Hardstuck Launch & Legendary Treasure Hunt!

We Are Live!

It’s been A long time coming but the shiny new version of this site has finally arrived!

Hardstuck is a community dedicated to bringing players together and making it easier to get into all content in Guild Wars 2 and our website is a reflection of that vision! We want to create the ultimate nexus for all things Guild Wars 2 and the perfect entry point for all content and activities in the game and this launch is the first step in that direction!

Content Guides

The first thing we have fully completed are a set of visual guides for every almost PvE encounter in the game – including the new Strike Mission Challenge Modes!

Aetherblade Hideout (CM)

Select difficulty

Do-or-die mechanics that engage the whole squad, an enrage timer, and a stacking debuff that punishes being unaware of the environment; the Aetherblade Hideout Challenge Mode is an entertaining and interesting strike mission.

Xunlai Jade Junkyard (CM)

Select difficulty

One of the most chaotic fights in the game. This encounter tests the entire squad's spatial awareness, mobility, and reaction times and features many mechanics that will heavily punish any players that are off the group for more than a brief period of time.

Kaineng Overlook (CM)

Select difficulty

One of the most mechanically complex Challenge Mode in the game. High group coordination and a fair amount of planning are required to succeed. This fight will test your reflexes and knowledge of the mechanics - so come prepared!

We worked hard to make sure the guides are as visual as possible so you can get a great overview of how the fight flows before you can get in there!
Additionally, care has been taken to not just list off the mechanics and what they do, instead our approach is to explain how mechanics work and demonstrate how to handle them to provide a clear strategy to achieve victory!

Legendary Treasure Hunt

To celebrate this momentous occasion we are doing something very original that nobody has ever thought of before: giving away a legendary weapon! You’ll have to work a bit for it though; over the next few weeks we’ll be hiding letters around the site that form a secret password! The first person to successfully determine the password and enter it on the site (you’ll have to figure out how to do that too!) will win a generation 3 legendary of their choice and the materials required to unlock the zhaitan variant too!

Here are a few extra details about how the treasure hunt works:

• To make sure the secret is found there will be a bunch of clues posted on our twitter, so make sure to follow us
• We’ll be tweeting clues about words scattered throughout the website as well as secret place where you can input the password (no, it’s not search bar)
• Not all letters are there yet, some will be added just before the hint will be posted
• All letters will be on the website, not in the tweet, with the exception of the first one, which will be hidden across multiple platforms

Build Guides

There are quite a lot of builds in the game right now – especially when dealing with multiple game modes. We haven’t got all of the build guides done yet but there are more being added as we speak! We don’t want to reinvent the wheel with Hardstuck – there are already excellent resources for fully optimized builds on websites such as Snowcrows.com or Discretize.eu so our philosophy is a little different.

The PvE builds on hardstuck.gg are designed around two key ideas:

Gear Reusability:

We want players to be able to try out different builds as easily as possible so you’ll see a lot of gear choices that are designed to work across multiple builds with minimal changes required!

Extra Breathing Room:

Things don’t always go to plan! With that in mind our builds usually have some built in padding such as extra boon duration that will keep them (and your squad) functioning well even when things are starting to crumble! The builds are still very much designed to be more than capable of crushing the hardest content in the game and try sacrifice minimal offensive potential for some additional flexibility. We also have PvP and WvW builds on their way, right now it’s just some of the more common builds but we plan on adding a lot more over time so no matter what your playstyle is they’ll be something there for you!

On top of just builds we also want to create guides for the strategies and key game mechanics for all game modes but especially for PvP and WvW as there is quite a steep learning curve when jumping in for the first time. There is a lot of knowledge that’s quite hard to come by in game that can drastically change the player experience in these intricate game modes and we’re working with top players to help make the all content types as accessible as possible!

The Future

We’re not done yet! Hardstuck is very much a work in progress and we have a few projects that are on their way!

Low Intensity Builds:

Hardstuck recently ran a competition challenging players to make the best builds possible with a limited amount of inputs! It was a great success with over 125 submissions including some extremely powerful and creative ideas! In light of this we’ll be adding a curated set of builds to the site aimed at newer players or just players who don’t enjoy extreme button mashing that are still highly efficient for conquering all content in the game.

Squad Builder:

It’s quite difficult to keep track of the metagame in Guild Wars 2 and exactly what every build can do. Our solution: a sandbox page where you can see the following information:

• What boons, roles and encounter specific utility builds provide
• Recommendations and requirements for building a squad for each specific PvE encounter
• Standard compositions for PvE, PvP and WvW

Users will then be able to make a virtual squad with any builds they like and see exactly what roles and boons will be covered by the setup they create! You can see a demo of this here, it’s a bit outdated but it very clearly demonstrates how powerful a tool like this can be as a learning aid or even for usage while playing to keep track of your squad.

Game Mode Guides:

Guild Wars 2 is famous for having tutorials everywhere. Wait, that’s not right – the game is famous for not having tutorials everywhere! Because of this, it can be quite daunting to try out a new game mode and this can lead to situations where players end up not having fun simply because they don’t know what’s going on rather than actually not liking the content.

Core Mechanics Guides:

Build guides are great, content guides are great but without the foundational skills to back up that knowledge they are not as effective as they should be!

Mount Guides:

Mounts in Guild Wars 2 are pretty good, in fact they’re so good that Blizzard are borrowing them to the next WoW expansion! What’s really interesting about a lot of features in Guild Wars 2 is how well fleshed out they are, in fact the griffon and the rollerbeetle in particular are so well executed that they could have a full on standalone game built around them on their own!
This mechanical depth of ‘mini games’ is a huge strength of the game and we think they need to be exposed to a wider audience. Just like the rest of the game with a little finesse mounts really open up a whole new world of gameplay.

The Team

It would be criminal to not praise the incredible team who are not just hardstuck.gg but also the Hardstuck project in it’s entirety! Hardstuck has been built by a crew of gamers who are truly passionate about Guild Wars 2 and supporting the community we all love.

You can see the vast list of greatness here and it’s been a privilege on my part to be able to get to know everyone and work on something massive together. The team are god gamers and have put thousands of hours of their own time into creating something truly special so you had better appreciate every single pixel!

Thanks for reading, we hope you enjoy the content – now get in there and try to break it!
– The Hardstuck Team