Returning couple looking for advice

Greetings! My wife and I played GW2 at release and level capped to 80 before leaving. I don't recall any expansions, and it's been a VERY long time since we played, but I do remember enjoying the combat (I think I played DW daggers) and having a great time completing zones, etc.

We are currently jonesing for an MMO experience and wondering if we should come back. Our general thought was to create new accounts, buy new copies of the game and buy up all the expansions and just level up fresh new characters. I don't want a bank full of crap to deal with and we can always go back to our old accounts and mail anything we need if we want, but mostly we want a fresh new experience with new banks, new characters, etc.

We have several questions:1) Do we have to re-do all the same quests we did before or can we avoid duplicating content by playing new races that didn't exist at launch, or different races this time?2) Are the lowbie zones going to be ghost towns, or does that game have sufficient incoming population to keep all zones active?3) Is it a good time to come back? Anything we should know about the timing, like "Wait for the XX release in June", anything like that?

Thanks, we are really looking forward to playing again if circumstances permit.

Oh, and another question: I like crafting, but I gotta think that by now the economy is just saturated with crafting goods. Apart from it being fun, is there any economic justification for starting new crafters now?

There haven't been any new races added. We still have Humans, Norn, Asura, Charr and Sylvari.

Each race has its own stories up to the third chapter of the Personal story (where you help out the orders and join one of them. And of course within each race's specific parts there are variations (Humans: noble/commoner/streets, sister/parents/circus, that stuff).

There is plenty of activity in all zones.

It's a pretty good time now. The Path of Fire expansion that was released last year has proved to be a great success, with the introduction of a humungously awesome mount system where the basic mounts are acquired strictly through gameplay. (They can be reskinned via the gemstore, but that's strictly cosmetic.)

Hi RegnorVex.

The new professions are specializations that existing professions can master rather than a completely new profession. For example a Ranger can become a Druid (HoT) or a Soulbeast (PoF). You don't have to replay any old content unless you want the achievements.

The starter zones are still populated, from what I've seen the human and charr starter zones seem the most populous. With the recent Awakened invasions the starter zones have been come a hotbed of activity.

I'd say it's always a good time to come back. :)

-DedTreeJig

I do hope to see you back, I was dormant for a while after the release of Heart of Thorns but then my spouse started playing again and it sparked my interest again. I don't know how much you know, so apologies if this feels patronizing - I don't mean it that way at all, just starting here assuming you know nothing since the game has changed quite a bit. To answer your questions from my own point of view:

1. There are no new races (and no plans to add them, if I recall correctly). They have added one new class, the Revenant, that is a heavy armor class whose basic concept is channeling specific powerful characters from GW lore, sort of becoming an avatar for them. They have also added two new "Elite Specializations" for each class, that give the class a different weapon to play with as well as a new set of skills and traits. They can feel a lot like an entirely new class. Because of that, they don't intend to add completely new classes either, though each specialization mixes the flavor and playstyle up enough that I don't think it's necessary.

Depending on what races, how many characters, and how far into the story you played, you can get a fairly different core-game personal story even on replays. And of course, each expansion has its own unique story that takes place after your personal story. They also release "Living Story" episodes between each expansion that advance the story. As long as you log in between one Living Story release and another, you'll get that episode for free. If you missed one, you'll have to pay a bit for each episode, but they are fairly cheap. I would highly recommend buying them to learn more about the characters and story taking place between the expansions, or you may be lost. Just remember, you can log in to get new ones as they are released for free. Also there is no Living World Season 1 available; it happened in real-time, rather than in instances, so they only have a free summary of it for you to review.

2. Low-level zones are less populated than at release, but they do still see decent traffic and dynamic events. You can look up "World Bosses," which are on timers throughout the world and will bring a mass influx of players to a zone to do an event chain together and kill a boss that can drop some nice things for your leveling-up adventures. Also, there are "dailies" that assign people a few different tasks for rewards. One of them every day involves going to a designated zone and completing at least four events, so that zone will always be saturated with people to help out. People will even call out an event in chat and link a nearby waypoint so you know where it is.

3. There's no news about another expansion yet, so now is a great time to jump back in. Get the stories done (including the Living World stuff between expansion releases, if you decide to do them and fill in the gaps). Play with the refreshed classes, try out WvW or PvP if interested. Logging in to do all that stuff will make sure you get any new Living World stories as they're released.

As far as crafting - there's not really much of a need for lower-level crafted content, but there is plenty of Ascended gear that can only be made bylevel 500 crafters of the appropriate type. That stuff is account-bound, so it can't be sold to you on the market, and if you want it you will have to craft it yourself. That can wait though, if you'd like to pick it up later on.

Trying to think of what else to say... don't be surprised when you get to Heart of Thorns content and find it's much harder. The new enemies there are real pains in the butt until you learn their patterns, and the Hero Points are usually champion fights. There are still people organizing hero point trains in the maps though, so if you want you can join them to grab a lot of them in one run. Path of Fire content is much easier for a duo... and man, mounts are fun, they made them so unique and a much better experience than any MMO I've played.

Let me know if you have more questions!

Ah, so much good advice, many thanks to each of you for your thoughts.

We created new accounts and started as humans, she rolled a Guardian and I'm an Elementalist. I have no idea if that will be an effective duo, but it has been fun so far. At this point the game doesn't seem any different from when we first played it, but we're still very young and I expect most of the changes will be more obvious later.

When will we get to HoT or PoF content? Is that all post-80 stuff? We're not in a hurry to level up, we enjoy the journey, but we're very curious about what's new (we each purchased the package that includes PoF Ultimate and HoT Standard).

Never having played an Elementalist before, I'm wondering if it's possible to kind of "specialize" in one of the attunements. I realize I'll have access to each of the elements, but what if I want to focus on Air, for example, and be a Lightning specialist , is that kind of thing possible?

I don't even know what else to ask at this point. We'll just keep leveling up for now and check back here for more tips.

Thanks, guys.

@"Wandering Minstrel.7645" said:Ah, so much good advice, many thanks to each of you for your thoughts.

We created new accounts and started as humans, she rolled a Guardian and I'm an Elementalist. I have no idea if that will be an effective duo, but it has been fun so far. At this point the game doesn't seem any different from when we first played it, but we're still very young and I expect most of the changes will be more obvious later.

When will we get to HoT or PoF content? Is that all post-80 stuff? We're not in a hurry to level up, we enjoy the journey, but we're very curious about what's new (we each purchased the package that includes PoF Ultimate and HoT Standard).

Never having played an Elementalist before, I'm wondering if it's possible to kind of "specialize" in one of the attunements. I realize I'll have access to each of the elements, but what if I want to focus on Air, for example, and be a Lightning specialist , is that kind of thing possible?

I don't even know what else to ask at this point. We'll just keep leveling up for now and check back here for more tips.

Thanks, guys.

Hello and welcome back. All expansions stuff (exept revenant) are accesable after lvl 80. It is much harder then the core game so if you feel like you are dominating in expansion maps this might not be the case. Most of the changes were to post 80 playing.As an ele you can specialise in one or 2 elements (look at specialisations i think after lvl 35 but i am not sure) but if you want to play him/her to the maximum you should know what other attunements does so you can swap if you need something specific (like cc or projectile defense) and swap back when you can.

Crafting is not that good for geting gold if you dont find a hole in Trading post (i found one and made hundreds of gold) but it provides experiance and you can use it to level your character. Especialy lower recepies are not that expensive. After 80 if you want to (its not needed for mos content) you can go for ascended gear (pink) that is above exotic (orange) and the most reliable way to get it is crafting.

I'll have to do some research on crafting ascended gear, I like the idea of making my own gear. I think I read somewhere that it's all soulbound so that if I want it, I either have to craft it myself or maybe get it as drops?

What about consumables like potions or stat foods, those are generally a good source of income in most MMOs, not here?

Thanks for the info

@"Wandering Minstrel.7645" said:Ah, so much good advice, many thanks to each of you for your thoughts.

We created new accounts and started as humans, she rolled a Guardian and I'm an Elementalist. I have no idea if that will be an effective duo, but it has been fun so far. At this point the game doesn't seem any different from when we first played it, but we're still very young and I expect most of the changes will be more obvious later.

When will we get to HoT or PoF content? Is that all post-80 stuff? We're not in a hurry to level up, we enjoy the journey, but we're very curious about what's new (we each purchased the package that includes PoF Ultimate and HoT Standard).

Never having played an Elementalist before, I'm wondering if it's possible to kind of "specialize" in one of the attunements. I realize I'll have access to each of the elements, but what if I want to focus on Air, for example, and be a Lightning specialist , is that kind of thing possible?

I don't even know what else to ask at this point. We'll just keep leveling up for now and check back here for more tips.

Thanks, guys.

Expansion content is all designed for experienced level 80 players. It's a significant step up from core content. I posted a response to another new player just now explaining a lot of this and a few other things that might be new to you: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/37642/new-80-level-fresh-korean-needs-help-recommendation-from-your-guys#latest

I'm not current on elementalist, but generally staff elementalists tend to spend a lot of time in fire attunement. This might work out well for you and your wife if she can keep them busy with the guardian while you drop area damage on them. The trouble with staff for solo play is that enemies tend to want to come and rip your face off rather than conveniently standing in your area effects while you pelt them from complete safety at 1200 range! And if your wife gets into trouble, you can use your other attunements to provide support in the form of healing and CC! Nice!

On the other hand, you really don't do the elementalist class justice by camping fire attunement. It's a complex class, but I recommend pushing yourself to explore it. I highly recommend dagger/dagger for open world. It's tougher than other weapon specs as you have to get fairly close to use it, but you and your wife can benefit eachother a lot more if you stick close together at melee range. In fact, if you like that sort of gameplay and you want to go tanky support, the HoT elite spec "Tempest" is really fun to do that with in open world!

Here's a sample of a d/d auramancer tempest support build in open world:

It's a versatile class. The build I used in the video is a tanky healer setup. If I hadn't been alone in the video, most of those boons and heals you saw would have applied to nearby allies as well! However, ele is typically played as a glass cannon - the best damage dealers around! It's tough because you have light armor and bottom-tier health, though! But maybe you can make it work with a little support from your wife? Guardians are good at giving out protective boons like protection and aegis, but also at boosting damage with boons like quickness! It's all in how you want to play it...at least until you start playing in organized groups with others!

@"Wandering Minstrel.7645" said:I'll have to do some research on crafting ascended gear, I like the idea of making my own gear. I think I read somewhere that it's all soulbound so that if I want it, I either have to craft it myself or maybe get it as drops?

What about consumables like potions or stat foods, those are generally a good source of income in most MMOs, not here?

Thanks for the info

This game has a weird relationship with consumables. "Technically" the most interested groups will be raiders..... but they are so few in number, and tend to be organized, that they all supply their own food. On top of this, to make consumables less market dependent, all the desirable Stats have alternative recipes that can be made for much cheaper, but are account bound by default. This leaves a very narrow market for consumables, requiring much more conscious tracking of market trends on an almost day to day basis.

As for the original questions..... populations ebb and flow depending on what the season is like, and if other players have a reason to be someplace. Theres a band up to level 45 where F2P players are most likely to be active in maps, but then drops sharply until you reach level 80 and World boss Train. This largely has to do with that being around how long players will either click with the game mechanics, or quit out of frustration with some arbitrary measurement of progress. As for the reason why it resumes at level 80 and World boss train, is this essentially being the lowest effort farming route for daily rewards. Expansion content requires more coordination, thus those actually need Commanders running squads to hold the Pugs together. The only event in HOT that still works on pugs in autopilot is Octovine in Tarir; but thats mostly because its been the #1 farming event for 18 months after HOT released. Everything else follows trends..... Living story maps are most active on their first 2 weeks, and then falls into line based on farming viability. To keep things sane, many guilds will host events on particular maps to enable achievement hunting or currency farming. Finding them is just a matter of scanning the LFG menu during various prime time hours for time zones, and seeing if any are active. Some guilds do things on the regular, and will usually have an events calendar you track and plan ahead for.

Another to consider is how you handle personal motivation. This is extremely relaxed when it comes to "end game", and gives you a bunch of activities, but no solid dictation as to what you should be doing. Many players out of the WoW crowd, and its clones, have trouble with this concept, since WoW's archetype is a reward treadmill at its core. Players who have weak self-initiative tend to get lost easily in this situation, and that turns into frustration as the rewards aren't modulated on a schedule, but rather sharp increases in investment effort.

On that note, it should also be pointed out that because this game isn't strictly linear, skipping or power-leveling through content has no inherent value in of itself. It boils down to how interested you are in the activity itself, or the rewards associated for completing that content. Even the leveling process for new players have been sped up via daily rewards and leveling tomes, so as not to get stuck in a level rut. Yet even without that, leveling in this game is incredibly fast, as long as you favor what the world design favors, as opposed to following habits developed in other MMOs. For example, grinding mob kills for exp and loot are stupidly inefficient; where as dynamic events give huge amounts of Exp, and present the player with strong rewards for participation and success. Thus the smoother dynamic events are completed, the better the reward rate for EVERYONE involved.

@"starlinvf.1358", thanks for a comprehensive answer, I re-read it several times.

I'm not concerned about leveling time, we recognize that the journey is the reward and our most fragile time in MMOs is always in so-called "end-game". I can't count the number of times we have level-capped in an MMO only to peter out shortly thereafter due to end-game ennui. We are not big on re-play via alts (though I have to admit, Path of Exile is a notable exception, where we regularly ran out of character slots and had to to delete characters in order to re-start), so we usually look at the end-game with either relief or sadness.

We'll keep your advice in mind as we level organically through game design. Thanks again.

@Wandering Minstrel.7645 said:@"starlinvf.1358", thanks for a comprehensive answer, I re-read it several times.

I'm not concerned about leveling time, we recognize that the journey is the reward and our most fragile time in MMOs is always in so-called "end-game". I can't count the number of times we have level-capped in an MMO only to peter out shortly thereafter due to end-game ennui. We are not big on re-play via alts (though I have to admit, Path of Exile is a notable exception, where we regularly ran out of character slots and had to to delete characters in order to re-start), so we usually look at the end-game with either relief or sadness.

We'll keep your advice in mind as we level organically through game design. Thanks again.

This game is extremly alt-friendly since you can get tomes of knowlage that provides whole level. So if you want another character and dont want to lvl you can just use 78 tomes of knowlage.

Generaly first full ascended gear nedds to be crafted and it is quite expensive. But most end game content doesnt require ascended gear (for example training raid guilds want only ascended weapons and trinkets)

You can get ascended trinkets from fractals or season 3 maps quite easily.And you can get ascended weapons from elite spec colection or from one part of story (knight of the thorn i guess) and this one is almost for free.

But first armor needs to be crafted. It cost between 100 and 200 g (+gold for maxing crafting) which might be alot for new player. Dont feel discouraged since as i said it is not needed for most things.

Hope you will both enjoy this game and gl