Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

ANet Customer Service Is Awesome

by

Good Morning Folks! Sometimes you have weird little regrets that nag at you over the years. For over a decade, the defacto guild that I started in new games was House Stalwart, aka the one that I founded back in World of Warcraft. At some point the group of friends in the orbit of the AggroChat podcast standardized on Greysky Armada. I thought this was first used in Final Fantasy XIV, but I might have my sequence of operations out of order because it seems like our Guild Wars 2 guild by that same name was founded in 2012. Anyway one of the little things that had bugged me over the years is that for Final Fantasy XIV we have the guild tag of [GREY] and in Guild Wars 2 for whatever godforsaken reason I ended up choosing [GsA]. There was no way to change this through the guild interface and when I asked a friend who works for Anet they shrugged and said that they did not think there was a way.

I should note… said person is on the development side and not the support side because apparently, it is a trivial matter. Last night towards the end of my evening I put in a support ticket asking if there was a way to change our guild tag to [GREY] so that it matched our FFXIV guild, and this morning I woke up to see the ticket had been worked. It was worked at like 3 am my time after being put in around 9 pm the previous night, so it even had an extremely fast turnaround. I have to say I have only used Anet support a few times, one of which was trying to reclaim access to my Guild Wars account after forgetting the name of any of my characters… and they have been phenomenal each time. It was a simple enough request but I cannot emphasize how much this improves my enjoyment of our guild. Essentially it was one of those eye-twitch things that always bugged me when doing WvW or just talking in guild chat.

I spent some time last night wrapping up Secrets of the Obscure and it was a perfectly cromulent expansion I guess. The ending did not endear me more to the plotline or some of the characters, but it felt fine enough. I was annoyed by further rounds of “fill the bar”, and still feel like this design ethic needs to die in a fire. I get that it is a way of drawing out the content and making it feel like it takes longer… but that is probably a bad thing. There is no way that you can do this that does not feel like you are just artificially padding for runtime. It was not the best expansion, and at some point, I will probably do a ranking list post as I feel like I have things to say about that in general. However, I consider Living World content to be expansions and ANet does not. There is a lot of deeply uneven content in Guild Wars 2 and I feel like Secrets of the Obscure only adds to that list. The first half of the content was pretty solid, but it kind of fell apart once we entered Nayos.

In other gaming news, The War Within expansion has dropped for World of Warcraft, and my Dark Iron Warrior that I played in Panda Remix has become my new main. I have to admit though I am struggling like hell to attach to this content. I am not sure what it is… but it just sort of feels boring. I think I might just not be in the mood for World of Warcraft. The pacing of the content and combat just feels off to me after so much Guild Wars 2 and assorted ARPGs like Path of Exile and Last Epoch. Everything feels like it takes forever and is causing me to zone the hell out. Everything I have seen of the expansions so far seems perfectly reasonable, I just appear not to be in the mood for it. I think I might stop trying to force it because it is doing nothing for my enjoyment currently. I can be such a fickle gamer and when something feels like homework I turn my nose up at it. Hell, it took me the better part of a decade to fall in love with Guild Wars 2.

Back to Guild Wars 2, one of those sites that I use an awful lot for various sundry reasons is GW2Efficiency. I also use an Ad Blocker 100% of the time and refuse to turn it off. Yesterday I was finally guilted into exploring the various support options. I have to say I love that they have both monthly support options and one-time payout options. So yesterday I threw them $50 so I could feel better about my Ad Blocking ways. I think this is my biggest problem with Patreon in general is the slow constant drain it ends up becoming. I want the tools that I use to thrive, and if I use them enough I feel like I need to give them a non-zero amount of money. However, I am never super keen to sign up for yet another subscription. Lifetime amounts, even if they were higher… will always probably be my choice.

Anyways thanks again to ANet customer service… who very much will never likely see this blog post. Shit, I would be shocked if ANYONE from ANet other than my friend who works there sees this. I still feel like I have to brag about how good their service is regardless.

Frickin Finally

by

Good Morning Folks. Lately, I have been spending quite a bit of time visiting Living World Season Three and Four zones and cashing in Unbound and Volatile Magic. Essentially I am working towards crafting another Gift of Magic and Gift of Might which requires 250 of each rare trophy. Buying these outright off the market is a pretty extreme expense with Might costing around 165 gold, and Magic around 332 gold. However, I have been buying Trophy Shipments and the less effective Magic-Warped Bundle in an attempt to blunt this cost. I still need to build back up my stockpile of Mystic Clover and I am hoping that by the time I hit 77 of those I will have 250 of most of the needed materials. Similarly, I am going to have to grind out another Gift of Battle which I am likely going to do this weekend while the anniversary buff is still active.

Last night the map gods smiled upon me and landed me in a group on a map that was capable of defeating the new world boss meta in Janthir Syntri. This was my tenth attempt after nine failed attempts with different groups since the launch of this expansion. Essentially it is both a DPS check and a mechanics check with Greer seemingly the harder part of the encounter. He throws out massive amounts of condition damage, which needs cleansing and everyone effectively needs to stack on top of the boss right up in his face in order to really make this work. The problem with Greer though is that there are several intermission phases that slow down the fight significantly. We technically had more DPS on Greer than on Decima and there was a point where we had to do nothing but auto attacks while the other group caught up.

As far as what I did differently this time… I put my faith in the Commander entirely. I stood on top of them no matter what was being dished out and tried my best to have faith that the cleansing and healing would keep me alive. This is a deeply uncomfortable position to be in and I had years of feeling like I needed to dodge out of every mechanic screaming at me. I also shifted things up a bit and brought the Juvenile Brown Bear… aka Daedalus who has the special attack of Shake it Off which removes two conditions from five targets. I have no clue how much this additional cleansing helped but I figured anything was better than nothing. I legitimately need to get better at bringing the right pet to the battle, because 99.9% of the time I run the same few pets over and over. I stayed out of Soulbeast form and just sort of let the pet do its thing, hoping that it was better at targetting cleansings than I would be given how furiously I was mashing buttons otherwise.

So on one hand… I am very happy to have completed this meta. On the other hand… I still think this is a miserable encounter that asks way too damned much out of random folks on a random map. You essentially need at least 50 players on each of the bosses to seemingly make this work, and even in spite of how well it was going… the fight was still really damned tight. We could have lost at the last minute easily, and there was not enough time to swap over to the other boss to help them burn it down if things got dicey. Like that is one of the huge parts of Auric Basin is if things go south folks can get over to the other vines pretty quickly to assist there and help push whichever one was lagging behind. We did send a few folks from our team over to Decima and we had two seasoned Commanders that were directing traffic. Basically, I just lucked out to finally get a group that was prepared for this nonsense.

With the wizard chore points from getting the special achievement from clearing the meta, I picked up my last piece of Ascended gear. It is probably very sad that it has taken me a decade to fully kit out a single character in Ascended items. It was just never really a priority, but I figure since I am doing harder stuff I need to make sure I have the best gear going into the encounters. Granted I have exotic underwater weapons… but really who gives a shit about underwater weapons. It is sad that I had an Ascended Rebreather before I had fully Ascended armor. I need to start figuring out what is required for the Legendary Armor set and begin chipping away at that. I will probably do Heavy first because there are multiple classes that could benefit from that whereas… medium is just Thieves and Engineers… neither of which I am terribly keen on.

I think one of my favorite things about Guild Wars 2 is how active the world feels, and how easy it is for me to set my focus on something… that does not necessarily require a group. Sure I would freaking love a full group to do things like Strikes and Fractals… but there is more than enough meat on the bone for me to enjoy myself doing things that do not require largescale organization.

The Sword of Midnight

by

I would love to give you all the customary “Good Morning Folks” greeting, but today has been straight in the shitter since I got up to my office. As a result, I am getting started on this post significantly later than normal. I’ve finally hit a lull and I am going to take this opportunity to talk about the nonsense I got up to this weekend. I spent a bit of time on my Warrior because that was my original main character in Guild Wars 2, and also the character that I was closest to finishing old world completion on. Basically with the new “season” aka the release of Janthir Wilds came a new Legendary Weapon Starter Kit, and more specifically this one includes Twilight a weapon I have been chasing for years. For the uninitiated, these give you basically 60% of the materials required to complete a Legendary weapon and cost 1000 Astral Acclaim aka the daily Wizard Chores currency that went in with Secrets of the Obscure.

However, I used the two gifts of exploration that I got from doing world completion on my Necromancer, which means that I needed to do another World Completion and get another two gifts as a result. I think when I started down this path I was sitting around 98% which essentially accounted for doing three zones, both of which I had partial completion on already. It was a pretty chill way to spend an evening and I came to a whole new appreciation of how good it is to use a gunblade underwater instead of the otherwise awful weapons. I also have a new appreciation of just how weird of a zone Mount Maelstrom is, because I totally forgot just how many different biomes there were given that I mostly only see the volcano during the world boss.

This also meant that I had to grind out another Gift of Battle, which I set my mind to doing on Saturday. From around 10 am until around 3 pm I spent my time grinding away in the Eternal Battlegrounds for my realm. If I were somewhere else and spending that time doing nothing but chain-capturing objectives, the WvW track experience probably would have gone faster. Instead large swaths of that time were spent fending off attackers trying to take Stonemist Castle. Even after we lost our commander we still managed to trudge along and be productive. During one of my breaks, we lost Stonemist Castle but then proceeded to get it back over and over. The green team seemed to be able to zerg just about anything down, but could not hold objectives to save their life. We did not have the numbers but appeared to have more skilled players.

So after a lot of grinding this weekend, I am now the proud owner of Twilight my third legendary weapon. I gotta say that if these starter kits were intended as a way of pushing players into the process of crafting legendaries it has worked. In addition to Twilight, I also have Bolt and Frostfang. I have an unfinished weapon kit for Juggernaut that I am going to shift my focus to trying to complete. This is going to require me to work on building back up a stockpile of Mystic Clovers which will take a bit. I am hoping in that time I will be able to grind out most of the trophies needed for Gift of Might and Gift of Magic through the Volatile Magic Trophy Deliveries.

Twilight really was the weapon that started my interest in Legendaries in the first place. Now that I have it… I feel like I have to at some point complete Sunrise its counterpoint. Eternity is a greatsword that requires you to have sacrificed both a Twilight and a Sunrise in order to craft it. All of this time I thought it meant basically burning through like 10,000 gold worth of crap in order to get it. However, when I crafted my Twilight and bound it to my account I got an interesting item called the Memory of Twilight. It seems like these can be used in lieu of the actual weapon for the purpose of crafting Eternity… which means now that I have one… I want the other… so I can get the third. Damn you Guild Wars 2… this is how you slip down the slope of having every Legendary.

Speaking of working as intended… ANet got a big chunk of gems from me this weekend when I noticed that there was this Mothra-adjascent Skyscale skin. I am a huge fan of Mothra and honestly most of the classical Toho Monsters, but Mothra has a special place in my heart. What is best about this is while it is doing the idle animations… it makes Mothra noises instead of the traditional Skyscale noises. I am so freaking sold on this skin and it even worked pretty well with the default them that I was using on my Branded Skyscale. I might tweak it at some point but I ma mostly good with dark purple with glowy pink eyes.

Lastly to paraphrase the immortal Jay Z… the Meta World Boss in Janthir Syntri “can kiss my whole asshole”. This fight is awful… largely because Greer is fucking awful. No one wants to do it… hell, I don’t want to fight Greer, but I keep going there because no one is ever willing to do that side of the two-part fight. I’ve attempted this Meta seven times and the groups have failed seven times. Last night was the most heartbreaking because we had a 2% wipe… but just could not push through the last little bit before they consumed the bloodstone and wiped the raids. Legitimately screw this fight and screw the designers who thought it was a good idea. I will be happy once the tryhards have extracted their pound of flesh from this encounter and the anet nerf it to be a little less fail-prone. So I love Janthir Wilds so far but this meta can fuck off.

Janthir Was Pretty Great

by

Good Morning Folks! Last night I wrapped the Janthir Wilds main story and this morning I am going to talk about some of my impressions. Some of this discussion will probably get into spoilers, so I am giving you all a proper warning now. So once I got past some of my early complaints about pacing and story being gated by mastery tracks… the flow of the content went fairly smoothly. There were several “fill the bar” moments that I still do not love… and will continue not to love for eternity… but the story instances themselves were pretty great. After Secrets of the Obscure, this really feels like a return to peak ANet and I would put this up there with some of my favorite content like End of Dragons, Living World Season 3, and Living World Season 4.

The challenge is however that we only got what is effectively the first chapter of a story that is going to be doled out over the next year in three more chunks. The first half of Icebrood Saga was amazing… but the hamfisted reliance on Dragon Response Missions to tell the rest of the story essentially ruined the entire experience. Basically, I am saying that I have a lot of hope for where we are going… but that there is also plenty of time for it to be fumbled completely. I largely enjoyed the first content drop for Secrets of the Obscure but pretty much hated it once we entered Nayos. I am hoping that they can keep up the pace and gravitas of the story that is laid out before us, because there are a lot more characters now that I already care about than I did in SOTO.

A huge chunk of the story revolves around us mentoring Poised Arrow, aka “Poky” the son of the current Lowland Kodan Claw Stoic Alder. He is very much the role of the brash young warrior who wants to prove himself… and the story beats at times feel DANGEROUSLY close to how our relationship started out with Braham. The key difference is however that “Poky” has a loving family, and while he is missing his mother greatly… he has a surrogate mother figure whom he has bonded with. As a result, this leads to someone who can be reasoned with in ways that we never seemed capable of reasoning with Braham, and is not necessarily driven by an overwhelming sense of angst but more a drive to find ways that he can help his people. I admit I’ve grown fond of the “cub” during this expansion and am hoping that he joins our larger entourage. It is however making me miss the rest of my team greatly, and I am hoping at some point there is a “getting the band back together” sequence in our future.

Right now we have two maps, both of which are gorgeous and feature a ton of content… some of which are fairly well hidden like the Bee hive that I highlighted at the top of this post. I’ve completed exploration of both of them and gotten doodads for crafting legendary items at some point. There is a thick density of events, and a lot of them are champion-level mobs that take a decent-sized group to drop them. I do wonder how this content will age as time goes on and the quantity of players dwindles. No content in Guild Wars 2 ever truly feels dead, but there are definitely less popular areas. For example, it is pretty hard to get a Gyala Delve meta going these days, and the last several Dragon’s End runs I have attempted have failed.

Speaking of failing content, the centerpiece of this expansion is your battle with two Titans: Greer the Blightbringer and Decima the Stormsinger. When you get into Janthir Syntri there is a world event that fires off every two hours as a “storm” arrives and Greer attacks from the SouthWestern corner of the map and Decima from the NorthEastern corner. One of these is MUCH harder than the other… and I keep throwing myself at Greer in part because I know as ranged that melee is largely useless there… and it is also the one with significantly lower turnout. I feel like this fight needs to be tuned a bit because right now I have participated in three attempts… all of which with Commanders leading the charge… and all three have failed miserably. I feel like this is a lesson that ANet has not learned yet… and should stop listening to the most tryhard voices in the crowd and realize that Open World content is Casual content. Wasting fifteen minutes of your time failing an event is fun for no one.

It is also a bit of a harsh contrast to how these fights feel in story missions. You’ve “defeated” both Greer and Decima at this point and both of the fights were largely you going through the motions and coming out a winner on the other side. I am not necessarily saying that the World Boss version should be an absolute cakewalk… but if warm bodies show up and participate it should fall over like most of the other World Bosses do currently. Guild Wars 2 has a massive identity crisis because playing the game like you would literally any other MMORPG, means you are also putting out one-tenth of the damage output of the highest damage player. That gap should not be that wide… but it is because playing Guild Wars 2 means you are expected to do some unintuitive things regularly for the sake of optimization. This is the next major bridge that the game needs to reconcile because the chasm is too wide at this point between the haves and have-nots.

Last night I also completed the Falling Star questline, which is a new sort of thing that ANet is trying. Essentially you buy the Falling Star Quest License from the Wizard’s Vault for 1000 Astral Acclaim. This is the same amount of Wizard Chore currency that you need to buy one of the Legendary Weapon starter boxes for example. You are then started down an achievement path that feels significantly more like a normal MMORPG quest than pretty much anything else in Guild Wars 2, including quest markers on your map indicating where you should go for various steps of the process. Essentially doing the quest chain does not require a huge outlay of time or gold and will end up with you getting a pair of Meteor Wielder’s Ascended Gloves in your armor type of choice, the Falling Star Ascended Spear, and the Heated Core Infusion which triggers the molten appearance of the spear weapon. Technically the infusion comes installed in the gloves but I am itemizing it separately given that Infusions are so overwhelmingly expensive and this one comes with +5 Power and +9 Agony Resistance. Well worth the 1000 Astral Acclaim and in total it took me maybe an hour to complete because I did not have any of the required old world renown hearts unlocked.

All told I am pretty happy with the start of Janthir Wilds. It gives me two new playgrounds to roam around and three mastery tracks to start chipping away at. I am hoping that either the World Boss Meta event gets watered down slightly, or folks figure out how to push through the mechanics a bit faster so that collectively the community can start clearing it. I need to sort through the achievements and see what I can reasonably knock out. I’ve not done any of the mini-games yet, and need to at least get silver in each of them to earn mastery points. I am very interested in seeing how the next few chapters of this storyline go. It feels fairly similar to Dawntrail honestly, where we have taken up this mentorship role over a brash youth, and while the stakes are high… they are maybe a little less world-ending. However, I do really want to see us building our retinue of characters up again and moving towards the next major objective on the horizon.

Anyway if I were to give the expansion a numerical grade, I would give it a strong 8 out of 10 currently with the ability to top that out if they land the next content drops over the coming year.