Guild Wars 2

Engie is difficult to master at higher levels if you want to properly maximize damage, at which point you need to balance a metric ton of cooldowns and swaps, but it’s very possible to play “easymode” by only using one kit in PvE and still do very well while having fun, which sounds like it could work for you?

I recently leveled my second engineer to max via PvE using rifle and bomb kit: rifle has good damage and CC, bomb kit is the highest auto-attack you can get on engie and also gives you close-range AoE as well as a smoke field that’ll blind mobs so you can mitigate damage while blowing them to bits, and you can experiment with the other two utility slots to find what you enjoy.

If that works well enough you can slowly ease yourself into more kits as you get more familiarized with the mechanics, if you want to. For running dungeons running bombs and/or grenades will work well enough for most non-meta parties, and as engineer you will have lots of good utilities for support (water fields for group heals in a pinch, providing smoke field for stealth if no one’s logged a thief, fire fields for might if the ele is slacking, etc).

Engie’s hard, probably impossible to be perfect at, but it’s not as hard to run around with as most people make it out to be, and IMO a lot of the fun is that you have so much versatility and room for improvement.

Seconding the engie suggestion – bit of a learning curve & requires good knowledge of game mechanics to maximize efficiency, possibly the most versatile class and able to bring a lot to a party. Has perma-swiftness from trait, a targeted leap skill (rifle 5), nice getaway utilities if it comes to that (slick shoes + rocket boots). It might take a while to get used to swapping kits/weapons/utilies at first but it’s very worth it.

One per boss per character per day. (So if you had two characters you could get two chests by doing one specific event twice in a day, and two more by doing another world boss).

I’d say the reference is to SC, not SCII. As far as I’m aware these terms have been around well before SCII, not necessarily in this game but in MMOs/online games – Starcraft was a pretty big influence on early gaming, at least in my entourage, so words & references to it are easily understood, then just get integrated through osmosis by people who haven’t actually played it.

(that said I’m not 100% sure ‘bunker’ is a SC term – it’s fairly generic & descriptive of its function so it could very well have popped up on its own)

As far as I’m aware mesmers are mostly wanted in dungeons for their reflects and a couple neat tricks like portals to make some things easier/faster, but their damage isn’t top tier. It’s not bad, but it takes some skill and knowing the tricks, and might not fit your DPS preference.

Thief would probably do the trick – very high single target DPS (which is good, because once/if you get into speedrunning then most trash mobs are skipped and the main fighting happens on bosses), shouldn’t have trouble finding a party, also brings utilities with blinding mobs, combo blasting, stripping defiance or stealthing (especially appreciated in specific dungeons, mainly Caudecus’ Manor and Arah).

Engineer, suggested above, could also, maybe, fit what you’re looking for (top tier DPS, great party support & versatility, fun to play) but it’s less straightforward than thief and has a steeper learning curve IMO. It’s also one of the least played classes so people might not always know what you bring to the party, but in a decent group it works great.

As a new player I’d say try thief first, as I think it’s what you’d get the most of. If what we say about engie sounds interesting, keep it in mind for if/when you get bored or want a break from thief and give it a shot.

Hey, just offering myself as extra back-up if you have questions and the others aren’t online! I’m heading off to bed right now but I’m online fairly frequently so hopefully I can be of some use.

5 engineers, 2 warriors, 2 guardians, 2 eles, 3 thieves, 2 rangers, 1 mesmer, 1 necro.

I’ve got two spots left, considering making more engies tbh.

Master/Mystic are preferred for rares because of the cost – given the gold:gem ratio, BLSK uses are pretty expensive and thus best saved for salvaging exotics with valuable sigils/runes/insignias, where the gold/salvage return is highest. (Master is also technically cheaper than mystic I think, but you get tons of mystic stones from achievement chests/dailies for free so that cancels out, especially since mystic has 250 charges vs master’s 25).

Re: crude, I believe most people don’t use them because they have 15 charges instead of the 25 basic has – more convenience, less having to replace them.

ekarat.1085:

Wouldn’t a rare have to go for 16 times the amount of a masterwork for the forge process to be worthwhile? (80% chance of losing 3 masterworks vs 20% chance of losing 4 masterworks but gaining a rare = -3.2 master + .2 rare >= 0 => rare >= 16 master?)

Of course, that would require holding onto goods, but I don’t have enough free space for a single dungeon trip and have to sort through my inventory partway through. I usually use the trick of going back to open chests after everyone else is done. A dungeon does require ~30 slots free for a run. I’m not sure how people cope with that. After a run, someone suggesting trying again immediately. That would require 60 inventory slots free (well, more like 50, since some items can stack with the previous run). I’ve gone in with ~10 slots free and have managed to free up 28 slots at my best by getting rid of runes and sigils I can’t immediately use.

IIRC most level 80 greens, if sold directly, go for about 1-2s. Rares sell at about 30s minimum, and if you salvage you have a chance for 1-3 ecto which sell for 40s each. If you get a rare weapon of a type that’s sought-after legendary wise (eg swords, greatswords, sometimes staff), you can sell it for 60-80s with minimal waiting.

Re: bag slots, yeah, that is an issue. I pick up my chests during the run and tend to salvage blues and whites on the fly, make good use of the ‘Deposit all materials’ option and I can usually have space enough for two runs, then I just go ‘gimme a sec to empty inventory’ in party chat and pop off to sell/forge, it takes a couple minutes at most and people don’t mind so much in my experience.

My usual method for level 80 stuff is salvage whites+blues with crude or basic kits, throw greens in the mystic forge (20% chance of getting a rare from them, which can then be sold, salvaged for globs of ectoplasm or forged again to roll for an exotic), salvage yellows that sell for less than the current price for one glob of ecto (~40s right now) with a mystic/master kit.

For items that are under level 65 I just salvage everything, as lower tier materials sell well.

If it’s an exotic, I first check if the rune/sigil sells for a high price. If yes, I use a Black Lion salvage kit. If not, mystic/master is good.

1. Yes, you need Blue/Red/Green Borderlands and Eternal Battlegrounds.

2. Watch the map like a hawk, spread it out, come back at different times if something you need isn’t taken, take advantage of color changes from week to week.

You can retrait on the fly whenever you’re not in combat, so spread them out until you unlock the tier you want and then respec into it.

Megaservers do indeed group up people from different servers, but there is still a region division so that people on NA servers cannot play with people on EU servers.

Being EU as well I’m afraid I can’t play with you either. If you’re having trouble finding people to play with may I also suggest you take a look at the Guild boards and see if one of them appeals to you? Guilds will let you hang out with a bunch of people and are good to get advice/guidance/company or just to chat while playing.

Hey and congrats on finishing the PS!

If it’s any consolation Anet have said they’d like to find a way to make S1 replayable. It’ll likely take a while to be implemented if at all, but it’s something.

Re: Trahearne, my impression is that a lot of people feel he takes all the credit/spotlight from your actions and basically gets to be the hero in their place. It’s not a feeling I got and personally I’m very fond of him, in a “oh my god Trahearne you’re a disaster stop making speeches” kind of way. To each their own :P

A trait point now is equivalent to 5 of the old system; you’ll have 14 total at level 80.

Traits themselves have to be unlocked, either by doing specific tasks/events (you can know which by hovering over the spyglass next to their name) or bought for gold and skill points if you can’t be bothered going out to do the thing.

Worth noting that you no longer have to pay to unlock tiers, this will happen on its own as you level. Retraiting is also free, and possible anytime you are not in combat.

As long as the stuff is not soulbound to your character, you can transfer it via depositing in your bank and then retrieving it with the other character.

You could consider running more dungeons? CoF 1 and 2, CoE 1, TA 1+2 and SE1 for example are pretty easy and shouldn’t take that long to do with a decent party.

No problem, good luck with running the dungeons! If you have any more questions down the line do feel free to pm or mail me ingame, those work even cross-region

I’d recommend either master or mystic kits. Any Black Lion salvage kits you may have are best used to recover expensive runes or possibly insignias on exotic stuff.

The ascended amulet is a good idea yes. Also, in the event that you are in EU zone feel free to add me ingame and I can show you through CoF (+CoE if you’re interested).

You can run dungeons with rare/yellow gear fine, especially CoF path 1 which is a very fast & easy run (10-20 min average running with random strangers I’d say, faster with a good group. You’ll get 60 tokens (+1.5g) per day running just that path once, so it can be worth looking into if only to get a couple pieces & buy the others with the gold.

Re: the lack of experience, just steer clear of exp/AP requirements, see if you can find lfgs saying “all welcome”. You can also make your own. The most important IMO is that you say that it’s your first time – in my experience a lot of people are willing to talk newbies through the dungeon, as long as they’re polite enough to warn beforehand and are willing to learn. The people we get annoyed at are people who join and say nothing, don’t listen and mess things up when we can see they don’t know what they’re doing.

Karma gear is good, but just keep in mind that it cannot be salvaged so you won’t be able to recover any rune you stick in it if you want to change later.

For the weapons, LB & S/A are good, consider also getting a warhorn (for blast finisher on skill 5). Just take whatever weapon has the right stats (berserker again) and is max level – I’d say check on the trading post, or buy them with dungeon tokens.

I didn’t enjoy that great because it felt like it was designed to spite me specifically as an engie player (aka crap access to stability, definitely don’t have it in my normal setup and couldn’t exactly switch builds during the fight). But eh, it got killed after some loud swearing and me camping the middle of the room as much as possible.

I get really uneasy at a lot of events/hearts that involve the ‘lesser’ sapient species like the skritt/jotun/hylek, who mostly seem to be aggressive due to the main races encroaching on their territories and/or their cultures – I’m thinking for example how there’s one event where you have to kill a bunch of jotun who’re just trying to recover artefacts that belong to them and that were, uh, ‘recovered’ by the Priory.

The customization of my first character is possibly the one thing that got me hooked into the game the moment I started. The pretty char customization/creation is one of the game’s strengths IMO, it’d be stupid to remove that early ‘hook’ into the game and lock it behind a tutorial instance, no matter how quick/easy it is.

I am pretty certain the trait will be waiting for you when you hit 30, as I seem to recall having unlocked one while leveling one of my alts about two weeks ago while not having the required level and being able to slot it as soon as I got there. So no waste

Yes it is true. No one knows if they’re coming back or not; Anet has undoubtedly seen all the criticism that came from that change (and the other stuff they moved around in the Orr storyline) but I don’t recall seeing them taking a stand on whether or not they’d restore it. I lean on the optimistic side, but even if they do bring it back to what it used to be it’ll likely be in a while.

As Thord said. I’ll also add that legendary weapons have the same stats as ascended, but with the shiny skin and the ability to change stat combo. It’s not that often used so most people want them for the skin – so while ascended is a fairly high investment, it will do just as good stats and damage-wise as a legendary and is cheaper.

1. Karma and laurels are used at higher levels to buy a bunch of stuff that can be handy. For example, karma allows you to buy obsidian shards (required for legendaries & ascended gear) and exotic armor, but you need it in pretty high quantities. Laurels are used to buy ascended trinkets (rings/amulets/accessories) and ascended recipes. However, both of those currencies are stuff you will continue to accumulate so if there is something you want right now you shouldn’t feel obligated to hoard them.

2. Exotic is ‘endgame gear’ for basically everything but high level fractals and maybe WvW. You can get exos for karma in Orr temples when you get there, buy them off the TP, craft them, buy them using dungeon tokens.

Once you’re set with exotic stuff, you can start thinking about legendary crafting (this is a huge grind for essentially cosmetics, you do not have to inflict this on yourself if that’s not fun for you) and ascended crafting (a big time/gold sink). Ascended is the best in slot gear but doesn’t have much higher stats than exotics, their attraction comes from their infusion slot that allows agony resistance for fractals or various bonuses for WvW.

3. Use em. You’ll keep gaining them as you play, there’s no cap on them as everytime you fill the exp bar as a level 80 you’ll gain a new SP. If you really have no use for them you can convert them to stuff to use in the Mystic Forge.

4. The Forge can be found in Lion’s Arch and in WvW. You throw four things in it, it spits back something else. It’s a part of legendary crafting, and some weapon skins come from MF recipes. It can also be used to promote crafting materials. It’s also basically a gambling machine: you can throw four gear pieces of the same rarity (blue/green/yellow/orange) and have a chance that the one random thing it spits back is one level of rarity higher (so four example throwing four yellow/rare pieces of gear in and getting an orange/exotic piece back). Some people make a profit from it or use it to get a precursor for their legendary. Others ruin themselves and get nothing. Gambling.

5. Missing a word here, but T3, T5, etc are usually used to refer to crafting materials and stand for Tier 1/2/3/4/5/6.

6. Your choice. Crafting can be expensive, but you can negate that if you gather everything yourself.

I have five engineers (one/race), two warriors, two guards, two rangers and three thieves. As I have one of each other class and don’t plan on stopping anytime soon, the duplicates will likely continue to increase.

Sometimes it’s not just a matter of speed but also sparing yourself some frustration.

Speaking for myself, as someone who runs a good share of my dungeons with inexperienced, non-meta guildies and doesn’t mind in the least, when I want to pug a path (because I don’t have a lot of time, I’m tired, or am not in the mood to explain, etc) I want to run it quick and efficient and with minimum hassle, so that’s when that kind of LFG message is useful.

So yes, I can, and have, run CoF1 with every sort of party composition. I do, however, prefer it when we don’t almost wipe at the effigy like it happened two days ago because while I posted “p1 zerk” I didn’t bother gearchecking and it became very obvious that AT MOST one other person was using zerk gear and the other three were using random stuff (fun fact: when I was down and the other four up and attacking, the effigy was actually regenerating health).

Sure, you can run SE or CM without a guardian or a thief respectively. But there’s a chance with random pugs that things are going to go pear-shaped, and that’s not something I have the strength to deal with all the time, so I make a “p1, need guard” listing and kick if no one’s willing to change. (Alternatively I change classes, but not everyone can do that.)

And yeah, I’m willing to wait two minutes more to get people I don’t have to vent about in gchat after.

The engineer skill floor isn’t that high, though the cap is if you want to really maximize your dps skill rotation, but that only comes up later. While you’re leveling you can be just fine with one kit and your main weapon.

You’ll also be a lot less squishy than an ele, viable at both melee and range (as an example, bomb kit is your highest raw damage and works at basically point-blank range, while grenades, which is likely going to be one of your main sources of damage at higher levels, can hit at 1500 range).

Ranger in my experience got a bit boring after a while; engineer didn’t.

Elementalist might be a good fit for you. They’re top tier damage, welcome everywhere, have staff for “easy mode” weapon that still does extremely high damage while having more active, in-your-face set-ups, like with dagger mainhand.

They’re fairly squishy, that said, but you can compensate by killing stuff fast or using defensive utilities/skills.

I recently leveled a new engineer from 1-80 (71 for the sake of honesty, I only broke and used tomes at the end because I wanted to gear up already) through open world and personal story and honestly it went fine. Traits issue notwithstanding, I suspect the issue might be more the class you’re using or the fact you are used to things going faster thanks to boosters/etc rather than some new change to the leveling experience in itself.

Have you gotten the newish PoI in Brisban Wildlands, near the entrance to Dry Top? I believe that one counts for map completion, and is fairly easy to miss.

AFAIK it varies, although a lot of mobs seem to hate elementalists in general. From what I’ve seen and heard discussed, some of the factors are toughness stat, total/remaining health, damage done and who damaged it first, but there’s no set formula for it that I know of.

I reran it yesterday with no problem so if there’s a bug it’s not affecting everyone. I found that there’s sometimes a delay between breaking a vortex and the next one spawning, but it shouldn’t be more than 5-8 seconds.

If you hover over the “Total Price” number you’ll get the estimated profit from the sale. Usually it’s 15% of the sell price.

If I understand right, you’d like to see every weapon you have slotted in weapon set 1 and 2, so for example using GS+Axe/Mace you’d want to see all three weapons equipped, or GS/LBow both of them, am I right?

While it might look cool in some situations I think there would be a lot of issues with clipping (the longbow for example would likely be all smushed with the greatsword) and/or visual clutter, so it would take a lot of work for not much reward.

1. Ele
2. Guardian
3. Engineer
4. Ranger / Warrior
6. Mesmer / Thief
8. Necro

The bubble gets you knocked back, you need to have the green light buff (ie, the step BEFORE the bubble) AND the fragile buff at once so that you can walk under the light and stay there long enough for the vortex to grab fragile.

I am okay with this particular design, as I’ve said earlier in this thread, other than its implementation as a Halloween costume and brushing aside all my problems with Cantha itself.

However, I find worrying that people are so quick to jump in shouting “it’s just a Halloween thing who cares” the moment people start discussing it, because it’s the same kind of defensiveness you see in people who find it fun to use blackface or wear feathered headdresses when told they’re being disrespectful, right before they shut down the conversation.

Fantasy and Cantha or not, the fact is inspiration is drawn from existing cultures. Please be open to discussion (or criticism, if it comes to that) on it, and be willing to accept that what seems ok to you as an outsider to those cultures can rub someone who knows and/or lives it wrong. People are allowed to say if something is wrong.

Note that this is not adressed to anyone in particular, but more a response to the tone of some of the posts I’m seeing in this thread. OP was wrong in saying the hat was a result of “not enough research”, as has been pointed out – but several people seem to see a general criticism of the costume and immediately jump on the “it’s just for fun/Halloween sheesh cool down” excuse, when it is not, in fact, a good excuse. If the issue had been that the hat was designed after a real life hat that had significant cultural meaning but was used here as a trivial matter and thus cheapened that culture for the sake of looking cool in a game, for example, would they have still used that excuse? Probably, and that’s what my issue is.

Prophet.6257:

kyrioscyrus.2857:

Prophet.6257:

Canthan is not Asian.

They get to take some artistic liberties.

Actually Canthan is very North-East Asian design influenced, not complete Asian influenced, because Asia would include Malayan, Philippines, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai culture influences.

But we do not see that in Canthan designs.

Influenced yes but not in fact Asian.

This being a fantasy world and all Anet does get to set the rules of how their own cultures are defined.

Which does not mean we are not allowed to discuss the cultures they take elements from, and/or express concerns if they steer close to harmful stereotypes.

Also just to add that the warning about this being from a player and not Anet is automatically added to player-to-player mails, it’s not something weird/suspicious or added by the sender.

The difficulty (in my playthrough) was to have both the light attunemnt from the facet (without triggering the invincibility) and the fragility buff at the same time, as it’s only when you have both that you can enter the light and stay there long enough for the vortex to get the buff.

First: “It’s just a Halloween costume” is no excuse for racism, and yes, it can be racism when you decide to generalize an entire continent with old stereotypes.

Speaking as a half-Viet person I’m okay with the design of the outfit in general, as while it does use a bunch of (mostly?) southeast Asian elements that are recognizable as such it doesn’t use anything that has significant cultural meaning that could be distorted/disrespected and it remains far enough from the usual stereotyped crap you see everywhere that it strikes me more as a decent effort for a one-off ‘Asian-inspired’ costume than anything else.

I do wish it had been available a something other than a Halloween reward however, because that buys right in the “dress up as another culture even though you know nothing about it” problematic issue, but well. Could have been worse.

As oxtred said, elementalist could work for you. Given your description I think engineer might be also be a good fit, as it is very versatile (for utilities and builds both), has great damage and mobility, use ranged weapons but are more powerful the closer you are to the enemy, have several kits to switch up gameplay and adapt to situation.

That’s because you’re supposed to transfer the Fragile buff to it so that it can be one-shotted.

IIRC you get it by following Caithe at the very end, the nightmare will pop as you open the chest in the room.

In PvE the most efficient stat combo is Berserker (Power/Precision/Ferocity) for every single piece of gear (so armor + weapons + trinkets), as it’ll let you kill stuff extra fast.

It will however also make you much more fragile that other stat combos. If you are uncomfortable running Berserker you may consider Knight (Toughness/Power/Precision) or Soldier’s (Power/Toughness/Vitality) stats, which are tankier but maintain high power.

If you don’t want to use them for forging or legendaries, sell them. At least you’ll get some gold out of it instead of having to delete.

Nerone.1724:

hopefully scherzasse.ma anyone know if the awards are for tt servers, or if they are broken down by each one?

Prizes are EU+NA wide, no server breakdowns.