Saving the Skyscales

Good Morning Friends! My life over the last several days has been devoted to Skyscale misadventures. For those who are not initiated, the Skyscale is the closest Guild Wars 2 has to a normal flying mount. It is behind a massive quest chain that takes a truly dumb amount of time and resources and ends up rewarding you with an account-wide mount that performs much like Dragonriding does in the latest World of Warcraft expansion. In order to qualify for the mount, you have to have fully completed the Path of Fire expansion and Living World Season 4 as it requires a lot of specific items sold on vendors in those content areas.

The quest starts on the Dragonfall map, and the early chains will involve you roaming around this area and collecting a lot of resources. Shown above is the map for the locations of the various Skyscale scales which is effectively the first long collection. After completing that you gain enough faction with each camp in Dragonfall to purchase five medicines. From there you have to roam around and treat fourteen sick Skyscales scattered throughout the zone, before twenty-one eggs… which are frustratingly often beside a location you already had to collect a scale at previously. After completing the meta collection the rest of the quest continues in Sun’s Refuge where Gorrick sets up a lab as you attempt to hatch and raise a Skyscale.

The next sequence sees you taking your egg to work with you, as you attempt to expose it to various elements. There are twelve in total and each step in that chain involves four or five individual sub-steps. Most of these are not terribly taxing, but I spent around two hours fully unlocking the Derelict Delve in Desert Highlands. This involved collecting a number of runestones and then slotting them one at a time into doors… which open the next piece of the delve. Effectively you need something in the second delve and the final delve, and something I learned a bit too late is you have to finish each individual delve in a single setting. I thought slotting a rune would be maintained between trips, and as a result, I had to do the final delve twice because I needed to leave halfway through. One positive is that I got really good at navigating the sequence of teleporters while moving around this area.

The quest step that took me the longest by far was the final bit of the Skyscale of Courage. This involved doing what I now know is the entire meta event in Elon Riverlands. You essentially need to fight the boss inside Augury Rock, and I spent quite a bit of time just milling around at the camp where the first step in the meta event spawns sequence spawns. Finally Sunday morning at about 11 am it fired off and I was able to complete the sequence and finish that step in the quest chain.

This moved me on to the phase where I actually spent time raising my newborn Skyscale. Essentially I had to collect a number of special treats by killing specific monsters scattered around the Crystal Desert region and waiting for a “Tasty” item to drop from them. I also had to spend quite a bit of fold buying “Toys” for the newborn, the most expensive of which was the grow lamp that goes for 22g currently on the market. Sadly I did not have my jewel-crafting skill high enough to make the item, nor did I really relish the thought of grinding it up. Lastly, I had to feed the Skyscale specifically crafted food and could feed a maximum of 4 pieces per day. Fortunately, I wrapped up the previous step before the daily reset so was able to get 8 feedings in within a single calendar day. Normally this takes three individual resets in order to get past the feeding step and more time if you did not already have a stash of materials ready to craft the food.

Now I am staring down the barrel of the bane of my existence. I have what is effectively twenty-one jumping puzzles to complete in order to find my Skyscale who has run away from the nest. I can craft something called Extra-Pungent Skyscale Treat to skip a jumping puzzle, but it comes with a hefty cost. Essentially it requires a reagent with a daily cooldown and an item that you can only purchase from a vendor that costs 4g. So in order to brute force my way through this… it would cost me a minimum of 80g as you get one for free when you start the quest chain. I think I am going to at least attempt some of the jumping puzzles and then fall back on making the treat if I get too frustrated by them. I tell reminding myself at any point I get angry, that I will only have to do this once.

I have to admit though, that I never would have made it this far without Blish HUD. There is an addon called pathing that you can install within the Blish HUD interface that marks various items on your in-game map. More specifically the pathing module that I would suggest using is ReActif EN pack as it seems to be the clearest to follow. For example, when doing Scales or Eggs in Dragonsfall I just had to roam around and follow the scale icon on my HUD until I finally found its location. Similarly, now that I am on the jumping puzzle step, it should in theory show me the correct path to follow the reach the top. That is what I tend to have the most trouble with while doing jumping puzzles is determining what areas I can actually stand on versus which areas are not valid terrain.

I expect tonight to start on the first of the jumping puzzles and then determine if I will buy my way out of this frustration or keep at it. While doing this however I am spending a lot of time farming Living World Season 4 content, because I need stacks of zone currency to complete the final step. I know I am lacking Branded Mass, Mistonium, and Inscribed Shards but I have the others already. Basically, I am focusing on this problem in a few ways firstly by doing the hearts each day and buying the amount of currency that I can from the karma vendor. Then I am spending some time roaming around Bjora Marches looking for Eternal Ice, as there is a Karma vendor there that will sell you the season 4 currencies in exchange for that resource. My hope is that by the time I finish chewing through the jumping puzzles, and the steps that follow them… I will have earned enough currency to be able to buy all of the saddle components shown above.

Basically, I guess I reached a point where I was tired of being grounded. So many of the meta events in Guild Wars 2 are just much easier with a Skyscale. As I’ve started working my way through content on the Ranger, I reached several points, especially in zone completion where I wished I had access to one. I knew eventually I would set my mind to churning through this quest, and it seems to be a solid activity to do while I am consuming an audiobook. All of this effort will eventually pay off though, and it will make all of my characters from that point forward much more enjoyable to spend time on. In the meantime, however… I have a lot of pain in front of me before I can settle into the joy of having the best mount in the game.