Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
6 
Report this post
2. Each profession in Guild Wars 2 has access to multiple elite specializations, which are like advanced subclasses that offer unique playstyles and abilities. You can unlock and switch between these elite specializations as you progress through the game, allowing for more versatility in how you build and play your character. You will have the choice to select and switch between different elite specializations without having to create a new character, giving you the flexibility to experiment with different playstyles.
3. The choices you make during character creation, including your character's beliefs and origin story, primarily influence the personal story quests you'll experience while leveling up. While these choices won't provide direct passive bonuses that impact endgame content, they do add depth to your character's narrative and can affect certain aspects of the story missions you encounter.
4. In Guild Wars 2, you have the option to completely change the appearance of your character using Transmutation Charges, which can be obtained in-game or purchased from the Gem Store. These charges allow you to modify your character's appearance, including changing hairstyles, colors, outfits, and more, without having to recreate your character from scratch. So feel free to spend time customizing your character during creation, knowing you can always make adjustments later on.
5. For new players focusing on PvP, Guild Wars 2 offers a structured PvP mode where players are provided with standardized gear and stat allocations to ensure a level playing field. This means that you do not need to engage in PvE content such as dungeons or raids to acquire gear for PvP. While experience and skill are important in PvP, gear discrepancies are minimized, allowing new players to compete on a relatively even footing. As you gain experience and improve your skills, you'll find PvP in Guild Wars 2 to be engaging and rewarding.
2: You have full control over what (if any) specialization you pick. You can also swap them at will withour starting a new character if you unlock them (this is character-based by the way. Unlocking Firebrand on one character will not auto-unlock it on others.)
3: Any questions about your character only affect story.
4: Yes, there exist kits to change just the hair (and horns if Charr/Ears if Asura), the entire look and even your character's name. These can be bought for Gems or through Black Lion Statues (appearances only).
5: PvP is dated but still solid. Beware of usual pitfalls (toxicity and bots). You do not need to do raids or dungeons to obtain quality gear, though having a set of Exotic-tier stuff will get you very far.
Thank you very much for your quick and in-depth response. This answered all my quesions.
Have a great day!
No problem, welcome to Guild Wars 2 and have fun!.
Thanks to you aswell. Much appreciated!
→ (✓) Mark this post as topic answer.
It is a fact that was very much in the mind of players when the game released but it isn't talked so much about anymore, but … GW2 was designed to challenge genre convenstions as they existed around the time of its making. While it looks very much alike a run-of-the-mill MMO at first glance, it does (or used to do) some things differently from others. It is very tempting, but I'd caution against trying to apply what you know about other MMOs to this one, but rather approach it naively for lack of a better word.
All professions (which is what we call the base classes and their elite specializations, i.e., a Dragonhunter is still of the Guardian profession, so the answer to "what class do you play would maybe be dragonhunter whereas "what profession is your character?" → guardian) are viable and fun.
This video showcases all 27 elite specializations and has a short overview of the professions and their approximate difficulty in the beginning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4D2dqG0eoE
The longer you play, the easier it becomes to level new characters. If you play one of the competitive modes, PvP or WvW, you get a lot of an item that gives you a level[wiki.guildwars2.com] (and transmutation charges, but more of that further down) which make leveling up a breeze.
A bit further down the road, your characters even get birthday presents containing "Experience Scrolls" that boost a character to level 10/20/30/40/50/60 in the 1st/2nd/3rd/4th/5th/6th birthday present, respectively.
( https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Birthday_Gift )
At level 11, you start earning hero points, which you can use to unlock skills and – starting at level 21 – traits in specializatiosn (not "elite" yet). Just by getting to level 80, you get enough points to train every last skill and trait in the five categories each.
→
After you unlocked every core skill and trait, you can start leveling elite specializations that you own the expansion for. Each one requires 250 hero points to level fully, which is a lot, more than you can get in the base game alone, but fear not … each hero challenge in HoT, PoF, and EoD zones rewards 10 hero points at once.
Once you started training an elite spec, you can equip it in the dedicated elite spec slot of the build tab and swap them around as you could any other specialization, whenever you are out of combat / match.
The only two questions that really matter are the two about your biographical background. For example with a sylvari (which I personally think have the best story for story-focused newcomer to Tyria), what you saw in your dream and what you think is the most important teaching of ventari; for a human, where you grew up and what your greatest regret is.
It makes sense to vary those if you make multiple characters of the same race.
The other questions are mostly fluff giving you unique cosmetics (like helmet or shoulder skins), remnants of a personality system that wasn't really developed further, determine which NPC side characters appear in your story instances etc.
Ah, the true endgame, fashion wars. Yes, there are transmutation charges which let you apply unlocked skins onto other equipment of the same type (don't buy those from the gem store unless you love getting ripped off; PvP reward tracks will shower you in those). There are also Self-style hair kits and total makeover kits (and the name change contract), which are mostly only available off the gem store and very rarely through special in-game events, Twitch drops etc. They also sometimes get given away for free on the gem store during special sales events.
They are rather costly and only worth it if you put a lot of time into a character already, but it's nice they do exist, AND they let you pick cosmetic options which are not available on character creation.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Total_Makeover_Kit
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Self-Style_Hair_Kit
You could theoretically hop into PvP at level 3. You'd be temporarily scaled up to level 80 and be given access to all build options that you own (meaning that you still have to own the relevant expansions to elite specialize or use all weapons on a profession without restrictions) … maybe don't do that 😅
It's certainly a good idea to first come to grips with the combat system in PvE before you hop into PvP, but the option is there. (It would also be an option to play around with all professions in the PvP training area in the PvP lobby before you decide your first question.)
The new player experience will be … 🤔🙄 I feel like I need to differentiate.
The game's systems are awesome. The buildcraft in GW2 is incredibly deep, combat is dynamic and fluid, it's extremely based in player skill.
But the PvP community is relatively small and a bit of a cesspit.
If you hop into a match, you better act like you've been around for the last 12½ years and know how the game is played. If you don't, that's your fault. [/s]
PvP is a microcosmos in GW2 and it's like any other always-on PvP game whose population has moved on to greener pastures long ago.
The game mode also doesn't see a lot of love from the developers, after they really tried to make GW2 into an e-sport at first.
Don't let any of this discourage yourself though. You can have a lot of fun in PvP if you remember that it's a game.
and last but actually first, I encourage you to check out this opinion piece about why I think it's better to play on a standalone ArenaNet account rather than a Steam GW2 account: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3335333185
Welcome to Tyria!
Structured PVP which has 5, 3 and 2 player teams going at it on small maps with different obstacles. There is no requirement for equipment as there is no equipment. Everyone has the same access to runes, sigils and relics. The armour and weapons are only skins.
WVW on the other hand is a free for all. As of now, guilds form "alliances" with other guilds by creating a..... that's right.... common guild. Every Friday (PST NA) the 3 "teams" are moved up or down within a tier system. Every month the guilds are reshuffled. Each tier has 3 "shards" that fight against each other. In WVW equipment is everything. The shills will tell you exotic gear is good enough but what you want to strive for is legendary so that you can change your build when the meta changes or the incompetent fools at ANet "balance" the classes again.
Be warned that ANet is all about pve content and pve "balance". Every "balance" has a negative effect on one class or another in WVW and boosts another way too much. For example, Josh Davis, the game director, said this about thief, which has been in the game from the beginning, "Shadow Arts has long been a source of frustrating gameplay, particularly in competitive PvP and WvW." And every chance they get, they pummel thief into oblivion. If the top guy in ANet has that to say about an element of his game, imagine how bad his decisions.
In every MMO, the meta always shifts. It is not unique for GW2. Balance updates included. A pointless slide with how normal that is for MMOs.
Equipment can't carry you in PvP like it can in other MMOs. But if you can't afford to switch exotic gear when the Meta changes, there's no way you will play enough, in your whole life, to make Legendaries. "Don't get another car to commute to work, just buy a private jet."
As a Thief main, that quote on Shadow Arts was stated before the change. Prior to that Shadow Arts benefited the thief only if they spent more time in stealth not doing anything. The change made it so they got the benefits when they entered stealth and when they exit stealth promoting aggressive gameplay instead of stopping combat and waiting around for benefits.
People didn't enjoy combat where Thief needs to disengage and wait around in stealth doing nothing. Neither the Thief nor the Enemy.
As always, you get it wrong. I said when the meta changes. What was unclear about that? And "balances" were explain further down.
And another who refuses to read. I said equipment was everything in WVW and just skins in PVP. Your attention span is really small. And the point I was making about stealth was that the director of the game DOES NOT fully endorse the game. He throws out disparaging comments and as a result the staff, to this day, do the same. Cal Cohen said the changed siege was done so that everyone has access to it. What? Was the new player incapable of buying siege from a npc or the trading post? Or are they too stupid to understand the 3 levels of siege? Or maybe it's not the new players but ANet employees themselves.
And yea that was the whole thing about thief, stealth, ambush, single target. When the game was first published, assassin, rogue, thief was the quintessential to all mmo's. Now that the game is 12 years on DOES NOT mean you can hammer the living crap out the thief. If thief/stealth is such a annoying source of frustrating game play, kill the game off and start again. It is odd that stealth is only nerfed on thief not mesmer, engi, ranger. ANet are just completely incompetent. They introduced trapper runes which use to give stealth when using traps as well as condition damage. Of course the thief exploited it. So instead of "adjusting" or removing the rune from the game, they ONLY removed traps from the thief. Dragon hunters and rangers still had traps.
Many of those people yearn for a state of the game that has passed and will never come back – bit of a MGWGA (Make Guild Wars Great Again) mindset – but they are still so strongly attached to the game emotionally that they cannot let go. It's quite sad really and they deserve our sympathy … but not our attention. They would just have you know that in their time everything about the game was better (which might still be factual), and that your current enjoyment is false and you must be brainwashed, lack taste etc. Your fun is wrong.
Writing this makes me a blinded whiteknighting fanboy shill, btw. ;)
I guess I have to make it clearer for you.
There is always a small group of people who will never be pleased and complain about every balance update in every MMO. You just happen to fall into that group.
But I can already hear you calling people sycophants like you always do.
Ouch. This isn't the game for PvP. You can dive right in from level 2 (or whenever the silly "new player experiences" deems it "unlocked"). PvP automatically sets everyone to the same level, and your gear is irrelevant: your stats belong to a selectable amulet instead.
But that's where the decent part ends. The devs desperately wanted to board the "e-sports" bandwagon early in the game's life, and when that failed, they completely abandoned the mode. Besides a small number of dedicated (and therefore extremely skilled) players, it's just bots who've taken over the mode, and the dev has never bothered taking any action to remedy this.
The "other" PvP mode is WvW. It's meant to be a mix of PvE and PvP, like Arathi Basin in WoW (i think that's the one?), but it's another mode that's suffered neglect, and has really just become about group vs group PvP. It's worth trying, but it's not for everyone, and as is typical with GW2, suffers from a decade of dev neglect.
WvW is PvP. I am sorry to be the one to inform you. But I'll play with your definitions.
The difference between Exotic and Ascended in WvW is negligible. Your equipment cannot carry you in WvW. Most of the power comes from player skill, while a good portion comes from the build. If you lost with Exotic, you would lose with Ascended.
Anyone who plays Thief can tell you know pretty much nothing about the profession. Stealth is just a buff that can be used by Mesmer, Engineer, and Ranger. Stealth is a core aspect of Thief and tied to it's survival. It STILL allows a Thief to engage and disengage at will. No other profession has that advantage, especially at 1500 range.
Thief/Stealth itself is not an annoying source of frustrating gameplay. It was how Shadow Arts pushed Thief into staying in stealth, during combat, for lengthy periods of time just to benefit. It was annoying in PvE as well, since you basically disengage a fight and wait for. Several. Seconds. To. Get. The. Benefit. Of. Being. In. Stealth. Now you can pop in and out, like a WoW Rogue using Shadow Dance, to get the full benefit.
I dunno man, maybe you should at least play the game once.