Guild Wars 2

I can’t imagine the trait being useful if it doesn’t cleanse conditions when you reach above the threshold. Does it not do that?

@ OP
Some of your points are valid. But they don’t address what makes the game not alt friendly.

• Vertical gear grind (promotes playing char with best build)
• Long grind for gear stats and look (promotes playing 1 char)
• Role locking based on gear (choice between build diversity or playing alts)
• Soul bound (promotes playing char with best soul bound gear)
• Long leveling process (it is long I played Gw1)
• the most interesting gameplay and most fun content is @ max level.
• Content encountered during the level up process does not have replay value, save story mode dungeons and some personal story (which can’t be replayed)
• others things not off the top of my head.

Both sides of this argument have valid points which is why there people that like the current state and people who don’t.

Personally I feel like GvG from GW1 was more esport than anything I’ve seen in GW2 so far.

I’d like to see a 6v6 GvG like game type in GW2. 8v8 was a little too much to have to follow. But I loved the 3 way split style in GW1 GvG with a base defender, main group, and roamers. Very fun to watch.

Did the OP come from Guild Wars 1 like I did? If so I totally feel the pain.

25 air, 10 water, 10 earth
Tomorrow 10 fire
That’s for vulnerability on critical, 20% more damage to vulnerable foes in water, 10% more damage to foes at close range, and conjurer for 25 weapon charges.

I can’t think of what to use the rest of the traits on off the top of my head.

Use the conjure lightning hammer and there you go.

You can already buy character levels via crafting. The OP’s initial problem wouldn’t not be solved by implementing purchasable level ups, because it already exists.

Shatters are weaker with less Illusions used. Also phantasms attack infrequently after they use their immediate attack. While I am sure some balancing would be required. It’s not something that would suddenly be game breaking, or couldn’t be fixed. It’s simply a suggestion to add depth to Mesmer combat.

Try some speedtest sites. Check your speeds that are going to your computer and check the ping your computer is getting.
speedtest.net
pingtest.net

If those are solid and all other web applications on your machine aren’t experiencing similar issues you should file a support ticket.

Imagi.4561:

I think it’s nice in concept—and would certainly be great in PvE—but has a lot of OP potential in PvP with being able to pressure with phantasms and shatters simultaneously.

I don’t know that I agree with that. You can already do a burst shatter and quickly follow up with new phantasms.

It’s too late to redesign.

It’s true blind and dodge will reduce the healing effectiveness. I don’t expect the skill to be used in PvP.

However, the skill will be solid in small scale WvW and PvE.

It’s too bad it’s not ground targeted, because it’d be really good with the Staff if it were.

I would imagine a thread has been brought up about this before.

I’m not sure if my idea has been suggested, but here goes.

Currently shatters are all or nothing in regard to your illusion count. Meaning you use a shatter and all your illusions shatter or you don’t use the shatter to keep them all.

I think it’d be nice if players had the option to decide between shattering clones only or all illusions (phantasms + clones)

Yeah, it’d be cool, but how to implement it?

I would say allow a brief queue for a double tap, meaning do a back to back command on the same shatter.

The first execution of the shatter would send clones, then provide a short window for the player to execute the shatter again (maybe a 1-1.5 second window) to send your phantasms as well.

Also in the dot’s representing the illusions on the UI, have a color distinction between phantasms and clones. Maybe keep the current color for clones and give phantasms a purply pink dot.

This is actually just my interim term solution.
.

The long term solution I’d like to reach for controlling shatters is similar and builds off my first suggestion.

On the UI show a clear distinction of what clone or phantasm is active (instead of just the 3 dots)

Then when you select a shatter adjust the UI to show the 3 illusions as F2, F3, F4 meaning you’d queue a shatter to use and be able to choose, which illusions shatter, also provide an ALL illusions shatter option as F1. If you do decide to only only send 1 illusion then provide a 1 second window to send a second illusions before return the F1-4 keys to the shatters, no need to do more than that, because if the player wanted to send all three they would hit F1.

That’s the jist of it. Obviously there are probably some logistical things to work out. But it’d be nice to give players the option to add to the skill cap of the mesmer, while keeping the basic functionality of the profession mechanic there still.

What kind of support are you trying to accomplish? Defensive, Offensive, Control?

Taking Phantasmal Defender might be a solid option with this skill. You can effectively control the opponents spike by either reducing it or making it more predictable, because they’ll have to kill the Phantasm first.

The challenge is managing the defender use with shattering

^ troll

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| . Please don’t .|
|.feed the trolls.|
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Breakdown

Arcane Brilliance
Type: Arcane

• Guarenteed crit
  - Somewhat helpful to proc effects more often, but it’s only 1 hit per enemy
• Arcane Mastery (Arcana Trait I) – Reduce Recharge by 20%
  - Reduces the Recharge of the heal to 20s. Also reduces recharge on the other two arcane skills. (I don’t count arcane blast, it’s too limited)
• Elemental Surge (Arcana Trait XII) – Inflict Burning (5s), Chilled (3s), Blind (5s), Immob (1s) depending on attunement
  - An extra blind, chill, or immobilize after healing. Cool
• Arcane Lightning (Air Magic Trait VII) – Gain 15% more critical damage
  - More damage if you need

Activation: 3/4s
- Fastest activation by 33%, 66%, 366% when compared to the other three heals

Recharge: 25s
- Consitent with other ele recharges, solid.

Damage : 120ish
- Arcane wave is about 5x more powerful, not very useful for damage

Healing: 3600ish
- Weak base heal. GoEH or ER are 50%+ better heals for that, which is the main purpose of skills in this slot.

Healing increase per Target: 20%
- Realistically you’re going to have 1 target around always. So expect heals to be 4300ish. At 2 targets which is pretty reasonable expect 5000ish. Max expect 7200ish.
- Unfortunately you can be dodged or blinded so that this heal won’t proc.

Radius: 240
- This radius is kind of weak. Lightning whip has a better range than this, but it can hit behind you too. Arcane wave has a 50% bigger radius.

Combo Finisher: Blast
- This is great for Staff, because of the access to water fields.
- As far as personal benefit, GoEH offers better selfish utility options.
- This is better if you are trying to give might to your party though.

Conclusion
It’s a solid skill for Group play in PvE/WvW.
It’s okay for solo play in PvE/WvW
I don’t expect to see it used in PvP much, because GoEH/ER are better in most situations and 1 handed weapon builds don’t have a water field to compensate.

Just to be clear imbagons didn’t have an advantage over each other once you got to title rank 2 of 12. You could easily maintain the damage reduction with the 5 second duration, obviously it being 6 seconds is more helpful, but 5 seconds was more than adequate.

Additionally r5 was all that was needed to max “Save Yourselves!”, which required less than a tenth of the points to max the titles due to exponential growth in title ranking.

The same is true of Asuran Scan, r5 is when it was at maximum effectiveness, which was less than a tenth of what it took to max the title.

You didn’t have to grind to get these abilities to max rank for maximum effectiveness.

Phy.2913:

So if WvW isn’t the only reason, then that leaves pve, in which case the stats and grind only affect hardcore pve.

It impacts regular PvE too. Rare and exotics aren’t worth the price while leveling. You can’t just get max stat gear part way through the story like you could in Guild Wars for dirt cheap prices. That’s what a lot of people complaining don’t like.

Leamas.5803:

The problem they face is that they HAVE to increase the stats and level on the legendary weapons if they’re going to introduce a new top end tier since they are the ultimate and best weapons in the game. But what happens to all the other level 80 gear? What of Exotic and Ascended? Will a new tier be added between ascended and legendary? Will ascended get bumped to 90 and legendary to 100? It all spells bad news and will cause many people to leave the game. If they want to add another tier and bump the level to 100, their best option for player retention is to bump everyone currently in the game up and create a new tier on the bottom. This isn’t a shiny new game anymore and they can’t be running around alienating huge amounts of players or they will simply leave.

Bumping existing player’s would defeat the purpose of having a higher level cap. The only reason to increase the level cap is for vertical power progression. If you automatically skip people from the current cap to the next cap, it’s like wasting development time. You’d be alienating new players by forcing them to spend more time leveling than existing players. Doing those two things together is a double whammy bad move.

The only reason to do a vertical progression treadmill is because you can’t put out content. Clearly ANet can rapidly put out content, they just need to work on the quality and also the quantity somewhat.

I would be very disappointed if Gw2 had it’s level cap increased. It would be like ANet finding a loophole in order to continue with vertical power progression while not doing another tier of gear.

Gw1 provided the option to grind. It just wasn’t associated with character power. Just by playing the story or doing dungeons you could get your ranks to the point that most skills were at max power. The time investment for maxing a title is exponential, meaning for a fraction of the time required to max the title you could get it to 1/2 complete or higher.

If you disagree about vertical power progression in Gw1 please provide examples. I’ll be happy to address them each individually and compare and contrast with Gw2.

Ursan.7846:

Rank 6 Kurzick took 1,200,000 faction to earn.

The most optimal Kurzick farm earned you like 40,000 an hour.

That’s approximately 30 horus STRAIGHT of doing a repetitive task over, and over, and over again. For one title track. How is this NOT a grind?

And these PvE skills are the bread and butter of PvE, especially in high-level content. IMBAgons were a huge staple, and completely relied on 2 PvE skills (Sunspear and Kurzick) which you had to grind out. Look at PvXwiki, skills such as Asuran Scan and the Ebon Vanguard battle standards are pretty common.

I mean seriously, if you want to talk about how these PvE skills weren’t “necessary,” then can’t the same argument be applied to Ascended gear? Nothing requires Ascended gear, just like it’s possible to do DoA without LightBringer. It’s going to be a lot more inefficient however, and this is the exact same across both games.

GW1 definitely had a grind.

I don’t think anyone is saying you couldn’t grind in Gw1 just that there wasn’t a grind for power progression. There was so little power progression that the Gw1 co-founder and current CEO said power progression wasn’t in GW1, even though it technically had a slight existence.

I’ve got lots of posts about the title progression impact on skills from Guild Wars 1 in conversations I’ve had with Vayne.8563.

You could grind out the titles if you wanted to, but very early in the title progression the title rank grind stops impacting the power of most skills.

Additionally many of the skills are great as soon as you get them without having title ranked at all.

It’s important to understand that once a product or service is released to the public a significant portion of development effort must go towards maintainence and development can’t interfere too much with the status quo anymore.

Development is always faster before release, and if 5+ years was what it took to develop in fast mode imagine how slow it is after release.

Capping damage is not a realistic suggestion. It’d be easier to buff condition damage than to rebalanced the entire game around a dps cap.

@OP
I’m actually very excited for a couple of years down the line. ANet’s track record is to make a lot of things more accessible as time goes on. I fully expect ascended to become what exotic is now within the next 3 years.

It’s also likely that they will soft cap prices of gear on the trading post as time goes on to allow newer players more access.

Also once they are done tracking how inflation works and is impacted in their game, we’ll likely see worthwhile gold sinks and easier ways for the newer players to get gold.

I realized not too long ago that for someone like me that has some time play, but isn’t going to be able to consistently invest 10+ hours a week, that the best time to invest your time in a long term game is right around year 3, because things start to become much more accessible, that was my observation with Guild Wars and I’ve heard similar things about other games. Time invested now will not go as far as the same amount of time down the line will, due to changes in accessibility and inflation.

About the only thing one could miss out on from now until then is the living story. But that’s why you play a couple hours every two weeks.

Countless number of hours?
Use /age to see how long you’ve been logged into each game.

Kidding aside, there are numerous things people will disagree with you about in regard to your opinion on both games. However, the main point you were driving at is that there’s nothing you find enough value in repeating that forces you to interact with other players, and that stays consistent.

I would think that PvP and WvW are probably what you’re looking for based upon your HA comment, but there’s no worthwhile carrot you see worth chasing. The finisher animation is pretty much the equivalent of the /rank from Guild Wars you’re referring to.

Based upon what you’re looking for and what exists in GW2, it’d appear it’s all there.

Grind is needing to repeat content so much to obtain something that the content itself no longer becomes enjoyable, and your only motivation for repeating the content is for whatever you are trying to obtain.

At least that’s my definition.

There’s a lot of things in GW2 that I view as grind.

There are some really great points in here.

The kinds of questions asked that show the core motivation.
“how do we get people to buy stuff from the cash-shop” — how do we make money
“how do we make the best game” — how do we add value to our customers

I think with a lot of things that have been in the game from launch, and things that have been added after, we’ve seen a lot of the how do we make money.

This is not a problem, not by itself. But I think a lot of implementations in this game ask the how do we make money question at the expense of the how do we add value question.

With Guild Wars 1 I never felt like anything added to their cash shop was at the expense of adding value to the customer base, EVER.

However, I feel very different about that in Guild Wars 2. And the root cause is at the core of the game economy, with time/gold/gems being as intertwined as they are and a huge amount of inflation occurring.

Say a 5 man group of thieves each had Venomous Aura. If each player took Basilisk Venom, 1 utility skill venom, and if hypothetically a heal venom that healed existed — meaning 3/5 slot skills were venoms leaving 2 slots for other utility, would that be a good team composition for anything?

Venomous Aura doesn’t allow stacking sadly, so teams would need a cadence to follow for chaining Venoms. Teams could potentially stack large amounts of party wide healing with the trait Leeching Venoms and a hypothetical Heal slot Venom. Also for 7.5+ seconds Basilisk Venom could keep between 1-5 enemies stuck as statues, or in PvE burn through 50 stacks of defiant.

Thoughts?

I think for staff 30 points into air isn’t really worthwhile unless you are purely trying to maximize your crit damage.

Jabberwock.9014:

I think scepter is horrible for open world because it’s terrible at hitting multiple foes consistently. D/D you’ll never not be hitting everything in the immediate area.

Honestly in PvE I think any skill that is single target should at least have a small splash radius. They can add balance to that however they want, such as reducing damage by 50% to non-targets, but the point is that this is an issue for any single target weapon or slot skill in PvE. The elementalist is able to work around this deficiency somewhat with lightning hammer, but there are other professions that can not.

There’s not much to the change to arcana.

All existing builds will be the same except if you spent 10 points to invest in elemental attunement.

The change to attunement recharge rate doesn’t matter because it’s going to be a smaller recharge for every investment into the line except for 30 points, which will be the same recharge as it currently is due to the base recharge reduction on attunements.

There’s really nothing to discuss about the arcana line, except that there’s the potential for more builds to viable with less arcana investment. However, no other trait lines are going to be anymore worth investing into than they are now (unless diamond skin offers a full condition cleanse upon reaching it’s threshold).

As convenient as this is, it’s probably better to not implement it for the time being.

There’s really not much build diversity to worry about, and it’s not like you’d be able to quick load the templates anyways.

Elitists are likely to demand build pinging and if you don’t conform to what they want they’ll probably kick you until they find someone who will.

I say that from experience in Guild Wars 1 where displaying title rank and templates was often demanded by people hosting dungeon like content.

ANet stated their reasoning for this previously OP.

30 points was challenging yet achieveable. The item rewards were intended to stop their.

For anyone who went the extra mile they could show their prestige with titles.

If condition removal works on it, expect Diamond Skin to work against it.

I wonder what they’ll do about glory boosters

S/D is my main build, I run 0/30/0/10/30.
Air: IV, VIII, XII
Water: IV
Arcana: VI, V, XI
Slot skills: Glyph of Elemental Harmony, Arcane Shield, Lightning Flash, Lightning Hammer, Fiery Greatsword

This build does pretty much everything for me.

Mobility
Perma Swiftness: GoEH + Inscription + Air attunement = 26s swiftness on a 25s recharge
Combat: Fresh Air + One with Air helps you keep a safe distance and deal with soft snares
Lightning Leap: Useful while exploring to get to otherwise impossible to reach places
One with air + Fiery Whirl = The longest on demand movement skill in the game (seems as long if not longer than RTL at launch)

Damage Resist
Blind from Lightning Hammer Auto Attack Chain, Dust Devil, and Blinding Flash
3 Blocks from Arcane Shield
Protection on earth attunement swap
+250 Toughness while Rock Barrier is active

Control
Launch from Updraft and Wind Blast (Lightning Hammer)
Knockdown from Earthquake
Stun from Static Field (Lightning Hammer)

Healing
Heal Slot
Regeneration from Water Attunment or GoEH + Inscription
Soothing Mist
Water Trident
Cleansing Wave from itself and Evasive Arcana

Damage Support
Vulnerability from Critical Hits and Water Attunement Critical Hits
High Crit Chance and Extra Crit Damage
Bleeds from Churning Earth and Stoneshards
Burning from Fire Attunement Skills
Might Stacking from Ring of Fire + Dragon’s Tooth, Phoenix, Earthquake, and Churning Earth + Lightning Hammer Auto Attack Chain, and GoEH + Fire Attunement

Raw DPS
Dragon’s Tooth + Ring of Fire + Phoenix
Churning Earth (Use with Lightning Flash to channeling from a safe distance)
Electric Discharge + Lightning Strike Every available every 5 seconds with Fresh Air + Crits
Lightning Hammer Auto Attack chain (attune to water for an extra 20% damage buff)
Fiery Great Sword Auto Attack
Fiery Rush stacking via Wall or Lightning Flash

Extra Notes
Weak spot and Arcane precision will trigger a lot of Vulnerability and some other conditions when landing a lot of hits via Water 1, Earth 1, Rock Barrier Hurl, and Frequent use of Fresh Air. These conditions will also trigger while using conjures.

If there is a condition heavy situation I’ll swap out GoEH for Ether Renewal and Air VI (Bolt to the Heart)

In certain fights where it makes sense to always be ranged, I’ll swap out Lightning Hammer for Flame Axe. Burning Retreat is good for maintaining distance, Fire Axe 4 + 2 combine for a Might blast finisher. Flame Axe 4 + 5 can create a fire aura, but is probably never going to be useful to use.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

People go on and on about the lack of skills, but lets be honest in both GW1 and GW2 there is a meta and almost nobody goes outside of the meta builds.
In GW1 nobody would group with you in a dungeon if your build wasn’t part of the meta and we see similar things happening in GW2. So GW2 having fewer skills doesn’t actually have all to much of an impact.

A build being in the “meta” is just a way of saying that a build is effective. In Guild Wars 1 there were dozens of core build concepts that were considered good enough to be “meta”.

stof.9341:

This is I’d say the biggest mistake in GW2 PvE. Gear should not have been role defining. The armor should have been just base armor, weapon base damage and trinkets shouldn’t exist. Traits, utilities and weapon type should have been the trait defining tools given to the players. Once that is done, the player dps and sustainability would be much less variable, allowing ANet to much better tune the PvE encounter difficulty to the point players will feel forced to make use of some really dedicated control and support roles.

This is a really good point. Gear is role defining, since there’s only 1 role though it’s a smaller issue than it will be in future if ANet introduces more roles. The thing that happens is people get stuck with gear for one role and when they want to change roles, they have to drop an arm and a leg to change their build.

I remember seeing that quote in your signature a long time ago, is was a good pitch to the Guild Wars 1 community.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

But Cultural Armors have always been that price, so have nothing to do with ‘people driving the prices so high one can’t invest the time to go after them’.

True for those armors. Maybe inflation would be helping my case for those. I wanted to get the flamekissed when it came out, becuase it looked exactly like the T3 Human armor. I was only 55 gems short before they pulled it off the gem store.

Pandeh.5248:

Shockwave.1230:

JustTrogdor.7892:

Part of being a casual player, as I am, is you have to realize that you won’t have the same opportunities for items or to earn as much gold as those that play more. That just goes with the territory of casual play in an MMO. The other option is to buy gems and convert to gold. That’s just the way it works.

The thing for me is that I’d like to play more, but it’s not worth my time unless it’s for a new content release.

It’s not worth my time, because other people are driving the prices so high I can’t possibly invest the time to go after the armor skins, weapon skins (not legendaries that is understandable), or dyes that I’d like.

It’s also hard to experiment with different builds, because of how expensive it is to change them.

Just out of curiosity which armor and weapon skins is it you are unable to get?

Apart from legendaries and a few exotics the other weapons are pretty cheap.

Armors? The most expensive one is, what ? 4ish gold?

120 gold for T3 Sylvari, and the Same for T3 Human.

Ellisande.5218:

Just because there aren’t as many skills doesn’t mean that the combat has left depth. There is much more to combat than the number of skill names and icons.

For example you could also look at the number of things that people have to do during combat, the affect that decisions have in combat, the number of characters affected by actions taken during combat, the length of combat, etc.

Frankly GW1 combat was actually pretty shallow. A lot of the skills were just repetitions of other skills.

You’re correct not to judge it by number of skill alone, however the large number of skills also had numerous different types and effects qualitatively and quantitatively.

Using the duplicates that existed to say Guild Wars’ combat as a whole was shallow holds no weight unless you only look at the duplicate skills, in which case there were numerous different kinds of skills that had duplicates.

That’d be like saying Magic The Gathering is shallow because you can have duplicates in your deck, or that it’s shallow becuase there are similar card effects.

Additionally if we do compare Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2, we see that the edge in regard to number of different skill effects to worry about in combat goes to Guild Wars 1.

DreamyAbaddon.3265:

Shockwave.1230:

DreamyAbaddon.3265:

Galphar.3901:

Like the rest who have posted here, I think the biggest thing missing is build diversity. I had all 3 campaigns and EotN which gave me about 200+ skills per profession and none locked to a weapon(except warrior that had separate skills for sword, axe and hammer). This made for some very interesting and cool builds. I used to run a R/P BM build in RA all the time. People would think I was just running a regular spear weilding Ranger until my wolf took their head off. We don’t have that diversity in GW2.

There are many different ways to build your playstyle in GW2.

Step#1 – Choose Weapons/Utilities that fits Your Playstyle
Step#2 – Choose (Traits) to build upon and Enhance Your Playstyle
Step#3 – Choose Armor/Stats to Balance Your Playstyle.

GW2 Combat System is based on: Damage/Control/Support
Refer to my Video above for that information.

Lots of different playstyles can be build upon in GW2.

There aren’t weapons/utilities/traits/stats that fit many people’s play styles is the issue

The problem isn’t the weapons/utilities/traits/stats.

The problem is people come from games like WoW and think it should play like WoW.

Then you got another crowed from GW1 and expect the builds to work the same way as GW2… This is a different game after all.

I think anyone coming from any game is confused by DPS being the only viable way to play is most situaitons

DreamyAbaddon.3265:

Galphar.3901:

Like the rest who have posted here, I think the biggest thing missing is build diversity. I had all 3 campaigns and EotN which gave me about 200+ skills per profession and none locked to a weapon(except warrior that had separate skills for sword, axe and hammer). This made for some very interesting and cool builds. I used to run a R/P BM build in RA all the time. People would think I was just running a regular spear weilding Ranger until my wolf took their head off. We don’t have that diversity in GW2.

There are many different ways to build your playstyle in GW2.

Step#1 – Choose Weapons/Utilities that fits Your Playstyle
Step#2 – Choose (Traits) to build upon and Enhance Your Playstyle
Step#3 – Choose Armor/Stats to Balance Your Playstyle.

GW2 Combat System is based on: Damage/Control/Support
Refer to my Video above for that information.

Lots of different playstyles can be build upon in GW2.

There aren’t weapons/utilities/traits/stats that fit many people’s play styles is the issue

JustTrogdor.7892:

Shockwave.1230:

JustTrogdor.7892:

Part of being a casual player, as I am, is you have to realize that you won’t have the same opportunities for items or to earn as much gold as those that play more. That just goes with the territory of casual play in an MMO. The other option is to buy gems and convert to gold. That’s just the way it works.

The thing for me is that I’d like to play more, but it’s not worth my time unless it’s for a new content release.

It’s not worth my time, because other people are driving the prices so high I can’t possibly invest the time to go after the armor skins, weapon skins (not legendaries that is understandable), or dyes that I’d like.

It’s also hard to experiment with different builds, because of how expensive it is to change them.

I understand because I am in the same spot. I just don’t have much time to play. The last living story event I was able to complete was the Bazaar for For Winds. I started trading on the TP and for about 20 minutes a day I can make between 10-30 gold depending on how aggressive I am. Not having much time to play to me means I have to come to terms that it will take me longer to get things I want. People that play more are rewarded with more gold and items. If rewards were skill > time spent those that play more would still have the upper hand because they would have more time to use their skill for greater reward. IMO the convert gems to gold is there for those with less time.

Zkeys were my saving grace in Guild Wars 1. Run a FoW, UW, or DoA with the guildies then do some PvP a bit and I was able to get every skin I wanted reasonably. The problem I experience is that there’s nothing like rediculously expensive rare materials or things to sell from PvP. If I had money to blow on the gem store, or knew of a way to earn more buying power in game I would.

JustTrogdor.7892:

Part of being a casual player, as I am, is you have to realize that you won’t have the same opportunities for items or to earn as much gold as those that play more. That just goes with the territory of casual play in an MMO. The other option is to buy gems and convert to gold. That’s just the way it works.

The thing for me is that I’d like to play more, but it’s not worth my time unless it’s for a new content release.

It’s not worth my time, because other people are driving the prices so high I can’t possibly invest the time to go after the armor skins, weapon skins (not legendaries that is understandable), or dyes that I’d like.

It’s also hard to experiment with different builds, because of how expensive it is to change them.

In googling farming, I see that there are ways for people farm 3, 5, 7+ gold per hour. When a casual player to semi-regular players play they’re on maybe a dozen hours or less per week.

I’ve been watching the trading post since launch, and inflation is occurring constantly due to the influx of gold and other currencies available to players.

Is there anything being done to give people who don’t spend much time farming the opportunity to have more buying power in the Guild Wars 2 economy?

Maybe more skill > time rewarding, or something like ZKeys from Guild Wars.

Or would those kinds of things cut into the revenue of real money to gems too much?

Try lightning hammer and Arcane Shield. Blind and blocks for when the blind isn’t enough.

I recommend as much berserker as you can manage. I’d trade in Knights or PVT if you’re hurting on survivability.

The way the game is designed, it’s better to drop the enemy red bars as fast as possible than anything else, so that’s why I say that.

Dagger offhand is usually the best. For leveling up I prefer Dagger mainhand, because it’s really the best all around weapon for AoE DPS and mobility.

I’d put 20 into fire for conjurer and run lightning hammer, because the damage on the auto attack is the best the ele has and the 3rd chain attack blinds.

So basically, D/D and Lightning hammer are best for damage, and damage is the best way to build because of the game’s design.

I can’t help but compare Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. Guild Wars is my favorite game of all time, so obviously I have some bias towards that due to the significant differences between the two. There’s something that’s very obvious though that I had never taken the time to notice. Guild Wars has much more depth than Guild Wars 2, in several areas, but most importantly combat.

The most obvious indicator here is the amount of primary roles available in each game.

In Guild Wars primary roles were DPS, healing, damage prevention, damage support, and control. Any of these roles could be featured or blended together in builds.

In Guild Wars 2 the only primary combat roles available are DPS and bunker. We don’t ever expect to see healing as a primary role in Guild Wars. Other roles serve as a secondary purpose, not the primary.

Another obvious indicator is each games build diversity.

Guild Wars has A LOT of build diversity. A single primary/secondary profession combination had hundreds of skills available, which added up a dozen or more extremely effective core build concepts for each primary combat role. Those core builds could be adjusted with a skill or two to fit various situations just as GW2 does.

Guild Wars 2 has maybe a handful of highly effective dps builds and maybe 1 or 2 bunker builds per profession.

Both games are great as indicated by their success. Guild Wars 2 obviously is visually superior, and is an actual MMORPG. The tradeoff was that a lot of depth was lost in the transition from Guild Wars to Guild Wars 2.