Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 related Posts

Always the Set Dungeon

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Sometimes a Rift just does not go your way. Yesterday I was trying for a level 72 to keep moving that needle forward and just ran into a chain of deaths and then got behind the timer. That is one of those things that happens in Diablo 3 sometimes, and it sort of highlights just how dependent upon RNG some of your success ends up being. I dusted myself off immediately and tried to just a straight 70 instead of the maximum I could do and breezed through it. I am having a freaking blast right now, in spite of the occasional death storm. There is just something about Diablo III that I have never found in another game. I’ve been spending some time playing Torchlight III a bit more, and it is a better game than I gave it credit for… but the dopamine cycle just isn’t the same.

When it comes to the Season 26 Journey, I have knocked out most of the low-hanging fruit. The one that is ALWAYS the bane of my existence is the set dungeon mastery. I hate doing set dungeons so much and I avoid them until I absolutely cannot any longer. This is a reoccurring theme and if you look up me talking about ANY past season… there is always a point where Slayer and Champion are done apart from the set dungeon. As far as conquests go I will probably start chewing away on those as well. I need to see if I am at a point where I can farm bounties on T16, and then start stockpiling caches for Avarice. Ultimately in an Avarice season, I tend to wait to do the cube 20 and 40 powers until after I have finished with that conquest because I will be swimming in materials. I need to also focus on doing a really fast T13 Neph Rift in order to knock out that under 4-minute run, which will tick two boxes.

Right now I am running a Thorns Bombardment build, mostly because it was something easy to build into from the Akkhans set granted by Haedrigs Gift. I have almost everything I need to switch over to a straight Invoker Thorns build, and I am contemplating making that shift at some point. I think Invoker might be an easier dungeon to do, but I am not entirely certain. I at least know it is a dungeon I have done several times. I have always thought Omnislash thorns build would be cool and apparently, some patch changes have now made that a viable thing. It is sorta dumb the amount of enjoyment I have by running back-to-back rifts trying to farm additional gear for gaining some power. I have a shockingly sparse number of Ancients at the moment, and my Primal gained from the 70 greater rift… was awful. My second primal wasn’t much better, but at least it was something I could hand to my Templar.

In other news, I am still logging into New World at least once a day and running around and collecting a few easy pieces of Gypsum. I’ve managed to slowly work all of my armor slots up to 600 expertise, and am now starting on weapons. I got my Sword all the way to 600 already, and Greataxe/Warhammer is in the 575ish range. I am not entirely certain WHY I continue to play other than running around and harvesting materials is still pretty enjoyable. I think ultimately I am waiting for the dungeon patch that removes keys, and then I will probably be spending some time trying to get groups tanking dungeons to finish out my expertise grind. I am also farming keys on the side because they have stated that each key will become a box full of dungeon loot. Especially now that all of my armor is at 600, there might be some interesting items that come from those.

The other game I am spending time in each day is Guild Wars 2, but lately, that has been limited to farming daily PVP Potions. For the time being the only members of the Greysky Armada that PVP at all… are me and Kodra and we are trying to farm up as many pots as we can. We’ve already farmed up to 50 a few times and unlocked some of those upgrades and now we are chewing away at one of the 100 potion requirements. At a minimum each day I do enough dailies in order to get the completion reward and the free 2 gold that comes with it. If I happen to be paying attention at Tequatl time, I still try and catch that whenever I can. However, the last few days of being in “Diabble land”, have caused me to miss those.

All in all, I am having quite a bit of fun, but I do need to revisit some other projects like finishing out Horizon Forbidden West.

Aetherblades and Jade Heroics

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Last night I finished up the second part of Living World Season 1. I enjoyed it mostly, but there is still this part where you are dumped into Bloodtide Coast and told to fill a bar. I am fairly certain that this is bugged because it took me somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 events to fill the said bar. Other folks were in chat talking about it as well, so I am hoping that some sort of patch drops to resolve this for the rest of the folks who will likely experience it on the weekend. [Edit] – It appears the patch that dropped while I was doing Tequatl last night addressed this. As far as the actual content… it was a bit shallow. This part seemed much faster than the first drop. Essentially you have some content in Lion’s Arch, followed by some running around and finding a bunch of people, then the Bloodtide Coast sequence, and finally a big set piece instance. If my recollection of part one is correct we got two different set piece instances, but I am guessing they wanted to limit this story arc to only involving Kas and Jory.

The other piece that I was not quite prepared for was the fact that I had already experienced this “dungeon”. I had heard along the way that a lot of the fractals were based on instances from Living World Season 1, but I was not exactly prepared for them to just exactly be those same instances. As a result, completing this area felt probably shorter than it actually was, because I had done it a few times now as a fractal. I guess I did not make that connection quite so succinctly during the first part, though I had also completed that instance as a fractal. All of that said I am still very happy to now have access to this, and I think it is pretty great that we seem to be getting a 20 slot bag for completing each step in this chain. I am wondering if this occurs only the first time you complete it, or if all characters that you run through this sequence are now going to end up fully equipped in bags as a result.

In other news, I have finished my process of leveling every profession in Guild Wars 2 to 80. Most of them, however… are in no condition to actually play. At this point, I feel pretty confident about Warrior, Necromancer, Ranger, and Engineer. All four of those are fairly well geared and have a reasonable build. My Mesmer is getting pretty close but I still feel like I need to do some tweaking. Thief is the one that I finished leveling the last and is a complete mess as is Elementalist. Revenant could be played in a pinch but really I need to get some elite specializations unlocked to make that a more enjoyable experience. I am not sure WHY I decided I wanted one of each, but it is a thing that I have completed nonetheless. Ultimately I am probably going to start doing map completion work on them while I sort out how best to play them.

Right now I am devoting my time to getting Dragonhunter unlocked for my little Asura Guardian. This is likely going to be the next character that I “figure out” and get some viable gear and a build that is enjoyable. Essentially I am abusing my addiction to World vs World to unlock Elite Specializations on the various alts that are still in progress being figured out. Heart of Thorns is my least favorite of the content drops and as a result, are the Hero Points that I am least interested in chasing. So every time I get a Skirmish Chest I am spending it on Testimonies of Jade Heroics, which I then spend at the Heroics Notary for Notarized Scrolls of Maguuma Heroics. Over time this allows me to unlock elite specializations on characters that I am not really actively playing. It might seem cheesy but it is all part of my process and I am very thankful that the game gives me an easy way to work on my alts… while not actively playing them.

Sky Pirates of Tyria

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Good Morning Friends! I find myself being forcefully cheery this morning because I have no clue what is up with me… but Wednesdays are hard. I am not exactly certain what is going on with me, but I have the hardest time getting started and actually blogging on hump day. We are starting off this post with this image that I found hilarious because I never noticed that the statue of Balthazar had a bucket over its head with two eyes drawn on it. This is an expert rebellion right here, because when a god goes amok… you don’t just remove a perfectly good statue… you make it look silly. I guess those are some spoilers right there but minor ones. Suffice to say that I have noticed the Guild Wars 2 maps are all loaded with similar attention to detail, and it is pretty cool.

Yesterday dropped the second part of Living World Season 1, and I was super excited about this. So far this content has not aged nearly as well, because there is a whole mystery aspect to it… and knowing what I know having finished End of Dragons… there are certain characters that are named that give these events away completely. I get that this is revising history here… but were it me I would have had that character be operating under an Alias given that we have seen and heard a lot about them over the years. Otherwise, I was exceptionally happy to finally see the official introduction to Kas and Jory, characters that I initially did not like in Season 2… but have come to love greatly over the subsequent content.

I thought I would end up playing through all of this new content last night but ultimately stalled out. they did it again with this content drop where they added a “do events” section in Bloodtide Coast. However, it seems like maybe not ALL events count evenly because it seemed like I was getting more credit when doing the events connected to pirates. There are also now a number of event areas around the zone without really clear objectives on how to progress them. Instead of bashing my face against this last night I proceeded with my usual nightly routine of a little WvW and a little PVP and figured I would regroup today in trying to get past the “help some people out” time gate. I am not sure if this factored into the actual events or if this is just a way of padding out the content. Whatever the case I don’t love it given that there was been one of these seemingly disconnected sections in both Living World parts so far.

Earlier in the evening though I participated in my nightly reset Tequatl kill, and it was one of the weirdest groups I have experienced. The entire zone felt like a bowl of fruity pebbles because seemingly EVERYONE had a commander tag up. Specifically, look at my minimap and if my count is correct, there were eighteen tags of one form or another active last night. Granted a few of those were mentor tags which don’t really count, but the vast majority were bonafide commanders. I mean it was a good meta and maybe went more smoothly than I am used to, but I fear my one map starved the rest of the server of commanders for a time. There is a part of me that wants a commander tag, but another part of me that doesn’t really want to spend the 300 gold on it.

Today I hope to sort out what I am supposed to do in those few situations that did not seem to have clear objectives. The story is great so far, and ultimately that is really what I am after when it comes to this content. It is weird having finished all of the other content in the game and then filling in key bits of information that would have been nice to know all those years ago.

An End To Dragons

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This weekend I got back on the main story quest for End of Dragons. I am not sure why I ultimately bail at times and have trouble following the main story thread, but it is definitely a thing. At least in the case of End of Dragons and Guild Wars 2, there are times when I know a major fight is about to happen which causes me to pause. I know from experience that no fight in Guild Wars 2 plays out quickly, and often times they last about two to three times longer than I feel like they should for a story mission. The end result is that I put off doing them, and return to my regularly scheduled nonsense. Then weeks if not months pass before returning to actually following that main story thread. I have this weird fear of being committed to doing something for an unknown period of time, that I cannot easily bail out of without forcing myself to do everything from the start. If you could restart story missions from the last checkpoint… this would probably alleviate my fears.

One cool thing that happened while questing my way across Echovald Wilds, is that I got to experience the zone meta event. Fighting this giant jade golem/mech thing was really fun and I liked the fact that the encounter moved to different locations. I greatly appreciate the new visualization mechanic of showing arrows in the direction that the entire party is supposed to go in. Older fights honestly could benefit from this, so it would be lovely if they shoehorned that into other encounters. I am specifically thinking of something like Tequatl with four points that need to be guarded, or Triple Trouble where there are three different worms in three different locations that need to be fought. Granted you can just do the tried and true “follow the mass of people” but I do appreciate having some indication of what to do.

As far as the final encounter of the expansion goes… it felt phenomenally epic but was also at times VERY busy. It was about as frenetic as I could possibly handle without just feeling overloaded by it. When it was over… I was thankful because honestly there was a little too much going on for me and I felt deeply overstimulated. Don’t get me wrong, it was cool as hell… but as someone who generally goes for maximalism, this was a bit much. It played out in a way that I more or less expected it to play out, which had a required amount of time associated with it and hoops to jump through… but it was a little overwhelming. I am honestly concerned about what this encounter looks like when you had in about sixty other players.

I guess I now need to join the vast numbers trying to get a turtle mount. I need to read up on the frequency of when the zone meta plays out and figure out a time that I can start doing it on a daily basis. I want my siege turtle because they are really cool looking, but also super handy for any sort of objective that requires breaking an obstacle. Then again I also need to buckle down and devote time and effort to finishing up my Skyscale and Griffon mounts as well, and sort out where to even begin my Rollerbeetle. I like that these long grinds exist, but I do find it hard to get excited over doing them. Now that I am done with the story and all caught up, however, I think it might actually give me the drive to start filling in the missing pieces.

As far as the story goes it was excellent. For me at least, each expansion has gotten better than the last… minus the bullshit with the dragon response missions. The problem with End of Dragons is that we are dumped off in a similar position to that of Final Fantasy XIV. In both cases, a decade-long journey has come to a close and for the most part, there is no obvious path forward. I will be interested to see where the Guild Wars 2 team goes from here now that the dragon magic crisis has been resolved. I have to admit there were moments in the epilogue that I teared up a little after reaching what was a pretty obvious point of conclusion for certain character arcs. I am very ready for the next expansion whenever it lands, and also deeply looking forward to the second part of Season 1 when it comes out in a few days.

To Dragon’s Watch!