I'm on vacation and typed this on my buddy's Ipad, i'm not going to complain that after i used the thing it makes my smartphone screens looks small and insignificant, damn you Apple!!! =))
Trying to grasp the immensiveness (that a word?) of Tyria can't be achieved by zooming your way to 80, it can be achieved by slowly exploring all nooks and cranny in a zone or just wandering yourself in every random Dynamic Event encounter that might happen in a zone and what the... i just leveled up!!!
If there's something i want to add in Tyria it's the stop experience button, i know, i know the scaling make sure no mob get one shotted on levels below me, but i just can't help feeling something off when i saw my 60ish level wandering around in the 40ish zone, i guess it's the residual habitual experience from my past MMOs. i'm an explorer so I tend to open up all the maps just like what i did on WOW (stop experience ftw!!!)
In Guild Wars 2 you leveled up fast (for a casual) but if you're the person that blinked to your experience bar every three seconds you might thought it's a little slow (btw WWW is your answer). every time i logged in I simply picked a map that several level belows me and run through it, completing dynamic events and heart quests also uncovered some vistas and point of interests, and when i completed that map i just simply run around following people and helped them out in DE or meta events, or just gathering stuffs and by two or three hours I probably leveled up once or two.
For crafting disciplines i picked up artificer and tailoring, leveling a discipline is much easier now since the trading post is up and running. I forgot to add that one of my reason to roam around low level area is to gather tier 2 crafting materials, leveling disciplines are somewhat a bittersweet thing, the problem with the materials is that it's just too much of it and sometimes the drop rate are abysmal, i can grab 15 small claw on a dynamic events but on another DE that features mobs that dropped vial of weak blood i probably only obtained 5 of them, but one thing I like is that loot bag dropped from humanoid mobs can contain random stuff (although they contain mostly butter now), occasionally i just go hunt out there and come back on later day to level up my crafting, still a long way for 400.
My crafting stuffs are way below my level although some of the masterwork items are fine looking and can be used as skin. Thing is: in Tyria I tend to chase vanity items like crazier than ever. I stylized my character by previewing every single armor i came whether it's from crafting or dropped items, and since I rolled a charr it's so tricky to stylized him, and of course being a mesmer makes it a double trouble (especially the pants and shoes that made him look like a skinny cat, and the cloth caps that always turn him into a big hooded walking head). Some of the neater stuffs are in the Personal Story which are littering my bank and using the transmutation stone is somewhat becomes a requirement =P
Of course after runnning around, crafting, and stylizing a character there is nothing more fitting than show it to a group of friends.... In dungeon =))
