Guild Wars 2

Intigo.1653:

Really now? They are very rarely unnecessary and if you feel you aren’t contributing that much then simply use the overpowered Glamour / Confusion build with Null Field.

Useful in WvW in Dungeons, yes.

In open world PvE, things die so fast to the zerg that there’s no real reason to be using condition removal, reflects, or pulls. In DEs or Dragon fights, those utilities are unnecessary.

Tips:

1. Read the guide linked above.
2. Go to a zone where you out-level the content considerably.
3. Work on learning your skills, attunement swaps, combos, and dodging. Even though you don’t have to to kill the things you’re fighting, try to use every tool at your disposal as if you’re fighting for your life.
4. Move to a higher level zone when it feels easy, steadily working your way up to same-level (or higher) content as your skills improve.

Trying to master all those skills and interactions can be overwhelming under the pressure of death all the time. It helped me greatly to get them down in a low-risk environment and then steadily work up the threat level.

What level is your toon? If it’s still low level, and you have some cash to spare, I’d recommend capping two or three crafting disciplines to get you into your mid-thirties. Like several other professions/builds, traits make a huge difference in how D/D plays. Once you can start using master traits the ride gets smoother.

I took a Mesmer to 80 as my first toon, and just got my Ele to 80 today.

Two things make me like the Ele better.

1. Both characters feel powerful in small encounters, but in massive zergs on my Mesmer I feel like I’m always struggling to make a meaningful contribution. Things die so fast I can’t keep clones up, which leaves my usefulness to a few awesome, but often unnecessary, utility abilities. On an Ele I simply switch to staff and feel like I am still contributing.

2. Did the first bounty with my guild last week. Looking forward to doing our first T3 bounty mission tonight. Over the last few days I decided to run around all of the zones where bounties happen and unlock the waypoints. On my D/D Ele I was zooming around opening things up in no time. That would never have happened on my mesmer who (without runes specifically for it) feels like she is moving through thick mud whenever she’s not in combat. I can’t get over how agile the Mesmer feels in combat, then how sluggish it feels as soon as it’s out of combat. Part of this game, whether open world or WvW, is covering ground between encounters, and the Ele outclasses the Mes by a mile in that regard.

Seriously, have you ever done any public speaking OP?

Colin’s explanation aside, if you’ve done any significant amount of public speaking, you’ll have said some stupid things from time to time.

It’s no indication of whether you know your topic or not. People make too much of this kind of thing.

Avatar.1923:

proof of that are the new laurels; they are not grind based.

You made my drink come out my nose.

Blues in this game are vendor trash. Greens sell so cheaply on the trading post that you can easily keep your character in them throughout the game.

Surely contributing significantly to the defeat of a Champion should at least warrant baseline gear?

Deria.9158:

Bear in mind, leveling from 1-80 doing crafting isn’t really a great idea. Yes, you have a level 80 character, but you don’t know anything about it or how to make it work well for you and you don’t have any skillpoints or basic map exploration done. If you want to level though crafting, you might want to consider the following path:

Level 1-20: Play.
Level 20-40: Craft.
Level 40-60: Play.
Level 60-70: Craft.
Level 70-80: Play.

I leveled my first character without crafting, but now I’m working on my first alt and my choice was to craft level to 40 and then level int the open world from there. There are three primary reasons:

1) You get more reward playing in high level areas. Leveling in 40 to 80 areas is going to net you more than leveling off and on, so I’ll have more resources when I hit level cap to gear up or start another alt. I know a lot of people prefer to use crafting to do the last 60-80 push, but that makes no sense from a reward standpoint since you’re likely to go for zone completion in the 60+ areas and hunt high tier mats anyway.

2) I find most of the game’s professions feel clunky until you get to at least the second tier of traits. I’d rather get partway to what my character is actually going to be like at endgame than mess around without utilities or any traits.

3) Get leveled halfway and you are able to participate in more things like dungeons, WvW and less likely to find yourself locked out of things like limited time events that run into higher level areas.

Some people like gambling.

Some people like working toward a goal without being at the mercy of chance.

One is never going to convince the other that their way is best.

You can check out the resource below to help answer your question.

http://gw2crafts.saladon.net/

According to this calculator it’ll be about 70g as of the time of this post to level all 8 disciplines, if you have to buy everything.

Talen Scathe.1670:

Bow your legs.
No.
Wider.
WIDER.
I SAID WIDER.

Because no one ever figure out how to ride an elephant in the real world, right?

Hm, warrior priests. I think if we bring Dervish into GW2, we’d have to rework them so that they don’t reflect the gods, so that they can apply to all races. So maybe they get their powers from…. well from faith in themselves and their allies. Magic from teamwork, so to speak.

They should probably be a soldier profession, because we have the fewest of those, so they’ll wear heavy armor instead of the GW1 robes.

Because they are warrior priests, they’ll have a blend of caster weapons and melee weapons. Say greatsword and hammer, shield, staff and scepter.

They’d be oriented around supporting allies while they fight, but they don’t really have mysticism any more, because of the whole god thing. Faith in themselves and allies…. maybe we can call that “virtues”, and they will give buffs to the new Dervish, but will be much more effective when helping out a whole team.

Vow of Silence might be worked into some kind of defensive bubble. Perhaps a reflect.

Hm… interesting.

Fletch.3572:

I wish you guys would do more stuff in line with the concept art instead of the cute sies trend that has been going on for months.

I see some of them loading screens, and the art, and think why on earth has this stuff not been added to the game, or remained somewhat faithful to the art =D

I’m a designer, and have done a little bit of concept work for video games.

It’s very easy as an artist to create exciting, dramatic images in two dimensions. Making three dimensional spaces that provide clear information to the viewer for navigation and interaction is an entirely different thing.

Not to mention having to think about technical details like system resources.

I’m amazed by some of the stuff that has remained true to the feel of the concept art.

Kasama.8941:

Any writer will tell you there’s a huge difference between writing a book and for a game. Anything you write for a game has to be created, anything you write for a book simply has to be imagined. Therefor, you have to ask a lot more questions when writing for a game. For instance “is this something that will make a noteworthy difference, or is it a waste of manpower and time, when taking into account the kind of game we want to create”.

Oh, sure. There can be design decisions made, and things eliminated, but that doesn’t change the fact that people will continue to feel weird about the fact that they are missing.

Look at player housing. Seems like something that would take an awful lot of development time and effort for something that would probably harm the game in that it would take people out of the shared world even more and put them in private instances.

But people still want it, because it feels a little weird not having somewhere your character calls, “home”.

I just thought this “the artists put them in because it felt right” was a good illustration for people who repeatedly, reliably put up threads asking, “Why do you want mounts anyway?”

Wasn’t trying to say that the game has to have mounts.

And here we have a demonstration for why people want mounts in the game. It goes beyond “mounts aren’t necessary because WP” and “blah blah game reason” (for which there are plenty of good counter arguments).

Simply put, mounts are intrinsic to most of human history, and part and parcel with heroic fantasy fiction. Not having them feels weird. It’d be like this game having no swords of any kind, or no cities (people often complained about Rift feeling weird because the cities were more like large forts).

Any fantasy artist is going to imagine mounts because of this, and many players are going to want them. Imagine the concept artists being restricted to not rendering any sort of fire in all of their art. It would be difficult because it is so much a part of thousands of years of human experience. They would have to make a conscious effort to do so.

Any decent fantasy writer will tell you that if you are going to create a world without something as basic as mounts, you’re going to have a very clear reason for doing so, or your audience is going to be left feeling like it was simply left out.

Charging false advertising, however, is a bit of a stretch. Those images don’t make me thing “player character”, so the leap to “they’re going to add mounts” is a long one.

ANet has very specifically put a wall between leveling PvE and their version of open-world PvP, WvW.

It’s a core design philosophy in which Rifting has no place.

It could be a very fun concept, but it doesn’t belong in GW2.

KorbanDallas.7389:

Why doesn’t everyone just give you everything for free, because you are “the big kitten hero?”

To be honest, it does stretch things a bit when you are supposed to have saved the world and some vendor (especially one who is part of the society in which you have attained a high rank) asks you to fork over some gold for a piece of armor.

Or when you save someones farm from being burned to the ground, and afterward they charge you for an apple.

Robotukas.1673:

But when you feel very sick, do you pay for ambulance to come? Don’t compare real life with game.

Actually, yes. I’ve got three bills for about $750 a piece for three ambulance rides that my family had the misfortune to need recently. The rides were to hospitals fewer than 2 miles away.

Back on topic, it’s good to have waypoint fees. Without them, I’d be using waypoints far more frequently. With them, I spend more time crossing the open world. I’m sure this is true for a lot of people, which means more toons out there populating the world and aiding in DEs as they come across them.

IMO, the problem, if there is one, is really about rewards. DEs and item drops are pretty wimpy income compared to gathering mats and running dungeons. That means when someone lets everyone know in map chat that a DE is starting or a Champ is up, often it’s not worth it to travel across the map to participate.

WP fees don’t really discourage exploration. As others have pointed out, exploration means moving through the zone on foot. If anything, WP fees are discouraging jumping over to help others, which goes against ANets goal of having a community of players who aid each other frequently. Increase rewards from Champs and DEs, and that could solve the problem.

I’ve been hoping for this for a while, too. Have a level 80 character who needs a name change.

Every time I see the makeover kit and think of people who changed gender but are stuck with the same name it makes me laugh a little.

I know they already have the system for people who used inappropriate names, but I wonder if there’s some technical difficulty involving turning that into a purchaseable item.

As Blix says, we do. It’s just called Artificer.

Thanks, Robyz. Gotta play around with it a bit more. Your split between power/prec and tough/vit seems like a good compromise while still in 2 trait gear. I’ll try it at next my next gear update in a few levels.

Thanks for the very thorough guide, Daphoenix. I just started working with a D/D ele and am enjoying it very much.

Note that there’s a typo in your guide. You mention Arcane Blast in your first tier skills in the “leveling up” section. I’m pretty sure you mean Arcane Wave, as it’s a first tier skill and a Blast finisher. Arcane Blast is a tier 3 skill and is a Projectile finisher.

Also, I know you’ve written that stats on gear doesn’t really matter while leveling, but I’m kinda curious what you and others found to be most useful at mid levels when you only have two stats on gear. Narrowing down to Power primary gear, the readily available mixes are Power/Vitality, Power/+Healing, and Power/Precision. Is the defense really necessary in those mid levels, or would more damage output with Precision make the most sense until mobs get harder in the late level zones?

I know I can probably just feel it out as I go, but I can’t play the game right now, but have access to forums, so I thought I’d get people’s thoughts.

I just switched the other direction. Had a lot of fun leveling my Mesmer to 80, dancing around multiple mobs and scattering illusions around. For some reason I got tired of her, and decided to roll Ele. Hit forty, and I’m loving it.

There are two big things that make Ele refreshing after playing Mesmer for so long.

1) Massive AoE. It’s frustrating to dance around DEs in Orr, shattering for AoE like a champ, and still pick up only a few bags. On my Ele, it’s like loot is raining down from the sky.

2) Mobility. Ride the lightning, swiftness from Auras, swiftness from Air attunement, and lightning flash let me get around, even when I’m not in combat. Mesmer’s feel great in combat, teleporting around the battle, but out of combat they suddenly feel like their slogging through waist-deep mud.

Oh, and for a bonus, there’s a great variety of visual effects. Mesmer’s purply shimmer fields and phantasms don’t have nearly the impact as four different attunements cycling regularly.

Everything gets stale eventually, so I’m sure I’ll put away the Ele someday and switch back to Mesmer, or maybe move on to Thief, but for now Ele is very refreshing.

Gotcha, thanks.

Went from 0-400 on Artificer today with a crafting booster on the whole time, and got 10 levels. I thought 10 levels was what one got from 0-400 without the boost. Was I just a victim of bad RNG results? What kind of bonus XP do people normally experience over the course of maxing a discipline?

Makes sense, really. In a world where magic is as prevalent as Tyria, wouldn’t everyone be using it in some form or other?

The scholars are all obviously magical. Rangers summon spirits and Guardians clearly have magical effects. Thieves teleport as well as disappear from plain sight.

That leaves Warriors and Engineers.

Warriors use Signets, which are apparently magical rings going back in the lore. A lot of their abilities blur the line between extreme ability and magic. Sure, there’s a kind of sense in buffing allies with banners and shouts. It’s all about morale and tactics…. but the results are pretty spectacular. Could just chalk it up to game mechanics representing something fairly intangible IRL, or it could be a subtle use of battle magic.

Engineers are the seemingly most non-magical profession. Their tech, however, contains a lot of randomness and unscientific results. One elixir can randomly do wildly different things. For all the lore about the engineer profession emerging from the Charr, their tech is reminiscent of Asura techno-magic in it’s flashy, but unreliable, style.

Unlike other fantasy worlds where there are “magic users” and “non-magic users” Tyria seems to be pretty saturated with magic.

Yeah.

On the mesmer side, there’s Illusionist’s Celerity. It improves cooldowns to all illusion summoning skills, which is what Mesmers are all about. That makes it impossible to pass up, and a pain to play a mesmer until you get those first five points.

I’ll second the post above about humans having clipping issues as well.

Try the panscopic monocle on a human engineer, and do anything significant with the head shape. If you change brow depth or head shape the monocle straps disappear into the head.

You’d think it’d be fairly straight forward to adapt those straps around the head geometry, but apparently not.

Human women also regularly bury their hands in any sort of skirt that has fullness to it.

There’re just a lot of clipping issues.

When I hit 80 I was at about 40% map completion, and I’ve only done WvW a couple of times, no dungeons, and 275 in one craft, 75 in the other. Most of my play time is in the wee hours of the morning for North America, so I’m on when populations are at a low.

It’s like the OP is playing a completely different game than me.

Not really much of a dungeon runner, but I’m considering it if the prices on Khilbron’s don’t come down after the holidays.

Still, I’m kinda wondering about the bigger question than “how to get rabid gear”. Is there design intent to keep some builds harder to gear up than others? Is there a pattern of this across other builds and professions?

The holes in the karma gear make me wonder. An adventurer can pick up two of the three karma sets without missing a piece. Scholars can pick up a complete set of Magi gear for Karma, and Soldiers can’t pick up a complete set of anything.

Surely there’s a logic here, but I’m having trouble figuring out what it might be.

Yes, it definitely looks like supply is the culprit here.

I’m wondering, though, if this is intentional on the part of ANet. Is there a pattern of some builds just being much harder to gear? Is it a specific design choice on the developers part to make some sets more rare than others?

You’d think that with the way they billed the game, each profession able to build to suit the player’s play style, that you could get a wide range of stat spreads with equal difficulty, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

Does ANet intend to funnel players toward glass cannon builds with the prevalence of power/prec/crit% gear so that condition/bunker builds are less common?

I just hit 80 recently, and am working on getting geared in exotics. I’m on a mesmer, and have chosen to go with a condition oriented build, which means a need for condition damage and precision. So I’m after “rabid” gear or equivalent.

I discover that Condition/precision/toughness gear is available as karma gear from the temple vendors in Orr, except coat and boots for light armor wearers. For some reason the developers chose to have all five temples offer some pieces of light “rabid” gear, but none of them offer coats and boots.

So I turn to getting gold for my last two pieces, because Khilbron’s Armor is tradeable. As I do zone completion and sell high tier mats I watch as Khilbron’s Armor gets more and more expensive.

From GW2 Spidy it looks like the problem is that supply has been steadily dropping for this set of armor, the only one with this stat spread can be traded.

Compare to Berserker’s which I’d need if I went for the fotm shatter build. It seems to have a steady supply in game and, while the price fluxuates, it’s actually lost value over the past month.

So, I’m wondering. While ANet decided to let us choose from among several specs within a given profession, do they intend that certain specs are simply more espensive/harder to achieve?

I’m curious if this is true with other specs and other profession. I don’t know, since I’ve just been watching this particular set and its steady cost increase followed by the recent spike.

After four hours of running around Orr, either Malchor’s Leap or Cursed Shore, I have a whopping 3 to 6 kill types listed for the daily.

Any other zone, and I get my 15 by the time I’ve worked through most of the zone. I can go to the starter areas and get my kill variety in twenty minutes.

I’d like to suggest that the game recognize risen as what they were in life, rather than their status of being undead. A risen chicken and a champion risen abomination should count as two different creatures for the sake of kill variety.

Oh, and thank you for risen chickens. I’ve killed countless numbers of them, and they still make me smile. Especially veteran risen chickens.

I get the importance of a gold sink, but I can only figure that the fees, and players ignorance of them, are what is causing crafted items to sell for less than their component parts.

There are many recipes where I can sell the mats and buy the crafted item and make a profit over just crafting the item for myself. It’s kinda ridiculous.

I can only figure that this is happening because people aren’t paying attention to how much their mats are worth and (more likely) how much the house is skimming off the top.

People continue to craft and offer the items on the TP at a loss. That could make sense if you’re just trying to level your craft quickly, but they are doing it with level 400 items!

Holding the jumping puzzle allows the team to create free access for their entire server to get the chest loot with almost no trouble. A couple of siege plans may not be worth a lot overall, but if people respond to map chat announcements that the puzzle is held that constant stream of players adds a large number of free siege plans to their side.

Holding the puzzle also denies this source of plans to the enemy.

OP’s argument seems to hinge around intent. It’s griefing, because it’s being done to harass. It’s very easy to project intent onto other people, but what evidence is there that this is some malicious need to harass other players, rather than a way to lock down that siege plan source for their team?

And how do the people camping the puzzle know that the OP is just one harmless PvE player trying to get badges? How many lone, harmless players are they expected to mercifully allow through?

Like many others have said, the jumping puzzle is a PvP area, and an PvP resource. Complaining about it being camped makes as much a sense as complaining that a PoI somewhere in the battlegrounds is being camped.

I’ll be one of the rare voices that says the jumping puzzle isn’t too hard, and isn’t too easy. I’m still working on cracking it, but I’ve gotten close to the end. Only here because the game is updating.

Thanks, ANet, for a very fun holiday feature. I’m enjoying the jumping puzzle a lot. Giving us the snowball fight to pass the time in the lobby is wonderful. My wife and I laughed for a long time.

Keep up the good work guys.

Less is more.

(Although apparently the forum doesn’t agree. /15chars)

Solitary Shell.4618:

5: Over 9000 things are bugged like events in Orr and some bosses/mobs. Such as risen sharks one shooting you from 30 miles away underwater

I think you’re exaggerating a bit. I can only count 8,642 distinct bugs in the game.

And what’s cooler than sharks with laser beams on their heads?

Frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads!!

You can trait for rezzing and play a combat medic in WvW with a Guardian. Get defense/healy and run around rezzing other players inside your bubble.

Thanks, Bill.

I came across this one today, and fought the three brood, but Pistrix is nowhere to be seen.

I went out of my way to rez someone in the open world. She thanked me.

Instead of going on my way, I started a conversation. We talked a bit. Didn’t feel lonely at all.

I love the game.

There are some things I would change about it, but it makes me very, very happy even with them.

I would love a %60 speed boost, non-flying mount that disappears whenever I enter combat. Unusable in WvW.

I would never use a waypoint again, which would put me out in the world more, not less.

Mounts are such a deep part of human history and a staple of fantasy. The lack of them feels like a missing tooth.

Hm.

I don’t think my thief looks like a ranger, engineer, or “tomboyish”.

I’ve since gotten away from the shortbow, which helps even more.

https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/26127/gw007.jpg

Yes, it’s a trenchcoat. I understand that it doesn’t appeal to everyone, but I like the Matrix quality.

My beef is with male medium armor. At least the female trench-coats look tailored to fit. Almost all of the male armor is weirdly bulky and over-layered.

Heavy armor and large weapons.

A lot of people prefer metal-encased toons with massive blades over guys in their bathrobes shooting light out of sticks they wave around.

My perception is that GW2 is no more buggy than Rift was in its first three months. And yet people were crowing about how Rift was so polished except for a few bugs here and there.

I wonder if it’s a recent shift in perception.

I haven’t been around the MMORPG world for very long, so all I have to go on is what people have said about their past experience. What I got from people talking about Rift was that previous launches included truly game-breaking bugs that made it so huge portions of the player base couldn’t even log in and that the servers were down for hours at a time. People were praising Rift because it was by and large stable, and the only bugs were class skills here and there, dungeon elements and quest issues. You know, ones you can skirt around and keep playing the game.

Just my perception. I haven’t hit 80 yet, so I haven’t been frustrated by the Arah bug, and I’m not a dungeon runner. I do, however, have a Mesmer main who has been impacted by the recent LoS change and Greatsword bug.

Still, I wouldn’t call the game “broken”.

Again, just my perception.

It at least serves the purpose of demonstrating that there are people enjoying the game to people who check out the forum for the first time. That’s something you wouldn’t expect based on the majority of posts here.

Perhaps, MageHeart, to make it more “constructive”, you could list more, specific things you think are working really well in the game.

That’s, surely, as constructive as the posts listing the things that people think are broken.

A very strong post, OP.

The only thing I strongly disagree with is your point about the professions. In other games I could easily discard the majority of classes right off the bat. There are typically one or two that interest me at all.

In GW2 I’m interested in all but one profession, and have a terrible time deciding which one I want to play at any given time.

I have hope for the big WvW update to come at the beginning of next year, as that is the one area of the game outside of open world PvE that I am very interested in. They’ve got a foundation to build on. I’m looking forward to seeing where they go with it.

It’s really the one area that no amount of testing was going to work before launch, and it takes time to make changes. They’ve had three months of data and feedback, and they’ve got another month or two to finish working on whatever changes they’ve come up with based on that. We’ll see come Jan/Feb.

He has all the personal dynamism of Droopy Dog.

Thanks for the specific, detailed feedback, Jon!

It’s greatly appreciated, and restores my hope for my Mesmer.

Numot.3965:

There are just some things you cannot iron out until they go live due to the differences of the internal test server, and live server.

Perhaps a Public Test Server is in order, then?