Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the drop of the last part of the Janthir Wilds story called Absolution. It was quite a hefty patch, but not one without some issues. The biggest one that I personally experienced is that for whatever reason they did not successfully reset purchases on the wizards vault, meaning that while I could see a new Legendary Weapon Kit was available… it showed that I had already purchased it. This was fixed early in the evening with an additional patch that required a restart, and from that point forward things seemed to be fine. I have pretty mixed emotions about this patch and there are some things that were phenomenal, others that were pretty disappointing, and then some that was just plain bad. Fair warning, as I get into the new map meta, there are going to be complete spoilers over what is going on there. I will warn you again because at least at the start I have some pretty surface level stuff to talk about.
First up, given that it is June now and Pride Month there are some new wings available this year. Initially I thought that they might be a re-offering of the wings from last year, but nope these are entirely new and pretty freaking amazing. The default rainbow pattern on these wings are significantly more vibrant than the previous macaw wings. Both the wings and the glider are patterned after the existing White or Black wings sets. For me it showed up untextured and brown, but I had to go use the dye eraser tool in order to show the default rainbow colors. I like that they are a much fuller wing than the macaw set and looks way more natural on a “girthy” model like that of the Norn and Char.
What is really cool about these wings however is that they have four dye channels. So you can of course use them in the default red, yellow, green, purple blended configuration. However you can also dye them to match ANY color scheme you might want. So this means you can effectively recreate any pride flag or simply dye them to match your outfit of choice. I turned mine into a recreation of the Bisexual Flag, since that is ultimately what represents me personally. No they don’t really match my outfit in the least but are freaking cool and I am really thankful that they are giving these away for free. The only caveat is that you have to have purchased the game. I tried to claim a set of these wings on my free-to-play account and they were not available.
Another really cool thing that they released on the cash shop is this Shimmering Aurora Homestead Sky. They absolutely got $10 in gems from me to pick this up, because one of my complaints about the existing sky is that I could not permanently set it to either night or day. I don’t like the lighting in the homestead during the day, and greatly preferred the night sky… and it would stick until I logged out and then when I logged in again everything would be back to the default day settings. With the Aurora sky it seems to stick permanently and also gives everything a beautiful lighting overlay. This makes me actually want to start building something properly in my homestead. Part of me wants to tear down everything that exists by default and create something from scratch.
Now for the disappointing. I think a lot of the failures that I am going to talk about in this post, come down to over-hyping and poorly marketing changes. One of the big quality of life changes that was announced was the addition of a universal teleportation tome, that in theory would collect all of your teleportation devices into a single item allowing you to free up a bunch of inventory slots. I don’t have mine fully unlocked yet because it is a long quest chain… but I have collected all of the scrolls that would fit into it and while it will free up a few slots… it does absolutely nothing for the cash shop lounge scrolls. So essentially I still will have multiple slots taken up by portal devices. The gobbler is also somewhat disappointing if only because it costs 100 Gold to buy it… which seems like a big chunk of change for something we have already gone through a lot of hassle to unlock.
Now we are entering the spoiler territory of this blog post, so if you care about such things… maybe stop reading.
The new story was pretty enjoyable, but felt extremely short… and also like nothing much happened. The true resolution of the expansion happens inside of the Bava Nisos meta event, and I will talk about that in a few. Essentially it is going between a bunch of locations, including some of Core Tyria searching for artifacts of the White Mantle. If you did not play through Bloodstone Fen or Lake Doric… most of this would largely feel non sequitur. Essentially the quest chain is effectively this heartfelt goodbye to Mabon… a character who does not really feel like earned the place he holds in the canon of this game. Secrets of the Obscure did not really flesh the character out enough to make me feel much of anything as a player about him. It isn’t like Aurene, a character that we learned to love over the course of several expansions worth of content. Mabon is just this character we are told is important and we are told is meaningful… and then is taken away and are told we should feel something about it. The story does however give us one of the best achievements ever that comes with the title of True Introvert… which I am absolutely using from this point forward… so it is not like I can be super harsh about it.
Where things start to fall apart however is when you approach Bava Nisos as a map. It is essentially a map that only exists to serve as a staging place for the meta event associated with it. The entire place is either monster guts or old crumbling buildings… often times a mixture of both as we are essentially fighting inside of a giant titan named Saevus Saxum. The entire map largely centers around killing the titan by damaging its vital organs. There is a staging area that is sealed off from the rest of the map by a Mursaat Mirror, but weirdly… if you are standing in this area when the map resets… you still die which feels thoroughly dumb. There just is not much going on in this map apart from the meta, and there are areas you cannot reach… until the meta has opened them up. All of the marketing going into this made it seem like this was going to be a rich map with multiple lanes… which of course made us all think we were getting another Dragon’s Stand which is quite possibly one of the best maps ever created.
What we got instead is a meta that feels like they ran out of funding, time, or wandered away like a bored toddler in an ADHD fugue state. The entire thing feels unfinished, and like we have half of a meta. Essentially there are some waves of fight the nonsense leading up to a proper boss fight in the form of a Gorseval clone that feels a little overtuned for pugs. Then you enter the lanes phase, where the groups have to split up and each take out a vital organ. I went down the path for the lungs and it involved us breaking objectives while fighting off waves of titanspawn. I will have to do the other lanes to find out what happened there, but for the most part it felt pretty basic. Then you are told to collapse on the heart chamber and wait for Livia. The timer ticks down and then suddenly Livia gets some dialog options that show up… and the event is just over.
Map chat was legitimately mad about this event last night. We were all sitting there wondering if we fucked something up… did we somehow fail the event and got a bad ending. None of us seemed to get credit in the achievements for the kill, but also that appears to just be a bug. Then another timer started and the map reset with everyone dying after having said we did fatal damage to the titan. The entire thing feels like it was half finished and rushed out the door. Is this why the expansion got delayed? Because if so… maybe delay it again and finish the damned thing. The problem is that we are now stuck with another bad map… that no one is going to actually play other than those who are chasing the backpack or specific achievements. This could have been another epic map that folks play every day… instead we get a non-ending. I guess I just want to know what the folks creating this thought about it… because surely they knew this would not be terribly well received.
The other problem with Janthir Wilds as a whole… is that it was impacted by the current SAG-AFTRA Voice Actors strike. It feels exceptionally jarring that you will have multi-character dialogs happening with a handful of them voiced… and the others relying entirely upon reading fleeting dialog balloons popping up on your screen. I will absolutely look forward to hopefully playing through this content at some point in the future when we have voice lines for all of the actors that were on strike. I will be exceptionally frustrated if this never happens however… because holy shit does it feel bad right now. Like the highlight of having Countess Anise in any content… is experience the full on epic levels of sass provided by Catherine Taber. On one hand I am super proud of Arena Net for not replacing folks… but on the other hand it absolutely underlines the importance of these actors delivering the dialog to make the characters feel real. They were in a rough position… and I don’t think just delaying the content would have been viable. Here is hoping we can play through this with all of the proper audio at some point in the not too distant future.
Janthir Wilds as a whole has been a weird mixed bag of an expansion for me. I wholeheartedly love Lowland Shore and the Bearkin and deeply care about many of the new characters that were introduced through their coastal lives. I did not care for the Greer/Decima meta, and still feel like it needs some improvement to make it a big easier to pull off… because getting anyone to do it at all is pure hell. I like the maps overall for roaming around and doing events however, and really enjoyed Mistburned Barrens. The story is a bit hit or miss because quite frankly… I do not give a shit about the Wizards Court. I like some of the characters associated with it, but I just don’t much care about the whole super secret magical society, and as a result the highlight of this expansion has been when I was spending time with the loveable bears. I would fucking die for Pokey, because he is the Braham that actually works and is not an insufferable ass for large chunks of the content. With both Secrets of the Obscure and Janthir Wilds however… they feel like unfinished content. They feel like the content we get, because the studio either no longer has the vision or the funding to create the best content they could be. They are a hollow shade of something like an End of Dragons, that really shows the best that Guild Wars 2 can possibly be.
Please do not take this as me saying that I will riot and want to rage against the crappy content we are getting. I got $25 worth of enjoyment out of Janthir Wilds. In truth I got way more enjoyment out of it… because I am still having a lot of fun with various aspects of that content. I think the Metas we were given are poorly designed and just not representative of the best that Arena Net can do… but the intricate details of the zones and certain aspects of the story make up for it. I think a lot of resources went into the creation of the Homestead, and I am really thankful for that. Hopefully without a big system like that looming and eating up development time… we will finally see what they are capable of with the third of these micro yearly expansions. What I want more than anything from whatever comes next… is more evergreen content that players actually WANT to do… rather than something that they feel compelled to do in order to check some box off in the achievement panel. You can do better Arena Net. I have seen it… countless times.
Good Morning Folks! I did not post yesterday because Thursdays have become a giant mess where I have to pull together this significant report first thing in the morning. I was in a position where it was 11 am and I was still waiting on some of the contributions… for a thing that was supposed to be done and submitted by noon. So essentially… I find myself in a position where I really cannot devote the effort to blogging. In other news today is the “Dateaversary” for my me and my wife, and at this point we have been together twenty nine years. We are old… and are starting to feel it. I got up this morning and got fancy cronuts, and they were delightful. With next year being our 30th year… we should probably plan something more special than chilling out as per our normal.
Last night was another round of Fractals with Friends, and it was pretty delightful as well. I am having a blast doing these each week with Ammo, Sita, and Sol. I think maybe starting this next week we might get a Thalen as well, which could see us turning our focus to dungeons. We actually learned things from the previous round because we did a few that we had already done as a group… and they went SUPER fast. I think we might actually reach a point where we can rip through more than five in our allotted time period. I’ve been scheming about other activities we might do as a group, because I know that Sita specifically needs the Nightmare Tower for Living World 1, which I managed to solo… but was a massive pain in the butt to do so.
I was actually smart and focused on the daily fractals… which means we finished up a several daily achievements and got bonus loot as a reward. At some point I kind of hope that we can manage to get together a group for some strikes and knock out some of the dailies there. In theory I could use my Commander powers to post a daily fractals group and just force them to happen for me every day. I really should get more comfortable being a Commander… or in my case a Catmander. There is a whole lot more than I could be doing in the game were I willing to seize the reigns and lead groups. I always feel like I just don’t know enough about the game to comfortable direct people through it. I am eternally lost… and while I could absolutely lead something like Tequatl that I can do in my sleep… the things I would actually want to do I don’t have a ton of experience doing myself.
I did actually use my Commander tag last night for a brief moment in Dragon’s End. Essentially we were on a map that was going to lose. Zero progress had been made towards buffing the defenses of each area, and there seemed to be only a handful of us on the map. I only really popped into the map to farm void mobs for the weekly quest, so I decided to tag up and see if I could get at least five of us so that we could do the three escort events. By the end I think we maybe had eight total… so not enough to do the meta event, but enough to actually do some stuff and have fun in the process. I made a few new friends, specifically one person who was with me in the notion that we would fail beautifully together. It was honestly a heck of a lot of fun… which is what makes me think I should actually put myself out there more often.
I am really looking forward to the patch drop next Tuesday and the assorted quality of life changes that come with it. The big thing will be reclaiming all of the shared inventory slots that I am currently using for teleporters. It does make me wonder what exactly I am going to use for the rest of the space. Having an all in one “gobbler” makes me actually want to start working on collecting more of these. Quality of life changes honestly are my favorite changes in any game, because I love convenience items. The less friction I have towards doing what I want in a game… the more likely I am to keep playing that game. At some point though I do want to dive into the housing system and actually build some proper structures in my Homestead.
I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, and if you make it into Guild Wars 2 say hi.
Good Morning Folks. Last night I apparently remembered that I had the Endless Kodan Tonic and decided to run World Bosses while transformed into a giant bear. One of the particularly nice things about this specific tonic is that you can actually do combat while transformed. Most of them largely turn you into a useless lump, but this one even allows you to use your glider. This has always made me wonder if at one point, Kodan were contemplated as a playable race. Right now I am very much in a mode of having a whole slew of activities that I am working on, and then just sort of picking the one that fits my current level of engagement. Specifically I have a sub achievement for Klobjarne Geirr the Legendary Spear that requires me to do a bunch of World Bosses so I decided to knock out a few of those last night.
Another way lower impact achievement series that I have been working on is the Home Sweet Homestead series. These essentially just require you to pop into a zone and do a bunch of events. Each one also has the benefit of awarding you a recipe book related to that specific zone. Weirdly I had already picked up a copy of the recipes from the Dragon’s Stand version of this achievement, but have no memory of how I might have acquired it. At some point I want to make a real push into building some of my own structures in the Homestead. Right now I mostly have the default everything with a handful of placed structures just to sort out how the system works. One of my internet acquaintances build a really cool fully underwater Homestead that is worth checking out.
Spending time doing events in Auric Basic… led to me also starting to chip away at the No Mask Left Behind achievement. This one is pretty slick because it gives you an Aurillium Node for your homestead/home instance which will of course be useful at giving me a constant feed of little bits of that currency as I do my daily gathering. This however has led me to realize… just how little of the zone I have explored. I had no clue that Auric Basic had as much verticality as it does. Verdant Brink is immediately noticeable because half of the meta event takes place on rubble platforms in the sky. However with Auric Basic you are spending most of your time on the ground completing events leading up to the taking of the golden city. I was not expecting to find entire treetop villages in this zone, which makes me also realize how little of all of the other maps in the game I have probably explored. I was not a big fan of Heart of Thorns because it felt like a massive increase in difficulty… with lots of mob types that could just straight up murder you. However spending more time exploring is making me appreciate at just how interesting these zones are.
Since I seem to be settling into Guild Wars 2 for the long haul… I’ve finally engaged in the practice of alt parking. I am really only playing my Ranger regularly, and as a result I could be stashing all of my other characters at key locations around the map where I can gather resources daily. There are many different alt parking videos out there, but this one from Laranity covers alt parking as well as a few other gold farming strategies. Essentially right now I have a few different alts parked at various large chests in Bjora Marches and another parked at the jumping puzzle in Kaineng City. There are a few other areas that might be worth parking alts, given that I have a full compliment of level eighty alts that I am not using much. I’ve just added this to my reset routine along with farming guild halls and my homestead for resources and going to beat up a naked man for his lunch money. If you ever want to follow along in this nonsense and have Teleport to Friend doodads hit me up and I can log in the character at each location and let you park one easily.
Where we get into proper degeneracy however is that I have started farming a Black Lion Key each week with one of my free character slots. Essentially… there is a thing that you can do once per week that involves creating a brand new character… running it up to the level 10 personal story quest which rewards a free Black Lion Chest Key. Most of the time when you open a Black Lion Chest… it gives you useless stuff and I would never recommend buying them. However I am also someone who pulled one of the most expensive items from a chest and sold it to effectively fund everything I have done on my account since that point. Specifically I am doing the method where you run up a Human Ranger which seems to be about the fastest method to get through this process. I wish I had honestly been doing this all this time… but alas I was too lazy. Right now it seems to take me about 15-20 minutes to complete the process at a casual pace. This video covers the entire process designed to be as optimal as possible. Do I suggest you follow along in this path of madness? Probably not.
Yesterday we got the teaser trailer for the next chapter of the Janthir Wilds story which will be dropping on Tuesday June 3rd. Since I am very much in the mindset of “do Guild Wars 2” stuff I am pretty much primed to experience this as it goes live. Probably the thing that excites me the most is that it sounds like the new zone meta is going to be similar to Dragon Stand, where you have three lanes to push at the same time. I have to admit I was pretty disappointed in the Greer/Decima meta and still feel like that needs significant balancing given that after all of this time… it rarely succeeds with random groups. I like all of the maps in Janthir Wilds immensely… but there just isn’t really a fun meta right now. Mistburned Barrens has a few fun events, but nothing to the level of a proper meta. I am really hoping that they nail the meta for this last zone.
Dragon Bash will also be starting soon, which is a pretty fun event. Mostly I just try and make sure I do the dailies associated with it. I am not big on farming the pinatas, especially given that I have one in my home instance now. Then WVW Rush is happening in July along with the expansion announcement, which will be an ideal time to farm up a bunch of Gift of Battle just to have them at the ready. I might also work on some of the WvW Exclusive legendary items during this time. The only problem with all of this is… there is a lot going on in June. There will be a new Path of Exile league dropping on the 13th, and before that Dune Awakening launches its head-start on June 5th and I will be checking that out. I wish all of these events were about a month apart, because I have no clue what I will be doing. Hopefully 3.26 in POE is a banger of a league, but I also do not want to abandon Guild Wars 2 right now either. Yesterday I decided that I was actually glad I did not score a Nintendo Switch 2 preorder, because that only would have added to the battle for my time and attention.
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:
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
