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Noob/Returning Player


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Hello guys, as the title says im a partial returning player, a bit of background.

Played Gw1 from day one to the end of his "active cycle", mainly gvg/ha and some pve. Classes were ranger and monk (infuser).Played gw2 for the first time in 2012 and stopped shortly, returning again in the past few days (because of the covid lockdown) and managed to get to lvl 80 in a couple of days.My question is, what to do now? Im totally lost, since im playing alone and i dont have the slightest about dungeons/gear and other things.I managed to read some infos on the wikis and other sites but alone is a bit hard and im clearly a noob atm (gear/gameplay wise). Any tips on what to do?

My id is raine.2439 and currently on Fissure of Woe server.

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Hi! Welcome back!

What to do is a big question! The short answer is: Anything you like!

Do you have the expansions? If so, I might recommend focusing on the storyline. You won't be leveling between episodes like you were during the personal story, but the expansions will require you to play through the maps and unlock various abilities in order to advance the story, so there is still a sense of progression there. Plus you'll get all kinds of cool rewards and skills as you play!

If that's not your thing right now, maybe get into fractals? Or WvW? Or PvP? There are lots of things to do! You just have to pick something and dive in!

Feel free to add me to your contact list and send me a whisper in game. I'm happy to chat with you if you need advice and, if you're on North American servers, we can play together some time! Seeya out there!

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Gears

Gear wise, one of the easiest and accessible gear set is Berserker's stat (power, precision, ferocity). You can get the Exotic version from trading post and, to get the cheapest version, use the search filter by only entering the attributes (power, precision & ferocity), rarity (in this case Exotic), and the type of the gear (e.g mace, or staff, or light armor). Then set the price from low to high. But eventually it boils down on what kind of build you want to go with. For more attribute combinations (prefix), you can check here

Hero Points, Specializations, and Build

Since you have the expansions, you can unlock & equip elite specializations. It can only be equipped in the third/bottom slot of the specialization template pic. At first, you need to gather Hero Points to unlock them, totaling 250 points for each specialization. The best way to do it is by hunting HPs from the expansion maps since each hero challenge there gives you 10 points or, if you like wvw, use the Testimony of Heorics and get the notarized scrolls of Maguuma/Desert from Heroic Notary vendor. These scrolls will grant you random hero challenges from HoT or PoF maps (that means you don't have to do that challenge anymore on that character). My advice if you wanna you the testimonies, get scrolls of Maguuma first since HoT hero challenges' fights are Champion grade and can be difficult to do alone. But you can always try and the Looking for Group feature and see if there is an HP Train ran by players that usually starts in Verdant Brink. For PoF hero challenge, they are much easier to solo and the fights usually just veteran/elite mobs.

Generally, there are two types of damage dealer, power (flat, direct, on-hit damage) and condi (DoT, ticking damage).

  • Power build benefits from power, precision & ferocity attributes. Prefix example: Berserker's, Marauder's
  • Condi benefits from condition damage, expertise, and sometimes precision (to proc passives that trigger conditions). And a bit of power that bump its damage. Prefix example: Rabid's/Carrion (easy to obtain), Viper's (glass cannon semi-hybrid, but need crafting), Trailblazer's (High condi dmg & tanky, but expensive to craft).

Some elite specializations work well with power, some with condi, and some even with both. I would suggest doing your own research on different builds since I don't know what class you're playing. You can check:

  • Metabattle
  • Discretize.eu
  • Snowcrows

Discretize & Snowcrows got group content builds, so the dps builds are mostly sacrificing self-sustain for open world. But they can give you a general idea on what elite spec is good in what aspect.

You can also try out the elite specializations & build by going to PvP lobby (panel located on the top left of your screen), since all skills and specializations are unlocked there, even if you're level 1 in PvE.

Content

So besides story, you can also do the respective achievements that rewards you title or items as well as AP that counts toward your account progressions. In fact, achievements are tied to many aspect contents across PvE, PvP, and WvW. So the achievement tab is actually a great content guide if you're wondering what there is. For PvE alone it's tied to:

  • Story journal
  • Elite specialization collections (reward you with the ascended version of that elite spec's signature weapon)
  • Fractals & Raids
  • World bosses
  • Legendary gears

World bosses/meta events. There are big events that happen around some maps and they happen on a schedule. Check this page to see the full schedule of all relevant meta events. Conveniently, you can also open that page from web browser in-game by typing "/wiki et". The letter in the bracket beneath the boss name is a waypoint link of the location of that event. So just click on one of those (like [&BLAAAAA=]), then paste it in your chat. It will create a link that you can click that will show you the location on the world map.

Fractals. You can start off your fractal career once you got your exotics. Fractals are divided into 4 tiers, each has 25 levels. Each tier means more difficulties (more HP, damage & "instabilities"). level 1-20 has no agony (in short, agony is a debuff that will seep your health occasionally and significantly reduce healing received). You will need agony resistance (AR) to counter it, that you mainly get from infusions. The higher the level, the more resistance points you need (lvl 21 needs 8 points, and at lvl 100, you'll need 150). These AR infusions can only be slotted to ascended gears (weapon, armors, trinkets), so start getting your ascended trinkets first since they dont need crafting (see this thread, it's about ascended gears), and start working your crafting towards lvl 500. But since you're a bit far from this, I digress.

But if you want to start fractals, just make your own LFG and type something like "new player. Doing 0 AR dailies & rec, all welcomed". Dailies and rec refer to daily fractals achievements that you can do everyday to get extra rewards. You can check today's daily from in-game achievement tab, or go to this page. There are 3 fractals that you can do in each Tier for daily (total 12 reward chests if you get to Tier 4), and another 3 for recommended, one fractal from each Tier 1-3. Since you're likely start off with 0 AR, avoid lvl 21-25. However you can use Anguished Tear of Alba to boot up your AR by 10, up to15 if you got Fractal Attunement Mastery, on a caveat that the discounted versions is limited per account (costs 1s60c), but the regular version is unlimited (10s). It might take a while to get your party up, but chances are other than other players who is starting their fractals, vets might come to help as well. All in all, fractal sounds like a lot, but it gives you something to work at and when you get T4 it's a really good way to make gold from dailies.

Anyway, I'm playing on NA, but feel free to message me here if you got more questions

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@"ErickDntn.1847" said:Gears

Gear wise, one of the easiest and accessible gear set is Berserker's stat (power, precision, ferocity). You can get the Exotic version from trading post and, to get the cheapest version, use the search filter by only entering the attributes (power, precision & ferocity), rarity (in this case Exotic), and the type of the gear (e.g mace, or staff, or light armor). Then set the price from low to high. But eventually it boils down on what kind of build you want to go with. For more attribute combinations (prefix), you can check here

Hero Points, Specializations, and Build

Since you have the expansions, you can unlock & equip elite specializations. It can only be equipped in the third/bottom slot of the specialization template pic. At first, you need to gather Hero Points to unlock them, totaling 250 points for each specialization. The best way to do it is by hunting HPs from the expansion maps since each hero challenge there gives you 10 points or, if you like wvw, use the Testimony of Heorics and get the notarized scrolls of Maguuma/Desert from Heroic Notary vendor. These scrolls will grant you random hero challenges from HoT or PoF maps (that means you don't have to do that challenge anymore on that character). My advice if you wanna you the testimonies, get scrolls of Maguuma first since HoT hero challenges' fights are Champion grade and can be difficult to do alone. But you can always try and the Looking for Group feature and see if there is an HP Train ran by players that usually starts in Verdant Brink. For PoF hero challenge, they are much easier to solo and the fights usually just veteran/elite mobs.

Generally, there are two types of damage dealer, power (flat, direct, on-hit damage) and condi (DoT, ticking damage).

  • Power build benefits from power, precision & ferocity attributes. Prefix example: Berserker's, Marauder's
  • Condi benefits from condition damage, expertise, and sometimes precision (to proc passives that trigger conditions). And a bit of power that bump its damage. Prefix example: Rabid's/Carrion (easy to obtain), Viper's (glass cannon semi-hybrid, but need crafting), Trailblazer's (High condi dmg & tanky, but expensive to craft).

Some elite specializations work well with power, some with condi, and some even with both. I would suggest doing your own research on different builds since I don't know what class you're playing. You can check:

  • Metabattle
  • Discretize.eu
  • Snowcrows

Discretize & Snowcrows got group content builds, so the dps builds are mostly sacrificing self-sustain for open world. But they can give you a general idea on what elite spec is good in what aspect.

You can also try out the elite specializations & build by going to PvP lobby (panel located on the top left of your screen), since all skills and specializations are unlocked there, even if you're level 1 in PvE.

Content

So besides story, you can also do the respective achievements that rewards you title or items as well as AP that counts toward your account progressions. In fact, achievements are tied to many aspect contents across PvE, PvP, and WvW. So the achievement tab is actually a great content guide if you're wondering what there is. For PvE alone it's tied to:

  • Story journal
  • Elite specialization collections (reward you with the ascended version of that elite spec's signature weapon)
  • Fractals & Raids
  • World bosses
  • Legendary gears

World bosses/meta events. There are big events that happen around some maps and they happen on a schedule. Check this page to see the full schedule of all relevant meta events. Conveniently, you can also open that page from web browser in-game by typing "/wiki et". The letter in the bracket beneath the boss name is a waypoint link of the location of that event. So just click on one of those (like [&BLAAAAA=]), then paste it in your chat. It will create a link that you can click that will show you the location on the world map.

Fractals. You can start off your fractal career once you got your exotics. Fractals are divided into 4 tiers, each has 25 levels. Each tier means more difficulties (more HP, damage & "instabilities"). level 1-20 has no agony (in short, agony is a debuff that will seep your health occasionally and significantly reduce healing received). You will need agony resistance (AR) to counter it, that you mainly get from infusions. The higher the level, the more resistance points you need (lvl 21 needs 8 points, and at lvl 100, you'll need 150). These AR infusions can only be slotted to ascended gears (weapon, armors, trinkets), so start getting your ascended trinkets first since they dont need crafting (see this thread, it's about ascended gears), and start working your crafting towards lvl 500. But since you're a bit far from this, I digress.

But if you want to start fractals, just make your own LFG and type something like "new player. Doing 0 AR dailies & rec, all welcomed". Dailies and rec refer to daily fractals achievements that you can do everyday to get extra rewards. You can check today's daily from in-game achievement tab, or go to this page. There are 3 fractals that you can do in each Tier for daily (total 12 reward chests if you get to Tier 4), and another 3 for recommended, one fractal from each Tier 1-3. Since you're likely start off with 0 AR, avoid lvl 21-25. However you can use Anguished Tear of Alba to boot up your AR by 10, up to15 if you got Fractal Attunement Mastery, on a caveat that the discounted versions is limited per account (costs 1s60c), but the regular version is unlimited (10s). It might take a while to get your party up, but chances are other than other players who is starting their fractals, vets might come to help as well. All in all, fractal sounds like a lot, but it gives you something to work at and when you get T4 it's a really good way to make gold from dailies.

Anyway, I'm playing on NA, but feel free to message me here if you got more questions

HelloFirst of all thanks for the very informative post. Im currently doing all the story content (LV S2 at the moment, since HoT keeps crashing at the prologue), atm im running some meta builds for pve with soulbeast spec. Gear-wise im currently all exotic and working up my leatherworking/weaponsmith all up to 500. Will surely follow your hint with the trinkets. Might as well look for a guild that can teach me a thing or two at this point :D

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