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.