PC How are the GW2 expansions?

[Rev]

I played through the main game to level 80. Thinking about picking up the 2 expansions and playing through that content. How is it? Can someone summarize it?

[projectmayhem]

I bought them recently. Not big on Heart of Thorns, but you can actually just go ahead and skip to the latest expansion. I actually had people in chat telling me to at least get the first mount there before coming back to HoT. I like the desert areas much more than the jungle and the mounts are hands down the best mounts in MMOs. 

[Rev]

18 minutes ago, projectmayhem said:

I bought them recently. Not big on Heart of Thorns, but you can actually just go ahead and skip to the latest expansion. I actually had people in chat telling me to at least get the first mount there before coming back to HoT. I like the desert areas much more than the jungle and the mounts are hands down the best mounts in MMOs. 

Do you have performance issues? I'm trying to play now and getting like 30-40 fps with a gtx 1080 on 1080p.

[HGLatinBoy]

Heart of Thorns  = Long lasting repeatable content with meta events. Only useful mastery is Gliding but has 4 raid wings and legendary armor. Living World Season 3 (extra DLC) was really good and  bookends the expansion and leads directly into PoF. Some of the Elite specializations  (class mods) are still viable for high level end game.

 

 

Path of Fire has amazing maps with a cool story and the mounts are a game changer. Other than that once you've done the expansion once there's almost no reason to even go back to it really except for completing collections/quests. Path of Fire has 1 raid wing so far and its a pretty good one its not easy by any means. Living World Season 4 has been a huge disappointment outside of Episode 1 and the new map "The Domain of Istan" with its 2 meta  events.

 

Most of the the Path of Fire Elite specs are the best in class for high level end game. They can outclass the HoT elite specializations. 

 

Just as a frame of reference and @BlueAngel can attest I'm a hardcore GW2 player. 

 

Spoiler

 

Full Legendary Warrior

 

 

 

[Rev]

6 minutes ago, HGLatinBoy said:

Heart of Thorns  = Long lasting repeatable content with meta events. Only useful mastery is Gliding but has 4 raid wings and legendary armor. Living World Season 3 (extra DLC) was really good and  bookends the expansion and leads directly into PoF. Some of the Elite specializations  (class mods) are still viable for high level end game.

 

 

Path of Fire has amazing maps with a cool story and the mounts are a game changer. Other than that once you've done the expansion once there's almost no reason to even go back to it really except for completing collections/quests. Path of Fire has 1 raid wing so far and its a pretty good one its not easy by any means. Living World Season 4 has been a huge disappointment outside of Episode 1 and the new map "The Domain of Istan" with its 2 meta  events.

 

Most of the the Path of Fire Elite specs are the best in class for high level end game. They can outclass the HoT elite specializations. 

 

Just as a frame of reference and @BlueAngel can attest I'm a hardcore GW2 player. 

Nice.. What about performance? Is there some trick to improving it? Seems like I should be getting much better performance with my system.

[HGLatinBoy]

The game is very much un-optimized and relies heavily on the strength of single core performance.  Its based on the Guild Wars 1 engine from over 10 years ago. You can adjust some settings that don't matter too  much that just drain performance. Never ever ever ever expect to maintain a stable framerate and never in big towns or when there lots of players in the area. Other players are the biggest cause of performance dips. 

 

probably the best thing you can do for performance is lower the character model limit and character model quality to Medium from Highest. It mostly lowers the number other players being rendered. 

[Bacon]

All MMO's run like shit

[Rev]

7 minutes ago, Bacon said:

All MMO's run like shit

Except ffxiv runs like a fucking dream imo. I'm just super burnt out on it.

[projectmayhem]

I'm using a Steam Machine that's not very powerful, but I managed to get it too run 50-60fps in the vanilla areas (cities and big towns excluded), but in PoF it struggles to stay about 40.

[Xbob42]

4 hours ago, Rev said:

Except ffxiv runs like a fucking dream imo. I'm just super burnt out on it.

WoW also runs incredibly well as long as you're not in a city, and even cities just just have a lower framerate, rather than stuttery shit. Of course this can change if you happen to be in a PvP battle with like 3 full raid groups. Things... get ugly.

 

Surprisingly, Camelot Unchained runs amazingly well with like 500+ people in active battle. And that's still early.

[Rodimus]

All this talk about Garden Warfare 2 I had no idea there was still interest.

 

Edit: I think your talking about Guild Wars. Is that right?

[Rev]

I had much better performance on my much older PC.

[HGLatinBoy]

Older areas have less going for them than HoT and Path of Fire plus some engine and effects changes can affect performance now. In fact minimum requirements were changed during PoF

[Rev]

17 hours ago, HGLatinBoy said:

Older areas have less going for them than HoT and Path of Fire plus some engine and effects changes can affect performance now. In fact minimum requirements were changed during PoF

My performance is bad everywhere. 

[Rev]

I got HOT and have been playing it a bit, and I really *want* to like it, but I don't really get a few things. What should my goals be? I already have orange gear so that's pretty much as high quality as my gear can get right? What am I working toward? Just masteries? How do I get into doing group content and which should I be doing? Fractals? Raids? Dungeons? If I start doing them, what's the process? I see the LFG tool but does that send me to the instances? I'm a little lost and don't want to just quest and that's it with no real goals. @HGLatinBoy

[HGLatinBoy]

5 hours ago, Rev said:

I got HOT and have been playing it a bit, and I really *want* to like it, but I don't really get a few things. What should my goals be? I already have orange gear so that's pretty much as high quality as my gear can get right? What am I working toward? Just masteries? How do I get into doing group content and which should I be doing? Fractals? Raids? Dungeons? If I start doing them, what's the process? I see the LFG tool but does that send me to the instances? I'm a little lost and don't want to just quest and that's it with no real goals. @HGLatinBoy

 

Okay so my first move would be to unlock your elite specs, masteries, and explore the first 2 maps to get used to gliding as much as possible. To complete your elite specs  you must first max out all of the original GW2 skills using hero points (at lvl 80 you have enough any extras can be put forth into unlocking your elites) Find an "HP" train meaning someone will show you where to go and what to kill  as a giant squad of players tries to kill the harder Hero Point Champions  Verdant brink has 4 champions that must be fought 1 being a vampire often called the Guano HP its hard to reach without updraft gliding so maybe hold off on that. A fresh lvl 80 will require all of the HPs in Verdant Brink, Auric Basin, and just 3 from tangled depths (no one likes tangled depths so I would not stress out about hating that map) 

 

What class are you playing ?

 

FRACTALS

Fractals are the new dungeons in the game. 5 man parties that can be done daily for lots of gold and rewards and have a chance to drop Ascended gear (Pink which is better than Orange Exotics). To get to the Fractal gate you go Lions Arch near the southern part of the map there you'll find a bridge leading up to a portal and as you approach the portal you'll open up the Fractal Menu once you select your options and choose to enter you'll go to the fractal lobby and once you have your group of 5 you can start. You start at tier 1 with no agony resistance and build your way up to Tier 4 with the cap of 150 agony resistance. There are 100 fractals divided into 4 tiers: Tier 1 #1-25, Tier 2 #26-50, T3 #51-75, and T4 #76-100) . Every time you comple your highest fractal lvl you'll get fractal lvl up, Or any time you complete a fractal thats ABOVE your fractal level you'll gain a fractal lvl up. All that means is that you personally can't OPEN fractal #11 without first completing Fractal #10 if your "Personal Fractal Level" is at 9. BUT if anyone in your party has a higher fractal lvl then you can open any fractal they can. So if you were in my party you can open 1-100, but if i was lvl 50 then you can only open up to Fractal 50. It's no big deal you'll get to 100 fairly fast assuming you have the Ascended gear and agony resistance.

 

I suggest you read some fractal guides and watch some videos of each encounter at tier 1 they're very easy you can open an LFG "New to fractals wanting to learn ALL welcome" and you'll fill up pretty fast. 

 

At tier 4 you'll see "CMs+T4 Dailies Food/Pots"  and those groups are the hardcore groups that expect you to be on point and can be toxic. To translate, CMs refers to Fractal 100 and Fractal 99 with Challenge Mote Activated (hardcore mode), T4 Dailies refers to the Dailies that cycled in at server reset there are 3 that will give you the most reward chests, Food and pots refers to using food buffs and special Fractal potions that buff you as well) There are Fractal Recs too but i'll dicuss that later.

 

Completed T4 Dailies You'll get rewards for Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 as well. So once you reach Tier 2 do your Tier 2 dailies and you'll also get the rewards for Tier 1 so you don't have to worry about doing lower tiers to get your reward chests. I once met someone that did Tier 1, then 2, I had to explain to him to just do Tier 2 and he'll get the chests from tier 1 as well.

 

https://discretize.eu/fractals here is a good fractal guide website.

 

I would not worry about their goofy builds they're just modified raid builds with an different sigils that only makes sense if you plan on running different sets of weapons, one for raids and one for fractals. Fuck that. 

 

Raids

 

Raids are 10 man squad based content where people fill in roles and follow the mechanics until each boss is dead. The easiest bosses in the game are actually in Wing 4 Bastion of the Penitent. Typically you'll bring 2 chronomancers, 1 druid, 1 other healer (could be druid, Tempest, healing Firebrand, Herald), 1 Banner Warrior, This pretty much fills up your support group leaving you to fill in 5 more DPS roles which can be a mix of Deadeye, Daredevil Weaver, Renegade, Mirage, DPS Firebrand, DPS chronomancer, Reaper, Scourge, and Soulbeast off the top of my head. You don't have any restrictions on Raids other than being lvl 80 and at the very least have exotic armor and maybe some Ascended trinkets. Raids can be completed once per week for maxium rewards. 

 

I will warn  you though Raids can be toxic as fuck and people will kick you  if you fuck up and that's IF they take you in and they might not take you  unless you can show that have experience and provide kill proof of the boss. I suggest you learn fractals so that you can understand how your class plays. 

 

Here is a website for raids. These are the build you should go for https://snowcrows.com/

 

I would look for Training Discords that will teach you how to do each raid encounter. There are plenty of them that do it. Raiders Academy, Raider's Inn, Raiders in Training. All they ask that you know your class and have most of a meta build and they'll teach you the mechanics of each boss fight. 

 

Dungeons

 

Classic GW2 dungeons are dead, buggy, and full of noobs that will fuck things up and make it harder to finish. If you have a premade group you can smoke through them with all of the power creep introduced with PoF and HoT. Mostly people do these for Dungeon  Exclusive runes like "Superior Rune of the Monk" which is used for most healers and it can only be obtained by the currency from the dungeon "Ascalonian Catacombs" 

[Rev]

I'm reading now but I figured I'd answer your question in the meantime. I went into it with an 80 elem and guardian but I bought HOT and I just now bought POF so I have 2 free level 80s I can make. I used one to make a Necro and I'm unsure what to make the last one.

[Rev]

Thanks for all the info. That's pretty helpful. I guess I'll start trying the fractals.