Man, I am tired.
Regular visitors may notice a slight new change in my sidebar. It’s a little awkward, but I can’t figure out a better place to put it at the moment.
This massive undertaking was started two months ago, when I decided that beginners to GW2 (or even to MMOs) might appreciate a guide that explained the concepts of “kiting” and “corrner-pulling.”
One thing led to another, there was just no end of concepts that seemed important to touch on, and it ballooned into a massive multiple-section outline.
I got about halfway through it, and then pretty much collapsed and wound down out of energy for a month of procrastination.
Finally lighting a fire in my behind was the thought that the Fiery Greatsword nerf was going to happen before I finished and invalidate entire references to FGS in multiple paragraphs.
No way, it’s got to be posted before the September patch, and then I’ll revise those sections later in the oh… umpteenth draft once it’s no more.
So for better or for worse, still rough around the edges, here it is:
The Beginner & Intermediate Player’s Guide to Movement and Combat in Guild Wars 2
If you find it useful, please feel free to share the link above, or the shortlink below:
Why I Game 
Great guide with excellent illustrations, both visual and examples. I wrote a massive long reply but then I thought about it and decided it wasn’t very helpful. You pretty much cover everything I was going to say in the opening Philosophy section.
I learned plenty, particularly on the shape and positioning of hitboxes and what “cleave” means. Both of those come up all the time at Teq and, while I had a vague idea what people were talking about, I never had a clear mental picture before. I certainly had no idea the swing of a melee weapon hit everything in an arc – I have never even noticed that happen in game except with one specific Warrior Adrenaline ability, which uses a very exaggerated sweeping animation.
This may just be me, but I found the opening section on keybindings particularly challenging. I had to stop reading and come back to it later because I felt overwhelmed. It’s full of good advice but it made me feel that I must be doing it all wrong because I’ve left my settings the way they came.
With the exception of switching off double-tap to dodge, which I did about six months after launch, when I had to do a bunch of jumping puzzles for some reason I now forget, I’m not sure I’ve changed anything from the defaults. May be this is naive but I would always like to think that a game ships with the best possible settings already bound and any change I would make would be likely to make things worse. If that isn’t the case then surely the developers aren’t doing their jobs properly? I realize people have personal preferences and often like to keep settings from game to game but other than that it just seems counter-intuitive that a game would have non-optimal default settings.
LikeLike
Outstanding guide. This really gives me a picture of how you approach the game, what you prioritize, and (to an extent) why I struggle with it. Very good job.
LikeLike