Guild Wars 2

But I thought they were already going to … oh, I get it.

Zylonite.5913:

It is funny when all these “Thank you” posts comes from people that have spent zero dollars in game and requesting more updates.

Man, Z, you have absolutely no idea how much people spend … or do you?

When the first GW came out, it was easily the best game in the ‘no monthly subs’ class. And GW2 has the same distinction. As I’ve posted before, I’m not worried about the other games coming out – they’re more of the same. They aren’t GW2.

THIS!!! This is why I love this game so much! You can argue the fine points of the game, of what it’s lacking and what it needs to do all you want, but when it comes time to just enjoy something for pure fun and entertainment, ANet knows how to poke fun and laugh for the sake of laughing. Nice work, guys! Love it!

Rewards always mean players. Put something in the cities that will reward players for doing something. Add at least one daily that requires interaction in one of the cities. You’ll have players doing it. Maybe it’s just running errands for someone or other ‘not so epic’ things – I just had the idea a few minutes ago so no real complex solution, just a suggestion.

I bought the game. I’ve spent real money in the gem store when I felt like it. Everything else has been for free. I’m not going to be critical of anything they throw at me. When the game gets boring and something better comes along, I’ll leave, like I did WoW, LOTRO, CoH, DCUO, CO, and the original GW. I’m looking forward to the update but I’m not agonizing over potential lost. As for TESO, I have a brother doing the beta and I’m not worried – the crowd that leaves for TESO probably never really “got” GW2.

Excellent post, Harper! +1

Aidenwolf.5964:

mjhungness.8059:

Well, I for one, hope the game doesn’t go the direction that a 149 member guild wants it to go. And I have to laugh that the point of some of the above posts is “They haven’t fixed ‘x’ yet so that means ANet doesn’t care at all.” Seriously, a thread that delivers on things the player base has wanted getting criticized because some internal personal clock went off some time ago? “Here, have some pizza and a beer.” “Nope – too late!”

Anyone who has played the original GW knows that ANet isn’t afraid to tweak or outright change the game and its mechanics based on player feedback. Countless innovations happened over the course of their expansions and continued even after they split off to work on GW2 (minor updates but still, a mostly F2P game with no gem store continuing to do ANYTHING for the player base speaks volumes for the company) .

The feature pack is doing one major thing that GW2 has done so well – eliminate grind and put the focus on playing whatever character and class you want and getting rewarded for it. I’m looking forward to it. And you have to ask yourself, if you think this is too late, what part of the last 19 months would you have sacrificed to have this then instead of what you got?

I’ll assume you mean hasn’t done well. And I see absolutely no grind removal in the patch. If you’ve seen that please do tell. I mean that sincerely, because this game’s a grind fest.

I don’t think you’re looking hard enough! First, you will have access to all the gear that you’ve worked at getting, for all your toons. Gone is having to craft a set of gear for each toon, which took a measure of … grind … to get. Second, all dyes across your account are available – if you have abyss and want it on all your toons but don’t want to … grind … to come up with the gold to get it, you don’t have to. Repair costs are gone, meaning you don’t have to carry around the cost/fun ratio of playing different builds with a worry that a crash and burn is going to cost you. I understand bias in an opinion but please explain to me how these enhancements do not remove some grind. If you’re looking for all grind to be removed, please explain how you do that without releasing new content daily so that daily players can wake up and have a new world to play in – that’s not realistic, at least on a game that doesn’t cost much to play.

As for the comment that someone made that they would sacrifice the Living Story altogether, I feel bad that you feel that way. The Living Story, for me, wasn’t a literary work of art, or an academy award winning adaptation of a masterpiece, but it was fun, it had a lot of ‘wow- that’s cool’ moments (for me) and sure kept me coming back to play at a rate that exceeds my interest in the other games I’ve played over the years that were pretty much stagnant between ‘purchasable’ patches.

I will honor anyone’s opinion if it is build fairly, but I have to laugh at the continued complaints while we are playing for free. Yeah, it cost to buy the game but, unless your time is worth a billion dollars an hour, I’m sure you’ve recouped that initial expense long ago. Constructive criticism is always valuable – silly complaining is a waste of everyone’s time and comes across as a little peevish.

Well, I for one, hope the game doesn’t go the direction that a 149 member guild wants it to go. And I have to laugh that the point of some of the above posts is “They haven’t fixed ‘x’ yet so that means ANet doesn’t care at all.” Seriously, a thread that delivers on things the player base has wanted getting criticized because some internal personal clock went off some time ago? “Here, have some pizza and a beer.” “Nope – too late!”

Anyone who has played the original GW knows that ANet isn’t afraid to tweak or outright change the game and its mechanics based on player feedback. Countless innovations happened over the course of their expansions and continued even after they split off to work on GW2 (minor updates but still, a mostly F2P game with no gem store continuing to do ANYTHING for the player base speaks volumes for the company) .

The feature pack is doing one major thing that GW2 has done so well – eliminate grind and put the focus on playing whatever character and class you want and getting rewarded for it. I’m looking forward to it. And you have to ask yourself, if you think this is too late, what part of the last 19 months would you have sacrificed to have this then instead of what you got?

I do not want trinity. I’ve played enough trinity – as in ALL of them have trinity. It’s refreshing to be pushed to a higher level where you aren’t pigeon-holed into a specific role. I like that some classes can be better than others at certain things but overall we can do more with what we’ve got than be expected to do less.

This is actually the first game, and I’ve played a LOT, that I’m not afraid of people leaving. I honestly don’t see anything similar in depth and breadth out there that would seriously make a run against GW2. Even what I’ve seen of ESO looks like the old tired and true. I’m on the GW2 rollarcoaster at least until something significantly better comes along. As for the forums, most of the complainers here are just that, complainers. The minority state their reasons and offer a solution – the rest just vent. I can’t wait for the changes to hit – they seem to be eliminating a lot of the multi-toon grind.

Loubbo.9852:

I think the biggest joke is going to be that it will go almost completely unnoticed and will only be heard about several days later considering a vast majority will be playing the early access of The Elder Scrolls Online.

What will be interesting is the realization that GW2 is clipping along at a higher level than the existing MMOs and ESO will just show how much GW2 evolved the genre when they release with ‘more of the same’. Especially if it plays like a console port.

On topic, with the Feature Pack hitting a few weeks later, I’m thinking April Fools will be one of the ‘one-day cosmetic’ shenanigans from GW1 days. How awesome would it be if we all turned into Scarlet for a day? “Ha-ha, April Fools, Salad-Boy!”

So this is purely without consideration of game mechanics, just a ‘wake up on Christmas morning with what I was hoping for under the tree’ thing. It would be cool for the city’s planners to propose a blueprint for the ‘new city’, with a number of new buildings with new functions (guild halls, personal homes and neighborhoods) as well as the old functions (bank, TP, crafting). And then give the players quests to help with the construction of each building. The amount of player resources spent would drive the speed in which the building was built, and which ones get built first. It would be interesting to see what the player base wants to get up first.

So the basic assumption is that, yeah, this is a fictional game. Second assumption is that this dialog reflects on us. Those two assumptions are critical to discussing the merits of the dialog – otherwise, you’re demonizing someone’s opinion.

That said, if we’re supposed to be heroes, wouldn’t it have been refreshing to be ‘heroic’ and pass on the smarty joke? Don’t heroes aspire to be better than average, above the fray, apart from anything that is unjust or cheap? If not, we’re just the thug that won.

Alice.8694:

Heck aren’t we just in it for the shenanigans?

NPC recruiter: “Random Moles are attacking villages, you in?”
Protagonist: “I don’t know if I can fit you in between slaughtering zombies and spamming cannons at Zhaitan.”
NPC recruiter: “They’ll be shenanigans”
Protagonist: “Tell Trahearne he can fire his own cannons!”

…Fire and Frost in a nutshell.

Nice! First laugh of the day! Thanks!

Jory’s sister’s reaction comes more from Jory’s sister knowing Jory’s buttons than an influence of the GW2 society. I took the dialog in the Dead End as being surprised and friendly banter that Jory’s interested in a noble – obviously one of Jory’s buttons. And sis is just lightly rubbing it in.

As for comparisons to our own history – how about we just not? Too much bad. Clean slate, Mr. Sulu, set a course for out there.

This one affected me more than my first time walking out into the ruins of Post Searing Ascalon. That first time, with my first GW1 toon, I honestly didn’t know what was happening when it happened and I hadn’t really adopted much attachment to Pre-Searing Ascalon. It was still a shock.

This time around, the city that I’ve come to call my GW2 home is ruined. Me and a few guildies were running around last night, trying to find familiar buildings and markers amidst the ruins and I just felt sad. Gone were the areas we took our in-game Christmas screenies for two straight years. Gone was the plaza in Fort Mariner that my thief practiced her teleporting skills. Gone was the little cove on the east side and tiki bar up on the hilltop west of that. Gone was the grand hall of the TP where I agonized over my armor upgrades for seemingly hours across all my toons. Gone was the Lion fountain where we all stood around in our Mad King outfits listening to his silly jokes. Gone is the Mystic Forge where I stood for hours with a mixture of dread and nervous anticipation, hoping beyond hope that I’d get a mystic clover instead of some more leather scraps. Gone was that first moment of exhileration when I found the old lions from GW1 in the bay.

Yeah, last night was a little heartwrenching. After the smoke and red haze disappeared, I realized that a chunk of happy times was now going to be a memory. Great job for doing all that in a game! Touches like the note boards and grieving citizens – wow. Just nice job!

As the topic asks, I’m curious how you got your legendary. I’m a few ectos away from creating my mystic clovers, I’ve got quite a ways to go with my top level materials and I’m trying to amass enough gold to buy my pre-cursor off the TP. I’ve done everything else. Is it really just a lot of grind from this point on? If so, is it dungeon runs and converting tokens, or mindless farming in dwindling value materials, or is it playing the TP? What did you do?

Leshain.6720:

Oi’ people keep talking about the whole “relationships” deal going on in season 1 with the two human female characters going all kissy face on each otha’.

Jus’ sayin it kinda ruined the experience for me, nothin wrong with a strong cool female character, but kitten mang balance the scales for season 2 please.

Pick any lad from this wallpaper and it’ll be all gewd.

I agree (I think – see below). The first season does cater to a number of strong females but I’m not going to go as far as to say we need a balance all the time. Story drives the characters, not gender.

Sorry this is off topic but what language is this? It’s kind of cutesy to type the way your particular dialect sounds when spoken, I’m thinking? I’m sorry, I just can’t get past anything of importance when I have to do a mental translation of ‘ghetto jive’ to English. Sorry again for the off topic comment.

My opinion: I think that if you needed to have this one achievement to get the meta-achievement then I would agree that having it in the game is unfair. But, you don’t need it, it’s just there. So saying to eliminate it is kind of silly. It’s something to shoot for, something that requires specific things like coordination, skill and probably luck and it represents a difficulty level that defines the top end. I’d rather have a mix of achievements available, covering a broad range from easy to very hard, than to cut out the two extremes and just have stuff I can do in one day and be done with the whole event. I don’t think everyone shares the same expectations of what achievements are.

I’ve capped both ranger and thief and I use SB on my thief all the time, never on my ranger. It’s my choice for ranged on thief. With ranger, I use LB primarily with my build (the ‘keep my pet alive at all costs’ build) and have GS for swap for RP reasons. I rarely use GS, though.

I think the post above is harsh, one way to look at the way you play this game. Staying on-topic, each class gives you the opportunity to do all of the holy trinity functions – some classes have an easier time of it, but if spec’d right, you can do it. One of the ways I inject new life into an existing toon is to learn a new build, as someone posted above. It can be night and day in game play. If you like challenges, play a build that isn’t an easy one for the class – play a support thief or a tanker mesmer – something that pushes your skill and creativity.

You’ve only played three classes so far – as someone posted above, starting a new class from scratch can be fun and will also build your overall understanding of how other’s play the class, which helps in PvP and WvW. GW2 has levels of complexity and if you’re hitting the wall at the level you’re at, take it to the next level. Yeah, it’s a sandbox, but I see the sandbox as rife with opportunity, not bleak with stale gameplay.

I do get the RP side has been criticized for coming up short but I’m not sure the MMO genre is ever going to be strong in RP. Single person games have that area beat.

I would say that you can do most of it solo. But the game world mechanics are different than what we have today with most MMOs ‘free-range’ model. GW1 was ‘gated’, meaning that you had to complete a mission instance to be able to ‘unlock’ the map beyond the mission. Some of those needed active players to complete, not just fodder like the henchmen in Prophecies and Factions, the first two in the series. Nightfall gives you heroes which are more customizeable and you have some control over what they do in combat. But there were still missions you in which you needed real players to coordinate the steps. I loved the first game. Lots of fun. You can see the ghost of some of the mechanics adopted for GW2 in GW1.

I enjoyed the first season, and to me, that’s the most important thing. I don’t feel qualified to rate the whole arc because I didn’t get a chance to fully participate in some of the content. The map-wide coordination events like Teq. the Wurms and Marrionette were hit and miss for me as I was in overflows or we just weren’t coordinated enough. And my (at the time) unskilled tiny guild had troubles with a few of the dungeons. But overall, I thought the mix of solo stuff, dungeons, map content and the final destruction of Lions Arch was very entertaining. I will say that I made it a point to check out all the LS content every two weeks and it kept me from doing the non-LS stuff much of the time.

I did get the impression that the story was sort of along for the ride and that this was very much a test bed for the future models that will come out. The story wasn’t the hero, in other words. What was the hero was the integration of the different styles of play that was the focus for each update or chapter. I saw a lot of experimentation, testing what works and correcting (look at the Karka attack versus the map-wide content that was LA1 and LA2). A few of the characters were interesting – yeah, they weren’t Macbeth or even Sparticus, but they were interesting.

One thing about the zergs – I think they were used appropriately. True, you could have nudged any number of gameplay styles to fit the LA chapters, but an angry mob rolling through the demolished city, army-ant stomping everything that gets in the way – that worked for me, plot-wise. I had fun. After a long day at work, zerging got me to a happy place and I slept better knowing I boot-stomped a billion toxic snakes before bed.

And allowing little old me perform the final death blow to Scarlet … priceless.

“Those chickens have a vicious streak a mile wide. They’re killers.”
“Go on, Bors. Go open the gate.”
“Right. Silly little bleeders. One chicken stew coming right up.”
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! ……”
“I warned you, but did you listen to me? Oh, no, you knew, didn’t you? Oh, they’re just harmless little chickens, aren’t they?”
“Well, we’ll not risk another frontal assault. Those chickens are dynamite!”

yorick.1305:

I’m a bit worried what this might lead to. What next, exotics, precursor’s?

Yes please! One free Spark, please!

Also funny is taking a running leap off a familiar cliff expecting water and getting … mud and death. Happened to me enough that I stopped jumping. Bet I looked pretty funny though.

Amazing! Great work!

My guildies and I have tried this about 30-40 times and it’s just too much! Please please please ANet nerf everything, EVERYTHING!!!!

Last Wintersday …

Sunrise and Eternity. He’s been playing for a while so I’m thinking he already has Twilight. And, wow, grats for the achievement!

PeterThomas, I believe I’m seeing your point, having re-read your posts. I’m guessing that, in answer to what I believe you are saying is a poorly integrated Living Story, it was just too big, too much, to integrate every aspect of the existing world with the new content. I’m talking about mob AI, existing quests, the ‘atmospere’ of the surroundings. It’s a valid complaint but that’s a daunting task. We already have this with the implementation of dungeons in just about every MMO currently out there – honestly, anyone invading a sentient area would have one huge fight 10 feet inside the doors once word travelled back that there were invaders. Not the ‘fight as you go’, where you can plainly see mobs in view, waiting around for us to ‘get to them’. So, I believe that your comment about the Living Story not contributing to making the world a living, breathing world, as I stated (defending my initial premise ) is more a matter of how far do you take the ‘ripple effect’ of something happening and the ripple it causes to the surroundings.

To a large extent, the first issue that comes up is how far o you change the experience of the area for those that have never been there before, have never done the quests. You have to, at some physical point, draw the line and say that beyond this line, the rest of the world will largely be unaffected. That the line is a hard line and too close to the LS event for you doesn’t necessarily reflect on whether that removes the living world aspect of the game. It’s a balance trying to define what the world looks like with the LS in it versus what it looked like before – playability, depth of existing storylines, etc. The worst thing that could happen, from an ANet marketing standpoint, is to lure new players (and accounts!) into a world that has changed completely from what it was at launch – to bring them into an ongoing story in which they’ve lost the opportunity to experience older content. Again, creating a constently engaging, fair, cohesive world with every patch is daunting. You have to draw the lines, create the ‘bubbles of consequences’, so to speak, and leave the rest of the existing world ‘as is’ for now, it’s fate ‘to be determined at a later date’.

I will defer on your commentary of Scarlett – I think you know more about her than I do. Actually, I’m sure you do. But for my opinion, I’m entertained by the whole story arc to this point and for me that’s enough.

Peter, I guess I was referring to the game being a living, changing world, regardless which mechanism is used, Living Story, Dynamic Event, etc. I agree that there are a number of aspects that should have changed based on the events, as you noted. There’s always room for improvement. But what ANet has undertaken is the desire to get to that point – we’re just along for the ride as they tweak and refine and see what works and what is important to the player base. I enjoy being along for the ride. Beats watching snow fall in the upper midwest. More importantly, it beats doing the same old tired quests over and over again – raise your hand if you want that.

Historically, they destroyed pre-searing Ascalon City in the original GW and one of the biggest ‘shock value’ moments of the game (at least for me) was suddenly being in post-searing AC and wandering around the charred remains of the old landmarks – to that point, the only city in the game. It’s not out of the question to change LA forever.

I know one citizen who’s going to spend the weekend taking screenies of all his favorite places in LA before they are changed. Someone above got it right: LA in the first GW was the first anchor of the game, the first place we (those that started with what was later called Prophecies) called ‘home’. GW2 has given us a different racial ‘birthplace’ but LA still feels like home, at least to me. We’ve had a year and half of this new version of LA and, regardless of the storyline that drives it, the changes will be sad to see. But the game was sold as being a living world, so be it. Kudos to ANet for being gutsy enough to take down a meaningful (and to some of us, sentimental) landmark.

Just a guess, but what you may see when the dust settles is the top tier servers will still be very competitive in WvW and the lower tiers will gravitate to the “community center” EotM format.

As for getting the POI for whatever reason, Legendary, exploration, etc… I thought it would be tough too, especially playing on a lowest tier server. It just took a little more time and planning. Each borderland will generally have most of your home points open most of the time and getting the others just requires you to keep your eye on the map and either run with the zergs or hit the easy soloable points when you can. Even the central keep in EB was in our server’s possession enough for me to get everything there. Now, getting the gold for the pre-cursor, that’s another whole ballgame…

My only issue is the luck of the draw with the platforms on Marionette. It doesn’t really test anyone’s skill or preparation when you are arbitrarily outnumbered and the fate of the ‘every 2 hours’ event rests on your shoulders. The rest is good, in my opinion. They require coordination and planning and a level of effectiveness. Clean up that platform mechanic and I think both events are pretty good. And this coming from a player that hasn’t beaten either. I’m good with losing a fair fight. That’s what keeps me coming back. Randomness, not so much.

We tried the quest twice with a party of five last night. The first time the player who initiated the quest got stuck on the beach leading to the first tower, after coming out of the cave mouth. He literally just stopped moving and couldn’t move or do anything – no skills, no ability to dodge, nothing. He finally got angry with trying to unfreeze and logged out, which kicked all of us from the instance as he was the one who started it.

Second time the same party of five cleared the undead around the first tower while Tonn stood near the boulder near the tower, the pack dolyak standing right on top of him and the other vigil standing around him. We couldn’t get him to do anything, even after the quest starter interracted with him (he got the canned dialog “I’m here to help” or something like that.) We decided to clear the whole map in the hopes he would unstick but no, still stuck on boulder. Since we were five, we were mowing down everything pretty quickly – maybe we should have let a mob go after Tonn and kill him forcing us to rez him? I dunno. The player who started the instance wasn’t up for trying it a third time so we did other stuff.

If you want more player interaction on the higher level maps, maybe your server is on the ‘underpopulated’ side. Try guesting on another server. One way to find the active servers is to google the Temple Status and see the servers that have unlocked certain temples – that means fairly recent significant activity in the area. Yeah, seeing other players in this game is a huge plus.

I’m not sure what a ‘precursor’ is exactly (I got this game for Christmas this year) but I got this gold dagger called Fire or Spark (I think it was Spark – that sounds right) when I walked into that one cave in Queensland and a bunch of players were fighting this big troll. I’m not that high level yet so I don’t think I did much damage but I did get a chest and this Spark popped out. I didn’t know I was supposed to keep it. It was too high level for me and it also said I was the wrong profession to use it so I just sold it to the merchant in Divnity’s Rest. It was worth something, huh? Rats.

Seriously, I’ve been playing since launch and have decided to go for Incinerator and really REALLY don’t want to rely on the Forge. I’ll probably just save up and buy Spark outright. In other news, my brother, who has no intentions of making a legendary, got Quip the other day after about 20-30 tosses. Sold it for 300gp.

Plus some really amazing scenery. Orr has some breathtaking views. There’s no hearts from Straits of Devestation on so it’s all about the landscape.

OP, what this game is NOT is linear to the degree that there are only a few limited paths to capping a toon. What is this game then? A sandbox in many ways. Literally everything you do gives you experience, so yeah, to that degree, you are always climbing the levelling ladder. The pre-80 experience is all about learning the skills and trying a number of builds. When you hit 80 you can focus on specializing in a build with gear and traits, based on the playstyle that is most fun for you. The fact that you have to ‘build’ your skillset because of the fixed number of skills you can use in-combat really drives the game more than level. You can be an experienced, solid player before you hit 80 if you play your build well.

I’m making the Legendary Weapon quest on my Thief and it’s a little more challenging to play than the Ranger and Warrior I have. While you can fulfill a number of ‘roles’ with each class almost equally, there will always be niche roles in which each class shines uniquely. A lot of that has to do with the mechanics of the class and the way the build is set up (traits, gear, playstyle). You get that experience during the levelling process. PvE is very forgiving during levelling as the mobs are not that difficult and you have a lot of opportunity to practice, while the ‘story-book’ progression keeps it interesting. PvP and WvW, especially a roaming thief who doesn’t follow the ‘zerg’ will require more skill to survive. In fact, the role of Thief in WvW is a very hot topic as the class can be extremely deadly when played with skill and a good understanding of stealth mechanics. But, like just about every aspect of the game, there are ways to overcome diversity and beat the roaming Thief, you just have to learn it.

And for those who say there is nothing to do at end game and that GW2 fails miserably, what have you been playing that offers more? I’m just curious. I’ve played a number of games to endgame content (WoW, LOTRO, DDO, DCUO, CoH, CO, GW) and have a hard time seeing where what GW2 brings to the table compared to those other games is a failure. It’s always going to be debatable whether they hit their promised marks, but this game pretty much broke the mold with a lot of content. Sorry for the off-topic question, just wondering what I’ve been missing all these years in the game that makes this one look like a miserable failure.

I’m not a number cruncher at all so this has the usual caveat of maybe not being the most efficient way to play engi. I latched onto flamethrower and really practiced positionally keeping the mobs in the flame. Agro the baddie with your pistol, switch to flamethrower, throw up a napalm wall (#4) in front of them, let them run through it once, air blast (#3) them back through the wall, let them come through a third time, then kite around them keeping them in the flames, firing flame jet (#1) and flame blast/detonate (#2) while they burn. If anyone gets too close smoke vent (#5) to blind them or air blast to get them off you. Getting the timing of flame blast and detonate (#2 twice) will get you some good AoE damage. As you progress, trait up your quickness and dodging (there are other good flamethrower traits out there too). My engi is literally doding and rolling all over the place, fire everywhere.

The thing to keep in mind is that the engi isn’t really a melee class. I’m sure there are builds out there that give you some success with close-in melee, but the class shines with ranged control and AoE. Elixir gun is very forgiving at the lower levels, as well as the rifle’s control skills. To play an engi, you have to think like an engi – it’s Christmas morning and you got a sack full of cool toys to play with. Get going with that inquisitive engi mind and just play with all of them!

Sorry if this has been posted before – I can’t get anything to come up on any relavent search strings (including “Wiki” which is currently in the title of the post below mine).

I just switched to a stealth Thief build and am getting stuck in combat way beyond the time when I should be freed. I’ve got 3 capped toons and the other 4 are well over 20th lvl so I do know when I should be breaking free. Is there a bug with the stealth mechanism? To be clear, I’ve checked conditions on me (none), cleared the whole area of anything I was fighting (all dead), and have stealthed and unstealthed numerous times. Logging works but that’s a pain in the Garfunkle. Bug or not!

Thanks!

I follow MattVisual’s videos – the guy knows his stuff and cracks me up every time I watch. Very entertaining and informative. He also has some good podcasts to follow.

Also, you’ll need to get all the points, vistas, and waypoints in the four WvWvW maps – watch when your server has the central keep in the Eternal Battlegrounds to get those points. Good luck! I’m currently down to my last 3 maps to finish.

The above posts are all really good. Having played the original Guild Wars as my first MMO years ago and also having played WoW a bit, there were a lot of aspects of the mechanics of GW2 that were intuitive to me and it’s a reality check to hear what it’s like coming into the game fresh. If you know WoW, I’ll add by comparing some of the mechanics to show the differences (some of this has been posted above in some form or other).

As you level, you can always go back to lower level stuff and it will downscale you so it will be almost as challenging as your current level stuff. There is no color coding for how much higher level the baddies are relative to you – they’re all red, so make sure you know that you’re in the area set for your level.

The skills work together much more than in WoW – they have to because you can only use a fixed number of them at any time (which you can change once you are out of combat). You unlock these in two different ways: your weapon skills (the five on the left side) unlock automatically as you fight and you should unlock those relatively fast. Some skills are chains, meaning you get slightly different attacks depending on if you’ve successfully hit previously and haven’t used another skil. The second set of skills (the five on the right side) are unlocked with skill points as you gain them. For now, realizing you aren’t comfortable with all the types of buffs and boons, just go off the word description and pick those that interest you. The wikis will give you all you need to know on buffs and boons but that’s a dry read.

The game is all about exploring and interacting with the world, not so much as the WoW quest chains. You can partially do a heart quest, move to another area, and come back and resume the original heart quest at any time. Very little is locked to you except for dungeons – you may get obliterated quickly in a much higher level but nothing is keeping you from going there (pay attention to the sentries, and actually, to all the NPC in-game, as they almost always have relevent information to the area that you are in).

I’m on Devona’s Rest in the US – look for me in the friends section under my login name here and I’d be happy to help! But whichever server you are on, finding a good guild helps a lot. Just go into the chat window and key /m then ask about guilds – you’re sure to get a response OR if you are helped by friendly player you can click on their name and key in /w in chat and ask about their guild.

Welcome to Guild Wars – it’s easily the best MMO I’ve played.

One side note, really irrelevent but… Charr and Norn races have slower animations when running, to illustrate their larger size. By the same token, Asura get those little legs pumping pretty fast. They all move at the same relative speed in-game. The Necro gets an automatic speed buff and you can get speed buffs for any class through skills and traits but the animations may look misleading. That said, I recommend playing a number of races and classes to 10th level or so and then go with the one you had the most fun playing. Even then, you’ll find that GW2 is rich with playstyle options within each class that can reward you for playing the class a number of ways.

The scaling system used for higher level toons in lower level areas keeps you engaged in the content of the area, unlike other MMOs. LOTRO for example, put higher level toons so far off the agro charts for low level mobs that you could waltz right through the toughest low level areas without having to fight one thing. Kinda destroys the suspension of disbelief. You are forced to engage all mobs in this game – granted you get a definite advantage if you are 80 in Queensdale, but you can still get pasted if you don’t watch yourself.

As for end-game, GW1 got you to the 20th level cap pretty early and the rest of the game was consistantly on-level after that. While a novel idea at the time, when compared to the other MMOs out there, it did seem a little one-dimensional. Like GW2, you focused on your builds and acquiring new skills, but there wasn’t that feeling of being ‘halfway up the hill’ – everyone was at the top already.

As for end-game content, I’ve played (and capped in) GW1, DDO, LOTRO, WoW, CO, CoH, CoV and DCU (don’t worry about figuring out all the acronyms!) and GW2 by far has the most diverse and quantity of content to do at all levels. And as someone mentioned above, going for a Legendary, as I’m doing now, is a long and interesting personal journey. You play SO much with one toon that you get inside that toon’s skins, learn new builds when needed, and see every aspect of the game (save PvP). I’ve been playing since launch, and this game is pretty great.