I have had “Hit That” by Offspring stuck in my head for a little over a week and its driving me nuts.
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All this Guild Wars 2 talk is making me want tk try it. I think I only played it for a few days at launch.
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My experience wasn’t as a Sylvari so I didn’t get to have my character grow up alongside Trahearne and experience every step of the story with him.
For me, he was the guy who suddenly appeared and had an inordinate amount of relevance once my origin-based and race-based stories were out of the way.
He was the guy who accompanied me on almost every significant mission, only to have the success typically attributed to him.
It stopped feeling like my adventure and rapidly became the adventure of Trahearne and the plebeian who gets stuff done on his behalf.
The base story genuinely felt like it ended when I completed Trahearne’s Wyld Hunt. The final segment in the Ruined City of Arah felt like it was tacked on as an after-thought, as the narrative sense of triumph seemed to surround the completion of Trahearne’s mission, instead of mine.
I get that you had your own experience and that it felt very different to mine, but that doesn’t change the fact that to me, Trahearne felt like an intruder who usurped the story rather than a companion.
The Charr PC has one of the best voice lines of any character I’ve come across.
“I’ll be there. And if my father is dead when I get there, I’m gonna put your head in a bag and set it on fire.”
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You can play for free to max level within the base game. Going beyond vanilla will require expansion purchases (the 1st and 2nd expansion are a 2 for 1 deal).
I play it solely for gameplay and to admire the scenery. Leveling is arguably the weakest part because there isn’t really any narrative to guide you, so you just run around the zones to complete activities and explore for exp. There is MSQ, but you get a handful of quests every 10 levels, so there are substantial gaps between plot dumps.
This kind of leveling isn’t for everyone, but with price of admission being 0, you don’t really lose anything but time. Also, you can engage in pvp pretty much immediately, because pvp is level and gear agnostic as stats are normalized.
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That kind of leveling doesnt sound like it’s for me.
IIRC is it that you run around basically doing world quests?
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Pretty much everything you do gives you exp. Exploring, looting chests, gathering, heart quests, dynamic events. This is the game blizzard essentially yoinked all of that stuff from (hearts are zone bonus objectives, dynamic events are world quests). Like, they are a bit more elaborate by often having multiple stages, but it’s still basically world quests.
You get exp from MSQ too, but I already spoke of that. So don’t expect ffxiv or wow kind of leveling. I’m not a fan of gw2 leveling, but it’s the combat that actually carried me through to the max (and it doesn’t really take too long).
Try it if you have free time and nothing better to do, but I’m not gonna be surprised if the leveling will be a turn off for you. Certainly was for my partner.
Man just wants a cute charr girl his age smh 
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And there I was stopping doing world quests completely because I kept getting an item every week that I could use to increase an alt’s level.
EDIT: the only character I did world quests on was my Sylvari Ranger.
Everybody else could just get the story quest done and get on with endgame content.
I actually forgot to mention another area where GW2 absolutely wrecks the competition: Open world content.
Though a lot of the basic open world content is rather standard, you get reasonably challenging content in the form of “metas.” These can be failed if there aren’t enough people or if they don’t know the strategies or if there’s not enough coordination, it’s nowhere near as mindless as world quests or even a world boss from World of Warcraft.
Some of these are as simple as turning up for a big boss fight, while others require lots of different quests and events to be completed by different groups - but almost all of them culminate in a big boss fight. Most of these are on end-game maps but there’s a handful of them which can be found on the base game levelling maps too. As they’re very rewarding, you’ll usually find lots of people gathering to do them too, unless you play during absolute off-peak hours.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Event_timers
Here’s a list of some of the metas. These are just the ones which are on a regular timer, while others are triggered by player contribution throughout the map instead.
Got 100% world completion many years ago on GW2 and remember naff all now. Just know I hated that zone with the big wall you had to climb up.
Same tbh…
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Just out of curiosity, what’s your gender? I don’t think you’ve ever said.
True. To add to that a bit is that even regular enemies are quite dangerous in groups, not to mention veterans, elites, etc. With the way gearing works you don’t really roflstomp everything in high level zones and there is a tangible risk of dying. Not so much when you get Scaled down in low level zones, but oh well.
Pretty sure I did, but I’m a guy.
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This is the sort of stupid conversation I have with The Cat, how did you know?
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Debatable. ArenaNet’s approach to balance is “we’ll just give you a bunch of toys and you can figure it out and occasionally we’ll tinker with things if we feel like it.” In short, there’s no balance at all and whenever they do make changes, they’re usually very puzzling.
Using all of your abilities as optimally as possible can do literally a tenth of the damage as someone else of the same profession just auto-attacking, even if you’re using the exact same weapons, utilities and stat distribution and the only difference is your specialisations.
So, some people can absolutely wreck veterans, elites and even champions effortlessly if they build right.
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i have sat here with 20 minutes trying to work out which it is from multiple hell walls.
i’ve been playing gw2 since the games beta and i can say there hasnt been any invalid complaints really. Its a really mixed bag of an mmo and yet its the only one i find enough charm to keep me coming back too partly because the world feels very…alive? the rper in my brain is obsessed with how much lore is there to pick apart just from wandering the world.
the enviromental storytelling is honestly peak. nothing like wandering through the dark blurry light hallways of an inquest complex while listening to the demon-rats slowly choking in mounds of tar like necromancer bodybags.
…also tyria is LGBT+ friendly af and that to me is a massive plus. Marjory and Kas can be very…on the nose at times but other than that. serotonin
Is that so? Admittedly I don’t have enough experience with the game’s patch cycle, so I wouldn’t know what their balancing is like.
Of course I’m only speaking subjectively and I have to think carefully before I pull and put in some effort, compared to wow for example. It could also be that I’m 
at the game still. (for context im playing a Berserker warrior with sword/torch and a long bow)
What stat combo are you using? That can make a big difference. Sword torch and longbow is typically a combo that lives and dies on condition damage, precision and expertise. Vitality and toughness if you need some staying power in combat. I wouldnt say its being bad some mob types are tough. The Heart of maguuma is hell enough
I’ve assembled a full set of viper stats. Bow is viper too. Sword is some random named sword but it has the same stats as the set, albeit it could be different values. Torch is just some trash I was given for unlocking the spec.
Mind, I’m not complaining about the difficulty and am actually enjoying it. Maybe my choice of words made it seem like every encounter is an Orphan of Kos tier struggle. I meant more that I have to think twice before rounding up 10 mobs and going full awooga on them.
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I tried dipping back into GW2 last year but I hit the same wall as the first time I stopped. Everything just seems to boil down to collecting marginally more powerful legendary items, seemingly just for the appearances, that all require such an absolutely ludicrous amount of crafting materials that it would make a korean mmo blush. I honestly don’t even know if I did something wrong or not, every guild I joined seemed to quite literally be a second job with dedicated farming hours for the guild hall and various welfare projects for people’s ascended gear.
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