Good Morning Friends. I had planned on blogging yesterday but reality got in the way of everything else in my life. Essentially long story short about 6 pm on Monday night our internet went to complete shit. I am not sure what happened exactly, but suffice to say that we could not maintain any sort of a stable connection. I logged into the web page for my internet provider and they indicated that there was an issue in my area and gave a resolution time of after midnight. At this point, I ended up tethering to my phone for the rest of the evening and going about my business of playing Guild Wars 2 and trying not to think about it.
When I got up yesterday morning… the internet was still shit. This began a panic-induced sequence of events that lead me to skip my coffee, skip blogging, and skip breakfast. After several hours on the phone with the ISP, we ended up seemingly isolating the problem to my router. Truth be told for whatever reason we only seem to get a few years out of a router before it flakes out. It might be the sheer number of devices that we have connected to it, the volume of usage… or the fact that my office gets hot as hell during the winter months. Whatever the case “routers going out” is a problem that we have dealt with throughout the years and when I looked the purchase date of my current one up it has been in service for a little over four years. I guess it was due and I have a replacement upgrade on the way, but for the time being, I am limping along hoping that really was the case.
What have I been doing? Playing an excessive amount of Guild Wars 2… and no one is more shocked by this than I am. GW2 and I have had a rough past, and while I know I have recounted the tale many times… I was an alpha tester for the game and in fact, recently I found the copy I kept of the NDA paperwork that I had to get notarized and snail mail to ArenaNet. Guild Wars 2 is also the only game I have ever resigned from testing and in part, there were a few of us as there was a massive thread called something to the akin of “It’s Just Not for Me” on the tester exclusive forums. But more recently after starting the Necromancer… something has clicked and I am not sure exactly what. It might be that my play style has changed and it might be that going into playing the Necromancer caused me to go in without any built-up expectations for what the class should feel like. Whatever the case I find myself reveling in all of the little details about how this game functions and how it fits my current “solo but also want to do drop-in group activities” playstyle.
In that vein, I need to sort out how best to follow along the meta train. Guild Wars 2 has this lovely rotating sequence of World Boss events and zone-wide Meta events so that a player can theoretically hop in and ride the wave of encounters until they are ready to stop for the night. Each one of the rewards a bunch of interesting things before zooming on to the next one. The only negative for me right now is that I do not have a lot of world progress, so moving around is probably going to be a bit more challenging than it would normally be for folks following this train. I spent some time last night working on that since my internet connection was less than stable. I need to look up a guide to the closest part to all of the world bosses and then I could at least make sure I had unlocked that specifically. Ultimately I am in a place where I need a lot of high-end crafting materials and riding the meta seems like a reasonable way to get some of those.
Ultimately I made a decision the other night that if I was going to need to spend a lot of gold on gearing… that I might as well just spend that gold on leveling a trade profession. As a result, then I pushed Tailoring to 400 in a single evening, and I even have the spiffy professional backpack to prove my efforts. Truth be told that backpack was an excellent gear upgrade because it was a customizable item. That is one cool thing about a lot of boss drops in Guild Wars 2 is that you can determine what stats you want on the item by right-clicking on it and choosing “Customize”. This allows you to kit out your character in the right items for the right slots without a ton of hassle, and it seems a lot of the zone metas like those in Heart of Thorns drop these customizable items. When I say “zone meta” what I mean by that is an hour or two long sequence of world events that ultimately culminate in a giant boss fight.
Another thing that I have done recently is to abandon the Braham outfit and venture out to create my own appearance. This is what I have landed on and I look like I have just taken the black and shipped up north to guard the wall. I don’t normally dig “light armor” classes and in truth, nothing about the Necromancer Reaper build FEELS like I am wearing tissue-thin armor. However, for cosmetic purposes, I am limited to only light appearances. I think I have landed on a gear style that looks good together and feels more like I am wearing a set of heavy leather than cloth. I think it fits my Norn very well and seems like something a man of the north would wear.
Now here is hoping that I can put my internet woes behind me in short order.
I wouldn’t normally suggest going to the Gem shop for anything since I’ve managed for a decade without bothering with it but there’s an item you can get there that both tells you which World Boss is up next and lets you portal directly to it, I think whether or not you already have the waypoint. It’s called the World Boss Portal Device and it’s the last item in the Utilities tab. It’s only 400 gems, too, which is cheap by ANet’s prices.
This was legitimately a great call. I have been spending my night ping ponging around the map doing different world bosses. Having a freaking blast.
It sounds like you had the same internet issues we had the past few nights. Sunday and Monday night around midnight, our internet would go out, and Spectrum wouldn’t report an outage until way later. Yesterday we didn’t get our internet back until 9am, so, I had to tether my work laptop to my phone to start my day, and hope the LTE signal held.