MMORPG

Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I managed to get my Warrior all the way trained in the Bladesworn Elite specialization and I have to say… I am really enjoying it. I grabbed a build from Snowcrows that I am using currently, with the minor substitution of using Marauder for survival rather than Berzerker gear. I think what I like the most is the gunblade that you end up wielding along with the spec, and how it feels very much like a greatsword without being a greatsword. Right now in the spec, it is running Axe/Pistol and then, of course, the Gun Katana shown above that just comes as part of running the build. I’ve been branching out a bit lately from the Necromancer, and I think likely I have just improved at predicting damage because other classes no longer feel as “squishy” as they once did.

I’ve also spent quite a bit of time playing the Ranger of late and recently went on a pilgrimage to get a Jacaranda as my pet. For those who have not experienced the Path of Fire content, these are angry floating balls of dirt and roots… with an inexplicable mouth full of teeth. They stand back and nuke the shit out of you with lightning and are apparently one of the better all-purpose pets in the game. They have pretty high DPS but also remain pretty damned tanky, and as such, I have shifted to using it all the time. I named mine Twigbert because it seemed fitting. At a minimum, I am running Tequatl every night as the Ranger. As far as weapons go I am mostly using a Longbow, and occasionally swapping to Greatsword for up close and personal damage.

I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time in WvW on the Ranger and I have to say it might be my favorite option for that game mode. Basically, I like being up on the ramparts and raining down arrows on the enemy team. This mission originally started as a way to boost my Warrior to be able to train Bladesworn a bit faster, since you can pretty reasonably get hero points as a byproduct of playing WvW. In truth, I have been doing this however as a way of working on getting some more Mystic Clovers, given that there are a few tracks that are extremely lucrative in this department. The sad truth that I have learned however is that the heroic scrolls are “bind on character”, which I learned too late… but you can still farm the currency to buy them and then just swap to the character that needs the points to purchase them. It wasn’t a complete loss because I do want to learn the Soulbeast elite specialization on Ranger.

As far as the story goes… I have stalled out a bit in New Kaineng City. This zone is beautiful… but also exceptionally dense and hard to navigate. As a result, I end up getting horribly distracted anytime I attempt to do anything. I’ve not had the mental fortitude to push through and as a result, I am floundering a bit and playing alts. I’ve never really loved the concept of a big sprawling urban area that is also a combat zone. I’ve seen several games do this over the years, but they always feel cumbersome and New Kaineng is no different. I mean that is not to say that I do not dig the look of the zone, and it really is an accomplishment in world-building, but it also feels like I have stepped into a different game than the one I have been playing for the last multiple hundred hours. I am looking forward to getting on the other side and pushing through into another “countryside” zone.

That is it, folks. Still very engaged with Guild Wars 2 and starting to branch out more into other characters. It is probably a good thing since I have a stack of 80s that get very little to no play. Currently, I have Necromancer, Warrior, Revenant, Guardian, Mesmer, and Ranger all sitting at level 80. My most recent leveling project has been the baby engineer, which is already around 30ish. At some point I should probably partake in some alt parking and at least rack in daily treasure chests.

Good Morning Friends! This is me… officially in Cantha and having legitimately gotten there through the story. This means that I have now finished all of the available story content in Guild Wars 2 prior to the release of the most current expansion, End of Dragons. So far Cantha seems to be a massive leap forward in the way the storytelling takes place, but we are not going to talk about that this morning. Instead we are going to talk about Living World Season 5, or what is otherwise known as the Icebrood Saga. Season 5 featured some of the best content I had experienced to date as well as some of the worst. Largely it was a season that felt like it was developed by two wildly different teams… and given the way layoffs hit ArenaNet in 2019 and 2020… that might be literally what happened.

The entire adventure spans the course of three zones: Grothmar Valley, Bjora Marches, and Drizzlewood Coast. Each of these is extremely well built and features some of the most interesting gameplay to date, especially Drizzlewood which is effectively a PVE only version of a WvW map. The story that unfolds is effectively one of a Charr civil war, as an entire culture of warriors is not quite certain who they should be fighting. It also furthers the character arc of the Norn prophecy and more specifically the evolution of the character Braham Eirsson. He has honestly turned from an insufferable ass of a character that I hated… to someone that I actually enjoy taking along on missions. The content is divided into a prologue and five chapters for a total of six parts. Everything but that last chapter is expertly crafted and deeply enjoyable… however it is in the end that the wheels fall off the cart.

It is in “Episode 5: Champions” that we are introduced to a new type of activity in Guild Wars 2, the Dragon Response Mission. At face value these are actually somewhat enjoyable, and reminds me of something akin to a Destiny 2 strike. You entire an area of an existing map, are given story dialog over coms, and asked to complete a sequence of tasks. They follow a very predictable pattern:

• You Zone into the Map and are given 5 minutes to complete three different tasks. You will not have enough time to do all three but this is effectively the “matchmaking time” while it searches for additional players. Doing any effort seems to award you gold participation.
• You are given a new task which is usually either escort someone to a place, or kill a bunch of things scattered around the map.
• Upon completion of this task a Champion will spawn somewhere around the map. You will need to kill it and the standard “boss” rules apply, in that at some interval it is going to do a thing that makes it invulnerable… which will require you to perform some gimmick to begin dealing damage to them again.

Again this mission construct in itself is pretty enjoyable, and would have been a great addition were it sprinkled in sparingly or just something you could do on the side. However the ENTIRETY of Episode 5 is doing these missions… ten of them. Every couple of missions you are going to get a brief story interlude where you are asked to go talk to Aurene… where some member of your entourage is going to interrupt you and tell you that you need to do more Dragon Response Missions. This is something that I more or less had to grit my teeth and just grind out, and it felt awful.

The finale of Episode 5 is effectively doing a story mode only version of the Dragonstorm event. This is also exceptionally good and I really enjoyed experiencing the full story version. However it in no way makes up for the slog that the player has had to go through in order to get here. It is my understanding that when they were released they were doled out two Dragon Response Missions at a time. MAYBE playing it in that manner would have felt a bit better, but having to do ten of them in a row without coming up for air… just is the worst. As a result I deem the Icebrood Saga both the best expansion content to this point in Guild Wars 2, and also the worst.

I hear there are challenge mode versions of the Dragon Response Missions, but I am not sure if I want to set foot in another one. There are a few where I was so dead set on burning through them that I missed checking whether or not there was a mastery point I should be getting. I need to revisit these and at least pop in long enough to get those. Otherwise I maybe never want to see that content type again until I level another character through the content. I am greatly looking forward to digging into End of Dragons because so far… it has been delightful. I do want to take a quick moment to note that Kalidris Sparrowhawk is maybe one of my new favorite characters and I am hoping at some point… she joins Dragon’s Watch.

Friends on April 19th the first part of Living World Season 1 dropped called Flame and Frost. I was so exceptionally excited to be able to experience this, and for me at least it did not disappoint. Some weeks back I covered what I considered to be the biggest challenges facing someone trying to get into Guild Wars 2, and the one that I highlighted as being the biggest was the huge hole in the story. The personal story of the core game is essentially one of saying goodbye to Destiny’s Edge and the rising if your own legend. By the time Living World Season 2 comes along you have an entire cast of characters that have been caught up in your wake and are given no introduction to them. This felt exceptionally jarring as I needed to understand where all of these people suddenly came from, and the answer is… Living World Season 1 was that introduction. In fact it seems to almost entirely be built around giving us the backstories of this new cast of companions that would ultimately be known as Dragon’s Watch.

What Living World Season 1 Episode 1 offers is about two or three hours worth of gameplay in total if you are pushing through it quickly. There were I believe four combat focused story instances, a few of them being rather lengthy. This is then combined with a good deal of story asides like this scene in Rytlock’s office. Then there is of course what I understand to be the original vehicle for a lot of the interaction… a series of email messages sent to the player that trigger progression in the story. I am not sure how much this version differs from the original version, but I feel like the team has done a pretty good job of taking what was ultimately a temporary event and packaging it up in the Living World format we are used to. For a moment however… can we just stop and marvel at how wide eyed and young Rox looks in this model? I knew the characters aged and changed over time, but going back like this it is staggering how many subtle changes have been made along the way. Rox has always been one of my favorite characters and I’ve loved every moment of her interactions during this story so far.

I’m also please as can be at just how many players are out in the world doing this content, or were doing this when the servers came back up on Tuesday. I popped in over lunch and did part of it, and then finished things up that evening. There is a tangible excitement in the community right now and it is infectious. Good things are happening and Arena Net has been nailing the communications with their new series of blog posts. Having a regular channel of information to the players is extremely important, the Destiny 2 community would not be nearly as cohesive as it is without the “TWAB” or “This Week at Bungie” a series of blog posts that come out on Thursdays. Seeing meaningful updates and forward momentum every few weeks is exceptionally important and I have to say I am enjoying watching this sleeping giant waking up. The faltering of World of Warcraft has caused a chain of events that I am not sure can really be stopped. So many players got disillusioned and branched out to explore the other games that were available in the genre… and it feels like ALL communities benefited by this not just Final Fantasy XIV.

We will have to wait until May 24th before we get to experience Episode 2, but given how fast time moves right now… that will be here before we know it. I have never played through content in Guild Wars 2 more than once on a single character, but I am honestly contemplating playing through LW1E1 again just to soak it in a little more deeply. I have to say the battles were extremely fun and I have some deep feelings about characters and their origins that I never had before. For years I have never quite understood why Braham as much of a dick as he ended up being at times. Now I know without a doubt that he had good reason and honestly it is probably a miracle that he is as functional as he is currently. It also is doing nothing to improve my opinions of Destiny’s Edge so far, but they were kind of awful to begin with.

If you never got to experience Living World Season 1, and also always struggled to get engaged with the story and characters of the game… then I highly suggest you check this out. It is providing the context behind actions that I really needed. It is providing a patch for the gaping hole in the story that the game desperately needed. This is a good call on the part of Arena Net and I am hoping that when we finally reach the end of this sequence that we get a glorious launch of Guild Wars 2 on Steam to christen the arrival at the end. If my math is correct we will be getting the final piece of the season around the time of the 10th anniversary of the game. I really think that would be the ideal time to welcome brand new players from Steam. Having a clear story progression is key, because your average player is not going to crawl through the wiki to try and piece together the details.

I am so freaking engaged right now, and seemingly picked the ideal time to get back into this game. I am still slowly catching up with Living World Season 5 and looking forward to starting Cantha with a clean conscience. I however was more than happy to take a quick break to get those missing bits of story. What are your thoughts about Living World Season 1 if you are playing through it? Did you also feel it was a rousing success, or did you find issues with it? Drop me a line below.