f13.net

So I logged in first time this week since september. To check stuff out.  On gear side apparently there are infinite levels of grinds introduced since then with "ascended"  gear and some "purple weapons". Another thing is that I am stuck on low pop server and transfer now costs an arm and a leg (it was free before).

So really I am not sure if I should continue  -stuff I liked about the game  kinda still there (great world, fun combat) , but some zones were completely devoid of people and dynamic events was what made game much more fun. There is also seem to be gear grind and  I dont even have the old gear (my gear is lvl 80 rares).   Spvp is apparently totally dead now though  -  there is new tourney system (without tickets!) but no one doing em?

Is this game worth sticking around or is in slow decay?

I personally don't know anyone still playing this.

All of my guild still plays... but playing intensity has decreased substantially. The game doesn't lend itself well to 'endgame' play (except for wvw) and since there's no monthly fee or 'crippled-unless-you-sub' features, there's no cost to check on things say, once a month. This isn't really different from GW1, btw (except that there was barely any reason to keep playing GW1 as a pve player after you've finished an expansion's story quests).

So yeah, pretty much everyone still logs in once or twice a month... and there are 3-4 people playing regularly (ie. every day). It's more than what I can say for my guildies' presence in SWTOR, Rift, LOTRO or even WOW, sooo.. /shrug

I dunno, the way they have changed dragon chests has brought a few people back. I think server choice matters a lot too. Northern Shiverpeaks for example hosts an "Orr Raid" every night. You run with a huge Zerg to all the temple events. Some nights it's a bit too busy.

I still do a fractal a night and try to complete my daily. But I'm on the catass end.

I have more reason to this day to go back to GW1 than GW2, so I'm not sure I agree with you there. Hunting down companion outfits, skill collecting, etc.

Well, the mods haven't graveyarded this subforum yet.

...mind you, they haven't moved the TSW subforum either.  :grin:

Yak's Bend is constantly in overflow for chest events as are our two Wx3 sparring partners. Warbands in Wx3 can become a sea of red and green. It seems far from dead from my perspective - just as well as I only went back to the game this month :) ToG has at least 20 members on an (Aussie) evening and we run instances/fractals etc.

Living story is a bit hit and miss but if great for levelling alts on - well, the PvE portals are anyway.

I gave up on GW because:WoW - but now that I'm thoroughly disillusioned with WoW I got back into it and am having a blast (4x80 and warrior at 30)

I can't say it's dead, just humming along quietly.

That's because TSW is still interesting.

It still seems to be going fairly healthy from what I've seen. If your world is dead guest somewhere else. If you read other threads here instead of just starting your own you will find people complaining about guesting making the dragon zones overcrowded, hardly the sign of a dying game. I log in every couple of days and do a daily and I usually find quite a crowd in the various zones where I have alts parked to do dailies.

Well, obviously with all of the new, fantastic AAA MMOs that we're all playing right now, we need to make some room.  We'll get right on that.

In the meantime, enjoy:

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/82533/rakedance.gif)

I'm still playing on the GoM server, although I just wvw. The pve in this game doesn't particularly interest me.

Different strokes, I guess. I could never stomach the skill collection and companion outfit things myself (way too grindy and/or annoying)... I mean I still log into GW2 to do a dungeon, and that's more fun than what I could do in GW1. Considering how un-fun GW2 dungeons can be, that's probably not a good thing. :p The only reason I went back to GW1 was to finish my HOM for GW2, and occasionally play some FA or JQ.. 'cos honestly, the rest of GW1 pvp was either unenjoyable, or inherently unpuggable.

e: to be fair, there isn't that much more to keep coming back to gw2 either (aside from wvw and spvp). The new living story thing is worth an hour or two I guess, as are the rewards from monthly achievements... but I personally won't be playing much until they add some kind of LFD. Also, screw the legendary weapon grind.

Having to do dungeons and fractals for monthly/gear is what made me quit.  Everything else with the game was fine, although it certainly did not have as many things to do as GW1 did.

WwW is what burned me out of the game first place  my guild was too hardcore and l www queues at release were insane. I liked spvp tourneys quite a bit but then again it requires a lot of dedications and other ppl to run with which seem resulted in fact that spvp is mostly dead now (or the tourneys displays are bugged?)

I still love pve side and world exploration Last night I was just running  around and world is still gorgeous and worth exploring every bit even if its a bit  lonely. I done one event quest (quaggan wants become pirate) and it was great fun and hilarious too ( i do pity the pirates though). Some NPC dialogue is pure gold . I just wish there was more dynamic events going on - not the chest stuff which seem to be plenty populated but its centered around a few boss mobs in few areas - standard gear grind i suppose


Also I been trying to lvl on my thief alt who was lvl 4 , and for some reason its so much more painfull than on my engi (well who is lvl80 but still) -no ranged aoe and have to melee mobs which hit  so hard i am down in 2 hits :(

Easy trick with the thief is offhand pistol. That aoe blind means you can kill stuff with impunity. It just takes a bit longer than other classes.

I haven't done that at all. I did some fractals for a monthly (it was like, 5 for one month. Which are 10 minute affairs), we'll see what next month's is. All my gear is crafted.

If anything, I'd argue that the daily vendor stuff for ascended is the worst of the lot, simply because it makes you feel like you HAVE to play every night for at least an hour or you are screwing yourself.  And it's also alt-unfriendly as all fuck since it's account wide for one laurel/day, and 35 laurels for an item.

Can do a few cheese with thief leveling. Offhand pistol for vets. Dual dagger #3 spam for packs of random things. Sword/Pistol #3 for large things that barely hurt. Use the healing signet for all of this as it's the only on-hit heal that heals per every hit instead of per skill activation.

Both of those #3s include evasion frames, so you basically take no damage for spamming them.

Lion's Arch in overflow today - haven't seen the game this busy. Lots of people in group scenarios at all levels and you bump into people in the wilds which is nice. Lots of people doing the guild events.

Currently I'm levelling my warrior but at 47 the signet build has just about done it's dash. I'm running a GS/Rifle P/P build. Any advice on a levelling build from 50 on?

When I started this game I got my Ranger to 39 and gave up on the game completely. Too hard to level. I got back into the game at the start of this month and in the process of hitting 80 on the Ranger, I realised the class is a bit underwhelming.

This month I've got the LBow/SBow ranger to 80. Followed by a Flamethrower/Elixir Engineer - against all advice this has been fun and a face-melter when levelling as long as you can keep the cone of fire centred. Once I learnt to forget the underwater weapon and use grenades I had a lot of fun.

Guardian next - bloody fast to level after 60 with GS/Hammer - prior to that I was levelling ok with Sword/Focus and Mace/Shield. This has to be the most enjoyable 80s I have in PvE although...

Mesmer was the next to 80 and omg - send in the clones and watch it level fast. I took it out into Wx3 and had a ball.

So 36 hours ago I started my warrior. Quite brutal when he hits things and can melt 4-5 normal mobs at once - but without the finesse of a guardian. I'm having a ball playing him, but I've been reading up on warriors in Wx3 and am a bit worried that it will be face-plant city.

This game is far from dead to me and is refreshing after my love-hate relationship with WoW.

I mean I do know thiefs spvp tricks - I won about 200 tourneys or so with thief, so quite familiar with LDB/caltrops condition build and with blind,  but for pve leveling its quite different. I think LDB /caltrops probably could be best option once I ever unlock them but I was just reading caltrops got  nerfed in half and I am like wtf.... -conditions were always awful for pve events (other people kill shit so fast you can barely get credits for it and there is cap on condition for bosses so you are SOL)

 One thing is having 1200 range grenades on engy with turrets for distraction where you can basically never get hit and do any packs as long as you are not "glancing ", all you need is grenade kit unlocked. And with my thief its been royal pain to get even to 20, let alone unlock the traits for effective build (because as stock thief without traits you have no ini and cant do shit)

Grenade engies are pretty shit until post-60 (due to the third grenade/throw trait being the only thing that makes it better than just spamming flamethrower in events)

Caltrops in pve zergs aren't bad as long as you have condition damage. The way condition stacking works sucks, but if you have any decent amount of cond damage, your bleed ticks will still trigger (the way it works on bleed is that the last dude to apply doesn't own the whole stack, everyone basically gets their slice. So my engie constantly has bleed ticks running, while his burning tick is pretty rare since it stacks duration)

DB/Caltrops in general will level a thief easy though. You only need to re-evaluate life around 60-70 where you get a normal build and start spamming point blank range Cluster Bombs for DE tagging. Seriously, the best tagging class in the game due to shotgun cluster bombs.

Yeah slowly getting hang of it . I was also doing the zone from "wrong" side and mobs were 5 lvls above me lol.caltrops are still good finally unlocked them :)  I might have forgotten all the leveling woes of the engi since he is lvl 80 now and just facerolls anything  .Its funny though that I never played thief in pve and first 20 levels are like fighting with both hands tied  after  getting used to  fully unlocked skills and gear in spvp

Finally done the monthly thing (the damn master crafter achieve was royal pain) to my dissapointment it was only 10 laurels (for some reason i thought if u do all 4 tiers u get extra 10).  I kinda want ascended stuff but seems best way is to grind dungeons and guild events.Seems I have  to look for guild  now

Also  world is not quite dead indeed I did kessex and around there  -  less people than at release but still enough to do most events. I just now guest to other servers if on mine it looks empty

I'm still logging in and periodically leveling my Necro. The new April content looks pretty great and I have a feeling that'll drag me back in pretty heavily.

I still need cooking for master crafter - I'm not looking forward to levelling it - the others were all easy

If you're not against following a guide then cooking isn't hard - went from 0 to 400 in an hour (plus shopping time) last night for around 1.8g plus a small amount of karma and still had a little inventory space left at the end.

Still finding GW2 Crafts (http://www.gw2crafts.net/) a useful resource as it works out the cheapest materials to use based on latest TH prices and then provides a crafting plan.  Big thank you to whoever dropped that link in one of the other threads btw, has been most helpful.

Thanks for that, I'll give it a shot :)

 Just got my warrior to 80 in 3 days. I'm a bit ambivalent towards the class since the signets became weak. Currently my rating of classes is Guardian = Mesmer > Engineer = Ramger > Warrior. Compared to a GS/Hammer Guardian, a GS/Bow/Rifle Warrior with shout-heals is weak - Orrians pulverise him into the ground compared to the Guardian (both in Knight's armour). The burst on the warrior seems higher but needs more finesse than the Guardian which just mows everything down. The mesmer GS/Scepter/Focus is just all-out awesome and has to be one of the most fun kiting classes I've played :)

With 3 classes to go, I need a break from levelling and to sit back and enjoy the classes I have levelled. I like exploring but have no wish to map-complete and TBH, I'm  a bit burnt out on the levelling process.

As far as races go, I love the Charr backstory (Warrior and Engineer) and the Norn was "OK" (Ranger). The human story was boring which is sad because the Mesmer and Guardian are both... human).

I have an Asura Thief at 8 but as an earlier post pointed out, it feels fragile. I might have to dig out the tree-necromancer when it next comes time to level and just take it easy.

I'm assuming that a necro is easier to level than a Thief or Ele.

Minor derail, but the April 1st thing GW2 is doing (https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/april-2013/) is pretty fucking  :awesome_for_real: :drill: :why_so_serious:.

It's basically an 8-bit style minigame with some really crazy stuff. They'll have it going until end of April, so get to de choppa!

I have a 61 mesmer, 61 necro and 80 ele. The ele was the most difficult to level, then the necro, then the mesmer.

Ele just doesn't feel strong enough to make up for its fragility (unless you go D/D bunker type). It's a little disappointing.

It does seem to me that there are fewer people playing the past couple of weeks, but maybe it's just my server. I mostly stay in wvw. The two servers we play against doesn't change very often. One of them just got a huge number of transfers, so that we are now outnumbered by a good bit, which isn't a whole lot of fun much of the time. We're down in the second to last tier, and in third place in our tier, so I suppose we'll be dropping to last tier soon. I don't know how this could be fixed by the developers in any long term way, really.

I hear there are some low pop servers, but Tarnished Coast is one of the full ones and it's anything but dead. 

I'd suggest trying the Adventure Box dungeon.  It made me want to kill myself because I hate jumping puzzles, but the community is going apeshit over it and it does look pretty amazing.

That and the game is still fun.  The grinds are entirely avoidable. 

I tried the Super Fun Adventure or whatever it's called. It made me want to stab myself, because I am terrible at jumping. I avoid jumping puzzles.

I made it through the first world but will not be playing further.

I did very much like the whole 8 bit platform-y Japanese style theme, however, but sucked at it.

You can always talk to the cloud and use baby mode. No jumping then.

Dat end boss.  :ye_gods:

I guess he's soloable, it just takes foreverrrrr... unless there are some [hidden] skills that make the process go faster.

I was using baby mode. I am that terrible at jumping.

Can you still get the chests?  I'm not aware of any rewards except scattered baubles with the chance of skins in the chests. 

I'm tempted to explore this dungeon solo, but I don't want to do the bauble grind.  If there was some other chance of something dropping, I'd invest the time.  Other than that, I've seen it, it's pretty, I'm fine to never go back.

Same here, it's a neat idea, but not for me. 

Yeah its full of jumping puzzles but I like most puzzles. Its pretty long though if you go for all chests  and end boss takes forever too

Laurels from the daily can net you all the Ascended gear now, if you need more than exotics.  Starting with this month, the Monthlies are like the Dailies in that you have to only complete four of several categories.

I think I finally "got" my warrior. I blew all my gold on exotic gear and watched him doing massive GS hits on mobs - all of a sudden he was fun :) Thief is still a pain for me as she's only level 8, still feels fragile. I fired up a Necro and got it to 30 (admittedly 10 of those levels were doing cooking for master crafter - thanks for the link).

I'm not feeling the necro yet - the minion master thing just doesn't feel as much fun as my L20 GW1 necro. I wondering about levelling with a condition build instead of pet P/P

Then again, I didn't feel my engineer until he was L70, guardian or mesmer until they were L60 and warrior until L50. My ranger never felt good sadly. I need to re-look at the build (P/P + beast)

Once I 80 the necro I want to have a look at the ele - I've never got around to one.

Yeah, they totally took everything that was cool about a minion master in GW1 and neutered it in GW2.  Granted probably about 50% of that is the pet AI in GW2 is flat out retarded.  I was pretty sad that they didnt' take a bunch of the cool necro stuff from GW1 to GW2.

Necro is more fun once you stop using their pets though.

I run a dagger focus power build now but leveling my necro I used a straight condition scepter dagger build all the way to 80.  I have 6 level 80's and my necro was the most fun and probably easiest to level.  I never thought twice about diving into a pack of mobs and just melting them all.

I finally got 30 laurels and god damn I am disappointed lol - reading descriptions all asceneded items are not only account bound (which I am fine with) but also soulbound on use! means i cant swap them between alts . Not only I would have to get jewelry for each slot , I have to get it for each spec and then for each alt... ughhhh .That seriously kills the desire to continue

Necklaces are the only piece you can't get through other means.  Rings drop like candy in the level 10+ fractal instances, and the rest of the pieces can be bought with tokens.

Now all those require a level of grinding I'm not willing to do, but if you're not running fractals, you don't really need the ascended gear anyways.  Just stick with exotics.

But...But the magic find...

I really dislike the account nature of ascended gear, simply because it limits the fuck out of alt lovers. Stat wise, the gear hasn't really bugged me that much. It's still dumb as hell and not needed, but not out and out offensive to me. I just really liked the relatively short hop from "just hit max level" to "and now I'm fully geared" that used to be there.

Yeah, I can see that.  Khalipha took me by surprise with the ferocity of the reaction for exactly that reason.  It's mostly a non-issue to me, but I could see hate burning in those eyes.

I keep playing it casually so far, which is quite enjoyable  - even though I already have 1 lvl 80 there is so much of the world I havent seen  . I have also 6 alts sitting there  waiting if I get bored with thief ( doubt  - its very fun class, despite it  could be frustrating to die if you miss the dodge lol). And  I  was able to do almost every event I want, -servers are not quite dead and people are around, when my server is empty  I just guest on high pop ones.

 Though more I play it its getting harder to keep   suppressing my achiever side which urges to  grind the chest events/fractals/www for ranks, which I think might actually turn it from fun into grind and make me quit again.

Please, for the love of all that's good and pure, fix your space bar.

Been doing dungeons (believe it or not only done Ascalon Tomb in release) - I dunno why the hate. they are pretty fun with decent story and amazing environment for most part(winter fractal impressed me the most so far). Fights themselves are not exactly the strongest point but they  are not too bad either.

The fractals in and of themselves are quite excellent I thought, it's just the poor implementation that let them down again;
- they're fun, fairly fast little things, but then they practically force you to do at least 3-4 in a row.
- they coupled them with a ridiculous gear grind and of course a 'magic stat' that they crow-barred in there.
- the unique skins (and what else does one play GW for in the end?  :drill:) are also walled off behind the higher tiers, again forcing you to take part in the grind.

And that's not even mentioning when they launched they had no respawn, no way to reconnect if someone got disconnected and everyone had to be on the exact same tier to get a reward.

The architecture of the world and the dungeons is probably some of the best I've seen in an MMO, but the more I played the more I saw how it's constantly marred by poor mechanics.

I got a good 3-4 months of solid fun out of this, but I haven't logged in more than a few hours the past month and the same goes for most people in my guild.
There's just no hook; no house to fill with silly trophies, no superduper raids to beat, nothing to rally a guild (the guild missions are an attempt, but not an impressive one), WvW got stale and repetitive by about the second month and I am one of those fools that's been pining for the RvR 'glory days' of DaoC as well.

No sub so who knows? I might jump back in and get hooked for another month next year, if they add some good content, but it doesn't feel like it atm.

Once they tuned them a bit, the dungeons are actually really fun, yeah. Weirdly, explorables are substantially better tuned and more fun than the story modes.

CoE is hell both ways.

Free 2 day trial offer this weekend and the game has gone to shit. Barren's chat everywhere on Yak's Bend.

Ehh Id say barrens chat >>> no chat. Game is populated and its good

By that standard every single game is shit.  People on the internet are morons, they have always been morons and they will always continue to be morons.  I don't see how this reflects in any way on the quality or enjoyment of a game.  I have not played an MMO since EQ were my very first action upon logging in was not to turn off any world broadcast channels.

Well 3-4 month of fun is imho a lot nowdays.  In my personal book TSW is one of the greatest online games I ever played(deliberately not saying MMO :) ), but I was done with it in 2 months (1 month of beta and 1 month at release). I literally done every single thing and seen every piece of content in that game in 1 month span. In gw2 on other hand I  probably seen 60%-70% of content, my most progressed lvl 80 character havent seen 8 big zones at all . And its my only lvl 80 class. There things which still genuinely new for me in there (well as far as "new" could be for old gamer)

I done quite a bit of WWW and Spvp at release and the former is a lot of content in itself if you are into that sort of thing. Spvp is sadly pretty much dead, but  even htojin  could be some mindless  fun occasionally

There is a lot of stuff GW2 offers. Sure some of it is of  grindy/repeat style quality, but nevertheless the rest is genuinely good . It is just I think honeymoon is over for most  and people wont play same game for extended period of time, regardless of the actual quality. "Been there done that". The only games people still play are same old games they married first place (read WoW for most people, EvE for some weirdos), some people are long divorced and only look at younglings in disgust (e.g. UO/EQ/Daoc hardcores)

I popped back in GW2 last night after three months away and had a good time.  But my Daily list showed me needing to kill a Champion?  With the low pop I saw last night how are you supposed to solo a Champion? 

Guest on a High Pop server - Yak's Bend is pretty much always got groups of 80+ taking on chest dragons/Maw etc.

I think the tower lords in wvw are champions.

Just finished a guild run of Ogre Wars and the Hrathi Centaur equivalent, chest at the end of each. 40-50 of us smashing Ogres and then Centaurs for over an hour - at the end of it my bags were full and everyone had fun. Infinitely more fun than trying not to fall asleep on a Jormag event. Last night we ran Low level Fractals for newbies and had 20 people in 4 groups having fun and not wiping.

Big guilds are fun and due to size constrictions, we actually run 3 guilds, so there's always something happening.

Queensdale is popular for the group events and champions.  Troll, Oakheart, Wasp, Boar, and of course the Shadow Beast.

You also only need five out of all those on the list, so it's safe to skip a few you don't like or aren't reasonable to do.

Yep! You'll probably finish 5 of those up during normal gameplay, though some MAY urge you to travel to a different area (ie. "complete 4 events in Shiverpeaks zones"). WvW is probably the best way to finish them all, since you get gathering, wvw / caravan kills, champion kills, group events, veteran kills, and maybe even kill variety if you go off-road a bit (does each player count as a separate kill for variety? me forget).

In fact, I think GW2's daily/monthly activity system is the ONLY one on the market that doesn't suck ass.

LoTRO skirmishes (NOT tasks) are still the best daily thinger, to me. GW2 does a nice job at that, at least, although I'm not sure the rewards are really very compelling.

The Laurels Dailies and Monthlies give allow you to buy some nice things, though their costs feel a bit high.

Well, it's an alternate way of getting ascended gear if you don't want to run fractals... and yeah, the costs are high. I'd either make the gear unlockable instead of buyable (so you'd get them on all your alts after buying them on one char), or cut their prices by at least 50%. As it is, you can gear up ONE of your characters in a year or so of on-and-off gameplay? Eh.

Yeah it kinda feels very grindy if you want get specific sets/gear. I mean I been running COF/fractals   daily for past  2 weeks. It take a lot of time and really only got me barely close to set of exotic gear. Only thing I got from over 70 fractals runs is 20 slot bag.  i shudder to think how much grind is to get armor set from unpopular explorable dungeons. I also really want one SAB skin but 50 bauble bubbles? - insane

I don't play GW2 for the loot, it blows chunks.  I vendor greens, who gives a shit.  This games for combat, exploration and WvW.

But I thought their cosmetic system was supposed to be so much better than anyone else's? Doesn't mean much if you can't get the gear to use for the look.

Ok, you get two per zone, so that's six per day per character. Plus you can easily get an extra one just with the shovel in zone two (trading baubles for bauble bubbles) if you run one character nine times you get a guarenteed skin. Running more characters makes it a bit quicker. Your 1/50 odds for  a drop also help a bit.  Or you can just run zone two digging for a couple hours and get 10 bauble bubbles.

About half the sets are actually available on the cheap for karma if you are fine with transmuting. I'd love a cosmetic slot, but it would probably mess with their micro transaction model.

For example, the CM armor sets are given out as greens by a bunch of the Orr vendors, texture wise. My engineer gets a bunch of compliments because I found a karma vendor in the middle of nowhere that sells a set that doesn't appear to be reused ever.

CoF armor isn't available via other methods, and fractal weapon skins are just a punch in the dick to get however.

It took me half a day to get the GS SAB skin. I ran each character through the first section for 2 baubles each run. Time in instance = 7 minutes including stupid intro. I then created 2 Asura alts and ran them through the starter area. One alt would be deleted after a SAB run and then re-created allowing infinite runs using that character slot.

I have 10 Character slots and by timing my run to before and after reset (2 runs each character on the same day) I only needed to recycle the lowbie alt 5 times to get the GS skin and less for the backpack. I did this 3 times over my holiday break and came away with a hatred of green. But it's not hard to do. The most boring part is the Asura starter area and the intro to SAB.

Oh, their cosmetic system is the best ever.. as long as you get some HOM points and get free infinitely reusable good-lookin' skins for all your gear. It's what I do, anyway. :grin:

Give us the location for the precious?

First vendor in Malchor's Leap is Pagga's Post. It sells some unique armor looks, and some that are the alternate quest rewards for the Orr chain textures (so you can get commando armor if you picked the CM lookalike during the chain)

edit: link to the set I'm using, and where it's from:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Conquest_armor

Thanks!  :drill:

After farming the damn SAB for 3 days  with 7 chars  and a few digging runs  I got myself 3 skins! I hate sab with a passion now lol . Also the SAB title  achievement is made by sadists

We've had a full month.  There was no reason to grind it out.  :-P

The greatsword skin on an Asura Warrior is perfect.  The way she flails about makes you wonder who thought giving a kid a lightsaber was a bright idea.

Darn Obi-Wan....but yea the 2% drop rate really made it punishing.  Then again I'm gonna make some clovers for cheap.

I picked up 4 GS skins and blew 16G each for 2 on the AH. When the prices rocketed to 70G I dumped 4 onto the market and am hanging on to the other 2 for now to see what the market does. I also have a staff, shield and scepter plus used by BBs to buy the soulbound skins. 2 swords left me with chump change for T3 Asura heavy armour and I'm going to blow the revenue on T3 Charr heavy tonight. I thought about saving the gold but screw it, I'm not going for a legendary and most of my characters are in exotics except for a few that are running rare underwater equipment.

SAB was good to me, but I don't ever want to go in there again - my eyes ache from it.

While I am not much into cosmetic stuff myself many other people characters outfits continue to amaze me on daily basis. Variety and customization of armor/weapons skins in this game is top notch, I dont ever get  now why people grind "x tier" gear in wow and such when all it achieves is making you exactly like next guy.

Interesting you should say that, my (female BE DK wears her DK 50-60 quest gear transmogged over whatever she has picked up because IMO it's the best looking DK gear in the game. She also uses the quest 2H sword for that matter - or she would if I didn't get sick of where WoW has gone.

I'm liking some of the GW2 T3 gear sets too not to mention some of the crafted

My level 80 GW2 character's gear pics in spoiler:


I'm currently rolling through a Sylvari ranger for the personal story achievement and have her in Whispers gear because I'm not sure I like the Syvari cultural sets.

At the moment I really rate the Asura T3 Heavy and light Armour and weapons over everything else. To the extent that I'll probably roll an Asuran Necro or Mesmer so I can kit them up in T3 (my guild holds fancy dress contests which Kira Chenco won last time on a theme "heroic"). The Charr heavy T3 is fantastic but I hate the leather/cloth wrapping on arms and legs as well as the "tail cover".

I may have carried my WoW-addiction over to GW2  :ye_gods:

Some really nice sets there.  Particularly like necro , charr engy and ele.


Yeah but Asura are so tiny you can literally hide them behind charr/norn ankles :) My original asura engy made with smallest possibly silhouette for www purposes is  as big as  a mini pet

I still think the start of this game is brilliant in terms of content (huge amounts) and the way your character naturally evolves, can just go wandering and find content, and that content naturally scales up to be co-operative and often more intense when done with others. It's a superb model for a more casual type of MMO.

But the content since launch has shown little foresight or novelty. World events that occur at one time and one place should have been seen as a bad idea on the drawing board. Much of the content seems determine to make it a grouping MMO (southsun, dungeons) which is pretty traditional and nothing much like the launch content. It's also creating a bit of a conflict between content and the progression carrot which splits the achievers and more casual players (and still no LFG while doing this?).

Even the model of content that is added and then vanishes after a set time is a pretty foolish use of resources. These days, despite being a fan of the game, I look at the new content and realise it is going to probably end up in a dungeon I'd need to PUG and don't bother. A lot of the added content, like southsun, isn't terribly fun... though I am told the intention is you should be bringing a group.

My thoughts exactly.  If group play wasn't so nut-crunching, maybe I'd have kept playing.  But it's such a tremendous solo game it's a shame their later patches don't continue that direction.  This game killed WoW and Rift dead for me with its fun, exciting combat and exploration.

Although I don't play anymore, I still keep an eye out to see if Arenanet comes to their senses.

Now that I've ordered my gaming PC I'm veeerryy tempted to start playing again.  But I dunno, I really have no desire to do fractals and dungeons (well I have a desire, but no desire to pug them) and I've missed most of the new content they've added so I'm not sure it'll be as fun as the first 2 or so months I played.

well gw2lfg.com is  good site for puggin and  I done FOTM to lvl28  purely with pugs and it was for most part decent experience.

Game itself experiences influx of new/returning people .  Servers now are "very high" on all time and now 4 servers are listed as "full" - that is stark contrast to february when none of the servers were "full " .

They new temporary content they adding is  good for most part (SAB/Molten Facility) despite southsun being some of a letdown (its just a few new dynamic events).

They adding new stuff on monthly basis  and it seems if they continue doing that eventually Gw2 will become  much better game than it was on release

I enjoy popping on from time to time.  I would really like to play as a Skrit.  Every quest could just be to get the shiny for all I care.  Just as long as everything I do or say is frantic.

Skrit tool tips change as you get more skrit in the party.

Warrior - Greatsword - Arcing Slice    Burst    ¾    10    Strike your foe with an uppercut and gain fury.

"Shiny!"
"Shiny hurt."
"Skrit hit! Rawr! 
"Hit foe.  Get mad."
"Strike your foes with an uppercut and gain fury."

This must happen.

Tomorrow's patch is supposed to be stupidly large, and focus primarily on balance chances and shaking up the viable build list.

Supposedly leaked notes. Take with a giant block of salt:

http://pastebin.com/2rrFg9pS

Are ranger pets still buggy ass?

Are Necro pets still even worse buggy ass?

They're not buggy anymore, but they are still ass imo.

They changed them a while back to run a bit faster/attack at a longer range so they wouldn't miss moving targets, and made their F2 specials FAR more responsive.

But they're still squishy as shit and you have to run the ranged pets in any sort of champion encounter or they just up and die in one hit. Still probably the class I dislike playing the most.

edit: necro pets aren't buggy, they're just shitty. And IIRC that stupid spawnling on target death is still a minor trait that everyone winds up with and hates. Though from the leaked notes, death nova may be even better now. Which was always the only thing to do with necro pets: hope they die somewhere useful.

Oh wow, they nerfed (or moved it way deeper) that petswap for haste talent. How mad are the rangers? Super mad or SUperDuper mad?

And I just started playing a ranger.  Heh.

Zero Fucks from what I've seen. Now, the shortbow range nerf however..

If the notes are true, I might go back to a pet spec:  "Bone Fiend and Shadow Fiend now regenerate outside of combat."

Rangers have been pissed since the game came out.  That part isn't new. 

That's why the question was Super mad or SuperDuper mad!

Mad is their default state.  :why_so_serious:

I'm eyeballing the changes to the Spite line for Necromancers and suddenly a crit based axe/signet build looks awfully fun. Not very group friendly, but awfully fun.

Doesn't matter. They're buffing wells.  :grin:

I'd like to get back into this.

The last time I played was the October halloween event.

I logged on and it's REALLY CONFUSING to me for some reason.

Is there a wiki summary page somewhere of new shit that I should be doing? These town crier dudes are pretty worthless.

I don't even know what a fractal IS. Or where they are.

Christ. This is one area that ongoing games need to work on. Do I just concentrate on THIS MONTHs content, or July content in a few days? Can I not do any of the previous shit?

The events are pretty well self-contained. dulfy.net has the best and most up to date guides.

That bolded part really does hamper me getting back into this and other games. You bail for a month and you might as well find a new game or start a new character. -

Pretty much, it's the cost of depth in the game... though I don't think GW2 does a very good job of helping, way too much hidden content and weird tokens.

Some of the larger changes of late have been guild events which progress your guild, fractals are a new layer of dungeon with gear progression (which is valuable only in the context of those dungeons) and I think they modified the dailies so you can buy equivalent gear just by doing the daily (using "laurels").

I used the wiki to decode the armor progression and was happy to find that while there are lots of, fairly confusing, paths to orange armor they all end up in the same place in terms of level of power. It turned out the easiest way to get orange weapons was buy them in the AH which was a bit of an anti-climax but I can live with it.

That couldn't be any more further from the truth.  In GW2 you simply do whatever the hell you want to do.  The monthly/bi-weekly patches don't provide anything but new skins and achievements for the most part.  If you don't want the holographic wings you can ignore Dragon Bash, although the Dragon Ball pvp instance is quite fun.  Again, the new content that just released today rewards only achievements, a mini, and a new skin (monocle).  If you like 5 man dungeons the one just released is challenging and a lot of fun.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a-guide-to-dragon-bash/

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a-guide-to-sky-pirates-of-tyria/

Nija, where did you leave off?  Did you get to 80?  Are you geared up?  Tell me what you WANT to do and I'll recommend a starting point.  One thing I recommend no matter your goal is doing the Daily/Monthly Achievements for the Laurel reward.  There are now a much larger variety of tasks to choose from so you can generally complete it by doing only things you want to do.  You can even just do 3 sPvP matches and get the daily Laurel that way.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Laurel

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Laurel_merchant

Liking this new dungeon a lot... definitely way better than the other dungeons, though Molten Facility was still better overall I think. The first boss is a definite pug-killer -- in my group, 3 people died ~15 seconds into phase 3 (with the slow lazers + fast lazers at the same time) and it took for-freaking-ever to kill the golems as a ranger (with perma-dead pet) and support-spec elementalist (basically I'd squeeze off a lava font + flame burst between all that running, and that was it). The fact that the golems kept changing direction and running into the walls even if we were kiting them properly didn't help, but I assume that was addressed in the hotfix. Also, the third 'run from zillions of AOE circles on the ground' cannon phase on the last boss is a killer... how long does it last, 3 minutes?!

I also dig what they did to staff elementalists. It felt very sluggish to play before, and all of the staple skills feel more responsive now with the reduced cast/aftercast times. Air attunement is still mostly crap for general use, but oh well!

They gutted the ranger class. Long Bow is now bugged or broken, it's hitting for a lot less than it did before. Pets are also dying faster and their F2 skill is lucky if it activates at all :( This shits me as I had got to 15 agony resist on mine as a SB/LB P/P build.

They really need a trait that you can select to get rid of the fucking useless pet and boost the ranger's dps. I can't even imagine taking my ranger into a fractal now, so it's back to guardian or warrior for me or start levelling my ele or necro's fractal level

I took a little break and now am getting back into this again. EWSpider has a good point, I just logged in and continued on with where I left off and easily managed to do the Dragon Bash stuff. Now, looks like I have some reading to do with this new patch...

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Update

I have two 80s, a 65, a 55, and like 3 ~20-30 dudes.

One 80 is geared out entirely, the other one is halfway.

I'm just lost as to what to do "next" with the most geared guy.

Depends on what you like.  If you are more into the 5 man instanced PvE than it's all about the dungeons and Fractals.  Fractal guide:

http://www.guildwars2hub.com/guides/basics/complete-guide-fractals-mists
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fractal

They basically have their own advancement mechanism with a new gear stat Agony.  The higher level you go the more Agony you need.

Does your 80 have all his Ascended accessories?  If not that is something to work towards and there are multiple ways to get most of them.

WvWvW is still a lot of fun if that's your cup of tea.  It now has World XP which you get for taking keeps, towers, supply camps, guard posts, repairing stuff, killing enemies, etc.  There are now Realm Levels similar to DAoC and you get titles and ability points which can be spent on passive abilities for w3.  The abilities don't affect player vs player (no power creep in that regard), but there are some nice minor boosts such as reduced damage from guards and boosts for using/defending siege weapons.

There are new Guild Missions now.  They are a lot of fun, but require you be in largish guild.  If you are on GoM I can recommend Indigo Plateau.  They do missions every Saturday and Sunday night at 9pm EST.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_missions

The tokens you get from doing the missions can be used for a variety of nice rewards including some Ascended accessories:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Commendation_Trader

Still playing.  Between a demanding job, and a marriage and toddler who deserve most of my attention, this is the perfect game to play.  A few reasons:

1.  You don't have to group.  Just walk up to events or mobs, there's almost no worry of competing for loot. 

2.  You don't need ascended gear.  Exotics are cheap and do the job just fine.  Some of my toons have one or two pieces of ascended, but that's just because laurels stack up and you might as well spend them.  I have 80s with nothing but rare level gear and they do just fine in the open world or wvw.

3.  WvW.  It's exactly the kind of large scale pvp that some of us waited a long time for, and it works.  Jump in, run around for a short time or long time, not a lot of pressure involved.  Can be extremely fun with good commanders and enough players following directions.

4.  Dragon timers.  http://guildwarstemple.com/dragontimer/  This is the first thing I pull up if I'm about to log on.  Guaranteed rares and sometimes exotics.  With this and selling mats, I always have enough gold for my needs.  (needs:  expensive dyes, leveling alts through crafting)

5.  No raiding.  No multi-hour time commitments at a time unless you really want them. 

6.  Professions, combat, combo systems are fun and interesting.  I installed Rift last week and played for about 30 seconds.  The characters looked like the dudes from "Money For Nothing" in comparison.

The game is by no means perfect, and if I was a bachelor under house arrest I might be open to different games, but for now GW2 is my pick and has been since launch.

Yep. I'm an old man with a kid and a mortgage and school and sudden writing gigs. I can't hit shit like I used to. This is great. I hooked up with a bunch of other old people. I know maybe four people by name, but whatever. They seem mostly okay, there are a lot of them for planned guild things, and it's fun in bursts.

You can buy things which achievement points soon. Stoked.

Not ToG (theoldergamers.com) by any chance? I've been with them on Yak's Bend for quite some time.

Working on alt #12 because I'm freaking mad. On the plus side, I scored 7 jade tickets - I more and one of my guardians will be fully kitted out with jade weapons (the other has full Asura T3 weapons :).

Yeah! That's me. I'm Brocktoon over there, usually on Meow Meow Nuggets or Ator.

Heh, other ToG'ers. The relatively relaxed nature of ToG is a good match for this game.

It really is. I'll not play for a couple weeks and then binge for one. Or drop in once every three days for a half hour at a time. And it's cool because whatever.

I don't really *know* anyone and that's a byproduct of not really needing to in order to accomplish things. That's a non-zero drawback to super casual games and play. But it's cool.

I'll be damned. What's all this about an achievement system which actually gives you things for your points?

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/new-account-achievement-rewards-incoming/

If it is just gated unlocks, fine. Making the points "spendable" is a shitty idea, and I hope that's not how it works.

Makes it sound like gated unlocks.

Yep... but if I put a lot of time into a game I'd start learning names. I mostly Duo with my wife though (we're almost 100% map completion, so casual). Kageru on the account and mainly Khelessar in game.

Oh nice, Other Toggers. I'm in Tyrian due to being on in the Aussie times. Usually on Dallith Bradley or Kira Chenco or Setanta (or any other of my 11 90s and 3 lowbies :D ).

Would you guys be Tyrian or Olden?

hahaha: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/dungeons/Ranger-DPS-in-Dungeons/first

No idea if legit, but it made me laugh either way. TLDR: PvE rangers better off picking up warrior banners instead of using their own weapons.  :why_so_serious:

I.... don't know. I'm just in TOG. :D

New jumping puzzles is brutal. Camera and tight jumps made me motion sick. I still didn't finish it. :(

I gave up on it (made the mistake of going in there on my charr and norn).

Took the human mesmer in and then cheated and got people to port me up :)

Well according to some datamined icons we are getting basketball.

The banners surprise me. The ele weapons don't, they do more damage than anyone's normal attacks since they're charge limited.

I'm curious how honest the banner thing is though, since it's just time limited IIRC. My ranger out damages my engineer and elementalist like there's no tomorrow, but I have no warrior or guardian to compare to what people are actually complaining about.

Definitely not warrior and probably not guardian. Having said that, ranger is still in a very average place and the pet mechanism stinks to high heaven, but It's still fun (more fun than my engineer). There really needs to be a trait to remove the pet completely and give the ranger the lost DPS. I'm trying to play with axes but the shortbow still leaves them for dead. As soon as I can get some knight's gear together (currently I'm using berserker) I'm going to go back to GS/S/WH.

I'm currently levelling my second thief as a pistol/pistol & dagger/dagger build. It craps all over the second ranger I finished a few weeks ago in terms of being able to tear through mobs even as a "button 3" build

Once I get to the Ruins of Orr areas I just lose interest with all the Champions and clustered veterans.  It's like it becomes a different game which I don't much like =/

Yeah. A desolate wasteland crammed full of undead and poison might have sounded "cool" but it's not much fun in practice. Though I believe they did a pass through it and reduced mob density and some other things.

We're "vacationing" in Timberline falls, a very scenic region, to recharge before we go finish Orr off.

I like Orr on all classes bar my thief and elementalist.

My rangers and guardians rip through it, warrior and FT Engineer face tank it, phantasm mesmers and condition necro melt faces. The thief sadly got smashed until I went Pistol/Pistol as did the ele until I went dagger/dagger pvp spec.

Mesmers: phantasm -> clone -> dodge clone ->shatter while circle strafing (condition removal is nice)
Necro: sceptre/dagger and staff strafe if not melted by the time they get to you (and 2 skills to lose conditions)
Warrior: burn them down fast and shout-heal, ignore vets unless they are in a clear space.
Engineer (flamethrower/elixir build) circle-strafe (which I hate as it's harder to get flames to hit than any other class) and face-tank. Elixir to remove conditions.
Rangers: melt them with longbow, strafe with shortbow (even with nerf) and use a southsun drake and a devourer (awesome little ranged tank the devourer is).
Guardians: GS and Hammer and lay down the law because guardians aren't OP at all.
Mage: melt with air stance and heal with water, fore for the ele.
Thief: Pistol/Pistol skill 3 ->  skill 3 ->  skill 3 -> loot. Daggers/heal etc for escape.

Southsun on the other hand is a pain especially with the vet/champ karka that pop up like godzilla on crack :D

I don't care for Orr either.  My Elementalist alt hit 80 without doing much in Orr.  I only went there for some of the personal story quests and didn't even finish those.  You're not missing much if you simply avoid it.

True but I'm a completionist whore.  I can't leave a zone until it's 100%. 

With a thief you want sword/pistol, lay down a black powder and auto attack with the sword.  You are basically immune as the mobs are blind the whole time.

Absolutely... but there's also some beautiful scenery oddly hidden away in the corners of the world they've built.

Thanks, I'll give that a go.

On another note, I may have an issue with this game:

(http://members.iinet.net.au/~setanta/gw2/row1.jpg)

(http://members.iinet.net.au/~setanta/gw2/row2.jpg)

98% map completion on my oldest char, all 80s bar the Sylvari Ranger are in exotics, too many sets of T3 gear... yeah I have a problem.

(http://cdn.meme.li/instances/300x300/27627829.jpg)

I'm not sure i get the point of multiple 80s of the same class, respeccing is damn near free.

I like levelling different classes and exploring the personal story. Then the OCD kicks in and I finish them.

I could respec, or I could just jump on the character specced/geared for the way I want to play... and play.

It's a combo of the two

Multiple 80's are also really nice for parking in places....

Reddit thread talking about how much people spend on this game. (http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1i2arl/how_is_anet_making_money/)  Whatever they are doing seems to be working for them to the point that they think its a good idea to do it harder i guess.

I'm still reading or? as Orr....

Wow, I definitely underestimated how much people were putting in. Maybe it's that I'm not at the top level or even in the next state over, but I just didn't see all that much to buy in the cash shop. Like I love little pets, but the things don't stay out and if I'm coughing up money, I want it to stay out and I want to choose what tiny critter I'm getting for my $$. Likewise the costume selection is good, but you can't wear it outside the city so who cares.

I don't think people spend that much in the cash shop, they buy gems to turn into gold.  Ten bucks gets you around 30 gold atm, which is more than i've ever had.

Yeah that has to be it.

I wish I'd bought more molten picks. They aren't justifiable in terms of economy but for convenience they rock (I only bought 2). On the other hand, I will probably deck out all my characters with the saw - or at least one from each class. Bank slots and character slots I have bought but bag slots - the characters have to earn the gold for them :)

I also bought an aether medium set of skins (can be worn outside) for my second engineer. Originally I bought the medium and heavy skin set and later the haloween costume - because it's functional as well as fun. I do buy XP, Karma and MF boosts if I run out - haven't done that in a long time though. Also the 80-80 transmog gems (but the lower level ones I have over 70 of due to zone completions). Gold is a necessity as I don't want to grind it (and I dump all my earned gold into T3 skins) so I buy a little now and then for exotics if I don't get decent drops. I bought a MF set of exotics and with food etc, I don't need to convert gems to gold as much. But as a starting point it was great :)

I ditched all my subscription games so I don't mind buying from the shop.

I don't buy vanity pets anymore, I'm over them. Likewise dyes, they are cheaper on the market individually. I refuse to buy the RNG chests but from the last content release I got 9 jade tickets (decked out my human guardian with all jade weapons) and so far have 2 sun-catchers and a helm.

I have a feeling the gem store is a great model to follow.

I hit max level in this game finally! Twice! Level 80 thief and level 80 guardian! Both of whom I immediately dropped upon hitting 80 because ugh I cannot be bothered to gear them up (yet). Next up is my elementalist! He's 63 or something.


PS: Setana, your little level 6 dude is hot.  :why_so_serious:

lol - got him to 11 to wear the shoulders :D


I even like the original colours - just needs a Captain America shield and pistol... which he can wear because he's an engineer :)

My 80 Necro has been running around in level 60-ish gear for months.  I only upgraded to exotics last week after deciding to drink a million karma in potions.  There's no reason to stop playing them if you find them fun.

What's T3 skins?

Tier 3 Cultural Gear. Can't say I've ever bought them for the stats, just the skin

Their price/stat stuff on gear is completely out of whack. It is far easier to earn the 44k karma to get an exotic piece from Orr than it is to get the gold for a T3 piece that only has rare stats.

Isn't that cultural stuff just prestige looks though?

Ingmar: Agreed, but I don't find it hard to make gold - usually a minimum of 5 a night just playing and selling off drops/salvages.

My 2nd Guardian has full T3 Heavy (skin only not stats) plus a full complement of T3 weapons from Karma. Getting the weapons was faster.
My original guardian runs full Orrian Karma gear (skins not stats) plus full jade weapons (other than water). The Orrian gear was faster to get than the 5 pieces of Charr T3 that my warrior has or the 5 pieces of Norn T3 my ranger has.

Karma is fast and easy, you really just have to play and it rains down on you which is why my second mesmer is using full T3 Asura weapons. Having said that, getting her into light T3 was easy because I had a good run of exotics dropping along with selling SAB items at just the right time. I have a greatsaw skin from Halloween tucked away for a rainy day but I am really tempted to use it myself. This one bugs me a bit, I could sell it and exchange the gold for gems or pretties... but I know I'd regret it.

When it comes to buying things from the store is where I baulk. Gold for gems is a lousy return. I could spend a couple of days getting gold together, or I could just use what equates to 20 minutes of real work and pony up cash. So for me it comes down to in-game earn gold and wait and gem-store spend cash and enjoy.

What's really sad is I think Blizzard missed the boat with this one. I have a feeling I've willingly spent more on GW2 than I begrudgingly paid as a sub to WoW, even without doing massive gem->cash transactions. 

You can get a full set of max stat exotic gear faster than you get the 44k karma too, the point of the cultural gear is looks.

Cultural gear is basically elite armor from GW1. Ridiculously expensive and something most people don't bother with unless they're crazy rich... or GW3 is announced with a similar GW2->3 reward program as the HOM.  :why_so_serious:

Was messing around in Orr (so ugly) and ran into a big group doing the gates of Orr event. Somewhere in the middle, unable to see my character given all the effects, getting randomly ganked when I got the champions attention (cause having "tanks" makes these encounters boring). The main tactic was a lot of running around circles, rezzing others or a stream of people running back from the nearest port.

I adore the GW2 levelling experience, but the end-game... urgh.

I have found that toughness/armor is very attractive to mobs.  Makes you tasty.

Rawr.


My elementalist is 77 or so now, turns out I really heart dagger/dagger for PvE. In WvW I've been lugging around a staff, though, and enjoying myself more than I expected, even though sometimes I have some mid/igraine flashbacks (I laughed at the "outnumbered" buff. Extra XP? Gosh, that makes it all worth it!). It's not really as bad as then, of course, we have more than 8 people in one place and no one is whining about how we're zerging.  :why_so_serious:

Once he bangs up to 80 I'll probably level my warrior or hunter. Need to ride this random whim while I can!

Both Ranger and Warrior are fun to level. My second ranger got to 80 in a few  days and I've just started my second warrior and elementalist. I've found that ignoring all the build advice is easiest, I'm just playing this warrior as sword/ace & GS and the ele as dagger dagger (which is what my 80 ele is for everything bar fractals).

So far I need to level:
Warrior 10-->80
Ele 11->80
Thief 41->80
Necro 0->80

and that will give me 2 80s in every class. Of them, the necro will level the fastest followed by the warrior. This time I'm levelling my Necro as a condition build - screw the pet build I used last time that led me to shelve the necro for a month.

I've hit the point where the fragility of the thief class hurts in PvE (as opposed to the fun I have as a glass cannon in PvP 80)

Elementalist hit 80 during WvW last night, I guess I'll probably try leveling my 20-something warrior next.  :why_so_serious:

People have some horrible fashion sense.  No, you don't have to wear tentacles or wings just cause you have them, specially if the rest of your outfit looks like a ninja.

YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!  :why_so_serious:



I followed Sjofn into WvW last night, my Ranger was ass in just about every way I expected it to be. Everything I do is easily ignored or just flat out dead 70-80% of the time, hurrah!  :oh_i_see:

Bunker Rangers are one of the strongest classes in pvp right now.  I'm not an expert on them myself, but I know I lose to them quite often!  They're usually S/D and best I can tell something along the lines of 0/0/30/20/20.  If you are interested in more details I can dig deeper.

Do you mean PVP PVP, or WvW PVP?

Bunker spec classes shine a bit more in sPvP/tPvP because of the mechanics (capture a point and sit your ass there daring someone to take it from you), but they can also be quite effective in WvW.  I went through the whole process with an Engineer I just leveled to 80.  My inclination was to spec more offensively and try to play that way, but I kept getting destroyed.  As soon as I shifted to a defense first mind set I started doing very well in all 3 forms of pvp.

Whatever wisdom you have available, feel free to lay it on me, because what I'm currently doing just ain't workin.


I can't even hit people with my freaking arrows half the time. They can twitch away, but I can't seem to lead my shots in return.

I play a P/P ranger in GW2 when I need lols. Even with the range nerf Shortbow is good for crippling and Longbow is viable with the (slight) buffs it got. Stay with the pack, rain arrows down to debuff run speed, nuke every time it's available. It's a newbie build but with a drake or devourer it can be fun, especially if you are in a base and the enemy builds within your traited longbow range.

Sadly, every other class feels more viable. No stupid pet mechanics (with gimped pets) and the most fun I have is to jump in on one of my guardians, strapping on a GS and Hammer and wading into a pack knowing that theere's a good chance I'll back out alive.

So there's my advice - save your ranger for PvE (they are actually fun in fractals once you realise that your pet IS going to die) and roll another class... any class.

You can generalize that. Don't ever play a pet or DoT class because they almost always get screwed over. Doubly so in PvP where encounters tend to be short and sharp. Been that way in pretty much every MMO I've ever played.

DoTs are king in GW2 right now.  The current meta is all Condition Damage.  Fear bombing Condition Necros are the most powerful build/class right now and Rangers/Engineers can do much the same though not nearly as effectively as a Necro.  Pets still stink in zerg fights because of all the AoE, but are very strong in small scale fights.

Pet classes are almost always overpowered for soloing content and single player stuff on the other hand.

The thing I find sort of disorienting coming from SWTOR is how fast all the fights are in WvW. One zerg will crash into the other and it's over in what feels like seconds, it's really weird. That's why I've been sticking with the elementalist, I lay down fields and hope they're useful to SOMEONE and try not to die immediately, basically.

This isn't quite the Ranger build I was thinking of, but it's close and supposedly one of the most effective builds currently.  This thread talks about it in-depth:

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/professions/ranger/My-Spirit-Build

(and just as a side not I'm in no way saying Rangers are in a good place overall, just that they have some effective builds you can run in the meantime)

I tried that build out and I just don't see the appeal in WvW. All the spirits and shit, just got SPLAT once an actual fight starts.

I went a total noobler build on the ranger now, 30 power, 30 toughness, 10 Vitality. Using that signet trait that lets them work on me too, arrow piercing, some + dmg thing and like every single defensive trait I have access too. All my gear is Power/Tough/Vit now too. Using Longbow/Greatsword and 2 Lizard pets. The lizard pets are almost as survivable as bears, but they actually do shit too, blast finishers and junk.


I can hump the friendly zerg reasonably well now, but I really really wish I could get the longbow range talent too somehow. I also have this talent that when I get stunned I turn invisible for 5 seconds (30 sec cd), this has saved my ass numerous times.

I think eventually, I might be able to move some points around so I can get a little crit too, maybe even get the longbow reduction thing, dunno.


I'm also having an easier time of things simply because Jade Quarry dropped down from T1 to T2, and the T2 servers are T2 for a reason it seems. They are soooo skittish! It's almost adorable. The T1 match up from last week, all 3 groups are just hyper aggressive. Outnumbered 2:1? Fuck it! BALLS DEEP BABY  :drill: . These guys, they see anything close to even numbers and just flee and flee and flee until they either find a base to hide in (which we take like half the time anyways), or we run them down in a corner.

As a TC resident, I like being in T2 thankyouverymuch. :p

T2 is low-pressure 'hop on, hop off' zerg-friendly wvw, basically. There is some 'super serious elite pvp guilds' doing small group stuff sometimes, maybe... but I don't bother with that stuff. T1 seems to be all super-fucking-serious-business all the time, from vnboards-style forum trash talk to spies to 100% coverage and all-nighters to people willing to wait x hours in queue just to get in. TC also has no queues for anything (except maybe EB on reset night), which is nice. We do have good commanders, and at least our militia is smart enough to know how to stack, when to engage and when to run (gotta get those loot bags), etc... which is good enough for tier2, considering that we also have a ton of people from RP guilds and/or upleveled people running around doing stupid stuff!

I just go wherever the pin tells me to go, it's easy! There's no queue for any of the Border lands unless there's a mass rally to save a garrison or something.

I do need to install team speak just so I can hear which waypoint to go to next faster, sometimes the chat relay is behind a few ticks and I spend a few moments wondering where the pin went. Isn't REALLY necessary though. Follow the pin, stack on the pin, fight with the pin, do not fear death the stack will keep you alive. Don't drop siege with the pin and don't take supply from the forts unless the pin calls it out.

We have a wide variety of Cat Herders and Den Mothers, lots of patience and inclusiveness. I ask questions/directions and get answers without any grief. If I see badguys, I say where and how many and get praised.


Really the biggest problem I come across is when I hit a map and there isn't a pin up. Then it's just a random crap shoot with people useless scattered all over. Like dirty fucking albs! IEW!

Wait, JQ finally went to T2?

Fuck, I need to log in and finish my world explore on the Ele. My issue with it was always that T1 was so aggressive and hyper competitive that being out there getting POIs felt like actively hurting THE REALM.

If we're just in the shits and grins tier that WvWs for fun instead of HONOR.. woo!

It isn't going to last so work fast.

The tier your server is for a week is now randomly chosen to be adjusted up or down 1 position. Jade Quarry is still the 3rd ranked server they just get to beat up the 4th and 6th ranked servers this week. Meanwhile poor Dragonbrand that is only 5th ranked got randomly chosen to be in T1. Even though they are in third place right nowin T1 they actually gaining ranking points for putting in a good show. In fact they are gaining nearly 45 points while JQ easily winning the T2 matching is only gaining 1.2 points.

Jade Quarry is in a weird spot right now WvW-wise, I think, because we are clearly just way more GRRRRRR than the T2 people we're up against this week, but we don't have the coverage (or WvW population, it feels like) that SoR and BG have, so they (from what I saw) crap all over us. Basically when we're in T1, I have Mid/Igraine flashbacks, when we're in T2, we are suddenly Mid/Percival.

I find the board trash talk funny, it's very nostalgic. SoR accusing BG and JQ working together last week was my favorite, although I am enjoying that BG is beating the fuck out of SoR this week without JQ around to distract them (especially since apparently JQ has a ridiculous SEA presence, complete with a commander whose name BG and SoR players use to frighten their children into being good). And of course the thread for this week's match up is sort of cute, it starts out with all three servers being very excited for the coming week and then TC and FA sort of losing their enthusiasm, in part because of that aforementioned insane commander.

But yeah Kild if you want those POIs and stuff, this is the week to do it.

Tonight was fun, the other two servers turned our garrison into swiss cheese! One was breaking the west, the other the east/south and we had no time to actually retake anything to resupply. Wipe one side and then move immediately to the other one.

We finally cleared everything out and went to retake a tower, but somehow didn't leave any eyeballs in the garry and gifted someone a empty throneroom.  :why_so_serious:

Took like 30 minutes to take it back in the end!

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/july-23-content-release-notes/

Patch notes up.

Also: Rangers are absolutely silly in keep defense. I'm sure everyone already knew that, but still.

I also didn't see many necros out and about last night, which struck me a really odd. Rangers, Guardians and Warriors all the way down.

My main enemy in keep taking are those goddamn arrow carts. And MAN, do the other two servers love them some arrow carts.

Staff elementalist is pretty fun in WvW. Lay down my fields, run around crying for a little bit, collect loot bags.

Yep. I like to switch between staff for sieges (meteor shower can hit way-out-of-LOS siege, which is nice) / zerginess and scepter/dagger for smaller groups / soloing... s/d is pretty decent with the last patch, and can burst shit down like whoa. I wouldn't take it in a zerg, though, as 900 range is Definitely Not Enough  :awesome_for_real:

Well I logged back in after 6 months away to see how things looked.  First I noticed there was almost no one in Orr, there used to be tons of people farming there and now its dead.  So I did some event farming for a bit and noticed I had over 100K karma so I hit a few vendors and there was nothing to spend it on I didn't already have or wanted since 6 months ago.  I noticed this 4500 karma box so I purchased up a bunch and got jack shit out of all of them...gg.  So Karma still appears useless.  Did a few world bosses, got junk.  So, I guess in summary nothing much has changed unless you like doing puzzles and shit?  Are the populations so low now that you can't do any of the big events?  I went to about 10 events that can't be soloed and no one came to any of them, just NPC's standing there or bosses waiting to go and no one cares to do them.  Went to lower level areas and saw same thing everywhere I went.  So I decided my only end game fun as a solo player will be to farm money somehow, anyone have any suggestions?  Crafting or farming mats to sell or something?

What server are you on?

Populations aren't low as much as the reward structures changed a bunch. So the population congregates near the revamped reward events.

Basically, major events give you a rare all the time once per day per account. This means dragons, and pretty much anything that results in a Splendid or Grand chest spawning. So you can always find people in Harathi doing the centaur chain, or watching the timers and showing up for Orr temples (and absolutely nothing else, which means half the time the temples aren't even up)

It's basically a direct result of the reward changes punishing repeatedly farming the same event and really only buffing certain events. So everyone who is farming goes to the easiest and fastest chains. Nothing in Orr is nearly as brain dead easy as things like Harathi or the Ice Worm thingy in snowland.

Karma can be spent at the Orrian Temples - if they are uncontested - for some nice armour - I think I spent 60K a piece on the heavy set.

So I havent played in quite a while and logged in to see how badly they fucked up the ranger. Pretty bad. I notice since they added the stealth on longbow pet agro seems to have been diminished considerably. I know my pet didnt used to have anywhere near the problem holding agro last time I played which effectively makes the solo pve for rangers worse than ever. I guess that is to justify putting an agro dump on longbow but doesn't help the shortbow in the slightest. Any urge I had to start playing has evaporated.

Soon as I finish with Orr I'm certainly never going back, what an ugly and depressing set of zones. Try the new event zone or Southsun Cove (if you need mobs that are more end-game than Orr).

Henge of Denravi.  I even asked in chat where I would find people and the answer was go do the event  :facepalm:

Or you could have asked and we could have told you to do none of those things... You can still get exotic gear from karma, several different sets, you just didn't know where to look.  Orr is not where farming is done, world bosses drop loot like candy now including a bonus chest with a guaranteed yellow/orange each. End game is still either finding something you enjoy doing from dungeons/pvp/exploring and doing it or playing pretty princess dress up which generally involves one or all of the above.

Rangers are kind of awesome at the moment. It's really strange.

That said: pet aggro and aggro in general is heavily proximity based. Short Bow's aggro issues are tied mostly to the range reduction. If you're at 1400 or so range with a long bow and send your pet in you should be good to go for a while with threat. My experience though is that I rarely want my pet holding aggro and it's just easier to go whack things with a sword in pve and use a dps pet.

About my only ranger complaint right now is that MH Sword #1 is still the single most aggravating attack chain in the entire game and basically makes the game unplayable to try and use without turning off autoattacks and basically fighting with the interface instead of your target.

If he was buying the exotic treasure box thing, he was looking at a vendor with the real exotic gear. I'm guessing he already is exotic'ed out; the random treasure box and exotic back items (maybe the jewelry? I crafted mine way back when) are really the only new things they added to the karma vendors that I've noticed.

Ya that sounds completely awesome all right. A playstyle I enjoyed is eliminated and substituted by an aggravating, unplayable style.
[/green text mode]
You might want to check the definition of awesome btw.

Or you could switch to longbow, if your "playstyle" is "hide behind my pet and cry."

I hated shortbow immediately when I tried it, though. I haven't touched one since release.

Yep this, I know where the vendors are and I have all the karma gear I need from 6 months ago, there didn't seem to be anything else to spend it on so I went with the boxes which are useless.  Thought maybe I was missing something but doesn't sound like it.  Sounds like boss chasing is the way to go I guess

They've got some weird and poorly designed proliferation of tokens. The Karma for temple armor hasn't changed much but they've added all sorts of even tokens, daily tokens (laurels), guild tokens, PvP tokens. They've even put rewards on achievement points.

But with a flat power curve most of them seem to be a path to cosmetics or things of the same power. If you wanted significant progression past temple armor you might be playing the wrong game.

Half right, I don't need significant progression but I do like to feel like I accomplished something at the end of the day.  I want to focus on making money in GW2 I think solo(I have to play solo cause I have a 2 year old and 5 year old so I can be pulled away anytime, hence why I play solo) so any tips on best ways to do that are appreciated.  I haven't done much crafting wise, are there some crafting mats I can farm or a crafting prof that works best?  Farming seems like a pretty slow way to try and make it at this point.

I actually used a longbow until they messed with it. I'd rather not play. Game's not much fun now anyway.

The best way to make money is to run dungeons.  The most efficient dungeon path is Citadel of Flame Path 1.  You can get speed farming groups that will run that path over and over for an hour or two at a time.  Although most of those hardcore groups will only take a Mesmer and zerker Warriors.

Farming events is pretty decent money, just open up an event timer for your server and hop around as needed. The money is in using high end salvage kits on the rares and exotics you get and selling those mats.

Dungeons are awesome money, but require you to be able to dedicate some time to them which is out of scope for your stated requirements.

World complete also gives a chunk of change, I think I wound up around 20-30 gold stockpiled just from all the shit I picked up and zone rewards while doing map complete stuff on my Elementalist.

Gaining money for money's sake probably isn't an ideal goal in GW2 though. To really enjoy it you need to pick goals (like I want X cosmetic armor set) and find a path to accomplish that given your playstyle.

I'm not sure you should salvage exotics, they sell for gold.

Depending on the stats. Glance at them on the exchange before salvaging them. But a number of them are only worth a bit because they're just orb fodder.

Valk/Zerker and other high value stats or a good rune = sell it.

Thanks, the goal would be to buy a Legendary which I believe you can do, since I don't have the time to do everything required to "earn it" I can farm over time and buy it eventually which would be the reason I am looking for ways to make cash over time. 

I looked at the legendary grind... and that was about as far as I got.

To answer the question in the OP, the game seems to be doing quite well. (http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1j6bkv/interesting_figures_about_guild_wars_2_from_the/)

I seriously fucking hate that you can twitch your way out of projectiles, but can't lead your shots and need a target yourself to actually 'aim'.

You don't have to be targeting something to hit it with a projectile. You can lead a moving target and hit it with a projectile, without ever targeting it.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/august-06-2013/

You can ignore that entire page, and skip to one line:


50/50 on shared money just because. But tokens out of the bank? Fuck yes.

More importantly than 'where do I keep these tokens,' making laurels and karma account-wide is a big deal.

Laurels already were, I am pretty sure? Account-wide karma is good, I have a giant pile on my elementalist that he has no use for.

It is definitely an encouragement for me to play alts and then never buy the poor bastards anything.

Laurels have been account wide. Karma will be useful since you have tons of it on the character who doesn't have anything to buy with it.

More bag space free!

The token account is great, the feature to start winding back visual effects as the numbers grow is almost as good. Some of the big event fights it's difficult to even see your character amidst the spell effects if you are melee. Which of course makes responding to red circles and mob telegraphs more or less impossible.

Am I allowed to hope that they will also make title visibility toggleable? They're just annoying fluff.

</grump>

Did they ever make it so you could see the chat for all your guilds?

No.  I see very little point in the whole "join multiple guilds" feature as it is.

You create a one-man guild for extra storage space, then join a real guild for giggles & stuff.

Made like 10g in about an hour of doing world bosses after reset last night, did get two exotics and above average on ectos from salvaging though.  Still, it seems a much better time investment than endless dungeoning, and more varied.

I need some of your luck.  I've yet to see an exotic drop from a world boss, and it's been over a month since I've even gotten two rares from a single event.

People tell me magic find only affects mob drops and not chests but i think they are nuts.  Two rares per boss is average, three is not rare at all.  Two exotics in one night is quite rare though, but i do average about 6 gold or so after clearing all the more common world bosses each day (no convington or karka queen or the hard temples usually).

So I have two friends looking to start playing and I decided to hop back on. 

Is WvW usually that dead on a sunday evening (3-5pm-ish)?  I play on Blackgate (which appears to be number 1 (https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/na/wvw)) and yet there was literally no action on any of the battle grounds except for Eternal Battlegrounds (which of course had a queue).  Are all servers like that?

It is really hard to get back into this game in a non-WvW aspect.  I haven't played since 2 months after launch and trying to remember all my abilities, how to play my character, what I should do, etc... just makes me feel pretty lost.

Nah, I just restarted last week and got back into it very fast which quickly reminded me why I left in the first place but I'm trogging through anyhow.  My experience so far though is a lot of areas are dead, just no one there, maybe its server dependent dunno.  Sucks to see events and stuff up and no one doing em. 

Has to be server dependant - Yak's Bend has at least 30-40 doing the chests at any one time in Aussie prime time, more during US prime.

WvW is good in US

It's the rewards revamps. People don't do the harder zones with shit rewards. So people will do the temples (though the timers on them are kind wonky), and everything you see on the timer sites. And you'll usually have a karma zerg around in a sub-40 zone hitting all the champ spawns in a rotation.

But 70-80? Kinda empty. Because the content is harder for roughly the same rewards as just farming lucrative events.

Ideally they patch in that exploration bonus XP => bonus loot chance to encourage people to spread out a little bit and reward killing that shark in the lower corner of the map who hasn't been killed in seven months.

That shark ain't doin' nothin' bad! Leave it alone!


As for WvW being dead, I think it depends pretty heavily on time zones, but probably also on the match-ups. I know I stopped bothering going last week mostly because JQ was so thoroughly owning the other two servers, there wasn't much to do, and the stuff there WAS to do just felt like needlessly kicking the other servers in the nuts, which would make them less likely to come back out, which meant we were even more ahead, etc.

And we still haven't gotten kicked back up to T1, so we are still just beating the shit out of the other two servers unlucky enough to be matched up with us. I am pretty sure Fort Aspenwood is ready to see us go away.

FA seems a lot happier about it than Maguuma, who as far as I can tell has ONE guild who cares about keeps and the rest basically forum troll about 8v8s or whatever the kids call it now.

I took the shit matchup as a reason to finish my WvW map complete. Got killed a few times running into hostile groups. Why you gotta bring 5 to fight my 1, FA! Zergers!

Wow, I was wondering why I wasn't doing as well as I remembered with my necromancer.  Just found out that sometime during my haitus they refunded all trait points, so I literally have zero trait points spent.  gg...

Now I have to remember what kind of build I can do and what I should be speccing in.

This was me yesterday - I can't even remember HOW I was speccing, let alone what all my points were in.

I was in the same boat. Fortunately I screenshot all my builds :)

Just respecced my warrior into 30/0/0/10/30 and am having a ball as axe/mace with greatsword. Finished my second thief and am playing it as S/P and P/P for fun. At 13 level 80s I can't bring myself to level another.

I didn't last long in my attempt to come back to GW2.  It really is like Shatter said, even in the newbie areas there aren't many dynamic events firing off, nor random people you run into to do quests with.  It really seems dead for a lot of content :-/

Guest on a different server. Yours is dead by the sounds of it but mine seems to be alive in both US and Aussie time zones.

JQ is pretty populated. But for this week nobody's in the world because everyone's farming the new zone for a bit. Seriously, everyone. I've yet to even see the non overflow version of it.

Likewise with Yak's.

Not entirely true, there are also giant champion trains in the 70-80 zones.  :why_so_serious:

You should be defending the realm instead!

I can't complete my daily in WvW alone!

You totally can!

Bah, inefficient! Low level champs die in 30 seconds!

This patch made the Harathi Powerlevel Event stupidly good and soon to be nerfed, because all in all there are 5 champs involved every 20 minutes or so.

What's the harathi powerlevel event?

The Harathi Overseer or whatever. Starts at the very NE part of Harathi Hinterlands, and involves a four event chain that spawns a billion centaur. If you go up there, you will find tons of people and usually XP/Karma banners. Bring food/oils for xp bonuses, and every AE you have. You will not be able to see the mobs, culling gets brutal.

But it's pretty comical amounts of xp, and a daily chest at the end if you just want to run it once a day with an 80.

All the fun of fin tree without the ability to go AFK ever.

Lies.

You have to move at the harathi event! Occasionally.

Depends on the set for any given day, and yesterday's was not one of those days.

Saw this for £25 on this place (http://play-sc.com/) a couple of days ago so. Been playing with a friend since then, really liking it.

So far it feels very much like you get rewards for doing pretty much anything you feel like. My highest level is only 15 so far, a Charr Necromancer, but it's fun. I'm digging the way skills work even if I don't yet understand a lot of it.

My one complaint would be that every single female character in the game, both player and non-player, appears to be a porn-star-esque 19 year old. Mind you there aren't many male characters over the age of about 30 either. MMOs are all like Logan's Run.

There ARE old person models in the game, I've seen some old ladies trundling along in the human capital, at least. But yes, basically everyone is young and pretty in GW2. Almost everyone was young and pretty in GW1, too (some of the dudes, like the necros, were not, but some of the other dudes, like the mesmers, were very pretty indeed). The derpy skimpy armor would bug me if I had to wear it, but I don't! Hooray!

Yeah that's cool, most of the female armour I've seen is vaguely sensible looking, so the mental score point I took away from the game for the sea of teenagers is given back for the relative lack of chainmail bikinis.  :awesome_for_real:

Anyway, is there anything I should be doing as a new player? I've managed to get the Daily reward two days in a row now, and am finding my feet with most things, but are there any other dailies or specific events I should be having a go at? Is there anything in the Queen's Jubilee stuff for lowbies?

You can certainly go and have a look. The event is level 80 but you'll be scaled up to level 80 yourself so you can participate.

In general I'd say just explore both the game world and the game systems at your own pace. There's not really anything to rush towards and the world is beautiful and encourages exploration. Whereas the end game... hm, some issues. The daily is a nice little boost and goal though.

The chainmail bikini's come as the armor gets higher level and more exotic. Thankfully I can transmute it all so it looks like the low level chainmail which I liked the look of for torso.

Your first point is spot on, I never feel like I get funnelled into any one thing and I usually get 4/5 of my dailies completed without even trying.

On your latter point, I'm not sure that I agree (then again, I have no desire to bang an Asura  or Charr :D ).

Cases in point (lots of SFW images and shameless admission of GW2 enjoyment):


Sigh, looking at those characters with 1 at 100% exploration and the rest at 35-55% exploration, I'm glad I'm not addicted!

Holy crap that's a lot of characters  :uhrr:

Good to see some variation from the teenager look, like I said I've only been playing a couple of days so that's what's stood out for me in that short time.

Loving the explorer vibe in the game. Me and a mate have been wandering almost randomly around the Ashford Plains (I think it's called) and have just constantly had things to do. We had a fun hour yesterday where there were 3 separate events all converging on the same location, each of which had 10-20 people doing them. It turned into an almighty clusterfuck bunfight. Was hilarious :)

And the nice things is that thanks to the character down-levelling you can wander into any zone you have missed and still find the content interesting. Though the scaling seemed to break down a bit when I got solid gear on one character and went back to a starter zone.

It's one of the few MMO's where the zones feel like they have a life of their own. There's things happening you wander into and there's a larger story to most zones. And if you go off the beaten track you'll quite possibly find there's something there. Also GW2 have astounding graphic artists, there is some really impressive scenery which the vista's show off really nicely. A nice change from WoW where it was too easy to see the zone (in cataclysm) was a linked series of rides.

The game still has some mechanics and goals incomplete, but it's certainly pretty good value for a one off box cost.

There's two parts to the queen's jubilee: the queen's pavillion is a straight up farmaton, you can usually find a group at the destroyer area since they have the best drops.  The exp is very good, you make more money than almost anything else and you can get a few free achievement points for representing the various cities and finishing events.  It also gets boring pretty fast since you are just doing old style mob grinding, even if it's fast paced.  The other part is the queen's gauntlet where you take on gimmicky one on one fights against tough oponents, you should be able to get through at least a couple of them if you want but at low levels you have very little chance of getting very far.  You get a special miniature for beating it and a large chunk of achievement points.  Also you can go around the world climbing the balloon towers, usually you have to do an event first and there is a chest at the top of each.  Edit: achievement points are nice because every 500 you get account wide gold karma or magic find boosts, a chest with gold and goodies and sexy weapon and armor skins you can use anytime you want.

Every time I've tried Liadri I've basically said fuck it to dying to dumb shit like lagging for half a second.

Anywho, with most of the living world content, they actually uplevel you to 80 for it. You're a shit 80 with few skills and crap gear, but you can at least see it. So if you do the Queen's Pavilion as a new player you will actually get a bit of a leg up since the repping buffs in there give 162% magic find. Which is why everyone and their dog is in there farming crafting mats.

Took me about 30 tries, but i hear us thieves have it pretty easy.

I've been trying on a necro, who appear to have some of the worst ability to recover from fuckups due to no access to vigor and limited access to swiftness. On the up side if you can get to phase 2 with a reasonable amount of health you can sit in lich form with stability and ignore the stupid orbs.

Most of my issues are a bit of lag and the really dumb visibility shit. I'm pretty offended that you need to turn off post-processing to make the fight not dickish. That's just dumb design.

I'm assuming that they are flooding the market with T6 mats in preparation for the T7 crafting stuff coming at the end of the month, or I just don't understand what the Queen's events are doing. I took my baby Necro in last night and got 5 levels just running with the zerg, plus a metric fuckton of mats and a few gold worth of items.

My Necro is also not much of a classy lady like all of Setana's.

I'm still trying to fit into this game, but I just have a time with the survival mechanics and such.  Too much time in WoW, I guess.  Any recommendations for someone who's played a Death Knight tank since their inception?  :grin:

My guardian seemed sturdiest right out of the box, although once I got the swing of it, my elementalist was/is pretty resilient.

Yeah guardians are the closest to a tanky type character, warriors could be too i guess but they are so good at putting out shit tons of damage nobody expects them to do anything else.

Warrior's banner revive (from downed) used to be something really appreciated by others atleast back in the spring when I played (could be that they've nerfed it since then)

It's extremely appreciated now that you have to do a very tough orr escort to get to the best farming spot in the game.

Warrior Banner is still the best rez ever. It's fallen out of favor because warriors have built boon duration builds that allow them to keep signet of rage's actives up permanently.

That said, my warrior is tanky as shit as a sword/longbow condition build. But anything can be, healing signet + the healing based on adrenaline minor trait causes you to regen around 6-800hp every second, and they have a bunch of really good access to stability. It's kind of stupid how much my trouble warrior can get in to in wvw and still get out alive.

Guardians are tanky from level 1, bunker Eles are pretty crazy tanky but require access to a bunch of traits to do it. They feel squishy as fuck at low level.

I recommend that you tell us what sort of thing you'd like to play (like, what about Dk tanks did you enjoy?) and then we'll give ideas and you take the class for a spin in the Mists training area to see if you like how the skills work.

For me it's a case of:

Fastest to level - Warrior/Ranger then Guardian
Easiest to level (survivability) - Guardian/Ranger
Best at surviving "oh shit" moments - Guardian

Fun after level 60 Ele/Mesmer then Thief then Necro

No fun to level - Engineer. Poor engies - Flamethrower is a boring skillset and despite actually being really good at open world PvE face-tanking once you get Juggernaught - but boring
Grenadier is fun to watch the numbers but too much effort compared to what every other class brings.

If you want to run PUG dungeons (I don't) then forget Ranger - no-one likes rangers and the pets are gimped with clunky mechanics. Engineers don't get much of a decent shake either.

Engines are fun, but you have to work so much harder pretty much constantly. A good example is that to have swiftness you need to take a trait and then toggle a kit every 5 seconds. No more, no less, since it gives 5s of swiftness with a 5s cooldown. Just freaking annoying micro heavy work just to walk around.

And fuck grenades. One of the best weapons in the game, and you will uninstall the game if you try to use them as a primary weapon.

Rangers are easily the best at solo PvE, but fall apart once the content gets beyond face tank mob, collect bag.

Something like 25-50% of the classes effective damage output is tied to the pet, the pet that cannot dodge/evade in content designed around the idea of constant evading and movement.

It's not a good equation.  :why_so_serious:

I rate pet mechanics in a dungeon/fractal up there with the fact that it is safer/easier for every melee class to equip a ranged weapon to increase survival in fractals :D It's my one hate with the game and the one thing WoW does better than GW2 - where melee can... melee.

Oh, I also love the fact that pets don't get agony resist and that Maw can one shot them, putting them on their swap timer. In fact, a few weeks ago I copped "burp - 1shot your pet (because I was on the swap CD), burp - 1shot your pet (when I swapped a few seconds after).

I didn't feel like my elementalist was particularly squishy, but that may be because I had started my mesmer first, who was squishy as fuck.  :why_so_serious:

Mesmer, for a long time, was one of those "dammit why won't you let me love you" classes until I figured out/got high enough to sword/pistol. Then it was fun! Getting an outfit that was 100% perfect for him helped too.  :grin:

I build my Ele's tough, but they wear mobs down by attrition rather than brute force. I tried to level one as power/precision - was awesome until they took a hit :D

I never really get into my mesmers until L60 - then they are just awesome.

My 1-80 class impressions so far:

- elementalist: my main, and the one I spent the most hours on. Lots of tricks, but requires a lot of button mashing (and constant attunement swaps). Also doesn't really produce BIG NUMBARS, though scepter/dagger has some decent burst. This class is so versatile that I find myself switching weapons (staff, s/d, s/f, d/d) and major traits (mostly between MAX DPS / survivability) between bosses all the time... this game needs some kind of dual spec badly.

- guardian: Greatsword kills stuff pretty good, though I'm fond of hammers... you can basically autoattack-chain + #2 your way to victory. Combine this with three spirit weapons and the invulnerability elite skill, and you can level semi-afk! This is also my only character that could reliably solo champions while levelling. The most annoying thing is that the only way to get swiftness is by using staff #3.... though staff #4 has an absolutely awesome animation on a (female?) asura, so I'll give that one a pass.

- mesmer: As posted above, really annoying to play and squishy until level 60 (that's when you get "create clone on dodge", right?) -- my biggest peeve was that all the illusions just vanish after their 'targeted' mob dies, so you need to be proactive with shatter skills and/or tab switch a lot. The only way to get swiftness reliably is on focus 4, which is good, since focus is pretty awesome when traited to reflect projectiles, plus spinny guy (#5) is great if used at the right time. I think my mesmer is the highest damage character I have... but I really have to be on top of the invulnerability skills to avoid faceplanting constantly, even more so than my elementalist.

- engineer: Grenadier is great on paper, but oh god the drudgery. I guess you could use a programmable mouse to autofire grenades on your mouse target while you hold down a side button. Is that a bannable offense? idk. Anyway, I use bombs 90% of the time, and that's pretty efficient for most pve situations. Smoke bomb (#4) basically makes you invulnerable in solo pve with the constantly reapplying blind, and fire bomb (#2) does a ridiculous amount of damage. The other fucking obnoxious thing is, like kildorn said, 'swap kits every 5 seconds to maintain swiftness' (and vigor). Just give the class a low-maintenance perma-swiftness option like everyone else, plzthx!

Mesmers of any type just become awesome at 60 because everything cool is hidden in the GM traits, and they all modify your base skills heavily. So shatter builds suddenly do a dickload more damage (trait that causes you to count as a shattering clone), glamour builds gain enough points to pick up most of the confuse/blind stuff instead of null field just sitting there looking pretty in solo pve, etc.

Non dagger Elementalists are a lot better now from the patch that messed with their casting animation speeds as well. But you should still roll dagger/* when in solo pve because it's the single most fun set in the game.

Necros are also kind of meh until high level as well, but oddly it's less missing GM traits (deathly precision or terror, depending on your build) and more due to leveling gear having stats all over the place and necros really needing to hyper specialize in their gear at all levels to not be rather underwhelming.

My thief was my first to 80 and she wasn't as squishy as I expected either, mostly because of the "heal on hit" heal skill. I am sure I did all sorts of things wrong with her, and she wasn't nigh immortal like my guardian, but she was pretty close... unless I was fighting those fucking dredge and their fucking immunity to blindness. Assholes!

I prefer the "stealth and GTFO" heal personally.

The heal on hit thing fits best with how I tend to play:

Am I dying? PUNCH THE THING HARDER

Thief heal on hit is amazing for pve. It's the only version of that type of effect that is per any physical damage dealt. So caltrops + healing signet = trolololol. You can basically just hit 80 by spamming dagger/dagger #3 with it equipped and between the evade frames and the healing you won't die unless you want to. The other variant is just auto attack with sword/pistol while standing in the smoke field from pistol #5.

One of the easier pve classes I've played, but all the tricks sort of fail the minute you do dungeons and actually need to remember how to avoid damage.

I played the signet on my first thief and yeah, got smashed the first time i walked into a dungeon. My first mesmer taught me how to dodge and from there my second thief used the stealth heal and learned to dodge everything with no crutch.

Feels strange to be posting all this in a thread with the title "Is this game dead or?" when it's clearly not.  :)

Anyway, are there ever sales on gems? I'd quite like some more bag slots, character slots and bank storage!

No, that would totally screw the economy.  You want gems then take advantage of the easy gold farming currently going on.

Gold -> Gem pricing will rise and fall every few weeks based on new things appearing in lockboxes and the like. If nothing new is out, nobody's spiking the price.

You can also get a few gems from the achievement chests, but very VERY few and far between (the 5k chest has 400 gems in it.  I suspect any crazy 10k chest may as well)

edit: but for some content: NEXT PATCH: Tuesday. Main thing changing so far in the preview? PVE Culling: Gone.

Also, it's the one year anniversary next year, so birthday presents will begin. It's looking like a static mini this time, mini queen jenna. So nobody cares, but they're glad it's not mini Traehern. Also an increase to WXP earning rates in WvW. I suspect it will be light on the balance changes because we're still dealing with the PAX tournament and nobody expects any balance changes until that's done with.

There is a post somewhere here explaining how to do this via autohotkey, it makes playing a grenadier tolerable and useful in mass RvR.  My favorite build was a pistol/pistol elixir roaming build that for some reason they decided to nerf into the ground.  At that point I just gave up the game entirely.

Fastest selling MMO in history. (http://www.guildwars2hub.com/news/guild-wars-2-fastest-selling-mmo-history)

When the fuck is that tourney over or whatever.

PAX itself is the 31st->Sept 2nd. Expect a massive patch on Sept 3rd at best (assuming nobody takes a break between the end of PAX and the new patch), 17th at worst.

Supposedly they're going to do some massive content reveal at PAX that is not an expansion. Realistically it's just going to be a preview of more living world stuff I'd bet.

I am super confident there's a whole fuck load of changes for rangers, but they are holding them all back because of the stupid tourney.

I have a harbour bridge for sale - slightly used - if you'd like to buy that too :(

I'm far more confident there are changes to terrormancers and probably spirit rangers waiting in the wings. If they're smart, it will be coupled with (at least a preview of) the first wave of new weapon selections to distract people.

If they add MH pistol to mesmers and I will be as distracted as they want!

Rangers are going to get some nerfs in SPvP probably yea, but they are going to give us more bullshit stealth stuff in return. Just watch.

Just finished my second warrior. Previously I'd been told signet builds were useless past level 40. Not any more they aren't, they are great for levelling to 80 and awesome for farming.

I'm loving Axe/mace and GS again and ended up going 30/0/0/10/30 on both warriors

You can fairly trivially get 100% crit rate on Signet warriors. It's pretty lawl worthy.  :why_so_serious:

Warriors seem ridiculously overpowered in PvE, to the point where I don't think my Mesmer can even do 50% of the damage they it out and they survive better...

Mesmer damage is just pretty sad in general beyond shatter builds. They got over nerfed a while back and never really recovered.

But yeah, my warrior can pretty much face tank things and give zero fucks. I think my necro beats him in theory for single target and my ranger does okay, but both of them wind up being crazy squishy in comparison due to warrior's easy access to invulns and crazy long duration stability.

Really though, my ranger's pve problems are entirely dumb pets in dungeons and sword #1 being irritating as fuck to use. My Mesmer's pve problems are that while I can do anything my other classes can do, it just takes 3-4x as long to do it.

When I hit 40 with my Warrior just the other day, I was able to unlock that Might proc on GS strikes. I now know why every warrior runs around with a GS.

Took my old warrior into Crucible of Eternity story mode last night. While my new one uses berserker gear, the old one runs knight's with berserker trinkets and divinity runes and a battle sigil on eack swap. With 22 stacks of might and about 70% crit my night was made when I weapon swapped from axe/mace to GS (love fast hands) and pulled off a 25K final hit with 100 blades.

I'd love to try Scholar runes to see if that would take me higher but I can't keep >90% health up but I'm not replacing the divinities - too damn expensive and I like the bonuses - there are times that not having them would have killed me.

That's what I mean. Do you know how long it would take my Mesmer to do 25K worth of damage?  I can't think of a single skill I have, in full exotics, that can do 2K without critting. My phantoms can do a ton of damage IF they survive to unload a few attacks, but generally they don't.

Have to say overall the class depresses me. It's such a wonderful, wonderful concept for a class and I love the illusions and clones and everything, but in PvE it seems stupidly underpowered and really only viable thanks to Time Warp.

On the plus side, experimenting with an engineer has been great fun - seems to click more for me than the elementalist did.

I hadn't ever really done much with my warrior other than get him 80 and have some half-ass spec I made up. I switched to this on Saturday and haven't looked back. I didn't go ALL Beserker gear yet (half Knight's) and it's already pretty smashfacingly good. Pretty nice rotation that does VERY good damage.

I just stuck Ruby Orbs into my armor for now, but Divinity Runes would be super duper.

Leveling right now is ridiculously easy too - I took my Necro from 62-80 in a little over a week with my spotty playtime without much difficulty. The Crown Pavillion stuff made it easy to level and not even worry about any sort of gearing as I went the last 20 levels. Finished it off by crafting 200-400 and my new exotic armor.

Setting on a 30/0/10/0/30 DPS build that I am pretty happy with.

I find it pretty awesome that I actually have a couple of decently geared, fun to play, max level characters in an MMO which I have never had before. Problem is my small guild of friends is down to 2 people so there's a whole lot of solo play and I'm not much of a PUG guy to do dungeons and fractals.

Scholar's are the best if you can keep >90% health for ~24% of the on target time of the fight.

A very cheap alternative that is nearly as good is simply using ruby orbs for dps.

And divinities are goddamned expensive. I personally default to orbs if I can't find a set I absolutely love the bonuses for. If I'm just after stats and nothing like boon duration or such the orbs wind up being about 2G total assuming you don't already have some lying around.

edit: and randomly: hundred blades is just a silly skill. It's overpowered as fuck in pve and some pvp (like the current mace/shield + gs build of doom). But a mesmer CAN do decent burst damage via shatter builds. But it's nowhere near the same tier. Same with Engineers in theory being able to drop a 17k 1-second burst down but in reality it takes so much work to set up that it's only useful against practice dummies and the world's easiest pve bosses.

The new zodiac weapons are amazing.  Except the warhorn, which has you blowing directly into a chickens asshole.

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-August-20-2013

Release notes. No real class changes. Update to the living world meta, and notification that the current arena thing closes on the 3rd.

Looks like open world invasions and a new temporary instance (no idea if it's solo or 5 man)

This update basically turns one zone an hour into a giant invasion event from Rift. Unfortunately folks haven't lernt the skills from RIFT about how to do zone wide group content so most times we lose because people dont split up and just stay in one zerg...

Zodiac weapons, aka BUY OUR FUCKING KEYS  :why_so_serious:

Some people are complaining about the way the zodiac skins look. I am not one of those people AND I NEED KEYS ARGH

Most of those skins are pretty ugly, I think. I do like the bows.

I'm not a huge fan of them either, but that's ok since the last thing I need is incentive to get some gems.

Still liked the Fused stuff the best.

I love almost all of them.

Jade staff is best staff. Now if only it was actually VISIBLE on an asura (this goes for every other weapon out there, too)...  :awesome_for_real:

Aw, why's the rabbit gotta be on the stupid scepter.  :heartbreak:

I fail to see the appeal of turning off pve culling or why it was necessary at all.

You don't like being able to see the monsters you're fighting?

I never had any problem seeing monsters, the only change is now i see about ten times the amount of people around which actually makes it harder to see anything at all.

Culling was stupid in a number of events where you could see players fine, but not see mobs. Because players have higher render priority.

The change is a bit laggy, but the new bit is that you can see mobs, not that you see more players exactly. If you're seeing more players you were already in a situation where it wasn't rendering mobs first for the most part.

Ya I have one of every class up to 60 except my mesmer who stalled in the low 50's. It's just hard to bother logging in to level a character who is so depressingly bad.

Get the mesmer to 60, that's when they start to come alive :)

Currently I'm sitting on 14 Level 80s and the only two classes I can't bring myself to level a second char on is engineer and necro.

Amusingly, necro is one of my favorite 80s. But leveling him was obnoxious.

Having just got my Necro to 80, I would have to agree. Totally fun now and I'm glad I got that last twenty levels just AoE'ing the Hell out of the Pavilion event.

Wow to both of you. I enjoyed leveling my necro immensely. Guess that was because I used a pet build that everyone swore was gimped.

That's what I'm going to try second time around. I went a well build to level and hated every minute of levelling. Since then I went condition for PvE/PvP and love it. Minions seemed weak early build so I'm hoping it was just me.

Yeah, I leveled pets and it was fine. Also not sure of the Well build hate. I love my wells so much that I don't see myself doing anything else. Things swarm me, I put down wells, pop shroud if I need to, and things just melt.

My necro was the first to 80 with wells.  Easy Peasy.

Blarg. So ever since the first day of this new event, I lose connection during phase 3 of the invasions. I suspect it's Comcast's fault since all of my connections quickly reset (youtube will error out, but a refresh brings it right back), but logging back into GW2 puts me into an overflow without an active event so I wind up never getting credit towards the meta.

Whine. Waaah.

Yeah, you are pretty screwed. 

I have no idea what the ramifications are for the economy long term. It's really weird. They've been so careful of keeping money flow tightly restricted, because of the RMT ramifications, that I simply cannot understand why they've opted to throw the doors open for three straight weeks now. So much money. Just greens and blues on this event are netting me something to the tune of 2-3g per event (half hour).

Its fucking the gold to gem conversion. Good for people who buy gems to turn into gold, bad for everyone else.

Perhaps that's exactly what they want to happen.  Now more people will have to buy gems.

I think it's just lack of planning, the two week cycle doesn't leave much time for balance testing.  A guildie made 200g on the first few hours of the pavillion before they took it down to nerf the champ centaur spawns, subject 7 was a cake walk with five gambits for a whole day before they nerfed him and even after deadeye dunwell was easy enough to farm with 3-4 gambits for several classes, now you only get rewarded once a day.  The aether champ farm from this event has already been toned down once.  They just aren't expecting people to thoroughly monetize everything so god damn efficiently and don't have enough time to make sure it's not easily exploitable before they roll it out.

Probably yea.


The bastards stole my bay tonight, I am sad :(

Whatever they are doing, they are doing it right. Logged in to Yak's Bend during Aussie day-time, LA and 3 other zones were in overflow. Hell, there were even people in the Asuran city

I don't think the intent is to flood the gold market to sell gems. They're trying to flood the high tier mats market to fix a few holes in the economy to prepare for 500 level crafting. The reality is that when they adjust the precursor system to be something other than bulk farming there will basically be no big ticket gold items left.

They're moving gold sinks into vendor purchased cosmetics, such as the gauntlet event letting you buy any racial weapon skins for gears + 5-10G per.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, etc.

Anyway, I haven't logged in for a couple of weeks (way too busy working on a Shadowrun Returns module), how fun is this event? I kinda got bored with the pavilion farm after an hour or two.

Same as the pavillion farm but spread across a lot of zones.

And the return of Super Adventure Box which I loved.

That sounds sweet.  Looks like i'll be finishing my legendary at a perfect time.

The additional functionality of changing stats when out of combat is a really nice way of make the Legendaries more than just aesthetics, but not making them more powerful than the other stuff to can be bought/crafted.

I'm still really really uncertain on the ascended weapons. Things leveled out a bit where getting ascended pieces wasn't that big a deal recently, but if the weapons are pricey as fuck it's going to be yet another alt-unfriendly patch and fuck with the power curve.

I will wait and see on this one when the patch hits. A lot of it comes down to how hard the new stuff is to craft.

I probably won't even come back to play RVR occasionally like I have been with ascended weapons being a thing. Oh well.

Quick newbie question: how do I do dungeons?

My necro is level 50 now and I've had 3 dungeons pop up on the map with mails suggesting I go there, but there's no dungeon finder? I found GW2LFG (http://gw2lfg.net/) but the groups that show up on that seem to always be level 80 and they don't say what server they're on. Can you group cross-server or something?

Is it even worth me doing story mode dungeons while leveling or does the lack of a group finder (which I am slightly stunned by, wtf is this 2004?) make it too much of a hassle without a large enough group of friends?

1) Guildies
2) Guildies
3) Guildies

PUGS are cancer and from my experience aren't prepared to carry sub-80s. Level to 80, get into yellows, then give it a shot.

Depending on your server, get into a big guild with others that run instances. This is why I'm in TOG (http://www.theoldergamers.com) and have been for several different games

I used GW2LFG a lot... haven't really had any bad experiences with it, really. Ironically, the only dungeon group I was in that failed / fell apart was an AC storymode dungeon ~1 month after release that was an almost-full guild group (4 people from the same guild, and I was the PUG along for the ride). But yea, you'll want to be 80 with at least yellow gear (maybe a few greens) for best results.

Anet has been promising a LFD tool forever, but I haven't heard anything about it lately.

I started the month with about 5 gold between my characters and due to random purchases tended to stay around that level. As of yesterday after plunking down 10 gold for a skin for my long bow I am at 55gp. This whole month has been one gigantic loot pinata of epic proportions and probably will have long term consequences on the economy.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2-the-first-year/

The graphic at the end was pretty interesting.

23 million dead cows  :ye_gods:

Pretty sure those Risen Thralls are just killstealing from all the other bullshit in Orr.

There's risen thralls in every zone with risen, and most zones have risen.

The caravan stat made me laugh. Poor yaks.

I seem to always end up playing the unpopular races & classes in MMOs. My Charr Necromancer feels special now!  :why_so_serious:

Dungeons are for 80s only then? Well that sucks.

I have a Charr Engineer - that makes him rare too :)

Of the races I love the Charr and Norn the most but have a fondness for Asura and the Humans are the easiest to do jumping puzzles with. Sylvari I'm not fond of but that's probably an anti-Treahearne thing.

Looking at the racial breakdown of my characters it looks like:
Charr: Warrior/Elementalist/Engineer
Norn: Ranger/Warrior/Elementalist/Necromancer
Asura: Mesmer/Guardian/Thief
Sylvari: Ranger
Human: Guardian/Mesmer/Thief/Engineer

Of those, only the Charr and Norn warriors, Charr and Human Engineers are male. I do wish I'd made the Human Engineer a Norn.

I'm considering a Sylvari Necro as there's nice dungeon armour that would fit the theme but again... Treahearne syndrome.

That's not strictly true but as people have said it'll be the rare pickup group that can get through one. I did the first one with a good group around 32 or so. It was difficult but we persisted and made it.

My boring race/class break down for level 80 goes like this:

norn elementalist
human mesmer
sylvari guardian
human thief (her armor looks hilarious on her right now, by the way, it all looks WAY TOO BIG for her which has the added bonus of making her look like she has a pinhead)

I was a little surprised to see norn so "low," just because it feels like there are a lot of them on Jade Quarry. Not at all surprised at the charr being the least popular, though. I feel a little bad I still don't have one, because I really like how they designed the females, but bleh. I just don't like the charr much to start with (NEVAR FORGET) and the running animation basically seals my DO NOT WANT opinion.

Still, I should probably make an engineer. Probably. Mmmmmeh, probably won't.

Norn Warrior, Thief, Engineer and Elementalist. Human Necro and Guardian for me.

I kept trying to make a Charr because I felt I ought to, but I could never make one I liked. The most important part of any MMO is character creation. If I don't do it right, I won't play no matter how good the game is.

That running animation is the worst thing in the game next to Orr.

The part thats hilarious is that it takes 1 million kills for the achievement and only 23 million total have died across all players.

You people all need to acknowledge the REAL masters of the universe.

My chars:
Asura Elementalist, Guardian, Warrior
Charr Engineer
Human Mesmer
Sylvari are boringNecro alt I'll never play
Norn are also boringRanger alt I'll also never play

e: I wish I could see my weapons though ;(

All of my characters are Norn Women, except for one Tree man.

I do have an asura necro that seems the likely next candidate for an 80. She's my only lady caster, too, so it'll help catch up my lady-to-gentleman ratio at the top a bit. It's currently three dudes to one chick (the thief is the chick), I blame the fact I loathe the female sylvari voice for my guardian being a dude, and I know better than to play a human-shaped female caster in a Guild Wars game for my own sanity.  :oh_i_see:

I am bored, here are pictures of three of them:




Tree dude isn't in an outfit I like yet, so poor Jassan the Guardian does not get a picture.

I don't know who would suggest such a thing in the first place. What possible benefit does ANet get from selling gems for gold?

The benefit to ANet comes from the gold price of gems going through the roof which means that newer players, who don't have 80s and can't make nearly as much gold from the events as longer-term players with 80s, are more likely to want to buy gems with real money.

Either that or these events are just badly thought out, but I don't think that's likely given that they've run 2 in a row like this.

Do the gear boxes that drop from the events have their item level set on drop or on opening does anyone know? It occurred to me yesterday that it might be worth be saving them til I'm 80 before opening.

Lol seriously.  It's like saying, "Surface most often walked on:  the ground." 

Engineer and Necromancer are my two top classes.  Thief and Guardian are a moderately placed third and fourth.  Love the idea of Mesmer but can't get past 40.  Warrior and Ranger I can't get into at all.

I made a second Engineer and run a 0/20/20/20/10 build that is beyond fun.  Flamethrower, Elixir Gun, Elixir B, Supply Crate.  Pistol/Shield.  Specc'd for toughness and might stacks with flamethrower, extra damage with flamethrower and elixir gun.  This is a build I tweaked and optimized during these zerg-heavy living world events.  Tagging mobs, good damage dealing, and lots of support/healing available.  Run in with elixir gun, hit button 5 where you stand, hit button 4 and it's area retaliation.  Hit button 3 and cleanse folks.  Switch to flamethrower and burn everything.  Repeat.  So fun.

The only class I just cannot make myself get into is the engineer, and I'm not sure why. I start and then I go "blurgh" and I do something else. I guess I could insta-20 one now if I really wanted, I have a spare scroll of that sitting around.

That's what I'm gonna do.  Level 8 engineer and six of those scrolls, he's getting one whether he likes it or not.

There is something wrong with engineer as a fun levelling experience. Admittedly mine was my second character but I had to push myself to hit 80 (no crafting either).

I wanted to be a grenadier - grenades were clunky.

Flamethrower was fun until the patch where you had to align stars or get "missmissmissmiss" etc.

Even then, once you work out how to maintain the correct angle to not miss, it wasn't fun.

Underwater sucked if tiy were FT - I ended up grenading underwater with a FT build. It's just so clunky and the class that should have been the most versatile just isn't.

Engineer really needs to have at least 2-3 toolbelt skills unlocked before it becomes fun to play.

My engineer levelled with a bomb spec -- keep dropping a trail of autoattack bombs while I gathered a bunch of mobs, drop 4 (basically perma-blinding them), then 2, 3, 5, and maybe the big bomb when needed. Marvel at the explosions, collect loot. 'Evil Midnight Bomber That Bombs At Midnight' cackle optional.

Or you could just do as i did: eat a scroll to 20, level 4 crafting skills for around 35 gold then do invasions till 80.  Took a whole afternoon.

I've never had 35 gold total.  :awesome_for_real:

The last two updates have been extremely good for my bank account.  I went from not being interested in a legendary to almost done.

Feel free to buy me bigger bags  :why_so_serious:

Lol, i actually sunk everything i had left into vicious claw prospecting.  If i'm not mistaken the new assassin armor will drive the price way up.

I can make you bags if you buy me the runes of holding for the bag size you want, you know! I have a 400 skill tailor!

Legendary Rifle precursor dropped for me. Time to decide if my Warrior main or my engineer gets it. Now I need to work out how much it's going to cost to make it.

Tier 6 mats and ectos are through the roof, unless you got a large stockpile of both those things you are looking at tons of farming still.  And rifle i would throw on an engi, at least they have a good rifle build.

I'm guessing the crafting update on Tuesday has something to do with the money explosion.

LFG system is in on 9/17, along with turning Tequatl into a full blown super fight.

 :woot: :thumbs_up: :Love_Letters: :yahoo:

Got my Charr Necro to 80 mostly by farming the Clockwork Chaos events. She has 25% map completion and 20g as a result.

Started on my Norn Guardian and realised after a few levels that not having a speed boost utility skill is painful. Might have to try the Elementalist instead...

The classes without the 25% run buff are dead to me.

Guardian has that one utility skill with a 60sec cooldown that gives swiftness, is that not enough?! :awesome_for_real:

Seriously though, guardian staff 3 is an ok swiftness skill (kinda similar to mesmer focus 4), though obviously nowhere near as good as other permaswiftness options. Now the engineer "swap kits every 5 seconds to get 5 sec of swiftness" thing... yeah.


Anyway, I decided to take a look at this arena thing before the entire meta-event ends (yeah yeah, late to the party). Didn't really have problems until sniper dude (screw 1sec cast time killshots with transatlantic latency), but eventually got to Liadri... at which point I realized that my scepter/dagger (or staff) elementalist is probably never going to make it. Have much higher hopes for my engineer (though my gear is kinda cruddy) after facerolling 5-gambit subject 7 -- we'll see.

Yeah I put a staff on her weapon slot 2 and with that in combo with "Save Yourselves!" it's better than nothing. Still painful.

Classes with no-fuss run speed buffs are Necro, Elementalist and Ranger yeah?

Thief has the 25% run speed signet too and runes of the traveler are gonna give run speed now.

Warriors have it as a trait in the adept section of the Discipline line "Warrior's Sprint" - "Run 25% faster while wielding melee weapons". I run it for open world PvE and for PvP - gives me one extra Slot Skill over the other 3 classes you mentioned.

Cool, thanks folks.

What I currently want is a keyboard shortcut to swap from Best Performance to Best Appearance graphics options and back again. I set Performance when porting to high population areas or Clockwork events, Appearance for everything else. Makes a big difference to loading times too.

As expected, fuckers have been sitting on some stuff due to the tournament. Full panel rundown from PAX:

http://dulfy.net/2013/08/31/gw2-pax-anniversary-bash-coverage/

Notable stuff is a peek at a dragon encounter revamp, a seasonal WvW thing starting in October where the matches will be in a bracket and give weekly rewards to winning participants and end of event (7 weeks) rewards based on total participation.

Man, that Q&A gets reeeeeally Engrishy in some places.

That's just Dulfy, I think. Her site is awesome, but she could use an editor  :awesome_for_real:

edited for actual content: I wonder if they'll give all the dragons the Tequatl treatment. Also, making it 'really hard' means it'll probably fail all the time and people will get fed up with it. I hope to be proven wrong!

All I know about the new encounter is that the Rangers are already cutting themselves over it.  :why_so_serious:


Elementalists, Thieves, Rangers and Necros all have a 25% Run Signet

Necros, Elementalists and Warriors have a 25% Run buff from traits when using X weapons.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Movement_speed


Engineers, Guardians and Mesmers are dead to me! DEAD!

Rangers are so odd. Even if you assume (safely) that pets will be terrible at the encounter.. it's still a fight about standing at range and nuking something. Which rangers are absolutely amazing at.

It always comes back to the reverse doublefrost math on our weapon scaling. During one of the last weeks of Beta, someone went and did the math on how much damage a pet did on a target dummy, then subtracted that from all the rangers weapons.  :why_so_serious:

My thief feels slow compared to my perma swiftness/vigor engi.  It requires a bit of upkeep but you are certainly extremely mobile.

DEAD TO ME!

I'm probably wrong, but it feels like Teq is going to be the new Jormag. By now people do the encounter for loot, not for the encounter itself. Jormag is still boring as all hell and I avoid it unless he's in phase 3 - in which case I'll come along and mooch free loot :D

I love my rangers, but watching their pets die to aggro/aoe/agony etc makes me cry. They need to share agony resist with their owner at the minimum, have reduced aoe damage (not negated - rangers should have to micro them a bit) and should definitely have a switchable taunt (WoW does this well). That or reduce the god damn 60 second switch timer on pet death. I love losing a pet to agony and then switch only to lose the second one and be gimped.

That, or has been said time and time again, have a trait that locks the pet away and boosts the ranger's DPS.

Trait perma-swiftness and add rocket boots (the tooltip is a high dps attack with a low cooldown as well).  It is among the most mobile classes in the game with these two abilities.   If you use medkit you don't have to constantly be switching kits either as you can stack a minute or two of swiftness with moderate boon duration buffs and using medkit 5.

Also if you are not broke runes of the traveler are pretty much perfect for engis now.

I would straight up drop about 30 bucks for one of the rainbow farting clouds from infantile mode.

I would disagree, engineers can easily run perma-swiftness or near perma swiftness in a variety of builds.  That overrides the runspeed bonus of travelers (unless travelers is a unique mechanism that stacks run speed boosts, but that would be a departure from every other speed boosting ability).

Kinda a  fiddle fucky way to to get perma swiftness though.

I did guild events tonight, the guild JP chest dropped a Angchu Weapon Chest that allowed me to choose an Ascended weapon with Power/Toughness/Crit Damage on it.

Not much use on my warrior but my engineer rocks it with Flamethrower spec and toughness converting to power trait.

Nice to see that I've saved myself 2 weeks of crafting :)

Everyone should have a 25% signet.  Since there are no mounts, swiftness is essentially the GW2 mount.  In this light, it's silly to say "some classes must spend trait points for a mount and others just get one for no trait points."  As an engineer who doesn't use the toolbelt kit, it's extra painful to lose 10 points just to not be slow.

I don't quite see it that way.
My Ranger/Eles/Thieves/Necro can use a signet but that's a Skill Slot gone that removes some versatility from what they do. My Warriors on the other hand trait it as it's in a line that I max, freeing up a slot. The trait is interchangeable just as a signet is. All classes can put traveller runes on - I dropped some power on my engineer to do so (I had Flame Citadel runes on) but am not fiddling with kits and played with my gear to make it back up.

My Guardians and Mesmers can grant run speed to my group, but not permanently. It's a trade off but it's what they do and in a WvW group it's a godsend. No class is perfect, but all do useful things. Only necros get access to all 3 options (trait/sig/rune) and ele's get staff swiftness for the group.

Builds are about compromise, if you want X you give up Y.

Run speed isn't something that should require a big tradeoff for, though. A slot skill, especially on some classes, isn't actually that big a deal, but being forced down a trait line or use a specific weapon you otherwise hate (like I really kind of hate focus for mesmer) is. Like Crumbs said, it's not like there are mounts or anything in this game to put people on a level playing field, and in WvW, I would much prefer everyone be able to keep up instead of have stragglers because the field combo cap left them out and now they're juuuuust enough behind that the guardian swiftness puddles fade juuuust before they get to them (this has happened to my mesmer so many fucking times, and no my own runspeed group buff is not enough to catch me up). I don't like that some classes have to give up more than others to have a non-painful run speed, and think that's a weird imbalance to allow.

Clearly the answer is to UP THE BASE RUNNING SPEED.  :why_so_serious:

17th patch preview is up:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/september-17-2013/

Teq update as promised, LFG tool (yay for me, I think everyone else hates dungeons BUT I WANT PRETTY ARMOR)

WvW is gaining a new bloodlust buff to replace Orbs. Kinda iffy on that one.

Many other world bosses updated to not be mindless dps fests, supposedly.

I don't get the hate for dungeons.  Most of the paths are super easy and there are only really a few "hard" ones.  I've done hundreds of dungeon runs (have my DM title as well) and every single run has been a pickup group.  I've had maybe 3 or 4 bad groups in all of those runs.  At this stage of the game most people know the paths by heart and can do them in their sleep, so even if you get 1 or 2 noobs in the group (or are one yourself) the other group members are always quick to explain whatever is necessary.  My best guess is people tried to do them while under geared and had difficulty.  If you had a bad experience previously give it another shot, especially if you are 80 now.  There are very few paths that take more than 30 minutes, and a lot of them can be done in far less time.  You can find a group in seconds using http://gw2lfg.com/ and next patch the lfg tool will make it even easier.  Anyhow, just throwing that out there if anyone has thought about trying dungeons again.


Edit:  Oh, and if you are new to a particular dungeon path just make sure you say so at the beginning of the run.  People don't mind explaining the encounters if you make them aware ahead of time.

I have had maybe 2 successful dungeon runs out of 15 or so tries if you don't include cof path 1, that one has a good 90% success rate.

Definitely looking forward to the LFG tool. Honestly I didn't have many problems with pugging GW2 dungeons at all -- get a group with gw2lfg.com within minutes, go to the entrance, be done in 30 mins or less, profit. Didn't have any wipefests, even though it was my first time for all of them except for AC (which I ran to death in the first few months to get a set of PTV gear). A lot of the time the dungeon run consists of applying AOE blind / knockdowns to trash and knowing when to dodge on bosses, but there are some really interesting fights out there, too. Of course there are a few cockstabs (like Arah)... but I solve that problem by not running Arah.  :awesome_for_real: Oh yeah, fractals used to be finicky at times with bad pugs (hi swamp/dredge/cliffside), but the few times I LFG'd for low-level fractals were painless as well. Guess everyone knows when to do what by now?

That said: GW2 dungeoning is definitely unlike diku dungeoning. If anything, it reminds me of doing COH TFs without any tankers in the group... which certainly is enjoyable (one of my best COH PUGs was a 5-defender 2-controller 1-stalker ITF), but you lose a lot of the pacing offered by a traditional tank/healer/cc setup. It's a lot more "everyone look out for themselves, sync up damage cooldowns + use your group buffs/cleanses as appropriate, get downed people up ASAP unless it'd kill you too". As someone who plays a healer and/or tank in almost every game, this took some getting used to... and it doesn't scratch the same dungeoning itches as running a heroic in WOW/Rift/SWTOR. ymmv.

So i'm one ingredient away from crafting my first Ascended weapon.

And by one I mean 492 Dragonite Ore. How I have collected everything else and next to none of that baffles me a little.

Wish i could send you some of mine, i'm going on my third stack.  World bosses, you'll get most done right after reset.

Find your server's World Boss zerg train and hop on.  You'll have 500 Dragonite in two nights easily.  Temples and Dragons give the most.  If you can't find the zerg use this to know when to be where:

http://us.gw2stuff.com/en/overlay

If you don't like using an app you can just use the website instead:

http://us.gw2stuff.com/en/events/gate-of-madness

Thanks guys.

These account bound mats are a pain in my mostly casual playing ass. I have been able to get some more free time to play lately, but generally speaking a purchase at least a portion of my mats for all crafting off the BLT. I wouldn't even have a level 400 crafter, let alone a Grandmaster if I had to gather everything myself.

It's even worse for someone like me who plays a lot but doesn't want to bother with crafting until prices settle down.  I have an alt with 10 slot bags full of dust, that's 60 stacks already.

Temples and Dragons have me down to 1 dragonite ore left.

I've got another day of quickly running a zone chest circuit on my 80s for the Shards as well, then I can make something.

Just.. not really sure what I want. I think I'll just make the zerk longbow for my ranger. Everything else I'm playing right now is condition spec for WvW and gives few fucks about ascended weapons.

I had enough mats to get to 500 and am now having to restock my mats together for my first berserker ascended weapon. I'm tossing up between greatsword and axe although axe/mace is my primary set.

The time-gating shits me and may kill my interest in the game if they keep it up.

What did it take to get to 500? current guides have it at around 200g cost to raise the skill, which is nuts.

Theorycost. You probably already have a lot of the stuff.

Basically, refine T6 mats (ori, whatever) until it's green/grey, then combine for your ascended ores until 475, then make six to ten random exotics.

I figure it cost me between 80-100g to go from 400-500 but I had a few T6 mats saved up.

I had a lot of mats already but even so it set me back 56 gold. Refining is the big key to it and sell off your lesser mats that you aren't using.

Pretty good overview of what they are doing to the WvW borderlands: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/wuv/wuv/Bloodlust-in-the-Borderlands-Details

ehhh  I dunno I had no major problems with mainstream dungeons. I even  got to like lvl 35 fractals  with 90% success rate . Only the ones I  had problem with are those  which- no one runs those ever (like arah explorable)

All the regular content updates in the game proved too much pressure for me though - like if you miss the content patch, its poof - gone, you never see it again. defeats purpose of casually playing game

The regular patches have gotten me to play more, if the event is interesting to me I play it, if not I just wait for the next one.  That you only miss out on a title and some pretty loot for most of them pretty much makes them painless to skip.

I bumped an Elementalist up to 20 and gave it a whirl this morning and... wow I am awful.

Elements list is probably the hardest class to learn, especially at the start. Also due to the mechanics I really can't recommend jumping to 20 because they have so many abilities to use at once and you need to learn how to weave between them to survive.

Jumping one to 20 shouldn't be that bad. But they are strangely squishy until suddenly their bunker specs work. There's no slow ramp up into being able to survive and pull 10 mobs at a time easily, it's just a sudden tipping point.

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/October-15th-balance-skills-updates-preview

Interesting. High level preview of class changes coming in October.

So I got this a couple months back and have been playing exceedingly casually. This past weekend, thanks to jetlag, I put in a few more hours than usual, and got my warrior into the early 70s. I must say it felt like smacking directly into a content brick wall; there's one zone with a bunch of group events that are always empty and another with just enough content to get from 70 to 72 before everything's too high-level to kill alone.

What's a guy to do here? Spend a bunch of cash on crafting? Go farm a whole bunch of 30-60 zones' content? Literally farm mobs and event failures in that 70-75 maritime zone in the south of the map?

Help?

You won't level any slower doing lower level content, that's how the game is designed.

Cool, thanks. I'll go slum it then.

Yeah, you also get mostly (like, 90%) drops for your actual level from lower level mobs. The whole downleveling thing is one of the very best bits of pve, even if it doesn't handle high level well geared characters at all in any zone below level 60 (you basically one shot shit because the content isn't scaled for exotic gear)

edit: If it's not broken on your server, there's an event in northern Harathi Hinterlands that is the usual powerleveling spot. Use food + oil (for the xp bonuses, so even level 10 food works), and go nuts.

You can also level in WvW if

A)  Your server has a decent population in there capturing objectives.  Just follow the group and xp rolls in; I've found that the last 10 levels really fly in WvW.
B)  You like WvW

If you're more inclined to head to the lower level areas, just do as many events as possible.  Queensdale now has a zerg group doing the events racetrack style, usually with a commander tag (again, depends on your server).  

If you're on a low pop server and are bummed out by empty zones, you might want to consider a transfer or reroll.  It won't get any better once you hit 80.

If that's the Modniir centaur one, I tried that one once when I was appropriately-leveled for the zone and there were like 3 other people doing it with me. We failed hard on the final boss. Also, I hate centaurs. Them and Risen Brutes. Fuck getting launch ping-ponged by multiple dudes, it's not fun.


I'm on Gunnar's Hold (Int'l EU), which seems to control at least 50% of the WvW screen every time I open it; I've gotten into the zerg twice, but I can't quite figure out my place in WvW yet. Going to the frontlines = near instant death. Hanging around in the back = event XP only.

I've definitely seen the Queensdale champion train; people even announce the next objective in /map. So there seems to be a decent enough population for the established activities, just nothing in the 70-75 range. I figure everyone who's in that range is pretty much in a guild or something.

I did just spring for an orange greatsword, so I might play reaper in one of the 30-60 zones. Kill twenty dudes? Sure, that's just a bit of training and a Hundred Blades.  :drill:

As a warrior, spec for some level of survival (15-20 in the defense tree) and make sure your gear has at least one tank stat on it. Then make sure you have dolyak signet or balanced stance on your bar. You should be comically survivable in WvW, just keep moving and you'll learn when to dive and when to gtfo.

Last time I went in with my warrior was probably in the 30s or early 40s, still wearing late-20s +power gear and without a single point in defense. My current gear is power/vitality and I've got 15 points in defense, I think, (the one that gives extra regen for higher adrenaline levels) so I'll give it another shot some time.

Go to Frostgorge Sound.  Make sure you have the necessary Waypoints discovered to follow this map:

http://dulfy.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/gw2-champions-frostgorge-sound-map2.jpg

Ask in /map where the train is.  Follow the above sequence once you've found the train.

Profit.

It should be good xp and you'll rake in the gold.

I've never seen our zerg do ooze .  Honestly, I just do fish, kodan, norn and then skip over to drake.  I tend to miss wurm about 50% of the time because the zerg gets it so fast and then you have to hope you load really quick and that people aren't already killing drake.  And troll is just as bad as you can then miss troll entirely due to super mario jump misses and then you'll maybe miss fish.  

I have the worst luck with exotic drops.  A harpoon and a trident two days ago and then a bow with terrible stats yesterday.

I'm getting pretty bored with the champ farming, but it is good money, especially if you can upgrade the rare crafting mats.

So how are classes these days? I haven't played in quite some time and the last time I did:

I had a 60+ Mesmer that was kind of meh. Cool shatter or condition build. Real squishy, but didn't feel satisfying.
I had a 70+ Engineer that is just hurts playing. I was playing a shotgun like build where I would jump into a mob, blow it up and knock it back. Was kind of fun, but a lot of work for not much damage comparatively.
I had a 80 Necro that I really enjoyed playing as a pool/power build. Condition builds were annoying to me in any multi person fight because of stacking issues.

I had a 30+ Thief that was entertaining, but it got boring.

I never got past 20 with a Guardian/Warrior/Ranger/Ele

Has anything changed that made some of these classes much better? I would really like to dive back into my necro or engi but they had real limited builds. Also Ranger pets were always ass.

Worm and Troll I can never hit on JQ. Too large a zerg, and shit tends to drop in under 10 seconds.


As for classes: Mesmers are amazing, wonderful, and fucking awful to actually play imo.

Warriors are little gods with amazing access to everything who should never be allowed to whine about shit since their condi removal issues were worked on.

Necros are little gods with amazing access to everything but stability who should never be allowed to whine about shit, ever. But if you want to play condi you need to use exotics in order to steal room in the bleed stacks (basically if you're capping out a champ, it will prioritize the people with the highest bleed damage. Be that person, or use a power spec.)

Engineers are fiddly fucks. I enjoy playing mine, but dear lord does that class make you put in work to do the same shit everyone else has on one skill bar. They're amazing (especially condi, but same rules as condi necros in a group), but holy shit does it get tiring to play after a while.

I switched from a zerker nerco using the 100% crit in DS build to full condition (using Rabid and Dire) and that wonky condition spike build with dhuumfire and terror. It's absolute bullshit in WvW, and pretty bullshit in PVE as well. The only real thing it's bad at is tagging champs in the frostgorge train. But Epidemic in large encounters like Aether farms? Amazing.

I remember trying forever to get a DS build to work. Never really did.

What wonky condition build are you using with those runes?

Outside that, looks like nothing really changed.

Power DS specs are 30/0/0/0/30. 10 free points people usually put in spite. They rely heavily on the new GM trait that gives you +50% crit in DS, so you wander around tossing out 6-8k lifeblasts like it's going out of style.


Personally, I'm running 30/20/0/0/20, which is a dhuumfire/terror build.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQQQNArYWjMaF7tbKb87JEoH9CuAiRKOmghSR5kOA-jEyAINBRaBIVJQ5wioxWNLiGrmBTlSEV7RKiWtQAPWDA-w

At least one of those Rabid items is secretly Dire, because Rabid is hard to come by. But all but two pieces you can buy for temple Karma if you're sitting on 600k or so. Signet of Spite  can be swapped for Corrupt Boon if you're planning on hitting a bunch of guardian abusers, it's primary purpose in life is just to give you something long ranged and rapid to spread with epidemic.

I'm running the Zerker 100% crit DS build on my Necro and having pretty limited success in WvW. Partly this is me because I'm just not very good at it right now, but I think I would do a better job with a different spec and keep looking at full condition.

Zerker can basically burst someone down before they can blink. But it lacks staying power in my mind. Condi allows you to disengage without completely removing pressure from the target. But be aware that condi's meta is a bit too strong right now and will likely eat a nerf in the near future.

Right now Condition builds are absolutely destroying small scale pvp, and hit a wall against organized WvW due to stacked AE condition removal. As long as you're okay with that and understand that sometimes you won't be able to dent a group, it's awesome.

Also: epidemic steals other people's conditions and applies them with your condition damage to the new targets. I have done a comical amount of damage by spreading 10stacks of confusion and guardian burns all over the place. Why does that skill only have a 15s cooldown, WHY?

So yeah, they do have something to whine about.

Ehh, not really. Their incredibly long health bar and lifestealing makes up for a lot of that.

Not even close.  The entire game seems designed around dodging or blocking big attacks, and Necromancers are hands down the worst at doing that.

Maybe in PVE. In WvW necromancers are very noticably slower for me to kill than, say, elementalists, engineers, or rangers.

Necro's big weakness is just the lack of stability, if they had access to easy stability they would be utterly overpowered. They also have the added bonus of having a universal zerg weapon in staff. Doesn't matter what spec you are, or even what level, equip staff, collect bacon. Very similar to thieves and shortbow, just a standard secondary zerg weapon to carry around.


Warrior's are just like, in the wrong game currently. They passively regen more health the most classes can actively heal and spam long duration stuns like it was DaoC before immunity timers. They can stack ridiculous amounts of stability, invulnerability and condition removal and baseline have more armor and hp then most bunker specs. They also have one of the best long range weapons in the game that they hardly ever use because their melee weapons are just that good. There's a reason your standard WvW zerg is like 30% warrior.


Ranger's are the best at anything where their pet A) lives and B) hits. This is sadly limited to Solo PvE and defending nodes in SPvP. They have bunker specs that make them immortal and single target condition damage comparable to necros. Their power builds are sub par, but they can tag zergs easily enough. Contribute not as much, but tag easy. In large scale stuff, the pet just gets jibbed and it's gone and your at 75% power at best. Really fucking good at solo pve though, if your goal is just casual leveling and exploration, can't go wrong with the ranger.


Mesmers are portal/veil/timewarp bots.

Necros are pretty good in WvW (I live a surprisingly long time, considering I am upleveled when I play her), but I prefer my staff elementalist for that when I'm being "serious." I just ... I really like dropping fields for people, I guess. A lot.

I want to love my mesmer, but it's pretty meh in WvW. My main role as a mesmer seems to be "help golems get around and tear down doors faster." I wish GW2 mesmers were more like GW1 mesmers, basically.

Which ranged weapon is that? I currently use the rifle as my ranged weapon, largely because I like the aesthetic. I found a shitty gun with a cool model a while back and I've been transmuting it onto all my newer, better-statted rifle finds. It's also nice as I can stay at range when fighting special mobs and bosses.

The longbow is just too Legolas for my taste, but if it's better at Murderin' Folks, I'll use it in WvW.

A lot of tears over warriors being OP on the forums - it makes me love my warrior even more.

I so want to try this, going to take one of my warriors into WvW with it tonight

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5FiSGEhyxM

Longbow yes. (Rifle is fine too mind you, just more gimmicky)

Most ranger would walk over their own mothers to get their hands on the warrior longbow. It works for either power or condition builds, doesn't need much (if any) trait support and has some of the best individual skills in the game that also all work together as a complete weapon. It's also a bag farming machine.


It's just usually overshadowed by stuff like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_syOEID1nU

Well, there is veil and feedback too, but yeah. I'd say staff elementalist is the best class for a wvw zerg. Playing a warrior is much more personally rewarding (longbow / greatsword for a combination of ranged aoe tagging and high melee damage + mobility), but a well-placed elementalist field can swing the balance of the battle right there. Though in practice I find that most group v group engagements depend on who gets the jump on the other first, which is where portals / veil matter a lot.

Warrior survivability is pretty good in general pve, too. My [staff or S/D] ele feels a lot more squishy in dungeons, even though my warrior is in full zerker gear and my elementalist is in a mix of PTV and Celestial. However, I'll say that the warrior needs a bit of support to be effective: someone making sure that the trash mobs aren't attacking the warrior (via aggro stealing or aoe blinds), or putting down fields to whirl around in. Only weakness is condition damage, at least in the cookie cutter 'omg max dps' build that I use right now...

Just thought I'd share my main warrior Setanta De Danaan (PvE spec 30/0/0/10/30 Axe/Mace + Greatsword) and his weapon skins:


The GS skin is why I am in no rush for a legendary and I love the back-piece. I have had them since their respective events and finally decided to equip them rather than cash them in on the market. He runs knight's gear with ascended jewellery.

So far the GS is ascended Zojja's (berserker) and I'm hoping to make the axe tonight or tomorrow followed by the mace in another 4-5 days.

My alt warrior Cuchulain De Danaan runs full berserker in the same spec - I love the Greatsword - and it was a cheap karma one at that:

That warrior video is crazy. The guy never took any damage.

The rifle warrior? At least in the first half nobody actually targeted him for some reason. The fight in the lord's room was particularly bad for that in that I didn't see that many friendlies and everyone was just letting him walk around.

But in zerg fights a decent amount of the fight is determined by how well your tanky folks draw attention and how well your dps-y folks pick out soft targets. If we're doing well at that, I'll frequently take nearly no damage during a clash on my necro. If we're doing poorly at it, I'll get chain stunned into the dirt in seconds.

The one time that's not the goal (avoid tanks, kill squishies) is if you have Corrupt Boon up and want to snipe one of their guardian tanks. That skill is seriously dickish against Guardians and I laugh every time one goes into bullshit bunker mode just to immediately die to boon stripping/some other dude hitting him once + auto spinal shivers.

re:  Necro

Apparently I'm getting very lucky or doing something right in WvW, as my Necro hardly ever dies.  The extra health and DS have been mentioned a million times.  Also plague:  for some reason I stop getting attacked when I pop it.  

Necro is great for getting people to stop attacking you.  People tend to run away when they set off a staff mark, especially chillblains.  That and Plague 3 cause cripples which usually cause panic.  People also tend to run away when feared :)  Staff 5.

Staff 4 is a blast finisher which should be placed at your feet when your group has stacked and put fields down.  Get some of that sweet combo lovin.

I've gone back to using wells.  If you've got suffering/corruption/power on your bar, plop them down during big fights and watch what happens.  It was difficult for me to give up epidemic, as a successful hit would cause a million bags to drop, but the advantage of wells to my allies and I was so obvious after a few big battles that I don't miss it as much.

Here's the build (I found it on the forums with a search for "wellomancer."  It's working quite nicely):

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/necromancer/?5.0|7.1g.h2.g.1g.h1|6.1g.h15|1n.7r.1g.7r.1n.7r.1g.7r.1n.7r.1g.7r|2t.d13.2v.d1a.3v.d16.2v.d14.3v.d16.2v.d14|0.p60.p57.k38.0|15.7|3r.4d.4a.48.4f|e

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-17-September

Looking like all the leaked class changes are still pending for the mid-october patch. So this is just boss updates, WVW map/bloodlust change, and bug fixes.

Is the LFG tool in this update?

It's in limited beta like the trading house at launch.  And making a world boss so easily griefed is fucking retarded.

My server has not figured him out yet.

Pretty sure no one has, even with people doing the right thing on the cannons and about 100 people dpsing him you still only get him to like 75%.  We had a dev helping us and didn't get him under 90%.

Blackgate took him down last night apparently, with over 120 people in TS.

After playing last night I wondered which Blizzard devs had just moved to the GW2 team. They've ramped the difficulty up a tad too high.

Gollem MK2 is togher but ok, Wurm and SB are fine, FE is a prick as melee and on a 180 ping, Teq was un-doable with 50 randoms.

I was already ignoring Jormag because it was tedious and not fun. Teq is now added to that list.

For bosses that drop shitty greens and blues, the time/effort is ridiculous and when you factor in having to do them for mats for ascended I really questioned the game for the first time since release.

They have made the horrible assumption that after 12 months of the game, these bosses should be harder, despite the fact that on Yak's Bend, we always had enough people to take them down and the fine balance between numbers and difficulty were there. I'll be interested to see where the fine line between numbers and overflow is.

I completely disagree. Games need challenging content and this game only challenges your patience with the farming. All the content doesn't need to be hard, but I think they did a pretty good job making one encounter pretty difficult. Probably needs tuning, but soemthing that isn't immediately facerolled by everyone is a good thing.

It gives the game depth.

If they made all the other bosses "hard" by just adding hps so all you are doing is safely wacking away at it for an extra 10 minutes, that's just bad design.

I'm probably just going to ignore Teq until they tune him lower.  Easy enough to do, I've got toons to level.  

I don't really want to bother with team speak and/or fail because some goofball grabbed the turrets or we don't have decent PVE commanders on.

Luckily there's a lot to do when you've been away for a long time.  SAB and this haven't exactly wowed me.

I tried the Tequila fight last night since it popped up right before bed, as well as the new Golem.

On the one hand, some of the mechanics are kinda fun for a bit. Evading poison clouds/electrical bursts and jumping over waves/fists is kinda neat; it's all on your own timing and skill.

On the other hand, after 50+ people pounding at Tequila for ten minutes, it was down maybe 5% health. The golem was similar - a brief (SNES-Megaman-like) attack cycle, but a huge sponge of HP so it took somewhere on the order of 13 minutes to grind through. Shooting for minutes on end at an essentially stationary object isn't fun, it's tedious.

Less HP and more active play would be nice. Perhaps stuff akin to the Jormag bits where you have to make him vulnerable by doing slightly different things; you know, take down the protection, then shoot the weak spot. Just like an old SNES shooter.

As is, I prefer the old taxiing-to-victory autoattack bosses.

Having one big badass boss is fine in my books and I'll probably ignore it for the most part. We got it down to 75% last night and my reward was 2 greens.  :oh_i_see:

Not a whole lot of incentive to go back other than "hey we finally did it and I was there for the first time".

I respec'd my Warrior last night though and decided to see how terrible I could be in WvW, and it was pretty damn fun with the new control points and some smaller group fights. Our matchup this week ran away from us, so there isn't a lot of reason to go out into the Borderlands, but that was pretty good time.

The difficulty of Teq is hardly the point.  The comparative difficulty of completing Teq on an overflow vs a home server is the point.

Home servers have public voice chat channels and guild coordination.  Overflows are random people from random servers. 

It's a lame change.  It's an answer to the call for raids, except it's a 15 minute sudden death raid at random times with random people.  I imagine one would need a third hand and some fleet enemas to do this and poop in a sock successfullly. 

Luckily it's mediocre loot and not necessary at all.  If the other chest events are made like this, I wish this game luck.

Apparently I stumbled on a serious Teq attempt last night.  Usually if it's even moderately close to expected Teq time or there's an organized attempt, the zone boots me to an overflow. Decided to stick around.

Despite what looked like an attempt that wasn't going to get it done, Teq scampered off at like maybe 3%, if that.   There were no serious mess ups.  And yet, still didn't down him.  That's got to be a bit frustrating, but the response from the pins reminded me why I don't do organized PvE much.  Instead of "good job, we'll get him next time" it was mostly "you guys suck dick.  do I need to bring my warrior? jesus, dps, learn how to do damage.  why is this so fucking hard for you retards? etc etc etc"

edit: It's funny, none of my toons are geared in "optimal" Teq gear, at least for the DPS stack.   They're either a bit too squishy, a bit too crit based or a bit too condition damage.  I guess this fight favors high vit/to/power builds.  Seemed to do really well at the turret defense, however.

Once the luster has worn off and there's a new build out, is anyone going to bother doing Teq?  The non-organized attempt I saw (same day as other) barely even damaged him.

This, other than the achievement for doing it - there's no real reason for me to keep going to this event already. My luck for good drops is awful and I hate running off from whatever I am doing to go fail an event over and over. It's already not worth my time, especially when you compare it to Scarlet's invasion and the jackpot each of those was.

I'm already ignoring it as hard as I can. I'd rather they kept the ball-kicking raid shit in their own little corner instead of deciding to make world bosses harder or whatever, but ... eh. Ignorable enough.

I ignore a lot of shit in this game, I've noticed.   :why_so_serious:

Pretty easy to do that when there's no sub fee.  I have serious doubts I'll ever do a regular dungeon or fractal.  I may some day finish my thief's personal story.

Furthest I've gotten on the personal story was somewhere in the 50's before going "fuck it, I just don't care." I like the early stuff well enough, when it has little shout-outs to the stuff you picked during chargen as your background and such, but once you pick an order it gets way bland.

Also the voice acting is so bad. Soooo bad. It's a good illustration of how important directors are.

I ignore a lot of shit as well.  Basically right now I'm exploring and fighting/doing quests that arise from said exploring.  When I get bored, I hop to an alt, rinse and repeat.  But I personally don't like the story quests/dungeons and don't give much of shit for fractals and PVP.  More power to those that do.

A huge fucking world with lots of nooks and crannies along with best in class combat.  Love it.

I WvW once or twice a month. Other than that I just don't see anything worth doing in the game for me that I haven't already done, and I find the replayability of a lot of this stuff very low. I thought about trying to level another class to try in WvW, and the only way I can stick with it is just by leveling IN WvW, every time I try to PVE I get bored with the repetitiveness of it all about 15 minutes in.

I just finished 100% world completion for the second time, have crafted 3 ascended weapons, completed personal story including Arah on 5 characters, done guild rushes and puzzles and challenges, run fractals and dungeons and done WvW.

The game has lost its shine for me and Teq etc isn't going to solve that.

Teq is a clusterfuck decision by Aanet. Like SAB2.0 they polarised their user base but this time took away a part of the daily chance to get precursers/ectos/ascended mats because of the need for heavy organisation in what was a casual-friendly game. People liked coming in, taking a shot at old Teq and walking away having fun and loot for 5 min and moving on. New Teq should have been called "New Big Angry Motherfucker Dragon", stuck in a living story zone as an option. That way the status quo wouldn't have been as badly disturbed by an old/new dragon that needed 80+ coordinated people killing him. He also should have had scaling on him.

My old game play used to be; family time, log in, dailies, chest bosses, fractal or dungeon, log out. It was fun because I could... have fun. They then upped the hit points on Wurm and Gollum making them.... boring. Seriously, what the hell were they thinking? To make these challenging... you can hit them some more. They also over-tuned the electricity grid on gollum making it difficult for higher ping players (fire elemental shares this issue). It should have had increasing damage the longer you stayed in it, not what appears (at 180 international ping) to be a nuke on my warrior. What really shits me is that to have a better chance at survival on these bosses, it's better for melee classes to equip ranged weapons. WTF????? This is fractal mindset at it's worst. In fact, it's the biggest design flaw in the game and has been there since day 1 as some bosses in dungeons are easier to range down.

Living story is shit. It's not interesting enough and doesn't bring much to the table. I rate it as just above personal story but only because it doesn't have Trahearne. They need to be thinking of opening up new lands/exploration or even an expansion.

WvW is stagnant - it needs something to get people in there. Maybe they should have put Teq in a borderland :D

I may be a touch jaded from overplaying the game I guess.

Unfortunately the new WvW stuff isn't going to help - it's a win-more mechanic, which is the opposite of what it needs.

I don't disagree with your assessments, Set, but..


Perhaps.

I'm so behind on everything, that I'm overplaying like hell (I usually don't play a single game for my entire gaming time, but I am here) and not yet feeling any burnout.  My alt-itis is making me a bit sick of leveling, however.

Yeah, the new WvW thing is just terrible. I understand (I SUPPOSE) wanting to break up zergs some (as someone who likes the zerg, I am not a big fan of this ... there was already shit to do as a small havoc squad, dammit), but the way it's been done just makes the population imbalances even more glaring, because Server A might have 80 people in the zone and able to break into 40 and 40, while Server B only has 40 total (and Server C is asleep). So Server A has a zerg that can capture all the horseshit, so that the other zerg, when meeting equal numbers, has a huge buff to overpower Server B. And they get more points to boot!

Basically, it's like the relic problem in DAoC all over again, where the rich get richer and the lower population servers in a match up (even just from time zone to time zone) have even less reason to voluntarily get steamrolled. Bigger population was already an advantage, now you get a freaking buff for it.

Some weird changes indeed.  The only thing that concerns me is that the team sees Teq as a success because it's "hard," and changes the game to fit this model on a wider scale.  The final nail would be to ensure that the best loot comes from only the "hard" content. 

I put "hard" in quotes not only because I like to set up jokes, but because this event isn't fucking hard.  The game mechanics of spam clicking "join your buddy in the main instance" and having to camp for hours is the hard part.  The difficulty level of Teq is easier than the first boss in Icecrown Citadel (Marrowgar).  And when you die, you can WP and run back to the fight.

The stupid part of this event is that "we can haz raid now?"  but let's have the raid at random times with random people.  And instead of 10 or 25, or even the old days of 40 players, we have 80+, most of whom are in overflows with an even more random set of people! 

 :uhrr: :uhrr: :uhrr: :uhrr:
 :ye_gods: :ye_gods: :ye_gods: :ye_gods:

I've been out for almost a year now, but have been thinking of coming back. I left just after Lost Shores launched, in part because I was playing at an addictive level that only 10 days of pneumonia could undo :-)

Anyway, just how lost will I be if I come back, and what should I pick up. Had an 80 Ele, 20 something Engy and a teens Mesmer. Keeping casually interested over the last 10 or so months it looks like most of the craziest changes were endgame type things, so is picking up and continuing an alt the best way to ease back in? And are all classes still pretty viable, or has there been some that have gotten much better while others have languished.

And no way am I asking any of this on the Oboards :wink:

The best way to get into the game is to have a goal.  There is really not much of and endgame, ascended weapons and legendaries are a tiny improvement over exotic stuff.  Did you enjoy wvwvw? or pvp? do you like making your characters look just right? dungeons? exploring?  I finished my legendary a week or so ago and found myself playing very little because i no longer had a goal in mind. 

Also, I don't think the game is all that different.  The high volume of temporary content was just that:  temporary.  New skins and achievements basically.  Actual class changes have occurred but they're not so huge as to alter play style (in my experience).  (Do make sure to see if trait points have been refunded though!)

So if you were to just futz around with your toons as you like, I think it would be pretty easy to get back into the groove pretty fast.

I started and quit exactly when you did.  I don't see many changes honestly, but then again I don't pvp or do dungeons/fractals.

If you don't do WvW (and even then the change isn't even a week old yet (I think?), so it's new for everyone) or dungeons/fractals, I don't think there's much different that isn't Living World nonsense, and right now the Living World thing is just derpy LOOK WE MADE THIS WORLD BOSS WAY HARDER that is easily ignored.

Cool ok. I didn't PvP (in any flavor) nor dungeon much, so it's cool to know the game is still approachable. I loved the casual play coupled with the random social large scale outdoor raid type stuff with zone controls stuff. I'll patch on up this week and see what's what on Friday.

Did they ever fix it so that regardless of what guild you're "active" in (whatever that was called), you could still see who in what other guilds is online and and where they were?

 :uhrr: SWAMP POOP EPISODE TEN MILLION :uhrr:

WTF is this bloodlust in WvW?  Logged in last night after a 2 week break and Orbs were back. 

Border Lands have 5 SPvP style capture points, hold 3 points for 2 minutes and you gain a stack of 'bloodlust' which gives you 50 bonus stats for each stack and most importantly, causes any STOMP you perform to add 1 point to your realms point total.

AKA: The OVERmanned buff. It's causing already lopsided matches to snowball into hell. I think something like 30-40% of Tier1 point totals are coming from Stomps now. I don't expect it to last longer then the first WvW season.

It really is the usual problem of "I want a tangible gain for winning wvw!" followed by "oh yeah, if we do that suddenly winning becomes a snowball situation."

On the plus side, they're kind of fun to fight over most of the time.

That hasn't been my experience. What I see happen is the zerg moves in, cleans them out and leaves a thief group to back cap to delay the flip until the zerg finishes its PPT objective and returns to clean out the middle again.

So basically they decided that if the WvWers didn't want to go sPvP, they'd bring the sPvP to the WvWers whether they like it or not, with buffs so stupid they'll be forced to do it.  :uhrr:

Back in GW1 I pledge not to buy this game and nearly broke that pledge before I noticed the lack of team deathmatch. One year in ill wait for a second drop in price before scooping up the bargin bin, let the gf buy me diablo 3 cause it can't be that bad :drill:

I really hope they don't NGE this game.  They're using this rapid fire content change model as an excuse to experiment with the live game.  I'm just a caveman, I fell on some ice and later I got thawed out by some of your scientists, but to me this seems like a bad thing.

Anet is historical bad at understand what make their pvp fun and is more apt to take the path of least resistance. 

I went to the Teq fight last night on GoM to get my daily and just see how far we had advanced in killing it.

There was maybe 20 people there? During primetime. I just ran around rezzing people for the daily and then afk'd for the last 8 minutes or so while the event finished. Apparently JQ guested to us at some point and killed the dragon for us and since then it's been a ghost town.

I actually got in for a kill a few days ago.  It took me actually not getting into an overflow (I'm on JQ) and then pretty much goofing around in the zone for 2 hours until it started. 

I guess we were bad on DPS.  At least that's what the guy on vent kept telling everyone.  I think it was downed with a minute or two left.   Didn't really look like a full attempt, there must have been a number of AFKers or people just in the zone for other reasons. 

They need to make the effective number needed for these fights a lot lower, IMO.  I've heard he's scaled to 80 people, no matter how many you have.  I don't see myself making a grand effort to try this again.

Now, I'm trying to leveling a mesmer.  Trying being the key word.  I feel like I don't do any damage.

I got a kill a few days ago too, the first 25% is the only real challenge after that it is just beating up on a punching bag.

Mesmers take a LONG time to start to feel good, unfortunately. I was like ... level 40 before I started thinking, "OK, I think I can dig this." And I only got that far because I bought the perfect outfit for him and GODDAMMIT I NEED TO LEVEL HIM TO JUSTIFY IT.

I have a token to level a class to 20.  I was going to use it for a Guardian but are Mesmers cool at 20?  I tried one from scratch and was unimpressed.

Mesmers are cool at 60. Having illusions on dodge roll talented makes them come alive as does the GS boosts. Levelling should be greatsword only. That kind of limits them in levelling as the other weapon set is utility. Having said that, I levelled my second one with sword/pistol but was paper thin and went back to GS.

This is how my experience went with classes (x2)

Fun/ease of play from zero:
Warrior (any weapon set bar mace/shield but big props to GS & Axe/Mace)
Ranger (Greatsword Sword/Torch Sword/Warhorn Longbow Shortbow) - get a tanky pet or you will cry when it goes splat. Get ready for dungeon tears if you try to take one in)
Guardian (Greatsword/Hammer but mace/shield & Sword/Focus or Sword/Torch is fun too)

"Meh" until 60, comes alive at 80:
Necromancer (pets or conditionmancer kiter)
Mesmer (GS scepter/focus) - 70 is really the sweetshot but I learnt to dodge roll on my first mes.

Not fun until 60 plus lack of survivability until you "get it":
Thief (Sword/Pistol and either P/P or shortbow) - you are a glass cannon, hated my first one as I made the mistake of levelling D/D

Oddball, horrible levelling, comes alive at 70-75
Elementalist (Dagger/Dagger or Scepter/Dagger) - avoid staff, prepare to do a lot to equal 2 button presses on Warrior/Ranger/Guardian

Screwball, not fun until 60+ if you are a masochist
Engineer (Flamethrower or kit swapper) - the red haired step child. Don't forget that if you have a kit equipped then you can swap to your primary weapons (rifle or pistol/shield). Flamethrower is a 4 button wonder and you need elixirs to boost them plus the ability to not hurl your monitor out the window when you see a #1 skill missmissmissmissmissmiss when you circle strafe or otherwise see the mob in your cone. I swear FT has it's own RNG. Bombs are fun but be brepared to buy a new keyboard and grenades are fun but the lack of autocast on #1 requires another spare keyboard. As with the elementalist, you do a lot to match what other classes do with a few keypresses and auto-attack. Not the king of Aoe, that's a necromancer with staff or a thief with a bow.

That's just my take on it from my experience, take it for what it's worth.

I went sword/pistol + GS for leveling on my mesmer and honestly I spent a lot more time being sword/pistol than GS. I didn't feel particularly squishy.

But yeah, even at 20, mesmers are still kinda feh. I would probably spent it on the mesmer if I wanted to level one at ALL, because the guardian is pretty fun early on and hitting 20 would be pretty trivial as one of those. ;)

You can level cooking to 400 for a gold and a half, it is still 7 free levels and highly recommended along with that scroll for a mesmer.

Did they change this? It used to be 10 levels per crafting 0- 400 on all types.

Yup, now it's 10 levels for 0-500 but only three skills so far go to 500.

This game lost me once I'd reached level cap with one character.

The events were uninteresting. Zerging is terrible gameplay and forcing me to turn visual settings way down to get playable framerates with 100s of players on-screen makes the gorgeous game engine pointless.

Map completion % being character-specific was also a turn-off. Very alt-unfriendly.

Never did any of the dungeons. Not a one. Didn't read or hear anything about them or the community that made me thing they'd be fun.

Patched and played for like two hours last night, spend almost the whole time just relearning how to play a level 10 Mesmer, plowing through all the UI changes, and trying to figure out what I needed to keep in my inventory vs bank vs what I could toss. Got a bunch of chests including some PvP stuff I'll never use but dunno what to do with.

Dinged 11 just farming stuff around Rata Sum to relearn the abilities :-)

For mesmer, I have to go GS/Staff if I'm doing events, otherwise it's GS/Scepter+Focus.  The swiftness from focus feels like a necessity, because you don't get a movement speed signet. You are the slowest thing on the planet and it's incredibly frustrating.  

With half of your skills dedicated to "making players look like idiots", you have a lot of stuff that's just dumb in PVE.  So, I mainly just focus on crap that produces clones for me to shatter.  And greatsword is nifty, because every ability does damage.

I'm enjoying my fully geared necro in WVW. I can actually kill people 1v1, and I don't feel helpless outside the zerg (my staff ele fills tha role nicely  :awesome_for_real:).  Epidemic is the best thing ever.  Rogues are still horseshit. I laughed a lot when one jumped me yesterday and promptly got slapped with corrupted boon and a dhuumfire proc.  Die die die die die die, dirty rogue.

I'm no expert but from what I understand it's generally better to focus on either Power or Condition.  Mesmer Greatsword is a Power weapon while the Scepter is a Condition weapon.  Probably doesn't matter at lower levels but once you hit 40 and have the clone on dodge trait, try going GS/Sword+Focus.  Even though Sword main hand is a melee weapon, the 2 skill makes you evade every attack while it channels.  With practice being in melee range of most mobs isn't as dangerous as you'd think.

For your utility skills, crap that produces clones is usually fine but don't overlook Arcane Thievery and/or Null Field for when you get to mobs that start throwing conditions on you.

I still hate my Necro in WvW but that's because I refuse to switch over to a condition build (and can't afford all new gear to change over anyway).  Since the power build has crap range, little mobility and next to no defense, there's not much point in playing that character anymore.  Between the Necro, Thief and Mesmer, I have easily the most success playing the Shatter Mesmer with Staff/Sword+Torch* in WvW but I'm sure that has a lot to do with playstyle.

*Yes, Staff and Torch are generally Condition weapons which goes against the conventional wisdom, but I use both for the utility and rely on the sword and shatters for damage.  I'd switch the torch for a pistol except there's a trait that adds a condition removal to activating torch skills, plus having an extra stealth never hurts.  The torch phantasm is so bad though.  SO BAD.

Sword/pistol for mesmer is really fun in PvE, as I mentioned earlier. I just sucked up being slow most of the time (I would run with that "get a random boon" signet while leveling because at least I had a CHANCE of not being super stupidly slow). I forget what DWing swords gets you, that might be fun, but I really love the pistol phantasm, so I didn't use it much. :P

WvW I use GS mainly, because I fucking hate scepter but I hate being in melee range as a mesmer even more, and not having focus for swiftness makes me depressed. If I know for sure I'm going to be keeping up with a zerg that's pooping out a lot of swiftness buffs, I'll consider strapping on a staff, as it's a pretty good defensive weapon.

Won't lie, though, I basically only play a mesmer in WvW when we really, really, really, really, really, REALLY need a portal/time warp bitch.

As for necro, I just use a staff and whatever armor I happen to be wearing (I honestly forget what the stats are on the shit she's wearing, it's like ... condi/power/vit mostly, maybe? It's a mess.) and still feel pretty good. I carry axe/dagger for basically no good reason (axe is more exciting during PvDoor). In theory I am trundling towards something vaguly like this (http://www.guildwars2hub.com/guides/professions/necromancer-build-guide-wellsdaggerfocusstaff) but we'll see. I'm level 61 now!  :why_so_serious:

Still like the elementalist best for zerging around in WvW. I can't (usually) kill thieves (fuck thieves) but I've gotten a lot better at running away from them so they get bored and go away.  :oh_i_see:

How effective is stacking +healing on a support staff ele?  My necro seems OK at killing people, so my ele I'd like to take in more of a wvw support role.   Just bring fields, boons, condition removal and healing yet no actual damage.

Objectively speaking, the offhand sword is probably better for PvE than the offhand pistol if you aren't using the focus for speed.  Offhand sword has a block that can spit out a clone on 4 and the swordsman phantasm on 5.  I seem to remember using GS/Sword+Sword for PvE back when I started my Mesmer, but I ended up leveling that character almost entirely in WvW.  As for speed, the reason I can't afford new gear for my Necro is because I finished off a Travelers set of runes for the +25% speed.  I already had 2 from somewhere that I didn't remember having so I just went ahead and bought 4 more.  That's how much I hated moving so slowly on my Mesmer.

As for healing gear, I have no idea.  I haven't tried using any.  I'd look around for a recent water attunement build and go from there.

I dunno! I'm power/vit/toughness gear-wise. I support pretty well with just that, because just the act of laying down water fields is a big help. I dunno how the math works out for people that stack healing.

I've considered buying my mesmer the traveller's runes, but haven't pulled the trigger yet, mostly because I only run with the zerg in WvW and I don't use him for anything else. Also block skills make me annoyed, so that's probably the reason I dumped dual wielding swords.

Sooo.. I finally bought this last night because it was on sale enough to break my threshold finally.  After dealing with NCSoft's terrible account management (I have a Lineage II and GuildWars acct I haven't used in 6 years and had to go through a really arcane recovery process)  I was able to get in and made a warrior.

Now I find myself questioning, is this the best choice?  How are warriors to play? Seems strong now is it a terrible class at the end?  Setana's post up above seems to indicate they're "OK" but is that throughout?

Warriors are basically playing a whole different game were everything is about three notches easier than for every other class.  Everyone of their weapons falls between "great" and "holy fucking shit". They have the best DPS while having high hps armor self healing good crowd control and crowd control avoidance.  They also get buffed every patch.  So yeah, good choice.

Warriors are solid throughout and have a few viable specs.

Right now I am testing a sword n board and hammer spec with %98 immobilize reduction and it's pretty swell.

Well awesome. If my usual jinx applies expect them to be nerfed heavily sometime in the next 2-3 months.

You bastard!   :awesome_for_real:

Patch notes (https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/release-notes-for-twilight-assault/)

They could probably use one, so thanks!  :why_so_serious:

Started working toward 500 artificing.. got to 452.  I don't think I have the money to see this through.  

Other than champ trains, is there a reliable way to make money solo?

Anytime.

My past resume of work:

WoW:
Druid; BC era
DK; Lich King
Hunter: BC
Shadow Priest: Vanilla
Rogue: Cataclysm

DAOC:
Warden

COH:
Regen Brawler

 :why_so_serious:

I do it with chest events, Scarlet invasion (still happens), and selling mats.

When crafting, do you do buy orders or do you buy instantly?  Took me awhile but finally discovered that buy orders are awesome.

Warriors are in a sweet spot right now. For PvE Axe/Mace and Greatsword is an awesome combo at 30/0/0/10/30. Fast hands means weapons swapping to maintain stacks of might and the healing signet is just fantastic. Last night's fractal run had me pulling 21K 100blades (or more). Switching to Longbow and Axe/Mace on the Grawl fractal dropped the DPS a bit but the numbers were still hitting hard. In WvW roaming or zerging, just strap on a mace/shield and it doesn't matter what you have, people avoid you. I've taken Rifle/Greatsword into WvW and had a ball as well. I'm actually running my guardian through Orr etc at the moment and wondering why I feel paper thin - I'm not, guardians are still tough as all hell, but the longer a mob is alive, the more damage I take. With the guardian I take on 4-5 mobs and walk away having burnt all my cool downs, the warrior just wades in and smashes and moves on.

The warrior just burns things down fast in a way that most other classes can only dream of. When I compare the warrior to what my ranger is I just cry. Having said that, my necro is at a sweet spot right now too as either condition or berserker nuke spec. I've found that kiting some champs is doable in condition spec, multiple mobs (7-10 ata time) just melt while I giggle like a school girl. They really need to fix condition stacking on bosses though, but a respec to berserker fixes that and the nukes that you can lay down are fun (admittedly with melee weapons making you a glass cannon).

I'm about to read the notes and see if my warrior needs a respec - I have a feeling that empowered allies should have been moved out of Tier 1 traits to at least Tier 2 and am wondering if Anet has done it or not. I also wouldn't mind seeing if shouts have been fixed.

Apparently i wasn't the only one to notice what the new haircuts looked like. (http://i.imgur.com/7fyjLV9.jpg)

OMG lol

What gear are they wearing?

That's actually pretty horrible.

I have no idea, i can't find it in the light armor pictures either.  Might be town clothes.  Also it is just one mesmer.

I keep forgetting I can name my clones. Or is it Phantasms? Whichever, I love the class a lot. I should dust off the Ele for dungeon runs through. At first I didn't think I'd remember how to play, but man muscle memory runs deep :-)

That's the guild wars 1 heritage armor hall of monuments reward.

This game puts me in such shitty moods, with all the stupid horse shit it has in terms of mechanics and balance.

OBSTRUCTED OBSTRUCTED OBSTRUCTED MISS OBSTRUCTED OUT OF RANGE.


FUCK YOU ITS A OPEN LEVEL PLAIN!

I don't get obstructed too often, but I am also melee distance for the most part so I would assume that changes it a little.

Got my Thief to 80 last night, and it's such a bullshit class. I am terrible on him, but if I don't burst you down - I can almost always get away and try again if I want. Kind of silly, the risk vs. reward is so out of balance. It was one of the first times I have not only won a 2 vs. 1 against me, but won handily.

Again - I am also terrible, so that says a lot.

You can be wearing full Toughness armor and have over 18k health and still get burst down in less than two seconds by a Thief plus they have near infinite in-combat stealthing so yeah, bullshit class.  Between them and Warriors, class 'balance' is the most out of whack I've seen in an MMO since the days that Infiltrators could one-hit kill you and not unstealth in DAoC.

Hey, guess what my other level 80 is?  :drill:

Thief is why I stopped bothering with this game, and I played one.

In sPVP each encounter was ridiculous. With certain builds you almost never die. Stealth, teleports, blinds; you have so many tools to easily get away or lock down your opponent. I played some Sword / Dagger build I found online and just wrecked everyone to point of being bored to death. I got to Dolyak rank in sPVP and then just put the game away.

I stopped playing my thief in spvp, the warrior is far superior at actually killing things it is ridiculous.  Hint: being able to run away doesn't actually win any fights, having the same damage with twice the hps/armor/healing does.  I can be a total pest with the thief, i can actually be effective with the warrior.

Yeah, its been a long while since I played so you're probably right.

Is it me or is this league thing fishy?  Like, even beyond the FTP "it's a business" model.  They're offering discounts on server transfers...in order to give players a chance to navigate game mechanics (once again, this time in the form of winning wvw servers)? 

It's like they gave up on matchups entirely and made wvw a cash shop "item."

It's an excuse to not have to put in any game balance changes for another 7 weeks. I'm sure the fat gem cash on all the transfers is also helping that motivation.

So I blew $40 on diamonds and unlocked my bags and bought the permanent salvaging device. That thing is the best expenditure of $15 in the game just because I no longer have to 1) stuff my bags with kits 2) stop off every few hours to buy new kits.  If I could sell/ salvage Karma or quest gear I'd be set for the life of my character.

I was very happy with my infinite pick and axe, refilling those when you are out in the world is a pain.

Finished my Ascended Staff.  And now they're counting blocks/evades toward AE targets.  THANKS, DEVS.  Might have to work a new spec to get around that, and that may require dropping dhuumfire.

So, now I'm relatively poor again. Although, my bankroll just moved down 100g over the entire process of going from 400-500 and crafting the staff.  Probably took about 150g overall.

Conditionmancer is pretty good for small/medium sized group and for wall defense at keeps/towers/garrisons, but kind of crap in open field zergs.  Time to keep the bankroll small and start building a well-o-mancer/DS set.  :awesome_for_real: And now with WvW season starting, blobs are going to be the way of things.

There's only going to be one matchup we really have to worry about, the SoR/BG/JQ one. Everything else waha will carry us, unless our SEA dies of boredom.


I've never had more then like 30 gold at once, you dirty PvE'er.

My staff has parts that jiggle.   :awesome_for_real:  Hey, and now I am under 30g.  

Yah, finally seeing TC in action was a bit disappointing.   They seemed to fight well, but just did a ton of really bone headed tactical moves.  Well, and they can't seem to field quite as large of a blob as BG. Past 10-11pm the scores would just go pear shaped for our opposing servers.  BG is good, though, and they have many, many people.  <not sure if green> Plus they ddos'd our teamspeak. </>

waha is the main SEA commander?  Seems like BG and SoR bitch about our SEA a lot.  I'm still really new the WvW, as I'm very afraid at this point to even man siege.  :awesome_for_real:

Yea, Waha is our major SEA commander. He's arguably the most infamous command pin in the entire game probably. Other servers use waha's name like a bogey man. "Eat your vegetables or waha will get you!" Him and his force are why JQ have been tier 1 for so long basically. It's a top tier, mobile, organized army in a time zone where most servers have zero to shit for coverage. Also makes our server excitingly multilingual!

If he and his forces ever decide they get tired of the game and stop playing or move servers or whatever, expect us to drop like 4 tiers over night  :why_so_serious: .


TC has a fair weather problem. They spend like 5 out of 6 match ups just rolling servers they completely out class, get really complacent and have a lot of random glassy people attach onto the karma trains. Then they get sent up to us for a week, or one of the big 3 goes down and they get farmed instead of doing the farming and sorta filter off till their next steamroll. I remember the first week the RNG sent us to the TC/FA match up and just how god damn squishy they all were.


BG is our big competition usually, they have just as much organization and coverage as we do, except for the SEA slot. They used to keep pace by their Oceanic coverage, using that window to paper all our keeps so our SEA had to rebuild instead of gain a lead. We recently poached their big oceanic guild [MERC], or most of it, notably their commanders, and this has thrown a big monkey wrench in BG's general direction.


SoR is our other competition, and are full of trolls and chest beaters and generally detestable people.  :why_so_serious: They are also in love/hate relationship with BG and will actively ruin each others chance of winning just to spite the other and give us (jq) the win. They are also the server most capable at shoving every single person on a map onto ONE point, in a true map zerg. If SoR and BG ever actually hatefuck it out and get married, we are basically boned too. This is unlikely though.

My favorite thing about SoR and BG is how quick they are to accuse the other of teaming up with JQ.  :why_so_serious:

I haven't www'd in forever, but basically TC has been a zergfest server of undergeared / underlevelled people since day 1, and it'll remain as such until the end of time. Most TCers don't care to get to the super-fucking-serious-business of tier1... though I'll say that completely dominating tier2 due to sheer numbers and some good zerg commanders on voice comm isn't that fun either (it's why I stopped playing wvw, I hate lopsided fights).

There may be some smaller military-style srs bsns wvw guilds on TC who actually use proper builds/gear, but they probably play in the borderlands or somesuch.

Almost all organized guilds play in the BL's, since you can't get a guild queued on EB for shit for the most part.

Yak's Bend and Oceanic timeslot do not WvW a good time :(

Plus a lot of our good players transferred making it limited fun. I understand the league thing but people getting transfers means this will always be lopsided. I now only go to BGs on alts to get my zone completion.

Clearly you should transfer up!  :grin:

GoM is the lowest of the low for WvW - I've been spending a lot more time WvW lately and it's basically the exact same handful of names every night. I keep debating transfering to a new server that has a much more active WvW population, but bottom tier isn't so bad for roaming and smaller group vs. group combat which is what I prefer anyways.

They added a greatsword that shits bats, my life is now complete.

How is throwing siege on a defeated enemy in WvW considered insulting?  :uhrr:

That is a fantastic idea.  

You lost.  Have a catapult.  (I don't think I'd build it)

Jeezus I'm really enjoying this again. And of course so much so I totally know why I had to quit last time. This game's an OCDs dream  :grin:

Made 51 levels in like twenty hours, forgetting another thing I've loved: flat leveling curves all the way up. I don't even notice the dings anymore, haven't slotted any new skills in 20 levels and still rotate through four different configs on my Mesmer (generally Staff and Scepter/Torch but sometimes GS and Pistol/Torch or Sword/Focus). I don't remember my Ele having anywhere near this breadth of options to explore, survive, fight single things, fight groups of things, fight groups of things when suddenly other things show up, including Veterans, etc. But then, I stopped playing him a year ago and haven't reupped him yet.

Engels was teasing me a few nights ago that I only played to play the market which made me log in to sell the 24 stacks of flawless snowflakes I had bought for 80 copper each. I was pretty happy to see they were selling for 8 silver 70 copper each now. Seasonal items are nice.

Ele's are the squishiest class in game by default, a real razor's edge class. If you do it right, it goes real good and you destroy things. If you slip up even once, you're a corpse.

That's not really true.  Sure, if you go full zerker with an Ele they're going to be squishy, but so is any other class.  If you are spec'd and geared well an Ele can tank just as well as any other class.

Honestly, my elementalist felt surprisingly sturdy leveling up.

That's like a precursor right there.  I've been buying lvl 400 leather at 1.5s each, hoping it goes to 15 or so the first day of ascended armor crafting.

In SWG, throwing a house down on a corpse kept them from rezzing.  /rosecoloredglasses

Also ITT:  JQ complaining about TC?  Next time you're in WvW, ask how many people xferred from TC.  It's not our fault the devs manipulate matchups and various other game mechanics to generate cash.  TC either wins by a zillion points or loses by a zillion points, there is no in between and it's boring as hell.

Commenting != complaining.

Yeah, I think the one closest to "complaining" about TC is ... someone from TC.

I mean, you tell me.  It's just funny to read people from T1 criticize TC.  You guys have better coverage, which I suppose is a tactical advantage.  If we go up against JQ and BG or SOR, we get the shit kicked out of us.  If we go up against anyone else, we kick the shit out of them.  Is the bell curve of skill really represented here?  No, TC just has better coverage than non-T1 servers and not as much coverage as T1.  Problem solved.  There are simply more of you, because of those early months of free server transfers. 

I can tell you that there are many dedicated, skilled WvWers who have stayed on TC because we have a strong community.   Others, literally some of the best pvpers I've ever seen, left because they wanted to win or at least be in more competitive matchups.  This is why I get peeved from the criticism. 

Statistically, skill ratios should be the same.  Are the quoted criticisms correct?  Absolutely.  Could they apply to T1 servers?  You bet.  Undergeared/underleveled players, boneheaded tactical decisions, fair weather playes and zergfests are absorbed and less noticeable when you have better coverage.  And if there is a higher ratio of skilled players in T1, it's because they transferred there out of frustration.

Blame Anet.  The coverage (sorry, skill) issue could easily be addressed by grouping servers together in WvW battlegroups the way WoW ended up doing, ensuring a more uniform coverage in every matchup.  Instead they're doing Leagues which is just another cash shop item.  The proof of this is that the cash shop offered discounts on server transfers when Leagues started.

Errr, sorry?  It turns out Fordel's (and other's) description of TC at Tier 1a is just very accurate.  THIS IS NOT MEANT TO BE DISPARAGING.  It's unfortunate and you have my condolences. 

As for the holiday thing: haha, one-shot capable bosses (with actual mechanics) v. zerg. This maze is great for leveling, it can just kind of suck a times when you're on an overflow and 2 bosses spawn in the same area.  :awesome_for_real:  The loot is terrible, but it has its uses for quick leveling outside of the normal event chains.  I'm kind of burnt out on map completion leveling.

edit: I just picked JQ to play with SLAP.  Honest.   :sad_panda:

WvW is serious business.

This may be nitpicky, but none of the stuff said by JQ people is "complaining." Call it insulting if you'd like, although I doubt that was the intent either. Criticism is a fine word for it, and had you used it in the first place, I wouldn't have thought anything of it. Also, I don't think the people of TC are bad people (I DO think the people of SoR are!  :why_so_serious:), and I do find their position sort of weird, for the exact reason you stated. They faceroll the other T2 and below servers easily, but cannot handle going against the big three (because we are enormous). That's got to be weird.


I do think the leagues are stupid. There are going to be a lot of boring stretches in it.

It doesn't make me want to play more or take it more seriously.  Although, I assume I'll be doing more of both.

People will probably be a lot crankier about losing.

Everyone trying to farm the achievements should be hilarious.

Depending on how Anet splits the match ups, the league will be karma train time for half of it at least. It's going to do a lot more harm then good in the long term.


I stand by my statements about TC, the dirty Yak lovers!

I get their theory that it gets "boring" to face the same servers all the time (indeed, getting a little break from SoR and BG a few months ago was sorely needed by JQ), but the problem is, I think people find it more boring to just stomp/be stomped by wildly mismatched servers. And the stupid bloodlust bullshit doesn't help that at all.

I finally read about the leagues ( :awesome_for_real: I know).  Uhhh, this won't work.  It'll work for 2 weeks and then, no, it won't work.  

It's going to be so dumb.

I did try to stealth-fix that.  It's a sore spot; I realize you guys weren't being personal.  I just felt like Tom Branson listening to the Crawleys talk shit about Ireland at the dinner table.

If iwe are losing hard, TC WvW is a ghost town.  No commander tags are up.  Map chat is dead.  Server mumble is empty.  The same is true, though , if we are winning disproportionately.  The whole thing is  :uhrr:

SoR and BG are already wailing that JQ has an easier schedule than they do bawwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

TC should have a good time this week, at least, they're up against SoS and #magswag.

Tried to PVP yesterday.  Got my ass handed to me so quickly so often I wonder what the fuck the point of trying is now.

I mostly just couldn't deal with the massive skill lag.

Yea I still haven't tried PvP here. I did enjoy the BGs in WoW, so I'd probably go with WvW here maybe. I've been enjoying the leveling up PvE and DEs enough as it is. I feel like going PvP would be going to almost a differnet game.

https://buy.guildwars2.com/en/buy/digital-heroic-edition

20 bucks off, today only.

Around this time Arena-net should be releasing a new expansion.

This. It's not like people haven't been screaming out for it. Anet is sadly all "that's nice, have a shitty 2 week living story that many couldn't give a damn about". TBH, Fire and frost was the only good one so far and even then as a living story it's pathetic.

I wish I could say I'm done with the game. Instead I crafted 4 more ascended weapons taking my total to 7  :ye_gods:

I've tried other games, i simply cannot handle the movement on any of them anymore.  Even the dodge rolling on secret world felt clunky.

Yeah, I booted Rift up and shut it off after 30 minutes.  GW2 has spoiled me.

That how it was like with Guild Wars 1 for me.

So no instant travel to regions I already explored? Uninstall.
No free reallocation of skill points? Uninstall.
Pointless level/weapon grind for pvp? Uninstall.

Decided to play some WvW and had a lot of fun. Had an exotic drop so linked it only to watch people get all excited.

Apparently The Legend* is a good drop?  :awesome_for_real:

Think I'll sell it and buy The Colossus and put the rest of the gold towards The Hunter.










* The Legend is the Staff Precurser for the legendary

I hate you so much right now.

PSA: if you are going to sell to the lowest bidder put it up for auction for 1 copper over vendor price.  It automatically sells to highest bidder but you pay the listing fee on the price you used.  It might sound kinda scary but it will save you about 15-20 gold depending on price.

Die.  I'm broke now that I've geared another character for wvw (runes, weapons, sigil, some trinks) and finished my ascended staff.  I don't think I play enough to actually make money. I might abandon ascended crafting all together, and just speculate on materials or just sell out once ascended armor crafting is released.  That stuff's for rich people.

Getting a power set for my necro, upgrading my ele's trinkets and then gearing a tank is probably worth more to me than doing another climb to 500.  

Of course, now that I can't get into wvw reliably due to queues, I have time to farm.  Seriously, fuck these stupid achievements.  It's hard to compete when you've got a bunch of assholes afk, doing jumping puzzles, or running around in berserker's gear.   And they're always spamming dumb shit in map chat.  I wish the Halloween event was pooping out free champs bags faster and had worse grinds just to get these people out of the damn borderlands and EB.  I'm not sure what voodoo BG and SoR are doing in order to get their fair weather wvwers to actually do something.  Their blobs seem unaffected.   And they actually get their guilds in..  :-o

 :angryfist: :tantrum: :cry2:

It's probably the last minute wagon, since we won the last couple weeks before the league.

BG and SoR probably paid to move all their PvEers over to JQ.  :awesome_for_real:

Really, it should be fine in another day or two as people get their achievements and never return. Even tonight the queue's went from hours to minutes.

Wvw is a different set of queues from the team pvp, yes?  I had instant access to the random team stuff on my server, but after getting my clock cleaned I didn't even try the WVW stuff.

Still struggling to figure out how I'm supposed to get 13 achievements for the next Halloween step when there's only 12 possible ones and I have no desire to do the pvp finisher one.  :|

Also, is there an easier way to map fill than running around to each and every check point?  I joined a new guild last night when I ran in to them trying the world dragon. (My previous guild had all of 4 people on at any one time.)  Turned out it was the night they do guild events but I missed out on two because I didn't have waypoints and it took me too long to run from 3 maps away.

PvP and WvW are totally separate. PvP is it's own entire rule set with it's own 'gear' and world. Everyone has the exact same item access in PvP and characters are automatically level 80 in PvP (not up-scaled, full 80 with full traits etc). WvW is DaoC/Warhammer style RvR, using any and all items/consumables available in PvE. Builds that are extremely powerful in PvP are often utterly useless in WvW and vice versa. Different scales to combat and stat combinations and vastly different objectives.

It's a LOT easier to just casually attach yourself to a zerg and follow a commander pin in WvW, then it is to jump into the PvP scene.

You pretty much just have to run around to places as far as I know. You can reach Lion's Arch easily by just going to the PvP lobby and exiting the gate.

Ah, I see now. That explains why I got my ass handed to me the one time I went in to the borderlands areas. I didn't notice I wasn't upleveled.  Then again my server doesn't seem to do the WvW thing *at all* as we're always the tiniest slice of the pie chart, owning maybe one or two nodes ever.

Thanks for the tips.   Hit 59 last night and now it's just feeling like a grind to 80.  Been to Lion's Arch, etc but haven't map-filled since I've been Champ Zerging and event hopping for XP.

Everyone is upleveled to 80 in the WvW maps.

Every day there are two halloween achievements on the daily tab.

Yep, this is the best way to get acclimated in WvW.  Find your blast finishers and combo fields, and use them often (commanders will usually call for them too).

TC/Mag/SoS is a good matchup indeed.  TC has the advantage but you can tell it's a popular match because the queues are long.  Now everyone is complaining about the wait time, which isn't helped by the fact that Anet has admitted that their queue system is messed up.

You're upleveled, but (correct me if I'm wrong), you're still not going to be upleveled to exotics. Those still make a difference.  And like Fordel said, your gear isn't going to be tailored for it.   I wvw'd a fair bit with my underleveled elementalist and still did OK.   I was able to provide a lot of fields, but I was really noobish and squishy.   I still kind of am, as I have no real good grasp on siege placement and range, and the most strategic aspects of it all.  However, my positioning is better and I'm not quite as squishy.  

The good thing is, you'll be able to buy some 80 exotic gear with all of the Badges of Honor you get from achievement chests up to this point.  You can get some good wvw type of gear that isn't even craftable, like Soldier's, Rabid and Dire.

You can also complete the pvp finisher one in The Mists staging area.  When you first zone into the Mists head to the back of the zone where there are NPCs for each profession.  You can duel them and when you down one use one of your Halloween finishers and you will get credit towards the achievement.

Ah ha! Thanks that'll be most beneficial.


Those count? Well shit then, that's awesome. All I need to do is save a few trick or treat bags instead of spamming them open as I get them. Thanks.

Sold the staff precursor, sold everything I had in terms of mats, bought the hammer precursor and learnt Sorrow's Embrace.

I'm not doing that again in a hurry.

Hello Juggernaut for PvP

(http://members.iinet.net.au/~setanta/gw2/jugger1.jpg)

(http://members.iinet.net.au/~setanta/gw2/jugger2.jpg)

Grats!

Well, this matchup is fucking boring.  Learned the jumping puzzle, though.  :awesome_for_real:

And somehow Mag talks more shit than SoR and BG combined.

Did you not know about #MagSwag?  :why_so_serious:

#Swagguma, we do have the goons after all.

Basically, Sjofn and I are waiting on the Mag vs SoR forum war, it will be the highlight of gold league.

It will definitely be the best forum match up, I can't fucking wait!  :why_so_serious:

I did not expect this level of swag.  I was not prepared. However, they are not completely awful.  They can do things when we get lazy and have troll commanders running things.   :why_so_serious:

This does give me time to leveling another character.  Can't decide between actually getting a tank (guardian), finishing my mesmer, or leveling an engineer.   Even with this matchup, I'm sure the EB queue won't get under my total play time allotted, so that crap will still stay unfinished.

Mag is actually quite good at the video game, they just like the warm safety blanket of "good fites", since that's entirely subjective and lets them fuel their forum game  :why_so_serious:

They also have like, zero coverage, so after like midnight est, they stop existing.

So far, I am pretty happy being in Bronze league. No queues except for the odd EB one, lots of smaller group fights in the ruins and the camps not in the south. You can actually defend stuff without just being swept aside by the zerg. Spent the other night just running through JPs and killing the people that were there for the first time for achievements until they get enough to kick us out.

All in all, this is the most fun I have had in WvW.

Updated and rolled a warrior this time.  Maybe I will make to rvr this go around.

Yay, more warriors.   :awesome_for_real:


Do you guys have regular pins and stuff?  We get a lot of small scale activity as well, just got to watch your ass for the moving swarm of death.  But yah, I could do without the queues.

I'd go park my lowbie guardian on a jumping puzzle, but I've yet to actually see someone from the other servers doing them. 

 :why_so_serious: so warriors are popular... what about engineer?

I feel noobish and dont want to roll what I played before (ranger, necro, and uh, warrior counterpart),

Please, do play what you want.  I've just taken a lot of hammer hits to the face lately.

But yes, warriors are popular.  They're versatile, powerful, and easy to play.  Engineers are rarer ducks.  There's a lot of button pushing involved.   I deleted  mine long ago and just remade one recently.  I haven't played it at all.  :awesome_for_real:

meh, I will try engineer.  I will probably crap out in a few weeks anyway.

Play your warrior.  :drill:


I thought I would too.  Didn't expected to get hooked.  I don't like a lot of what they do, but the wvw is compelling.

The only thing I regret about playing my warrior is that I made him first, so every time I play another class I think, "man, I kinda wish I was playing my warrior".

Same here! ~twinz~

My engineer is 75 or so now, the best part about playing it is no one knows wtf engineers actually do, so no one can tell how shitty you are.

I'm on mag and pretty much this.  I am completely amazed we made it to gold league considering how piss poor our oceanic coverage is.  On the plus side, it's a gold league server with almost zero queues (unless xushin is running a karma train).  There was actually a big argument about whether or not to go for gold league, but some of our more popula commanders decided to do it, and promptly burnt themselves out getting to gold league and disappeared from play. 

Folks take the "we don't care about PPT" pretty seriously, until they don't lol.  But I love forum-whoring on mag, we rule PvF.

I mained an engineer but switched to a warrior recently.  Engineer is just too fiddly a class to be very effective in PvP or PvE.  There are some amazing players out there who can play them very well, and they do good in sPvP at very specific rolls (knocking folks out of control points seems to be a big one). In lag-heavy situations like large scale WvW they are horrendous because not being able to switch kits means you have zero offense and zero defense.

Sorry, pins?

What seems to happen is that each server puts a super zerg in the field somewhere and they play a little cat and mouse with each other, if we get the super zergs in the same zone it might queue for a bit. Then we have a couple groups of 10ish wandering around taking towers and the odd camp in the BLs. Most of the time I find groups of <5 hitting the southside of each BL. We usually prowl the ruins since it's pretty easy to keep an eye on flips with the minimap zoomed out as far as you can go.

Our last ditch efforts of the night are usually to take the North camp of one of the other server BLs and defend it as best we can from everyone that piles in from the port-in keep for that BL.

I thought queues were for your side only.

Yes, I just worded what I was trying to say wrong. When the super zergs meet up, it tends to draw a lot of people which gets the queue going. And by queue I mean 10-15 minute wait.

Commanders.  Guys with the blue dorrito/taco/chevron on them.  Are there recognizable commanders on the field?  Is there a server vent used for wvw?

And on another note, necro well builds are complete shit for 1v1 and small engagements.  They are, however,  absolutely hilarious when you can catch a small group unawares.   Great for siege killing and camping clearing too.  

Oh yeah - there's 5-6 recognizable, decent Commanders. A few not great ones that I just ignore and a bunch of newly bought ones. There's a server vent set up, but it's really new only about a dozen guilds ranging in size use it. I would say at most we have about 15-25% of the WvW population using it right now, but as we keep doing decently that number seems to be increasing.

It wouldn't be gold league if Mag wasn't there to shit up the forums.  :why_so_serious:

Lots of incoming balance changes. (https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/Dec-10th-Balance-Preview)

I like how GW2 devs think I actually know what my traits are called.

I clicked Threash's link and I got:


And I laughed.

The end!

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/professions/ranger/December-10th-Ranger-changes/page/9#post3162139

Anet Dev's have been making the rounds on the class forums, but I enjoyed this particular post. Confirming what everyone whose who has spent more then 5 mins on a Ranger already knew, pets are fucking broken.


-edit- whose? Is that even a word? That sounds really wrong in my head now!

You were looking for the contraction "who's" which can mean either "who is" or "who has".

"Whose" is the possessive. Think it's/its with a silent "e" to sustain the vowel sound.

Lord Above I hope they never do another WvW "season" because getting match ups where we are just completely overwhelming to the two servers we're against is really fucking dull. I would like to take a moment to laugh at Sanctum of Rall, though, who has gotten a painful lesson the past two weeks that they need JQ on that wall.

The main issue with the Gold League at least is that there's a massive gap between the upper three and the lower three. Like, a comically large gap in numbers, coverage, everything.

I don't know if the other leagues have the same issue, but while the numbers in WvW are high I don't know how many of them are just in it for the achievements. Personally, I'm not enjoying the matches at all, and I have little motivation to actually sit through the queue to work on the meta.

I've been vaguely watching the scores (http://mos.millenium.org/na) in the lower leagues, and they're not much closer, really. This week's seems particularly shitty. But what's interesting to me is just how crap SoR's been without JQ to draw BG's ire. So even in the BG/SoR/poor bastard match ups, BG's been having a snoozefest too.


edit: As for queues, they go down pretty substantially during the week. Once we hit Tuesday, there's always been at least one BL without a queue ... of course, it's always the BL where we own almost everything anyway, so not much help towards the meta there (unless you want to do the jumping puzzle) (which I keep putting off because fuck jumping puzzles).

Apparently, BG added a huge Russian guild which has totally fucked the EU time zone shit.  SoR just sounds demoralized as hell on the boards.  Even without the EU stuff (which kind of can wreck reset day), they've been ticking hella low all the time.

Tue/Wed/Thursday is a great time to try and get lucky with the EB queue.  Karma train is fantastic for the meta, and you don't feel bad about doing shit like jumping on rams without mastery.  

Still, there have been some decent fights.  TC can be really effective defenders when they've got some map presence.  In lower numbers, their lack of appropriate armor is really obvious.  It could also just be that we've been running really high DPS blobs, with little front line.  AOE meltage is rough against straight line rushes.

All server clusters seem to be set up with one dominant one mid and one who just doens't give a fuck.  I'm on Anvil Rock and tried PVP a few times.  The most AR players I've ever seen at a time was 10.  And we got roflstomped quickly by the FC zerg that had easily 3x our numbers.  It's just not worth it. 

When folks mention getting a zerg in Lion's Arch they get laughed at and told not to bother on this server.

Reflecting - once again - why WvW is a terrible model.

Pssh. RVR is just bad as a concept. The only solution is to match up the severs with the highest pvp participation and cross your fingers. How much better would the game run if it merely capped participation to 300 man instances (100/100/100) and did a special guild que for the hardcore.

Yeah I didn't mean to imply RvR would be any better.  The best format *is* capped instances, though you have to have better tools for booting botters & leeches than we've seen to date from any game company.

The problem is less with WvW and more with the fucking stupid league. Well, maybe not for Anvil Rock, they've been the crap-ass server for months and months. But when you toss vaguely-similar populations at each other, it's a lot of fun. Population is a problem (always will be) and ANet's solution to it seems to be "transfer to one of the T1 servers, T2 in a pinch," which is a terrible goddamn solution.

Some of the lower pop servers could probably stand a merge. Honestly, I'd love if they merged the EU servers with the US ones, that would suddenly make a lot more servers have a lot better coverage. :P Won't happen, though.

Plus WvW is pretty low on their priorities list. Which is OK with me, really, because when they pay attention to it, we get stupid shit like this league nonsense.  :uhrr:

Population and Participation are always the problems with ANY kind of PvP in any game. Large scale or small. MMO Dev's love to make various systems and just assume everyone will use them forever and equally distribute amongst themselves.

This is always wrong and leads to broken things.

The problem is checklist MMO design.  You gotta have everything so everything ends up sucking.  You put in world pvp because there is always that segment that demands world pvp no matter how unbalanced it ends up and how the population always cannibalizes itself, but you keep it separated from everything else so it doesn't affect the pvers.  You put in crafting because there is always a group that wants crafting, but you never make it give the best items because that upsets the raiders and pvpers.  You gotta have battlegrounds and dungeons with dungeon finders and raids and talent trees and gigantic shoulderpads and mounts and talent trees and levels...etc etc etc.  Because god forbid you piss off any possible customer.  There is absolutely no reason any game should have world pvp unless the game is entirely based around world pvp.  You are either making the nect Daoc or Shadowbane or you are just marking off things off a checklist.

DaoC had the exact same problem though in regards to Population and Participation.

It's intellectually dishonest to assume that a game made with mmo dollars should slavishly devote all its attention to one game made/rule set. It makes sense to us forum warriors since we only play 10% of any given game anyway and half us will never be better than mediocre at it anyway. But to the average Timmy they want as many game modes as possible because that determines to them anyway whether or not they play for 2 months or 6 years.

The average Timmy might enjoy a couple well done game modes more than twenty half assed ones also.

The average Timmy couldn't find his ass with both hands, and a map.  I don't know that building your game around his input is that great of an idea.

How about building your game around his dollars  :oh_i_see:

Regardless WvW is clearly not just a 'checkbox' feature in GW2, so I don't know why we're on this tangent.

I'm really enjoying this Season WvW stuff and this is coming from a server that wakes up each morning to see all the BLs and EB taken over by the one server with an overnight crew. I cannot think of a way to prevent that and some servers are just going to have much better 24/7 coverage. Population imbalance is something that these types of games will always struggle with and I personally have no idea how to fix that without wrecking some other aspect of it that I would prefer not to lose.

We have basically none unless some of the WvW guilds pull 18-20 hour days playing, which is pretty unreasonable. The prime time fights are ridiculously fun though, even if there is no way for us to win our match this week.

Overall, more people are involved. I know more about all my classes than I did 3 weeks ago and instead of running cookie cutter specs - I am starting to make my own that fit my playstyle. I've actually gotten back to being involved with the server community which is something that hasn't happened since the DAoC days.

Season 1 has been pretty much win for me so far /shrug.

Although GW2 WvW is the best so far, it still suffers from "the best time to fight when there is no opposition."  This is a fundamental an anti-casual state. Player vs Door > Player vs Player still the biggest problem with Large Scale PVP.

Is that a game design flaw or a human nature one though?

I always feel like games built entirely on the concept of constant achievement through predictable encounters contradict the premise of WvW (a constant fight with uncertain outcome). Of course, PvP in general presents a contradiction between what players say they want (balance) versus what they really mean (for them to win and everyone else to lose).

Unless you do the SB approach of scheduled fights, I don't see a way to get around this problem.

Don't divide your player base by region would be a start.

I'm not sure that 'players might try to engage in sound military tactics' is really a problem. Taking undefended targets is always going to be important.

Its still a game. If a game can't balance with real life, it not going to work in the long run.  Is it undefended because your opponents have chosen other objectives? Or because they prioritized employment over a video game? That seems pretty key.  Anyway A.net has the population data, they control the scoring system, its not rocket science.

Quite frankly in BF4 I always attack poorly defended points. While shooting mans is fun, it's now how the game is (usually) scored.

WvW's problem is that it's very fuzzy as to how balanced the teams were to start with, same issue DAOC had and such. Not the PvD, but the lack of a balanced number of players PvDing you back if you ignore them. You don't really want to tell the players no when they say they want to play with their friends on server X, but you also need some way to encourage play on what is going to be the losing team for quite a while.

It's not rocket science, it's revenue generation science.  WvW and its leagues are the result of reading the data and calculating how to get people to spend gems on transferring.  Not only do people transfer to stacked servers to win, but many guilds transfer FROM stacked servers to escape long queues and give themselves more of a challenge.

That said, TC is having fun this season.  Having accepted the fact that JQ will be at least 100k points ahead of us by the end of any week with them, we just adapt.  I think that's the strength of TC from the start and why we get underestimated; we don't rage, we learn from getting stomped.  Even got to kill/be killed by some SLAP folks!  Nice to see ya.  As an extra added bonus, one of our best liked guilds moved to SoS and we really enjoy hunting them. 

"It is what it is"...as skewed as the numbers may be, and whatever balance is, and whatever blobs mean skill-wise, the important thing to remember is that with WvW they're doing what other games have shied away from.  Gotta give them credit for that. 

So, they're adding some sort of precursor scavenger hunt (according to data mined shit in the newest patch)?  How much you want to bet it takes longer than farming up for a precursor or ends up costing more?  Or it could cost like $30 in gems.

5 ranks from my wvw meta, which means it's essentially done.  I think I can manage 5 ranks, even with our SRS BZNS matchups coming in the next weeks.  We're (JQ) still getting 2nd, I think.  SOR is shitting the bed and arguably their best guild is probably pissing off back to EU (IRON).  They'll be so damn weak, even attempting to stop the BG train will be futile. Plus, we've had such easy matchups lately, it'll be Tuesday before we're able to get any traction.  Reset day is going to be brutal.

This newest LS update is kind of garbage.  The rewards are OK, and the soloable tiny instances are OK, but the annoying debuff thing is annoying.  Also, giant gauntlets of death are only doable when people are around that will actually do it.  Floor 3 is a bit stupid.  I'm not sure they can do much better.

edit: SoR is ticking at a 45 right now.  Jesus.  BG is a monster right now.

I finally finished my WvW meta last night, went around looking for walls and doors to repair to do it. Wouldn't mind the gasmask reward for the LS meta this time around, but not sure I am really wanting to do the stuff to get it. The only time I have really dealt with the toxic crap is because they stuck it in all the PvE content sprinkled in WvW.

We are just finishing up our weekly matchup against the two servers that will probably go 1-2 in Bronze and they leveled us pretty good. I woke up Monday morning and logged in to find that HoD had completely taken over the world overnight. They owned pretty much everything they could and that was the end of this week.

Gate of Madness is definitely a PvE server and every second week on Tuesday WvW becomes a ghosttown for us, even more so because we are a very distant third place. Next week is a better match up for us though, so I expect to see a return once we jump out to a what I anticipate will be a quick lead on reset night.

Money is so easy to get that any scavenger hunt is bound to be harder than the two weeks of half assed farming buying it would cost.  But it allows people to do it in small quantifiable steps, which is really what they want.

We can beat BG as long as whoever the third is isn't shitting on us too. Week one was that, because JQ has the easy schedule and SoR was SURE it would run over BG, so JQ had to be stopped and blah blah.

SoR bought into it's own hype, then failed and imploded because of it. BG tricked them and it's ruined SoR. They've lost their server identity and morale. The pugs don't trust the pins, the pins are openly berating the pugs and the guilds are all blaming each other for buying BG's snake-oil. TC may very well get 3rd place at this rate.

In order for us to take 1st, I think we basically need to beat BG in our 1v1 and then somehow get BG into a 3rd place in one other week, which probably isn't happening. Not unless SoR somehow pulls its shit together for that last week, if only out of spite for BG.  :why_so_serious:

Not here it isn't.  I spend a majority of my time in wvw.  I don't really play enough to supplement this with farming. 

But, I guess it is for some.  There's people in my guild on their 7th legendary.  Some dude has every single thing from the gem store that he's purchased with only gold.  Meanwhile, I can't buy a full set of certain runes.   :sad_panda:

Well obviously i meant money is easy if you focus is getting money, it ain't just going to magically appear in your bags.

I really wish it would!  :sad:

Our offbrand/third-string commanders have this problem too. The second Elvadara Dod (I hate this kid), Molasses Mussles, or someone like Ninja Spawn pin up, people just lose all confidence and start steadily ticking away.  These guys can't win fights and take objectives even when we have overwhelming numbers.  At least Molasses doesn't fill teamspeak with spergy teen tantrums like the others; he just sucks.   It's sad when I look forward to LeeT and HZH commanders.  The alternatives are just that bad.

Heh, I think BG is floating rumors that MERC or waha is leaving.   :awesome_for_real:

I don't think SOS, TC or Mag will go along with us beating BG.  We haven't been nice enough, and they've had too much of us.   Plus, coverage.


I needed a precursor to drop.  Last week.   I did get an exotic with a divinity rune doing Orr map completion while waiting for queue.  /flex

Looking like there's a real possibility of a 2 way tie for first in tier 1 NA.  Well, provided BG's EU coverage dominance doesn't kick into overdrive and start steamrolling this week's matchup.   SoR, I believe, had a sizeable lead going into the week in their first matchup and then just got knocked the fuck out.

I have gotten used to jumping with my charr.  Cue end of the world in 5.. 4.. 3.. 2.. 1..

Apparently ascended armor is right around the corner. I will not be able to afford any of this garbage.  I wonder what the overall statistical advantage is going to be and how this will assjam wvw.  Weapons are already more than should be allowed.

Full set for one character: 3000 bloodstone dusk/dragonite ore/empyreal fragments (if it requires a vision crystal for each).  5 augur stones.  180 obsidian shards. Thermocatalytic Reagent costs will start to stack up.  Plus material cost and leveling.  Gossamer is going to be incredibly expensive.  So, good luck with that.  Tailoring will be the worst out of  all of them.   I wonder if hardened leather has started spiking yet, although that'll be the least contested.

I can tell you the general sentiment on Mag is $#%# everybody, let's troll.  Since we are never going to win PPT we just spend all our time sieging up stuff to hell, sneak attacking waypoints, roaming, gvg, and just generally being a nuisance.  We make no deals.

How is that different from any other server?  :why_so_serious:


Rasix, unless something truly catastrophic happens, I don't see BG beating our SEA. Our SEA looks like its been staying up to cut into BG's Russian/Euro coverage, which just means we only need to stop the bleeding till our NA logs back in and then it's probably in our favor from then to SEA again. BG had an early weekend lead from reset due to superior bloodlust maintenance, but our insistence on maintaining our keeps and breaking their WPs slowly overturned it.

Still close match so far, like 4-5k separation only.

This PPT is troubling, Ford.  These guys don't have jobs.  :awesome_for_real:

Nah, that's just the EU hole we have. The big issue is when they paper the WP's.

http://imgur.com/a/p7DhG

I love that gas mask lol.

The papering of keeps is killing more momentum then I'd hoped. The other thing is we don't only have to stop the bleeding on our own stuff, but SoS's as well and we clearly don't have enough in that time zone to do both.

At about 9-11 PST we start tapering off.  SoS loses any presence and we start to get less organized. Our second string commanders are less effective (sadly even our own guild's).  BG can just blob free on all 3 BLs.   Around midnight or later, they'll have papered all of our keeps.   By then the damage, as you've said, is done.  Enter SoR demoralization syndrome.  100 point ticks during the day when their crazy ass Russians run free.  

I'll give them something, they keep up their zergs 24/7.  You always encounter BG blobs when you encounter BG.  No piddly ass 15 person groups. 30-80 or go home.  They don't suck either, we're losing fights where we'd steam roll any other server.

Do we even have Euro guilds?  Mance joked that 30% of our Euro base is SG daytime players.   :awesome_for_real:

...

And.. updates to fractals.  I've never done one.  :oh_i_see:

EU has always been a hole for us, it's literally NA housewives and college students and stuff like that. We have a few small EU guilds that put in a ton of work, but you can only do so much with whats available.

It's usually a hole for all NA servers (Since EU people would rather play on their own servers usually) so it didn't matter before. It's also why IRON always got so much shit for their shit talking on the forums, since they were essentially fighting no one most of the time.



It's the papering of the WP's though, JQ's plan against other T1 servers was always maintaining a WP on each BL and just being able to Map hop our shitty timezones effectively. Instead of being able to maintain a WP, we have to rebuild one each day so we can't claw back effectively.

Well it seems substantially different from BG and the "let's buy guilds to super stack our server" and the constant whining from the T1 servers on the official forums about JQ's easier schedule.  I know we have been approached by several of the T1 servers in match-ups to double team other servers in exchange for second place and thus far we have laughed off these suggestions.  :awesome_for_real:

We also had a lot of people pull all-nighters to get into gold league knowing we would get our face smashed just so we wouldn't kitten-stomp in the silver league and would have the luxury of non-stop action in every borderland.  I would say its a substantially different mentality than the T1 PPT servers, not better, just different.