Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 related Posts

Secrets of the Obscure Announcement

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Good Morning Friends! While I have not been actively talking much about Guild Wars 2, I still end up poking my head into the game a few times a week. I need to properly spend some time catching up and experiencing the “What Lies Within” content update and the second part of the Gyala Delve zone meta. I feel like before I talk about anything that transpired yesterday, I need to talk about the controversial post that the Arena Net team made back in February. Essentially in the Studio Update a new path forward for Guild Wars 2 was outlined, that they would be moving away from Living World and instead doing smaller and more frequent expansions.

With this post, the community sort of spun off in a bunch of directions. Some seemingly now accurately predicted that this would mean yearly expansions. Others went into doomer territory and assumed that this was the beginning of the end of Guild Wars 2. Whatever the case… this shift in direction combined with a somewhat poorly received content update for What Lies Beneath caused some opinions to circulate. I personally thought Gyala Delve and the What Lies Beneath update were pretty enjoyable. I was largely on board with this concept of narrowing the scope of what an expansion meant and then following it up with specific quarterly content drops. In the time since then, we have seen effectively a quarterly schedule which I think is awesome. Mostly for me when it comes to a live service game, the studio behind it needs to nail a predictable cadence and set expectations… and I think Arena Net is now doing both.

Now we move forward to yesterday, and ANet dropped the trailer for the next Guild Wars 2 expansion, Secrets of the Obscure. With the close of the Dragon Cycle expansions with End of Dragons, we now move back to core Tyria and are delving into mysteries that have just been sitting there in the open for a decade now. We’ve had this giant floating Dalaran-esc tower in Kessex Hills that was just begging to be explored, and it seems like the new expansion is going to be taking us there. This is honestly something that Wooden Potatoes predicted in his mega video throwing out mini-expansion ideas that would begin to tie up loose ends in the world. If you look at the map there is already a bunch of areas to expand into new zones, without the need to necessarily build another content island.

With the announcement came a bit of an info dump about the features of Secrets of the Obscure or as the community is already referring to it as just “SOTO”. There is a new expansion site that serves largely as a teaser for the features and a way to pre-purchase. Then there are a number of news blog posts that deep dive into some of the features themselves. More specifically there is one covering combat changes and another talking about some of the more ephemeral rewards structure features. I think what excites me the most are the tweaks to combat, which again everyone was speculating since content creators had latched onto the fact that an Elite Specialization had not been mentioned in either the roadmap or the subsequent Q&A.

Essentially we are getting new build diversity through the removal of elite specialization requirements for weapons. As it stands right now in order to use a Longbow on a Guardian, for example, you have to be using the Dragon Hunter talent tree with your build. In order to use a shield with a Mesmer, you have to be a Chronomancer. The first change with SOTO is that they are removing these requirements and when a class has access to a weapon… all of the specializations have access to that weapon. For ages I have wished I could build a Reaper that used the Greatsword as the main weapon set, and then Pistol as my secondary weapon. Sure I realize that Pistol is largely designed for condition damage… but it plays fine with Power Gear at least in the open-world content I largely do. I will now be able to craft this as well as a bunch of other dumb build ideas that I am sure the community will go wild with.

More than that, however, in one of the quarterly updates it seems like every single class is getting another weapon to play with.

  • Guardian: Pistol (main and off hand)
  • Revenant: Scepter (main hand)
  • Warrior: Staff
  • Engineer: Short bow
  • Ranger: Mace (main and off hand)
  • Thief: Axe (main hand)
  • Elementalist: Pistol (main hand)
  • Mesmer: Rifle
  • Necromancer: Sword (main and off hand)

I am super interested in Staff for Warrior because I am hoping that opens up a healing option for that class. I am also naturally interested in Necromancer getting Sword Main and Offhand… because I wonder what a Pistol/Sword combo would look like. I don’t love Daggers in general… so if a game gives me the option to not use one… I will generally take that option. Ranger getting access to maces could also be interesting. I could see some sort of Hammer/Mace/Mace build being interesting probably with some CC nonsense going on.

Another huge thing that I am looking forward to… doesn’t directly impact me. They are adding in a new way of earning the Skyscale mount, that in theory should be less of a grind and hopefully less of a gold sink. I went through the entire process of getting a Skyscale and while I enjoy it… it is so much of a grind that I would never wish that for anyone. The Skyscale is the single highest quality of life addition I have made to my account, and in truth much like lowering the barrier of entry of getting access to the raptor and gliding quickly… this one is pretty huge and is currently gated behind having to do a mount of content to get it. This is a good change for future generations that might adopt the game later, but I do like that they are giving those of us who unlocked the first track a bit of a bonus when we unlock both tracks.

Another thing that I am supremely excited about is the possibility of an Open World track for earning Legendary gear. Guild Wars 2 is a bit odd when it comes to gearing because Legendary gear is mechanically the same as Ascended gear. The key difference being that you can change the stats on Legendary gear as often as you like, meaning once you have a set for each armor weight… you effectively never need to worry about gearing ever again. The problem with the way this gear is earned currently is that for the PVE variant, you essentially have to raid. While I would love to do this at some point… I don’t necessarily have a pre-baked static team to take with me. I mostly play Guild Wars 2 as a solo adventure, and I figure this is the case for a lot of players. The idea of opening this up to give us a way to earn purple gear makes me extremely happy.

I am also fairly interested in this “Rift” mechanic that they talk about, and I am interested to see how this shakes out. More interesting things in the Open World are always a bonus for me, given that is my primary mode of play in Guild Wars 2. I’ve loved Rift mechanics in other games… like the actual elemental Rifts in the game of that namesake, the anchors in Elder Scrolls Online, and the corruption pillar things in New World. My hope is that this ends up being something of the sort and just adds one more game mode to an already-packed world. I kinda dig the seemingly darker theme of this expansion. There are a lot of threats from Tyria’s past that could easily come back now that the dragons are out of the way. Maybe the dragons served the purpose of guarding against even worse things.

I have no clue what this nightmare-fueled monstrosity is, but I am here for it. Sign me up for dark eldritch horror thank you very much. While I am not really a “Wizard Tower” type of person, I am all here for floating cities and more importantly floating continents. Mostly what excites me is the addition of more vibrant maps into the game. Guild Wars 2 isn’t so much an “Open World” game as it is a dense content map game and I am here for more fun zones to hang out in. I am also interested in seeing what wild zone metas we could have when it is assumed that EVERYONE has easy access to a flying mount. I think that has been one of the challenges with the Skyscale to date, is that it is really hard to design content around having it because the grind was so arduous.

I realize I somewhat buried the lede here a bit and am just now embedding the trailer. The truth is the trailer doesn’t say much of substance. You are far better off reading the blog post, and then the combat and rewards breakout posts. I think what mostly shocked everyone was the date. This is going to be launching on August 22nd. At the time of writing this post, that is only 55 days away. I have to be honest… I wish EVERY game announcement was on this short of a timeframe. Previously my favorite announcement was Fallout 4 when we had it in our hands roughly six months later. This is great because a few months is sufficient time for a hype cycle to build, and spend time theory-crafting new build options. The biggest challenge that ANet has had to date has been the consistency of content releases, and I think a few years of this content model will do a lot to sure up the player base.

What are your thoughts about the expansion announcement? Are you as excited as I am? Drop me a line below with your thoughts and feelings.

Low Polygon Turtle

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Good Morning Friends! Happy Super Adventure Box! I have to be honest I am not nearly as nostalgic for the April Fools event in Guild Wars 2 as some folks are, but they did manage to pry some more money from my pocket with this amazing Siege Turtle skin. Really the price of admission is entirely worth it for the 1980s arcade sound effects while using it. I love the aesthetics of this event even if I don’t necessarily love grinding through the world. Essentially I tend to easily get up to the frog boss and then fail miserably. What I did not expect is that apparently unlocks for SAB are character bound instead of account bound, so I had to go through the process of rigging up all of the things like bombs and shovels on my Ranger since I prefer to be playing that character currently even though for the purposes of the Super Adventure Box it does not really matter.

For anyone who has no clue what I am talking about, the Super Adventure Box is this weird original one-off April Fool’s event where players could run around in a vaguely Super Mario 64 inspired map. This was so beloved by the player base that it ultimate became a permanent event coming back each year for a week or so around the beginning of April. I’ve talked about it before in the past and even have some screenshots of the world. Essentially you work your way through a series of challenges in a Mario-esc 1-1, 1-2 etc sequence. There are a number of achievements for you to get like finding green and red baubles and a whole slew of items available for purchase through Bauble Bubbles which you can purchase for every 250 baubles collected in the levels. It uses a Zelda-like mechanic where you keep having to purchase larger wallets in order to hold more Baubles through each trip into the zones.

Super Adventure Box requires a continue coin in order to play, and at the beginning of the festival, you are given five of these. They can then be purchased with baubles or I believe found in chests spread throughout the levels. Since I was already making a purchase, I decided to pick up the Super Adventure Pack which includes a convenience item called the Infinite Continue Coin. Essentially when you hit the game over screen, in lieu of inserting a continue coin… you can use your infinite continue coin which will then give you 99 lives to explore the level making the whole process way less tedious. This is essentially a one-time purchase and is only available during the Super Adventure Festival.

Now this is where we get into the long history of Guild Wars 2, because apparently as I understand it… there was a third world teased at one point but never actually delivered. I believe this is in part because all of Super Adventure Box was essentially a passion project of one of the devs, and when they left the company so left the motivation to keep making Super Adventure Box levels. So all of the achievement hunters are currently slavering over a playable “test” of the third world. Essentially this area is missing some of the final polish but allows folks to go through it and collect some of the achievements. I watched a live stream for a bit yesterday afternoon of one of the OG players hunting for the baubles that they were missing.

While the jumping puzzles are not necessarily my jam… I do love this time of year for the neat skins that you can get. For example yesterday out of one of my daily loot boxes from killing Champions, I got this Retro-Forged Rifle which sorta looks like a giant 8-bit era zapper gun. I’ve got a similar pixelated hammer and Legend of Zelda-looking short bow skin. There are also craftable skins for various bosses in the mini-game. I picked up the infinite continue coin because this year I would really like to finish the entire map, or at least beat all of the bosses. I might need to watch a strategy video because King Toad always kicks my ass. It feels like I should be able to dodge or jump over some of the mechanics but I never seem to be able to do so.

Are you participating in Super Adventure Festival? Were you also swayed by the low polygon turtle mount skin? Have you been anxiously awaiting World Three? Drop me a line below.

Goodbye Merigold

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I have this weird superstition when it comes to computers. I will never name the same build the same thing twice. It is almost as though each machine that gets a fresh install is its own “being”, because yes I suffer from the personification of machinery. Generally speaking, the machine gets named after something that I am engaged with at the time. My current gaming desktop is named NormandySR2 and my laptop is named NightCity. My gaming desktop before that was named Serenity, and when I rebuilt the gaming desktop before that into a Plex Server I named it Merigold as I was playing through Witcher 2 and 3 at the time and Triss is legitimately the correct choice. Over the weekend that machine gave up the ghost, and while I could potentially resurrect it with a new system build… I’ve decided to move on. Another proud tradition of mine is to turn my previous gaming desktop into my new “fuck around and find out” system. Merigold was my old AMD FX-6300-based system and when I upgraded to my current i7-10700K-based system a few years ago, I left my previous x99-based i7-5820k system largely sitting there dormant.

The plan is to build this into a Linux Mint based system. Why that distro? Largely it is a case of comfort and familiarity. I’ve built up a few past laptops using it and felt good about it. In theory, I could just run a more server-ly distribution on it, but I often like to use this machine as a secondary desktop. I’ve always built my second machine as a Windows machine, so this is going to be a bit of a first for me. This is going to mean that I will be using Linux a heck of a lot more than I normally do. For decades I’ve had a Linux box as a “toy” machine, that I fiddle with for a few days and then forget about it… and by the time I need it again, I often burn it down and start from scratch. The fediverse however has immersed me more into open source culture… and I am thinking it might be time to test drive actually running one of my primary machines as Linux. I mean I will still likely run Plex on it, but I am also really interested in trying to figure out the best use of it as a remote machine given that I never actually use my second machine with a proper monitor/keyboard/mouse. Previously I had used Parsec as my remote tool of choice, but there is no Linux hosting option for that sadly. In the short term, I will probably use VNC, which I have never loved… but it is functional and easy enough to set up.

I popped in for a little bit yesterday before Diablo IV Beta came to a close and finished leveling to 25, the level cap for that test. I am still a bit “up in my feels” about what I really think about that game. I was honestly not expecting “Blizzard Does Lost Ark” and since I bounced so phenomenally hard from that game I guess I understand the dissonance that I am going through regarding that. Diablo Immortal is also somewhat of a version of that experience, and I liked it just fine because I entered into that with very low expectations. Diablo IV however had been a game I had whether or not I wanted to… been pinning my hopes on as the last chance for Blizzard to really grab me. I’ve always cared far more about the Diablo franchise than anything else that the company has put out, and slowly over the years, I have peeled away from the other franchises. I did not really want to also feel like I had moved on past Diablo as well. I mean I have a copy of it now, so I might sit and watch and see what it evolves into over time.

The experience of the Diablo IV Beta has had the effect of causing me to pour my heart and soul back into Last Epoch. This is honestly the sort of experience I was hoping Diablo IV was going to be. For all of the talk of a return to Diablo 2 from the devs… I sort of expected something that would straddle the gap between Path of Exile and Diablo 3. That is ultimately what Last Epoch feels like, a happy medium between those two games. I got my Sentinel/Paladin up to fairly high levels and while I enjoy it… I also was not really feeling it. So instead this weekend I started pushing up my Necromancer and have now almost gotten up to the same levels that I was sitting at on my Paladin. I’ve not started the Monoliths yet but am working my way through the final chapter of content that is currently in the game. I think I have effectively a fully fleshed-out “kit” at this point and it is just a matter of getting levels and getting better gear.

I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time in Guild Wars 2. Here is one of those Legendary bosses that I compared Diablo IV bosses to. I legitimately hate the Legendary rogues that spawn after you have defeated a Champion rogue. I largely stick around to help fight them because they are such pains in the butt… and I know they can wipe an entire field’s worth of unsuspecting open-world players. It always feels like I spend most of my time resurrecting other players. It is more a case that I don’t want to damn anyone to do this horrible encounter alone, as opposed to actually wanting to fight it myself. That is the weird thing about Guild Wars 2… it makes me want to take action to help other players because it seems like it is the right and proper thing to do. I have a post in me about how Guild Wars 2 is the best game that the mainstream isn’t taking seriously… but that is going to have to wait for another day. The annoying thing about Guild Wars 2 is that it is so good… that it turns players into evangelists for it… which only ends up pissing off the unindoctrinated.

So the goal for today is to finish the installation of whatever I end up naming the new box. I spent most of yesterday furiously copying files from a machine that I have not touched in two years… and probably didn’t actually need anything from… but felt like I had to back up “just in case”. I’m currently running it off the bootable image and am just about ready to do the proper install. Linux “live” images are really a godsend, especially given that they just sort of “work” now to let you copy files off an otherwise dead system. That whole world has evolved so far since the first time I installed RedHat in the late 90s.

Enjoying the Journey

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Good Morning Friends! I am not entirely certain what it is about the ritual of doing Tequatl the Sunless at server reset that I enjoy so much but it is most definitely a thing. I am honestly a bit annoyed with the time change because it pushes the “start” of my evening back an hour later than it was. There was just something about sitting down with dinner and killing a giant undead dragon as my first activity of the evening that set the tone for the rest of it. It isn’t that Tequatl or “Taco” as I occasionally call it is really that rewarding. There are much better uses of my time, but there is something about the event that I enjoy and the fact that I have managed to pull several ascended weapons from it at this point. There is also a little community of folks who run this every single night and I enjoy the vibe they bring… that is unless I get the map with the Goon Squad on it.

I’ve been working my way through the story with my Ranger and am on the second section of Living World Season 2. In theory, my excuse is to use this experience as a way of knocking out the “Return To” achievements and eventually earning myself a Legendary Amulet as a result. Essentially ANet as a way of buying time for the End of Dragons release threw in a “Living World Return” series that provides a ton of rewards along the way and a legendary item that you can use on all of your characters. It was due to some of these achievements that I was able to finish my Skyscale so quickly because completing segments gave me exactly the amount of zone currency required for one of the steps of that quest chain. I have completed all of the content in Guild Wars 2, but had done so often times out of sequence and over the course of ten years of me playing off and on.

What has been so interesting is seeing this cast of characters that I am already so engaged with… evolving into what they will eventually become. It is like I read the last chapter of the story and now can better appreciate the chapters that are leading up to it as a result. So many of these characters I did not like at all when I first met them through Living World Season 2, because I did not understand what had happened during the first Living World Season. The game just sort of threw you in the middle of something that didn’t make much sense. While I disliked Braham specifically for most of a decade, I now feel like I understand him a bit better as a character and also think that Kas is less of an airhead because I know that both Kas and Jory to some extent are dealing with a lot of shit that went down along the way while still trying to remain a strong couple.

It makes me think that at some point in the future, I should probably start a brand new character and play all of Final Fantasy XIV through from the very beginning. Now that I know where the story is going, I feel like I will better appreciate the journey. I’m not one who is negatively impacted by spoilers and quite honestly most of the time… knowing the destination makes me stop trying to second-guess every decision along the way. I can finally relax and enjoy the ride for what it is without feeling like I need to be wary of each step. I think this is part of why I have fairly regular replaying of games that meant a lot to me like Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Skyrim, Fallout, or The Witcher 3. It is the same reason why I find comfort in watching Star Wars, Dune, or Blade Runner… it is comfortable to re-experience things that once made me happy and it is something I can use as a bit of solace when I am struggling.

In more current and fresh news… I was in fact able to skip past the game-breaking bug surrounding the Lagon boss fight in Last Epoch. If you get stuck where Lagon will not summon a portal for you to take, you can just teleport to Soreth’ka in the Divine Era. This does in fact cause you to complete the quest you are on and allow you to pick up the next sequence and begin the ninth and final chapter of the game. The last chapter was pretty fun but included maybe the worst possible archetype of creation… a wizard that summons a ring of bad around him so you have to fight him in close quarters… then summons an endless string of bees for you to fight. Bees in ARPGs are just universally awful and end up doing way more damage they you would think they should.

I’ve made minimal progress in the Monolith system, but have finished the first boss and am working on unlocking the second. I am not sure what it is about the game but I’m less driven to keep going not that I have finished the story. Maybe it is that I know I will be poking my head into Diablo IV in a few minutes, or that I am really enjoying Guild Wars 2 at the moment. The monolith just doesn’t seem as “sticky” as I would like it to be. It is really fun with friends, but I sorta find it less interesting when I am running it by myself. The drop rates of gear also feel a bit fickle in that it has been probably 20 levels since I last got an upgrade. I’m just not seeing items that are worth swapping to and would require more crafting than I have forging potential available to fix. I know as I progress upwards in the monolith that I will keep seeing better and better items, but I am in this weird period where nothing useful seems to be dropping. The rewards from each monolith echo feel significantly less important when you know you are just going to be vendoring almost all of it.

I think in the test realm they must have buffed drop rates significantly because it feels like I am only getting a trickle of useful gear. Maybe it is just that I know more specifically what types of items I am after with my paladin build than I did with the necromancer. Whatever the case the game as a whole just feels less rewarding than it did in testing. I am trying not to force myself to play Last Epoch because I don’t want to ruin the experience. I might try playing something else because while I enjoy the tanky nature of the Paladin build I am running, it isn’t terribly exciting gameplay-wise. I sorta miss having my Bone Golem thrashing about. I would also like to try building something with Primalist, and if I do plan on switching classes I should probably do so before I get too deep into the monolith system since that is unlocked on a character-by-character basis and not account-wide.

In the short term however, I am going to be playing a lot of Diablo IV as I try and get used to that game, and get far enough along to unlock the wolf cub backpack. It is sort of adorable.