Guild Wars 2

I don’t think the first chapter has retry motes — those first showed up in Hidden Arcana (and then vanished for the chapter after that). Chapter 8 certainly doesn’t; while you can restart just the instance you are achieving (be it the Asura lab or the centaur town), you can’t restart segments inside the instance.

Scrump.8614:

Arianhod.3485:

Hello Scrump and Welcome!!

For the hearts: if you can get to level 10 you start your personal story (which is nice exp); if you’re still too far from that (e.g. starting lvl 9 now), I suggest going to your racial city (that is, Divinity’s Reach if you’re human, etc..), go through the asura gate (big pink circle on the map) to LA (Lion’s Arch). From there there you can go through one of the other asura gates to the other cities. Exit the city you’ve choosen and you’re in a new 1-15 map (new hearts and map to explore—> exp :P)

OHHH! Someone in game said to “go to other start zone” but I had NO IDEA how to do that, I might just do that. Thanks a ton!

And thanks for all the responses!

Hint on other start zones: Some of the cities have multiple exits. You could end up in a dangerous place! So if you are in Hoelbrak you want to take the east side exit, same in Black Citadel. South from Hoelbrak takes you into a level 40 or so area, north from BC is kinder but still starts at level 15ish. And when you do the starter Norn area (Wayfarer, east from Hoelbrak), be wary of the north facing zone exit in the northeast corner of the map, as that takes you to a level 80 zone.

Guhracie posted this just 10 hours ago, a fine preliminary list of what CDI’s brought us:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/The-Impact-of-the-CDI/first#post4869867

Mob killing is the worst XP source. Hearts are there to give some guidance but also are only partially useful. The real xp comes from doing events, and once you are of level, dungeons. You can get most of a level from one dungeon path. You also get xp from exploration and from gathering nodes.

Speaking of crafting … that gives a lot of xp as well. It does take a bit of time to start your mats collection. Over time you’ll get more. Also, use salvage kits on any gear you don’t want to keep or sell on the TP. Most cloth comes from salvaging cloth armor.

Character creation: The choices set up your Personal Storyline for the first 20 levels of it. They have no impact at all on your game mechanics; everyone has access to the same skills and traits for their profession. Warning on Personal Story, it starts with many paths and narrows down to the same end for everyone.

Dyes: Don’t worry! You can toss any random colors on at the start. If you open your hero panel (press H), and click on the top part to get the drop down list, you’ll see “Dyes” as one of the tabs. With a recent change, you’ll be able to see all the game’s dyes and preview them in that panel on your current gear. The starter dyes are all there and unlocked for you. Any dyes you collect (mostly via purchase on the TP, most cost a couple of silver, pricey ones go up to a lot of gold) will be applied account wide. Any time you want you can open your hero panel and change your colors around.

I think originally the idea was your starter color would be applied to any new gear until you used other dyes on it, but ui advances have made that obsolete. Dye changes you make to a specific item do persist so long as you have it in inventory.

Note there are gem-store-purchaseable items called “Outfits.” These are costumes that cover up your armor. In your dye panel there is a place at the top to set up your Outfit dye scheme. Whatever colors you put in there will go on any outfit you equip. I think they’ve fixed the bug that occasionally wiped those dyes. Regardless, I keep a Word document listing my preferred dye scheme for each outfit on each alt so I can more quickly replicate it.

Welcome and have fun!

Long years ago I bought a DELL XPS gaming laptop (back when you could configure your options when ordering from them). I think it was $4K … and it lasted me about 4 years after which I gave it to a niece because it was about as good as her desktop. It was a heavy beast, more a portable computer than a laptop, but I could plug peripherals into it and use it as my WoW machine on the go. For cooling I put it on this neat telescoping x-shaped rack I bought at Best Buy, with that on top of a flat fan.

It did fine, just had the video fry once and warranty covered a guy coming to my house to replace that.

A thousand a year seemed ok to me (back then a good desktop was around $2K and might need replacing in 2 years), though eventually my needs changed and I went to pure desktop use with a tablet for internet while traveling. Nowadays I don’t think I could deal with laptop limitations on my MMO’s.

The main thing is that laptops do keep getting more powerful, but so do desktops. At some point laptops may match what a desktop can do and be as comfortable to use. For now, be ready to spend big bucks to get comparable performance, and even bigger bucks to get something that will last long enough to make it worth the purchase.

1 – It’s true. There is a paid expansion coming, and since you weren’t here during the free access to Living Story Season Two you’d have to pay gems to get those chapters if you want full rewards from them. You can play them for story just by having a friend start them up. But once you own the content you always own it, and they give a lot of updates for free.

2 — I don’t know, I don’t PvP, but I hear Thieves and Necromancers are currently pretty strong there.

3 — Yes, if you farm up enough gold you can buy gems with it and never pay a real world cent on gem store items. A lot of skins also come via game play. Now, the exchange rate of gold→gems keeps rising as more things come that people want gems for, as the source of gold-bought gems is other players spending cash on gems to turn into gold. Demand keeps outstripping supply. For me, real cash is much easier to gather than gold, so I seldom buy gems with gold.

4 — You can get some idiots in Map but for the most part this is a kinder, gentler community than you’ve seen elsewhere (I played WoW for 7 years, including raiding, until GW2 arrived, so I know whereof you speak). It helps that blocking and reporting the truly nasty is fairly easy, and ANet takes it seriously when people talk trash. (I hear PvP chat is nastier, but in PvE things are on the benign side).

5 — I believe you mean craft skills. “Professions” is GW2 lingo for “classes.” Most crafts are money sinks, but needed to make account bound ascended gear. That’s BiS, though only by a slim margin. You can do just fine without a single ascended item. There are some niche items you can make money on. Most people who get super rich do it by playing the Trading Post, which takes much the same focus and skill and research as doing well on RL stock exchanges. I’ve got over 200 gold right now after nearly 3 years of play, most of my friends are in double digits only, the best I ever had was the mid 400’s. TP traders make it into the thousands of gold but that’s not standard.

6 — Dungeons can be casual once you know them, and between gold rewards and selling drops from them you can increase your gold reserves reasonably steadily. There is also a zone called Silverwastes that drops so much loot in one events cycle that you may need 15 minutes at the end just to sort it all out. PvP lets you go in and compete starting at level 1; you are upleveled to 80 and everyone has the same gear level in it, with their choice of stat distribution. So you can start learning the ropes there right away and if you get skilled, yes, you’ll be competitive.

7 – I don’t know, I don’t PvP.

8 – I’m glad you found out about the game.

9 – 500 max in a guild. We believe that in the expansion there will be guild alliances so the really large guilds such as Tequatl Terror Squad (dedicated to taking down the hardest world bosses) will be able to coordinate their many chapters.

Bonuses: As guilds build influence they can unlock benefits that apply guild-wide, and create banners that give buffs to any passersby that use them. They get missions to do as a guild, which give merits, which are used to expand guild benefits. Individuals get commendations from the missions they can use to buy guild-related gear. The expansion will be bringing refinements to the guild UI — details have not yet been released. Banking permissions currently are not as robustly configurable as in WoW, it’s sort of all or nothing access to each tab. Hopefully that will also be improving.

Check Players Helping Players at the top stickies for the Tips thread. There are lots of little things veterans take for granted that new players need to know (like Deposit all Materials from your inventory cogwheel to send mats to your bank mats tabs) and that thread mentions many of them.

Have fun in Tyria!

I know of whom you speak, Mireles Lore. Those of us in the know give Map Chat a warning when she starts her spiel but there’s no 24-7 coverage possible.

The safest thing in games and RL is to be cautious about giving to beggars. Do it, but wisely. I remember one homeless woman I passed near the National Archives on a regular basis, asking for money for food. There was a vendor cart nearby so I bought her food, easily chewable given her bad teeth, and she was so clearly grateful that I gave her cash every week after that. Most of the time you offer to buy food for someone and they get cranky — like the guy outside Chipotles that refused to come in with me so I could buy him a burrito. He claimed he was trying to go get some other type of food.

In game I’ve sent people items I saw them needing on the forums, I’ve helped run folks through LS, I’ve handed out bags to clearly new players. But I tune my skepticism high and I never give to someone who just flat out asks for handouts. I like to be generous, not a fool.

I know right? That’s why I was so psyched for Tuesday and so sad to see there is a delay, though far better a delay than a broken game. I’m really hoping for more updates on the fix’s progress, or at least some blog posts about HoT … even though it’s likely any posts this week will be about the new borderland rather than things with wider game impact such as specializations or guild halls.

These forums do tend to start spinning in circles until new info arrives for digestion and discussion.

Trey Enma.7851:

I don’t care if they take a while to release a camera update, what I would appreciate is seeing the fruits of these changes in advance instead of reading about options that have no value because I can’t specifically imagine how it will effect my gameplay experience.

Show me some pictures of horribad camera moments in the current build that can be avoided via changes with the new patch…

There are no server forums. There are barely any servers now, except for WvW purposes, everyone just gets mingled together and if you want to attend an event you need to group with someone in the right map shard to taxi in.

I don’t frequent the WvW forums but I do recall there at least used to be threads dedicated to the three-server matchups so you could at least go in to a thread focused on a fight you were part of.

Actually if you’ve already completed the mission on an alt, and are now repeating it for achieves with that same alt, and goof up an achieve — just log out to character select and back in. You’ll be back outside the instance with it reset from the start.

You don’t have to slog through the whole thing.

edit: I put it this way because OP said they missed an achievement. Since they cannot do the achievements until their second run-through on the same alt, I assumed they were now at the achievement phase.

Azhure.1857:

mXz.4512:

Naming and shaming isn’t allowed on the forums. Regardless ‘how bad’ someone is. Best to just report that person anonymously in-game.

Er….. how is begging against the ToS? I’m just curious.

Well, defrauding other players is. Compare with scammers who trick people out of valuable items. While the items don’t get restored, the scammers get banned or at least punished.

Not only does someone with that much AP have much better legit ways to make money, s/he clearly knew s/he was scamming based on the comment to OP about it only needing to “work” on some people.

I’m more in the wth did I just read category … not that I actually find Quaggans cute (they’re more cloying than cute imo), but your paragraph ended with far too much hostility.

That said, the names won’t work lore-wise (no Mars in Tyrian space, and I’m pretty sure the names are Greek-derived, not Latin as Charr use). Maybe Phooboos and Deimoos would.

(I see that Phobos may crash in … 50 million years or so … that seems a nice long life).

I’ll toss in a “what Cynova said,” since I get too lazy to start nice threads like this. I know others may come in to try to counter the compliments, but you ANetters need to know that many people do appreciate you and understand that you’re doing something you love.

I am sorry, MurdocSmash, but the preview of the camera changes showed that you cannot see any part of yourself or your gear when you go into first person. They had a guardian fighting mordrem in the start of HoT lands and you could see his blue fireballs from his scepter but not the scepter itself.

You don’t have to switch windows, just move the preview off to the side so you can see both. Now, with the new dye system, I do agree it would be nice to have wardrobe preview in the hero panel so full dye testing could be done on prospective gear rather than the semi random 4 channels you can preview via TP dye listings in the current preview window.

No need to imagine, I have a guild member on my friends list who keeps swapping between NA and EU, and he remains on the list no matter which region he’s in.

Awww, Chris and his CDI’s were one of the things giving a face to ANet.

You’re a classy guy, Chris, I hope you have fun and find fulfillment wherever your career takes you.

No one has deals with ANet or NCSoft yet, there’s still a lot of work before release dates and prices can be set. Any projected release dates are just third parties trying to grab your cash. And ANet would never partner with power-leveling or gold seller sites, those activities result in account bans.

(I say the latter based on ronpierce’s post, as I don’t want to click the link in the OP).

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

A status report about their progress would be nice.

An example:
We are still not ready to release the new build but we are making good progress. We hope to release the new build within a week.

With that simple response you reassure people that the QA test is going well and give them a rough timeframe without actually promising/confirming anything.

Gaile actually did that when we had a delay on something last Halloween, after I and others suggested such a format of reply. I’m sure once she is settled at a computer again, and has something further to report, she’ll give us a clue.

After decades of reeanactment, LARP, tabletop and online RP, not to mention reading voraciously since I was 2 … yeah, I use antiquated phrasings now and then

For those not versed in old colloquialisms, I meant “will resume tomorrow.”

Our prime info source right now is Gaile and today she’s traveling in England from one place to another so I imagine her posts will be more sporadic. Hopefully her cheery presence will resume on the morrow.

MaXi.3642:

I bet the gliding in AA is just like a flying mount… and that’s completely different purpose than in GW2, so they can’t use the same principle

Dondarrion gave a nicely complete answer. I’ll just add that the AA gliders were more vehicle than mount, in that you got different abilities while using one. Different gliders had different abilities, and the basic gliders got you almost no horizontal distance at all compared to the high end ones.

They weren’t like WoW’s flying mounts. You couldn’t hover, though you could “stall” to slow your lateral motion, and you couldn’t get higher without using a rocket boost thing with a long cooldown. You had to get to a high spot to start if you wanted to go any distance — and then you might have issues landing where you want because you could only go straight down by releasing the glider and plummeting.

I did really enjoy using them, along with the mounts in that game. Hated most everything else about the game, but I liked the gliders and horses.

That doesn’t mean the same system would work in HoT’s design. AA style gliding could cover far too much of the map given the zone sizes we’re working with. So we’ll have to see how gliding’s implemented in beta and give feedback for improvements that benefit game play without breaking encounters.

JustTrogdor is right, but if you have an open slot (which you’d need if you want to grab a name anyway) you can do an instant-create by doing Skip To End and put the name in. Then you can leave that character as a place holder until you want the name for your real alt. When you delete the character, the name remains yours for 24 hours so you can take your sweet time designing your look. (Hint: take screenshots of the sliders once you like how you did it, it really helps if for some reason you have to do it again later. Eg making a character in beta that you want to re-create in live).

I’ve noticed it for years. Getting in game is so lovely and fast. In my other MMOs my attention span lapses just waiting for log in, to the point I get caught up in a solitaire game or a forum thread and then it’s even longer before I actually see the game world. That plus the very quick patch load times and lack of weekly downtimes makes it become something taken for granted that we can play the moment we feel like it.

It does deserve a shout-out, though, so thanks for posting the thanks, OP!

Not PvP related, but possibly in the bailiwick of game design:

What QoL tweaks might we expect?

Examples: Our choice of helms with outfits? Better chat customization — client-assigned chat color, custom chat channels, etc? The ability to assign hotkeys to UI click elements such as toggling outfits and armor pieces? (If nothing else, the old toggle from armor to town clothes could be reassigned to armor/outfit). Consume all in a stack?

What’s the overall intended schedule for deep dive releases?

While we know build templates aren’t intended for HoT, what’s the relative priority level for getting them in game?

In all the years this game’s been out, a promised build has almost never been delayed past the scheduled day. It may have come out late in the day, but I can’t remember one that got this sort of delay before. So something went wrong that doesn’t usually go wrong and surely they are sweating overtime bullets on it.

Any of you unwilling to forgive this, I hope you never miss a deadline in your life even if you have a sudden funeral you must attend or other unpredictable interferences with your plans.

I am sad for no camera tomorrow, and hopeful that it will come later this week — which would almost be better for me since Tuesdays I always have to leave in the late afternoon and frequently miss new things for a day as a result.

I know you guys wouldn’t delay it without serious reason. Thanks for the heads up, I know you’ll tell us when you have a timeframe for release. Meanwhile … blogs on specializations and guild halls? P-p-p-p-pleeeease?

As Healix said, this doesn’t mean “use every button on your skill bar at least once per mob.” It means “don’t ignore the rest of your skill bar because just one skill will mow down the mob, use the situationally appropriate skills even if they’re way over in your utilities.”

Well, this fall the clocks go back an hour again? Hang on until then, I guess

My problem is opposite to yours, I’m a night owl and need my morning sleep. This week is a sleep dep hell for me every year. Or was until I resigned my job last summer and now I get all the sleeps! ALL of them.

They are only one hour later if you are in a time zone that bumped your clock ahead. Otherwise they remain at the same time as before for you. Though your friends in zones that did the reset may complain it’s too late at night to start a dungeon or RP when before they were fine, because to them the clock has changed.

I elected to embrace it as canon. My female necro in RP has a bad back thanks to her heavy chest, hence all the stretching idles and leaning on her staff …

… then they took away the stretching idles.

Yep. I didn’t mention that because then there’s the whole issue of people who are so nervous about mis-clicking and thus spending money having to avoid mis-clicking the button that destroys the guild and everything in its bank. Many teeth would be gnashed.

The reason folks complained about it when the wallet came into existence was they wanted to track which alt earned/used how much gold (for RP reasons or just to keep alts feeling individual). Also they hated the risk they might accidentally buy something they didn’t mean to thanks to a hasty double click or other mistake, and having most of their gold in the bank meant they would have to deliberately withdraw it for large purchases.

I finally ran into this last night. I got my favorite north mortar and some norn stood on top of me pleading for a turn so he could tag the boss. When I got chased away from the mortar (which I was using to save our ammunition, lay down fire pools to melt lane mobs, and aid the arrow carts when mobs got on them) others pounced the mortar even if it meant standing in insect swarms and swiveled it around to aim at the boss room.

Fortunately (?) south failed — guess the mortars weren’t adding much to that fight — and I ran down to mid to help there since I didn’t have reflects for thrasher. That lane was so nicely organized it was a dream to defend and we took out the beekeeper with a minute to spare. VW ended up succeeding, hurray!

One champ bag just can’t be worth risking the whole event failing ><

It’s brilliantly creative thinking. I’m betting you’re the filmer as I noted it was by “Jerem” so kudos to you, sir/madam.

Apologies if this has already been posted, a friend linked this to me and it’s wonderful.

If you are standing in the field, and shoot out of it (like with pistol 4), your attacks apply Blind as well — so do your friends if they are in it. So you can drop it on your own party and everyone can shoot blinds at ranged foes.

I’d say Guardian or Engie; Thief isn’t as supportive as you think. Engie gives a lot of flexibility as to role, though it requires the most keyboard dancing of any profession since you swap your weapon skills via selecting different utilities and may not spend much time with your base equipped weapons at all.

Guardian is super supportive if built that way. It’s not terribly ranged for dps, even scepter won’t reach that far, but hoo boy can it block and mitigate damage to its friends. Also if you want heals, the healing elite skill heals every party member in range to full after a 5 second channel. Time that right and you get real healing satisfaction.

One profession you didn’t mention that might do well — though it’s nearly as complex as Engie to play it well, and it’s incredibly squishy — is Elementalist. They can be built to be highly supportive. They can’t suddenly swap mid fight between melee and ranged weapons, as they swap attunements rather than weapons, but they can do quite a bit and use water attunement to help heal.

Note however that no profession can singlehandedly keep friends alive. Healing is something each player does for themselves, with others providing a boost but not salvation.

No, no price has been announced. ANet themselves don’t have it set yet. OP is guessing.

I would say the biggest flaw is the one Wanze mentioned and you quoted but only responded to the other point in his paragraph:

Designing a completely new treasure hunt to a completely new location every time players find one is far too resource intensive. Yet if it’s a repeating cycle, players will quickly know exactly where to go and there goes your fun in figuring it out.

Those will work well enough together, as long as the thief doesn’t mind the warrior chortling about high damage numbers /grin

Race won’t matter other than for flavor, and you’ll have to go back and forth to each others’ starter areas for the personal story. You might want a sylvari simply because it’s been hinted there’ll be some cool story stuff aimed at level 80 ’varis in the expansion, so why not work on one now? (Plus they are a very fun race to play, imo).

They’re much more useful once you get to season 2 living story instances (they even rez you from downed). They were just always weak sauce in the original dungeons, which have not gotten many changes since launch.

I’d suggest against elementalist as a first class when you’re new to MMO’s or even just new to GW2. After years of other MMO’s I made Ele one of my first five alts … and died and died and died and died. It is super squishy until you know what you’re doing with the game mechanics, and each weapon set gets 4 skill bars of 5 skills each. To compound that, the same hotkey (such as “3”) will send you charging towards the enemy with one weapon and away with another, or worse the same weapon will do that to you depending on which element you’ve attuned at that moment.

From what I hear, Necro does pretty well in PvP (which I don’t do myself, so I can’t say for sure), but is less useful in dungeons. Mesmer is pretty good all around and I’ve found it the most fun profession out of all 8 for all the range of PvE I do. That’s fully traited, however, all my mesmers were born before the new trait system went into effect so they got traits just for leveling.

Annnnnd … all this may change come the expansion, as they are tweaking base professions, adding specializations for each profession, and in some unknown-as-yet way revamping the trait system.

So don’t worry too much that you’ll be “wasting” your time. You won’t be. You can learn the game on any profession, then try another one for a fresh new experience, and it’ll all change again when HoT hits. I’ve been idly leveling an Ele recently since he’s my only sub-80, and I’m finding him far more fun than my first one now that I grok the game so much better As long as you’re enjoying your time in game, you’ll be fine.

(Also I have a ‘vari necro who specializes in rot and decay with an eye towards preventing blighting attacks on the Pale Tree’s roots. Believe me she had a lot of angst over having “failed” when the Shadow of the Dragon struck).

I was wondering this as well. One streamer did take a little bit of time to toss on some different dyes at the start but did not bother with the helm, not even clicking it to see the palette. I understand the urge to just leap into playing when you have a countdown on your play time, but a quick mouseover would have been so nice for those watching and recording.

BammBamm.6719:

to be honest, a mass of humans is mainly a childish, selfish blob of people without much relevant opinion. with every nerf people will whine about it and others will like it, with every buff people will whine about it and others will like it. there are a few people that see the big picture but they are a minority.

This. ANet does care about the players. ANet cannot however let the players call all the shots. The game would suffer death by committee. A poorly informed committee at that.

It would take a long time to sort through all my shots to find the ones where I managed to ditch my avatar, but here is one I’m fond of.

What needs explaining? I guess I can give you a synopsis.

- People on forums who don’t see the big picture complain about one thing that annoys them personally.

- Sometimes they have a point.

- Usually they don’t understand the overall reasons for why something they personally dislike is actually beneficial to the game, and they don’t read up on the reasons, they just post in anger.

- ANet is paying attention to game balance based on data they can more fully gather than can anyone else, and they will make changes when something really is out of whack.

Does that make the text clearer to you?

If you’re taking turns playing (which is what it sounds like, unless you do something wonky to run two clients simultaneously on one computer, which might possibly lead to getting flagged for a ban), then you don’t even need to install a second copy afaik. You do need to buy the second copy, but that’s so he can have an account. He just needs to log in with his account on a machine with the client installed.

Well that was biased …

I can’t speak to other servers, I’ve been Tarnished Coast since thousands of RPers voted it as the unofficial RP server in Beta. TC has a lot of camaraderie, a strong WvW presence, and plenty of people playing at any hour I’m ever on (US east coast afternoon to midnight as a rule). Is it the best? I don’t know. I’m certainly happy being on it.