My Horrible Children

This present fascination with Guild Wars 2 continued last night. I have to admit that I am really enjoying this whole Necromancer thing. The class as a whole is an odd blend of the Warlock from World of Warcraft and the Necromancer from Diablo 2/3. You can see my delightful family of horrible children pictured here. Right now I am running a build that is using three pets… two of which that I can use as walking bombs if I so choose to. My gameplay tends to be running around and picking up a bunch of things and then letting my children and a series of curses decimate the entire pack. There is something stupidly fun about this and I have to say… Guild Wars 2 is far more enjoyable as a ranged character than it is as a melee character.

Last night I went down a different sort of rabbit hole. The last time I was extremely active in Guild Wars 2 was back in 2017, and at that time I used an addon of sorts called TaCO… or Tactical Overlay. It offered a number of things in game that you would normally have to tab out to in order to check, like event timers as well as a large variety of map markers for things like jumping puzzles. I had one of those moments yesterday where I suddenly remembered it was a thing that existed, and set forth in an attempt to find it and install it. It turns out that in late 2020 there was an issue that caused a good chunk of the code base to be lost completely. Then in September of 2021 the project appears to have ceased development and is now largely in a defunct state.

That is fine however because apparently someone has decided to pick up the torch and carry it forward. There is a replacement for TaCo called Blish HUD and honestly… after only a little bit with it I would say it is a sizeable improvement. There are two huge benefits to this over TaCo, the first being that it runs as an icon in your system tray so you don’t have to manually run Blish each time before you launch Guild Wars 2 like you did with TaCo. The next benefit is that it is more Framework than specific addon, and as a result there is an addon repository built into the application allowing you to install one or all of the addons from within game. It also appears to support all of the marker and trial packs from TaCo, but those need to be loaded in before launching the game it seems since they are external files that are being referenced.

The other thing that I suddenly remembered existing is GW2 Efficiency, which is a website that tracks all sorts of things about your account. In both cases Blish and Efficiency require you to set up an API key which can be done as part of the Arena Net Account management page. You can create more than one key, so I have taken the effort of making a new one for each website that I want to use. You can create very granular permissions and give a given site only access to the items that are specifically needed for that tool. As always you can check out a number of different resources in the Game Tools menu above on this website under Guild Wars 2. I vaguely remember using Efficiency to tell me what I was sitting on in the bank that I could sell for large amounts of gold… but I am uncertain what of the many sub tools I was using to do that.

As far as progress goes… I have officially made it further into the Heart of Thorns story than I ever have up until this point. Additionally I have collected enough Hero Points to be able to unlock access to the Greatsword… which is cool and all but without unlocking the rest of the skills there is not a whole lot I can do with it. I did play around for a bit with it and I do think that my future shenanigans involve this class and the power reaper spec. At some point I will need to cajole one of the more seasoned Greysky folks to knock me out a set of Berserker gear. I am also spending some time learning about how to upgrade my Reaper greatsword into the pink version through a long collection, so I might start chipping away at that.

I am finding a shocking amount of joy in this game, so we will see how long that lasts. At a bare minimum I needed something that I could play during the podcast on Saturday nights. I made some strategic keybind changes that seem to work better for me as well.