Good Morning Friends. I am moving in slow motion today because I ended up sleeping in super late. I am technically in vacation mode for the next few days but decided I should probably still blog. In Guild Wars 2 last night I made some movement in Living World Season 3. I also came to a decision with what to do regarding my Perm Auction contract. Ultimately I went with an instant sale and got it over with because just having to think about it was stressing me out. All of the third party ways of trading goods seemed super sketchy and I decided I would rather have “some” money hassle free as opposed to maybe getting zero money and jumping through a bunch of hoops. The first thing I did with the windfall was spend about 500 gold in materials to help the Guild Hall upgrade a little quicker.
This screenshot does not do this justice. I am sorta terrified of deep water, and one of the most horrifying moments in my life for me was traveling to the edge of the continental shelf in a submarine and seeing the seemingly dark endless abyss. As a result games like Subnautica trigger a deep primal fear in me at times, and yesterday Guild Wars 2 absolutely tapped into this. I was swimming through an area in Mount Maelstrom and saw this gigantic fish thing and for reference… I am maybe about half the size of its fin. It is very hard to really appreciate the scale while in a very flattened screenshot and not seeing it in motion. I did my best to avoid it because it was also a champion.
I did have a moment yesterday that made me want to throw my laptop. I was doing this mission where I was supposed to be bonding with Aurene the baby dragon. The final stage was to fight a Mordrem and there is an ability that I had to fire that caused both my character and Aurene to attack at the same time. Problem is we would collectively get the mob down to around 25% health and then it would instantly heal back up. So my original thought process was that I was simply not burning hard enough to be able to defeat it in the hard time limit. I fought this thing for over an hour straight trying to burn harder because it could not kill me, and I clearly could not kill it.
Eventually I AFK’d during the fight and started watching YouTube videos to try and figure out what the gimmick was. It turns out that it is impossible to kill it in one go, and it does this ability that causes it to regenerate health by damaging you and Aurene. However it also gains health for damaging your pets. As a Necromancer on average I have somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to ten pets up at any given time, so to me it seemed like the Modrem was just healing back to full health instantly because it was soaking in tiny bits of health… but from like 12 targets at a time causing it to jump straight back to 100% health.
This is one of the frustrating things that can happen in Guild Wars 2 is that there are times… especially with older content that it is really bad at messaging what the hell is actually going on. Unfortunately with a Necromancer I have no control over my pets and once I have summoned them… I can’t dismiss them. So what ended up happening is I had to struggle to find a way to actually die on the encounter, and then restart at the check point and do the fight without my pets. After an hour of failing… the entire fight only took a few minutes once I figured out the gimmick that I had to follow. I really hate gimmick fights regardless of the game, but I hate them even more when it is deeply unclear what is actually going on.
So, we did this mission in co-op for Lyle recently: It turns out that if you are OP enough, you can just ignore mechanics, and there were three high-damage builds in that story instance that only expected one person.
That said, there are a number of “team up with Aurene” moments that need that button coming up, so it’s a bit of a recurring gimmick. It eventually feels like less of one, but that particular story instance frustrates me anyway.