Guild Wars 2

Hi everyone.

I’m starting a YouTube series on playing a Mesmer and basically just learning the class from the start without looking up guides, just leveling and discovering the class and having fun.

The first video is on the list, the next few will be out next week. I had some volume/resolution issues but they have been fixed for the later episodes.

If anyone wants to watch a noob try and learn the class here is the link.
https://youtu.be/GzSYnI1gTpU

Hi everyone.

I’ve been away from the game for a few years and decided to make a video series from the perspective of a returning player. I created a Revenant and have been learning editing and recording,.

I’d love and feedback or suggestions, and if you’d like to watch me blunder along my playlist link is below.

thanks for your time,
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7DzIwQMH-Hf6RFLxduJH-tiH6CLXXT43

Yes I’m on NA servers

I just bought GW2 and am looking for an active guild with social members that tackles all the content the game has to offer.

I should be at level cap soon and have the expansion.

My playtimes are late night weekends so oceanic guilds are always a good fit.

If you have a guild that needs an active player please contact me.

trap line
fort aspenwood
thanks

Every story needs structure, why not have each story two cut scenes, one at the start and one at the end.
Each cut scene is similar to the queen’s jubilee one, and establish the story, then concludes it.
Take all the cuts scenes and put them on the website, with descriptive text.
When players want to come back after a break, or come to guildwars for the first time they go to “the story so far” section of the website and read/watch to catch up.
make the narratives tie in to each other and make sure they aren’t watered down and generic.. characters need to develop, struggle, die, triumph, betray..

After a year of the living story , Imagine what a new player coming to guildwars gets to see on the website, a large well written story with animated art that brings them up to speed and hooks them.

I think it’s great that you are looking for player feedback in the living story, and here is mine.

I think one of the things missing for me at least is a sense of narritive to the events taking place. One of the topics borught up a lot in the thread is how it doesn’t really change the world…and it’s hard to develop around that, but it’s not hard to change the people in the world.

I’ll use the queen’s jubilee as an example.
This event did a good job of establishing a narrative without having to leave the game and go to a fansite and learn the story. It had a few scripted NPC conversations, and when scarlet appeared gave us a well illustrated cutscene with good voice acting and a slice of humor.
This was a great way to tell the story, and I think the cutscene is critical, as it gives us a solid story break to absorb the narrative, make a connection to it’s principal participants, and give us a desire to see a further outcome. It’s a solid hook.

Where it kind of came apart for me was the events after. I defeated the clock works, and watched the second NPC dialogue. After I left the instance, the city was pretty much business as usual, despite the fact that an enemy just crashed the party and introduced a threat.
If the threat has no teeth it becomes just another checkbox.

I think in the city there should have been some npc soldiers running around, higher levels of security, npc’s talking in nervous tones about clockwork creatures, bringing a more urgent mood.

Scarlet as a villain didn’t really make sense, I don’t know what she is or why she is doing this, who decides to dress up like a clown and summon mechanical creatures? Is she a skeleton of the queen’s past maybe? A noble of the aristocracy driven insane by the continued festivals and parties that put undue financial strain on the nobility?

I guess my expectaions of a villan and plot would involve something more grounded, and I think the “it doesn’t change the world” argument would go away if maybe these events drove a compelling narrative.

Why not put some teeth in this story, make players anticipate and desire to see what comes next, Imagine if Logan Thackery’s obsession with the queen slowly becomes more and more unhealthy, and he begins to violently eliminate her closest advisers and friends whom he can only perceive as traitors and threats to her safety. The nightmare court is exposed when it’s discovered all the flowers in the throne room cause violent paranoia, Logan loses control and at the conclusion of the story thread Thackarey is found in the throne room, cradling the body of the queen slain by his hand.

Imagine If Rylock, tired of the constant war with ghosts and the threat to his people starts holding their living human ancestors in prison camps to force the spirits to give up their endless struggle, forcing the charr and humans to once again plunge towards war.

Plots of that type with existing characters not only give us debates of morality, but also impact the world in that it changes the narrative of the world, because it’s main inhabitants are changed by the events.

I know people hate to reference other games, especially WOW, but please hear me out. During the entire cycle of wrath of the lich king, no giant new landmass popped into existence, there wasn’t a change physically..but there was a narrative, the horde got a new leader (who later went insane) the forsaken were betrayed and a battle was fought to reclaim the city, mistrust and anger boiled over..

I think this is an example of how you can change the world with the story, but not have to rebuild land masses and create new ones, just tell a good story, that isn’t afraid to kill off main characters, or have them do evil things, go to the moral gray area and build around choices and consequence, and then make the players live in those choices and see the impact.

I think taking a page out of guild wars 1 is a good idea.

Instead of wvw being about server vs server, why not have alliances.

each alliance has a population cap attached and then are matched up against other alliances, get rid of the server vs server altogether and make each alliance have some back story, coat of arms etc.

let alliances be cross server, and keep caps on them, make new ones as needed.

example : The Lionguard

Players that fight for this alliance wear the lionguard’s colors, and keeps they capture display the lionguard symbol. A player allied with the lionguard builds up ranking (wvw xp) and can unlock lionguard equipment blah blah blah.

the problem with the current system is it’s server based, and there is not way to fix it, ever. By making alliances multi server, and making wvw about these alliances competing, you have a way to cap numbers, ensure good fights, and add a whole new meta to wvw.

at the end of each season players sign up for a new alliance, the meta shifts, drama between guilds etc, all the juicy stuff that makes wvw fun.

Thank you for this thread, and listening to us, allowing our feedback to be heard this way is very refreshing.

I play a Ranger, I’m not very good with numbers, but I can tell you how the class feels for me in wvw .

1.I feel like the Longbow is very underpowered, and requires a lot more traits than other weapons to become viable compared to other weapons, I understand that it’s a slippery slope considering it’s range, however the marksmanship trait line needs some slimming down, 1500 range should be an aspect of the weapon, not a trait.

2. Spirits are very weak, don’t feel intuitive to activate and use. They go down very quickly in wvw, and it feels like those skills are taking up space, rather than giving a viable playstyle.

3. The “does more damage at x range” mechanic on the longbow is weird, if there’s a reason for it’s existence I’d love to hear it.

4. I’d like to play more with the sword, but find it too annoying to take it off auto attack and spam my 1 key so I can move.

5. Is there any plans for axe/axe to get better? I love the playstyle, but the damage is very weak.

6. I like pets, but they have a hard time hitting enemies, especially cone attacks. I’d love to see cone attacks just become aoe circles, the drakes breath is way to hard to get lined up.

That’s all that I can say bothers me with my class, I hope this style of engagement continue with the players, this really is a great game.

Well here’s the down low.
Rangers are pretty low on the list for development time, and since we don’t see much in the way of patches that address the issues we bring to the forums, I’d say something like pet names would be right under “add in item hotbar” to the development list.

I think any game not on steam is losing right off the bat, especially buy to play games like GW2. Since the secret world went on steam the servers have had a sizeable boost. GW2 should be on steam period.

As for steam OS I think it’s incredibly important to gaming at large to support it, as it gains momentum it’s going to finally put an OS tailored for gamers in our hands, for free.

I’ve played hours of GW2 using a controller and Xpadder, and it’s not only viable, it’s also intuitive.

Anet I hope, is paying close attention to steam OS, any MMO that can be on the initial release would reap a ton of rewards if it can deliver a good experience, since gw2’s combat system is already very controller friendly it would be a smart move.

SteamOs is going to succeed, there is no doubt in my mind. When Valve launched half life 2 and tied it to steam people were outraged, predicted the end of valve and the death of digital delivery to any one and everyone.

Steam now accounts for roughly 2% of the total Internet traffic on the planet.

Steam OS is free, open source and tied to a company that has incredible resources and connections in a sub culture it helped build. Anet get it in gear.

1. Class balance.
Each class should have fun utility, and many options for play. Engineers are pigeon holed into grenade builds while turrets sit unused, Rangers are in need of some more interesting mechanics, especially in support.

2. More skills,
GW1 had a huge diverse build system, full of creativity, backed by many many skills that could be unlocked and capped. Gw2 is very linear in this regard.

3. Armor Variety
the armor needs more unique looks, instead of the proliferation of trench coats.

1. Population Imbalance, we all just want good close matches with even teams, that needs to take priority over single server communities.

2. Guilds need meaning in WvW, emphasis on guilds, and alliances above server vs server could help with population imbalance.

3. More individual progression, unique wvw armors and skins, ascended level gear.

The outmanned buff is fine, what is needed is an outscored buff, that scales the value of towers, camps and keeps up based off the disparity in score. If a realm is getting blown out then every capture should be worth way more.

Adding some fast travel mechanic to the lower score realm on top of this could also help.

Just going to add my feedback into the black hole here, not very confident it’s reaching the people that could ever do anything about it, but hey worth a shot.

The issue WvW has always really suffered from is population disparity between competing realms, and this buff really doesn’t help this much at all. The map changes are good, they are providing a smaller scale of encounters in the mid zone, and I like that.
The Buff however is just not a good thing for realms that are fighting against blowout scoreboards, not having the population to both defend keeps and keep bloodlust, the buff instead is throwing gas on the fire.

What The buff should be is a way for smaller groups to impact score, not a way for larger groups to shut the match down beyond interest of recovery.

The stat bonuses and points for stomps should go to the realm with the lowest score, this would force the top realm to devote some level of defense to this area, reducing the numbers they can send to siege keeps, thus allowing smaller groups to assault and capture more often.

The second place realm would also benefit, as now they can also capture and assault more, forcing the top score further down.

It would be much funner to play in close matches than constant lopsided matches.

For the most part I have fun on my ranger, but we really are lacking compared to other classes when it comes to having some interesting weapon and skill interactions.

For example..long bow 3 gives us a short stealth, and beyond that we have abilities that make us jump forwards and backwards..but nothing as fun as what other classes can do.

Engineers and Mesmers can pull targets off walls, mesmers can mass stealth and portal. Warriors can plant banners, use their hammer jumps for interesting maneuvers. Guardians can make barriers, knockbacks, and drop ground spells to speed up allies. Necromancers can self portal, etc etc.

All of these abilities add a touch of variety and allow players to engage the world and its combat system with creativity.

Rangers need a bit of support capability, but they also need some FUN FACTOR, we are so very bland in this area and I personally believe this is the area we are so overlooked.
Perhaps initially the pet was supposed to offer us more in this department, however this isn’t enjoyable for the player, actions that can cause unique and dynamic outcomes need the control and responsiveness only a human can provide.

I think others would describe the as utility, and there is in aspect of that..but for me it’s more about plain old fun.

Mag doesn’t have the numbers many of it’s opponents imagine it does, and the numbers it does have vary in consistency. People here play for fun, they like having a pug public mumble and the majority of the wvw people use it and are chill to each other on it. It’s a fun server to wvw on, you always have organized pugs without the ego wars of big guilds.
Mag hasn’t given up, but I don’t think we live and breathe wvw as much, it’s a bit more casual than that.

Freelancer.4526:

Had a good time tonight, especially when AoN poked around.

Shame there isn’t more quality guilds on Maguuma/Dragonbrand, or at least none that we’ve seen yet. Matchup has been pretty bland in our BL.

Here’s to tomorrow!

Mag was fortunate to avoid “quality guilds” joining it and jumping ship every time they lost to other “quality guilds”.
This lack of “quality guilds” allowed Mag’s players to remain in their own smaller groups and work together building a sustainable dedicated wvw community, one that has earned it’s ranking and managed to have fun at the same time.
Mag is a server, much more than just a mash up of “quality guilds”

Is anyone else running into that wonderful problem where you’ve just got one thing left on the daily list and POOF it resets and you’ve got to start all over again, would it not be more reasonable to have a daily be a daily relative to the character not the server..

I.E your daily resets based on when you finish it on a timer, if I complete my daily at 4pm, then until 4pm the next day it is on cool down. This would make it less of a pain in the kitten for people who aren’t able to play at the exact hours optimal for the current reset time,

Wow so many dum dums took this troll bait, it’s sad how easy it’s getting, a good troll used to be require wit and misdirection, and even a subtle nod to those who saw it.

I am just curious what others think, on my engineer and warrior, exploring tyria and confronting jumping puzzles is much less frustrating, while on my main ranger I find some of the fun is leeches out when I’m taking much longer to get past some parts. I realize that many would answer I need to learn to play etc, but honestly think about it, if every class had a ground targeted leap, much more of the population might enjoy another aspect of the game.

Any further information on this? We need an update!

It’s really bumming me out that Anet hasn’t given us any interaction in these forums at all about spirits, all these great ideas and suggestions seem like they are blowing in the wind

I’m mostly happy with my ranger, but they do need some tweaks, spirits is one area, even trained they simply die too quickly, and the activated abilities are buggy and unreliable. I think Anet needs to decide what they want them to be and properly implement that concept… Right now they are just either ignorant of the issues or choosing not to make design choices.

This is bad news to players when something so obvious warrants no attention.

With this cool sounding system will we see more exploring added to the game? One of my favorite parts of gw2 is finding little mini dungeons, caves and events. The Halloween book quests were awesome too.

I find I run with double devourer pets, they burrow to avoid damage, attack at range and work with combo fields pretty well. I like having poison on a quick cd as well for countering healers. I find they do well in dungeons and wvw as well.

The class is struggling right now, having little diversity in builds and some pretty mediocre weapon skills. Even the builds that have potential are not very capable of achieving the damage or survival of the other professions.

Some skills, most notably spirits are either marginally effective in incredibly specific situations or down right useless otherwise.

All that having been said, progress while slow is being made, with recent pet fixes spearheading what most currently playing the class will be significant re-tooling of the more glaring issues.

As a hunter from wow, and Ranger from gw1, rift, lotro, eq2,vanguard,aoc,daoc and any other title with a bow class I can honestly say arena net is closer to my ideal Ranger than anyone has come… However they still have a lot of work to do.

I’m curious about using axe/Axe with this build somehow any ideas?

I disagree, I love the combat.

Just roll a Ranger! I feel no pressure or desire at all to grind for months to obtain the incredibly dumb legendary bows… Rainbow unicorns and flowers are such a lame conclusion to my characters development that I feel set free from any bother to grind.

It’s pretty fun to pop with dmg immunity signet on spin to win thieves

Actually I take that back, the elder scrolls games stamina /block style is a skill based melee mitigation system

GW2 is a very kite heavy game, in pve good kiting skills can mitigate an enormous amount of damage.
Melee suffers from some kind of similar skill based mitigation, beyond abilities that block there isn’t much else, popping cooldowns and dodges.

It’s an eternal problem in these games and I’ve yet too see an iteration that works.

I’d love to see more Linux love for major titles, windows is so bloated for gaming now.

Groovy.6749:

LieutenantGoogle.7326:

Groovy.6749:

what you want is to make an engineer specced in grenades.

Haha, that’s just cruel

Cruel for all the players who will die by his hand, yes.

Until his hand develops carpal tunnel

I use gw2lfg.com and never need to spam chat, the mobile app even eliminates alt tabbing.. Anet should hire the guy who made it or buy it and make it a tab in the trading Post…. Call it mercenary work or something

There is a veteran centaur shaman in a cave in the lvl 20ish plus human zone… Not sure the zone name but the second zones for humans.. Anyways its a skill point.

The mobs in that cave spawn a little too quickly while trying to solo the point, and there isn’t much room

I like both classes, and I want to run with a hammer in wvw, what class would be better for survival?

I’d like to be able to do decent support, and respectable dps.

I’m sorry to hear about that disability, I’m not sure I could imagine what that would be like, what about maps, can you look at a map and see what place to go to but then can’t remember what you saw on the map?

I hope you don’t mind me asking.

Thanks for the constructive replies.

I’m approaching level 80 and my main playtime is spent in wvw, previously I’d been happy that at level cap I could farm some dungeons and get the looks i wanted on the exotics I acquired, and then just keep playing wvw and not have to do any other content unless I wanted new visuals and something different when I felt like it.

With ascended gear I am wondering if now I need to do this new dungeon a bunch to get it? can it be bought instead or crafted?

If I just stick with exotics am I going to be really weaker in wvw?

I’ll try
1.spirits are now immune to damage until they use their ability, the ability now takes 1.5 seconds to cast and the spirit can be attacked and interrupted during this time.

2. All pets base movement speed has been increased by 10% movement speed traits have been replaced by attack speed bonuses.

3. Pets take less damage from aoe attacks based on how many points in beast master a player allocates.

4.long bow shots travel 10% faster.

5. Long bow number 1 has a 33% chance to fire a second arrow that hits for 20% damage and causes vulnerability.

6. Shouts remove one condition.

7. Great sword 3 is now ground targeted and causes cripple like hammer warrior leap minus the stun.

8. Pets f1 ability can be swapped with the other attacks the pet posses, but the timers will not swap.

9. Stowing a pet will remove the pet toolbar and will give the Ranger a passive state buff based on the highest stat on the character sheet.

10 sword #2 is now a ground targeted leap that applies poison

I agree with the O. P, and as an mmo veteran I know no game this early in has been perfect.. Gw2 is trying to do things we always wanted, events that matter and we don’t know every single thing about them because they were on a test server getting farmed by people months in advance.

Things will get better lessons will be learned, and one day we will talk about all this with rose colored glasses.

Just have to say thanks for up scaling low levels, I brought a low level 40 warrior in with friends, and it was very fun, the xp wasn’t stellar, but the dungeons were fun especially the snow and dredge ones, wandering around with torches felt very game of thrones, intuitive design and mechanics, well done.

Let’s calm down a bit here and discuss this, are people really going to give up customized runes for a small state increase? All we’ve seen bundled in is magic find…

Yes, and I think that being creative costs more to accomplish, and that’s why a treadmill emerges. It’s unfortunate because diversity in builds and coming up with new builds made gw1 more interesting than any mmo I’ve played, it just lacked the large persistant world and of course jumping!

The gw2 comes out and not only is there a large persistant world, its a massive living one, with stuff popping off all over the place, and we didn’t just get jumping, we got elaborate exploration jumping puzzles that are fantastic and fresh to the genre.

I think gw2 needs to take the same apporach to progression and dungeons, I understand that a subset of the population wants pve gear creep, and that’s cool, but can’t it be done in a way that doesn’t impact the rest of us that don’t mind the slow ride?

I really hope they add a bunch more skills too as the game continues, we need more buildwars in guildwars2

I think I’m probably about as close to the average GW2 player right now…
I’ve got one character just about to 80
a few alts in the 30’s
and I’ve done a lot of wvwvw and dipped my toes into Spvp
I’ve checked out two dungeons with guildies, and really enjoyed them for the mechanics and the branching paths, nothing to complain about (bugs are bugs they will be fixed eventually)

I think it’s important to add my voice to the others here concerned with gear treadmills, I feel that this game is simply put, too good for them, and it would be a shame to see an artificial time sink plugged into a game that has launched with so much promise.

I love that my time in gw2 is spent doing things that I want to do, not have to do, so much of the fun of this game is exploring new areas, and with level scaling it isn’t boring. New events, new puzzles, new dungeons..to me those are a better way to want to keep playing, other MMO’s use gear treadmills to accomplish the same, and when I play those other games it shows, the bland boring worlds, the lack of live events and world pvp..all of that is a result of adopting that cheap and quick fix to retain players.

I love gw2 because it breaks the mold, I can go into wvw and scale up and be competitive, I don’t have to spend my time trying to get groups together to farm gear so i’m not an easy kill, or can’t contribute to my team. I realize exotics are an advantage in wvw, but they aren’t overwhelming.

I also like the philosophy of legendaries being more visual, I’m not getting one any time this year or the next, but eventually by playing the game and saving I will complete one, and it won’t be obsolete.

I’m just worried about the power creep factor that gw1 avoided so many years by creating fun content that required thought, not numbers. Even though I never even finished a campaign in gw1 I still faithfully bought every single expansion, because I loved the concept, and how it wasn’t a job. Anet I hope you decide to add skills and traits down the road, not stats.

In gw1 hunting elite skills was awesome, there were so many skills and builds that I never felt bored, but moving away from that horizontal expansion to a gear treadmill is a bad idea, there are other games out there that already do that, and for the most part they are fading off.

I have both, rifle does not have aoe, or 1500 range, but you don’t also have the stupid farther away means more damage crap.
With bolas, kick and rifle 5 I can pew pew and even if they close swap to hammer and still come out on top.

Flyfunner.2093:

two high end desktops

some of us don’t have the luxury of being at home, thanks for the useless standard desktop guy reply, you made it in earlier than expected, but we never doubted you’d arrive.

I’m trying to find a gaming laptop for 3000 or under, but the options are overwhelming me, purchasing in January

I want something that can run this game in all its glory, and will not be obsolete in 2 years. If possible a back lighted keyboard, but no laser light show… Any ideas?