Hey team,

So, about 6-7 years ago, I got GW2. I played it for about...a year? And enjoyed it a lot. I like the hot swapping of weapons, and how it rewarded exploration more than WoW did at the time.

I just recovered my account, and I want to play again! But...I logged onto my character and didn't have a CLUE what was going on.

What do I need to know about playing GW2 in 2019? Is it worth me just restarting on a new char so I can understand it again?

DISCLAIMER: I have not played GW2 since a certain debacle last year as the company and community's behavior really turned me off. But I played it heavily for a year or two before that

I would actively suggest NOT restarting unless you really want a new class. With the more recent systems you can respec at a moment's notice and the only meaningful investment is the order in which you unlock prestige classes. And the expansions tend to add enough high skill point activities that you can get the unlock cost for each prc pretty quick

And the main issue is that GW2 has done a great job with (some of) the Living Story and expansions. The difficulty ramps up drastically from the original campaign and you'll need at least a competent build to do them, but you get fairly frequent rewards and a higher percentage of set piece activities. Whereas the original campaign got a remix (that pretty much ensures nobody does dungeons anymore) but no QoL improvements and still feels like a very "okay" campaign from a decade ago.

What I would personally recommend, and what I did before probably permanently uninstalling it, is to play the original campaign probably up until you need to pick an order. That should be enough time to get a feel for the different classes and figure out who feels overly squishy or boring or like you are playing a piano. If you have any level 20 boosters they are a good choice. Then, once you figure out what you like, probably use an endgame booster. Or just go do map completion. The story takes a massive nosedive after the order selection and you've already unlocked most of the dialogue affecting stuff for the Living Story and expansions.

I recently started playing it again after years away, it's really quite a simple game so just spend an hour or two following the next recommended "objectives" that appear above your minimap, and you'll soon start remembering how it all works.

@sombre: There's a fundamental question that needs to be asked before you take the dive: PvP or PvE?

As someone who still plays this game, albeit casually, it's hard to recommend GW2 for its PvE content. The world bosses and more engaging PvE encounters will probably feel fairly solid as spectacles, but there's not much longevity outside of farming them for rare drops that puts you at the mercy of RNG. Raiding was introduced at some point, and frankly, the raiding community in this game became an elitist shit hole somewhere down the line (the player base at large is probably way friendlier than many other MMOs, however). You could probably find a decent guild and roll with them for a while, but at some point GW2 began feeling like nothing more than a glorified chat room to me. Fractals (GW2 version of endgame dungeon instances) are a decent alternative, but it's also rather dependent on the group you run with. Achievement hunting is a fairly good pastime also, if that's you thing, but beware many of the rarer achievements are stupid tedious and require some hefty commitment.

PvP is where most people I know spend their time in GW2, or more specifically World versus World mode (WvWvW). If you dabbled in this mode back at release you know how fucking broken it was. Fortunately, most of the problems have been resolved and I find this mode a lot of fun. It's a healthy mix of PvP and PvE, where the objective is to capture fortified points on the maps and hold them for score accumulation. Players are divided based on their server ("world") and fight other servers for an ongoing period. At the end of the duration, the server with the highest score wins and moves onto a higher tier and the losers either stay in the current tier or gets dropped down. You can drop in or out at any point with no penalty, and when server "zergs" (big groups of players) meet one another the results are often thrilling and hilarious. The most fun I've ever had in the game is when all three zergs smack into one another and all hell breaks loose. I mean, there will probably be ridiculous lag and you'll likely disconnect or crash, but fucking a', it's great.

And I suppose there's another point worth mentioning: how much do you like to play dress-up? This game is affectionately called "Fashion Wars" by its players for good reason. There are a lot of cosmetics. A lot of them happen to cost real money, or no real money if you know good ways to make ingame money. This game sports one of the most robust cosmetic systems I've ever experienced, and I wish more games did this.

The core game mechanics are pretty much unchanged from launch, with the exception of the talent system receiving a significant overhaul. You still do world completion the same way and get the same completion rewards. There are more legendaries to craft, salvaging runes and sigils got a very recent change, Living Story is still a thing... It's still the same game, really, just with a lot more polish. Optimization is still utter garbage, though.

Ultimately, it's a free game. If you've got free time, go for it.