A consistently surprising, meticulously constructed fantasy world.

You expect to see only fields of grazing deer and idle monsters but when you turn the corner, there’s chaos. Crowds crush together, jumping around and blasting spells and swinging huge weapons. You join in, and though all possibility for any real coordination is lost in the frenzy, a sense of community, of belonging, solidifies as everyone strives to destroy a shared target. In Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet builds these events into every single zone, teasing you to explore by instilling a sense that despite Tyria’s colossal size, another surprise isn’t far away.

There’s no global player versus player combat in main zones where you’ll level up to the 80 cap. Like Turbine’s The Lord of the Rings Online, Guild Wars 2 establishes a friendly, inviting atmosphere by setting everyone on the same path to vanquish a seemingly invincible evil, and effectively removes many of the genre’s tedious restrictions on cooperation. There are no long lines to wait in, no cliques of high level players lording their seniority over the rest, no wristbands required to see the most interesting stuff, everyone can easily take part in the cyclical, world-spanning party.

Anyone who’s played Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning and Rift should be familiar with the idea of public questing, which ArenaNet utilizes to achieve spectacular effects in Guild Wars 2. More than serving as simply another bit of busywork, the events fill out the fiction of each zone, requiring those present to do things like aid Asuran scientists in a fight against colossal fiery destroyers in a volcano’s superheated stomach or defend a drowsy mountainside shack from rampaging steam-powered creatures. Events are often linked, so what begins as a simple kill quest could eventually turn into a full-on centaur invasion of an otherwise peaceful township, making each task more exciting because it could be lead to some sinister and undiscovered threat.

These events serve as Guild Wars 2’s primary form of quests. They activate in every zone regularly, and at low levels involve kill, escort or collection tasks. While the initial event goals may not be especially memorable, they effectively bind your cause to everyone else’s and set the tone for the rest of the experience. There are no hoops to jump through to participate in an event. You don’t have to group up and make sure everyone’s on the same step. There’s no waiting around for a group that’s already engaged the enemy to finish up so you can beat up the mob when it respawns. Instead, when something happens, you just show up and play.

Need help in Guild Wars 2? Check out IGN's wiki.

In higher level zones the events become more complex in nature, until, in the level 70 through 80 areas, you get zone-wide stories culminating in thrilling climactic encounters in ominous coral-lined battlegrounds. Even before reaching those, the outcomes of events beyond the starting zones gain significance as entire in-game structures can be destroyed and rebuilt, and waypoint travel through contested territory temporarily blocked. These events never seem to cease, making Tyria feel chaotic and vaguely plausible, a place where the forces of good and evil don’t simply wait around for your permission to act.

You get experience and virtual currency for partaking in these roving battle parties regardless of which stage you happened to walk in at. By stripping away restrictions to join and generously blanketing all involved with rewards, ArenaNet provides ample motivation to bunch up and share the storytelling experience as NPCs shout orders and crack jokes while monsters attack. It brings the whole world together so naturally that there’s rarely a lonely moment, and anytime the in-game interface lights up with notifications and you see a big cluster of players, it’s always a joyous event.

One drawback of this system is, though the social experience and spectacle of the bigger event chains can be exhilarating, the gameplay doesn’t really match up. After running an event multiple times and learning the story and its mechanics, the initial sense of wonder melts away, and most are left doing the same old dull skill rotations over and over. Often such a big crowd gathers at an event that it’s easy to get lost in in the fireworks of spell effects and slashing of giant weapons, making it difficult to tell what effect you’re really having in the overall battle. As social storytelling devices the events are brilliant, but in making the experience accessible to all, sophisticated gameplay is sacrificed.

Still need help in Guild Wars 2? You can also check out IGN's iOS app.

Aside from events, the world of Tyria is dotted with quest givers represented by hearts on the world map, and the tasks they offer are more standard MMO fare. There’s still no quest log associated with these NPCs; their demands can be met by simply standing near them and completing specific tasks like rousing lazy workers, mending fences, killing enemies and retrieving artifacts. Compared to the hyperactive pageantry of the event system, the gameplay of the heart tasks feels tedious, despite ArenaNet’s frequent implementation of alternate skill bars to add variety. They’re something to do instead of something worth doing, which even ArenaNet appears to recognize because heart tasks appear nowhere in the post-level 70 zones.

Still, event chains and heart tasks are often built to overlap, so not too much time must be spend taking care of Guild Wars 2’s chores. Better yet, nearly everything in Guild Wars 2 awards experience, from mining to jumping up the sides of mountains to reach vista points to leveling your crafting skills by discovering recipes for stuffed mushrooms and cheese pizza. If someone else in the world is already attacking an enemy, you can attack too and still claim loot and experience. If someone is already mining ore, that doesn’t prevent you from mining it as well. So not only are other players barred from attacking and killing you in the PvE world, they’re prevented from inconveniencing you, which casts off a significant amount of unnecessary tension usually associated with MMO play. You’re constantly showered in positive reinforcement, given items or experience or currency or all three for nearly everything, and yet it never seems excessive to the point where the rewards lose their significance.

GUIDE TO HALL OF MONUMENTS AWARDS

 Bog Otter has a great video guide to the Hall of Momuments awards. Worth checking out if you can spare the time away from GW2 at the moment.

Underwater Combat And Auto Attacks

Elementalist 

Weakness of Elementalists in Underwater Battles: [link]
Jon Peters: We are working on getting Whirlpool working in PvE so that Elementalists have an underwater Elite skill
_____________________________ 

 Engineer 

Adding Auto Attack to Skill 1: [link]
Jon Peters: This is something we want to fix as soon as possible. Thanks for bringing it some attention. If it was simple we would have done it already, but we are working on it.
_____________________________  

 World 

Difficulty Finding Entrance to Dissun Mines: [link]Lauren Hotson: I’ve relayed your concerns about the entrance along to the appropriate team. For those still searching for the entrance, it’s under a snowy tuft just Southwest of the “Steelbrachen” label on the map.

DEATH FROM THE DEPTHS

I don’t know about you, but I love sPvP.  I mean, I REALLY love it.  The killing, the bloodshed, destroying your opponent or sometimes you getting destroyed, I love all of it!  When the new map,Raid on the Capricorn, came out I hopped right into a nearly empty server and started playing around.  I was elated to find it included underwater combat and then was soon attacked by sharks . . . and they promptly killed me.  I then remembered I sucked at three-dimensional combat and then spent the next few hours honing my skills.  The result: a brief Necro-centric guide for those of us who are three-dimensionally combat impaired.

I’m sure you are all thinking, “Why should we be taking pointers from a guy who died to NPC sharks in a sPvP map?”  Excellent question!  First, shut up.  Second, this demonstrates a key activity to do during PvP: find your weaknesses and progressively eliminate them. To be honest, I expected to die a lot in underwater combat, just not to sharks.  At least they didn’t have lasers on them.   The only 3D combat system I was ever good at was Descent, and that was a long time ago and very different from GW2 underwater combat.  The general principles of combat still apply in underwater sPvP, but their application is different, so we will cover the three key areas you will need to improve to make the most of your Necro in the Raid on the Capricorn.

Movement

Underwater movement is a bit disorientating at first, particularly in the heat of combat.  The number one thing people fail to do is make use of all the degrees of freedom.  Forward, backward, left, right and strafe still work but you also have the ability to swim up and dive down as well.  Swim up is your space bar and swim down is assigned to NOTHING!  Thanks, ArenaNet.  So, first things first, go assign “dive” to something, I suggest shift since it’s a big key and you generally aren’t doing anything with it.  Go on, I’ll wait . . . okay, lets move on.  You can use up and down in combination with  your other movement skills which will help put you out of the range of enemy attacks.

Next, stay out of swimming limbo.  If you’ve spent any time in the water you will notice that swimming on the surface takes away your spells–all of them. Not just your normal land-based skills, but also the underwater skills.  Not only are you unskillful but you also can’t dodge, making you basically an easy kill for the enemy.  Just in case any of you had the brilliant idea that you move faster swimming on the surface, you don’t.  In fact, since you can’t dodge or use speed-enhancing skills, you are much MUCH slower swimming on the surface.  Take-home lesson, don’t do it.

Feeling disoriented during combat is normal, you just have to desensitize yourself to it.  I suggest fighting some NPCs in an underwater zone.  Don’t just clobber them to death, but instead try to kite them around and practice moving out of the way of attacks or moving around the environment.  To really put the pressure on, grab several mobs at once to really put yourself in danger similar to an sPvP environment.

Positioning and Environment

When attacking an enemy, avoid trying to position yourself to attack them but rather force them to move to attack you!  This will give you the advantage. Heck, even Sun Tzu says this!

Thus one who is skillful at keeping the enemy on the move maintains deceitful appearances, according to which the enemy will act.

In fact, almost all of the fifth book is  about movement and manipulating your enemy, so I suggest reading it for good measure.  If you read that and were like “Whaaa . . .?” don’t worry, I will break it down for you.  You want the enemy to be forced to react to you, not the other way around. In underwater combat, if you have mastered movement, then you will have the advantage, and by always forcing the enemy to react to you, it automatically gives you an advantage.  Not only that, but if you make the enemy believe you are running away or are flailing about they may make some bad decision, thinking they can just chase you and burst you down.  They will burn cooldowns and move themselves out of advantageous positions to accomplish this, giving you the opportunity to crush them.

Treasure, score!

Make use of the underwater environment to give you an advantage.  Let’s take a quick look at the capture point here.  One of the most common issues in sPvP is people just standing around on a flat area and pummeling each other, occasionally dodging.  This is bad, NO! *smacks you with a newspaper* Bad Necro!  We use line of sight to block enemy attacks, we use the environment to conceal our location so we can surprise the enemy, and we use the environment to force the enemy to move to a disadvantageous location.  

Go away shark, I am screenshotting here.

The underwater capture point has a few things that other capture points have, such as a flat surface area and some pillars providing LoS around the point.  If  you look reeeeeally close you can identify a few things that are new, like sharks (without lasers).  We can also see two large stone formations on either side, with a lip at the top of both, a rock ceiling area, and finally, a small sunken dome area that is a little more than 1,200 units away from the capture point.  The great thing about these ledges is that incoming enemies rarely look up when they are entering the area.  Even if you don’t look up, watch yourself next time and you will realize you scan the entire area below you looking for enemies while you shrug off sharks and try to capture the point.  Even if you start taking damage, you are far more likely to look around you in a 360-degree arc and never once look up!  Use this to your advantage and also start breaking yourself of this habit.

If you are defending or guarding a point, try positioning yourself up above the point so you can view incoming enemies and get several great hits on them before they even know to defend themselves.  This position will leave you a bit exposed . . . and encircled by sharks, so you may want to use the sunken dome area to the south.  You can quickly get in long-distance range of enemies from this point while having a great view of the capture point, but are also easily able to conceal yourself.

Skills and Traits

As Necromancers, we get two weapons for underwater combat, Spears and Tridents (because those just scream undead summoner).  The Spear is your up-close and personal weapon with a life force-generating autoattack.  The Trident, on the other hand, is the longer-range weapon.  These weapons take a LOT of practice to get down and there will be a lot of weapon-swapping if you want to use them effectively.  While it is somewhat effective to kite foes at max range using the Trident’s Crimson Tide spell, it is not very practical if you have more than one foe or if they close that gap.  Instead, you want to build a bit of a cadence where you pull foes in, quickly damage them, and then gain distance again.  My favorite way is to pull multiple foes towards you with the Spear’s Deadly Catch, switch to Trident, use Feast to gain a lot of Life Force, and finally use Frozen Abyss to freeze them and Foul Current to dart away.  This is just one of the many combinations you can use and it will make you extremely deadly underwater.

Right about now you may be saying to yourself, “Hey, we have a whole new set of skills for our Death Shroud, those must be awesome!” Well, there is good news and bad news.  The good news is you will be able to generate Life Force just as rapidly underwater as above, and a lot of your non-damaging abilities are incredibly useful, like a two-second directional AoE fear and a targeted AoE blindness and poison. The bad news is your big gun, Life Blast, is a bit different than its dry land counterpart.  The primary difference is the time between casts.  It takes about three seconds from start of cast to end of cast underwater as opposed to one second on dry land.  You also don’t gain more damage from having more life force underwater, but you do get to transfer one condition to an enemy when you Life Blast.  

Your utility skills are pretty limited underwater; they literally blank out a number of your abilities.  Basically, you get Minions, with the exception of the Flesh Wurm, and you get the Signet of Undeath and a few others.  Remember, you get a secondary set of Utility Skills underwater, so make sure you choose them before battle.  On the plus side, minions are some of the best underwater skills since minion AI doesn’t become disoriented underwater like their masters.  You are limited to one Elite, Plague Form, which is okay, since it really is an omnidirectional attack, which suits the underwater life quite well.  However, I feel the Flesh Golem would have done just as well.  

As you can see, since you are limited in your utility skills there are a number of traits that are not optimal underwater.  Pretty much anything that gives you a bonus to weapons or ground-targeted abilities is a waste.  Siphoning, Minion, and Death Shroud traits will benefit you greatly.  Keep in mind that this all depends on how much time you plan on spending underwater.  If your team doesn’t need you there all the time then strike a balance favoring land lover traits.  On the other hand, with all these tips and practice you’ve been doing, your team may demand you spend the entire game down there. . . or maybe it’s because your minions creep them out.  Either way, at least you will be surrounded by sharks, and I think we can all agree that is awesome.

Good Luck and Good Fishing!

Health Versus Toughness & More Builds

This week I will elaborate on the Toughness vs health pool debate, as far as Warriors are concerned, and help you decide which stat to focus on. Then we’ll look at utilities in PvE, and melee survivability in World vs World. As promised, more builds ready to use at the end of this week’s column. Enjoy !

Health Pool Vs Toughness

While the debate is often very one-sided, an explanation of the differences between health pool and Toughness might be helpful. 

What is toughness? To explain it in just one sentence, the more toughness you have, the less damage you take; and the less toughness you have, the more damage you take–all of it exponential. As a Warrior, you have a pretty high base armor, making Toughness a good stat to improve. Toughness is only efficient against direct damage, and therefore has no effect on conditions. There are two ways to greatly improve your toughness: amulets (Soldier, Valkyrie and Cleric are the amulets that grant Toughness for Warriors) and our defense tree (the maximum being 300 toughness), but you can also find some with runes and jewels. I’d say to aim for up to 3100 armor. While it’s not mandatory, this is a good baseline. To give you a quick understanding, 2200 armor is weak, 2500 armor is ok, 2800 armor is very tanky, and at 3100, you are playing a tin can.

What about health pool? This stat is self-explanatory. Having a large health pool is good to stay longer in a fight and gives you more time before being killed by conditions. It is usually dangerous to be under around 16K health because high burst professions can kill someone under 16K in one successful combo (dagger Thieves, scepter dagger Elementalists, etc). You have the chance to have a very high base healthpool (18372) so you are pretty much 100% safe from senseless deaths. It is also very easy to reach a higher health pool with amulets: Berserker gives 2840 health and Soldier 5690. Those are the two amulets you will use most of the time that give you a larger health pool. Because Warrior is not necessarily sensitive to condition damage since you can counter them through utilities, traits and runes, a larger health pool is not the best way to prevent conditions from killing you.

To conclude, I’ll say as expected that toughness is by far superior to health, and health should never replace toughness. While it is good to improve health, many other stats are so much more efficient to grab (even offensive stats). Health is supposed to be the last stat you have to care about as a Warrior (even condition damage has more usefulness in certain builds). As always, we can be happy to be the only profession that combines the highest base health pool and the highest armor.

A quick note about Knight Amulet:

I know this Amulet grabs people’s attention because when you first take a look at it, you see “damage, crit and survivability and a free cup of coffee”. This is the fast food version of this combination of stats. As expected after reading the toughness paragraph, this amulet terribly lacks toughness and by no means is superior to Berserker’s amulet in most scenarios (if you compare both, you trade 5160 health for 15% critical damage and 229 power) . I’ll never suggest this amulet for Warriors over another. Feel free to take a look at my oldest entries to find ways to keep a good ratio between power, toughness (survivability)  and critical chance.

Choosing Utilities for Leveling

Before going further, the above choices are made with the expectation that you’re using Mending as your healing skill. While you can find usefulness in other heals, Mending will always be the most convenient way to go. It offers a good amount of healing combined with condition removal (that you generally only need time to time in PvE). If you are playing a signet build with Signet of Stamina then you can go with the Healing Signet.

Shouts: Three viable options here with Fear Me, For Great Justice and On My Mark. Fear Me is supposed to be a defensive skill, as a last-chance tool. For Great Justice is just an awesome damage buff with three permanent stacks of might. On My Mark will generally be hard to play with because of other choices but is still amazing.

Banners: While banners are very efficient in endgame PvE and WvWvW, they are not convenient for leveling, you will have to lug those banners all the time.

Stances: Three viable options here again with Balanced Stance, Endure Pain and Berserker Stance. Balanced Stance is good when you know you will face enemies with CCs, but you don’t have to bother too much with this if you are a beginner. Endure Pain is another last chance tool to use in dying scenarios. Berserker’s Stance is useful if you equipped a set of weapons that are adrenaline-hungry and at the same time you wanted to take advantage of Berserker’s Power and Heightened Focus.

Physical: Two choices here with Bull’s Charge and Stomp. Bull’s Charge is very good to engage fights in PvE and travel faster on the map, while Stomp is another kind of last chance tool. Make sure you pick Kick if you’re some kind of roleplayer.

Signets: All signets are good if you traited Deep Strike in the Arms tree (at low level, then banners and shouts become better). The one you don’t want to grab is the Dolyak Signet. You will want to keep the signets unused with or without the trait because their passive is generally stronger than their active in a PvE environment (unless you wanted to purge some conditions with the Signet of Stamina).  

Going into Melee against a WvW Enemy Raid

When you have 40 people or more waiting for the next hero to come into melee, you may feel like you need to give your best friend a letter addressed to your wife. Don’t worry–there are ways to go in and out enemy raids and not only will you not necessarily die but you will bring a very strong fighting dynamic to your raid.

To ensure smooth operation, make sure you have condition removals, movement skills, stability and CC. Taking a sword or a greatsword with you pretty much ensures a good amount of movement skills (Bull’s charge works too). Bring easy condition removals with Signet of Stamina, Mending, ruined Shouts or traited Warhorn. Gain Stability with Balanced Stance or the Last Stand trait in the Defense tree. And finally, bring CC with any kind of weapon or utility, since Warriors have an enormous amount of CC (AoE CC if possible).

There–you’re good to go.

More Builds Ready to Use

Melee mobility and CC WvW “Balls of Steel” build

Rifle shouts “Melee Recon”  SPvP build

Sheepy’s Team Legacy EU Tanky greatsword Mace build

Digital Sales Back Online

If you haven’t purchased GW2 yet because you’ve been waiting for the official site’s sales section to come back up, you’re in luck…because it is! After being taken down to ensure quality of gameplay for current users, ANet has reinstated it’s digital sales section. Countless hours spent troubleshooting and fixing bugs, improving server stability and overall performance has paid off. Now is your chance to get in an start your rampage! Go! Buy! Play!

Trading Post Calculator

Reddit user EskNerd recently put together a useful little tool to help people with the Trading Post. The tool is designed to calculate the revenue that a user would receive based upon the input figures. It also calculates the fees that will be accrued for listing the item on the TP.

In the below example we can see that buying an item for 3 silver and then trying to sell it for 3 silver 15 copper will result in a loss of 33 copper per transaction.

You can also use just the sell price and quickly figure out what the listing and sale fee will be. The tool can be found here and there is also an Android app available as well.