Guild Wars 2

Not eye candy? Take a look at this Norn my guildie made.

http://i40.tinypic.com/2h658ac.jpg

edit: Sorry, I have no idea why TinyPic suddenly started making you load a TinyPic page instead of just showing the image. I wish I knew how to stop that from happening.

Not exactly. Lanfear is simply asking that all races get tattoos rather than just Norns. He’s not asking that all races get horns.

It does seem odd that only Norn have the art of applying dye in patterns via needles. Wouldn’t other races have caught on to the technique by now?

(While we’re at it, I have a guild mate that very much wants a scar option for her female main’s face. I don’t like scarring up my character faces but surely it would be handy for many people to have the choice so they can look like more hardened warriors etc).

I think you can get that from the Blackroot Cut heart vendor in Kessex, or from the Oldgate Clearing heart vendor in Diessa. At least, so sayeth the Argo gallery. Also I am pretty sure I saw that hood yesterday and I was in Kessex quite a bit.

If you have multiple mouse buttons perhaps you can designate some keys for movement. I strafe with my HEX. Of course I’m still using my left hand on the keys but I read comments all the time from people that have everything bound to a mouse or keypad controller including full movement.

Try going there right after a patch. Generally that is the best time to find an event unstuck.

I’ve done the cowtapult many a time, it is not a permanent block to the gold star. WvW was much trickier, in fact, requiring both patience and leaping in during major PvE events that sucked out most of the WvWers (like the Karka invasion).

It is unfortunate that you have been blocked for a bit in this one spot. However, that does not translate to you will -always- be blocked and getting the gold star flat out can’t be done. Work on other areas and check Diessa now and then to see if the event’s working, or ask people on other servers if it’s working there and guest over to do it.

I like having plenty of stones as it means I can customize alts’ looks as I level. I’d still like a few more keys showing up here and there because I’m not going to buy them at the gem store on any regular basis so the BLC chests just sit around in my bank, but I’d be a sad person indeed if stones became so rare I had to think real hard about transmuting for my lowbies. I can see why they don’t give keys for city completion, people could just farm up the keys by making a human or asura and zipping around the city for the reward, then delete and repeat.

You do get materials, you get 40 of something level appropriate to the zone you finished.

I’m 47 and also had Pong fun! I have had some of the same issues, but have slowly been assimilating what’s what as I choose new gear for alts I’m leveling and have to see which stats I want to raise up. I still have to mouse over to confirm anything but the first four stats, however.

I’m not sure how they could have all the info on the panel without insane amounts of clutter. Maybe a 3 letter abbreviation before each icon? I do like the icons as they fit the game aesthetic.

Keep in mind it’s not quite the radical change you’d think — before they gave us the plethora of icon info we had to mouse over a base stat to see the secondary stats anyway.

Absolutely amazing. I’m going to link this to my old WoW guild because we have a guildie there who is awesome as a left handed only gamer, his right arm/hand being disabled to the point of being a blunt instrument only. Apparently his left hand looks like a demented spider dancing over the keys as he runs a druid very effectively in PvE and PvP and even types chat lines at speed while he does it.

Still I bet these various hardware ideas could be great for him if he gets the money together for them.

-applause for Kodesh-

Crafting, the gist:

Chop trees down, mine ore nodes, gather plants. You will need tools for this (buy at a vendor near the city bank and equip them, they show in the lower right of the character panel below accessories). There is no competition for nodes, each one is harvestable by everyone around.

Learn a craft by talking to the crafter. They will tell you what things you can learn to make; if it sounds useful to your profession, go for it. You can learn all crafts on one character, but only have 2 active at a time and it does cost some money to switch.

Stand at a crafting table, try to have the crafting vendor also in reach so you can have the vendor and table windows open at the same time. In the craft window upper left there is a choice of things. First one for discovery, second one for crafting known things, third thing to see your bank (you can use the bank at any crafting station even if you don’t know that craft, btw).

Refinement is how you process mats. Ore into bars, wood into planks, etc. Discovery means dragging items from your inventory window on the left to the slots on the right. If you get enough items that work together, it prompts you to learn the recipe.

There are crafting guides to do it at max efficiency for leveling but I vastly prefer noodling around on my own as I get the mats. I did cave in and use guides to find what foods I was missing once I got Cooking 400, since figuring out the missing thing I need is a jar of poultry stock isn’t exactly intuitive or easy to find out without random luck.

Every mat you need except for account bound foods from karma vendors is available on the TP. That gets pricey though. Do it in batches as you have the mats and you’ll not get there as fast but the journey will be more fun imo.

The free way is to click the PvP crossed swords in the upper left of your screen. Pick Go to the Mists. That ports you to the sPvP lobby. Look ahead to your left, there is another portal. That takes you to Lion’s Arch. Run forward over the bridge to the set of 5 portals on a little island to the left. Each of those leads to another racial city, and when you exit the city you are in the starting zone.

I’d recommend the Charr starting area as an alternative to the Human one, but be advised their city is a nightmare to navigate. You want to get to the east edge of it for the gate out to the starter lands.

Also note that killing creatures is NOT the way to level. You’ll never get anywhere. Instead, look for hearts and do the things they want you to do. Run around and find waypoints and vistas and points of interest. Get gathering tools and gather all the wood, metal, and plants you can (remember to deposit collectibles from the gear at your inventory upper right to clear bags). Follow the lead to your personal story. Possibly pick up some crafting and do that once you have gathered enough mats. Key point for crafting: Don’t just make a pile of one thing once you learn how. You get the most boost from discovering new things to make.

If you do all those things you will level lightning fast. Killing creatures is something you do incidentally, not as the main focus.

Update: Logging in today I was able to buy things as usual. So either time or a full client restart was the answer.

I seem to be the only one in my guild on at this hour. We do more in the later evening, so check in around then if you can.

I agree with both of you. Stack merging should be painless.

It could happen. I’ve wanted the Lionguard masked tricorn for my thief since launch. Guess what? A kind soul on these forums saw my comment on it and let me know that it’s in game now! 20 badges of honor for a skin from the borderlands vendor (the vendor nearest the entrance, her bottom tab, scroll down to the bottom to the Conquest gear).

They might do something similar with the Tribal armor at some point. Cross your fingers and wish real hard

JoxerNL.3752:

It’s funny how really old games had no issues with capes (example : DaoC) yet the latest games suck balls with them.

On the other hand the DaoC capes were stiff little rectangular panels going down the back that bent in the middle as if hinged. I’ve worn a number of capes RL (decades of costuming) and I would hope that any GW2 cape would have flow and billow and drape. That it would look like something you could pull around yourself for warmth. There are so many styles possible: half circle, full circle, shoulder (think Musketeers), coachman, opera, all of them in multiple lengths …. and the more they can move and cover things, the more the clipping will suck. Also possibly people will complain “now you can’t see my armor!” which happens to be what capes DO, they cover things!

Still I’d rather have no cape than a sad little patch of fabric down my back that no one would actually wear other than for weird ceremonial occasions.

I can’t promise how the day will go but once I’m in game, if my guild wants to do a run, I can see about getting you in on it. Go ahead and friend me in game so you can see when I’m on and poke me about doing the run. It’s 11:30 Eastern; I should be in and active within an hour. (This assumes you are NA — I am on Tarnished Coast).

They actually put it in the patch notes that you could no longer just swap tonic forms while in the form. I just tested my Cat tonic and as long as I hit 6 to drop the transform, I could immediately re-use the tonic for a new form.

I just can’t cycle through the cat forms directly to look for the one I want (Tiger! omg Tiger!) but the tonic’s not broken.

I bought an upgrade trident. I decided to salvage the old one to add to my salvage count for the monthly. While I might have been wrong, it looked to me that I did not get credit. So I filtered down to white armor, sorted by price, tried to buy some cheap low whites to test the salvage count.

Suddenly the Buy button was grey and I could not buy items that were clearly still there for sale. I relogged to an alt, did the same filter search, and it was greyed out. So I altered the search to level 80 blues. Still greyed out.

I have not yet restarted the game, which hopefully would do the trick, as it being so close to bedtime I’d just quit the game for the evening. I did just -make- a low white item to test and that one increased my salvage count.

A guild mate says her buy button is fine.

A note on the quiver — there is currently one in the gem shop, as a skin. It has a notably different appearance from the Ascended one, though. However, if you simply want a quiver and have a wider range of statted items that appeal to you, you can get that skin and apply it to the statted item of your choice.

There is no such thing as late-game content! Though if you are on a lower population server, you might not find swarms of people in some starter areas unless they are doing side kicked events for a daily.

There’s a whole world waiting for you and only some of it really -needs- someone around to help you explore it. Go on, take a look. Do tasks for hearts, seek out points of interest, vistas, and waypoints, get the skill points, unlock weapon skills by using the weapons, all that good stuff.

Dungeons first unlock when you are 30 (and open up a new one to you every few levels thereafter) and do need a group.

Worst thing that happens is you don’t like it. There’s certainly plenty to do and you can, in time, “catch up” to the geared 80’s. But you don’t have to, that’s the brilliance of this game, you can do it at your own speed.

In WoW there was a mod that I adored. If you had an item, or even a linked item in chat, you could mouse over it and in the tooltip it would say how many of that item you had across all your alts, breaking it down by each alt. So a guildie could ask for, say, 10 copper ore, and I could check their link and see where I had the ore stashed. It did require logging in on the alts and opening banks etc to refresh the mod’s data base.

Still, a feature like that would be a huge quality of life change in GW2. I certainly want to be able to look at a dye and know which of my alts (if any) have unlocked it!

You can toggle backpacks, there is a check mark on the back item down in accessories. I use that with Mad King’s Memories so I only have a giant flaming book on my back when I need a light source.

I agree that being able to hide weapons would be very handy for RP. I would suggest that being in combat toggles them back on, though, to assuage those PvPers who want to be able to gauge likely attacks from their opponents.

I was wondering about that as well. “Pac man ghost thing” is a perfect description of it. I’ll pay attention to see if it does its thing while I have Retaliation up.

I’m not so sure I like the color of it, it doesn’t blend in too well to the other effects going on. Not that it should disappear, but something about it, color, size, shape, or all three together, makes it seem jarring and pasted on. Maybe I’ll get used to it

Fastest way to any hub city is to go to Lion’s Arch. Cheapest way to do that is to click on the PvP crossed swords at your upper left screen and click Go To the Mists. You arrive in the Mists lobby and ahead to your left is a gate to LA. That lets you out in Ft. Mariner so you can hop across the bridge to the city gates and enter the one you want.

There was a lot of agitation for hiding gloves in the first few months of the game. I’m very please to be able to do so now as it can enhance the effect of an outfit or keep you from looking silly with something big and clunky on your hands added to a frilly top.

Plus, for RP, now I can emote removing my gloves without having to haul them over to my bags!

The guide is helpful but because the items spawn randomly it only gives you a general place to look (and some of the spawn points aren’t exactly where the red circles show). I used it in conjunction with asking in Map Chat if anyone knew where particular items were. Generally there would be someone standing at the spawn point to help lead others to it, and I’d then stand there a bit to aid the next person.

This was on Tarnished Coast during the time when a lot of people were looking for the objects though. Servers may vary in population and helpfulness. Still, it shouldn’t hurt to ask in Map if anyone’s spotted an item sparkle. Note that they don’t show up from a distance nor do they highlight like other yellow-named objects when you hold down CTRL. You have to be within feet to spot the little glow.

Unfortunately this is how it is every single month, and with every single limited time event. Things end with the patch, not the clock. I warned my guild mates last night to get their last SAB runs in because I’d be surprised if it was still around tonight.

Sorry I didn’t think to put a similar heads up in the forums here Remember for the future, y’all, GW2 things end -on- the last day, not at the -end- of the last day.

Ah, good to know. I will look forward to jumping in there after tomorrow afternoon’s office meeting. Thanks!

Whichever name the Medium hat has that is the Lionguard hat (tricorn with eye mask), that’s not available PvE. I thought it was called Conquest?

It is the only PvP skin I truly desperately want in PvE.

Oh that is soooooo nice. Thanks for noticing and posting! spreads word to guild

Um, that sounds like once all the facilities are gone we can’t do the dungeon? Tuesday is the one day a week I can’t play, will there still be stuff to do tomorrow? I do want to destroy a facility for the achieve so what happens if I don’t get in there tonight?

Other people have given great answers, so I’ll focus on one small thing you said about not wanting to PvP until you are 50. Note that I am not a PvPer myself!

There are two types of PvP: Structured and World vs. World.

In structured, you are boosted to 80 with level 80 gear and all traits and skills unlocked (you might have to pick trait lines, I’m not sure, as I haven’t done sPvP yet). You fight in a small team against an equal sized team in a small arena map.

In WvW you are boosted to 80 stat wise but only have the weapon skills and utilities you’ve unlocked in PvE already, plus you have your same gear on. You fight in a tremendous landscape against hundreds of enemies with a lot of PvE things to do as well. There are keeps to capture and hold, supply caravans to escort or disrupt, etc.

While waiting to 50 makes sense in terms of wanting to make sure you really understand your profession’s mechanics, it’s not necessary for purely level reasons beyond wanting more available skills and more helpful gear.

Indeed, the reason to do windowed full screen is so that you can work with other windows on the other monitor without having to alt-tab. If you are in plain old full screen, your cursor won’t leave the game screen.

None of it is pointless. It all gives you xp, and world exploration gives you many more options later. Do a heart, the heart vendor opens up to you, sometimes with items no one else in the world sells. Find a waypoint, you can travel to it later. Find all the waypoints, you are much better off helping with guild bounty missions when you have 15 minutes to get to the random zone, scout it for the target, find the target, and kill the target. Make that 15 minutes total to do that with 2 or even 3 targets!

Gathering gets you mats to play with in crafting or just to sell for sweet sweet monies. Fighting the mobs gets you experience in how to fight and dodge, how to read the world for clues as to something big coming. Being 80 is nice, yeah. You have better gear and more skills and right now you don’t downscale so much in lower zones to truly be at the level of those just starting. But it’s not the -point-. Playing and exploring is the point!

So … do it all. How else will you learn which parts you like most?

Remembering it’s a ranger hasn’t been so hard for me. I have the hardest time remembering boons/conditions instead of buffs/debuffs even after a year of playing GW2. (Yes, a year, I was in all the BWE’s ). While the new terminology makes perfect sense, it’s not nearly so intuitive in meaning for me thanks to decades of PnP and LARP with advantages/disadvantages in character creation. Using two completely different words makes me all confused ’n stuff.

During beta they did have little feedback popups at the close of each PS step as well as after some other actions iirc. That was great for beta, since we were supposed to be helping test and evaluate.

I wouldn’t mind doing them now, either, if they are not intrusive. However, I would strongly recommend that any such thing have a toggle in options to disable because plenty of people won’t want the interruption. Also your first and third questions should be globally trackable by ANet without needing subjective spot check reporting, as they aren’t actually about an opinion.

So if it’s opinion surveying you want, let people evaluate a jump puzzle they just finished, or an event chain, or the PS. Give them a short text box to explain their reasoning. And make it clear that the surveyee isn’t going to see any response.

Being able to /assist a groupmate would be nice, though they do that with ctrl-T and then just T to nab the chosen target.

However, the game’s design philosophy involves minimizing UI use. You learn to see which way the opponent is facing, to see them glowing/rearing back/pawing the ground and thus know the big attack’s coming. Cast bars would mean playing the UI, not the world.

It took a while for me to adjust to this after my plethora of WoW mods but now it makes combat feel much more dynamic and fun for me.

Nope, in fact I felt slower as a cat. I got into the Snow Leopard form and a couple of guildies got into snow leopard forms from the heart vendor in Norn start area. They outran me.

The skills you get are costume brawl ones. Swipe, Maul, Pounce, and Play. Pounce does send you leaping a good distance but it takes a lot of hunkering down time first. So the usefulness of the tonic is for fun or RP, not really for any game mechanics boosts.

On the other hand, now and then you turn into this:
http://i42.tinypic.com/124knpj.jpg

I’d embed the image but I’d need a how-to on that as the last time I tried to follow the forum format instructions for it nothing good resulted.

I believe you can get that skin set from Iron Marches karma vendors.

I don’t mind sharing the styles. There should be some cross-cultural influence, after all. In fact, I want all the Norn options for humans! Though humans and Norns have the most choices by far as it is.

Charr could use more manes, yes, especially more decoration choices for them. As for Sylvari, just imagine a tangled fall of ivy, a spray of honeysuckle, a froth of spider ferns, a drape of baby roses or periwinkle …

Not to my knowledge. ANet really doesn’t want us able to inspect each other except visually or by voluntary linking of gear. Thus we can avoid elitists refusing to play with people that don’t match “acceptable” setups.

Note that you still have to get to 30 to use it. What level are your Ranger and Warrior?

When I finish my daily the five 100%‘s remain until I open the daily achieve and click off each box. Could there perhaps be a box to click in the daily panel to “clear all tracking?” I’d keep it specific to the panel rather than the UI as sometimes you still want to track something else.

I have no expertise so this might be naive of me, but could you just physically swap the monitors in place while leaving them hooked up as they are? You’d have some issues with the mouse cursor in sliding it between screens.

I use two monitors as well but I use the right hand one off to the side for keeping a browser, mumble, etc. My task bar’s on the left, and only visible when I click on the right monitor to toggle out of the game. A quick mouse swipe and click and there my task bar is. I play windowed full screen.

If you hold both mouse buttons down you will move forward, you can sweep the mouse left or right as you do so to turn while running. No need for auto run except to spare your hand tendons from constantly holding down two buttons.

This works for jumping around corners, too, you steer midair with the mouse while holding both buttons down. (Warning: not doable on Clock Tower or anything else that requires constant turning in one direction, as you run out of mouse pad).

I see this in MMO after MMO. “I worked so hard for this thing, it should never become easier to get later.” Like having it for a few months before everyone can get it isn’t a reward by itself, or other people getting “your” special thing makes you less worthwhile as a person.

Gold’s not even needed to enjoy this game. It can be accumulated in large amounts, things can be sold for lots of it when others have accumulated enough to spend, but really one can do just fine without it. So if one source of profit is lessened, and you really feel the need to see those numbers go up at the bottom of your bag panel, then find another means to make it.

If nothing else, it’s more spots to go sell things to clear your bags and it gives the cities more “bustle” to have merchants all over. I do agree that there’s no need to buy the items they sell, however.

You can also get a Ghostly Spineguard, level 35, from AC explorable. It’s tradeable; type Spine into a TP search and you’ll see it along with a couple of level 45 ones.

Besides, they don’t even have any expansions planned. If you worry about something becoming not useful a year from now so you won’t spend money on it now, you probably don’t have any nice things.

How about /point @? Like, “Hey, you, I challenge you!”