Leo.3428

Thank you, @"Danikat.8537" ! @"Ashantara.8731" , this is the path I discovered by mere luck the first time around :) @"archmagus.7249" , I'm not sure, I'll test it with a starting character with no skill out of scientific curiosity.

@"Ojimaru.8970" and @"Tanner Blackfeather.6509" - Thank you! It makes more sense to me now.

One thing was wrong in my initial assumptions. I considered crafting central and trading secondary, but reality is the reverse of that. Crafting is functionally detached from the characters even if technically bound to them - this looks very weird in hindsight - and one really crafts only late in the game, with several characters to the rescue for one discipline and/or a heap of gold.

As a casual player, I will probably give up crafting and try WvW with whatever equipment I have. Let's see if this works.

> @"Linken.6345" said:

> Write first timer watching movies/cutsence and you should get veterans and newbies that want to do the same mate.

This is what I did and yet some on the party would enter in exploration mode without waiting :)

@"Randulf.7614" - Yes, it is Lion's Arch's jumping puzzle. As Ashantara suggests, try it again with a trait that reduces fall damage. I can also share how I did it even without the trait if I get a confirmation that I can write spoilers here.

@"Ashantara.8731" - Thank you for the clarification. Indeed, "percentage" means the damage points are proportional to the character's vitality, which as a consequence doesn't matter at all. I had missed the logic of it.

Ha, I'm discovering these traits. The first time I jumped, as a low level elementalist who just found the way to the vista, I had no fall damage trait or anything activated, and a squishy build. However, I was lucky enough to pick one particular starting point that saved me. -- Are spoilers permitted on the forum? I will describe it and why I picked it if they are and I can find the spoiler tag. -- When I went back with my wife, we jumped from the same point, I was a ranger this time, she was a higher level mesmer; it is possible I had the Soften the Fall trait though; but we jumped the same trajectory I jumped as the elementalist.

We still have to try the Cavern again because we haven't finished it. But I just spoiled myself looking it up a bit on the wiki. A difference in one inch might make the difference actually, so it's probably just a matter of luck, not mechanics. Thank you for the replies!

The other day my wife and I jumped down the Sharkmaw Caverns from the exact same point and landed onto the exact same spot. She had more health points than I, she died, I survived. My understanding from the wiki is that fall damage is a percentage of your health points exponentially aggravated by the falling height, so I don't understand what happened. Is there some magic in that place that changes the laws of the game?

_EDIT: Edited the discussion title._

As a new player my experience is probably not comparable, but in a month I met a lot of people in the game. Sure, people won't always interact on the spot, and typing in the chat is awkward in a mob infested place, but I had some funny conversations around champion spots and goofy events, and party invitations. And the Looking For Group dialog is working well - except when you want to do a dungeon for the first time in story mode and everybody bypasses the cutscenes and rushes to the next challenge.

Regarding voice chat, my wife and I use it and we invite the players we meet to join us on it because it makes getting to know each other and coordinating the team so much easier. I understand that it also makes the text chat a lonely place though. If voice was integrated into the game, maybe the experience would be radically different?

Thank you all so much for the help. I will study this during the weekend. Maybe I had a streak of bad luck when I tried to farm the Inquest, Nightmare Court, Bandits, etc. on the starter maps with high level characters, and a streak of slightly better luck with the brand new character, or these were special bags of the sort that scales to your level.

To clarify: I wasn't really hoping to craft armor and weapons for my rapidly growing level, but a few inventory chests and bags with runes of holding of increasing capacity along the way, then, once I had explored all the maps, craft a decent equipment and jump into WvW.

What puzzles me is where all the materials on the trading post come from, if not from some form of grinding forced by scarcity, which is not in the philosophy of the game as far as I understand it.

I will come back once I have digested the information. Thank you again to all!

My goal was to evolve my crafting disciplines in parallel to evolving my characters, but I quickly ended up out of tier 1 materials, in particular jute scraps. I concluded that I had done something wrong, searched the web, found mostly advice about grinding Fractals and the Trading Post to make gold and buy materials, meaning that I would need to keep evolving my characters to level 80 and get ascended gear without any crafting discipline before I can get beyond tier 1 crafting. This looks to be upside down.

I tried farming starting maps but my characters are too high level to get basic materials from loot, and I was an annoyance to the new players trying to do the events there. So I sacrificed one character to create a brand new disposable character and stormed all the bandit caverns and centaur camps on the way. I had some better luck getting jute scrap. But it feels like playing Space Invaders, and the character levels up too fast even when trying to avoid all the map completion points. There is no fun in that.

So, either I missed something obvious, or crafting is grindy by design and is not for me. Any help is appreciated to clear up the situation :)