Sunday, March 31, 2013

Easter! Guild Wars News!

It's Easter and it's a cold one too! I bet most of you readers have had a great week or just a weekend.
Nothing special has happened in my end, only that I've started on my legendary in guild Wars 2.

How is it going with the legendary project?

Good, I've started on the mystic clovers to hope I could get the tier 6 mats instead of clovers every now and then, but NO! I've tried 8 times and I've gotten 50 mystic clovers already. And the chance for mystic clovers are 1/3 ratio or 33% if that's better understanding.
In other words.... I got quite lucky on the magic clovers.
I just need 27 more clovers, but I'll be aiming for 30 more so i have a better chance of getting mats I need for the legendary. I'm using the 10 clover recipe instead of the 1 clover recipe

And I'm also close to finish of the Gift Of Battle, which requires 500 badges of honor. The only way to attain those are from WvW jumping puzzles or by defeating players.
Since I hate WvW because of the zerging all the time, I'm just doing jumping puzzles! Which then again makes it fast and....painful, mostly because of the people who can kill you before you reach the end, over and over again...

The tier 6 mats ain't going so well because of the amount i need, I need 250 of each tier 6 and by now I got around 26-46 of each item.




And now for something completely different:


Fire and frost

The latest news are of course the new update that gives us some new living story content, we will learn more about the molten alliance and the norn and charrs problems with them. We even have new weapon skins; fused weapons, you need a Fused Weapon Claim Ticket to buy a skin. Where to get them? In black lion chests, rarely. 





April fools' day

Yes, April 1st is coming to guild wars 2, if you change your date to April 1st and then log in to guild wars 2 you'll hear something special, 8-bit music of GW2! Yeah! Not only that but there is a machine in Rata sum that requires continue coins to use it, the machine is called "Super Adventure Box".

I've done some research on it and I've seen some skins that have 8-bit looks, is it from the "SAB"? Can we use it in the world of Tyria? or is it just for Super adventure box? 
We will know tomorrow!





Bugged event in cursed shore

The bugged Event in penitent camp in cursed shore was bugged for at least a week, thanks to the update it got fixed. What was really happening on the broken event was quite simple: the npc's who were trying to build the camp back up again just stopped building. They didn't do a thing, but the risen spawned again and again in a pattern so you could just stay there and gain xp and loot, no karma is possible on that event because it never ends.

But the amount of different loot you could gain and even the rare items makes this broken event a huge money making machine. After the time i spent on farming there ( at least 2 hours per day) I gained 340 heavy moldy sacks, around 190 per tier 5 item and 16-43 per tier 6 items and 40-42 rares which resulted in approximately 50-56 glob of ectoplasm and last but not least... 25 gold gained.

Now then, as i said this is now fixed, but maybe one day it will get bugged again and you should be ready to get in there and gain some loot!

That will be all for now.
Keep on playing!

Monday, March 18, 2013

Guild Wars 2: My Character, my goals

All right, here we go. A post about my character and why I play that certain class and everything else.
Hopefully you've read my Introduction to Guild Wars 2, Leveling through "Questing" and Events and Leveling through crafting and maybe caught an eye on the norn characters in one of the pictures, well that's me and a friend. 


The Past: first Character


When Guild Wars 2 started I made a human female Mesmer, I fell in love with the class in the beta and I was leveling with friends and had a good time, until my first Dungeon run.
It was horrible and it was a slaughter, the combat mechanic was so different from any game I tried so I felt like a total noob running around there. Thankfully we had some patient random players with us that explained boss fights, traps and certain mobs (NPC enemies if you didn't already know that). Sooner or later I got the hang of handling my class and it was even more fun! 

Later on I started studying on how Mesmer actually works; What's the best stat, how should I use my skills and when to use them. Sooner or later it all fell into my fingertips but I still feel that the class was a glass cannon, too fragile but massive on damage.

After a while I started to get bored with my Mesmer and started leveling up a Thief, Guardian, Ranger and an Elementalist. Thief, Guardian and Ranger is now lvl 80 and I'm leveling my Elementalist but I still didn't find the "right" class for me. Once again I made a new character, watched every class closely and wondered what would fit me since I'm mostly a supportive/assisting/tanking/healing kind.

This game don't have the "specific" roles to the classes, by that I mean we don't have the typical "priest healer" or "Warrior Tank" type. In Guild Wars 2 even a warrior can be a healer and Engineer can be the "tanky" type. it's all about how you gear up and spend your traits.

Then one day, I made a new character with a friend and I figured I wanted to try out the Warrior class, in my eyes they seemed too simple, "wield some weapons and just mash your face on the keyboard = Win" But i was wrong, so horribly wrong it's not even funny. I had a blast running around with dual axes and my greatsword, butchering through any enemy in my path. For each level I gained, I felt new doors opened up for my Warrior and I had some challenges with certain events or Story Line, but I learned from my mistakes and improved my tactics.

And finally, my Warrior reached level 80, I could now finally craft and equip the armor with the orange text, Exotic. I started grabbing all my mats and craftet Helmet, shoulders, chest piece, gloves, legging and boots. Finally, my Warrior was prepared for the Ruins of Orr, no enemy should stop me from gaining better loot or karma!

....or so I Though. The first thing that happens to me in Cursed shore is that I get so horrible crushed by the horde of undead roaming the place while I'm just trying to make a living. They just send me to the grave, over and over again, I got frustrated and called for backup, I gather my friends and started to head from North of Cursed shore to the south.
We had a good time, but we felt that something was wrong, we couldn't quite do enough damage to finish of the undead fast enough or nuke the target when it was needed. 

Then I figured that the problem was me. Truth be told, after all those hours playing warrior and I thought I had the hang of it, I didn't. I might have used some of the right skills and utility skills, but i still missed on how certain skills worked and how it affected to the party.
So I started to research, reading and watching how others play their Warrior and get some information on how to improve myself.

Thanks to Dontain, A commentator(?) who plays Warrior with a Legendary (thanks to fans and friends) two-handed Sword "Twilight". He have so many videos about what type of build you want to go with your warrior and gear, the looks on certain weapons and gear, how to get the items and he even have videos on his progress with the Legendary. He has done so much for the subscribers with the videos about tips n' tricks, not only with the warrior class, but with the game itself! Do check him out!




The present: My Warrior

After all the research I've done I have now finally found my build and gear. The Dungeons goes smooth and fast, I'm still a glass cannon but not as one of my friends put it: "papercannon soaked in gasoline", hehe, I must say that made me giggle the first time I heard it. 
So then! Now that I've found my Gear, traits and playstyle I started to wonder: 
"what should I do now?"

I started spending gold on random things that I wanted but didn't need, sooner or later that wallet got empty. Even how many dungeons I did, the mats and gold always got spend one way or another. suddenly a friend of mine got awesome look on the character, and I got informed on the "Cultural Armors and Weapons" which is a look for the certain race. 

I had a goal to get all the tiers of the cultural armor and merge them into different stats, so they weren't only for looks. After a day I had Tier 1, and Tier 2 came close by in a week or two. but then it was the most expensive one, the grand price! Tier 3.


Let's sum it up on the costs for all  cultural armors:

Tier 1 =     2 Gold 88 Silver
Tier 2 =     7 Gold 10 Silver
Tier 3 = 119 Gold
--------------------------------
Total   = 128 Gold 98 Silver

And you have to add the exotics i've made to make them useful in combat.            


Let me show you how they look:

DOLYAK (TIER 1 Norn)




To be honest, i got this gear already around level 50 and was running around looking awesome! This is my first cultural I transmuted into Berserker gear and spent a lot of time in it. Now it's my Magic Find armor, it's still Berserker stats but with Superior rune of the pirate in it.


EAGLE (TIER 2 Norn)










This is an armor I'm not that pleased with, sure it looks awesome and cool, but it lacks the "warrior" feeling to it. The armor it self looks more for a class like the guardian or something "holy" if you want. I've made this my "Tanky" armor, when i need more thoughness and health.


STAG (Tier 3 Norn)
Now this is my pride and honor! The Stag armor is the most expensive one since it's the top tier of the cultural armor but it looks so AWESOME! sure the colours might not match that great since i'm in the phase of finding the right "theme" if you want. It's matching my Greatsword and it's not too dark, or too orange.


It felt horribly satisfying to finally have all the Cultural Tiers on my Warrior, now i could take a break on the farming and grinding for the certain Items I wanted.

Once again, So I thought!
Now that I've gotten everything I wanted, I started searching for something else to get my hands on. I started a Collection of Axes, which will be completed sooner or later, but I wanted a challenge, something that takes time to do. 
ah yes.... I want a legendary to complete it all, you probably think I'll go for Twilight or Sunrise.



You're wrong, I'm aiming for this beauty!


Frosfang (Wikipedia picture!)

The deal about this axe is it's a frozen weapon with awesome graphical looks:
  • The arm holding Frostfang is covered in ice.
  • The user leaves icy footsteps.
  • The "mouth" of the axe opens and closes and emits an icy breath.
  • Some skills differ slightly, such as Life Blast (Necromancer skill) which has an icy effect.
So this ends this post about my goals in GW2, I will write more about my progress, and the ups and downs with the farming for it. 

UNTILL NEXT TIME!


Sunday, March 17, 2013

The Startup of Sim City, Part 3: City Specialization

All right! welcome back to the Startup "blogpost" or whatever you want to call it, today/this weekend (or whatnot) It's all about City Specialization.
What is City Specialization?
Well my good sir/Ma'am! It's all about how you're going to contribute to the others in the region with workforce, work, tourism, plastic, TVs, processors etc. the list goes on.

Let's get it started!



CITY SPECIALIZATION

City Specialization is all about money, where and how!
You have 5 different specializations to choose from, This depends on your city Site, you can't make a coal city if you have no coal to mine! get it?

"HEY! You're forgetting 1! n00b!", yes and no, i'm not counting the Trading Specialization since you need to earn Money to actually make something good out of it. Sure you could import all kinds of resources to make a different one that sells for more, but to do so you need the money for it.


Mining
Want to be an industrial City with all those awesome chimneys popping up all around the City site? Then this is the one for you!

Mining is the most efficient and easiest way to earn Money in this game.  

You can mine Coal for your Coal plant or making Alloy. Raw ore to sell or to make Metal and earn even more money from it.

Drilling
How are y'all? ...right, drilling is all about Oil and making Plastic and fuel that is om nom nom Money!
Fuel is hard cash for the ones who wants to sell it, but it takes time to make.
It's also needed for the Great Works sooner or later. Don't forget you can fuel up your city with the oil power plant!

Trading
Now this is a MUST for any city that wants to Mine, drill or make Electronics in their city, Without it you're nothing, NOTHING I TELL YOU!

The Trading Specialization goes hand in hand with Drilling, mining and Electronics because of the selling and buying you can do with it.


Electronics

Now then! remember the thing i said about Mining? I LIED! Electronics have the far highest profit by far when you get the hang of it.
You can make processors and TVs, bear in mind that this requires plastic, metal and alloy to do so. 
which is a pain at times if you cant get it all.

Culture

Culture is all about tourism and making your city the most attractive.

You can host events  so Sims from around the region would like to visit your beautiful city and spend their simoleons (Sims currency) in your shops! Beware the traffic!



Gambling

"18, Hit me, 20, Hit me, 21.... hit me.... 32, A DAMN IT I LOST! how much do I get for my kidney?"

Gambling goes almost hand in hand with Culture, it's tourism and it's money! ...and criminals... and... arsonists and... murderers. oh well still earning some money!


Coal City!

All right! we're back to Triton valley, where I started my city couple of days ago in my earlier posts. As you can see, I've just made some industrial area and wanting to plop a Coal mine around that area.


By clicking on the City specialization in the bottom left corner and choosing Mining, I can now look where I have my coal on the map. The darkest spot is where there is the most coal. My mine will mine the total of 358.8 tons, but adding more mine shafts, it will increase the total and the daily gathering.




 Here I'm adding mine shafts so we can mine more coal for our city, as you can see by the cyan dot we need to "click" it on the mine to actually add an extra mineshaft, this goes for the raw ore mine too.








Trading

 We need a trade Depot to sell our coal, and maybe import some raw ore later on to smelt it into metal or alloy and earning more money. so I've popped this Trade depot close to the Mine so the trucks don't need to spend so long time on the road. But as you can see, I don't have a storage area for the coal!



Let's add some coal Storage lot on this Depot so I can store our coal! I'll just put down some trucks as well, so they can go out and sell the coal on the global market.






Here you can choose to:

Use Locally, Import and export.

Using it locally will make the selected resource stay in your city and used in the factories who needs it.



Importing means that you will buy the resource for a price and keep it in your city. they will buy until the Storage is full or when you turn it off.

By exporting you will sell the selected resources to the Global market, which I want to do right now. Something you need to pay attention to when it comes to Trading is when you get your trade port (the biggest storage house if you want) that there is a certain timer on the trading when it comes to trading by train. Sure nothing scary could happen, but you know, it's nice to be aware of things!



And this is part 3 of Startup of Sim City!

Next time we will go over Density and how to actually make more Sims move in as the Site is pretty small from the other Sim City Series!
Thanks for reading and don't forget to share!

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

The Startup of Sim City, Part 2

Allright! Part 2! YEAH!
Let's do this! I've been playing this game more and more and get lost almost everytime because of the "worker shortage" or whatnot. So let's just go for the startup of a city!




STARTING UP A CITY

All right, first of all we need to connect the city to the main road so we can get people to move in and get to work here. let's start by taking the low density street, so we don't waste all our money on the road.



There we go! now we've made our self places to put up the zones, as you can see I've already done that. The green zones are residential and the blue ones are commercial, yellow are industrial, but I haven't put up any yet because I want them further away from the neighbourhood since it's lowering the land value




CITY NEEDS


Now our City wants the basic needs as Water, Sewage pump and power. This is an easy thing to do as I'll just show you where to put the water as it is a graphical picture on where you got the most water.

As you can see the darkest overlay is where you have the most water and will bring the water tower max water.



HAPPINESS

We finally got our Town Hall and as we can see the happiness on our Sims goes up as we plopped the building down, In this building you can get upgrades for better water/sewage pump and alike.






LAND VALUE


Now this is one of the important thing to look after, you got alot of graphical map to look for, but the Land Value is in my opinion the most important one to look after since it increases the income for residental and commercial areas.



 As you can see on this graphical map, the only place with land value is where the faint blue circle is. And if you look at the window to the top right, it gives us the information on what kind of colours gives certain buildings and happiness. Let's try to improve a neighbourhood and maybe there will be more "high valued" citizens in our city.





How to do so? well just plop a Park down and keep on connecting them by clicking on the edit button in the Simple Walkway Window. Notice the Simdollar Icons right next to the park name, there is three of them and they will give you a high value aera where people can "upgrade" themselves to be high value Citizens or shops.





You have a wide Variety on what kind of parks you want, Some times they fit right in but at times you actually need to think before you're playing them down. 
The shame is: it's a grid building and you can't freely build the park as you want. Which then again is going to force you to spend more time on making the parks look beautiful in your city rather than if you had the free build mode in my opinion. 





Now then! after plopping down 2-3 connections to the park, you can see the land value has increased drasticly, but bear in mind, the expensive parks also have expensive upkeep, so make sure you can pay for it.





There we go! As you can see, there is already high valued resident and some of the commercial areas are upgrading aswell.

Be Aware that you need certain valued residences in your city to employ the different Industrial and commercial buildings.





And this concludes today's "intro" on starting up a City in Sim City, To be honest, the City zone is faaar to small, and they are even talking about adding an expansion pack for improving the zie. GG EA, GG!
Sigh... oh well even how much i hate this game I also love it at the same time. 


I'll come back to the part Where you Specialize your city into a Gambling, Mining, Oil or Tourism City!

Monday, March 11, 2013

The Startup of Sim City, Part 1

Sigh... I've really done it this time, I ranted about the game Sim City too hard in some certain areas. The storm has settled and truth be told, It's enjoyable, but the servers were horrible at release but they've cooled down now days after.

I must be honest and say: Why didn't they put up more servers in the first place? 
They started with only 2-3 servers for each continent, from US east/west to EU east/west. Did they really not think about how many people who would log in at the release date and start playing? C'mon we're gamers and we all love the Sim City series, well besides from Sim City 4 and Society...

Let's get this started on how my first impression were:


MAKING A NEW CITY:




Making a new game is quite simple, you can join or create one yourself. By creating a game you got 8 maps (or Regions as they like to call it) from 2 cities to 16.
Different regions have their own set of Raw materials, from Coal to wind power, so choose your city specialisation from what part of the region you're in.






SETUP REGION:


On the Setup region you can name your Region, set up private (invite only) or public, which is an open game and everyone can join.
'Sandbox' mode is pretty much building your city with no limits at all and no disasters can strike your city!






CLAIM CITY:


This is where you start claiming your city. 
When you're playing with friends I'd recommend you to pay attention to the road and railroad connection, because this is how your friends can help you with trading, burning houses, police backup and even workers (there is more they can help you with). The Roads are marked with a white line and the Railroad are yellow. When you start a new game with friends or just by yourself a Road is the safest way to get tourists/employees/new citizens or selling freight and goods. Later in the game you could try to get up a railroad station or even an airfield for carrying resources or people.

Alot of coal on this site.
How to claim a city?
just click on the cyan looking squares on the map and check the information about the site for how you're going to build yours. The white circles on the map are "Great work sites" which needs the following cities to team up to meet the requirements of the building they want. (more on that in next post!)

As you can see "triton valley" got loads of Coal and two bars of water and a full bar of wind power. This would be a nice place for a coal City, mining the resources would bring a lot of money to this city as you can trade with others or even make more advance resources you can sell for more money.



Claimed a City!

PLAY:

There we go! now we've claimed a site for our city and the industrial empire can grow!
Other players can now join your game after you've claimed your city (Pay attention if the game is private, you'll need to invite your friends to the game!)







To summarise:

I loved the whole part of actually playing with friends, but the lack of actually trying to survive on your own by just making one city in a "singleplayer game" is troublesome.
You have issues with having enough citizens to work or buy from the local stores, or even tourists to come to your city to make an actual income. 

This game works best with friends, and so bad at singleplayer it's not even funny.
It's nice that they've pushed the limit on the Sim City world so others can play together, but the small size on the cities makes it nearly impossible to enjoy it later in the game. They have spoken about adding an expansion pack to increase the size but then again... why pay for something like that when it should have already been in the game? I smell the works of EA here... 

Since of this blog post became a "tutorial" on how to start up a game, I'll make a new post tomorrow about the actual gameplay, since it's too big to put in one blog and it will be a huge massive wall of text and pictures.


Thursday, March 7, 2013

Monthly Rant: Sim City

Yesterday something caught my eye, something ridiculous about a SINGLEPLAYER game, which I even looked up to until now, has now been ruined so hard I don't even know anymore.

We're talking about the new Sim City, how EA wants us to be always online DRM (Digital Rights Management) for a singleplayer game, it's absurd!

DRM (Digital Rights Management)


Quick info about DRM and the Always Online part in games:

"Many mainstream publishers continued to rely on online-based DRM throughout the later half of 2008 and early 2009, including Electronic ArtsUbisoftValve, and AtariThe Sims 3 being a notable exception in the case of Electronic Arts. Ubisoft broke with the tendency to use online DRM in late 2008 with the release of Prince of Persia as an experiment to "see how truthful people really are" regarding the claim that DRM was inciting people to use pirated copies. Although Ubisoft has not commented on the results of the "experiment", Tweakguides noted that two torrents on Mininova had over 23,000 people downloading the game within 24 hours of its release.
 Ubisoft formally announced a return to online authentication on 9 February 2010 through its Uplay online gaming platform, starting with Silent Hunter 5The Settlers 7, and Assassin's Creed IISilent Hunter 5 was first reported to have been compromised within 24 hours of release, but users of the cracked version soon found out that only early parts of the game were playable. The Uplay system works by having the installed game on the local PCs incomplete and then continuously downloading parts of the game-code from Ubisoft's servers as the game progresses. It was only more than a month after the PC release in the first week of April that software was released that could bypass Ubisoft's DRM in Assassin's Creed II, demonstrating its strength. The software did this by emulating a Ubisoft server for the game. Later that month, a real crack was released that was able to remove the connection requirement altogether.
In early March 2010, Uplay servers suffered a period of inaccessibility due to a large scale DDoS attack, causing around 5% of game owners to become locked out of playing their game. The company later credited owners of the affected games with a free download, and there has been no further downtime. 
Other developers, such as Blizzard Entertainment are also shifting to a strategy where most of the game logic is on the "side" or taken care of by the servers of the game maker. Blizzard uses this for its game Diablo III, citing "a need for an always-on connection" as a "piracy deterrant" and Electronic Arts also is intending to use this same strategy with their reboot of SimCity." - Wikipedia

Always online is one thing.

But having a Queue system on a singleplayer game? C'mon, this is getting pathetic.
Sure it's "multiplayer" in some way where you have a city next to different players and you can sell/buy from them or even send out help when their city is in need.
But you should have an option to have an offline city in case of horrible accident as losing the Internet for a day or a week! It have happened and it happened to me, I lost the Internet for a week and I had almost NOTHING to play thanks to the "Always online" policy the games usually have now.

(I wonder how players will handle it when they are playing a SINGLEPLAYER game and they start lagging because of the masses of players logging in to the servers.)

Back to the point; having a queue system for a singleplayer and a "touch" of "multiplayer" is getting stupid, thanks for the information Totalbiscuit (YOUTUBE VIDEO), I was THIS close to buy the game. On the bloody release day the servers couldn't even handle the players who have bought the Digital Deluxe edition and waiting for the "pre-order early release". 
I even felt it on Origin how it lagged like hell on the Sim City release date. 
Yes, yes, I know. Usually the servers crash as hell on the release day, just look at Diablo III, Release of new Expansions for World of Warcraft etc.


Against piracy.

Apparently the DRM is to "defend" the product from piracy, which then again fails so horribly it's not even funny watching them burn themselves and lose consumers.
We've all heard about PirateBay and the "good" work they do (different opinion, I'll stay neutral on this one!) and how it opens the world for certain people for movies, games, music and other files.

But what really grinds my gear is how narrow-headed-sons-of-..... yes, let's just say EA and others "Always online" gaming companies only thinks about money and how to FORCE the online part on consumers. Haven't they even thought for a second to listen to the customers? Maybe it is overpriced, maybe the Always online part is bad for a singleplayer game, maybe shooting the customer down with DLC's aint the best way?

This is also why I got my thumbs up for Valve, they have offline mode (but a shame, not always working as intended, but it's there) so you can play your games.... offline!
I get it that certain games are hard to play offline if they are almost purely Multiplayer, like Team Fortress 2, but at least they try! 
Not only that but valve tries to make a way for you to sell your "old" digital games you have on steam to friends or to a random person, which makes a lot of big gaming companies boil of anger, because they want more money.



I could go on but I fear I will go out of context and just "personalize" my attacks directly to EA games and before I know it, I got a black van sitting outside of my house.

So this ends this Month's Rant, Maybe it will be more than just 1 a month, who knows what else will piss me off. Oh right, who am I kidding? EA will... and the DEAD SPACE 3 DLC'S THAT ARE UTTER USELESS!

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Guild wars 2: Leveling through Crafting

I've covered how to level through with assists and Events, so i might as well just talk about the crafting while we're at it. I'll try to cover it as good as i can! Let's DO THIS!


CRAFTING

Crafting is a great way to level up your character from 1-80, bear in mind you need to level all crafting profession to 400 for this to work. It's also a nice way to earn money by making the items and selling them on the trading post, but you need to look at the price for making it and the price for selling the final product.








There is 8 Crafting professions, and here's the list:

Armorsmith - Makes heavy armor for the Warrior and Guardian class. from boots to helmets.

Leatherworker - Makes Medium armor, Recommended for Thief, Engineers and Rangers.

Tailor - Makes Light armor for Mesmer, Elementalist and Necromancer.

Jeweler - Makes Jewels (duh!) and gems, you'll be making earrings, rings and amulets.

Weaponsmith - This profession you'll be making Two-handed swords and hammers, one-handed swords, axes, maces, spears and shields.

Artificer - Makes  Staffs, Scepters, Focus, Tridents and potions

Huntsman - Makes bows, rifles, pistols, war horn and torches

Chef - Makes Food with boons (buffs), from magic find to power and crit. you can even have tray of food for a certain meal/dessert/snack.

Choosing the correct crafting profession could be a headache at times since your class needs weapons but also needs the armor, or even the Jewels. If it's your first character I would recommend you to stick with at least 1 profession and max it out so you can make gear for yourself and others for a fee, or just sell it on the TP (Trading post)

If you are one of those patient ones who can actually Farm for a Legendary, i would recommend you to do some research on the Legendary you want and how to get it, because every Legendary needs a certain Crafting profession to make the unique item needed to merge it with the rest of the materials needed.


DISCOVERY

Discovering items in the 'Discovery' tab is a nice way to gain a bunch of crafting skill level. So if you miss those 3 levels to craft new items, try to discover as much as you can. 

To be honest, try to discover more than you're crafting the finished products, since they yield more xp for the profession than the items themselves. Also try to get as close to the appropriate skill level you got.

For an example:
If you have 120 in Weaponsmithing, try to make items as close to the level, preferably 100 and closer. 







CRAFTING  FINISHED PRODUCTS


How to craft a weapon or something may sound "simple", but it's more of a chain of items needed. The Chef profession is the perfect example of it, but I wont use that of an example, instead, I'll use Weaponsmithing for now.

If you want to make the "Berserker's Pearl Broadsword (Exotic)" you'll need the "Berserker's Orichalcum Imbued Insciption (Exotic) which then again needs 5 "Orichalcum Plated Dowel (Master)"

So it goes as followed:

You need 5 of these     ------->             To make 1 of these     ---->             Which then makes the final product




So this pretty much covers the crafting part of Guild Wars 2, next time i might talk more about the WvW part and how it benefits your world(server). If you like what you read, feel free to toss it around on the Internet! Share it away!