I meant to post something long and meaningful all night but I’m so mentally drained and exhausted I can’t bring myself to focus. Right now with so many great games to play out there, work really is my biggest enemy. Even my GW2 sessions suffer with my weekends becoming gaming prime time. Is this what it means to progress in your professional life? I think a part of me will never grow up (or go to bed early).
In lieu of WoT, a couple of useful GW2 links I’ve been collecting for a while and meant to publish in a round-up. Hopefully they’ll be of use to some of you – I certainly learned a thing or two.
- Weapon and Armor Stats Explained; I am still familiarizing myself with GW2’s different gear quality/rarity levels. An awesome introduction to different stats and also where to get what equipment from.
- *NEW* Attributes and Equipment in GW2; A great must-read, in-depth guide on getting to grips with speccing and gearing in GW2, understanding basic attributes, enhancements and synergies. Don’t miss this one!
- *NEW* Basic Naming Conventions and Runes; this concise overview will bring some light into the gear jungle on the market place and help you find what you’re looking for.
- Cultural Armor and Weapons Guide; I always liked the concept of cultural or racial armor sets in MMOs. GW2 has them too, even if they’re somewhat hidden.
- GW2 Trait Calculator; while costs for respeccing keep going down in the game, it’s well worth experimenting online first what to go for!
- *NEW* Combo Fields and Finishers; as interesting as combos sound, many players don’t quite grasp how these are set up in GW2 and how to best leverage on them. Find out what combos are available to your class!
- Where to find Jumping Puzzles; Hunter has been working on completing an overview to all jumping puzzles in GW2 for a good while now, taking great care not to spoil anything.
- Chef Helper and Dyealogue; Aro has created two awesome and fancy tools to make both cooking and dye collection easier in GW2. I wish I had such coding skills!
- Minis and their idle Animations; Paeroka published this useful video of 84(!) mini-pets plus animations a while ago. I don’t feel like becoming a big pet collector in GW2, but this overview certainly helps with selecting favorites.
- Guild Emblem Creator; in case you ever wondered what kind of options GW2 offers to guild leaders in this department, there are quite a few. I was personally delighted to find the ape design for my own guild of olde WoW monkeys.
- GW2 Storylines; heavily influenced by the personal choices you make, it’s worth looking into how the system works – especially if you consider running alts at some point
- GW2 “Census”; finally a visualized representation of race-profession spreads in the game. In case you were wondering just how popular your own combos are. Not many surprises there.
What I’m still looking for is a (more) useful world map and a guide to mini-game locations. That last feature has been completely ignored by myself thus far and seems too easy to miss in the game. Any link recommendations much appreciated!
For maps I recommend two: my go-to map is http://gw2cartographers.com/ for pretty much all kinds of information on the game. The second (http://gw2craftmap.bteamgaming.com/) is one Ambermist linked once on Twitter, and is specific for crafting material nodes.
Now, as far as mini-games… is there any other aside from Keg Brawl on Hoelbrak? Unless you’re counting minor stuff like the jumping board on Lion’s Arch, of course.
Oooh good list you’ve got here! Thank you for making it. 🙂 I have to second Kemwer’s mention of GW2Cartographers!
I knew about the cartographer one, but not the nodes one – cheers!
GW2’s world map is just….not very good lol. finding specific locations or somebody else is a nightmare, the way the map isn’t ‘centered’ and the whole manual zooming and dragging around is clunky and confusing. I really am doing my best to get used to it but bleh, I’ve seen much better functional MMO maps. 😉
About the mini-games / activities: according to this earlier video there’s one for every capital at least? – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jimIpVDiTrk
I haven’t checked yet though and the complete lack of bloggers commenting on them makes me wonder what happened there. think I have to go find out tonight!
Oh, that video is pretty old. Originally ArenaNet did announce that every major city would have a few activities you could participate on, but closer to release they told us that the only major activity the game would launch with was Keg Brawl. You can find a post a little before release day on Hunter’s Insight, I believe, where he comments on the news that no other options would be available.
If you go to Divinity’s Reach you can see a shooting gallery that they showed many times as one of the planned activities, but it’s still not “open to public”. I guess they just decided that they had to release the game eventually, and it was too overwhelming to finish all of those for launch.
I would assume that these others will be released eventually as patches, but as of right now, Keg Brawl is the only big activity on the game, and we don’t have information about any other.
That news completely eluded my radar, thanks for the update! it’s too bad but your explanation makes sense. something to look forward to then for future patches 🙂
Thank you for the links.
Not your fault, but I /facepalm upon seeing the GW2 “Census”. If you click through on the “data source” link, you see that all the author did was copy the data chart from the bottom of John Smith’s blog[1] and present it in circular form instead of bar chart form. It’s literally the same four factoids, just plotted in circles.
[1] John Smith’s blog, with original chart, is here: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/john-smith-on-the-state-of-the-guild-wars-2-economy/
Oh, fair point. I think I would’ve preferred that original version too but it’s odd they didn’t care to add percentages. players kinda cling to numbers.
The population breakdown is interesting, but I can’t help but wish it went further and dug into at least the race/profession combos. I want to know how many Charr Mesmers (and a variety of other weird combos) there are.
Hmmm true, that would be more useful – I actually read it in a combined way; human warriors would be the most preferred combo therefore and charr engineers the least? I realize that’s actually wrong now in terms of relative vs. absolute popularity 🙂 good point!
Here’s a different site that allows for greater breakdowns. It’s purely based on volunteered information, not server mining, but it’s still interesting.
http://gw2census.com/