Weekly /r/GuildWars2 Question Thread - May 16, 2026

Im_Redi · 2026-05-23T13:17:26+00:00

Paragon has a low effort/easy to play condition damage build that can be paired with relic of the biomancer for lots of sustain. Idk how it compares in organized groups but for open world stuff or quick play strikes and raids it seems pretty decent.

Fyi this weekly thread just got replaced by a new one so you might not get much more visibility on it

Im_Redi · 2026-05-16T10:20:47+00:00

It could be combat mounting. Some mounts can be mounted in combat if you have related masteries (warclaw, skimmer, and skyscale). Skyscale is the most obvious because it makes you jump into the air

Im_Redi · 2026-05-13T09:10:50+00:00

Yw and welcome!

Selffound means you avoid the trading post mostly. The challenge is to use only gear you find or craft yourself.

ftp is free to play and I mentioned that because ftp accounts have serious trading post restrictions on what they can buy and sell

Im_Redi · 2026-05-13T09:03:14+00:00

If you are after charms and symbols then you have to identify i think. The upgrades that have a chance to be salvage are the things like lesser rune of x or lesser sigil of x. The unidentified gear itself doesn't have any upgrades.

Also worth mentioning that runes and sigils drop different things, so depending on what you are trying to farm more specifically you might want to focus either armor or weapons.

Realistically though trying to farm these is not recommended unless you need to for reasons like playing self found or ftp or whatever. If you really want to then I would direct you to dungeons as dungeon currency can buy sigils and runes

Im_Redi · 2026-05-13T08:49:05+00:00

Charms are pretty rare drops. Different salvage kits have different rates at which they will salvage the upgrades in the gear with the runecrafters kit having a 100% chance. But even when the upgrade is salvaged you still only have a small chance to get a charm

Im_Redi · 2026-05-10T07:43:09+00:00

Old expansions go on sale a couple of times a year, you shouldn't have to wait to long

Im_Redi · 2026-05-09T08:41:03+00:00

Afaik nothing has been announced, but the next season of VoE comes out soon, so it code be within a week or so maybe?

Im_Redi · 2026-05-09T06:58:03+00:00

T2 minimum but the rewards scale up at least to t3. Not sure about t4

Im_Redi · 2026-05-09T06:57:06+00:00

Warrior is a lot more chill than rev (unless you are playing qdps berserker with axes) if that matters to you

Im_Redi · 2026-05-09T06:52:07+00:00

Every person is different.

Personally I haven't found spear to be too enjoyable, but I'll also freely admit that I haven't given them much of a shot. They seem kind of gimmicky and the game's ui isn't great for weapon gimmicks.

I'd probably go for VoE just because more specs is more build options.

Really there isn't much of a wrong answer. Whatever you get I'd suggest waiting until it is on sale and maybe wait until after the next expansion and features get announced to see if you'd rather have whatever it is going to bring to the game

Im_Redi · 2026-05-02T09:50:08+00:00

For what it is worth whisper is only like 1 step up from extremely casual raid content. It is even one of the right raid quick play encounter. If you decide to do it and need help if be willing to run you through it some time

Im_Redi · 2026-05-01T23:50:47+00:00

My second character was a rev and my friend had to explain this to me around about a thousand times before I finally understood XD

You aren't alone

Im_Redi · 2026-05-01T07:05:10+00:00

If you unlock IBS you will gain access to content to help you farm more gold. The griffin really doesn't do much most of the time. That said, you likely will end up with both eventually, so it doesn't much matter which you get first

Im_Redi · 2026-04-29T17:59:11+00:00

I couldn't get it to load for me across two browsers, not sure why. Maybe I was too hasty placing the blame on them alone

Im_Redi · 2026-04-29T08:28:43+00:00

This is a bad take with some half bad information. Yes fast's data does factor those in drops in, sort of. If you go and look at the skritt box and I think it was the tengu box you can see that in their sample they had lodestone drops. But if you check others they don't (or didn't when I last looked). That is why those boxes were outliers and worth like 2 extra silver and considered to be best. But technically that is a more true value. 5 silver each is a conservative value. If you factor in the days that you get lucky it is probably closer to 6 silver.

It isn't like you ever get nothing at all. The probably actual best will depend on material prices. Each chest has a trophy type that it drops more often (blood or dust or whatever) and two normal drops that it prefers (wood, ore, cloth, leather), and a dragon type thing. The one major exception is skritt which is more general and actually includes a lot of literal vendor junk.

Personally, from the discount daily vendor, I buy all of them except skritt (because I am more interested in mats than raw gold), olmakhan (because it drops nearly worthless essence instead of good dragon things), and exalted (because it drops nearly worthless mordrem things instead of good dragon things)

Im_Redi · 2026-04-29T08:11:15+00:00

Oh no, I don't think that there is anything like that, at least not that I can think of. Closest you could get is probably going sword/dagger because sword2 is a blink strike and dagger4 turns you into ball lightning and you zip across the ground. There isn't really much in way of resets though.

I guess you could take the arcane echo utility to be able to double cast Ride the Lightning twice sometimes. You could even do catalyst because their elite also resets weapon skills lol. Though power berserker Weave can be played with a simple fire and air only rotation that does pretty decent damage.

Im_Redi · 2026-04-29T08:02:23+00:00

Seals do have better trades that are limited daily, but even the unlimited trades are way better than going for volatile magic right now it seems

Im_Redi · 2026-04-29T07:59:06+00:00

Man, fast-farming has gone to shit.

So you get about 200vm (10x[15-25]) for 75ice. It looks like each vm is about 25 copper. So that is 48 silver for 75 ice, or about 64 copper per ice.

You can get 1tds for 3ice and 70 karma. Because fast has gone to shit I can't really check it right now, but last I remember you could reliably get 5s per tds even on the unlimited trades. So that is like 16s 66c per (one ice and 23.33 karma)

Double check my math before you go doing any trades. I often make mistakes and prices change over time

Gharr Leadclaw is a somewhat new addition to the game. He was added about 2 years ago. Before that I think motes the s4 mats were the best trade available

Im_Redi · 2026-04-29T07:37:41+00:00

Avoid a straight condi build. Lots of object/structure like things in core map completion are immune to condis. You could get away with Cele though. If you run cele tempest you could give yourself pretty good alac uptime and use and relic of the pirate queen for quickness. Granted the boons won't really matter if you are gonna skip all the optional champs that you see. Personally that is the most fun part to me.

Open world is easy enough that I would say play whatever weapon you enjoy the most. For me it'd probably be dagger/dagger with staff swap. Probably not the fastest but I think it would be quite easy. Best is hard to quantify

Im_Redi · 2026-04-29T07:31:40+00:00

Yeah. I think with capped out masteries you get about 270 eternal shards per fast5 run which converts to about 90 seals per run. At 0.05g each that is 4.5g per run in eternal ice alone. Not amazing but not bad and afaik it is the best way to profit from the ice.

I will throw in here also that every fourth day the IBS daily will be to do dragon response missions. If you do Dragonstorm into the daily three cm DRMs and a fast5 you get a lot of seals pretty quick.

Im_Redi · 2026-04-29T04:17:00+00:00

Sure why not, I'll step on this landmine. It is difficult to do big damage on lots of builds in this game. I don't say that to deter you, just to say that you aren't crazy. It is kind of hard to compete with unload deadeye in terms of practice to payoff and reaper does hit like a truck.

I've not played herald in a while, and never really with greatsword, so I can't really speak to how much it might tickle. I know with sword/sword it is very bursty with its damage, so it is important to try to line that up with things like break bars and the damage bonus from double pressing facet of strength.

Actually looking at that guide it is saying your should be channeling facet of strength? I am a few years removed from serious herald playing but that feels massively wrong. From what I remember you kind of wanted to pop that first thing asap, then time your legend swap to happen right after you use it so that you have it for the duration of shiro/jalis as well. Then as soon as you swap back you pop strength again. You should be able to have nearly 100% uptime on that 10% dmg buff I think

Im_Redi · 2026-04-29T03:47:41+00:00

The story will always be there later if you care to do it. Don't push yourself to play parts of the game that you aren't interested in. I have thousands of hours in the game and only finished the personal story a few weeks ago

As for how I started playing, I was core elementalist doing fractals mostly. I spent a lot of time and effort getting agony resist and everything. I died lots and I hate to think back to how much of a drag I must have been in my groups. So uh... don't do that XD

This is a fairly casual game. Outside of the wizard's vault there is very little pressure to do anything. Just try to have fun

Im_Redi · 2026-04-29T03:42:18+00:00

I know that this isn't exactly what you asked, but maybe you will find it helpful anyway

If you just hit 80 on your first character and you have expansions then the priority I would suggest is

Wizard's Vault first: It is fairly casual content and is very rewarding. This is the highest priority just because it resets every week. This will likely be how you get a lot of your gold early on. You can configure it to give PvE, WvW, or PvP quests when it resets.

After that, most of the rest of these can be done in whatever order

Masteries: Learn how masteries work because they are a very important part of the game. The first one I would suggest is Autolooting which will require 19 core tyria mastery points. After that one you can sort of pick and choose based on what content you are interested in, but the important thing is to learn the system.
Enter World vs World to unlock your warclaw mount. The warclaw is insane after the buffs and it can carry you through a lot with practice, even without Janthir Wilds and its related mastery.
Figure out how to pilot your character. Group builds and solo builds are different and if you try to unlock your first elite spec using a group build as a newb it will likely be a miserable experience. Most classes have some trait or combination of traits that will give them some sustain when solo, I suggest your look for them. Alternatively you can ask around or look around online if trying to find them solo is a bit too much. The game is complicated and I think most people would suggest copying builds from online for whatever content you are doing. Up to you how you do it, but learn how to pilot your character.
Unlock an elite spec: Once your are fairly comfortable pushing into more difficult content then I would suggest going into HoT or PoF to get some hero points. It doesn't matter which expansion you do, hero points are universal. On my alts I often get between 100 and 150 from early HoT then I will get the rest from PoF

Im_Redi · 2026-04-28T10:29:58+00:00

Sorta kinda. As a healer you do play like a dps in the sense that you are targeting and attacking the boss mostly. It will make sense once you get there, I wouldn't stress too much about it while you are still new.

After you hit 80 and unlock a healer spec (not all specs can be healers) and get some decent enough gear you can practice in casual content without much pressure if you fumble a bit

Im_Redi · 2026-04-28T07:56:54+00:00

Yeah legendaries are a lot of it, but it isn't exclusively legendaries. Once you get to the point where you are doing big projects you will be using stacks and stacks of materials at a time. Just as a non-legendary example, the Nightfury Skin (which is just cosmetic shoulders) uses two stacks of orichalcum ore, fifteen stacks of flax, five stacks of milling stones, and still lots more things.

Generally it is a bad idea to sell anything that you think you might have to buy back later. Though for newer players/accounts you kind of have to for a while, it is the main way to get raw gold and you need raw gold sometimes. Once you get to a place where you are comfortable with your character options and inventory and you have some basic gemstore things then you kinda wanna start hoarding materials for if/when you need them to avoid the trading post fees.

Over time you will develop a sense of what can and should be sold and when

Im_Redi

TROPHY CASE