Guild Wars 2

The only way to min/max your way to an optimal build is to run extensive simulations and compare results. A simple analysis just doesn’t work. To explain:

+Power might, by the numbers, give a better gain than +Condition damage. However, this is limited by your ability to swing and hit the target. If you are being kited, condition damage from that occasional hit you manage to land might be significantly more.

Conversely, in an environment where conditions are being stacked up the wazoo, power most likely would be the better choice since a target that is already burning until dead and at 25 bleeds won’t take any more damage from your contribution.

+Critical damage might work well if you have a high-precision build, which also works well with on-crit effects. But this is further complicated by stacking of effects, ability to land hits, survivability, etc.

Spike vs. steady damage is also a factor and the relevance varies based on what you are fighting.

The only advice I can really give (and the advice I follow myself) is that you need to look at what skills are successful and build synergy from that. Be aware of how much defensive capability you need and maintain that as well. If you need two sets of armor for two separate situations, then always bring a spare set. No one solution is always right. Over-specialization is posible.

A friend and I both run near-identical warrior builds. Our gear and playstyles are completely different, but we manage to run neck-and-neck most of the time, since we’ve matched our gear to our playstyle.

In short, experiment, and use what you find works best.

What content have you been trying? If PvE is not to your tastes, perhaps you might want to try PvP. With all your skills and skill slots unlocked, the basic gameplay is much more enjoyable, and you get a taste of what you’re heading towards in PvE—a carrot to chase, so to speak.

Failing that, perhaps a little information about the type of gameplay you are looking for—what is fun to you—would help us make recommendations.

I have completed it but am unable to get to my computer to take a screenshot at the moment… But the wiki already has one, so I don’t have to.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/e/e4/Brisban_Wildlands_map.jpg

Just to clarify, what happened to me the other night was:

1. I had just found a rifle on my warrior, so I decided to swap to it to unlock the skills.
2. I equipped it and set up auto-attack on skill 1.
3. I clicked on a target in range.
4. I explicitly had to press 1 to start attcking.
5. As soon as the target was dead, my character automatically re-targeted another creature—one that was just standing around, idle—and proceeded to shoot it, too.
6. As soon as the new character died, it re-targeted and started shooting again. And again. And again.
7. It only stopped when I weapon-swapped.

I have never seen this behavior before and, while I chalked it up to user error at first, I’m beginning to question that.

Sparkie.3465:

Similarly, malicious or bored players (or groups of players) would be able to game the system.

There are guilds dedicated to manipulation of the TP and currency exchange. I’ve seen them advertising on the forums and their intended activities are not bannable. Be happy these protections exist.

My undertanding (and this is based on what I’ve been told, not my own research) is that similar effects tend to share a cooldown. Furthermore, the main-hand weapon is checked for a proc and, if it procs, the off-hand is not checked, so you cannot have two procs on a single hit.

I expereinced this the other night with my warrior while I had a rifle out. I thought it was auto-attack/carelessness on my part (might still be just that) but it could be a bug with the warrior+rifle combination.

Gas up the mystery machine and restock on Garmy snacks, we have a mystery to solve!

My wife, kids, and I have all worked on jumping puzzles together. they aren’t always easy and the difficulty varies for each of us. The best advice I can come up with off the top of my head is…

• If you need to make a mostly vertical jump, jump straight up without any other movement first—sometimes you hit your head before getting the required height and need to find an alternate path.

• Line up your jumps as well as you can ahead of time using mouselook—if I know the camera and my character are lined up, I should land on something that is occluded by my character.

• You can move in any driection mid-jump to correct, you just need to be fast to catch the mistake.

• Swiftness makes you move faster in every direction—you don’t get any extra distance and it can be harder to make some jumps as you have less time to react.

• Don’t panic. Failure happens, and the moment you start getting emotional, you’re probably compromised your ability to to complete the next step.

• For many jumps, you can jump straight up and, at the peak, tap forwards to make it to the next platform. This reduces the risk of a huge overshoot of your target if you are mostly going up.

• Some jumps are just that difficult to make and repeated failure is the norm.

• If you play multiple races frequently, you will need to adjust your perceptions to make sure your expected jump distance is appropriate for the character you are currently playing (Norn might be able to leap one norn length, but an asura can leap 4 asura lengths, etc.).

• Walkthroughs are available online. If you can’t make a jump, it may, in fact, be impossible and actually be a decoy path.

• Most vistas don’t require many tricky jumps, just a litle rock climbing.

• Sometimes you just need to walk away from a puzzle to get a good camera angle to see what to do next.

Thats all I can think of right now, hope it helps.

Not enough time to put in a full post, so apologies in advance for hte tl/dr verion:

Large events feature multiple targets. If you are a condition damage build, maybe you need to pick a non-boss target to focus on. I can’t tall you how many people fight tequatl the sunless and don’t realize there are hundreds of adds over the course of that fight hitting the back lines.

In a dungeon setting, multiple condition builds don’t stack well. Neither do 5 AE damage specced elementalists. Balance is the key, and the more specialized you are, the less likely your build as a whole stacks. Thats just life.

In other content, it doesn’t matter. 25 bleeds in regular PvE in’t a big deal. WvW easily falls into either regular PvE or large events.

A cap of 25 bleeds might not be the right answer. Perhaps every person with a bleed effect on the target raises the cap by 5. I’m not suggesting the exact implementation is perfect, but removal of the cap doesn’t necessarily improve the state of the game either.

I wasn’t a big fan of GW1 dungeons. Learn the enemy skills, faceroll with heroes—it works almost everywhere with no effort (I made it to Kanaxai with just myself and 7 heroes, but firepower was lacking being down 4, so i left and returned adding my wife and kids, plus a hero). Seldom did I ever change from my standard team setup. Don’t get me wrong, I played the dungeons a lot and it was some good content, but after the initial learning curve, they were too easy to hold my attention.

GW2 dugneons have a lower margin of error, and a lot of people have trouble adjusting to this. The GW1 dungeons were difficult when they first launched, but as people learned how to best handle the challenges (key point here) and shared that information with others, the difficulty disappeared. The first time I made it to Urgoz took over 3 hours and featured 3 well-coordinated MMO veterans. I can not only make it to Urgoz, but beat him in under an hour in the company of my wife and kids using far less synergy, now that I know the dungeon. I fully expect I will find GW2 dungeons boring in a few months when more people figure out the tricks to use in each area—and at this time the “too hard” crowd will likely be content. Welcome to being a content pioneer.

Time is money. If you have time, you can save money. If you want things fast, it will cost you. This is the explanation for waypoint costs, and I think it holds its ground well.

Conversely, money is the reward for your time. The better your time is spent, the more you earn. Ideally, when you complete a dungeon, the reward will be based on your performance—a flawless run should obviously be worth more than a messy one. The problem with this is that if you defer the reward penalty to the end, at the first sign of trouble, people will leave because they know they will be docked upon completing it. Therefore, you suffer the penalty to your reward up front—in the form of repair costs—to give people the drive to complete the dungeon.

A lot of vocal people love the dungeons, and a lot of vocal people hate them. They are what they are, and if you don’t like that, then do not play them. This sends a stronger message than a “this game is broken” thread ever did and is more likely to result in the development of content that you will play—the old dungeons will still be there because many poeple love them, but you might get something new.

Also, there is a suggestion thread, where suggestions with descriptive names are given due attention. Here, it is just a rant.

If I remember the history right, back in BWE 1 drops were always level-appropriate. There was a serious problem with this that was brought up: If I get level-appropriate drops, I will not get drops that I can give to my lower-level friends, I will not get drops I can give to my alts, and I will not get crafting materials that I probably still need for myself (out-leveled content and going back to take up a new skill, get the last few points of it, etc.). This last one was the biggie.

So the change was made that some loot is level-appropriate to the player, the rest is scaled to the area.

As for coin rewards on DEs, the rewards scale with your level, but the baseline varies—DEs in low-level areas are fundamentally worth less than those in higher level areas.

If you do damage to an enemy, you do not necessarily get any credit towards loot, exp, or even completion. I do not know what the threshold is, but if you put a level 10 in Orr, AoEing in the big karma farming events (yes, I tried this), you will get a lot of hits for 1 but no credit towards anything. Even grouped with somebody that is participating fully and level appropriate, the elementalist gets nothing.

That said, any reasonable level of participation will be rewarded in all areas. When I group with my wife and kids, they do not get credit for kills they do not help with, and I do not get credit when I fail to participate in a kill. Event participation is a little trickier to determine, but follows similar rules—I have gotten gold failure for not killing a boss in time, when I never even tried to fight it, and gold success for an escort I didn’t help with.

Try a greatsword on a guardian—theres some nice AE potential there. You might want to hold off a moment until you see the seal (skill #2 on guardian greatsword) hit the ground. Skill #4 within range of #2 grants retaliation—nice if you are AEing.

I’ve observed that each participatign guild member generates 4 influence when 2 are participating in the same event (influence is 2 when solo). Since, most of the time, we see things like “4 guild members generated 148 influence from 23 events” in our log, tracking the exact contribution, participation in individual events, etc. is difficult.

I seem to recall that 3 people in 1 event generated 18 influence, but I might be remembering wrong.

Tharjax.9068:

If anyone here are god-like at programming then give ANet your resume and you can show them how it’s done….if not just be patient and know they will fix it.

My coworkers tell me I am and I did—but I didn’t give the appliction the effort it really deserved (I have a life, after all, and I can’t brush off my kids or current employer) and was ultimately rejected.

But that aside, I make mistakes. Typically broken features result from unforeseen circumstances, not shoddy work.

All things considered, they’re doing (have done) a great job and responding as fast as they responsibly can (rushed fixes are seldom the right ones).

Story mode is completely PuG-able; that is effectively what we did and the point I wanted to make. The attitudes of the players, builds, and coordination between attempt #1 and attempt #2 were the difference between catastrophic failure and success.

With a little more preparation, we could have avoided even more hardship—two guardians in the group and neither had any stability skills equipped. I did it once without—I know better for next time.

There were no untelegraphed one-shots. Stability skills would have solved the knockdown issue—but even lacking stability, we still did it.

I may have called in two guildmates (friend and son) but there was no special coordination between us. No voice chat (my son was in the same room but I didn’t say much to him during the run, just a couple directions so he didn’t get lost). No build synergies—the warrior specced the way he wanted, I specced how I wanted, my son specced to his tastes. Three completely arbitrary and uncoordinated builds.

The cost to repair armor is based on level/how many/which pieces are broken. Repairing one at a time or all at once costs the same. Also, a back slot item makes for 7 breakables.

Rack’s experience and opinions are not representative of everyone’s.

• I have not had to do a single jumping puzzle as part of my personal story. Admittedly, I’m only around level 60 on that.
• Elites are not panic butons; most lack the strength to function in that capacity. They do, however, allow you to bring a skill to the table that can tip the balance in your favor.
• I have not noticed a change in the aggro range of enemies. I can confirm that a large level difference increases the range, and if you are in harder content, you will aggro from further away (I had a level 8 elementalist almost make it to Orr). As enemies in higher level areas tend to close the level gap, yes, they seem to aggro from farther away, but really it is the same as it would be in a lower level area.
• Dungeons are not awful, your experiecnes there, however, may have been. Considering they ask players to bring their all to the table, your general dissatisification with the game lends me to believe you didn’t bring your A-game to the table.
• Zones are still beautiful and intricate. Orr isn’t exactly as picturesque as Caledon forest, but there is a good reason for that.
• Cost does scale, but it is not an insurmountable hurdle. Being dissuaded from waypoint-hopping actually increases your exposure to exp-yielding content. Jumping to a place you really need to be is no big deal.
• It doesn’t really take any longer to level up. The exp requirement rises with level, but the rewards for all exp-yielding actions do too. It will take longer if you stay in content that you have out-leveled, since those areas have lower rewards in general. Stay with current content and it really isn’t noticable.

As to the OP’s questions:
It is hard for me to say because the last time I really leveled, the zones were more popular than they are now. More people emans tougher enemies, means more bonus exp, to say nothing on what can happen to DE reset rates and the like. There were also many bugged events, so it may have been a zero-sum affair; I really don’t know.

100%ing an area is a nice boost. Complete your dailies, that is important—make sure you get them all. If you just need one more kill type to complete them ll, it is worth finding something to kill (don’t forget critters—just because they didn’t do anything to you, doesn’t mean they can’t do something for you).
The amount of exp you get for a kill increases with the level of the enemy you kill.
While 100%ing a map is nice, if your goal is to jsut level, the bonus is probably not worth it. Going out of your way in an area that you have out-leveled for a PoI, Skill Challenge, or Vista will likely yield less experience than focusing on content that is your level to your level+2.

Crafting can be a nice boost, too, especially when you hit a rough patch in finding content. I often start out with cooking as a profession and change to something I plan to use for the long haul after the first 50-100 points. There are guides for leveling 1-80 using just crafting (note: this is not cheap).

At any point in time, there should be several zones where you can find level-appropriate enemies, so you shouldn’t ever run out.

Preface: I work at least a 40-hour week. I have 3 children, my wife works very long weekends and, during this time, I am of course tasked with watching our 2-year-old. In my spare time I am learning to play the bowed psaltry and sculpt. So, I have a life, and preserving my life has been very important to me while I play.

When I 100%ed the level 80 orr zone, I received 2 exotics. One was a sword, which I currently use, the other was a pistol which I salvaged for ecto.

I’m an armorsmith/JC, so I can craft everything except weapons for myself (which made that sword a particularly lucky find). I have not looted any exotics and have had very bad luck looting 70-80 rares (I think 3 total).

I have 5 crafted peices of exotic armor and an exotic ring, each costing 5 ectos. I needed another 3 ectos to get my JC to 400. I’m pretty poor (I tend to have under 1g) but do have a large stockpile of materials. I am 3 ectos and a little gossamer away from my 6th piece.

Of the 33 ectos I have consumed for crafting, 8 were from the TP, the remainder salvaged. I use the gold salvage kits on crafted level 80 rares. These cost ~20s to craft (and I have a lot of the material for them on hand already) and, on the average, have yielded more than 1 ecto each.

Orihalcum and Gossamer I have had to purchase more often than not—I salvage what I can, but I have needed to supplement quite often.

I haven’t priced the completed armor, but I do know a friend of mine bought an armor pack off the TP for his full set (hes an armorsmith, so the cost to buy the kit couldn’t have been too bad relative to the cost of crafting, which is often in the 2g/piece range).

It probably isn’t what you are looking for, but have you looked at the Seraph-Issue gear? I believe it is from karma merchants in the human 15-25 zone.

The experience described sounds similar to my first failed run. But then we replaced two quitters and tried again.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/CM-My-first-dungeon-and-bankruptcy-from-repairs

The results may surprise you.

I think this was an issue during BWE1 where people were effectively perma-dead, and it was corrected by BWE2.

Nkuvu.2570:

[F]or Sylvari, the single most common heart to overlook is the Ogham Wilds heart.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Caledon forest, first for my characters, then later with my wife and kids. People are always looking for one last heart, and this is almost always it. I want to say that 95% of the time, it is this heart, the other 5% is the small nightmare court outpost on the east side, near the skill challenge.

I see far more credibility in the idea that the world is subject to cycles of spitting out new races—elder dragons were firstborn of a previous cycle, the human gods firstborns of another, and so on.

The pale tree’s seed predates the transformation of the dwarves, so it is less liekly to be a reaction to that event, but that is another theory I’ve heard, too.

Then there is the wild theory that the human gods created everything, and the dragons were a failed creation, while they sylvari are creations of Melandru.

Want something more abstract? The sentient races are the embodiment of order, the dragons of chaos, and the races are simply these primordial forces given form.

The bottom line is that nothing means anything until ArenaNet says it does, and even then, it could just be misinformation—the perceptions of the imperfect characters of the world being communicated to the players. For a long time, Glint was not a minion, Kralkatorik was a hill, and primordius was a statue. A slight change to narrative, and these things would not have changed. The only way we will have anything but crazy theories is to wait and find out what happens next.

Edit: Fixed typos; i really need to Preview more.

You can hop over to the other zones whenever you want. But you don’t really have to.

If you hang out at level-appropriate content, you’re bound to find an event or two to participate in. Couple those with completing your daily achievements and you’re bound to get a level or two in no time.

If time doesn’t permit completing your dailies, that is understandable, in which case I would still advocate hanging out in a 17-ish area and looking for events while killing the local baddies and gathering crafting materials. But, if time does permit, make sure you hit all the dailies—60 kills, 15 types of enemy, 15 gathers, and 5 events, as I recall.

My understanding is that these items are not stacks of items, they are single items with charges remaining—a minor distinction, but one that means you cannot combine them.

I play a warrior in PvP, so I’d like to toss in my 2 copper.

I run a sword/horn build with a longbow on weapon swap. I can’t recall the name, but I have a stomp utility that knocks players back, “fear me”, and I’ve been dabbling with changing my other utility, so I can’t recall what it is currently set to. I use the banner for my elite.

I don’t PvP a lot, but I have a 67% win rate when I do. It may not be perfect, but for random matchups (and that accursed autobalance) I consider anything over 50% to be decent (ignoring the people that quit while losing—I will fight to the bitter end, regardless of which side I am on).

I can kill or be killed by any class. Mesmers can be a little tougher than others sometimes, but this is where the smartness comes into play. You can usually tell which is the real one by watching how they move and act. If an engineer (or anyone) knocks you back, just close the gap and kill or, better yet, evade the knockback and cripple them. Also, don’t forget that you have a team. If the mesmer is attacking you, they are not attacking the elementalist that is blasting the kitten out of them.

I’m even going to share my secret for having a winning rate as a rather crappy PvPer (I’m under no illusions as to my actual skill level—I’m bad), and this works for all classes. In PvP your goal is to score 500 points. The enemy’s gate is down, so to speak (if you don’t get the reference, don’t worry, just accept that it is a literary reference and move on). To do this, you need to capture and hold objectives. This is not a deathmatch. Killing other people is helpful, but if you want to win and, therefore, be of service to your team, it is all about the points.

It is more constructive for you to delay the other team for a minute while your team is up 2-1 and die than it is for you to get a single kill. Your personal glory may not be as high this way, but if you want to win, it is a team game, not a solo event.

Getting to objectives first is more useful than killing someone that beat you there. They are winning the game while you fight them and re-capture the objective.

Keeping opposing players from capturing objectives is more useful than the simple act of killing them—when most people die, they run to either the location of most of their team, or they capture an objective that is undefended—a stalled player, however, does not support their team and does not take an objective. Multiple stalled players are even less useful to their team—if you can keep three people at bay, just think about how much easier the rest of your team can run the map.

If you can stall the other team long enough for reinforcements to arrive to support you, then you get the best of both worlds. Stomp them, fear them, kite them—do what you can to get them outside the capture area and then you fight them… while you’re standing inside it.

You can change what channels are displayed and in which tab—I suppose it is possible that you have /map turned off, but as this is not something I’ve fiddled with, I can’t offer any advice on the order of “click here, then here, then here to change the configuration”

1) Yes, there is an advantage, but a fight could go either way, depending on build, player skill, and so on.

2) I believe groups are limited to 5, but a squad can grow larger. I’m not a WvW fan, so I’m not sure about this.

3) I believe anyone can pick up and move the orb. There is no official decision, as far as I know, jsut what people decide to do and support.

4) Several recipies call for them, most likely more than have been discovered. The wiki probably has more info than I do.

5) The wiki will likely help, but the TP, crafting, and karma vendors (42k/piece, available at Pact-controlled temples in Orr) are the most common places to go.

I’ve only used armor I’ve found or crafted. From time to time, I picked up a piece that was a major upgrade from a karma vendor, but I’ve never gone out of my way to acquire an upgrade.

Most of the karma-purchased gear was weapons—I am an armorsmith/jeweler, so weapons were the only parts I needed to craft.

Crafting, you’ll have an upgrade every 5-10 levels.

I think Daboris is on to something…

My son views guardian as a damage-dealing whirlwind (he loves his greatsword). He has some decent utilities but doesn’t use them often. He has a very damage-centric build.

The warrior involved is a tank. That is all he ever specs, in any game. This didn’t stop him from being killed in 5 seconds in one pull gone wrong, but he specs tank, not glass cannon.

At the time, I was specced tank/support. It was a blind-heavy build, with protection and regen for all. In retrospect, I should have swapped to some stability skills.

I have no idea how the elementalist and thief were traited.

I often play a support role, my friend often plays a tank role and, while everyone has shared responsbility for all the roles, we probably found a nice balance of everything that last time.

That said, I see no reason why the same feat could not have been performed by Thief / Guardian / Necromancer / Elementalist / Engineer.

What both sides of this “discussion” need to understand is that there are two very different groups that are meeting in the same game, with conflicting experiences and expectations.

Veterans of GW1 are used to the notion that full-party wipe means restarting from the beginning. Also, it means you’re out an entry fee to the dungeon. We’re used to the idea that not everybody does everything, or has the ability to do everything, and we’re fine with that (for a long time, access to two elite PvE dungeons was restricted to one guild alliance each, determined by largely PvP-oriented efforts). When you do accomplish something, however, you have a way of showing this to the world. Prestige armor, titles… there was a way to show the world that you worked hard, and after months of dedicated effort, reached a goal. I’m in this camp.

Then you have the players migrating from “more traditional” MMOs. Most people don’t remember life before WoW, so that is what I will reference. Dungeons are mandatory. A long time ago, they were the source of “good” gear. Not “great,” just “good.” Then something changed. Dungeons were made more accessible to everybody, and formed a sort of progression. After reaching the cap, this is what we were expected to do to get upgrades. Because we were expected to do it, it had to be within the reach of the casual, unorganized players. Players returning from canceled accounts also had to be accomodated—we needed a leg-up in getting back into the current content. The end result was that dungeons were a chore (chore meaning it is the result and not the process that is important), and the rewards important. I’m in this camp, too.

The middle ground that GW2 reached is that dungeons are hard. That is how they are meant to be. If you want casual content for your friends, form a group and do DEs—I do it with my family all the time. Dungeons are harder, but you don’t get any better gear from them. These are GW1-style dungeons, with concessions to WoW-style plyers (waypoints, chance to recover from a wipe, etc.). I remember fighting to the very end of a GW1 dungeon, only to realize that I had forgotten to bring a certain skill. Back out to the beginning we go. This was not a hardship; this was the price of carelessness.

Just because it is not what you wanted, does not mean it is bad at being what it is. And just because it is what you wanted, does not mean that others should not expect their desires to be met by the content.

I’ve followed GW2 news for a long time; I knew what to expect in dungeons for a long time, and it excited me. A lot of people coming to GW2 have not and default to expectations based on prior experiences.

e have very different communities merged together here—to some PvPers, “gg” is a sign of respect for one’s opponents in a well-fought battle, regardless of the outcome. To others, it is a taunt for a bested opponent.

I hope to one day obtain a legendary, but I don’t know that I will ever make it. If I don’t, it just means that the legendaries that other people have mean that much more—these are people that have endured a rite of passage, put in time and effort, and walked away with a reward. And it won’t affect my ability to enjoy the game, because I still have a goal to work towards, and there is no functional difference between their character and mine. It is that last part that makes the system work: that excessively rare gear is no better than an exotic that can be crafted for ~2g in materials. It is a title.

It confirmed what I’ve suspected for a long time: the people that complain about the insane difficulty* are primarily whiners that want handouts—they have preconceived notions of what rewards one should obtain for completing dungeons, but do not want to actully be bothered by that pesky content that is the dungeon.

*Obviously my very limited experience does not extend to Explorable mode or other dungeons. I accept that there are legitimate balance issues that are likely to be out there, and the content that I experienced was fairly easy on the grand scale. I am not dismissing all complints outright. However, I have heard people claim that the first boss in CM story mode is impossible without a graveyard zerg or a highly-synergized team of 80s in full exotics. As is often the case, the middle ground seems to be more accurate than the extremes.

This is not a rant thread, it actually ends on a happy note. I just want to make that clear now.

Also, this post contains many minor spoilers. I’m not trying to spoil the plot, but I do have to mention basic information about the layout and enemies you face in Caudecus’ (sp?) Manor.

I’m a Sylvari guardian. Level 80. I have 3 kids, the youngest being 2. I find time to play when I should be doing other, more important things, but I have difficulty committing to something like a dungeon. With a toddler, I have to run AFK frequently, and this is something I just have to accept, yet I feel it is unfair for me to impose this on a group of random strangers. Yesterday, I happened to be near CM at the same time that the little one fell asleep for her afternoon nap… and a group was looking for more for story mode. It doesn’t get much better than that right? Fate was telling me to go, I had to leap at the opportunity.

The group fills up and we set in. Most of us haven’t been here before, but at least one has.

During the first boss I am downed once, but not killed. Others are not so lucky. Why was I downed? I took a rocket barrage to the face while helping the rest of the group get back on their feet. Again. This wasn’t the first time; I had spent most of that fight helping people get back up, noting at one point that I was the only non-downed player.

I died during the second boss. I died several times to the zerg rush of sepratists that followed. I stayed up until just before the exit from the tunnel, where we all died.

Total cost to repair: 16s
Total cash on hand: 11s

The engineer leaves the party.
The necromancer (also group organizer) leaves the party.

I have broken armor and cannot afford to take a waypoint out of here. I wilt a little on the inside.

At this point, we talk amongst ourselves. We’re not done, lets get 2 more and keep going. A warrior friend of mine (that has done the dungeon) comes online and asks if I’d want to run it again with him after we’re done. I invite him to join us and he accepts.

We need one more, but can only find pairs. The 35 Thief offers to leave, being under-leveled for the dungeon. We tell her to stay, since she didn’t wimp out and had been giving it her all—we respect that and would rather keep her than take a chance on somebody else. At this point I mention that I may have a solution, but it might not be a good one. My warrior friend knows what I am thinking and responds with a firm ‘no.’ In guildchat I promise to pay his repair bills if this goes poorly. He relents, and I explain the idea to the group. My son (age 12) has a low-40s guardian. He isn’t a great player, but he will try hard—he might not get it right, but he will try. They agree. I have no idea how this will go or how I will pay for two repair bills.

We restart the dungeon. Fast forward to the end: we talked more this time, setting up some basic strategy. My friend called out what we should know and we focused on marked targets. My son died a few times, as did other people. I think everybody had at least one death but I don’t think anyone had more than 3. Mistakes were made all around, but we never had a full wipe—we always recovered. It was pretty smooth. I made back enough money to do a full repair and travel to Orr, my son got to do his first non-trivial content (in any game), and I finally got to do a GW2 dungeon. We were all happy.

Moral of the story: You don’t need a lot of skill or over-powered group members, just a little leadership, clear communication, and hard work.

I have a wife and 3 kids. I work long hours during the week and have to watch the 2-year-old on weekends while my wife works. I try to play as much as I can, and so far I’ve managed about 150 hours since the headstart weekend. This isn’t a lot (average of 5 hours/day is more than some can do, but a lot less than the people that chase the grind)—that was a week of game time in college. I haven’t been grinding, I hoard more than I sell on the TP. Lets look at where I stand relative to a legendary:

I have 6 exotics, 1 was a drop, 5 crafted. I’ve consumed 25 ectos while making gear to wear, and 4 more while leveling JC. I have a couple in the bank. This means I’ve acquired about 30 ectos. This is 12% of a stack.

I have about 45k karma. I’ve spent several thousand on recipies. This is about 8% of the karma goal.

While making my armor I’ve consumed 20 t6 materials, and have about 30 more in the bank. This is 10% of the 2-stack requirement.

I’ve explored approximately 50% of the world.

I expect that I’ll have a legendary somewhere around 1500-2000 hours played. I don’t plan to grind, just stockpile resources like I have been and get it eventually. When I do finally equip it, I’m not going to think back on days of karma farming, or running around zones with a pickaxe, I’m going to think about the places I explored with my family (they play too, time permitting). I’m going to think about the people I met running dungeons, the friends I’ve made, and how I’ve enjoyed relaxing in such a well-crafted world for the past year(s) of my life. I intend to help my wife, children, and close friends create theirs as well—simply by playing the game with them. Everything you do moves you closer, all you have to do is set a goal and allocate resources to reach it.

I beleive there is a difference, but I’d want to try them on to verify that. You can always go to Lion’s Arch and preview them to see if there is a difference and which you like more.

The bonus from the runes is only applied once, not per-piece.

If you have more than 2 minor runes or more than 4 major runes (of the same type), you get no additional bonus.

I have 5 exotics now and average 1/day. I craft my own and get the materials from spending ~30 minutes in Orr. It is not a significant upgrade over my rares. I wouldn’t say that I "[repeat the] same thing over and over again," I just spend 30 minutes doing whatever events are active while hunting ore and other nodes.

Plying the game is what you make it--if you have a goal, you will have to work towards it. If you want to reach it sooner instead of later, you will need to find an efficient path and repeat it to maximize gain/time. If you’re not in a hurry, it is just cumulative progress as you do what you want. Eventually you’ll get there.

The only way I know involves Rytlock, an Asura, and a lot of dwarven ale. Sorry.

Hopefully a GM can help with this.

I’d like to second Ranger. It souns like the bet fit for what you described, but I could see engineer, elementalist, and necromancer filling that role too.

I’m also going to second unlearning what you have learned. Quick run-down of why:

In EQ, only the chosen few could kite. This is not the case in GW2. Everyone can, even warriors—even guardiancs, and they have the worst ranged damage capabilities.

In EQ, soloing was similarly restricted to a few classes. In WoW, soling was possible by all classes, but only when using certain builds. In GW2, these things don’t matter—you can solo as any class, as any build.

The “end game” notion goes back a long ways, when players ran out of things to do to challenge themselves at the level cap. EQ added massive quests and endless farming of world raid zones, relying on a trickle-down effect to spread the player base over the last several expansions of content. WoW added a series of dungeons and a gear treadmill that was designed to be available to everybody. GW2 doesn’t work this way. Do you like dungeons? You can start them at level 30 (when you unlock your last skill slot). Do you like killing world bosses in massive raids? Your tutorial will end with one (it is a tutorial, so don’t expect a significant challenge) and most zones have a nice boss fight in them (even at 80, I go out of my way to fight the wurm boss in Caledon forest when he is up).
In other MMOs, there was a different game that you played at the level cap—having endured the rite of passage that was grinding levels, you were allowed to play the fun game. That philosophy is the exact opposite of GW2’s. When you take your decked-out 80 and start going to PvP, you’ll find yourself on equal footing with a fresh-from-the-tutorial new player, because PvP is a completely separate branch of the game. You don’t even get to bring your gear in with you, there is a separate set of PvP armor to level the playing field. In WoW I used to love Deadmines, and hated when I leveled so much that it was too easy to be fun. Thanks to downscaling your level, while you might get stronger, content is always difficult enough to pose enough of a challenge to be fun, and thanks to loot scaling, you will get level-appropriate rewards no matter what content you choose to do. You’re not roped into following a developer’s concept of progress, you’re simply invited to have fun, at whatever pace you want, doing the type of content you want.

I remember hearing that the current record for making it to 80 was 21 hours. I can believe this. In 21 hours of EQ, you were lucky to make 10% of a level… GW2 is not about reaching your destination, it is about the journey.

So welcome, I hope you have a lot of fun.

Edit: I suppose that wasn’t so quick after all. Sorry x.x

The amount of influence earned by each person increases with the number of guild mates participating in the event (there is a cap). If I complete an event without any guildmates present, I get 2 influence. If my wife (who is in the same guild) and I complete it together, we each earn 4 influence. I’m not sure how much more is added for each additional member, but there have been times where a small group of us produced a few hundred influence in an hour—but 100 influence would be 50 DEs for a soloist.

Your best bet is to get cash and buy the influence.

to clarify, you need the Eye of the North expansion, and you need to record your accomplishments in the Hall of Monuments. If you have done nothing except link your accounts, you should have 3 points (and some heritage armor unlocked), but this assumes that you have GW:EN. If you don’t, then you will have 0 points and no HoM loot.

@Fredlicious: To the best of my knowledge, all bonuses are scaled. Traits, food buffs, gear… everything.

You are correct that your effective stats drop the moment you level. I’m currently digging into this more, but I have a feeling that over a span of 5 levels, there will be minimal variation, and since crafted armor upgrades can be fairly reliably produced every 5 levels, the gear gap should close about as fast as it opens.

On traits, as I recall they don’t show in the hero panel, but common sense says they scale as well. I plan to gather evidence to support this, but until I do, consider the following:

A level 1 has 96 base stats and 0 trait stats.
A level 80 has 3664 base stats and 1400 trait stats.

If it didn’t scale, the 80 would still have 1400 points at 1 when scaled. At ~1500% of the natural strength of a 1, this would be massively overpowered.
With scaling, this is ~36 extra points, which is a far more modest ~37.5% boost, which is significant but not breaking.

Why are there no traits at levels 1-10? The stat boost is likely too large to be offset by scaling at those levels, so instead the helm, shoulder, and jewelrey slots are filled instead. The smaller increases which, on the average, should be spread over the levels compensate for the absence of traits.

I haven’t compared tiers of armor to each other, but I expect to find that fine armor, scaled, is equivalent to fine armor. Masterwork will remain equivalent to masterwork, and so on. This means that when you get to 80 and exotic is the norm, your scaled gear will have an advantage over unscaled gear, since exotic armor is not available at significantly lower levels.

You also have to consider the effects of slotted traits, rune sets, and so on. Undeniably, your character gets stronger as you level, but only so much comes from stats.

Unfortunately, I won’t have time to do research this weekend as my parents are coming to visit.

The effects vary from condition to condition, and are applied on a per-second basis.

If I remember right, half your condition damage is added to burning every second and bleeding gets something around 1/20th of your condition damage every second. The wiki should have accurate information for each condition.

I do not, although I have a hunch the final damage is calculated from a formula of the form: damage = a*level + b*power + c

I’m also curious if anyone has looked into this yet; it will save me the time if they have and are willing to share. If not, I do plan to look into this as well as mitigation after I’m done validating some downscaling mechanics.

Better late than never… I haven’t had a chance to run a statistically rigorous test at home, but I’ve managed to hit a few test cases and so far everything (Including Zenith’s numbers) is matching my BWE2 findings.

On another note, you get floor(level/10 + 2) * 2 stat points each level, and 20 extra points at level 1. This seems to be holding true so far for all the test cases I’ve investigated but, again, I haven’t brute-forced every level to verify. The best-fit second-order polynomial for this is 0.1x^2 + 3.1981x + 20.856 (for those of you that prefer continuous functions).

Dungeon attunement… I haven’t heard that since the EQ days.

Whenever you reach the minimum level for a dungeon, you will receive in-game mail telling you about the dungeon and where it is. At that point you just need to grab a group of 4 other people and go.

I leveled a gurdian to 80 and had a lot of fun. Unfortunately my expected dungeon group is a ranger, a guardian, a warrior, and myself (plus a random sap). Being a bit melee-heavy, and with a redundant guardian, I will very likely work on leveling my elementalist. I don’t plan to buy the boosts, but I have several from opening chests-they will be used to speed the process a bit. I could take my time on the leveling, but I’m already over 50% world completion and have most of the lowbie areas done—theres not a lot of exciting new stuff to see to make smelling the centaur-trampled roses fun.

I remember watching a panel where somebody asked why there were no two-handed axes in Guild Wars 2 and the response was something to the effect of “we have to save something for an expansion”

Welcome.

Most important advice (and I’m not the first to say this, but it is important enough that I’m repeating it): Have fun. If something is frustrating you in-game, rest assured, it is optional. Max level? Optional. Crafting? Optional. Dungeons? Optional. PvP? Optional. You can perform a variety of tasks at any level.

Some tips to help you have fun: In the options, turn on the local clock and auto-loot. The latter saves you a lot of clicking when looting (just hit “F” to loot instead of “F” to see what can be looted, then click the loot to pick it up) and the former helps you realize that you were supposed to leave for work 2 hours ago (I swear that has not happened to me more than twice)

There are a lot of people venting frustrations right now because they were exploiting and were called on it. I’m sure at least one person will take offense to my calling their actions “exploits” but if it quacks like a duck and tastes like a duck…

Guild Wars 2 is less than a month old, so there are some changes, including some rather significant balance changes, in the pipe. This is one of the most helpful MMO communities I’ve seen, you just have to ignore the trolls.

Edit: By Balthazar’s hairy back was my spelling atrocious!

I need to verify a lot of numbers, but I plan to do this sometime soonish.

My experiences suggest that an 80 downscaled to a 35 will have a numerical advantage over a natural 35. A lot of the advantage, however, stems from traits and skills. A level 30 downscaled to 29 has a huge advantage in an elite skill. Traits tend to provide unique bonuses—faster cooldowns, new abilities, etc. These bonuses do far more for you than stats do most of the time.

Disclaimer: This was found to be true diring BWE2 and has not been re-verified.

Downscaling is a linear multiplier applied to all of your stats. The multiplier is the ratio of your natural (naked, no buffs) stats at the to/from levels.

If I remember my numbers right, this means that an 80 (natural stats are 916) being re-scaled to a 40 (natural stats are 308) will have all their stats adjusted to 308/916 ~= 33.6% of the level 80 values. This multiplier is plied to the composite stats—natural+gear+buffs.

That said, I haven’t re-validated this since release and I haven’t followed the curve to see if gear inflation follows the curve of your natural stats well enough to result in no change, gain, or less as you level.

What you gain for leveling is not actually stats, it is options. You gain access to more traits, more skills, and more varied gear. As you level you should be better equipped to take on a larger variety of situations and have a better-defined playstyle. If you feel that a mission is too hard, chances are a change in technique will have more impact than gear ever would.

It might be a quirk of how the curves interact, but at 80 being downscaled to other content, I kill noticably faster than I did when level-appropriate: Panthers do not have a chance to stealth on me, skills don’t refresh every fight, etc.