Fractals with Friends

Good Morning Folks. Last night I finished getting the wizard chore currency to buy the last of the three pieces available of the Ward Knight’s Armor set. One of the things I dig about this set is that the appearance works regardless of the armor class, which means I can be running around in leather armor but looking like I am wearing plate. This of course required me to dye several pieces of my set, which led to me changing up a bunch of things about the outfit while still keeping to my traditional red, green, and black color palette. Unfortunately the infusion I am using kind of muddies the waters when it comes to appearance, and everything is a bit more hazy than I want it to be. I could remove the infusion… but then I would just end up needing ANOTHER one that grants some buffs.

Last night was the second outing of what I am currently referring to as Fractals with Friends. I am sure we will vary that activity at some point… but we made it through five fractals before running out of time. Technically in a few weeks when the Street Fighter 2 collaboration happens in Monster Hunter Wilds we will be spending the evening doing that content and taking a break from Guild Wars 2. Additionally there are a bunch of dungeons that I think we want to run as well, so we will probably be weaving those in from time to time. However Fractals with Friends just has the magical power of alliteration so it is what I am using. This whole thing reminds me of how much more enjoyable it is to fail with friends, than execute perfectly with strangers.

I’ve taken a bit of a break from the whole Vision questline and started working on filling every Janthir region renown heart each day. At some point I would like to finish the Janthir Mastery quests, which I believe are a prerequisite for the Legendary Spear. It does not hurt that Janthir is quite possibly my favorite area of the map currently. The Janthir Syntri meta is still butts… and a bit too tight on timing. I was with a team that executed pretty much perfectly and we still only managed to down the encounter with roughly a minute to spare. I am hoping that when the next expansion goes in, that they water down this bit of content at least for the open world variant. I think the tryhard players are probably mostly doing this as a convergence instead of joining in the open world shenanigans. I only do it if I happen to be in zone at the time it is firing off… and only then if we have decent support on both bosses. Last night just happened to be a perfect storm and we got it finished.

The best of the Renown Hearts is the Journeykin Outpost, which is what the Bearfolk call the Warclaws. Sure there is a World of Warcraft poop quest where you gather the scat and take it to the composter… but most of your time is spent petting the big cats and feeding them. The whole thing is delightful, and I would happily take care of my big kitty friends every single day. Janthir is so fucking charming. It has Grizzly Hills vibes and even the later maps are pretty nice. Guild Wars 2 usually has this problem where the early maps are a lot of fun… but some of the later maps are pure hell. I am looking at you Nayos, Desolation, etc. So far all of the Janthir maps feel fairly charming, even though you start dealing with my absolutely least favorite mob type… Bloodstone Elementals.

I did the reset Taco as usual, and there was a point where I was hanging out on voice but cracking up at the fight. Someone decided to take their fishing boat and ram it repeatedly into Tequatl. The above screenshot was taken right before they decided to desummon it and start fighting legitimately. There is just something balancing about doing the server reset Tequatl fight, and folks are generally the most chill you have ever seen. The other night we had something totally dumb where someone asked every one that could tag up to do so… and we had like 20+ commander and catmander tags running on a single map. It is dumb stuff like this that really make me enjoy this fight.

I did encounter what appears to be some sort of a bug. There is a dumb crafting mini game involving fractals where you use one miniature to craft another miniature… over and over until you have created all of the named cat golems. I had three of the Mini Professor Mews sitting in my bank and from a fractal loot box I pulled the very rare Amber Quantic Dipole. So immediately I thought I would try and craft the next Golem in sequence: Mini Mister Mittens. However for whatever reason… the Mystic Toilet is not letting me add the last two ingredients… which I have plenty of: Obsidian Shards, and Crystalline Dust. I have no clue what is going on and have checked the wiki multiple times to make sure I am not missing anything. I am guessing it is just bugged. If anyone out there has an idea of what I might be doing wrong… please let me know.

In other news… I did in fact do the dumb thing. I created a purely free to play character named Belgratis. I might buy the base version of the game at some point for the account, but mostly the idea behind this character is to have something stripped down that I can use for the purpose of writing guides. I have a very basic guide in the works that I took a ton of screenshots for yesterday and will likely massage into something that makes sense over the extended holiday weekend. Not that it will be of any value to a seasoned player… but sometimes the Guild Wars 2 interface is a bit much for players who have come from more Wow-like MMORPGs.