Sorry this turned in to a bit of an essay, hope you don't mind! I'll try and answer only questions you directly asked for comments on: Mounts: from what I understand WoW's dragonriding is somewhat of a simplification of the Griffon with a bit of the other mount, the Skyscale tacked on. The bunny specifically does somewhat get superseded by other mounts over time but it significantly earlier in the endgame progression and retains a few uses/advantages; the flying mounts are quite long quests to obtain and individually represent one of those kinda "what do I do?" objectives you were asking about as a signpost to a desirable thing you can go out and earn. Earlier on one thing you can be progressing is what each mount can do - I know you've seen the super long jump the raptor can get for instance. Narrative: The short answer is "somewhere in the middle of WoW and 14" the longer answer is "It gets better over time". The base game narrative is... serviceable and there are several characters that people care about, but even as a big fan I appreciate that that is damning with faint praise... I think the comparisons to ARR are fair here... and I'll say that I don't consider the story to be anywhere close to as overwhelmingly central to the game's enjoyment as it is in FFXIV once FFXIV gets going. Still the GW2 story improves significantly over the course of time, and I think there are noticable bumps in quality and character investment as you progress along the game's timeline, it's admittedly never super consistent but the trajectory is inarguably significantly upwards and the game does manage to hit several strong emotional moments and has some truly awesome peaks. Endgame: The whole roadmap / endgame objectives question is a long, complicated one and I'll try and avoid the word "Horizontal" too much but to some extent that does need acknowledging that one way to think of GW2 is a big... flat ahem, theme park where you hit max level and then you can just go experience whatever attraction you want. The most commonly suggested route around the park is to play the game in chronological order, doing all the story content along the way and unlocking / experiencing features as they were added with a few small asterisks that sometimes things were retroactively added, like the Mastery Point you mention getting from the story (masteries weren't added until the first expansion, and were then retroactively added to the base game too). I would say that this with, perhaps taking suggestions/curation from trusted members of your community as to attractions you should detour slightly to stop and visit along the way would probably be the most comfy route in terms of avoiding that overwhelming feeling that comes, especially at level 80 where you're fully unleashed upon the world and can, if you want, start and/or ignore any expansion story, go to any geographic area, unlock anything, try anything, do ALL THE THINGS... and then get stuck in terminal decision paralysis. One suggestion I would make is that the game has a lot of hidden little areas with fun npcs and lore and especially jumping puzzles which can add a lot to the whole exploration angle so either seeking them out yourselves or having community members direct you a little may be worthwhile. Beyond that there's still a lot to say but I'll try and be brief, I know there are several videos on the topic from a GW2 creators, (personally I like Laranity's) covering the "what do I do at 80, what is the endgame?" question as it's a common one so they may be worth a look, but in brief: - Gearing is a good early objective - exotic gear is the kinda "basic endgame" gear, then Ascended gear is the "actually the top tier, usually said to be about 5%, but takes a lot more work" tier - first one build's worth of gear is a nice start but later on (even much later on) more over time as one of the big things in GW2 with how the game system is set up is flexibility so one of the endgame things is that while you might not get gear that has better raw stats you will get gear that has different stats and may allow you to play your character differently. Do you want to do direct damage or damage over time with conditions, do you want to be a support build, and then what variant (more emphasis on damage and buffs or healing and buffs or maybe a bit of tankisnness thrown in?) etc. With a few gear sets you can be all of those on one character. And also a lot of stuff is account bound. - Elite Specialisations, these are kinda... subclasses? Don't worry we all say class too instead of profession, sorry ArenaNet. They can hugely change your play style or simply make you more of what you already are, open up new build and weapon options, and also tend to represent a power jump over the basic classes, so getting one or more fully unlocked is up there as a milestone objective. - Masteries, you've seen all of us with big numbers next to our names. Collecting those masteries is a nice sense of progression, and provides one part of the motivation to do content of specific areas for exp to fill the bar or specific things that give mastery points. - Alts! Much as many players max all the jobs in 14 many players have a maxed alt of each class set up in GW2. As most of your progression is account wide and you are not required to play through the story linearly (or mostly at all) and there are a bunch of other things that help with getting your alt levelled up/set up it's not quite as cozy as it all being on your one character like in 14 but it's actually pretty close IMO. - Meta events and world bosses, you've already seen some of these, and they continue to exist throughout the game, some of them being huge in scale/scope and taking up entire zones with big chains of events leading up to huge boss battles. They're a big focus for a lot of players as a very casual friendly endgame that anyone can enjoy and experience. Some have specific rewards tied to them, but all are profitable and money/resources tie back to a lot of other endgame goals / progressions, not to mention that they give a ton of exp for your mastery progression. - Fractals, these are the endgame 5 man dungeons, they have their own progression system from level 1 up to level 100 challenge mode. They are well liked, rewarding (money, resources, gear), and very actively played. Since it has an attached progression system it can help give that nice progression feeling we mmo gamers have been taught to love. They start very accessible and progress up to being very challenging at the top end so there's something for everyone. - Raids/Strike, these are basically the same thing. They're 10 man content, we've just made our first forray in to the first raids with the GG guild last week and downed 3 bosses! Raids are more of the traditional "WoW-style" raid where you fight through a big zone that's fully contiguous with trash mobs and lore books and all sorts of stuff, whereas strikes are more like FFXIV where you push the button to go in and just arrive at a contained boss arena and fight a single boss. The difficulty of these is quite variable but in general the early ones are quite accessible, there are many that are somewhat challenging, and a few (especially with the challenge modes turned on) that are very very hard - two in particular may be comparable to ultimates maybe? I've seen the comparison made but haven't the personal experience of ultimates to say for certain, and obviously the game combat systems are extremely different. - Legendary and other chase items. There are a bunch of very rare, very expensive things that people pursue, either for the cosmetic or just the flex. Earning gold and resources towards these goals is a big reason many people do whatever activities they find to be the right balance of fun and profitable. Legendary items in GW2 are mostly crafted and are a big funnel for a wide variety of resources you collect throughout the game's different activities. They do not provide a statistical benefit but in addition to their shiny skins do provide huge quality of life benefits - they can be used by all your characters and gear templates simultaneously, they are infinitely free to transmog, you can choose and freely swap what stat combination/spread they have, can freely add and remove upgrades from them... and probably some other stuff I forgot. And my cats really want food so I'll stop hurling more information into this reply 😅 hope at least some of it was what you wanted.
Aww, is this the Poobah we have in the guild? I like this person, they've always been helpful. One thing I'd add is regarding Garrett's comment on the holy trinity: Tanks, healers, and DPS absolutely exist in GW2. These roles not being a thing in GW2 is a misconception (not aided by Anet when they say they didn't have any LOL). They do but the thing that's different is that they're simply not beholden to specific classes only. Instead, all classes are given the option of being one of these. In this way, if you want to be a healer but favor rangers for class fantasy, you can then be a Druid. If you like being a healing mage instead, you can then be a Tempest. These roles may not be apparent in open world PVE (because ANet desperately needs to buff a lot of the enemies due to power creep), but it's definitely there for instanced PVE as well as in competitive modes like WvW. (note on WvW: it USED to be server vs. server. It's been changed into guilds coming together to form larger teams that then duke it out. A change that wasn't welcomed by the community for the most part, but it is what it is.) Sorry, another edit: Another thing for Garrett in terms of weapon swaps. One way to do it is to view the secondary weapon as your "utility" weapon. For example, one thing I ran with my ranger for awhile was axe and warhorn as my first set, and staff as my second. Axe/warhorn is my dps for the most part, but when I need some healing or skills to get away from danger, I then switch to my staff.
I hope yo don't mind me asking but you suggest playing the story chronologically so I have to ask did they ever add back in the story they removed or made you have to pay for patches? I dropped off mid way through heart of the thorns and tried to get back into it but knowing I'd have to pay for the living world story killed any motivation to get back in.
@@dunidane5206 They did add back the stuff that was previously one time only (Living World Season 1) and they gave it a polish and some new stuff, that is considered to be part of the core game and is totally free for all players. The other Living World seasons are paid for though - I do understand the frustration with having to pay more for stuff, and honestly I do think it's good that since End of Dragons they have done away with having these long stretches of "free but only if you're there at the time" content patches, but I do also think that the seasons are worth the money given that each episode adds a whole new map at minimum. If you're looking to return and play through with only buying expansions I think S2 and S3 are quite reasonably skippable and you can just go ahead to the next expansion and you'll be pretty much fine with knowing what's going on the big exception is Living World Season 4 IMO; more than anything else Season 4 is basically a full expansion and contains some of the highest peaks of emotion and storytelling in the game. It's also the most directly relevant to the game's story, contains six maps, two new mounts (skyscale is now alternatively available in the SotO expansion) and is just... really good.
GW2 has the most build diversity of any MMO by far. It's not even close. Every class can do everything, heal, tank, damage over time or direct damage dps, and at max level you're not chasing endlessly higher gear score, but there are tons of different stat combinations that are good at different things.
GW2s buildcraft easily a sleeper feature people miss. Look at Throne and liberty. 7 weapons or so. 21 combos. Sure you can change your skills and passives. I haven't dived in to that yet too much yet. I hope T&L will develop more build craft in the future because it could get old really fast. When you look at Gw2 you get 27 elite specs plus 9 core. Then weapon load out, and THEN trait lines. And it doesn't punish you if you want to experiment.
@@bosunbones.8815 tbf there's almost never a reason to use a core spec over an elite spec outside of being brand new to the game and not having them unlocked. but there's usually multiple ways to build each elite spec anyway, although a lot of it will come down to whether you want to provide quick/alac or not.
@@Sobepome Some core specs can actually perform as well as (or in some rare cases, out perform) elite specs. In WvW, core necros, guards, and thieves do really well. Perhaps it's just based on game modes, in terms of how viable they are.
Today in GW2 I attended a Heavy Metal concert featuring a Furry band playing for a Furry crowd. I caught stage divers, fixed the amps joined the pogo mosh pit, and danced on stage. The band played actual Metal songs. Some of the players were singing the lyrics in the chat panel it was Metal. Then I went fishing for a bit. Later I went on a world boss tour, and when I returned to Divinities Reach there was group of players jamming at the bank with real in game musical instruments while another group had a fashion show across the courtyard. 10/10 game day. GW2 community, I love you, you mad bastards! GW2 is the greatest MMO, if you don't agree, I respect your right to be wrong.
and not to mention that event u found fun gives u a token that is worth 1-2 gold, or can be saved w/ the other tokens from that maps events to roll a small chance of an infusion worth like 2k gold. getting all the daily tokens from that map to sell for gold was on my daily grind list forever when i was still kinda new
To compare between XIV and GW2. They both play to their strengths. The best opinion I heard about these two games is this: “XIV does what gw2 struggles with, while GW2 does what XIV struggles with.” Also Staff Infection!
@@zavos5659 'the game is strong on gameplay and weak on story' is hardly damning for a game, though. Sure it's a shame, but the opposite would be much worse.
Mukluk has been playing GW2 for years and made guides on basically any topic in the game, and if he's streaming he and his community are always happy to answer questions (beware, he's a dad, and sometimes he likes to pull your nose!). I personally used mostly Metabattle and sometimes Snowcrows to look up builds. There's builds for every activity, but also a bunch of 'fun' builds. Muk has bunch of videos of those too. GW2 has two main ways of dealing damage: power and conditions. You can pick a weapon and see which category it's abilities mostly fall to, or decide 'I want to make a condi build' and select fitting weapons based on that (this is what most people seem to be doing). During leveling, I've found it easier to use power weapons because finding ones with correct stats (power, precision, fury) is way easier. Mesmer and Necro both have a great access to condi abilities, if correct gear is available.
Staff staff, especially mesmer, is definitely a thing! Though weapons of the same type in both weapon sets share cooldowns, you swap between both staffs to proc sigils that activate on weapon swap without having to go to a different weapon.
I started playing GW2 when you guys did your first stream of it. So far I've been enjoying the heck out of it! What people keep saying about horizontal progression certainly rings true though.And what that has meant in my journey is, I'm no longer gaining power - Shortly after hitting max level, I acquired gear that's very close to the strongest in the game. So my journey now is more about collecting mastery points. These mastery points unlock things that help me explore more of the world. Some of them unlock abilities for my mounts, such as the ability for my mount to jump higher, or the ability to glide through the air with a glider. And instead of searching for stronger gear, I'm now in search for gear that can be shared across several characters, which makes trying out new builds a lot easier.
The progression after cap is basically like a metrovania game. Side upgrades that give you more options on how to play and explore instead of raw power. Also do not forget about getting good. The combat is quite skill based so understanding your rotation and the buildcrafting (that can be complex) can be the source of really power in game. You get really more powerful by learning to play.
GW2 is the kind of MMO where you start clicking on NPC to see what they have to say as you explore a main city, only for oine such unmarked NPC to start talking about an invasive species of creeatures, gives you a special gun to detect and hunt them, and all of a sudden you're running around the city looking like a crazy person hunting creatures only you can see and hear. And then when you finish this crazy achievement of doing this, you get a unique looking skin as a reward and some other stuff. This is when you realize how different GW2 can be. Also for wepaon swap, a lot of people have a melee weapon and a ranged weapon to be able to cover most type of combat by being in ranged mode and melee mode.
Sideways progression makes more sense if you think about it like a legend of Zelda game where you can't access some areas/content until you unlock an ability or mount. But you don't really start seeing that until the xpacs.
For GW2 goals, I would say....what do you like to do? Because GW2 probably has something to work towards, whatever it is. The key area where GW2 is different - and this makes the early game very overwhelming, and sometimes directionless - is that because content is evergreen, over the years, it's created multiple endgame paths for people to follow. It's common to hear people say that "the whole game is endgame", but I personally think that's only really true for a small minority. Most people choose a narrower focus, so I've tried to cover as many as I can down below! Some people really enjoy the story (I promise it gets better after Core - the ARR of GW2), so their GW2 experience is logging in for every patch and playing the new episode. Maybe messing around in the areas for a bit. And then they log out and come back later. I'd say this group also includes those who enjoy exploring the new areas and discovering all the hidden secrets (there are MANY). Once they've "finished" a patch, they wait for the next update. Some people love group content, so their endgame experience is putting together groups for Raids/Strikes, or running Fractal Dungeons (the OG dungeons are still there, but power creep has made them largely obsolete and they're also pretty buggy. Still fun to mess around in with some guildies tho!). As GW2 has no gear treadmill, even the oldest raids and strikes still offer a challenge to new players, and are regularly run by groups of all abilities. For those who don't enjoy organised groups, open world bosses and meta events (which you won't really run into until you're at level 80) are a good alternative. The reason there's a cool, flashy world-boss in the starter zones is to tease this aspect of the later game. Eventually, you can join map-wide events which require synchronised groups to split off and complete simultaneous objectives to unlock a final boss, which requires coordination and the understanding of its mechanics to complete. It's literally open-world raiding, although obviously balanced to account for the wide range in skills, and the fact that not everyone might know what's going on. Some people want to achievement hunt, either for Achievement Points (which you get ingame rewards for!), or to unlock prestige weapon/armour sets. So they use the Achievement panel as a checklist. Some people want to PvP, either in structured/5-man PvP, or the mass chaos of WvW (Think 150v150v150 people, all on the same massive map, fighting over castles and supply lines.) There are plenty of people who exclusively play those game-modes, and nothing else! On a semi-related note, with some of the later-added mounts, there are also communities who focus on player-run racing tournaments, which take place on custom-built racetracks in guild halls. There are full tournaments and racing leagues in GW2! Finally, you have the players who care about Fashion. For them, the endgame of Fashion Wars 2 is to collect as many different weapon and armour skins as possible, so that they can strut their stuff in major cities. There are actually quite a few player-run fashion shows as well. Obviously, many people will pick and choose from several of those goals for their personal endgame. Where GW2 shines is in allowing all of those paths to be equally viable alternatives, because the flat level cap means that even events, bosses, and goals from the base game are still viable, and are still being regularly run by large amounts of players. I know this is a giant textwall of a comment, but you did ask, so I hope this helps!
unless it's dungeons. the devs completely abandoned dungeons for fractals which is honestly a crying shame. i loved dungeons with all of its separate wings and story mode versions
@@fencingfireferret1188 Yeah, I really enjoyed dungeons when they were actively challenging (and when the mechanics all actually worked lol). But I do kinda understand why they made the switch. As soon as it became clear that more players were interested in open world than 5-man instances, the amount of dev resources they'd need to keep maming dungeons just wasn't viable anymore. I also think that player habits have really shifted over time. We saw the same situation with raids. Large, map-sized zones with dedicated lore and multiple boss arenas require long, dedicated play sessions which many people can't commit to anymore. Meanwhile, Fractals and Strikes are more accessible as they're bite-sized by comparison. It's a shame...but not a surprise, I guess.
As a former resident of Eorzea, I'm thoroughly enjoying my time in Tyria. 1) The open world events and world bosses are more engaging than FFXIV's open world offerings. 2) Thanks to GW2's horizontal progression system, every piece of legendary armor and weapons actually feels legendary as those items will always be BIS. Thanks to FFXIV's vertical progression, the BIS armor that you work towards will ultimately be worthless once any new expansion drops. 3) GW2 mounts are all unique, handle differently, and have their practical benefits. Mounts in FFXIV feel more like movement buffs rather than you actually riding a tamed beast. 4) Thanks to GW2 latest expac, EVERYONE gets a house, as opposed to FFXIV's limited housing system. If there's any FFXIV players out there feeling burnt out, or looking for a seond mmo, than I strongly recommend giving Guild Wars 2 a try.
I'm very glad that a channel like yours is talking about guild wars 2, one of the mmorpg that has added many more innovations to the genre than a lot of people give it credit for. Gw2 is unique and as you have well understood any content in gw2 is evergreen. From exploring an early map to low-level materials everything can come in handy. GW2 is perfect for those who have other responsibilities or other video games to play, because it allows you to choose your goal and pursue it. If that is not respecting our time, I don't know what could be more. Also, GW2 does not destroy your progress when you leave the game. What you have achieved is there waiting for you. That's why in addition to: one of the most beautiful explorations ever, a collaborative openwold without necessarily having to party, a world alive with events and not static npc's, a combat system as fluid as never before in mmo's, fair and non-oppressive monetization of more of the same things, the best made mounts with different abilities from each other and not skins with speed buffs, fantastic music and audio themes. I could go on, but GW2 is unique and that is why so many people love it.
When you hit max level you've hit "end game" which is really just the entire game. like 90% of the game is post max level. But then you start leveling mastery which always unlock new functionality
I started playing GW2 back in its beta, and dropped off pretty quick for other MMO's, even if I found it charming. Came back last year at some friends' recommendations and also felt equally overwhelmed LOL. What helped me was kind of taking a 2 pronged approach to 'get' the game: I boosted a class with one of the free boosts they sent me as old account-holder, picking one recommended by friends for how I generally like to play: ranged/caster/support/healing - (I picked ranger knowing there was a healing/support subclass of druid) - then picked one of the expacs that unlocked a traversal mechanic I wanted (gliders) and got to experience what endgame zones were like and how you'd usually work your way through expac content, which also let me work on unlocking the subclass I wanted and start earning masteries and see how they worked. I looked up a build for my class that was recommended as good for open world content, (and bookmarked a support build for the subclass I had my eyes on) Once I picked one, my friends also just threw an endgame set of gear at me that was good for the class/build I was aiming for so I didn't have to even think about that since gear progression isn't nearly as much of a thing - I can basically go into any endgame content with that gear and contribute without having to worry about anything being an upgrade or not. Doing all this gave me the sort of 'aHA' sense at what the cycle of max level is like and what I could potentially want to work on - which masteries I wanted to definitely get, which mounts to work on unlocking, looking through legendary weapons available to me and finding one I fell in love with and wanted to look up a guide on all the many steps to unlocking. THEN I also made a new bb toon to just.... slowly work my way through the early game content when my friends weren't online because while boosting let me understand what sort of endgame gameplay loops existed, I still felt like I missed SO much, especially if I wanted to understand the story/characters more and see the original zones and this gave me a lot of satisfaction to just explore, work on map completion, discover puzzles, see intros to characters that I had met in my boosted character expacs (some in VERY different places now lol) and of course experiment with other classes and weapon combos. I felt a lot calmer doing this at whatever pace I wanted now that I knew what was waiting for me at end game. So yeah, overwhelming is definitely the word for it but once I *saw* how max level content worked, it finally clicked that like oh, when my friends are playing GW2, one is working on unlocking their sky-dragon (whatever it's called, I don't remember), another is trying to run a world event a bunch for drops that go toward the legendary weapon they're work on, another is playing through one of the expacs they hadn't experienced yet or unlocking a subclass they want to try, everyone can be working on their own project/goals and then come together to do events or world bosses etc together and show off all the fashion and mount customizations we've unlocked, etc. It's fun and something that I like to pop into now when I feel like playing a very 'make your own to-do list' style mmo, but some guidance to get going was really useful. Good luck, and I hope you continue to have fun with it!!
16:31 Personally, contrary to other MMOs where the main story is where most of the narrative is, I care about the story conveyed by the zones, events, NPCs, and also sometimes the main story. It's the "I was there when it happened" instead of "My entry is creating a narrative".
You've conveyed something that I was having a hard time with. GW2 definitely makes the environment a huge part of the storytelling. The types of monsters you fight, including the weapons and skills they're using, the events, the idle chatter from the NPCs, some bits of letter or object out in the world... they all contribute to the overall narrative.
Something I think is interesting about the weapons in Guild Wars 2 is that the same weapon can behave differently on different jobs. For example, while a Necromancer uses a Staff by placing AoEs on the ground from range, a Revenant instead uses a staff to whack people in the face. Also important: You can have two different Offhand weapons as well. For example, my Scourge (one of the Necromancer's Elite Specialisations) wields a Scepter+Torch in one set and an Axe+War Horn in the other that I swap between when need be.
Also, having just played through the base story and being on the cusp of the first expansion, here's the list of things I wish people had told me: 1) It's fine to just pick whatever set of weapons feels most fun and stick with that through the base game, with the assumption that you'll try everything out again and maybe swap once you hit max level. Even setting the meta aside, "elite specializations" (basically subclasses) each unlock an additional weapon so you might not even have access to what could be your favorite yet. (And you will get plenty of loot during the game to keep your weapons reasonably up to date as you do.) 2) Don't worry too much about how your pace through the maps vs pace through the story vs. character level lines up. There's way more stuff to complete than you need to get to max level, but extra experience gain rolls over into other stuff once you hit max level, and on the other end stuff you out level still gives you experience, so you really don't have to worry about optimizing this. And the adventurer guide achievements or whatever they're called are going to shower you with xp so you'll hit max level and qualify for advancing the story much faster than you'll probably be working through the maps. Just do whatever feels fun. 3) The pacing of the base game story is awful, and in particular it tends to explain the context you need to understand the section you just did right *after* you finish the section you needed it. This is a little extra work, but if you want to actually have a good time with the base story and understand the world better, I kind of suggest making a character of each race and playing through playing through until the end of the level 30 story (basically to where you're going to pick one of the three orders to join). This really helps make sure you're introduced to a number of important concepts before they take off running with them. If you were to only pick one, the Sylvari start is probably the most relevant to the base game story and the first expansion. (The Sylvari were clearly their favorite lol.) 4) On the multiple characters note: story and map completion progression is character specific, but most everything else is account wide. Most of the important game progression transitions to the achievement & mastery systems once you finish the base game, so that's account wide. The more endgame oriented gear tends to be account bound instead of character bound, so if you make it to 80 and are still interested in the game, definitely use the free boosts you get from buying each expansion on alts to add a couple additional max level characters to mix up the classes you're playing. 5) Actually actually, while we're talking about the boosts: if you use the level 80 boost from buying an expansion on a character that is below level 80, you'll actually be taken to a later map to "try before you buy" where you can play on that character at level 80 on that map only before you lock in and permanently consume the boost. This is actually a good opportunity to make a few different characters and try out all the classes at level 80. Since the first expansion is pretty cheap you might want to do this fairly early (though maybe once you've played enough to feel like you "understand" the game) in case you want to change up your main before you get super invested and need to redo a lot of base game map completion. 6) I'm sure people have mentioned this but the first "season" of patch story content was a bunch of live events that included blowing up and remaking the initial hub city. They very recently created story instance versions of all that after it being completely unplayable for most of the games life. This leads to the weird but very illuminating thing similar to the ARR dungeons that got heavily reworked where you'll suddenly get a glimpse of what their "modern" game design looks like, so look forward to that. The story in that section is still pretty rough though--Living World season 2 is where the narrative feels like it's starting to hit its stride.
Progression is all about gaining access to new options and playstyles instead of strictly more power. Take the elite specs of the necromancer for example: You can choose to be either a Reaper, giving you a big melee scythe in your shroud instead of ranged skills, or a Scourge, replacing a strict shroud with skills F1 through F5, so you don't get a second health bar anymore but now can spawn up to three stationary sand shades that repeat your F-skills, pulsing debuffs or providing buffs, or a Harbinger, giving you a mobile, high damage shroud that drains your life instead of protecting it, but get's stronger the more life is drained. And even within one elite spec there's build variety. For example scourge can be a competent pure dps, offensive support, or healer/support based on your weapons, gear and traits. Mounts are similar (though there's definitely movement power creep, looking at the skyscale). The raptor jumps far and has an engage skill that pulls enemies together, the springer jumps high and has a big cc on its engage skill, the skimmer can move over or under water, the griffon can convert height into speed by diving down, the roller beetle is a super high speed ground mount with difficult handling including drifting (there are communities entirely focused on doing races with these including building their own tracks in guild halls), the siege turtle is a two player mount with one driver and one gunner. The skyscale is kind of an allrounder, a limited height "helicopter" with some air dashes and limited wall climbing ability. For general terrain traversal it has mostly pushed out the raptor and springer, though it's slower on the ground than the raptor, not as fast in the air as the griffon and doesn't have a cc skill like the springer.
Each mount has situations where it is useful. Beyond the high jump, the bunny's battle dismount is very useful as a starter move in PvE Boss fights like bounties. Its cannonball has CC that can lower a bosses' Breakbar.
In regards to necromancer and its form change, that is indeed how it works! On one of the specializations, there's a trait that ups your damage after you swap from necro to shroud and vice versa. So its actually intended that you go back and forth.
Weapon Recommendation for Garrett: Axe / Warhorn. And not just because both get Heavy Metal-inspired weapon skins later. But that's definitely a factor. Charr Profession Recommendation for Kyle: Depends on what you're looking for in terms of swinging around big weapons. Greatsword Warrior is very spin-to-win and that can be really fun. As you attack, you build up your profession's gauge, which gives you up to three tiers of a kind of an "Ultimate Attack" of sorts for that weapon? Also, while this is not a class that can equip greatswords, I would recommend trying out one of the professions that doesn't allow in-combat weapon swapping to see how the game can play with the fundamental mechanics of the combat depending on your build. For Charr, I would absolutely recommend Engineer for this, but Elementalist is also fun! For Engineer, you get toolkits that you equip instead of weapon swapping. So you can equip a medkit that gives you healing abilities or a grenade kit to lob a ton of grenades, or even a flamethrower! For Elementalist, instead of weapon swapping, you get access to four Elemental Attunements (so you're essentially the Avatar from ATLA), and each attunement flavors your equipped weapon as if you weapon swapped to something different. It's all really interesting!
I'm a little late, and a lot of people have answered your questions in depth, so i won't do that but i do wanna encourage and wish you guys well. I found you guys from the GW2 streams and as an 11 year vet thought i'd pop in and watch, offer advice where i could and it's been so entertaining and a blast to see you guys enjoying it and getting to know all the fun of early game. It will get better with time, once you get around level 40-60 is when the core storyline picks up and becomes more uniform, so you guys will be able to play the exact same story to progress simultaneously, if you so desire, and the quality is a bit better, leading up to the post launch content which starts a little rocky and then by the first expac hits the ground running. As such a long time vet i'll say it's honestly worth it to keep going. I have almost 6k hours and among my friend group of vets i'm on the low end of playtime. There's so much to do and love, it's just mostly level 80 content that really makes it shine. I hope you guys keep it up and keep the streams up too, it's been a blast. Glad to see everything is good after the hurricane! As for a fun martial class, i am personally biased against the expansion exclusive class the Revenant. It's extremely unique among the classes in the game, but has a limited weapon selection. Guardian however is spoiled in balance and is honestly an extremely functional and well built class all the way through with amazing weapon variety. I personally don't play it often, (mesmer lover here too), but guard is versitile and competent everywhere, and is a great class to both learn on and stick with long term. And don't worry too much on weapon swapping. Early on it's not a huge deal and with enough time it'll start to make sense. Some meta builds for endgame don't even use it. I wish y'all all the best and hope that you get many more hours of play out of the game.
"Does anyone care about the narrative?" Yes! I'm only partway through Heart of Thorns, the first expansion, and have been told the best is yet to come. But I'm already enamoured by the worldbuilding and the story, while not the best from the outset, does build and has characters I care about and a villain that was pretty top tier.
Garret, your weapons in GW2 are a large part of what defines how your character is built, so you're understanding something inherently. It's a very flexible game so you're never locked in, but a lot of the game is about feeling out what weapon set you want to use and build yourself around it. Figure out if the weapons you like focus more on DoTs or Direct damage and then pick another weapon that works the same, and get stats that support that. And if you find you really badly need an upgrade because you're sticking to one weapon, don't be afraid to visit the auction house. It'll fix you right up and gear is generally cheap if you're not looking for tmog. Kyle, Charr warrior is really fun. You can make them very spikey and big, and warrior kind of exemplifies what the Charr are about. I'm partial to double axes for feeling like a fury warrior, but there's plenty of ways to play it. You're more open to changing weapons as you level so just try some early level and feel it out. Also, for both of you, you can actually look up what your class does with each weapon in the build menu.
Came here to say this. I think the weapon swap thing is throwing them off too, but really, it's just like having all 15 or so skills like in FF14, except all those skills are just not on the screen all at once. The weapon swap is a QoL choice, that way you can have one keybind work for more than one skill. But yes. I'm not sure what gave them the impression that their weapons don't matter. The variety is there just for the sake of choice, but in the end, you still have to make a choice. I have my favorite weapons that I use for any build that I have, due to the class/character fantasy that I have in my head.
DUNGEONS STILL EXIST - i dont know why you said they don't. you can play them very early on, they have seperate max lvl paths too, Arenanet just has not implemented any new ones in favor of other dungeon-like content. Sooo many fun questions: How does combat turn out to be, how is the meta? how do mounts work? Whats the goal of the game? is the story well received? and thus is it worth investing time into this MMO? I wont answer any of this and i kinda hope noone spoils too much so that unlocking some stuff becomes like "i knew thats what it is exactly, i will just get it and move on"
Starting new in GW2 can in my experience be the hardest part of the game as you lack the knowledge and goals. Yet it can also be the best part of the game, running around exploring, finding secrets and immerse yourself completely. If you find yourself constantly looking for the meaning of playing, hard time with the story or immersing yourself, the game really opens up with the first expansion, especially the story. enjoy the journey in your own pace, if you struggle with that, set a goal to reach the first expansion maybe? Looking forward to the next gw2 stream! p.s. your character starts speaking a whole lot more the further into the story you get, early story is much more about you "building up reputation and a story" types where you're tagging along.
You will usually have set weapons that pair well with your build, and both weapon sets will play to the same build strengths. The change of weapons in early game go away later, that's just because you get drops as you level. Build diversity is pretty big, there are many options for each class. Staff/staff is definitely possible, usually with different sigils on them
Build diversity isn't really a thing, you either go full power or full condition with supplemental stats for precision or expertise. The metas kind of pigeonhole you into very specific builds, pvp has the most variety but for pve you're more or less stuck with a single route on specs. It's the main reason I dropped my ranger/druid because I found out I had to play all spirits with all spirit boosting talents for alacrity and might uptime or else I wasn't getting into groups. Also vitality and healing are basically useless stats and scale very poorly. If you compare the build diversity to that of retail wow, it's not even in the same universe. 15 talent points and going either 100% power or condition isn't really much, he's right to say its on par with something like diablo 4. Most of teh combat ends up being stacking in one spot and cycling boons for buff uptime.
9:02 Black hair guy gets it on the function of weapons and weapon swapping. Salt and pepper is being hard to please. xD Oh and pepper chose necro too, so lucky for him he can go reaper so he doesn't need to weapon swap at all cuz greatsword is stronk. 12:30 There are 3 "roles" in gw2: defensive support/healer, offensive support, and dps. When it comes to dps there are two ways of doing damage, condition or strike(power), which translates to dots or direct damage. All classes have 3 elite specializations that can be unlocked at level 80, as long as you own the corresponding expansion, and necromancer has reaper, scourge, and harbinger. For necromancer in the current pve meta there is heal scourge for heal/def-support, alac-condi scourge & quickness-condi or quickness-power harbinger for offensive support, and for raw dps condi has scourge & harbinger while power has harbinger & reaper. Now there is a condi reaper build but it's not very popular as gearing power is always cheaper & easier and then there's the fact that power reaper just slaps. Like sure condi reaper can drop 48 bleed stacks on someone with two buttons or you could nuke them for up to 140k damage with those same two buttons as power. :3 Something you'll find later on is that overall the difference between condi and power builds isn't much in terms of power and you can usually just play whatever you want even in the majority of endgame. It's fairy unique for an encounter to really favor one playstyle over another. 13:15 Any and every goal in GW2 is whatever you set it to be for yourself. At endgame, the stat difference between exotic and ascended/legendary gear isn't that large so for less than 30g you can easily fill out an entire power build with exotic quality gear and clear 97% of the game and no one will be able to tell the difference. The only content where ascended/legendary quality gear is required is in fractals, which are mini-dungeons that will obtain kiss/curse modifiers (this is where wow stole the idea of mythic+ affixes) that will absolutely wreck you if you don't obtain a certain amount of a resistance stat (agony resistance) which can only be slotted onto ascended/legendary quality gear. 13:30 Narrative: early game story quality entirely depends on starting race, imo, and the follow up story that leads to the end of the core game is the weakest part of the overall gw2 story. The expansion/living-world story lines are far better both in quality and how well they're written as they had time to really start to get the ball rolling after the game launched. The living world story are essentially the in-between of each expansion that connect everything together and while they stopped producing, in-between content, with that method for the latest expansions the quality hasn't deteriorated at all from what I've seen.
5:31 '...and it has made me want to just take what I thought I'd knew about MMOs and just throw it in the trash.' exactly! GW2 has achieved its goal. the devs wanted to give us players another experience, more quality of life, more fun, less frustration, less competition and grieve among players and more cooperation. the game is fundamentally friendly in design, horizontal progression etc is not devaluating your past efforts even after years of absence from the game and the devs did their best to make us players best friends instead of making us run ahead for harvesting nods to outpace the competition. the game is massive. we have raids, strikes, fractals etc for 'endgame', we can explore, embellish our characters ('fashion wars') fight in OpenPvP (WvW) or structured PvP, decorate our homesteads and whatnot. have fun! the game is full of it.
It's designed to be enjoyable and worth playing even if you only have a few hours a week to play it, so it's always been pretty popular with people that have real world responsibilities(like parents) but still want to play MMOs
I believe an appeal to some is that this game launched and grew as we did. So it makes sense that some people remain invested for long periods of time.
So happy you tried GW2. It was my frst MMO and I still say it's the most "real MMO" i played. Having the map metas with dozens of players is peak MMO no matter how good the instanced content in other MMOs is (which unfortunately isn't GW2's strength I admit). GW2 is a lot about finding your own endgame, like some people already explained. Go fashion hunting, grind for legendaries, get all elite-specs for all classes, do all the little treasure hunts in the maps or reach the highes fractal level etc - all valid playstyles. Hope you continue to enjoy it :)
I have to admit, the Path of Fire story is epic. I had a lot of fun with that one. Also, you have to finish the whole storyline to begin the quest to obtain griffon.
In GW2 there are currently 72 (9 classes with 5 core / 3 elite specializations each) specializations, which are used depending on the content (PvE, PvP, WvW, OpenWorld). The talents have FAR more synergy effects with the weapons than you are used to in other games. BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY... finally you should play your class in a way that feels good for you!
Loved that intro bit. I played GW2 when it was pretty new and my memories are faded, but when people say the game is about exploration that sounds right to me. I remember ignoring leveling after a while and just trying to sneak around to fill in the map and get vistas as much as I could. You guys are going to make me try to figure out how to install it and log in again, aren't you?
Narrative-wise - to put it simply, core game GW2 story has too many things going on for it to establish emotional points that hook people into becoming more interested into what they are trying to do. Like what most people already said in the comments, Arenanet learned and slowly condensed their story into a narrative that is both easier to follow and easier to relate to, as evidenced by their direction in the first Living World Season (or patches post core game story). They developed a set of characters similar to the Scions in FF14; Characters that the playerbase either loved or hated. Either way, it served to get them invested in those characters - what they want to do, what was happening to them etc and subsequently get invested into the story as well. Honestly, if you really wanted to understand how GW2 delivers its narrative, you have got to play through most of it and see how they improved over time. Sure, there will be ups and downs in its writing (you will know when you get there lol), but it's the same experience that most other players had with games like FF14.
I used to run two staves on my mesmer but it was a special case since it doesn't help with cooldowns. On each of the staves I had a sigil that refill my dodge bar when I swap weapon. I played an elite spec variant of the mesmer called the mirage that gets access to ambush abilities under certain conditions, for example right after dodging. The mirage staff ambush launches a huge projectile that applies conditions to the enemy and speed up your allies cooldowns. Just quite a roundabout way to play a condi/support hybrid.
As far as core main story quest goes: You will play out a story early on that ties into your decisions in character creation. About 25-30 you will make a choice as to what faction out of three choices to join. Then the game comes back together as all three factions join together to engage the world dragon Zhaitan.
I dont really play core to much anymore but it is there to teach you how to play the game. Once you get into heart of thorns, you see the difficultly turn up a bit. When Heart of thorns came out everyone was dying constantly from the maps and the fact there was no mounts at that time. HoT give you gliding and Path of fire gives you mounts. Soto ( secrets of the obscure gives you skyscale ( flying dragon mount) and rift hunting. The newest release GW2 janthir Wilds gives you a Homested where you can get gather nodes for resources, you can deco it or you can ignore it) You will get the springer (rabbit) mount next after the Raptor in POF and the flying mount (Griffon) is at the end of the that expansion. The Idea of GW2 is a casual go at your own pace MMORPG. you dont need to rush to then end of the content. WvW is alliance battles now.. Its your guild and your alliance guilds vs other Alliances guilds in a Massive Capture the flag game concept with Keeps, towers, and supply camps that buff the keeps, towers and garrisons. It one game Spit over 4 maps. ( red borderlands , blue borderlands, green border lands and Eternal Battle grounds in the center. the idea is you want to capture and hold as much land as possible to win the skirmish which then adds points to you war score (highest War scores wins and moves up a tier while the middle stays in the same tier and the lowest drops down a tier). Probably one of the best Action packed capture the flag games you'll probably ever see from a MMORPG. Guild wars 2 is for casual Players and caters to them. Dungeons have been Replaced with Fractals which are mini dungeons and are profitable ( accessible thru lions arch). if you like straight boss fights and just want make a team and try and kill a boss then Strikes could be a thing.( strikes mission are the beginning and easier small scale raids). You will get strikes starting in the living world series ( Living world is small scale story patches that tie the whole story together) There are countless ways to play Gw2 and keep with it and you'll find a enough content to last you years of enjoyment. Good luck fellas!
So as far as the question about story, for me at least the answer is yes it does get better as you progress but admittedly it does also have a little of that A Realm Reborn effect where the beginning portions are really just an introduction and it isn’t until you get out of your zone and start exploring the world where things start to escalate
Re: Specialisations You unlock the base specialisations first. They are like talent trees. You use your hero points for learning abilities or for learning traits in a specialisation. Once you learn some traits, you can slot that specialisation into one of three slots (which unlock at certain levels). Since you are limited in the number of skills you can slot or traits you can slot, try to focus in on what you like and invest here points towards that. What you are thinking about as Specialisation is the elite spec, which is a lvl 80 specialisation line that alters class mechanics and can only be put in the third slot. Each class has 5 base specialisation lines, and each has their own strengths. Generally, they fit into: - Power Damage - Condi Damage - Sustain/Tankiness - Healing - Class Mechanic So take Necro: - Spite (Power Damage) - Curses (Condi Damage) - Death Magic (Sustain/Minions) - Blood Magic (Healing/life drain) - Soul Reapering (Death Shroud) Or Elementalist: - Air (Crit/Power/Mobility) - Fire (Burning Condi or Power damage) - Earth (Bleed Condi or Sustain) - Water (Healing/Cleanse) - Arcane (Attunement swapping, boons) Look what the traits do, see which ones interact with the skills and weapons you like to use and go for that first. Re: Weapons Weapons tied to skills is the way the game is designed so that you can have a good visual indication of what an enemy can do in PvP. Their class and their weapons will tell you a lot about what they can do, and with a game as flexible as this in terms of builds, it does need good ways of sussing out an enemies build. There can be benefit to equipping the same weapon type in both slots. This allows you to take advantage of weapon swapping traits or sigils on weapons, while keeping your skills. Useful for classes like Mirage where you may be trying to keep staff clones up, and regaining endurance for ambush attacks by using a Sigil of Energy.
So bad news, if you want to do anything that isn't comically easy group content, you will have to look up a build. You can make something that works for you for overworld or single player content, but not if you want to do high tier fractals, strike missions, or raids. The flying mount is as busted as you think it is. The jumpy rabbit is good for vertical ascension, but a skyscale is a straight upgrade. There are multiple types of endgames, but my best explanation is that your endgame is collectathon/completionist based. Legendaries are forged by collecting "gifts", maps are finished by doing all the activities on them. Fashion Wars gets easier the more skins and dyes you collect for your account.
Love GW2 been playing for about 10 years! Since there are so many ways to level (explore, events, pvp, wvw) and not too much direction at any point in the game it can be difficult to find a goal to work towards. Especially starting out. My goal until I hit lvl 80 is usually to find all waypoints in each map for easy travel, and complete all hero points in each map that way I have some extra hero points to add to whatever elite spec I want to unlock at lvl 80. There is a lot of variety and customization when it comes to builds but most don't worry too much about that until they reach 80. Building for either power or condition damage while leveling is pretty common.
For core necromancer weapons, I'm a big fan of staff/axe dagger. Once you hit 80 and can unlock elite specs, Reaper (Heart of Thorns) is super popular and engaging to play. I typically run a Power build (upfront strike damage) that originally used great sword/staff. However, when necromancer got one-hand swords unlocked in Secrets of the Obscure, I changed the staff to dual wielding swords. I know it's kinda odd at first, but tying skills to the weapons themselves makes weapon choices in builds feel much more impactful. The best advice I can give is try out different weapons till you find what feels good, then build your traits and specializations around those weapons.
I'm brand new to the game and was shocked at how low the barrier to entry is compared to WoW, New World and BDO 3 weeks in with a couple hours a week and you can be rolling in full exotic with some ascended pieces, an elite spec or two fully trained, following zergs and roaming in wvw and actually being impactful. If you have experience in large scale pvp in another mmo, your sense of movement and positioning will largely carry over The constant valuable rewards from wvw translating to player power in pve is also very new to me. It's like having been in a toxic relationship, and meeting someone who's actually good to you and you're like "this is normal??"
in end-game builds you will have a setups that you use the MAJORITY of the time... Let me toss out an example, my necromancer: I really enjoy the way necro spear plays so I'm using that now, it's a melee weapon and sometimes there are enemies you just don't (or can't) get close to so I swap to sword / sword. (sword for necromancer is a range weapon) and I like how that plays too... so I use them. In one encounter I knew an NPC needed to survive so I changed from DPS necromancer to **HEALING NECROMANCER** (yes necro can heal with the right build) and still did decent condition damage. got the achievement and helped other people too since I turned on the old commander tag and let people know I was doing the thing. There are *VAST* amounts of build diversity, not all of them are effective but a tremendous amount of them are. Guildwars 2 *DOES* have tank / healer / DPS setups it's not as "cut and dry" as FF14 or WoW as there is some degree of overlap but the setup does exist, you won't bump into it doing storyline at all... and you won't see it in open world until you're doing very hard open world content (End of Dragons or the new Janthir meta, stuff like that) but in raids / strikes you'll see tank / healer / DPS setups all the time... though I suppose it's more accurate to say Tank / support / DPS since there's more to it than just playing wack-a-mole with health bars (I was a SCH main in FF14 before I stopped playing last year) Yes there *ARE* builds that use staff / staff. also you will *NOT* always have two weapons and swap, it depends on the build... for example there's a guardian build that pumps out 28 - 30k dps and it only uses hammer, weapon swapping would be a DPS *LOSS* so you don't swap and avoid abilities with casting timers as those too would be a DPS loss. There are some builds that take advantage of swapping too, Dual Pistol thief players sometimes put a pistol in their main hand then a pistol in their *swap weapon set offhand* so on screen you have Pistol and nothing / nothing and Pistol. The result is you can still "weapon swap" but you don't actually change weapons (it'll still be pistol / pistol) this is used to trigger the thief "quick Pockets" buff for an initiative boost so they can 3-spam DPS a little longer. does GW2 care about it's story: YES.. in fact I'll say more so than FF14. Case and point: Play Heart of thorns as any race BUT sylvari, then play it again as Sylvari. The ff14 story is amazing but your choices don't matter in the slightest. In GW2 there *are* slight alterations (all be it superficial) to the story depending on choices made in the past. As for players.. some care, some don't. As a LONG time Guildwars player (I was in the GW 1 beta) I *DO* care a lot about the story and I'll say Path of Fire was my favorite MMO story arc of all time until FF14 released their absolutely fantastic Shadowbringers. So ShB is #1, but 2 and 3 are Season 4 and Path of Fire (both GW2 DLC and expansions respectively). as for mounts... don't worry about that now. Until VERY recently you couldn't even get a mount until you were at Path of fire. You can get the raptor at lev 10 now but you can't level him or unlock his special abilities at all until you get to PoF so you're using raptors at their most basic level which is: it moves a little faster and can jump a bit.
As far as the 'staff/staff' question, I have a fun build I use for Mesmer that does the double staff thing. At endgame you will start unlocking new class options called elite specializations, but only if you buy the expansions.
rly surprised to hear someone not like the weapon swapping mechanic. i feel like it makes the gameplay feel a lot more fluid, and as someone who gave this game a chance by coming back and making a thief, but rly wanted to play ranger I was super happy w it. found out i could unlock soulbeast and use dual dagger like a thief/rogue, and still use a bow like a ranger should. even had a ton of stealth access from my runes that synergized w my class by giving me stealth when i placed traps(until they replaced the awesome rune system with whatever the hell this new relic system is. give me back my condi stealth archer)
You can do whatever you want in GW2, theres everything and whatever you do you're progressing your account. Many people mentioned most of the things you can do I want to add-collecting materials. I got into this in the last 2 days, I have 2-3 maps I like and I gather resources. Sometimes I login and I haven’t decided what to do yet (because there's tons of super interesting stuff to do in GW2) and I see a bunch of peole running/flying in the same direction because there's a meta event going on and I just follow them 😀 I play open world mostly, I haven’t even got into fractals or rides yet and there's tons of stuff to do. The thing about GW2 is that you can basically really do whatever you want and you can achieve things for your account whatever you choose to do. The open world is huge and they keep adding more 🙂 Also if you stop playing for a month,two or more the game doesn’t punish you for it, you literally login and move on with whatever you were doing before you stopped playing. Also experiencing the game with different classes changes your experience a lot. I'm also into fashion and achievements. Everything brings you rewards, I think GW2 has possibly the most interesting and diverse endgame for the lack of a better word.
For graphics, disable bloom and if you have an NVIDIA GPU with NVIDIA experience/app installed, press alt+f3 while in-game, select the Detail effect and the Contrast effect and welcome to a much, much more gorgeous game
The narrative is what I love. It's the reason I play. And yes, it gets better. One of the things that fascinates me with core gw2 story is that it borrowed quite a bit from Dragon Age: Origins-- it has the weaving narrative with multiple starting points that ultimately end up in the same place. I've played through most races' starting options at this point, they're all different. That's a LOT of work-- five races with two sets of three possible branches for a player to take, and have it all work together regardless of which path the player takes, is impressive narrative.
For Necromancer, a good core Necro build is Axe with a Focus in the offhand and when you get your second weapon set slots, Dual daggers. When using those make sure you pick gear that focuses on Power as your main stat. Those pair well with Consume Conditions, Well of Darkness, Well of Suffering, Spectral Armor, and once you get your "ult" slot Summon Flesh Golemn is always a favorite.
Most important thing about getting into the game is realizing that you start in maps from 2012 with a story from 2012. After you are level 80 and play the expansion, it gets A LOT better than that. Consider the "base game" and the level 1-80 journey a VERY long tutorial that prepares you for the 10 years of content that came after the base game.
if you are addicted to many buttons you can play an elementalist and add conjured weapons,so for example you can have as your main weapons 2 daggers,outside of combat you can swap to a staff,inside combat you can swap 4 elements to change you bar with the same weapon to 5 new skills,then you can sumon a frost bow,use those 5 skills,drop it,summon a flaming greatsword,...drop it summon a lightning hammer,drop it sumon a fiery axe,and never even look at cooldowns again in your life.( then there is an elite skill that resets the cooldown on your current 5 skills haha)
9:12 Yes you can Kyle! There is actually a Mesmer build I've run where you swap between staffs to regain resources, and you never really run out of cooldowns cause you are also spawning clones to explode with your dodge. Super fun build! Edit: Very on the nose but Metabattle is the go to for the most part and there are a ton of builds for basically all classes so odds are you'll find something you'll like.
Narratively GW2 is kind of like FFXIV in that it gets muuuuuch better once you're out of the base game. When the Living World chapters and the expansions get going it really does take a huge step forward. I hope you guys stick with it long enough to see the good stuff.
@@FlickTakFlakAttack Not sure I fully agree. Sure, Secrets of the Obscure was sort of mediocre but End of Dragons is better than I think a lot of people give it credit for and Janthir Wilds has been good so far. Also it feels like SotO suffered a bit from what Dawntrail is dealing with. First chapter in a new storyline, right?
As insane as it sounds the best way to enjoy GW2 is to not overthink it. As someone that grew up playing MMOs GW2 feels like an old school game made new, modern QoL with the feeling of old mmos where theres no rush to endgame and the game itself is your journey not getting to the raids and dungeons and doing number go up constantly. My current project I'm working on is Obsidian armor for light professions since i main mesmer. Legendaries are cool in the fact they are account bound and you can switch your stats on them at any time. I can have celestial on my mesmer if i feel like doing open world or if i feel like pvp, i can switch it over to my necromancer and put on power substats and not have to fumble with making multiple gear sets. The best thing about GW2 is things like this, your longterm progression and advancement of quality of life things, not necessary power progression. Thats why people say its horizontal progression, theres no constant pressure to carrot chase, its letting you breathe and decide what you want your endgame to be, whether its mass scale world vs world pvp or just doing things in the open world
World vs World used to be server vs server but it's currently undergoing restructruring to instead be based around guilds and alliances of guilds instead. I'm a 9-year veteran just getting into it, really enjoying it.
For goals, a short-term one could be to simply find out what type of damage you like doing. GW2 has two primary sources of damage which are Strike (normal mace-hit-face damage) and Condition Damage (damage-over-time effects). Many Conditions can be fun to use because they often have some secondary effect like Torment inflicting more damage when the enemy stands still, or Confusion where it applies more damage whenever an enemy does an attack. Some weapons can excel at dealing different types of damage and if a certain weapon or condition speaks to you, it could inform what kind of build you want to go for later on. For the story, I generally get the idea that most people don't care a ton but it's rarely disregarded entirely and people tend to at least have a grasp of who is who. I imagine some of this attitude towards the story is due to how awful it's sold (like monetarily) towards anyone who isn't an active player who can keep up with the release schedule and know what the next part is even called. I'll admit that I also were kinda lost on what to do in GW2 until their first expansion Heart of Thorns was released and I was forced to actually learn how to play due to how much more difficult it was to just survive in the horrible jungle and its invisible frog ninjas but that's when it kinda clicked into place when it wasn't a case of "I can dodge" and it became "I have to dodge" to even do basic exploration.
I recommend playing a charr engineer. In this setting, charr invented guns (and basically all highly mechanical technology, like the printing press), and the most powerful political faction is the engineering superpower, the iron legion. They were originally designed to not swap to a second weapon, instead pulling out kits that are effectively their own weapons. Med kits, granades, mortars, flamethrowers, etc. It's vary fun. Random anecdote: During GW2's development, two classes were "revealed" during an april's fools day: Commando and Alchemist. The extra meta joke is that, when these two concepts are combined, you basically get the Engineer that was the true class of that reveal.
But thats not melee :/ Charr Warrior also works great and fits the setting perfectly and feels VERY martial and heavy bonk. Engi is cool but not only for new players is swapping out a second weapon slot (thus only having one weapon always) for one or multiple kits that replace your weapon skills highly confusing and clunky
The zones you guys are going through are designed to be traversed on foot, since mounts didn't exist till expansions, so there's no rush for them while levelling, unless you want to speedrun levelling/exploration.
One MAJOR mention regarding GW2 Meta, the Meta is very very well balanced especially lately. This means you CAN'T GO WRONG whatever Class you pick as long as you know or as you ll learn what you re doing. When you go for the absolute End Game roles are being distinct the tank the healer the dps etc. BUT the BIG THING is this, the ROLE in a Party is being held by the Skill Trees and the Attributes NOT the class itself. That means that a Guardian with the right Skill Tree and Attributes can go either for FullDPS or FullHealing or FullBuffing or a even a MIX between whatever you want but with less potency. I repeat the Class is about the Playstyle NOT the Role in a Party.... I ve said it again cause its so unheard of for you outside GW2. I'd recommend Thief, Ranger or Warrior for "Martial" Classes. Thief and Ranger have a lot of versatility while Warrior has the safety of a Heavy Armor Class. All three of them deal tons of damage with their OWN way or have other roles as said above in the Guardian example. The most Unusual Class ever for you is the Mesmer. Extremely unique and powerful but I wouldn't recommend for first timers, you can go if you want but requires you to think completely outside from the all time classic classes you ve played before
For necromancer, until endgame, a good weapon combo I like is axe/horn or scepter/focus. A thing to consider as far as stats is to prioritize power (direct damage) or condition damage (dots and debuffs).
Some Guild Wars players definitely care about the story. I remember in 2012 when I started playing but was used to WoW I decided that I liked the way gw2 story is told better, but I liked WoW story better. I think that changed for me some time around Season 3 or Path of Fire. I am now fully invested in gw2's story.
About mounts: Every mount has its use and own feel to them; for example, once you level the Raptor mastery it can jump far away horizontally, the Skyscale (the flying dragon) can indeed hover in the air like a helicopter and cling to walls/mountains to gain endurance to stay in the air for longer and go higher, the Griffon (the one that glides and flaps) requires skill and patience; it is not an easy mount to learn but once you learn how to fly it you can combine it with skyscale like this: Gain height with skyscale, mount griffon mid air (griffon can't gain height on its own) and once on griffon fly like a jet around the map so fast you dont even need to use waipoints. Really nice video btw!
Carrot on the stick? I guess it's having fun...I mean, there are carrots, but you have to choose your own: want best gear? Get legendaries. Like PvP? Rank up, partecipate in tournaments and get a statue of your character in the lobby. Love the world? Explore every nook and cranny, partake in meta events and discover hidden stories around, do fractals, strikes and raids. You get on by leading armies to victory? Become a commander and lead people in WvW. Are you a completionist or fashion collector? Go for achievements! Just playing will lead to every bit of content: basically the first playthrough of the game story (and first leveling to 80) it's a journey to discover what you like, so if you like playing the game that's enough, the carrot will come.
It's funny you point out Diablo similarities, it is one that often gets overlooked. The team that founded Arenanet was actually comprised mostly of DiabloII vets. Many of whom stuck with it through Guild Wars 2's launch
Build and theory crafting is one of the key strengths of GW2. Meta is apparent through content like raids and fractals (the game's actual dungeon system) but when you are roaming around the open world PvE, there are builds from TH-camrs and Community like Lord Hizen or Guild Jen. Some advice I learned in my time playing. 1) Find a class or few you like! A beautiful feature of GW2 is that you can go into sPvP and every class is max level with all skills and all specializations unlocked. Give any class a try, see if you like the vibe on a striking dummy. That way you can decide which class you wanna put time into! 2) Boons. Are. Everything. Most metas late game revolve around boons and maintaining them utilizing them. With the exceptions being roaming/small scale of WvW and PvP. Boons are powerful, so learn about them too! 3) The biggest strength and weakness in GW2 is the freedom to do things. Be that legendary farming, mount gathering, PvP leaderboard, raids/fractals, WvW competition, or personal improvement. Some players can solo legendary bosses and even some strike missions. It is a game with high skill expression. 4) Ascended gear is only a like... 2-5% difference in DPS. So it is worth getting but Exotic can carry you through most things. Legendary weapons, armor and jewelry all have Ascended stats. The difference is they are customizable! Any legendary can be any stat type. Hope that helps! Welcome to GW2 :D
The story of this game is what hooked me, and it's one of the few games where I actually felt like I cared about the characters and the lore. Aurene, once you meet her, is what made this game the best game I've ever played ;-;
it's more of a single player RPG that you play with others. Masteries is such a cool unique system where you feel yourself progressing your account like unlocks in an RPG
The goal of the game is what you make it. I'm currently grinding for legendary armor via WvW and the PVE set in the SotO expansion. There are some instanced content at the end (Raid and Strikes) that I have been wanting to get into, but I need to find a group for first. The neat thing about anything Legendary in this game is that you have an "Legendary Wardrobe" in the game. So lets say I have a full set of Legendary Medium armor. It means that anytime I want to play a medium armor job, I can just grab a copy of my legendary gear out of the wardrobe and immediately equip it to my character and set the stats how I want them. I never have to grind for gear again.
For a Martial class, Warrior, a good core is Dual Axes with a Greatsword for backup. Focus on Shouts and Signets for your skills at first, as "For Great Justice" and "Shake it off" with the Fury and Rage Signets can carry you even in max level content. Also focus Power for your main stat for this build out.
My guardian has two pistols. As you get up in level, you can get any weapon with any stat you want. So it is more of 'find the weapon you like', 'find the stat set you like', and go with that. YES you can have two staves! My WvW roaming druid had a staff on each weapon swap for a while there.
There is a ton of creativity in build-creation. You can come up with almost everything. One of the first things I tried, was playing a warrior healer (long before they got their staff). It did work fine in all open world, dungeons and low level (not because it's too bad for high level, but because I didn't have the gear to go high level) fractals. Basically just check your trait-lines and skills and decide, what the want to do. If you tinker a bit, you will come up with something decent. Only community that is not completely open is the raiding community. But even there if you join a raiding guild you might end up running raids in your own fancy creation. A few years back, a youtuber did actually run the raids in funny squads of 10 of the same class and if I remember correctly he did this for all classes. Other point, story: I really actually care for the narrative. It is a bit hard to grasp though, because it is not necessarily one storyline. For example: If you pick one specific Asura storyline you will meet Professor Gorr, the guy who basically figured out Elder dragons. If you run any of the other races, you will not meet him until way later. So you don't get the insight. One choice will have you meet Tonn and watch his story unfold. If you choose anything else a that point, he will be mentioned, but you will never really know anything about him. Then there are dynamic events, hearts, and hero-points, telling their part of the story. One other part of story-telling that absolutely fascinates me, are collections. You can find them in your hero-tab under achievements. Some of them have specific prerequesites. For example, if you start to work towards one of the old legendary weapons, you will experience a whole unique adventure untill you get them. Just to name one: I f you start H.O.P.E. you will be sent to a Hylek alchemist. he will teach you bits and pieces about Hylek alchemy. After learning as much as you can from him you create a prototype. Since it's not just good enough you return to the grandmaster craftsman in Lions Arch. He is willing to help you out, but you have to hone your skills in the relevant craft first. And so on, and so on. It's a whole story. And the same is true for all of the S1 and S2 legendaries. Basically, storytelling in GW2, like everything else, is not focussed towards a singular target, but it's a world you live in, decide which parts you want to take in and experience.
To clarify the talking points! Your main goal to unlocking the entire game Get to level Cap, get atleast exotic (orange) gear with the stat you want, get the weapons you want. Cap never increases beyond 80 and the exotic gear is the cheapest end game gear to let you do about 98% of the game adequately. PVP doesnt require anygear and fractals only ever require one tier higher for specifically fractal infusions for defense. Hero points which you get from beating up mini bosses and events that have a hero point marker will unlock every skill, passive and elite specialization for every character as you go. After that its just progress the story and keep leveling as exp changes from levels to accountwide mastery after you reach level cap, which will unlock things for every character on the account itself. The story for base is very much world building and will come back at a later time like XIV though maybe not in such a grand way. It does decently with continuity but the stories them selves can be hit or miss depending on your preferences. For instance Heart of Thorns is an amazing story but I think its because I played sylvari and my chosen origin story path was enjoyable. Like how Dragoons feel a sense of star player syndrome in Heavensward. For mounts, prior to the 2nd expansion PoF there were no mounts and prior to the first expansion HoT there were no gliders. So technically speaking you have something in the base game that you should not have but they added anyways. Around PoF and onwards you will get so many mounts for free and couple specialized mounts you need to grind for.
i think one of the biggest misconceptions garrett has about the weaponswap is that you're not swapping your build. the second slot IS part of the build, rotating between your fat cd ability, switching to the other weapon and casting whatever you got on there is literally the same as swapping a stance with classes in other games. as such people who actively play endgame content most certainly dont forget about their weaponswap, it'd be like forgetting your icy veins as a wow frostmage or the like. Kyle is also correct in his assumptions that you should use the leveling phase as the time to familiarize yourself with what weapon types unlock what skills, because they're immutably bound to one another. figure out what skills you like or what feels like a sensible combo, then stick with those weapons at lvl 80, where youll have plenty of opportunity to work on the type of weapon you would care about, kind of in a similar fashion to the ff14 relics most importantly tho: enjoy the world, take your time and just... breathe. gw2 is very sandboxy in its goals, as in i know a lot of people who just play the story and then farm achievements or large group events and spend their time with friends without any actual "goal" in mind
you guys need to log in now and experience the Halloween event that is now live and ty for giving gw2 a try and actually enjoying your adventures is great to watch new players do this and fall in love with the game it has mountains of content
Great video! I've never tried GW2 and watching you guys try it out has me interested (if I can find a way to make it work with my dexterity issues). It looks like a lot of fun :D Send headpats to Dexter, please :)
There are Low Intensity versions of almost(?) every if not every class these days, and they are viable to do most content, except maybe the 2 hardest fights in the game, but those are optional
Weapon swapping is fun. Finding a combo with synergy in your playstyle is so cathartic. Changing combos for pragmatism means you need to keep sharp with your options and the tools you have.
Honestly, treat the base game leveling (1-80) as a tutorial/training portion of the game. Getting used to systems and things available to you. Once you finish the base story/get to level 80, that's when almost *everything* unlocks, but a recommendation would be going for gear upgrades of weapons you like and a damage type you like (pure damage vs damage over time). You might've noticed some gear give different groups of stats, and at max level, those stat groups (prefixes) dictate the large chunk of your build and going up the gear rarity will also help in that regard (text colors being blue -> green -> yellow -> orange -> pink/purple). Once you get to expansions, you'll get access to Elite Specializations that often change your class mechanic a little bit and kinda gives you a focus on your builds. Mounts and their unlocks/progressions don't become fully available till the second expansion (Path of Fire). PvP can queued into relatively early on if you wanna try that, but WvW is scaled around max level and gear, so I'd wait till then to try that. And as always, tooltips (both on skills and on traits in specializations) does help for understanding playstyles a bit. Staff Infection! (per request)
Man I envy y’all’s uninformed perspective. If only I could go back 6000hrs and re-experience GW2 all over again for the first time. There are answers to all your questions, and many people love the answers and have made this game their home for the last 13yrs. But I won’t attempt answering them all here, lots of others have. Enjoy and thanks for the video. Don’t be scared to use the official Wiki, it’s accessible from in-game for a reason haha
On the front of builds and build diversity: things really open up when you unlock specializations (which you begin unlocking at level 21 and are NOT the thing you referred to in the video as specializations; those are mastery points, and is a whole separate, horizontal progression system that replaces typical levelling). Every profession has six specializations in the base game, and eventually you can equip three of them at a time. Specializations generally amount to passive buffs that either supplement your current abilities and boost them, or change them entirely to do different things. As far as the story goes, I have STRONG feelings in that department. I was an avid GW1 player in high school. I specifically beefed up our family PC so that it could run the game, and it was the single game I had ever put the most time into until I started playing FFXIV four years ago. When GW2 came out I was beyond excited that a game had come out as a continuation of the story I had grown up loving my time with. And the story of GW2 disappointed me immeasurably. I never even finished it on release, and I dropped it after about 100 hours, very close to endgame. I revisited the game in recent years, determined to give it a second (and third and fourth chance), but every time I worked through the base game story I was just reminded of how bad it was, especially having played FFXIV in the intervening years. Without digging at it too much, I will leave my opinions on the base game story as: there have been very few times I've come away from a story angry, and this is one of them. With all that said, now that I'm through the first expansion and working my way through the third season of Living World content, I can say that I don't regret the time I spent going through the base game. It served well to setup narrative beats and plot points that would pay off later, and introduced me to characters I've grown to love and are frankly up there with some of my favorite characters from FFXIV. At the point I'm at now, the game doesn't hold a candle to FF14 in terms of writing, but it's building up to something, and I think that something may rock my socks.
For high-level instanced play many builds will have rotations that swap between weapons to use more high-cooldown abilities (typically skills 4&5) and/or take advantage of weapon sigils (think Diablo gem slots) with abilities that proc when swapping weapons. For just running around the open world it's totally OK to ignore that. I like to have a melee and a ranged option I can swap to depending on the situation.
What are your goals in GW2? This is very flexible depending on the player. But since you are still early levels I'll make a short list. Get all of your weapon and utility skills slots unlocked. This opens up as you level. MSQ is every 10 levels. Do hearts quests, find Vistas, Points of Interest via exploration (you get XP for this). If you 100% explore a zone you get bonuses. I suppose the short answer is level up in the most fun way you can. More depth and options become available as you level up.
Garrett! There are indeed meta builds, but there are several different builds per class. There's a bunch of websites out there that list them. The ultimate carrot in GW2 is the legendary weapons and armor. As for the story, I'd compare the base game of GW2 with ARR. It gets better with the expansions, but never quite to the level of FFXIV. A weapon set for necromancer if you want to do direct damage is axe with a focus and a staff for the weapon swap weapon (axe for single target, staff for AoE, f1 shroud for whenever you've used the cooldowns on whatever weapon you're holding). In later expansions, necromancer also gets to use greatsword for melee and swords for ranged damage, which are great. I think Kyle might enjoy guardian as a martial, since that has thr option to later on spec into a more supportive or DPS build.
From my limited knowledge experience, weapon-swapping can be more or less optimal depending heavily on your build and how often your optimal abilities come off cooldown. If your class spends a ton of time with an alternate ability set from a form change or special kit, there's less reason to need a 2nd set of cooldowns. On my main (I am a new player recently arrived at early endgame), my weapon swap is mostly just so I have a long range weapon option. I swap between my basic 5 weapon abilities and the alternate sets that come from using my elite spec's 3 extra modes.
You aren't meant to swap weapons(not referring to swapping weapon sets, just weapons themselves). Learn 1 weapon you like, integrate it into your kit and use it. Ignore the "stronger weapon" that is a different type. You can easily acquire upgraded versions of your greatsword, for example, as you play. Don't feel pressured to switch weapons because of number increases. Make a build.
@@Crashh965 osrs is probably the most acessable retro feeling mmo. You can even play it on your phone. I feel like Garett might appreciate the quest design of osrs.
Sorry this turned in to a bit of an essay, hope you don't mind!
I'll try and answer only questions you directly asked for comments on:
Mounts: from what I understand WoW's dragonriding is somewhat of a simplification of the Griffon with a bit of the other mount, the Skyscale tacked on. The bunny specifically does somewhat get superseded by other mounts over time but it significantly earlier in the endgame progression and retains a few uses/advantages; the flying mounts are quite long quests to obtain and individually represent one of those kinda "what do I do?" objectives you were asking about as a signpost to a desirable thing you can go out and earn. Earlier on one thing you can be progressing is what each mount can do - I know you've seen the super long jump the raptor can get for instance.
Narrative: The short answer is "somewhere in the middle of WoW and 14" the longer answer is "It gets better over time". The base game narrative is... serviceable and there are several characters that people care about, but even as a big fan I appreciate that that is damning with faint praise... I think the comparisons to ARR are fair here... and I'll say that I don't consider the story to be anywhere close to as overwhelmingly central to the game's enjoyment as it is in FFXIV once FFXIV gets going. Still the GW2 story improves significantly over the course of time, and I think there are noticable bumps in quality and character investment as you progress along the game's timeline, it's admittedly never super consistent but the trajectory is inarguably significantly upwards and the game does manage to hit several strong emotional moments and has some truly awesome peaks.
Endgame: The whole roadmap / endgame objectives question is a long, complicated one and I'll try and avoid the word "Horizontal" too much but to some extent that does need acknowledging that one way to think of GW2 is a big... flat ahem, theme park where you hit max level and then you can just go experience whatever attraction you want.
The most commonly suggested route around the park is to play the game in chronological order, doing all the story content along the way and unlocking / experiencing features as they were added with a few small asterisks that sometimes things were retroactively added, like the Mastery Point you mention getting from the story (masteries weren't added until the first expansion, and were then retroactively added to the base game too). I would say that this with, perhaps taking suggestions/curation from trusted members of your community as to attractions you should detour slightly to stop and visit along the way would probably be the most comfy route in terms of avoiding that overwhelming feeling that comes, especially at level 80 where you're fully unleashed upon the world and can, if you want, start and/or ignore any expansion story, go to any geographic area, unlock anything, try anything, do ALL THE THINGS... and then get stuck in terminal decision paralysis. One suggestion I would make is that the game has a lot of hidden little areas with fun npcs and lore and especially jumping puzzles which can add a lot to the whole exploration angle so either seeking them out yourselves or having community members direct you a little may be worthwhile.
Beyond that there's still a lot to say but I'll try and be brief, I know there are several videos on the topic from a GW2 creators, (personally I like Laranity's) covering the "what do I do at 80, what is the endgame?" question as it's a common one so they may be worth a look, but in brief:
- Gearing is a good early objective - exotic gear is the kinda "basic endgame" gear, then Ascended gear is the "actually the top tier, usually said to be about 5%, but takes a lot more work" tier - first one build's worth of gear is a nice start but later on (even much later on) more over time as one of the big things in GW2 with how the game system is set up is flexibility so one of the endgame things is that while you might not get gear that has better raw stats you will get gear that has different stats and may allow you to play your character differently. Do you want to do direct damage or damage over time with conditions, do you want to be a support build, and then what variant (more emphasis on damage and buffs or healing and buffs or maybe a bit of tankisnness thrown in?) etc. With a few gear sets you can be all of those on one character. And also a lot of stuff is account bound.
- Elite Specialisations, these are kinda... subclasses? Don't worry we all say class too instead of profession, sorry ArenaNet. They can hugely change your play style or simply make you more of what you already are, open up new build and weapon options, and also tend to represent a power jump over the basic classes, so getting one or more fully unlocked is up there as a milestone objective.
- Masteries, you've seen all of us with big numbers next to our names. Collecting those masteries is a nice sense of progression, and provides one part of the motivation to do content of specific areas for exp to fill the bar or specific things that give mastery points.
- Alts! Much as many players max all the jobs in 14 many players have a maxed alt of each class set up in GW2. As most of your progression is account wide and you are not required to play through the story linearly (or mostly at all) and there are a bunch of other things that help with getting your alt levelled up/set up it's not quite as cozy as it all being on your one character like in 14 but it's actually pretty close IMO.
- Meta events and world bosses, you've already seen some of these, and they continue to exist throughout the game, some of them being huge in scale/scope and taking up entire zones with big chains of events leading up to huge boss battles. They're a big focus for a lot of players as a very casual friendly endgame that anyone can enjoy and experience. Some have specific rewards tied to them, but all are profitable and money/resources tie back to a lot of other endgame goals / progressions, not to mention that they give a ton of exp for your mastery progression.
- Fractals, these are the endgame 5 man dungeons, they have their own progression system from level 1 up to level 100 challenge mode. They are well liked, rewarding (money, resources, gear), and very actively played. Since it has an attached progression system it can help give that nice progression feeling we mmo gamers have been taught to love. They start very accessible and progress up to being very challenging at the top end so there's something for everyone.
- Raids/Strike, these are basically the same thing. They're 10 man content, we've just made our first forray in to the first raids with the GG guild last week and downed 3 bosses! Raids are more of the traditional "WoW-style" raid where you fight through a big zone that's fully contiguous with trash mobs and lore books and all sorts of stuff, whereas strikes are more like FFXIV where you push the button to go in and just arrive at a contained boss arena and fight a single boss. The difficulty of these is quite variable but in general the early ones are quite accessible, there are many that are somewhat challenging, and a few (especially with the challenge modes turned on) that are very very hard - two in particular may be comparable to ultimates maybe? I've seen the comparison made but haven't the personal experience of ultimates to say for certain, and obviously the game combat systems are extremely different.
- Legendary and other chase items. There are a bunch of very rare, very expensive things that people pursue, either for the cosmetic or just the flex. Earning gold and resources towards these goals is a big reason many people do whatever activities they find to be the right balance of fun and profitable. Legendary items in GW2 are mostly crafted and are a big funnel for a wide variety of resources you collect throughout the game's different activities. They do not provide a statistical benefit but in addition to their shiny skins do provide huge quality of life benefits - they can be used by all your characters and gear templates simultaneously, they are infinitely free to transmog, you can choose and freely swap what stat combination/spread they have, can freely add and remove upgrades from them... and probably some other stuff I forgot.
And my cats really want food so I'll stop hurling more information into this reply 😅 hope at least some of it was what you wanted.
Read this one, Poobah knows things :)
@@Sephalia Aw thanks Sephalia!
Aww, is this the Poobah we have in the guild? I like this person, they've always been helpful.
One thing I'd add is regarding Garrett's comment on the holy trinity: Tanks, healers, and DPS absolutely exist in GW2. These roles not being a thing in GW2 is a misconception (not aided by Anet when they say they didn't have any LOL). They do but the thing that's different is that they're simply not beholden to specific classes only. Instead, all classes are given the option of being one of these. In this way, if you want to be a healer but favor rangers for class fantasy, you can then be a Druid. If you like being a healing mage instead, you can then be a Tempest.
These roles may not be apparent in open world PVE (because ANet desperately needs to buff a lot of the enemies due to power creep), but it's definitely there for instanced PVE as well as in competitive modes like WvW.
(note on WvW: it USED to be server vs. server. It's been changed into guilds coming together to form larger teams that then duke it out. A change that wasn't welcomed by the community for the most part, but it is what it is.)
Sorry, another edit: Another thing for Garrett in terms of weapon swaps. One way to do it is to view the secondary weapon as your "utility" weapon. For example, one thing I ran with my ranger for awhile was axe and warhorn as my first set, and staff as my second. Axe/warhorn is my dps for the most part, but when I need some healing or skills to get away from danger, I then switch to my staff.
I hope yo don't mind me asking but you suggest playing the story chronologically so I have to ask did they ever add back in the story they removed or made you have to pay for patches? I dropped off mid way through heart of the thorns and tried to get back into it but knowing I'd have to pay for the living world story killed any motivation to get back in.
@@dunidane5206 They did add back the stuff that was previously one time only (Living World Season 1) and they gave it a polish and some new stuff, that is considered to be part of the core game and is totally free for all players. The other Living World seasons are paid for though - I do understand the frustration with having to pay more for stuff, and honestly I do think it's good that since End of Dragons they have done away with having these long stretches of "free but only if you're there at the time" content patches, but I do also think that the seasons are worth the money given that each episode adds a whole new map at minimum.
If you're looking to return and play through with only buying expansions I think S2 and S3 are quite reasonably skippable and you can just go ahead to the next expansion and you'll be pretty much fine with knowing what's going on the big exception is Living World Season 4 IMO; more than anything else Season 4 is basically a full expansion and contains some of the highest peaks of emotion and storytelling in the game. It's also the most directly relevant to the game's story, contains six maps, two new mounts (skyscale is now alternatively available in the SotO expansion) and is just... really good.
GW2 has the most build diversity of any MMO by far. It's not even close. Every class can do everything, heal, tank, damage over time or direct damage dps, and at max level you're not chasing endlessly higher gear score, but there are tons of different stat combinations that are good at different things.
I think the original Guild Wars might have the edge in matter of build variety due to multiclassing.
GW2s buildcraft easily a sleeper feature people miss.
Look at Throne and liberty. 7 weapons or so. 21 combos. Sure you can change your skills and passives. I haven't dived in to that yet too much yet. I hope T&L will develop more build craft in the future because it could get old really fast.
When you look at Gw2 you get 27 elite specs plus 9 core. Then weapon load out, and THEN trait lines. And it doesn't punish you if you want to experiment.
@@bosunbones.8815 tbf there's almost never a reason to use a core spec over an elite spec outside of being brand new to the game and not having them unlocked.
but there's usually multiple ways to build each elite spec anyway, although a lot of it will come down to whether you want to provide quick/alac or not.
@@Sobepome there is in PvP core guard is the best support most of the time and some other work well too
@@Sobepome Some core specs can actually perform as well as (or in some rare cases, out perform) elite specs. In WvW, core necros, guards, and thieves do really well. Perhaps it's just based on game modes, in terms of how viable they are.
Today in GW2 I attended a Heavy Metal concert featuring a Furry band playing for a Furry crowd. I caught stage divers, fixed the amps joined the pogo mosh pit, and danced on stage.
The band played actual Metal songs. Some of the players were singing the lyrics in the chat panel it was Metal. Then I went fishing for a bit.
Later I went on a world boss tour, and when I returned to Divinities Reach there was group of players jamming at the bank with real in game musical instruments while another group had a fashion show across the courtyard. 10/10 game day. GW2 community, I love you, you mad bastards!
GW2 is the greatest MMO, if you don't agree, I respect your right to be wrong.
and not to mention that event u found fun gives u a token that is worth 1-2 gold, or can be saved w/ the other tokens from that maps events to roll a small chance of an infusion worth like 2k gold. getting all the daily tokens from that map to sell for gold was on my daily grind list forever when i was still kinda new
To compare between XIV and GW2. They both play to their strengths. The best opinion I heard about these two games is this: “XIV does what gw2 struggles with, while GW2 does what XIV struggles with.”
Also Staff Infection!
Both doing what the other struggles with is a pretty accurate take. ...shame what GW2 struggles with be writing, though.
@@zavos5659 Tbh, most of the time I zone out in the story
@@zavos5659 'the game is strong on gameplay and weak on story' is hardly damning for a game, though. Sure it's a shame, but the opposite would be much worse.
Mukluk has been playing GW2 for years and made guides on basically any topic in the game, and if he's streaming he and his community are always happy to answer questions (beware, he's a dad, and sometimes he likes to pull your nose!).
I personally used mostly Metabattle and sometimes Snowcrows to look up builds. There's builds for every activity, but also a bunch of 'fun' builds. Muk has bunch of videos of those too.
GW2 has two main ways of dealing damage: power and conditions. You can pick a weapon and see which category it's abilities mostly fall to, or decide 'I want to make a condi build' and select fitting weapons based on that (this is what most people seem to be doing). During leveling, I've found it easier to use power weapons because finding ones with correct stats (power, precision, fury) is way easier. Mesmer and Necro both have a great access to condi abilities, if correct gear is available.
I'm very hopeful for the ggxmukluk collab
Staff staff, especially mesmer, is definitely a thing! Though weapons of the same type in both weapon sets share cooldowns, you swap between both staffs to proc sigils that activate on weapon swap without having to go to a different weapon.
I started playing GW2 when you guys did your first stream of it. So far I've been enjoying the heck out of it! What people keep saying about horizontal progression certainly rings true though.And what that has meant in my journey is, I'm no longer gaining power - Shortly after hitting max level, I acquired gear that's very close to the strongest in the game. So my journey now is more about collecting mastery points.
These mastery points unlock things that help me explore more of the world. Some of them unlock abilities for my mounts, such as the ability for my mount to jump higher, or the ability to glide through the air with a glider. And instead of searching for stronger gear, I'm now in search for gear that can be shared across several characters, which makes trying out new builds a lot easier.
The progression after cap is basically like a metrovania game. Side upgrades that give you more options on how to play and explore instead of raw power.
Also do not forget about getting good. The combat is quite skill based so understanding your rotation and the buildcrafting (that can be complex) can be the source of really power in game. You get really more powerful by learning to play.
GW2 is the kind of MMO where you start clicking on NPC to see what they have to say as you explore a main city, only for oine such unmarked NPC to start talking about an invasive species of creeatures, gives you a special gun to detect and hunt them, and all of a sudden you're running around the city looking like a crazy person hunting creatures only you can see and hear.
And then when you finish this crazy achievement of doing this, you get a unique looking skin as a reward and some other stuff. This is when you realize how different GW2 can be.
Also for wepaon swap, a lot of people have a melee weapon and a ranged weapon to be able to cover most type of combat by being in ranged mode and melee mode.
I don't remember this, but you now got my curiosity to find this mission lol.
@@sevask8768 wont spoiled much to you but its on lion arch,and its better if you dont use guide to find the invasive creature
Its fun!
look in the North-West of the main city
Sideways progression makes more sense if you think about it like a legend of Zelda game where you can't access some areas/content until you unlock an ability or mount. But you don't really start seeing that until the xpacs.
For GW2 goals, I would say....what do you like to do? Because GW2 probably has something to work towards, whatever it is. The key area where GW2 is different - and this makes the early game very overwhelming, and sometimes directionless - is that because content is evergreen, over the years, it's created multiple endgame paths for people to follow. It's common to hear people say that "the whole game is endgame", but I personally think that's only really true for a small minority. Most people choose a narrower focus, so I've tried to cover as many as I can down below!
Some people really enjoy the story (I promise it gets better after Core - the ARR of GW2), so their GW2 experience is logging in for every patch and playing the new episode. Maybe messing around in the areas for a bit. And then they log out and come back later. I'd say this group also includes those who enjoy exploring the new areas and discovering all the hidden secrets (there are MANY). Once they've "finished" a patch, they wait for the next update.
Some people love group content, so their endgame experience is putting together groups for Raids/Strikes, or running Fractal Dungeons (the OG dungeons are still there, but power creep has made them largely obsolete and they're also pretty buggy. Still fun to mess around in with some guildies tho!). As GW2 has no gear treadmill, even the oldest raids and strikes still offer a challenge to new players, and are regularly run by groups of all abilities.
For those who don't enjoy organised groups, open world bosses and meta events (which you won't really run into until you're at level 80) are a good alternative. The reason there's a cool, flashy world-boss in the starter zones is to tease this aspect of the later game. Eventually, you can join map-wide events which require synchronised groups to split off and complete simultaneous objectives to unlock a final boss, which requires coordination and the understanding of its mechanics to complete. It's literally open-world raiding, although obviously balanced to account for the wide range in skills, and the fact that not everyone might know what's going on.
Some people want to achievement hunt, either for Achievement Points (which you get ingame rewards for!), or to unlock prestige weapon/armour sets. So they use the Achievement panel as a checklist.
Some people want to PvP, either in structured/5-man PvP, or the mass chaos of WvW (Think 150v150v150 people, all on the same massive map, fighting over castles and supply lines.) There are plenty of people who exclusively play those game-modes, and nothing else!
On a semi-related note, with some of the later-added mounts, there are also communities who focus on player-run racing tournaments, which take place on custom-built racetracks in guild halls. There are full tournaments and racing leagues in GW2!
Finally, you have the players who care about Fashion. For them, the endgame of Fashion Wars 2 is to collect as many different weapon and armour skins as possible, so that they can strut their stuff in major cities. There are actually quite a few player-run fashion shows as well.
Obviously, many people will pick and choose from several of those goals for their personal endgame. Where GW2 shines is in allowing all of those paths to be equally viable alternatives, because the flat level cap means that even events, bosses, and goals from the base game are still viable, and are still being regularly run by large amounts of players. I know this is a giant textwall of a comment, but you did ask, so I hope this helps!
unless it's dungeons. the devs completely abandoned dungeons for fractals which is honestly a crying shame. i loved dungeons with all of its separate wings and story mode versions
@@fencingfireferret1188 Yeah, I really enjoyed dungeons when they were actively challenging (and when the mechanics all actually worked lol). But I do kinda understand why they made the switch.
As soon as it became clear that more players were interested in open world than 5-man instances, the amount of dev resources they'd need to keep maming dungeons just wasn't viable anymore.
I also think that player habits have really shifted over time. We saw the same situation with raids. Large, map-sized zones with dedicated lore and multiple boss arenas require long, dedicated play sessions which many people can't commit to anymore. Meanwhile, Fractals and Strikes are more accessible as they're bite-sized by comparison. It's a shame...but not a surprise, I guess.
As a former resident of Eorzea, I'm thoroughly enjoying my time in Tyria.
1) The open world events and world bosses are more engaging than FFXIV's open world offerings.
2) Thanks to GW2's horizontal progression system, every piece of legendary armor and weapons actually feels legendary as those items will always be BIS. Thanks to FFXIV's vertical progression, the BIS armor that you work towards will ultimately be worthless once any new expansion drops.
3) GW2 mounts are all unique, handle differently, and have their practical benefits. Mounts in FFXIV feel more like movement buffs rather than you actually riding a tamed beast.
4) Thanks to GW2 latest expac, EVERYONE gets a house, as opposed to FFXIV's limited housing system.
If there's any FFXIV players out there feeling burnt out, or looking for a seond mmo, than I strongly recommend giving Guild Wars 2 a try.
I'm very glad that a channel like yours is talking about guild wars 2, one of the mmorpg that has added many more innovations to the genre than a lot of people give it credit for.
Gw2 is unique and as you have well understood any content in gw2 is evergreen. From exploring an early map to low-level materials everything can come in handy.
GW2 is perfect for those who have other responsibilities or other video games to play, because it allows you to choose your goal and pursue it. If that is not respecting our time, I don't know what could be more. Also, GW2 does not destroy your progress when you leave the game. What you have achieved is there waiting for you.
That's why in addition to: one of the most beautiful explorations ever, a collaborative openwold without necessarily having to party, a world alive with events and not static npc's, a combat system as fluid as never before in mmo's, fair and non-oppressive monetization of more of the same things, the best made mounts with different abilities from each other and not skins with speed buffs, fantastic music and audio themes.
I could go on, but GW2 is unique and that is why so many people love it.
When you hit max level you've hit "end game" which is really just the entire game. like 90% of the game is post max level. But then you start leveling mastery which always unlock new functionality
I started playing GW2 back in its beta, and dropped off pretty quick for other MMO's, even if I found it charming. Came back last year at some friends' recommendations and also felt equally overwhelmed LOL. What helped me was kind of taking a 2 pronged approach to 'get' the game:
I boosted a class with one of the free boosts they sent me as old account-holder, picking one recommended by friends for how I generally like to play: ranged/caster/support/healing - (I picked ranger knowing there was a healing/support subclass of druid) - then picked one of the expacs that unlocked a traversal mechanic I wanted (gliders) and got to experience what endgame zones were like and how you'd usually work your way through expac content, which also let me work on unlocking the subclass I wanted and start earning masteries and see how they worked. I looked up a build for my class that was recommended as good for open world content, (and bookmarked a support build for the subclass I had my eyes on) Once I picked one, my friends also just threw an endgame set of gear at me that was good for the class/build I was aiming for so I didn't have to even think about that since gear progression isn't nearly as much of a thing - I can basically go into any endgame content with that gear and contribute without having to worry about anything being an upgrade or not. Doing all this gave me the sort of 'aHA' sense at what the cycle of max level is like and what I could potentially want to work on - which masteries I wanted to definitely get, which mounts to work on unlocking, looking through legendary weapons available to me and finding one I fell in love with and wanted to look up a guide on all the many steps to unlocking.
THEN I also made a new bb toon to just.... slowly work my way through the early game content when my friends weren't online because while boosting let me understand what sort of endgame gameplay loops existed, I still felt like I missed SO much, especially if I wanted to understand the story/characters more and see the original zones and this gave me a lot of satisfaction to just explore, work on map completion, discover puzzles, see intros to characters that I had met in my boosted character expacs (some in VERY different places now lol) and of course experiment with other classes and weapon combos. I felt a lot calmer doing this at whatever pace I wanted now that I knew what was waiting for me at end game.
So yeah, overwhelming is definitely the word for it but once I *saw* how max level content worked, it finally clicked that like oh, when my friends are playing GW2, one is working on unlocking their sky-dragon (whatever it's called, I don't remember), another is trying to run a world event a bunch for drops that go toward the legendary weapon they're work on, another is playing through one of the expacs they hadn't experienced yet or unlocking a subclass they want to try, everyone can be working on their own project/goals and then come together to do events or world bosses etc together and show off all the fashion and mount customizations we've unlocked, etc. It's fun and something that I like to pop into now when I feel like playing a very 'make your own to-do list' style mmo, but some guidance to get going was really useful. Good luck, and I hope you continue to have fun with it!!
YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS - yes it looks better with bloom off.
Oh hi marco!
@@stormshadow5382 hi!
Living world season 1 is where you start to really get into characters and stories you truly care about. Gw2 definitely cares about the story a lot
16:31 Personally, contrary to other MMOs where the main story is where most of the narrative is, I care about the story conveyed by the zones, events, NPCs, and also sometimes the main story. It's the "I was there when it happened" instead of "My entry is creating a narrative".
You've conveyed something that I was having a hard time with. GW2 definitely makes the environment a huge part of the storytelling. The types of monsters you fight, including the weapons and skills they're using, the events, the idle chatter from the NPCs, some bits of letter or object out in the world... they all contribute to the overall narrative.
Something I think is interesting about the weapons in Guild Wars 2 is that the same weapon can behave differently on different jobs. For example, while a Necromancer uses a Staff by placing AoEs on the ground from range, a Revenant instead uses a staff to whack people in the face.
Also important: You can have two different Offhand weapons as well. For example, my Scourge (one of the Necromancer's Elite Specialisations) wields a Scepter+Torch in one set and an Axe+War Horn in the other that I swap between when need be.
Also, having just played through the base story and being on the cusp of the first expansion, here's the list of things I wish people had told me:
1) It's fine to just pick whatever set of weapons feels most fun and stick with that through the base game, with the assumption that you'll try everything out again and maybe swap once you hit max level. Even setting the meta aside, "elite specializations" (basically subclasses) each unlock an additional weapon so you might not even have access to what could be your favorite yet. (And you will get plenty of loot during the game to keep your weapons reasonably up to date as you do.)
2) Don't worry too much about how your pace through the maps vs pace through the story vs. character level lines up. There's way more stuff to complete than you need to get to max level, but extra experience gain rolls over into other stuff once you hit max level, and on the other end stuff you out level still gives you experience, so you really don't have to worry about optimizing this. And the adventurer guide achievements or whatever they're called are going to shower you with xp so you'll hit max level and qualify for advancing the story much faster than you'll probably be working through the maps. Just do whatever feels fun.
3) The pacing of the base game story is awful, and in particular it tends to explain the context you need to understand the section you just did right *after* you finish the section you needed it. This is a little extra work, but if you want to actually have a good time with the base story and understand the world better, I kind of suggest making a character of each race and playing through playing through until the end of the level 30 story (basically to where you're going to pick one of the three orders to join). This really helps make sure you're introduced to a number of important concepts before they take off running with them. If you were to only pick one, the Sylvari start is probably the most relevant to the base game story and the first expansion. (The Sylvari were clearly their favorite lol.)
4) On the multiple characters note: story and map completion progression is character specific, but most everything else is account wide. Most of the important game progression transitions to the achievement & mastery systems once you finish the base game, so that's account wide. The more endgame oriented gear tends to be account bound instead of character bound, so if you make it to 80 and are still interested in the game, definitely use the free boosts you get from buying each expansion on alts to add a couple additional max level characters to mix up the classes you're playing.
5) Actually actually, while we're talking about the boosts: if you use the level 80 boost from buying an expansion on a character that is below level 80, you'll actually be taken to a later map to "try before you buy" where you can play on that character at level 80 on that map only before you lock in and permanently consume the boost. This is actually a good opportunity to make a few different characters and try out all the classes at level 80. Since the first expansion is pretty cheap you might want to do this fairly early (though maybe once you've played enough to feel like you "understand" the game) in case you want to change up your main before you get super invested and need to redo a lot of base game map completion.
6) I'm sure people have mentioned this but the first "season" of patch story content was a bunch of live events that included blowing up and remaking the initial hub city. They very recently created story instance versions of all that after it being completely unplayable for most of the games life. This leads to the weird but very illuminating thing similar to the ARR dungeons that got heavily reworked where you'll suddenly get a glimpse of what their "modern" game design looks like, so look forward to that. The story in that section is still pretty rough though--Living World season 2 is where the narrative feels like it's starting to hit its stride.
Progression is all about gaining access to new options and playstyles instead of strictly more power.
Take the elite specs of the necromancer for example: You can choose to be either a Reaper, giving you a big melee scythe in your shroud instead of ranged skills, or a Scourge, replacing a strict shroud with skills F1 through F5, so you don't get a second health bar anymore but now can spawn up to three stationary sand shades that repeat your F-skills, pulsing debuffs or providing buffs, or a Harbinger, giving you a mobile, high damage shroud that drains your life instead of protecting it, but get's stronger the more life is drained.
And even within one elite spec there's build variety. For example scourge can be a competent pure dps, offensive support, or healer/support based on your weapons, gear and traits.
Mounts are similar (though there's definitely movement power creep, looking at the skyscale). The raptor jumps far and has an engage skill that pulls enemies together, the springer jumps high and has a big cc on its engage skill, the skimmer can move over or under water, the griffon can convert height into speed by diving down, the roller beetle is a super high speed ground mount with difficult handling including drifting (there are communities entirely focused on doing races with these including building their own tracks in guild halls), the siege turtle is a two player mount with one driver and one gunner.
The skyscale is kind of an allrounder, a limited height "helicopter" with some air dashes and limited wall climbing ability. For general terrain traversal it has mostly pushed out the raptor and springer, though it's slower on the ground than the raptor, not as fast in the air as the griffon and doesn't have a cc skill like the springer.
Each mount has situations where it is useful. Beyond the high jump, the bunny's battle dismount is very useful as a starter move in PvE Boss fights like bounties. Its cannonball has CC that can lower a bosses' Breakbar.
In regards to necromancer and its form change, that is indeed how it works! On one of the specializations, there's a trait that ups your damage after you swap from necro to shroud and vice versa. So its actually intended that you go back and forth.
Unless you're using the Reaper elite spec, at which point you want to be in Enshroud as much as humanly possible
Weapon Recommendation for Garrett: Axe / Warhorn. And not just because both get Heavy Metal-inspired weapon skins later. But that's definitely a factor.
Charr Profession Recommendation for Kyle: Depends on what you're looking for in terms of swinging around big weapons. Greatsword Warrior is very spin-to-win and that can be really fun. As you attack, you build up your profession's gauge, which gives you up to three tiers of a kind of an "Ultimate Attack" of sorts for that weapon?
Also, while this is not a class that can equip greatswords, I would recommend trying out one of the professions that doesn't allow in-combat weapon swapping to see how the game can play with the fundamental mechanics of the combat depending on your build. For Charr, I would absolutely recommend Engineer for this, but Elementalist is also fun!
For Engineer, you get toolkits that you equip instead of weapon swapping. So you can equip a medkit that gives you healing abilities or a grenade kit to lob a ton of grenades, or even a flamethrower!
For Elementalist, instead of weapon swapping, you get access to four Elemental Attunements (so you're essentially the Avatar from ATLA), and each attunement flavors your equipped weapon as if you weapon swapped to something different. It's all really interesting!
Flamethrower is such fun while in open world.
Great video. It was a blast getting back into Guild Wars 2 with you guys.
I'm a little late, and a lot of people have answered your questions in depth, so i won't do that but i do wanna encourage and wish you guys well. I found you guys from the GW2 streams and as an 11 year vet thought i'd pop in and watch, offer advice where i could and it's been so entertaining and a blast to see you guys enjoying it and getting to know all the fun of early game. It will get better with time, once you get around level 40-60 is when the core storyline picks up and becomes more uniform, so you guys will be able to play the exact same story to progress simultaneously, if you so desire, and the quality is a bit better, leading up to the post launch content which starts a little rocky and then by the first expac hits the ground running. As such a long time vet i'll say it's honestly worth it to keep going. I have almost 6k hours and among my friend group of vets i'm on the low end of playtime. There's so much to do and love, it's just mostly level 80 content that really makes it shine. I hope you guys keep it up and keep the streams up too, it's been a blast. Glad to see everything is good after the hurricane!
As for a fun martial class, i am personally biased against the expansion exclusive class the Revenant. It's extremely unique among the classes in the game, but has a limited weapon selection.
Guardian however is spoiled in balance and is honestly an extremely functional and well built class all the way through with amazing weapon variety. I personally don't play it often, (mesmer lover here too), but guard is versitile and competent everywhere, and is a great class to both learn on and stick with long term. And don't worry too much on weapon swapping. Early on it's not a huge deal and with enough time it'll start to make sense. Some meta builds for endgame don't even use it.
I wish y'all all the best and hope that you get many more hours of play out of the game.
"Does anyone care about the narrative?"
Yes! I'm only partway through Heart of Thorns, the first expansion, and have been told the best is yet to come. But I'm already enamoured by the worldbuilding and the story, while not the best from the outset, does build and has characters I care about and a villain that was pretty top tier.
Wait, did Garrett just say that GG is going to be a Runescape-centric channel in a year?
That's clearly what I heard.
Garret, your weapons in GW2 are a large part of what defines how your character is built, so you're understanding something inherently. It's a very flexible game so you're never locked in, but a lot of the game is about feeling out what weapon set you want to use and build yourself around it. Figure out if the weapons you like focus more on DoTs or Direct damage and then pick another weapon that works the same, and get stats that support that. And if you find you really badly need an upgrade because you're sticking to one weapon, don't be afraid to visit the auction house. It'll fix you right up and gear is generally cheap if you're not looking for tmog.
Kyle, Charr warrior is really fun. You can make them very spikey and big, and warrior kind of exemplifies what the Charr are about. I'm partial to double axes for feeling like a fury warrior, but there's plenty of ways to play it. You're more open to changing weapons as you level so just try some early level and feel it out.
Also, for both of you, you can actually look up what your class does with each weapon in the build menu.
Also useful: You can try out everything your currently owned expansions give access to (including elite specialisations) in the PvP lobby.
Came here to say this. I think the weapon swap thing is throwing them off too, but really, it's just like having all 15 or so skills like in FF14, except all those skills are just not on the screen all at once. The weapon swap is a QoL choice, that way you can have one keybind work for more than one skill.
But yes. I'm not sure what gave them the impression that their weapons don't matter. The variety is there just for the sake of choice, but in the end, you still have to make a choice. I have my favorite weapons that I use for any build that I have, due to the class/character fantasy that I have in my head.
DUNGEONS STILL EXIST -
i dont know why you said they don't. you can play them very early on, they have seperate max lvl paths too,
Arenanet just has not implemented any new ones in favor of other dungeon-like content.
Sooo many fun questions:
How does combat turn out to be, how is the meta?
how do mounts work?
Whats the goal of the game?
is the story well received?
and thus is it worth investing time into this MMO?
I wont answer any of this and i kinda hope noone spoils too much so that unlocking some stuff becomes like
"i knew thats what it is exactly, i will just get it and move on"
Starting new in GW2 can in my experience be the hardest part of the game as you lack the knowledge and goals. Yet it can also be the best part of the game, running around exploring, finding secrets and immerse yourself completely.
If you find yourself constantly looking for the meaning of playing, hard time with the story or immersing yourself, the game really opens up with the first expansion, especially the story.
enjoy the journey in your own pace, if you struggle with that, set a goal to reach the first expansion maybe?
Looking forward to the next gw2 stream!
p.s. your character starts speaking a whole lot more the further into the story you get, early story is much more about you "building up reputation and a story" types where you're tagging along.
The intro is just how it feels to clean a room with ADHD
God dammit, I hate how right you are lmao
Would you stop talking about me? Rude.
Very funny intro for a parent (with ADHD)
You will usually have set weapons that pair well with your build, and both weapon sets will play to the same build strengths. The change of weapons in early game go away later, that's just because you get drops as you level. Build diversity is pretty big, there are many options for each class. Staff/staff is definitely possible, usually with different sigils on them
Build diversity isn't really a thing, you either go full power or full condition with supplemental stats for precision or expertise. The metas kind of pigeonhole you into very specific builds, pvp has the most variety but for pve you're more or less stuck with a single route on specs. It's the main reason I dropped my ranger/druid because I found out I had to play all spirits with all spirit boosting talents for alacrity and might uptime or else I wasn't getting into groups. Also vitality and healing are basically useless stats and scale very poorly.
If you compare the build diversity to that of retail wow, it's not even in the same universe. 15 talent points and going either 100% power or condition isn't really much, he's right to say its on par with something like diablo 4. Most of teh combat ends up being stacking in one spot and cycling boons for buff uptime.
9:02 Black hair guy gets it on the function of weapons and weapon swapping. Salt and pepper is being hard to please. xD Oh and pepper chose necro too, so lucky for him he can go reaper so he doesn't need to weapon swap at all cuz greatsword is stronk.
12:30 There are 3 "roles" in gw2: defensive support/healer, offensive support, and dps. When it comes to dps there are two ways of doing damage, condition or strike(power), which translates to dots or direct damage. All classes have 3 elite specializations that can be unlocked at level 80, as long as you own the corresponding expansion, and necromancer has reaper, scourge, and harbinger. For necromancer in the current pve meta there is heal scourge for heal/def-support, alac-condi scourge & quickness-condi or quickness-power harbinger for offensive support, and for raw dps condi has scourge & harbinger while power has harbinger & reaper. Now there is a condi reaper build but it's not very popular as gearing power is always cheaper & easier and then there's the fact that power reaper just slaps. Like sure condi reaper can drop 48 bleed stacks on someone with two buttons or you could nuke them for up to 140k damage with those same two buttons as power. :3
Something you'll find later on is that overall the difference between condi and power builds isn't much in terms of power and you can usually just play whatever you want even in the majority of endgame. It's fairy unique for an encounter to really favor one playstyle over another.
13:15 Any and every goal in GW2 is whatever you set it to be for yourself. At endgame, the stat difference between exotic and ascended/legendary gear isn't that large so for less than 30g you can easily fill out an entire power build with exotic quality gear and clear 97% of the game and no one will be able to tell the difference. The only content where ascended/legendary quality gear is required is in fractals, which are mini-dungeons that will obtain kiss/curse modifiers (this is where wow stole the idea of mythic+ affixes) that will absolutely wreck you if you don't obtain a certain amount of a resistance stat (agony resistance) which can only be slotted onto ascended/legendary quality gear.
13:30 Narrative: early game story quality entirely depends on starting race, imo, and the follow up story that leads to the end of the core game is the weakest part of the overall gw2 story. The expansion/living-world story lines are far better both in quality and how well they're written as they had time to really start to get the ball rolling after the game launched. The living world story are essentially the in-between of each expansion that connect everything together and while they stopped producing, in-between content, with that method for the latest expansions the quality hasn't deteriorated at all from what I've seen.
5:31 '...and it has made me want to just take what I thought I'd knew about MMOs and just throw it in the trash.' exactly! GW2 has achieved its goal. the devs wanted to give us players another experience, more quality of life, more fun, less frustration, less competition and grieve among players and more cooperation. the game is fundamentally friendly in design, horizontal progression etc is not devaluating your past efforts even after years of absence from the game and the devs did their best to make us players best friends instead of making us run ahead for harvesting nods to outpace the competition.
the game is massive. we have raids, strikes, fractals etc for 'endgame', we can explore, embellish our characters ('fashion wars') fight in OpenPvP (WvW) or structured PvP, decorate our homesteads and whatnot.
have fun! the game is full of it.
The intro just made me think „What is it with this game and dad gamers“ 😂 seriously check out the GW2 TH-camrs, half of them are dads
It's designed to be enjoyable and worth playing even if you only have a few hours a week to play it, so it's always been pretty popular with people that have real world responsibilities(like parents) but still want to play MMOs
I believe an appeal to some is that this game launched and grew as we did. So it makes sense that some people remain invested for long periods of time.
So happy you tried GW2. It was my frst MMO and I still say it's the most "real MMO" i played. Having the map metas with dozens of players is peak MMO no matter how good the instanced content in other MMOs is (which unfortunately isn't GW2's strength I admit).
GW2 is a lot about finding your own endgame, like some people already explained. Go fashion hunting, grind for legendaries, get all elite-specs for all classes, do all the little treasure hunts in the maps or reach the highes fractal level etc - all valid playstyles.
Hope you continue to enjoy it :)
I love the POF and EOD expac storyline more than any others. Praise JOKO! 🤣✌️
I have to admit, the Path of Fire story is epic. I had a lot of fun with that one. Also, you have to finish the whole storyline to begin the quest to obtain griffon.
In GW2 there are currently 72 (9 classes with 5 core / 3 elite specializations each) specializations, which are used depending on the content (PvE, PvP, WvW, OpenWorld). The talents have FAR more synergy effects with the weapons than you are used to in other games. BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY... finally you should play your class in a way that feels good for you!
Loved that intro bit. I played GW2 when it was pretty new and my memories are faded, but when people say the game is about exploration that sounds right to me. I remember ignoring leveling after a while and just trying to sneak around to fill in the map and get vistas as much as I could. You guys are going to make me try to figure out how to install it and log in again, aren't you?
Its on steam nowadays. cant get any easier
Narrative-wise - to put it simply, core game GW2 story has too many things going on for it to establish emotional points that hook people into becoming more interested into what they are trying to do. Like what most people already said in the comments, Arenanet learned and slowly condensed their story into a narrative that is both easier to follow and easier to relate to, as evidenced by their direction in the first Living World Season (or patches post core game story). They developed a set of characters similar to the Scions in FF14; Characters that the playerbase either loved or hated. Either way, it served to get them invested in those characters - what they want to do, what was happening to them etc and subsequently get invested into the story as well.
Honestly, if you really wanted to understand how GW2 delivers its narrative, you have got to play through most of it and see how they improved over time. Sure, there will be ups and downs in its writing (you will know when you get there lol), but it's the same experience that most other players had with games like FF14.
I used to run two staves on my mesmer but it was a special case since it doesn't help with cooldowns.
On each of the staves I had a sigil that refill my dodge bar when I swap weapon. I played an elite spec variant of the mesmer called the mirage that gets access to ambush abilities under certain conditions, for example right after dodging. The mirage staff ambush launches a huge projectile that applies conditions to the enemy and speed up your allies cooldowns. Just quite a roundabout way to play a condi/support hybrid.
As far as core main story quest goes: You will play out a story early on that ties into your decisions in character creation. About 25-30 you will make a choice as to what faction out of three choices to join. Then the game comes back together as all three factions join together to engage the world dragon Zhaitan.
I dont really play core to much anymore but it is there to teach you how to play the game. Once you get into heart of thorns, you see the difficultly turn up a bit. When Heart of thorns came out everyone was dying constantly from the maps and the fact there was no mounts at that time. HoT give you gliding and Path of fire gives you mounts. Soto ( secrets of the obscure gives you skyscale ( flying dragon mount) and rift hunting. The newest release GW2 janthir Wilds gives you a Homested where you can get gather nodes for resources, you can deco it or you can ignore it) You will get the springer (rabbit) mount next after the Raptor in POF and the flying mount (Griffon) is at the end of the that expansion. The Idea of GW2 is a casual go at your own pace MMORPG. you dont need to rush to then end of the content. WvW is alliance battles now.. Its your guild and your alliance guilds vs other Alliances guilds in a Massive Capture the flag game concept with Keeps, towers, and supply camps that buff the keeps, towers and garrisons. It one game Spit over 4 maps. ( red borderlands , blue borderlands, green border lands and Eternal Battle grounds in the center. the idea is you want to capture and hold as much land as possible to win the skirmish which then adds points to you war score (highest War scores wins and moves up a tier while the middle stays in the same tier and the lowest drops down a tier). Probably one of the best Action packed capture the flag games you'll probably ever see from a MMORPG. Guild wars 2 is for casual Players and caters to them. Dungeons have been Replaced with Fractals which are mini dungeons and are profitable ( accessible thru lions arch). if you like straight boss fights and just want make a team and try and kill a boss then Strikes could be a thing.( strikes mission are the beginning and easier small scale raids). You will get strikes starting in the living world series ( Living world is small scale story patches that tie the whole story together) There are countless ways to play Gw2 and keep with it and you'll find a enough content to last you years of enjoyment. Good luck fellas!
So as far as the question about story, for me at least the answer is yes it does get better as you progress but admittedly it does also have a little of that A Realm Reborn effect where the beginning portions are really just an introduction and it isn’t until you get out of your zone and start exploring the world where things start to escalate
Re: Specialisations
You unlock the base specialisations first. They are like talent trees.
You use your hero points for learning abilities or for learning traits in a specialisation. Once you learn some traits, you can slot that specialisation into one of three slots (which unlock at certain levels).
Since you are limited in the number of skills you can slot or traits you can slot, try to focus in on what you like and invest here points towards that.
What you are thinking about as Specialisation is the elite spec, which is a lvl 80 specialisation line that alters class mechanics and can only be put in the third slot.
Each class has 5 base specialisation lines, and each has their own strengths. Generally, they fit into:
- Power Damage
- Condi Damage
- Sustain/Tankiness
- Healing
- Class Mechanic
So take Necro:
- Spite (Power Damage)
- Curses (Condi Damage)
- Death Magic (Sustain/Minions)
- Blood Magic (Healing/life drain)
- Soul Reapering (Death Shroud)
Or Elementalist:
- Air (Crit/Power/Mobility)
- Fire (Burning Condi or Power damage)
- Earth (Bleed Condi or Sustain)
- Water (Healing/Cleanse)
- Arcane (Attunement swapping, boons)
Look what the traits do, see which ones interact with the skills and weapons you like to use and go for that first.
Re: Weapons
Weapons tied to skills is the way the game is designed so that you can have a good visual indication of what an enemy can do in PvP.
Their class and their weapons will tell you a lot about what they can do, and with a game as flexible as this in terms of builds, it does need good ways of sussing out an enemies build.
There can be benefit to equipping the same weapon type in both slots. This allows you to take advantage of weapon swapping traits or sigils on weapons, while keeping your skills. Useful for classes like Mirage where you may be trying to keep staff clones up, and regaining endurance for ambush attacks by using a Sigil of Energy.
So bad news, if you want to do anything that isn't comically easy group content, you will have to look up a build. You can make something that works for you for overworld or single player content, but not if you want to do high tier fractals, strike missions, or raids.
The flying mount is as busted as you think it is. The jumpy rabbit is good for vertical ascension, but a skyscale is a straight upgrade.
There are multiple types of endgames, but my best explanation is that your endgame is collectathon/completionist based. Legendaries are forged by collecting "gifts", maps are finished by doing all the activities on them. Fashion Wars gets easier the more skins and dyes you collect for your account.
Love GW2 been playing for about 10 years! Since there are so many ways to level (explore, events, pvp, wvw) and not too much direction at any point in the game it can be difficult to find a goal to work towards. Especially starting out.
My goal until I hit lvl 80 is usually to find all waypoints in each map for easy travel, and complete all hero points in each map that way I have some extra hero points to add to whatever elite spec I want to unlock at lvl 80.
There is a lot of variety and customization when it comes to builds but most don't worry too much about that until they reach 80. Building for either power or condition damage while leveling is pretty common.
For core necromancer weapons, I'm a big fan of staff/axe dagger. Once you hit 80 and can unlock elite specs, Reaper (Heart of Thorns) is super popular and engaging to play. I typically run a Power build (upfront strike damage) that originally used great sword/staff. However, when necromancer got one-hand swords unlocked in Secrets of the Obscure, I changed the staff to dual wielding swords. I know it's kinda odd at first, but tying skills to the weapons themselves makes weapon choices in builds feel much more impactful. The best advice I can give is try out different weapons till you find what feels good, then build your traits and specializations around those weapons.
The start brings me joy to see its not just my kids who leave a mess.
Okay the intro bit was 10/10 on point
I'm brand new to the game and was shocked at how low the barrier to entry is compared to WoW, New World and BDO
3 weeks in with a couple hours a week and you can be rolling in full exotic with some ascended pieces, an elite spec or two fully trained, following zergs and roaming in wvw and actually being impactful. If you have experience in large scale pvp in another mmo, your sense of movement and positioning will largely carry over
The constant valuable rewards from wvw translating to player power in pve is also very new to me. It's like having been in a toxic relationship, and meeting someone who's actually good to you and you're like "this is normal??"
in end-game builds you will have a setups that you use the MAJORITY of the time... Let me toss out an example, my necromancer:
I really enjoy the way necro spear plays so I'm using that now, it's a melee weapon and sometimes there are enemies you just don't (or can't) get close to so I swap to sword / sword. (sword for necromancer is a range weapon) and I like how that plays too... so I use them. In one encounter I knew an NPC needed to survive so I changed from DPS necromancer to **HEALING NECROMANCER** (yes necro can heal with the right build) and still did decent condition damage. got the achievement and helped other people too since I turned on the old commander tag and let people know I was doing the thing.
There are *VAST* amounts of build diversity, not all of them are effective but a tremendous amount of them are. Guildwars 2 *DOES* have tank / healer / DPS setups it's not as "cut and dry" as FF14 or WoW as there is some degree of overlap but the setup does exist, you won't bump into it doing storyline at all... and you won't see it in open world until you're doing very hard open world content (End of Dragons or the new Janthir meta, stuff like that) but in raids / strikes you'll see tank / healer / DPS setups all the time... though I suppose it's more accurate to say Tank / support / DPS since there's more to it than just playing wack-a-mole with health bars (I was a SCH main in FF14 before I stopped playing last year)
Yes there *ARE* builds that use staff / staff.
also you will *NOT* always have two weapons and swap, it depends on the build... for example there's a guardian build that pumps out 28 - 30k dps and it only uses hammer, weapon swapping would be a DPS *LOSS* so you don't swap and avoid abilities with casting timers as those too would be a DPS loss.
There are some builds that take advantage of swapping too, Dual Pistol thief players sometimes put a pistol in their main hand then a pistol in their *swap weapon set offhand* so on screen you have Pistol and nothing / nothing and Pistol. The result is you can still "weapon swap" but you don't actually change weapons (it'll still be pistol / pistol) this is used to trigger the thief "quick Pockets" buff for an initiative boost so they can 3-spam DPS a little longer.
does GW2 care about it's story: YES.. in fact I'll say more so than FF14. Case and point: Play Heart of thorns as any race BUT sylvari, then play it again as Sylvari. The ff14 story is amazing but your choices don't matter in the slightest. In GW2 there *are* slight alterations (all be it superficial) to the story depending on choices made in the past. As for players.. some care, some don't. As a LONG time Guildwars player (I was in the GW 1 beta) I *DO* care a lot about the story and I'll say Path of Fire was my favorite MMO story arc of all time until FF14 released their absolutely fantastic Shadowbringers. So ShB is #1, but 2 and 3 are Season 4 and Path of Fire (both GW2 DLC and expansions respectively).
as for mounts... don't worry about that now. Until VERY recently you couldn't even get a mount until you were at Path of fire. You can get the raptor at lev 10 now but you can't level him or unlock his special abilities at all until you get to PoF so you're using raptors at their most basic level which is: it moves a little faster and can jump a bit.
As far as the 'staff/staff' question, I have a fun build I use for Mesmer that does the double staff thing. At endgame you will start unlocking new class options called elite specializations, but only if you buy the expansions.
"i play guild wars 2; for fun?" --Mukluk Bartholomew Reginald Esq. III
rly surprised to hear someone not like the weapon swapping mechanic. i feel like it makes the gameplay feel a lot more fluid, and as someone who gave this game a chance by coming back and making a thief, but rly wanted to play ranger I was super happy w it. found out i could unlock soulbeast and use dual dagger like a thief/rogue, and still use a bow like a ranger should. even had a ton of stealth access from my runes that synergized w my class by giving me stealth when i placed traps(until they replaced the awesome rune system with whatever the hell this new relic system is. give me back my condi stealth archer)
You can do whatever you want in GW2, theres everything and whatever you do you're progressing your account.
Many people mentioned most of the things you can do I want to add-collecting materials. I got into this in the last 2 days, I have 2-3 maps I like and I gather resources.
Sometimes I login and I haven’t decided what to do yet (because there's tons of super interesting stuff to do in GW2) and I see a bunch of peole running/flying in the same direction because there's a meta event going on and I just follow them 😀
I play open world mostly, I haven’t even got into fractals or rides yet and there's tons of stuff to do.
The thing about GW2 is that you can basically really do whatever you want and you can achieve things for your account whatever you choose to do.
The open world is huge and they keep adding more 🙂 Also if you stop playing for a month,two or more the game doesn’t punish you for it, you literally login and move on with whatever you were doing before you stopped playing. Also experiencing the game with different classes changes your experience a lot.
I'm also into fashion and achievements. Everything brings you rewards, I think GW2 has possibly the most interesting and diverse endgame for the lack of a better word.
For graphics, disable bloom and if you have an NVIDIA GPU with NVIDIA experience/app installed, press alt+f3 while in-game, select the Detail effect and the Contrast effect and welcome to a much, much more gorgeous game
The narrative is what I love. It's the reason I play. And yes, it gets better. One of the things that fascinates me with core gw2 story is that it borrowed quite a bit from Dragon Age: Origins-- it has the weaving narrative with multiple starting points that ultimately end up in the same place. I've played through most races' starting options at this point, they're all different. That's a LOT of work-- five races with two sets of three possible branches for a player to take, and have it all work together regardless of which path the player takes, is impressive narrative.
For Necromancer, a good core Necro build is Axe with a Focus in the offhand and when you get your second weapon set slots, Dual daggers. When using those make sure you pick gear that focuses on Power as your main stat. Those pair well with Consume Conditions, Well of Darkness, Well of Suffering, Spectral Armor, and once you get your "ult" slot Summon Flesh Golemn is always a favorite.
Most important thing about getting into the game is realizing that you start in maps from 2012 with a story from 2012. After you are level 80 and play the expansion, it gets A LOT better than that. Consider the "base game" and the level 1-80 journey a VERY long tutorial that prepares you for the 10 years of content that came after the base game.
if you are addicted to many buttons you can play an elementalist and add conjured weapons,so for example you can have as your main weapons 2 daggers,outside of combat you can swap to a staff,inside combat you can swap 4 elements to change you bar with the same weapon to 5 new skills,then you can sumon a frost bow,use those 5 skills,drop it,summon a flaming greatsword,...drop it summon a lightning hammer,drop it sumon a fiery axe,and never even look at cooldowns again in your life.( then there is an elite skill that resets the cooldown on your current 5 skills haha)
9:12 Yes you can Kyle! There is actually a Mesmer build I've run where you swap between staffs to regain resources, and you never really run out of cooldowns cause you are also spawning clones to explode with your dodge. Super fun build!
Edit: Very on the nose but Metabattle is the go to for the most part and there are a ton of builds for basically all classes so odds are you'll find something you'll like.
Narratively GW2 is kind of like FFXIV in that it gets muuuuuch better once you're out of the base game. When the Living World chapters and the expansions get going it really does take a huge step forward. I hope you guys stick with it long enough to see the good stuff.
Not for the recent expansions, not by a long shot
@@FlickTakFlakAttack Not sure I fully agree. Sure, Secrets of the Obscure was sort of mediocre but End of Dragons is better than I think a lot of people give it credit for and Janthir Wilds has been good so far. Also it feels like SotO suffered a bit from what Dawntrail is dealing with. First chapter in a new storyline, right?
As insane as it sounds the best way to enjoy GW2 is to not overthink it. As someone that grew up playing MMOs GW2 feels like an old school game made new, modern QoL with the feeling of old mmos where theres no rush to endgame and the game itself is your journey not getting to the raids and dungeons and doing number go up constantly.
My current project I'm working on is Obsidian armor for light professions since i main mesmer. Legendaries are cool in the fact they are account bound and you can switch your stats on them at any time. I can have celestial on my mesmer if i feel like doing open world or if i feel like pvp, i can switch it over to my necromancer and put on power substats and not have to fumble with making multiple gear sets. The best thing about GW2 is things like this, your longterm progression and advancement of quality of life things, not necessary power progression. Thats why people say its horizontal progression, theres no constant pressure to carrot chase, its letting you breathe and decide what you want your endgame to be, whether its mass scale world vs world pvp or just doing things in the open world
World vs World used to be server vs server but it's currently undergoing restructruring to instead be based around guilds and alliances of guilds instead. I'm a 9-year veteran just getting into it, really enjoying it.
For goals, a short-term one could be to simply find out what type of damage you like doing. GW2 has two primary sources of damage which are Strike (normal mace-hit-face damage) and Condition Damage (damage-over-time effects). Many Conditions can be fun to use because they often have some secondary effect like Torment inflicting more damage when the enemy stands still, or Confusion where it applies more damage whenever an enemy does an attack. Some weapons can excel at dealing different types of damage and if a certain weapon or condition speaks to you, it could inform what kind of build you want to go for later on.
For the story, I generally get the idea that most people don't care a ton but it's rarely disregarded entirely and people tend to at least have a grasp of who is who. I imagine some of this attitude towards the story is due to how awful it's sold (like monetarily) towards anyone who isn't an active player who can keep up with the release schedule and know what the next part is even called.
I'll admit that I also were kinda lost on what to do in GW2 until their first expansion Heart of Thorns was released and I was forced to actually learn how to play due to how much more difficult it was to just survive in the horrible jungle and its invisible frog ninjas but that's when it kinda clicked into place when it wasn't a case of "I can dodge" and it became "I have to dodge" to even do basic exploration.
I recommend playing a charr engineer. In this setting, charr invented guns (and basically all highly mechanical technology, like the printing press), and the most powerful political faction is the engineering superpower, the iron legion.
They were originally designed to not swap to a second weapon, instead pulling out kits that are effectively their own weapons. Med kits, granades, mortars, flamethrowers, etc. It's vary fun.
Random anecdote: During GW2's development, two classes were "revealed" during an april's fools day: Commando and Alchemist. The extra meta joke is that, when these two concepts are combined, you basically get the Engineer that was the true class of that reveal.
But thats not melee :/
Charr Warrior also works great and fits the setting perfectly
and feels VERY martial and heavy bonk.
Engi is cool but not only for new players is swapping out a second weapon slot (thus only having one weapon always) for one or multiple kits that replace your weapon skills highly confusing and clunky
The zones you guys are going through are designed to be traversed on foot, since mounts didn't exist till expansions, so there's no rush for them while levelling, unless you want to speedrun levelling/exploration.
One MAJOR mention regarding GW2 Meta, the Meta is very very well balanced especially lately. This means you CAN'T GO WRONG whatever Class you pick as long as you know or as you ll learn what you re doing.
When you go for the absolute End Game roles are being distinct the tank the healer the dps etc. BUT the BIG THING is this, the ROLE in a Party is being held by the Skill Trees and the Attributes NOT the class itself. That means that a Guardian with the right Skill Tree and Attributes can go either for FullDPS or FullHealing or FullBuffing or a even a MIX between whatever you want but with less potency. I repeat the Class is about the Playstyle NOT the Role in a Party.... I ve said it again cause its so unheard of for you outside GW2.
I'd recommend Thief, Ranger or Warrior for "Martial" Classes. Thief and Ranger have a lot of versatility while Warrior has the safety of a Heavy Armor Class. All three of them deal tons of damage with their OWN way or have other roles as said above in the Guardian example. The most Unusual Class ever for you is the Mesmer. Extremely unique and powerful but I wouldn't recommend for first timers, you can go if you want but requires you to think completely outside from the all time classic classes you ve played before
For necromancer, until endgame, a good weapon combo I like is axe/horn or scepter/focus. A thing to consider as far as stats is to prioritize power (direct damage) or condition damage (dots and debuffs).
7:52 I mean... You have that before Level 20 :), you even have that in the footage you had running in the background lol.
Some Guild Wars players definitely care about the story. I remember in 2012 when I started playing but was used to WoW I decided that I liked the way gw2 story is told better, but I liked WoW story better. I think that changed for me some time around Season 3 or Path of Fire. I am now fully invested in gw2's story.
About mounts: Every mount has its use and own feel to them; for example, once you level the Raptor mastery it can jump far away horizontally, the Skyscale (the flying dragon) can indeed hover in the air like a helicopter and cling to walls/mountains to gain endurance to stay in the air for longer and go higher, the Griffon (the one that glides and flaps) requires skill and patience; it is not an easy mount to learn but once you learn how to fly it you can combine it with skyscale like this: Gain height with skyscale, mount griffon mid air (griffon can't gain height on its own) and once on griffon fly like a jet around the map so fast you dont even need to use waipoints. Really nice video btw!
Carrot on the stick? I guess it's having fun...I mean, there are carrots, but you have to choose your own: want best gear? Get legendaries. Like PvP? Rank up, partecipate in tournaments and get a statue of your character in the lobby. Love the world? Explore every nook and cranny, partake in meta events and discover hidden stories around, do fractals, strikes and raids. You get on by leading armies to victory? Become a commander and lead people in WvW. Are you a completionist or fashion collector? Go for achievements!
Just playing will lead to every bit of content: basically the first playthrough of the game story (and first leveling to 80) it's a journey to discover what you like, so if you like playing the game that's enough, the carrot will come.
It's funny you point out Diablo similarities, it is one that often gets overlooked. The team that founded Arenanet was actually comprised mostly of DiabloII vets. Many of whom stuck with it through Guild Wars 2's launch
Build and theory crafting is one of the key strengths of GW2. Meta is apparent through content like raids and fractals (the game's actual dungeon system) but when you are roaming around the open world PvE, there are builds from TH-camrs and Community like Lord Hizen or Guild Jen. Some advice I learned in my time playing.
1) Find a class or few you like! A beautiful feature of GW2 is that you can go into sPvP and every class is max level with all skills and all specializations unlocked. Give any class a try, see if you like the vibe on a striking dummy. That way you can decide which class you wanna put time into!
2) Boons. Are. Everything. Most metas late game revolve around boons and maintaining them utilizing them. With the exceptions being roaming/small scale of WvW and PvP. Boons are powerful, so learn about them too!
3) The biggest strength and weakness in GW2 is the freedom to do things. Be that legendary farming, mount gathering, PvP leaderboard, raids/fractals, WvW competition, or personal improvement. Some players can solo legendary bosses and even some strike missions. It is a game with high skill expression.
4) Ascended gear is only a like... 2-5% difference in DPS. So it is worth getting but Exotic can carry you through most things. Legendary weapons, armor and jewelry all have Ascended stats. The difference is they are customizable! Any legendary can be any stat type.
Hope that helps! Welcome to GW2 :D
The story of this game is what hooked me, and it's one of the few games where I actually felt like I cared about the characters and the lore. Aurene, once you meet her, is what made this game the best game I've ever played ;-;
As an engineer main, I don't get to swap weapons (but I do get to swap kits, which can get even wilder! But it's not dependent on equipped weapons)
it's more of a single player RPG that you play with others. Masteries is such a cool unique system where you feel yourself progressing your account like unlocks in an RPG
The goal of the game is what you make it. I'm currently grinding for legendary armor via WvW and the PVE set in the SotO expansion. There are some instanced content at the end (Raid and Strikes) that I have been wanting to get into, but I need to find a group for first. The neat thing about anything Legendary in this game is that you have an "Legendary Wardrobe" in the game. So lets say I have a full set of Legendary Medium armor. It means that anytime I want to play a medium armor job, I can just grab a copy of my legendary gear out of the wardrobe and immediately equip it to my character and set the stats how I want them. I never have to grind for gear again.
For a Martial class, Warrior, a good core is Dual Axes with a Greatsword for backup. Focus on Shouts and Signets for your skills at first, as "For Great Justice" and "Shake it off" with the Fury and Rage Signets can carry you even in max level content. Also focus Power for your main stat for this build out.
13:15 oh no garrett found the cult of horizontal
My guardian has two pistols. As you get up in level, you can get any weapon with any stat you want. So it is more of 'find the weapon you like', 'find the stat set you like', and go with that. YES you can have two staves! My WvW roaming druid had a staff on each weapon swap for a while there.
There is a ton of creativity in build-creation. You can come up with almost everything. One of the first things I tried, was playing a warrior healer (long before they got their staff). It did work fine in all open world, dungeons and low level (not because it's too bad for high level, but because I didn't have the gear to go high level) fractals. Basically just check your trait-lines and skills and decide, what the want to do. If you tinker a bit, you will come up with something decent. Only community that is not completely open is the raiding community. But even there if you join a raiding guild you might end up running raids in your own fancy creation. A few years back, a youtuber did actually run the raids in funny squads of 10 of the same class and if I remember correctly he did this for all classes.
Other point, story: I really actually care for the narrative. It is a bit hard to grasp though, because it is not necessarily one storyline. For example: If you pick one specific Asura storyline you will meet Professor Gorr, the guy who basically figured out Elder dragons. If you run any of the other races, you will not meet him until way later. So you don't get the insight. One choice will have you meet Tonn and watch his story unfold. If you choose anything else a that point, he will be mentioned, but you will never really know anything about him. Then there are dynamic events, hearts, and hero-points, telling their part of the story. One other part of story-telling that absolutely fascinates me, are collections. You can find them in your hero-tab under achievements. Some of them have specific prerequesites. For example, if you start to work towards one of the old legendary weapons, you will experience a whole unique adventure untill you get them. Just to name one: I f you start H.O.P.E. you will be sent to a Hylek alchemist. he will teach you bits and pieces about Hylek alchemy. After learning as much as you can from him you create a prototype. Since it's not just good enough you return to the grandmaster craftsman in Lions Arch. He is willing to help you out, but you have to hone your skills in the relevant craft first. And so on, and so on. It's a whole story. And the same is true for all of the S1 and S2 legendaries.
Basically, storytelling in GW2, like everything else, is not focussed towards a singular target, but it's a world you live in, decide which parts you want to take in and experience.
To clarify the talking points!
Your main goal to unlocking the entire game
Get to level Cap, get atleast exotic (orange) gear with the stat you want, get the weapons you want.
Cap never increases beyond 80 and the exotic gear is the cheapest end game gear to let you do about 98% of the game adequately. PVP doesnt require anygear and fractals only ever require one tier higher for specifically fractal infusions for defense. Hero points which you get from beating up mini bosses and events that have a hero point marker will unlock every skill, passive and elite specialization for every character as you go.
After that its just progress the story and keep leveling as exp changes from levels to accountwide mastery after you reach level cap, which will unlock things for every character on the account itself.
The story for base is very much world building and will come back at a later time like XIV though maybe not in such a grand way. It does decently with continuity but the stories them selves can be hit or miss depending on your preferences. For instance Heart of Thorns is an amazing story but I think its because I played sylvari and my chosen origin story path was enjoyable. Like how Dragoons feel a sense of star player syndrome in Heavensward.
For mounts, prior to the 2nd expansion PoF there were no mounts and prior to the first expansion HoT there were no gliders. So technically speaking you have something in the base game that you should not have but they added anyways. Around PoF and onwards you will get so many mounts for free and couple specialized mounts you need to grind for.
i think one of the biggest misconceptions garrett has about the weaponswap is that you're not swapping your build. the second slot IS part of the build, rotating between your fat cd ability, switching to the other weapon and casting whatever you got on there is literally the same as swapping a stance with classes in other games. as such people who actively play endgame content most certainly dont forget about their weaponswap, it'd be like forgetting your icy veins as a wow frostmage or the like.
Kyle is also correct in his assumptions that you should use the leveling phase as the time to familiarize yourself with what weapon types unlock what skills, because they're immutably bound to one another. figure out what skills you like or what feels like a sensible combo, then stick with those weapons at lvl 80, where youll have plenty of opportunity to work on the type of weapon you would care about, kind of in a similar fashion to the ff14 relics
most importantly tho: enjoy the world, take your time and just... breathe. gw2 is very sandboxy in its goals, as in i know a lot of people who just play the story and then farm achievements or large group events and spend their time with friends without any actual "goal" in mind
you guys need to log in now and experience the Halloween event that is now live and ty for giving gw2 a try and actually enjoying your adventures is great to watch new players do this and fall in love with the game it has mountains of content
Great video! I've never tried GW2 and watching you guys try it out has me interested (if I can find a way to make it work with my dexterity issues). It looks like a lot of fun :D
Send headpats to Dexter, please :)
There are Low Intensity versions of almost(?) every if not every class these days, and they are viable to do most content, except maybe the 2 hardest fights in the game, but those are optional
Weapon swapping is fun.
Finding a combo with synergy in your playstyle is so cathartic. Changing combos for pragmatism means you need to keep sharp with your options and the tools you have.
Honestly, treat the base game leveling (1-80) as a tutorial/training portion of the game. Getting used to systems and things available to you. Once you finish the base story/get to level 80, that's when almost *everything* unlocks, but a recommendation would be going for gear upgrades of weapons you like and a damage type you like (pure damage vs damage over time). You might've noticed some gear give different groups of stats, and at max level, those stat groups (prefixes) dictate the large chunk of your build and going up the gear rarity will also help in that regard (text colors being blue -> green -> yellow -> orange -> pink/purple).
Once you get to expansions, you'll get access to Elite Specializations that often change your class mechanic a little bit and kinda gives you a focus on your builds. Mounts and their unlocks/progressions don't become fully available till the second expansion (Path of Fire).
PvP can queued into relatively early on if you wanna try that, but WvW is scaled around max level and gear, so I'd wait till then to try that.
And as always, tooltips (both on skills and on traits in specializations) does help for understanding playstyles a bit.
Staff Infection! (per request)
Man I envy y’all’s uninformed perspective. If only I could go back 6000hrs and re-experience GW2 all over again for the first time. There are answers to all your questions, and many people love the answers and have made this game their home for the last 13yrs. But I won’t attempt answering them all here, lots of others have. Enjoy and thanks for the video. Don’t be scared to use the official Wiki, it’s accessible from in-game for a reason haha
On the front of builds and build diversity: things really open up when you unlock specializations (which you begin unlocking at level 21 and are NOT the thing you referred to in the video as specializations; those are mastery points, and is a whole separate, horizontal progression system that replaces typical levelling). Every profession has six specializations in the base game, and eventually you can equip three of them at a time. Specializations generally amount to passive buffs that either supplement your current abilities and boost them, or change them entirely to do different things.
As far as the story goes, I have STRONG feelings in that department.
I was an avid GW1 player in high school. I specifically beefed up our family PC so that it could run the game, and it was the single game I had ever put the most time into until I started playing FFXIV four years ago. When GW2 came out I was beyond excited that a game had come out as a continuation of the story I had grown up loving my time with.
And the story of GW2 disappointed me immeasurably. I never even finished it on release, and I dropped it after about 100 hours, very close to endgame. I revisited the game in recent years, determined to give it a second (and third and fourth chance), but every time I worked through the base game story I was just reminded of how bad it was, especially having played FFXIV in the intervening years. Without digging at it too much, I will leave my opinions on the base game story as: there have been very few times I've come away from a story angry, and this is one of them.
With all that said, now that I'm through the first expansion and working my way through the third season of Living World content, I can say that I don't regret the time I spent going through the base game. It served well to setup narrative beats and plot points that would pay off later, and introduced me to characters I've grown to love and are frankly up there with some of my favorite characters from FFXIV.
At the point I'm at now, the game doesn't hold a candle to FF14 in terms of writing, but it's building up to something, and I think that something may rock my socks.
For high-level instanced play many builds will have rotations that swap between weapons to use more high-cooldown abilities (typically skills 4&5) and/or take advantage of weapon sigils (think Diablo gem slots) with abilities that proc when swapping weapons.
For just running around the open world it's totally OK to ignore that. I like to have a melee and a ranged option I can swap to depending on the situation.
What are your goals in GW2?
This is very flexible depending on the player. But since you are still early levels I'll make a short list.
Get all of your weapon and utility skills slots unlocked. This opens up as you level.
MSQ is every 10 levels. Do hearts quests, find Vistas, Points of Interest via exploration (you get XP for this).
If you 100% explore a zone you get bonuses.
I suppose the short answer is level up in the most fun way you can.
More depth and options become available as you level up.
Garrett! There are indeed meta builds, but there are several different builds per class. There's a bunch of websites out there that list them. The ultimate carrot in GW2 is the legendary weapons and armor.
As for the story, I'd compare the base game of GW2 with ARR. It gets better with the expansions, but never quite to the level of FFXIV.
A weapon set for necromancer if you want to do direct damage is axe with a focus and a staff for the weapon swap weapon (axe for single target, staff for AoE, f1 shroud for whenever you've used the cooldowns on whatever weapon you're holding). In later expansions, necromancer also gets to use greatsword for melee and swords for ranged damage, which are great.
I think Kyle might enjoy guardian as a martial, since that has thr option to later on spec into a more supportive or DPS build.
From my limited knowledge experience, weapon-swapping can be more or less optimal depending heavily on your build and how often your optimal abilities come off cooldown. If your class spends a ton of time with an alternate ability set from a form change or special kit, there's less reason to need a 2nd set of cooldowns. On my main (I am a new player recently arrived at early endgame), my weapon swap is mostly just so I have a long range weapon option. I swap between my basic 5 weapon abilities and the alternate sets that come from using my elite spec's 3 extra modes.
You aren't meant to swap weapons(not referring to swapping weapon sets, just weapons themselves). Learn 1 weapon you like, integrate it into your kit and use it. Ignore the "stronger weapon" that is a different type. You can easily acquire upgraded versions of your greatsword, for example, as you play. Don't feel pressured to switch weapons because of number increases. Make a build.
Hi kitty! 😁
The part at the beginning with Kyle cleaning up and getting quest progression was cute.
Cut to 5yrs from now and Garret is obsessed with runescape
Lol I don't think Oldschool will be able to ever draw some people in. Would be funny to have another mmo like ff14 do that to them though.
@@Crashh965 osrs is probably the most acessable retro feeling mmo. You can even play it on your phone. I feel like Garett might appreciate the quest design of osrs.
I adore that intro!