Guild Wars 2: The One Thread

[PACOX]

What collections are really great/fun/etc?

I only ask because most of the ones I tried when I played were either grindy farms or just "9 items that you can get in 5 minutes and 1 item that costs 200g".

Snargle's books

There's 3 fan weapons that I forget the name of

Meta achieves for various maps

Just filter achieves by rewards, there's a lot of stuff.

[Edge-]

Snargle's books

There's 3 fan weapons that I forget the name of

Meta achieves for various maps

Just filter achieves by rewards, there's a lot of stuff.

Big ups for Snargle. Though most of the EoD collections have been pretty good so far, IMO. Only one that seems to require much gold is the turtle.

There are others, like the Caldabog collection that comes from HoT. That one was particularly fun.

[Felthan]

If you don't have a skyscale its long one, but another great one is getting ones that eat ascended materiel like bloodstone dust. Hera is one that comes to mine and there is a few from living story season 3 that you can get that when merged together form a big one that is needed for a legendary ring( or trinket).

[Edge-]

If you don't have a skyscale its long one, but another great one is getting ones that eat ascended materiel like bloodstone dust. Hera is one that comes to mine and there is a few from living story season 3 that you can get that when merged together form a big one that is needed for a legendary ring( or trinket).

I do need to look into some ways to burn some ascended materials again. Bought storage increases but I'm starting to fill up my bank with auric dust and shit once more.

Same with spirit shards and mystic forge. Basically never used it other than for the occasional daily (toss in 4 karma items, get daily achieve), but I'm sitting on like 1700 of the suckers and figure I should use them to make some gold somehow.

[Ghost of Cow]

Same with spirit shards and mystic forge. Basically never used it other than for the occasional daily (toss in 4 karma items, get daily achieve), but I'm sitting on like 1700 of the suckers and figure I should use them to make some gold somehow.

Funny you mention that now, the way I made all my money with those was crafting the weapons that were the "200g items" used in the collections I mentioned earlier!

They sold pretty fast, too. But that was a long time ago.

[Edge-]

Funny you mention that now, the way I made all my money with those was crafting the weapons that were the "200g items" used in the collections I mentioned earlier!

They sold pretty fast, too. But that was a long time ago.

There's apparently a djinn that spawns every few hours at the mystic forge that you can give some mats you purchase from the main NPC lady to, but I still have yet to check the forge while he's there : (

[PACOX]

https://gw2efficiency.com/currencies/spirit-shards

How to convert spirit shards. It's a pain in the ass. The general concept is that you use spirit shards to buy mats needed for the recipes on the page then sell the results for a profit.

Also the djinn is a lie.

[Edge-]

https://gw2efficiency.com/currencies/spirit-shards

How to convert spirit shards. It's a pain in the ass. The general concept is that you use spirit shards to buy mats needed for the recipes on the page then sell the results for a profit.

Also the djinn is a lie.

Well that's good, fewer trips to LA : P

I keep forgetting that site exists, and sadly it seems that weapons are more of the profitable items to craft and my only maxed out crafting profession is armorsmith (for ascended gear for my guardian). Guess I'll have to get around to trying to remember how to use the crafting site to powerlevel my weaponsmithing so I can start earning some gold.

I'm constantly poor (2-300G max, with lots of things I want to buy but simply don't because I like having a nice supply of gold in case there's an expensive new collection a la gryphon/skyscale) so once I figure out how to get weaponsmithing up I can hopefully start making some scratch off converting those spirit shards I'm collecting everywhere except IBS (one day I'll finish clearing out those masteries).

Edit: Dope, at most it looks like I'm spending around a whopping 13G to max that out via GW2 crafts (had to find my API key). Yay for stockpiling materials and recently buying storage expansions to help with that. I should get around to just blasting out all my crafting professions finally and be done with it. I've been collecting so many plans/recipes I can't use over the years. All my EoD meta rewards are mostly going towards those ascended recipe's just so I can have them all. Sure I don't need them and won't really use them, and I could probably benefit from getting the other rewards to sell and whatnot...but I like collecting things!

[Felthan]

The collections i was talking about is These 4:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sentient_Aberration
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sentient_Anomaly
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sentient_Oddity
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sentient_Singularity

Once you do those 4 you can make https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gle...tience#vendor1 by putting those 4 in in the mystic forge

Gleam of Sentience lets you buy https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sentient_Seed needed to make https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Aurora

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Herta is one you can do also for eating bloodstone dust. Also has a small chance to drop a infusion worth 800g+

[Edge-]

A bit more expensive, but got to 400 weaponsmithing and discovering I can make a fair number of weapons that sell for a bit of gold with what I've got stored. Yay, I can recoup some of my losses and get to 500 while periodically making a bit of gold.

Finally getting some research notes to boot which is nice, guess holding off on leveling up professions may end up playing out alright as I can level them all up and just scrap everything I make for research notes.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

If you own any expansion you unlock the raptor at level 10 (Hooray, players no longer need to do the story out of order to unlock this necessary feature!). You still need PoF to unlock the masteries.

Untamed pet abilities can now be set to autoattack by holding the control key and right clicking. Still doesn't fix the spec but it helps a little.

[pahbi]

What is guildwars 2 like in the end game? Is it dungeoning and raiding like wow or more solo orientated?

[PACOX]

What is guildwars 2 like in the end game? Is it dungeoning and raiding like wow or more solo orientated?

Its open. You can be someone who only does open world stuff and not run out of content.

As far as endgame PVE instances go, there's fractals, raids, and strikes.

If you played Mystic+ in WoW know Blizzard adapted the idea from GW2s fractals. There are mini-dungeon instances that scale in difficulty and add affixes to the encounters.

Raids a(10 man) re what you would expect in any game with raids except GW2 doesn't have ilvls. So people who know the game very well will make the fights look easy while beginners might seens countless hours trying to learn fights.

Strikes are 10 man single boss encounters, like FF14. They were originally designed to be intros to raids so the first set of strikes are easy. Each strike is progressively harder or more mechanic intensive. With the latest expansion strikes have completely replaced raids. They come with two difficulties, normal and CM. Normals are on par with or slightly below raid boss difficulty. CMs are raid boss difficulty. The most recent CM released gained some hype among other MMO communities due to its difficulty.

Then you have your PVP and WvW scenes, some would call those the original endgame modes way back in the day before Anet started making more PVE oriented content.

- - - Updated - - -

If you own any expansion you unlock the raptor at level 10 (Hooray, players no longer need to do the story out of order to unlock this necessary feature!). You still need PoF to unlock the masteries.

Untamed pet abilities can now be set to autoattack by holding the control key and right clicking. Still doesn't fix the spec but it helps a little.

It was a smart decision. A lot of people buy the expansion because they heard about GW2s amazing mounts but then find out you have to be lvl 80 and through the entire core story, an expansion, and 2 (almost 3 now) living story chapters to unlock mounts naturally.

On Untamed, TBF Untamed is the best dps/alac option in endgame and not bad in pvp.

[pahbi]

So if I buy the expansion I can get a mount at level 10, otherwise I have to wait till level 80?

[PACOX]

You always had to buy the expansion for the mount. The change is that you had do a lvl 80 story mission to get it. Now you automatically get your first mount at lvl 10.

People who don't have the expansion also get a trial mount that lasts 5 hours or something.

[Ghost of Cow]

What is guildwars 2 like in the end game? Is it dungeoning and raiding like wow or more solo orientated?

It has steadily become more of your typical MMO endgame over the years. Raids, mini-raids ("strikes") and dungeons (fractals) are where you get a lot of your content.

Yes, people will still drag out the old pre-release marketing stuff about how the whole game is endgame, that you can do stuff outside in the world and it's great content and yadda yadda. But that hasn't been an honest assessment for years. You can go out and kill shit in the open world, sure, just like you can in any other MMO. You'll generally get next to nothing for it, too. Just like in any other MMO.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

What is guildwars 2 like in the end game? Is it dungeoning and raiding like wow or more solo orientated?

Grinding for sparkly weapons. If you do PvE then you are either farming the same world bosses and map events for currencies and mats to make a legend. Or you do 5v5 PvP or WvW zergs.

[Edge-]

Yes, people will still drag out the old pre-release marketing stuff about how the whole game is endgame, that you can do stuff outside in the world and it's great content and yadda yadda. But that hasn't been an honest assessment for years. You can go out and kill shit in the open world, sure, just like you can in any other MMO. You'll generally get next to nothing for it, too. Just like in any other MMO.

I mean...it still very much is. I regularly do world bosses for hours and just farm lower level zones. I'm on max level alts doing atlas completion. I'm going back to older zones for dailies and sticking around for some extra events/material farming. I'm going back and re-exploring/doing events in older zones for various collection quests etc.

Is just farming random mobs or low level events going to pay out huge? No, of course not. It shouldn't, since taking a level 80 character with a decent build back to low level zones lets you absolutely shitstomp everything with ease (hell, seeing a lot of HoT events being "kill a veteran mob" that goes down easily by yourself is hilarious).

Even if it's not huge payouts, it still all tracks towards your overall progress in meaningful ways. Events etc. contribute decent chunks towards XP for mastery progress or Spirit Shards (if you're into mystic forge crafting). Lower level mats are needed to level up crafting professions and specific recipes, and still sell fairly well on the AH (usually they're actually more profitable to sell vs. the second-highest tier of mats like mithril since it's so absurdly abundant).

I've been surprised at how many collection items I've accidentally picked up while going back to older expansions or lower level zones. Been progressing my elite spec collections towards the ascended weapons on my engineer and I think I've finished like almost 70% of my scrapper collection purely on accident. And that's just a freebie ascended hammer if I ever decide to put together a scrapper support build or something.

- - - Updated - - -

Grinding for sparkly weapons.

Fasion Wars has always been the true endgame of GW2.

[Ghost of Cow]

I mean...it still very much is. I regularly do world bosses for hours and just farm lower level zones. I'm on max level alts doing atlas completion. I'm going back to older zones for dailies and sticking around for some extra events/material farming. I'm going back and re-exploring/doing events in older zones for various collection quests etc.

Is just farming random mobs or low level events going to pay out huge? No, of course not. It shouldn't, since taking a level 80 character with a decent build back to low level zones lets you absolutely shitstomp everything with ease (hell, seeing a lot of HoT events being "kill a veteran mob" that goes down easily by yourself is hilarious).

Even if it's not huge payouts, it still all tracks towards your overall progress in meaningful ways. Events etc. contribute decent chunks towards XP for mastery progress or Spirit Shards (if you're into mystic forge crafting). Lower level mats are needed to level up crafting professions and specific recipes, and still sell fairly well on the AH (usually they're actually more profitable to sell vs. the second-highest tier of mats like mithril since it's so absurdly abundant).

Sure, but the point being that it's not something unique or special to GW2. It's just...farming stuff out in the world.

I've been surprised at how many collection items I've accidentally picked up while going back to older expansions or lower level zones. Been progressing my elite spec collections towards the ascended weapons on my engineer and I think I've finished like almost 70% of my scrapper collection purely on accident. And that's just a freebie ascended hammer if I ever decide to put together a scrapper support build or something.

Not free at all considering that those collections are the, "Everything is trivial to get except this one item that costs darn near what you'd pay for an ascended item anyway." sort that I was referring to earlier.

Of course, you can probably just make your own Mystic Battlehammer at this point, but yeah. Those kind of collections are really for the skin, not for a "free item" in any way.

[Edge-]

Sure, but the point being that it's not something unique or special to GW2. It's just...farming stuff out in the world.

Except it is, both due to level scaling (which does reduce power to a point). There's more designed reward-incentives for returning to lower level zones in GW2 for mats vs. many other MMO's, for returning to do boss fights or dynamic events vs. other MMO's. There's extensive use of collections/achievements that give specific reasons to return to older zones, too. Sure your chances at getting "good" rewards in lower level zones is lower given that they're largely easy, but you're still hunting for achievements (maybe) and some rare drops on lower level bosses like Shatterer or Teq (SPOONS!)

It's not all equally rewarding, and nobody is arguing that it is. But it's still rewarding, hence why you still regularly see packed world boss fights and still fairly often see max level players running around low level zones.

Not free at all considering that those collections are the, "Everything is trivial to get except this one item that costs darn near what you'd pay for an ascended item anyway." sort that I was referring to earlier.

I mean...part of that is literally the design. It's designed to send you to various locations for lore reasons etc. and that not every step in the collection is supposed to be super cereal difficult. Especially as there are a lot of multi-step collections that frequently send you back to zones. Is this "busywork" I can see that argument and sometimes it feels like it. But there are plenty of outright challenging collections too, and variety is good.

Of course, you can probably just make your own Mystic Battlehammer at this point, but yeah. Those kind of collections are really for the skin, not for a "free item" in any way.

But that's an exotic hammer with a pretty "bleh" selection of stats?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_Battlehammer

Sure I could try crafting an ascended hammer assume I have a recipe with the right stats on it, but that's also kinda expensive. Granted Fix-r-Upper doesn't include a good selection of stats for support (wanderer is bleh) but there's at least a boring zerker option. It's still a "free" ascended quality hammer I can slap zerker stats on and bank in case I want to do something like pick back up my revenant and throw hammers again.