Guild Wars 2

One of the challenges of being an adult and playing an MMORPG is that from time to time I have to step away from the screen, and because of the online nature there is no “pause” feature. I cannot count the number of times I have needed to step away to deal with some crisis, only to return dead and need to resurrect and find my way back to whatever it was that I was doing. “Hang on, I need to get to a save space” is probably something that my wife is exceptionally tired of hearing. Guild Wars 2 however has a feature that I wish EVERY MMORPG had, and that is a way to teleport quickly to someplace safe… and then return to exactly where you were in the normal game so you can return to whatever it was that you were doing.

The thing is… this isn’t just a paid feature available only from premium VIP passes, but something you can do with the base features easily. This morning I am going to talk a bit about each of the ways that you can teleport out of the action to hit a bank or vendor, and then rapidly teleport back to where you were in the world.

PVP Lobby – Heart of the Mists

Heart of the Mists is a zone that you can enter while waiting on a PVP Match to start, and also allows you access to your PVP-only gear profiles and build information. It can also be used as a rapid method of getting to a bank, vendor, trading post, or even getting a free teleport to Lion’s Arch. The coolest part about this is that I believe it is available at level one, and exiting this area through the PVP menu will teleport you right back to where you left the world so long as it is someplace still accessible. If you teleport while in the middle of a story instance, it will teleport you back to wherever you started that story instance.

WvW Lobby – Edge of the Mists

Calling Edge of the Mists this a lobby is a bit of a lie, but when you first teleport into it you are placed in a safe space where no players can harm you. This is nowhere near as feature-rich as Heart of the Mists as there is no bank access, but you can still teleport to Lion’s Arch and still have the functionality to return to the last location in Tyria.

Guild Hall – Location and Amenities Vary

There are currently four different guild halls that are available to players, with two located in Maguma, one in the Crystal Desert, and then one in Cantha. The Cantha guild hall called the Isle of Reflection is the one pictured above. They all function effectively the same and if you exit the guild hall via the guild interface, it will take you right back to where you were last located in Tyria. What you have access to in a given guild hall is wildly dependent upon how much of the restoration process your guild has completed. At the bare minimum however you should have access to vendors and can access your bank through the scribe station crafting machine. Using this as your fast escape to safety has the side benefit of maybe letting you bump into other members of your guild.

VIP Lounge Passes

There are a number of VIP lounge areas that are scattered around the world which require some sort of access pass in order to enter them. The passes come in two variants: a two-week pass and a permanent access pass. You can get some of the two-week passes by playing the game, but the permanent ones are generally only available on the Black Lion Store and cost 1000 gems each. While there are currently ten available in the game, there are only three that can function as a way to return to the spot you were last at in Tyria, and as such there are only three that really matter.

• Armistice Bastion – has direct access to WvW lobby
• Mistlock Sanctuary – has direct access to Fractal lobby
• Thousand Seas Pavilion – has jadebot workshop and teleports to fishing destinations

I personally spend most of my time in Mistlock Sanctuary which is pictured above, and generally speaking, is almost always full of players doing whatever business they need. Essentially it is a complete replacement for all of the amenities that you might need from Lion’s Arch. If I need to use the Mystic Forge or do some Crafting… I teleport to Mistlock and then can immediately return to whatever I was doing previously. Since so many people in our guild have Mistlock it also doubles as a sort of unofficial guild hall. I have this pass sitting in my shared account inventory which gives me easy access to it from any character.

If you do not have the gems to spend on a Mistlock pass, or it is currently not available on the market (which happens regularly as they rotate them out), then probably my favorite of the other options is the PVP lobby. Once you unlock the portals you can teleport quickly to the market area and do whatever business you might need to do before returning to the world. Sadly none of the free options have crafting machines, but it at least will give you a way to “pause” the game and go someplace safe whenever you need to unexpectedly afk. I wish EVERY game had something like this. Most games have the ability to teleport somehow, but it also means that when you come back to the screen… you will have to go through some level of nonsense to get back to where you were. This is quick and convenient and I love it so much.

Good Morning Friends! I’ve not put a ton of effort into it but as I get time I have been collecting cats for my home instance, and I noticed in Rata Sum one of them has started hanging out with this random Asura on the roof. I think this is pretty freaking cute and that you all needed this in your lives. There are times when I question who the hell I am anymore. Firstly for so many years I was diametrically opposed to Guild Wars 2, or at the very least I did not understand what people saw in the game. For even longer I have been one of the most anti-PVP people I know in my circle… and what am I doing now? I am dabbling in PVP in Guild Wars 2, and enjoying myself. I legitimately am wondering if I need to find an exorcist.

It all started simple enough with Thalen repeatedly making the comment that we need to find someone into PVP so we can get the reward potions for the guild hall upgrades. At that point, I had been enjoying World vs World in the game for a while, and it planted a thought in my brain. If I can enjoy this game mode where I spend most of my time dead and running back… maybe I can actually enjoy the structured PVP in Guild Wars 2. One of the things that I enjoyed about the siege combat of the battlegrounds is that there really is no negative to it. The deaths don’t incur a cost, and almost any amount of time spent there is rewarding so it is pretty much a win/win situation. Lately, I have been using the rewards tracks to farm up Mystic Clovers, and my extreme need for them also planted the idea of maybe doing the Drizzlewood track in PVP as well.

So for the last several days, I have been on this weird mission to farm as many PVP potions as I could. This has more or less meant doing three of the four PVP dailies each day, with the fourth being inaccessible because I have no interest in joining a tournament and waiting around for it to start. Through sheer happenstance, I have landed on my Ranger as my WvW character and my fledgling Engineer as my PVP character. So each day at reset I do Tequatl, then pop over to Belglory my Engineer and knock out my PVP dailies, then finally land on my Ranger for some WvW dailies. The end result is that on an average day I am knocking out all but two of my dailies in total. Depending on how fast I get through all of this I often end up working on leveling the Engineer that is now I believe 73.

So far in my travels, I have encountered two different modes of play for PVP, the first of which being Stronghold. As far as I can tell there is only one map here called Battle of Champion’s Dusk, with the layout shown above. This is essentially a highly condensed version of Summoner’s Rift from League of Legends, with your objective being to break into the enemy fort at the end of your lane and kill the “Lord”. This is done by summoning “creeps” to borrow the LoL parlance, which travel down the lane and bombs the fortified door. These are summoned through collecting supplies that spawn in the center of the map and are a contested resource. Additionally, there are trebuchets on both sides that are constantly attacking the door, and players can disable these to slow down the progress of the enemy team. It is a perfectly cromulent game mode, but it is far from my favorite.

The mode I would far rather play is Conquest, which is essentially this game’s version of capture the flag or as I am most used to it Control from Destiny 2. There are three objectives that can be held by moving your team members into the circle and waiting for it to capture. Each objective you hold contributes points to your score and the first team to 500 points wins. Each map in the rotation also has some sort of a secondary objective that might be taking down NPCs that spawn at regular intervals for bonus points, or pushing through to an objective and channeling an orb to capture it for your team. I am not sure what it is about this mode but it feels much more simple and as a result more enjoyable. It seems to be way more flexible for random players, whereas Stronghold feels like it needs a fixed strategy and core teamwork. I may also be biased because my dumb turrets build seems to work swimmingly in Conquest and mostly fails in Stronghold.

Friends… I still have no clue who the hell I am anymore. I am championing a game that I resigned from the alpha testing for because I thought it felt awful. Now I am playing a game mode that I have traditionally railed against for breeding toxic players. I mean sure I have run into a few knobs so far in PVP and WvW but for the most part, everyone has been damned chill. I am certain that the toxicity exists, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised to just follow along and do some content. I did run into a commander the other night that was kicking anyone who would not join his Discord, so there was that. However, that has seemingly been the massive exception as opposed to being the norm. With my Necro, I mostly enjoyed taking camps, but with the Ranger, I find I am actually enjoying objective defense.

We need literally multiple hundred PVP potions for upgrades, so I am trying to ignore this and keep plugging away at it. We knocked out several of the other objectives in a similar faction by just contributing a little bit each day, so I figure slow and steady here will also win the race. I think more than anything that is the thing I am enjoying about Guild Wars 2. Progress is measured in weeks and months rather than days… which makes it feel not so crushing when you can’t do a certain thing on a specific day. All of the gearing objectives are working towards a long-tailed objective that isn’t also moving further away from me. Eventually, I will have Legendary items in the game, but I am also in no real rush to get there either, and not having them is not adversely impacting my enjoyment. So far at least it feels like pretty much everything is doable in a good set of starter exotics.

Good Morning Friends! I’ve not really been feeling myself this week. It might be the constant rain or the impending stress of a holiday weekend and juggling visits to three houses. Whatever the case I have felt like going into turtle mode where I pull my head up into my shell. As such most of my gaming of late has been running around on my little Engineer in Guild Wars 2 and working on zone completion for leveling purposes. As of last night, she is 36 and I have at least one trait line fully trained to give me access to all sorts of goodies with my turrets. Engineer is a weird class, and honestly, I think it would be significantly better if the turrets were on shorter cooldowns. Essentially it feels like I can take on anything in the world… if I have my full retinue of mechanical friends, and the rest of the time I feel like a harsh glance could kill me.

The only World Boss that I have been doing on the regular is Tequatl, and of late I have been doing that on my Ranger. I am not sure why the sudden switch in allegiance, but doing Tequatl on a Longbow Ranger is pretty painless and I am mostly just running it for the chance at easy ascended gear. There are a few other bosses that would be probably beneficial to loop in, but it seems like I operate in one of two modes. Either I ride the World Boss train and spend all evening hitting everything, or I do Tequatl at reset and call it good for the rest of the evening. Once I settle into leveling an alt for the night, it is hard to poke my head back out and pay attention to other boss spawns from that point forward even though I get notifications. If I felt better this week I would probably be pushing the main story forward, but a fugue state of leveling my Engineer seems to be what my mind needs right now.

Moon Knight wrapped up and I am extremely happy with the conclusion of the series and where it places the character going forward for season two. The highlight of the series however is Taweret, because those ear wiggles are so damned great. I love the character of Layla and I have all sorts of theories as to how things are going to progress from here. However, I am seeing a lot of people who either were disappointed in the series or considered it generally meh. I’ve been talking to Thalen about this and I think it might be based on how bought into the character of Moon Knight you were going into the show. I was a Marvel kid and as such had encountered Moon Knight countless times… which gave me a firm understanding of which alters we might be seeing during the course of the show. The conclusion really is how I expected things to go down, or more so how it HAD to go down to progress.

Another interesting thing that I am watching now as it releases on YouTube is Mystery Incorporated, a version of Scooby Doo that appears to have taken notes from the modern Archie/Riverdale CW Series. So far it is interesting and very much NOT the slapstick romp that the cartoon is. Right now the only piece that exists is the pilot but it was interesting enough to subscribe to the channel and see where this goes. I’m not likely to get much gaming or media time this weekend, but at some point, there is a whole slew of other things that I want to catch up on. I purposefully waited until the entire Picard series had finished season 2 before checking that out, and then there is Strange New Worlds. I also need to actually sit down and watch my way through Discovery as well. Star Trek is definitely something that I have neglected over the years because while it was something I enjoyed… it was never the cultural touchstone for me that Star Was was.

There we have it… a blog post created. I sorta had to force my way through this one because I was not even sure what I wanted to talk about this morning. However, I did not want to go two days in a row without a post because it felt like I would be sliding down a potentially slippery slope back into going months between writing. Sometimes you just sorta have to brute force your way through it for a bit to keep the words flowing.