I’ve been having so much fun doing hearts and events as they pop up, I’m way behind on my story quest. I’ll go back eventually…
I completed the first zone with my human ranger. Be sure to complete (get all the hearts, waypoints, vistas, etc) a zone so you get the bonus rewards. Now I’m working through the first zone with my norn guardian.
I noticed something cute. If you type something in guild chat when you’re the only one online your get a message “No one can hear you”. Of course, it’s proven false when you see whatever you typed.
I’ve been getting killed every 5 minutes or so, with every possible character. I’m starting to have not very much fun. I might just go back to getting killed all the time in Diablo 3 where I can perform a mouse-click without starting a conversation with some teenager in Newark.
I’m not a particularly young gamer (42), but I’m not being killed very much in GW2.
Are you using your dodge skill and moving around? I’ve found you don’t have to be too twitchy in order to avoid being hit overly much, at least not while doing ranged fighting. I move back and forth with autoshoot on, using the keyboard to move. I use the mouse to hit my special attacks when I want.
Double-tap a movement key to dodge in that direction every once in a while.
I haven’t played much melee, but that’s what’s working so far with ranged fighting. Just keep moving.
The guild bank is in the game, however it needs to be researched under upgrades on the Guild screen. And you have to research at least one or two things before you can research the bank, then you can upgrade the bank with more slots via future research. Since I am not an officer, I can’t tell you exactly how it works.
I think the biggest thing is that you *must *move and dodge in GW2 or you *will *die, early and often. It took me a little while to figure that out. At first I was trying to play like I did in WoW, mostly standing in one place…I soon found out that doesn’t work.
Arenanet suspended online purchases, but as far as I know it’s always been available from third party retailers in boxed form. It seems to be available for purchase as a boxed item from Amazon right now, but the digital download option is unavailable.
One huge issue the game has is that the auction house doesn’t work at all. They’ev evidently been opening it up to only 15% of the playerbase at a time… which is pointless and moronic, because there’s no way to know you even have access at all. And if you do, nobody else does, so there’s nothing to buy there.
Bricks and mortar retailers don’t seem to have any anymore. I suppose I could try Amazon, but it’d be nice for them to say roughly WHEN they’re going to sell the game online again. Surely they know their server plan.
I’ve got around 10 life and single-player years on you guys, but I’m an MMO newbie. I’m sure I’ll get less killable eventually (and I like the franchise enough that I’ll put in a lot of effort at it) but accustoming myself to using the keyboard so much instead of the mouse has been handicapping me, and I’m distracted by all the other players coming into a fight and sorting out who’s who. I also kind of hate that I’ll be wandering around trying to explore things and figure out where things are and a New Event notice will pop up and suddenly I’m in the middle of a battle. The learning curve is pretty steep and my brain and reflexes have aged a bit. I still have hope, but I find myself missing the original instanced format of GW 1.
I do know I don’t use the dodge feature enough. I do try to use it, but coordinating that with keyboard attack and skill keys gets me all confused. I just need to get the muscle memory down for the various keystrokes and I won’t be dying as often.
BTW, does anybody else hate using the same key for every interaction? Is that structure common to MMOs? I find myself carting around a bucket of something when I was hoping to pick up my loot, etc. Drives me nuts. (I also spend a lot of time “interacting” with things when I’m trying to use one of the movement keys, but at least that I can fix by remapping.)
I’m your age, Sudden Kestrel. My oldster challenge is remembering where all the abilities/spells are in MMO’s, especially since I play alts a lot.
If when fighting, you rest your left hand with fingers on 1-2-3-4 keys, your thumb automatically rests on the V key, which is conveniently also the dodge key. Just get used to tapping the dodge key often, and you’ll find you rarely die. I think the dodging was my biggest adjustment to this game.
I don’t see why there’s not an option for true auto-loot. We don’t roll on items, and there’s no cursed loot.
Completely agree on this one. I find myself accidentally picking my my turrets (I play an engineer) during fights instead of looting, or (like you said) I suddenly have a stupid bucket in my hands or something.
As far as the dodging and all that, it’s new to me as well, I just sort of forced myself to keep moving around and eventually figured it all out.
At first I missed the personal instances that GW had but now, I really like the current set up. Yesterday an event spawned around me when I was alone (well, with my Flesh Golem) and there was no way I could have survived too long against the huge group. However, within moments the cavalry shows up. We have an epic battle and I get a huge amount of XP.
There is a Necro trait line, that when you get it to level 10, you get the ability to leave a Mark of Death on the ground when you dodge. That was very helpful to accelerate the dodge learning curve. Also, the very first dungeon I have been in, Ascalon Catacombs (explorer instance) will chew you up and spit you out if you have decent dodge skill.
Yup. The default “interact” key is “F”, and (since I am a mouse & click type of player) the “interact” popup UI on the screen is in the same place for all things. I go to loot something, only to have some NPC come running in, changing the “interact” action from “search” to “talk” as I’m clicking. Very frustrating.
I wish they would seperate those unique (to me) type of interactions, and/or allow me to keybind “search” seperate from the other types of interactions.
Engineers get the option to drop bombs when they dodge, and it did the same thing for me - I suddenly learned how to dodge REALLY WELL because I was so enamored of dropping bombs when I did it.
Now it’s like second nature, especially when I figured out that double-clicking the direction key I want to go in did the dodge.
That sounds like a very good suggestion. I’ll give it a try later on. I was also thinking of changing the key binding for Dodge to the space bar since I spend very little time jumping in this game.
Ah! I always liked playing a necro in the first game but I haven’t explored it much this time around. I’ll have to try both that and the engineer bomb-n-flip Athena mentioned. I tried an engineer but abandoned it when it became apparent that I need to concentrate on the basics (my old standby ranger and a melee character) until I get more survival skills.
