Good morning, GAF'alonians (don't ask.. or do, tis' silly). Catching up on the OT now after staying up late to see them push the button, apologies for the Mega Post. I tried to get any questions / comments that slipped through the cracks.
First, some notes for the update that just went live (Update notes can always be found
here)
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a server crash.
- Fixed a client crash.
- Removed Mordrem Menders from Destroy Crawler event and replaced them with Mordrem Vile Thrashers. Menders were healing the prop boss and making the event difficult to complete.
- Fixed a broken jumping mushroom in the Westwatch Patch area.
- Auric Basin: Added Nuhoch Wallows directional markers which point to their destination.
- Added directional arrows to the Nuhoch Wallows to make navigating them easier.
- Fixed an issue with Silver and Gold One-Time Adventure Rewards not granting experience.
- Fixed an issue that prevented P4F players from exiting the mad king labyrinth.
ah crap. for most of my later school and uni days GW was a great timesink. would love to experience the new stuff. but at the moment my job robs me of my time.
Quoting myself here but; it really doesn't have as much of a time investment as you'd think. Because there's no gear treadmill (and no level cap increase with the expansion) you could have started playing a month after launch (3 years ago), gotten full Exotic-tier weapons (which isn't terribly difficult) and stopped. You'd still be able to log in today and pick up right where you left off, the only thing you'd have missed was the huge amount of content they've added.
You can pick it up and play it when you have free time and never worry that you're falling behind everyone else or missing out on what ever's new. The only thing that requires a major time commitment are dungeons and (presumably) raids, but even there we're not talking more than 30 minutes unless you pick one of the harder dungeons (which can go on a bit longer).
This is a game (and maybe the first real MMO) that actually respects your time, though don't be surprised if you
want to play more. At the very least, you can check it out for free.
I miss playing with GAF; the community is fantastic and very open to new or returning players. I would absolutely be jumping in again ... if I only had the time!
See above. We're not kidding guys, this isn't the kind of game you need to spend hours playing each week. You can spend 10-20 minutes in the evening knocking out some daily achievements or doing a match in PVP, 30 minutes in a fast dungeon run, an hour kicking around WvW capturing some supply camps or just wandering the world doing events.
Don't let the "MMO" part scare you, it only takes over your life if you
want it to, not because you have to keep up with the Joneses or get left behind, but because you're having fun.
amazing dam awesome smooth launch, how do they do it
Networking Wizards. Seriously, this game has had less than 12 hours downtime
total in 3 years. The one time they had to take the game down for an update was because they were transferring everyone's currencies to account-wide wallets and they wanted to make sure nothing screwed up because that's a pretty sensitive area. They predicted 3 hours, but it only took one.
So... yeah... Wizards. About what you'd expect from a company founded by a guy who built Battle.net from scratch.
Regarding the Elite Specializations, it seems to be that there is no reason -not- to go on one of the specializations. Do they plan later on to give each class more specializations so that there will be more diversity among players?
It really depends; I'm not planning to go Scrapper on my Engineer just because the build I have right now (Flamethrower / Elixir build, for what it's worth) is very very good and the things I would have to give up for the elite spec aren't worth the trade off. So no, I don't think they're mandatory for
every class, but there's certainly a few where the payoff is totally worth the sacrifice.
Try to think of it as just one more option for your build instead of something new everyone has to have.
They've stated that there will be more elite specializations later, yes, and if memory serves me correctly they said adding them isn't tied to expansions either (so they may put them in for a major feature update, they've done stuff like that before).
I assume the pictures in the OP explain what is new in the expansion? I can't see them right now (firewall). Thinking about getting back into the game. I stopped playing back in June 2013 because of an upheaval in my life - not because I didn't like it.
Yeah, the OT is mostly images. The Wiki though should have you covered for details though;
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2:_Heart_of_Thorns#Features
But one thing that always bothered me was I didn't quite like any of the armor in the game, legendaries took forever to obtain, and the stats - particularly toughness - felt meaningless to me (what I mean by that is that you died quick regardless so you might as well go full damage). Have they addressed those issues? Is there a place where I can see the new armors they have added?
There's quite a lot of new armor in the game, especially in the expansion. I don't have any site that's up to date (other than the wiki, if you want to look), but the in-game Wardrobe allows you to preview everything in the game if you want to look around.
There's now a way to obtain Legendaries without relying on luck / cash where you basically wander the world crafting it by performing various achievements.
As far as stats go, that's always been the case; all of your active defensive options (stuff like blind, aegis, skills that block and dodging) are more important than your stats, so if you want to be survival-oriented it's more important to instead focus on weapon choice, utility skills and traits,
then round things out stat-wise from there. For what it's worth, though, Toughness seemed to be the main factor in getting the raid boss we fought in beta to stick to someone, so depending on how raids work in general it might become the de facto "Tanking" stat (in so far as there's anything resembling tanking in GW2).
Are there any active groups of Euro GAFers out there? The friends I was playing with have pretty much all stopped playing, would like semi-regular group to PvE with.
This is the only reason I've not bought this, no one to play with. No way am I paying the £20 to move to the US to play on their off peak times. Fuck that noise.
The guild has a lotto every week where 10% of the pot goes to a fund specifically set up to help transfer people from EU to NA, since a lot of European players joined the EU chapter of the guild (which we had no part in, two people took it upon themselves to organize it and then promptly disappeared after launch). We may not be able to cover the entire cost, but we can certainly help soften the blow.
So, how's the Daredevil specialization? It is the only thing that might bring me back to the game
What I played in the last beta weekend was really fun and had a lot of potential (especially if you were already playing a Thief with acrobatics and such), I haven't gotten into it on live so I can't say for sure, but everything they've changed since then has been an improvement so... might be worth checking out?
Well I really wanted to love this when it came out (pretty sure I'm even in the GAF guild still) but could never stick to it. Now after seeing all the new features jammed into this expansion, I think I'll grab it and jump back in this weekend
IS it best to play through the personal and season stories if I have them in my journal before jumping into the jungle??
You can skip the Personal Story and read a plot summary of the two Living World seasons if you want; the first season isn't available anymore, but you can pick up Season 2 if you'd like to go through it. I thought it was fun, but your milage may vary. Either way, it's not required and I think even reading the summary in the OT covers all you really need to know (beyond "who are these characters in my story?", of course).
I haven't played in a while. No idea if I'm still in the guild.
Please invite epmode.3081
Invite sent. FYI, your username is 3801, not 3081 (I checked our old pre-launch database, welcome back old timer
)
I meant to ask this also, I want when I logged in.. Do I need to be on the same server/shard or whatever?
As long as you're on a North American server, you can do everything but WvW with GAF (since WvW is built around server competition).
I don't know if I should really try it again. I stopped after that first week of release.
All it costs is bandwidth to find out. I'm 90% sure the reason you left so soon is because you picked a character class that didn't 'click' with you. We've found that's the single most important thing that seems to determine whether people stick with the game or not; people who came from WoW or whatever and said "Oh, I played a Warlock, Necromancer is for me" hit a wall when it just didn't mesh well, but later came back and tried a new profession and fell completely head over heels for the game.
That'd be my advice. Each one plays so different from the others that it can completely change your experience.