5801

I worded that poorly, so let me give it another shot. Updates usually have some content that low levels can’t do, which is fine, but they also have at least SOME content that you can do as a fresh off the boat character, usually thanks to upleveling. This update offers nothing to new players, because the story is gated behind content they can’t play.

5802

If you’re a truly fresh off the boat character, I’m not sure you care too much. The game is fairly overwhelming, regardless of whether it is your first MMO, or you are coming from a DIKU-style MMO. You likely aren’t going to even fully grasp the story behind the living story content at that point. Granted, you might be hitting your stride right as the content slips away, but new content is right around the corner so you’ve not really ‘lost’ anything.

Even though I’m not ‘new’, I haven’t been a frequent player of late but I did hop on for the Jubilee portion. It was still a bit confusing, and I claim to have at least a rudimentary grasp of the basics. Granted, more than just dinking around would have cleared things up.

5803

There is something to be said about crafting your own level appropriate gear with the stuff that you’ve gathered yourself.

Just know that equivalent gear is cheaper on the trading post (ie/ cheaper than the selling price of the raw materials you use to craft), and that its difficult to be self-sustaining from your own gathered materials by the mid levels of crafting - most find themselves running into a bottleneck of materials by mid-tier 2 crafting (~level 125)

5804

I agree. I’m a casual player of GW2, been on and off it a few times, but love it when I play it. I’ve had a lvl 80 since a while after launch, and alts of each profession, highest 50. I never really had much interest in any of the Living Story content at all, apart from a dabble with the Flame and Frost single player bits, until the Zephyr Sanctum and the more recent updates. I’m now very much into it all. But before, I was quite happy to pootle about in the open world doing my thing.

5805

A few more hours in and my engineer is 5 and my guardian is now 8. Man oh man am I loving this. In other good news my wife never made it to the free weekend either and picked up a copy for herself last night. I absolutely love how a new weapon can change things up so radically. I was using a mace and shield on my guardian, plugging away having fun, then I got a two handed sword as a drop. All of a sudden i’m a leaping, yanking, twirling typhoon of death. At some point while escorting a young lady in her hunt for the yeti, another player did, something, to me that turned all my attacks into a totally different set of fire based apocalypse madness for a time, it was awesome! Loving this so much.

I also love how the bank and collection storage is all shared between characters. And being able to send all your mats there with a couple clicks, so gooood. And holy cow on high the cities are huge. I walked into Divinities Reach and it blew me away how big it all was. I seriously feel like a kid in a candy store being told, go ahead, its all yours!

Sorry just had to gush, I’ll be in my bunk.

5806

I’ll echo this. For the first batch of levels (maybe to 25 or so?) I was able to provide my wife and I some pretty decent pieces with everything I picked up. After that, I really ran into issues with a lack of materials (namely the blood, fangs, etc.) and could not continue leveling it inline with my character level.

It also became much, much easier to just update my gear from the trading post every 5 levels. Blue quality gear (which is fine for leveling) almost always sells for 1 copper above vendor price. So you can buy the gear, use it, then sell it to the vendor and your net loss is something like 10 copper.

In other news, ahead of the free trial GW2 has updated the $50 version of the game and renamed it the digital heroic version:

https://buy.guildwars2.com/en/

It now includes some gear (or maybe armor skins?), an extra bag for holding stuff, and 10 XP boosters.

5807

It’s the standard Deluxe Edition stuff plus some extras:
Summonable 2-week bank golem for all characters, the summon a wolf elite skill that no one uses, influence (for guild), glory (to buy sPvP stuff)

And the new stuff:
18 slot bag (technically quite expensive)
10 xp boosters
1 choice of skins - apparently this gets you two sets of your choice

I did some gold->gems earlier this week in anticipation of gem store sales, and I did pick this up for unknown impulse reasons (haven’t turned in for the skin choice yet).

5808

Note that both the standard edition has the new heroic stuff (bag, XP booster, skins) added too, not just the deluxe.

5809

Language!

I have a general question for everyone: Do you use these boosters rarely? Often? Always? Right now I’m just stockpiling them, possible for some far-off future when I play for hours on end and really need them. But now I’m thinking that I should just be popping boosters all the time like Tic-Tacs. Since the leveling curve really is flat(tish), I suppose it doesn’t matter if I boost from 30-40 or from 70-80, right?

5810

I used to hoard them but yeah, it makes no real difference as long as you’re active during the time they’re up. You should also pretty much always have a food buff up.

5811

I went from 6 gold to 13 tonight, plus about five levels and more gear than I could shake all of my sticks at. And I’m an elementalist. I got a lot of sticks.

5812

I’m enjoying myself quite a bit with the last 2 living world installments. I worry, however, that, because the new events – especially the Clockwork stuff – are SO lucrative in terms of gear, cash and experience, that other parts of the game are accumulating a thick layer of dust. I have no data to back this up, except that, when my newly minted level 80 necro headed over to the Straits of Devastation to try to pick up some of the exotic karma gear, there was, literally, no one running the events there. I didn’t even see another soul in the whole zone, nor did I receive any response to my inquiries in the “map” channel.

I guess I’m also worried that ANet is setting a precedent that will be hard to back away from. Anyone else concerned or am I just being a nervous ninny?

5813

I think it is a fair concern. A lot of the complaints about the current event style is that they are too ‘single zone’ focused. Even though this one changes zones, I believe it is still just one zone at a time. People seem to be clamoring for more ‘full world’ events in order to spread people out into the world again (I see RIFT-style invasions often cited).

5814

Also no one actually sticks around the zone. Once the invasions over, the normal events still remain untouched.

5815

Nice interview of a GW2 player (mother) by a GW2 player (daughter).

5816

I leveled up my Norn Guardian to 21 over the weekend. Absolutely in love with this game. In the four days I’ve played I’ve managed to polish off the daily achievement every day and am not that far from finishing the monthly too. I wasn’t sure if I’d like being auto leveled to the zone, but I’m really liking it now. I can almost forget what level I am and just run around and enjoy whats happening in the zone I’m in. There zones seem to have a decent number of people in them too. I know a bunch were from the free weekend, but there were a lot of higher level toons running around doing events etc too. My only regret so far is that I couldn’t have started playing a year ago.

5817

Hmm, I purchased the game on Day 1, and still haven’t left my starting area (you’re higher level than me!). My problem is that I played WoW for so many years using the mouse and mouse buttons to move, and the keyboard to trigger abilities, which was fine, since WoW’s combat isn’t too directional dependent. But GW2’s is, so I’m forced to use the keyboard for movement and abilities, which is difficult for me (yeah, PC FPSs are also difficult for me).

My latest attempt at a solution, though, is mapping all of my abilities to my mouse buttons, but that can interfere with free looking while trying to actuate the buttons. The frustration of feeling like my fingers on my left hand are twisting into pretzels is what’s been keeping me from playing the game. :-(

5818

I suspect they’ve built a lot more headroom into the game for rewards (without breaking the economy or the rest of the game) than they’ve let on. People keep forgetting that Anet had a HUGE botting problem with the game when it started. What this “feels” like to me (admittedly totally subjectively) is that they’re starting to turn the rewards up to the “eleven” that they were meant to be, but they couldn’t be because Anet were starting cautiously.

I suspect rewards are going to be upped across the board, for DEs too, which I think will smooth out the distribution of the population again.

I may be being Pollyannaish on this, I know, but I just find it hard to believe that the team who developed GW are stupid enough not to know how doing what they’re doing could screw the game, if they don’t have something up their sleeve like I’ve been describing.

The net result is going to be that it’s going to be a bit easier to get nice stuff than it has been.

5819

(response to Mysterio, two posts up)

I can understand that, it took me a few hours to feel like I wasn’t spazzing out in combat. In WoW I always used the keyboard to move and then a combo of keys and clicking for abilities so it wasn’t that far of a stretch for me. The one thing that I really like is that there is a hard limit on the number of abilities you have available to use. So I won’t wind up with those sprawling hotbars that do in WoW.

5820

So… after trying the free weekend pass, i confirmed to myself i’m just not interested in MMOs. Maybe if i were younger or could stand to play just one game at a time. If this is the pinnacle of what an MMO can be, i’m worried i won’t enjoy Elder Scrolls online.