Guild Wars II GAME RELEASE happened a while ago

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Uhhh GW2 doesn't like Latvian credit cards and support hasn't responded yet so I might miss out ._.

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I'll join you next beta weekend, too. Sadtimes ;_;

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So, how was it? Fun, I presume?

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71,000 MINUTES

5 days?

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Guild Wars 2 is an MMO that encourages facerolling in PvE by not including a mana bar.

Well, kinda yeah, but mostly no.

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Herpderp maths at 4AM are fun

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I'll be there.

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Will the characters from the previous beta weekend be deleted?

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Sooooo I'm gonna have to play catchup

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Staeg.3859
I'm downloading the client.
Just ftr, to what level did everyone get?

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Uhhhh Crystal Desert's full

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So, the game's launching 28/7, which means we get to start playing on 25/8. That's two and a half weeks from now. I'll go ahead and assume that we'll just rename the thread, instead of making a new one.

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Uhh

I dunno what you're talkin about >.>

Anyway, at some point I received an email that the game launches in 1 month

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Yeah let's do that.

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Exactly when is this starting (in hours not some silly xx:xx EST crap)
I need to know this (because loltimezones)

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FUCKING INTERWEB MAKE IT UPDATE FASTER

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this is the last BWE before release right?

looks like I'll just see you all at release

In a month-or-so, that's when the release is. You'll be there, right?

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So I realized that I like playing the classes (professions, yeah, shut up) the way they weren't "supposed" to be played - aka the melee weapon choices on ranged classes and ranged choices on melee classes. I have no clue why.

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ON A QUEST CALLED "SAVING THE STAG"

Where is this?

Edit: does anyone have ANY idea about where the Bonus Exp from killing mobs comes from?

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Looks quite fun, shame it's p2w.

Proceed.

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Yeah, it's p2w.

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Also, completely unrelated to this conversation...

I LIED

The items do absolutely nothing in PvP, did you know? Everyone gets the same stats relative to their profession! The gear does make you cooler, so you kinda demoralize your opponents into losing... yeah, red's right.

[Staeg]

Two players in GW2 with equal characters, the person who has paid money has acquired all their gear quicker and easier than the person who didn't pay anything.

The items do absolutely nothing in PvP, did you know? Everyone gets the same stats relative to their profession!

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It doesn't really matter all too much as long as we have a guardian and probably a necro. I'll play a necro and/or a warrior.

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What do those people call professions, anyway, if classes are professions? (checked: disciplines)

Oh and mine will be armorsmith and one of jeweler/weaponsmith if warrior and artificer+jewelcrafter if necro.

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The latter, I think, is called monopoly.

I haven't done any research on this subject whatsoever. Will need to look at things once game comes out.

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It depends on what you want to do. I'd expect PvP to require very little time, since you don't even need to grind to get the best gear.

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2nd

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Uh what? Why?

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:I indeed

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That is actually true >_>

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http://www.gamebreaker.tv/mmorpg/breaking-the-trinity/

Those guys had a fetish for standing in red circles D:

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Aren't the most important things the traits?
(also the page was in russian, lol)

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Are there any good warrior builds for PVP and PVE at the same time?

Good, as in, optimal? I'm not sure, but I'd say no.
Edit: ohhh hey I'm retarded; the thing Fate linked did indeed have traits and stuff.

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Is there any inherit advantage of taking certain class/race combos like in WoW? Or are there even racial bonuses?

You get special non-weapon skills. Not sure if there's stat bonuses.

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No bonuses, skills are PvE only. Endgame will be sex

Group
sex

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vote: Fate

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you'd probably make an ugly guild emblem

I don't think that this is within the sphere of influence of the guild leader (might be within yours)

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This series of events was really amusing, but on the serious side, I'd want Socio to take care of the economy, be the main person that coordinates things and does the general stuff that's important but not many people notice it, while having Fate as the spokesperson of sorts.

Also, I'd prefer SDC over MafiaScum (over ScumChat, but that's a horrible name)

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Well, if Brandi was a candidate, she'd be winning right now (but I don't think she is - didn't she say that she didn't want to be guild leader?)

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Just ftr, there will be free transfers for an indefinite amount of time after launch; if all of us don't make it to GoM, we can easily swap to something else.

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Mesmer was a blast, but I could see it being rather tricky to play. Also some things didn't make sense to me... why waste time autoattacking when you have abilities that just straight up summon copies of yourself?

I'm not sure, but I'd guess that you can't chain the other 4 abilities infinitely due to cooldowns... I think?

[Staeg]

I think you have to wait till tomorrow.

In other news now going to sleep; will be there 4 hours before the official launch time (aka 1 hour before the actual launch)

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They said that they

might be opening 3 hours early;

So I'm going to be attempting to log in as early as

9 PM PST TODAY

.
But the OFFICIAL RELEASE DATE is

MIDNIGHT PST

Uh, I believe that the official is 3 AM PST and the 'unofficial' is midnight?

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OKAY OKAY GOING TO SLEEP

AFTER THIS MATCH

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I keep opening it, but I cant login to patch, it wont let me

You don't need to login to patch...?

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Woop woop the server firewall thingy hit me too~

In other news I apparently went weaponsmith/armorsmith because the names are so similar, but I'll probably reroll the weaponsmith to something like cooking.

Edit: oop it's patching something!

...and it's at 0.00 KB/s, and the file amount is increasing instead of decreasing

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Connection error(s) detected. Retrying...

LOGIN WARS 2 WOO

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HOLYSHIT IT WORKS

I LOGGED ON

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So uh me and Fate did the first run of AC pretty smooth; didn't wipe and we had like 6 deaths over our team.

When nuwen got to 30, we did it again and we had a team of derps. The warrior refused to go back to waypoints and needed resurrection after being defeated until a certain point (let's not speak of how he decided to go to the dungeon entrance itself) and the ranger didn't seem to know that he had a pet. The last bossfight felt like we were part of a zerg colony, taking on a new life after we inevitably die in the fight.

[Staeg]

also: how important is building for PvE versus building for PvP?

in WoW it was pretty much you were one or the other, but in GW2, since you autoscale in PvP, it seems like getting a gearset/weaponset/spec that fits PvP the best is the way to go (esp since there's no raid type hardcore PvE content for endgame)

like I REALLY love playing my greatsword Mesmer right now but it's super glass cannon and I know that shit won't fly in PvP

You build for PvE when you're doing PvP.
When you go to the Mists, you get a new set of perfect PvP weaponry and srmor which you can customize even further; this set of items returns to tou when you enter the Mists again.

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How many of you have been to the Sharkmaw Caverns in Lion's Arch? This place is amazing, and I'm playing on the lowest settings possible

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So how does one gain levels? I'm level 17, and I've already done all the areas and quests up to that point, and the next area is level 20, and the mobs there wreck me. So either I'm missing some aspect of leveling up, or I need help, or something.

Aside from the obvious heart-doing thing:
1) Crafting (and gathering for that matter)
2) Exploring
3) Extra dynamic event doing
If all that fails, go to another 15-25 zone.

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Wasn't the dude Italian?

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So uh

I looked up AC Explorable videos. First,

all

of the path choices involve defending somethingoranother from spawning burrows. The scenery is different, but the event is essentially the same.

Second, there's a trap trigger in the event room. Pulling the lever will spawn spike traps which KILL ENTIRE WAVES OF BUG SHIT at once. We tried to aoe everything down. Whoops.

Are you sure that there's trap triggers in every event? From what I gather, only the Soul Eater one has traps.

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I'm 46, but that's mainly because I don't want to powerlevel without Fatewen :3

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anyone have any experience to share on the pvp side of things?

1) Thieves are broken
2) The combat is generally balanced, but there are builds that are way better than others (but it's available to everyone so yeah)
3) Thieves are broken
4) Pubs can't help but fight that lone guardian outside any capturable points when they're down in score
5) Thieves are broken
I mean, there's a few observations, but what exactly are you looking for?

[Staeg]

PvP is a completely different beast from PvE from what I've seen so far - in PvE, you're generally fighting 1 big bad guy, so you have to look for his skillshots that you dodge out of, probably ward off some adds and then maybe something specific to the bad guy. In PvP, you have to keep an eye out for what weapons the enemies are using - you should memorize the general skillsets of all professions (most importantly, what kinds of CC do they have, how dangerous they are at which range with each set of weapons and their downed state skills); you have to look if you're getting backup soon or if the enemy's getting support, you have to see if fighting in the spot that you're currently in is beneficial to your winchance (aka, if you're winning 400-350 and you have 2 points to their 1, it's probably a good idea to spend people's time miles away from points), you need to know the specific strategies for each of the 4 maps (not that this is hard at all, but still).
All of the stuff for PvP is obviously only for tournament play - I've never actually seen a pub player have more than 2 of the mentioned skills (me included, probably .-.)

[Staeg]

So, my experience in PvP as a warrior:

I first played a mace+mace/hammer combo, but I sucked at the game at that point and I decided that it wasn't fun (heh, I was wrong but more on that later).

I then switched to axe+axe/rifle glass cannon power-based combo. Used bull rush, that aoe fear thingy and the 5 second damage immunity. If I got a bull rush+double fury+spin2win combo off on an elementalist or necro, he was dead. The problem is, those two classes aren't actually that good in pvp and things like ranger, thief and mesmer could use lololo blink/trap/invis, go about 300 feet away from me and /laugh while I die a sad death (no, switching to rifle didn't help much because their ranged damage would be better than mine). I also encountered a problem where, when I faced another warrior I could get them into downed state but they'd just go lol I'm a warrior and VENGEANCE and they'd get backup and I'd be sad.
So, I switched to a more condition-damagey build with sword+axe/rifle, bull rush, aoe fear and the stability signet. This fared much better; very few things could go 1v1 with me... and by very few things, I mean some specific rangers and literally every competent thief ever. Those fucks would throw ten billion cc at me and when I activate stability they go lol I'm a thief and just disappear. If I was somehow winning the fight they would again go lol I'm a thief and just invis away.

One day, I fought another thief and got reasonably mad at him, so I decided to make my enemies cry: the dreaded stunlock brickwall warrior build. Axe+shield/hammer. Full vitality+toughness build, focused on extra stun durations and less cooldowns. Bull rush, stomp, AoE fear, Juggernaut. If I want a point, I'm getting that point and nobody's going to be capable of doing jack shit to stop me (CC me? I guess that'll work for .5 seconds. Kill me? hah). There's a slight problem where I don't actually do damage but points win games, not kills (although they certainly help).

[Staeg]

That's because it's their culture. It's their racial kind of thing. Yes, a necromancer wouldn't normally hunt wild beasts - but a norn necromancer would.

It's the same thing with Charr necros and mesmers being so out of place it isn't funny.

[Staeg]

So I finally managed to immerse myself in the world through reading literally every single article in the Lore section ever. The most important things that I managed to find are:
The Elder Dragons are not a unified force or team - they fight eachother just as much as us mortals. This is probably why we are still alive.
The Order of Whispers is a bunch of cheeky scumfucks and share less than 1% of what they know with the rest of mankind and a kinda civil war-ish thing is probably coming from the Order (one of the sides wants to protect mankind, the other wants to go fuckit and either join the dragons or use information to block themselves off the rest of the world or somesuch).
Not all undead things are Risen, so not all undead are evil.
There are probably eggs or even hatchlings of Glint, a champion of the Elder Dragons that turned good due to reading the minds of hundreds of mortals, hidden somewhere (probably the Crystal Desert). Not sure if said hatchlings will retain their mother's mindset (but even if they don't, they might eventually come around to it, like their mother).

[Staeg]

Okay, so I decided to try some more WvW action on my thief (the premise was that thieves are better than warriors doing hit-and-run solo missions than warriors, and solo missions are all that my computer is good for).

I started on the Crystal Desert borderlands - we had a fairly good standing, but we were being sieged at some northern keep. They had superior numbers, but very few of them had supplies with them (or were incapable of using them) - they could never get siege engines up and some of them kept running back (presumably for more supplies). So, I decided to go and ambush the enemy supply caravans inbound for the closest keep. Sadly, they had about 30 people escorting the caravan, so I didn't have any hopes of picking it off. I later chased an engineer into a fairly big battle, but we eventually won due to us having greater numbers (about 30 to 20); we later split up and chased the stragglers. Our group of 6 people chased 3 of them across the lake; the last one of them died pretty much on the stairs to their keep. Upon aggroing some more npcs and stopping to kill them, we got ambushed by ~10 people of the same guild and died.

It was fun.

[Staeg]

Sword+pistol thief with quickness is stupid in SPvP

Also, condition damage double daggers thief is insanely fun in PvE

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When is tonight

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Sooo I just finished my lvl 55 Vigil quest

I found out that Caithe, the sylvari Destiny's Edge member,

is a lesbian plant. What?

[Staeg]

@Staeg:

pollination has no sexual orientation

Also, why am I not in dis guild yet?

Since this already moved out of spoilers:
Sylvari DO differentiate gender, as evidenced by the fact that you, um, get to choose which gender you'll be.

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Oic

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-"Do you have a plan to get out of this place alive?"
Me - "*uhh* Sort of... The plan usually starts with "run for it" and goes downhill from there..."

Also featuring my sidekick being the only comedy relief character that I've found in the game so far ("Raise the crow's foot and rope down the jib-jabber-gabber... thingy..." being one of my favorite quotes), the Order of Whispers sounds like a bunch of wimps rather than a secret omniscient conspiracy group... so far.

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So we did Sorrow's Furnace

The second-to-last boss was, uhh, us throwing our bodies at it for a good 30 minutes

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AC SM is not actually that hard if everyone in the group knows the tactics for romeo & juliet over there
(also no standing in red circles)

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Yeah I was wondering why I was suddenly getting ten million walnuts from a single tree

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Don't they teleport to eachother and stuff?

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So guys did you know that my Warrior has an innate 80% magic find?

Also, is anyone experiencing issues where at some random points in a SPvP match your major traits just disappear, so you have to re-bind them?

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The Flame Citadel is the best-made dungeon I've seen so far; every boss has a very certain counterplay to him and a strategy that you should use, but it doesn't go to the point of obnoxiousness (we also 3-man'd the last boss due to lolservers but shhhh).

[Staeg]

FLYING TENTACLE RAPE CTHULHU DOWN

The fight was kinda boring. We just sat on the cannons and clicked 2 - all of the attacks the dude threw at us missed by default so we didn't need to dodge (the fights before him were pretty damn epic and cool, though).

Also the feeling when you aggro 14 dungeon-veteran things and about 10 normal mobs (a few of us died but we found the breaking strat)... yeah the explorable modes are pretty funsies.

[Staeg]

I kind of wish it was realistic to just grind up the rest of the way running dungeons over and over, but that'd take quite awhile

Idk man. You get like 2/3 of a level from finishing a dungeon and probably another 1/6 from the mobs in it. Then you get zie lewts. I'd say that coupled with crafting, you can safely vroom vroom to 80.

[Staeg]

Do you guys do any dungeons? Despite my pretty bad gear they sound pretty cool. Right now I'm level 70, is that high enough to do any of them?

You don't need any gear for story modes, and most explorables are ok, but the 65+ explorables usually have some form of gear check in them.

[Staeg]

So I got an achievement for getting 1-shot by a dargen (The claw of jormag, to be precise).

I also realized that I need ten billion everything to get Twilight
Then I'll need ten more billion everything to get Sunrise

And then I'll combine them to get Eternity
(the last two parts, probably not - depending on how much my innate 80% magic find helps me in cutting down the grinding speed)

[Staeg]

I don't think you need good gear at all - I had mosly level 6x stuff and I did just fine. However, Orr is not designed to be a leveling zone - frostgorge is. Also, get your disciplines to 400 if possible, switch to other disciplines if not in case you really want to hit 80 fast.

[Staeg]

Seriously. Nobody was on. Is this dead?

what kind of dumbass times do you play on
Cause I'm pretty sure me and fatewen were on yesterday

[Staeg]

Well, Warrior is... you either go the "safe" route with condition damage (bleeds, mostly)+tankyness or you go for the much more common (and imo worse, but possibly more fun) glass cannon melee warrior. In either case, you can equip traits and utilities that basically go "whenever you receive a condition you actually don't," there's stuff like movement skills break immobilizes (which are actually the hardest-to-cure condition, along with confusion). Double axes (MAYBE greatsword) for melee AoE, longbow for ranged AoE, shield for defense, rest is mostly single-target deeps (sword is more over-time-ish, rifle is ranged jack-of-all-trades greatsword is a one-trick pony, maces are "I'll win this battle by making the other dude ragequit!" and hammer is a really good CC-bot with some damage on top - oh, and there's warhorn, but shush let's pretend that doesn't exist).

What I'm trying to say is, Warriors are well-rounded, but they're really hit-or-miss as to whether you'll like them or not.

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Idk, if you think that element switching is not fun, elementalist doesn't seem like your thing.

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Catacombs, yeah. 30 will do, but the higher you are, the better.

[Staeg]

"6 runes of the pirate makes you spawn a bird in combat (very high chance), lasts about 30-45 seconds with a 1 min CD. This bird... has an agro range the size of the minimap.
If you're standing there, and see no mobs, it will dart off out of your LOS behind walls and whatnot just to attack random mobs. Not only that, but unlike most pets it wont keep attacking, it hits the mob once, then goes and attacks something else.
You'll just see white numbers start popping up behind buildings, then you get swarmed by angry mobs."
This is from a discussion on what runes are best for magicfind gear (apparently 5 pirate+1 traveler is the choice here).

Edit: is anyone else getting bugs where when they search for an item, it shows up some relatively low value, but when you click on it to buy it, the value jumps way the fuck up? Like, I was about to buy some orichalcums for 2.5s and then they were 3.5s, and a bit later a dye jumped from 30c to 2.17s

Edit2: uh guys whats wrong with WvW

Everything... is taking place in the normal zones
I think I'm just bugged

[Staeg]

So there's a bug where some profession can somehow move NPCs around

Some dick has hidden Miyani somewhere in LA and I can't find her :<

[Staeg]

So the November update. Much good stuff. Lost Shores, new anti-bunker spvp map, new dungeon, new gear!
I'm not sure why everything everywhere exploded with "ERRHAGERRD GRINDING ASCENDED GEA WAH AGAINST ANETS PRINCIPLES WAH WAH," though.

[Staeg]

a best class yet?

Thief and/or Mesmer - Thieves are outright batshit broken with their 12 second invisibilities which are actually 40 sec stealths in WvW due to player culling, and mesmers simply have the single best elites and utilities in the game, so they're the de facto best support class.