The Skyscale Club

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Good Morning Friends! I am so exceptionally happy to announce that I am part of the Skyscale Club as my friend Pixel put it last night. The truth is the entire process was way more of a mental barrier than it actually was to go through the steps to complete it. Had I tried to do this back when the mount went in, I understand it was a bit worse. Leading up to the anniversary of Guild Wars 2 they introduced a number of “return to” achievements for each of the zones that in turn reward you exactly the amount of currency needed to buy your Skyscale saddle. Sure you still need raw gold, but I was also lucky in that department because last year upon returning to the game I lucked into a drop that sold for several thousand and that has largely been able to fund any shenanigans that I want to get up to. Having gold has been a significant benefit to improving my enjoyment of the game because it has allowed me to simply buy my way out of a number of frustrations along the way.

The Jumping Puzzles were far less frustrating than I expected them to be. I thought that step in the process would kill my momentum entirely. I give a lot of credit to BlishHUD and the ReacTif marker pack which you can see marking the path I should take in blue in the above screenshot. Essentially you have to find your wayward Skyscale in 21 locations, two of which are world boss encounters I am exceptionally familiar with, and the rest are generally some sort of a jumping puzzle or in later zones a mount-based jumping puzzle. You have a way of buying yourself out of frustration in the form of an Extra-Pungent Skyscale Treat which summons the nearest Skyscale to your destination. Out of the 21 objectives, I completed 14 of them on my own and bought my way out of 7… after giving them an attempt and deciding it was worth the 4 gold to simply not have to care about it anymore. The game gives you one of the treats for free when you get the recipe and then I crafted 6 more at 4 gold each for a total of 24 gold that I did not need to spend.

I finished up around 7 pm last night and of course, had to spend some time carefully dying a mount skin the way I wanted it. I picked up the Branded skin for Skyscale well ahead of time because I love the other branded mount skins for their ability to have crackling energy in whatever color you choose. Then I spent the obligatory hour just flying around doing stupid stuff and not really making any forward momentum in any direction. It is going to take me a bit to optimize traveling on a Skyscale, because they are very much not just “GM Flight” as Tam calls it. You need to figure out places where you will land to pick back up stamina before ascending higher. At face value, it is much like a glider in that it slowly loses altitude over time. If you land on any flat surface for a short period of time while moving, you pick back up momentum and can ascend higher so you sorta have to plan your path to optimize places to land and places to ascend. What they do excel at however is hovering in place, and so long as you are not moving you are not losing altitude.

What I did not expect was just how attached to the Skyscale I would end up getting. I really wish that we were allowed to name ours and associate some general personalization to them. By the time you get your mount, you have fed them, cleaned up after them, taught them how to hide, and how to play catch. You’ve spent a lot of time getting used to your new friend, and even in the quest chain they become sullen when you are not around… immediately cheering up when you show back up. It is my sweet smushy faced baby, and I sorta wish I could at least bestow them a name. The Skyscale is essentially a Tamagotchi that you get to ride around, and it would be so much more interesting if we could see the names players bestow upon them. What I also did not expect is that I would now look fondly upon the journey I just completed. Sure it was a lot of tedious busywork, but the charm and personality of the quest chain really help to curb the annoyance of having to collect that 20th egg or scale.

The Final step in the quest chain involves riding your Skyscale in 28 different zones scattered around the game and studying reality tears. Essentially this means you need to fly up and hover in a tear until a bar fills, then move to the next zone and do the same thing. I fully expected this last process before you finally get your mount and have full control over it to feel extremely frustrating, but in reality, it felt like a bit of a victory lap. The hard parts of the quest chain were over and now you were getting to know your mount controls before the game truly took off the training wheels. I’d maybe cut the number of zones you have to visit in half though, because like most things in Guild Wars 2… it sort of outstays its welcome. I am looking at you every boss fight in the story quests that lasts two to three times more than it probably should.

Now I set my sights on finishing up my Griffon. I started on this some time back and am in the “Open Skies” meta-achievements section. This will go so much quicker now that I have a flying mount of my own to reach a few of the eggs that frustrated me. I am looking at you “egg at the top of the damned branded pyramid”. After that, I think I will sort out how to get my Roller Beetle and maybe get serious about trying to get my Siege Turtle. I’ve been growing and harvesting Kale in my home instance for a while now so hopefully, I have a goodly amount of that when it comes to feeding my “smol” shelled friend. I suppose after I wrap all of those up, I need to get properly motivated to work on an epic weapon and get one of those under my belt.

Saving the Skyscales

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Good Morning Friends! My life over the last several days has been devoted to Skyscale misadventures. For those who are not initiated, the Skyscale is the closest Guild Wars 2 has to a normal flying mount. It is behind a massive quest chain that takes a truly dumb amount of time and resources and ends up rewarding you with an account-wide mount that performs much like Dragonriding does in the latest World of Warcraft expansion. In order to qualify for the mount, you have to have fully completed the Path of Fire expansion and Living World Season 4 as it requires a lot of specific items sold on vendors in those content areas.

The quest starts on the Dragonfall map, and the early chains will involve you roaming around this area and collecting a lot of resources. Shown above is the map for the locations of the various Skyscale scales which is effectively the first long collection. After completing that you gain enough faction with each camp in Dragonfall to purchase five medicines. From there you have to roam around and treat fourteen sick Skyscales scattered throughout the zone, before twenty-one eggs… which are frustratingly often beside a location you already had to collect a scale at previously. After completing the meta collection the rest of the quest continues in Sun’s Refuge where Gorrick sets up a lab as you attempt to hatch and raise a Skyscale.

The next sequence sees you taking your egg to work with you, as you attempt to expose it to various elements. There are twelve in total and each step in that chain involves four or five individual sub-steps. Most of these are not terribly taxing, but I spent around two hours fully unlocking the Derelict Delve in Desert Highlands. This involved collecting a number of runestones and then slotting them one at a time into doors… which open the next piece of the delve. Effectively you need something in the second delve and the final delve, and something I learned a bit too late is you have to finish each individual delve in a single setting. I thought slotting a rune would be maintained between trips, and as a result, I had to do the final delve twice because I needed to leave halfway through. One positive is that I got really good at navigating the sequence of teleporters while moving around this area.

The quest step that took me the longest by far was the final bit of the Skyscale of Courage. This involved doing what I now know is the entire meta event in Elon Riverlands. You essentially need to fight the boss inside Augury Rock, and I spent quite a bit of time just milling around at the camp where the first step in the meta event spawns sequence spawns. Finally Sunday morning at about 11 am it fired off and I was able to complete the sequence and finish that step in the quest chain.

This moved me on to the phase where I actually spent time raising my newborn Skyscale. Essentially I had to collect a number of special treats by killing specific monsters scattered around the Crystal Desert region and waiting for a “Tasty” item to drop from them. I also had to spend quite a bit of fold buying “Toys” for the newborn, the most expensive of which was the grow lamp that goes for 22g currently on the market. Sadly I did not have my jewel-crafting skill high enough to make the item, nor did I really relish the thought of grinding it up. Lastly, I had to feed the Skyscale specifically crafted food and could feed a maximum of 4 pieces per day. Fortunately, I wrapped up the previous step before the daily reset so was able to get 8 feedings in within a single calendar day. Normally this takes three individual resets in order to get past the feeding step and more time if you did not already have a stash of materials ready to craft the food.

Now I am staring down the barrel of the bane of my existence. I have what is effectively twenty-one jumping puzzles to complete in order to find my Skyscale who has run away from the nest. I can craft something called Extra-Pungent Skyscale Treat to skip a jumping puzzle, but it comes with a hefty cost. Essentially it requires a reagent with a daily cooldown and an item that you can only purchase from a vendor that costs 4g. So in order to brute force my way through this… it would cost me a minimum of 80g as you get one for free when you start the quest chain. I think I am going to at least attempt some of the jumping puzzles and then fall back on making the treat if I get too frustrated by them. I tell reminding myself at any point I get angry, that I will only have to do this once.

I have to admit though, that I never would have made it this far without Blish HUD. There is an addon called pathing that you can install within the Blish HUD interface that marks various items on your in-game map. More specifically the pathing module that I would suggest using is ReActif EN pack as it seems to be the clearest to follow. For example, when doing Scales or Eggs in Dragonsfall I just had to roam around and follow the scale icon on my HUD until I finally found its location. Similarly, now that I am on the jumping puzzle step, it should in theory show me the correct path to follow the reach the top. That is what I tend to have the most trouble with while doing jumping puzzles is determining what areas I can actually stand on versus which areas are not valid terrain.

I expect tonight to start on the first of the jumping puzzles and then determine if I will buy my way out of this frustration or keep at it. While doing this however I am spending a lot of time farming Living World Season 4 content, because I need stacks of zone currency to complete the final step. I know I am lacking Branded Mass, Mistonium, and Inscribed Shards but I have the others already. Basically, I am focusing on this problem in a few ways firstly by doing the hearts each day and buying the amount of currency that I can from the karma vendor. Then I am spending some time roaming around Bjora Marches looking for Eternal Ice, as there is a Karma vendor there that will sell you the season 4 currencies in exchange for that resource. My hope is that by the time I finish chewing through the jumping puzzles, and the steps that follow them… I will have earned enough currency to be able to buy all of the saddle components shown above.

Basically, I guess I reached a point where I was tired of being grounded. So many of the meta events in Guild Wars 2 are just much easier with a Skyscale. As I’ve started working my way through content on the Ranger, I reached several points, especially in zone completion where I wished I had access to one. I knew eventually I would set my mind to churning through this quest, and it seems to be a solid activity to do while I am consuming an audiobook. All of this effort will eventually pay off though, and it will make all of my characters from that point forward much more enjoyable to spend time on. In the meantime, however… I have a lot of pain in front of me before I can settle into the joy of having the best mount in the game.

Thirteen Books

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Good Morning Friends! I am on my fourth day this weekend and as a result, it has made me terribly late to sit down and write a blog post. When last I shared my progress in this year’s bookish journey, I had finished my tenth book. As of about 11 pm last night, I have now finished my thirteenth. I find myself in a position currently where none of my holds are available and I have nothing currently checked out of the library. So once I finish writing my morning post, I will begin the process of sifting around and trying to land on my next novel. I have a handful of ideas but ultimately it will be determined by what is actually available. I acquired the Iron Druid series from something other than Amazon or the Libby app, so I might start down that road next. I am thinking about starting an audiobook section of my Plex Server so that I can use that to keep track of my progress and shift between machines while listening to the same book.

The goal of this weekend was to acquire two shiny new library cards. That did not exactly work as expected, because thankfully I consulted one of my librarian friends first. It turns out that most of the smaller libraries are all signed on to the “OK Virtual Library” which was a way of allowing smaller communities with smaller budgets to be able to afford the trappings of full access to digital materials. However, this means that one Library card at the OK Virtual Library system is effectively the same as any other card, meaning that if I really want a third card to expand my access… I will need to make a trek down to the Oklahoma City Metro Library system. I’ve already noticed a difference in what I have access to through Libby however, so our trip to Bartlesville is definitely a net positive. I also got to hang out albeit briefly with my friend who is a Librarian there which was also extremely good.

When last I shared my journey through books, I mentioned that I was about to start Heroic Hearts. This is a collection of short stories from various authors, but the primary reason I was interested is it includes another tale that takes place after the events of Battle Ground involving Major General Toot-Toot Minimus and Lacuna… and to a much much much smaller extent Harry Dresden and Will the Werewolf. The story itself was fun, but I stuck around and consumed a number of the other tales including one set in the Iron Druid Chronicles focused around the dog Oberron and his point of view. Probably my favorite of the stories was The Dark Ship by Anne Bishop… which means I need to do some searches to find out what else that author has written. I think this is why I have always liked these anthologies of short stories because it gives you a view into the world of a lot of authors in a short condensed manner. I have to admit from the short focusing on Oberron I am thinking the Iron Druid Chronicles might be a little too “captain planet” for my tastes, but I am still willing to give it a shot since it was suggested by a good friend.

Next up I dove into Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis. This has been on my list of books to read for a long while because I am a big fan of Lindsay’s long-form YouTube video essays, and wish that was a thing she was still doing. I remember listening to some podcast discussion centered around the creation of this book and how one of the things about being a popular YouTuber is that book deals appear out of the woodwork, and how she waited for the right one that would more or less give her free reign. What we get in Axiom’s End is a nostalgic trip through that particular brand of internet weirdness that was the late 2000s, more specifically 2007. Effectively this novel is Dubya-era nonsense blended with Wikileaks scandals, a bit of the X-Files, and the movie E.T. centered around a fully adult cast rather than a group of kids.

It takes a bit to really get engaged in the setting because it starts throwing out what sounds like important vocabulary without really explaining what any of it means. It reminds me of reading Dune for the first time and having to interpret a lot of things through context clues, the key difference being there was a thick glossary at the back of that novel… which is lacking here. I like the central character of Cora Sabino and the journey she goes through during the course of the pages. It is a bit of a weird romp, but well worth your time sticking around until it properly grabs you. There are a few unanswered questions that you sort of have to roll with because I still have no fucking clue why the first events of the novel actually took place. There is a logical sequence that never really resolves that you sort of have to hand wave away, but the rest of the novel resolves neatly.

Most recently I finished up Dead Man’s Hand by James J. Butcher… who is the son of Jim Butcher the author of the Dresden Files series. While digging around to catch up on the Dresden series I stumbled upon the existence of this novel which immediately placed it on my radar. My friend the aforementioned Librarian said that they were reading the novel, and funnily enough, my hold kept them from extending their own old so I technically finished it first. At its core… Dead Man’s Hand is the most generically competent urban fantasy novel you have ever read. That doesn’t necessarily make it bad, but it feels like a setting you have been to before with highly regulated magic users and a not-quite-ministry-of-magic governing them and their actions. I guess one of the things that do make it more interesting is this is a post-unmasking society where “usuals” and “unorthodox” have learned to live together in a somewhat unsteady peace.

One of the cardinal sins of this novel is that it has some truly awful character names like the primary protagonist of Grimshaw Griswald Grimsby. At face value, it is a slightly awkward first novel from an author that at times feels like a caricature of his father’s writing style. That is probably unfair however because if I did not go into this expecting at least some similarities due to my extreme familiarity with the other’s body of work… I would likely judge it more positively. The novel did manage to make me care about the characters and make me interested in hearing more about this world. The second book in the Unorthodox Chronicles series has already been announced and will be called Long Past Dues releasing this October. I am interested enough in GG Grimsby, Huntsman Mayflower, and Wudge to definitely throw that on the list of must-reads. If you like magical detective stories, and more specifically like the buddy cop dynamic of a completely green rookie and grizzled grumpy veteran, then this is probably worth a read for you as well.

More than likely I am going to be starting book one of the Iron Druid Chronicles at some point today. The series begins with a book called Hounded, which I am guessing will dive into the bond that the main character has with the hound Oberron that I met in the short story discussed earlier in this post. I liked Oberron quite a bit, so if nothing else I think I can limp through a novel just based on that alone. My friend mentioned that it felt a lot like Dresden Files and even though the story I read was from the point of view of the dog, I can absolutely see some similarities. It still floors me that I am thirteen books into this journey with no real signs of slowing down. I know at some point I will probably stall out at least for a bit as I will want to play some narrative games this year, namely the new Jedi Survivor game coming out in April. Tomorrow I will likely share my progress in Guild Wars 2 that I made over the weekend.

Hopefully, you have a great week and as always feel free to drop me any suggestions for novels I should explore. I will say that I am not terribly interested in anything with a more romantic focus. That isn’t really my jam, as I tend to skip through romance scenes in novels because I find them exceedingly awkward most of the time. I might have to dive into a few at some point because I happen to be friends with several romance authors, but I am largely putting that off for now lest I get bogged down.

AggroChat #423 – Why Is Bel Laughing?

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, and Kodra

Tonight we have a bit of a short show as we had to punt several topics to next week since Tam and Thalen were out.  Bel talks about his recent adventures since the beginning of the year with the Library system and the Libby App.  From there Ash shares his experience using Character Questionnaires to drive character development in a tabletop pen-and-paper game.  Kodra talks about streaming a day of Celeste Strawberry Jam and his experiences playing the game with a pillowcase on his head.  Bel talks about what happens when a large Mastodon instance closes and over 17,000 folks have to relocate at once.  Bel also talks about his experiences helping to administrate Gamepad.club. Finally, we talk about times when games decided to break their world or remove large chunks of content and why it didn’t work.

Topics Discussed

  • Adventures with the Library System
    • Bel gets a Library Card
    • The Libby App
    • Gideon the Ninth / Harrow the Ninth
    • The Last Watch
    • Catching up with Dresden
  • Character Questionnaires are Amazing
    • Using a questionnaire to help build character development in tabletop games.
  • Celeste Strawberry Jam
    • Beginner Lobby
    • Kodra plays with a Pillowcase on their Head
  • The Death of an Instance
    • What happens when a large Mastodon Instance closes
    • Bel helping admin Gamepad.club
  • Breaking the World Does Not Work
    • Guild Wars 2 Living World Season 1
    • World of Warcraft Cataclysm
    • Evequest 1 to Everquest 2
    • Destiny 2 Removing Content
    • FFXIV ARR did Work However

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