Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I managed to get my Warrior all the way trained in the Bladesworn Elite specialization and I have to say… I am really enjoying it. I grabbed a build from Snowcrows that I am using currently, with the minor substitution of using Marauder for survival rather than Berzerker gear. I think what I like the most is the gunblade that you end up wielding along with the spec, and how it feels very much like a greatsword without being a greatsword. Right now in the spec, it is running Axe/Pistol and then, of course, the Gun Katana shown above that just comes as part of running the build. I’ve been branching out a bit lately from the Necromancer, and I think likely I have just improved at predicting damage because other classes no longer feel as “squishy” as they once did.
I’ve also spent quite a bit of time playing the Ranger of late and recently went on a pilgrimage to get a Jacaranda as my pet. For those who have not experienced the Path of Fire content, these are angry floating balls of dirt and roots… with an inexplicable mouth full of teeth. They stand back and nuke the shit out of you with lightning and are apparently one of the better all-purpose pets in the game. They have pretty high DPS but also remain pretty damned tanky, and as such, I have shifted to using it all the time. I named mine Twigbert because it seemed fitting. At a minimum, I am running Tequatl every night as the Ranger. As far as weapons go I am mostly using a Longbow, and occasionally swapping to Greatsword for up close and personal damage.
I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time in WvW on the Ranger and I have to say it might be my favorite option for that game mode. Basically, I like being up on the ramparts and raining down arrows on the enemy team. This mission originally started as a way to boost my Warrior to be able to train Bladesworn a bit faster, since you can pretty reasonably get hero points as a byproduct of playing WvW. In truth, I have been doing this however as a way of working on getting some more Mystic Clovers, given that there are a few tracks that are extremely lucrative in this department. The sad truth that I have learned however is that the heroic scrolls are “bind on character”, which I learned too late… but you can still farm the currency to buy them and then just swap to the character that needs the points to purchase them. It wasn’t a complete loss because I do want to learn the Soulbeast elite specialization on Ranger.
As far as the story goes… I have stalled out a bit in New Kaineng City. This zone is beautiful… but also exceptionally dense and hard to navigate. As a result, I end up getting horribly distracted anytime I attempt to do anything. I’ve not had the mental fortitude to push through and as a result, I am floundering a bit and playing alts. I’ve never really loved the concept of a big sprawling urban area that is also a combat zone. I’ve seen several games do this over the years, but they always feel cumbersome and New Kaineng is no different. I mean that is not to say that I do not dig the look of the zone, and it really is an accomplishment in world-building, but it also feels like I have stepped into a different game than the one I have been playing for the last multiple hundred hours. I am looking forward to getting on the other side and pushing through into another “countryside” zone.
That is it, folks. Still very engaged with Guild Wars 2 and starting to branch out more into other characters. It is probably a good thing since I have a stack of 80s that get very little to no play. Currently, I have Necromancer, Warrior, Revenant, Guardian, Mesmer, and Ranger all sitting at level 80. My most recent leveling project has been the baby engineer, which is already around 30ish. At some point I should probably partake in some alt parking and at least rack in daily treasure chests.
One of my rangers has a Jacaranda pet but only for the CC. At least, I thought that was what it was good for,. You have me wondering if I have it wrong now. You remind me I really must take the rangers to get their new EoD pets sometime soon.
I love New Kaineng City and Echovald. All the Cantha maps, really. The verticality is amazing. There’s so much climbing to do, it’s virtually a game in its own right. I never really had any issues with it being a “combat zone” too – I just ignored all the events. Most of them seemed very localised and easy to avoid.
Echovald Wilds… “countryside” zone… heh, OK. 😉
For a goth, maybe.
They leaned hard into the multi-level map to encourage the jade bot zip lines in both New Kaineng and the Echovald Wilds. The forest isn’t any less dense than the city in this case. Since the game sort of encourages you to run through the story when given the opportunity, we ended up following the story out of both New Kaineng and Echovald before finishing the zones, which we figure we’ll do later.
I thought I had named my Jacaranda something clever, but it’s “Thunderbolt.” I little side note on that, which you may already know, but I just recently learned watching “Encanto.” Jacaranda starts with an H sound, as it is borrowed from Spanish. We had been pronouncing it with a J, like Jackie the Jacaranda.