Good Morning Friends! One of the things about me that I find odd is for as much as I claim to enjoy spontaneous events in games… I find myself falling into a large number of routines. For example I have begun this lunch time routine of working on whatever the World vs World dailies are for the previous reset. The server reset happens at 7 pm my time, and often times I chew through the PVE requirements and use those as a guide to determine what I am doing in a given evening. However that leaves some valuable dailies still on the table and I have realized that I can usually do at least two of them solo. Each daily done is direct rewards track progress via the potion you get, so this gives me a fairly casual way of getting my Gift of Battle progress. Admittedly I could do the thing that folks talk about and just grind out eight hours worth of solid progress on a weekend… but I would far rather spend thirty minutes to an hour each day and get incremental progress. I am however close enough that I might finish it up this week.
I am still progressing my way through the Path of Fire story. I now have my skimmer and I am guessing next comes the Jackal. I’ve arrived at the Domain of Vabbi through questing and honestly I like that area quite a bit. The Desolation is a zone I need to revisit but it seemed to be a bit painful to navigate. Vabbi on the other hand seems completely reasonable and I have had a lot of fun doing content in it. It does not hurt that last nights PVE event completion daily took place in the same zone I have spent quite a bit of time lately chipping away at.
Prior to the reset I even seem to have lucked into part of the meta, or at least a series of events that reward a Hero’s Choice chest. I honestly damned near solo’d this event because for the first phases I had an Engineer with me, but when the two legendary hounds started attacking they kept dying in a place that I found it extremely hard to resurrect them. I solo burned them down through the first several phases of the encounter, because every 25% health they swap places and one hound becomes invulnerable and the other becomes the main target. Once they get below 25% health in total however they both start attacking and I had whittled them both down to around 15% when a group of players showed up to help me finish out the event. Most of that time though I was solo kiting while waiting on my Flesh Golem to cooldown.
Once reset happened though, this sleepy hamlet of a zone become hopping. I think that is one of the cooler things about the Daily quests is how they focus the player base on a specific segment of the game. If you are able to be on at the time the daily reset happens, you can guarantee a massive amount of players trying to complete the same content at the same time. One thing that I have noticed that is pretty great is that for the jumping puzzles, there is almost always someone in the looking for group tool with an open party that you can use “teleport to friend” on and get completion. After having it suggested to me many times I am starting to pay a bit more attention to the tool and have joined a few groups through it.
The timing landed just right and I happened into a run of Dragon’s Stand later in the evening. I poked my other guild members and Ash and Tam happened to get slots in the southern group with me. This went exceptionally smoothly and I arrived in zone just before the last attempt failed, so we had a critical mass of players ready to go immediately. I think for the next run I am going to need to go mid so I can finish my mastery points for completing the event on a specific lane. I also probably need to focus on the bosses a bit because I noticed there were achievements for those as well. I don’t really have any speed boost abilities so I am better suited for the boss burn party rather than the folks running around in a ring killing the dudes who regenerate the towers.
I closed out my evening with a daily dungeon run, and I am super happy the timing landed in a way as to be able to do it. Granted I got to bed a little later than normal, but it was worth it. We only did the story mode version, but picked up a random player who was outside the instance asking for a group. The person seemed nice enough so I friended them for later shenanigans. I need to work on building out my friends list in Guild Wars 2, because this absolutely seems like a game where having a deep list could be beneficial. This game lives in this weird place where most grouping is inconsequential to your enjoyment… but then there are other modes of play with STRICT grouping and no auto matching tool to act as a bridge. I want to be able to explore more of the game and I know in order to do so I am going to have to reach out a bit. I have access to a large multi-game guild and I have contemplated joining up on one of my guild slots. I need to see what their rules are regarding representation because really I still plan on spending most of my time in Greysky chat.
All told though another great night in Guild Was 2 doing a staggering variety of different things. I think more than anything that is the thing that I am enjoying. So often I get into situations in MMORPGs where every night feels pretty much the same, because I end up doing the same things. Between slowly chewing through the story, allowing myself to get caught up in events, and occasionally doing more structured group activities… it all seems fresh. Granted in several years of doing all of this I am sure it would start to feel stale. Prior to this resurgence I had put in around 200 hours in the game, but it was spread out over the course of the decade it has been in operation. Belgraven my Necromancer is a character that I created when I returned… and it already has 240 hours worth of playtime associated with it according to GW2 Efficiency.