MMORPG

My Horrible Children

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This present fascination with Guild Wars 2 continued last night. I have to admit that I am really enjoying this whole Necromancer thing. The class as a whole is an odd blend of the Warlock from World of Warcraft and the Necromancer from Diablo 2/3. You can see my delightful family of horrible children pictured here. Right now I am running a build that is using three pets… two of which that I can use as walking bombs if I so choose to. My gameplay tends to be running around and picking up a bunch of things and then letting my children and a series of curses decimate the entire pack. There is something stupidly fun about this and I have to say… Guild Wars 2 is far more enjoyable as a ranged character than it is as a melee character.

Last night I went down a different sort of rabbit hole. The last time I was extremely active in Guild Wars 2 was back in 2017, and at that time I used an addon of sorts called TaCO… or Tactical Overlay. It offered a number of things in game that you would normally have to tab out to in order to check, like event timers as well as a large variety of map markers for things like jumping puzzles. I had one of those moments yesterday where I suddenly remembered it was a thing that existed, and set forth in an attempt to find it and install it. It turns out that in late 2020 there was an issue that caused a good chunk of the code base to be lost completely. Then in September of 2021 the project appears to have ceased development and is now largely in a defunct state.

That is fine however because apparently someone has decided to pick up the torch and carry it forward. There is a replacement for TaCo called Blish HUD and honestly… after only a little bit with it I would say it is a sizeable improvement. There are two huge benefits to this over TaCo, the first being that it runs as an icon in your system tray so you don’t have to manually run Blish each time before you launch Guild Wars 2 like you did with TaCo. The next benefit is that it is more Framework than specific addon, and as a result there is an addon repository built into the application allowing you to install one or all of the addons from within game. It also appears to support all of the marker and trial packs from TaCo, but those need to be loaded in before launching the game it seems since they are external files that are being referenced.

The other thing that I suddenly remembered existing is GW2 Efficiency, which is a website that tracks all sorts of things about your account. In both cases Blish and Efficiency require you to set up an API key which can be done as part of the Arena Net Account management page. You can create more than one key, so I have taken the effort of making a new one for each website that I want to use. You can create very granular permissions and give a given site only access to the items that are specifically needed for that tool. As always you can check out a number of different resources in the Game Tools menu above on this website under Guild Wars 2. I vaguely remember using Efficiency to tell me what I was sitting on in the bank that I could sell for large amounts of gold… but I am uncertain what of the many sub tools I was using to do that.

As far as progress goes… I have officially made it further into the Heart of Thorns story than I ever have up until this point. Additionally I have collected enough Hero Points to be able to unlock access to the Greatsword… which is cool and all but without unlocking the rest of the skills there is not a whole lot I can do with it. I did play around for a bit with it and I do think that my future shenanigans involve this class and the power reaper spec. At some point I will need to cajole one of the more seasoned Greysky folks to knock me out a set of Berserker gear. I am also spending some time learning about how to upgrade my Reaper greatsword into the pink version through a long collection, so I might start chipping away at that.

I am finding a shocking amount of joy in this game, so we will see how long that lasts. At a bare minimum I needed something that I could play during the podcast on Saturday nights. I made some strategic keybind changes that seem to work better for me as well.

Lost My Damned Mind

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Friends I have very clearly lost my damned mind. Originally I was planning on playing some Guild Wars 2 tonight because I would not have access to the downstairs television where the PlayStation 5 is connected. As a result all day I was planning on playing some more Horizon Forbidden West and moving forward with knocking some of the side quests out. Instead as it was fated I ended up having a late afternoon conversation with a friend about my struggles with Guild Wars 2. The problem for me is that “Warrior” has always meant tanky and the Guild Wars 2 warrior just does not feel tanky to me. So I went through this entire diatribe of explaining what I wanted out of a class and I got an answer I was not expecting.

Essentially my friend said that while I would not like the class fantasy of it… that it really sounded like I wanted to play a Reaper Necromancer which is the Greatsword based elite specialization that came with Heart of Thorns. I already had a Necromancer, but he is a Char… and I have to admit I don’t love Char for the same reason that I don’t love Tauren. They feel slow and lumbering, which is ironic given that when I re-rolled the class I also went with a large race… my favorite of the GW2 races… the Norn. So instead of spending a night in Horizon Forbidden West, I created a brand new character and returned to Guild Wars 2… a game with which I have an exceptionally checkered past. The initial problem is that even starting down the Reaper path is going to require me to grind out a bunch of Hero points, so ultimately I needed to learn how to play Necromancer in default mode.

Where things go really off the rails however is that Thalen who happened to be online mentioned that the WVW daily quest was really easy today. One of the required components was something that could just be purchased cheaply in the Guild Hall. In truth I have only participated in WVW once or twice in the entirety of Guild Wars 2 and the last instance I specifically remember is when I joined Liore and a few others and all joined together around the time the game launched. Suffice to say I am a newbie in such things… and as a result I asked an innocent question. “How the heck do I get access to my mount in WvW?”. This friends is an answer that ultimately dominated t he rest of my evening.

It began simple enough, that I had to rank up once and then purchase the Warclaw Mastery track. Then I had to complete that track, along with completing a collection of items that can only be found in WvW. That sounded easy enough, but essentially I legitimately spent the rest of the evening in WvW. That is enough time to see one skirmish finish and another skirmish get to about the halfway point. The truth is… while I suck at PVP interaction… the entire experience was pretty great. There are enough things going on in the map that much like Alterac Valley you can hang back and do useful things even if you are not with the vanguard charging up against the major objectives. Before I knew it I was starting to knock out these collection bits. For anyone who comes along before me… this is what is needed to complete the Warclaw Mount Collection:

  • Emblem – You get this through unlocking the Warclaw Mastery track
  • Tail Armor – This comes from defeating and looking any Veteran guarding an objective. Seems to have a non-100% drop chance.
  • Horn Spikes – Participate in the capture anything flagged as an enemy camp.
  • Saddle – Participate in the capture of one of the enemy towers.
  • Gorget – Participate in the capture of one of the enemy keeps.
  • Leg Armor – Purchased for 250 Badges of Honor from the Warclaw Tender
  • Body Armor – Purchased for 50 WvW Skirmish Tickets from the Warclaw Tender
  • Helmet – Gained from completing the entire Warclaw Mastery Track.

Lastly after doing ALL of this you need to go back to the Warclaw Tender and purchase your license for 8 gold. After that you have a new mount that you can use to zip around the battlefield in WvW. I believe you can also ride it out in the wild, but any of the mastery upgrades only really apply to PVP.

At the end of the night I managed to gather up 5 of the 8 armor pieces needed for the Warclaw Companion collection. Of the few that I am missing, the one that really concerns me is the Gorget gained through capturing a Keep. All night I was not able to find a map that had a keep that someone was trying to capture for team blue, seeing as Yaks Bend is paired with another server group to represent that faction currently. The body armor should be gained pretty quickly, I think I am 3 WvW tickets shy of being able to pick that up. Lastly the mastery track is just going to take a lot more WvW in order to get. I need to go rifling through my bank because I am almost certain to have some WvW tokens that I can burn through.

So there you have it friends. I set out with the mission of trying out Reaper for the Necromancer… and made zero progress towards that goal. Instead I wound up down this rabbit trail of trying to get access to a mount in WvW in order to make the daily quests go quicker. I am not proud of myself and I am confused about who I even am… seeing as I am supposedly allergic to PVP. I am even more confused that I actually found myself enjoying my currently pure caster Necromancer. I like my army of disturbing looking pets that I can explode for extra damage. I might need an intervention because I am not even sure who I am at this point.

If you find yourself playing GW2 however, I am over on Yaks Bend which does not really matter and you can friend me up with “belghast.5496”. I saw a lot of familiar faces like Ardua, Lvrfmsc, Rowan, and Sctrz at which point I remembered… oh yeah this is where they hang their hats these days. I was mostly quiet other than talking in guild chat to Thalen however, because I was apparently a man on a mission… just not the mission I had originally started on. It was a weird night, but a mostly enjoyable night.

Queuewalker

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Good morning friends! I thought this morning I would take a bit on the blog to talk about me and Final Fantasy XIV. I am very much not done with the game, but the current congestion situation that we find ourselves in has made it much harder for me to play “on a whim”. I’ve been doing my normal end of the year/beginning of the year binge of single player games. However normally when I am in this mode I am still logging in at least once a day into the MMORPGs I am playing at the same time. Generally speaking at least once per day I would log in, maybe do a roulette or deal with my retainers and then log back out. The challenge however is that I plan on the highest population data center and one of the highest population servers period.

When I was working on the Main Story Quest for Endwalker, I had a pretty rigorous routine of logging in at a specific time during the day so that I could be through the queue when I got “off work”. The queue would idle in the background and tick down as I finished out my afternoon and then could be ready to make progress in the story. The drive to do this was there because the story of Endwalker was so damned good. What has happened since then however is that I fell out of the routines I had been engaged with because I was in “vacation mode”. This means that by the time I think about logging in, it is usually early evening and the queues are already madness.

Earlier this week I tried to make my way through. I logged in as soon as I got off work, and then proceeded to go about my daily routine of fixing dinner and feeding the animals. About an hour and a half later we were sitting at the lower number. Meaning in that hour and a half I made it roughly one third of the way through the initial queue. My quick napkin math told me I had at least 2-3 more hours before I could make my way in… at which point I bailed out and gave my slot to someone else who needed it more. Finishing the MSQ took away a lot of my drive to fight through that queue because I know at some point in the future I can catch back up pretty easily. Instead I have been spending that time focused on playing games that are also bringing me joy… but can more easily be played on my schedule.

Once I burn through this current phase of single player games, if the state of the queues is still this rough I might even poke my head back into Elder Scrolls Online. I am still woefully behind the main story and sitting somewhere in Summerset at the moment. Which means I still have a mount of content in front of me before I am even vaguely ready for the new expansion that they are already teasing. So to recap…. very much not done with Endwalker and Final Fantasy XIV but the queues are making it very difficult to muster the desire to fight my way through them at the moment.

Midgar Reimagined

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I am uncertain what it is about Christmas Vacation that makes me extra antisocial. Maybe it is the crowds and dealing with Christmas shopping, but whatever the case I tend to go through a turtle phase at the end of the year and beginning of the next. This is specifically heralded by me significantly increasing the number of single player types of games that I am engaged with. Last year at this time it was Cyberpunk 2077 and Jedi Fallen Order then a foray into Knights of the Old Republic 2 in January. The year before that I was heavily engaged Witcher 2 and 3 and this pattern keeps going back as you look at what I am playing at the end/beginning of the year. Winter break seems to have been the time I actually re-engaged with Final Fantasy VII Remake and finally finished it.

I have to say I really liked what they did with this. Not only did they spend a lot of time fleshing out areas of the game that buzzed by extremely quickly in the original game, but also taking the opportunity to change the story a bit. This is going into mild spoiler territory but if you have not caught on… Final Fantasy VII Remake is not a faithful recreation of the original and more a re-imagining of the game and with that comes an interesting plot device to explain those differences. I think it works well and I greatly appreciate the more action oriented style of gameplay… which again is a non-starter for some fans of the original. I greatly enjoyed the ride and look forward to the next “disc” worth of game when it releases.

I’ve moved on to Intergrade, which is the Yuffie adventure. So far this is extremely enjoyable and it has a completely different feel to the base “Remake”. While it weaves in an out of the story, it has an almost Cowboy Bebop vibe to it… which I think is largely influenced by the deep jazz cuts for the soundtrack. I am not very far into this side adventure but I think it will be an enjoyable way to finish out this week… if it lasts that long. After watching Witcher on netflix… I am having a deep desire to replay Witcher 3 which may end up happening. I also really want to try Red Dead Redemption 2 again to see if it can grab me this time around. I bounced pretty hard the first time but I have a good friend who absolutely loved it… so I might give it another shot. I don’t love the Rockstar style of open world games, but now that I better understand what the expectations are… maybe I can account for that in my expectations.

Lastly I am still poking my head into New World each day for long enough to collect 3 packages, make a gypsum orb, and make a sword cast to get expertise gains. I have to say the merger has had the opposite impact for me… in actually killing my desire to play the game. Firstly there is the challenge that there are exactly 3 covenant territories… and all three of them are the places where I have a home. Second there is the problem that on Minda Brightwood was one of the best late game crafting hubs… and on Frislandia it has been maintained by a bunch of slumlords who have done little to nothing to keep the crafting machines maintained. All of my crafting resources were centered around my tier 4 house in Brightwood… which sorta wrecks any desire to actually try and craft anything since there isn’t the resources I actually need there.

So I am concerned that as people continue to leave the game… we might end up going through another round of mergers meaning that once again the structure of the towns and the machines in them could change. This really harms my enjoyment when I do not care at all about the PVP mini-game. My personal preference would be that crafting resources never downgrade, and once a town is tier 5 in everything… that it just stays that way because this nonsense of mergers downgrading towns has been a significant hardship. I am sure that once the Christmas event is over and I no longer get free upgrades and gold every day… that New World is going to fall by the wayside for me.