GameInformer published a brief, useful guide for Guild Wars 2 players that are new to the game’s dungeon system. Dungeons in GW2 are a little different than in most MMORPGs that utilize the familiar “trinity” system. Players will need to be a little quicker on their toes, and maintain responsibility of their individual survivability as well as keep group utility in mind. This can take a little reprogramming, but the playstyle can lead to some fun dungeoning adventures!

Here’s a preview of one of the tips offered:

Embrace multiple roles.

Tanking and healing don’t exist in Guild Wars 2 like they do in most MMOs, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t different roles to play and ways to specialize your character. Many dungeon fights throw curveballs at you, from additional enemies spawning mid-battle to bursts of status effects that cripple the party for short durations. Be ready to not only change your tactics, but switch to a different weapon set and embrace a secondary role. Many elite skills, like the guardian’s tome of courage, change your entire skill loadout – learn when those dramatic changes are useful, and capitalize on them. Weapon switches (or attunement changes, for you elementalists out there) are much more useful than just for the occasional swiftness buff. Take a second look at your classes’ skills, and see what might be useful in a party despite being pointless for a solo player. You’ll be glad the first time you turn the tide of a battle by blocking off a doorway and locking out a bunch of monsters with a support skill that does nothing in one-on-one fights.

Good stuff. Check out the full article for all of the tips.

Account Security
Hackers have lists of email addresses and passwords stolen from other games and web sites, and collected through spyware, and are systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts. To protect yourself, use a strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve never used anywhere else!

When accounts are hacked and then used for botting or spamming ads for gold sales, we ban the accounts until we can return them to their rightful owner. If you login and see the message, “this account has been permanently banned for a violation of the User Agreement,” and you’re not a gold seller, it’s likely that your account was hacked. Please contact customer support using the instructions below.

If you see email authentication messages in your inbox asking you to approve a login that you didn’t initiate and from someplace you don’t recognize, that’s a sign that a hacker knows your account name and password, and is only being prevented by the email authentication feature from accessing your account. You should immediately change your password to a new, unique password that you’ve never used anywhere else.

UPDATE: If you’re interested in reading about the speculation on how to craft this, here is a Reddit thread, that goes over some of the details. With the current prices, it seems like this might cost almost $1000 in gems/gold. Yikes!

I have no idea how it’s crafted/forged, but I think everyone needs to check out how badass this things looks. If you’ve got other legendaries you think are awesome, share them in the commends.

Continue reading to see what may or may not be entailed to get your hands on a Twilight.

The following guide will bring you from newbie chef to Master in mere hours, and it’s pretty easy to do. You’re going to have to do some Trading Post shopping if you haven’t collected many ingredients, but the guide keeps gathered material to a minimum.

There are simple ingredients that you can find from the Chef Vendor for karma and copper. These items are Water, Flour, Butter, Sugar, Egg, Chocolate Bar, Oil, Vinegar, Buttermilk, Bell Pepper, Black Peppercorn, Salt and Soy Sauce.

One thing to note: The karma vendor ingredients require you to complete hearts to access. The highest level heart required in this guide is level 69. Obviously, there are other alternatives if you have access to other ingredients.

I know. You’re thinking this title’s crazy. It probably is, but hey– you can’t totally fault me. I was inspired by a piece of in-game architecture! An old pillar in Metrica Province reads “Given asura ‘Place of Ultra-Mega-Importance’ status in 1325 A.E.” When I first found the pillar a couple hours into my Metric Province leveling adventure during Headstart, I instantly fell in love with the area, and everything to do with the asura race– even though, you know, I’m really a tiger-striped lumbering charr. No matter. Awesomeness is awesomeness, right?

With that attitude in mind, I come to you with a brand new Guild Wars 2 Junkies feature. You can call it the Question Box. You can call it whatever you want, really, but what I’m calling it is a “Place of Ultra-Mega Awesomeness.” We all have things we love about Guild Wars 2, places that make us cheer out and say “yes, this is my ultra-mega place!” We all have classes, abilities, and features we’re passionate about, either negatively or positively. This is a place to share all that. A couple times a week I’ll be raising a Guild Wars 2 question to the community– hopefully an interesting one– and we’ll share our opinions.

One of the most enjoyable things about crafting in Guild Wars 2 is the fact that if a recipe calls for materials in a lower level area, farming those materials isn’t necessarily a waste of time. Experience, gold, karma, dynamic events, and map completion all come attached with your crafting goodies. Exploration at any level is encouraged and rewarding.

So, where are some good crafting material farming hotspots? Need help remembering what mobs drop Bone Shards or Vials of Thick Blood? GW2Guru has a pretty awesome list that’s currently a work in progress. Here’s a sample:

Format: Material — Zone / Area — Monster Type — Monster Level — [Area Level]

Vial of Thin Blood — Kessex Hills / Manfire Hills — Skales — XX — [YY]
– Gendarran Fields / Lake Gendarr — Skales — XX — [YY]
Bone Shard — Diessa Plateau / Holystone Caves — Grawl — 25 — [26]
Small Claw — Harathi Hinterlands / Guardian Lake – River Drake — 34 — [34]
Pile of Shimmering Dust – Gendarran Fields / Lawen Ponds — Risen — 28/29 — [27]
Small Fang Diessa Plateau / Holystone Caves — Grubs — 25 — [26]
Small Scale — Gendarran Fields / Lake Gendarr — Barracuda — XX — [YY]
— Harathi Hinterlands / Guardian Lake – River Drake — 34 — [34]
Small Totem — Diessa Plateau / Holystone Caves — Grawl — 25 — [26]
Small Venom Sack — Diessa Plateau / Holystone Caves — Grubs — 25 — [26]
— Kessex Hills / Overlord’s Greatcamp — Fireflies — XX — [YY]
— Gendarran Fields / Cornucopian Fields (east) — Wurm Hatchlings — XX — [YY]
— Gendarran Fields / Vigilant Hills — Fireflies — XX — [YY]
— Gendarran Fields / Overlook Caverns (vista) — 28 — [YY]

Head on over to the complete thread to see the full list.

Account Security

Hackers have lists of email addresses and passwords stolen from other games and web sites, and collected through spyware, and are systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts.

To protect yourself, use a strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve never used anywhere else!

Today a Guild Wars related fan site announced that its account database has been breached. That’s important but just one of many apparent breaches of other games and web sites that hackers have been collecting email addresses and passwords from. Protect yourself by using a unique password for each game and web site account you care about, and especially be sure to use a unique password for your Guild Wars 2 account.

Account Security

Read this! If you don’t want your account hacked, don’t use the same email address and password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve used for another game or web site. Hackers have big lists of email addresses and passwords that they’ve harvested from malware and from security vulnerabilities in other games and web sites, and they’re systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts.

We’re doing everything we can to protect you. But to protect you in this case, we have to start with, “the hacker knows this person’s account name and password; now how do we keep him from stealing the account?” That’s hard to protect against. Don’t let it get to that point. Please immediately change your password to a new, strong, unique password that you’ve never used anywhere else.

Hacked Accounts

Our customer support team is prioritizing tickets from customers with hacked accounts or who are otherwise blocked from logging into the game. If your account was hacked, please follow these instructions for submitting a ticket, to make sure that your ticket is correctly prioritized and to make sure you’re submitting all the information we need to restore your access.

For hacked accounts, expect a response within 72 hours. As of this writing we’re working on tickets submitted August 30. If you submitted a hacked account ticket on August 29 or earlier, and haven’t received a response yet, your ticket may not be correctly prioritized. In that case, please submit a new ticket using the above instructions, and in the title write, “Hacked Account – Ticket submitted August 2x – Ticket number xxxxxx-xxxxxx” (fill in the date and ticket number), and we will prioritize your existing (August 29 or earlier) ticket.

Reset Password

We’re leaving the “reset password” feature disabled for now. If you forgot your password, please contact the customer support team.

We’re leaving this disabled for now because we believe that a significant number of customers are unaware that hackers have the passwords for their email accounts. If we enable “reset password”, a hacker who can get into an email account can use that access to get into the associated Guild Wars 2 game account.

Email Authentication

Email authentication is a feature we use to prevent hackers from gaining access to an account even if they know the account name and password.

We suffered an outage of email authentication mails today, preventing players from authorizing logins from new locations. This is now resolved.

When you receive an email authentication message, or any other email from [email protected], do not mark the email as spam! If you do, your email provider may prevent you from seeing any future email authentication messages.

Parties, Guilds, etc.

We’ve made significant fixes to parties and guilds. However, you may still see intermittent outages. These outages cause symptoms such as party members not appearing on the map, party members not staying in the same overflow servers as they travel between maps, party members not joining dungeons together, and guild invites not working.

Trading Post

We’re periodically opening the Trading Post for testing. This morning it was open to all players for six hours. As of this writing, the Trading Post is offline so we can apply further bug fixes and performance improvements.

This morning during testing, some users purchased items and didn’t immediately receive them, or sold items and didn’t immediately receive the gold. We do have record of these transactions and are working on completing them. Check the “pick up” tab on your commerce panel to see if your transaction has completed.

PvP Tournaments

PvP tournaments were temporarily disabled today. We have now restored them.

World v. World

World v. World matches are now updating daily. We’re running 24-hour matches to balance servers.

Worlds

We added three new worlds in Europe on Thursday, and three new worlds in America on Friday, and increased the population limits on all worlds.

Overflow

During this initial surge of high concurrency, and especially while most characters are low-level and thus playing in the same starting areas, it’s common for players to be directed to overflow servers. If you want to play with a friend, but you’re not on the same overflow servers, you can form a party together, then right-click on your friend’s portrait in the party list and click “join”.

We expect the use of overflow servers to naturally subside as players spread out more through the world.

Botting and exploits

It is our policy to permanently ban accounts engaged in botting and exploits, and we’re ramping up to do that.

If you discover an exploit in the game, do not exploit it or publicize it, but instead please notify us immediately at this new email address: exploits (at) arena (dot) net. (This email address is for notifying us of emergency exploits. We cannot respond individually to questions sent to this address.)

Forums

Our most important priority at the moment is to ensure that the game runs stably and flawlessly. So as to not create additional demand on our infrastructure and on our programming team, we made the decision not to open the forums until the initial mass influx of players has calmed down a bit.

Next software updates

We’re making non-disruptive changes throughout the day. We’ll publish the next back-end server update tonight at midnight Seattle time. The game may be unavailable for approximately 20-60 minutes while we perform this update.

There are a lot of places in the game where you can follow an event train from beginning to end for multiple rewards and it then cycles back to the beginning. The biggest one we’ve found is in Kessex Hills on the western side of the map. This is an efficient way to level (if efficient leveling is your goal) up through the 40s.

The start point is the bridge at the northwest corner of the lake. Once finished you won’t have to wait very long for the event to start over again. There are also two nearby events (marked off in purple) that might randomly show up that you can diverge and complete during your cycle.

This rotation works extremely well at all level ranges. The experience starts to lag down after level 30, but is still completely viable. It’s a very good way to earn karma and gold as well.
 
 

 
Here is what to expect at each step:
 

• Point 1: Break centaur worker morale to prevent bridge repairs. Reduce morale to 0%.
• Point 2: Dispatch the Harathi Lieutenants. Kill all three.
• Point 3: Kill the Harathi Overlord.
• Point 4: Stop the Risen Krait from building their army. Kill all four, not labeled on map.
• Point 5: The END point has it’s own rotation of events:
• END 1: Destroy the bandit cannons before the ore shipment is ready. Kill five canons.
• END 2: Stop bandits from collecting ore for a centaur supply shipment. Kill all the miners.
• END 3: Defeat the champion bandit foreman before he finishes collecting ore for centaurs. He has two forms: Mech and Human.

There are a few other places where you have a system like this after level 40. We’ll bring those to you as soon as we can.

Arenanet is serious business. They are policing this game tremendously and they are doing a great job of it. Not only have they been banning people for using excessive language (which was hilarious by the way) they are taking people down who abused a bug in the game. There were certain karma vendors and an exploit that allowed you to buy weapons for 60 karma when they should of been around 63,000 karma. People were buying 100′s of these weapons and then heading over to the Mystic Forge. Here’s what Anet had to say on the subject:

Today we banned a number of players for exploiting Guild Wars 2. We take our community and the integrity of the game very seriously, and want to be clear that intentionally exploiting the game is unacceptable. The players we banned were certainly intentionally and repeatedly exploiting a bug in the game. We intended to send a very clear message that exploiting the game in this way will not be tolerated, and we believe this message now has been well understood.

We also believe and respect that people make mistakes. This is in fact the first example of a widespread exploit in the game. With this in mind, we are offering the members of our community who exploited the game a second chance to repair the damage that has been done.

Thus, just this once, we will offer to convert permanent bans to 72-hour suspensions. Should those involved want to accept this offer of reinstatement, contact us on our support website–support.guildwars2.com—and submit a ticket through the “Ask a Question” tab. Please use the subject heading of “Karma Weapons Exploit Appeal”, then confirm in the body of your ticket that you will delete any items/currency that you gained from the exploit. You should submit only one ticket. Once you have done so, we will lower your ban to 72 hours, and following your re-activation we will check your account to make sure that you have honored your commitment. If that commitment is not honored, we will re-terminate the account.

This is a first and final warning. Moving forward, please make sure you that when you see an exploitable part of the game, you report it and do not attempt to benefit from it.
We look forward to seeing you in game,

Yours Sincerely,
Chris Whiteside- Lead Producer ArenaNet

Other people have been getting banned for exploiting parts of the game. For example, a popular streamer was buying cooking materials for cheap karma, combining them, and selling them for a large profit. So this should be a warning to everyone out there: if there is a part of the game that seems too good to be true, don’t take advantage of it. You’ll get the bannhammer.

This is the current status of the most important issues we’re tracking with Guild Wars 2 live service.

Account security – We’re seeing an uptick in reports of account theft and attempted account theft. We believe hackers are using databases of email addresses and passwords stolen from other games and web sites, and pre-existing trojan horses, to search for matching Guild Wars 2 accounts which they attempt to compromise. To prevent this, we have temporarily disabled the “reset password” feature, and we’re working to bring email authentication online. To protect yourself, please ensure that you use a unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you don’t use for any other game, email account, forum or web account.

There has been a rash of phishing emails, scams and hacks that have plagued GW2′s launch. Well, Arenanet has not been sitting idly by as they are working on different solutions. They have come up with a list of precautions that you should take and are actively working on something that should help secure your account more.

Guild Wars Account E-mail Authentication is a new feature that we’ll be introducing to Account Management that will provide you with extra security by requiring you to verify every login request from a new location with your e-mail account.

Whenever you attempt to login from a new location, we will send an authentication request e-mail that contains both a description of where you are logging in from, and a link you click to authenticate the login request. We decided to implement this as a mechanism that anyone can benefit from, since it’s free and easy for anyone to sign up for a secure e-mail account. Keep in mind, when you click on your authentication request e-mail, we will never ask you to enter any login information. Verification requests are only sent after you attempt to login, not before.

See the Account E-mail Authentication article in the Guild Wars 2 Knowledge Base for detailed instructions on how to take advantage of this feature.

You can find the rest of the article here.

JUNKIES NATION has a program for all of the leet junkies out there called Premium Junkies where you can subscribe to all the Junkies sites where you will get access to special contests and most importantly no ads!. Not only that, you’ll also help support the JUNKIES NATION network with your contributions to help us grow the network and create more content and expand to your other favorite games!

Here’s what you get:
No ads shown on any JUNKIES NATION website.
Access to exclusive Premium Junkies contests for computer hardware and software and other game swag.

So how much does it cost?
Not much at all! It’s only $3 US per month or $25 for the whole year.

So how do I sign up!?
Follow THIS LINK to our sign-up page!

If you’re a Ranger and looking for a specific pet, go no further, here is a full list of all the Ranger pets and where you can find them. Continue reading for the full list.

Mesmers are a tricky profession; they were one of the last to be introduced and almost universally thought of as underpowered through the vast majority of BWEs. What a lot of people don’t realize is that Mesmer is a very fun profession to play and actually quite powerful if you understand the fundamentals. With the buffs they received just prior to the launch they achieve parity with other DPS classes by the time you achieve level 80, or jump on one in sPVP.

Mesmers are extremely dependent on traits, much more than any other class. For example, using arbitrary, made up numbers, an Elementalist starts off with 80% of its full potential and gain the last 20% of its power via traits as he or she levels up to 80. The Mesmer, on the other hand, probably starts off at 40% of its full potential and their traits give it 60% of its strength. Because a bulk of a Mesmer’s damage is based off of illusions one way or another, there are a series of traits and skills that make them do more damage and survive longer that are essential to almost every build.