Guild Wars 2

An addendum: I also strongly feel that ANet should never take something away due to inactivity. The game was advertised as having no downside to leaving for a long time beyond missing out on events. No falling off a gear treadmill, no losing stuff.

Names should not be taken. Housing, did it exist, should not vanish without monthly payments. Personal guilds should not be dissolved (so no, inactive guilds should remain intact, for how will ANet know if it’s an abandoned guild or merely the guild of someone who is gone for a while?). What we build and create in this game should persist.

As others have noted, a unique but still lore-friendly name is easy enough to create. Add a letter, subtract a letter, use different letters that create the same sound, or simply change your approach and go for an entirely different name. Making my male Sylvari mesmer, I tried half a dozen Arthurian names, all taken (I no longer remember what they were). Finally I just generated a bunch of random Arthurian names off a name generator, mumbling them to myself, to get the flavor of how they sounded, and tried “Briamor.” Lo and behold, it was available.

I wanted to do an Asura to see the Infinity Ball PS. “Blekk” was taken. I muttered to myself, sounded out “Froblekk” and it worked. Not perfectly canon as it’s two syllables but it has the semi-pretentious sound of “Froderick” ala Eye-gor in Young Frankenstein, and that helped me figure out his RP personality.

At launch I wanted Altdrag Splitstack to be my Norn engineer, as a mnemonic for how to split stacks of items. I had mentioned the idea either in beta chat or on 2RP, so either someone took it from me or independently conceived it, and I was barred. Eventually I did Altdragg Splitstack, even more Norn sounding imo!

Once you have multiple names with spaces available, there’s so many options. I’d say the only problem really would come if you were trying to use a name by which you are well known, so you have to keep the core of it. But then, it’s still possible to be well known by a unique name. I was Issaela (Blood Elf) on Earthen Ring in WoW. For years I was the only Issaela in the whole game, per Armory searches. Then one Draenei Shaman took it as well … but that was it. I now have an Issaela in TESO. None in GW2, though, it doesn’t really fit any of the GW2 races — but if someone now nabs it and I want it some day? Well, I have a couple of last name variations. It won’t be a problem.

That’s not the summit, as no leaders save the Pale Tree were there. Still, I expect there will be a problem at the summit. I thought it was shadows occluding the windows, not a light source turning off, myself … could be giant vines? Red thorny ones maybe?

As to Taimi — looking closely I do believe that Scruffy is in pieces on the ground by her and Braham. That’s probably why she’s so scared.

But the cost of buying the one shot kits is miniscule compared to the permanent one. There’s not so much “prestige” when you can gather the resources to cover the cost of a one shot rather easily, assuming none have dropped for you from free sources. At this point, if I have a permanent one fall into my lap (unlikely, I’ve never had a permanent thing of any sort out of a BLC and if I buy keys this week it’ll be no more than 25), I think it’d make more sense to sell it and then buy a stack of one shots with the proceeds. This despite my having wanted one since they first appeared so I could RP hair changes on the fly.

The permanent kit is just ridiculously lucrative for the lucky few.

Let’s go with omnivorous. I’ve seen sylvari noshing on melons.

But yes, a lot of things die near the Pale Tree’s roots. She could well be getting direct nutrients from the corpses.

I did see someone complaining that they shouldn’t have wrecked the most useful WP in LA. And somewhere else there were comments about which WP’s across the land are now completely shattered.

It’s a mystery and has been for over 250 years.

Oh, one other trick: Press your CTRL key down as you run around, so you can highlight yellow item names. It may depend on your settings, but I can spot a chest over by the Inquest mine entrance after running a very short way towards it from the waypoint. “Buried Locked Chest” is a nice long line of yellow letters.

If you’ve re-assigned your show yellow names button from the default CTRL, use the one you’ve set, obviously.

It’s the house door nearest the well, west side of town. One time I saw it shut but just walked through it like one of those fake rocks in Sharksmaw in LA.

The Dulfy guide did say at its end: “You are all done until the next patch!” Which to me suggests there will be a new series of steps to grow the next stage, rather than an automatic change.

Starting with the Season 2 episodes (we are on the 3rd one of those), either you log fully into game some time during the two weeks the episode is live, or you pay 200 gems after it’s over. Once logged in, you’ve unlocked it for free forever for all your alts (once they are level 80 and qualify).

At least one person didn’t realize that logging in after reset on the last calendar day meant he was logging in to the next episode. Get in game as early in the 2 weeks as you can, but then there’s no rush to actually play the content other than some parts being easier when a few others are there doing it too.

They have definite spawn points but not every spawn point gets a chest each storm. Pay attention to map chat, kind people will shout out locations, especially if you “seed” the chat by noting where you just found a chest.

Smokestrike
Smokeblade
Smokeshot
Smoketail
Smokeblast
Smokestorm
Smokeslice
Smokeblaze
Smokekipper (I’ll be back by morning) … sorry .. had to …

Now I wish I’d taken a screenie. I saw a guy in Rata Sum with it, in blonde, with sunglasses. The underlying jaw line was reasonably rugged with a bit of stubble, and his armor was some interesting plate with deep green highlights. He looked like something from an edgy movie and the hair worked well — something I’d have sworn it never could do.

What boggles me is that people buy gold from these jerks. If you want it to get gems, you can just buy the gems directly. If you want it for in game items, you can buy gems and convert them to gold, legitimately, without risking account bans, viruses, and much greater losses than the price difference between the sellers and the gem store.

I mean, I’m assuming the jerks are undercutting gem store prices, because they’d have to, wouldn’t they? Or how would they attract idiot customers?

Lupini noted the two methods of leaving: get into a red hash zone, or relog to character select. Either one resets the instance to its start if you haven’t got the completion yet.

Well, I had mine in pale blue/gold for a bit (I think it was Mintay for the blue?), now she’s in Midnight Fire, Lemon, Redemption, and Sunset (on the chest/legs, which are the ascended parts).

If you’re willing to go with bright gold or rose, there’s the Fervid Censer and the Desert Rose. I’m not sure if the back section of the Wardrobe offers preview options, but if so you can just click through all the choices and see if the one you like is still obtainable.

Before I got cultural on my guardian, I had her in Primeval chest and legs with a choice of AC/CM gloves, banded pauldrons, and a variety of helms. Boots .. I think those were Primeval as well. I was able to mix in some cultural too for when she leafed out.

Here are some shots of a couple of combo variations based on Primeval chest and legs:

Nope I can’t help you there. My comments were all aimed at PvE play.

To me, humans have a better city and starting area, and norns feel slow due to their animations (plus they are among the harder races to deal with jumping puzzles due to their size). Most armor looks best on humans, as it tends to just stretch and clip on others.

On the other hand, I have friends who adore playing norns and seldom do any other race. It’s all in what appeals to you.

For profession — I see you don’t have ranger and engineer listed. Not that I recommend them, as medium armor professions have proven my least favorite. Of those two, I’d go with ranger because it has standard weapon swap and that’s an instinct you want to have. Engineer does swap out via the utility keys, making you fling your fingers all over the keyboard (assuming you don’t re-map) for every fight.

My favorite professions game-play-wise are mesmer and guardian. Again, highly subjective, each player has his/her own preferences. For learning the game, I’d say guardian. Fights will take longer but you’ll die a heck of a lot less. Though … I barely dodge on my guardians whereas my thief is all over the place, and dodge is another thing you want to get into the instinct level.

I hope you enjoy whatever you choose!

More powerful, yes, unless you elect to use the racial elites or the ghost wolves that upgraded accounts can use. Those are all by design less powerful than the elites that every player can get, so as to avoid giving some min max weight to what race you pick or a “pay to win” in the case of the wolves.

If by “super uber hardcore” you mean “got a slight edge over those who stuck with just exotics,” yep. Full ascended does give some advantage, per a lot of threads doing the math on the matter, but it will never compensate for lack of player skill.

(I’m not saying you lack skill. Just that skill is a bigger factor than the small stat spread in this game).

I believe Ronin needs to watch the video more closely to get the true tone of this thread.

I myself will forever hear “CHOP … WOOD …” from Risen lips now (or whatever fleshless slits they have left where lips once formed).

Narwhalsbend — why not sell the wood and use the proceeds for the Clusters? Though I assume wood is not selling so well just now.

I came across the new mechanic while running to nab buried chests. Shot a few bolts at him and then he started burying me. There was only the tiniest reaction time from the orange circle to being buried, then downed. As I don’t have a fast dodge button on my mouse, I simply could not avoid getting trapped.

This got me charged up to kill that …. (cussing descriptor here). The map took him out and it felt reeeeeally good.

But then today I saw him and no one was touching him, nor did I really feel like taking the time when I wanted to find lots of geode-bearing events. I don’t mind a challenge, and running into surprise mechanics was refreshing, but given the usual reasons most people run around Dry Top there’s really no incentive to engage in that fight as it will only block overall progress (unless somehow it advances Favor of the Zephyrites by half a bar or more?).

I use Cooks on my Norn and Sylvari, because it looks good on them, very nicely culturally designed. Though now that I can’t hide the big club hand on the sylvari, it’s less in vogue for me than when I could mix and match. You may have seen it on those races without knowing, because it’s much fancier for them than humans.

I used part of Cook’s on my street rat warrior before the town clothes nerf, as well. Now it’s too fugly for me to bother with on a human.

Those new outfits do intrigue me, however. I hope they don’t go the way of the datamined Scholars and Blacksmith’s that we never got.

I was lucky enough to get through the story in the 2 hours I had, without any progress-blocking bugs, but with a lot of confusion and zerg following to reduce the story impact. I actually liked them weaving in existing dynamic events, but then I didn’t have to wait ungodly amounts of time for the events to happen and I got credit for them all. Had that not been the case I would have been far more frustrated.

I was disappointed that as a human nobleman I didn’t get to go shmooze Anise and Jennah but instead was somehow the convincing factor for all the other races. And I was very disappointed by the ease of finding the crown pieces. When Rytlock set up the hunt for them I said in gchat, “Oh, this could be epic!” … and then it wasn’t.

However, I don’t think they should have included the summit itself in this chapter, primarily because I believe the summit is going to feature some sort of mayhem. So I’m hoping they saved it for next patch so we can get more epic action than perhaps would have flowed well in this part.

I think that hat fell over your eyes or you’d have seen the plentiful guild banks available in a Major City Near You™. The world’s bigger than LA, my friend!

:D

I was interested to see that as a human I got to say things about the crown that likely wouldn’t be said by the other 4 races. I’m also curious as to what other races see in the chat with Rytlock. I did screen a couple of my lines but won’t post yet as a) even a spoilers tag might not stop someone losing that “oh ho” moment and b) I have to leave the house any second.

My only other alt with world completion is a sylvari, so I can try on her. I’m not sure I want to attempt this LS/PS on my less explored alts, at least not when in a hurry as I was today given my short play time window since the patch hit.

If you do it in the first few minutes of release, you’ll have a ton of company. Wait a week and it’ll be more as intended.

Looks like the Perma Hair Kit will (rarely) drop in Black Lion chests for the next 2 weeks.

The very last patch was much earlier in the day, actually. I’m usually keenly aware of the time frame as on Tuesdays I leave my house at 5:30 eastern and don’t usually get back to the computer that day. So I was very happy to have so many hours to explore Dry Top’s new section.

Right now I have about 2 hours left in my playing day — AND IT COMES. New build in 10 minutes!

I don’t tend to use food buffs unless I remember them (I made sure to use the right ones back when I was doing Tequatl, and sometimes I’ll chomp something at the start of a dungeon). As such, my 400 Cooking goes to RP purposes.

So account bound food? Despite being a bit completionist on my master chef, I’m not bothering to buy any of the recipes unless in months to come I find myself with the spare geodes and nothing else I want to buy. Sure I can link the item in chat for RP purposes just by opening my craft panel, but there’s something nifty about actually handing over the picnic food …

For my purposes, ANet was not right.

As I understand it all gems come from people spending cash on them. Real money. Then they swap the gems for gold which makes them available for people buying gems with gold to buy.

I know that I have bought many gems for cash over the years, though none since the town clothes fiasco. I almost never bought gold with the gems, though, so I wasn’t putting so many into the economy. But it’s no scam, it’s the design. Gems come from players.

I’ve been trying to see what message you mean. Is it “I saw it .. the Eternal Alchemy?” Because that is the standard text for everyone.

Or did your screenshot link get changed after you posted somehow? There’s nothing Engineer specific in there that I can see.

If you have someone you trust who can log in on any of your characters before the patch hits today (could be any time from now to hours from now), just getting into game and then logging out again, that’ll unlock it for you.

(I do not advocate account sharing. But it is an option as described).

I’m sure the link is safe, it’s just how female Tauren have been upgraded to smooth out pixelated angles and give them more facial expressions. However, they have human-style chests, which is bothersome to those who prefer not to anthropomorphize non human races.

Anyway, while I’m not reading things too closely because I’d rather just play later today and see for myself, I did note that the kites give a movement boost. Interesting. I wonder how much of one, what the restrictions are on use, and how much RNG is involved in getting one.

You don’t even have to have an Asura to use that home instance afaik.

It is, but if you find a guild via it, you can RP with them just fine. You simply can’t WvW on the TC team unless you get to it as home server.

My bias is to Mesmer. I have 3 of them at 80. Asura Mesmer is the bomb — she’s the first alt I got to 80 without any RP to invest me in playing her. My other 2 are strongly RP’d.

I find Ele least fun because of the complex attunement dancing — I do enjoy that at times but don’t want to have to concentrate kitten every fight ever.

Necro is also fun, I’m working on my 3rd one now (mostly because I wanted to see the Asura Infinity Ball PS and that profession appealed most when making him). There are many spins possible on sylvari necro’s — mine is a slightly mad scientist focused on understanding rot and decay so that she can help the Pale Tree against a possible attack on her roots.

… I bet she feels uber vindicated now with Mordy on his way …

Perhaps it is just an animation difference, but I have always subjectively felt that my character moved faster once weapons were sheathed. Plus I seem to pull ahead of those running with weapons out.

It might be worth testing in a controlled race with two people with no speed buffs on of any sort, just running a straight distance, one with weapons out and one with sheathed.

Your bank is account wide. So long as the item is not soul bound, you can drop it in your bank, and the alt can pick it up.

Your wallet is account wide as well. No need to transfer, the money you see listed in your inventory at the bottom is all the money you have for everyone.

Are you NA? If so I’ll be glad to assist with it. I’ve done the full PS a number of times

As Sorann Peace said, Maklain never moved, he’s not the guy that was in LA. There are -two- minstrels.

I believe every TP user ever would agree with the need for a sort by armor weight feature. It has been repeatedly requested since beta. You can be sure ArenaNet is fully aware that we want this feature. You can be equally sure you’re not likely to see it happen. (Sure it could come in a feature pack. But I’d rather toss money at BLT chests than bet a plugged nickel that it will. And no, I’m not a heavy buyer of the RNG items.

There are Runes of the Guardian, Tman. Check the TP!

They’re by Postern Ward in LA, downhill a little, arrayed on two wooden platforms. You can see the little row of merchant icons on the map.

Cleric is Power/Toughness/Healing power stats. Guardian is pure Toughness/Healing.

I was sort of mentally flailing around with the monitor thing, as your screenshot made it look like everything was shuffled to fit in a square. That could just be cropping.

Try notching your interface size down one increment in the Option>Graphics panel (4th item down in the Display section). It could be your hotbar got too large to fit the chat box in?

I’ll highlight what Behellagh said as it will help you in all the jumping you’ll need to do — move forward during the jump. If you let go of the move forward button you will plummet in place (handy if you do it on purpose to drop onto a narrow pillar). You also can steer mid air to curve around corners. Jump physics are rather bizarre in this game.