Guild Wars 2 Catch All

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Release date:
Head start: August 25th 00:00 PST (03:00 EST)
Launch: August 28th

Preorder/prepurchase Info: Traditional preorders and "prepurchases" (pay full price now and get beta access) are now available from ArenaNet and select retailers
ArenaNet Order Page
Official Retailer List

Official FAQ: Here

Official Wiki: Here

Official Manual: Here

GWJ Build Thread: Here

GamersWithJobs Guild Info:
Guild Name: Gamers with Jobs [GWJ]
GWJ Server: Northern Shiverpeaks
Organization Thread

Helpful Information
Registering your retail box code
Some Basic Play Tips

If they actually stick to their stated design philosophy, they could have the greatest MMO ever on their hands.

I never played the first one, but this is starting to look pretty cool. I'm getting a serious Avatar vibe from that elementalist, and apparently there are viking dudes that can turn into bears? I like vikings, and I like bears. I will be watching this one with great interest.

Regarding Mike's thoughts about adding fast-travel to WoW: Long flights do kind of suck, but they also underscore that each continent is one gigantic land mass. My friend, who has only played Conan, finds that to be mind-blowing.

Now, they should add the option to jump off the bird, for sure. And if they wanted to enable fast travel at a certain level (maybe when you get a flying mount), I'd be okay with that. But I'm fine with them leaving it as it is. A cohesive, congruent Azeroth is one of WoW's highlights imho. Not that fast travel would remove that, but it might lessen the impact.

Fedaykin98 wrote:

Regarding Mike's thoughts about adding fast-travel to WoW: Long flights do kind of suck, but they also underscore that each continent is one gigantic land mass. My friend, who has only played Conan, finds that to be mind-blowing.

Now, they should add the option to jump off the bird, for sure. And if they wanted to enable fast travel at a certain level (maybe when you get a flying mount), I'd be okay with that. But I'm fine with them leaving it as it is. A cohesive, congruent Azeroth is one of WoW's highlights imho. Not that fast travel would remove that, but it might lessen the impact.

You and I look at it differently. You see it as an experience; I've long since left the days of experiencing Azeroth behind. I have no objection to making it a kind-of, "find your way there first" system, and perhaps the occasional quest where there's some kind of justification for going by land rather than fast-travel. But once you hit 80, if you're going back to mainland Azeroth, you should not be required to wait on a 10-minute flight to get from one end to the other.

Very excited for this. I still play GW every Wednesday. We tried Aion, but it really just got us excited for GW2.

I fired my Guild Wars character back up a couple of weeks ago after the buzz around Guild Wars 2 caught my attention. It's still a great game, I think the only reason I never got "hardcore" about it was that I didn't start playing until it was already a couple of years old and that made it pretty hard to catch up with the jargon, acronyms, and strategy.

Just hearing that GW2 will follow the same subscription-free model is enough to tell me that this time it will be a release day purchase.

In the meanwhile I'll keep trying to get my Ranger through Factions and Eye of the North!

DevilStick steps up to the plate. And the crowd goes wild.

NSMike wrote:
Fedaykin98 wrote:

Regarding Mike's thoughts about adding fast-travel to WoW: Long flights do kind of suck, but they also underscore that each continent is one gigantic land mass. My friend, who has only played Conan, finds that to be mind-blowing.

Now, they should add the option to jump off the bird, for sure. And if they wanted to enable fast travel at a certain level (maybe when you get a flying mount), I'd be okay with that. But I'm fine with them leaving it as it is. A cohesive, congruent Azeroth is one of WoW's highlights imho. Not that fast travel would remove that, but it might lessen the impact.

You and I look at it differently. You see it as an experience; I've long since left the days of experiencing Azeroth behind. I have no objection to making it a kind-of, "find your way there first" system, and perhaps the occasional quest where there's some kind of justification for going by land rather than fast-travel. But once you hit 80, if you're going back to mainland Azeroth, you should not be required to wait on a 10-minute flight to get from one end to the other.

I'm totally with NSMike here. Lack of real quick travel is what kills every MMO I've played besides GuildWars. Fine, get to the next travel point the hard way, but you should be able to warp around to your heart's content once you are done. It just seems like an old convention that designers have stuck with out of habit.

I get the 'explore the world' thing, but that can be optional for those who feel like commuting with their free time. I'm playing a game, I want things to happen in my time.

Elycion wrote:

I fired my Guild Wars character back up a couple of weeks ago after the buzz around Guild Wars 2 caught my attention. It's still a great game, I think the only reason I never got "hardcore" about it was that I didn't start playing until it was already a couple of years old and that made it pretty hard to catch up with the jargon, acronyms, and strategy.

Just hearing that GW2 will follow the same subscription-free model is enough to tell me that this time it will be a release day purchase.

In the meanwhile I'll keep trying to get my Ranger through Factions and Eye of the North!

I mentioned in the other thread that I tried firing up my Dervish to take part in the War in Kryta event. I can barely remember anything and the skills have changed so much in the nearly 2 years since I played regularly that I really struggled.

I think I'm going to start up a new character to get back into the game. Keep trying a Prophecies character, but the start is so slow.

http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-gam...

10 skill slots. The first 5 are not chosen by the player, but are chosen by the weapon equipped and the profession. I like that idea as it adds more decisions to a spec rather than just choosing the weapon with the best stats, yet provides a similar effect to warrior style axe mastery/hammer mastery/swordsmanship categories without having a bunch of useless skills hanging around if you've got the 'wrong' weapon equipped.

One thing I like the look of from those elementalist spell videos is how readable they are, it seems like the perfect example of graphics serving the gameplay. I just hope they continue it for all abilities by all classes, yet doesn't end up as visual spam when there's a ton of people fighting. WoW and GW1 do this to a good extent, but don't quite take it as far as they should to make it easy to 'read' a situation. Examples being when you're fighting a boss in WoW, each player's individual spells are quite readable, but there is simply a white cloud of effects around them, or in GW1 you need to look at the log of the last few abilities to be used on you to work out what happened than by looking at the action as it seems half of what characters do doesn't really make a clear readable visual effect.

Nothing to see here. You don't need to see their identification. Move along.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

I think I'm going to start up a new character to get back into the game. Keep trying a Prophecies character, but the start is so slow.

I really think that starting anywhere other than the Nightfall campaign is pure masochism. The Heroes are a total game-changer.

Elycion wrote:
MrDeVil909 wrote:

I think I'm going to start up a new character to get back into the game. Keep trying a Prophecies character, but the start is so slow.

I really think that starting anywhere other than the Nightfall campaign is pure masochism. The Heroes are a total game-changer.

True, but I have done the beginning of Nightfall many times now, it's a little stale TBH. But then, it has been a while.

New Article is up on Weapons, Professions and Races. There isn't much new info, but it's still a good read if you're at all interested in GW2.

Oh. And Freakin Pistols!

I still play GW off and on. All this GW2 talk has inspired me to finish my run through the content with my Barrage spec'd Ranger. If anyone wants to friend me, this char's name is Osei Namba (He is Nightfall origin). I agree with Elycion, if you have all of the content, Nightfall is the place to start as the heroes make the other campaigns much more manageable since you don't have to rely on the henchies, or try to fill out a full group.

Steam has GW Trilogy on sale for $20 right now. I might pick it up just to get the expansions for cheap.

ELewis17 wrote:

Steam has GW Trilogy on sale for $20 right now. I might pick it up just to get the expansions for cheap.

Uh oh, I think I just got enabled.

Alright, well, since I already had the original GW and Factions, I went ahead and picked up Nightfall. Yay wasted money on a game that's likely to go dark in less than a year!

I have 3 level 20's if anyone's interested in playing around:

Caledrin Wusterly (ele/necro)
F Chivalry Farseer (Mesmer/Hunter)
Mito Mitsukini (Warrior/Monk)

I also just created a Nightfall Paragon character, named Narayan Al Caldani, after my WoW paladin. So, anyone leveling up, you're welcome to join me.

If anyone is interesting in playing "classic" GW, drop me a line. I'm on as DrunkenSleipnir in game, and have chars everywhere.

NSMike wrote:

Alright, well, since I already had the original GW and Factions, I went ahead and picked up Nightfall. Yay wasted money on a game that's likely to go dark in less than a year!

At current prices it isn't much of a waste and I think it will pick up just before the GW2 launch as people try fill up their Halls.

Make sure you get Eye of the North....

It's a shame there are so few Euro goodjers playing, I'm on the Euro servers.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

It's a shame there are so few Euro goodjers playing, I'm on the Euro servers.

Just use the drop-down menu and move yourself somewhere more populated. I often play on the international district just because there's less spam there than the North American defaults.

As for Guild Wars only having a year left in it, I really don't buy that. NCSoft has already said they have no intention of killing the servers, and I know a great many people who are already saying they just plan to stick to the original game.

I recently picked up EotN, and I'm playing it through with my Dervish 'Stalk Reah', I've got 20s for all 3 campaigns, although I haven't finished any of them

Scratched, look me up Zul Aronos. That's my Level 20 monk and I also have level 20s for every campaign. I am very rusty with those characters though.

Last night I spent 20 minutes rounding up my 3rd birthday presents, including my level 6 Mesmer in pre-Searing!

Then I started an ele in Nightfall, definitely more fun than starting a character in any of the other games. It's a pity, I like the starting areas for Factions and Prophecies, but it is so much harder to start a game in those.

Prophecies was quite slow in how much xp a quest/mission gave you, and your character was fairly slow to progress, but it was hard to be overwhelmed by enemies early on if you paid attention. Factions was quite fast in throwing xp at you, but fast at throwing challenges at you. Nightfall seems to have the best balance between learning curve and keeping it exciting.

Yeah, I basically have no idea how to play this game anymore... starting a new toon is going to be good, I think. I was just happy to be able to get back into my account. I had trouble remembering exactly what my old login information was. I had to reset about half a dozen passwords, but I got it eventually. I had 4 birthday presents on each of my old toons.

Scratched wrote:

Prophecies was quite slow in how much xp a quest/mission gave you, and your character was fairly slow to progress, but it was hard to be overwhelmed by enemies early on if you paid attention. Factions was quite fast in throwing xp at you, but fast at throwing challenges at you. Nightfall seems to have the best balance between learning curve and keeping it exciting.

The biggest problem in Factions is the exploding Afflicted, especially when everyone rolls an assassin. And it's a problem for the Monk. :/

I started a new thread for people coming back to the original Guild Wars:

http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/5...

Information is coming out at a decent rate for Guild Wars 2 now, I predict a fall, or holiday, release.

New blog post

Nine GW2 Follow Up Questions with Eric Flannum

By Regina Buenaobra May 5th, 2010

We dropped a lot of Guild Wars 2 info on you last week. From details about the Guild Wars 2 combat system, to the introduction of the Elementalist, to studio head Mike O’Brien’s MMO Manifesto, there was a lot of new stuff to absorb. As we expected, you had questions.

We scoured the Internet to find the most commonly asked community questions about Guild Wars 2, and then we bugged Lead Designer Eric Flannum for some answers. Here’s what we found out!

Q: We’ve read some concerns about limitations of a 10-slot skill bar. Some players feel that it’s inflexible and doesn’t allow for enough creativity in making a build. What say you?

Eric: Think of it this way: You’ve got 5 slots that you can slot freely, with the caveat that you have to bring one heal and one elite skill. Your other 5 skills are determined by the weapon set you bring. Most professions can equip two weapon sets and switch freely between them in combat, even stringing together combinations of attacks between them. That means you have access to 15 skills at any given time and you make a minimum of 7 choices (9 at most) to determine what those skills are. Yes, we do restrict some of your choices to particular categories, but there is still a lot of choice there.

If you use the CCG paradigm to explain our skill system, we went from a system with almost no deck building restrictions in Guild Wars to one that has some necessary and sane deck building restrictions in Guild Wars 2. The new system is much friendlier to new players and to those players who either aren’t interested in the deck building aspect (or are just not that good at it), but it still allows advanced players to come up with literally hundreds of combinations to trash their opponents with. One of our designers did the math and the possible number of combinations is in the millions. This system also allows us to more easily balance the game and maintain that balance.

Q: We know that players who choose to play norn will be able to shapeshift using a skill. So, when you shape change, the skill bar changes to reflect the form you shape changed into?

Eric: Absolutely, yes.

Q: Let’s clear up this whole “anti-social” gaming thing that players read on Kotaku and IGN. Is Guild Wars 2 an anti-social game?

Eric: “Anti-social” is a bit of a mischaracterization. The systems in Guild Wars 2 don’t make the game less social; they actually make it more social. As Mike stated in his blog post, you can still group and join guilds, and you can still go off and play by yourself if you desire. However, Guild Wars 2 offers another social approach: you can just choose to play with the people who happen to be around you while you’re out adventuring. This is made possible through shared goals, dynamic content scaling, and more forgiving rules on loot and XP distribution.

Q: Speaking of loot and XP, there were a lot of questions about XP distribution among players who participate in a dynamic event in Guild Wars 2. Will this system reward leeches? How do you determine whether someone gets credit for participating in an event?

Eric: Because all events are different, each event has its own criteria for determining participation that gauges who actually made a decent effort at participating. It’s designed to give no credit or lower credit to players who were AFK during an event or just did a fly-by, using only a few skills and moved on.

Q: So you won’t be able to skip in, tag mobs for minimal damage, have someone else kill it, and still get significant XP?

Eric: Well, that really depends on what you mean by minimal damage, but the short answer is no. The intention of the system is to encourage players to participate in fights. We don’t define participation as either idling and doing nothing, or using one skill and simply tagging a monster.

Q: Guild Wars 2 is a big, persistent MMO. Some players out there have expressed concerns about the loss of instancing, since this means that there may be negative people in public areas.

Eric: There are always going to be negative people in public areas, which is something we’re well aware of. However, with its more social gameplay, Guild Wars 2 takes away most of the ways that other players can negatively impact your play experience. Shared goals means that “mob ownership” issues are almost non-existent. More forgiving loot and XP rules make kill-stealing a thing of the past. Of course, there are many ways players can find to disrupt each other’s play experiences, and it is our goal to limit those types of interactions wherever they occur. These are just some of the things that we’re doing to ensure that playing Guild Wars 2 is as enjoyable and grief-free an experience as possible.

Q: Can you comment on the “companion” system that we discussed very early in the development of Guild Wars 2?

Eric: Early in the development stage, we worked on the concept of a single “companion” NPC who would accompany the player, but we soon determined that it wasn’t necessary. We’ve developed Guild Wars 2 so that it’s a completely soloable experience due to our profession design, dynamically scaling content, and the social approach to events. And, since Guild Wars 2 is a persistent world, we can’t really let each character run around with a full party of NPCs in tow.

We’ve designed the eight professions to be self-sufficient; everyone has some form of self-healing and they all have a wide range of skills that allow them to play solo. Our events scale dynamically, so we can accommodate solo play as well as a multiple parties who want to participate in the same content. Plus, the social framework of the game encourages group play and casual grouping.

Because of these factors, we decided that we didn’t need the companion system and could focus our efforts on making the professions that do use pets very distinctive and cool. We’ll be talking more about that as we further reveal the GW2 professions.

Q: Will there be non-combat activities in Guild Wars 2 such as crafting, cooking, fishing, etc?

Eric: There’s more to Guild Wars 2 than our combat system – we have a wide variety of non-combat activities in the game. All of the major cities in Guild Wars 2 will feature games and activities that people can play regardless of their level. You can slug it out in a bar brawl, test your aim in a shooting gallery, or ride the Smash ‘Em Ups at the carnival.

Q: Will players be able to change their profession after character creation, or will they need to create a new character to change professions?

Eric: Players will be unable to change professions in Guild Wars 2. We’ve designed each profession in the game to be very distinct and different from each other, and many of our game systems take that into account. Because of this, it’s not easy for us to change the profession of a character once they’ve been created.

Thanks, Eric, for taking the time to answer these questions!

I've bolded my highlight, he implies no crafting. Thank all the gods, I play games to kill sh*t, not sew. Brawling and carnival rides could be fun though. The dwarf boxing in EotN is a fun diversion.

Picked up the original games on steam for 20 bucks. Anyone goodjers still play?

Dangofrank88 wrote:

Picked up the original games on steam for 20 bucks. Anyone goodjers still play?

Yes, see: http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/5...

Put down the name of one of your characters to get an invite.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

Information is coming out at a decent rate for Guild Wars 2 now, I predict a fall, or holiday, release.

Not coming out until at least next year. They've been pretty vocal about that.

New information dropped today:

On Dynamic Events

In Guild Wars 2, our event system won't make you read a huge quest description to find out what's going on. You'll experience it by seeing and hearing things in the world. If a dragon is attacking, you won't read three paragraphs telling you about it, you'll see buildings exploding in giant balls of fire, and hear characters in the game world screaming about a dragon attack. You'll hear guards from nearby cities trying to recruit players to go help fight the dragon, and see huge clouds of smoke in the distance, rising from the village under siege.

Also did a nice interview with Eurogamer.

It would not be an understatement to say that between GW2, TOR, and asian games like TERA, I haven't been this excited for the MMO scene in years.

Dragon Nest looks great too!

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