Sometimes you don’t have to look terribly far to find nonsense in games… sometimes it finds you. Mistlock Sanctuary is an extremely handy place to have access to, and honestly half of the time it becomes the unofficial Guild Hall of Greysky Armada given that it tends to be where we all meet up on the regular. It is essentially a tightly condensed area that has all of the vendors and services that you might need from a town, and allows you to teleport right back to where you were before entering. It becomes a hangout spot for lots of folks within the Guild Wars 2 community, including apparently a group of Thundershrimps. I briefly joined this hivemind when I noticed there were two players glamoured to this appearance following me around the Mists… and then shortly I received an mail message with a tonic attached.
It was fun… nonsensical… and we slowly gained numbers until I believe right before I left we had six players running around as shrimp. I think this might be the highlight of my weekend and I am leading off this mornings post using it as a reminder. There are moments in MMORPGs that are completely meaningless in the scope of the game itself or your own progression… but are absolutely moments worth indulging in. The above image is from our old FC house on Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV, and that night a bunch of us just happened to be wearing the newly added Dragon Quest Slime Hat… and proceeded to dance around for thirty minutes. Moments like this is well worth indulging when they happen, and I think are good for the soul.
The other highlight of the weekend is getting a new ascended weapon for free. Since coming back I have been trying to run Tequatl as many times as possible. There are days where the stars have not aligned, but more times than not… I am running this each time the server resets. I have known for awhile that there is a very rare chance of getting ascended weapons to drop, and I believe Friday night I managed to get a Settlers chest to drop. Seeing as I had crafted a Greatsword already, I opted instead to go pistol given that I am spending so much time as Harbinger of late. I immediately took it to the mystic toilet and changed its stat package to something more reasonable for the sort of nonsense I have been doing of late. I may never actually see another of these, but it isn’t going to stop me from trying each day. I could now really use a dagger and a staff.
Another great moment from the weekend is that Sunday afternoon the stars aligned and a bunch of us ran some fractals. I needed three for the first part of the Twilight precursor quest, and Thalen needed three different ones for some other quest. I’ve decided that Fractals are more or less what Mythic+ feels like in World of Warcraft. While the Fractals themselves are shorter, the pace feels similar and the fact that they scale over time also feels similar. I really think that this was the dungeon content I had been looking for, and while Tam kept telling me that… I was bad at listening because my preconceived notions of what that meant kept getting in the way. This whole experience of coming back to Guild Wars 2 and it lighting a fire in me… has also made me realize how generally closed minded I have been when it comes to MMORPGs. If the game did not fit a specific mold that I had determined was optimized for my enjoyment… I wanted no part of it.
Lastly for the weekend I spent a good deal of time chipping away at Living World Season 4. If my theory is correct, I am nearing the end of Chapter 5 and will be starting the final chapter soon. Not every new map is a winner, but I have to say LW4 so far has had far more winners than losers. I love the intricacy of each new map, and this is honestly slowing me down in my progress because I keep getting distracted by events and metas. Admittedly this is artificially causing me to engage with the content as though it were releasing more slowly, rather than just powering through it. We talked a bit about this over the weekend, but when you are powering through things you have trouble realizing that significant chunks of time have passed in game between content drops. Essentially the expansions and Living World progress in real time, meaning that a number of years sit between the end of one expansion and the beginning of the next.
It was a pretty great weekend, albeit a pretty short one. I do need to get finishing up Horizon Forbidden West but lord it has been awhile since I have been this engaged with a game. During my months of playing Final Fantasy XIV every single day… I was deeply beholden to the mission. Were it not for my quest to get everything to level 80… I am pretty sure I would have bounced much earlier. This… I just have so many different dials and levers that I can interact with and it all feels fresh. I am sure doing Tequatl for the 200th time will start to tarnish it a bit, but I really do love the encounter. I mean I managed to do Praetorium every single day and find enjoyment it in while I was grinding out those 80s.
Caladbolg is both easy and fun to do. Definitely worth it.
If you’ve finished the HoT storyline, one possibility is to look into reforging Caladbolg. I believe one of the weapon shapes it can take is a dagger.