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Getting Started with Guild Wars 2

May 26, 2025May 26, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. I’ve had a bit of a fraught relationship with Guild Wars 2, given that I resigned from the alpha program initially… and then later came to terms with exactly the sort of game that it was. That understanding became a deep love of its quirky systems and wholly unique community. The challenge however… is that on-boarding new friends into the game is a bit of a pain in the ass. I went through a lot of this with my friend Zarly, and quite honestly… she is what has prompted me to sit down an attempt the impossible… creating a starter guide. I’ve been playing this game since 2011 in one form or another and there are just aspects to the game that are so ingrained in me… that it is sometimes hard to realize how wildly different it is than the archetypal “World of Warcraft” norms for MMORPGs. As such I am going to attempt to set out to explain some of the core elements. This will of course be woefully incomplete… because I am effectively setting out to do the impossible which is to try and cram fourteen years of already incomplete knowledge into a single blog post.

Character Creation

The beginning of any MMORPG journey starts with Character Creation. This is also the point at which the true analysis paralysis begins, because Guild Wars 2 in particular asks the player a lot of questions… and at the same time does not really explain what matters and what does not matter. Basically the only elements that have lasting ramifications are your race and profession. Those are locked in and unchangeable. All of the questions that you are asked after that first decision, are mostly flavor shaping how your personal story is going to play out. There might be later calls back to these elements, but they will not drastically change the game after the first thirty levels. Essentially the Core Guild Wars 2 story can be divided up into three segments:

Your Racial Origin Story – Levels 1 – 30
- This is largely centered around the race of your choice and will start with a tutorial mission and then follow forth with you being mentored by one of the members of Destiny’s Edge.
The Orders Story – Levels 30-70
- At level 30 the Racial aspects of your story stop and you are asked to choose one of three orders, and from that point until around level 70 you will be largely following a preset story arc centered around that group. The three orders are:
  - Durmand Priory – Researchers, Scholars, and Archivists
  - Order of Whispers – Spies, and Assassins
  - The Vigil – Soldiers
- There are no hard profession requirements for each of these, but it is just more the vibe of the order. If you have any doubts I highly suggest Order of Whispers because it has the best story overall.
The Pact Story – Levels 70-80
- Leading up to level 70, some major world events start happening which require the three orders to tightly coordinate together and form a brand new group referred to as the Pact. Any choices that you made during the Racial and Order story segments might be name checked in the future, but from this point on you are largely part of this group until the primary story arc of the game completes with End of Dragons.

There are reasons to make all of the different choices that you are given… but effectively I would say just choose something and move on with your life. Any impact that they might have are VERY short lived, and you have so much game ahead of you especially once you factor in all of the Living World Seasons and Expansions… so any option is going to be fine.

Combat and Leveling

The first core difference between Guild Wars 2 and other MMORPGs is that it is not a purely tab target and spam spells sort of gameplay. You can move while you are attacking and by default you are firing your attacks in whatever direction that your cursor is pointing. So in order for me to hit this griffon on the above screenshot with my ranged attacks, I need to be pointing my cursor at the target. Generally speaking you have your first skill with any weapon as an auto attack, and then the rest of your skills do different things and have longer cool downs. The most effective combat is to weave together profession abilities and weapon skills for both of your weapons. You can make it through MOST open world content in the game by just spamming your auto attack, but it will be less than optimal game play. Hitting every ability on cooldown is also not necessarily optimal gameplay. You need to understand what every skill does, and the best scenario to use it.

The game uses a pretty familiar friend vs foe system. Anything highlighted in Red will attack you if you get close enough to it. Anything that shows up as yellow is neutral but will turn red if you take a hostile action towards this. Usually this is attacking it outright, but occasionally this will involve taking some action that the target does not like. For example there is a common trope during collection quests where there will be a bunch of neutral mobs in amongst the things that you are collecting and if you pick up one of the items… it turns anything near you hostile forcing you to run back to the objective with monsters trailing you. Anything that is Green is considered an ally and cannot be attacked and will not openly attack you. Occasionally part of stories and events Green mobs might turn hostile but will change their color to Red before doing so.

There is a concept that is extremely important and that can often determine success or failure in large events. However please note… that this is also something that you will not encounter super often until you reach the end game and later expansions. That concept is the “Break Bar” or more correctly termed Defiance Bar. Essentially it is a row of grey shields that appears below the health bar on some bosses, and occasionally on very specific normal encounters. When this row is present it means that the mob is taking much less damage. However occasionally that grey bar will turn blue which means you need to do anything you can to lower it giving you and all of the other players a “burn phase” to deal extra damage to the boss. Certain skills will say that they deal “defiance damage” and you want to largely hold these in reserve when you are encounters with a break bar. After you have “broken” the bar it will turn orange and start filling up again indicating how much longer you have on your current burn phase. Once it goes back to Grey shields, you are back to dealing lowered damage again. Like I said this is something that you will not encounter for awhile, but it is important enough that I am highlighting this functionality so that you at least know it exists.

After you kill something in game, you are going to want to loot any items that drop. This is a bit of a quirk of Guild Wars 2 in that looting is not clicking on the corpse, but instead getting in range of it and then using the default interaction key of F to vacuum up anything in the area. If there is loot available there will be little sparkles showing up over the corpse. I zoomed in closely so that I could give an example of what that is going to look like. The above screenshot also shows the AOE Loot interaction popup. Eventually given enough time you can earn the Advanced Logistics mastery on the Pact Commander track which allows you to have everything you kill automatically looted into your inventory. In World vs World it works a little differently but there is a Provision Master skill line you can invest points into in order to get the same auto loot functionality.

Every time your character levels up you will be presented with this screen showing you what just unlocked. Guild Wars 2 tries to roll systems out to you slowly, as not to overwhelm you. However I feel like this sort of has the opposite effect given how quickly levels roll past… it seems like you are constantly having new things thrown at you. After you hit accept on this screen it is going to give you a preview of what abilities unlock for your next level, giving you a bit of a heads up from how far away you are from various systems. I get what the game is going for… but I also feel like to a brand new player who has never played a game like this… that it probably feels like an overload of information. If there is something that you want to know more detail about you can click the information icon out to the side of each element and it will pop up an explanation of what that item is. For example if you click on Conditions it not only pops up a paragraph of text explaining it but also highlights where in the user interface that information shows up.

Another system that you are introduced to pretty quickly is the Adventure Guide. This is essentially a series of Achievements that are designed to walk you through the basics of learning the game. Completing each objective will focus on a single concept. This is definitely a positive step forward, but also… players don’t really read dialogs anymore. This only really adds to the information overload aspect of having to learn too many things at once. These are absolutely worth doing however and will count towards unlocking various achievement rewards. This also familiarizes the player with the existence of Achievements which in other games would be though of as side quests. This is the first of many cases where Guild Wars 2 is using a word that lots of other games use… but applying a wildly different meaning towards it. In World of Warcraft most achievements are essentially stretch goals… a way to flex on others because you have done something in a manner that is outside of the ordinary. In Guild Wars 2, this is how you unlock a lot of optional side systems like all of the most interesting mounts.

The User Interface

One of the first challenges that will face you… is learning how to read the user interface. There is a heck of a lot going on there, and there will be things flashing at you trying to get your attention. In order to dive into the process of writing this guide, I started a brand new account so that I would be able to see again what this looks like to a brand new player. I applied some color blocks to the user interface screenshot and labeled these and am going to talk about each of the elements. If you want more information I highly suggest spending time on the excellent Guild Wars 2 Wiki, and more specifically they have a page devoted to the User Interface. The problem with the Wiki is that you have to know what you need to know… before you can find it… and it is also an awful lot to throw at a brand new player.

The Menu Bar
- This section of the UI is located in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and gives you access to some of the basic systems like the Game Menu, Contacts, Hero Screen, Inventory, Mail, and Guild interfaces. It also grants access to some of the game modes like World vs World and PVP as well as giving you the ability to sell things on the auction house from anywhere in the world via the Black Lion Trading Company. There are shortcuts that you will likely learn to get into all of these systems, but when in doubt you can always just hit these icons.
Group Interface
- This is where all of your party and squad related information will be shown. I am not in a group in the screenshot but once you are in one, several icons will be shown descending down the left side of the screen. When you are in a squad you will see a large block of small icons indicating every member with their profession icon. For folks used to other MMORPGs, squads are effectively raid groups, with the key difference here being you have to have purchased a Commander tag in order to create them.
Objective Pointer
- I legitimately have no clue what this is actually called, but essentially it is a little window that points you in the direction of your next objective. If you have a quest set as active it will show you the direction you need to go for that. If you do not have a quest active, it is going to show you the next undiscovered element in your current zone or the nearest event that is happening.
Quest List
- Again I have no clue what this element is actually called but in common MMORPG verbiage this is the quest list. This shows you what step in a given story quest you are on and also shows you any achievements you are tracking. The thing that took me forever to realize, is that in this game… Achievements are essentially what side quests would be in any other game. The only “quests” that show up by default are the story driven quests. However there is an almost infinite amount of content that can be unlocked by browsing through the achievements interface. These can be everything from Kill X Mobs of a Specific Type in a Specific Zone… all the way to multiple hundred hour system unlock grinds like Legendary Weapons.
Interaction Dialog
- This is a little pop up window to the side of your character in the center of your screen that shows you what the current interaction element would be when you hit F the default interaction key. For example in the above image, the interaction option is Talk, but it could be gathering nodes, picking up items, using gadgets in the world… basically this is how you navigate your way through objectives by finding objects and doing the thing highlighted with the F key or whatever you have rebound this to.
Awards and Notifications
- As soon as you get into the game for the first time… there are going to be a bunch of bouncing icons above your mini-map. This is essentially where the game sends you any notifications that require you to interact with them, and it also is where an rewards you have been given show up. When you level up, you will be able to access the level up dialog here outlining what you just got for that level. Later as you complete events or renown hearts, they will show up here giving you any rewards that you have gained from them. You are going to be clicking this area an awful lot.
The Chat Window
- This is extremely straight forward, and works more or less like every other chat interface does. You type in the box and it sends it out to other players in the world. Chat is divided up into various channels and you can filter what shows up in the box. Additionally you can create various tabs of specifically filtered chat that you can flip back and forth between to limit the amount of information you are seeing at any given time. These are the channels that you will have access to:
  - Say/Local – This sends a message and can be seen by anyone standing near you and within 2000 range of you.
  - Map/Yell/Shout – This sends a message to the current map/zone instance that you are in. Essentially everyone can see this. Often used during events to communicate between groups of players not in parties or squads.
  - Party – This sends messages to your active party or squad subgroup. This pretty much works like every game that has this functionality.
  - Squad – Sends a message to the squad you are in. This is essentially raid chat from other games.
  - Team – This is a unique channel mode that only shows up when you are in a PVP game mode which is either structured PVP or World Vs World and sends out a message to everyone that is on the same PVP faction that you represent.
  - Whisper/Tell/Reply – This sends or replies to a message from a single user and is essentially a private message that works much the same as similar concepts on MMORPGs.
  - Guild – This will send a message to the guild that you are currently representing. Guild Wars 2 is a little weird in that it allows you to be a member of six different guilds, and representing is the process of showing that you are actively a member of that guild. It sets your guild tag to that specific guild. You can send messages to any guild regardless if you are representing them or not by typing /g1-/g6 which is the order in which they appear on your guild screen.
Profession Mechanics
- This is a short hotbar of abilities that are default to your profession. They can change based on which Elite spec you are using if you are using one, but essentially are skills that are baked in and are often times the core mechanic for that profession. For example Ranger has pet abilities that show up on this bar which gives you direct control over what your pet is doing. This is going to be different for every profession… which I keep wanting to refer to as your class.
Endurance Pips
- This shows how much endurance your character has and is essentially how many times you can dodge. By default you will have two pips that show up in yellow on this interface that sits on top of your health globe. Various things might change how this works, for example some mount masteries can give you three pips instead of two while riding that mount. Basically if you have a full pip showing up, you can actively dodge something or use abilities that consume endurance.
Mini Map
- Its a small representation of the map. It shows whatever happens to be around you and can be zoomed in and out. Clicking on it will bring up the full map, and if there is some objective that you are tracking or have set a user defined way point… it will show up on the edge of the mini map in the direction that you need to travel in order to get there. If there is a Commander or Mentor active on the map it will show which direction they are located in relation to your current position. I will talk a bit more about those two situations later when I talk about the full map view as understanding the map is SUPER important.
Weapon Swap
- This widget allows you to swap which set of weapons you are actively using. Normally you would be doing this through your hotkey, but if you are more of a clicker… you can click this widget to perfect a weapon swap.
Weapon Skills
- This is where Guild Wars 2 really begins to differentiate itself from other games. If you think of a traditional 10 key MMORPG hotbar, the first five slots are determined by what weapons you have equipped. Every profession has specific abilities that it gains from equipping each of the weapon types that it can equip. If you are wielding a one-hander and another one-hander or off-hand the first three slots will be determined by your mainhand, and the last two will be determined by your offhand. If you are using a two handed weapon, then all five slots will be determined by that one weapon. Swapping your weapons… will produce a different set of five skills. You will have to play around with what each weapon does for your profession because sometimes it is less than obvious. Necromancer Axe is a ranged weapon, so is Greatsword for Mesmers… both a non-standard interpretation of what a traditionally melee weapon might do. Basically equip every weapon at least once so that you can fiddle with it and decide which you actually like using.
Health Globe
- It’s a Health Globe. It shows how much life you have and also shows if there is an over-shield on you. Not sure what else I can add of value here.
Trait Skills
- I said the first five skills on you hotbar came from your weapons, and the second set of five skills are chosen from a pool that is based on which three traits you have chosen for your character and how much you have progressed them. The first skill in this second set of five will always be your healing ability. You can choose from several different ones, and they all have their edge cases as to which you might want to use them. The next three skills are referred to as Utility Skills and can be chosen in any order from a massive pool of skills that you gain from your profession and the traits you have equipped. The last skill in this batch of five will always be your elite skill. This is a special extra powerful ability inherited from whichever trait you have equipped as your elite trait or one of the ones associated with the core profession.
Mounts
- Once you have gained a mount, either through completing the mastery track that unlocks it… or reaching level 10 and unlocking it through the new player progression it will show up in this menu. Whichever mount you have selected from this menu will be the mount that you use when you hit the active hotkey or press this widget.
Experience Bar
- This shows how much experience you have gained and how far from the next level you are. Once you have hit level 80, this turns into your mastery bar and shows how much experience you have gained towards the next mastery objective that you are working towards. This bar will also show what your current level is and whether or not the zone you are in has down-scaled you to a lower level.

There are a few other user interface elements that can show be situational… but really I am focused on the core elements that every new player will see rather than things that may show up given time. If you want more detail then once again I highly suggest you spend some time reading the wiki page about the Graphical User Interface.

The Map Screen

Almost more important than learning how to interpret the default user interface of the game… is understanding the map. Guild Wars 2 is a game that gives you an immense amount of information in a very condensed form, but you have to be able to interpret it. Most of your time you are going to be roaming around maps and interacting with various elements. There is a whole side goal of getting 100% world completion which unlocks items needed for crafting Legendary Weapons. Before that however… doing things on the map are going to be your main way of gaining experience and progressing from 1 to 80. Later it is going to be through the map, and meta events that you progress endgame systems and navigate your way through unlocking various aspects of the game through achievements. The wiki is once again the best source of information about this… but I am going to do my best to explain the things you see on the map so that you can interpret them more easily. Everything has a purpose.

Map Markers

Events on Maps

Events are very much the secret sauce of Guild Wars 2. They are reoccurring events that either cycle in a rotation of available events, or fire at specific times of day. For special events and zone metas there is even this handy timer schedule that shows what events are active at that very moment and what ones are about to fire soon. They are always fairly rewarding and almost always worth your time to stop whatever you are doing and complete them. They also offer this wonderful impromptu grouping activity where you and other player can temporarily collaborate in order to finish an activity together. On most nights I set out with a fixed goal, but then end up roaming around from event to event because I get easily distracted. Events never encourage player conflict, and as such… it has helped to build the unique community that Guild Wars 2 has. These have their own set of markers associated with them that explain what the goal of a given event is.

There are other event types, but these four are the most common and if you understand them it is going to get you most of the way towards learning how to interpret events as they spawn on the map. Occasionally you will encounter events that are red instead of orange. These are generally associated with World Bosses, Zone Metas, or some sort of player summoned event like a Rift Hunt. To be completely honest… some of the color coding of things in Guild Wars 2 has been an evolving process over the course of the last decade. Not even meta is colored red… sometimes they are colored yellow… or have unique icons associated with them. However once you learn to interpret events as a whole, the rest of the details can be figured out on the fly. Basically I want you to feel comfortable enough that when you see an event going on… to tag along and have fun. Throwing yourself into random events is quite possibly the best aspect of the game, and you should never feel afraid to do it. Players are generally fairly forgiving of failed states… and only the most hardcore and newest meta events really have any friction associated with them.

Future Discussions

At this point if you truly are a brand new player… I am certain I have completely overloaded you. At some point I will probably pick up this discussion because I have yet to talk about buildcraft in any fashion. I’ve only covered some of the quirks of Guild Wars 2 Combat and Leveling, and then gave you a bit of a primer on how to interpret the user interface and the game map. There are countless other systems that I could talk about in length, and I think the next time I do one of these it will be focused on how to understand a written guide and then translate that into recreating it in game. You can essentially get through the core story without having any clue what you are doing. You can and should pick whatever you think is the most enjoyable and then just do that thing until you clear core Tyria. As you dive into further content in the expansions however… what is acceptable and viable starts to narrow a bit and you will probably want to find a build.

Anyways… hopefully someone out there in the future will find this nonsense useful. Further adventures down this whole path of “Bel Writes Guides” will probably be a bit more bite sized. I only dove this far down the rabbit hole because it is the Memorial Day holiday and I had the time to spend a few hours knocking this out. I am by no means an expert in this game. There are aspects that I am still learning myself. However I did find a gap in the content that was available, in that none of it seems to really be targeting someone who has zero to twenty hours in the game. I am sure someone will show up in the comments telling me how wrong I am about various elements, and that is okay. However it is also my hope that someone out there finds this helpful as they begin their journey to understanding this extremely rich game.

Getting Started with Path of Exile

July 24, 2023 by Belghast

The launch of Diablo IV was a huge event, and it brought a lot of players who latently enjoy the ARPG genre out of the woodwork. Unfortunately, this mishandling of the game leading up to the launch of the first season has created a bit of a vacuum. If you survey the ARPG landscape you find many options with various benefits. Last Epoch, for example, shows a lot of promise but is still very much “in development” and lacks a lot of excitement regarding its endgame options. Grim Dawn feels a little dated, and while Wolcen has a great campaign it lacks a bit once you wrap things up. Path of Exile is by far the most complete package out there, but it has an extremely steep learning curve in order to get to the point where you feel comfortable with all of the concepts. For example, I am well over 1200 hours into the game and I still feel like I am just getting started.

The popular logic within the Path of Exile community is that new players should follow a build guide. I have done this thing… but quite honestly the “newbie” focused content isn’t quite “newbie enough” for someone just getting started with this game. The thing is Path of Exile has a lot of concepts that are fairly unique to this game. The problem is that a veteran of this game will just accept as common knowledge a number of concepts that you may have never experienced before. I feel like I am setting myself up for failure, but my hope is that I can help to bridge that gap. I do feel like the best way to play this game IS to follow a guide, but my goal will be to fill in some of the necessary 100-level coursework required to make it so that you CAN realistically hop into the game and follow a guide.

What is a League?

I am going to be addressing the new character creation process, but I am going to go a bit out of order. One of the first screens that can throw a player for a loop is this one, which asks you to make some decisions about your characters. Many ARPGs have the concept of a season and Path of Exile refers to this as a “League”. Essentially this is how the game adds new content, and there will be some form of a seasonal mechanic that lasts for somewhere in the neighborhood of three months before being replaced by another “league”. Currently, we are in the Crucible League and this adds a weird mechanic where you can add randomly generated talent trees to your weapons. When a specific league is over, everything migrates to the Standard league where your characters will reside from that point forward.

Path of Exile has a wide variety of different game modes, and all of these started out at one point as “League” mechanics. If for example, Crucible was well enough received, it might at some point get reworked slightly and brought into the Standard league and as such become a permanent part of the game going forward. There are a number of optional challenges that make content more difficult. Hardcore for example is treated as a separate league where you only have one life, and if you die your character can migrate to either the Standard or current League mechanic. “Solo Self Found” or SSF is a special challenge that makes it so that you cannot trade items with players or have access to your guild’s shared stash. Ruthless is a relatively new mode where you have extreme item scarcity in your drops and player skills are not available on vendors and have to be found either from quests or drops.

Generally speaking, I recommend players start characters in whatever League happens to be going on at the time and without any optional difficulty settings. Right now the Crucible League is taking place, and on the 18th of August, the next league will start. We find out this Friday what those league mechanics are going to look like. When a League ends, all of your characters are migrated to Standard and all of your stash tabs will be migrated intact as special “remove-only” tabs that allow you to withdraw items but not store new items.

What Class Should I Play?

This is the screen that allows you to choose what character class you want to play. This screen is a bit of a trap because if you are used to playing games like Diablo… your character class means something very specific. You might see the big beefy Marauder and think, that I need to choose this class in order to play a melee character. You might see the Templar aka the Old Man… and think this is going to be a cleric class and will heal people. You would be wrong, and I feel like this sets players up to make some wildly incorrect assumptions about the game. All classes in Path of Exile can essentially use every single skill available in the game. You can make a spell-slinging Marauder or a two-handed weapon melee-focused Witch. There are no hard lines drawn in the sand about what each of these can do other than the ascendancies… which is a rabbit hole we will talk about later.

Instead, it is best to think about the different classes in Path of Exile based on where they start on the passive tree. Please note… this is a wildly truncated version of the passive tree because I cannot really get a screenshot that has ALL of it in the same 16:9 aspect ratio image. There are six sectors to the passive tree and these are labelled based on the core stats that they tend to focus on. Often times these are referred to as “Pure Characters” and “Hybrid Characters”.

Pure Characters
- Marauder – Strength – Starts in the South West Sector.
- Witch – Intelligence – Starts in the North Central Sector
- Ranger – Dexterity – Starts in the South East Sector
Hybrid Characters
- Templar – Strength and Intelligence – Starts in the North West Sector.
- Shadow – Intelligence and Dexterity – Starts in the North East Sector
- Duelist – Strength and Dexterity – Starts in the South Central Sector

The Scion is a character class that you cannot start the game with until you have unlocked that character by playing through the campaign on at least one other character. The Scion is a bit of an odd duck in that you start in the dead center of the passive tree. It also has some other weird things going on in that it has a bit of a hybrid ascension path allowing you to choose from traits available of any of the other ascensions.

While your character class does not dictate the type of character you can build, it does however dictate what you have easy access to based upon the starting position. For example, this is my Wintertide Brand Occultist, which is based on the Witch starter class. I have spread out my points all along the top of the passive tree going both into the Templar and Shadow sectors to grab things that made the build work. There are a lot of nodes in the Shadow area that allow you to scale up damage over time, and then nodes in the Templar area that allow me to buff up the brand spells that I am casting. Almost all builds are going to travel around between multiple different regions of the tree as they seek out nodes that specifically bolster whatever build they are trying to accomplish.

What are Ascendancy Classes?

Starting in Act III of the campaign you will gain access to “Ascendancy Classes” which shift your character from the fairly generic starter class to something a bit more focused. Each has its own talent tree that is independent of the rest of the passive skill tree, and over the course of your leveling process, you will be able to choose eight different skill nodes in those ascendancy trees. They tend to lean in a specific direction for example if you really love Totem builds, then you might want to specifically check out the Chieftan Marauder ascendancy or the Hierophant Templar ascendancy. Do you really want to play a super tanky character that has a lot of defensive layers? Then you might want to check out the Juggernaut Marauder ascendancy or the Champion Duelist ascendancy. If you really love Minion builds… then, unfortunately, you are probably going to be pigeonholed into playing a Witch and then ascending into a Necromancer.

While the Ascendency class focuses the character in a more specific direction, it is still important not to try and think of them as being ONLY one type of character. For example, Toxic Rain is a very popular ability that causes poisonous rain to deal chaos damage to everything in an area. There are many ways to build this type of character and currently, there are at least four different meta builds for different ascendency classes. I personally played Toxic Rain Pathfinder which is a ranger ascendency, but Raider is also popular as well as Toxic Rain Trickster in Shadow, and Toxic Rain Champion in Duelist. When someone is building a character they tend to focus more on what ability they want to use and less on which specific character and ascension path that they want to follow. I love Righteous Fire and there are very specific builds for Juggernaut, Inquisitor, and Elementalist… that all have different positives and negatives.

What are Skill Gems?

One of the things that makes Path of Exile different from other ARPGs is the fact that you can socket any skill gem into almost any piece of gear and your character can immediately start using that ability. There are a bunch of caveats around that statement that we will dive into a bit later, but essentially the gems that you socket into your gear are what give your character different abilities. All gems essentially fall into one of two broad categories:

Active Skill Gems – These are abilities that can be bound to a key and are performed when that key bind is pressed or the skill slot is clicked. These fire off spells, swing weapons, cast buffs, or move players around the screen. They DO things… thus Active Skills.
Support Gems – These gems specifically modify Active Skill gems and change either how they work or the types and amount of damage that they deal.

Not all support gems can modify all active skill gems, and how this is determined is based on a “tag” system. In the above image, you will notice that there is a comma-delimited list of terms that appear in the first line of the skill. In order to use a Support Gem on Ground Slam for example, that Support Gem must include at least one of the following terms: Attack, AoE, Slam, or Melee. This is going to be true for passive skills and gear as well, but we will get into that a bit further in.

Another key differentiator to get in your head is the type of active ability. Essentially everything is going to be one of the following:

Attack Skill – This is a physical attack and is the equivalent of swinging a sword, throwing a spear, or some other kinetic physical activity.
Spell Skill – This is the act of casting a spell or channeling your focus into something mystically.

This largely matters because the items you pick up out in the world will give you bonuses for different sorts of skills. For example, the Sceptre on the left says that it increases the Elemental Damage of the player by 40% so that specifically means that the tags of the skill have to have Fire, Cold, Lightning, or Elemental in order to benefit from that bonus. Similarly the Gauntlets on the right show that they add 11 to 17 Cold Damage to Attacks. In order for the player to receive this bonus, they have to be using a Skill that has the tag “Attack” in it. So scrolling back up in this case the gauntlets would give that bonus to someone using Ground Slam, but not someone using Holy Flame Totem. Often times you end up with gear with stats that you can’t necessarily use… because it is extremely rare that an item roll is perfectly applicable to whatever build you are trying to create.

What are Item Links?

The items that you pick up are going to have a number of sockets available, each of them with a specific color, and the possibility of having those sockets linked. There are also white sockets that allow you to put any color gem in them, but they are a bit rare so we are not going to get into them. In order for a support gem to apply to a specific skill, it needs to be “linked” to the socket that the active skill gem is in. Now this link does not have to be direct… for example, in the above image I have a chest with six links, and the very last green socket is still applying to the active skill gem which happens to be the green gem in the first socket. The order of the sockets does not matter in a link, only that they are linked. Folks tend to refer to items based on the color of sockets that are available. So in the above sequence of items, I would refer to them as RRRB, RRGB, and GGGBBR. More correctly folks often refer to things with a dash indicating the links so since the gloves above have two different two-links they would be referred to as R-R B-R.

You can change the color and links of an item but for the sake of being the most basic of primers… I am not going to dive into that at all. On the Scion that I have been leveling recently, I am using Armageddon Brand as my primary skill, and as such I am using it as my six-link. Essentially there are only two pieces of gear that can have six links. The most common of these is your chestpiece, but if your build can use a two-handed weapon you can have a second six-link there. Let’s dive into the chain of skills that I am specifically using with that ability and I will explain a little bit of the logic behind them.

Armageddon Brand – A brand is a type of spell that is fairly unique to Path of Exile, but essentially it is a magical disease that can spread between enemies. There are lots of different kinds, but this one in particular calls down a meteor from above that smashes into the enemy and deals area-of-effect damage. As such this spell has these tags: Spell, AOE, Fire, Duration, Brand
- Swiftbrand Support – This skill essentially makes it so that brands apply their effect faster and then fizzle out faster as well. Essentially imagine dealing more damage over a shorter period of time.
- Increased Critical Damage Support – Pretty self-explanatory, it increases the Critical Damage Multiplier for the spell. This bends the rules a bit because Arma Brand does not specifically have a tag that says “Critical” but it does have verbiage down in the body of the spell.
- Concentrated Effect Support – This support gem makes it so Armageddon Brand deals more area damage, but makes the total radius where the damage is applied a bit smaller.
- Elemental Focus Support – This will make it so Arma Brand deals more elemental damage, but can’t apply any elemental ailments. This is fine because most of our damage is coming from the meteor strike so that is what we want to increase the damage of.
- Lifetap – This is a utility gem that makes it so any active skill in the link will cost life instead of mana. This is a common tactic that allows you to reserve your mana for other purposes and has the nice side benefit of giving you a buff to total damage after you have effectively damaged yourself to cast the spell. We won’t necessarily go into this… but you can also use Lifetap to give any Active Skill Gem the “duration” tag.

It is around this point that you are thinking to yourself “Gee Bel, that is a lot of nonsense to keep straight in my head” and you would be correct. Thankfully there is a faster way in the game to see what support gems work with which active skills. There will be a vendor in every act that sells skill gems that you have unlocked, as well as one in Act III in the Library that sells all gems that you have access to, and another one much later that does the same role. When you mouse over a support gem in the vendor inventory, it will tell you which skills you have actively slotted into your gear that it will be capable of supporting. For example, Generosity Support makes it so that Auras no longer benefit you, but instead affect your allies… which are anyone in your party or your minions. If you notice it tells me with a green checkmark that Defiance Banner, Determination, and Vitality can use this support gem… aka all of my Aura-based buffs.

Following a Guide or Yoloing It

Essentially there are two ways to play Path of Exile. The first is following a guide and trying to understand the thought processes that led to the creation of that guide. The second is to just get into the game and start making choices, knowing that eventually you will probably hit a wall and need to start over from scratch. I did not really come to love this game until I followed a guide… and even then it took me three leagues of semi-serious play before I felt like I really got a handle on how exactly this game works. Before then I made a lot of failed attempts to get into the game and created some pretty crappy characters in the process. This guide is less a guide trying to tell you how you should be playing, and more an attempt at helping you across the chasm of knowledge between where the guide creators think you are… and where you actually are as a brand-new player.

Like I said before, I am over 1200 hours into this game and there are still segments of the game that I have never experienced… and honestly may never experience. The depth is a huge factor for why I keep recommending this game in spite of the fact that it is so easy for a new player to completely drown in it. Having played and knowing what I know now… I do find a certain amount of merit in the “fuck around and find out” school of thought when it comes to a game like this. I think ultimately which path I would suggest you take, entirely depends upon you as a player. Are you easily frustrated when the journey comes to a hard impassible wall? If so then you would likely have a much better experience following a guide from someone like Zizaran or Pohx. However, if you are someone who loves to experiment and can accept failure and start over from scratch several times… then maybe your best option is just to roll something and go with it until you hit a wall.

But Can’t I Just Respec?

Technically the only decision that you cannot undo in Path of Exile is your starter class. You can respec your entire passive tree… all 124 points of it and even respec your Ascendency to choose another one. However, this is not as easy a thing as that sounds. During the course of the campaign, pending you do all of the side quests, your character will gain 20 Passive Skill Refund points. Generally speaking in order to do a full respec you are going to need to lean on Orbs of Regret that drop randomly in the wild. By the end of a league I have more of these than I can use, but before you get up and running… and can successfully farm content you will be strapped to get enough of these to reasonably change up a character. This is why the common logic is that if you hit a wall, and need to do more than minor tweaks to your character… you are just better off starting from scratch and carrying with your the knowledge of where you strayed from your objectives.

The world record for leveling through the campaign and getting to level 100 is roughly an hour. This is not something I could ever accomplish, but I can zip through the campaign and get to maps in about five hours. I’ve gotten to that point after playing many characters and realizing the flow of zones and some improved questing tips. Your first time through the ten acts of Path of Exile is likely going to take you multiple days. However, every time you do it… you get faster and I think before long I will probably be able to do it in around three hours. I’ve reached the point where I find leveling a new character to be one of my most relaxing activities, but it took me a while to get there. I know it seems daunting to start over, but the more often you do it… the faster you will get at zipping through all of the early activities.

Sometimes your accidents just lead you down paths you didn’t think to go… if you are willing to keep poking at it. For example, I started this dumb Scion character entirely for the purpose of beating Act III so I could get that achievement. I had no real plan for that character and am not following any sort of a build guide, and have already pivoted hard away from the skill that I was originally intending to follow. It has introduced me to Armageddon Brand, a skill I had never used and now like enough to consider properly designing a character around it. I consider that extremely valuable experience that came only because I gave myself the leverage to just start fucking around until I found a path to move forward. It took me a long time before I was willing to let go of the ladder and accept the possibility of a failed state. I am having a heck of a lot of fun, with a character that I never planned on caring about and gave the truly dumb name of “BelGlamRock”.

Barely Scratched the Surface

This is already a massive post… so I am going to wrap things up. As the heading says, I have barely scratched the surface of this game. I am not sure how many more guides like this I intend to create. The goal here is just to throw some terms out, explain them a bit, and give players a bit of an easier time starting the game. There are a slew of way more qualified guide makers out there that can pick up where I left off. I am looking forward to the announcements from ExileCon this Friday and the start of whatever the new league is on August 18th. I hope something I said helps you in your journey, and feel free to reach out to me if you have any specific questions. That is one positive about the Path of Exile community, is that generally speaking, most players are happy to help new folks get started.

400 Light Solo

January 4, 2017 by Belghast

This mornings post is something I have been kicking around in my head for awhile. If you have read any of my blog over the last few years, you will already know that I am nigh obsessed with Destiny. I am not exactly sure what it is about this game that draws me to it so much, but I am smitten. One of the big problems however is that it can be more than a little obtuse for new players. There are so many things that you COULD be doing… that it is sometimes hard to identify what it is that you SHOULD be doing. One of the key goals in the game is the improving of your light level, which is for all intents and purposes exactly the same thing as the modern MMO concept of item level. Higher light level means you simply perform better, in having slightly better stats on your gear… as well as doing more damage. Your light level also dictates how well you will perform against the various levels of content in the game from Patrols, to Strikes, to Raids each with their own suggested light levels.

Now throughout Taken King I raided with then Axioma Clan and now Tequila Mockingbird, but with the release of Rise of Iron I simply haven’t been able to align my schedule to be available for raiding… given that for a lot of it I have been raiding in two other games. That did not however change my desire to keep improving and bumping my gear towards the currently light cap of 400. Over the break I managed to push my Titan main to 400 light, and my Warlock and Hunter are lagging slightly behind at 399 and 398 respectively. I managed to do this entirely through doing solo content with a few hours per sitting of time invested, and honestly… I did it mostly wrong. The problem with Destiny information is that most of it that you will find are either in insanely long and difficult to parse Reddit posts, or in a plethora of YouTube videos that you have to listen to a few times to really grok what they are saying. What doesn’t really help is that most of the “get to 400” information is targeted at folks who ground it up as soon as the game came out and are now trying to explain how it was that they got there. I have the benefit of having just reached 400 light on my Playstation Main… and am now slogging my way back there on my alternate Xbox One account.

New To Destiny

One of the problems with Destiny is that it is really bad at on-boarding new players. At this point there are likely two different categories of players that might be looking at this guide. Firstly they purchased the game at launch, played it… got frustrated and are now contemplating coming back. Second is that they never got into it… and want to get started but find all of the options for purchasing the game confusing. Regardless you are likely honestly wanting the Destiny Collection, which is a set that includes all content released to this point and will upgrade existing accounts to bring them current. Please note that you absolutely want to be current because honestly Destiny does not function nicely if you are not up to the latest version of the game. Largely speaking you are simply limited in what you can do… and this guide of sorts is going to focus on players you are caught up to the Rise of Iron release of the game. The other confusing thing is that long term Destiny players like myself tend to refer to things as years. So for the sake of clarification…

Year One

Destiny Original Release
Dark Below Expansion
House of Wolves Expansion

Year Two

The Taken King Release

Year Three

The Rise of Iron Release

Now your first instinct is going to be that you need to play through all of the original content, then all of the Dark Below content, then all of the House of Wolves content, then the Taken King content, and finally end up with Rise of Iron. On this I am torn because I absolutely think it is worth playing through all of the content available, especially the two expansions from year one because they are going to give you bits of information that will help to fill in gaps in your knowledge as you do various strikes. However started at Year One and leveling your way slowly to Year Three is probably the least efficient way that you can be playing this game. From the standpoint of getting to 400 light… literally everything that happens in Year One is going to be of no long term use to you other than taking up space in your vault as a collectible.

The Infusion System

For the most part Year One was full of a lot of mistakes on how to make content that ages gracefully, and with Year Two they introduced the infusion system allowing you to essentially grow your weapons and armor with you by infusing items into them. Thankfully if you are coming into the game now, you also missed a completely frustrating grind that was the infusion calculation system because during most of Year Two this was an extremely lossy system. For example if you took a 300 light item and infused a 308 light item into it… you were likely going to end up with a 304 light item as a result. With an update in 2015 they shifted this so that infusion was a one for one increase… meaning if you took that same 300 light item and infused a 300 light item into it… you wound up with a 308 light item. However this only applies to items that dropped from Year 2 or Year 3 content… meaning everything from Year 1 will functionally be locked at the gear levels from that era.

Boosting to the Rescue

The other main problem with playing through content as it was designed is that your light levels are going to increase extremely slowly. Destiny is confusing in that it has physical levels… and light levels. When you finish the base game you will be sitting at around physical level 14… and completing both Dark Below and House of Wolves should be able to take you to level 20 without much issue. Taken King content opens at level 20… and takes you to physical level 40. However upon exiting the content you are going to be sitting somewhere around 180-200 light. The Rise of Iron content expects you to be at a minimum of 280 light level, which was the Year 2 floor for being completely outfitted in beginner Legendary gear. If we imagine that you are at 200 light, it is going to take an awful lot of grinding older content to get to 280 and again… that is largely going to be wasted time since the goal has moved on you and are looking at 400 light as the new target.

Buying either Rise of Iron or the Collection both give you a boost that you can use to take your character to level 40… and also outfit them in a full set of 280 blue gear, instantly giving you access to start the newest content. If you want to see the older content, I honestly at this point suggest going ahead and boosting and then just playing through it for the sake of seeing the story… knowing that the only thing of use that you are going to get out of it is some engrams. For the sake of speed and getting you on the path to 400 light fastest… I also suggest playing through the Rise of Iron story as soon as you reasonably can. I did it last night on my 280ish geared Xbox One character and had no real problem making it through the missions. That said… I play a lot of Destiny and there are a few places where the missions can be a little brutal like during the final fight of the opening Rise of Iron mission. However completing the Rise of Iron is going to outfit your character in a full set of 320 blue gear, putting you on a much better ground for starting the push to 400 light.

Level Plateaus

Another concept that you are going to need to learn is that the game rations how much light you can get from certain content. As a result I am going to give you some advice that is going to seem counter intuitive at first. Don’t decode Blue, Purple or god forbid Orange engrams while you are leveling. The temptation is going to be great to rush over to the Cryptarch and see what new and shiny loot you get… but that effort is going to be wasted for the most part until you are at least ready to begin the light push in proper. You are going to ultimately thank yourself later once you reach certain light plateaus that you have a much needed boost waiting for you in the bank. I am going to lay out the various light plateaus and then talk you through them.

Blue (Rare) Engrams – These Max out at 365 light
Purple (Lengendary) Engrams – These Max out at 385 light
Faction Package Loot – These Max out at 390 light
Orange (Exotic) Engrams – These Max out at 400 light with some caveats
“End Game Activities” – Max out at 400 light

The general theory being that you hold all of your engrams until you are at least to the 320 light level that you exit Rise of Iron with. From there you decrypt your blues and do so in a slow and methodical faction. Light level is an average, and your engrams will decode to the same light or slightly higher than whatever your current light level happens to be. So that means as you decode them you want to be doing so as evenly as possible. So you might decode a helm… equip it, and then decode a chest piece… equip it… then a weapon… equip it. Essentially you are trying to stair step up your light as much as you can before decoding the next engram. When you hit 365 light in every slot… you start working on your purples and do the same stair stepping manor until you have everything sitting at 385. Then… you really do not touch your exotics until you have hit 390 loot off of faction packages. Finally and this one gets awkward quickly… you decode exotics until you reach around 399. There seems to be a bug in place where once you get past 399 you stop reliably getting upgrades from Exotics. Sure you can get 400s… but during my most recent slot I would say 80% or so of the exotics I decrypted sat at 399 light instead of going on up to 400 making it heartbreaking. I saved the remaining exotics for after I actually hit 400 to use as infusion fodder.

Bridging the Gaps

Quite simply put… there is no way you are going to have enough engrams to get you all of the way through the light leveling process. This is where all of the other activities come into play. I personally did a ton of bounties to help start getting me faction packages along the way. In the above image you see three types of bounties, the first row being the new Strike Bounties that will give you reputation with the Vanguard and your chosen faction that you should have joined by now… Dead Orbit/Future War Cult/New Monarchy. The middle row are the traditional Vanguard Packages that can be completed anywhere in the game and these give Vanguard and Faction reputation same as the strike bounties. The last row are the Crucible bounties that give you reputation with Lord Shax, but pay special attention to these because some of them require you to be a member of a fire team…. and while technically every group is a fire team… they mean one that you formed yourself. Here is an attempt at a list of the things that you can do to get past various light plateaus.

365 Light Barrier

Blue (Rare) Engrams
Siva Crisis Strike List

Side note during this grind… Siva Crisis Strike list also has the ability to drop Skeleton Keys used to open the Hoard Chests at the end of the strike. Once again hold these in reserve because you are going to need the light boost to hit 400 and each chest you open will reward you one Legendary and one Rare item up to 400 light. So start stockpiling keys now as you go through this process.

385 Light Barrier

Purple (Legendary) Engrams
Archon’s Forge event in Plaguelands Patrol Zone
Heroic Siva Crisis Strike List
Normal Mode Wrath of the Machine Raid

While this is a guide largely targeted at soloing your way to 400 light… I did include the raid content in the list because it also bridges the gap if that is something you have the opportunity to run easily.

390 Light Barrier

Package Loot
- Vanguard – Tower
- Crucible – Tower
- Faction (Dead Orbit/Future War Cult/New Monarchy) – Tower
- Gunsmith – Tower
- Eris Morn – Tower
- Variks – Reef
- Petra Venj – Reef

Now of note… while you are getting to this point you are going to start getting package loot already. There is no real way to hold multiple packages in reserve, and you need to be watching your faction ranks manually because as far as I know when you gain a new rank… and have not collected the previous faction package it is lost. Now I have not experienced this personally, but it is the wisdom of the community that this is apparently a thing that can happen. This is especially important when you are grinding out a bunch of Crucible matches or Strikes in a row… because the faction goes quickly if you are not watching it.

400 Light Barrier

Orange (Exotic) Engrams
Archon’s Forge – Ghost and Artifact slots only
Crucible Matches
Strike Hoard Chests – Requires 1 Skeleton Key each
Iron Banner – Monthly Crucible Event
Nightfall Strike – Once Weekly Per Character
Trials of Osiris – Serious Team vs Team Event
Hard Mode Wrath of the Machine Raid

So something important of note… Rise of Iron came out in September and I am just now hitting the level 400 light cap. I am slow as hell and I did not do things in the most opportune fashion. I broke every single rule that I lined out in this guide, because I was not super focused on getting there as quickly as possible. However expect that each step in this ladder is probably going to take twice as long as the last step, with the last 10 points taking easily the longest if you don’t have access to something like the raid… or a team that can carry you to the tower each week in Trials of Osiris. Your absolute best bet is going to be something like the Iron Banner which has a really good drop rate for gear. The gotcha there however is that each month the Lady Efrideet (pictured above) only brings a few items to the tournament.

This past Iron Banner for example she brought Class Items, Helms, Fusion Rifles and Scout Rifles, so when you add to it the chance of an Artifact or Ghost Shell dropping which is always the case with Iron Banner that gives you six possible items you can get at the end of matches, out of the total 10 slots that you eventually need to raise your light. There are also four bounties that you can complete each time the event runs, and two reward gear drops, and the other two reward weapon drops… that can drop something that in the current months assortment of items. The absolute best case scenario is that you save these until the end of the week because they will reward you based on your current equipped light levels… and hopefully by the end of the tournament you will have bumped up your light a bit. There is also a catch up mechanic that makes gaining faction with the Iron Banner faster on your alts, so in theory I try and run multiple characters through at a time to get more than one set of these packages. However you are going to have to stomach the crucible, so if you are a strictly non-pvp player this might be a step too far for you.

The Missing Pieces

Ultimately whatever path you choose, there is likely going to be a point where you cannot get the drop you need to take you from 399 to 400. For me that item slot was my Heavy Weapon, and nothing I did seemed to be willing to drop one. I finally got it from decoding a Legendary engram, which of note… there is always a slight chance that Rares upgrade into Legendary and Legendary into Exotics. Hell yesterday I even managed to pull a 400 Mida Multitool off of a Rare Primary Engram… so that is also a thing, but just don’t bank on that actually happening. Where the Hoard Chests at the end of strikes come in handy is that each one of them has a chance of dropping a specific set of loot, with a loot table of generally only a couple of items per chest available. The below image is from an excellent reddit post where they took the time to format all of the information in which item drops from which Hoard chest in table form.

If you are interested in which specific drops come from which specific chest… then I suggest you check out this visual guide both of these I am simply referencing for the sake of space and my sanity rather than recreating in blog form. I have recently been chaining strikes in the effort to get an Imago Loop with a decent roll for example. Regardless you should be able to target specific strikes in spending those keys that I hope at this point you have stockpiled and get yourself the rest of the way to 400 in no time.

But What About Xur?

Honestly I largely left Xur off the initial list… because honestly you never know from week to week if he is going to bring something useful. When you take that can combine it with the fact that for the last two weeks Xur has not brought Three of Coins… it feels like his purpose is a bit up in the air at the moment. Previously Three of Coins was a bizarre stacking buff system that made it so that you had an increasing chance of getting an exotic engram to drop any time you killed an ultra, or completed a crucible match. Traditionally this was the thing that I saved my Strange Coins for… and popped one anytime I was chain running Crucible or Strike content. It has problems but it is a nice way of increasing the chance especially new players have of seeing interesting loot. As far as the items he brings, in Year 3 they are all 350 light level and I absolutely abused this fact on my Xbox One account to get a short term boost in light and also provide me with a decent weapon to finish content on. Each week Xur brings one weapon, one warlock armor, one hunter armor and one titan armor. The combination of things you can get however are like I said at the start totally random… and some of the exotic rolls are notoriously bad like bringing items with straight intellect or discipline rolls making it hard to balance your gear around that. They can of course be re-rolled using Glass Needles that he also sells, and recently he has started selling Exotic Shards making upgrading those Exotics lining your bank significantly easier. Essentially I check one of the many youtubers Xur videos Friday morning, or hit WhereIsXur.com to see what he is selling an determine if I care about it for the weekend. Traditionally speaking Saturday night after we recorded our Podcast I would pop over and liquidate my stock of Strange Coins into Three of Coins. He arrives in the wee hours of Friday morning, and disappears in the wee hours of Sunday morning, so you have a limited chance to get items from him, but it is definitely something worth checking out. I just wouldn’t count on actually getting something you needed from him.

Revisiting Old Ideas

June 28, 2016 by Belghast

ArcheAge Resurgence

I have been on quite the Trion Worlds games kick lately after coming back to Rift, and that has how officially spilled over into ArcheAge as well. ArcheAge and I have a bit of a torrid past, or at least it was not a game that I really latched onto from the moment I first played it. In fact in those early Alpha and eventual Beta days… the game had a less than stellar community. That however has changed with time and a significant amount of effort by Trion staff, and the community that exists today is pretty great. I blame Kiwi entirely for me starting to poke my head back into the game, and right now I am largely focused on leveling. Right now I am playing a Firran Bloodreaver on Tahyang server, however as soon as the 3.0 patch lands I will largely be restarting as a Dwarf which will place me on the Nuia faction instead of Haranya. Because of the lag between the South Korean and American versions of this game, we have known that Dwarves and Warborn would be something that would more than likely eventually cross between versions… so I have been patiently waiting. Of the starter races the Firrans were by far my favorite… but if you put Dwarves in the game there is zero contest. So I will have to bid a farewell to the crazy oriental steampunk land that I have grown up in on my cat, and get used to a more european fantasy setting once again. Not necessarily a bad thing, just different.

I believe the level cap is somewhere in the 50s, so I still have a good ways to go since I am sitting at only 36 and that leveling in general does not go terribly quickly in this game. It seems like my return was well timed, given that they gave me some sort of a welcome back package. It included a quest that opens every 24 hours for various rewards, and a bunch of tokens that can be spent on Mirage Island, but I have not ventured back out there to see what all I can purchase with them. At this point I am sorta waiting until I hit the level cap before being too tempted by the shiny baubles. The game has so many little systems and currencies and things that can be done… but I feel like I would need to do a bunch of research to even begin to start taking advantage of half of it. That is why in the meantime I am largely focusing on the leveling game, because combat is something that I understand… and honestly enjoy quite a lot after settling on the Bloodreaver class that is a mixture of Battlerage, Occultism and Auramancy. One of the big concerns I can remember having about this game is the fairly open PVP system, but for the last several zones I have been in “High Tension” zones and really have remained largely uninterrupted in my pursuit of leveling. The ArcheAge community staff deserves some pretty major Kudos for turning the course around in this game, and fostering what appears to be a real sense of community in its players. Looking forward to delving further into it the longer I stick around.

Working on Something

Last night was largely devoted to helping a friend of mine get to level 40 in Destiny and through the Taken King storyline missions. However after I logged out of that game I poked my head back into Rift. I worry that maybe folks reading this blog are getting tired of me talking about the game, but then again I am certain they also felt that way about Destiny, The Division and Diablo 3… or any of the other games I have latched onto and obsessed over. The weird thing about Rift is how much it has felt like “coming home”. What you have to understand is that there has never been a period of time where I did not log into Rift, but for a good chunk of it I was honestly confused by the options. What I mean by that is there are just so many different things that you can do in this game, and I felt like I was missing any real sense of bearing. I would log into the game… see my insanely full bags, see the fact that I was nowhere near the level cap and struggle to sort out exactly what I wanted to do with myself. Then like a sad little puppy I would log right back out feeling confused and frustrated because I had the desire to play… but somehow lacked the force to break the inertia of standing around in the Tempest Bay Canals district. Granted right now… I still spend a good deal of my time in that location… however current it is out of a sense of feeling like I belong there, and not out of a sense of being trapped there. I go out into the world and explore all manner of new stuff, but I wind up returning back to my home base in the crafting area.

A little over five years ago when Rift launched I did a series of posts called “Why You Should Be Playing Rift”. The purpose of these posts was extremely misguided, and was my way of rebelling against “the man” at that time… aka trying to convert the folks still playing World of Warcraft to being Rift players. It worked for some, and others it just caused them to delete my blog from their blog roll, and un-follow me over on social media. The other day I started thinking about these posts and what I was trying to do with them, and decided that it might be interesting to revisit that concept. However instead of writing them in spite, as a way of trying to show the world what they were missing… the idea this time is for me to tell you all what I see in the game. Rift is like that friend in high school that you have maybe drifted apart from… but when you get back together it is like no time has passed. Except in this case your friend has quietly evolved and developed a bunch of cool new things they know how to do. Rift has remained trucking along in the background, seemingly ignored by a lot of the MMORPG players as a phase they maybe went through at some point. It is a game that seems to keep figuring out new quality of life tweaks to make the game more enjoyable. However it is also a game with a bunch of scary looking monetization methods that I think frighten too many players, and keep them from spending more time and getting to know the game the way I do. So while I am adopting the same sort of name that I had the first time… as a sort of revisiting effort, the purpose is completely different this time. My goal is to show you my readers why I feel the way I feel about various aspects of this game. I am still working on the first part, but hopefully soon it will make its way to the front page and kick off the sequence properly. More than anything I guess I wanted to warn my long time readers, that you are going to likely be reading a lot more of Rift and ArcheAge content in the near future.

	This is a Renown Heart, and is essentially an in map side quest. There will be an NPC indicated by the heart and a number of side objectives will be indicated in the quest list. Completing any of those tasks will fill a progress bar and once filled you will gain a large influx of experience, a specific currency called karma, and often times unlock a new vendor on the map.
	This is a Waypoint icon. When you move close to this icon on the map, it will discover an Asuran Waypoint and the center of this icon will turn light blue. At any point you can click on a discovered Waypoint to teleport to that location. Generally speaking I consider finding all the waypoints to be one of the higher priorities in a map because it will make your travel much faster after that.
	This icon indicates a Scout. Scouts will give you a report about the current area, and will flag objectives nearby and unveil areas of the map from the default fog of war state. These are skippable but will tell you a good deal of lore about the region which can be fun.
	This is a Vista. These are often hard to get to but reward the player with a really cool cinematic. You get experience for completing them, but otherwise these are mostly just for map completion objectives.
	This green starburst indicates a location associated with your currently active story quest. Initially this will be your personal story quest, but later will indicate the active expansion that you are working on.
	The skull and crossbones icon indicates a downed player or NPC and resurrecting them will give you experience. If it is an NPC associated with a renown heart it will also likely give you progress towards filling the bar. It is always a good idea to resurrect your fellow players. Sure you get experience but it is also the right thing to do.
	This icon indicates a vendor. They will usually sell necessary equipment like gathering tools or salvage kits. When you fill a renown heart it will often turn that NPC into a vendor selling unique items that are exclusive to that area.
	This is a point of interest. These largely associated with map completion goals but occasionally can be the marker for some really interesting stuff. For example there are some really interesting underwater cities associated with Hylek and Quaggan that you might not ever see were it not for the POI markers.
	This is a Hero Challenge icon. Generally speaking these will trigger some sort of battle against a Veteran or greater encounter that will then reward Hero Points, which are used to level trait lines and unlock elite classes. Sometimes these will simply be channeled abilities that will reward you the points, other times it might be a looted item that you then need to use from your inventory. You will absolutely need to seek these out to progress your character.
	Once you reach the expansion content and have hit level 80, you will start to see Mastery Insights showing up on your map. Essentially channeling at this location will unlock Mastery Points that are then spent to unlock the various mastery tracks for that expansion.
	These little dots indicate that path you have traveled on the current map instance. Mostly this is just a neat aspect of the map, but can occasionally be useful for tracing your steps.
	This is a Commander Tag and represents the way structured content happens in Guild Wars 2. They come in nine different colors that you commander can set for themselves and represent that someone is running a squad on that current map. Generally speaking you can click on the tag on the map and choose Join Squad to get into whatever activity they are doing. Unfortunately in WvW there are a lot of folks who close their squads… which I feel like is a bit of a dick move. There is a variant referred to as the Catmander which instead looks like a little Cat Head. Regardless of which version it costs 300g and serves as a pretty significant commitment of resources to be able to “tag up”. Players tend to run a specific color, for example when I tag I tag up as the Purple Catmander.
	Similar in appearance, but lacking a lot of functionality is the Mentor Tag. These are gained through completing the Pact Mentor step on the Pact Commander Mastery track. Unfortunately they do not bestow the ability to create a squad, but players often use them as a way of making themselves show up on a map for the purpose of other players finding that location. These are often referred to as “Apples” because the icon that appears over the head of the player prominently features an apple.
	This indicates the beginning of an event. Often times these are NPCs that are just sort of waiting there for you to talk to them before kicking off a larger event. I am going to go into further detail about events next, but wanted to treat this icon as part of the larger map discussion instead.

	These are easily my favorite type of event and represent a boss of some sort. These vary wildly based on the zone but are usually at least a Veteran level encounter and will drop some pretty decent rewards once completed. These are generally fast to complete.
	Another very common event type is marked with the shield icon and this will either indicate that you need to protect a specific NPC or protect some other objective at that location. Often times this will involve escorting a group around the map between two specific locations where you will be ambushed several times along the path.
	Another fairly common objective is the crossed swords, which means you will need to kill a bunch of monsters that spawn at a location. How this actually plays out varies wildly but it will involve killing a bunch of relatively normal spawns. These phases can also be chained with other phases.
	The last of the four that I am going to cover is a collection event. This will involve you either picking up items and returning them to a location or harvesting items and returning them to an NPC. Sometimes this will be combined with the crossed swords so that you are killing monsters which drop something, that then needs to be deposited somewhere.