Kichwas.7152

Bought a character slot recently.

Bought gems to exchange for gold... yeah... don't do that in MMOs where it's not allowed, but here gold always seems to come in slower than it goes out. In 8 years I've only made it over 200 gold a few times. Was down to 40 earlier this week.

There was a limited sale to get tokens to exchange for your choice of outfit. Bought a 5 pack and used 4 of them. Should have bought a 10-pack as the reason I haven't used the 5th is my final choice locks out the others I want... O.o

Bought bunny ears

During a sale I bought 5 BL keys - first time I've done that, ever, I think. They were all junk but it was cheap. Lesson learned.

The history says I bought a weapons voucher but I have no recollection of that or what I used it on.

Bought Abyss Stalker and Aetherblade heavy armor - in my eternal quest to have a heavy armor character without a buttflap... And at this point we've managed to go back to 2018... so... that's how often I buy stuff. It took from 2018 to 2020 to get a look on one character that I liked using that Aetherblade armor skin's pants...

In 2017 I bought the feline familiar and a bunch of stuff in October... so that was a year gap. My history doesn't show before October 2017... if it did it would mostly show character slots and I think the bank slot thing 2 or 3 times over the years.

For me... the gem store fails to have the things I want... and when it does they're silly high in price - like mount skins. Only one I've bought was the Spooky because it was a sale... If those things were about $1 USA I'd probably have 100 of them... because it's easier to spend money in tiny bits to add up to an ocean than to buy the ocean outright... or worse... to buy a glass of water for the price of an ocean.

Likewise for skins and outfits. In some other games Outfits priced at about 1/3 of the price here has in past led to me buying a dozen or more a week... but the price here has cut that to... 17 over 8 years... 4 of which came in a pack, 1 was included in something, and I think 2 or 3 were free...

The prices here are just over the 'impulse buy' trigger, even for the gambling junkie junk (things with a random element)...

If they fixed that, this game would be more profitable.

What's wrong with the animations?

I just made a second revenant yesterday to do a DPS build (my other recent thread). She's running around with mace/axe and the animations are what sold me on keeping the character.

In any PvE content where the NPCs are not using the 'aggro on toughness' mechanic it can increase survivability a lot if you're not 'skilled' in timing dodges yet or if you're having latency issues.

Soldiers is an ideal gear set for new players, especially if coming from something like WoW. Despite being a tab-target game fights in FFXIV are all about moving in and out of telegraphed AoEs... so FFXIV players can probably skip toughness. After that, graduate to Knights or Rabid, and then once you're fully dodging properly... you go berserk, vipers, or whatever fits your build...

Before HoT I had high toughness builds on all professions. I didn't do as much DPS as others, but we didn't have a DPS meter so I didn't really fully know that also... I survived more than most other people though because the folks I was running with were, like me, coming from 'tab target' games and not good at getting out of the way of attacks. Over the years I started learning to dodge more. Now... the attacks that do hit me still take me down if I put on the old "knight's" set I used to use, so toughness has little value for me in most PvE now.

In WvW where you're not being focused, just being attacked alongside your group - it can greatly increase your survival rate but it comes at the cost of giving up some DPS stat that may have been more useful to the group. I use it on a 'WvW roaming' build - if you're playing WvW solo, even when you end up with a zerg or a group they will often break up after each battle or they might all be in comms and suddenly port out on you... so having toughness makes things viable.

> @"Kossage.9072" said:

> > @"Kichwas.7152" said:

> > It also didn't help that the lore folks broke canon with the very initial realize - changing the ethnicity of the Krytans to be 'caucasian' when that's NOT what they were in Guild Wars 1... Then when Living Story happened, they broke even their own canon when they added the people on the sky ships who had Charr and Humans together for a few hundred years - when the end of the Charr and Human war was only recent.

> >

> > So you had:

> > - our combat engine wasn't the challenge we expected it to be

> > - our lore team didn't read any of the prior lore, let alone even their own lore

> >

> > And so I think a lot of them just stopped caring.

> >

> > Shortly after this we started seeing them trying to move away from the core NPCs they had launched the game with. People started getting killed off or otherwise replaced... and the 'dragon' storyline started being something to avoid rather than explore. Granted we have finally moved the dragon plot forward, but it seems like it's been more of 'something that was around the story the new writers wanted to do, rather than what they really wanted to explore'.

>

> To be fair, I wouldn't necessarily call these narrative points as lore discrepancies as we have evidence to the contrary from a historical basis.

>

> **1) Krytan "whitewashing"**

>

> While it is a bit unfortunate that the more Mediterranean-like Krytans were mostly replaced by the Caucasian-like Ascalonians, lorewise this kind of change makes sense if we consider the 250 years between games and the Ascalonians' mindset during a time of crisis for their people.

>

> The Ascalonians had been displaced from their homes because of the aggressive charr invasion, and those who stuck with Rurik followed him on his dangerous trek west to seek sanctuary in Kryta. The besieged Ebonhawke, and the Foefire which had culled most of the Ascalonians who had decided to stay in their homeland, certainly didn't help matters a few decades later as far as Ascalonian population went.

>

> It thus makes sense that the Ascalonians, while considering themselves to be on the brink of extinction, would breed like rabbits in Kryta. While some of them would settle into what became known as the Ascalonian Settlement in Gendarran Fields, many more integrated into Krytan society once Divinity's Reach had been built in the aftermath of Zhaitan's rise flooding the coastline. So, under this historical lens it is understandable why so many present-day denizens of the Kingdom of Kryta appear to be descended from Ascalon based on skin color while a few other ethnicities would be native Krytan as well as of Canthan, Elonian and Orrian descent.

>

> At least Queen Jennah is decidedly Krytan in ethnicity as we can see in her skin color. :)

>

If roughly a thousand brits showed up in Egypt around the year 1300, it wouldn't matter how 'pushy' they were. In 250 years they simply couldn't breed fast enough to replace the entire Egyptian population. Even if they did it today, it still wouldn't happn.

The Ascalonian refugees were a smaller group by a vast margin because so few made it over and their kingdom was not large to begin with.

The numbers just can't do that. The Ascalonians would largely vanish into the scene.

We have historical examples of this. The Jewish population of Ethiopia looks decidedly Ethiopian. There's a "Chinese" population in east Africa and an African population in India - and you can only know this with DNA tests or talking to people. There's a Korean population in Mexico that... looks mestizo, and that only took 100 years.

When groups work to keep their lines distinct, then they don't visibly vanish, but also don't "take over". The Chinese population of Jamaica mostly looks Chinese. Spainish people are still visibly Spanish in Mexico - and the Indian and Mestizo populations did not also vanish - and in this case the groups actively mix and have for 500 years.

That... was my attempt.

But I'd love to see if anyone has 'high DPS' builds for the revenant - of any flavor.

So my attempt is shaping up to:

- this is inwork. I used a 12th character slot last night to make this character, , ran around for 10 levels to see if I liked the feel of the weapon animations, then used one of those "make a character level 60 followed by 20 knowledge tomes, and then started crafting...

So here is the inprogress:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PmjAkelxQIMPKi1RSMOCiRSgMCSgj+k/yE-zRZYBJEmZSDHYhCFgMKFuIc0ogISgKKAhHA-e

- Note that some of the gear in the accessories area is berserker, because getting that gear in other stats wasn't easily available to me yet.

- Likewise I went with 'nightmare' rune because I'm sitting on a mountain of dungeon tokens so that rune was easy, while the 'torment' rune is crazy expensive and I'm very low on gold.

- Likewise sigils of force and accuracy - basic easy to get, force is slightly pricey but within reach.

- my current swap weapon is a level 10 mighty hammer, so yeah... but I have a viper shortbow in my bag to use as soon as I got get the skill points...

Now to make this build perfect... if it's even any good at all or headed in the right direction, I need to think of what to change.

This is a brand new character - so now I need to get a huge stack of skill points, unlock the two elite specs... and figure out which of them is known as renegade and this is better... assuming that is correct. ;)

> @"ArielRebel.3426" said:

> [spectrum Shield](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Spectrum_Shield) from holosmith vs [RotGD ](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rite_of_the_Great_Dwarf) from rev.

>

> The only advantage for RotGD is that you can share the damage reduction with 4 allies which we can all agree happens rarely (that you give it to 4 ppl) in sPVP for example. In WvW, not gonna change the tide of a Zerg vs Zerg and needs a lot of coordination to be reliably used in a roaming party vs party to be useful for your allies (and it's way too expensive to use for allies).

>

> What gives?

I think what gives is that most of us don't play PvP either at all or as our primary game mode.

> @"felix.2386" said:

> well condi dps is what you would go for and can share build.

> but i assume you want power.

>

> just like mallyx/kalla is two legend for condi, tho kalla by legend herself isn't really condi focused, but shortbow is, so it can be used after mace/axe

>

I don't really care on power vs condition actually. Mostly just trying to find 'what can pump out a lot of DPS for revenant?'

In other words, is this currently a 'support only profession' in all builds, or is there a DPS build 'out there somewhere' that can be good to 'almost meta' in fractals?

> @"Thornwolf.9721" said:

>

> Making Hammer melee? Nah I dont really feel that should be the case.

I agree. Just like Mesmer and greatsword and thief with staff - it's nice to have a profession out there that uses a weapon in a very different way than others do.

How about melee scepter? Sound odd? well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stick-fighting

Or ranged dagger - throwing knives.

Trying to find the ideal options if one wanted to make a build that was DPS focused rather than support focused.

Particularly in light of most support gear being so hard to obtain, locked behind complex grinds if one wants to avoid being swamped with toughness, and my revenant being one of many characters...

A second reason I'm looking is I'm thinking of buying another character slot, and I already have 1 of each profession, I just have an itch to make another character... and I'm weighing between revenant, guardian, and warrior for that - I feel mostly like going revenant, but only if I can find enough valid builds to split between 2 of them (I know it's cheaper to just unlock a 3rd build slot, but I have the itch to make another character because I want a character that wears the norn cultural heavy armor :3 ).

I'd like a build I could use in fractals and dungeons that was a DPS.

Is the path to this to go sword / sword and power shortbow, or is there a condition path to it?

is it only renegade or is there a viable Herald choice as well / instead?

I assume, but am not sure, that one stance is Assassin. The other would be Renegade if it was a renegade build? But if not a renegade build?

Is there a build that is at all decent as DPS in PvE content like fractals and dungeons when compared to using my elementalist, mesmer, guardian, or even engineer?

> @"Animism.7530" said:

>

> Honestly, with the hype and trailers Anet provided before GW2 released, I thought it was going to be far better than it was.

>

They thought they had created the perfect 'role-less' combat system, finally breaking free of the 'trinity' MMOs so often rely on.

Within about 2 months players had figured out how to break it using as simple a trick as 'stack and dodge'...

And I guess the original developer team was so insulted to find out that their mechanic was that easy to break that they just... gave up... They got rid of their dungeon team, and ever since then on some levels they have been floundering.

Remember how before Guild Wars 2 came out we got all these videos about how they had made the perfect combat system that would be so dynamic and intense to play and something no one could ever 'gimp'. It would challenge novice and master alike and require intense team planning and real time coordination.

stack, and dodge. collect loot.

dev team quits.

It also didn't help that the lore folks broke canon with the very initial realize - changing the ethnicity of the Krytans to be 'caucasian' when that's NOT what they were in Guild Wars 1... Then when Living Story happened, they broke even their own canon when they added the people on the sky ships who had Charr and Humans together for a few hundred years - when the end of the Charr and Human war was only recent.

So you had:

- our combat engine wasn't the challenge we expected it to be

- our lore team didn't read any of the prior lore, let alone even their own lore

And so I think a lot of them just stopped caring.

Shortly after this we started seeing them trying to move away from the core NPCs they had launched the game with. People started getting killed off or otherwise replaced... and the 'dragon' storyline started being something to avoid rather than explore. Granted we have finally moved the dragon plot forward, but it seems like it's been more of 'something that was around the story the new writers wanted to do, rather than what they really wanted to explore'.

They shouldn't have merged the old 2017 'real' thread with the new troll 'only PvP games are MMos' fake thread...

But since they have...

I'm going to ignore the new troll and reply to the 2017 guy...

> @"Cyrin.1035" said:

> Should the GW series continue with an entirely new sequel? Or should GW 2 simply continue with expansions?

>

> Some want a new and more advanced graphics engine. Some want new or more races and professions to be explored. There are so many possibilities for a GW 3, but is GW 2 enough to expand on and if it is, what does that mean for its longevity?

>

Guild Wars 3 should happen once the 'core lore' of Guild Wars is finally present in Guild Wars 2. Ie... we still need Cantha. Thankfully that's coming soon. Back in 2017 it didn't look like it would ever happen.

When they do get around to Guild Wars 3 they need to make sure the launch day version includes some parts of Kryta, Elona, and Cantha. Enough that we know the core game won't take 8 years to be out again...

It should also remember the name of the franchise... "Guild Wars"... and... actually have guild wars in it. Maybe that could be the actual plot. It was the 'lead to' for Guild Wars 1... the backstory was that the 'guild wars' had recently ended... but we got Guild v Guild PvP....

For Guild Wars 3... they should make some large world scale 'NPC Guilds' that are at war. Like FFXIV does - where a guild there is an NPC organization so the player groups got a funky name 'free company'... But not as... funky...

Players could then either be involved as participants in this, or as a neutral third party trying to stop it because 'hey - the real threat is over here guys'...

- That said the 'hey the real threat is over here' plot device is too over-used... so I would favor either 'the guild war is the real threat - lets destroy these guilds' or 'the guild war is the real issue, let's win it'.

Then we need to think about timeline and technology.

Guild Wars 2 is already more of a sci fi game than a fantasy game. The Asura have future tech, the Charr sometimes do. They need to either 'destroy the technology' or 'push it forward'.

So Guild Wars 3 is either 'back in the iron age because something broke all the tech' or looks like 'Shadowrun' - Cyberpunk era technology with magic. I think the Cyberpunk angle would be best - as it's territory no other MMO has done. Shadowrun itself keeps 'almost coming to MMOs' but never quite, and is a dated concept anyway...

Graphics and so on... yeah - update to whatever's current when it comes out. And maybe less with the 'extreme contrasts in colors' that cause Guild Wars 2 to be a source of eye-strain when played for long sessions...

Races / Professions... Mostly the current core races, but add Tengu, Hylek, Skritt, and Dredge. Skritt and Dredge are actually perfect for higher tech. Skritt could either be 'junk rats' or... having realized they get super smart when in large numbers, there could be Skritt cities that make even the Asura look dumb, but any Skritt outside of them is 'less developed'. And a small few skritt have mastered being 'smart but not super-genius' when alone - the player option.

Professions... and game engine... I think it would be time to bring tanks and healers in. Not because it's "better", but because it's better... in an MMO... it makes designing organized team play content a lot smoother... there's a reason we don't have new dungeons and our fractals are not as dynamic as they could be - there's only so much you can do when your player comp is basically 5 DPS that don't harmonize well all that often... and the current system, when they do harmonize, is too easily 'broken' by those players...

Roles at least give developers tools to enforce the way fights play out.

These things usually just give me repair cannisters and one to two of those black lion tokens. Which is an improvement over 2013 when... they just gave repair cannisters...

Sometimes they give a 'guaranteed wardrobe unlock' which always manages to find that one 'common' item I missed... and then next time... somehow manages to find another one that I missed even though I spent a few hours in the trading post buying every single last white, blue, and green piece of gear that was a locked skin just to avoid having that happen... it happens anyway...

So... meh...

It is purposefully a rather weak mount, with a curious ability early into the training to let people on foot who are near it run just as fast as it.

- and even without that ability they can almost keep pace with you.

- Anything else would make WvW something that accounts with Path of Fire would so dominate that it might as well end up being locked out for 'free' accounts.

It's meant to be slightly useful in WvW, but not dominating. All of the other mounts are meant to be 'radical game changers' once you unlock them.

Yeah it would be cool to have that look on a mount that worked like the raptor - which is actually what it is, a weakened raptor, but... if they did that it would need a version for WvW and a version for outside of WvW.

Personally I'm fine with things as they are. One thing the mount does do is signify who on your WvW team is most likely dedicated enough to have at least been playing the format for a few days, and who is just a roaming tourist following the catmander icon... if you're planning an assault, that's useful information in deciding your odds of success or if you should just go it 'casual style' and accept that your team will get rolled.

The only reason I would choose yes on this is because the medium armor is horrible for males... but pretty much required for females...

light and heavy armor is all skirts and buttflaps for females. Medium armor is all skirts and buttflaps for males.

Just...

wearing...

some...

freaking...

pants...

is...

seriously...

an...

issue...

in...

this...

game...

> @"Timbersword.9014" said:

> > @"The Greyhawk.9107" said:

> > Ehhh, I'd prefer it if the outfit actually match my characters shape.

>

> I can get behind this... if female Sylvari and especially Norn get human female tier figures. Norn have no hips.

One of the Sylvari cultural armors actually goes the other way and significantly reduces bust size. Tier 2 light I think - I swapped in the nightmare court dungeon set top to avoid that.

I would only be for all outfits NOT modifying the body shape if we then could have a better range of body shapes across the humanoid / sized race choices.

Put them in your bank to keep the banker from floating away in a gust of wind... That's what happens to 90% of the bank slots on my account... O.o

> @"uberkingkong.8041" said:

> Should there be a GW3?

> GW2 though, its not a full MMORPG yet either, one aspect it is missing, is Open World PvP.

> Open World PvP is... [what... ever...]

Well you just disqualified most MMOs out there...

Kinda hard to take you seriously if you think an MMO needs PvP, let alone 'open world'...

> @"Asturias.1064" said:

> I'm excited more for End of Dragons expansion then World of Warcrafts Shadowlands expansion.

>

I'm more excited to pay my taxes than for WoW content...

The upcoming GW2 expansion though will finally give us the full 'basic game' as it was defined in Guild Wars 1... so I am looking forward to that if only for completeness sake. If it's good, all the better.

> @"Fallesafe.5932" said:

> Any old Everquest players who find it hilarious to see GW2 mounts described as 'a grind in need of toning down?'? Is there even a mount in this game that takes more than a week to get??

Yeah...

Back in WoW around 2006/7 when I started, it took me about 3 or 4 months to get enough gold to afford my first mount.

The longest mount grind I have had here was just shy of a week to get the war claw. It took that long ONLY because I'm NOT a WvW player and I spent most of that time randomly running from here to there then back over here because I had no idea what people were calling out in map chat...

According to the wiki, it takes '8 hours of play' to do that grind if you're competent in WvW... which I was not.

- I did notice that about half of the entire grind was spent on the very first 1/4th of the progress bar... because I started to get what was going on as I was playing there which resulted in things speeding up.

I do still have the newest mount left. So maybe I will finally find this horrible multiple months long grind people are complaining about... because anything less would not be an actual grind...

The only reason I lack the current mount is I am refusing to go get it until I get to that point in the Living Story - and I am 'catching up' on years away from here still, about halfway through season 4 right now, yet spending most of my time in Fractals and trying to get my craft skills up to 500...

If we want to have a conversation about grind... I will be there when we get to talking about the last 35 points of crafting... from about 465 to 500... trying to that without crafting any 'vendor / sell / toss' items...

> @"Fenom.9457" said:

> ?? Why is it awful to have the same keybindings? Isn't it infinitely more difficult to learn 9 sets of keys to press, and form different muscle memories for the same game?

Situational use.

In all other games I bind my keys so that my 'core rotation' is the 3 keys right under my fingers, the row above them on my keypad (razer) is interrupts and/or mitigation abilities, the row below them will usually be AoEs. Shift and one of these has major spillpover for each category, control the next level of spill over.

The keys to the left of these primary keys hold alt, shift, control. To the right I have specials - a game's version of an elite skill, weapon swaps, or 'instance specific special ability'.

A top row then has things like mounts, sheath/unsheath, escape out of a menu, push to talk...

- I've got this so refined that I can seemlessly switch between playing a tank in FFXIV, a DPS in WoW, and a healer in ESO - and not change how my fingers are working at all...

I bound the keys in GW2 to work for this for one class - it will "mostly" map for another... but it actually takes me longer to become "good again" in switching between something as similar as my Elementalist and my Mesmer, than it does to switch between my FFXIV Dark Knight tank and my ESO Necromancer Healer... completely different MMOs yet I can switch between them into different roles faster than I can between two GW2 'berserker gear' DPS...

How many boxes of the basic one do you need to buy to 'complete' things?

I had no idea there even were achievements or rewards for this.

EDIT: Bought one, quit the game and then logged back in and got 5 tiers of achievements / rewards. I've earned just over 150 tokens so far though.

> @"Randulf.7614" said:

> My big bearded Norn warrior would look good in this

That literally was a buddy of mine at his wedding 20 something years ago. He was a big muscle bound guy - former biker gang type turned worldly teddy bear traveler. His wife picked it out for him and it was heavy on pink and pastel blue. Lost contact with him decades ago but those two hold a place in my memories because I had to be their translator for the first few months of their relationship.

The closest we can get - the wedding dress on a charr:


And for some reason screenshots won't show up for me.

Personally I much prefer the current LFG tool over a World of Warcraft style random PUG maker.

Something that is loosely based on this might work in Cantha. Loosely because - Guild Wars has, outside of when the Norn were added, managed to avoid directly ripping stereotypes or actual references of real world cultures.

But this could be the basis for a loose inspiration.