Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 related Posts

Sandswept Isles

by

Good Morning Friends! This is going to be a bit of a meandering post as I don’t have anything terribly pressing to talk about, but also a handful of blurbs. So as is something that often happens when I get into a game… I have commissioned my good friend and unofficial blog/podcast artist AmmosArt to do a version of my Guild Wars 2 Necromancer. I got an update yesterday that she would probably kill me if I shared… because it is still very much in the rough sketch phase but the idea is coming along nicely. I am going to have to fiddle with the masthead at some point soon in the future to determine who stays and who goes. I also have a secondary project which is to add some more game critters to the bar similar to the Moogles… maybe a Choya or a Quaggan.

As far as game progress goes, I am now in the second zone of Living World Season 4, but immediately allowed myself to get distracted by the world boss train last night. I’ve been trying to farm Tequatl each night since it spawns as the game is resetting and is easy to track. I have singled out this boss more than any in part due to the convenience and in part because it has a chance of dropping Tequatl’s Hoard which is a chest granting you a choice of ascended weapons. Additionally there is the chance for Wings of the Sunless which is a back item that I would not mind having either. Often times I stay on the world boss train for a few kills before finally tucking into some daily achievement content. Last night I rode the train longer than normal and never quite got back to working on story content.

One of the things that I dig about games like Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online is that they allow you to be in multiple guilds at the same time. So I can for example stay in a smaller tight knit Greysky Armada or Kamikaze Runners and still have access to larger guilds. I’ve been in a few Gaiscioch guilds before and given that I kept bumping into members while doing the World Boss train I decided to investigate. Gaiscioch for those who do not know is a large multi-game guild with many “adventures” that span into different titles. I likely SHOULD have followed them into New World as from what I can tell that branch is still rather active. The Guild Wars 2 seems extremely active as well with around sixty or so people being online last night when I was playing. My theory is this should give me access to some larger events when I have the social and emotional energy to participate in them. A lot of activities tend to start around 7 pm my time which is something I can easily join in without becoming sleep deprived.

In another news we’ve done some recent renovations on the Super Dungeon Friends discord. This concept was envisioned during my fevered pitch of playing Final Fantasy XIV, as having a way to help more shy and social awkward folks get groups going. The problem with this concept is that since so many of us are on Aether… the busiest of all data centers, it became a challenge during the crush of new membership to really make cross realm groups happen on the regular. However what has evolved instead is just a place to hang out and chat about games. Recently I threw out a question about expanding this beyond the scope of Final Fantasy XIV and to a lesser extent our brief foray into New World. The end result is that I collected some games as suggestions and then spent a chunk of time reworking things over the weekend to condense the structure a bit.

Now the “Games You Play” selector has a wider swath of games available, and each role toggles on a little area with at a minimum a chat channel devoted to the game and a voice channel. So far the “Lion’s Arch” channel devoted to Guild Wars 2 seems to be among the busiest. Basically this is not me abandoning the FFXIV mission, but more expanding it out since we have a great group of people gathered here. Of these the only game that I am personally playing on the regular is in fact Guild Wars 2. However I think it is awesome that folks were interested in seeing who was playing the other games. If you’ve ever been active, swing on by and check it out again. If you stayed away because you simply did not play FFXIV, it might be worth checking out. You can find the discord invite link here.

Domain of Istan

by

Good Morning Friends! I spent an awful lot of the weekend in Tyria, or more correctly Elona. I wrapped up the story line to Path of Fire and I have to say I am very impressed by the way things came together. This entire ending however feels very much like the ending to Empire Strikes Back, where we are trying to put a positive spin as we know just how bad things are about to get. Carrying forward immediately with Living World Season 4, we see just how bad and how fast things truly do get. I think this is the challenge of playing catch up in a video game, you are not given the benefit of time to spend addressing what just happened. I’ve seen this in the folks catching up to the phenomenal story in Final Fantasy XIV and not really having the benefit of time to process their emotions before throwing themselves back into the grinder.

I’ve been very impressed so far of what I have experienced in Istan. I mean this is where the Guild Wars Nightfall campaign begins, and in part this is the area of Guild Wars 1 that I am the most familiar with. I did not feel like the Path of Fire story took as many trips down memory lane as it could have, but Istan is absolutely drawing deep upon the well of nostalgia. I am very much here for this. I am not extremely far into the story, or at least not far enough to move past this first zone. Path of Fire in general feels like a real turning point for the way that the narrative is being told in Guild Wars 2. This began with Heart of Thorns and Living World Season 3, but it feels like they have improved upon it greatly in the years they spent working on The Elonian content. It really makes me look forward to getting caught up and playing through Living World Season 5 and End of Dragons.

I’ve spent a bit of time playing “mount catchup”. I never managed to get my Jackal during the storyline, so I did what any self respecting MMO player would do… and googled it. The sequence of events required to get the Jackal was fairly benign and just involved collecting a bunch of magic essences while mounted… without falling from the rather tall tower you are in. This may or may not have tweaked my fear of heights a few times but I pushed through and managed to walk away with my doggo mount. Now I need to spend time leveling it up and collecting more mastery points so I can finally use the stupid sand portals. I’ve also unlocked the beginning of the Griffon mount quest, but I have to say one of the eggs in Crystal Desert was pissing me off enough yesterday that I needed to walk away from it. I will return to this madness another day, but mostly I wanted to get the collections as I know a number of events are required to complete it and I might as well start getting credit for those.

In my travels I finally happened to be in the zone at the right time and managed to do the Chalk Gerent event, which I needed to complete a collection. Having experienced the other metas, I have to say Tangled Depths is probably my least favorite. I think this is in part because moving around the zone is way more of a pain in the butt than the other metas. Dragon’s Stand is without a doubt the easiest because there are three clear lanes that you need to follow. The second best is probably Auric Basin because again… simple objectives and simple paths. Verdant Brink on the other hand is also annoying as hell because there is way too much “over and under” nonsense going on in that zone. Tangled Depths is the worst though because no one seems to be willing to ever do it.

It did however allow me to complete my Rytlock cosplay, which I immediately equipped on my Charr Revenant. During the tail end of the Path of Fire campaign you get to run around with Sohothin, the flaming sword that Rytlock uses… which incidentally is the twin of the sword Magdaer that caused the Searing of Ascalon. Having gotten to play with this sword… I want to use it more! It was silly amounts of fun to run around the battlefield broasting everything with my flames. The elite skill with that weapon was what I can only describe as an orbital bombardment. Sadly I do not think there is any way we the player can use this weapon in a more permanent manner… or at least use the appearance. As a result my Rytlock cosplay will always be slightly incomplete.

I finished out my weekend doing what I do so many times… and joining a big squad of players as we burned through World Boss events. I am always slightly impressed by just how many players these events summon forth. They make the world feel thriving, in a manner that I am just not used to from MMORPGs lately. In World of Warcraft, if you have a dozen or so players in an area it feels active. This instead is more akin to the 40 player raid days of that game. Now granted it is unlikely that everyone on a given map is ever going to be focused on a single event, but while things are going on it absolutely feels like that is the case, especially when you have three commanders leading three very full teams. I would love to have a commander tag at some point, but I am uncertain if that desire is worthy of the 300 gold price tag associated with it.

Liars Day

by

Well folks it is that time again. April Fools Day is upon us or as it is also colloquially known among my friends “Liars Day” I believe in part to this Penny Arcade comic. I know this is a thing yet this year I managed to allow myself to get caught up in it. Yesterday a news story began circulating that the Tulsa metro was finally getting an IKEA, only to be retracted several hours later and confirmed that it was an early April Fool’s joke. This cycle of excitement and crushing defeat is why April Fool’s day is actually pretty awful when you think about it. I get that it is basically one day each year when you should not trust anything you read… but also REAL things happen at the same time. Is the Final Fantasy XIV 6.1 patch just a giant April Fools Joke or will I actually be able to download it shortly? It creates this pitfall where for plus or minus a few days of the actual event… you have to approach every revelation with a healthy degree of side-eye.

A younger version of me legitimately looked forward to this day, because it meant a bounty of whacky tech news stories. I think the problem there is that the line between reality and fiction has sufficiently blurred to the point where it is extremely hard to tell the difference. I mean for years I thought “Flat Earthers” were an internet joke, but it turns out that no there are people who legitimately are committed to that nonsense. In this climate, the last thing we really need is a full day where anything goes and you are left to try and sweep up the pieces of reality left on the table. Even though Pandarens were a really fun April Fools Joke back in the day that eventually became reality, I think we are probably just better off without the practice. Besides it also seems deeply cruel to keep trying to dunk on your supposed friends.

What isn’t a lie however is that in Guild Wars 2 they have started the Dogs Day festival in Lion’s Arch where you just get to pet a lot of peppers and talk to one that is sage beyond their years. There are a few achievements associated with doing a handful of things including petting a lot of dogs, and taking a nap among them. There are also “dog” and dog vendors that sell a few items, including some that trade items you get from karma hearts for “doggy bags” that can include all sorts of random stuff. I opened up 9 of these in total to get the achievement and I got stuff from the Halloween event, Christmas event, loot boxes from world bosses, and a handful of random materials. Nothing terribly exciting but there does appear to be a pattern to it of a sort. You get a Fool’s Dog Treat, some sort of a loot box, some sort of currency from a past event, or a luck item.

Other than that I chipped away at the first part of the Twilight Legendary achievement. I get that the wisdom is to just save the money and buy the damned precursor, but I want to at least craft one of these through the full process. I am working on the Greatsword in part because more than any other weapon in the game it seems to be the one I more or less universally enjoy across many classes. Once I craft a single Legendary weapon, all of my characters will be able to use it so that seems like a good thing. I’ve reached the point where I can no longer progress on my own and have knocked out pretty much everything that I could reasonably solo. What is left is four specific fractals, which I am hoping I can wrangle folks this weekend to go and do. The ones I need are as follows:

From there I will be able to start on the way more egregious second achievement. Again I know that I should probably just BUY Dusk, but I want to go through this process at least once on my own by crafting the precursor. There is a pretty hefty list of materials required for that second part, but I think honestly I have most of it already on hand save for some of the mithril… even though I have 1000 ingots in my material storage and close to 1000 raw ore as well. I mean these are the long-tailed grinds in this game, and honestly, I am here for it. Unlike a Relic weapon, I end up getting something that can be used as eternal end game gear for every single one of my characters. If in the process of all of this nonsense Dusk happens to drop… well then we will rethink this whole plan heh.

Stomping Dredge and Golems

by

Good Morning Friends! One of the things about me that I find odd is for as much as I claim to enjoy spontaneous events in games… I find myself falling into a large number of routines. For example I have begun this lunch time routine of working on whatever the World vs World dailies are for the previous reset. The server reset happens at 7 pm my time, and often times I chew through the PVE requirements and use those as a guide to determine what I am doing in a given evening. However that leaves some valuable dailies still on the table and I have realized that I can usually do at least two of them solo. Each daily done is direct rewards track progress via the potion you get, so this gives me a fairly casual way of getting my Gift of Battle progress. Admittedly I could do the thing that folks talk about and just grind out eight hours worth of solid progress on a weekend… but I would far rather spend thirty minutes to an hour each day and get incremental progress. I am however close enough that I might finish it up this week.

I am still progressing my way through the Path of Fire story. I now have my skimmer and I am guessing next comes the Jackal. I’ve arrived at the Domain of Vabbi through questing and honestly I like that area quite a bit. The Desolation is a zone I need to revisit but it seemed to be a bit painful to navigate. Vabbi on the other hand seems completely reasonable and I have had a lot of fun doing content in it. It does not hurt that last nights PVE event completion daily took place in the same zone I have spent quite a bit of time lately chipping away at.

Prior to the reset I even seem to have lucked into part of the meta, or at least a series of events that reward a Hero’s Choice chest. I honestly damned near solo’d this event because for the first phases I had an Engineer with me, but when the two legendary hounds started attacking they kept dying in a place that I found it extremely hard to resurrect them. I solo burned them down through the first several phases of the encounter, because every 25% health they swap places and one hound becomes invulnerable and the other becomes the main target. Once they get below 25% health in total however they both start attacking and I had whittled them both down to around 15% when a group of players showed up to help me finish out the event. Most of that time though I was solo kiting while waiting on my Flesh Golem to cooldown.

Once reset happened though, this sleepy hamlet of a zone become hopping. I think that is one of the cooler things about the Daily quests is how they focus the player base on a specific segment of the game. If you are able to be on at the time the daily reset happens, you can guarantee a massive amount of players trying to complete the same content at the same time. One thing that I have noticed that is pretty great is that for the jumping puzzles, there is almost always someone in the looking for group tool with an open party that you can use “teleport to friend” on and get completion. After having it suggested to me many times I am starting to pay a bit more attention to the tool and have joined a few groups through it.

The timing landed just right and I happened into a run of Dragon’s Stand later in the evening. I poked my other guild members and Ash and Tam happened to get slots in the southern group with me. This went exceptionally smoothly and I arrived in zone just before the last attempt failed, so we had a critical mass of players ready to go immediately. I think for the next run I am going to need to go mid so I can finish my mastery points for completing the event on a specific lane. I also probably need to focus on the bosses a bit because I noticed there were achievements for those as well. I don’t really have any speed boost abilities so I am better suited for the boss burn party rather than the folks running around in a ring killing the dudes who regenerate the towers.

I closed out my evening with a daily dungeon run, and I am super happy the timing landed in a way as to be able to do it. Granted I got to bed a little later than normal, but it was worth it. We only did the story mode version, but picked up a random player who was outside the instance asking for a group. The person seemed nice enough so I friended them for later shenanigans. I need to work on building out my friends list in Guild Wars 2, because this absolutely seems like a game where having a deep list could be beneficial. This game lives in this weird place where most grouping is inconsequential to your enjoyment… but then there are other modes of play with STRICT grouping and no auto matching tool to act as a bridge. I want to be able to explore more of the game and I know in order to do so I am going to have to reach out a bit. I have access to a large multi-game guild and I have contemplated joining up on one of my guild slots. I need to see what their rules are regarding representation because really I still plan on spending most of my time in Greysky chat.

All told though another great night in Guild Was 2 doing a staggering variety of different things. I think more than anything that is the thing that I am enjoying. So often I get into situations in MMORPGs where every night feels pretty much the same, because I end up doing the same things. Between slowly chewing through the story, allowing myself to get caught up in events, and occasionally doing more structured group activities… it all seems fresh. Granted in several years of doing all of this I am sure it would start to feel stale. Prior to this resurgence I had put in around 200 hours in the game, but it was spread out over the course of the decade it has been in operation. Belgraven my Necromancer is a character that I created when I returned… and it already has 240 hours worth of playtime associated with it according to GW2 Efficiency.