Guild Wars 2

Vayne.8563:

You didn’t mention what server you’re on. I know in Tarnished Coast, there are usually some people around willing to do events. You do have to talk in map chat sometimes to get people there, however.

This makes a huge difference. I admit that it never occurred to me, but I explore to level and if someone says they need help with something in a zone I’m in, I’ll go over to assist if I can.

You can meet some nice people this way, and also have fights that are tougher than the typical zerg slaughter, but much more fun than trying (and failing) to solo.

I do have a level 20 warrior. TBH I don’t play her much because, well, warriors seem like easy button in this game and there are just too many of them around. But maybe if I played it a different way…

Any idea where I can find the build in question? Again, I’m rather new and clueless. Thanks.

In “real war”, camouflage is an important consideration. If we had different races in the real world, an asura darting around wearing mottled brown armor would be a lot harder to detect than a norn wearing shiny plate armor.

But in WvW there’s a complicating factor, the block of text that floats overhead.

So since I am not experienced, my question is: does physical appearance actually make any difference? Is it harder to notice, find and hunt down a character of one particular type compared to another based on character and gear appearance choices, rather than profession/skills?

That could be fun too, Jayne.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

If that happens, just back away. Nothing is stopping you from retreating. Fight the enemies in the area that is not filled with mines, and once its safe, then try to carefully cross the room.

The problem is the whole tower is basically an area I have to retreat from. And others are coming to the same conclusion, which means the tower will fairly soon be rather completely “retreated from”.

I think the tower itself is amazing. I just think it needs to be reined in a bit so you don’t have to be either an expert or in a zerg to survive it.

Oh, and with regard to the glass cannon comments, I completely respecced all of my abilities and traits just to try to survive in this area, giving up all offense in favor of defense, and I still went up and down more frequently than a thermometer in New England.

Thanks for all the replies!

I get that warrior seems to be the answer to all build questions these days. (Sad face.) But I really am going for sneaky/deceptive here. I want to use stealth so I want to stick with thief if that’s at all viable.

My “main” (first character, not really all that well equipped yet) is a mesmer. I haven’t had a lot of luck with it in WvW so far, at least in part due to the difficulty of playing the class well. Also, the class is slow and I can’t afford 6 traveler’s runes yet.

Can anyone possibly give me a link to a specific high-regen high-stealth thief build, so I can see what sorts of traits and gear I should be looking at? I’m still really, really new so the build names don’t mean a lot to me.

Also, I believe permastealth disappears in 4 weeks so I need to know how to adapt to that as well, if possible…

Okay, so I’ve only dabbled in WvW. I know the zerg-running is not for me. I’m new and not likely to be very good 1 on 1 against other players for many months, if ever.

What I’d like to build is a harrassment/annoyance/surveillance type character. Someone who can sneak around, get behind enemy lines, pick off supply caravans, provide information about zerg movements to my team, and so forth.

It should be high mobility, evasion and survivability. I don’t care much about beating the other guy if I run into him in a dark alley; that would be nice, but it’s optional. I just don’t want him to beat me either, I want to get away and keep doing what I’m doing.

I’ve been building a thief believing it would be the natural choice for this. So far I’ve played it a bit in WvW but being upleveled I’m still pretty weak and lack experience. Is it a good idea to continue to pursue for this purpose or would another class be a better idea?

If I stick with the thief can anyone suggest a good build for this concept? I do have a few ideas but am eager to learn more. Thanks.

It’s not just you. The third floor especially is an exercise in frustration. Earlier I was in a huge zerg with like 50 people and even there a lot of people went down multiple times. I just watched a smaller group get completely wiped out.

A lot of folks are going to “one and done” this tower because it’s just aggravating. The final boss fight was less difficult and annoying than getting to it.

The “overflow” system makes this even worse. The instance I’m in right now is a ghost town.

It’ll be a lot less than a week is my guess.

It’s one thing when a zerg makes things easier, and another when it’s all but required except for very skilled players on specific builds.

I’m a new player. I can’t compare it to older releases.

But it’s an order of magnitude harder than the release two weeks ago, and substantially harder even than the Mad King’s labyrinth, in terms of just trying to get from point A to point B without dying.

By themselves I could avoid those flower things. But there are too many mobs, and it seems like 1/4 of them are veterans or elites, and all of it put together is overdone.

I’m certainly going to keep at it. I like the update, overall I think it’s well done and shows a lot of work and care went into it. I just think they need to ratchet back the difficulty in getting from one place to another or it will be a ghosttown very quickly. It’s frustrating as it is now.

Well, I have to admit that I’ve now seen what some of the others were saying. People are leaving others behind some of the time, at least partially because the AOE and mob damage in the mazes are WAY WAY overdone.

I’m sure some players are better than others, and I’m also sure some classes can deal with it better than others. But there are a LOT of downed and dead players on the map so I am not imagining this.

Taku.6352:

Don’t walk into the spore mines… They show a clear AoE marker around them and pop few seconds later.

And if there weren’t 70,000 other things going on, I might be able to avoid them.

Add those to the AOE poison, huge quantities of nasty mobs spawning all around…

It’s a bit much for an area you are supposed to just be traveling through.

Challenge is cool. Needing a team to traverse an area is cool.

Going up and down more frequently than a yo-yo because of random stuff that pops up and hits for 15,000 damage — not fun.

Vol.5241:

You make things too easy, ppl whine.

You make things too hard, ppl whine.

You make things at moderate difficulty, ppl whine cause it’s boring

Pretty much, which is why legitimate complaints get ignored.

If the environment is oh-so-terrible in there, how did my 11,000 HP thief wearing level 53 yellow gear get to the top in under 15 minutes?

lunacrous.6751:

How are you posting from a parallel universe? Never seen a single other person help anyone in this mess.

All those people rezzing my pathetic 11k HP upleveled thief could have been a.. hallucination.

So they make something actually challenging and people still complain. LOL.

I thought it was awesome, despite being on a squishy uplevel thief who went down numerous times. People always stopped to help.

Utility skills are IMO one of the worst-implemented aspects of combat in this game. There aren’t enough slots, and the cooldowns are excessive.

Long cooldowns just means I spend more time auto-attacking in boredom. It also means I prefer items like signets where I get a passive benefit permanently, chewing up what few slots already exist.

Really in need of an overhaul IMO.

Syrpharon.7491:

Let’s suppose that a casual player like me wants to get a skin because he likes it: let’s say the Foefire’s Essence. This sword costs around 400g just for the appearance and the cost of the materials to make it. Those materials are the real problem since they are rare, don’t drop so frequently, and you need around 100 or so to get the sword, but people sell them for a lot.

So we have casual players, or players who don’t want to or can’t farm, that want to get something very expensive. What can we do about it?

If it’s important to you, you can decide to spend either the time or money to get it. If you aren’t willing to spend the time or money, it’s not important to you.

Just like, well, everything else in life.

MMO developers have no options for making the best items available that people won’t whine about. If they’re time-consuming to get people complain that it takes too long; if they can be gotten quickly, people get all the best items and then they’re bored. If it requires skill to get them then people who don’t have the necessary skill complain, and if there’s no skill involved, the people who want to prove their higher skill complain.

There is no solution that will keep everyone happy. Given that in this game there’s barely any difference between legendary weapons and ones you can get pretty easily, this is much ado about not much.

Funny, the last two games I played you got 0 XP towards general leveling through crafting.

I’m increasingly convinced that there’s NOTHING that MMO players won’t complain about.

A huge, complex software development project has failed to meet some of its schedule goals! Stop the presses!

What they all lack for me are cooldowns that allow me to remember they exist as I’m playing. No matter how great an ability is, if I can only use it for 10 seconds of out every 240, I generally don’t care about it.

bravoart.5308:

OP brought up a valid complaint, that people that don’t buy gems can’t compete in gold purchases, and everyone suddenly starts talking about cosmetics and ‘endgame’ and exotics.

It’s not a valid complaint, because it’s based on a false premise — that you need to be rich to ‘compete’ in the first place. Gear makes less of a difference in this game than in any I’ve played going back to the days of DOS single player RPGs.

Psst: It’s not a competition.

Thanks for the replies. I think in this case it is in fact the melee assist, it stops me from moving through the mob. I turned it off, and it helps with this, we’ll see if it causes other problems.

Can’t quite seem to figure this out. I activate it, but then I can’t get behind the mob before the stealth wears off. Most of the time if I just try to move I get stuck, which I realized may be the “melee assist” feature. If I turn that off, I’ll be swinging at air half the time though, and if I try to dodge through the mob, I’m usually too far away to hit the 1 skill.

Suggestions? Thanks.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Who is running TA Aetherpath anymore. It is not efficient. It is not profitable.

Are you playing a game, or running a manufacturing plant?

Someone mentioned Rift. Before I signed up to GW2 I went over to their site and looked on their forums. What I found there made the complaints in the GW2 forum look like a tea party at Buckingham Palace.

Grass is always greener and all that…

Aeolus.3615:

I think gw2 only please players that never played good mmo’s before.

What are those “good mmo’s” and why are you posting here instead of playing one of them?

Fine? I was just in a group with an 80, 68, a couple in the 40s and me, a 38. We repeatedly got our butts handed to us. We only really got through one fight, and that was by ‘stacking’ which seems to be somewhat controversial.

This is the first dungeon new players like me are likely to try. What a horrible experience.

I think challenge is great but it should scale properly to the levels of the players. The issue is that even downscaled, higher-level gear has more + stats, and higher-level players also have more traits and skills.

… it really isn’t. Very weird that they have dungeons of different difficulty levels that mostly seem to need at least half the party to be much higher level downscaled.

Hear, hear! (See, see?) The graphics are truly amazing. Only game I’ve ever played where I felt tempted to buy a new graphics card just so I could turn up the detail.

Yeah I was wondering about the quick escape. Though it still seems fairly uncommon and we do get not very many trait slots… then again, he seems to know his game a lot better than I do.

It doesn’t matter how many 80s you have. It matters how you got them, and whether or not you enjoyed doing it.

There are people who begin grinding the first day they log into a game, and there are people who aren’t doing it after playing daily for 5 years. It’s an attitude and approach, not a matter of time.

I find the “elite” skills mostly quite disappointing in all the classes I’ve tried so far, and the reason is the insanely high cooldowns. There are just not many situations in which I care about something I can use for 15 seconds or whatnot every 3 minutes.

In general, the cooldowns of most skills in this game are way too long given how few of them you can use at any given time.

As a new thief player I was fascinated by that video. Boy do I have a long way to go!

Question: why Descent of Shadows? It doesn’t seem like falling is something that comes up too often?

Thanks Big Tower. I’m sticking with a condition/mobility build for leveling, so far so good, and will reassess at 40 and at 60.

Thanks. I’m currently leveling with D/D and SB and haven’t had much experience with backstabbing yet.

Big Tower, would you mind explaining the acronyms in “C&D → BS → AA” for me? Thanks.

That’s one perspective.

From where I sit, I see lots of casual players saying they have lots to do and are mostly enjoying doing it, while a few hard-core players tell them they’re actually not having fun.

What the others said. Gold is pretty easy to get especially at high levels. And no need to delete anything.

As an aside, any chance you’d be willing to share the “easy to play, epic at WWW” mesmer build? Here or PM is fine. Thanks.

Except nobody is stealing anything from you. If anything you’re stealing from yourself by apparently choosing to on purpose play in a way you dislike.

Seems to me that what you’re after doesn’t exist, and can’t exist because it is based on contradiction.

TooBz.3065:

I actually did answer your question. The part of the game that requires getting ascended gear is getting ascended gear. It’s in the game, it’s a part of the game. Therefore, I think my answer is valid.

If that’s an answer, it’s a circular one.

In most games you need to get ever-better equipment just to participate in the content. In this one, you really don’t.

If you’re grinding to get gear just for the sake of getting it, and then complaining about how much you hate the grind, then you’re doing it wrong. Sorry, it’s really as simple as that.

TooBz.3065:

Qaelyn.7612:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Then why all the catering to the people that play so much and not to the ones that play 5 hours a week? Why the ascended stuff, if those people burn through it anyway? Why the achievement rewards?

Can you please tell me what in this game requires legendary or ascended gear?

Can you please tell me why I would play the game and not try to get legendary or ascended gear?

Or to put it another way Getting a legendary or ascended gear requires getting a legendary or ascended gear. That’s why it’s there. To be gotten.

Leaving aside the fact that you didn’t actually answer my question (and I have a pretty good idea why)…

The answer to your question is that you should do whatever you enjoy. Some people enjoy working towards long-term equipment goals; others do not.

It’s optional.

The reason to not try to get a particular type of gear is that you are more interested in playing the game than grinding equipment. Which, it just so happens, this game is ideally designed for.

IME the people who complain about stuff like this simply cannot be satisfied:

- If they put in stuff that requires time and effort to get, they get complaints about grind.
- If they put in stuff that is easy to get, they get complaints about lack of challenge.
- If the new stuff comes slowly, people say they’re bored.
- If they put in new stuff frequently, people get upset because old gear isn’t as valuable.

The real solution is to get off the merry-go-round of trying to please hardcore gamers. And from what I can see, that’s what Arenanet basically has done.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Then why all the catering to the people that play so much and not to the ones that play 5 hours a week? Why the ascended stuff, if those people burn through it anyway? Why the achievement rewards?

Can you please tell me what in this game requires legendary or ascended gear?

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

The problem is that to many players are focused on achievement points and the reward chests, Legendaries and Ascended gear.
They don’t play games for enjoyment anymore, they play for bragging rights and to get everything ASAP.
They cry like a spoiled child.
‘UUAHHH!!! Mommy I have compleated everything in the game, I got some other small stuff to do but that isn’t fun!!! Give me more content that won’t take 1 hour for me to compleate, give me! Give me! … I’m gonna do these ascended weapons, Legendaries and farm AP and complain how much I have to farm them while I wait for you to give me more content I don’t have to farm’

That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. Common theme in the forums of most MMOs, I’ve found.

It’s impossible for any game developer to keep people who play 80 hours a week entertained, especially when those people deliberately do things they don’t enjoy and then complain about not having fun.

So far this game does a far better job of keeping things interesting than any other I’ve encountered.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

They get out of honeymoon (enjoy it while you can) and than see that brick wall of grind to get anywhere near the content offered. They already missed out achievements, which sets them further back (AP farming is a progression after all with the bonuses offered).

“Brick wall of grind” to get near the content? I honestly have no idea what you are talking about.

This is BY FAR the most friendly game I have EVER played in terms of allowing new players to jump right into the thick of things. I started my first character on October 12th. The new Hallowe’en content came out on October 15th. And by October 19th I was running around in the labyrinth with the zerg, slaughtering mobs and getting candy corn and having a blast. In what other game would that be possible?

Also a week in I was able to participate in WvW. Didn’t have to wait until level 80. I died a lot, but so what? The death penalty in this game is practically zero.

I can go to any lower areas also any time I want to do whatever activities are going on.

And I haven’t even touched PvP yet, barely done any WvW, barely done any dungeons. On top of that, they put new stuff in every two weeks.

All of that for what, 40 bucks one time and no subscription fees.

What exactly is the problem? Because I’m not seeing it.

If you have to ask the question, then for you it probably has no answer, and you might be better off playing something else.

I’m new and recognize that I’m still in the ‘honeymoon’ period of the game, but I’ll never get to the point where I feel I have to grind junk. I’ll do stuff I find fun, and if I no longer find it fun, I’ll leave.

The problem is that people get attached to a game and feel like it’s a marriage or something. If you don’t enjoy it, do something else. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the game itself.

Ghostwolf.9863:

Nowadays GW2 is all about grinding.

Only if all you care about is having the best ‘stuff’.

This game actually has a huge variety of things you can do. Grinding is a choice.

Ghostwolf.9863:

Crafting is a pain and isn’t rewarding enough, I worked really hard and even spent irl money to buy gems to convert to gold to level up huntsman from 400 to 500, just to get a slight touch in stats and getting the same items as everyone else.

Well there you go. So if it doesn’t make a big difference, why bother grinding it? Just do what you enjoy.

Or if you’re burned out, take a break. Happens with most people in every game after a while.