Good Morning Friends! Last night I finished up map completion and it feels great to have finally done this on one of my characters. I did struggle a bit at the very end because I had all of the exploration achievements completed and every zone I moused over was showing 100%. However my World Completion was stuck at 99% so I found a list online of some areas that folks might have missed. I ported to all three of the faction headquarters, which you can zone into and do not seem to count towards map completion for a given area. Then I ported to each of the capitol cities that have a separate chamber used by the ruling body. It turns out it was the council chambers in Rata Sum that I missed and that managed to push me over to 100%.

I now have two Gift of Exploration waiting for me in the bank for Legendary nonsense. I guess at some point I should start working on a Gift of Battle, which I know I will need as well. Now I will probably focus on getting some of the achievements that grant mastery points in the various “expansion” zones like Silverwastes or Dry Top. I also should really push forward in Living World 3 again, but I ended up getting caught up in a pattern of knocking out zones for completion. Doing World Completion made me realize just how much I do not like the Orr zones. My friend Sita talked about that being his favorite area, but I just find them depressing and I am pretty sure the “Quake” color palate is part of it. I would love to see what that area was like in its heyday and I have always wondered if some of the Orr escaped to another area before the fall.

The other thing that I did yesterday was watch the first episode of the Halo television series while eating dinner. I enjoyed it but also you have to understand I have very little connection to this franchise. I know he is a green shootymans that fights purple and blue aliens, and that his name is Master Chief and after that… it all is fuzzy. This series however does not seem like anything I remember from the bits and pieces of the games that I attempted to play, but confession time… I’ve never successfully made it through a Halo game. I hate the mechanics of throw away weapons and all I really wanted was unlimited ammo for the auto rifle that you start with. All of the other weapons felt like trash.

What the series does do is set up an interesting science fiction setting, but I have a feeling it doesn’t come very close to the games. I mean the look and feel seem spot on, and even I have played enough to recognize the shield recharging sound. I also noticed at one point when they were at the UNSC headquarters on Reach that in the background you could hear someone paging “Commander Shepard” which seemed like a nice Mass Effect easter egg. I will likely keep watching it to see where it goes because I went into it expecting next to nothing. I will be curious to hear how the more diehard fans of the series interpret it.

Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I remarked that I really wish I could be a Kodan, the anthropomorphic polar bear race. My friend Ash was like “Hey Bel” and then filled me in on the details of how to make this happen. After that I was off to Bitterfrost Frontier doing enough activity to unlock a heart vendor and then spending 175,000 Karma to get the Endless Kodan Tonic. Now I can run around doing combat as a Bear person at will for as long as I like… or at least until I want to ride a mount where I have to go back to being a Norn. This however pretty neatly encapsulates how I am engaging with Guild Wars 2. There are so damned many things to do that I am allowing myself to get distracted on a mission and then… also allowing myself to get distracted while being distracted. The end result is a whole sequence of fun interactions that eventually lead to really cool things happening.

Active World and Community

Yesterday I came to a bit of a stark realization when I read a comment from my friend Nimgimli. I’ve spent an awful lot of time over the last few weeks talking about the struggles that I had with Guild Wars 2, and not spent much time talking about why I am playing it. I tend to focus on problems and ignore the things that are working… because the whole “if it aint broke, don’t fix it” adage. Once the game clicked with him, I remembered all of the things about it that I already liked. I’ve very much be locked in a pattern of solo play for a very long time… more or less since I quit actively raiding. While that solo play may include queuing for instances from time to time… I am very much off roaming the world on my own as my default action. Guild Wars 2 has this wonderful way of allowing you to blend seamlessly with activities that are happening around you and give you the general feeling of doing bigger group things… without having to ever manage human interactions. I cannot tell you how immensely attractive this prospect is for me because it allows me to feel like I am doing something meaningful without also having to burn through my emotional and social energy.

It does not matter what time of the day it is, there is something going on actively right now in game. There are a number of community driven tools that track what events are happening when and even provide some information on how to participate. The world is alive and bustling and if you show up in the right area, there is a high chance that you can just sort of blend into the crowd, complete the event, and then walk away with some really interesting rewards as a result. Often times the mere act of participating is enough to tick a few boxes in your achievements and set you down a path towards some neat bauble or even some of the account wide mastery points. It gives this feeling that literally anything I could be doing is at least somewhat useful from the small events popping up in a given zone to the big world boss encounters.

Daily Completionist

This however leads to the problem of having an overwhelming number of things that you could be doing at any given time. Ultimately my day is centered around the reset, which in my timezone happens at 7 pm CDT. There are a lot of things in Guild Wars 2 that are on a daily timer like bonus loot from world bosses or various treasure chests scattered through the game. Each day you are presented with sixteen daily achievements divided between 4 PVP, 4 WvW, and 4 PVE activities. Essentially I look through these and try and determine which three I am going to go after in a given day. Since I don’t do PVP those are ruled out quickly but I am willing to go into WVW. For example yesterday I thought it was going to be easier to do Master of Monuments which involves taking one of the shrines and Caravan Disruptor which involves finding a supply Dolyak and killing it. I always do whatever harvesting achievement there is because these pay out a large chest full of related harvest goods. Completing any three will reward you with “Daily Completionist” giving you a flat two gold, a small bag of spirit shards, and 10 achievement points. Two gold is honestly a lot of money in Guild Wars 2, especially if you are starting out and it makes this absolutely worth knocking out every day.

These daily micro missions give me certain zones that I need to target and while doing that… I more or less allow myself to get swept up in whatever happens to be going on in a zone. If I see a commander tag up on the minimap, it is often worth wandering over in that direction to see what is happening. While roaming around I allow myself to stop and harvest nodes as I come across them, or if it is a zone that I have not completed yet knock out progress along the way. Essentially it gives me a sense of purpose as I move through the world doing whatever happens to cross my path while trying to achieve the overarching goal of knocking out that daily completion bonus. Every so often I will deal with the loot in my bags to see if anything interesting might have ended up in there. I feel like it is important to talk about one of my favorite systems that this game has that I have appreciated from day one.

Deposit All Materials

In the top corner of your bag is an icon labelled “Deposit All Materials”. This button magically whisks away everything that can fit in your account wide material storage. This can then be drawn on while accessing either your bank or a crafting machine, or automatically as you are creating anything. By default you can storage up to 1000 of any given item, and there are separate storage slots for refined and raw materials. This is the system that drives another core system of the game. Doing things in the world is going to give you “stuff” and most of that stuff is not usable by itself. However there is a magical salvage system that lets you take this dross and turn it into raw materials… that then can disappear from your inventory into your account wide stores. Meaning that every character no matter of what level they are… are helping to fill your bank with things that are ultimately going to be useful in the future.

Now you can liquidate your stores of materials and make a pretty hefty profit doing that. However what I tend to do is let them build up and then use my vast stores to help level some tradeskill. Right now I have Armorsmithing, Weaponsmithing, Cooking and Tailoring above 400 with Weaponsmithing capped at 500. That means that I can create effectively “end game” items for myself or for my friends. However there are a bunch of other trades that I want to level like Leatherworking or Artificing and me actively participating in the world is slowly creating a backlog of materials that I can convert into levels when I made a conscious decision that I am going to spend my night crafting. It creates the cycle of feeling like everything that I am doing regardless of what it is… somehow benefits me in the future. I can either turn all of these random items that I am picking up into direct profit through the trading post, or a more long tailed benefit like maxing out a crafting profession.

Shared Progression

Another thing that I love about harvesting and crafting is that I can put it to use towards a shared objective. Greysky Armada has a lovely guild hall and recently we moved to the Cantha based one. However this is maybe one of the longest grinds in the game of slowly unlocking and upgrading things. You could of course buy your way to victory, but it would cost multiple thousands of gold to burn through the progression path. Instead what it really benefits is everyone in the guild keeping an eye out for various materials while you are progressing through the game. At any point you can walk up to the treasury vendor in the guild hall and deposit materials. These are then used as part of various restoration projects. For example in the second sub panel above it shows we are working on “Workshop Restoration 2” and have managed to gather everything needed but Linseed Oil and Elonian Leather Squares.

Both of these can be bought from the Trading post but given that Linseed Oil goes for roughly half a gold each and Elonian Leather for roughly 4.5 gold each they are something better tackled slowly over time. I personally can craft one piece of Elonian Leather each day, or the various world activities have a chance of rewarding either as I go about my travels. Linseed Oil specifically can be refined from Flax, so I am always on the look out for any of that to harvest as I roam around. This gives yet another mission in the back of my head that impacts what I might be doing on a given night. There are a lot of grinds like this in Guild Wars 2 where it can be extremely painful if you try and brute force it, but over time you end up happening into a lot of the materials along the journey.

Long Tailed Grinds

Similarly the Achievement system creates a bunch of very long term grinds that you can work on as much or as little as you like. For example a few things that I am slowly completing are my Agent’s Pack which gives me a level 80 Exotic backpack item that I can customize to be any specific stat package. While it isn’t super useful for my current main, it would give me access to a nice backpack for one of my alts and is largely something I am doing passively as I move around the zones and collect Heart of Thorns currencies. A more active grind however is that I am working very slowly on trying to craft my first Legendary Weapon.

I’ve targeted one of the old school and extremely expensive weapons the Greatsword Twilight. When it is available on the trading post it goes for upwards of 3000 gold, and even the exotic precursor weapon goes for around 400 gold. This means the best way for me access this is to go through the process of crafting both the precursor and ultimately the legendary weapon. However the steps required for this are a sequence of four different achievements, each with a bunch of things that you need to accomplish to finish. For example one of the items I need to do is wait in a zone for a specific event to happen and then complete that event… at the end of which an NPC spawns that allows me to talk to them and check off a step. Sure I could specifically target items… but in me just going about my business I have already completed four parts of this first step.

The World Boss Train

If I am in the mood for action, there are times I decide that I am going to spend my entire night farming world boss encounters. There are enough of these and they are arranged in such a way as to always have one just about to start. So beginning at server reset and with Tequatl the Sunless in Sparkfly Fen, I will begin a course of encounters that last upwards of three hours if I let it. There is enough of a gap between bosses to allow you to travel to the next zone in sequence and also have some time to repair if needed and sort through any loot you got from the last boss before the new one spawns in. Each boss has just enough mechanics to be interesting… but is simple enough that you can sort of go along with the flow and learn what is happening at your own pace.

So one of the things that games like World of Warcraft have taught me is to fear other players. If someone is in the area they might gank my spawn, steal a chest that I am clearing towards, or harvest that node I wanted. Guild Wars 2 instead makes me actively seek out large groups of players because there really is no negative interaction and no fears of PVP. In fact players will usually go out of their way to resurrect fallen players because the experience gained and progress towards various achievements make it always valuable on top of the community result of just being the right thing to do. Similarly more often than not Guild Wars 2 players will go out of the way to help players out if they happen to be running along and see someone overwhelmed. Sure there are some negative elements like there always are, but the folks who self label themselves as Commanders do a pretty good job of leading whatever activity happens to be going on.

Chill Progression

Then there are times when ALL of this seems too much, and I need some thing more contemplative. Those are the times when I fall back on zone completion either on my main or one of my many alts. One of the things that will ultimately be required for crafting a legendary weapon is Gift of Exploration, which is received through getting a character to 100% world completion in the old world. There is something relaxing about roaming around a zone and ticking of micro accomplishments. This might be completing hearts or finding points of interest… which in itself often leads me to participate in a bunch of events along the way. Zone completion gives me an overarching goal that is just enough forward momentum to feel like I accomplished something, but a slow enough pace that I can turn off my brain and just meld into the background of the game.

I’ve nearly completed the map on my current main, and when I finish it… I will probably start doing the same as my downtime activity for various alts that are nowhere near finishing. The end result of ALL of the above gives me a wide variety of activities that I could be doing on any given evening and still feel like it was an enjoyable experience. Since the game is based on horizontal progression rather than vertical… everything I am doing feels permanent. When I get a set of gear it isn’t going to be invalidated by the next expansion and can spend my time focusing on other things. Additionally there are multiple paths to get there and Achievements, Crafting, Fractals, Raids, Strikes, World vs World, and even PVP are all treated as equal parties giving you effectively similar results and progression systems. If you are like me and wanting to do a little bit of everything… you can get small bits of progression towards a lot of different objectives.

Rich and Interesting World

One I got past my hangups about Guild Wars 2… which admittedly is MOST of what I have been talking about… I’ve rapidly fallen in love with the game. There were aspects of it that I always enjoyed and respected. Tyria is a highly detailed and intricate place. There are so many neat details in the world… for example the Kodan in the north traveled south to avoid the “Bad Ice” from Jormag and arrived her on ships fashioned out of Icebergs that they built cities on top of and fashioned sails to effectively move the entire icy landmass. That is just conceptually a cool idea and nothing I had seen in any other game, and not really pushed as a key plot point… just something that happens to be going on in the zone. There are so many little cool moments like this or places to visit in the world.

I’ve not even touched on the story at all, but as I have arrived at Living World Season 3, things are really starting to get interesting. Up through Heart of Thorns the writing was admittedly a bit rough, and now that we are going to get the missing piece of Living World Season 1, I hope they take a chance to tweak it a bit and make it a better experience. However I am enjoying where I am in the narrative and there will be nights where I focus on nothing but pushing it forward and ultimately unlocking access to new zones to explore. There are just so many different things that I want to do, and at any given turn I can freely jump tracks between them without feeling like I am sacrificing anything in the process. It is all waiting there for me to be experienced on my own pace and in any way that I choose.

These and likely many more reasons are why I am actively playing Guild Wars 2. I am feeling with this game like I felt with games like The Witcher 3 or Control that I was late in playing, wishing that I had come to understand it sooner. I actively fought playing this game to be honest because of negative experiences I had during the alpha test that forever colored my impressions of it. I am thankful for htis new perspective that I have arrived at, and just wish I had done so earlier. Now I feel like I am going to forever be playing catch up, but there is no real pressure to actually arrive at any specific point in said progression. Nothing I am doing feels outdated or useless and I know that I will just keep unlocking more interesting things to spend my time doing. The game is thriving right now and every single zone that I walk into seems to be bustling with players, which means there really isn’t anything that I don’t have access to.

So this is the post that I probably should have led with before I started talking about the woes I have experienced. I do think some of the other posts are important to set a frame of reference however.

Last night I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine as they struggled to figure out which class that they wanted to play in Guild Wars 2, and it reminded me of something that I did not talk about yesterday. This is potentially the largest challenge that I had to overcome, and it is wrapping my head around the concept of class as it relates to this game. World of Warcraft and Everquest before it poisoned the well when it came to thinking about what a class means. For me each word associated with a class meant something specific, and this ultimately will set you off on the wrong foot when it comes to understanding Guild Wars.

Going into this game I brought with me a lot of assumptions about what each class available meant. I am going to share with you those assumptions and then the reality check that I had to have in order to wrap my head around the truth. Here goes some bad takes:

• Elementalist – Glass cannon caster that hurls fireballs at things and falls over if anything looks at them wrong… aka WoW Mage.
• Engineer – Ranged class that maybe uses mechanical pets or traps. Basically an old school survival hunter from WoW.
• Guardian – The Paladin, tries to be a Warrior but mostly fails and is resigned to a support role.
• Mesmer – The illusionist… essentially the Everquest Enchanter.
• Necromancer – Squishy caster that only really survives because of their undead pets that they summon.
• Ranger – Ranged pet class aka the WoW Beastmaster Hunter.
• Revenant – Seems a lot like a Frost Death Knight from WoW.
• Thief – Lightweight melee class that relies on stealth and sneak attacks to survive aka WoW Rogue.
• Warrior – Tank or at least a Tanky DPS. High survival and can just soak damage.

Talking with my friend last night, it sounds like they also made some of these assumptions because it is what we are used to thinking when we think of “class”. However while you can effectively play each of them as the thing I said… they are so much more than that. Guild Wars 2 specifically uses the term profession instead of class, but I have to admit that I did not catch onto this because I already had my mind set down a specific path. The truth is none of the professions have a fixed path that you have to or are supposed to follow. They are instead a combination of choices made in your build, the gear that you are wearing, and most importantly the weapon combinations that you choose to be using.

Instead it is best to think of the “classes” of Guild Wars 2 as classes from Dungeons and Dragons or any other pen and paper roleplaying game. They are archetypes but do not dictate the role that you will play. For example in Dungeons and Dragons it is super easy to create a Cleric and turn them into a murder machine on the battlefield… or resign to the back line as their more common role of the healer or combat medic. Cleric is less a specific role that is played and more a style of magic that is used, and for the most part this type of mindset translates over to Guild Wars 2 very well. Your profession dictates the types of abilities that you are going to have access to, but not necessarily what you do with them.

So for example if we go back through the list of professions, here is a more truthful statement about what they represent. Granted this is my understanding and it might conflict with yours… so bear with me.

• Elementalist – Has access to elemental magic fire/ice/lightning etc and things related to that.
• Engineer – The tinkerer or artificer that has access to things related to machinery and technology based attacks.
• Guardian – I mean it is a Paladin but think of it as a Holy Warrior archetype with access to auras and holy magic.
• Mesmer – Illusionist is correct but way more broad and adaptable with the ability to bend reality.
• Necromancer – Anything related to Death, Blood, or Curse Magic is its jam which of course also includes reanimating dead things to fight for it.
• Ranger – Deep affinity with nature magic and its pet bond, with a wide variety of pets to choose from.
• Revenant – Draws strength from the ancestors and what that means is determined greatly by which ancestor you are choosing to channel.
• Thief – Relies on Agility, Stealth, Surprise and an acrobatic fighting style but can go in a bunch of different directions.
• Warrior – Adrenaline fueled combatant that relies on shouts, banners, and rage style mechanics to command the battlefield and also buff the party.

I have been spending most of my time playing Necromancer of late so let’s use that as an example. When I first started playing the class I was using more of a pure caster build where I stood back and cast spells with my staff and let the pets do most of the work. When I learned the Reaper elite specialization from Heart of Thorns, I transitioned to playing more of something akin to a World of Warcraft Death Knight or Everquest Shadow Knight. This allowed me to be a big tanky melee with a great sword and hacking the enemies up while my pets kept me healed. Yesterday I finished learning Harbinger the specialization from End of Dragons, and it allowed me to start playing a sort of gunslinger build where I fire pistols at my opponents and the bullets ricochet through the entire pack. These are three wildly different feeling builds, all out of the same class… and I am certain there are other builds I could have gone with that would have taken it in wildly different directions.

It was a hard fought realization, but the truth is the weapons you decide to bring to the battlefield and the abilities that you pair with them are what makes your character… not your class. As a result I spent a decade trying to make this game fit a model that it just did not. I kept trying to make the Warrior be this uber tank, when it was way more suited to being something completely different. I can of course BUILD the Warrior tanky… just not in the way I wanted it to be, and it will never be the tank archtype from other games either. It was not until I pushed myself completely out of my comfort zone with a “finger wiggler” class that I started to understand that my preconceived notions were getting in the way of my enjoyment.

This is just a me thing but mentally I started thinking of it in terms of Diablo 3, and how I build characters there and how wildly different a Barbarian can be for example depending on how you gear them. A Barbarian is no more tanky than any other class in that game, but it can take on that role if geared and built correctly. Guild Wars 2 essentially works in a very similar pattern and placing the game in that sort of headspace helped me to really engage with it. I am not sure if this will help anyone out there who has tried and failed to engage with it, but this is what worked for me. Based on a few conversations last night, it sounds like some of my friends are also standing on this precipice as well.