Feycat

100% your zones. Seriously, jump up to those vistas. You get a big bump for the 100%, and more importantly it leads you places where you find events and nodes.

Hit every event you see, unless it's one you hate or didn't enjoy. Especially escort or "hold the camp" type events that throw huge waves of mobs at you. Equip whatever gives you the most AOE and rain death. You will make bank on this. If it is humanoid mobs, thank your lucky stars and enjoy picking up all those little "tiny thorned bags" and "bag of filched goods," because that's where cloth drops, and if you're not tailoring, cloth sells like mad.

Pick up EVERY crafting node. Seriously, go out of your way for them. You get more xp for picking a carrot than for killing a mob (because mobs come in a much greater density) and crafting mats you're not going to use, you can sell. Plus, you'll usually have to kill some mobs getting to them, and that's xp.

Do your personal story until it becomes too high level for you to handle it, then move back to the overworld.

If you really get tired of a zone, don't 100% it. Just move on to the next. You get more xp and a higher chance of drops the higher level mobs you're fighting, but if you're soloing it'll be harder to handle them. Group events that are higher level to you are a great place to rack up kills with assistance though.

Unlock all your abilities with your weapons, sure, but find 2 that work for the playstyle you enjoy and stick with them. I personally think it's more important to be really good at a couple weapons than to be the mediocre master of everything. As long as you keep one ranged or defensive option, and one high dps option, you will do well. My guardian goes greatsword/mace & focus - Haunt's guardian goes 2H hammer/sword & shield - my thief goes 2 daggers/2 guns and his goes sword & gun/shortbow. We're both pretty good at what we do. You can literally take whatever playstyle blows your hair back and run with it.

Unlock ALL the skill points on a map, and buy all the skills. Save for those elite skills, but once you have them, seriously, unlock everything. I'm not a fan of traps on my ranger, but I unlocked them because there's some instances in the higher level where a ranger laying rows of traps makes all the difference.

Sell all your greens and blues to vendors. Salvage everything white, and all the salvage drops. Sell the crafting mats you're not using on the TP.

Don't buy karma armor unless you REALLY love the look of it and want to keep it with transmutation stones. Save your karma for high levels. Keep your armor up to date with cheap greens from the TP, and drops. Lean toward toughness and vit on your gear when you can.

Man, that was rambly. But that's my advice. I know it kinda LOOKS like work, but when I'm doing it, it doesn't FEEL like work. It's just how I enjoy the game and make bank doing it I love exploring, I love picking crap up, I love events and 100%ing a zone, so luckily I seem to be naturally geared toward doing the things the game rewards.

I'm not talking about WoW-level population in regards to anything except the deluded investors who think THAT'S what an MMO needs.

An MMO can go along quite happily, in the black but not excessively so, with a steady population not even close to the size of WoW.

I do think, however, that pouring more and more MMOs onto that population is a bad plan. Most people only want to play 1-2 games on a regular basis, or they're nomadic gamers who aren't looking to park and pay their loyalty to a game anyway.

I'd like to see a lot more studios handle their MMOs like COH - rather than putting more and more games out there to dilute the population, develop and innovate from within the game itself, changing things up, adding new tech, keeping the loyal playerbase interested and with plenty of new toys to play with, without having to keep chasing after the Next MMO.

I'm not really sure how that's a response to the statement you quoted.

I'm saying that the physical population of MMO gamers - which is actually quite a bit smaller than WoW, which is what makes WoW such an aberration, lots of non-MMO players play it - is not large enough to support a constant population in as many games as we have on the market right now.

We have some people who'll dip their toes in multiple games at a time. We have more people who serially move from game to game. But "monogamous" gamers don't have the numbers to support the population numbers that the big studios think they "need." They don't want EQ or COH numbers of constant, steady players who love their game. They over-invest and need GIANT launches... and then they want that giant launch to STAY.

The problem is that most of the really loyal playerbases, the ones who REALLY pay the bills? They're still going back to "their" game when the free month is over. There just aren't enough people out there to play all these games they're throwing at us, not on a regular basis.

NOW I'm depressed again.

D: D: D:

For which part? I'm not being snarky, I'm just wondering what you're looking for? Leveling advice?

Heh, the funny thing is, the only classes that come even close to the whole "healer/support" area of the trinity are Water Eles... and Guardians.

Last discussion I saw on it, there are some "hidden mechanics" to aggo that Anet wants us to find out on our own, but aggro is mostly controlled by proximity and LOS (getting out of LOS and having a mob drop off me is fantastic) but also by armor class (light armor gains MORE aggro, which makes sense and also sucks for me! Hah!) and by health (people with lower health/downed attract more mob attention, which again is smart on the mob's side - makes no sense to go after the big dude in platemail calling your mama fat when there's a clothie on the floor healing people :P) I haven't seen any mention of guardian abilities causing extra aggro - I think their aggro is mostly about proximity.

And that's how it all balances out - yes, light armor wearers cause more inherent aggro, but if they stand way back, they're usually ok. And almost all classes have a downed skill that lets them teleport/move a distance away so it's safer to bring them back up.

Honestly, I go double daggers 99% of the time, and I pretty much only attune fire/water. The mobility that gives me is incredible, and water puts out tons of regen/healing as well as a couple fairly decent damage skills.

Now, I DO go staff in PvP and did in CM, but that's mostly because daggers require me to get tooooooooo close to things in those cases.


There's a fellow on these forums claiming that ONLY a glass-canon crit-and-dps build is worthwhile in GW2 and no other builds are viable. Despite constant evidence to the contrary :P

Well, that's where folks like Notch have a freedom that invested game studios don't.

Game studios HAVE to make back their development costs, and then make money after that, in order to keep putting a product out. They can't afford to just go "hey, I think this random level-less game where you do nothing but build and explore would be fun!" and then get it made.

I think we're going to see all our innovation come from small studios like Mojang where the initial investment is a labor of love. We're not going to see anything but imbeciles in suits trying to jam things into the same WoW-shaped hole over and over from the big studios. Even games like GW2 can only innovate so far - they're basically just "fixing" some of the things wrong with the WoW model, rather than coming up with anything REALLY shockingly new.

Oh, just wanted to touch on this - TheHaunt is doing every crafting profession (except cooking, which I'm doing.) We duo everything. The first time our duo does any map, leveling through, he gets all the crafting mats (except the food, which goes to me.) Any subsequent visit to a map to 100% it, I get to keep what drops - unless he's specifically asked for a certain thing he needs to level. All of our duo's going through the 1-15 zone netted him all the tier 1 mats he needed to make all of our characters level 10 armor/jewelry/weapons and level past it. Same with tier 2 and level 20-30 armor. It's pretty much worked out well so that we CAN have crafting AND also still make money on drops.

Of course, we're doing it by leveling a full stable of characters in equal jumps (everyone went to 15, then everyone went to 20, now we're working everyone to 30, except the one duo that's 55 now) which I realize isn't viable for everyone, but if you have any kind of gaming buddy it's a pretty sweet system.

That's kinda happening too. The MMOs we're seeing out now have been at least 5 years in development. The way SWTOR crashed and burned sent a message to investors that no one's really going to "take" all of WoW's customers, and MMOs are not a great investment (especially if you force them to go the WoW route and stifle innovation - if people wanted to play WoW, they'd go to WoW with its 7 years of content, not to a brand-new clone.)

I think we're going to see a lot more think-outside-the-box games like Minecraft and the stuff in Arcanaville's thread, and a lot less traditional pay-to-play MMOs being released in the next 5 years or so.

Personally, I'm in favor of slowing the hell down. The market really does NOT need 50 MMOs. The gaming population can't support it.

You can have multiple-word names that aren't surnames. My Sylvari is Teanga Alainn - that's not a surname, her name is Celtic for "beautiful tongue/words," it just happens to be a 2-name word. She goes by Tea anyway.

Also I've seen Asura named things like Frizz the Golemancer and Master Frizz, both of which are lore-appropriate.

Baby-level mats will always go high, because people spend the least amount of time there. Pretty much in every game with an AH that I've played, the lowest-tier and highest-tier mats are where the money is. Mid-tiers are where people spend the most time, and those mats go for crap - with the exception in GW of the drop-mats like fangs, blood, etc. And cloth will always sell high because the ONLY way to get it is through drops/salvaging and you get a paltry amount.


BTW, just to refute someone in another thread who I won't mention (not interested in hijacking that thread into another GW2-fest):

I did Caducus' Manor yesterday for the first time. It was not impossibly hard. There was no graveyard zerg. I died twice, downed a handful of times.

We did not have a "tank" - it's impossible to have a tank in a game with NO AGGRO CONTROLS - but I did it with my Elementalist (who is NOT weak, and contributed a ton by staying Water most of the time so everyone had 24/7 regeneration and all the mobs were chilled the whole time) 3 thieves and a ranger with a ranged pet (not a tanky bear.) One of the theives was evade up the yin-yang and did most of our kiting/pulling. One was double-guns and stayed at range with me and the ranger the whole time, dropping stealth on all three of us when we'd pull aggro. The third thief was condition damage and debuffed the crap out of the mobs at all time. You can literally do it with ANY party composition - like COH - and I personally build for vit/toughness on almost all my characters, since you will ALWAYS have enough inherent DPS to take down ANYTHING in PvE, the question is can you survive long enough to do it.

I made almost a gold on 2 story-mode runs, just vendoring drops and with coin drops, and then went to go finish completing Queensdale. This includes repairs for my 2 deaths.

I kinda am too.

I just took my "main" (haha, Feycat with a main, that doesn't happen, but she's my highest level character anyway :P) who is basically my "badger" (working on 100% world completion) to Metrica Province, which is the Asura starter zone and IMO a zone I hate for the bad layout. I end up crossing and re-crossing my own path constantly in order to find things, and then I miss things, and then I have to go back over and over...

I sold every green or blue that dropped to a vendor. I picked up every crafting node with cheap copper tools. I salvaged every white drop with a basic cheap salvage kit. I participated in any event I came across, but didn't go out of my way to get them.

When I hit 100% on the zone, I went to Lion's Arch, popped to my bank, pulled out all the tier 1 mats I picked up (jute, copper, claws, fangs, blood, carrots, etc) and then threw them all on the AH.

Walked away with 2.76 gold for my trouble. Even though I used waypoints quite a bit and had to repair my armor (screw that fire elemental event!!!) Not to mention 7 shiny new skillpoints, and another zone under my belt toward 100%

Hey man, not a criticism! I LOVE the way MC handles multiplayer, and I've been saying for a while that I actually think this would be the perfect format for MMOs.

Which is weird, because I've got an NCsoft account AND an Anet account and didn't get that email. Kinda hit and miss, aren't they?


Except salt is a disinfectant that's GOOD for wounds! >.>

I know, I know...

Yes! I had a moment where I was really sort of excited about the idea of a high-fantasy martial-art MMO based on the art style, like Okami (what a beautiful game!) Alas...

I do not believe these two things O.o For reals? I can't even imagine how...

Me toooo.

Actually, the way Haunt and I have been handling it is to follow the personal storyline until it's red and 2-5 levels above us (when we hit a combat episode we can't handle and lol ourselves outta there for a bit) and then go world questing until we're a level or 2 above the storyline, then go for it again. It's actually been really successful for us, we're getting gobs of xp, good drops, and still not "missing out" on any zone.

That's something I REALLY love about GW2 that always bummed me out in other games. I really WANTED to go from Praetoria straight to Faultline. But I couldn't. Because you can't start the Faultline arc at 20, you're too high. You have to go through Oro to do it, which for me broke the "immersion." I love, love, love not having to worry about hitting up an instance, TF, other zone, what-have-you making me "miss out" on story or zone stuff.

She is literally the most counter-productive poster on these boards. Which is sort of amazing.

Gonna stop picking at the rest of it because I think we're talking past each other on stuff we're never gonna agree with, but this - me too. COH was always the place I came back too for a little R&R time and to refresh. It was "home" - and I don't think anything else is gonna replace that.

Man, I was thinking the SAME thing.

I've never once farmed anything to level. In fact, since you get less xp per kill than for anything else (harvesting, exploring, hearts, etc) it's a really really bad way to grind up levels.

Teaming isn't needed. I team because I have a "gaming partner," but it's not necessary. When he's not around, I enjoy doing 100% completes on zones my elementalist main didn't do yet

I wouldn't really call that griefing. In most cases, that's helping. Yeah, killing an animal you're trying to capture is griefing and horrible. I haven't encountered that problem, luckily, but I'm sure it happens.

I have seriously never seen this O.o. Most of the time, you trigger the event and folks from everywhere coming running hell-bent for leather to get in on it. I've stayed around and killed the same skillpoint mob three or four times for the xp (you get an event complete every time) and also to make sure everyone else there has gotten the point.

Heh, I love cooking! I guess you're right, but those things don't really bother me since they're pretty much intrinsic to all game crafting systems, including COH. Ingredients don't always make sense. That's part of the reason I love cooking - the ingredient make sense.


You should never listen to the forums for that kind of thing. My Elementalist is a sheer, unadulterated joy, and she definitely feels like my most powerful character. Also, the opinions really are not "universal" - whiners will whine about every class being more powerful than theirs.

Yeah again, don't take the forum masses as gospel. It's not like other play classes, you need to control your pets a lot more (it's not fire-and-forget like a WoW hunter) but pet classes are very satisfying and powerful to play.

And seriously, if you're not interested in PvP? Why would you care if other classes might do something a little faster or "better" than what you're playing? It's like COH - play what you enjoy, and enjoy what you play. Every single class can contribute, solo, and in groups. Promise!

The AH has been working for a solid week now. They had a lot of downtime in the first week of the game.

If you're poor, don't craft. You don't need to anyway - other people get enough of a kick out of crafting that you can literally buy a full set of greens under the vendor value every 5-10 levels if you wish.

Sell your junk drops, and all the greens and blues you're not planning on using. Salvage all whites with a basic kit. Sell all your crafting drops on the AH. You will have a LOT of money with very little effort, easily enough to buy what you need for leveling.

I cannot disagree with this more. BECAUSE it's a very casual friendly system, there's no waiting around looking for a tank or healer or rezzer. You can do all the content on any combination of characters, just like COH.

Kiting is NOT exploiting the AI. It's the intended method of play. Just because it's different doesn't make it bad. Personally, I find combat in COH extremely boring and un-dynamic, lacking real OOMF, since playing GW2. Standing still and firing off skills as they come off cooldown while you wallow in long-term buffs is pretty static. Constant movement, watching the enemy's animations, and choosing which short-term buff or heal to use when, to me, is a much more exciting and dynamic system. Not everyone will like it, but it's a good system.

It's true though. There's a very slight xp ramp until 30, and then it stops. It's about 1 hour of play per level, all the way up. I suspect that you're not doing all the events and explorations in a zone, because there's really no slowing down or stopping unless you choose to stop.

And they chose to make money hard to get for extras, but for basics, it's really not hard. Crafting is an extra - and luckily, the Trading Post makes it so you don't need to craft if you don't enjoy it. Personally, I'm kinda loving a game without the insane $$ bloat that both COH and WoW suffer from.

Well, I disagree that it's not for casual players - it very much is. But you clearly didn't enjoy it, and I'm sorry for that. If you ever want to try again, I'd be glad to help you out, just shoot me a PM.

Heh, just to let you know, GW2 is actually the best inventory system I've worked with so far. The deposit collectibles/collectibles tab is a huge boon. I don't have to look at it, I just pop it into my collectibles tab at the click of a button and then sort it later when I feel like crafting/selling.

All crafting materials that drop not only go into the collectibles tab, but are all clearly labeled on mouseover as to what craft they're used for and what skill level. All of them are used for multiple craftings.

Whenever I hit a vendor, they have a "sell all junk" button, so all grey items immediately give me their money without me having to look at them. Then I sell all the magic blue/green drops I've gotten and don't want to use (global AH means that there's 8 million green axes on it, so selling it's a waste of time since people are selling at a loss, too dumb to understand the AH cut :P) then salvage (take apart) all the white drops and salvage mats that are in my bag. I hit "deposit all collectibles" and go on my merry way with pretty much empty bags. Takes about a minute and with 8 slot bags in all my bagslots, my inventory almost never fills up between vendors.

It's actually pretty great.

^^^

And the deal is guesting and WvWvW. Although I do think guesting has a lot more to do with it, since only the server needs to keep track of your name in WvWvW. When I'm in WvWvW, other characters all have the name [Name-of-Server Invader] (ie, I look like Tarnished Coast Invader and not Teanga Alainn when I WvW) and the server could easily call you by character-server-global strings. I'm not even sure why it couldn't internally keep track of the fact that Seven Of Cups (Tarnished Coast) was playing on Jade Quarry and runs into the Seven of Cups there. Then again, IANAP (programmer!)