Crafting is broadly speaking a money sink for some experience, or if you want to make a legendary or ascended gear, or if you find exploration of the recipes fun (i.e. cooking). Generally equivalent prices for stuff on the market.
You should be able to respec into anything you’ve unlocked.
Does anyone know if you need to actually load up a character to play, or do you just need to log in to get the season 3 episodes?
I think you log in as a character and click the little wiggly green icon and it activates. It’s unlocked account wide.
I did not even have to click anything, after selecting a character I just had a pop up after a brief period advising that season 3 was available.
Cooking is not particularly useful, since it often costs more to craft food than buy it. Why? Because crafting food gives experience, and buying doesn’t. Hence, people craft food for xp and then sell the product at a loss.
As a guardian, armorsmith and weaponsmith are more likely to be useful. You still get experience, and eventually you can make ascended weapons and armor which cannot be bought from the trading post.
I’d go with skip crafting for now. It is a sink until max level and after some recipes collected. Actually crafting ascended is a bit of a grind, and much of it time gated. You can level well enough usually in “whatever dropped that looks better” up to close to max level. Save the money you’d spend leveling crafting to buy some upgrades at 80.
If you think you’ll be around after leveling then level what you want then. You get 2 crafts per character, and can buy expansion items to have 2 more per character. By then you’ll also have a better idea what you want to make too.
I did crafting as I went. I was never up to date enough to make myself gear to use, but all of my characters got 5-10 levels out of crafting, using incidental materials I gathered/salvaged. Unless something has changed since release, you can do all the crafting tracks on one character—you don’t lose progress/level when you switch, although there is a cost associated with it.
Now, for some talk about the story!
I’m liking the start of Season 3. They certainly aren’t wasting any time getting into the swing of things, and it seems to me like this could be another expansion lead-in, based on patterns from last time around.
Cool stuff: the new zone is super cool, although I don’t have enough gliding masteries to make it as cool as it could be. There was a little bit of dialogue specific to character race, which is always welcome.
Fishbreath’s common complaints: now that we know there’s no technical reason why GW2 can’t do different voiced dialog per character race, I wish they’d go the whole way and pass the player character script around to rewrite it per-race. An asura talking to Taimi about the science of magic should sound completely different than a human, who should sound completely different than a charr. That’s just me, though, and a very certain kind of griping.
Fishbreath’s specific complaints: enemy density is super-high, and player density wasn’t quite there yet. Maybe it gets better. ANet seems to think that 1) I was paying attention for and 2) remember all of the lore from the past few games/expansions, and I most certainly was not. I had to do a little wiki diving to catch up on what was up with the bloodstones.
So yesterday, being the altaholic that I am, I decided to try the new Daredevil specialization for my Thief.
And OMG, I love it.
I didn’t play Thief much because it’s not a very strong class for PvE (and I don’t have much interest in PvP or even WvW). However, the staff you get as a Daredevil not only solves that, but it does so in a spectacular manner. It’s amazingly powerful, and it has a very active flow in gameplay, with lots of quick tactical decisions to be made, a lot of reliance on proper timing (with some fair leeway though), in which you have to choose correct skills and evade to both do damage and stay alive. It’s awesome, and I can see myself playing with my Thief/Daredevil a lot more now.
Ah good to know! I haven’t played much since pre-HoT, and my son dragged me back in oh maybe 2 months ago. I had all 80s, so I’m slowly re-equipping them and unlocking the HoT specs and relearning play. 4 down, on Elementalist now, and Thief was next on my list!
Glad I waited though. I should feel well enough soon for a fast decision class and ele which is fragile if you mess up should be a good warm up. (Recovering from a major surgery)
That sounds fun. I tried boosting my Necro but it gave me a condition build with scepter/dagger that I thought was really boring. You still have to unlock the Elite specs I noticed.
Power Necro is pretty fun to play, even more so if you go with the Reaper specialization (that’s how I run now - greatsword and axe/focus). Condition builds are not as fun, yes. I used to run a condition build with scepter/dagger and staff, but I find the power build a lot better and more fun to play.
Even if you don’t go with the Reaper specialization, going Power with axe/focus and staff can be pretty cool. The secret to the Necro (specially the Power Necro) is using the shroud abilities well, particularly Life Blast. Dhuumfire is pretty helpful in giving it a further punch. Basic strategy is to use Axe 2 (Ghastly Claws) to fill the life force bar, and then turn the shroud on and Life Blast away, trying to position myself well enough to take full advantage of the piercing properties it has.
Going Reaper changes the shroud abilities, so it’s pretty different to play in some ways, but the same principle applies - going in and out of shroud as needed is key to using the Necro effectively.
Yes, and it takes a good amount of Hero points to do so. I did unlock the specializations on the characters I play the most (and I’m not working on unlocking all the skills for the Daredevil), but it’s a fair amount of “work”. Going for the Hero Challenges in the HoT areas does help, since they give you 10 points instead of 1 as in Central Tyria, but many of them are harder to get. It’s still fairly doable and doesn’t take too long, though you’ll need around 20 Hero Challenges to fully unlock specializations, which is neither extremely hard nor trivial.
Thanks rhamorim–yeah, I was interested in playing Reaper more than anything, but it doesn’t look like I can check that out without committing to the boost. The shroud mechanic seems interesting, but my main concern is that overall Reaper would feel too slow; coming from an Elementalist that doesn’t like Tempest and misses daggers, that’s probably the case regardless, but I think Reaper looks really cool. I still have to boost up the Revenant and see if I still like him.
You can check out any skill or trait in Heart of the Mists (PvP zone). If you own HoT, all elite specs will be available as well. You can even practice against a few NPCs.
I was just coming in to ask about Thief class, cause I’m an altaholic as well. Any other tips? Just at lev 4 now.
Let’s see. You should remember that you can use a certain skill repeatedly, since weapons skills for the Thief have no cooldowns, having only a initiative cost (that’s key to using a thief effectively).
Staying alive with a thief is tricky - you want to make sure you know when to use skills that have evade built-in to enhance survivability.
Thieves don’t have many ranged options, but using the shortbow while you get used to the class can help, even if it is ultimately a bit underpowered. Also, before unlocking the Daredevil specialization, shortbow is the only AoE the thief has access to in terms of weapon skills, so keep that in mind.
One good combo against most normal enemies is using dagger+pistol. Pistol 5 creates a circle that pulses blind to enemies, so you can approach an enemy, drop pistol 5, and use dagger skills to hurt the enemy. Reapply circle as needed, disengage when you run out of initiative. And remember it doesn’t work against enemies that can’t be blinded, like the Dredge.
As for stealing, I barely use it. It is more useful with proper traits, but I never really grokked how to use it to great effect. YMMV.
Thanks, Very useful. But now I’m on my elementalist. It sucks that I can’t just play one char for a while. I wish I could find my old game. I had chars pretty high. I think I’ll spend some time guessing email and passwords. :)
You filthy bastards have got me reinstalling GW2 again. I figure I’ll wipe my two 80s since I don’t know how to play them any more (stashing my gear, of course) and start AGAIN.
I logged in for a minute to get my free whatevers… bombarded with achievements, chests, choices and a notification about a skill path or something. I’ll definitely not be able to jump in for an hour or so… gonna have to go in hard to figure out what;s going on again.
Liking main hand pistol/off hand dagger for Thief. Tried pistol/pistol but it seems underpowered.