Buying Battlecat

Good Morning Friends! I hope you are recovering from sleep theft weekend. I found myself waking up this morning, setting a second alarm and then going back to sleep. This one seems to be hitting me personally harder than they usually do, but I am uncertain why. Whatever the case I mostly spent the weekend playing Guild Wars 2, which is probably of no surprise to anyone who has been reading this blog lately. Once the game clicked finally… I have been unpacking this huge box of things to do. So one of the things that I never quite understood before now is that while technically there are three expansions to Guild Wars 2, it is more like there are six.

What I mean by that is starting with Living World Season 3, each new season is almost like an expansion in itself with a large number of new zones being added to the game. While the scope of each zone is maybe not as grand as a proper expansion zone, they are most definitely cool. I am working my way through Living World Season 3 before starting Path of Fire properly. I’ve talked about this before with Elder Scrolls Online, but I have a strong desire to complete content in the order in which it was released. I screwed this up with Living World Season 2, given that I have now beaten Heart of Thorns before seeing it all the way through. However I did make it pretty far into Season 2 on my Warrior so I did not feel like I was missing a lot of information. At some point I will go back and finish that up. However going forward I want to try and follow the story track because it is actually getting interesting.

I spent a good chunk of last night running around the Ring of Fire zone and doing events as they popped up. It is shocking just how lucrative this new area appears to be at least compared to zones in the old school Tyria zones. I am guessing this is going to be a thing going forward as I spend more time in these new expansion zones. The story is also starting to ramp up so that I better understand what lead to Heart of Thorns and why our actions directly influenced the events. There are a lot of folks who really seem to hate Taimi but I find I really like that character. I mean she is infinitely less egotistical than Zojja was, but is still an Asuran so you have to sorta give her some slack. At some point I need to buckle down and find the rest of the drones that I am supposed to be reactivating.

Another big thing that happened this weekend is that I finished off the grind for my Warclaw, which should make World vs World significantly more enjoyable. It has sorta sucked being one of the only people on foot while everyone else rode around mounted. I talk about the steps required to get the mount in another post, but essentially I have been on the experience grind for awhile now having completed all of the other objectives. On Friday I got in with a really good group that was rolling through objectives left and right and ground out almost half of the progression track then. Last night I got back into the game and ground out the last pip of progress. Of course after ALL of the work… it still required that I spend 8 gold which I happily did to finish this out. If you can get in with a good commander, WvW is really an excellent source of resources especially high end leather and cloth.

I also managed to wrap up the meta achievement for killing all three Wurms in the Triple Trouble event. I did not grab a screenshot so instead you get one of me fighting another big baddie called Drakkar. That fight in particular is maybe the hardest thing that I have encountered in GW2 and had serious flashbacks to FFXIV raiding. I did however manage to get through Drakkar without dying at all, and managed to pick up a number of the achievements for avoiding things. I think we ultimately just didn’t have enough players to really make the fight manageable. I am guessing because of its relative difficulty level that it does not get run as often as the others. I find myself having a blast in this game and have so many long term grinds that I am working on… but often times find myself easily distracted by whatever happens to be going on in a specific zone.

AggroChat #381 – Fun With World Bosses

Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Tonight we have a bit of an odd show to usher in sleep theft weekend.  First we talk about Bel’s descent into madness…  that is getting super engaged in Guild Wars 2.  He spent the last week chain running World Bosses and talks about how freaking fun that is.  From there we talk about some of the long grind systems and how there are multiple paths for different playstyles to reach the same ultimate goal.  From there we dust off a topic that has been sitting on the list for a long while, that was originally inspired by Warhammer 40,000 but applies to a lot of different games.  Largely we discuss how the most hardcore players represent the smallest portion of the community, but also are the ones that set the pace that everyone else is forced to live up to.  This covers a wide swath of topics from Magic the Gathering to MMO Chain Pulling to even the death of New World.  It is one wild ride  of a show.

Topics Discussed

  • Bel’s further descent into Guild Wars 2
    • The Joy of Chain Running World Bosses
    • The Good Long Grinds
  • Catering to the minority in games
    • How the most competitive players set the rules of the community
    • Warhammer 40,000
    • FFXIV and MMO Chain Pulling
    • Magic the Gathering
      • Netdecking
      • Missing Jank Magic
    • Destiny 2
      • Death of Skill Based Matchmaking
    • New World and how catering to a minority is killing game
    • Missing the innocence of being able to be bad

Spending Money on Tyria

If you have been reading my blog lately, you will have shockingly realized that I am playing an excessive amount of Guild Wars 2 at the moment. I am having a freaking blast but I thought I would talk some about one of the elements that I think scares some folks away… the cash shop. Guild Wars 2 is financed through a combination of “buy the box” expansions and then a slew of “priced to own” cash shop doodads. I personally have zero problem spending money on a game and effectively if I am not paying a subscription for something, it becomes a heck of a lot easier to justify buying items from the cash shop, especially if they improve my overall quality of life. Given that I have been playing Guild Wars 2 for a decade now… I have accumulated quite a few baubles that improve game-play. I thought I would take a moment this morning to talk about the things that I personally find value in from the long list of things available.

Shared Inventory Storage

One of the cool features of Guild Wars 2 is the ability to acquire inventory slots that show up on every single character on your account. These are super useful for storing gadgets that I will get into later as well as any consumables you might like to have access to like teleport to friend or the ever present birthday boosters. I’ve highlighted my shared storage row at the top of my bag in green. Purchased at the cheapest rate you can get 5 slots for 2800 gems which works out to 560 per slot. However like EVERYTHING I am going to talk about today… wait for it to go on sale. The Black Lion store has a somewhat predictable cadence of sales and as such it is certain that ANYTHING you are wanting will eventually go on promotion if you wait it out. Each time you purchase an expansion you get one of these for free.

Permanent Lounge Passes

In Guild Wars 2 there are special “VIP” areas of the game that you gain access to through holding a pass. There are time limited versions of these that are pretty easy to get, but the more interesting variant grants you permanent access to teleport to this location from anywhere in the world. You can check out this run down from the wiki that lists the features that each of them have, but essentially it grants you easy access to banks, vendors, crafting machines, and the market boards. Unfortunately they are not all created equal because Armistice Bastion and Mistlock Sanctuary give you access to a wide variety of teleports as well as the ability to pop right back to the spot that you clicked your pass from. You can get “Lily of the Elon” from purchasing the Deluxe edition of Path of Fire, but I would largely hold out and pick up Mistlock Sanctuary as it seems to be the most compact and useful version. When one of these is available they are 1000 gems, but unfortunately the permanent version of the pass shows up fairly rarely.

Unbreakable Tools

I have to admit two of the most annoying things for me personally when it comes to Guild Wars 2 is the fact that Salvage Kits and Harvesting Tools are a depleting resource. These next two picks fix that, but may not be as big of a deal for you. Unfortunately with the various permanent tool options, they are not account wide which means if you want to actively be using them on all of your characters you have to shell out for MANY sets. They come in really cool cosmetic versions and also these boring plain ones that are a bit cheaper. Again with everything else… wait for them to go on sale.

Copper-Fed Salvage-o-Matic

You are going to spend an exceptional amount of time salvaging gear for materials. This is just part of the core loop of the game and as a result you are going to go through prodigious amounts of salvage kits. For anything green quality or lower I end up using the lowest kit possible, and with this machine you essentially pay 3 copper to destroy an item, which is a .52 copper savings per item salvaged over just buying kits. The real reason why this is worth it however is that it can be used an unlimited number of times and you never have to worry about restocking ever again. I also have a copy of the Runecrafter’s Salvage-o-Matic because it has a 100% chance of recovering upgrades.

World Boss Portal Device

This is new to my repertoire of baubles, but this item when clicked on gives you a list of every event that is just about to happen and allows you to teleport to the nearest waypoint, even if you have not unlocked it yet. This has been the source of so much joy over the last few nights because it makes running world events super seamless and simple. Money very well spent, and now it lives permanently in my shared storage so all of my characters to access these events.

Those are the items that I have personally found extremely useful. Are there any items that I missed that you personally recommend from the cash shop? Again like I said several times, don’t buy anything until it is on sale. If you are curious what is available at any time, the Wiki seems to keep an updated list.

Understanding the Bounce

Good Morning Friends. Sometimes I get something stuck in my head and I have trouble letting go of it. For a decade now, Guild Wars 2 has been this puzzle that I have been trying to crack. I’ve fought and spent countless hours trying to sort out why many of my friends enjoyed it, but that I struggled to latch onto it. Now that I have arrived at the moment where it is really clicking for me… I’ve been puzzling over why exactly I bounced so hard for so many years. Last night I think I landed on the very specific reasons, and this morning I am going to take you on a journey as I dive into them. Ultimately like so many problems in my life it has come down to assumptions and expectations.

In 1996 when I got into the beta for a game from then upstart developer Blizzard called Diablo, it was essentially everything I had wanted in a video game up until that point. Suffice to say that I love Diablo with all of my heart and even though the original is rather kludgy by today’s comparisons, it will always right or wrong be up on a bit of a pedestal. There are times when it is important to understand the lineage of a game and I have talked about in the past how Final Fantasy XIV behaves oddly not because it draws its roots to World of Warcraft, but that it ultimately draws its roots to Everquest and that community by way of Final Fantasy XI which was directly inspired by EQ. As we talk about Guild Wars, we have to start with Diablo and ultimately the games that spun out of Diablo like Lineage and Dungeon Siege.

So while Guild Wars and World of Warcraft were technically contemporaries, there was never a time when I actively compared the two games or even treated them like they were in the same genre. Guild Wars very clearly drew its provenance from Diablo and Lineage by reference whereas World of Warcraft was based out of building a better Everquest. As a result the sort of gameplay that Guild Wars had felt like a fresh take on the dungeon crawler genre, or more so expanded upon it by adding much better story and new kinds of networked gameplay. I did not expect anything more from it than a game that let me kill monsters for stacks of loot, and I found the card based skill system to be interesting. I have always been a huge fan of Magic the Gathering and once I made that mental connection to deck building I was set.

Where we run into problems however is with the release of Guild Wars 2. During the run up to the game there was a lot of very lofty bullshit bandied about by the team. Rather intentional or not, they painted a target on their back of having to bear the burden of being the “WoW Killer”. So as a result I stopped comparing Guild Wars 2 to that provenance of Guild Wars dating back to Diablo… and instead started comparing it directly to World of Warcraft. The comparison did not really hold up because as we all know Guild Wars 2 is doing something very different, and as a result was missing a lot of the underpinnings of that traditional World of Warcraft experience. I gave it a shot but it just did not have the same magic I was hoping it would rekindle from those early days of Warcraft. Like I said I am not sure if this really was intention on the part of the developers or if something that some marketing agency decided needed to happen but in truth they should have spent more time distancing themselves from the MMORPG pack than they did.

The problem for me however is that the damage was already done. Guild Wars 1 mentally was ArenaNet showing me what they could do with the Diablo formula, and as a result I had equated the second game to them showing me their take on World of Warcraft. The word “Warrior” means something very specific to me as a result of that connection. Tales of the Aggronaut started its life as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog, so I had a very specific style of gameplay that I wanted to experience when I rolled this new character type in Guild Wars 2. The disconnect being that Warrior is no more tanky than any other class in the game because there is no traditional trinity of roles, nor should there really be. I kept trying to force Guild Wars 2 into the mold of my experiences from other MMORPGs when I never thought to take a step back and trace the path back to Diablo.

In Diablo you have the Barbarian and it is no more tanky than any other class in that game. It is instead a class defined by melee combat and short duration largely shout based buffs for your team. Effectively you could swap the word Barbarian for Warrior and have a better understanding of what the Guild Wars 2 class is trying to be. However for me the well was poisoned and Guild Was 2 was a game that was “doing warriors wrong!” even though I had been perfectly happy to play the “Warrior as Barbarian” in the original Guild Wars. It is shocking just how much difference the right frame of mind makes when approaching something, and how our assumptions can be the destroyer of possibilities.

One of the problems that I have is that I get hung up on fetishizing specific weapons. For example in Destiny 2, there is never going to be a point where I am not either actively wielding or have in my inventory an Auto Rifle. That is the weapon for me and I will go through some weird contorted lengths to make sure I am using one. Similarly with MMORPGs, I want to be using a sword and a shield… and occasionally an Axe or a Mace will do but the important part is the shield. That is a deep part of what I consider to be a “tank” and why I play them. While I enjoy the non-traditional tanks like the Warrior in FFXIV or the Demon Hunter in World of Warcraft, I will never feel quite as at home as when I have a large chunk of metal strapped to my left arm. This is what is largely referred to as a “class fantasy” and it is one that is completely unsupported by Guild Wars 2.

What changed is that I had a conversation with my friend Tam about what I actually want from a class and he managed to narrow in on one piece of the narrative that I had not caught myself. I want a character with extremely high suitability. So while it is very much not my “class fantasy” he said I should check out the Necromancer and I did precisely that. There is something about playing a caster which is entirely out of my comfort range, and a pet class specifically… and caused me to completely re-frame the experience of playing Guild Wars 2. No longer was I playing a game that was pretending to be World of Warcraft but instead playing a game that very much drew its roots to the Diablo 2/3 Necromancer, another class that I love. Being forcibly pushed out of my comfort zone has allowed me to completely re-imagine the experience of playing Guild Wars 2 for the better.

For years I have believed that Guild Wars 2 was an attempt to build the WoW Killer, because that is what the marketing told me it was. What the game is instead however is a direct successor to Guild Wars 1, taking a lot of the things that worked well there and expanding upon them and building them into a big open world event based game. It is a game where your class doesn’t really matter all that much, but what does matter is the way you build it and the gear that you equip… which is entirely translatable to the experience I have with builds and Diablo 3. With this frame of context everything about the Guild Wars 2 experience suddenly feels better. I’ve been able to chuck it mentally into the appropriate bin of equivalent experiences and now it is absolutely scratching that Diablo itch for me.

Last night I had a freaking blast running around and doing the big World Boss events. At the suggestion of Bhagpuss in my comments yesterday, I spent the 400 gems on the doodad that auto teleports me to any available events. It is maybe some of the best money I have ever spent on a game like this, and the end result was three hours of mayhem and so much loot. Granted a large chunk of it was salvage fodder, but I did manage to pull a really cool exotic staff and more importantly a ton of gossamer and a handful of high end leather as well as a few more crafting patterns. What Guild Wars 2 does best is the drop in nature of the big zone events, and now that I have tackled the mental obstacles that I had placed in front of my enjoyment… it is a glorious experience.