Adventure Log: First Day in Guild Wars 2

Glumshanks at level 14
Glumshanks busting a move at level 14.

Sorry for how slow it has been around here!  I spent the last week moving and getting settled for my last little bit of school before I graduate.  Despite being busy, I managed to play the first day of Guild Wars 2’s launch, and what better way than an Adventure Log to fill you all in on the details.

I decided to go into GW2 ignorant to almost every detail, so I’m seeing the world through the wide-eyes of a newbie.  At times I regret this decision because I’m asking so many questions about where this is or how that works.

My name is Glumshanks, and I am an Asura Ranger. I don’t know what kind of Ranger, yet, but I know I like pets so I’ll probably start by boosting Beastmastery.  I’m still figuring out which pet I want to use.  I like bears because they tank, but I know from beta that the lynx can do a lot of damage.  For now, I’m just using what I can find.

Leveling through the Asura area has been a real pleasure.  Everything seems to flow so naturally.  I didn’t try to go from one heart to the next.  I just went around killing monsters and seeing if the area I’m in wanted an objective completed.  I found events, followed them around, and allowed myself to be easily distracted.  I don’t know if that’s the most efficient way to level, but I got to level 15 quickly and never once felt like I was grinding or having to work for it.  GW2 lacks that ‘hub to hub’ sensation — I love it.

Something I like is 100% completion for zones.  It’s a bit meta, but if you get the chance hit the map key and check out on the left side what you haven’t completed.  I realized I missed two entire areas and went back to finish them up to get credit for achievements and rewards.

GW2’s scaling system seems extremely useful.  I went to the Norn area to grab a bear pet, and while I was there I did one event and gained a huge amount of experience despite being nearly ten levels higher.  I might have to go and do the human starting area now just to see what it’s like.

My crafting professions are Huntsman and Leatherworking.  I can make most ranged weapons with Huntsman, and LW obviously makes armor.  This is the first time I’ve played around with crafting.  It feels like a mix between a complex crafting system, and a very superficial themepark model.  It works, though.  You find items to fulfill a recipe and you make things.  Discovery, however, is where you can make things and add bonuses to items to discover new recipes.  I find the crafting enjoyable.

I have a few complaints so far.  The auction house has been down the entire time, and the mail system is also sporadic at best.  The global naming system where only one person can have a name across all servers — including guild names — hurt my guild and many of the people I play with because we couldn’t get our names.  Joining people in group across overflows is still broken; It rarely works.  Several bugs with our guild are causing issues.  What we are researching is only visible to some people — I can’t even see the research I started for us.  One of our guild officers who created the guild while I was away now can’t even see that he’s in a guild.  Editing ranks and the motd can also crash me.

More to come!

  • I spent my first real time in GW2 last night with a close friend. (Who will be applying for the guild btw 😛 )

    This is the first time we have stayed up until 7 am in… well, forever.

    The vast majority of our time was spent in WvW, after initially figuring out the basics for him. The learning experience was a blast, he is having fun with his elementalist and their large bag of tricks. My engineer I have found is quite useful in many different ways!

    We roamed the Frontiers (Name?) for hours, finding and killing Hibs. There were no Albs on. The Hibs own literally everything. I use these terms because I cannot remember the names of the other two zones, which are what appear over the heads of the enemies. All I know is we are blue, the no shows are red, and green owns EVERYTHING.

    But we still wandered around, did a bit of pve, got some skillpoints, and managed to kill about twenty of the enemy. I got rolled over by a zerg only once. Man it was large 🙁

    So far, this is the most reminiscent of the DAoC RvR I knew and loved in ANY game I have played. The WvW zone is large. There are hills and roads and keeps and valleys and choke points and rivers and lakes and I can SWIM UNDERWATER and PvE and kill guards to take objectives (keeps and camps). Ah…. This is going to be wonderful. I just can’t believe they don’t charge a sub for this. Just blown away at present.

    And to think, from any of my previous posts it would seem like I was marginally excited for the game at best. The funny thing is, that is true. /salute ArenaNet

  • Maybe someone could answer this for me, when you’re on the overflow server, do you not have access to guild chat? Every time I’d try to talk to people on KGC it would tell me I wasn’t guilded. Specific whispers to guildies didn’t seem to get through either.

  • @Syeric – The guild system has been pretty bugged for the first 2 days. For some the join button didn’t work; and make sure you are representing your guild. But it does work from overflow when it works and they are fixing bugs quickly…

  • I did the same thing, I went in not having read any info this time around. I’m level 10 now and even I think I have a pretty good grasp on a few things, even crafting though I lack mats atm.

    I also love how things seem to flow and it hasn’t felt like a grind at all. I’ll go for a skill challenge or a vista and an event will pop up. I’m exploring and killing various things (Killing a wider variety of enemies in a day gives a bonus, which I love) The only quests you really “accept” are your personal story ones, which I’m loving the Sylvari story with the choices I’ve made so far, since I’m thinking they may be slightly different from another random Sylvari’s. I’ve noticed a few opportunities for potentially different outcomes already.

    The other quests just pop up as events or hearts and you can jump in or leave them. Hearts, the closest thing to a hub have various helpful things you can do to finish them and actually mixing it up gives you bigger bonuses than just grinding whatever mobs are plaguing the area.

    The skill system is crazy. As an elementalist I have 4 forms I can switch between freely each with 5 skills that are different based on the weapon I wield. I can swap weapons and forms and it just feels like with enough practice I can be ready for anything. I’ve been in fire form to lay down lava bursts and a meteor storm and while those are burning away I’ve switched to water form to lay down healing rains and geysers on my allies.

    One of my favorite things about the PvE questing is fallen players appear in a large radius on your map. I’ve cleared through some trash to get to a dead player to revive him, which gets you a fair bit of exp! Exp for reviving people, simply mind blowing I love it.

    @Syric I don’t know the exact mechanics but I don’t think you can cross the overflow to real server boundary. The guild is based on the server so guild chat is probably unavailable for that reason. I’m not in a guild yet so I dunno. But if the guildie you want to talk to is on your overflow server I assume you can talk to them. My biggest complaint is the annoyance of having to wait in the overflow and when I do get in, going into a story instance and beating it sends me back into the overflow queue 🙁

  • I had to log out & back in to accept guild invites. I love the overflow system, no need to stare at a Q for hours instead of playing the game.

  • @Fergor – Emhry Bay has been pretty smooth. WvW seems to be pretty even at the moment.

  • @Syeric: You must be bugged. I’m fairly certain guild chat works across the overflow.If I’m wrong, someone please let met know.

    One of the officers in our guild (Eternity) can’t even see that he’s in a guild.

    Hit the G key (default) to open the guild section. Do you see KGC and that you are representing?

    @Fergor: Ehmry bay is awesome.

  • @Gringar – Guilds are across worlds. Only problem being they haven’t yet implemented the guesting system, whereby you can go and play on any world that you have friends on (to invite you). When they do this will even be the case for people in different regions – EU & US will be able to play together. Only thing in GW2 that isn’t cross world is WvW, since you can only represent one world in that, for obvious reasons.

  • So far I am really liking GW2 a lot. The gameplay itself has been amazing, although a lot of the peripheral features (like those that you mentioned) are buggy. I imagine Anet will have those things up and running soon. At least I hope!

    One thing that has really surprised me is the quality of the dynamic events even in low level zones. Most aren’t that interesting in terms of the actual objectives but there have been a lot of “wow!” moments when you get into what is actually going on. My favorites so far have been the delver burrowing machine popping up and kidnapping the snow leopard cubs in the norn starting area, the tricking the grawl into worshiping the norns line in the norn starting area, and the quest line involving setting up a forward base in the charr starting area. The first two were just kinda cool in general whereas the last showed off a way in which ANet is making good on their promises.

    Keen, if I recall correctly you’ve commented a few times that you feel that the idea of actually changing the world with your actions is an exaggerated selling point. I agreed with you at first but now I’m not so sure. In that Charr quest for example, one dynamic event leads you to set up a few tents including NPC guards, merchants etc. in an area that was previously controlled by NPCs. I expected this to be temporary and for it all to just despawn after awhile. What actually happened, however, was that it triggered another dynamic event maybe 10-15 minutes later in which the enemies made a major counterattack to destroy the forward base. It was very difficult, but we came pretty close to defending. If we were successful I imagine the base would have stayed up. Because we failed the enemies moved back into that area.

    For me, that kind of mechanic is a far cry from just having your progress reset after a fixed amount of time. If you really wanted to you could set up a group there and defend the camp for as long as you want/are able. In that way it seems like there are mechanics in place which really do allow you to impact the world.

    I imagine this will become more complex in higher level zones too. It wouldn’t really make sense to have a series of events that play out over hours/days/weeks in the newbie area, but for a high level area it could absolutely work that way. Given that ANet has made claims that this is how things will work, I see no reason to believe otherwise.

  • I have put a fair number of hours in so far and I have really enjoyed the experience, aside from the slight downtown a few hours after the start (which actually started earlier than promised), one instance of a about 20 minutes of character progression after a kick, and a few problems with chatting in the KGC guild, which were because of my own lack of knowledge about having to represent after joining. I figured when you joined it it would automatically do that for you. The only real guild problem was after Evalissa sent me an invite I could see the invite, but when I kicked on join nothing would happen. Multiple reboots didn’t resolve it, but eventually it worked.

    Game wise I am crazy about 99% of the game. I already spent $20 in the Gem store to get more bank storage and converted some gems into gold so I could help power level my cooking skill some.

    I played a fair amount in BWE 1, but barely touched the other BWE other than the last one just to see the Asura and Sylvian starting areas. My main focus so far has been weapon skill unlocking. I have unlocked almost all the weapon skills on my main, an Elementalist, my main alt a warrior and my Mesmer. I really enjoy weapon skill unlocks as it really encourages you to try different strategies from the very beginning of the game. By level 8-9 is has been about the point when I finish my skill unlocks and it amazes me by those levels the amount of options that the characters have rival what most MMOs offer by end game.

    I am enjoying crafting for the first time in an MMO, something that I usually loathe. Not some much that it is all that different than other MMO as much as that I like that you get actual XP for time spent doing it. I know that WoW and a few others started offering marginal XP for gathering and such, but I feel that GW2 is offers enough that you can really enjoy the game and progress a fair amount just crafting and gathering.

    Also I love the exploration XP and so forth. Pretty much if I sound like I am gushing about the game it is because I am. Other than a few launch hiccups which always happen in MMOs, ArenaNet has created something of an artform with GW2.

    My seven year old has had a blast even playing. I let her make a couple of characters and she loves just exploring around and I actually think I am going to get her and my wife copies to play eventually because I can see us all having a great time as a family playing.

  • i really really hate that when you are out of range from your mob and you click in a spell then your character begins the animation to cast the spell and when it finish you see the “out of range” message then you walk 2 steps closer to your target and the same..you walk 2 steps and the same…
    in WoW your spells are greyed when you are out of range and you cant cast spells if you are too far from your target so you can know when you are in range.

    isnt there any option to fix this?

  • I have to say that I am loving the game so far. So far I have a lvl 15 Human Thief, however I am not sure if I will be sticking with that as my main as so many classes I tried in BWE were fun. The Thief has been fun but I am not sure if I like the traits for it or not and none of the weapon combos I seem to really enjoy. Dual pistols is the only one that seems okay and I am concentrating on doing a critical build right now and planning on increasing pistol damage with the traits, and using the signet use gives might stacks, and pretty much just running signets for the most part though using venoms and a couple tricks and traps as secondaries but mostly using them just to get to the next tier.

    Which does lead me to one question, does anyone know if you increase your healing power does it increase how much you heal per hit with the thief healing signets passive?

    Have to say I also really enjoy being in the Guild so far as well. Haven’t been on vent yet as I was watching MLG Raleigh all weekend, and would have been way to distracted to pay attention to anything anyone said, but I did enjoy the conversations in guild chat. Also I could see guild chat and talk in it while in overflow. Have not tried grouping yet but hopefully soon. I hope to be on vent and starting to get to know everyone better tonight as well after I finish classes.

  • I picked Emery Bay server to join KGC, and I’ve registered on the forums, but I can’t seem to post my application… not sure what’s up.

    HALP!

  • Blog Home | Hello Grinr | View Inbox | 0 messages, 0 are new.

    That’s the top bar. I’ve logged out and then back in again, but I only have Notify and Mark Read as options at the bottom and top of the forum.

    ??