Guild Wars 2

Yes, that’s more or less the best way to go about it. You can combine a fine, journeyman, master, and 3 mystic forge stones to get a mystic salvage kit (250 uses) which is currently a slightly better deal than master, though it has the same effectiveness IINM (value of this will vary based on gem/gold conversion, since mystic stones are a gem store item).

You get experience for everything. Hearts, dynamic events, skill point challenges, vistas, discovering waypoints and points of interest, and unfogging new areas of the map. 100% completing an area is one of the better ways to level, all things considered.

You can use it, then transmute it when you get a better back item. You just need a transmutation stone or transmutation crystal (crystal if one of the items is level 80, stone if neither are). Trans crystals are kind of hard to come by without spending gems, so if you think you can wait a bit to use the skin then why not? But you can certainly use it now and worry about transferring later too, totally up to you.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Field

Click on the field name on the table to see who can drop what field with what skills; click on the finisher name to see who can use what finisher with what skills, in case you’re interested in other combos too. But as stated, Engineer is the only other option for creating that particular combo field on land. Area stealth would work as well, so you could use a blast finisher instead of a leap finisher.

Interesting. I’m on Devona’s as well and Shatterer is always right on time for me, but then I always tend to get to it ~as soon as it’s available after reset, so it may be that the circumstances required to make it hang have never come up for me.

Fire Elemental gets blocked by the random things that pop up in the various chambers; the oakheart in the poison chamber for example. I don’t know whether to count them as pres or not. And then after that there’s the chaotic material event but I’d consider that a true pre since Rooba is ready to go as soon as its done. I’m not aware of any others though.

I can’t speak to the Shatterer, because in my experience he is by far the most punctual event out there. The pre for him (escort and collection) starts exactly when the timer says it will. Only question is how long collection takes; if too many people try to do it, the required number of parts scales way up but the number of available parts doesn’t, so you have a ton of people waiting for ghosts and parts to respawn. I’ve never been aware of any blocking events.

The added POIs from launch are in gendarran fields (not so secret JP), diessa plateau/wayfarer foothills (flame and frost stuff), and lion’s arch (consortium gift shop from way back at southsun’s launch). Might as well make sure you kept up on each of them even though you should have them if you’ve triple checked each map. Chantry is the only “hidden” POI that counts…

You can craft exotics, but it’s not terribly cost effective. If you have a lot of karma and can find an open temple you can buy them from temple vendors in orr. Obviously there’s the trading post, and as stated above dungeons as well.

But what constitutes “best” really depends on how you’re built. Do you want power or condition damage? Toughness or vitality? Read the wiki to find the different possible combinations (various links from the http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Armor page for example).

At level 80, the rule of thumb is usually salvage whites (common), vendor sell blues and greens (fine/masterwork), rares are mostly up to you (save for the mystic forge to try and get an exotic, sell on TP if you get a good enough price, or salvage with a high level salvage kit to try and get ectos and upgrades), exotics sell on TP or salvage for the rune/sigil if that particular one is valuable enough (or save for the forge if you want to try and get a precursor).

I tend to save level 80 masterworks for the mystic forge just to try and get a rare, even though it’s probably not the optimal choice. For rares I usually don’t sell on TP unless they’ll go for ~20s or more; less than that and I’d rather take a chance at getting ectos.

Home instances are in each racial city, and is labeled as such.

In Rata Sum, it’s the applied development lab, which is accessed through one of the gates at the upper level.

In the Black Citadel, it’s the Hero’s Canton, the northeast quadrant of the map (more or less).

In Divinity’s Reach, it’s the Salma District, which is the northeast section.

In Hoelbrak, it’s the Hunter’s Hearth, which is an upper level in the Great Lodge.

In the Grove, it’s the Dreamer’s Terrace, which is located on the very bottom level.

There’s nothing much else to do there, although your personal story will take you back there relatively often (the level 20-30 quests in particular IINM).

Engie or Ele. Both can be very useful support players (water Ele/elixir Engie), both can be useful ranged AOE attackers (staff/grenades)… survivability depends on build, but for solo content a bunker elementalist works fine and an engineer that takes advantage of CC and interrupt abilities can get through pretty well as well.

I can’t speak to group acceptance, though I would think it’s only a minor risk either way.

(also should not that the ranged AOE for both is great for WvW; staff and grenades are both good for attacking people on walls)

Check wiki (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Main_Page) for any maps you’ve visited to see what events are there. The dragon battles are level 50, 65, and 80 events so you’ve got a ways to go there. 4 of the racial starting zones (Metrica/Asura, Caledon/Sylvari, Queensdale/Human, Wayfarer/Norn) have big meta-events with world bosses that draw a lot of people to them when the timer is on so you can definitely jump into those now. The rewards will be better at higher levels though. The first dungeon opens at level 30 (you won’t get notified about it unless you keep up with your personal story, but you can still do it) but it may not be easy to find a group to do the story mode. An active guild could help, though, if you join one.

sPvP (small group matches) uses a different version of your character that is always at level 80 with full skills, traits, etc. so you can do that at any time. WvW upscales your PvE character to 80 but a sub-80 will be weaker. You can still try it out though and maybe join in any big groups running around. Both are accessed from the top menu bar, or in fort marriner in lion’s arch.

Best advice I can give is find a guild that is recruiting (and open to low level players) and find people with similar schedules that will tag along from time to time. PvE is almost entirely solo friendly but a traveling buddy can help you find a groove and point out interesting stuff to do.

Crafting will get you there, and you might be able to do it through that $30-50 worth of gems (full disclosure, this is almost certainly a waste of money. It’s nice to have some crafting maxed, but it’s not tremendously useful. You’d be doing it to get the experience, but if you don’t like the rest of the PvE content then it’s probably not worth it just to rush to 80. Then again, it’s not my money…)

I used http://www.guildwars2-crafting.com/ when I powerleveled my crafting. The guides weren’t entirely up to date, so I had to sort of patch it up as I went along, but it wasn’t that difficult. It’ll cost a lot of coin, and if you’re going to do it you should take the time to plan out buying materials on the trading post (calculate what it’ll cost with a spreadsheet or something, place buy orders instead of just going with the lowest seller, etc.)

That’s the only “fast” way to get to 80. With the cash to buy all the materials you need, you can get to 80 in a day or two probably. It’s not really any fun but it’ll work.

Otherwise, the best way to get to 80 is to just completely explore anything you can. Go to each starter zone, max them out. Go to each 15-25 zone, max them out. I think you can reach 80 by the time you’re at 50% world completion or so if you do some events while you explore, but your mileage may vary. It will take longer, but it’ll be free and you’ll see what the PvE really has to offer.

The last option I’d suggest is to check out WvW. If your server has a big group doing things, it’d be a quick way to just run a bunch of events over and over. You’ll be underpowered compared to everyone else (scaled-up but not true 80) but in a big group that won’t matter. You might find it repetitive. I don’t know that it’s actually any faster for gaining experience (probably is for karma, since you’ll do so many events) but it’s an option.

Shatterer is quick and easy, which is nice (especially since it always starts promptly) but yeah, the safe zone is a bit obvious and it would make sense to change it up a bit. Hopefully in a way that is creative, though.

I don’t see the point in changing Tequatl. The unavoidable fear is annoying enough. The risen being more of a factor would make sense (though his exploders tend to take people out regularly enough), but forcing people to deal with the wall would just be prolonging the fight for not good reason; killing the wall isn’t fun, it’s just busy work.

Claw (at least phase 1) has its safe spots depending on whether the champs roam far enough, but it takes. so. long. regardless that there’s no point in making it tougher unless you also make it quicker. Phase 2 seems pretty well done to me. The big damage/fear is avoidable via the special weapon mechanics (perfect use of that setup), the adds are a factor without being just a total distraction… only problem I have with it is that a few of the ice spikes seem to be a matter of luck whether you’ll actually be able to destroy them in time to save a given golem, and even that only happens once in awhile.

Guardian and Ranger are the two easiest 80s I’ve gotten/easiest for world completion. But getting to 80 isn’t tough no matter what because you can stick to lower level zones if you want to, or join a huge group in WvW or whatever.

You can’t change the frequency of this specific phrase without changing the fight; the phrase is your cue to dodge to avoid being transformed (without it, you’d only have her hop which is just a bit too little prep time). It’s a pretty vital part of the fight unless you just want to zerg her with animal transformations.

Toning down how far away you hear it, though, that’s something that should definitely be looked into. You don’t need it unless you’re within her transformation range, and the meta-event tracker tells you all you need to know without the boss shouting at you.

Guardian is probably the most useful if you want to jump into group content. Done right you’ll be almost unkillable solo. Downside is things slow down at higher levels; you don’t do damage very quickly. No passive movement buff either.

IMO my 80 Ranger is my favorite for just farming. Longbow gives you some of the best range in the game with traits (tied with grenade ENG, which I also like) and is good for tagging enemies in events. Then I use either greatsword or axe/torch for melee, which are decent enough in terms of pace for me. In addition it seems like it’s the easiest/most painless solo experience I’ve had with any character, even in Orr. Ranger has passive movement signet which is nice for jumping puzzles and the like as well. You just have to get comfortable managing your pets, which really isn’t so bad.

Latest patch (updated last night) claims to have fixed the issue. Any projector in the entire world is supposed to have a chance of spawning them. I used Fields of Ruin, since there’s a nice wide loop you can run north of Ebonhawke between the brand and the central camps that covers the reset time nicely, but go wherever you want.

Did you get the goggles too? That strikes me as the real challange…

It’s not as if the downed state is balanced among the other classes either (damage dealing capability, healing capability, etc is all very different), so nerfing the pet mechanic wouldn’t exactly make things even. If its not working as intended obviously that’d be something, but it seems to me that’s how it was designed.

You can definitely get the mini without touching the dungeon. 8 achievements for the caches (although you’ll have to go through obsidian sanctum) and 5 for the aether kills. You’re covered if you can do that.

Same on Devona’s Rest. Assume it’s a buff not a bug, but that puts it way out of line with the other events of that scale in terms of time commitment. Took at least 40 minutes from the end of the pre.

carmanut.5341:

That’s really annoying, I have two characters with heavy armor, so I can’t let both of em wear the Dragon Helm?

That’s pretty freaking annoying

Not at the same time, but they’re account bound, not soulbound, so you can move them back and forth if you want to.

Yeah, the Shatterer just sort of sitting there for the majority of the time was a little underwhelming. At first I couldn’t tell when it started because it seemed too similar to the normal personal fireworks. Otherwise thought it was perfectly nice. The achievement and “once every two hours” wait forced too much of a buildup for it, that’s all.

Fiontar.4695:

cpg.7140:

I’m assuming they made them the way they did to control the amount of candy in the economy, which hey that’s their call. I would be nice if the spawners spawned more than just 4 holos every 8 minutes, though, even if you had to do it in waves. Very difficult to get to them when they respawn unless you’re right by one.

Haunted doors respawned faster and there were way more of them. Gift boxes weren’t as important as these are, since you got the mats from the events. Of course maybe they didn’t like the way candy corn ended up being distributed or whatever, who knows.

Considering that you need 500 candies for the achievement and 100,000 candies for the wings, I think they went way, way overboard in trying to limit candies.

You only need 250 for the achievement, and you’ll get 150 of that from the pinatas. I don’t like how hard it is to get the wings, but I can’t say it’s an illegitimate choice on their part either…

Xhyros.1340:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dragon_Bash_%28achievements%29
10th achievement, something about a ship?

The Ship’s Council members are the line of people by the plaza in Lion’s Arch. Might be unrelated.

I only found like 6 in the Grove. I didn’t bother taking the time to hoof it around Divinity’s Reach to find them there. There are 35? in LA. If you can luck into overflow you can use them multiple times, and otherwise you can just switch to a different character to get them (they are single-use-per-character, not per-account).

I’m assuming they made them the way they did to control the amount of candy in the economy, which hey that’s their call. I would be nice if the spawners spawned more than just 4 holos every 8 minutes, though, even if you had to do it in waves. Very difficult to get to them when they respawn unless you’re right by one.

Haunted doors respawned faster and there were way more of them. Gift boxes weren’t as important as these are, since you got the mats from the events. Of course maybe they didn’t like the way candy corn ended up being distributed or whatever, who knows.

I didn’t get mine until I switched to a different character. Probably just a coincidence though.

Use throw mine and/or personal battering ram for extra control of enemies, if you can spare the slot(s). Combine that with the net shot from a rifle, glue shot from a pistol, or ice grenade from the kit and you can push a mob back and immobilize or slow him to give you more time to kill.

Each new tab is the same size as the original.

Kraggy.4169:

Um, what do I ‘win’ with gold?

How can the amount of gold you have be a measure of anything but your real-world bank balance when you can officially buy gold with real money?

It also can represent your ability to optimize certain aspects of gameplay. People get rich by either having lots of real money to buy gems, being very good at playing the market, or being very good at some form of farming. People will brag about just about anything so…

Even the Chantry of Secrets? Just to get the obvious out of the way…

This is going to sound stupid, but what time were you playing? They reset at 7PM EST, just to be clear.

I wonder if we’re not in for a somewhat moderate decline over the next few months since these new content updates seem like they’d be thinner on the “theme” items, meaning less demand for the gem store. Guess it will depend on what is really included this month.

Gold is good for getting stuff on the trading post. Exotic armors/weapons, runes/sigils, materials for crafting if you want to craft. That and cultural armor, if you care for that sort of thing.

It’s not clear exactly how independent the gem/gold market is, but you’re right in that it’s probably not going to go down much. Maybe a bit, depending on whether the next few updates have any gem store items.

Does Dagger/Dagger elementalist not suit your playstyle? They’re still squishy, but the power is there. The inability to switch from melee to ranged on the fly is the biggest drawback I can see there though.

I can’t tell you whether a class will get boring, because most of them I’ve only taken to 20-40 or so (took and engineer and guardian to 80, had fun with both albeit changing builds multiple times while leveling). Warrior is fun because stuff just dies fast, and it really does sound like the best description of what you want if ranged combat is important. Guardian would be almost perfect if not for the lack of ranged options.

I will add that a pistol, interrupt (mines/ram) based engineer can be a fun, sort of tactical solo experience rather than a support player. It’s not really what you’ve described as wanting to main but IMO is worth serious time on an alt if you get the chance.

Although keep in mind that I have found Ranger a bit boring even from the start, so I’m probably not giving it fair consideration.

5% listing fee you pay at sale, 10% tax paid at sale (buyer pays, but it’s money you don’t get).

Sajuuk.5706:

Glektor.2934:

For the same reason you can’t print your own dollar bills.

Money is controlled by the governments. I’m sure the Tyrian treasury department mint stamps the legal gold coins with their seal. Your unmarked gold is counterfeit.

The intrinsic problem with this statement is that dollars are valueless outside of the promise of being legal tender for all debts public and private. We’ve moved on from the gold standard, where the dollar was tied to and represented a given amount of gold. Gold coins in a society are valuable because they are maid of gold. Gold coins minted in one section of Tyria are usable elsewhere because of this fact, or else they’d be valueless. It’s extremely unlikely that all the races mint the same currency. The economy of Tyria only functions because coins have intrinsic value, unlike the dollar. So, going into the market and plopping down a bar of solid gold should be a legitimate buying technique, you’d just need to figure out the value of the bar by the weight versus the weight of the gold coins (against how much gold is actually in them, since that’s where the value of the coins come from).

Thus, I posit that the only reason you can’t break that gold bar into coins is because fantasy world logic (or lack thereof) to stop you from destroying the economy of the game. I mean really, you can’t look at the in game economy in a logical light of value or else the whole thing falls into hilarious shambles.

Well, there’s no reason you couldn’t make a dollar out of solid gold and have it legally be worth 1 dollar (pennies and nickels in the US are worth more than 1c and 5c in terms of materials IINM, but it’s illegal to melt them down and take advantage of that); with the right situation, a currency’s intrinsic material value doesn’t matter. If gold were worth about as much as the linens/silk/etc used to make current dollars it wouldn’t be much different than how things are now. Maybe that’s how it is in Tyria, and the currency value comes from it being minted rather than it being made of gold.

epicbawler.6854:

cpg.7140:

Best way to level is to explore, at least early on. Explore your starting zone, view Vistas, collect Skill Points, discover Points of Interest, unfog new areas of the map; you get experience for doing all of that. If you run into a wall in your own zone, go to your starter city to lion’s arch (via the purple asura gate) to another starter city to another starter zone and explore that one.

Once you get a bit of cash or collect a lot of materials, doing some crafting is a quick way to level. But early on it won’t give you enough to make a huge difference.

I thought leveling was linear throughtout all 80lvls so I don’t see how exploring could possibly be better earlier on, also from my experience aka discovering all of the asura city and the human city at lvl5 it only gave 2 lvls total. For me I leveled up very quickly in WvW (or it seemed that way most likely since I really enjoy it, and as they say, time flies when your having fun). Otherwise I would just do other race starter areas. Goooooooooodluck!
Also if you do want to try out wvw send me a mail on gw2 my username is Tasty Pants

I say its better early on because early on you won’t have the money or materials to craft, and you won’t (likely) be strong enough to do much in WvW, and won’t have access to dungeons. Early on it’s basically the only game in town; later on there are other options that may or may not be better depending on what you’re looking for (i.e. crafting is faster, dungeons give you tokens/coin, WvW might be more fun if that’s your style).

Leveling is actually faster for the first 15-20 levels or so, if I remember the curve correctly, but you’re right in that after that it’s supposed to be a flat line.

MaRko.3165:

Thanks!

Now I wonder if its worth it – travel expenses to the Mystic forge and back and all. Since I get most my gear from Karma vendors – that must be why I can’t salvage it.

Thanks again!

M.

Go into WvW and use the forges there. Enter/leave via the WvW menu (rather than the gates in lion’s arch) and you’ll go back to wherever you started in PvE.

Of course this is assuming your server doesn’t have queues.

Best way to level is to explore, at least early on. Explore your starting zone, view Vistas, collect Skill Points, discover Points of Interest, unfog new areas of the map; you get experience for doing all of that. If you run into a wall in your own zone, go to your starter city to lion’s arch (via the purple asura gate) to another starter city to another starter zone and explore that one.

Once you get a bit of cash or collect a lot of materials, doing some crafting is a quick way to level. But early on it won’t give you enough to make a huge difference.

Most of the time it’s stuff you buy with karma that you can’t salvage (so that you can’t turn karma into gold, I suppose). Don’t know what other restrictions there are though.

I think Dark Reverie needs to be listed as harder than Morgan’s leap, if for no other reason than it requires you to do Morgan’s Leap every (or every other, if you open the door) time you want to attempt it. There’s an additional chest on the floor area if you want to clear out the nightmare court (though a party may be advisable for this). But really it’s just that one jump to that one slanted mushroom at the top that will kill you probably 95% of the time if you don’t look up the right way to do it. Downright devious.

Great idea, though. Jumping puzzles are great fun, and having a non-spoilery way to judge how you should approach them going into things is a great resource to have here.

The way to do it would be to dynamically adjust the price of waypoints based on zone population… make it cheaper to go to empty zones. Tweak it as needed so that its effectiveness as a gold sink stays about the same. It would just require a lot of work, I’d imagine, and in the end probably wouldn’t be worth it from anets perspective.

No, others are as well. It sounds like the counter triggers at a very specific spot on each puzzle, and if you don’t go through whatever that spot happens to be for whatever reason you don’t get credit.

Vexa’s Lab isn’t a jumping puzzle, it’s a mini-dungeon. Not that that explains why pig iron wouldn’t work for you…

I have little experience with Ranger (I find the weapon options a little bland for melee, although I’m sure they’re viable, I just haven’t gotten around to exploring them more seriously).

For my Guardian that I recently took to 80, at some point the low HP pool becomes a non issue because you are a complete tank via nearly-constant healing, damage mitigation boons (aegis/protection), etc.

The big downside to being a Guardian is that you have pretty much zilch in the way of ranged combat. Yeah, if you’re trying to be tanky you don’t usually need it but having a ranged option that you can get comfortable with is just nice when going up against champion mobs, dragons, in dungeons etc. Scepter is lackluster at best.

The small downside to being a Guardian is that damage output isn’t great. You’ll live forever but killing can be slow. But some of the weapons have some good synergies and are fun to use, so it’s not a big deal. The other small downside is that their elite skills are ho-hum. Might be doubly troublesome if you are a Norn, since the Norn elites have their own drawbacks.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Updated-World-Ratings-Dec-21/first#post1071021

I don’t know how the WvW scoring correlates to the ranking, but if your server wins the matchup by a certain amount they gain traction in the “rating.” You swap once you overtake the server ahead of you in rating (at reset). I don’t know how easy a 60 point gap is to make up in the upper tiers, though.

Red = bottom of the tier, Green = top of the tier (blue = middle, obviously). If there’s no movement in the rankings, you won’t change borderlands on reset.

So yeah, the easiest solution is to change servers if your current matchup isn’t working. Either change to one that’s currently in the right borderland (the rankings are posted in the WvW forum so you can always tell who should be where) or find a matchup that seems really lopsided and hope you can get on at a time when they might be sweeping several maps. I guess a low population matchup would be most likely to see dramatic sweeps back and forth, but hard to say and it may not coincide with your preferred coverage time so transfer at your own risk.