Guild Wars 2

Just a flesh wound.3589:

They don’t care about this incentive to try different things for the time it takes to get 15,000 AP (about 4 years) but after 15,000 AP and 4 years they suddenly do care so they put a cap on AP? I doubt that.

Cristalyan.5728:

To reach the 15k Ap cap from daily activities you need more than 4 years. Doing the same thing. From your post we can understand the doing the same activity for 4 years is not grinding. The grinding starts (according to your interpretation of ANet intentions) only after 4 years of doing the same thing.

I do think (and tried to express this in my previous post) that the 15k cap in itself is too high, but by the time ANet put in the cap, players had already gotten too many ap through dailies and monthlies (which came a lot faster than 10 per day during some iterations of the dailies) that putting a lower, more reasonable cap in place wasn’t an option.

To me it looks more like a compromise between putting up a cap and not stopping a sizeable number of veterans in their tracks of ap progression right then and there. The progression would slow eventually (when people reach the cap, as many are starting to now), but not as abrupt as it would have if the cap they’d introduced was lower than what people had accumulated until then.

Cristalyan.5728:

As for the “It was never meant to be the sole or even major way to acquire those rewards” – indeed, I agree with you here. But, unfortunately, some players are now in a point where the sole/major way to acquire specific rewards is the daily AP reward. So, that means something was wrong when designing this system. And this is what we want to find with this debate – a way to fix this design error.

I’m still not convinced that it’s a design error. At least no more than the “design error” to lock the legendary backpiece skins and gliders behind their specific content (even time-limited in one case), the triumphant and glorious skins behind reward tracks, the specialization weapons and their skins behind certain collections, the new legendary weapons behind full HoT mastery and so on.

Achievement rewards are kind of an ongoing project, with more ap coming in with most every update. If something is “wrong”, then I’d say it’s the fact that people can preview skins not accessible right now (because they require ap not yet in game) and expect to beeline straight to those skin rewards.

Is displaying future ap reward skins so much different from e.g. mistforge hero weapons? People had to choose which of those skins to unlock, and while all skins are available, and it is intended (as far as I understand it) to give people a chance to unlock more of them in the future (through ways not yet determined), for now the skins beyond the ones you unlocked from former wvw seasons are not accessible to you either.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

My guess is that they are not going to remove the cap or increase the other AP because they do not wish to take the time to add more rewards to the chests above where rewards stop.

My guess is they are not going to remove the cap simply because they want (and have always wanted) people to spend their time on different activities rather than grinding one specific aspect of this game.

In a way, doing dailies each day for the ap is not much different than grinding a specific map/dungeon/event chain only. You move around different maps, but essentially you’re mostly doing a lot of similar activities (harvesting, vista etc.).

The original idea of dailies as I understood them was to give people incentive to try different things in this game and get a small bonus on the side. Just like any other small bonus you get in this game (extra blood rubies or petrified wood for dailies on the new maps, extra dungeon tokens after doing a number of different dungeon paths, map rewards for doing events and activities in a map …), the daily ap give players interested in specific rewards a bit of a boost towards achieving those rewards. It was never meant to be the sole or even major way to aquire those rewards.

Looking at my own achievement points, it does in fact feel weird that more than half of my points (12k of 23k) come from dailies and monthlies. It’ll still take a while for me to reach the cap, since I only do dailies whenever I feel like it or if they happen by themselves. To be honest, I don’t care if or when I hit the cap since I prefer to see the achievement chests as a nice surprise rather than something to “work for”.

If anything is wrong about the cap on daily ap (in my opinion), is that it’s too high compared to the permanent ap available. It’s made daily the major source of ap rather than a bonus for regular players. Unfortunately at the time ANet introduced the cap people had already aquired so many ap that ANet couldn’t really put the cap lower without capping a lot of people right then and there.

I’m hoping for more future permanent achievements (like the ones coming to pvp now) rather than making the tired old repeatable ones even more intense than they already are.

Depends on the character. One of my elementalists, a very light-skinned, blonde norn with white and winter blue dyes, uses the wintersday staff, scepter, and focus. The swirling snow globes go great with the look (and the snow shoulders have only added to the outfit ). Since I don’t like the dagger that goes along with that set I use the mistforged hero dagger instead.

Another one of my favourites is more of a fun weapon, the toy rifle. My asura golemancer carries that one and loves to shoot corks at stuff while his golems do the heavy work.

My main ele, a green-skinned (or green-barked? ) sylvari, uses Usoku’s Needle in combination with Essence of Time, another of my favourite sets. Her dragon’s jade staff is among my favourites, too.

Then there is, of course, Bo, the main weapon of my charr druid. The elegance of that staff works well with his monk’s outfit (yeah, charr medium is just too much of a pain to find decent armor for the poor guy ).

There’s a lot more I like (and many many more I find absolutely horrible ) … too many to list here really.

Shin Phoenix.9243:

2) Items that say “This item only has value as part of a collection.” should also be junk, right? I understand that once you’ve picked them up they’ve been unlocked and that’s all you need.

No please. I like to keep some of the collection items as mementos of going on the collection journey, like Rabsovitch’s Lost Treasure or the flowers from the Leaf of Kudzu I collection. These are items I can’t get back once they’re gone. For you to sell them if you don’t want them is just one extra click. For me to sell my junk and make sure I don’t accidentally sell those items if they are automatically classified as junk is a lot more complicated.

Everything on the character the moment you delete her is gone for good. Everything in account-shared storage (bank, wallet, wardrobe unlocks) is preserved.

Zedek.8932:

Now a very personal statement:
From an esthetically viewpoint I personally need a match as well. A norn thief is not a thief, it’s a bandit if at all. An Asura is small, swift and sneaky. That works better. Male and female does not matter in the case of Asura (female thieves work well as well), but Asura female tanks for example are already at the very border immersion-wise.. ;-)

I used to main a tiny hobbit tank back when I was still actively playing and raiding in LotRO. I fondly remember raids with giant bosses that were so tall I hardly reached above their ankles . Still I could keep their attention all day from all the big guys in shiny armor standing behind them .

Aside from that, my norn (female) thief, a very slim and elegant young lady, would like to disagree with your stereotyping, too .

goes off to switch languages on her game client to check out the german voices she hasn’t hear in years while primarily playing asura

Fosio.8217:

You missed the point entirely

Who missed what point is be debatable . My point is: the new stat sets are purposefully placed behind hard-to-get materials to appeal to people willing to grind a lot for a little increase in strength. Just like ascended armor isn’t a huge leap from exotic armor when it comes to the strength it gives your character but is a huge leap in cost.

Did that make it more clear, madame?

The (purposefully) vague anouncement from ArenaNet suggested that they were hoping for updates to happen every 2-3 months. Judging from that we’re at the bare minimum time of when we can hope for the next update. And they never promised those 2-3 months, just said they’d hope to be able to keep that schedule .

Anyway, if and when they anounce the next update it probably won’t be in response to a forum post but rather through one of their official channels that reach a wider audience.

There are similar stat sets widely available in core content. Most (if not all) of the game’s content can be played with those core stat sets that are easy to get. The newer, more specialized (and in some builds more powerful) stat sets were added to keep the min-maxing part of the population busy. If you want to go for the optimum, go grind your expansion stats. If “almost as good” is good enough for you, take what the base game offers.

At least that’s my guess on the topic .

P.S.: It’s minstrel’s, not minister’s .

OriOri.8724:

Rasimir.6239:

Don’t even think of touching my golems!

Signed: the asura hiding behind a golem army (golemancer runes and asura racials ftw )

You should roll a chrono as an asura and get golemancer runes

I’ve actually got a couple of asura chronomancers (as well as a norn, a human and a charr one … mesmer is my favourite profession ), but the extra golems don’t really fit them all that well. On the other hand, have you ever seen a mesmer/chrono with the hohotron backpack in action? Each of the clones’ backpacks have their own chatter, making for a variety of comments at once . At times it really is hillarious. (and if I ever feel any of them needs more golems I’ve got a spare set of golemancer runes in my bank ).

What level is the character you are playing? The personal story was revamped a while back. It used to be that story steps were spaced roughly two levels apart, and you could access them one after the other, which lead to people ending up with story instances way over their level (and suddenly stalled because they just couldn’t do the next step) and made it hard to actually see and follow the different story archs.

A while back (a little over two years to be exact) they changed the story so that now the story steps of a single story arch all are placed on the same level (in steps of 10, lvl 10 for the beginning race arch and so on), and you can no longer jump ahead in your story.

Now if you character has done the story more than two years back and is still below the level now needed (the minor races story arch is lvl 50 now I think, where it used to start around level 40 before the story revamp), then you will have the story step visible but won’t be actually able to play it. In this case, just level the character outside the story and the green star should turn up once you hit the next -0 level.

What class(es) are you playing on btw? I’m just wondering, because going into the labyrinth or any open world map on a ranger or engineer seems to give me a decent supply of leather armor to salvage. It’s a lot less if I’m on a light or heavy class though.

Finalfreefall.8247:

I agree with the people saying the maps are dead. 8 tries on Verdant brink and nothing gets me a shot at that Bladed Coat that I want so very very badly. So I’m going to offer a quick solution

The game is already offering a different “solution” to aquiring the bladed coat (and other HoT armor skins): The Heart of Maguuma reward tracks in WvW and PvP. The final reward of those tracks (Mordremoth Cache ) offers a choice of different HoT skins, including all of the bladed skins.

What class and build are you trying this with? I don’t remember having a hard time with any of my characters, but most of them are pretty much going damage-only for living story content.

If all else fails you can always ask a friend or two to help you.

My charr (including my main and first character) are all male, simply because I dislike how the female charr look and move. Sylvari and norn on the other hand are all female, because I don’t enjoy playing their male counterparts. My asura (the majority of my 28 characters ) are mostly female, but a few, including my very first asura (2nd character I created in this game after the first charr) are male. Oh, and I do have one human female, that one was a mistake (looong story) that I certainly won’t repeat again.

For statistics: female, online gamer since the early 90s (MUDs back then), but only ever started playing mostly female characters in the last 5 or so years when female gamers became the norm rather than the odd one out. Before that, playing male characters made for a much more relaxed gaming atmosphere .

Other GW2-gaming family members: both of my daughters. The 13-year-old is a die-hard asura player and exclusively plays wvw. She’s just recently started commanding public squads, and seems to do so pretty successfully . The 10-year-old plays mostly charr with the odd asura inbetween, and prefers jumping puzzles to any other in-game activity. No human female on either of their accounts .

If it’s the more recent developments before the pact advanced into the Heart of Maguuma that you are currently interested in, consider getting Living Story Season 2, as that holds most of the explanation for the Sylvari development from just one of five races to being the odd one out.

If you don’t have the gems or just don’t want to commit that much on top of buying the game, you can also join a friend on a play-through of all 8 episodes. You won’t be able to control the story yourself, but you’ll see and experience everything that happens, from the first intrusions of Mordremoth’s minions towards the east to the revelations of the origins of the Sylvari and the attack on the Pale Tree.

No more dailies, please, and especially no more complex, specific ones. It’s already bad enough when there is a daily adventure or jp and everyone and their mother is crowded around that one spot. Having played in the days of the Queensdale champ train, I really don’t want to see people clash with each other on the subject of having to do specific event chains/meta events.

We already have more than enough daily tasks to choose from in this game. ANet doesn’t have to make more of them or make them more specific. If you feel the need for more specific goals each day (and have the time for doing them all), just set your own goals. Check the wiki for event chains going on in the different maps and go for a specific one. Set yourself a number of materials you want to gather, and go out and get harvesting. You’re already rewarded by gaining materials and experience from gathering, karma and experience from events, opening of special vendors and so on.

If it’s achievement points you’re after, dailies aren’t the only way to get them. In fact, dailies were never even meant to be the main way to get them. Check your achievement log, and you’ll most likely find a lot of achievements that would make good short- or long-term goals to pursue. Have you finished the slayer achievements yet? The explorer achievements? JPs and minidungeons? Everything fractals have to offer?

It’s all there, and ready for each of us to choose for ourselves. No need to complicate things with yet another (or an extended) list of suggested achievements that give the equivalent of a cookie as extra reward. The activities are all there, as well as the rewards. Just go out and choose your own road to fortune and fame.

Yasi.9065:

TP is not an option for me, rather I spent the extra time buying white armor from vendor to MF and salvage it than supporting an absolutely broken market.

I’m afraid this is your biggest problem, because the game economy is built so that you can exchange all the non-leather loot you gain while farming leather into more leather. That way, the hours you’ve calculated will be significantly reduced (but of course at the price of not increasing your stores of any other materials you might find helpful in the future).

This game isn’t set up so that dedicated farming for one material and one alone will give the desired result. It will always cost you, in time and enjoyment if nothing else, unless you are willing to accept that exchanging unwanted for wanted materials via the TP is supposed to be the most direct path of aquiring any one material in this game.

Gop.8713:

Er, no. In the past the ToT bag or gift was an added fourth item. Now it replaces the booster slot . . .

Says who?

In the past, during holiday events we had four slots: 1 guaranteed seasonal slot (special holidays only), 2 random slots, 1 booster slot.

Now we always have 4 slots: 1 guaranteed seasonal slot (all-year round now instead of only for special holidays), one convenience item, one account progression and one for rare stuff with the drawback that when random doesn’t come up with anything rare the slots stays empty.

Nowhere does it say the booster slot is replaced with the seasonal bag. In fact, the slot that holds the seasonal bag is the only one that didn’t change at all (other than becoming a year-round addition to the chests). The other three slots got sorted around and drop categories assigned to single slots rather than double slots, but for all we know the drop rate of “good” stuff might actually be higher now (despite the missing boosters) than it used to be before.

There has been a guaranteed trick or treat bag in chests in previous years during Halloween, and nobody made a fuss about them. Effectively they’ve replaced the slot that held a guaranteed booster (that many people made a fuss about and declared as useless … not me though, I enjoyed the boosters ) with a slot that has a chance for a high-ticket item but also has a (bigger) chance to hold nothing. The seasonal bag has been there for a long time, the only change is that it’s going to be present all-year round now, not just during special festivals.

Both! Fractals when I feel like fast-paced, challenging content, or just chilling and goofing around with some guildies on low tiers. Dungeons when I’m in story mood .

Don’t even think of touching my golems!

Signed: the asura hiding behind a golem army (golemancer runes and asura racials ftw )

If you’re into WvW, there’s always the option to go the proof of heroics route for hero points. I know one of my daughters, who is heavily into WvW but hasn’t set foot into HoT beyond the entrance to VB, has each new character’s elite spec unlocked in a matter of minutes because she’s got so many tomes of knowledge and proofs of heroics saved that she hardly knows what else to do with it .

starlinvf.1358:

3. If you lack the mastery points to spend on the track once filled, you have to switch tracks manually, or lose exp in the mean time.

Wrong. If you have filled the mastery bar but not unlocked the tier yet, experience automatically gets redirected into the next open mastery track of the corresponding region that isn’t maxed yet.

Example: You’ve filled the bar for pact commander 3 but not unlocked the tier, the experience you gain will be redirected to either your currently open legendary or fractal mastery track, provided you don’t have both of these maxed in experience for the current tier. This will happen even if pact commander is still your choosen active mastery track.

It is a good idea to check for maxed mastery bars frequently (I personally find it pretty hard to see if the bar at the bottom of your screen is actually maxed, but you can simply mouse over it and check the numbers in the tooltip) and activate/unlock to match however you wish to progress, but (over-)filling the mastery bar is nothing to stress about since you won’t loose experience easily.

To the OPs question, if you are looking for ways to earn central Tyria mastery experience, just do whatever you’ve done to level (provided you don’t level exclusively with tomes of knowledge ). World exploration, events and event chains, dungeons, personal story (on lvl 80 characters), even a simple gathering run will give you experience that goes towards your masteries.

If it’s the mastery points you are after rather than the experience, check the achievement log for red mastery points, as somebody above suggested. There’s a variety of points to be gotten from different sources, with enough extra points to give you choices of which content to actually do to gather them.

Rauderi.8706:

Tekoneiric.6817:

It’s happened a lot over the last month. Trolling or not; an exclusion zone would stop this.

That said, bolded part is fully agreed with. Player-created spawns should never overlap with other interactables, including other player spawns. Range 100 would be sufficient, probably.

Tell that to a commander trying to place siege in WvW. Not being allowed to overlap other siege would be a disaster (and open ways for a lot more trolling, too).

I’ve got gold on exactly two adventures, and not even silver on many of them (bad hand-eye coordination and reflexes). Despite that I have all masteries maxed (including 8 points in the raid mastery tree, only four of which I actually got from raiding) and have a few spare points.

Check your achievement log for points available outside of adventures. Living World Season 3 especially introduced a ton of mastery points that are doable, way more than the ancient magics mastery track requires. You don’t need any gold adventures and not even all of the silvers to max out your masteries.

Danikat.8537:

But still, when I’m playing them I’m supposed to be working on whatever I created them for. Not getting side-tracked with screenshots, jumping puzzles, or trying to break out of maps or playing through long event chains or whatever else I keep finding myself doing.

Why not? Is anyone (other than yourself ) forcing you to do specific tasks and those tasks only?

Quite a few of my (currently 28) characters got created with the intent to check something out and then free up the character slot again, but I always end up rather buying new character slots than deleting anyone. My norn ele for example, that I created to check out the NPE, just had her second birthday. Not that I needed yet another ele (my most-played character is a Sylvari ele, and there’s a couple of asura eles around, too), but I found I enjoyed the character and wouldn’t let her go again.

Maybe it really is a sign of old age, but I refuse to stress myself over a game. I’ve been there and done that, played and optimized and gamed everything to the fullest when I was 20 or 30 years younger, but I learned that I don’t enjoy forcing myself and in most cases even end up losing interest in the game, so I no longer play like that. Personal choice .

Adelas.6598:

And for me, the things that I wish to keep but clog up my inventory the most – the things that would benefit me (and my kids on their accounts) the most if they were out of my bank – are tonic and other consumable bundle items: rotten eggs, toilet paper, . My kids could actually keep and use them.

My youngest daughter has a character dedicated to collecting tonics. She loves moving around (mostly in the cities ) in different tonic forms, and makes sure she has one or more of as many types of tonic as she can get.

Actually one of her first trips outside of a city was exploration of the caledon forest in pink quaggan transformation (with one of my guardians as a bodyguard). Walking around transformed and unable to fight somehow made her feel safer .

I’d love a tonic tab in the wardrobe similar to the finisher one that takes both endless and limited-use tonics. Goofing around with friends and guildies in transformation form is one thing I really enjoy, but the tonic I’d love to use is almost never on the character I’m on at that moment.

Danikat.8537:

I’ll be in the middle of seeking out hero points to unlock a jump skill so I can get to the top of a mountain to take a screenshot and/or glide off when I’ll remember I’m playing a key runner and was supposed to just do the storyline and nothing else. (That’s a real example.)

Sounds familiar . In fact, this is one of the reasons why I never got the hang of keyfarming. My latest keyfarmer will soon turn a year old and is looking back on a short story run to level 40 followed by a productive year as pvp dragonhunter . The one before that ended up with a restyling kit, a legendary longbow and three full sets of equipment to lead a happy and productive life as my secondary ranger (and more often than not primary these days, much to the displeasure of my main and first character, a huge charr ranger who’s very sceptical of this glittery pink asura girl ).

starlinvf.1358:

People “talk” like crafting projects and progression work like the PvP reward tracks, where you focus on one at a time- but the reality is that much of these projects have overlaps, time gates, or bottlenecks that encourage us to do things in Parallel, so that no matter what we’re doing, we’re getting closer to a goal.

I think you are mistaking peoples intent here. They do not assume that everyone focuses on one project at a time. Quite the contrary: many people, especially in this game, don’t focus on any project at all but rather let things accumulate organically.

Personally, I have been playing this game for four years, three of them on two accounts. I have 20k+ achievement points on the main account and 10k+ on the secondary account. I’ve got a variety of ascended equipment and two or even three full exotic sets for different situations on many of my 28 characters. I’ve got enough gifts of exploration to craft a dozend core and half a dozend maguuma legendaries, full mastery on the main account and lots more.

Yet I haven’t “worked” on any project. On the contrary, I absolutely hate farming and play this game as my entertainment, in the evenings after work and family (although the times when I’m playing with one of my daughters have been steadily increasing lately ) or on the weekends if I find the time. I play often, but not daily, and certainly not daily on both accounts.

I just play whatever catches my fancy that day, sometimes alone out in the world, sometimes with friends in dungeons, fractals, or (rarely because of time constraints) raids, sometimes in wvw or pvp. Stuff simply accumulates, and achievements often get done without actively seeking them out.

I just recently got my first legendary weapon, Kudzu, because I enjoyed doing the precursor hunt for that weapon. I even had to figure out a new character for that weapon because my main ranger, a male charr, wouldn’t be caught dead with it . A couple of weeks earlier I crafted the legendary backpack Ad Infinitum. Both items were mostly done with materials that had accumulated over the years from just playing whatever I enjoyed at that moment.

You’d be surprised how many people enjoy playing this game without checklists, without focus on one project or a few, but rather to just enjoy playing, walking through the world, enjoying the view. Focussing on one project (or even a handful) would feel way too restrictive to me. I love that this game allows me to just accumulate stuff and do a big project once I’ve got the materials, rather than having to focus on gathering specific stuff to ever get a chance at the big projects.

The dailies in Bloodstone Fen and Ember Bay work great with this approach. The materials you get from those dailies have a finite niche use. You need a certain amount for specific ascended trinkets plus some goodies like minis and such, and the dailies help you if you want to specifically farm for them, but they’re not substantial enough that you couldn’t just make up for them by playing the areas a bit longer. If you focus on getting the trinkets they’ll give you a small boost, but once you’ve got all the trinkets (and minis ) you want there’s no need to worry yourself about them any longer.

Unlike games like WoW, where dailies are pretty much the main (if not only) aquisition method to progress your characters to be endgame-viable, dailies in GW2 are really of the “nice to have, but nothing substantial” variety. No matter if it’s regular dailies, Halloween, fractals, wvw, Bloodstone Fen or whatever, dailies give a nice extra but it’s not big enough to go out of my way to do them. I can always gather stuff another time.

I don’t want to stress myself over a small bonus. I’m here to enjoy myself and relax after a busy day in real life. I check the dailies whenever I’m undecided what to do and see if any of them appeal to me, just like I check unfinished achievements or my material storage to see if a little gathering could finish of an interesting crafting recipe.

It’s mostly the conditioning from games where dailies are as good as mandatory that makes people stress over the dailies in this game. Once you realize that our dailies are truly optional you’ll have much more fun actually doing them (whenever you feel like it ).

About the scribe materials: Would it be possible for you to create a guild material storage that takes the different lumber cores, defensive maps of the mists and similar stuff? That way, people could donate all of their scribe materials to the guild without them disappearing forever in everyone’s personal material storage, and the guild scribes that have the matching guild rights could use them for crafting just like the decorations are already used.

DoctorDing.5890:

IndigoSundown.5419:

In the original GW game, many popular builds involved mix/match choices to take advantage of such synergies. That made that game, by dev admission, problematic to balance.

And yet, loads more fun for the players.

My main is an ele and, for me, an ele needs to use a staff. I can’t get very excited about an ele with a war horn so I end up with the same ol’, same ol’ skills.

But that’s entirely your choice. I do play all of my eles as staff tempest whenever it suits me. Nobody’s keeping you from utilizing other aspects of the elite spec (overloads, utility skills, traits) if you don’t want to use the new weapon. Staff tempest plays quite differently than staff ele depending on how you’ve traited and skilled them.

To the op, the reson for restricting all aspects of the elite specialization to using that traitline seems to really be balance. Imagine a guardian with longbow but without dragonhunter traitline. Along comes a new specialization, and the devs will effectively be restricted from putting in goodies to that specialization that would synergise too well with the longbow. If on the other hand elites are mutually exclusive, they have much more freedom in designing traits and skills for each elite as they won’t have to worry about synergy with other elite traitlines.

Question: what (or who?) do you want to catch up to? “Contents” in this game can be pretty much anything. Experience the story, complete collections, explore maps, progress your masteries, advance your fractal level, gain pvp or wvw ranks, and lots and lots of other activities and goals.

What you spend your time with depends entirely on your goals, and those depend pretty much mostly on what you enjoy about the game. How “effective” your playtime is again depends on what goals you pursue. So to give you some ideas of what to do, it would be helpful to get an understanding of what it is you are looking for in the first place.

Dreamcycler.5490:

That slot almost made the expansion worth the price for the little content it really gives

Wait, I’m confused … if you don’t own the expansion and haven’t played it, how do you know that it gives “little content”???

In a way, Halloween is a bad time to judge how busy the maps are, since many people enjoy the halloween maps, most notably the Mad King’s Library for the limited time they’re available.

The game is however far from empty. It is pretty huge by now. There have been 7 additional maps released over the years, and especially the HoT maps are pretty extensive and people can get lost in a full map. Silverwastes is probably not the best to judge the population, since it can be hit and miss depending on whether the map is going for meta event progression or just has people wandering around aimlessly.

I take it you’ve gone to the Silverwastes to check out the lvl 80 boost? If so, you might have better luck getting back into the game by starting a new character. The low-level zones are still pretty much as busy as the highlevel ones, and it’ll make it easier to get back into the game since you won’t stumble into complex meta events where people just expect you to know what to do (Silverwastes is especially guilty of this since the meta depends on people cooperating across large parts of the map).

Or jump into the Heart of Thorns story (you’ll find the story journal in the hero panel of your lvl 80 character and can activate the HoT storyline there) and check out the new maps. Verdant Brink is quite a bit easier to get into solo than the Silverwastes.

One thing for sure: Things are far from empty, nor are they remotely the same as they were four years ago. Just take your time and explore the game again, there is so much to do you’ll surely be busy for a long time if you want to .

LinseyMurdock.4165:

Eirian Direstorm.9748:

I agree about blade shards, chak eggs, mysitic forge stones, etc. I also suggest resonating slivers.

I undertsand why you don’t want to put crafted things in. Would it be hard to at least make more things stackable in the bank, like the various salvage kits, harvesting tools, etc.?

Every month I end up getting quite a few BL salvage kits. It’s great to get them for free, but it would be even better if they stacked.

It would be extremely hard, if not impossible to make those things stack.

Maybe a mystic forge recipe where you can forge four full (25 charges) black lion salvage kits into one 100 charge kit? I also have the (mis-)fortune of gathering a lot more bl salvage kits than looting exotics and would love a way to compress those so they use fewer spaces.

Open your hero panel (default hotkey H). The lowest option on the left-hand side should be masteries. Choose that to open the mastery menu. Alternatively you can left-click to the right of your experience bar (the line at the very bottom of your screen) to open this.

Once on the masteries menu, you have a choice between Heart of Thorns (or is it Heart of Maguuma) and Central Tyria (Pact Tyria?) mastery lines. Choose Heart of Thorns, then Gliding, and you’ll see a bar about 2/3 filled (the same one you see as experience bar at the bottom of your screen).

To fully fill that bar, just go out into the expansion maps and do whatever you’d do on other maps to gain experience: play events, kill mobs, harvest, uncover the map, resurrect players and npc and so on.

When the bar is full there’ll be a quick flash (easy to miss) and in the mastery menu you’ll be able to spend a mastery point (you should’ve gotten one for completing Torn from the Sky) to unlock the basic gliding mastery. From there, you can choose the next Maguuma mastery to explore (either updraft in gliding or bouncing mushrooms in itzl) and so on.

Whenever you go back to the old tyria maps you’ll no longer gain experience for Maguuma masteries but for pact Tyria masteries instead, so make sure to choose a mastery to train from each area.

Check the wiki for more information.

Are you on a US or EU server? If you’re on EU I’d gladly do a few Arah runs with you. I’m not pro at that dungeon (especially not p4, but if you’re only in it for the tokens then I guess p4 isn’t what you’re looking for anyway ), but I do enjoy that dungeon very much, and it’s really not quite as difficult as people make it out to be.

I ran p3 with friends from my (very casual) guild just last week, and even though three out of 5 people were new to Arah explorable we got through smoothly. Once you have one or two people who can explain the encounters Arah is one of the (if not the) nicest dungeons in this game.

If all else fails you can always run other dungeons instead. 8 dungeon paths of your choice (including storymode) will give you a chest with 150 tokens from a dungeon of your choice, so at worst it’s 32 random dungeons to get the gift you need for your bifrost.

mia.8209:

• Running around and “discovering” them all at once – a project that takes several days and is mindnumbingly dull

I tried that once in the lull before the expansion release last year. Took a brand new character and went across the world to unlock every single waypoint there is (which is a lot more than the ones you need to just be moderately mobile in this world). I used a few tomes inbetween (around 35 if I recall correctly) whenever she was too badly underlevel for the next area, but other than that just went from waypoint to waypoint in a fairly straight but far from optimized manner.

The “several days” turned out to be less than 10 hours gametime, and since I was underleveled for most of the areas I was in it often proved quite interesting rather than “mindnumbingly dull” . And this was, as mentioned, for every last waypoint on the core Tyria maps. You probably don’t even need half of them if your goal is just to get to the interesting places, and you’ll grab a lot of them automatically on e.g. material gathering rounds.

Then there’s a lot of shortcuts like having somebody open dungeons for you, then walk out of the dungeon door to grab the wp right in front of the dungeon, taking guild portals to guild mission locations and so on. If you want to play on alts, waypoints should really be the least of your problems.

Last time I remember something like this happen was with the introduction of the Silverwastes, roughly two years ago I think. For a brief period, the player bribing the bandits would turn hostile to other players and was able to be killed.

I don’t have the quotes, but I do remember that when fixing that bug (rather quickly) back then ANet explicitely stated that no way of making players hostile to each other and able to attack each other was ever considered for the pve part of this game, and I see no reason at all (judging from ANets history with this game and its predecessor) to even start to wonder if their stance has changed.

Players being able to attack and kill each other outside of pvp and wvw (and the occasional trollish mesmer portal high up in the air) is not on the agenda. It’s simply a bug.

jcnc.3268:

There should be something for players to quickly judge other players.

There isn’t, simply because there is no metric that would allow for an objectiv ranking of player skills. You not only need to be able to rank a players experience and skill with a specific part of the game (many of which need wildly different skills and knowledge), but also with the playstyle expected of them.

For example, I have friends who like to run dungeons and fractals, and do pretty much nothing than that (well, raiding these days, too). They know the ins and out of every dungeon encounter this game has, and the meta strategies to deal with it. Drop them in the open world, and many of them are simply lost because they don’t know anything about the encounters nor have any experience in dealing with a substantial part of the players they’d come across. How would you rank them to “quickly judge” them should you encounter them anywhere in the game?

No matter the metrics you decide on, all ranking systems (whether they be plain numbers like AP and mastery points are, or something completely different like a special aura or skin) are weak to people gaming the system and playing purely to increase their rank without actually putting in effort to understand what they’re doing. I know several people who play purely for AP, not caring how they get those AP. They’ve got all dungeon and fractal achievements, but are some of the worst players in those areas because they’ve spent their energy almost exclusively to find the easiest way of getting themselves carried to the achievements and not one step beyond.

Lastly, there will always be people incapable of dealing with unknown entities or adjusting to others who are then falling back on judging others by whatever ranking they can get their hands on (AP, mastery level, wvw rank, pvp finishers, whatever). They will always find a way to rank people and discriminate because of whatever ranking they have come up with. Give them more ways to rank people, and they’ll find even more ways to misuse the system to discriminate. Hiding the numbers from that kind of person usually doesn’t help either. As others have said, the best way to counter those is to ignore/block and move on.

I’d love to see a special bookshelf in the home instances where I can deposit all of the diaries, Zinn’s books etc., so I can just go into my home instance and re-read them at my leisure with any character I have.

I, too, missed at least one of Cami’s journals due to being attacked, and also found them out of order, not being able to re-read them in order like the Bloodstone Fen diaries was a disappointment.

Mini snowman, for personal reasons.

I used to get them, but fortunately they have been less and less the better I learned to jump in this game. What helped (and still helps) me a lot is to not go into those puzzles alone, but bring a mesmer friend, and preferably go in as a mesmer myself, too.

The one in VB I conquered in team with my youngest daughter, with our two asura mesmers. Whenever one of us fell, the other one would portal her back to the place where she fell off. Those last few jumps on that one are rather tricky, and it took us several tries each (and a good bit of patience to wait for our portals to get off cooldown ), but eventually we made it up there and both felt great.

If you don’t have a friend or guildie interested in teaming up with you on this you might find somebody in map chat. Or whisper me if you see me online and happen to be on an EU server, I like to redo jps occasionally especially since they aren’t particularly easy for me but good fun with company that goes at a similar pace.

Danikat.8537:

(Obviously the names are different in French, but all the links will be in the same places. The client is also the same no matter which language you’re using when you download it, but it might change which language it defaults to.)

Small side info:

The client language (text and audio) is stored in the preferences of the windows user (provided you play this game under windows) and always defaults to the language last selected for that user (regardless if you changed ingame or on the launcher).

My daughters and I are playing on the same machine but with different windows users, with the girls playing in our native language and my client set to english, and the only time I have to reset my client language is when one of the girls played their gw2 accounts from my windows account instead of their own (and only because they’ll manually reset my language settings ) .

If you do plan to use the client with different languages, make sure to always patch all languages you want to use (just choose the other language on the launcher and it’ll start the patch automatically if one is needed). By default, the launcher only patches text and audio files for the currently selected language, so if you want to switch languages after a while the launcher will restart and potentially have a sizeable download waiting for you.

Switching audio language in-game doesn’t switch right away. Instead audio language will be turned off until you restart the client, at which point it’ll switch to the selected language.

Like Rayden said, go into WvW with a level 80 character, it’s more fun for everyone including yourself. Leveling experience in WvW no longer comes through a yellow bar, but rather through reward tracks and rank-up chests, and the tomes of knowledge those give you are usable on any of your characters.

If by chance the lvl 64 is your first character though and going into WvW on an 80 isn’t an option, you might want to rethink that approach from the bottom up. There isn’t a lot in the game world that you can’t do just as well on a level 64, and you’ll get to level 80 just by running around the world, uncovering the map and tagging the odd event here or there, in no time. Send your level 64 into the world to unlock the basic waypoints you are interested in (dungeon entrances, world bosses, Silverwastes for access to HoT maps etc.). You’ll have to do it anyway, and by doing it now you’ll also grab some quick experience to quickly gain the remaining levels.

A warning though: The game won’t feel much different at level 80 than it does at level 64 (excepting access to a few higher-level maps) .

I think it is an account issue, not a client issue. I logged in last night on this account (that I played during the time that was rolled back) without issues. Afterwards, I tried to log in my main account that I had previously last logged out just as the original patch hit on tuesday, and I got a network error every time I tried to log in a character (tried with three or four different ones before looking for another solution).

The client used was exactly the same that had worked flawlessly with this account just minutes before, so it couldn’t have been a fundamental client problem, but rather an account problem.

The way it corrected itself for my main account was to go into the GW2 directory and start the 64 bit client manually. Once I had done that (and logged in a character successfully), starting the game through my regular taskbar shortcut again worked without problems on both accounts.

Another suggestion I had seen was to start the client with administration rights, but I didn’t have to go that far to get my account to correct itself.

My 13-year old daughter almost exclusively plays WvW, with very limited playtime. She’s been actively playing since the launch of HoT, but only has a mastery count of 4, with 1 point in basic gliding and the other 3 in the pact commander line.

Nevertheless, she played the season 3 story right into the Bloodstone Fen with me last night and explored a good bit of the map. Sure, it wasn’t quite es easy for her to navigate and made her backtrack by waypoint a few times (as well as decide to spend more time in the jungle to unlock the mushrooms ), but it was perfectly doable and even enjoyable for her.

GW2 is a game that offers a lot of fredom regarding where, what, and for how long you play, but assuming you can just join any kind of content whatsoever and be at the top of the food chain instantly is just not realistic. There is content for those, who play a little, or with a very narrow focus, but there has to bee content for those who have “been there, done that”, too.

Personally I feel that opening up more movement and exploration options on the map for people with a lot of mastery (both in raw mastery track numbers and in time and effort invested in the game) is a very elegant way to offer content and is doable by everyone but still gives you a feeling of progressing and gaining more options.

Aside from the very basic gliding mastery, all masteries are optional to play the map, even though some do make it more smooth. It’s all soft barriers, not hard ones, that you can either live with, work around, or just play some more to do away with them. I myself am regularly switching with my two accounts, one in the low double digits mastery-wise (and most of that in core tyria), and the other one maxed except for itzl 6 and raid 4. My play experience isn’t drastically different, both accounts are perfectly playable and enjoyable in all of HoT as well as the new map.

FrostDraco.8306:

Actually I can confirm you still get the shards without completing all of your masteries. My core tyria ones are finished, and i was getting spirit shards while doing map completion the other night.

That only works for completed areas. If you don’t have the raid mastery unlocked (because you don’t raid for whatever reason), no matter if you’ve finished every unlocked track in HoT, you won’t gain spirit shards while in that area. Quite a few of my guildies and friends are in that boat, since raiding just isn’t their cup of tea.

Personally, I’m only missing out on HoT spirit shards because I’m lousy at adventures (high ping, old age, and lousy reflexes to begin with) to the point where I have every other mastery point (except raids, I rarely get dragged into them by friends, but at least I’ve got those tracks unlocked and filled) and still don’t have enough to finally unlock my adrenal mushroom mastery (xp for that one has long since been collected).

I had the impression that scaling was a bit off on that event. I succeeded on it once last night, with maybe 5 players involved total. We didn’t have a lot of seekers spawn, and were able to kill most of them quickly. The shield dropped down nice and quick.

The rest of the time, there would be 15+ players at the event, many of them obviously incapable of even reading the event text and doing a lot of random things. Seekers would spawn left, right, and center, and rarely would one go down. It was near impossible to get the shield down then.

I’m not yet 100% if it’s really the scaling that’s the problem (more players → more seekers → more shield healing), or just s question of people learning what to do in this event, but scaling the strength and defenses of the seekers rather than the amount of them might make this event more doable for the masses.