Rasimir.6239

If you check the "Seasons of the Dragons" achievement you will notice that it has 24 parts, the first one of which is "Return to Dry Top 1". The tier 1 reward is given at four points, which coincides with the four releases of new Season 2 achievements. You will have to do the next 3 weeks' achievements to unlock tier 1.

Fun fact: if I don't have any pressing appointments and the weather is nice, I often get off/on the subway two or three stations away from where I work to walk the rest of the way 😉 . If you don't like exploring on your own, that's fine, but rpgs have always been a game for explorer types, too. You might be surprised how many of your fellow gamers actually like that the game offers lots of opportunities to explore a fantasy world. To me, fighting is just a small part of the game. I enjoy to find a hidden chest in an out-of-the-way cave just as much as I enjoy figuring out a boss fight somewhere. If fight mechanics were the only thing you could discover in this game, then I probably wouldn't play it.

I have a shelf in my office that holds several folders full of information about video games I have played. Handwritten information about quests, equipment, characters, handdrawn maps and so on. This is for games I have played a long time ago, like Ultima IV or Wizardry VI when they were first released. Back then, we didn't have any wiki to look things up, and it would take weeks for game magazines to publish any spoilers, so we would simply go into the game, explore, experiment, and take our own notes. These days I still take notes when playing, only not in as nice and durable a format as I used to back then, because I know that I can look it up on the wiki if I need to check what I wrote down later on and happen to not find my notes any more. I don't however look things up in the wiki initially, because exploration, experimentation, and discovery are the main activities that draw me to this kind of game. Where's the fun in just blindly following what others discovered? What is your goal when playing GW2? Why do you feel the need to look things up in the wiki? Is it just a numbers game to you ("need to have max level/max crafting/max mastery asap")? Is there anybody pushing you to finish things quicker than you could explore and discover them on your own time? I still have a notebook and pen sitting next to my keyboard. Right now the two top-most pages contain information about the Astralaria collection IV (taken from the in-game tooltips of the collection items) and a list about crafting-trait research for my ESO alts. Both pages are heavily used, added to, and crossed out, on a daily basis. Other pages hold notes on other things I've done, am doing, or might want to do in the future. It's a bit of a mess right now, since the information available via wiki and other internet resources has made me more relaxed in taking notes, but the basic way of playing rpg games really hasn't changed for me over the last 30 years. The wiki is nice to have, but personally I just use it for known content. I won't let it rob me of the joy of discovery and exploration.

Are they standing in the same spot? Same traits? Same consumables? Same buffs and debuffs? Do you have a screenshot of whatever difference you think you saw?

I seriously wonder if you'd see it the same way if this was about some kind of content that you absolutely don't enjoy ... This is not about pandering or being inoffensive, this is simply about giving people choices. Just like you have choices of different activities when doing hearts, or choices about gaining leveling experience in whatever way suits you, or lots of other ways this game gives you choices to do the kind of content you enjoy. Forcing people into specific content to unlock basic gameplay abilities to use in totally different content isn't the way this game works. It's one of this game's core design philosophies. You may not like it, but it's one of the main selling points to many players.

Guides are optional for requiring the skyscale. The descriptions of the collection items are very well done, and you can find everything with a little looking around. A friend and I got our skyscales a couple of weeks after release, without the help of any guides. It took us maybe around 10 days, and it was one of the most enjoyable and satisfying activities I've ever done in this game. Guides are there for those who don't enjoy scavenger hunts, or figuring things out for themselves, so they can shortcut the process, but they are in no way needed for getting the skyscale.

They did improve on that with PoF, although in a way that is fully optional. Each PoF elite spec has an npc in one of the PoF maps with information regarding the lore and background of the spec, as well as associated events where you can see the npc in action (and if you're lucky even drop a mini version of them that are in the reward drop table of the event). It's not in your face, nobody forces you to seek out the npc to unlock your elite, and I suspect that there are a lot of players who don't care about the lore and prefer to just unlock their elite and play around with it, but if you are more of a roleplaying type that likes to know the background of your character's abilities, nobody is stopping you from finding out. Personally I'm glad they did it this way. I did go looking for the elite npc and their events on some characters, but I'm sure glad it's not a quest that I have to repeat on the 3rd ranger or 5th mesmer to unlock their elites.

You do realize that there are players out there who have no other mount than the warclaw, because they simply do not like to play PvE enough to gain another? Why would you punish them by removing their access to the only mount they have available in PvE? Personally I do not think anything needs changing. The warclaw has its own area of expertise, just like every other mount has, too, only in this case it's not a PvE ability but instead the ability to use it in WvW. It also does have its own mastery track that enhances its abilities. Unlike the other mounts, it's just not a track you fill with PvE experience, but rather one you fill with WvW ability points.

Once you gain any weapon, armor, mini pet, ... from an achievement that is account bound (or you bind it to your account), the corresponding skin will be unlocked in your account wardrobe. To use it on different characters, just go to the wardrobe and use a transmutation charge to put the skin on that characters backpack (or whatever).

First step: check the wiki page on experience modifiers. There are a lot of ways to increase the experience you gain, like using foods and boosters, guild buffs, an amulet enrichment and more. Many of these stack with each other to the point where you gain several times the raw experience. Next check out the experience mechanics this game uses (on the same wiki page). You'll get an idea of what kind of activity gives what amount of experience. You can skip those two steps if you are not big on researching, but they will help you understand why you're gaining much or little experience from the activities you do. Now that you're going out to gain experience, try to combine as many experience-giving activities as you can. Jump into all events you see. Harvest any crafting material on the way. Unlock that waypoint or poi that is still unexplored but just slightly out of the way. It all adds up quickly (especially if you have buffs running that multiply your experience gain, see step 1). Personally I love exploring maps, so a lot of my experience gain comes from map-completing with different characters. I also like to replay story on different characters for a similar reason. Finally if I'm going for specific experience, I try to change it up by playing different maps and events, simply because the change in scenery makes it more fun (to me) and feel less like a grind. If you have season 3 unlocked that adds up to 6 more maps and story episodes that also give maguma mastery experience (plus one set of dailies that give extra xp and are often easy to do). A final word: HoT masteries take a LOT of experience to finish, much more so than any of the other mastery branches. It's pretty normal to take a long time to get them done. We've all been there. Try to find some other goals in HoT and season 3 to go for at the same time. Experience gain will continue, no matter what you do, but it just feels so much better with those slow-moving bars if you aren't staring at the xp counter all the time 🙂 .

Welcome to Tyria! For a start, try to let go of the "role" idea the way you know it from WoW. The classes in GW2 are very versatile, and most of the gameplay relies on each character being self-sufficient. As such, every class has abilities to offer group support, some more obvious (like the guardian spec firebrand or the ranger spec druid), others less so but not necessarily less potent. Elementalist (most notably when specced as tempest) and engineer (scrapper spec) can be built to be good buffers and healers, too, and personally I find them very fun to use. Even the thief, which tends to be a glass cannon dd with most players, has interesting support builds. Personally I see guardian/firebrand as the "lazy" support option. It is one most people know and rely on, and at the same time gets pigeon-holed into the support role a lot, despite being able to build into a very good dd, too. You'll have an easier time getting into groups with people that insist on playing "meta" compositions, although meta in this game is less about being the absolute best (or even only) group composition, but rather about people unwilling or unable to adapt to different set-ups. The game really does hand out the tools to make pretty much every class combination work even in instanced group content. Depending on how desperately you want to play that kind of thing (mostly high-end fractals and raids), which isn't nearly as important or played by as wide a part of the playerbase as it is in WoW, you might want to try all of the classes before deciding on a main (or two or three or ...). If you have access to an unused lvl80 ticket, your best bet might be to use that to test-drive all of the (base) classes in lvl 80 content. It will drop you in the Silverwastes with equipment appropriate to the map (not the best, but good enough to check out the playstyle of each class) and you can play around on that map as long as you want before committing to actually boost that character. After you've tried the classes, choose whichever one feels most fun to play to you to learn the game. If you find at one time in the future that high-end fractals and raids (the only kind of content that honestly needs that kind of specialized class setup) is in fact your endgame (which it actually isn't for most of the playerbase) then you'll have gathered enough resources to quickly and easily level and gear another class anyway.

You are right. There is NO permanent version of the total makeover kit (so far).

I'd say it depends a lot on how much else you find in game that you enjoy. If you're still busy exploring older seasons and expansion maps, wait. If you know you won't have much (or any) time to play the new (to you) episodes before they are released for free, wait. If on the other hand you feel you've got everything out of the content available to you and are dying for something new to explore, get them now. Or if you are the kind of player that is drawn to farming and values the feeling of efficient gameplay over fun gameplay and feel left out with only what's available to you right now, go ahead and buy them straight away. Personally I have enjoyed them, especially the later episodes of season 4 (although a lot of that appeal was actually the cliffhanger after ep 5 that is kind of irrelevant if you can go straight into ep 6 or know how the story continues) and the icebrood saga before champions. I am however a very casual explorer, so I'd personally still wait to get them until I had explored whatever else I have available fully 🙂 .

This game was founded on the idea of comparable rewards. From the get go, ArenaNet tried to set up content and game modes so that you could choose the content you want to play, rather than being led along by some carrots on a stick. There are no exclusive rewards you get from only doing specific dailies or other time-limited content. If you look closely, you'll find that even stuff like festival rewards and season 1 rewards have made their way back into the game through a variety of ways, allowing everyone a chance to get it. Daily rewards are also set up in a way that missing or out-right ignoring them doesn't have much impact on your game in the long run. There is no bonus for buying gems in bulk, or time-limited gem discounts, like may other games have. They have done a pretty good job at keeping the feeling that the time you invest into the game, as well as the real life money you invest into the game, always has a similar value. They have mostly kept away from offering "bargains" that are aimed at encouraging people to pay more than they feel appropriate. Personally it is one of the main reasons why this game is my main mmo in today's market. I pay for the things I want, whenever it suits me, instead of always having the gnawing feeling that I'm left behind because I don't pay for this or that, or getting short-changed because I don't pay during a specific sale, or that I should play more than my real life permits to get the most out of whatever I paid. A season pass may look like a great way to get people to pay more for (often less) content. It's a kind of marketing psychology that this game has stayed further away from than most other games out there, and I for one sincerely hope that they will stick to the way they've followed so far and not implement (more) monetizetion schemes that aim at making people pay and play more than they really want to.

Honestly I'm wondering if they are just "leftovers" of the 2nd half of the IBS. Lots of "features" we got lately look like they had planned to develop Braham and Primordus in the 2nd half of the saga similarly to how the first half developed Ryland and Jormag, and were likely designing another armor to go with that, too. When they butchered the IBS at half point, maybe the armor was already designed and they decided to throw it in the store instead? No matter if that's the explanation or not, selling it piece-meal at premium price does leave a bad taste in my mouth. Anet has been decently good at keeping the store feeling "fair" to me, but putting full armors back into it at that price, no matter the reason, doesn't sit well with me, especially on top of the "champions" releases instead of "normal" living story episodes.

May I ask how much (and what kind of content) you play each day? I play most days, a couple of hours at night, more on the weekends, but I'm not big in farming and rather play whatever looks fun at any given moment. I have all of the gobblers, but if I can feed them twice a week that's a lot already. Bloodstone dust is especially rare in my case, probably because I don't enjoy running meta events and boss trains (nor the same fractals over and over, although I do enjoy the occasional dungeon) and don't get many champion bags. In the end, it all comes down to playstyle. Personally I'd rather keep any material overabundand for some than too scarce for many others, especially if it's not tradeable. Scarce materials that are only freely available to players willing and able to farm them for an extended period of time invariably put pressure on the rest of the playerbase to farm them, too, to not be left behind, which is one of the main failings of most other mmos for me, and as such one of the main reasons GW2 is my main mmo.

Honestly I've never considered myself ocd, but the moment I saw the first person go Off-line last night in my chat box, it made me feel really uncomfortable. I wondered if I was seeing things and had never noticed the hyphen or the capitalized O before, but glad to know it really is a "new thing". I'll adapt if this stays, but I'd prefer them to revert the change.

There is a very fine line between "encouraging" and "forcing". Many of this game's systems exist in a way that makes you free to choose to play them or get what you're after in a different way, and crafting is a prime example. You'd be surprised how many people despise crafting, not just in this game but in all similar games. They already find way too many rewards in this game tied to crafting (starting with ascended equipment, which early on was very hard to get outside of crafting it yourself). That's why the game has different avenues to the same results, and that's why crafting is where it is, offering nice perks if you choose to craft, but giving you different ways to get most of what's available if you don't want to bother with crafting. According to the wiki there are 43 different types of exotic lvl 80 insignia (if I have counted them correctly), times 6 different armor pieces. A few of them might actually need a recipe sheet to learn, but the majority is available to discover, as long as you have the insignia and the matching armor components at hand. You only need a fraction of the possible discoveries to reach armorsmithing lvl 500.

I'm usually very laid back about this kind of thing, but I have to admit that this makes me feel lousy. I followed the forum and twitter during the day and, like the op and others, refrained from logging in after work (which was about two hours before the server shut down) even though I would've loved to spend time in SAB (just for the activity itself, I don't need the baubles), just to make sure I wouldn't help creating even more of a mess. Others logged in specifically to take advantage of the situation (no matter if large or small, just stashing a few mats in guild bank or similar). Those who did get a mount license (which is something you really can't get in the course of playing), while the rest of us gets a useless bonfire???? Sorry, I really hate feeling this way, but somehow this time the compensation feels incredibly unfair. I know I won't collect the stupid bonfire, even though the icon on the trading post will drive me nuts. I also know next to nobody will care (and it's their right to do so), but I just had to vent. I don't want any compensation (no compensation can bring back the time I would've spent having fun in SAB on monday anyway), but the way they are handling this still feels like the proverbial slap in the fact (even though I absolutely hate that comparison in relation to free game goodies).

Your argument hinges on your personal definition of endgame content as either pvp (including wvw) or instanced group (raids/fractals) content. Looking around among my in-game friends, many of them have been playing since headstart or soon after and are still heavily invested into the game but play neither of those types of content. To them, story and exploration are their main content types. Then there are many players that have been playing wvw since the start and still spend considerable time in that gamemode that play wvw because they enjoy what it is and find the special rule events more of a gimmick, if not a nuisance. If you ask around the die-hard wvw players, I'm not sure you'll actually find a majority of them enjoying those weeks. Personally I do play raids/fractals (all tiers)/wvw (mostly smallscale) on a rather casual level (and even started getting back into pvp recently), but for the next expansion pack to be a success for me personally it needs to add more of what the previous expansions added that enhanced my gameplay: explorable maps (preferably the HoT type that were 3-dimensional and made exploration much more interesting to me than the PoF maps), extensive scavenger hunts (like the Skyscale collections), fun events to jump into and out of (preferably more small/soloable events and less scheduled meta events).

Congratulations! Now I'm jealous, I've run that zone daily on 1-3 accounts and no shield for me :) . That said, there are several versions of the shield, the regular blue "super shield" that you can buy at the vendor, the glitched shield that is much the same but has a special animation occasionally (storywise it's a hologram that's glitching every now and then), plus green, yellow, orange, and red versions that you can gain via tribulation mode and dailies. Check the links at the bottom of this wiki page to find the colour variant collections, and the main SAB wiki page for general info.

I can just jump on my skyscale when things get complicated and easily go places even in difficult terrain. My daugher who hasn't got her skyscale yet can't do that. I can play in the Bjora marches and gather loot from essence chests. My friend who hasn't leveled the essence masteries yet can't do that. I can jump into fractals and grab the mistlock singularity to give me a second life when things get rough. My husband who hasn't trained that mastery gets downed right away. All of those masteries I have trained reward me with abilities I would not have access to without. This game is really good on that front, rewarding you for the content you choose to play, instead of arbitrarily locking rewards behind completion of unrelated stuff. I'd rather they keep it that way instead of implementing status symbols that lock out people who choose to play only parts of the content that awards masteries.

I second the one above, just try any that looks interesting. Once you've done them a few times they all go by quickly. Just don't expect a path you haven't played before (or at least not for a long time) to go as quickly first time as the one you've done each week for ages. Being interested in the story helps to make it seem faster, too :) .

Having max mastery is a reward in itself, but the mastery system is flexible in that you don't need to get all of the masteries if you don't care to play certain parts of the game (fractals, legendary crafting, or even just leveling the stupid roller beetle that makes me violently motion sick each time I try to ride it). Locking ANYTHING in game behind max mastery that doesn't need all of the masteries (and to my knowledge there's no activity in game that requires even close to all of them) is just a way of forcing people into all playing the same stuff instead of choosing to play content they want to play.