Guild Wars 2

I haven’t tried but I think it should work.

Soulbound works the same way on all items, no matter where you get them from, so I can’t see why it’d make a difference.

In some ways yes it is.

The fact that you can get Exotic armor relatively easily and don’t need Ascended for anything other than higher level Fractals makes it very casual friendly. You don’t need to put a huge amount of time into the game before you’re able to actually start doing what you wanted to do. Combined with the fact that there’s no subscription fee so you don’t need to make sure you’re playing enough to get your money’s worth each month it’s great for people who don’t have a huge amount of time.

But as a lot of people have said actually getting to be good at the game, especially in PvP, takes skill; you need to understand your class and have a definite build in mind (as opposed to people like me who just toss trait points into whatever sounds interesting) and also understand general mechanics like what each buff and condition does.

All of which casual players can do. But in my experience they’re less likely to. They’re more likely to be satisfied with using traits they think are fun or which ‘sound useful’ and if it takes them longer to kill something or they can’t solo a dungeon then oh well, it’s no big deal.

In that way too I’d say the game is focused on casual players because even at level 80 you can get away with that, at least as long as you have some friends with you. But the extra complexity is there for those who want it and the difference in skill level will be evident.

There were never complete patch notes for the betas but you can probably find lists of player-noted changes somewhere.

I don’t think there were any big changes through. The main things are remember are:
The UI changed a lot. The map used to be round and a fixed size, there were less buttons on the menu in the top left (and during the betas bug report had it’s own button) and the dodge bar used to be horizontal, running across the space where buffs and conditions go now.

They also re-worked the ranger pets, adding the option to stow pets and a few other options.

They scrapped the original dye system (where a dye seed dropped and you had to give it to an NPC in your home instance to grow into an unidentified dye, which took 24 hours) but also made dyes character bound instead of account bound.

They also slowed down the respawn rate for a lot of enemies. During the early betas it was a bit crazy – you could kill one normal enemy, kill another and the 1st would be back.

They also fixed a lot of bugs and added language tags to some EU servers.

khefka.2804:

schizandra.4587:

The Grove! So many beautiful places.

Yep, the secret area you have to swim to on bottom level would be perfect.

Valento.9852:

Also, invite The Dreamer wielders to fire off happiness across the sky. xD

I agree with these guys. Alternatively I’d go for a cliff or mountainside in Lornar’s pass or Wayfarer Foothills for the epic scenery, or for RP purposes somewhere in your home city.

For a honeymoon I think it should be something your characters would enjoy. For my main for example it’d probably be an epic “camping”/hunting trip down Timberline Falls.

But if you have guild members on multiple servers with bank access permissions you could send items to each other to transfer them.

Edge.4180:

I think this is likely most frustrating for role-players, who (without reasonable, non-forced in-character reasons) view the activity as immersion breaking. Despite the fact that some will just laugh at anyone role-playing a character in a role-playing game………. I think the frustration is reasonable.

They can always choose another Daily task, but when the choice for a fifth boils down to ambient killer or something they personally loathe doing even more.. you have one of those “stuck between a rock and a hard place” situations, which no one enjoys.

How many people are both strict enough RPers that they’re not willing to ever do anything out of character AND so concerned about getting laurels ASAP that they’re not willing to miss a day?

I can’t imagine there’s many of them.

If they are concerned they could always create an alt and/or guest on another server so they can be out of character. Or create an alt for the express purpose of killing ambient creatures and make it part of their personality.

Do you really get hit with confusion while using the 1 skill often enough that it’s worth disabling auto-attack and using a macro (or hurting your hand) to do the same thing?

Seems like a lot of hassle for relatively minor results.

Yes they will.

Anet’s main source of income from this game is people buying copies. When they bring out an expansion pack they will need to charge for it in order to cover the cost of making it.

And really it’s only fair. Most RPG expansion packs have a significant amount of content. Some, including the first 2 GW1 expansions, are basically whole new games. That’s well worth paying for IMO.

Rukia.4802:

SneakyErvin.3056:

Since it’s not a world wide festivity I dont see why they should. It’s just a very irish christian celebration that stretches to irish parts of america.

Personally, with the mythos around Saint Patrick, I dont see it fitting at all to celebrate this day in a worldwide multicultural game.

As a very strongly non-christian I would personally find it very offensive for such a celebration to take place, especially due to the story about St. Patrick driving the “snakes” from ireland. Aswell as the destruction of ancient celtic monuments.

Thats not something that should be celebrated.

You’re taking it too literally/seriously it’s just supposed to be a fun celebration, an excuse to party or wear green. GW1 also held events for things like year of the dragon.

I’m athiest and no holiday bothers me.

It depends where you are in the world. In America it’s mostly a day for people to get drunk and joke about being “Irish for the day” but in Ireland it’s still primarily a religious holiday and a celebration of the nations history. In a lot of places it’s not celebrated at all.

And yes a lot of pagans, in Ireland and elsewhere, are offended by the idea of celebrating St. Partrick, who is best known for “driving the snakes out of Ireland” which (since there have never been actual snakes in Ireland) is commonly interpreted as driving out (and/or killing) the native pagans.

I think all the ones shown at character creation are a mix of different sets, but yes you can get them all.

I think Anet like to ban bots in groups.

Partially because they take some time to check reported players actually are bots and to find out how to identify each type and look for more.

And partially so they can ban all the botters of a particular type together (or as many as they can find) to reduce the chance of the ones that survived figuring out how to avoid getting caught.

Amun Ra.6435:

This was not an issue before questing…I should not have to come earlier. Anet needs to make some changes to their servers. I paid to play the game, same as the person WHO TAKES MY SPOT when these evetns spawn, plain and simple.

It was not an issue with the dragon events because fewer people were doing them before they improved the loot. It was an issue with other areas.

The Lost Shores event for example. Guesting wasn’t implimented then but many people still missed out on the chest (or other parts of the event) because they disconnected and when they logged back in they were in an overflow where the event was either finished or hadn’t started.

It was the same with starter areas during the Headstart weekend, it was very rare to get into the main zone straight away, you’d usually start off in an overflow and have to wait. (And I feel like it always let me switch when I was in the middle of an event.)

As other people have explained at the moment everyone wants to do the world bosses (mainly the dragons). Even if they did remove guesting I think you’d find you’re still getting the same problem because unless you’re on a virtually empty server there are still more people than 1 zone can hold.

You’re allowed to use things like gaming mice, joysticks etc. that let you set skills to a button as long as it’s 1:1.

If you push a button and use an attack (like you’re doing) that’s fine.
If you push a button and it uses all your attack skills one after the other without any other input from you that’s not ok.

If you push a button and it targets an enemy, attacks until they’re dead, runs over, loots the corpose, targets another enemy and repeats the process that’s botting and will get you banned.

(And as other people have pointed out your auto-attack should repeat itself automatically. That’s why it’s called an auto-attack. If it doesn’t you can hold down Ctrl and click it with the right mouse button to enable that.)

Ore nodes, trees and edible plants are scattered around the world. In some places you’ll find groups together, but in most cases you’ll get just one on it’s own.

The best way to find them is just to look out for the map icons. Although if you’re looking for something specific it can be helpful to check websites too.

And yes after you’ve used one it will dissapear (or rather go into a ‘used’ state, for example trees are replaced with stumps). They are on a timer but I’m not sure how long it is. Long enough that it’s not worth standing there waiting for it to come back.

Sometimes if your server is doing well in WvW you can get a bonus which lets you use a node more than once, in which case you’ll have the option to do it again as soon as the animation has finished.

Go south from Lions Arch to Bloodtide Coast. Right outside the entrance are marsh drakes that create poison clouds. Even after the drake is dead you can stand in the cloud and it will keep applying poison.

I got condition removal for the daily almost by accident because I finished a battle standing in both a poison cloud and a healing spring.

On my server there’s usually at least a few people around too, and plenty of NPC allies.

My engineer is a female norn.

When I got this game I knew I wanted a human ranger, a charr thief and I also wanted an elementaist and an engineer and a sylvari and a norn. I kept switching them around in my mind but in the end I decided sylvari ele and norn engi fit best.

I made her female because that seemed to fit the character and the name I had in mind better.

I think they’re permanent.

They haven’t said anything about them being for a limited time only and I think they’d want to make sure we knew if that was the case so people would get on and buy it instead of waiting. (Which would mean lost sales as well as dissapointed customers.)

Oh, I see.

So we won’t ever be getting the end of the Flame & Frost story arc, complete sets of Ascended armor, a way to change character names, the Legendary scavenger hunt or any expansion packs either then?

To me it’s having to do the same things over and over again in order to progress. And I don’t mean “OMG I just did a Dynamic Event, now there’s another one?” or “I was defending an NPC in my last Personal Story”.

I mean those sections of games which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever played Pokemon or pretty much any JRPG. The part where you get to the next boss, or dungeon, or whatever and realise that in spite of having done all the side-quests you’ve come across and killed most/all the enemies along the way you’re still a few levels below what you need and the only way to get it is to walk round and round the same area fighting the same random spawns over and over. Or in an MMO camping a spawn point.

Or when you’re trying to buy or make a particular item and the only way to get the required materials is to keep killing a specific enemy until they eventually drop enough of what you need.

By this definition GW2 has stuck to the Manifesto. There is some grind in the game but it is all for optional extras. You’ll never find you’re a few levels below the next map or dungeon or whatever and your only option is to kill random spawns until you level up. If you randomly decide to switch from a sword to a rifle you don’t need to go back to a low level area and spend some time killing easy enemies to improve your rifle skill before you can use it in real combat. You’ll never be told you need gear from the last dungeon to go on to the next one.

Salacious.7358:

This will never be implemented.

What makes you think that?

Anet have said they’re going to add player housing and guild halls at some point in the future, but that it’s not a priority.

As long as they don’t do it like Ultima Online where people could buy houses and place them anywhere out in the world. On any server with a decent population it got to the point where the biggest challenge in exploring the “wilderness” was finding a way between the houses.

Personally I’d like player houses to be instanced. Ideally they’d be within the home instance since that is supposed to be where your character lives, but maybe there could be options to buy houses in other places (also instanced).

Warriors have such a wide array of weapons because they don’t get that customisation through anything else.

You could argue that eles are the ones with an unfair advantage because if they want to change their build all they need to do is push 1 button and they’ve got a whole new set of weapon skills. Warriors have to buy and carry around a whole extra set of a weapons to get the same functionality and in battle they’re limited to just 2 sets instead of the 4 eles have. And even then all their weapon sets are primarily focused on damage, they don’t have the same AoE healing capacity that eles do.

Or you could claim both are at a disadvantage to engineeers who, like eles, don’t get weapon swapping but can have up to 3 kits to give themselves new weapon skills and get 3 extra attacks and an extra heal from their profession mechanic.

But really it’s just different forms of customisation. If they made all the professions the same there would be no point having different ones.

Trenchfeeder.6813:

If the solution was on google, I did it.

With the exception of the port 80 in the shortcut, because I don’t have an actual shortcut for the game. I had to finagle it to get it to DL and I have to use the installer file to start the game.

It’s pretty obvious to me what’s happening. The server is spewing out way too much data at once in too big of chunks because when it D/Cs me it blows out my entire internet connection.

Does your internet ever cut out when you’re not playing GW2? Particularly when you’re doing other things that are quite demanding on the connection.

I had a problem like that in both GW and GW2 a few months ago, but it also happened whenever I tried to stream a movie on my blu-ray player. I called my ISP, they spent half an hour running some tests on the connection, the next day some guys spent a morning up a telephone pole across the street and I haven’t had a problem since. I later found out the guy upstairs (who shares the same cable) had been having the same problems streaming movies on his computer and it fixed it for him as well. (He had been blaming the PC.)

I haven’t experienced any constant disconnects to try and fix. Sometimes my computer loses internet connection but that’s definitely a problem on my end (which could probably the solved by getting the new ethernet cable I keep meaning to buy).

Even if it is a problem on Anet’s end if it’s only happening occasionally and only to one or a few people it can be very hard for them to identify what the common factor in each occurance is and therefore what’s causing the problem. Especially since it’s unlikely those people will report it every single time it happens and if they do they probably won’t include every relevant bit of information so Anet are left guessing at what might have caused it.

It looks kind of scared to me, like it’s frantically running away from something.

I should probably have mentioned I’m not done with map exploration yet. I’ll probably have a lot more by the time I’m done.

But I did say I wouldn’t recommend doing it all that way, just that it’d save you a bit of time when you do come to do the title. It’s like the slayer and weapon master skills, you might not get it all through your normal play but even if you get a little bit it’ll save you some time when you do come to do it.

I have the G400 and I really like it. Much better IMO than the Razer Diamondback I had before.

I did look at the G500 as well but at the time the G400 was about £20 cheaper and I decided I didn’t need the weight adjustment or on-board memory.

I also prefer having 3 extra buttons down the middle over the slider to adjust wheel speed. I’ve re-mapped them to some of my most commonly used commands and (being left-handed) find them more comfortable and easier to use than buttons on the side. (Although I use those too.)

None of the WvW bonuses apply when you’re in an overflow. Also any influence you earn won’t count towards your guilds total because influence is counted seperately for each server.

So it is better to avoid being in an overflow if you can, but for most things it doesn’t make much difference. I’d certainly take this approach over queing to get into a map.

Kelly.4678:

This is truly ridiculous. i want the drunkard achievement but you have to have 100,000 drinks! if you drink an alcoholic beverage it counts for 2 points. THAT’S 50,000 clicks to buy that kitten from a merchant. and 50,000 more to consume it! my hand starts cramping around 700 clicks….. it sure would be nice to buy in bulk over here.

You could space it out a bit.

You could also look for the Elixir of Heroes which are dotted around the map. They count towards the achievement and have the advantage of being free. I wouldn’t recommend trying to do it entirely that way but if you leave the achievement until after you’ve explored the map and look out for them as you’re going along it’ll help. I’ve got something like 70 points in the title already and I’ve never bought a drink.

DryHumour.1307

[ Good grief. The filter replaces an entirely fabricated vulgarism created especially for use on television in the British comedy Red Dwarf kitten with kitten. While I’m all for not offending anyone in a family friendly forum, that’s political correctness run amok…. ]

I’ve heard people use it as an actual swear word. I didn’t think anyone would be offended by it though.

(It’s also a brand of fridge, which I always find amusing.)

ZeftheWicked.3076:

I think we should have a large pool fo dailies for a month to choose from. You make your own daily from that. But to make it far each would have a limited number of uses (so you don’t do laurel vendor daily everyday). Then on a short day you pick easy ones, on one with more time you “pay the debt” and do the hard ones left in the pool.

I’d be willing to bet a lot of people wouldn’t do it that way. They’d use up all the uses on the easiest ones first and then complain that it’s “impossible” for them to do the dailies any more because there is nothing they can do (or want to do). Then they’d complain that the limit needs to be removed because otherwise it’s too much of a grind and didn’t Anet promise that everything would be handed to you in this game…

Edge.4180:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I “work on the daily” because I don’t have other things to do most days. No, I don’t. I’ve got 100% world completion on my ranger, my computer stinks for doing WvW, and since I’m a ranger I generally avoid trying to pick-up-group for dungeons or Fractals. So instead? I do my daily, see if the guild is doing anything. If not? I screw around with small things for a while.

OR, you could just pick a direction in the game and go, and see where the adventure takes you. There are plenty of events out there to just stumble across and play in, often one leading you to another. And the best part with the original Daily was that you actually stood a pretty great chance of completing it and being rewarded in the process, because the goals were so purposely generic.

But now.. well, you better hope your random journey takes you across some very specific hoops to jump through.

Honestly my experience with the dailies has been the complete opposite. Before it was changed I rarely got them (and if I came close but didn’t quite get it I felt absolutely no reason to make the extra effort because the rewards weren’t worth getting).

Now I usually get at least 3/5 without even trying. I just log in, pick a character and get on with whatever I was going to do. Then when I have about 10 minutes left I check what progress I’ve made and more often than not realise I can finish the whole thing in a few minutes of dedicated play.

The funny thing about it is that if I look at the options before I start playing I almost always decided I won’t be able to get it. That I could work 3 or maybe 4 at a push into what I wanted to do but that’s it. It’s only after I’ve given up and thought I wasn’t even bothering that I realise it’s actually fairly easy.

Mad Rasputin.7809:

While the ‘consume 25 foods’ daily is easily obtainable by purchasing cheap food on the TP, it seems completely out of whack.

Most foods give you a 30 minute buff minimum. 25 foods would equate to over 12 hours worth of buffs.

Why require the consumption of more than 2-3 foods? A ‘normal’ player just playing would not use much more than this if this amount. I don’t know anyone who plays and consumes 25 foods in a normal playing day.

That said, I acknowledge it is an easy daily to complete.

Personal story completer? What if you have already completed your story? You are sol on that one. Mist caravan? Nice to have it in there, but if you don’t WvW then you won’t attempt this one. Five mystic forge attempts? Unless I’m trying for something, I rarely mystic forge misc items more than once or twice a day. Costume brawl? A novelty that not everyone even knows what it is.

And this is exactly the point of the new system. Get players to try something they haven’t done before and maybe don’t know anything about, instead of always doing the same few things (and then complaining that there is nothing else).

(And about the personal story one you can make an alt and get it in a few minutes. I haven’t tried but you might even be able to get it just by doing the introduction.)

Orion Templar.4589:

I like the new dailies a lot. The recent one involving eating food though was a bit of a turnoff since as mentioned above, the completion of the daily means you need to eat food faster than the buffs would normally last so you’re essentially wasting food. I picture my character standing there forcing food into his mouth as fast as he can.

I wasn’t keen on doing that one either. So I didn’t. I picked another 5 that fit with what I wanted to do today. Still IMO a big improvement over the old system where if you didn’t want to do just one of the achievements it meant you had absolutely no chance of getting the daily.

Clark Skinner.4902:

I guess I should have given this a title that at first glance appeared to be an argument starter about ascended gear to get people participating.

Anyway, I think I have it figured out.

I logged all of my alts under my personal guild (30 influence).
Next day, I logged in with the first. Influence was now 40.
Logged in under the next. Influence was now 50
Logged in under the next 2. Influence went to 60, 70.

I think 10 attendance points get added to the guild which you are representing the first time that each character logs on for the day.

And then at a set time each day the line gets added in the History tab “x members logged in 11/26/2012 for 10x influence”. This tells you the tally of attendance points that were added in the previous 24 hours.

This is exactly how it has been working for me over the last month and a bit since I created my own guild.

One other thing, which I suspect might be messing up a lot of peoples calculations, is that each character can only give influence to 1 guild per day through this method.

So if I leave a character representing my “real” guild (the one with other players in) when I log in the influence goes to them and nothing is added to my personal guild. Even if I change which one I’m representing and log out then back in again.

I suspect this is where the mis-match between the actual influence gain and the notification comes in: It will only count players who earned influence for that guild. So if a guild member logs in representing another guild and then switches to yours it could give you a total of (for example) 6 players online but show only 5 logged in and earned influence.

In practice it’s fairly simple: When you’re done playing make sure your character(s) are all representing the guild(s) you want the next days influence to go to. Then when you log in tomorrow that’s where it will go.

Elementalists get much better at higher levels. According to some people their survivability/damage output is so good they’re over-powered in WvW.

I have a ranger, elementaist, engineer, thief and guardian and I’m enjoying using them all (although I’ve played the ranger most). IMO it really comes down to what you enjoy and what playstyle you’re best at.

If you really want them you can still go and earn them the same way everyone else did. And IMO you’d be giving yourself an excuse to experience a great game in the process.

I have to admit I have mixed feelings on the HoM items. I don’t feel like I really earned them because I love GW1 and I got almost all my HoM points through doing things I would have done anyway. I bought Vabbian armor and a few more Destroyer weapons than I would have otherwise, but that’s about it.

At the same time I would feel dissapointed if they started giving the items out to people who never played GW1. As other people have said those items were added to the game in recognition of the hours, days, years in some cases, people put into that game. So that players wouldn’t feel like they were abandoning everything they’d earned to start from scratch.

To give them out to everyone for a few laurels or whatever would make them meaningless.

DryHumour.1307

And ask the folks who have the original (and non-Kilroy) Survivor how their PTSD is doing….

I’ve done Survivor both ways and I have to say I hated Kilroy and would never do it again but I really enjoyed doing it the old-school way. (See attachment.)

It all comes down to what you enjoy. For me it was an extra challenge which made re-playing quests and missions I’d already done dozens of times fun again.

And yes there were plenty of achievements to let you get GWAMM without the 4 you listed. Although you’d probably need to do the PvP ones instead and IMO they’re the real grind. I think it was years before anyone even knew what max rank was in some of those, whereas drunkard some people got relatively quickly.

If you’re in a small guild remember, and remind all your guild members, that logging in on a character gets you 10 influence a day.

If you’ve got a few people with alts that adds up quickly. And if you don’t use alts you can always create some random characters to fill the slots and get extra influence.

It’s probably not the best way to do it but my method for sorting my inventory is:
1) Deposit all collectables
2) Open any bags, salvage any salvage items
3) Deposit again
4) Check for anything I can use and equip it or shift it to the bottom bag (if it’s for another character)
5) Open the trading post, click sell and sell anything where the offered price (minus fee) is higher than or equal to the vendor price
6) Salvage any remaining whites
7) Sell everything else to a merchant.

I play extremely casually (1 hour a day, and not every day) and I have 5 alts. I see no problem with this.

Why? Because I don’t think I need ascended gear on them all. You don’t really need it at all and you definitely don’t need it on every character. Unless you’re really wanting to do WvW and Fractals on every single character.

Also I don’t understand how joining a large guild leads to you getting rewards other players have earned. You don’t get the guild commendations or whatever they’re called unless you join in with the event.

There’s Keg Brawl, but that’s about it. I keep hoping they’ll put the others in soon. Especially the moa racing in LA.

I also want to know what the huge targets out in the bay in LA are for.

Edit: For some reason my original wording “in @ some point” without the symbol got kittened, so I changed it.

When waiting for a reply on a forum (any forum) it helps to consider the time of day. Most GW2 players are in Western Countries which means they’re likely to be at work or school when you posted this. Or on their way to work/school. If you’d posted it in about 6 hours time you’d have a good chance of getting a response in 15 minutes, but not now.

Anyway, you can unlock Guild Bounties without needing any merits, then use the merits earned from doing them to unlock other missions.

Anything labelled as ‘Master’. Cheapest would be emborided jute insignias.

But if you’re wanting to level tailor anyway it might be worth making some of the higher levelled (and more expensive) ones and do both at the same time.

Before they changed dailies I hardly ever did them, now I’ve got 19 laurels. Which for me is a huge jump.

But I don’t feel any real urge to do my daily, certainly not to JUST do the daily and then log out again. If I do them I do it while doing other activities, like levelling an alt or exploring. Frequently I’ll get at least one part done without even trying.

(And yesterday I got condition remover without even knowing it was possible. I was on a low level longbow ranger with no traits and no utility skills that remove conditions. All I can think is it all happened through combos, which I also didn’t notice I was doing.)

Personally I think it comes down to your playstyle and attitude towards the game. If you approach it as if the focus is to level up and then get gear and then you’re finished then yes you probably will feel like you need to focus on whatever is giving you gear you don’t have and you won’t have much motivation to play once you’ve done it.

But to me getting gear has never been the point of this game. It’s something that happens along the way in order to make playing easier, but it’s not a goal in itself. My goal is to explore the world, to do all the personal story quests, events, see all the areas, etc. etc. so that’s what I focus on when I’m playing.

Well the method is pretty much to make a character you like and then keep playing them instead of deleting and starting over.

So the question should really be what makes you NOT stick with a character? What makes you think you want to scrap them and start over? Do you get bored? Does something about the profession or playstyle annoy you? Do you not like the story?

I did keep deleting and remaking some of my characters because I kept changing my mind on what story or other options I wanted, but for me it was just a matter of getting the character right. Once I was happy I kept them and I plan to get them all to 80 eventually (and keep them after that).

I’ve noticed the same with dropped weapons and armor. I suspect it’s at least partially down to the fact that last month Salvaging was one of the monthly achievements so a lot of people were buying up whatever they could get to salvage.

This month it’s not on there so there is less of a reason to buy.

You don’t need to hit 400 on any of them to get the monthly. I did it on a mix of Huntsman and Leatherworker and on both I’m just over 100. I think you actually unlock the first Master recipies at about level 50 and you can do it using entirely tier 1 mats.

Female 5 (the one with thorns).

And currently Male 5 as well but that’s a tempoary character I’m going to delete as soon as I’ve gotten to the orders section of the personal story.

Also whenever you get loot remember to check the trading post, sometimes other players are paying more than the merchants.

You can also sell any crafting materials you don’t need.

Yes you can mail things to different worlds.

I think you can even send things from a US server to an EU one (or visa versa). The Trading Post is definitely shared by all servers.

You can download it to as many computers as you want. You can also use any copy of the game to play on your account.

The only thing you can’t do without buying it again is make a second account.

I’m not sure if ‘Diminishing Returns’ has been used in other games but in GW2 it’s specifically an anti-farming system. I don’t know exactly how it works but it basically means if you repeatedly kill the same type of enemy in the same area after a while you will get less loot, and what you do get will be less valuable.

It seems to be used as a bit of a whipping boy on the forum and gets blamed for all kinds of things that are nothing to do with it. But that is the total of it’s effect.

As for armor I’d say you want the maximum possible armor rating because there isn’t really any downside to that. You can overspec toughness but it depends on your profession and build. It might be something you need to work out by trial and error – if you’re taking ages to kill anything, but have that time because they’re not doing much damage to you either (and you don’t like that situation) it might be worth moving some of the trait points/armor bonuses to other things, like power or precision.

Anything you haven’t already done.