New player questions about guides and other things

Hi guys, I searched the forum and wiki at length so if I missed an answer, I apologize. I'm slowly working my way through the HoM points while waiting for Guild Wars 2, but am a bit stumped at some things, hopefully you can help me out.

1. Hero Skills.
I die a lot, probably due to a bad set-up. I found a skillguide here: http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/h...t10474776.html and want to try the Discordway, for example. However, I can't build this. Take for example the skill "Flesh of My Flesh". According to the Wiki, the only place you can get this is from a Skills trainer. But it's not available for my class. So how can I ever teach this to my heroes if there are no hero skill trainers available with it? I saw a skill pack in the store thatll teach me the skills, but theyre 9 euros each, which seems awfully excessive to me, especially if I want all 4. Same thing goes with skills that can only be aquired from fallen bosses, not sure how to get these on my heroes.

2. Aggro.
I read the aggro guide on the Wiki, and I get that I can scatter enemies with AOE spells. However, the basic concept of aggro makes no sense to me and seems to discard MMO logic. If I send my troops into battle and join afterwards (I'm Elementalist), 1-2 mobs will always start hitting me, even if I don't even cast a spell. As their hits can take off 25-40% of my armor, this is an issue. It's even funnier when I die and get resurrected during combat, I instantly get hit and die again, without even having moved or cast anything. I only have 6 heroes at this point so I can't really mix that up, but there don't appear to be aggro holding abilities anyway.

3. Quests
I hit level 20 a while ago and am still seeing sidequests everywhere. But as weapons are dropped and armor is crafted, I see 0 point in doing them. They don't seem to give enough gold or reputation to warrant it. Is there any point at all in veering away from the main quest line in order to defend someones farm or find someones lost ring? Seems like a waste of time. On a similar note are the dungeons in Eye of the North. For me, dungeons in MMOs are fun because the bosses drop nice loot. I read through the Wiki, and it seems the bosses drop pretty much nothing. Seems like a waste of time then.

4. Repeatable split-missions. Some missions in Nightfall require me to pick hero A or hero B, and I'll get a different mission based on my choice. The HoM guide suggests I can do hero B missions later on by finding someone who did hero B and having him start the mission. Is this really the only way? Most people have been doing this game for years and likely have 0 interest in replaying trivial content to help some random guy complete all his missions. Would I have to start a new character to do the other branch on my own?

These questions have probably been answered before but hopefully, from the information I gave, you can tell that I did search and find some things, just didn't find enough to give me answers. Hopefully you guys can help me out!

You can change your 2nd profession, as you can see here, so you can change your 2nd to a Rit and then buy "Flesh of My Flesh" and unlock it to your heroes, that same idea work for elite skills.

Yes, aggro in GW is very unique, it also counts your HP, Armor even the weapon you are using.
I think after you get a better hero set up and get more used to how you flag your heroes you'll die a lot less.

Yeah, most of the side quests in GW are "useless". Dungeons are for the title, fill books also for titles and some dungeons may drop very expensive weapons from the last chest.

After you finish the Nightfall you can get the heroes you didn't get during the gameplay, so you don't need a new char and then do the missions that require those heroes.

1. Hero Skills. As already said, changing your secondary profession allows you to buy skills for your heroes. Elite skills can only be captured from bosses. Note that both buying skills and capturing elites will unlock these skills so that they will be available to all heroes on the account. On a side note, on your first playthrough you will have no choice but to run sub-optimal builds on your heroes unless you buy the unlock packs or unlock the skills via PVP. That's actually part of the game design, and if you think it's annoying now, it used to be a lot more aggravating since there were no skill packs, no heroes etc.

2. Aggro.
Unlike other MMO's you can't use skills or techniques to boost a tanks "threat" and draw all the aggro onto a single target even if you leeroy into a mob. Aggro in GW is decided by armor rating (low is bad), health (low is bad), weapons (caster weapons attract aggro), damage threat (so AoE can make you a target) and damage mitigation (healing, protting).

In effect, this means that enemies will generally target the softest (lowest AL, health) squishy who is having the most impact.... like a monk. Or an ele dealing mass damage. It's also worth bearing in mind that range to target can affect aggro too, so the closer you are, the more tasty you become.

3. Quests
Yeah, they're a waste of time, basically. Apart from Dungeons which have chests which spawn after killing the boss and can drop nice items. A key point to bear in mind though is that though some of these items are sought after and expensive, that is entirely down to their appearance. Functionality wise, crafters, collectors etc are fine for weapons.

GW isn't like most MMO's (or even RPG games), in that you won't get elite armor or massively OP weapons dropping as loot. All the elite armor in GW has to be crafted, and the only thing different about it is the appearance.

4. Repeatable split-missions
Yeah, when you finish NF you can get quests from the other heroes in the epilogue which will allow you to recruit them and complete the missions yourself.

Apologies for a quick sideline question in this thread, I was about to make a new thread to ask about the skill unlock packs - as a person who's new to GW (and, as a result, isn't aware of any fine-line difference between "learn" and "unlock"), am I correct in thinking that buying all 4 unlock packs (Factions, Nightfall, Prophecies, EotN) will then make all skills available to all heroes on my account, but NOT for my own toon? That is to say, I could then follow (or download) templates for my heroes, and have them fully able to use all skills, but for my own character, I would still need to learn the skills I want to use?

That's correct. To get them for yourself you would either need to buy them from a skill trainer or use a tome to obtain them. For elite skills, you'd have to use a tome (or of course you could still capture them as someone without the skill packs would).

It's also worth mentioning that whether you buy the skill packs or not, once a skill is unlocked on one of your toons, it is unlocked on ALL of your toons - unlocked, not learned. Basically, assuming you didn't buy the skill packs and just used skill trainers (or skill capping for elites) to unlock them with your first toon, all subsequent toons you create would be able to learn those skills through a tome. And their heroes would immediately have all skills you had unlocked with your first account available to them as well.

Thank you most kindly for the quick and useful information! At least now I'm beginning to understand more about the game (and why - when jumping "ahead" in some content, it seems a little rough at times)

EDIT: Cancelled previous edit, missed a skill pack and ended up asking a self-answered question.

you can also unlock skills with balthazar factions from pvp'ing. each normal skill is 1000, every elite skill is 3000.

Thanks a lot for the answers guys, this'll help a great deal. I feel a bit sad that I didn't discover GW years ago. Its age is starting to show but the gameplay is so much deeper than any recent AAA MMO out there. Lots of fun

Honestly, you should search for basic gaming mechanics (pulling, moving, skill mixes, etc) first because that sounds like your biggest problem. Plenty of eles and monks who lead parties of henchies/heroes all the time who dont die over and over again. As far as side quests and Dungeons? For you i would suggest doing every one of them so you can figure out how to really play the game. Sounds like you are looking to zip through the games. While natural instinct is to bypass the optional, the optional actually helps new players learn the game so they can zip through it faster.

As far as buying skill packs? Yes...if you plan on buying any of them, and money isnt a big issue, buying all of them is the way to go...at least for your heroes since youll be able to immediately gimmickthem up with the popular builds. As have been said of course, that doesnt help you directly as skills for yourself all that much as you wont haveimmediate access to them, but buffing your heroes will help keep you alive....as you learn how to play the game.

@OP:

You mentioned that your toon is level 20...but do you have the max armor for him/her? This is just a guess...but if foes are doing enough damage to halve your health/armor in one or two hits then you may not have max armor. Max for eles is AR 60. Hero armor levels up as the hero does, but your starter armor doesn't. Except for visual appearance and materials needed, all max armor has the exact same stats. Also, are you and your heroes fully runed? This will also help your survivability. Have you gotten you and your heroes max damage weapons?

You also didn't mention the skills your toon *does* have...you get a mix of them starting out and more as you progress in the storyline of your toon's native campaign...but that doesn't mean you should have all of them on your skillbar. GW isn't about super-max gear and weapons, everything up until level 20 is just a tutorial. At 20 you should be looking into maximizing your skillbar for best synergy with your party. General rule of thumb: don't spread your attribute points across more than 2-3 attributes. One of those should be your profession's primary att (in your case, Energy Storage).

As pointed out by other posters, you need to be the same primary/secondary profession as the skill you want to buy. In this case FoMF is a rit skill, so your ele will need to change their secondary to rit temporarily to acquire it from the Skill Trainers in Factions. However, in order to change your secondary profession, your toon has to be Ascended. After ascending, you can visit the Profession Changer (usually in the Great Temple of Balthazar), pay 500g and change your secondary to whatever you want. OR if you have the area open, you can visit the Crystal Desert in Prophecies and change it for free by doing a short side quest.

To cap elite skills from fallen bosses, kill the boss and use a Signet of Capture to "cap" their elite skill. Your toon will have to be the same profession (either primary or secondary) as the boss though, same as when buying skills.

You can also acquire skills for your heroes in Nightfall (if you have access to it) from the Hero Skill Trainer. Your heroes gain skill points same as you do and you can redeem them for skills for them/yourself.


Also....while some of these side quests may seem "meh" and distracting from the storyline...some of them reward skills and, as mentioned above, handy things like a secondary profession change for just the "price" of a quick quest. What skills are often dependent upon your primary and/or secondary prof at the time. Even if you don't want them now, these free skills can come in handy later for you or your heroes. Among other things...every campaign features two "optional" side quests that reward your toon with 30 attribute points. These will round out your toon's att point total to 200, which is necessary to get the most out of your skills later.

On a slight side-note...if you haven't already done so, finish the storyline for your toon's native campaign. The process of doing so will usually teach you some of the gameplay basics and rewards you with a title for your HoM and an end-game green weapon of your choice. *Don't* try to rush through and hop over to EotN....that expansion is designed for players who have finished at least one campaign and know how to pull/ping/call targets to prioritize red-dot nukage/etc.

Finally, can't say this enough...imo you should make use of the official GW wiki. It's been invaluable for me

I had a few thoughts triggered by reading some of the other great replies...

Meow Ren was talking about changing your secondary profession by either paying for it or doing quests in the Crystal Desert - one important note is that you only need to do this once for each profession. Once you have either bought or earned the ability to switch your secondary profession to any given profession, you forever have the ability to switch to that profession as your secondary at will. So you only have to pay/quest once per profession.

I also think the various mentions of how important it is to do "the optional" is worth reiterating. If you're trying to fill your HOM, you're going to find that "the optional" becomes more like "the mandatory." For example, you cannot achieve Master of the North without doing all of the dungeons in both normal mode and hard mode. There isn't any other way to earn all of the points needed for that title. And that is a relatively easy title to obtain, just by fully playing through EotN. In addition, unless you want to spend a few thousand hours grinding at the same tired tasks, you're going to WANT the EotN Reputation points (Norn, Vanguard, Asuran & Dwarven titles) you'll get from doing those dungeons. And skipping those titles isn't really an option if you're going to fully flesh out your Armor monument... not unless you're going to excessively grind at farming so you can get/afford the much more expensive materials for other armors.

I've been playing for about 15 months now... and my ideas about what I would need to do for my HOM have changed drastically after playing the game. Achievements I thought looked easy when I first learned about the HOM turned out to be much harder than I thought - because I HATE grind. Conversely, ones I thought I would never try for, have turned out to be the easiest to obtain.

The Wiki also has some great information about the synergy between titles... it's definitely worth paying attention to. http://wiki.gtm.guildwars.com/wiki/Kind_of_a_Big_Deal

That Wiki is a life saver... make liberal use of it.

Well I do have my armor maxed, but maxing it drained my money supply almost completely. The weapons I have is mainly stuff that dropped, as are the runes, so not optimal I suppose. I'm working on optimizing my skillbar, but the funny thing there is all the guides I read require certain elite skills that are either not in my campaign, or on a boss that I cannot defeat. So I'm mixing and matching with what I do have available. My main problem is usually just stuff killing my party. I'm roughly halfway through Nightfall right now, at the areas where Djinns become regularly enemies, and they're tearing me to shreds. My attributes are fine I think, I run 13 Fire and 12 Energy storage. I run Fire Attunement and Aura of Restoration so I pretty much have infinite energy. The DPS skills I run right now are Flare, Meteor, Fire Storm and Inferno. I tried getting Searing Flames but couldn't beat the boss to get it.

My hero skills are a bit messy I guess. I only have 9 heroes so can't pick as many different combinations as I'd like, but some of my professions like the Ranger and the Warrior are just behind on skills. I'll have to keep scouring the lands. It feels a bit annoying having to travel around the world to get that one skill thats slightly better than the current one so your performance increases and you can actually continue the story again, but I guess that's what the game is all about

As another general suggestion...don't pay so much attention to the exact elites in the guides for now....even though you're level 20 it sounds as if you're also still learning some of the basics. Getting those elite skills doesn't guarantee an easier time of the game content (imo). Instead, refer to the wiki and find out what bosses are in the area you will be in for a mission/quest and see if any of the elites would be beneficial for you or your heroes. Once you have a better grasp of the game mechanics, *then* worry about how to get the elites in the guides.

Since you mentioned facing Djinns in NF, you should have already gotten 15 of your last 30 att points, plus you're officially "ascended" so you can change your secondary to cap skills from other professions for you and your heroes' use. Take advantage of that.

as for Searing Flames....don't forget to take advantage of the flags on your compass to spread out your party so they aren't clumped together. And if all else fails....henchmen are a perfectly viable option to add to your party until some of your heroes are ready. If they're not quite level 20 yet, add the heroes back into your party when possible before taking quest rewards...they'll benefit from the exp you are rewarded.

If you wish, there are also forum boards here where you can post the builds for yourself and your heroes to get suggestions on possible improvements, etc., plus a Pick Up Group (PUG) forum to find others who can join you in your travels

Really, there are no skills -- regular, elite, or PvE -- that operate as "I win if I have it and die if I don't". Every campaign is designed to be self-contained and able to be completed with the skills available in that campaign. You should not need to be chasing halfway around the world to pick up some skill without which you cannot progress. (Yes, doing so can make it easier, but it should still be doable with proper team selection and tactics.)

Sites like PvXwiki focus on builds meant for completely-developed characters with all skills available. The builds are meant for characters who are ready to progress to Hard Mode, vanquishing, elite areas, etc. They may represent a goal that you want to work towards, but it is not necessary to have one of these builds for regular Normal Mode PvE. The important thing to understand is WHY and HOW those builds work so that you can see what sorts of skills are important in the builds you CAN create at this point in the game.

Knowing your enemy is important.

For the djinn, which ones are you having trouble with? For the Ruby Djinn, having interrupts is important, so you should have at least one hero or henchman with interrupt skills (ranger or mesmer, primarily). Odurra is a pretty good Domination henchman, for example. For the Sapphire Djinn, you need blocking and/or blindness to shut them down, but they aren't that hard to kill. There are a number of ele, mesmer, monk, and para skills that can be used to do one of these things, and Herta is a decent earth-ele henchman with wards and one of the best earth elite skills in the game. Diamond Djinn are no real threat, though they can be very hard to kill.

For your own build, Flare and Firestorm are, frankly, weak skills and you should be able to do better at this point. Inferno is a really bad choice because it is a point-blank AoE skill, and if you are running into the middle of foes to use it, you are making a tactical error. Squishies are not meant to be front-line. If you are simply saving it for self-defense when the baddies close in on you, you are wasting damage potential. Learn to kite instead.

Some better skills that should be available to you at this point include Fireball (hero skill trainer at the Kodash Bazzar), Glowing Gaze (Kamadan), and Liquid Flame (Yohlon Haven). You should be able to capture Mind Burn in Resplendent Makkun, which is a good enough elite to get by with for a while. Note that burst AoE is generally better than DoT (Damage over Time) AoE because foes can't flee it.

If you think you have infinite energy, then your build is probably not where it needs to be. IMHO, your build should challenge your energy management or it is probably not as effective as it should be. An elementalist must learn and practice good energy management, and there are reasons why eles have some of the best energy-management skills in the game.

Keep in mind that you are not restricted to fire skills. There are skills from other attunements that can be highly useful even with zero attribute points invested. Case in point: Maelstrom, which gives 10 seconds of interrupts even with zero points in Water Magic and can really hammer a balled-up bunch of casters. Another case in point: Eruption, which gives at least 10 seconds of unconditional AoE blindness even with zero points in Earth Magic and can really shut down a mess of melee (like Sapphire Djinn).

Remember what I said about energy management? You may be able to take some points out of Energy Storage and put them into another magic line (or into your secondary profession) to power useful complementary skills. Steam, for example, is a good complement to fire skills that cause burning. If your energy management is good, this is no problem. You should be able to get along at 8+1 or 9+1 Energy Storage without any real trouble.

BrettM really hit things on the nail. And Meows guestimate at why you are dying at the djinn (that you are not flagging...again game basics that you should focus on more so than skill chasing...and therefore getting cluster f-d) is my guess as well. The ruby djinns, the roaring ethers and sapphire djinns (dervs who can hit multiple party members at once with each swing if clystered) all work best on clustered parties. Heroes and henchies WILL cluster around you like puppy dogs unless you tell them otherwise (by flagging them apart). Not only will that help avoid party wipes bur it will also minimize the computer AI from casting some of the more devastating AoE attacks, hexes and degens in lieue of less potent individual target spells AND not put pressure on your healers to try to healeveryone. Again...it all falls back to really learning the game and not expecting builds to get you through stuff by simply mashing buttons in predetermined sequences. Anyone can do that. Not everyone can actually really play.

There are actullay 5 skill packs:
* Core: 241 core skills spanning all Guild Wars games
* Prophecies: 330 skills introduced in Guild Wars Prophecies
* Factions: 350 skills introduced in Guild Wars Factions
* Nightfall: 350 skills introduced in Guild Wars Nightfall
* EOTN: 100 skills introduced in the Guild Wars: Eye of the North expansion

If you can afford it i suggest you buy them as it speeds up a lot (and gw2 is getting closer): at this stage of the game you have to relay on heroes a lot and its really helpful when your heroes have good builds.

With a bit of luck anet may consider some "sales" again when gw hits it 7th birthday....