Janthir Wilds

Frickin Finally

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Good Morning Folks. Lately, I have been spending quite a bit of time visiting Living World Season Three and Four zones and cashing in Unbound and Volatile Magic. Essentially I am working towards crafting another Gift of Magic and Gift of Might which requires 250 of each rare trophy. Buying these outright off the market is a pretty extreme expense with Might costing around 165 gold, and Magic around 332 gold. However, I have been buying Trophy Shipments and the less effective Magic-Warped Bundle in an attempt to blunt this cost. I still need to build back up my stockpile of Mystic Clover and I am hoping that by the time I hit 77 of those I will have 250 of most of the needed materials. Similarly, I am going to have to grind out another Gift of Battle which I am likely going to do this weekend while the anniversary buff is still active.

Last night the map gods smiled upon me and landed me in a group on a map that was capable of defeating the new world boss meta in Janthir Syntri. This was my tenth attempt after nine failed attempts with different groups since the launch of this expansion. Essentially it is both a DPS check and a mechanics check with Greer seemingly the harder part of the encounter. He throws out massive amounts of condition damage, which needs cleansing and everyone effectively needs to stack on top of the boss right up in his face in order to really make this work. The problem with Greer though is that there are several intermission phases that slow down the fight significantly. We technically had more DPS on Greer than on Decima and there was a point where we had to do nothing but auto attacks while the other group caught up.

As far as what I did differently this time… I put my faith in the Commander entirely. I stood on top of them no matter what was being dished out and tried my best to have faith that the cleansing and healing would keep me alive. This is a deeply uncomfortable position to be in and I had years of feeling like I needed to dodge out of every mechanic screaming at me. I also shifted things up a bit and brought the Juvenile Brown Bear… aka Daedalus who has the special attack of Shake it Off which removes two conditions from five targets. I have no clue how much this additional cleansing helped but I figured anything was better than nothing. I legitimately need to get better at bringing the right pet to the battle, because 99.9% of the time I run the same few pets over and over. I stayed out of Soulbeast form and just sort of let the pet do its thing, hoping that it was better at targetting cleansings than I would be given how furiously I was mashing buttons otherwise.

So on one hand… I am very happy to have completed this meta. On the other hand… I still think this is a miserable encounter that asks way too damned much out of random folks on a random map. You essentially need at least 50 players on each of the bosses to seemingly make this work, and even in spite of how well it was going… the fight was still really damned tight. We could have lost at the last minute easily, and there was not enough time to swap over to the other boss to help them burn it down if things got dicey. Like that is one of the huge parts of Auric Basin is if things go south folks can get over to the other vines pretty quickly to assist there and help push whichever one was lagging behind. We did send a few folks from our team over to Decima and we had two seasoned Commanders that were directing traffic. Basically, I just lucked out to finally get a group that was prepared for this nonsense.

With the wizard chore points from getting the special achievement from clearing the meta, I picked up my last piece of Ascended gear. It is probably very sad that it has taken me a decade to fully kit out a single character in Ascended items. It was just never really a priority, but I figure since I am doing harder stuff I need to make sure I have the best gear going into the encounters. Granted I have exotic underwater weapons… but really who gives a shit about underwater weapons. It is sad that I had an Ascended Rebreather before I had fully Ascended armor. I need to start figuring out what is required for the Legendary Armor set and begin chipping away at that. I will probably do Heavy first because there are multiple classes that could benefit from that whereas… medium is just Thieves and Engineers… neither of which I am terribly keen on.

I think one of my favorite things about Guild Wars 2 is how active the world feels, and how easy it is for me to set my focus on something… that does not necessarily require a group. Sure I would freaking love a full group to do things like Strikes and Fractals… but there is more than enough meat on the bone for me to enjoy myself doing things that do not require largescale organization.

The Sword of Midnight

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I would love to give you all the customary “Good Morning Folks” greeting, but today has been straight in the shitter since I got up to my office. As a result, I am getting started on this post significantly later than normal. I’ve finally hit a lull and I am going to take this opportunity to talk about the nonsense I got up to this weekend. I spent a bit of time on my Warrior because that was my original main character in Guild Wars 2, and also the character that I was closest to finishing old world completion on. Basically with the new “season” aka the release of Janthir Wilds came a new Legendary Weapon Starter Kit, and more specifically this one includes Twilight a weapon I have been chasing for years. For the uninitiated, these give you basically 60% of the materials required to complete a Legendary weapon and cost 1000 Astral Acclaim aka the daily Wizard Chores currency that went in with Secrets of the Obscure.

However, I used the two gifts of exploration that I got from doing world completion on my Necromancer, which means that I needed to do another World Completion and get another two gifts as a result. I think when I started down this path I was sitting around 98% which essentially accounted for doing three zones, both of which I had partial completion on already. It was a pretty chill way to spend an evening and I came to a whole new appreciation of how good it is to use a gunblade underwater instead of the otherwise awful weapons. I also have a new appreciation of just how weird of a zone Mount Maelstrom is, because I totally forgot just how many different biomes there were given that I mostly only see the volcano during the world boss.

This also meant that I had to grind out another Gift of Battle, which I set my mind to doing on Saturday. From around 10 am until around 3 pm I spent my time grinding away in the Eternal Battlegrounds for my realm. If I were somewhere else and spending that time doing nothing but chain-capturing objectives, the WvW track experience probably would have gone faster. Instead large swaths of that time were spent fending off attackers trying to take Stonemist Castle. Even after we lost our commander we still managed to trudge along and be productive. During one of my breaks, we lost Stonemist Castle but then proceeded to get it back over and over. The green team seemed to be able to zerg just about anything down, but could not hold objectives to save their life. We did not have the numbers but appeared to have more skilled players.

So after a lot of grinding this weekend, I am now the proud owner of Twilight my third legendary weapon. I gotta say that if these starter kits were intended as a way of pushing players into the process of crafting legendaries it has worked. In addition to Twilight, I also have Bolt and Frostfang. I have an unfinished weapon kit for Juggernaut that I am going to shift my focus to trying to complete. This is going to require me to work on building back up a stockpile of Mystic Clovers which will take a bit. I am hoping in that time I will be able to grind out most of the trophies needed for Gift of Might and Gift of Magic through the Volatile Magic Trophy Deliveries.

Twilight really was the weapon that started my interest in Legendaries in the first place. Now that I have it… I feel like I have to at some point complete Sunrise its counterpoint. Eternity is a greatsword that requires you to have sacrificed both a Twilight and a Sunrise in order to craft it. All of this time I thought it meant basically burning through like 10,000 gold worth of crap in order to get it. However, when I crafted my Twilight and bound it to my account I got an interesting item called the Memory of Twilight. It seems like these can be used in lieu of the actual weapon for the purpose of crafting Eternity… which means now that I have one… I want the other… so I can get the third. Damn you Guild Wars 2… this is how you slip down the slope of having every Legendary.

Speaking of working as intended… ANet got a big chunk of gems from me this weekend when I noticed that there was this Mothra-adjascent Skyscale skin. I am a huge fan of Mothra and honestly most of the classical Toho Monsters, but Mothra has a special place in my heart. What is best about this is while it is doing the idle animations… it makes Mothra noises instead of the traditional Skyscale noises. I am so freaking sold on this skin and it even worked pretty well with the default them that I was using on my Branded Skyscale. I might tweak it at some point but I ma mostly good with dark purple with glowy pink eyes.

Lastly to paraphrase the immortal Jay Z… the Meta World Boss in Janthir Syntri “can kiss my whole asshole”. This fight is awful… largely because Greer is fucking awful. No one wants to do it… hell, I don’t want to fight Greer, but I keep going there because no one is ever willing to do that side of the two-part fight. I’ve attempted this Meta seven times and the groups have failed seven times. Last night was the most heartbreaking because we had a 2% wipe… but just could not push through the last little bit before they consumed the bloodstone and wiped the raids. Legitimately screw this fight and screw the designers who thought it was a good idea. I will be happy once the tryhards have extracted their pound of flesh from this encounter and the anet nerf it to be a little less fail-prone. So I love Janthir Wilds so far but this meta can fuck off.

Janthir Was Pretty Great

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Good Morning Folks! Last night I wrapped the Janthir Wilds main story and this morning I am going to talk about some of my impressions. Some of this discussion will probably get into spoilers, so I am giving you all a proper warning now. So once I got past some of my early complaints about pacing and story being gated by mastery tracks… the flow of the content went fairly smoothly. There were several “fill the bar” moments that I still do not love… and will continue not to love for eternity… but the story instances themselves were pretty great. After Secrets of the Obscure, this really feels like a return to peak ANet and I would put this up there with some of my favorite content like End of Dragons, Living World Season 3, and Living World Season 4.

The challenge is however that we only got what is effectively the first chapter of a story that is going to be doled out over the next year in three more chunks. The first half of Icebrood Saga was amazing… but the hamfisted reliance on Dragon Response Missions to tell the rest of the story essentially ruined the entire experience. Basically, I am saying that I have a lot of hope for where we are going… but that there is also plenty of time for it to be fumbled completely. I largely enjoyed the first content drop for Secrets of the Obscure but pretty much hated it once we entered Nayos. I am hoping that they can keep up the pace and gravitas of the story that is laid out before us, because there are a lot more characters now that I already care about than I did in SOTO.

A huge chunk of the story revolves around us mentoring Poised Arrow, aka “Poky” the son of the current Lowland Kodan Claw Stoic Alder. He is very much the role of the brash young warrior who wants to prove himself… and the story beats at times feel DANGEROUSLY close to how our relationship started out with Braham. The key difference is however that “Poky” has a loving family, and while he is missing his mother greatly… he has a surrogate mother figure whom he has bonded with. As a result, this leads to someone who can be reasoned with in ways that we never seemed capable of reasoning with Braham, and is not necessarily driven by an overwhelming sense of angst but more a drive to find ways that he can help his people. I admit I’ve grown fond of the “cub” during this expansion and am hoping that he joins our larger entourage. It is however making me miss the rest of my team greatly, and I am hoping at some point there is a “getting the band back together” sequence in our future.

Right now we have two maps, both of which are gorgeous and feature a ton of content… some of which are fairly well hidden like the Bee hive that I highlighted at the top of this post. I’ve completed exploration of both of them and gotten doodads for crafting legendary items at some point. There is a thick density of events, and a lot of them are champion-level mobs that take a decent-sized group to drop them. I do wonder how this content will age as time goes on and the quantity of players dwindles. No content in Guild Wars 2 ever truly feels dead, but there are definitely less popular areas. For example, it is pretty hard to get a Gyala Delve meta going these days, and the last several Dragon’s End runs I have attempted have failed.

Speaking of failing content, the centerpiece of this expansion is your battle with two Titans: Greer the Blightbringer and Decima the Stormsinger. When you get into Janthir Syntri there is a world event that fires off every two hours as a “storm” arrives and Greer attacks from the SouthWestern corner of the map and Decima from the NorthEastern corner. One of these is MUCH harder than the other… and I keep throwing myself at Greer in part because I know as ranged that melee is largely useless there… and it is also the one with significantly lower turnout. I feel like this fight needs to be tuned a bit because right now I have participated in three attempts… all of which with Commanders leading the charge… and all three have failed miserably. I feel like this is a lesson that ANet has not learned yet… and should stop listening to the most tryhard voices in the crowd and realize that Open World content is Casual content. Wasting fifteen minutes of your time failing an event is fun for no one.

It is also a bit of a harsh contrast to how these fights feel in story missions. You’ve “defeated” both Greer and Decima at this point and both of the fights were largely you going through the motions and coming out a winner on the other side. I am not necessarily saying that the World Boss version should be an absolute cakewalk… but if warm bodies show up and participate it should fall over like most of the other World Bosses do currently. Guild Wars 2 has a massive identity crisis because playing the game like you would literally any other MMORPG, means you are also putting out one-tenth of the damage output of the highest damage player. That gap should not be that wide… but it is because playing Guild Wars 2 means you are expected to do some unintuitive things regularly for the sake of optimization. This is the next major bridge that the game needs to reconcile because the chasm is too wide at this point between the haves and have-nots.

Last night I also completed the Falling Star questline, which is a new sort of thing that ANet is trying. Essentially you buy the Falling Star Quest License from the Wizard’s Vault for 1000 Astral Acclaim. This is the same amount of Wizard Chore currency that you need to buy one of the Legendary Weapon starter boxes for example. You are then started down an achievement path that feels significantly more like a normal MMORPG quest than pretty much anything else in Guild Wars 2, including quest markers on your map indicating where you should go for various steps of the process. Essentially doing the quest chain does not require a huge outlay of time or gold and will end up with you getting a pair of Meteor Wielder’s Ascended Gloves in your armor type of choice, the Falling Star Ascended Spear, and the Heated Core Infusion which triggers the molten appearance of the spear weapon. Technically the infusion comes installed in the gloves but I am itemizing it separately given that Infusions are so overwhelmingly expensive and this one comes with +5 Power and +9 Agony Resistance. Well worth the 1000 Astral Acclaim and in total it took me maybe an hour to complete because I did not have any of the required old world renown hearts unlocked.

All told I am pretty happy with the start of Janthir Wilds. It gives me two new playgrounds to roam around and three mastery tracks to start chipping away at. I am hoping that either the World Boss Meta event gets watered down slightly, or folks figure out how to push through the mechanics a bit faster so that collectively the community can start clearing it. I need to sort through the achievements and see what I can reasonably knock out. I’ve not done any of the mini-games yet, and need to at least get silver in each of them to earn mastery points. I am very interested in seeing how the next few chapters of this storyline go. It feels fairly similar to Dawntrail honestly, where we have taken up this mentorship role over a brash youth, and while the stakes are high… they are maybe a little less world-ending. However, I do really want to see us building our retinue of characters up again and moving towards the next major objective on the horizon.

Anyway if I were to give the expansion a numerical grade, I would give it a strong 8 out of 10 currently with the ability to top that out if they land the next content drops over the coming year.

A Better Garrison

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve been a bit frustrated the last few days, but that is only because I was trying to rush ahead to unlock my Homestead in Guild Wars 2. Out of all of the features coming with Janthir Wilds, that was the one that I cared the most about. Unfortunately, it is behind a few grinds and I already do not love the “fill the bar” mechanic when it comes to questing in modern Guild Wars 2, and the fact that it was holding back the feature that I really wanted to play with only served to make me a little hyperbolic. For anyone curious the order of unlocks that comes into the expansion is Warclaw which happens almost immediately, next up you have to learn how to use the spear, and then there is a whole ton of faffing about and learning the new Rift system for Janthir.

Finally, you get to visit your Homestead. I wish they had shifted up this order a bit because I personally do not care about the spear or at least don’t care about it right now. However, I am sure there is someone out there who really wanted to use it and was happy to get access to it so early. Also for reference immediately following the Homestead section you are going to be asked to earn a Mastery level with the Warclaw, so you might as well start chipping away on that in the time between learning that system and learning the Spear. Thankfully thought, Homesteads are well worth the wait and basically everything that I had hoped Garrisons would be in World of Warcraft back during Warlords of Draenor. Of note… if you are like me and have a ton of stuff that you have collected in your Home Instance over the years… you will need to leave and re-enter after completing the intro quest before any of that shows up.

One of my favorite dumb features of The Homestead is the fact that all of my characters are milling around doing random things. Granted in order to make this happen, you will need to get into the practice of logging your characters out in your Homestead. However, when you do so, they all show up and hang out there. The only thing that I really wish existed was a custom keybind just for popping up the instance portal. If you have it set as your active doodad, you can use the default keybind for that but I really don’t want to sacrifice my rift finder tool for faster access to The Homestead. Even though the Rift Finder tool appears to be broken… which in itself added a lot of frustration to the step between unlocking the spear and finally getting into your Homestead. I’ve honestly not dabbled in decorating that much, because I am also focused on leveling up the Homestead mastery so I can unlock the collection chests. At the maximum rank, you will be able to hit a single chest for each item type and collect all of the resource nodes that you have in your Homestead… which will greatly simplify my daily routine of gathering all the nodes. I am hoping we get something similar for Guild Halls.

I also love that all of my mounts with my chosen skins and dye jobs are milling around at the stable. It is sort of weird when you choose to mount up, because they will do a little spin and then disappear and reappear as your mount. Another really cool feature is the crafting bench for homestead crafting… works like ANY other crafting bench and gives you full access to your bank. This means if you have the Krait Obelisk you will be able to pull out Quartz Crystals without having to go find a bank. I WISH they would wire the Obelisk up to just draw from your bank directly, but given how old that is… who knows what that would require to make it work?

By default, the Homestead will have a day/night cycle, but you can talk to the Bear Bro at your teleport location in order to permanently set this to either day or night if you like. I have mine set as of this morning to perma-night largely because it has some amazing aurora effects up in the sky. I tend to be a night person anyways and there is more than enough light to navigate by. Eventually, I am sure I will utilize some lighting effects which will make everything look a bit more dramatic than flat ambient lighting. Mostly I am working on unlocking masteries before I fiddle around with anything too deeply. Each mastery rank you gain unlocks additional crafting options, and some of the later ones unlock additional areas of your Homestead that you can start using. However, that last rank and the collection boxes are my real objective. I am sorry Bearkin… but your nonsense is going to get leveled the last because I care the least about any of it.

One of the first things that I did yesterday once I found out it was a thing… was troddle off to go tame a Juvenille Warclaw, which can be found behind all of the buildings at the Warclaw paddock in Lowland Shore. I immediately named this Warclaw Josie after one of my cats, the one that is more “mine” than shared between the two of us. I can’t say the Warclaw is anywhere near as effective as some of my other pets, but I am very much using it by choice for the time being. I still have my Sky Chalk as backup, but how could I not use a cute Warclaw as a proper Ranger with a kitty-eared hood?

In the same paddock area, you can find a Warclaw Cub/Kitten in one of the pens and you have the option of petting it. Which of course is precious as heck and I did several times. I was hoping there was the option of feeding it… and inviting it back to my home instance and thereby my Homestead like you can with other cats in the world. I need to get serious at some point and collect the rest of these because while I have a handful of them… I by no means have them all.

Unlock order frustrations aside, I am having a heck of a lot of fun playing this expansion. The zones are really well designed, and the music feels like it is taking deep notes from The Witcher 3. There are a ton of Champion monster fights out in the zones and folks are regularly taking these down. A number of the fights require you to use your Warclaw in interesting ways. There is a lich/hag sort of monster that summons maggots and you have to charge around and stomp the maggots with your Warclaw to transition her between phases. There was a corrupted Reindeer that would charge off at various times during the fight and you would have to chain them down to fill a breakbar in order to transition back to a normal battle phase. Given that you are handed your Warclaw almost immediately upon entering the zone, this feels great… unlike mechanics that are centered around Skyscales and such in other areas when there is a clear dichotomy between haves and have-nots.

I’ve made it to the second zone and taken down the first of the big bads of this expansion. I have no clue how deep this initial foray is going to go. On the 20th ANet released a roadmap for the planned drops along the way during this expansion. Essentially the launch of the expansion aka this week, and whenever Update 1 happens… I figure in three months roughly… are going to focus on the story surrounding these first two zones. When Update 2 drops we will get a third map and then Update 3 a fourth map and the conclusion of this story arc. Lowland Shore and Janthir Syntri are both pretty large zones and have good layouts which should make them fun to bip around and run events. As far as I can tell there is no Meta for Lowland Shore and the major boss is the Lich/Hag thing I was talking about earlier. I am not far enough into the second zone to really know what the lay of the land is there, but I think there is a big World Boss there from what I have heard.

For now, I am focused on getting map completion, collecting all of the mastery points, and then obviously leveling said Mastery tracks. At some point, I need to finish up another World Completion on one of my alts so I can get the Gift of Exploration that comes with it. I also need to dive back into WvW and farm up another Gift of Battle, because those are the only things between me and crafting Twilight. I guess I now have a clear focus in Guild Wars 2 for the first time in a while. I am pretty freaking happy about that.