Guild Wars 2

I am hardly an expert on WvW jump puzzles, but I do know you get in the EBG puzzle by going in the central keep and finding the portal. The puzzle is an instance. I don’t know that the portal is always in the same place in the keep.

If your server owns the whole map then you won’t have enemies attacking you inside. I think. It worked that way when I did the puzzle in beta and I haven’t tried doing it since launch.

You have to buy a training manual first, there are three tiers of them. Level 10 (or 11?), Level 40, and Level 60. The lowest one costs 10 silver, though is usually cheaper on the TP. The next is … um … 1 gold? Though I think it’s 1 gold for the top one?

Anyway, you buy a manual, use it, and then you can spend your points. When you use the next tier manual it wipes out all you’ve spent, so make a note of what you had if you want to keep the same setup (you just reapply all the points gained). You can’t get to the second and third sets of traits until you use the manuals.

*edit — buy them from your profession trainer. They have a book over their head. In LA they are near the Forge.

My two most played are my Thief (main character for RP) and Guardian (tons of RP plus she is awesome for dungeons).

I find the Guardian much more satisfying in PvE. She has a lot more flexibility in fighting style, so much more support, and survives stuff that put any of my other characters in the dirt. I got past the “boring” feel of the weapons by using scepter/focus and sword(or mace)/shield. That gives me a lot of zippy zapping, mobility, cc, and defense. I use Tome of Courage for the Elite. Sooooo heart warming to tell my group “big heal near me” as I channel the 5 skill and watch all their health bars bounce to full at once.

My thief has style, I admit, and is still my favorite for storylines. He’s darn good for most of my dailies, too, and has World Completion so he goes on Guild Missions. I couldn’t have started and mained anyone but him thanks to the hooks that pulled me into GW2 in the first place.

Still, if you’re starting from scratch and want something versatile and survivable, I would recommend the Guardian.

First one is great from in front but I feel that Norns should have an exuberance of hair. So I vote the second.

The guild back pack might do what you want. Go to a guild vendor and take a look at it.

Banners are dropped by guilds, you can usually find one outside the LA bank (at least on Tarnished Coast you can). The Bonfires give you 50% boosts on top of that, and the boosters come from the gem store if you don’t get them randomly. Ice cream is the food, you can buy it on the TP. When you stack all the boosts together, that is when you want to chug your liquid karma from dailies/monthlies.

Right now there are some Living Story instances. You can get a hefty Box of Karma each time you run the Rox Hatchery one (I don’t know if there is DR or a daily cooldown on that).

One caution about the Heart of Mists trick is that it can be overwhelming to try to integrate all the skills in your mind and reflexes for testing if you aren’t already familiar with how the game works. At least for me it is. In all my MMO’s I have always wanted to level from the beginning, adding in a few skills at a time so as to learn them properly.

But if you can understand the tooltips on the skills and parse them in your mind into how they work together, it -is- nice to have access to all of them to see how fluid they feel, how nice they look, how convenient you find the keyboard settings, etc.

Of course it would! You achieved friendship and trust in getting someone to hand over that large sum (and honor in returning it).

I got my Golden in the first few months thanks to a wonderful guildmate. I wanted it not to show wealth, but because it is the most perfect title of those available for my golden boy main character. He’s so shiny -grins- I myself have not gotten beyond 25 gold on one character, as I actually spend money once I feel I have enough.

1) Get a Transmutation Crystal. One for each piece of armor or weaponry you want to transmute. Have the crystals in your inventory.

2) Put the stats item and the looks item in your inventory.

3) Double click the crystal. You will get a popup window. Drag the two items into it (some people say to make sure the appearance one is on the left side due to possible bugs). You will get three sections in the window for each item.

4) Click on the name of the appearance item, it will woosh to the center. Click on the list of stats from the stats armor. Woosh! If there is an upgrade you want from one or the other, click on that. Woosh! You will see what the new item will be.

5) Click Accept (or Transmute or whatever the button at the bottom is called.

You will now have one item with the Tier 2 look and the exotic stats. All the stats come in a lump when you do this.

The reason to use a crystal rather than a stone is that you must use crystals if either of your items is level 80. If both are under 80, use a stone.

I spent 7 years in WoW, mostly doing cloth casters. I was sure I wouldn’t like Guardian because Paladin never did much for me. It turns out she’s my fave for dungeons and general survivability. You should give each profession a go here, they have very different feels from their WoW analogues. And no matter what you’re playing, make sure to dodge attacks, strafe, kite, move around. Learn your weapon swaps and use them freely.

A Warrior will be a good straight up learning experience for the game mechanics, as others suggest. Every profession has basic competence and then has superlative play possible, and though each one tends to different mechanics the overall idea of meshing your skills, dodging, using skills when appropriate rather than spamming them, and reacting to the situation instead of doing a rotation — all that will serve you well and make additional professions that much easier to figure out as you pick them up.

Sorry, terrible grammar, it’s past bedtime and I’m not crafting my words that well. Do some test runs on various professions with various races, see what feels fun and keep on doing the fun one. You can always roll another character to try out the next thing!

I think those count as Risen, not Giants. I know the giant that attacks in south Diessa (at Nageling) does count. Getting 1,000 giants seems a years-long task for now.

All races can do all professions in lore. Perhaps your Norn is Snow Leopard, good at prowling. Also, “Thief” in GW2 isn’t necessarily a shadow hiding backstabbing assassin. It includes con men, swashbucklers, and the like.

Elementalist? I think that fits great, it gets you into the heart of natural things. As someone noted in another thread, ice/water are very Nornly attunement things.

Hex:

4 left arrow
5 down arrow
6 right arrow
3 up arrow
1 + 2 also up arrow, I think.

I really just use 4,5,6 for moving around in combat (and the two mouse buttons together to go forward). The keyboard is fine for firing off abilities, albeit a bit annoying on my Engineer since I keep wanting to swap kits and that’s a reach over to 7 8 9. I don’t bother with pushing the scroll wheel button or the two buttons behind it because I need my fingers on the left/right buttons all the time.

The Hex solved my can’t dodge/can’t strafe issues that plagued me in BWE1 (and strafing was always hard for me in WoW). It’s the perfect multi button mouse for me.

It’s not a bug. What you need to do is hover your mouse around the right edge of the minimap until you get a little hand icon. Click and drag all the way down to the lower right of the screen. When you see a white outline of a square down there, let go, and the map will move back where you want it.

It can be a real beast getting that hand icon, but it does eventually work.

I have an 80 of each and the Guardian is -way- more useful in dungeons. Which doesn’t mean Warriors aren’t handy and powerful, but I think learning how to do them well as support and keep them alive takes a steeper curve. At least, my Guardian has been very intuitive. Also, we ran a quick CM Butler path yesterday and happened to be 4 guardians and a warrior. The warrior fell down a heck of a lot more. I took my Guardian to Harathi to do events for the monthly and managed to solo a good number of centaur zergs. Not the big take back the camp from vets and champs one, but smaller ones with planting explosives and wrecking trebuchets, and I barely went down and never got defeated.

Both of my heavies are in exotics, I’ve played both extensively, and the Guardian gives me more variety and durability by far.

Also, this may be obvious, but don’t just tap W. Hold it down. GW2 jumping gives you midair steering and movement (so funky!) which means that if you let go of your forward motion, you plummet straight down. This is good for jumping onto narrow pillars, as you can let go when over them rather than trying to figure your jump speed from the start.

I mouse move, so I’m holding down both buttons to go forward as I tap the space bar; this lets me steer if I need to shift my angle a little or jump around a corner. Killed me in Clock Tower, though, I kept running out of mouse pad due to all the motion being to the right …

I had a friend mail me 200 gold in the first month or two of the game, I got Golden, and mailed it right back. We were in a guild, guild chat was full of me thanking her, and nothing happened.

They may have altered their reaction to it since then, but back then all was fine.

I take it you don’t have the book back piece from the Mad King That is my go to for light.

I don’t know for a fact that he’s up at this moment but he’s almost always up on Tarnished Coast. At least, I’ve never had an issue buying from him. I thought they fixed things so Arah was nearly always available? Or is that just for entering the dungeon?

You can whisper and mail cross servers, you can join dungeons cross servers, and the Trading Post is game-wide.

The whispers go to the game name. I find it easiest to click the portrait or the name in chat or guild panels and select Whisper, rather than trying to type out the names people have come up with.

I used Duilfy’s guide, which lists level of difficulty, how to get to and through, has screenshots and videos. I did a bunch I never had before and it was fun!

Have you not only entered the home instance but run all the way to the back end of it? I don’t think you get credit for just peeking in the door.

The only time it’s happened to me in recent memory I was able to add one letter while still preserving the name’s nuances. So “Altdrag Splitstack” became “Altdragg Splitstack.” The double g almost feels more Nornly, even.

I did make sure to leap into the early access the moment it opened and create my then five characters with planned names without even picking race and profession, just skipping to end and jamming in the name so I could later delete at my leisure and make them properly. That mattered most for my one-word characters, my Sylvari and Asura.

I’ve either been lucky or creative. I’ve never had issues getting a character name I liked in any MMO. I think the toughest one was naming my Worgen Rogue in WoW as from a long list of British first names I wanted almost all were taken, but I still ended up with a fine one. It’s a matter of getting more of a flavor of name in your mind than feeling locked into just one variant. Then you get something that fits the genre of the game and of the specific race/culture, and usually you’re the only one named that so people get to know you as you.

Have you checked http://gw2.mmorpg-life.com/interactive-maps/ ? I used that getting my world completion and it guided me to everything in every zone. That was before the new WP’s got added, though, so it could be missing something you need.

A guildie got the greatsword and swooshed it around near me. I only heard some swoosh sounds, nothing lightsaberish. It’s possible you hear your own weapons a lot more, because he was enthusing far too much over the sounds for the subtle woosh I could hear.

Josh Foreman.8250:

I’m not going to make ANY promises. Developing a AAA MMO with a constant stream of free content is new territory. There are no guarantees. But I can say that it is fully my INTENTION to release new worlds and weapon skins. Our team is part of Living World now, so we will be developing more content. I simply can’t make any promises about what it will be because we have to make decisions that are best for GW2 as a whole.

Understanding that no promises can be made, can you at least say how likely it is at this time that any new skins would use the bauble bauble currency, and will the current skins remain available later? I’m happy to hold onto my currency for a long time if I’ll get a fuller choice later, but would mope a great deal if it became useless because I didn’t spend it on the current crop of skins.

The only change I see is that in the third tab you can’t get a singleton continue coin now. Though in tab 2 the stack of 5 coints only cost 1 bauble bauble, is that different?

Given that we can expect more skins to come out down the line, I’d say this just gives us more time to collect the bauble baubles needed. Not that my thief or engineer would ICly use -any- of the skins. I’m hopeful the daggers will look cool enough to suit my necromancer. Meanwhile, I’ll enjoy the content and not worry about buying any goodies until either more are out to choose from or we get a heads up that the vendor’s going away.

ANet -will- warn us of that? Right? (I’d assumed it was only during April but if they are keeping the content growing over months, maybe not).

I’m having such a blast. In fact, I got so involved in the Box that I totally forgot to watch Game of Thrones, which I’d meant to watch live as it premiered. I’m not a great jumper (never did finish Clocktower in hours of attempts) but this one is thus far within my skills and has so many little tidbits of laughter. Like the tapdancing spider. I had to ask my teammate if he saw it.

You guys understand how to make things fun. -cheers you all-

Oh my goodness. Good thing I am enjoying the heck out of the Box! I’ll keep hoping when I get to chests.

If you cannot sell them, how are they on the TP? I haven’t actually looked at how they bind yet because I’m nowhere near buying one so far and am not sure which one(s) I want for which characters.

There’s no dagger either. I am sad, as my necro would do a dagger like that. The scepter suits my asura mesmer, too. Otherwise, much though I like the skins, I have no one to use them.

The Box is open on Tarnished Coast. I’m in RP so I can’t go check it out yet. I have no coins, anyway, so I’m hoping they aren’t required.

Not that I want to play GW1, in fact I specifically chose not to in advance of GW2, but I will note the laurels cat has a costume on. The GW1 cat looks normal.

So far there is not a way to do that and many people are glad because they don’t want elitist idiots denying them a dungeon group based on preconceptions.

Gimmethegepgun hit the thing that would be most wrong with this: the time investment each day. Despite my great interest in not grinding, I find myself working to do the daily even though I don’t particularly need anything the laurels will buy. I have 7 alts. I don’t want to do the daily 7 times a day or get forced to do it with a specific character, I want to do it once with whatever character is best suited to the task (eg thief for dodging) and pick which alt gets stuff.

In fact, I’d be more up for it moving to a weekly system where you can do the daily 7 times any time in the week, as others have suggested, so it can be knocked out when convenient.

In term of “saving zillions of gold” the things you have to collect to make them aren’t cheap or plentiful. While I’m sure some people are posting them on the TP at a hefty profit, I wouldn’t call the posted prices outrageous. I’m frankly amazed anyone has legendaries at all yet; several people in my guild are trying for them and even with donations of mats from the rest of us they’re not very close. So the posted price reflects saving yourself a LOT of time, in some ways. Legendaries were meant to take a year to make.

It’s not unique to these instances. I pretty much always have to relog or pay WP costs to leave a place. A guildie today said it’s because if you’ve finished the PS in an instance you no longer get an exit, which would explain why Salma traps me every time, as does Eir’s place.

It was extra annoying today when I couldn’t leave Knut’s place and the only WP in the whole world I could use was the upper trade wp in Hoelbrak. No others appeared on my map. I wanted to go to Dolyak Pass and had to double WP to do it.

My husband gave it to me for Christmas. I looked through it a bit, as I have a coworker whose group of friends wrote it, but there didn’t seem to be anything there I hadn’t already learned by playing the game through beta and since launch. It is pretty, though.

I suggest simply playing the game and asking in mapchat or in these forums (or finding a helpful guild) to aid you in the fine details.

I would be so happy to help with this … but I think the only tradeable mini I even have right now is the jungle stalker, which is cheap enough I’d imagine you have it. Despite being a completionist in such things, minis haven’t grabbed me because 1) I can’t afford a big enough invisible bag to replace my regular bag, so they just end up in the bank and 2) I have trouble RPing a “puppet” be it a pet, a child, or an NPC, so the mini would just be some random thing standing around for no reason.

Anyway, send me an in game mail and I’ll check what I have to see if it will count for you.

I’ve mastered none of them, so I’m not sure. No one profession can use all three anyway, you’ll need at least two.

For training the weapons, try the lake east of the Shaemoor Garrison. Tons of low level drakes and barracudas. Just don’t go while the daily is aquatic kills, you’ll have competition. A little higher level, you can go to Triskel Quay for krait, thundershrimp, and some hermit crabs.

This happened to me last night, I had to carefully mouse over the right edge until a hand icon appeared, then drag all the way down to make the lower right white border appear and release the mouse inside that border.

They stated in the patch notes that all three parts are still available. You will get less of a sense of developing story if you are simultaneously aiding refugees fleeing a mysterious thing and fighting that mysterious thing in events at portals, but you can do it.

Your clarification is correct. I don’t know if it would block me from FPS as I have never had the twitch reflexes to enjoy that sort of gaming experience anyway, so I don’t play them. I -did- find it difficult to play WoW with it, the one time I went back to play post GW2 launch, but I think I just in general had developed GW2 reflexes and would have been stymied by WoW’s mechanics regardless.

It works just fine for web browsing, Peggle, and GW2, those being my prime computer activities. For GW2, it greatly enhances my experience. It is possible settings could be changed to improve it for FPS; I happen to like large cursor movement from small mouse motion so I use perhaps 7" width of my mouse pad. (one reason the Clocktower chewed me up so badly, I kept running out of pad from the constant right motion). Maybe I’d have finer control if I needed grosser movement for tiny cursor flicks.

-boggles- I have to be online to use my HEX? That’s news to me. It certainly works before I open any browsers. Now, I don’t swap its settings around, so maybe that needs a connection to the RAZER site, I have no idea. The only issue I have with it is that I have to manually correct mouse scroll from 30 lines to 3 lines every time I boot my machine, though that might be from my old ABYSSUS driver as I still have the latter mouse hooked in as well.

I love the HEX for GW2. It’s a little clunky for more precise movement (hence my keeping the lighter weight mouse ready to hand). For instance, there’s a minesweeper like game I like to play, and I cannot speedily move to and click the tiny squares with the HEX. For GW2 it’s awesome. I couldn’t effectively dodge without it — I bought it after BWE1 because of that issue.

Among all the other changes, they added preview of TP items, moved hip items out to reduce clipping, and you can preview wielded weapons or just the weapons themselves. It’s not a huge gameplay change but sure helps quality of life.

As Danikat said, you can only swap the two sets you have equipped. There have been suggestion threads about being able to create more alternate sets, or at least to let Elementalists (and Engineers, no doubt) have the ` key work when out of combat. I have noticed that the ` works to swap from a world-object or kit back to personal weapons on my Engineer, btw.

For now, if you want a fast swap to focus, it needs to be equipped in your alternate set.

Agreed. Once a character is leveled enough to have a lot of stuff, I never bother with the hero equipment panel. Instead I keep my swap-out gear in a specific location in my bags and get it from there.

No one seems to have answered the “Temper” part. There is almost no noticeable effect except in how NPC’s react to you. My totally charismatic thief gets comments like “You seem friendly.” And my quite ferocious warrior gets the option of shoving a man off a diving board into a lake, kerSPLOOSH, which was one of the funniest game moments ever for me. It doesn’t affect your Personal Story outcome, however, or in any way block/open any part of the game beyond those little flavor moments.

I’d have to go to the vendor to be sure but plugging in the links to the Whispers sets my preview shows the wierd red inclusions in the Medium set but no such effect in the Light or Heavy ones.