Guild Wars 2

NA or EU?

I haven't had any issues catching a DS event on NA.

EU, as usual.

I personally am a fan of raiding in most games. But the way the classes work, its just chaos with reins. Im not one to recommend it in GW2, but I think the rest of the game "overall" is great.

Daidraco said:

I personally am a fan of raiding in most games. But the way the classes work, its just chaos with reins. Im not one to recommend it in GW2, but I think the rest of the game "overall" is great.

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Gw2's problem with organized PvE is that either you have the encounters tuned for pubs where they have to be playable for people who just walk in with zero info, or you end up being very specific, which in the absence of trinity means the dreaded meta builds. GW1 was kinda similar until they broke the game with heroes who could straight up play better than most players. On one hand, you don't have the shit like trash mobs, on the other hand, every piece of PvE content is designed to be repeated forever, which means people running it will put together optimal cheoreography for the whole run, which is a bitch to learn for newcomers, no to mention gear for, just so you satisfy the community's requirements for "optimal" run. And most people are just straight up bad at the game, but I can't blame them, you are never really forced to "git gud" in PvE, since 99% of the time, you can just zerg the encounter.

For now, I'm having enough fun doing all the exploring and mastery achievements with some fractals sprinkled in, maybe I will make it to raids eventually, but even maxing out gliding is turning out to be a bit of a chore, no to mention living world's "unlock X mastery to continue". Bloodstone Fen was fun and short enough to not bore me while getting its mastery. Also I swear the game makes it rain much more these days, I'm tempted to unload my stacks of mystic coins for the 300 gold it would make me, daily is 2g, the lego crafting mats you get from metas also sell for like 2,5g and salvaging all the rares for ectos brings in even more.

Miele said:

I got HoT some months ago, but I can't really love it like I did with the original content. Any tricks to speed up masteries or should I just gtfo of the first HoT zone?

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I would suggest doing all the strongboxes and all the mastery points around the zone on the map, after you finish the story/boxes/insights do the easier masteries. There are some decent writeups on the wiki as to what is required to get most masteries. The good thing is season 3 uses the same mastery points and each episode gives excess of around 2-3 points so you can skip doing a lot of the HoT ones.

Daidraco said:

I personally am a fan of raiding in most games. But the way the classes work, its just chaos with reins. Im not one to recommend it in GW2, but I think the rest of the game "overall" is great.

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The raiding is dreadful, it's ridiculous when I go into a pug raid and some guy is bitching about my daredevil doing 20k on slothasor while doing the slubbling and hes doing 26k and yelling i'm not doing more dps when 10k of his damage is going to the adds in the encounter and i'm topping the incoming damage on the named technically.

It's got really great potential raiding wise, I really enjoy the combat and the mechanics of a lot of the fights but the player base really makes it hard.

For example when I go into a pick up raid and some random necro is wearing nomad pieces and parsing 3k and I have to kick him and then start the vicious cycle over again, and the game just simply isn't interesting enough to join a "raid guild" and i use that term lightly because typically their all just shit balls who try to speedrun the same shitty instances weekly.

The final nail in the coffin for raiding was the terrible rewards, the legendary armor was extremely disappointing and requires you to hammer at the same shitty mechanics for months to even get a single set.

chorboy said:

I would suggest doing all the strongboxes and all the mastery points around the zone on the map, after you finish the story/boxes/insights do the easier masteries. There are some decent writeups on the wiki as to what is required to get most masteries. The good thing is season 3 uses the same mastery points and each episode gives excess of around 2-3 points so you can skip doing a lot of the HoT ones.

The raiding is dreadful, it's ridiculous when I go into a pug raid and some guy is bitching about my daredevil doing 20k on slothasor while doing the slubbling and hes doing 26k and yelling i'm not doing more dps when 10k of his damage is going to the adds in the encounter and i'm topping the incoming damage on the named technically.

It's got really great potential raiding wise, I really enjoy the combat and the mechanics of a lot of the fights but the player base really makes it hard.

For example when I go into a pick up raid and some random necro is wearing nomad pieces and parsing 3k and I have to kick him and then start the vicious cycle over again, and the game just simply isn't interesting enough to join a "raid guild" and i use that term lightly because typically their all just shit balls who try to speedrun the same shitty instances weekly.

The final nail in the coffin for raiding was the terrible rewards, the legendary armor was extremely disappointing and requires you to hammer at the same shitty mechanics for months to even get a single set.

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HoT without masteries is pretty rough, I basically followed the story as much as possible with small stop in Auric Basin, since it seemed to be the most alive of all the maps, so it's a good place to grind the few basic ones. Then once you finish off the main story, Living World maps are tiny and very much alive with events going nonstop, so you have experience raining from the sky, but a good meta event still pulls ahead. Classic masteries can still be done in Frostgorge Sound in champion trains or whatever the daily event map is, or just start running fractals. Dungeons have been reduced to achievement whoring, which is kind of sad.

I've been poking at some of the legendary grinds, but once I put together the crazy amount of mats and time you have to spend, I think I'll just quit once I get bored again. On one hand, Anet really put a lot of work into their crafting and collections to make the weapons feel epic, but on the other hand, I have better shit to do.

Sometimes I wish GW2 had as many PvE tools as WoW, where you can dissect your performance to a crazy degree, but I don't think idiots need anymore reasons to bash others, however the only feedback in 99% of the game on whether you are doing well is not dying and events getting done, which is a pretty shitty metric.

The story quests need skippable dialogue, having an achievement locked behind 15 minutes of crap is terrible.

The season 3 zones are just better than HoT zones. HoT was just pushing their verticality movement gimmicks to 11 and it was no fun, they dialed it down to acceptable levels on all season 3 maps.

Valderen said:

Well, finally started Season 3, the first zone Bloodstone Fen was an improvement over the HoT zones, the next zone Amber Bay is an improvement over that too, has "Hearts" like the original zones. Feels much close to the original zones in design than HoT zones. Much easier to navigate. The meta events in Bloodstone Fen were much less disruptive then HoT events too, haven't seen the Amber Bay ones yet just got there.

Overall it's an improvement in my opinion. It kept some of the stuff like gliding updrafts, mushrooms jump, etc...but it feels a lot smoother in design so far. If the expansion follows this sort of zone design...I'm going to like more than HoT for sure.

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I'm up to Bitterfrost Frontier and Lake Doric now and the zones keep the quality, even if they get a bit formulaic with rewards and meta events all the bloody time. Lake Doric suffers from many maps having a farm train in the upper right corner which saps people from the rest of the events. The personal story isn't so bad, even if it feels a lot more scattershot but the final Caudecus fight is fucking retarded, one of the most aoe happy fights that takes place in a shoebox and even if you figure out a strategy, they deem it fun to redo it like 3-4 times for some reason and the game rewards you for just zerging the boss instead of going for better execution. I still can't seem to care about any of the characters, mostly because they all seem completely incompetent, since you are the only person who ever does anything. The Icebeast fight at the end of Bitterfrost is also pretty silly, I had no idea how should I even approach it and suddenly it transpired I was halfway done... And their fetish for trash mobs in the personal story is pretty sad. Taimi is giving you some expostion ? here is some random trash to kill !

Also stopped by the gw2 subreddit, holy shit are some of the fanboys insufferable - a thread about how Anet can do no wrong with expansions, thankfully it was mostly filled with people reminiscing what kind of a turd HoT at launch was.

I logged into this just to screw around and unlock the living story episode and after 5 minutes of remembering what the abilities and shit were, I thought, well maybe I will just play the first season 3 episode to see what's going on.

And then, just like that, I was a full time GW2 player again, heh. Path of Fire here I come baby!

Faltigoth said:

I logged into this just to screw around and unlock the living story episode and after 5 minutes of remembering what the abilities and shit were, I thought, well maybe I will just play the first season 3 episode to see what's going on.

And then, just like that, I was a full time GW2 player again, heh. Path of Fire here I come baby!

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Careful, eventually you hit the end of the story ad most of the easy achievements and you realize why you quit in the first place. But the ride was fun and I'm still enjoying the fractals.

Zaphid said:

Careful, eventually you hit the end of the story ad most of the easy achievements and you realize why you quit in the first place. But the ride was fun and I'm still enjoying the fractals.

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Hah but expansion coming end of the month, that should hit right around the time I am back to decent at playing a few different characters and hold me a month or two, then the Halloween and Xmas events...I'll be stuck here till early 2018. I haven't even gotten back into fractal running yet, still in the 're-learning how to play' mode.

Valderen said:

I've reached Bitterfrost now, I like the zone, interesting mechanics with the Flame thingy, and the chill effect mobs put on you.

While they don't always succeed, I can't fault ArenaNet for trying new stuff with their zones. They more often than not manage to create a very unique feel to each zones, more so than any MMO I remember.

I just got my Leatherworker to 500, going to start on Ascended gear, although I am not sure I'll have the patience for it.

I went back to Silverwaste a little for Bandit Crest so I can buy the Sinister Insignia recipe, to make a Sinister Set, I need 400 Crest and I am at 380 or so, so should be able to get it tonight.

Even after all this time, I still enjoy getting caught up in a series of events that distract from my objective and drag me across the zone...and then while you're trying to get back to what you were doing, you get distracted again...and 3 hours later you didn't do what you were planning but had tons of fun, and 3-4 POI discovered, and Vista or two done.

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Yeah, but that is exactly the problem once you "finish" the main storylines - if you have goals to work towards, that sidetracking is horrible for your progress since it's not very effective, it doesn't get you the achievements you want and generally just gets in the way if you have specific goals in mind. On the other hand, you have the best maps of the story ahead of you, especially the last one is sort of "greatest hits" of GW2. Draconis Mons has an awesome idea they didn't have enough time to fully flesh out, inside out Un'Goro is a great premise, but ultimately falls short. Lake Doric is Queensdale lvl 80 edition and has no business being as good as it is, since it's rather basic compared to other zones, but sometimes you just want an easy to navigate map. Bitterfrost is decent, but besides easy daily quests and the gimmicky killzone, the only memorable parts are the hot spring jumping puzzles.

If you have played games in any capacity, the difficulty of GW2 is laughable. Sure the game could be balls to the walls difficult with unforgiving dodge timings, but more often than not you die due to being lazy. If you keep hitting your attack skills and have a berserker exotic set, you are good to go. Fractals are a goldmine, especially once you hit t2+

Yeah. GW2 is the game I always go back to. A huge reason for that is that it is so easy to go back to. Also there is a ton to do, and most of it is optional.

For most other mmo's you have to study for days to remember all the intricacies of playing effectively. And then grind gear for days or weeks just to catch up to where you were. Good or bad, in GW2 you can pretty much faceroll the keyboard and still be somewhat effective, even in PvP / WvW. Good players will still pwn you but it at least you have a chance. Plus there isn't a gear treadmill that resets every 3 months. Hate that.

I just realized there's a quest/achievement line for the broken Caladbolg you get after the end of HotS. Shame there's no staff, because otherwise it's probably the easiest ascended weapon you can get, done in an hour or two, even if the final fight is really annoying.

Well, I was going to install this and get ready for the expansion but the new launcher does not let you pick where to install the game and it defaults to C:, which I bought specifically to fit windows only.

What boneheaded dev made this decision?

Hekotat said:

Well, I was going to install this and get ready for the expansion but the new launcher does not let you pick where to install the game and it defaults to C:, which I bought specifically to fit windows only.

What boneheaded dev made this decision?

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Weird, it downloaded into the same directory the launcher was in, but it wasn't even "installed" since I changed system drives and Win versions since I last played it, I just had the old version on a drive and everything ran smoothly. The game really is just like 3 files.

Zaphid said:

Weird, it downloaded into the same directory the launcher was in, but it wasn't even "installed" since I changed system drives and Win versions since I last played it, I just had the old version on a drive and everything ran smoothly. The game really is just like 3 files.

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I tried moving it to a different hard drive and it still defaulted to C: