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Translating this game from WoW.


DigletteFan.9815

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This game is awesome so far, and I'm having a lot of fun learning about the game.

Though having used the character boost, having everything thrown at me at once is a little daunting.If anyone else came from wow that could help kind of seperate any significant differences about this game from wow, it might help me transition between the two.

Thanks!

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The biggest difference is that this game is about horizontal progression. It doesn't take much, relatively speaking, to get the "top tier" of stats, and the 2nd-best tier is very very close in power to the top tier.

Guild Wars in general rewards skill and exploration above playtime. You get exp just for exploring corners of the map, and end-game content like raids and Fractals (a kind of dungeon) don't require "meta" builds, they most just require you to know what you're doing.

The game is most rewarding when you identify what you like doing and do it.

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Hi,I was from vanilla WoW and joined GW2 a month or so after launch. Even then it took me ages to figure my way around.

Horizontal end game progressionLevel cap has always been 80 - progression past this has been via the mastery systemNo equipment threadmill - once you get to ascended level gear, there is no greater stat amount to grind for... only the stat combinations change with each expansion. Legendary items have the same stat amounts but are freely changeable and with unique skins. Exotic level equipment will get you through most content.

Fashion warsSome of the most expensive items in the game are purely cosmetic in nature.

CombatAction combat instead of tab targetting. Meaning dodging, movement and LoS plays a bigger role.There is no traditional trinity of tank, healer, dps in most content. It only applies to raids, and even then some conventions get turned on its head (e.g. the best tank is the light armored Mesmer). This has resulted in a very dps focused meta since you can keep yourself alive with self-heals, dodging, blocks, etc in all the non-raid content.

PvPAll stats normalized and your PvE is only for cosmetics. So you are not at a level or gearing disadvantage. This does not apply in WvW though.

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A few resources first, if you haven't found them yet:http://dulfy.net/category/gw2/ - a good place to go to keep up to date on the latest events, gemstore changes, etc. Not at all the guides and things are up to date, so if something is more than a couple of years off I would look elsewhere.

Gw2 wiki: very useful tool available right from your chat box in game. You can use it by typing, for example, /wiki gathering (to get info about gathering, level ranges for gathering tools, etc). /wiki wb gets you a world boss countdown timer. Another way I use the wiki is when I can't figure out how to get to zone. Search the zone in wiki and it will have a "how to get there" section that you can backtrack from.

Here are some sites to help keep on top of your resources and timed events and many many more things.gw2efficiency.com/gw2timer.com/

There are tons of collectibles and currencies and special map events that can be difficult to keep track of. I personally gw2efficiency because I like the clean interface and I like the crafting planning tools, but both are well worth a look . Bookmark them for later because they might be a bit overwhelming if you are brand new to the game.

Oh and if you want to learn about the world and the lore, woodenpotatoes on youtube is your guy. Fair warning, he's not known for being very concise, but that's actually one of the things I enjoy about his videos. He is a walking gw2 and gw1 encyclopedia. You might already know who he is anyway:

Final thought, speaking as an ex-wow player/raider:I have the most fun in this game when I take a breath and look around. Let the world take you on an adventure. There are tons of random things and places to find if you explore, and trust me if you don't look you would never know just much detail is tucked away all over the place. It's remarkable. Since there isn't a continual gear grind you can afford yourself the freedom to take in the world and have fun with it. And hell, if you wanna take a few days away from the game, that's ok too. you might miss an event or something but you aren't punished for having a life, both in and out of the game :)

Oh one more thing: if you have serious completionist tendencies, learn to keep them in check or you might lose your mind. It's impossible to own all the collectibles in the game. Enjoy the ones you can get and don't worry about ones you miss. There are always new things to collect on the horizon.

Cheers and most of all have fun.

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Make the GW2 WIKI your friend. You will need to refer to it regularly. Dulfy site already mentioned and a few other good ones but the beauty of this game is that it is meant to be explored and for much to be discovered/learned as you come across things, not all at once.

A big difference is that a lot of the best content is group content-- even if you are level 1 and just leveling up. Always look for orange circles on the map as they indicate what events are currently in progress. Also check the Looking for Group tab-- as some get set up ahead of time. With the exception of raids, or groups that post requirements, you are able to join most map events without any prior knowledge and just follow along, or ask questions in squad/map. Otherwise, turn up the music, wander around, and when all else fails start looking at achievements tab as it will lead you to a ton of stuff.

The volume of things there are to do, and how to go about doing them, are not always obvious. Always feel free to ask questions in map chat (some trolls but many extremely helpful people who will go out of their way to show or explain things) and if that doesn't work come here and ask.

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The best thing you can do is park your level 80 for a while and play an alt and learn the ropes. Completing an area fully (all hearts, way points, vistas, points of interest) will get you some (optional) rewards. Dailies also give you 2 gold, which is a lot when you're starting out.

Story mode dungeons are easy to do once you reach their level and no one should get bitchy at you for not knowing what you're doing. (they aren't end game stuff)

Crafting is a big money sink at 1st but does pay off later.

When you do go back to your 80, you'll actually earn boosts that you can use on your low level character and may them instantly gain levels.

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Ah, I meant to reply to this a while ago. One major difference from WoW not yet mentioned in this thread is that nodes here are not stealable, nor are kills unless you flat out kill something before another person can tag it. So you don't have to panic if someone runs up and starts mining while you are fighting nearby (usually they do that if they see you are handily winning, elsewise they're likely to toss in a few hits to help you out and get their own loot besides). The node will still be there for you at your leisure.

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Welcome!

There are a ton of little differences that most of us may not even think of at first.. way too many to list in a thread. In addition to the great info above (especially /wiki, that is your new best friend), and with some more detail, a few things about the combat in general:

  • Dodging is extremely important. While there are a lot of times you can just run out of enemy aoe circles, there are some that are large enough to make that impractical at best, and some enemies have particularly nasty attacks (mainly knockdowns, that often lead into more knockdowns). Make sure to bind the dodge hotkey on something easy to reach, and practice it as much as possible. You have a fairly generous amount of time where you're evading all attacks (except for dots that are already on you). Defensive gear is much less effective, relatively, than abilities that flat out avoid damage or reduce it. A skill that gives protection will reduce your damage intake by almost as much or even more than an entire set of defensive gear, if I'm remembering correctly. Some classes with low health do tend to use a little extra vitality on their gear, though (esp. thieves, elementalists, or guardians).

  • Buffs are almost all extremely short range, and short duration. If you're more than a few character lengths away from someone you're grouping with, you're probably not getting any buffs from them or giving any to them. This is one reason that range specs are generally not favored over melee specs, which is pretty much the opposite of WoW. The effect of boons is also MASSIVE in comparison to buffs in WoW, especially in recent times - you can more than double your damage on most professions going from no boons to 25 might, fury, and quickness, so maintaining them is a cornerstone of group play. Most buffs are referred to as Boons, those are the orange icons with white borders. There are a few types of buffs that don't appear as boons. This mainly matters if an enemy can remove on convert boons into conditions (much more common in PvP than in PvE).

  • Tanks effectively don't exist. Enemies have a tendency to go for characters with higher toughness, but this is only a hard and fast rule in raids, and there only in certain encounters. Taunts are also very short and few classes have them. Most of time, avoiding damage is a combination of personal responsibility from dodges, and group buffs like distortion from mesmers, aegis from guardians, blind fields on weaker enemies from necromancers or thieves, projectile reflects or destruction from several professions, etc.

  • Pure healers do exist, but are generally only used in specific, high end content, e.g. raids and high level fractals (similar to mythic plus, but with a wider range, there are 100 levels of increasing difficulty). Everyone has their own healing skill, and while some professions also have extra healing from utilities or weapons, people rarely have gear to increase it in PvE. Most of the time, the base healing that everyone has is enough to get you through once you know which big attacks to dodge.

I think that covers a bit more of the basics. Feel free to send me a message in game if you have more questions (you can whisper with /w as usual and you'll want to use the same tag, including the number, shown here on the forums, since that will message someone no matter what character they're on).

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As others have mentioned, there is no gear treadmill so you can come and go as you please. If you do, keep an eye out for Living Story releases. They're free forever if you login on the right dates. You might also consider logging in every day as the rewards are very good for the minute it takes. When you do come back, you'll have a pile of loot and some new content to play.

As a new player you will need gold. There are a variety of map wide meta events that provide good rewards but Silverwastes RIBA farming is the best for gold. You can find a group under that description or similar.

Look out for commanders on your minimap. They're players who are leading others on a group activity. The icon is a colored inverted triangle/chevron and if you mouse over it you will get a name and distance. You don't need an invite, just go join in.

Inventory management can be a chore in this game but there are tools to deal with it. Your bank has a materials section where you can store stacks of 250 (increased by gems). You can send all mats there by clicking the gear in your bag window and selecting the deposit option. Items can be sold on the Trading Post (Auction House) from any location but you will need to speak with a Black Lion NPC to get your gold. You don't need any crafting ability to salvage (Disenchant) gear and you can automatically salvage everything of a particular quality by using the menu on the salvage kit. You should salvage blues and greens that you aren't using because they give you luck which is an account wide permanent increase to magic find. Check the price of yellows, they might be worth selling instead of salvaging. There is also a Sell Junk button on every vendor.

You can access any gathering node with the proper tool. This is a good way to make gold or get crafting mats. The nodes will show up on your minimap. Normal ones respawn in an hour, the rich ones once a day.

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There are a lot of basics as well:

  1. Different weapons have different skills. In WoW, different weapons were for looks and different stats, but in GW2, you will literally get different skills on your bar when you equip a new weapon. You will probably want to experiment to see what you like. Note that you have different weapons for underwater combat as well, and your other skills will also swap when you're underwater. There's an in-between where you're swimming on the surface which can be dangerous: you don't have your underwater skills nor do you have your land-based skills.
  2. Your traits (WoW talents, I think) are changeable any time out of combat, though there's no A/B traiting that lets you swap between two builds.
  3. Your character down-levels when you go to lower-level areas, so you don't quite steamroll through. (Not everything scales well, especially the fact that a level 80 will have more traits available to you than the down-scaled char. You and your equipment's stats downscale, but no traits are removed.)
  4. Weapon swapping (between two alternatives) is gained at a fairly low level. Elementalist can't switch weapons, but instead switches attunements, giving four different skills for each slot. Engineers also can't switch weapons, though they have kits, which they can equip in a skill slot that acts like a weapon swap. Revenants are even more different.
  5. You have a lot of things to choose from, but unlike WoW, you don't require a macro program to give you access to them all. You have to choose: 5 weapon skill slots -- with possibly two weapons, etc, as mentioned in #4 -- and five other skills. You may also get some additional skills above the five on the left, related to modes, pets, etc. Still, in general you have ten skill buttons plus some extras, not dozens. So you can do a LOT of things, but you have to choose -- for this particular combat -- which things are important.
  6. You have several game modes: 1) Open world which may have fairly large events and has hearts (local quest NPCs), 2) story line which often break you out into an instance that appears to be open world but is not, 3) WvW where you are fighting two other realms in PvP, 4) PvP of various quality and types. WvW and PvP are available from icons in the upper left of your screen. There's a place called "The Mists" that's sort of a lobby area for WvW where you can try things out. You have separate builds for open world and WvW.
  7. Even though you leaped to 80 -- and got some level-80 gear free -- you'll see that very little of your map is revealed and very few waypoints are enabled. You should probably explore the maps and unlock waypoints. (There are no Warlocks to summon you.) You'll also want to earn Skill Points, which enable you to add unlock traits/skills. And distinct from Skill Points are Mastery Points. Skill points need to be earned by each alt, while Mastery points are account-wide. Mastery points allow you to add new kinds of skills and to master gliding (added in the first expansion, HoT) and mounts (added in the second expansion PoF). There are also scenic panorama points. All of these, and completely exploring sections of the map, and crafting, etc, give you experience and rewards.
  8. Speaking of which, since you're 80, your experience is used to train masteries. You need to select what you're training -- and will be training different things in different expansion areas -- and this applies across all characters. Once you've filled the exp bar, you can use Mastery points to actually level up the mastery you've been training. You need both, and in general the limiting factor is Masery Points so you may want to be strategic with what masteries you gain. In general, I've found that you don't want to max any particulary mastery out -- you usually suffer diminishing returns with higher levels giving less-generally-useful bonuses -- and mounts in particular have a strategy to your progression.

Hope that helps. (My WoW knowledge is years old, though.)

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Also, I recently discovered that if you use one-handed weapons and you want to use, say, a torch in your off hand, but want to switch between axe and sword in your main hand, you do NOT have to have two torches. GW2 is smart enough to know that if you swap to a set with one of the hands missing but your other set has that hand, it uses it. (Skills-wise. I haven't tested stats and sigils to make sure they also work across.)

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@DigletteFan.9815 said:This game is awesome so far, and I'm having a lot of fun learning about the game.

Though having used the character boost, having everything thrown at me at once is a little daunting.If anyone else came from wow that could help kind of seperate any significant differences about this game from wow, it might help me transition between the two.

Thanks!

Power-Strength, basically its raw damageCondition or Condi for shot-Stats geared towards damage over time (Think Destruction vs Affliction Warlock give or take as power vs condi) most people pick one dmg type n go for it in fullPrecision-Crit ChanceFerocity- Crit Damage (goes hand in hand with precision, few exceptions like greatsword guardian build)

If you have a boost id reccomend to NOT use it on the following classe: Mesmer, Elementalist, Revenant, Thief. Reason being is, they have more complicated mechanics than most classes whereas other classes are just plain so to speak and do what they do at face value, whereas the ones i listed tend to have lots of combos and nuances to them, and your lack of expertise in their function might have you makin th emistake of selling gear you might be able to use or equipping the wrong stats.

The game and its community is pretty chill overal,, unlike most MMOs theres no gear treadmill where next expansion pops out, suddnely theres a mad scramble to gear up because overall, your gear is just as viable as it was before more or less.

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/wiki is your friend

And the best advice is the same as WoW (or was in my day). Play through the game learning as you go from level 1 through 80. Avoid level boosts (and other expenses boosters) a least on your first character. By the time you've hit 80 you should have a pretty good idea of how the game works if you've been paying attention.

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A few significant titles would be:Mobility.It pays to keep moving, watch where you and your enemies are. Secondly, dodge, avasiveness is key to survival. Learn to recognize big attacks, and dodge them.QuestingGuild wars relies less on events and a streamlined story thats essentially a lot of quests, instead, the story is cut into cinematic instances with big fights, the lore of the world is put into heart quests, or events. The best way to experience a story is going from marker to marker, doing all events and hearts along the way.GearingUnlike wow, there is no Armor Level (iL), instead, there are stats you focus on, and then select one of few qualities:Basic, whiteFine, blueMasterwork, greenRare, yellowExotic, orangeAscended (perfect), pinkLegendary (perfect flexible), purple.so, you'll focus on a stat, say, condition play, toughness, raw power, and then choose or work towards a quality level. Legendary is a tier above ascended, but its reward is the abilitynto change its stats on the fly, which ascended cannot.combat mechanicsSome bosses have complex mechanics that require mastering. Sometimes you can ignore them, but that would only bring impending doom upon you. Various mechanics are stability, reflecting or blocking, or breaking a creatures breakbar (by using crowd control abilities)

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