Guild Wars 2

None.

No need for them, and none of them have skins I like.

So not going for one.

Nyminett.8954:

Kichwas.7152:

Yep.

Its either buttflappery all up in this place, or the duelist bikini top, or the one gemstore goth outfit.

Agreed. One of the first things I did was to purchase the Gemstore Medium Armor set and handful of Transmutation stones. I only use the coat, though.

More “jacket-like” medium armors would be definitely welcome.

That’s a great corset top if you like the style. As the Duelist one is great if you like its style. But then those of us wanting no buttflaps sadly get limited to just these two options… Its a trenchcoat army in here…

I get it with ‘having a design vision’ but that doesn’t mean you only shop in the coat and jackets section of Macys…

DarksunG.9537:

lmaonade.9207:

DarksunG.9537:

lmaonade.9207:

try telling that to human females :P

huh? telling what?

was a reply to the topic…

I thought most ppl who played Human females hated the medium armor in the game?

Yep.

Its either buttflappery all up in this place, or the duelist bikini top, or the one gemstore goth outfit.

I have a norn thief, a human ranger, and a sylvari engineer – all 3 of them use almost the exact same armor… starting with the duelist top. I actually like that top, but I don’t like that it is (word contractions are censored here?) one of only two buttflapless choices… Especially as I don’t like the other choice…

I do know some people who like the trenchcoats… but they are not 95% of folks, yet they get 95% of the choices.

For people who play male characters… to my eyes at least, the entire repertoire of options looks from bad to horrible, and the best I’ve found among my circle of people is one person who like one single choice… but I can never remember which one it is because they all look so similar to me…

Hickeroar.9734:

Know what causes connectivity issues?

Patches.

/facepalm

Aristio.2784:

Nobody is gear locked out of anything. You can see all content in level 80 yellows.

You can complete them in green and blue gear too…

Even green and blue gear that is 10 levels below your character’s level – well, if you’re just one or two of the people there doing that. At least one of guildies seems to always forget to upgrade his gear.

Folks are getting ‘people locked’ by trying to run content with other people who are just nasty individuals… that’s not a problem with the game or the gear – but the kinds of people some choose to game with.

They might claim “I didn’t choose them, its just who I get stuck with…” But not making a choice is a choice. Choose better running mates, or your choice will be to get bad ones.

No one has claimed ‘every guild will let anyone do anything’. Just well, all the guilds of those of us not having these problems – because we all made an active choice to game with better people.

This is one reason why I tend to always run my own guild. Nobody’s gonna block me out of anything in my guild… Nobody but myself that is: I used to pull myself off the raid roster all the time in my WoW guild when I felt I was falling behind – but that’s not an issue here where gear progression pretty much ends the moment you have orange stuff (*).

Skill progression is fairly forgiving too. While one can always improve, I’ve found I can have a fun run with folks once they reach a basic ‘decent enough’ state, and after that all that really counts is whether or not they have an attitude I’m fine with being around.
- Another benefit of being a guild GM, I get to have some say in that kind of thing. :p

If you don’t want to run a guild, and most people don’t, then go onto your server and start looking really hard for the right one for your personality. There’s no limit (that I know of) to how many you can join… so join a few dozen until you hit the right one for you and can slowly pull away from the others.

Its not that hard… You just have to be willing to put in the effort into finding people that some are clearly willing to put into mastering the gameplay. Master the socialplay…

(*
Ascended and Legendary are trivially different from exotic unless you’ve chosen to farm high level fractals. And if you have, by the time you reach the level of fractal where you need AR, you can likely afford 10 AR, or 5 on two toons… Or you can be like me and be sitting on about 100 laurels but with no desire to deal with the community of high level fractals, Chauncey Von Snuffles is looking mighty fine as my idea of ‘progression’. Especially since the difference between a level 80 fractals and a level 1 is… um… nothing… the same map, the same enemies… So why bother?
)

Shadow Blade.1324:

tolunart.2095:

Shadow Blade.1324:

Hobocop.1508:

Since when did you need to have a maxed out character to participate effectively in anything besides high level fractals?

see any one of the many posts about people running MF in dungeons
or the zerker requirement for various groups…

That’s kitten locking, not the game’s fault.

actually it is “the games fault” as the content is designed around a certain level, but doesn’t enforce it on entry, try a dungeon with everyone in white gear or leveling gear that’s lagging a few levels behind their actual level or characters that are a number of levels below the recommended see how far you get.

I have, see my comments above. We managed to get all the way that popup chest thing with some loot that blocks half the screen, but can’t seem to get any further. :P

tigirius.9014:

Love it when people are in denial. Gear locking is locking content from people who don’t have a certain score on gear or a certain tier of gear to see content. And don’t tell us the myth that all guilds are active and will accept anyone trying to do these things without the gear they need because the longer it takes for new players to get into the game the fewer people run the old content, it’s a known fact this happens in every mmo.

OP is right. Sorry folks just not going to deny this one away in the forums and get away with it.

The game is supposed to be the fantasy land, the side of the monitor where your keyboard lies – that’s reality.

I have no idea what kind of horrible guild you have landed in that is putting you through such torment, but its not like anything I have ever seen around this MMO.

I got my first character to try fractals up to fractal level 3 before she was even level 60…

I did many explorables on characters below level 80.

If the OP is getting locked out, its time to find a new guild.

That did it. Apparently the Dragon Bash emails counted against the limit – a lot of event mails and ‘you can now do this dungeon’ did not.

Got my stuff now. Thank you.

Yeah, I’d planned to buy that, then buy some gems and get a name contract as well. But holding off on the rest of it until I know what’s going on with the first purchase.

If I’m not the only one with this issue, hopefully some eyes at ArenaNet will get on it ASAP.

Gem store might be bugged right now…

Spent 280 gems to buy the new sale of 10 transmutation crystals last night. It subtracted my gems but never delivered anything…

Rechecking this morning, still no delivery and gems are still subtracted.

I’ve submitted a bug report last night, as well as this post now.

Notice the strange orange icon on the first recent purchase – as if it got stuck after removing my gems, but has not yet registered that I bought…

What I said on the Guild Wars 2 Google + group:

Re the Torment Condition:
Actually think that is a good change if its used in the right skills. It also gives them the ability to include a movement impairing condition that could work on bosses without creating balance issues – so hopefully it will ignore/bypass defiant? and unshakeable.

On the patch notes overall:
This to me is looking like one of the better patches they will have ever done. It will do a lot to increase build diversity if it lives up the the claims in the article. More of this, less of my other recent concerns…?

And since for some reason no one in this thread bothered to link what they were actually discussing, here it is:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/upcoming-skill-and-trait-changes/

Forcing PvP onto PvE is why it doesn’t count.

That said I agree that making it ‘any 8 of the 10’ would be better.
AND I agree that this doesn’t belong on the wiki, but on the in-game tooltip.

Orr is where I go to finish off my levels.

The place is so easy to solo, you can go in there a few levels early and just start mashing away the mobs. If you have situational awareness you can control pull size quite a bit there.

Since I use balanced builds rather than zerker or glass canon – nothing but champions / group event bosses there will hit hard enough to be un-soloable. But mobs also hit hard enough that I can’t faceroll my keyboard through the place. Which makes for more entertaining gameplay.

If Orr mobs are hard, if the non-group events are hard; your build is too glassy.

This game is designed so that a good enough number of direct attacks will lack a clear tell or come too fast to dodge them all; for which protection, regen, armor, and healing all have their place. Glass canon zerker builds work in places where that model is broken. Orr is not one of those places.

There’s enough people around there on my server that when an event needs doing, people put out the call and others show up to do it.

In PvE P/P is a good choice as the ‘swap to’ set for when you have to go ranged.

In PvE, you have to go ranged when you not only need to get out of melee, but also likely need mobility to avoid effects and kite a train of bad stuff. Shortbow has too many AoE targeting effects for this (if you -ever- have to get out melee to begin with, you stand a higher chance of not being as good at dropping AoE effects behind yourself in the right spot while circle strafing).

Pistol / Pistol is all direct single target – so you can keep blasting away while ‘getting out of the bad situation’ and waiting to get back into melee.

Everyone seems to say its bad for PvP and WvW. I don’t do either of these enough to say.

I run Sword / Pistol and Pistol / Pistol – AoE melee with the 3 skill, and a good ‘get out of town’ weapon swap. Sword / Pistol is about evasion, blind, stun rather than stealth – so my build is already low stealth. Pistol / Pistol is stealth poor… so they match well enough.

A common concern with Pistol / Pistol is poor synergy. I somewhat agree – most of the skills have too high initiative for what they do. #3 is burst, but #1 is condition – so your build has to pick between them. #2, #4, and #5 are also condition – so you would think the choice is to just not use #3. But #3 has two traits built for it, and is so much easier to spam than the other choices for a decent hit… and the #4 is useless on many bosses, while the #5 only has duration boosted by condition boosting, but expires on enemy next attack.

Pistol / Dagger might be better (I don’t know), but Pistol / Pistol is -good enough- in PvE and a lot more engaging to play. Plus the real problem with Pistol Thieves is in the 1-3 skills…

Gambling results in what is deserved.

I tried the thing twice, saw it for what it was, and moved on.

Aberrant.6749:

Kichwas.7152:

Kichwas.7152:

The entire event seems designed to remind us of why we left WoW…

Node stealing has come to GW2.

Nodes respawn in WoW too BTW.

But no – not everyone can tag them if you have some 80 running through 1-shotting them before anyone can get a solid hit in by using speed buffs to race ahead of folks, or running past folks trying to clear adds.

I’ve even been mob trained – had an 80 dump a stack of mobs on me as I was trying to reach the node – click it, one shot AOE the whole thing, and then run to the next one while I was trying to avoid going down.

Yeah I could farm these on my 80 and grief him right back… But should I be -required- to use my most farming-powerful character just to do open world PvE content?

They don’t respawn on an 8 min timer, nor are they as plentiful in WoW. Who cares if they kill them all quickly, tons more around. If this sort of thing bothers you then I would imagine you would be constantly infuriated irl.

As an adult I can tell you that people in “real life” have social etiquette born out by either being good folks or afraid of consequences.

I don’t see conduct like this “in real life”. Not even when I was growing up in gang territory in LA and Oakland (were folks are amazingly polite because consequence can come come hard and fast).

I left WoW so I could have a friendly, social MMO. Not a griefer’s MMO.

aspirine.6852:

BlueSoda.6297:

Sorry but it’s every man for himself,lol. Nobody waits for me on those things so why should I wait for them? Plus, I usually don’t get credit for the kills if I let someone else come over so…no deal kiddo, just going to keep killing them as fast as I can.

So because some other are kittens you are one too? Nice attitude right there.

That’s the WoW attitude right there.

I -DO NOT LIKE- seeing that attitude show up in GW2, which up to now has been a more friendly and social game (the forums have been the exception, not the rule, until now).

As for ‘there are plenty of them to go around’ – not if the same person speed clears them all. I’ve had the same guy show up and race past me repeatedly. Unless there were just a stack of norn warriors all using identical armor and weapon skins.

I intentionally avoided the things last night though – not wanting to see or have to deal with these WoW-like people. Got maybe 2 or 3 of them the whole night (was on for about 5 hours – long night).

Aberrant.6749:

Kichwas.7152:

The entire event seems designed to remind us of why we left WoW…

Node stealing has come to GW2.

Other than everyone can tag the mobs… and they only have a 8 min respawn timer… and there are tons all around… so… not at all like that really…

Nodes respawn in WoW too BTW.

But no – not everyone can tag them if you have some 80 running through 1-shotting them before anyone can get a solid hit in by using speed buffs to race ahead of folks, or running past folks trying to clear adds.

I’ve even been mob trained – had an 80 dump a stack of mobs on me as I was trying to reach the node – click it, one shot AOE the whole thing, and then run to the next one while I was trying to avoid going down.

Yeah I could farm these on my 80 and grief him right back… But should I be -required- to use my most farming-powerful character just to do open world PvE content?

Stark.1350:

2.) The holo dragons in the lower zones breed competition and contempt.

It was like this during Halloween, Christmas and SAB. Same plan. But considering all the impatient people want to finish this in a day, it’s become a major issue. Once again, YOU HAVE AN ENTIRE MONTH. Let the crowds thin out and you’ll see the nodes sitting around doing nothing, like they have in every other event beforehand.

It was NOT like that during SAB.

Those spawned crystals that anyone could come and gather.

Sigh… I JUST spent 500 gems to buy a second copy of the pets to make this…

I hope they re-enable it at some point.

The entire event seems designed to remind us of why we left WoW…

Node stealing has come to GW2.

nethykins.7986:

Vayne.8563:

nethykins.7986:

Vayne.8563:

It really is about finding people who share your play style and playing with them. I can’t stress this enough.

But it helps a whole lot to have like-minded people to share that time with.

Now while I agree with the “finding people who share your play-style”… that can only last so long. I’ve been jumping between multiple guilds, both big and small because time after time, my “play-style” gets boring for those, who have more time than me to play

You’re in the wrong guild. I never get tired of helping newbies, because I don’t play for rewards. Or, more importantly, I find helping newbies rewarding. I’m not the only person in my guild who feels this way.

Have to reiterate. I’ve been jumping around in Multiple guilds, I’m still jumping around as we speak. They start out with completely “all inclusive” intentions, but slowly devolve to “want to do fractals 20+?” or “want to farm xyz dungeon?”…

I’ll still echo Vayne there and say you’ve been jumping through the wrong guilds.

Can’t blame you as the right people are never easy to find.

It only takes one person seeking to farm xyz and run exploit abc to ruin not just a dungeon, but if left unchecked an entire guild.

In my guild we’ve actually taken breaks from dungeons and booted people to avoid this.

Rather be on an off cycle from dungeons that let some folks poison things.

I -have- run CoF story and exp. We did part of it as a guild, and I carefully PUG’d the rest. But I’ve no intentions of going back unless its with people I know. I refuse to cater to the zerker/farmers and the poison they bring to things.

Thankfully they limit themselves to CoF p1 and p2… and higher ranked fractals. So they’re very easy to avoid.

But there usually is one in every guild, and they will drag others into that mess with them – because no junkie ever wants to be alone in the crack house.

Keep searching for the right guild. I’d say us but as I noted above – we’re in a down cycle right now with the core dungeon folks not fully active (2 of them on summer vacations, but as they’re real life family I know they’re coming back soon, and another dealing with a newborn). And we’re on Tarnished Coast, active in the GMT-8 / PST timezone.

I’m sure there’s good guilds in Europe. Maybe on the European roleplay server. I find people who are in good guilds ALL THE TIME when I PUG.

Given how the folks on the forums seem to play this game, they should add backhoe, pitchforch, sickle, shovel, and pruning shears.
- Farmers keep demanding the game cater to them, so give them farming tools.

And a little plot outside of DR that they can log into every day and plant carrots and turnips on…

And maybe do quests for a Panda guy from Cantha…

and…
…

But seriously…

I’d like to see:

Scythe – for a dervish / paragon hybrid class, and necros and ritualists.
Greataxe – for warriors and the dervish / paragon hybrid.
Bola – thief, ritualist, and warrior.
flail – warrior and one other, but who I don’t know.
javelin (land spear) – for ritualists and the dervish / paragon hybrid.

- As in, I think new weapons and classes should come in a package together when / if they come.

Kryptonite.9376:

there’s no reason to be re-exploring the open world on an alt since it’s no fun

There’s also no reason to even log in at all.

The fastest way to earn in this game is to just to quit. Then you won’t waste time OR money on it.

Since you already hate playing the game, why stay?

Bye.

Next?

The Nostromo has been my solution, couple with some new keybinds.

The combined effect means very little finger movement required to hit almost anything but chatting.

MisterEction.9382:

Vayne.8563:

MisterEction.9382:

kokiman.2364:

Most of the people who post here seem to hate social interaction. Raids would be a horror for them.

It isn’t social interaction that most people here dislike, it is social exclusion.

Don’t have this gear, get out.
Don’t have this class, get out.
Don’t have this build, get out.
Don’t have this level, get out.
Miss a dodge because the battle has been going on forever because you’re the only one doing good damage, get out.
You’re the only one not doing good damage, get out.
You haven’t watched the dungeon/event on YouTube beforehand to see the most efficient way to do every bit, get out.

In the end, everything where structured grouping is required in this game devolves to this. If you don’t hit an event or dungeon early, as in the first few hours, it gets progressively harder to find a group that you can play through it with. And when you do, you get one or two people that ragequit when it becomes evident it isn’t going to be a speedrun becasue it is the first time for one or more of the group.

This is probably the least true post I’ve seen on these forums. Maybe you’re just hanging around with the wrong type of people. While this element does exist in this game, it exists no more in this game than other MMOs, in fact, considerably less in my experience.

In fact, I only ever hear this happening in speed runs. And in Guild Wars 1, it happened in speed runs there too.

Who do you hang out with? Do you PUG or run with the same people? If you’re claiming you PUG and you’ve never seen this, that would be the least true post I’ve ever seen in the forums.

This is the only MMO I play, so how often it happens here compared to others is meaningless to me. It still happens too often.

I’ve never seen it either.

I only see that kind of negativity on these forums.

In game I PUG a LOT, and I never see this. But I don’t do CoF exp. Other than once for each of them to get it on my achievements list. I know that’s the place farmers go. All the negative minded people will be there. I avoid it.

krisztian.6513:

Kichwas.7152:

Another farming spot nerfed is always good news.

Especially a repetitive do the same thing over and over spot – those ones really should get temp bans when exploited.

Sounds like a jelly troll who couldnt farm some nice spots in time :P dont worry, there are many yet ^^

Or you could notice what I’ve been saying since launch around here.

This game was meant to be played for the game, the actual content. The intrinsic rewards are what it is designed for.

If you want a progression based game where you need to gather all these shinies, go back to WoW where you belong.

Another farming spot nerfed is always good news.

Especially a repetitive do the same thing over and over spot – those ones really should get temp bans when exploited.

They’re super cheap to craft however. Any recipe that can make a bag, plus one of the runes sold by that crafting station’s vendor.

I keep one invisible bag on each of my 8 characters.

Well, if you don’t like it. You can always ask them to start charging you $14.95 a month.

You don’t need any of the stuff you can buy in order to play the game fully – so why sweat it?

Um… was asking not about how to control it in game.

But about websites where I can put together builds, like http://gw2skills.net
- Looking for one that has added the new settler armor’s stats.

I see a lot of ‘almosts’ in this one.

The fight design on Canach and Null had some real thought in being more engaging – not health sink fights. BUT the plot was missing and the two bosses should have swapped places – the story boss should be the entertaining fight. The minion should be for the tutorial and the tutorial should only be as long as it takes to teach the mechanic.

Karka Queen: Having to do a series of events to trigger the boss is good. Gets people moving. Designing it in a way that you don’t have a small group out there doing the events while the crowd waits (like the dragon fights, such kittenterer) is good. Everyone has to help out or the queen is likely to be missed.

Putting the queen on a timer such that it only matters to hold the towns during a short time frame – bad because people often miss this specific timeframe. I’d go for having her only able to spawn once per hour, but always spawning if the two conditions are met of: 4 towns clear, min 1 hour since last spawn, 3 minutes after last town clear (to give people time to reach her spot).

Queen fight design: the eggs are not meaningful enough. Yes she’s immune to damage until you use them. But while not immune she’s no more complex than a health sink. I’d add 2 more buttons to eggs for abilities one would use with them against the boss, and maybe something in the area we need to build / deploy against her.

I really liked one idea I read of building a weapon: so maybe, deploy an egg launcher. One set of people has to gather eggs and bring them to launcher, which takes about 5 people to operate as it breaks after every use and they have to gather the pieces and put them back together. Make the eggs as big as a human, and need to be rolled over to it.
- That kind of interaction is what events like this need. Maybe not my idea. But the theme that my idea takes 3 sets of people doing different things: fighters, gatherers, and artillery to debuff her shield.

The beat up settlers / consortium events: These really bothered me because until the final story of sinking the contracts this last week, every indication had us backing slavery. Our own characters never voice an objection in this entire plot. Never even get a dialogue window option that says “now wait a minute, what gives?”
- Even at the end, I felt like I was one of the consortium duped while Kiel burned the contracts and schooled me on things…
Since this story launched I’d wanted to open up some Django on the Consortium, and I’d much rather that we have had the ability to join rioters in those moments they rioted and help them beat up the consortium…

The best content this story-cycle seems to have been the mini-pets and the town clothes shorts…
- unplotted items.

Which tells me the patch cycle needs to slow down so that storycrafting can move from an afterthought to something more front and center.

And no more putting the story outside the game on a website…

Iruwen.3164:

ANet seems to try so hard not to to anything like WoW that they prefer doing it wrong. WoW’s world bosses have actually been challenging and fun.

Um…

Have you fought any of the WoW world bosses since PandaVille launched?

The two of them – the Flinstones Dinosaur and the Sha of Smog Monster…

- You just stand there and… autoattack.

The boss doesn’t even move. It has no pre-events to trigger it. It has no special abilities. It is just 10-gazillion health and a 1-shot on any melee once per minute. Each then has some adds that make ‘Hoggar’ look hard…

- Its like WoW looked at GW2 world bosses and thought “how can we do this, even worse than they do?”

But at least the loot pinata on it is only once per week. But per toon. Still, its a free raid-quality item.

Got a new 90, go beat up on Fred Flintstone’s construction crane or find out where the smog monster went after his film with Godzilla in the 70s…
- That’s two free raid-quality items, per week, per toon. So right out the door you get bumped from leveling greens to the second tier of LFR just by… being Away-from-keyboard near the thing.

I’ve tanked dino, on a new 90 monk… I wasn’t in a group – I was getting leftover AoE heals from the other people, but I held half the aggro for the fight.
… that’s just sad.

WoW has thrown in the towel on raiding even more than GW2 has. At least GWs doesn’t claim to have raids. So I don’t show up here looking for one.

I find the Karka Queen a let-down. But don’t compare it to the competition. They’re dropping the ball even harder.
- Thing is, GW2 gave us this in about 1-2 weeks of dev time. It took WoW months to do it and still get it all wrong. If ArenaNet just slowed the dev time down and took about twice as long, this fight would have been amazing.

Does anyone know if any of the various websites you can make & link to builds on has added in the new settler armor yet?

Not seeing it as a choice where I’ve so far tried.

I can tear through content like crazy, doing some group events in Southsun solo, on this new build for me:

20 (III, II) / 20 (II, IX) / 20 (V, X) / 10 (III) / 0

Rune of mesmer x5, and one rune of Dwayna.

4x settler items, but chest and helm are different. Chest is Power > tough/vital chest, and rampager helm.

Sword/Torch and Axe/Axe.
Rampager on all 4 weapons, with sigils of force and purity.

Rabid back and amulets w/ ruby jewels
rampager accessories with corel jewels
rabid ring with ruby jewel and rampager ring with corel jewel.

- A mix of mitigation and damage. I take mobs out much faster than my warrior, guardian, or mesmer – and have ‘tanky’ survival.?

- That’s my dungeon build, based on what I’ve seen with my other characters. This is my 4th 80 but my characters all run dungeons.

The idea is to do a lot of damage and be able to take a good solid hit. At least survive a ‘one-shot’ move, with the tools to come back and keep going.

The damage is heavily condition damage – so you won’t see numbers flashing on your screen or in your log (I checked my log and it doesn’t even seem to show condition damage unless I misread it), but stuff dies super fast – much faster than it does when I go after it with my warrior.

Pets: I alternate between the three devourers. Keeping any two of them at a time. I am not yet sure which two are best for my build. But these are ranged pets that spam conditions – they very rarely take damage, and when they do get aggro they burrow to hide (a dodge). I swap between them to get maximum uptime of the F2 ability. If F2 is on cooldown, I switch pets… if a pet gets to half health, I switch pets.
- Result is pet goes down very rarely. Usually only goes down if I do, and often not even then….
- It only goes down when I get distracted or forget to manage it.

Kiijj.3594:

I think you’re missing the whole point of GW2. This game isn’t about end-game content or gear treadmills. It’s about people playing the game for I don’t know…. fun? Where gear does not determine the outcome of a fight between two parties, but skill?

Yep.

OP bought GW2 thinking they were buying Warhammer Online.

Oops.

thefantasticg.3984:

Kichwas.7152:

Nothing wrong with bow. But many people use it and the pet with it wrongly.

So, if you aren’t a beastmaster melee ranger, you aren’t playing the class right. Got it. Thanks for clearing that up.

Funny I distinctly recall NOT saying that.

tubi.9021:

I thought it was a competitive PvP-heavy game,

They have PvP in this game?

…

…

Almost every “tell” other than talking to folks has a counter-tell / counter-stance.
There are opposing perspectives on many things:
1. zerker gear / CoF makes you ‘epix’ vs. anyone in zerker gear is a fool / needs to L2P.
- A day on the forums will encounter both sides of this, and in-game they travel in completely different circles that back up their different opinions.

WvW pros always follow an organized commander vs. WvW pros use voice and avoid anywhere on the map with a commander.
- A recent surprise to me was finding that second community, a very successful WvW group that holds to a belief of ‘commanders lead to failure’. They’re right, in their circle. But the view that not following a commander leads to failure is… also right.

Wearing gear set X shows you’re pro vs. people in themed gear sets lack perspective on the game and experts mix/match.
- Right, and right.

Casual hardcores vs hardcore casuals…

PvP vs. PvE…

Titles vs. anyone can get a title.
- both true if you think about it.

Must run classes X, Y, and Z. for efficiency vs. run a wide variety to cover bases.

- Backers of any stance above will often vehemently flame those disagreeing with them (self included :p).

You really can’t.

And achievement score is highly misleading as you can rack it up super quick by just doing dailies and killing the same mob a few hundred thousand times.

Take a player who takes a month off – that could knock them behind the curve on achievement points from others by as much as 500-1000 if enough content comes out that month. A simple 300 just from folks who did the daily every day for the 30 days…

Honestly just talk to people, and from their conversations you can get a feel for things. This isn’t really a game with a ‘score’ that has any meaning.

Get a level 80 exotic when you hit level 80. If you’re 78, you’re probably about 2 hours of play away from 80 – those last few levels seem to to go absurdly fast.

As for stats – buy the one complimenting your build most.

My warrior has never used greatsword after about level 5 (I unlocked the skills and then vendored it) – so I’m fuzzy on whether or not there is much condition damage in there for a warrior, but I don’t think so. That condition one is likely meant for rangers and mesmers.

If you’re doing a lot of condition attacks, you want condition damage.
If you’re going for burst damage direct attacks, you want total ‘power’ score to be at 2000, and then stack crit chance (precision) and crit damage from there.

If you find you’re taking too much damage – I suggest boosting toughness or vitality, but usually in the armor with the weapons more straight DPS. However whichever is easier to replace works… Armor score above 2700 suffers an accelerating DR, but is still useful for gaining threat over others (armor and DPS both count for threat, but armor counts more).
- ‘zerkers’ on the other hand, go for minimum armor and try to get somebody else to be the one who suffers hits.

Vitality is a good way to shoot for more survival but with lower threat – but comes at the cost of needing more healing to bring yourself back to full. On the other hand, condition damage ignore armor, so vitality is good if facing off against a lot condition attacks (if this was WvW and you wanted to build a character that was a ‘bunker buster’ vitality would help survive against bunker-rangers, I -think-. I lack enough WvW experience to be sure).

Stacking -both- vitality and toughness starts to be wasting your damage output if overdone, but some of it is handy – soldier’s armor. Note how soldier’s armor gives Power first, and has the toughness and vitality as secondary to keep it from being -too much- of a DPS hit.

Amadan.9451:

and as i said, she would be just shocked

besides his great grandson pretend to be in love with a queen while he is in love with a charr, everyone knows that…

edit: i think also the blaming a race because their ancestors from 250 years ago were “terrorist” isn’t a rational thought, not that i expect gwen to be rational since no npc seems to be anyway)

250 years is a long time.

There was no USA 250 years ago. That’s 1763 AD.
France Ceded Canada to the British Empire in 1763.
Prussia and Austria ended a 7 year war.
The British East India Company deposed the ruler of Bengal.
The British win a war against the Chippewas in what is now Michigan.
A year long slave uprising begins in the dutch colony of Berbice (Guyana).

The British declare an end to westward expansion in North America signing permanent treaties with several Native American nations (colonial resistance to this treaty is why the British later moved troops away from the border and stationed them inside the homes of people in NY and Boston).

Paxton Boys murder local Indians in their homes, in Lancaster, and then break into a jail where survivors were being sheltered to kill them as well – in response to the results of the war between the British and French.

- A whole different sort of world than today.

Nobody alive in ’today’s’ GW2 is even the great grandchild of a person from the GW1 era. Our current toons are as removed from those characters as we in the real world are from Thomas Jefferson, King George, George Washington, et all. Napoleon wasn’t even alive yet.

Imagine if Thomas Jefferson popped up today, and walked over to the White House… given what we know of his personal life…
- It could go any number of ways, but he would probably say a whole mess of stupid before he got sorted out.

zenleto.6179:

Sovta.4719:

Ashabhi.1365:

@ the OP:

Yes. The elitism you speak of is ruining the game…for you.

I am sorry that the game does not cater to the ultra-hardcore dungeon crawlers/raiders. If it did, may of us (myself included) would be looking for something else.

Yes, you ruined it for yourself.

But what about us who just want to play game, challenge? Us that socialise in real life? (that we have)

What about you? If you aren’t finding any challenges and you aren’t enjoying your time playing then you should really consider your options.

Yep.

There are games made for 17 year olds who skip school to play 16 hours a day, make spreadsheets to min/max, and rage at the screen over a 0.1% difference between X and Y.

This game is not one of those games.

This is the game for that kid above once she or he hits over 30, has a kid, a job, and plays here and there while looking for an easy way to chat with her or his mates about the events of the day.

Our spreadsheets are devoted to the quarterly statement for management, we skip work because the kid got sick and we clock in 16 hours for less wages than we should get, and we rage at the screen over the 1% taking 90% of the fruits of our labor.

We don’t care for Farmville either, we want an action MMO, and now we have one.

DeWolfe.2174:

I just spent over an hour or so clearing the settlements. Then went to clear the Pride Point settlement for the 4/4 and the second it’s done, the Queen pops.

Now I’m racing to try and get there in time. I get there and everyone’s inside fighting her. Awesome, now it’s just me vs the 20 lvl 84’s in Steampipe Steading. As you can imagined, I was killed in about a second. WP’d to tried again, killed in about a second, again. Suffice it to say, they killed the queen in about 4 minutes. So… after all that effort clearing settlements, I got nothing.

Before anyone say’s anything, there was only one gimmick as a Norn Ranger I could have tried. That is if my Elite wasn’t on cool down from using it in Pride Point.

Because what’s the alternative, be a kitten and just park yourself in front of the queen and let someone else do the settlements?

WP to the other side of the queen – or WP to the starting spot and run all the way west to the omelet vendor area, climb up, and run back. Will take about 3 mins with no speed boost. Less on a ranger with their 25% perma-speed boost skill going.

When you reach the queen, sneak into range of the settlement back there with all the karka and pull a few outside to the area with the queen…
- The practical purpose of which will slow down the time it takes for the queen to be taken out, so folks who arrive later from having to run the long run will be able to get kill credit.

DeWolfe.2174:

Now, they raised the damage output of the “Crazed” creatures in Southsun. Being 1 or 2 shotted isn’t fun at all. Not too mention costly.

Dev’s…. lower the damage to defense ratio. You are out of control!

Get better toughness and vitality. Solved.

If 100 of them spawn right on you, or are culled until after they kill you – you’ve got a valid complaint.

But if 100 of them are over there and you see them before they kill you and then can’t pick them off without going down, that’s your gear being too low on mitigation.

SKiNBuS.4730:

Oh and PS: If it’s mindless or difficult, quick or time consuming… what difference does it make to you… really? CoF P1 is mindless and quick… I don’t hear people making a fuss over that.

Then you must have me and many others on mute.

pricer.5091:

If you can only gather about 1-2 gold in the game in a day (say two hours playtime)and there are items that are available that cost between 500 and 900 gold to craft (any of the more desirable exotics like Volcanus and legendaries) that would take you somewhere between three and five YEARS to achieve.

I believe that it taking years is the intended design goal.

- This is likely where the disconnect occurs. They put stuff in at launch that was not intended to be seen in game for another 3 years. Some few managed to get it in under a month (those first few mostly from exploits / hacking), and suddenly a mass of people were aware of it and thought they had to have it NAO!!!

They however, still seem to see this as content for somewhere down the road of years.

That said – if you look back to GW1, this is not different from there. To get the top armors can cost thousands of ectos. If you play “normally” it could take 5+ years to get the mats for them. Some like myself have never had the mats for even one armor piece despite playing for over 7 years. Others have them within a week of buying the game – exploits for some, others legit trading maximization and farming.

GW2’s loot system is not all that different from GW1’s.
- You do not NEED a legendary. Its a stat boost of about 1-2%, for a cost boost of about 50-thousand percent. Why? Because it is really meant to be ‘legendary’.

How many people in WoW own ‘Thunderfury, Blessed blade of the Windseeker’?
- Maybe 1 or 2 per server, tops. If even that.

That is where these items were intended to fall.

Not many in WoW complain that they don’t yet have the Windseeker. So I am always baffled at the people complaining about it here.

(and yes I know that some newer legendaries over in WoW are actually semi-common. WoW has changed its model over time. GW1&2 though – have partially stuck to their guns on the idea that it is supposed to be legendary. Partially only in that they did not make it -MORE- expensive after players started proving they could get to it before the third anniversary of the game.)

The only “game” with more updates than this Second Life.

And that should also speak to why quantity over quality is not exactly ideal…

If anything GW2 needs to slow it down, and ramp up the QA, editing, and maybe hire some more story-writers. I’m not yet willing to demand they push out the current ones – because there is hope in what I see from them. But I think they’re in an echo chamber and need more varied opinions.

In fact they even admit with pride to being in an echo chamber – in one video two of them note going into a closed room for a day…

The coders seem fast enough now -but they too need maybe 1-2 more weeks to not just put in “stuffzz” but make it good and integrate well. This last Karka Queen patch: put in a big mega boss really fast, but no time to notice that her timer is not syncing well with nearby spots going contested or spawning mobs so thick they cull on people trying to reach the queen, and of course – the queen herself having a mechanic (egg toss) that seems too trivial to matter making the fight feel like a straight health sink spank it fight.
- One more week of testing, and a week after of tweaking, and this would not be as likely to occur…

Nothing wrong with bow. But many people use it and the pet with it wrongly.

My initial attempt at humor has trapped my comments above into a bit of a snarky attitude that I think has me losing track of the point I’d wanted to make.

- Look through the skills on the bow, look through the pets, find compliments in terms of conditions that work well when both on the enemy at the same time, or other playstyle aspects that can boost performance.

My hunter comment refers to the people that get a bow, get a ‘tanky pet’ and stand way back there spamming a few keys while trying to have the pet hold aggro. Often the pet is chosen for cosmetics – “cute kitty” or “adorable bear” or “vicious dog” rather than because it does things that fit the build / weapon of that ranger.

- Many “hunter” players also won’t swap their pet until its dead or nearly so. An effective “ranger” player will swap the pet anytime it is beneficial to get their other pet’s skills into play, and the better the player, the better they are at timing this (I personally suck at it and just swap on cooldown so that my pets almost never die, but even this is better than the non-swappers – if I tried that in PvP or WvW, I suspect people would see me as a ‘huntard’…).

“Hunter” as I noted it might better be described as “huntard” because even WoW players who are good at WoW hunter don’t do these mistakes. They maximize the toolsets of that class in that game. But the toolset of ranger here is very different from that of hunter there.

Both are pet using classes on medium armors. Both -can- use bows. But that’s about where it ends.

And WoW has more bad hunter players than GW2 has bad ranger players…

(Or did, before poorly skilled players started switching to DK, though I think many have switched back as DK has not been the shiny new thing for almost 4 years now).

The problem is best summed up as “relying on the pet to play the game for you while yourself doing as little as possible, rather than playing the game by using the pet to maximum potential.”

One trick that helped me in GW2 a lot was rebinding all the F1 – F4 keys to shift-1 through shift-4 – so I can use those keys now as fast as I use my core abilities. For my pet that means switching what it is attacking or triggering the ‘F2’ skill are actions I can do with very little hand-movement (all my keys are actually arranged on a nostromo pad, if not, I’d have rebound everything on my keyboard into a tight circle to keep my fingers from needing to stretch).

Well, this one just comes down to which one looks best to your eyes, has the most entertaining personal story options, fits the name you’re thinking of, etc.

There are a few racial skills in this game, and one could say… they have perks to some classes.

Do you want a robot to get into and smash face with? Asura.
Do you want to apply a random condition and get a random boon? Human
Do you want an AoE regen over time heal that is nearly identical to one already in the class? Sylvarri. But you also get to RP ERPing and pretend you’re an elf.
Do you want to summon two allies to help you out in a pinch? Charr
Do you want to yell out “Form of… a panther!” and become a jaguar for a bit? Norn.

My ranger is human because she got slated before launch by me to be a carryover from GW1. Same name and a similar took to my GW1 Elonan Ranger. My GW1 ranger mostly used a pink flamingo (Named EddyVanH) and a Croc (SteveIrwin) – pets chosen for… silly reasons… and I had planned to have a flamingo here as well, before learning it wasn’t an option (Moa is NOT the same).

But once the character was made, I liked it, so I kept that and got more sensible in pet choice.

I see no bait and switch. I see ‘reading too much into something’.

When Frank tells Alice: :To the Moon Alice! Too the Moon!
- She doesn’t call it bait and switch when he fails to deliver.

When they say play how you want – that doesn’t include obvious bad play being just as good as obvious good play.

Its like how, in kindergarden, the teach tells you you’re a special snowflake. Well honey, you ain’t.

And when they say ‘everyone is entitled to an opinion’ to all the little kiddies now… well child, only one opinion in any debate is ever actually right – and often none of them are. Debate is the cruel wall of reality smashing into the face okittendergarden 80s-90s ‘special snowflake’ teaching.

Yes you can play as you like – but you won’t be as good.

Reality melts the special snowflakes.