species, like the Orrian gorilla, are probably gone forever.)

But it would be nice to see some progress at least. Maybe small protected areas with grass and shrubs, or even some small trees, and NPCs monitoring them.

Thanks.

Someone posted about this in my guild, but literally just linked the recipe and said it’s available – I didn’t know why it was worth mentioning.

Zelanard.5806:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Ok, if for nothing other than having the bank, and material storage disallowed from Account Restoration, it would not be something many would desire, I imagine.

Again, I doubt the CS Team would relish all the problems something like this would engender.

Still, good luck.

Being a member of a guild, does not block you from having your account restored. Since this would use the same functions, this wouldn’t either.

Being a guild member doesn’t stop you having your account restored, but anything in the guild bank is not included. That applies even if you’re the only member of the guild (on just 1 account) – it’s still considered shared storage and not part of your account.

According to CS responses from previous times this has been suggested if account banks were linked, or even just part of it like the material storage – exactly the same would apply – if someone gets hacked and everything is removed then it’s gone forever.

Where are dungeons going? Have Anet said they’re being removed?

Ryou.2398:

I was really looking foward to getting some legendarys not so sure now, hopefully they will look into making this a little easier in the future.

It’s highly unlikely that Anet will intentionally make it easier (or cheaper) to get legendaries because they were designed with the express purpose of being a long-term goal and a major achievement.

They process has changed over time, sometimes intentionally – like when they introduced precursor collections so you don’t have to throw rares into the Mystic Forge and hope you get lucky (the drop rate for that method is something like 0.5%) or buy them from other players. Sometimes unintentionally like when achievement chests awarding badges of honour briefly made it easier to get the Gift of Battle, or when material prices change because of other things they can be used for.

But they’ve not going to make it quick and easy to get a legendary, because that would defeat the point of having them in the game.

Technically yes you will be wasting XP if you don’t unlock the masteries now. But XP is infinite, and you likely won’t have any mastery points to spend anyway so that may not be a problem.

But honestly you’re going to be confused however you do it. The story for GW2 goes:

• Character’s personal story
• Living World Season 1
• Living World Season 2
• Heart of Thorns
• Living World Season 3

Season 1 was temporary content and it’s now completely inaccessible – no one can play it any more. All we’ve got is a short compilation of cut scenes to give a brief over-view of what happened. Season 2 is available – but it has to be purchased from the gem store. If you’re interested in the story then it’s well worth buying (and remember you can use gold to buy gems, or use a mix of gold and real money), or you can see if you can find a friend who’s willing to let you play along with them – that lets you do the story but you won’t get any of the rewards. (Also there’s no need to buy it until you’ve finished your personal story, then you can decide if you want more story.)

My advice is to do the first step of HoT to unlock the masteries. It won’t make sense, but it’s only a tiny part of the story and overall it’s a minor issue. Then go back to your personal story, or whatever you want to do and train up your masteries while you’re doing it.

We don’t know anything about the next expansion except that there is one. Anything else is pure speculation or “leaks” which may be fake, altered or old ideas that won’t make it into the final release.

I understand it would be a lot of work and they can’t justify doing that, but I’d love to see it happen and I keep hoping it will somehow return one day.

Of course that seems extremely unlikely, but then I’ve spent this evening finalising plans for next week when I’m going to see a band who I was convinced for years would never tour again, so I’m in an ‘anything can happen’ mood.

Like Illconceived said starting a new guild is hard any time.

My number one tip would be to think about what you can offer players – why should they join your guild instead of any of the others recruiting?

If your answer is that you’re a small friendly guild with active, helpful players who do a bit of everything in-game then that’s your problem. Not that there’s anything wrong with that but there are thousands of identical sounding guilds in the game and nothing to make yours stand out.

Behellagh.1468:

Players should never be fixated at getting a single item from the uncommon and up pools. That’s just asking for disappointment.

Whilst that’s good advice for people looking at chests generally it really sucks for people who want a specific item which is not available any other way. It basically means their only option is disappointment.

To me even if it does make more money that’s just bad game design. You shouldn’t be counting disappointing your players to make a profit.

I’ve made 2 legendaries and both times my first step was to make a big list of everything I needed and where it came from. I found that extremely helpful.

Firstly because I could check off several things already (or partially check them off, like I had 60% world completion so I only needed 40% for the Gift of Exploration) and that made it seem less daunting.

But also because it enabled me to plan ahead. I knew to save my Mystic Coins to make Clovers, but also that I could get some clovers from other places. I knew to wait to buy T6 mats until I’d got everything else because the Clover recipe would give some and they can drop, and that I could buy them with laurels. I knew to start playing WvW right away (the first time for map completion, 2nd time for the gift of battle). I knew which materials I needed to save and which I could sell for gold.

That meant I didn’t have any nasty surprises as I was going along and I could space out the most time consuming or boring parts, which made the whole process more bearable.

It also let me track my progress so every time I felt daunted by what I had left to do I could see all the stuff I’d already done and feel like I was getting somewhere.

Actually…that was the second thing I did. The first thing was make sure I was absolutely certain I wanted a legendary, wanted that legendary and wanted it for reasons that weren’t going to change. The first one I made was The Dreamer and although I loved the concept of it right from the start I held off until I was absolutely certain I’d be sticking with my ranger as my main, and using a shortbow a lot (regardless of what builds are currently in vogue) and I was prepared to go through with the process of making it. The last thing you want is to be stuck with an account bound weapon costing thousands of gold which you don’t even want and a whole lot of buyers remorse.

LFG is cross-server, but it can still be tricky to find a group listed. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly there aren’t massive amounts of people doing dungeons these days.

But maybe more importantly it depends on the time of day. As you might expect most players on the NA servers are in North America and most on the EU servers are in Europe. When you posted this it was 12:49pm in the UK, on a Wednesday. Which means most people in Europe were at work or school and most people in America were just getting up and going to work/school (or possibly still asleep? I’m terrible at time zones). It’s much more likely that you’ll find a group at peak times – evenings and weekends.

Finally and most importantly remember that the LFG tool doesn’t actually show you how many people are looking for a group, it only shows you how many have manually created a listing.

What’s the difference? Well you were looking for a group, but unless you created a listing no one else in the game would know that. There might have been 4 other people looking to do the same dungeon you were at the same time as you, all thinking they can’t get a group because no one else was looking. There might have been 20 of you, or 50, or 500. But until someone takes the step of making an advert on the LFG tool you’re all invisible to each other.

In other words if you’re looking and you don’t immediately see a group you want to join the very next step should be to create one.

You’re not committing to being the party leader (GW2 doesn’t have party leaders) or announcing you know how to do the dungeon or making any kind of commitment at all. If you’re worried about that the tool includes a free text field where you can write things like “first time, help appreciated” or “lf people to muddle through it with me” or whatever you want people to know about your group.

But until you put a listing up your potential group mates will all think you’re not there and there’s no one interested in doing the dungeon.

Edit: I should mention that’s not directly aimed at the OP, or rather not exclusively. I’m reminding myself as much as anyone because I make that mistake all the time. But I’m always seeing people saying they can’t find groups for things and then when I get ‘brave’ enough to list one it fills up in about 10 minutes.

I could have sworn that was already an option, but now I’m looking I can’t find it anywhere.

I agree, that would be really helpful.

Or even keep them as one list but add ‘PvP only’ to the start of the PvP changes instead of right at the end.

Apart from the fact that certain names are blocked because they’re used by major NPCs I think NPCs use exactly the same naming rules as players.

The problem you’re encountering isn’t that the game won’t permit those names but that someone else has already got them. There’s a lot of player characters in GW2 so a lot of obvious names have been taken. But even for lore-friendly asuran names it’s still possible to find available ones.

If you’re willing to bend the rules a bit there’s even more options. My latest asuran is called Ambage. It’d be unusual for an asuran but not totally different to the names used for the NPCs and it was so perfect for him I had to go with it.

That’s people for you.

Not all of them obviously, but there are people out there who will do things like this given any opportunity. Either because they somehow find it amusing or because they genuinely think they have the right to lord it over everyone else because things went their way for once.

One thing that might help is putting something like “first timers” or “everyone welcome” in the group description. As well as the explicit purpose of inviting other people who are in a similar position to give it a try it lets more experienced players who expect or demand that everyone conform to their expectations know they are not going to get that here and to find another group.

As other people have said I think it’d be fantastic for players who want to theorycraft builds, but potentially horrible for balance. The current system is designed to restrict us to maintain balance, just like restricting players to just 2 weapons or the various iterations or the trait system while all involved trade-offs of some sort.

If I remember correctly it did take longer when they first introduced cats who didn’t want meat, and there’s been some which took a lot of guesswork to unlock, like the feline familiar.

Others were fairly obvious as soon as you saw them. For example I found the leopard cub on the second day Bitterfrost Frontier was released, I doubt I was the first one but there was nothing about it on the Wiki at that point, but it was immediately obvious what you needed to do for it, and not a big jump (if you knew about the hungry cats) to guess it’d show up in your home instance.

Why would anyone agree to that?

What are these guilds offering that makes it seem worth 10g to join when there’s dozens of guilds advertising on any given day that will recruit for free?

Oh, so that’s why some people have started calling low level alts ‘heirlooms’.

It’s a vast improvement over ‘twinks’, less awkward confusion with other uses for the word.

Gaile Gray.6029:

It is not a GM island.

To be fair that is exactly what you’d say if it was a secret GM island.

As RoseofGilead said we’ve not been given any information on the next expansion except that it exists. So any details you’ve seen are either unconfirmed leaks, fake leaks or speculation.

In this case it’s highly likely someone misunderstood the mastery system. It’s very common discussion on the Elder Scrolls Online forum – someone complains about grinding champion points, GW2 is mentioned as an alternate model, people spend a few minutes on google and insist that mastery points are obviously the exact same thing with a different name. (FYI They’re not, ESO’s champion points are more like Hero points – you use them to unlock passive abilities and stat increases.)

Alternatively it could be someone who wants that type of progression in GW2 talking about masteries they’d like to see, which aren’t as situational and give combat bonuses.

I’m not sure if items in shared slots are lost when you delete all your characters, but for safety I recommend putting anything you want to keep in the bank.

I am pretty sure however that the reason the Level 80 Boost is in a shared slot and can’t be removed is so new players can’t lose or delete it. As far as I know it’s literally impossible to get rid of it without using it to boost a character (or using it on an existing level 80). And it seems like brand new players are more likely to make 1 character and then delete them, so that should have been checked when the level 80 boost was made.

If you do lose the level 80 boost I strongly recommend contacting support – they should be able to restore it and they’d likely want to know that problem existed.

(On a related note if you have any other shared slots could you maybe put an item you don’t care about in one of them and let us know if it’s still there after deleting your character, moving servers and making a new one?)