Guild Wars 2 thread

Bumping because Lion's Arch is finally getting rebuilt. The map has been updated with enough scaffold-covered structures to hint at what the new city will look like, and there's a poll to rename a few rebuilt landmarks.

EDIT: Here's a gallery of some of the new stuff. NPCs in the refugee camps in adjacent maps have some nice new dialogue too.

edited 20th May '15 8:24:28 PM by Gaunt88

Holy fuuuuuuuuuck level 10+ Fractals are hard with only three people. Not even the Agony, just because we just can't deal the damage necessary for the fights in time.

We did 'Uncategorized Fractal', 'Charr assault ion Ascalon', 'Dredge factory' and 'Mai Trinn', and Trinn as the easiest out of the three. We had to cheeze old Tom(By having on person wait outside until the other two died, then running in and surviving until they could return so Tom's health wouldn't reset), Ashym took three or four goes, and the Dredge Power suit... ugh, that thing takes WEEKS to kill.

... but, I gotta say, this is the first MMO I've managed to max out a character on. Not just one, either, but two. I'm having fun with it, even if some of the high-level stuff is crazy tough and wreaks havoc on my PC. World bosses are fought at like, 5 FPS.

edited 18th Jul '15 7:04:26 AM by kegisak

This is free to play now? How free? And what does this mean to regulars?

Wait til October and as a newbie, you'll get the original Guild Wars 2 plus the new expansion pack, Heart of the Thorns.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en-gb/

You pay one price and that's it. No monthly subscription fees, though there is a cash shop.

So the base game is free now and you need to pay only for the expansion? I'll give it a try.

I'm trying to give it a shot but it wants me to make a new account from within my old GW 1 account, then gives me errors that it can't use the information provided.

I forgot my old password, so I had to get help from the support staff to get access to my old account back before GW 2 was released. They're VERY serious about customer protection, so I had to find and dig up my old Guild Wars 1 box to convince them that I really do own that account.

Yeah, I just can't be bothered to jump through whatever hoops they want to allow an old customer to play the new game. Honestly, I don't think I ever forgave them for bringing every old class back except for my main, monk.

Because nobody likes to heal if I recall?

I think the Monk is Guardian, now. Based on what I can tell by comparing the two.

I just tried this game out a week ago. For a (now) f2p mmo I'd call it damn decent. Even though a few slots here and there are restricted the free players aren't hobbled to death and back like a few others out there.

I like the whole idea especially around the whole World vs World game type. I made the unfortunate error of choosing a less populated server though, which means that when I tried it out, one of the others had a massive numerical advantage and were pretty much just spawn camping the other two.

Hey, so I have a question for the more experienced players/builders here.

At the moment, I have two fully level characters, a Thief and a Guardian. The Thief is built for backstab, and is built for pure damage - all assassins or Berserkers, etc. The only exception is rings and amulet, which even then provide some offensive stats in addition to the defensive ones. He hits like a truck, doing 6-8K damage per backstab, but the moment anyone so much as looks at him he drops.

The guardian is built fully tank/support, largely by way of passive heals. I use the active healing virtue, but mostly I try to just pile on enough passive healing that as long as my allies don't get hit by a huge burst they're fine. Like the thief but opposite, all of his stats are Defensive, with the exception of offensive rings and amulet. Since he's my main at the moment, he also has ascended trinkets as well. He's a brick wall, and is damn near unkillable in most non-boss encounters, but he takes ages to deal any significant damage.

Both of them work fairly well for team play("Well, I need more practice with the thief), but the trouble is that if I ever want to go solo their weaknesses make it hard to do much in the higher level regions, especially in terms of harder-to-reach areas where other players are less likely to go.

My question is this, then: Is it better to go for full builds, as I've done, or to go for a mixed build, and accept not being great at either in exchange for being reasonable at both.

Like, I understand that the mechanics are going to lean towards one or the other. the guardian will always be more survivable, but deal less damage, than the thief.

I'm leveling a Revenant at the moment, and I've been looking into the Warrior and Necromancer as well... I'm basically looking for something that would be able to wade into a fight, deal a respectable amount of damage but not go down too fast. From what I can see Revenant can work towards that well, as the Assassin spirit can stack a bunch of might and increase attack speed to increase overall DPS, but it also feels pigeonholed. The Legends are great in very specific fields, but anywhere outside of those fields the Rev has pretty much nothing.

Necromancer seems like he has the most robust and diverse set of possibilities, and Warrior seems lowest-maintenance in terms of what I'd need to do to make him viable as a wade-and-fight character, but doesn't seem to have much more flexibility than the Revenant. A bit more, but not a huge amount.

So yeah, essentially I'm just curious if it's generally considered as better to set yourself up for a solid role and trust your team/the crowd to make up for what you lack, or if it's better to try and at least partially cover your own weaknesses even if you're still mostly moving towards something.

Also, if it's worth noting at all: For dungeons, fractals, et, I run with a group of three people as opposed to five. So we pretty much have to hard-build for our roles because we don't have backup. One tank, one DPS, one support.

I haven't played the game in a long time, but season 3 of the living story recently hit and it contains some heavy lore spoilers.

In the new zone Bloodstone Fen, we find the Bloodstone having exploded, Caudecus being revealed as the Confessor and leader of the White Mantle, and Lazarus the Dire returning as the last of the mursaat. Lazarus may have absorbed the power of the Bloodstone as well. Furthermore, apparently Primordus is becoming active again.

Oh hey this thread is a thing. I've been starting out a couple years after my friends got me to actually buy the game (at which point we proceeded to do absolutely nothing with it). Somehow my buddies have fought their way to level 80 in less than a week while I'm still hovering at 22.

It's worth noting that one of these friends had a character that wasn't level 80 yet still managed to singlehandedly break a server-wide event and force an immediate hotfix by killing an unkillable NPC, then proceeded to solo the event boss for a while after it one-shotted the entire server population. He tells me that he was holding back when he did it. I'm not sure if I believe him.

EDIT: Okay, apparently it was a bit more complicated than that. I'll do an actual interview or something... eventually, I guess?

edited 29th Jul '16 9:30:02 PM by EndlessSea

There was an amusing-if-not-annoying bug or two a ways back that allowed you to murder friendly NP Cs but they fixed them several months ago. One especially morbid (or cathartic if you found their repetitive lines really annoying)one was where you could kill children in snowball fights because the snowballs you threw inherited your condition proc on hit traits and poisoned/burned/tormented/confused them to death.

The runes of perplexity ^note A rune set that casts multiple stacks of confusion on anything that hits you have been pretty notorious for causing all sorts of mayhem with stuff like that

Thinking about possibly coming back to this game to see if just how much it improved since launch....

Necro with bad news time: Kotaku: NCSoft planning massive layoffs at ArenaNet.

Lot of things happening with the game! New expansion since the last post, an ongoing rebuild of the lost season 1 content, whole lot of balances and reworks, the game hitting its 10 year anniversary, and a big one for player count- tomorrow brings the Steam launch after a year of waiting past the initial delay.

• End Of Dragons
  • 9 New Elite Specs, per the course for each expansion. YMMV on how they compare to the specs from the previous expansions. IMO they're a little unpolished and a few are insanely OP as of writing.
  • Fishing for fun and profit.
  • A new Jade Bot QOL helper gadget with customization to offer various passive and active boosts to movement and resource gathering, as well as a HP buff for yourself that increases with bot upgrade level.
  • Siege Turtle, a new tank-like mount that can allow a passenger to ride along and control a turret. Currently PVE only but devs have hinted at future plans to maybe incorporate them into WvW if they can get the balance right.
  • Skiffs, a new boat vehicle summonable if the water is deep enough. Can give rides to other players and can be parked and used as a platform to stand on for fishing. IMO not game changing like mounts but they're still fun, and as with mounts they're very well designed with a great "feel" to their acceleration and handling.

I'm not sure how they're going to incorporate them but I hope the steam release gives a mount rental service to F2P players like they do during festivals. PoF absolutely nailed it with introducing mounts, IMO probably the best of any MMO I've played. The first comparison that comes to mind for me would probably trying the vehicles in Halo: Combat Evolved for the first time. They're each very polished and varied in their handling, with unique "feel" to each. Their roles and skills mean that each one has their own niche and subsequently you'll find uses for each one in different situations.

Right now balance feels like a bit of a mess. There was a bunch of drama around some of the balance devs having a discord log leaked revealing that they definitely have a preference to certain classes over others. They're reworking core traits and removing unique class buffs, which leads to some old standby classes like Warriors and Rangers eating it and having to reroll their kit while buffs to the new engineer Mechanist spec make it an insanely useful jack of all trades that outshines nearly every other class in PvE, just like Firebrand was (and still is to a large extent) for PoF.

Edited by carbon-mantis on Aug 22nd 2022 at 1:05:23 PM