As we get closer to Friday, I think I have finally come to terms with the fact that I will be going Boneshatter for the league start. After sifting through many different guides and POBs, I think I honestly prefer the one that Zizaran released for 3.22. This is mostly because the gear seems pretty straightforward and craftable and it features some of the things that I knew that I wanted to lean into like double-dipping evasion for armor with Iron Reflexes. We have a Trello for all of the folks doing league starts in the private league we are running and I have highlighted some of the uniques that I am looking out for, but in theory, this should be able to be done with nothing but rares at least for a while. If this can get me down into Delve at around 150 depth I will be very happy.
Additionally, since yesterday was the official stop of the Trial of the Ancestors league, it meant that they opened up the ability to create private leagues for Affliction. So we now officially have the “Bel League Affliction” set up and running and most of the participants have joined. Ash and Kodra helped split the cost of the league three ways with us each chipping in 100 coins, with more folks willing to chip in if we decide to expand it past the initial 40 days. I figure at the 40-day mark we will either allow the characters to drop down into the trade league or if folks are still going hot and heavy, expand it out by another 30 days.
The other big thing that I did in Path of Exile last night was to get both my personal and the guild’s stash set up in standard the way I want it to look in Affliction. Essentially the state of your standard stash is what gets imported into the next league, and for the guild, I mostly wanted to get the tabs named and affinities set properly so that hopefully I don’t have to do this on the first day of the new league. Similarly, I did a bunch of rearranging things in my personal stash to go ahead and set up some of the common folders that I used in Ancestor League. As far as all of those “Remove-Only” tabs I tend to shove them into a folder named after the league they were created during. Not that I spend much time in Standard, but I figure this will make this a bit easier at a later date when I might be looking for something.
In other news, I have been playing a not-insignificant amount of Guild Wars 2 lately. I’ve talked about this a bit, but I have been popping in at least once each day to chip away at my “wizard chores” which is a humorous term that I picked up from my friend Ace regarding World of Warcraft Dailies. Given that I am actually doing them for a tower full of wizards… and the reward system is called the Wizard’s Vault… it is finally the perfect term for what I am doing. Doing various daily, weekly, and period objectives gives you a currency called Astral Acclaim which can then be used to buy all manner of things from cosmetics, to pieces of usable gear… to probably the most valuable item which amounts to a massive boost in crafting your choice of a legendary from four different options.
Astral Acclaim stacks to 1300 points, and I was nearing the cap where I could not earn anymore and needed to spend down some of it. So I opted to pick up the Legendary Weapon Starter Kit – Set 2. This gave me access to shortcutting the crafting process for Bolt, The Moot, Quip, or The Predator. Since I use Sword on a few of my characters and am looking forward to playing around with Sword on my Necromancer soonish… I opted to go with Bolt. I don’t really love the appearance of any of these weapons, but the other one I was considering for a bit was Quip just to give me access to a pistol as that seems to be a weapon archetype I also enjoy. What this box does is give you the precursor weapon, the “gift of” for the specific weapon shortcutting the need to level a profession to 400, and either a Gift of Magic or Gift of Might. This then requires you to supply your own Gift of Mastery and the Gift of Magic/Might that you did not receive, along with 77 Mystic Clovers, and 250 Globs of Ecotoplasm to craft a Gift of Fortune.
I had already been chipping away at some of the legendary weapon requirements because I have been working towards Twilight… which I stalled out on when it came to crafting the precursor. I should have just sucked it up and bought the precursor and would have likely already completed that weapon before now had I done so. This however meant that I had already done the legwork to craft a Gift of Mastery, and had been stockpiling resources that got me at least part of the way towards the missing Gift of Magic since my package gave me Might instead. I took the easy way out and spent roughly 200 gold to finish gathering the Tier 6 materials needed to craft the Gift of Fortune and then threw all of the expensive bits in the mystical commode to get my very first Legendary weapon in Guild Wars 2.
To be fair… I said “sorta” in the title because it doesn’t feel like I really put in all of the effort required to craft a Legendary weapon. I would probably feel more accomplished had I done so, but given that gathering Legendary gear is the true endgame of Guild Wars 2, it does seem a bit brilliant to give players an onramp to demystify the process a bit. According to GW2 Efficiency, the price right now to craft a Bolt from scratch would require about 1300 gold. This is greatly shortcutting that process giving you the Gift of Bolt (~200 Gold), Gift of Might (~150 Gold), and the precursor (~70 Gold) all for the low price of a month’s worth of dailies. It also encourages players to complete that Gift of Mastery on their own which requires getting full Tyria exploration completion and farming up a Gift of Battle. The more players engage with Legendary crafting, the more they become entwined into the flow of the game… and likely the longer they will stick around. While this essentially handed me 450 Gold… it did so in a way that meant I had to have poured a good deal of my time into the project to make anything of it.
The only annoyance is that I will have to craft a second legendary sword at some point for the characters that would want to dual-wield them. Now that I have broken the seal on this system, however… I sorta want to focus some time on wrapping up Twilight and getting a Greatsword for all of my alts to use as well. I see what you did there Wizard Vault…