Janthir Wilds

Wilds is Cursed

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Hey Folks! Last night instead of our usual Guild Wars 2 nonsense on Thursday nights… I attempted to do some Monster Hunter Wilds again with Ammo and Sita. We have tried to do this a few times… but something always ends up causing problems. The first time Ammo chain crashed until I lost power… and then when the power came back… I lost internet. Last night the entire time we were playing Sita sounded like a robot… and every time we engaged anything one or more of us would get dropped from the linked party. Dealing with Capcom multiplayer is a very specific realm of hell. Then we realized the thing we were trying to unlock and group up for… is a Solo Arena quest. So we had a lot of us all hanging out on voice and being frustrated together as we attempted to “Akuma”. But hey… Barrel bowling is still fun as heck.

Over in Guild Wars 2… I am back on that World vs World grind and so is Sita. Specifically we both bought Legendary Weapon Kits and I am chasing the very dumb goal of making Sunrise. This however is only a means to an end, because it will in turn allow me to make the Voltron of Guild Wars 2 weapons… Eternity. We even managed to drag Ammo along for this nonsense… but in truth… grouping with friends in WvW is pretty much pointless because it is not like you can actually see each other in the giant “Zerg” huddle. The key trait that you need to learn to succeed in this game mode is find the tag and stand on the tag… and then move only when the tag moves. We had a good commander that was flanked by some really freaking phenomenal healers and were able to “OutZerg” the other teams as we captured their stuff.

We were exceptionally successful and in a single average I managed to do half of a Gift of Battle reward track. I believe Sita who had started this grind before me came within a fraction of finishing his up. I am really looking for the WvW Rush event in July and will probably just bank a bunch of Gift of Battles because they are always useful… and also the track in general is a decent way to get Mystic Clovers. More importantly… I passed rank 100 in World Vs World and got the new title of Veteran… which seems weird that this is higher than General was. Why do I care about WvW ranks? Well I kind of want to make the backpack… which itself will require that I have rank 350. Only 248 left to go. I am hoping I can make a massive dent in this during the WvW Rush and hopefully finish that off… and will absolutely probably just be living in WvW during that time. Thankfully I find that whole nonsense shockingly enjoyable… for someone who is traditionally a massive CareBear.

Dune is out… or at least the headstart is out and I played a bit of it last night. Enough to get through the very beginning of the tutorial and out into Hagga Basin which is the first real zone. I watched a video about how limited the Trooper ends up being and how I should probably just play a Mentat which has a turret… so I did that thing. It really probably is the correct decision because very early you can get a bunch of “makes guns better” abilities. The turret unfortunately is kind of shit. I expected something more akin to the pop up turrets in The Division. What it is instead is a grenade that you throw… and then when you “detonate” it, it turns into a turret that maybe fires off three bolts before exploding and if you are standing near it… you take damage. I am not extremely sold on this game yet. I like the vibe and I am a massive Dune geek… but also the gameplay feels more extreme than I like my survival games. Dealing with lack of water is a massive problem… but I have a thing that lets me drain my victims of blood and convert that to water so hopefully that will make things easier. What I really need though is a Literjon so that I can carry water with me.

I am very much in the bumblefucking my way around the desert mode right now, but at least I have a crappy shelter. I strategically set up my shelter in a valley that stays almost entirely in shade no matter what time of day it is, that happens to be right beside one of the vacuum sealed caves. Given that things respawn in the world pretty regularly, this gives me a pretty decent source of scrap metal as well as some lootable chests that have a few materials that I do not have any use for right now… but are flagged as orange in color which makes me think at some point they will be useful. For the moment I am stumbling up the tech tree and the entire game will probably feel much better once I have a way to carry around water, and a way to traverse between the assorted rock outcroppings more easily. I have “walked without rhythm” my way to another outcropping… found a much larger scavenger camp than I am used to…and died without remembering to set down a respawn beacon. Tonight I will probably make my way back over there and try and retrieve whatever I dropped in my backpack.

The other huge benefit of where I decided to set up my base is that on the other side of the sealed cave… is a small scavenger camp. Essentially when it respawns… I can set down my turret, unseal the cave door… and let the turret kill the two Scavengers without me having to lift a finger. This gives me a somewhat reasonable renewable source of blood to then convert into water with my purification machine. There are various lootables around the camp as well, but I am not sure how much value a handful of Solari will have in the grand scheme of things. I have a contract to deliver scrap metal to someone, but it is also way across another open stretch of desert which terrifies me at the moment. I will probably wait until nightfall to cross so that I won’t have to also worry about the impact of direct sunlight. I am in this weird state of equilibrium with the game where I don’t love it and I don’t hate it… I just feel like I need to push through the awkward first steps that any survival game has.

Yesterday was also the content reveal stream for the Secrets of the Atlas expansion for Path of Exile and it looks amazing. However if I were to sit down and start talking about it… it would be a whole other blog post. I will probably save that for Monday. I hope you all have a phenomenal weekend and if you too are venturing forth into Arrakis, drop me a line and let me know what you are thinking about the game so far.

Temu Dragon Stand

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the drop of the last part of the Janthir Wilds story called Absolution. It was quite a hefty patch, but not one without some issues. The biggest one that I personally experienced is that for whatever reason they did not successfully reset purchases on the wizards vault, meaning that while I could see a new Legendary Weapon Kit was available… it showed that I had already purchased it. This was fixed early in the evening with an additional patch that required a restart, and from that point forward things seemed to be fine. I have pretty mixed emotions about this patch and there are some things that were phenomenal, others that were pretty disappointing, and then some that was just plain bad. Fair warning, as I get into the new map meta, there are going to be complete spoilers over what is going on there. I will warn you again because at least at the start I have some pretty surface level stuff to talk about.

First up, given that it is June now and Pride Month there are some new wings available this year. Initially I thought that they might be a re-offering of the wings from last year, but nope these are entirely new and pretty freaking amazing. The default rainbow pattern on these wings are significantly more vibrant than the previous macaw wings. Both the wings and the glider are patterned after the existing White or Black wings sets. For me it showed up untextured and brown, but I had to go use the dye eraser tool in order to show the default rainbow colors. I like that they are a much fuller wing than the macaw set and looks way more natural on a “girthy” model like that of the Norn and Char.

What is really cool about these wings however is that they have four dye channels. So you can of course use them in the default red, yellow, green, purple blended configuration. However you can also dye them to match ANY color scheme you might want. So this means you can effectively recreate any pride flag or simply dye them to match your outfit of choice. I turned mine into a recreation of the Bisexual Flag, since that is ultimately what represents me personally. No they don’t really match my outfit in the least but are freaking cool and I am really thankful that they are giving these away for free. The only caveat is that you have to have purchased the game. I tried to claim a set of these wings on my free-to-play account and they were not available.

Another really cool thing that they released on the cash shop is this Shimmering Aurora Homestead Sky. They absolutely got $10 in gems from me to pick this up, because one of my complaints about the existing sky is that I could not permanently set it to either night or day. I don’t like the lighting in the homestead during the day, and greatly preferred the night sky… and it would stick until I logged out and then when I logged in again everything would be back to the default day settings. With the Aurora sky it seems to stick permanently and also gives everything a beautiful lighting overlay. This makes me actually want to start building something properly in my homestead. Part of me wants to tear down everything that exists by default and create something from scratch.

Now for the disappointing. I think a lot of the failures that I am going to talk about in this post, come down to over-hyping and poorly marketing changes. One of the big quality of life changes that was announced was the addition of a universal teleportation tome, that in theory would collect all of your teleportation devices into a single item allowing you to free up a bunch of inventory slots. I don’t have mine fully unlocked yet because it is a long quest chain… but I have collected all of the scrolls that would fit into it and while it will free up a few slots… it does absolutely nothing for the cash shop lounge scrolls. So essentially I still will have multiple slots taken up by portal devices. The gobbler is also somewhat disappointing if only because it costs 100 Gold to buy it… which seems like a big chunk of change for something we have already gone through a lot of hassle to unlock.

Now we are entering the spoiler territory of this blog post, so if you care about such things… maybe stop reading.

The new story was pretty enjoyable, but felt extremely short… and also like nothing much happened. The true resolution of the expansion happens inside of the Bava Nisos meta event, and I will talk about that in a few. Essentially it is going between a bunch of locations, including some of Core Tyria searching for artifacts of the White Mantle. If you did not play through Bloodstone Fen or Lake Doric… most of this would largely feel non sequitur. Essentially the quest chain is effectively this heartfelt goodbye to Mabon… a character who does not really feel like earned the place he holds in the canon of this game. Secrets of the Obscure did not really flesh the character out enough to make me feel much of anything as a player about him. It isn’t like Aurene, a character that we learned to love over the course of several expansions worth of content. Mabon is just this character we are told is important and we are told is meaningful… and then is taken away and are told we should feel something about it. The story does however give us one of the best achievements ever that comes with the title of True Introvert… which I am absolutely using from this point forward… so it is not like I can be super harsh about it.

Where things start to fall apart however is when you approach Bava Nisos as a map. It is essentially a map that only exists to serve as a staging place for the meta event associated with it. The entire place is either monster guts or old crumbling buildings… often times a mixture of both as we are essentially fighting inside of a giant titan named Saevus Saxum. The entire map largely centers around killing the titan by damaging its vital organs. There is a staging area that is sealed off from the rest of the map by a Mursaat Mirror, but weirdly… if you are standing in this area when the map resets… you still die which feels thoroughly dumb. There just is not much going on in this map apart from the meta, and there are areas you cannot reach… until the meta has opened them up. All of the marketing going into this made it seem like this was going to be a rich map with multiple lanes… which of course made us all think we were getting another Dragon’s Stand which is quite possibly one of the best maps ever created.

What we got instead is a meta that feels like they ran out of funding, time, or wandered away like a bored toddler in an ADHD fugue state. The entire thing feels unfinished, and like we have half of a meta. Essentially there are some waves of fight the nonsense leading up to a proper boss fight in the form of a Gorseval clone that feels a little overtuned for pugs. Then you enter the lanes phase, where the groups have to split up and each take out a vital organ. I went down the path for the lungs and it involved us breaking objectives while fighting off waves of titanspawn. I will have to do the other lanes to find out what happened there, but for the most part it felt pretty basic. Then you are told to collapse on the heart chamber and wait for Livia. The timer ticks down and then suddenly Livia gets some dialog options that show up… and the event is just over.

Map chat was legitimately mad about this event last night. We were all sitting there wondering if we fucked something up… did we somehow fail the event and got a bad ending. None of us seemed to get credit in the achievements for the kill, but also that appears to just be a bug. Then another timer started and the map reset with everyone dying after having said we did fatal damage to the titan. The entire thing feels like it was half finished and rushed out the door. Is this why the expansion got delayed? Because if so… maybe delay it again and finish the damned thing. The problem is that we are now stuck with another bad map… that no one is going to actually play other than those who are chasing the backpack or specific achievements. This could have been another epic map that folks play every day… instead we get a non-ending. I guess I just want to know what the folks creating this thought about it… because surely they knew this would not be terribly well received.

The other problem with Janthir Wilds as a whole… is that it was impacted by the current SAG-AFTRA Voice Actors strike. It feels exceptionally jarring that you will have multi-character dialogs happening with a handful of them voiced… and the others relying entirely upon reading fleeting dialog balloons popping up on your screen. I will absolutely look forward to hopefully playing through this content at some point in the future when we have voice lines for all of the actors that were on strike. I will be exceptionally frustrated if this never happens however… because holy shit does it feel bad right now. Like the highlight of having Countess Anise in any content… is experience the full on epic levels of sass provided by Catherine Taber. On one hand I am super proud of Arena Net for not replacing folks… but on the other hand it absolutely underlines the importance of these actors delivering the dialog to make the characters feel real. They were in a rough position… and I don’t think just delaying the content would have been viable. Here is hoping we can play through this with all of the proper audio at some point in the not too distant future.

Janthir Wilds as a whole has been a weird mixed bag of an expansion for me. I wholeheartedly love Lowland Shore and the Bearkin and deeply care about many of the new characters that were introduced through their coastal lives. I did not care for the Greer/Decima meta, and still feel like it needs some improvement to make it a big easier to pull off… because getting anyone to do it at all is pure hell. I like the maps overall for roaming around and doing events however, and really enjoyed Mistburned Barrens. The story is a bit hit or miss because quite frankly… I do not give a shit about the Wizards Court. I like some of the characters associated with it, but I just don’t much care about the whole super secret magical society, and as a result the highlight of this expansion has been when I was spending time with the loveable bears. I would fucking die for Pokey, because he is the Braham that actually works and is not an insufferable ass for large chunks of the content. With both Secrets of the Obscure and Janthir Wilds however… they feel like unfinished content. They feel like the content we get, because the studio either no longer has the vision or the funding to create the best content they could be. They are a hollow shade of something like an End of Dragons, that really shows the best that Guild Wars 2 can possibly be.

Please do not take this as me saying that I will riot and want to rage against the crappy content we are getting. I got $25 worth of enjoyment out of Janthir Wilds. In truth I got way more enjoyment out of it… because I am still having a lot of fun with various aspects of that content. I think the Metas we were given are poorly designed and just not representative of the best that Arena Net can do… but the intricate details of the zones and certain aspects of the story make up for it. I think a lot of resources went into the creation of the Homestead, and I am really thankful for that. Hopefully without a big system like that looming and eating up development time… we will finally see what they are capable of with the third of these micro yearly expansions. What I want more than anything from whatever comes next… is more evergreen content that players actually WANT to do… rather than something that they feel compelled to do in order to check some box off in the achievement panel. You can do better Arena Net. I have seen it… countless times.

Further Incomprehensible Nonsense

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Good Morning Folks. Last night I apparently remembered that I had the Endless Kodan Tonic and decided to run World Bosses while transformed into a giant bear. One of the particularly nice things about this specific tonic is that you can actually do combat while transformed. Most of them largely turn you into a useless lump, but this one even allows you to use your glider. This has always made me wonder if at one point, Kodan were contemplated as a playable race. Right now I am very much in a mode of having a whole slew of activities that I am working on, and then just sort of picking the one that fits my current level of engagement. Specifically I have a sub achievement for Klobjarne Geirr the Legendary Spear that requires me to do a bunch of World Bosses so I decided to knock out a few of those last night.

Another way lower impact achievement series that I have been working on is the Home Sweet Homestead series. These essentially just require you to pop into a zone and do a bunch of events. Each one also has the benefit of awarding you a recipe book related to that specific zone. Weirdly I had already picked up a copy of the recipes from the Dragon’s Stand version of this achievement, but have no memory of how I might have acquired it. At some point I want to make a real push into building some of my own structures in the Homestead. Right now I mostly have the default everything with a handful of placed structures just to sort out how the system works. One of my internet acquaintances build a really cool fully underwater Homestead that is worth checking out.

Spending time doing events in Auric Basic… led to me also starting to chip away at the No Mask Left Behind achievement. This one is pretty slick because it gives you an Aurillium Node for your homestead/home instance which will of course be useful at giving me a constant feed of little bits of that currency as I do my daily gathering. This however has led me to realize… just how little of the zone I have explored. I had no clue that Auric Basic had as much verticality as it does. Verdant Brink is immediately noticeable because half of the meta event takes place on rubble platforms in the sky. However with Auric Basic you are spending most of your time on the ground completing events leading up to the taking of the golden city. I was not expecting to find entire treetop villages in this zone, which makes me also realize how little of all of the other maps in the game I have probably explored. I was not a big fan of Heart of Thorns because it felt like a massive increase in difficulty… with lots of mob types that could just straight up murder you. However spending more time exploring is making me appreciate at just how interesting these zones are.

Since I seem to be settling into Guild Wars 2 for the long haul… I’ve finally engaged in the practice of alt parking. I am really only playing my Ranger regularly, and as a result I could be stashing all of my other characters at key locations around the map where I can gather resources daily. There are many different alt parking videos out there, but this one from Laranity covers alt parking as well as a few other gold farming strategies. Essentially right now I have a few different alts parked at various large chests in Bjora Marches and another parked at the jumping puzzle in Kaineng City. There are a few other areas that might be worth parking alts, given that I have a full compliment of level eighty alts that I am not using much. I’ve just added this to my reset routine along with farming guild halls and my homestead for resources and going to beat up a naked man for his lunch money. If you ever want to follow along in this nonsense and have Teleport to Friend doodads hit me up and I can log in the character at each location and let you park one easily.

Where we get into proper degeneracy however is that I have started farming a Black Lion Key each week with one of my free character slots. Essentially… there is a thing that you can do once per week that involves creating a brand new character… running it up to the level 10 personal story quest which rewards a free Black Lion Chest Key. Most of the time when you open a Black Lion Chest… it gives you useless stuff and I would never recommend buying them. However I am also someone who pulled one of the most expensive items from a chest and sold it to effectively fund everything I have done on my account since that point. Specifically I am doing the method where you run up a Human Ranger which seems to be about the fastest method to get through this process. I wish I had honestly been doing this all this time… but alas I was too lazy. Right now it seems to take me about 15-20 minutes to complete the process at a casual pace. This video covers the entire process designed to be as optimal as possible. Do I suggest you follow along in this path of madness? Probably not.

Yesterday we got the teaser trailer for the next chapter of the Janthir Wilds story which will be dropping on Tuesday June 3rd. Since I am very much in the mindset of “do Guild Wars 2” stuff I am pretty much primed to experience this as it goes live. Probably the thing that excites me the most is that it sounds like the new zone meta is going to be similar to Dragon Stand, where you have three lanes to push at the same time. I have to admit I was pretty disappointed in the Greer/Decima meta and still feel like that needs significant balancing given that after all of this time… it rarely succeeds with random groups. I like all of the maps in Janthir Wilds immensely… but there just isn’t really a fun meta right now. Mistburned Barrens has a few fun events, but nothing to the level of a proper meta. I am really hoping that they nail the meta for this last zone.

Dragon Bash will also be starting soon, which is a pretty fun event. Mostly I just try and make sure I do the dailies associated with it. I am not big on farming the pinatas, especially given that I have one in my home instance now. Then WVW Rush is happening in July along with the expansion announcement, which will be an ideal time to farm up a bunch of Gift of Battle just to have them at the ready. I might also work on some of the WvW Exclusive legendary items during this time. The only problem with all of this is… there is a lot going on in June. There will be a new Path of Exile league dropping on the 13th, and before that Dune Awakening launches its head-start on June 5th and I will be checking that out. I wish all of these events were about a month apart, because I have no clue what I will be doing. Hopefully 3.26 in POE is a banger of a league, but I also do not want to abandon Guild Wars 2 right now either. Yesterday I decided that I was actually glad I did not score a Nintendo Switch 2 preorder, because that only would have added to the battle for my time and attention.

Fractals with Friends

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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.