Siege Turtle Get

Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was a pretty glorious day at least so far as I knocked out a bunch of things in Guild Wars 2. Sometimes I just stand around admiring the majesty of our Guild Hall from the rainbow bridge. There is this dumb side project I created which is using a bunch of the super adventure box clouds… to create a way up onto the rooftops… then Thalen branched off of this with the rainbow bridge. I heartily approve of this particular brand of nonsense… and honestly, I think Thalen and I may have been the only two people to have placed anything in our guild hall ever. I know I have Tequatl backbones for days if we want to build a pillow fort out of them. I have nothing better to do with those drops so I always deposit anything from world bosses in the decorations bank.

I know I talked about the noodle cart yesterday, but I thought I would bring it up again. I picked one up after experiencing it from a random player in Rata Sum, and last night while waiting on Tequatl I opted to throw mine out there. Notice how the player beside me has two players in their cart and I have two players in my cart, and a third player has also thrown theirs out beside me. Before the start of Tequatl, their noodle cart was full of people as well. I love objects that create casual social interaction like this. Often times folks chat away while sitting on the cart and these are so much better than the “Box of Fun” or the “Bobblehead Laboratory”. I would love to see them create more multi-person chairs like this that have a purpose behind them. It would probably even be cooler if eating the noodles actually gave you something like the birthday cake food buff.

So first accomplishment of the night is that I finally managed to catch the meta event in Seitung and collected that piece of the turtle saddle. I mean I had done this event several times before, but never when I was actively on the correct step on the achievement chain. I managed to catch someone doing a train and caught Echovald Wilds and Kaineng City as well. Not that I needed the other two, but it was a source of some pretty good loot. I have to admit that I have contemplated buying a commander tag many times. When there is one on the map, folks seem to automagically coalesce behind it. The problem is they also expect the commander to have a clue about what is going on, which I do not entirely yet. It does however seem to be a huge boon for actually doing any sort of activity though, so as I delve into making groups I feel like I probably need one.

Shortly after resetting, I decided to check the group finder tool and happened onto someone in Strike Training forming a group for Kaineng Overlook. I was legitimately working up the nerve to do the same thing, so I very happily joined their team. This was the last piece that I needed for the turtle mount, and within ten minutes we had filled our party of ten and shockingly had a pretty reasonable group balance. What is even more shocking is the fact that eight out of the ten of us had never been there before, and we somehow managed to one-shot the encounter without much in the way of training. What helped me specifically is that the markers and warnings used in the fight seem to be pretty standard from what I have seen in other games. There is a mechanic where it puts numbers over the top of your head, and we all spread out to the edges because this was something I had seen several times in Final Fantasy XIV as the boss attacks each of us in that order.

Just like that, I was able to go back to Arborstone and turn in my quest and get my very own turtle friend. In the grand scheme of things, this was a much easier quest chain than I needed for the Skyscale, but it did require actual group activity rather than largely being a solo activity. This means the only mount that I do not have currently is the Gryphon. I’ve started on it, but I guess will actually start devoting some real effort to getting it finished. When we were doing Kaineng City Blackout, the Commander was using the Gryphon and there was no way that I could keep up with them over Skyscale so I absolutely understand the specific use case for that mount. In truth, there is a pretty solid use case for every mount, and since the new meta in Gyala Delve requires a Siege Turtle at times… I figured I would get mine so that I could at least fill that role if none were available.

After getting my Siege Turtle I turned my eyes to my next objective of the night which was to finish out the Battle for Lion’s Arch and more specifically the Breachmaker portion of that quest. I boarded and defeated Scarlet and after a bit of back and forth finished Living World Season 1. I will say that already Living World Season 2 feels so much better than I remember it because I understand the events that led up to that point. I get why Kas is so guarded about letting Jory do anything because she almost died during the battle on top of the Breachmaker. I get why Taimi is so weird about Scarlet and seemingly obsessed with her, and I get why Braham and Rox are being a wet blanket about it. There is also the fact that I care about these characters way more than I did when I was first dipping my toes into this content having not seen much of the Living World Season 1. This is going to help massively for anyone starting out the game now without the wealth of years of experience and understanding of the lore.

I still do not love Dry Top, but apart from the quests I at least have Skyscale to move around it rapidly. I remember unlocking the zone the very first time and having to use the dumb Zepherite crystals. I get annoyed at having to continue to use them for mobility during the story quests, but those at least are limited in scope. I get that someone at ANet put a lot of work into creating those baubles and wanted to show the technology off… but it doesn’t make me like them anymore. I am going to try and burn through Living World Season 2 since I have seen it before so that I can start Heart of Thorns properly soon. My goal is still to play through all of the stories on the Ranger, but I have been cheating a bit when I see a group open in one of the Living World maps and using “Teleport to Friend” to get access to the zone without doing the story.

All told it was a great night and a great place to put Guild Wars 2 to bed for a bit. I know starting tonight I will be spending a lot of time playing the new Last Epoch Multiplayer patch, so it might be a bit before I check back into Tyria. I love my turtle so much and have started working on unlocking its masteries. It still floors me how much I love this game today after spending so much time frankly not understanding why anyone else did. There is part of me that wishes I could teleport back to the version of me that was in the alpha program all those years ago… and make him understand what was special about the game so that I could have experienced everything as the content rolled out. Then again if I could do that… I would probably be just as jaded as the folks who seem to dislike Gyala Delve so maybe it is better that I approached with relatively fresh eyes over the last few years.