What Lies Beneath

Good Morning Friends! This is a pretty exciting week on top of wrapping up Diablo III Season 28, we had the first content drop from Guild Wars 2 after the “roadmap” and “vision” for the game going forward were announced on the 13th. This new content patch came out on the 28th, but much to my chagrin I realized that I had a library book that was going to be due on the 1st… so instead of really playing any of the new content I pushed my way through the second book in the Gentleman Bastards series by Scott Lynch. That meant last night I was entirely focused on getting into the game on my Necromancer and trying out some of the new content.

For the last few weeks, there has been a certain amount of consternation from the community stalwarts about what exactly Guild Wars 2 looks like in a “post-living-world” environment. The pattern of things in the past has been that there would be a paid expansion followed by a sizeable gap while the content was being worked on with a living world season released and then another gap until either another living world season or the release of another paid expansion. The “roadmap” instead seemed to indicate that we would begin to see smaller expansions followed by quarterly content drops leading up to another paid expansion in a semi-yearly cycle. I think in the grand scheme of things this sort of release cadence is best for growing a population of active players, but I also think the quality and detail of each single map drop needs to be significant. Not all expansion maps in Guild Wars 2 are created equal so would this be a Bloodstone Fen that folks rarely revisit or something more akin to a Drizzlewood Coast and becomes an active pillar of the community?

Last night I finished the story as it exists currently, finishing with the “Deep Trouble” mission. Something of note, I have never played Guild Wars 2 current content ever. I’ve never been caught up enough with the game to play “Living World” content as it was being doled out, so I have no real frame of reference for what to expect. What is currently in the game seems to be four story missions that lead you down into the Gyala Delve, and introduce you to the situation that is happening there. My gut feeling is that I am waiting on some sort of timer before the next set of quests drops, but in reality, I might be waiting a few months given that the next content drop is expected “before summer” whatever that means for a timeframe. I enjoyed hanging around with Gorrick, Rama, and Yao and want more of the “Best Friends Detective Agency”.

So while the story left me somewhat wanting… the zone is absolutely phenomenal. If this is the sort of expansion map that we can expect to be seeing every three months or so, I think the community is going to be extremely pleased. Effectively the map unfolds over the course of four subregions, the first of which is above ground… and then the next three regions going deeper under the jade sea into a mining pit of a sort. The further down you get the more sinister things to end up being. There is a void haze mechanic that requires you to keep renewing a Jadebot Filtration system at each outpost. Being down in the complex of caverns and tunnels eventually will use up your filter requiring you to get a new one or risk taking damage over time from the haze. Visually everything is stunning, with probably my favorite bit being that you can see aquatic life frozen in the jade walls, for example, this big whale shadowed in the distance.

What I spent most of my night doing was doing bits and pieces of the meta event that spans the zone. Essentially this reminds me of a weird mix of Drizzlewood Coast and the Chalk Gerent meta. You are following Gorrick, Rama, and Yao as they retake sections of the cave complex and in doing so make them safe from the incursion of the haze and corrupted Jade Brotherhood members. Essentially you follow the red events and they will take you through the sequence as you leave the “safe” camp up top and head to various points on the map retaking them. During each sequence, there are a number of side bosses that spawn and a big battle to take back a base. Along the way, each encounter will spawn a number of Gyala Delve Mining Caches that you can open with Jade Miner’s Keycards.

The final phase of the event involves fighting three bosses on three different platforms, so you ultimately have to split your group in order to deal with all of them. I am uncertain how this is supposed to work, but in my experience so far everyone keeps killing their boss until everyone else has killed theirs as well. I assume there is supposed to be some measure of coordination, but it feels like right now we are largely brute-forcing this mechanic until we find out something better. Over time the community will learn the best way to do this, and I have a feeling this entire sequence is going to be popular for farming the Gyala loot boxes. I managed to pull one of the unique items from the loot boxes, a Mini Void Emberknight. Completing the final event also seems to reward you with two Luxon Hunter’s Weapon Caches which include brand new jade item appearances and drop with the Ritualist’s prefix.

All told I had a lot of fun doing the meta a few times, but realistically I need to get my Ranger caught up because I think I would rather do these metas on that character as opposed to my Necromancer. The Necro is a content soloing god, but it feels like I do a much better job at being a team player on my Soulbeast Longbow Ranger. So more than likely I am going to fall back to working on catching that character up through the story. I might pop my head into Gyala once a night and try and ride the meta for a single completion or something, but I would rather be there with a different character long term. In truth, I want to get the Ranger up because it seems like a better option for ALL team content in the long run. I mean I could always respec to a more group-friendly Necromancer build… but then I would not be as good at soloing content as I am now.

Now that I have finished with the story as it stands currently, I am going to venture forth today and check out some of the community opinions about how successful “What Lies Beneath” and Gyala Delve have been received. Until I completed the story I was staying entirely away from any content about the game because I wanted to experience it all with fresh eyes. I personally think this is a good course forward with the game and I look forward to more of these content drops if this is the quality of content we are going to get. The new meta is really fun and feels extremely rewarding. The only thing that would be better is if there was an albeit rare chance of getting ascended drops. I mean that might be the case but the wiki pages for Ravenous Wanderer are not filled out yet, so I am not sure we know the full drop table yet.

Have you dipped your toes into the new story content drop? What were your feelings about it? Drop me a line below.

[Edit] – I found out after writing this that you do in fact have a chance of getting some ascended stat choice weapons from this meta. More specifically the new Sword, and both new Dagger appearances.