Guild Wars 2 Catch All

Tyops wrote:

...and if they do, what will they do for the players whose ascended zerk gear has been patched into irrelevance. That represent hundreds of hours of farming for a gear set.

Not much, since they added the ability to change ascended stats via a relatively cheap forge recipe.

Badferret wrote:
Tyops wrote:

...and if they do, what will they do for the players whose ascended zerk gear has been patched into irrelevance. That represent hundreds of hours of farming for a gear set.

Not much, since they added the ability to change ascended stats via a relatively cheap forge recipe.

I guess under a "loose" description of cheap if you're going to need six insignia but I guess if you're looking at about 100g for a whole set it;'s better than nothing. I'm happy to hear that they've moved on that.

When did this change come in? Looks like about 3 months ago?

I did a stat swap on an ascended piece yesterday. One exotic insignia, 5 ecto, 10 spirit shards. So fairly cheap to do.

It's a great change (shame it eats upgrades).

I have mixed opinions on moving away from the zerk meta. I spent a LOT of time equipping my toons with zerk exotics.

Am I going to learn what all these words mean when I get to the end game?

Edit: Are the dungeons that unlock around level 30 solo?

No, dungeons are group activities and I'd really recommend getting a full group of five. You can get by with less when you know what you're doing and by skipping fights through stealth, but I wouldn't recommend that when starting out.

I'm disappointed in druid so far. You basically have to camp staff and the pay off for stacking healing power just isn't there. In open world play it's just not a worthwhile trade-off over a balanced build with more damage ... but without the healing the whole staff + celestial avatar thing is kinda pointless.

But the dinosaur pets are great.

But reapers are cool right? Right?

Haven't tried Reaper although feedback seems positive overall. Since I 'main' warrior, if anything, I'll probably go berserker next. My warrior has more excess hero points than my other characters which means I'll be closer to unlocking that spec at launch.

I didn't preorder early enough to do the other beta weekends, but the challenging gameplay people described from the previous betas just wasn't there in my experience. I really hope they adjust this back up before release ... I realise you shouldn't base decisions on a beta but all the encouraging sounds about more involving PvE was a major reason I bought into HoT.

Has it been stated how many hero points are needed to unlock an elite spec?

I don't think that's been confirmed yet, but I could be wrong.

My google fu turned up nothing on the topic.

Okay so I played a fair bit of beta and made 4 characters. Did anyone else play BWE3? There were some definite highs and a few lows for me.

Revenant/Herald
Entirely new class so not easy to grasp in a short amount of time. If I wanted one of these I wouldn't take the tome route as getting used to switching legends effectively takes practice. It feels a lot like playing Elementalist with its one weapon set but the fact you're stuck with the utilities a legend comes with means build diversity is a bit limited. Not planning to make one.

Ranger/Druid
Specialises in healing in a game not designed around healing. DPS is consequently low and the druid traits seem largely built around staff which is an issue if you don't want it. I can't help but feel I would have been better off using a regular ranger with dps gear for open world play. You can still take healing spring and blast it for AOE heal. Druid feels mostly pointless right now. The major plus point for HoT rangers are the dino pets. Both are great.

Warrior/Berserker
Makes for a good condi warrior for PvE if that's your thing. Unfortunately for warrior in PvP or WvW, both Defence and Discipline traitlines are verging on mandatory, so if you take Berserker then forget Strength or Arms. Overall for power builds, the standard strength/defence/discipline lines are a better combination ... or take tactics for phalanx strength in PvE in place of defence. Berserker feels like 'more' warrior: more burst skills, more physical skills, none of which are arguably better than the base profession. I couldn't help but feel disappointed. For this to work, 'Fast Hands' needs to be baseline.

Necromancer/Reaper
I saved the best for last. Reaper is AMAZING. As a specialisation it takes necro in a whole new direction, and feels really fresh, plugging known deficiencies such as dps and lack of cleave. Lots of build potential as power/hybrid/condi in both PvE and PvP. I could honestly see this becoming my 'main' for most of HoT, both PvE and WvW.

Now, that's only 4/9 specialisations. I didn't get to try the others but from watching streams and reading forums the general consensus is that some of them succeed much more than others in expanding their respective professions. I fully intend to unlock Reaper, and possibly Chronomancer, but considering the amount of hero points I will need to grind these are the only ones that feel 'worth it' to me. My necro currently has 5% map completion (I made it specifically to have a WvW backline character, and it's barely set foot outside the Mists), some of you may be better off in that respect.

Moving away from the professions, the new map has a similar feel to Drytop and Silverwastes, with a series of repeatable dynamic events. Access to content is gated through the masteries - you need gliding and mushroom jumping to get to many areas, so it's easy to see how grinding mastery tracks will pad out the experience. That said the unlocks are account bound, and to get the first unlocks didn't take long. Arenanet have come out and said they didn't intend to nerf the open world difficulty for this weekend, so I look forward to a more challenging game when HoT launches.

I fought the legendary wyvern twice, both times we beat it in maybe 15 minutes and it drops .... one champ bag. No, really, one solitary bag with some random junk in it. It's fair to say Arenanet's love of paltry rewards isn't changing with HoT. The encounter was an improvement on current 'cleave the left foot' world bosses but it still only has 4-5 attacks and is static for much of the fight. I can't see any reason to do it again.

Based on this weekend, my plan for HoT is to work on getting hero points for my Reaper, and hoping that Arenanet don't feel the need to nerf it into oblivion - some specialisations seem way stronger than the base profession, something Arenanet had said they weren't aiming for. Chronomancer in particular seems destined for the nerf bat, but we'll see.

Heretk wrote:

Has it been stated how many hero points are needed to unlock an elite spec?

Datamining has shown it is 170 to unlock the spec, 250 to unlock spec and skins (2 skins). If you have every possible hero point, you will have ~210 spare right now, so will not be able to instantly finish, but will have the full elite spec.

Details are here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/...

Data-mined stuff does change sometimes, but 170? Not too fussed about skins, but hopefully you can unlock the traitline separate from the new utility category as you do with spending hero points to level 80.

Ozzie wrote:
Heretk wrote:

Has it been stated how many hero points are needed to unlock an elite spec?

Datamining has shown it is 170 to unlock the spec, 250 to unlock spec and skins (2 skins). If you have every possible hero point, you will have ~210 spare right now, so will not be able to instantly finish, but will have the full elite spec.

Details are here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/...

Holy cow. That is way too high.

Are hero points = skill points from before?

Tyops wrote:

Are hero points = skill points from before?

Yes

If anyone else needs to grab large numbers of hero points you may find this map useful.

Oh, man. What's the story here?

IMAGE(https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-vlmGeh3EOPo/VhPtatxbxvI/AAAAAAAACMM/mVi0J5L6Y9M/w1520-h855-no/2015-10-06.jpg)

Is it a bug when some crafting materials will not deposit into the bank?

EverythingsTentative wrote:

Is it a bug when some crafting materials will not deposit into the bank?

There is a max of 250 per stack. If you are full of that item, it won't go when you do the deposit.

Cragmyre wrote:
EverythingsTentative wrote:

Is it a bug when some crafting materials will not deposit into the bank?

There is a max of 250 per stack. If you are full of that item, it won't go when you do the deposit.

You can expand that 250 per stack via gem store purchase, or just manually deposit elsewhere in your bank.

Okay, thanks. I guess I need to figure out crafting then. I can't seem to refine anything into usable materials. I gather at every opportunity, but I still can't do anything at the crafting tables.

EverythingsTentative wrote:

Okay, thanks. I guess I need to figure out crafting then. I can't seem to refine anything into usable materials. I gather at every opportunity, but I still can't do anything at the crafting tables.

You have to talk to the NPC standing next to a crafting table and have them teach you the crafting profession. Each toon can have two active crafting professions at one time.

Badferret wrote:
EverythingsTentative wrote:

Okay, thanks. I guess I need to figure out crafting then. I can't seem to refine anything into usable materials. I gather at every opportunity, but I still can't do anything at the crafting tables.

You have to talk to the NPC standing next to a crafting table and have them teach you the crafting profession. Each toon can have two active crafting professions at one time.

I've figured it out. You have to be at certain crafting levels to work with certain materials, and I didn't have enough of the starting materials.

WP got a hold of a Chinese client, kinda of interesting.

So how realistic would it be for me to power through Living Story Season 2 in the next week? I'm on episode 3 but only have an hour or two to play each day. Also, is the story worth playing through before the expansion hits?

I don't recall any of the story episodes being particularly long, perhaps a couple of hours each? (unless you want to 100% the achievements to get the rewards in which case youll need to do each episode at least twice).

And some of those achievements definitely call for having a group.