I hit level 80... Now what?

[Ingmar]

I wouldn't really call 3 leveling paths cheaping out, it's pretty comparable (or more) than what most other MMOs have had at release. Especially if you consider that leveling via WvW essentially constitutes another path.

Other than WoW, what MMO has had more than one levelling path on release?

Rift, Secret World, TOR - they all only have one levelling path. The fact that GW2 has multiple paths like WoW is very encouraging to me as its always been a huge complaint of mine of other games. doing the same content twice just isn't that attractive.

SWTOR has 2 (Imperial, Republic) - I assume that's also true for Rift but I never played a 2nd side there. WAR had what, 6? EQ2 had several. City of Heroes had multiple paths even at release, in its way, as did Auto Assault ( ) and LOTRO to an extent. Champions Online at least started you with multiple places to pick from, but I don't know if that stayed true farther on as I didn't make it real far in that game.

EQ, DAOC, et. al. arguably had lots but you can't really call old school grind-mob-camps a path.

[Lantyssa]

WAR started with 6, but by the time you were hitting midway through Tier 2, and definitely by Tier 3, you had to go to the other lands.    Because of that it only had two real paths.  Of course that was because of the good ole' "It's Launch, So Nerf XP" syndrome.

[WayAbvPar]

WAR started with 6, but by the time you were hitting midway through Tier 2, and definitely by Tier 3, you had to go to the other lands.    Because of that it only had two real paths.  Of course that was because of the good ole' "It's Launch, So Nerf XP" syndrome.

They did that AGAIN? That was what made me quit DAOC 

[Sjofn]

Oh, WAR. You still make me sad.

[Sky]

I really lack the achiever gaming gene. I see those trackers more as a log of what I did while playing, not an objective. "Hey look, you got 100% in the Norn lands, you like ice and snow" kinda thing.

[Ingmar]

They're an objective because they give specific (and very good in some cases) rewards. 100% a zone, you get 2 random green/yellow/orange items of appropriate level for the zone, a bunch of cash, a stack of 40 crafting mats of appropriate level for the zone, and a shitload of XP. (Capital cities only give the XP and a single copper piece though.)

EDIT: And I should add, 100%ing the map as a whole gets you needed components for legendary weapons that you can't get any other way, if you care about that.

[Modern Angel]

Oh, WAR. You still make me sad.

Every time I fire up an MMO, any MMO, I think this.

[Sky]

They're an objective because they give specific (and very good in some cases) rewards.

Ah, good to know. I'm still pretty much in "wander around for an hour and do whatever strikes my fancy" mode. Much like minecraft, it scratches my 'puttering around' itch.

Level 24! Haven't even been playing my other characters, warrior is awesome.

[Furiously]

Every class is AWESOME!

[PalmTrees]

The Orr zones have slowly been killing the game for me. They're just so annoying and tedious. Take a step, get aggro from trash mob, kill it, repeat. Sigh at the tedium, oops, you expanded your chest enough to aggro another mob.

The speed at which camps flip is also annoying. I clear the enemies, revive some engineers so they can fix the catapults and go check if a skill point is fixed (it wasn't). On my way back, not more than ten minutes later, all the bastards are dead again. A npc in cursed shores sums it up nicely in his dialogue "The constant back and forth is exhausting".

[Falconeer]

As a melee I like the extreme aggro and mob density in some areas, it forces you to play carefully and to maximize your efficiency. I hate the 3-4 seconds knockdowns, but it's part of the challenge to learn how to avoid them. It's a nice change -especially cause it's not mandatory- after many many zones where you were just mowing through everything. Hyper-packed events are lovely, there's so many mobs that it feels like Diablo at times.

[Ashamanchill]

Oh, WAR. You still make me sad.

Of all the flaming wrecks lying on the MMO wasteland, that one grieves me the most. WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN!!!! For my buddies it's AoC, for me it's that.

Also, obligatory 'Fuck You Tor Anrroc!'

[Redgiant]

Other than WoW, what MMO has had more than one levelling path on release?

EQ, DAOC, et. al. arguably had lots but you can't really call old school grind-mob-camps a path.

Why not? Unless by 'path' you mean 'rail'. They surely had distinct paths, just highly branching due to world degrees of freedom.

I can still tell you which parts of which zones tend to be good hunting for any level range. That's a path, just not one driven on quest rails but rather on where the challenges that were hard enough yet manageable with your forces were at. It started with diverse home regions but continued through all levels.

In EQ's case, it expanded even more with Kunark and Velious and even Luclin. Same with DAoC and SI. Crazy numbers of choices.

And I wouldn't call the freedom to hunt or dungeon crawl and try to survive it "lacking a path" as if that were a bad thing. I'd call it more of a 'world'.

[Fordel]

It's a shitty path, how about that?


Oh boy, farm coruscating mines or farm fin tree. 

[kildorn]

If we count "places you can sit and grind mobs" as a leveling path, GW2 has more leveling paths than anyone since nothing can go grey and stop giving decent xp :P

But I think what people mean by path is "I'm seeing new content as I go", not sitting at the Hib Tree for hours watching some midget create seizure balls (or post SI, watching a silly number of mushrooms)

[Lakov_Sanite]

I think I'm out.  Just been completing every zone with my guardian, I'm up to level 50 without having even touched the 25+ zones yet but I'm not enjoying the class as much as others.  Only problem is the idea of going back and completing everything over again is so daunting and yes, I NEED to complete everything.  May go back later, the exploration in the game is so fun, just not sure how much I wanna do it twice.

[Ingmar]

Other than WoW, what MMO has had more than one levelling path on release?

EQ, DAOC, et. al. arguably had lots but you can't really call old school grind-mob-camps a path.

Why not? Unless by 'path' you mean 'rail'. They surely had distinct paths, just highly branching due to world degrees of freedom.

I can still tell you which parts of which zones tend to be good hunting for any level range. That's a path, just not one driven on quest rails but rather on where the challenges that were hard enough yet manageable with your forces were at. It started with diverse home regions but continued through all levels.

In EQ's case, it expanded even more with Kunark and Velious and even Luclin. Same with DAoC and SI. Crazy numbers of choices.

And I wouldn't call the freedom to hunt or dungeon crawl and try to survive it "lacking a path" as if that were a bad thing. I'd call it more of a 'world'.

Path implies you move on it. Camp grinding involves very little movement.  

[Lantyssa]

I think I'm out.  Just been completing every zone with my guardian, I'm up to level 50 without having even touched the 25+ zones yet but I'm not enjoying the class as much as others.  Only problem is the idea of going back and completing everything over again is so daunting and yes, I NEED to complete everything.  May go back later, the exploration in the game is so fun, just not sure how much I wanna do it twice.

Speaking as someone who loves exploring every nook and cranny:

[kildorn]

Other than WoW, what MMO has had more than one levelling path on release?

EQ, DAOC, et. al. arguably had lots but you can't really call old school grind-mob-camps a path.

Why not? Unless by 'path' you mean 'rail'. They surely had distinct paths, just highly branching due to world degrees of freedom.

I can still tell you which parts of which zones tend to be good hunting for any level range. That's a path, just not one driven on quest rails but rather on where the challenges that were hard enough yet manageable with your forces were at. It started with diverse home regions but continued through all levels.

In EQ's case, it expanded even more with Kunark and Velious and even Luclin. Same with DAoC and SI. Crazy numbers of choices.

And I wouldn't call the freedom to hunt or dungeon crawl and try to survive it "lacking a path" as if that were a bad thing. I'd call it more of a 'world'.

Path implies you move on it. Camp grinding involves very little movement.  

NASCAR is a path, too! ;)

[Lakov_Sanite]

I think I'm out.  Just been completing every zone with my guardian, I'm up to level 50 without having even touched the 25+ zones yet but I'm not enjoying the class as much as others.  Only problem is the idea of going back and completing everything over again is so daunting and yes, I NEED to complete everything.  May go back later, the exploration in the game is so fun, just not sure how much I wanna do it twice.

Speaking as someone who loves exploring every nook and cranny:

To be fair I've done my class quests and tradeskills as well to get to 50.

[PalmTrees]

Well, finally finished my story quest. When I first got the kill zhaitan quest and it pointed me at the dungeon I thought I'd get my own personal story mission version. Nope, you just gotta do the regular dungeon with a group. My first thought was "A solo quest chain that ends with group content, how very EQ2 of them." The dungeon itself was a pita, two-shot bosses, long repetitive waves of enemies, and overlapping circles too wide to dodge out of.

It's kinda hard to judge the quest chain itself (sylvari female-priory-skritt) as it was continuosly marred by lousy balance that made me hate playing it at times. When I wasn't raging at the lousy balance it was at best, average. Your character is not very interesting. As far as I could tell the noble/charming/firece has no impact on anything. The asura/charr engineer pair gave me a chuckle or two, but otherwise it was by the numbers save the fantasy world. Hated blue underwater chick. "I'm tough and mysterious but I have this rigid but undefined code of honor" blech, go blow a klingon.

[Tmon]

Kinda disappointed about the dungeon requirement, I'll probably do it once just to say I finished the story, but haven't seen anything that will compel me to finish it on all my characters.  The biggest failing so far to me is that I feel like I'm just a spear carrier and not really the focus of the story.

[Miasma]

Storyline was rubbish.  I just finished it to get rid of that damn tracker entry in the upper right.  I was surprised that my pickup group dungeon run went quite smoothly, I guess two of them had already run it before knowing they would have to do it again for the storyline.  The last five minutes of the fight is stupid anti climatic.

[Threash]

That sucks, all the final fights of GW1 took about 5 minutes and were easily soloed with heroes.

[Rasix]

Having seen what real "boss fights" are like, I don't really want to do the group dungeon, but I will feel compelled to.  It's completely stupid to tack on a group dungeon on the end of a 100% solo story line.

Still about 10 levels ahead of my story line at the moment because, quite honestly, it's just a giant, overly long, poorly tuned mess. If they just put some breadcrumbs in the leveling content, they could remove it altogether.  Maybe up zone completion rewards to compensate for the missing exp/loot.

[Zetor]

That sucks, all the final fights of GW1 took about 5 minutes and were easily soloed with heroes.

Maybe after the 7-hero patch... 6+ years after the game's release  

GW1 was far, far, FAR worse about mandatory grouping than GW2 since every single storyline mission required a group of 4+ (after Nightfall this became 3+ or 2+ in some cases). I distinctly remember getting to crystal desert after GW1 released and quitting in frustrations because story missions got really tough. Then there were infuse runs, bleargh. Even after the second expansion added heroes, there were plenty of missions that couldn't be done with heroes and [braindead] henchmen even if you used optimal builds and had the micromanagement skills of a champion starcraft player.

As I posted before, the story was... not very good, it was about what I expected - but again, not really worse than the GW1 stories (Trahearne vs. Rurik grudge match go). I got my enjoyment from the side characters' escapades (especially asura/charr, and the sylvari in the priory missions to an extent)

e: the last 5 minutes of the end boss fight were indeed fuckstupid. Some dev posted on the forum that it's not intended, and they're working on a fix... my money's on content they cut to make the launch, though.

[Ingmar]

You only needed 3 heroes to solo the story ends in GW1. Trying to do Prophecies/Factions with just henchmen is where the fail came in. I soloed all the way through every 'main' quest in the game except the final fight of EOTN with just the 3 heroes (and a fair chunk of Prophecies without any.)

[Zetor]

Maybe, I haven't tried specifically soloing *only* the end missions. There were plenty of missions on the way in all three main campaigns where 3 heroes weren't enough, though (typically ones where you needed to split up, carry a widget or TWO widgets, defend an area, etc) and henchmen were pretty much 100% useless (did their armor even count as infused?). There were also quite a few patches that made H/h-ing areas/missions a lot easier (your own class choice and PVE-only skills counted a lot too)

[Ingmar]

Their armor did count as infused yeah. It is possible I missed 'carry 2 items' type stuff getting patched out before I got to areas, and there were certainly some missions that took me multiple tries, but I don't recall ever having to call in another player to help, other than pre-Lion's Arch in Prophecies  (you can't have heroes before that.)

The end of EOTN was probably doable with 3 too, I just never got around to it until recently. It was an utter joke with 7 heroes, I was really surprised after the difficulty I had with certain other missions. (The Shiro+Lich fight just before the end of Nightfall comes to mind.)

[Threash]

Ok so i just hit 80 and my gear is horrible, probably because i haven't stepped foot in any zone higher than 65 or so.  I have 4.7 gold to my name and 77k karma, how do i go about gearing up?

[kildorn]

Bug someone to make gear, or go to Orr(last zone preferred) and do DEs for it. The cheap karma gear is workable, the nice stuff is 42k/piece. The last bits of your story will also give you decent mid/late 70s armor and weapons.

[sachiel]

Ok so i just hit 80 and my gear is horrible, probably because i haven't stepped foot in any zone higher than 65 or so.  I have 4.7 gold to my name and 77k karma, how do i go about gearing up?

Start out by buying rare 80 armor off the TP.  I'd grab a lvl 78-80 exotic weapon.  78 exotic is better than 80 rare and usually quite a bit cheaper than 80 exotic.  With 77k karma, I'd grab an exotic Orr armor piece or weapon, which are 42k per.  The look on all the Orr armor is the same, but the stats are different per piece, per set. 

[Raknor]

What I did when I hit 80. 

Buy full set of green accessories off TP. These don't drop often and never seem to have the stats I want.  Should cost you about 20 silver.
Craft yellow armor for myself.  If you cannot do this. Buy full set of green off TP. (20s ish)
Buy yellow weapon off TP. 22 silver  It might also be worth your time to look up mystic weapons that are made in the mystic forge.  I've heard they are rather nice. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_weapon


That should get you up to date with armor but now (at least for me) was a choice that I had to make.  Go DPS or support.  These are two entirely different gear sets and when you start picking exotics its good to have a plan. They aren't cheap.

I also started running CoF daily.  Its still super fast and at 60 token a day you can get the cheaper exotics every 3 days. There is also a google spreadsheet out there with the dragon spawn timers that people update.  Find the link to that and start hitting some dragon events.  You get 6 items from the chest and I get a yellow about half the time. Sell the yellow if you don't need it or use a yellow salvage kit and hope for some ectos. 

Don't worry about spending a couple gold to get current.  Money seems to come in pretty fast once you get to the Orr area. The quicker you can kill that stuff the quicker you can make your money back.  Also the level 80 zone (Cursed Shore) with a 100% map complete gave me 2 exotics that were level 78 and 76. But they sold for 70 silver a piece.

[kildorn]

Honestly, I did Orr entirely in level 60-70 magic find gear. World PVE usually isn't that hard*


(*) Unless Imps are involved. Fuck imps.

[01101010]

(*) Unless Imps are involved. Fuck imps.

I believe this needs to be reiterated.