Quartz 4

Guild Wars 2 game

11 min read

This is intended to help get back up to speed after a long absence from Guild Wars 2.

General

  • The character I play primarily is Quallomb
    • Quallomb runs this build: https://snowcrows.com/builds/open-world/ranger/power-soulbeast
      • I do not have the exact equipment for the build
      • The build equipment doesn’t need to be exact. For this build, I should have berserker equipment.
      • When you equip an exotic or higher level piece of equipment, you will get to select the stats and can select the berserker stats for the item
  • The level cap is 80
  • After reaching level cap, characters can continue to gain experience toward mastery levels.
    • Mastery levels each convey a specific skill or ability
    • Choose the mastery to pursue by going to your hero panel (h) and selecting it in the mastery tab
    • Once a mastery level is completed (yellow bar under skill bar is filled), you need to go back into the panel and spend a number of master points to cash in the XP and unlock the skill. Additional XP accumulated before doing so is lost, so it’s important to watch the bar and do this when it’s full.
    • The masteries you are able to pursue changes depending on which area you’re playing in, and mastery points only apply toward masteries in the area in which they were obtained.
  • You can search the wiki directly from the game client by typing /wiki <query> into the chat. On Linux, this will open the browser to the wiki page in the background, so you’ll need to alt-tab out to it.
    • The wiki is great and has tons of information
    • The wiki has links you can use in-game for waypoints. You will see a code in the wiki that can be pasted into chat. Click it once in the wiki to highlight it, and copy/paste that into the chat. Switch to the say channel with /s before pasting the link so you don’t broadcast it to general chat or guild chat. After pasting, you can click on the resulting text in the chat to zoom to the location on the map.

Inventory

  • Access the inventory by pressing i
  • The top row of inventory slots are shared slots. These are accessible by every character.
  • Inventory pressure is pretty constant in the game. Your bags will get full, and you will need to manage inventory.

Management

  • The general management loop:
    • Deposit all materials (see below)
    • Find any merchant with a “sell” tab, and click the “Sell junk” button at the bottom right
    • If you still need to make room, look for other items in inventory that are useless or only useful in a specific area you don’t feel like going to for a while. Choose some method to get rid of them.
      • Destroy by dragging them out of the inventory panel. This is the right way to deal with dragonite ore, emphyreal something-or-others, and bloodstone dust.
      • Salvage what can be salvaged. Do this by double-clicking the copper-fed salvage-o-matic in the shared inventory and then clicking the item. Once that’s salvaged, deposit what’s left.
      • Sell any materials that are already full in material storage. The tooltip will say 500/500 in material storage. You probably don’t need more than 500 of anything, unless you do.
  • In the top right of the inventory window, you’ll find the “Deposit materials” button. This button magically sends crafting and other materials to a section of your bank called “material storage”. I’ve upgraded it currently to store up to 500 of each material. Many of the items you collect can easily be moved out of your way just by clicking this button. After I play for a while, I open the inventory and click it to clean things up.
  • If you hover over an item that can go to material storage, the tooltip will show how many you already have in material storage.
  • Items that are account bound or soulbound cannot be sold to merchants or on the auction house. If you want to get rid of them, you can salvage them which breaks them down into materials that you can then send to material storage.
  • Most equippable items that are not at least exotic rarity are not worth keeping. The item classes that matter at endgame are exotic, ascended, and legendary (which do not drop and have to be crafted).
  • “Trophy” items can usually be sold without consequence
  • As far as I know, collection items can be sold once they have been collected. At the very least, the progress they contribute toward achievements remains after they are sold.
  • Many items are usable only in a single area. Their tooltip will say so.

Controls

  • I’m currently using an MMO mouse as my primary means of controller GW2
    • I have all the buttons on the side mapped to skills in the game
    • Since the mouse software is not available on Linux, the buttons on the mouse are bound to their default keys, which is just the number keys and some other keys for the last 3
    • I have keys in the game bound such that the mouse buttons do what I want
  • I rebind the keyboard to shift my movement keys over one position to the right (ESDF for movement rather than WASD). This gives me access to a few additional keys.
  • I use A for dodging, which is an important mechanic in GW2

Chat

  • /s for local chat. Use this to talk to people around you who you are not partied with
  • /gN for guild chat, where N is the guild number. /g2 would chat to Remnants of Hope
  • /p for party chat
  • /squad for squad chat. A squad is like a big party for content that needs more than 5 players.
  • /wiki <query> to search the wiki. The wiki page will open in a browser in the background.
  • Paste codes from the wiki into say (/s) chat to make it easy to find them on the map

Map

  • You can fast travel using waypoints on the map for some in-game currency
    • The cost for fast travel is generally trivial
    • Double-click a waypoint to skip the confirmation dialog
  • Parts of the map you haven’t visited (or haven’t gone deep enough into) are rendered without detail on the map. They don’t show any roads or specific items.
  • Map completion is one way to earn experience in Guild Wars 2
    • You earn experience for map completion activities
    • Completing a map earns a chest containing additional rewards, usually including some of that map’s currency, which can be used at local heart vendors to buy things.
  • The things to find on a map toward completion are waypoints, points of interest, vistas, hearts, and hero points
    • Once you have found and unlocked all of these points on the map, that map is complete, and you will receive a reward.

Waypoints

Waypoints let you fast travel. Prioritize these, and open them as quickly as possible. They are symbolized by a large-ish diamond shape.

  • Unopened waypoints appear on the map with a gray center. Their center is blue when they have been discovered.

Points of Interest

Points of interest are opened just by going to the area. They are symoblized by a tiny square.

  • Like with waypoints, unopened are gray and opened are blue
  • Elevation is important, so you may be perfectly aligned with one on the map without unlocking it. You should see a small arrow that shows whether it is above or below you. Hovering over it will also tell you the relative vertical position in the tooltip.

Vistas

Vistas are usually high up places which, when activated, show you an overview of the surrounding area. They are symbolized by two red mountain peaks.

  • Unopened are outlined and opened are filled with red
  • Accessing many of them is trivialized by the Skyscale and Springer mounts
  • Although many are high up, some are not. They can even be underwater.

Renown Hearts

Renown Hearts are the closest thing GW2 has to traditional quests. They are symbolized by a heart.

  • You do not have to obtain a heart quest by talking to an NPC. Instead, they will pop up in your quest tracker on the right when you are within range.
  • The description in the quest tracker will tell you what activities you can do in the area to progress the heart
  • Activities may be killing enemies or interacting with objects and NPCs in various ways
  • The heart icon will fill as you complete activities
  • Once the heart icon is filled, the NPC at the heart’s position on the map will now sell you any items they offer, usually for karma and/or one or more of the map’s currencies
  • Some hearts are repeatable. They will show as empty hearts with an infinity symbol overlaid to indicate that you have completed the heart but that it can be completed again. I believe you need to complete it again to access the NPC’s wares.
  • A heart only needs to be completed once to count toward map completion

Hero Points

Hero points offer various challenges in exchange for points which can be used to level your character’s specializations. They are symbolized by a yellow upward arrow with a silhouette in it.

  • The icon is outline only before completion and filled after completion
  • Some can be completed multiple times for additional rewards
  • Central Tyria hero points are worth a single point each. Expansion areas have hero points worth 10 points each.
    • This is because the expansions shipped elite specializations, which are much more expensive to skill up than standard specializations
  • Only the first completion is required for a hero point to count toward map completion

Combat

Skills

Specializations

Weapons

Mounts

Raptor

Springer

Skyscale

Skimmer

Jackal

Achievements/Collections

  • Access achievements from the so-named tab in the hero panel (h)
  • The achievement system does double-duty, also tracking collections
  • Achievements convey all sorts of different rewards like mastery points, access to pursue particular masteries, unlocking mounts, etc.
  • Achievements/collections can be tracked by clicking the eye icon when the achievement is open. This will show them in the quest tracker on the right under any progress toward open quests.
  • Open the wiki page (/wiki <achievement name> in chat) for the achievement you’re pursuing to find a guide for how to find everything
    • To make this go faster, you can paste the waypoint codes in from the wiki and travel directly to them

Addons

  • The most popular addon, BlishUI, doesn’t work well on Linux because of the way it achieves transparency on Windows
    • BlishUI allows you to choose from and install many other addons from its UI
    • Many of the addons do things like overlay navigation arrows on the screen to help you with map completion, jumping puzzles, and other navigation challenges
    • On Linux, the overlay will be opaque black
    • Some players have been able to make it semi-transparent and use it by cranking up the gamma on the game underneath to overcome the darkening effect of the overlay
    • Seems like more trouble than it’s worth
  • Taco is an alternative that just does the map overlay stuff, and Burrito is a port of Taco specifically for Linux
    • Burrito didn’t work very well for me
    • I got it installed, but the icon was very small since it didn’t seem to know about my UI scaling. I couldn’t find a way to scale the addon to match.
    • I installed a few marker packs, but not all of the were selectable in the addon after installing
    • I tried enabling one of the marker packs that was visible, and I could never see the actual markers. Not sure what I did wrong.
  • ArcDPS is a popular addon for measuring your DPS
    • It requires frequent updates, which would need to be scripted on Linux
    • I never cared enough about optimizing DPS to bother
  • There’s a mount wheel addon that would have been useful
    • I never tried it knowing the issues associated with other addons

Goals

  • Unlock the Griffon mount
  • Fill out remaining slots with Ascended gear
  • Craft a legendary
    • I have a kit in my bank to get this started, purchased from the Wizard’s Vault

Resources

Graph View

Backlinks