Guild Wars 2 and GWJ: Launch Date And Final Beta Weekend

Cobble wrote:

What will I be missing by jumping right into GW2 without all that GW stuff? just some achievements?

If you just want to get the main armor my suggestion would be to pick up the combined collection and play through the Nightfall and Eye of the North campaigns. You should have time to finish them by August, and Nightfall is really well done. One of the better roleplaying stories out there by a company that's not Bioware/Bethesda. It's also set in an African/Middle Eastern setting which is a nice change of pace from ye olde European fantasy.

Finished my 30th HoM point today during my lunch break - I am officially ready for GW2!

Heh, managed to get myself to 11 points and I suspect that's as good as it's going to get. Maybe I need to focus a little more.

Not going for GWAMM?

Scratched wrote:

Not going for GWAMM?

Probably not - I set up a second account back when you were limited to 4 characters per account. Combine that with altitis and my play time and progress was spread across two accounts, making getting 30 points enough of a pain.

After GW and other MMOs, I've learned my lesson. In GW2, I'm going to stick to one main.

I've just realised that one reason I'm struggling with HoM points is that I'm heartily sick of my Monk 'Main' that has the most progress in the various tracks.

I'm so glad dedicated healers have been dropped, playing the game by watching health bars is really no fun.

DevilStick wrote:
Scratched wrote:

Not going for GWAMM?

Probably not - I set up a second account back when you were limited to 4 characters per account. Combine that with altitis and my play time and progress was spread across two accounts, making getting 30 points enough of a pain.

After GW and other MMOs, I've learned my lesson. In GW2, I'm going to stick to one main.

One main? Your willpower is high

I'm going to try oh so hard to at least hit 80 before I start the 2nd character. If I could, I'd bet the house against myself even at terrible odds.

Personally I'm going to roll a big spread of characters and then pick whichever one grabs me as my main.

I guess I'll have to at least roll the max number of starting characters to reserve names as quickly as possible. Speaking of which, if I start now I might be able to come up with 5 creative and interesting names by then. I doubt it though. Ugh.

As someone who didnt really get into GW.. what is the end game like? Is that going to be any different in GW2?

TheGameguru wrote:

As someone who didnt really get into GW.. what is the end game like? Is that going to be any different in GW2?

The original Guild Wars had elite missions (kind of like raiding), hard mode, Challenge Missions, and various flavors of competitive and casual PvP.

With the advent of heroes in Nightfall, the original Guild Wars became (in my view) almost a squad based game. You have your original core character, but you also could build out the rest of the party (gear, skills, talents, etc.). With GW2, we are back to focusing on a single character.

I'm honestly not sure what to expect from GW2's end game, but I assume there will be competitive/casual PvP and big bosses that drop phat lewt.

Are the gear sets for PVP and PVE completely different? How did GW balance out those aspects of the game? i.e. were PVP'ers good at "raiding" or only PVP and vice versa?

aka how much grinding of either/both does one have to do?

From what I understand

Mists (structured PvP) - everyone uses PvP equipment from Mists vendors. No PvE equipment of any kind allowed

WvW (World vs World - large scale server vs server battles) - you use PvE equipment

GW1 - I only played until the release of first expansion, but you could use your PvE equipment in PvP and gain a ever so slight advantage with unique pve gear that had just one low proc attribute better than PvP gear

For GW2

Gear grinds are low in general for best gear. The hardcore grinding is for better looking versions of the same gear. Same goes for structured PvP, you can get pieces that look cooler but same stats.

The last BWE instituted a new honor ranking system for PvP. As you leveled up you'd get a loot box that have some sundries and a random piece of gear. I didnt test it, but i think we'd be able to use the AH for pieces that you get that and cant use or find specific items you'd want. The grind there to be completely kitted out with the alternate looking gear will take awhile.

DevilStick wrote:

With the advent of heroes in Nightfall, the original Guild Wars became (in my view) almost a squad based game. You have your original core character, but you also could build out the rest of the party (gear, skills, talents, etc.). With GW2, we are back to focusing on a single character.

This was actually the hardest thing for me to get used to during the transition because I really love party-based tactical rpg games.

I've got my HoM up to 23 but I'm not really motivated to get it any higher, none of the rewards look that enticing to me.

at this point my main is gonna be a pistol/dagger & pistol/pistol human thief. I know I'll be making at least 5 characters because I want to go through every race's storyline...so now I'm theory crafting which 4 other classes I like the most and which race it makes the most for.

I will test those out during the last beta.. right now i'm thinking sylvari necro, asuran engineer...and I can't decide between ele, guardian and warrior for the charr and norn. Though im leaning towards charr warrior, i tried the warrior rifle build during the stress test and it was pretty fun, played a lot like my pistol thief..only slower and with more armour.

Something I'm wondering whether I should be concerned about, especially with no trinity - Should I care about playing a class that is very popular or unpopular?

I know the mantra for GW2 is play how you want to play, I'm just wondering for the future whether I could do myself any favours by trying to avoid "everyone plays elementalist, we don't need you", or aim for "engineers are rare, come here". I guess I'm looking to feel useful, but if I understand right, it shouldn't be an issue, because everyone is useful.

A lot of the "grouping" so far has been a roving angry mob rolling over objectives. And it is a complete blast!

I hope that continues to be popular because then it really doesn't matter what class you play in those mobs and it doesn't matter if you have 3 or 15 players in your "group". I also know it runs the risk of meeting the same fate as public quests in Warhammer Online. (very bad)

I think 2 things will help remove the required classes in groups: combat rezes and the fact that any class can do them at any time. Well if you want to count those as one thing then the rally and downed system is the second major blow to the trinity.

GrandmaFunk wrote:
DevilStick wrote:

With the advent of heroes in Nightfall, the original Guild Wars became (in my view) almost a squad based game. You have your original core character, but you also could build out the rest of the party (gear, skills, talents, etc.). With GW2, we are back to focusing on a single character.

This was actually the hardest thing for me to get used to during the transition because I really love party-based tactical rpg games.

I've got my HoM up to 23 but I'm not really motivated to get it any higher, none of the rewards look that enticing to me.

That's a healthy amount of rewards. I suspect most folks will only use a handful of the reward items anyway.

TheGameguru wrote:

Are the gear sets for PVP and PVE completely different? How did GW balance out those aspects of the game? i.e. were PVP'ers good at "raiding" or only PVP and vice versa?

aka how much grinding of either/both does one have to do?

In the original GW, some skills work a bit differently between PvE and PvP, and there are some consumables that are usable in PvE only. Otherwise, the gear is pretty much the same.

Example: The Empathy skill has a PvE version and a PvP version. The Wintergreen Candy Cane is an example of a PvE-only consumable.

Getting max level gear is trivial in GW - at least compared to WoW and traditonal MMOs - so it's relatively easy to acquire max level weapons and armor sets for different builds. Especially compared to WoW.

Most "green" items can be recreated by trading some monster parts to a collector and applying weapon mods salvaged or purchased. For example, I generally run with a "green" Stonereaper staff in my Curses based builds, but if you scroll to the bottom of the page, you'll see how to make a staff with the same stats.

Similarly, you can craft expensive looking armor with gold and materials, but there are collectors that will give you armor with equivalent stats in exchange for monster parts.

Note however, that builds of skills and talent points may vary widely between between builds for PvE and PvP (remember that GW builds are like an 8 card Magic deck), which may cause you to put different runes and insignias on your armor.

Example - my necro main uses one primary set of armor, but I tend to switch staves and headpieces depending on whether I'm running a Death Magic or Curses build.

Final point - playing through one or more of the GW chapters in the next couple of months for fun should be doable and should net a few HoM points for GW2. Make no mistake however, getting to 30-50 HoM points would be a huge grind if you're just getting started now.

Edit: Added the example in italics.

Scratched wrote:

Something I'm wondering whether I should be concerned about, especially with no trinity - Should I care about playing a class that is very popular or unpopular?

I know the mantra for GW2 is play how you want to play, I'm just wondering for the future whether I could do myself any favours by trying to avoid "everyone plays elementalist, we don't need you", or aim for "engineers are rare, come here". I guess I'm looking to feel useful, but if I understand right, it shouldn't be an issue, because everyone is useful.

In public quests it won't be a problem as every player is welcome. Not sure about dungeons, but I've seen YouTube videos were players were beating Ascalon Catacombs with a group containing all engineers or all elementalists. The only problem might be PVP where having too many of one class on your side will unbalance things. I didn't see that in the beta but it was a problem in GW 1.

The good news is I saw a good spread of characters in the beta.

I guess I'm overthinking class selection a bit. Probably a symptom of the 7 and a half week wait until release with no other decent games to occupy my mind with. No matter what choice I make for my main, there's always going to be 'grass is greener on the other side' situations, I guess the design goal is to minimise that.

jdzappa wrote:

In public quests it won't be a problem as every player is welcome. Not sure about dungeons, but I've seen YouTube videos were players were beating Ascalon Catacombs with a group containing all engineers or all elementalists. The only problem might be PVP where having too many of one class on your side will unbalance things. I didn't see that in the beta but it was a problem in GW 1.

The good news is I saw a good spread of characters in the beta.

Additionally, PvP proper is designed to facilitate class switching. Everyone gets bumped to 80 and you will have access to all the PvP gear you have unlocked afaik.

As for switching between characters for PvE, from what I could see there were daily/monthly achievement tracks that seemed to be linked between characters, and other account based achievement tracks. The only part where I could see that you would be tied to "one" PvE character was for the global exploration stuff (percentage of world explored) and the zone-based rewards. There likely will be other things but hard to tell at this point. There have been other things that were mentioned as per-character unlocks (i.e., dye) but it's not clear yet where the development will land.

Tyops wrote:

Additionally, PvP proper is designed to facilitate class switching. Everyone gets bumped to 80 and you will have access to all the PvP gear you have unlocked afaik.

Is this going to stay that way for launch? I thought getting boosted to 80 was a function of the beta and testing.

Scratched wrote:

Something I'm wondering whether I should be concerned about, especially with no trinity - Should I care about playing a class that is very popular or unpopular?

I know the mantra for GW2 is play how you want to play, I'm just wondering for the future whether I could do myself any favours by trying to avoid "everyone plays elementalist, we don't need you", or aim for "engineers are rare, come here". I guess I'm looking to feel useful, but if I understand right, it shouldn't be an issue, because everyone is useful.

With the claims that all classes can perform multiple roles this shouldn't be much of an issue. It should come down to player ability to fill a role, and the composition of their skill bar.

I don't have the hands on experience to say whether it holds up in practice, but A.net seems aware of the issue.

ranalin wrote:
Tyops wrote:

Additionally, PvP proper is designed to facilitate class switching. Everyone gets bumped to 80 and you will have access to all the PvP gear you have unlocked afaik.

Is this going to stay that way for launch? I thought getting boosted to 80 was a function of the beta and testing.

I was under the impression that this is standard.

ranalin wrote:
Tyops wrote:

Additionally, PvP proper is designed to facilitate class switching. Everyone gets bumped to 80 and you will have access to all the PvP gear you have unlocked afaik.

Is this going to stay that way for launch? I thought getting boosted to 80 was a function of the beta and testing.

Yep. WvW everyone gets boosted to effective 80, but with your current skills. sPvP (structured) everyone gets a fully unlocked 80 with free 80 PvP gear for an even footing. If your character isn't actually 80 yet in PvE, you gain xp while playing.

Managed to finish my first Guild Wars campaign, Factions with my Monk. Only 5/13 Masters though. I think I'll go through and try get the rest.

Feeling pretty satisfied though tbh, I normally get very easily distracted.

Did you grab the phoenix and the armour? I was banging my head against Shiro for a while again trying to get them after I had a planning failure.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

Managed to finish my first Guild Wars campaign, Factions with my Monk.

Grats.

Scratched wrote:

Did you grab the phoenix and the armour?

Which armor?

DevilStick wrote:
Scratched wrote:

Did you grab the phoenix and the armour?

Which armor?

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Divin...
The Factions prestige armor