Friends I have very clearly lost my damned mind. Originally I was planning on playing some Guild Wars 2 tonight because I would not have access to the downstairs television where the PlayStation 5 is connected. As a result all day I was planning on playing some more Horizon Forbidden West and moving forward with knocking some of the side quests out. Instead as it was fated I ended up having a late afternoon conversation with a friend about my struggles with Guild Wars 2. The problem for me is that “Warrior” has always meant tanky and the Guild Wars 2 warrior just does not feel tanky to me. So I went through this entire diatribe of explaining what I wanted out of a class and I got an answer I was not expecting.
Essentially my friend said that while I would not like the class fantasy of it… that it really sounded like I wanted to play a Reaper Necromancer which is the Greatsword based elite specialization that came with Heart of Thorns. I already had a Necromancer, but he is a Char… and I have to admit I don’t love Char for the same reason that I don’t love Tauren. They feel slow and lumbering, which is ironic given that when I re-rolled the class I also went with a large race… my favorite of the GW2 races… the Norn. So instead of spending a night in Horizon Forbidden West, I created a brand new character and returned to Guild Wars 2… a game with which I have an exceptionally checkered past. The initial problem is that even starting down the Reaper path is going to require me to grind out a bunch of Hero points, so ultimately I needed to learn how to play Necromancer in default mode.
Where things go really off the rails however is that Thalen who happened to be online mentioned that the WVW daily quest was really easy today. One of the required components was something that could just be purchased cheaply in the Guild Hall. In truth I have only participated in WVW once or twice in the entirety of Guild Wars 2 and the last instance I specifically remember is when I joined Liore and a few others and all joined together around the time the game launched. Suffice to say I am a newbie in such things… and as a result I asked an innocent question. “How the heck do I get access to my mount in WvW?”. This friends is an answer that ultimately dominated t he rest of my evening.
It began simple enough, that I had to rank up once and then purchase the Warclaw Mastery track. Then I had to complete that track, along with completing a collection of items that can only be found in WvW. That sounded easy enough, but essentially I legitimately spent the rest of the evening in WvW. That is enough time to see one skirmish finish and another skirmish get to about the halfway point. The truth is… while I suck at PVP interaction… the entire experience was pretty great. There are enough things going on in the map that much like Alterac Valley you can hang back and do useful things even if you are not with the vanguard charging up against the major objectives. Before I knew it I was starting to knock out these collection bits. For anyone who comes along before me… this is what is needed to complete the Warclaw Mount Collection:
- Emblem – You get this through unlocking the Warclaw Mastery track
- Tail Armor – This comes from defeating and looking any Veteran guarding an objective. Seems to have a non-100% drop chance.
- Horn Spikes – Participate in the capture anything flagged as an enemy camp.
- Saddle – Participate in the capture of one of the enemy towers.
- Gorget – Participate in the capture of one of the enemy keeps.
- Leg Armor – Purchased for 250 Badges of Honor from the Warclaw Tender
- Body Armor – Purchased for 50 WvW Skirmish Tickets from the Warclaw Tender
- Helmet – Gained from completing the entire Warclaw Mastery Track.
Lastly after doing ALL of this you need to go back to the Warclaw Tender and purchase your license for 8 gold. After that you have a new mount that you can use to zip around the battlefield in WvW. I believe you can also ride it out in the wild, but any of the mastery upgrades only really apply to PVP.
At the end of the night I managed to gather up 5 of the 8 armor pieces needed for the Warclaw Companion collection. Of the few that I am missing, the one that really concerns me is the Gorget gained through capturing a Keep. All night I was not able to find a map that had a keep that someone was trying to capture for team blue, seeing as Yaks Bend is paired with another server group to represent that faction currently. The body armor should be gained pretty quickly, I think I am 3 WvW tickets shy of being able to pick that up. Lastly the mastery track is just going to take a lot more WvW in order to get. I need to go rifling through my bank because I am almost certain to have some WvW tokens that I can burn through.
So there you have it friends. I set out with the mission of trying out Reaper for the Necromancer… and made zero progress towards that goal. Instead I wound up down this rabbit trail of trying to get access to a mount in WvW in order to make the daily quests go quicker. I am not proud of myself and I am confused about who I even am… seeing as I am supposedly allergic to PVP. I am even more confused that I actually found myself enjoying my currently pure caster Necromancer. I like my army of disturbing looking pets that I can explode for extra damage. I might need an intervention because I am not even sure who I am at this point.
If you find yourself playing GW2 however, I am over on Yaks Bend which does not really matter and you can friend me up with “belghast.5496”. I saw a lot of familiar faces like Ardua, Lvrfmsc, Rowan, and Sctrz at which point I remembered… oh yeah this is where they hang their hats these days. I was mostly quiet other than talking in guild chat to Thalen however, because I was apparently a man on a mission… just not the mission I had originally started on. It was a weird night, but a mostly enjoyable night.
just got back into this game for the expansion. Don’t know what the heck is going on, there is so much to do, all my characters are maxed out. I was also thinking of restarting my Necro for the same exact reason! I am going to delete it now knowing I am not the only one.
Hah! That’s very funny! I’ve been on Yaks Bend since launch, on two of my three accounts – I moved one to Ehmry Bay a few years back. I’ll add you to friends but I imagine due to our different time zones we’re unlikely to be on at the same time all that often. I’d add Rowan too, if I knew his ID.
WvW is and always has been PvPvE rather than PvP. In the old days, when a lot of people cared about the match result, people took the PvE part pretty seriously but it’s been a few years since more than a handful of people really bothered about which side is winning. That said, it does vary enormously from server to server and there are some guilds who do pretty much nothing but PvE in WvW (Usually known as PvD – Player vs Door – because they go round and round taking structures all day). If you can tag on to one of those squads you’ll get your keep easily enough although on YB (aka Borlis Pass) at the moment, your best chance is probably when we take back our stuff after someone else has captured it all.
The new expansion is very good, by the way, just in case you find yourself getting into GW2 after all.
rowanblaze.2134 🙂
Thanks! I’ll send you mine in game! Literally can’t remember what it is without logging in.
Haha, I had to do exactly that. Ended up on the GW2 website to find it.
Dang! I’m sorry I missed you. Yeah, we’re pretty much online at least for a little bit every evening. If you ever want to run a few HPs on your Necro, I’d be happy to help. Definitely have a few alts that need it.
And Reaper is amazing, though I ended up keeping my minion army rather than using the Reaper skills.
Couple additional notes:
If you have any boosters those can speed up both the reward track and earning xp for rank gain. Experience boosters will bump both by 50% for 2 hours which can make burning through the reward track a lot faster. Celebration and Birthday boosters only boost reward track by 10% but they double rank xp.
As you do WvW you’ll earn skirmish chests which have a bunch of options to pull from them. If you take Testimonies of Jade Heroics you can exchange those for items that will complete a random hero challenge. Effectively you can trade those testimonies in for hero points at a 1:1 rate. So you could WvW and unlock Reaper that way.