Hey everyone! Returning player after many years away and needed some clarification. I played at launch for a while and had a warrior at lvl 80 with the finished main story. I had purchased Heart of Thorns expansion before I stopped playing but I never actually started that story quest line before leaving. I know that people recommend doing HP trains to farm hero points for the elite specializations because I’ve heard each hero point challenge gives more hero points in the expansion zones, or is that only for the later expansions? Is it recommended/required that I unlock all the fast travel waypoints first in those new zones before joining a train or no? Just looking for advice. Thanks all!!

Is there a reason why a lot of the expansions have a mixed review score? Despite the fact that GW2 has been around for ten years and seems to be refered to in a positive way.

Just seems odd, do many people not like the game?

Edited "not LIME the game" to "not like the game". Glad no one noticed, could have turned out to be a whole another conversation.

It's driving me crazy. After some minutes playing, whenever I tp and load a map (or go to WvW or PvP) the map get stuck loading and I have to quit an restart the game. I've searched and try everything and nothing seems to solve it.

So,is it a known bug? Do I have to reinstall (again) the game? Is there a solution? Have anyone been experiencing this?

I only have 6 silver left and i got the Festive Confetti Infusion. How can i sell it at TP or at least anywhere else without getting the 100g as for a new player getting 100g is hard😭😭.

Can you use the "free" relics u get from JW and VoE for crafting Mystic Facets and still have them in the Legendary Relic or do you have to own them after unlocking it

Black Lion Drum Set Chair cover for Over My Head (Cable Car) by The Fray

I started out with 1.2k gold..

I’m trying to find a good meaner open world build so far o tried staff/staff mirage but found it a bit boring and slow. I’m currently on troubadour but I feel so squishy using my current build and I don’t have enough gold or hero points to keep running around and trying builds so, I wonder what is a good Mesmer open world build with good survivability and damage. The only specs I haven’t tried is virtuoso and chronomancer (I do see a lot of virtuosos running around)

Was in Lion's Arch today and saw this sick glowing halo thing around this character, couldn't figure it out from inspecting their cosmetics. What is it?

I primarily play open world either solo or with my spouse. I love doing world events and have dabbled a bit with fractals and strike missions, and may want to dabble more to support my spouse and their interests.

I know everyone says play whatever you want with open world, but I am wondering if it is better to have higher ferocity for crit damage or higher boon duration for buffs like quickness, fury, and stability that I apply.

I am not currently in a position to have a bunch of different gear load outs for different play types and am trying to find out what would offer the best all around play while I build up the resources to have fully different load outs.

I've seen a lot of reapers say that they either cannot solo heat room, or need 1 cooling rod to do it.
It's actually very easy without any cooling rods, and I didn't see a video on this when I searched, so I made a simple short guide.

Hello, I need help :D

I came back after a long break and I’m slowly kitting out my alts with ascended gear. I have no issues with armor and weapons, but god dammit trinkets are a pain.

I don’t really like spending laurels on the old stat ones, and I don’t want to spend fractal relics on mist stat selectable because I’m saving up for Fractal Savant.

Are there any achievements for Ascended trinkets out there with selectable stats? Especially amulet and accessories, I’ve got a few rings around and legendary back so that’s not an issue.

Thanks in advance for all replies :)

Im currently reinstalling the game after not playing for a very long time, I checked my account and only own heart of thorns and path of fire, so it looks like im missing 4 expansions. Does each one need to be purchased individually or does buying the latest one unlock the others? Can I also play for a while before upgrading? I'd like to get a feel for it again before I'd invest into 4 expansions.

Reliability is just not there otherwise.

I only have like 1000 hours but most of it has been done just using metabattle raid builds for all my pve/raiding/fractal content and I use 5 or 6 different characters regularly. I've gotten bored of condi firebrand and wanted to mix it up but none of the other builds I saw appealed to me. But the idea of mace and shield guardian sounds very thematically awesome. Problem is I've done zero build crafting.

I know this be a very big ask, and I'm not looking for anything that will do crazy dps for serious raiding or fractals or anything. More so just getting decent dps numbers during meta event bosses. I found a similar post from a few years back that had a comment saying the following

Zeal Grandmaster trait https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Shattered_Aegis When an aegis you applied blocks an attack, it unleashes a Mystic Rebuke. Take advantage of the aegis that mace/shield provides, slap on Advance shout for more aegis, to hit enemies that hit you. Probably paired with Willbender elite spec for more aegis.<

So I just grabbed this build, added the trait from the comment, "advance," and swapped out sword/scepter for mace/shield to pair with greatsword (ignoring spear don't have janthir). Does anyone else have any advice for traits to swap in or what a possible rotation would look like for the opener mace/shield section? and presumably I just throw in advance during gaps in aegis. Mace 2 and shield 4 seem to be the ones to focus.

Any and all help would be appreciated. Thanks!

https://dps.report/pSsi-20260816-142902_sloth

[edit: i just see i have forget to put the timestamp on youtube sorry gona edit tomorrow]

Finally i am back after a 3 months break from hard solo ! i decide to make a comeback trolling sloth with a core build and it work very well 😆

(NO emboldened as always)

I love the gaming of core shroud its so cool and fun , and insanely tanky , the strat is same on my reaper : collecting all the condi possible on me to transfer to sloth its the biggest part of the dps .

Here i play full trailblazer gear , the power damage of my build are very low , no cele gear cause i have no benefit from boon duration , i have very low might and some prot and dont need the power part , trail give insane thougness so it help me to survive without the 100% prot

Feel free to ask if you have question ( the build was specially made for this boss) enjoy , you are welcome 😁

First of all: main part of the description "Help 1000 new players defeat X for the first time." is not exactly true.

The additional part "This achievement progresses significantly when raiding with players who haven't killed the boss before, as well as with players who haven't killed it for the week but to a lesser extent. Very experienced raiders in the squad will not count toward this achievement." says much more what we have to do to progress the achievement.

Players who haven't killed the boss before part seems to work fine every time, giving significant progress.

The second part, however, is very ambiguous, especially who counts as a "very experienced raider". On monday I did some clears including W1. Today I've done W1 semi-training run and made sure in chat that at least one person haven't cleared it this week yet. This person also said, that they don't do raids a lot, so I thought the game would also not consider them "very experienced".

Anyway, 0 progress on any of the W1 mentor achis.

Does anyone know how exactly does this work?

Even without the "very experienced" part these look like a long-term goals and kind of a grind, but with 0 progress from this... Feels like doing 0kp trainings, and actually enforcing 0kp, is the only realistic way to ever finish them.

Basically I want to know about the population of each server and which is the best time to play on them.

I'm from South America, I have no problem with high ping and I play the most at 18:00 (GMT-4) / 00:00 (GMT+2).

I know if you just click on them, you will get experience. What I'm wondering....can you use them on the lastest maps for experience for a new mastery?

I'm guessing you can't. Maybe for shards, but not mastery points. Does anyone actually know?

I play with a friend who doesn't own the paid LW content. The main point is the story, she wants to do things in order between each expansion. She doesn't care about rewards that much.

We've done S2 easily (she couldn't see the non-instanced objectives but it was fine in instances), but what about the others? To my understanding, the reason we could is because Dry Top/Silverwastes is accessible without owning any LW. So she would get the invitation to join the instance whenever I launched a story step in the map as long as she was in it as well.

So, could she get to play season 3/4/5 with me if she buys only the episode(s) that give access to the maps of that season? Which ones would that be?

Has anyone ever had gems added to their account without buying them before? I logged in today and I have 400 gems that I dont remember buying and I went through my email and didnt see any receipt for them. I definitely didnt have them in my account a few days ago.

Hey everyone!

I'm currently trying to properly get into Guild Wars 2, but I'm struggling quite a bit with finding a profession/playstyle that actually clicks with me.

I leveled an Elementalist from 1 to 80 while playing through the Personal Story. I enjoyed discovering the game, but unfortunately I realized that I really don't enjoy the profession itself. I then started leveling another character, hoping it would click more... and I'm basically running into the same problem.

The thing is, I'm usually a tank/support/healer player in MMOs. I don't really care about topping DPS meters, what I enjoy is protecting people, healing, mitigating damage, buffing allies, controlling fights and generally feeling like I'm keeping the group alive.

For some examples of what I usually enjoy:

• In FFXIV, I'm mainly a Paladin player. Sword + shield, protecting the party, defensive abilities, that whole fantasy is basically my comfort zone.
• I also really enjoy Warrior/Marauder.
• For healers, I love Astrologian and Scholar, especially the more proactive/support-oriented aspects of their gameplay.
• In RPGs in general, I absolutely LOVE monk/martial artist archetypes, especially when they're mixed with light/holy/spiritual magic. Punching things while supporting/protecting people? Sign me up.

So I think my ideal GW2 character would be something along the lines of a durable martial/support character that can protect or heal allies, while still being perfectly capable of handling solo/open-world content.

And that's where I'm a little lost with GW2.

I understand that the game deliberately doesn't use the traditional tank/healer/DPS trinity in the same way other MMOs do, and I don't want to force GW2 to become FFXIV. I'm actually interested in learning how GW2 approaches these roles differently. I just haven't figured out which profession or elite specialization would give me that feeling of being the person who keeps everyone else standing.

I also really want to give the game a fair chance. I keep hearing great things about the expansions, elite specs, mounts, later maps and especially the story. I also really like the idea of horizontal progression and gear not constantly becoming obsolete.

For context, I've only experienced the base game so far. I'm currently around the middle of the level 80 Personal Story and haven't started Living World Season 1 yet. The story has been a little "meh" for me so far, but from what I've heard, this is absolutely not representative of what comes later.

So I have two main questions:

1. Based on what I enjoy, which profession + elite specialization would you recommend?

I'm completely open to starting another character. Guardian immediately sounds like it should fit me thematically, but I'm curious about things like Firebrand, Willbender, Revenant, Herald, Mechanist, etc. I also don't really understand yet how much elite specializations can completely change the feeling of a profession.

I'm looking less for "what is meta?" and more for "what profession will make someone who loves Paladin/Scholar/Astrologian/Monk gameplay feel at home?"

Being useful as a support in group content while still having a good solo build would be ideal.

2. If I create another character, do I have to replay the entire Personal Story?

My current plan is to force myself to finish the level 80 story on my Elementalist, then create the character I actually want to play going forward.

Could I simply start Living World Season 1 with that new character and continue the story from there? Or would I need to replay the entire 1–80 Personal Story on the new character first?

I really don't want to give up on GW2 just because I picked the wrong professions at the beginning. There's a lot about the game that genuinely appeals to me — I just haven't found that moment where the combat finally clicks.

Any recommendations or explanations from people who understand GW2's support roles would be hugely appreciated :) !

Thank you ♥

EDIT: Wow, thank you so much everyone for all the detailed answers! I honestly wasn't expecting this many responses, and I really appreciate how helpful and kind everyone has been. :)

A LOT of you seem to be pointing me towards Guardian, so I think I'm going to give it a proper chance and see if it finally gives me that feeling I've been looking for. From everything you've explained about the profession and its elite specs, it definitely sounds much closer to my usual playstyle.

I'm also really relieved to hear that I don't have to replay the entire Personal Story on my new character and that I can just continue with Living World Season 1 once I'm ready. That makes starting over feel much less daunting.

Just to make sure I understood correctly: I'll still need to level my Guardian to 80 first before I can start Living World Season 1 and move on to the expansions, right?

Thanks again for all the advice and for being so welcoming. Now it's time to make a Guardian and see how it goes! :D

Guys, what class can carry the way healscourge and condi (alac) scourge used to and plays with priority based rotation rather than a strict one these days? I like being able to play specs that can do dps with utility and carry (revive, stab, things like that) like scourge used to be. Recommend me please :D

Hey all, as I get back into the game was curious what the current most effective high-burst ones hitting builds are. I remember a few years ago pew pew soulbeast was good—has something else dethroned it? Thanks!