Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 related Posts

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!

A Brand New Jade Mech

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Hey Friends! This morning is going to be a bit of a random mix of things because that is sort of where my brain is. There are times when I find myself juggling a number of threads and I appear to be going through one of those right now. Meet my big jade friend! I finished collecting the hero points needed to turn my fresh level 80 Engineer into a Mechanist. I’ve yet to do much of anything with it yet, but I am happy to have my robot friend. I’ve been utilizing a mechanic in World vs World to collect Hero Points for the classes that I am not actively playing.

As a result of my frequent participation, I get Skirmish Chests and one of the items that you can receive from them is Testimonies of Jade Heroics when then can be used to buy Notarized Scrolls of Maguuma Heroics allowing me to largely skip the hero points from Heart of Thorns which are all annoying. Granted I can do the same thing for Tyria, Path of Fire, and End of Dragons heroics, but I actually like doing those. This is how I have unlocked Bladesworn, Chronomancer, and now Mechanist so it is actually a fairly quick process if you are doing a good deal of WvW. The next target is probably unlocking DragonHunter on my Guardian.

In other news, I am closing in on having a full stable of professions at level 80 in Guild Wars 2. Here is a mildly modified image showing that I have everything but the Thief up to level 80. Granted I have cheesed some of these and abused the birthday rewards to push them up to level 60 before going the rest of the way. The longer-term battle however is unlocking heroic points on each of them and figuring out a viable build to go for, and then gearing them all. Right now Warrior, Ranger, and Necromancer are pretty solid, and Engineer is slowly getting there. Everyone else… I am all over the place but I am starting to click the pieces into place on the Mesmer now that I have Chronomancer unlocked.

In Other Other News… The Housing Lottery system in Final Fantasy XIV should be rolling once again based on this post from 5/13. Granted I still cannot do anything related to it, because I have to wait around until May 26th at 8 am PDT in order for this first round to be finalized. I’ve had my character parked at the plot that I am interested in over in The Mists since this all started, and at that point, I am going to be putting my bid in place and trying for the one I like the best. I am trying not to get my hopes up because housing, in general, has been a giant clusterfuck, to be honest. The lottery will be a better clusterfuck, but it is still going to be one nonetheless. The biggest problem with housing is that I am also going to be chaining myself to logging regularly so I make sure that I keep it. I do need to figure out a reasonable way to weave this game back into my rotation, however.

In my recent dabbling around in New World again, I decided to give Outpost Rush a try. I figured that maybe something flipped in my brain to make me like PVP given that I am doing quite a bit of it in Guild Wars 2. Nope… whatever indoctrination that has taken place does not appear to universally apply to all games and Outpost Rush still feels awful. In spite of all of the improvements made to New World, I have to say that the core problem with the game now resides in the generally awful PVP-focused community. I think it is probably too little too late to ever turn this game around, given that they ran off most of their PVE-focused players last year. Chat on Valhalla is better than it was on Minda, but it is still filled with the same jackasses… just in smaller numbers. It is especially shocking coming from Guild Wars 2 which is pretty great so long as you avoid the Goons.

Another thing that I have noticed in coming back is that many of the rarer resources have plummeted in value. I am not sure if I talked about this the other day but Void Ore used to be the single most valuable chase item and would go for upwards of 10k gold each. Now you can pick them up for 150 gold without much issue, and after opening a few professional aptitude caches I understand why. Essentially every third of a level after maxing a profession, you get awarded a cache of materials… and these are chock full of those orange rarity items. I took a screenshot of an example where I got 3 vials of azoth (used to go for 200g each, now 5g each), 8 of legendary cloth Blisterweave, and 6 of the other legendary cloth Scalecloth. I believe each of those used to go for around 2k gold on my original server, and now I am sure they are peanuts given how much the game is throwing at you.

Like I said before right now it is shaping up that the community is the worst part of the game. While chat is calm most of the time, you are constantly seeing nonsense like this scroll past. The Edgelord energy is strong in this community. It is fine, but it is essentially the sort of thing that I would make sure anyone asking me about the game receives a hefty disclaimer. I have a few things that I want to do… just not sure if I will actually do them. I always wanted a set of Voidbent Armor and I might finish leveling my Armoring up to make that. I also always wanted to make one of the legendary hatchets, and I might spend the time to finish leveling up engineering to make one of those as well. Past that, I am not sure how long I will be back. Harvesting is still fun and moment-to-moment open world gameplay is still fun… but it also largely feels pointless given that you can’t really use it to acquire gear score improvements other than the daily gypsum orbs. I saw someone talking about the Priest farm in Myrkgard last night, so I might need to wade in deep enough to see if those are still viable.