Guild Wars 2

I can’t speak for anyone but myself on this one, but I had no clue what the commander tag did/didn’t do when I bought mine. It was a pure vanity buy, but my goal was for my guild, rather for me to putz around in WvW or just to have it up in PVE because I’m awesome like that.

There really isn’t any tutorials that’s readily apparent to newbs. I even thought the ‘puddles’ that come from legendary weapons were path tracking options for a commander and red text in map chat was a commander channel. So, I bought mine thinking I’d have these options available for our guild runs, to be a focal point.

Yep…utter clueless newb with disposable income (at the time.) You get a generic blue chevron above your head for 100g…totally not worth it. Haha.

On occasion, I’ll throw it up, if another commander prompts or if there is a world event that needs a focal point on the screen. Otherwise, there isn’t any point to it.

Even having it, I’ve always felt that it’s not the chevron that you’re following, it’s the leadership under it. You can quickly ascertain who is leading and who is just running around.

I do like the idea of different colors, though. Seeing several blue tags on the mini-map can be rather confusing. Not sure about the ranking part…seems convoluted and potential for abuse/trickery.

I’d love to get a refund on it, if it were possible.

Just one. My only one, I believe. I used the gold to finish leveling my crafting to 500, bought me a few vanity trinkets and equipment upgrades. It wasn’t a huge windfall…only 400g’s.

It may sound like a lot, but it goes fast.

I have nearly 10k. I’m actually intimidated by folks who are near or above my AP and I prefer seeing folks with a much lower AP. Probably over generalizing, but I like to think they haven’t done everything and haven’t been everywhere and the game is still an adventure for them, rather than a grind fest. The only time a low AP gets an eyebrow raise from me is if they’re bagging on other players and have 1.5k to their account.

So, after leveling an 80 of each class, spending WAY too much time in both WvW flavors, hating every bit of area pvp (not my thing, you guys keep having fun! It’s cool), all crafting to 500, lots of ascended gear, getting my kitten kicked in fractals (I’m challenged, I know…) and getting 100% map completion for my starter character, I’ve ran into a snag.

What to do?

Well, I like the game, so I find things to do. And one of those things to do is work on map completion for another character. After mastering leveling across eight characters, I’ve only ever explored the full world with one. I guess now is as good of time as ever to explore it again.

So, here’s something that’s become pretty glaring for me:
It seems like the overwhelming majority of the world isn’t even utilized by every day play. There are so many places, just sitting there, with no story, no dialog, no events, etc. Wonderful places, with wonderful architecture and colorful and interesting names.

I know we’re all gunning for new content and what not, and I certainly am, but if I could take a moment and offer a simple analogy. This world is a canvas, whose artists created a hellva masterpiece, but in it’s gameplay, we only ever focus on bits and pieces, as we view it. The rest seems almost ambient in nature, destined to remain on the sidelines of peripheral vision.

All we would need are a few extra quests, here and there, that involve these under utilized areas, to get people showing up there that are not doing so only for map completion and more than likely on auto-pilot, racing from POI to POI in the most efficient manner possible.

Just sneak them in there. A couple each patch. Across a couple of different zones. It’d give purpose to head off exploring again, without being driven by percentages.

So, each of my characters got several town clothes tonics and I had purchased the Mad King outfit some time ago and now I have a stack of 3 of that.

Do I need to keep these for any particular reason other than having a tonic on each character that I may want to be seen walking around in town clothes?

I agree with your point on how worthless it is other than an inconvenience.

It really should be more difficult, where you have to ‘craft’ to repair your armor. Needing mats, tailoring/leatherworking/ etc to repair. And if you decide to go to a repair NPC, your armor is nulled for x amount of time for the ‘repair’, plus an increased fee that seems relative to the repair. Yellow damage equals % of vendor cost of item, red is higher percentage. Completely broken, full vendor cost.

That’d really put a damper on zerging into death.

:D

I have a level 80 for each class, all exotic geared and build tuned to a specific task. The thief was the last to 80 because I struggled to emulate what I saw others doing with their thieves. Before that? Engineer. Struggled with that one, too. In hindsight, trying to play a class, in a style that doesn’t suit your own natural play style, or goals, is a lesson in frustration.

I agree that the engineer seems more flexible. You can mow down people with the flamethrower and bomb/grenade condition combo, you can focus just on grenades for both condition or crit builds, you can try to make the turret thing work and maybe be more of a support build. Tons of options with the engineer. A lot, actually…maybe why it was difficult for me to zero in on exactly what I wanted to accomplish with it. Too many options!

With the thief…you are there to make a person’s life hell. It’s burst damage and stealth. If that’s your calling, then you have your class. haha.

I can’t really comment on the specifics to the thief class specifics that may be overpowered or not, but I can attest to the rage inducing play style that makes me want to headbutt my monitor when taken down by a thief and having a giant cow planted on my face.

Here’s my two cents that wasn’t asked for. I can’t play that kind of thief. I tried and the play style is not my flavor. After several failed attempts to lvl 20-30, I finally was able to get a thief to 80. I followed several builds across dagger/dagger, dagger/pistol and sword/dagger. Spent way too much gold outfitting my thief, per these builds and I found nothing changed. I still sucked at playing a thief. I could not, for the life of me, mirror those shadowy terrorists in WvW that would solo, or two man, and flat out destroy 3-5x their numbers and then vanish, only to repeat it again. They were like lions, snagging the weak in a stampede and thinning the herd. What makes it even more amazing, to me, is that I can’t do it. I tried and I don’t have the skill to do it.

More power to the folks that can.

So, I avoid them. Rule of the jungle out there…they are the hunters and if I’m not keeping an eye out, I’m going to be the pray.

What of my thief now? I’m having a blast playing pistol/pistol. It’s fun. I’m not a dangerous hunter, but I’m having a good time. And that’s all that is important for me.

Is it just coincidence (i.e net traffic on my end) or is this causing some pretty bad lagging?

I had to call it early last night because it was taking forever to load into anywhere and EotM was kitten near unplayable because folks were warping all over the place. This has been going on for a few days now. Bonus, though…it was really nice to see a few player mobs populating Cursed Shore and Malchor’s leap for a change. They’re usually dead zones on my server.

I really like the ‘alliance’ idea. Our guild is only six strong; just friends and family. We mainly run the various game components together and have made a couple of quirky offshoot guilds (one guild just of engineers, for example), but obviously, also small. If we could align with a larger guild to assist with events, WvW, PvP, etc and not have to leave the cozy confines of our own guild, we’d be ecstatic to be able to help out. I can only imagine other small guilds signing up to help out the larger guilds with these various tasks.

I was using the mask skin on a low level character and when it came time for an upgrade, I forgot to transmute the new helm with the gas mask skinned helm. And then recycled my mask. I submitted two tickets to Anet support, but neither were replied to.

Is there a way of obtaining this skin again? Via TP, events, quests, etc?

Thank you!