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It's a bit hard to say for solo builds, because it depends on your Might generation. (Might boosts both strike and condi damage, and your Cele gears' boon duration bonus also increases your ability to keep that Might stacked up.) For example, the Cele Pistol-Devil build people play in WvW often uses Aristocracy runes to gain 5 Might every time it inflicts Weakness (Daredevil inflict Weakness after every dodge). They can very quickly end up at 15-25 Might, and keep it up for quite a while. This isn't necessarily what you'd want for PvE, because you're trading away the potential DPS of something like the Nightmare rune (which is stronger in PvE where enemies can have way more than ~30k hp and don't cleanse conditions).

Carrion kinda sucks for PvE, imo. Power without crits is pretty weak, Vitality gives you a bigger hp buffer but doesn't actually help sustain much, Condition Damage without Expertise is basically leaving 50% of your potential damage output on the floor. Against PvE enemies (who don't cleanse), Trailblazers can out-damage Carrion while providing better sustain as well. Celestial probably will as well, as long as you have any decent source of Might in your build. (Celestial will also give you better sustain than Carrion.) And if all you're getting is Vitality, you can use a Level 10 Jade Bot to mitigate some of the fragility of Viper's and roll that instead.

In my eye, the basics are: • Knowing what your stats do. Understand how to get strike damage (Power + Precision + Ferocity, and thinking about crit cap), understand how to get condition damage (Condition Damage + Expertise, and paying attention to where conditions actually come from — since not every weapon or trait line applies a enough conditions for a condi build to be worthwhile), understand boons and boon duration, understand how scaling multipliers work. • Learning the value of boons boons boons. Both offensively and defensively. Think about how to self-generate boons if you're playing solo, or what role your build will play in a group and how that maps to which boons you will provide to yourself, which boons you will provide to everyone, and which boons you will need from other people in order to play at peak performance. • Trait synergy. This is the stuff that turns a basic competent build into a truly strong build. • Understand your class/spec's resource cycle. I.e. learn all the mechanics of clones if you want to make a useful Mesmer build, learn how Initiative works if you want to make a thief, &c. • For endgame PvE especially, stacking +%damage boosts from traits. • Understand the viable roles in group PvE (dps, offensive support, defensive support; in some fights one player is a designated tank also) or SPvP (roamer, duelist, dps team fighter, support) and how they work together to make the team achieve things. • Think about your rotation (for instanced group PvE), area attacks / CCs (for open-world PvE especially), or burst combos (for competitive).

Black Powder + everybody in your group blasting = so much stealth.

The other ting to note is that your intrinsic character abilities will be progressing a bit after level 80: • Unlocking elite specializations from the expansions, which you can swap between freely once you've invested the hero points • Unlocking masteries (account-wide) as you explore the world and complete specific achievements — these include mounts and advanced mount abilities, gliding, auto-loot, the ability to use various area-specific buffs, fishing, and even the ability to see certain invisible enemies • Gaining World vs. World masteries, if you play World vs. World • Likely you'll eventually want to raise crafting so you can do Ascended/Legendary crafting eventually (no sweat it if you put this off, though) P.S. Someone mentioned Ascended drops from Fractals. The key to making use of those is to understand that you can reforge them in the Mystic Forge to get the stat combinations you want (at the cost of some crafting materials you can easily buy on the TP) — https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stat_changing

In GW2, the gear tiers are: white - blue - green - yellow - orange (exotic) - pink (ascended) - purple (legendary) Exotic gear is about 5-10% behind ascended, which is best-in-slot. The level above that, legendary, doesn't offer any stat benefits over ascended, but lets you change its attributes freely, meaning one piece of gear can be used for any number of builds. Think of legendary as kinda like unlocking an endless armory of options for that equipment slot. You'll use mostly blue/green/yellow gear while leveling. At 80, you'll want to quickly move to exotics (you can obtain them with karma or buy them cheaply on the TP). Backpacks and aqua breathers can be a bit hard to get (and don't provide a lot of stats), so don't worry if those lag behind in gear quality for a while. You can start doing everything but higher-level Fractals in all exotic gear — as long as that gear is actually assembled with an eye to playing a coherent build and not just a mishmash of random stat bonuses. Note that a major role of gear is to increase your character attributes, so the specific stat combos on your gear matter a lot in this game: if you're playing a built that's all about strike damage, a yellow helmet with Berserker (+Power, +Precision, +Ferocity) stats is still way better for you than an exotic helmet with +Healing Power as its main stat. A lot of people don't bother to upgrade every single piece of equipment to ascended/legendary. Generally speaking, ascended weapons are worth it because of the DPS boost they provide, and ascended trinkets are worth it because they're easy to get with various in-game currencies, but a lot of players just stick to Exotic armor on most of their endgame toons unless they feel like min/maxing or have extra gold to burn. Here's a pretty decent guide: https://metabattle.com/wiki/Guide:How_to_Gear_a_Character

Are you specifically looking to solo everything (like the harder Champions/Legendaries) or just for a relatively safe/chill build for farming and stuff? Do you also intend to use the same character/build for instanced group play or is that irrelevant to you?

Shared inventory slots are incredibly useful. Boosting a character to 80, though? The game gives you ample ways to do that for free, via Tomes of Knowledge and such. I have a thousand Tomes just sitting in my bank. I would never spend money just to speed-level.

You can just buy shared slots individually or in sets.

You'll do fine. Eventually you'll want to switch to Daredevil or Deadeye because they both offer useful power-ups to the Pistol/Pistol playstyle.

Err, they mostly jump in using mounts, Vault, &c., don't they. I don't know of any map locations where shadowsteps work through walls.

I like the idea of it. It's just annoying that the final encounter is a huge hp sponge with no breakbar.

Yup. Putting everything related to a tactic or ability into one trait line means builds lose a lot of the ability to specialize. The point of the current structure is that a broad strategy like "I want to focus on condition damage" has deep support and useful synergy across 2-4 viable trait lines. If you pile everything into one scrupluously-single-themed trait line, you're just creating a situation where the most likely outcome is that half of it never gets used.

It's very easy for some builds to end up overpowered/overperforming in this game, but I find it funny how often people are like, "yeah, so I pasted this enemy playing a build with obvious glaring weaknesses, and then the same player came back with a different build — it's very clear I was defeated by someone with OBVIOUSLY LOWER SKILL!" (If someone of equal or greater skill deleted you with an OP build, would that be better?) Like, come on. Reaper is easy pickings for a lot of standard roaming builds: if you have any kind of good ranged pressure, the whole time they're fighting you they're basically doomed unless they land a lucky Spinal Shivers; ditto if you have strong CC it's very easy to burn down their health.

Norn is the best ranger race because you can troll people with gigantic Become the Bear one-shots in World vs. World. Beyond that, the racial skills don't matter at all.

Try it out in gw2skills.net I get exactly 80% crit chance (meaning 100% with Fury) using all Marauder armor + trinkets, a Berserker rifle, Silent Scope, Signet of Agility, and 4 Precise infusions. 210% crit damage thanks to Scholar runes. You can go lower if you want since you'll get guild claiming aura and stuff buffing you sometimes (these buffs are also available in gw2skills, in the top bar, if you have it set to WvW mode, so you can see how they affect our stats). Or if you're comfortable trading a bit of consistency for bigger hits.

Try picking a map with a really big meta, doing it for a while, and then switching to a different one. There's always going to be an element of easy repetition, of course, but you can have fun learning different tricks and then applying that knowledge to either leading the map or just doing a bunch of little things to make the map run smoother for everyone (make the pre events go faster, do the big mechanic when it's time, &c.). Silverwastes, Auric Basin, Dragon's Stand, Dragonfall, and Drizzlewood Coast are some examples. A lot of maps, especially Living World maps, also have achievements that will get you some cool stuff, so you can create goals for yourself more complex than just "get gold." Start doing Strikes once a week if you haven't done those, too. And consider getting into newbie-friendly raiding.

Dagger/Pistol is by far the strongest power thief melee set imo. The full-Malice sneak attacks are pretty beefy, which is clutch against enemies who spam projectile reflects or just happen to consistently dodge your Death's Judgement. The autos are super fast, Shadow Shot and Heartseeker have good damage and don't limit your mobility. I like Sword #2 a lot as well but Pistol Whip feels like another Three-Round Burst and the Sword sneak attack is nothing to write home about. Also Sword/Pistol means you won't have any stealth on your second weapon set.

I'm glad Viri isn't alive to see this thread.

There's two kinds of gifts. • Every character gets birthday gifts as they age up. • The first time you hit a birthday milestone on any character on your account, you also get an additional once-per-account anniversary gift. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Birthday_Gift

Decouple Shroud hp from Vitality and Specter is fine.

You can speed-level to 80 and keep exploring, if you want. The level-scaling feature will ensure that your stats are "corrected" for lower-level areas — you'll still generally be more powerful than a low-level character, because you have access to more skills and traits, and the scaling still leaves you with stronger stats overall, but you won't literally one-shot everything like you might expect. Another major reason you might want a level 80 character right away is to do group stuff, like instanced PvE or World vs. World. I have a few characters I speed-leveled for WvW, Raids, or Fractals (it's trivial if you keep getting Tomes of Knowledge from various activities) but that I just don't really like playing solo in open world.

You all are complicating the heck out of this for no value. It's clearly just a "if this is your first toon, how much are you gonna have to learn super fast to avoid falling behind while leveling" kind of thing. 90% of this design is just to prevent people from going, "aha! a mage! elementalist!" before they even understand what a boon is.

I suspect the new anniversary achievements are exacerbating the problem a tad. On account of how we've got a few days of people running around trying to blitz events in lower-level areas they might otherwise ignore.

Seems pretty sensible to me, overall. All the 1-star classes require you to master the game's core concepts but don't add a lot of extra cognitive load on top of that. All the 2-star classes have some kind of weird class-specific resource management (Rev energy, Thief initiative, Mesmer clones/blades), all the 3-star classes can have very complex rotations when played optimally. Arguably Mechanist is kind of a weird exception (since it removes the extra toolbelt skills and also has viable builds that don't make heavy use of kits), but you have to play through a ton of the game to unlock Mechanist anyway. N.B. I'm not saying Thief is harder to play than Warrior or whatever. Just that you have to learn extra weird things on top of the normal game stuff to play it.