Guild Wars 2 Tips and Tricks

Guild Wars 2 Tips and Tricks by Neato

I found a few that some may have not noticed and figured I’d share them with the rest of you, and everyone else can add their own too!

I’m sure you’ve heard the complaint… “We can use skills even if we aren’t in range and there’s no way of knowing if we’re out of range!”
But I learned that’s wrong. I actually thought this too, and thought they should make the skills turn red or have a red bar over them when out of range, that is… until I discovered that they already do. It’s the number. If you’re in range, the skill number is white, if you’re out of range it’s red. Here’s a visual example, watch skill #4 and F1, F2, F3:

Next, the complaint… “If I finish off a monster and have skills queued then they’ll auto target the next mob and possibly agro something I had no intention of agroing!”
Well, this one’s true. But there’s a few workarounds…

1) In Options, just disable Auto Targeting. Now, for your game to not have become suddenly incredibly difficult… you need to go into Options -> Control Options and set Targeting Foe – Nearest to a hotkey you can easily use. For those familiar with GW, you may want to use C as the hotkey. From now on, you’ll have to target manually using C (or clicking), but if you finish something off you won’t start attacking something else (unless it’s in your line of fire).

2) This method is a little harder in some ways and easier in others, but it’s just a different way of going about it. Rather than disabling auto targeting, instead we want to set a hotkey in Options -> Control Options. The option is Targeting: Hold Lock (locks the auto-target while held down). So, you can set this to something like say… Shift, and then when you’re about to kill something you hold down Shift (or whatever hotkey you chose), and it won’t select a new target once your current one is dead. All you have to do is let off the “hold lock” key you designated to begin auto targeting again. Overall, the best all around solution I think. Very useful.

Next… “Where’s the Guild Panel?!”
There’s no button at the top left for it, so it’s a little hard to find. But there’s a hotkey set for it, just hit “G”.

Next… “How do I sheath/unsheath my weapons?”
This one’s easy, there’s a hotkey for it but it isn’t set. So you gotta go in there and set it. It’s called Action: Stow/Draw Weapons, and there you go!

Next… “Chat is too transparent and too small, I never even notice it’s there, and there’s no tabs or anything! I have to keep using these stupid slash commands to switch chat channels. They had a good thing with GW and shouldn’t have changed it.”
I feel your pain. I thought this too, for the longest time… That is, until I figured out that it wasn’t the case.You should see this down at the bottom left hand corner of your screen:

Click that little icon next to [Guild], which for you will probably be [Local]. Show/Hide Chat Panel. Then, it’ll come up. I have mine resized, but it should look like this…

And here’s what all that junk is…

#1 Show/Hide Chat Panel (toggle)
#2 Where you type.
#3 Area where text appears.
#4 Settings

• You can change the size of the font displayed in the chat panel here.
• You can also change the profanity filter to various levels.
• You can also enable timestamps or channel tags.

#5 Tab settings

• Click another tab so it’s active to edit its settings.

#6 Close tab.
#7 Add new tab.
#8 Drag this to resize the chat panel.

Next… “The towns are too freakin’ huge! I get completely lost, and having to run all over the place is a major pain in the butt!”
Indeed it was, until I discovered I could use waypoints in town at no charge. Hit M to pull up your map. There are 3 levels. Above ground, ground level, and under ground. You can click each of the levels to show a different map. Wherever you need to go, just find a waypoint near there and use that to fast travel to that location rather than getting lost or running all over the place trying to find it. This proves very very useful…

“I hate having to find X weapon for Y class, I end up having to play with some weapon I don’t want for so long!”
Well if you have a little bit of money (something in the range of 50 or so copper) then you can head to your “home.” For instance for human noble, this would be in the Salma District – the place you have your party. If you go there at another time, you have your own personal instance. It has all sorts of merchants in there. You can find an armorsmith and weaponsmith as well. Oh and there’s a dye npc as well. He’ll take your colorful seeds and take a day to convert them to random dyes. If you have plant food then he’ll do it instantly.

“Having to hit F and click each item individually to loot them is so annoying! They need some kind of auto loot.”
There is an auto-loot system actually – it’s in Options. You still have to hit F, but it’ll automatically pick up everything for you so you don’t have to click each individual thing. It can still be somewhat annoying if there’s an NPC near you since there is no dedicated loot button and you’ll tend to “interact” with the NPC a lot by mistake, but it’s worlds easier than clicking each item individually.

“OMG I have this stack of X and I can’t split it!”
Try alt+clicking and dragging the stack to open the split dialog panel.

“I’ve tried to mail items to my alt but it says that I can’t send stuff to myself!”
At this time mail to other characters on your account can’t be done, but…… Your bank is account wide so you can put items and cash in there and any character on your account can access them. This is great for the times you get a nice weapon you can use but an alt may be able to.

“I wish there was an easier way to sell things…”
You can sell things at the trading post from anywhere by right clicking the item and going to sell at trading post. You only need to head to the trading post to buy things, and collect what your items sold for.

“I wish there was an easier way to aim these ground target skills…”
There is, actually. There’s a fast-cast ground target option and it’ll automatically cast them for you without having to aim. But, that’s not all… There are four ways to cast ground target skills:

• Press hotkey, aim ground reticle, cast by pressing left mouse button.
• Press hotkey, aim ground reticle, cast by pressing hotkey again.
• Aim at ground with mouse cursor first, rapidly tap hotkey twice to simulate fast cast. This retains the ability to aim with reticle (tap once instead of twice), or cancel the cast with right mouse button, when needed.
• Enable fastcast ground targeting option in menus, aim at ground with mouse cursor first and tap hotkey once to cast instantly. No ground reticle will ever appear, no second chance to retract or hold the cast if a situation changed.

“I wish there was some kind of crafting material storage…”
There is, actually. And not only that, but you can right click on crafting materials to add them to your collection and they’ll be transported to your bank instantly.

“I wish there was a way to easily swim up and down…”
You can swim directly up by pressing the spacebar and directly down by assigning a key to that action in the options menu (it has no hotkey by default).

“What do all these area of effect circles on the ground mean..?”
Red circles on the ground have a bad effect on you, blue circles have a beneficial effect on you and white circles have no effect.

“This PvP armor looks so boring!”
You can spend the glory you earned from PvPing to purchase new looks. These glory merchants will sell you rank 1 vanity PvP armor at 1500 glory and items costs around 500-1000 glory each.

“I wish I could add markers to the map…”
You can add your own markers (waypoints) to the map, by using Alt + left mouse!

“I’ve seen some people linking things in chat. How do they do that?”
Shift+click an item/waypoint/point of interest will allow you to link it into the chat log. Doing so with a waypoint for example, will allow anyone that clicks on it through the chat log to pull up the map showing them its location and allowing them to travel there if they have unlocked it.

“How do I join PvP with a friend?”
Right click their name (Party list, guild list, etc.) and select, “Join Friend in PvP”. You can also go to the PvP Channel NPC by the LA Portal, any channel which contains a Friend will have an icon beside it.

How do I split a stack?
alt drag

How do I send an item link in a message without it sending immediately by itself?
shift+click (alt+click to just send it immediately)

How do I report a gold spammer, or someone insulting me or someone else?
– Right click on their name in chat, and choose report

Okay, so then how do I report a player that hasn’t typed in chat?
Why would you need to or want to do this you may ask? Well, maybe they’re a botter, or maybe they have an offensive name. Either way, it’s not immediately clear how to do so, so here’s how:

• Click on their character.
• Right click on their portrait at the top of screen.
• Choose “Report”

How do I get 8 slot bags?

The first thing on most people’s minds while playing is probably “damn, I don’t have nearly enough space!” – well, there are several solutions for that in-game. The first of which being to just craft bigger bags!

Now, it’s not all that hard. There’s a few crafts that can do it, which are Tailoring, Leatherworking, and Armorsmithing. Respectively, you will either need jute, rawhide leather sections, or copper ore. Copper ore is probably the easiest (Armorsmithing), since you can just run around a few nodes (7 of them, for 20 ore), and there you have it. As for the jute and rawhide leather sections, you’re going to need to salvage cloth or leather items, or find the stuff quite frequently in bags of (pinched/stolen) goods, which you’ll find from Bandits and Centaurs.

You can find the best spots that work for you, but an easy place to find is the human tutorial. There are tons of centaurs and they respawn very quickly and are very easy to kill. Just farm them for 20 minutes or so and you’ll have enough for several 8 slot bags. You can of course get them naturally through play, but if you know you just want to work on that, then you know what you need to do. If you’re in the human area and level 9, Beggar’s Burrow just south of Divinity’s Reach is an okay spot (location). As for ore, they tend to be pretty frequently near open rock faces such as the dam, caves, etc.

Here’s an extra tip to clear up inventory space while out in the world!

If you look in your inventory up at the top right you’ll see the gear icon (pictured left). If you click it, you can choose “Deposit All Collectables” and it’ll send anything that can be stored in your Collections to your Collections.

What the heck is this “Collections..?”

Oho! You don’t know about that?! If you open your Bank (which is account-wide), you can click the little icon (pictured left), and it’ll take you to your Collections, which is just about anything you could collect. Crafting materials, mini pets, and such!

Where do I find Vials of Weak Blood, Tiny Claws, Tiny Scales, etc.?
I found that while these tend to drop very frequently off of drakes and skale, they also drop from the previously mentioned bags of (stolen/pinched) goods that drop from centaurs and bandits. So to knock out the most birds with one stone, I’d go for the bags. But if you just specifically need these 3 things, then go for the reptiles.

When are they going to add more bank space in the store?
Actually, I was frustrated about this, too. But! I discovered that if you look at your bank and actually double click that little lock icon

(pictured) it’ll ask you if you want to buy a bank tab for gems, at the cost of 600 gems (pictured below). I don’t know why they chose to have it hidden there and not in the store, but that’s where it is if you want it! You don’t have to buy gems either, you can convert gold into gems and get it solely with in-game currency.

Leveling crafting is going SO slow! What do I do?!
Well, it may be going slow because you’re not getting the most efficiency out of your materials as possible. Here are a few tips to help with that…

• Discovery. Discovery gives double exp. So whenever you can use it, do so. You can find recipes online, most only involve substituting one material with a different one, and there tend to be many easy variations you can use to substantially boost your crafting.
• Crafting divides things into color coded categories based on how much exp it’ll provide. Orange = good, green = decent, gray = none. So, try to use the ones that will give you the most, obviously.
• Farm the materials yourself, or buy them once the trade broker goes up. This is generally a traditional tip for any kind of crafting, but you need the materials to craft. So, go get ’em somehow!

How do I change someone’s rank in my guild?
Right click their icon.

I can’t _____ a guild, it doesn’t work!
Whatever the word in the blank is, usually the solution is to log out to character select and back in. This is actually the most common solution to most in-game issues.

Why can I only see some people’s levels in my guild list or friends list and not others?
I tested this with a friend, and it seems that it has something to do with being mutual friends.

My (pet / some npc) is walking around REALLY loudly, like louder than all my other sounds! What the heck is going on?
This is a bug, I’ve had it myself. For me it was with a yak for some quest – went away after the quest. For a friend of mine it was his pet. He managed to fix it by unsummoning his pet and resummoning it. I imagine a relog would probably fix it as well.