Dragon's End

Doofy Babby Turt

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Good Morning Friends! I swear sometimes all it takes for me is to complain about something and then the universe decides to immediately make me wrong. Yesterday I complained about how difficult it was to get a Dragon’s End group so that I could get my turtle egg. Then yesterday over lunch while eating my shin ramen, I zoned into Dragon’s End with the thought of grinding out some Writs, and moments later… an entire map’s worth of skyscales arrived. So I had to hold on for dear life because I had won the lottery and was able to join up on the commander and ride along for a meta completion. The final fight sucked a bit and it took me a while to realize I could resurrect on an airship and fly back down to the battle. The part that freaked me out a bit is that I did not specifically get a turtle egg of any sort drop… instead the only way I knew I completed it was that I got an in-game mail telling me to go to Arborstone. I am sure I probably got an achievement as well but so many scrolled by for completing the event that I absolutely missed it.

The Commander also did a Dragonstorm so I rode along for that event as well. While the group is going you might as well get as much out of it as you can. I know I talked about this yesterday but if you find yourself in a group with a good commander then you should just go with it until the train ends. This was maybe the easiest Dragonstorm I had ever done, so kudos to that team. I think about the time I play something over lunch, I am getting the benefit of the oceanic crew doing activities because there are often things going on in zones. I learned this early in my gaming career, but “Aussies” and “Kiwis” are just fucking awesome to play with when it comes to group content. Back during our Late Night Raiders days in OG World of Warcraft, we had a contingency of about twenty Australians and they were all amazing. I miss gaming with my friend Banzai, which reminds me that I should try and check up on him.

After the squad wound down I started chipping away at some of the requirements for the turtle. Luckily I had been growing Kale for ages in my home instance garden, so I had more than enough of that. I might even liquidate my reserves at this point. I was able to get through the first hurdle which was making turtle baby food and then bought my way through the fishing requirements. This left the “Suiting Up” achievement to complete which involves completing a bunch of events, hearts, and bosses in Cantha. After last night I am down to just two sub-components, getting a successful kill of Renyak in Seitung, and completing the Kaineng Overlook Strike Mission. The last bit is what worries me as I have not completed ANY strike missions. I’ve been watching the looking for group “training” section to see if anyone posts a Kaineng Overlook, but so far no luck. My plan is to post a message maybe tonight looking for a group and admitting I have no clue what I am doing. The Guild Wars 2 community seems pretty chill so we will see if this holds for group activities.

What I love more than anything thought is just like the Skyscale, my baby turtle loves me and follows me around. Whenever I zone into Arborstone the turtle comes running… or what passes for running at the pace of a giant turtle. As soon as it gets within range of me the heart bubbles start floating up which completely melts my heart. It is dumb how a game can make me care so much about a virtual pet, but it absolutely does. Growing up we regularly had turtles that would come and eat the leftovers of the dry cat food, and I would regularly befriend them. I remember I had a turtle that I named Yertle, because of course you have to name a turtle Yertle… that I drew designs on his shell with a paint pen. I have no clue if that is harmful to a turtle, but he didn’t seem to mind. I would bring him random treats… mostly in the form of lunch meat that he really loved. Having a big doofy turt following me around Arborstone is bringing back all of those memories in a constant flood.

I continue to be surprised at how seemingly poorly “What Lies Beneath” is being taken at least by the YouTuber crew of Guild Wars 2 players. I think the first component at play is that none of them seem to appreciate the amount of work that resurrecting Living World Season 1 had to have taken by Arena.net. The assumption is that it is recycled content so it is just a matter of re-releasing it… and while technically there are some components of it that are, it is very clear that everything was rebuilt from the ground up. You can look at Living World Season 1 content and compare it to Living World Season 2 content for example, and the re-release is way more akin to what we might expect from the most current content releases from End of Dragons. The content was better than it ever was at the release of the game and is structured in a modern and accessible way rather than what I remember from the tiny bit of the Living World that I experienced. I’m a developer… re-releasing code is always a misnomer because you always have to refactor it to meet current standards which takes time and effort and careful surgery to make sure that you don’t completely break everything.

The other big problem that I see is that Guild Wars 2 is sort of everything to everyone. Inside the game there is enough content to be able to support a bunch of different communities that all want something slightly different:

  • Raid
  • Small-Scale PVP
  • World vs World
  • Strikes
  • Dungeons
  • Fractals
  • Fashionistas
  • Legendary Crafters
  • Trading Post Barons
  • Casual Map Completion
  • Meta Trains
  • Story and Lore Hounds

There are probably several others that I am not even listing out, but each one of those has a dedicated community that feels that Arena.Net should focus the game on their interests. So at any given time, any release is going to let someone down. The consensus that I have heard is that folks felt like there simply was not enough story and that there was not enough going on with the Gyala Delve map. There were no new masteries and the map is completely devoid of hearts. The component that I do agree with more than any of them however is that the final boss fight of the current meta is not great. Killing the same boss four times in a row per platform is a bit annoying, and I wish there had been some sort of “Voltron” thing going on where the three platforms coalesced into the center platform into a larger boss for the final phase. I enjoy the meta enough to have run it a half dozen times so far, but I am not the biggest fan of that final boss. Killing the bosses that spawn afterward is way more enjoyable as a whole.

I mean every game has its doomers, and Guild Wars 2 players honestly have more reason than a lot of games to feel that way. The history of the game seems to be a history of false starts and wild shifts in direction, trying to narrow in on how exactly the game should proceed with its content. Would I like the quarterly updates to have a bit more meat on the bones than Gyala Delve did? Absolutely… I think everyone would. Was I fine with what we got? Absolutely, because I got quite a bit of enjoyment from the gorgeous map and will likely be adding it to my rotation of low-key metas. Content creators oftentimes end up being the biggest doomers because their livelihood lies on a constant feed of information both positive and negative to bring eyeballs to their content. Outrage usually sells better than joy, but it is up to you to moderate your own reaction to their content. I think Guild Wars 2 is in a really good state, but I feel that way because I have ten years’ worth of content to fully explore. Maybe if I had been playing this game as my ONLY game for the last decade I would feel differently.

In the meantime, however, I need to get over my fear of human beings and get a strike group going. I really do want to get more comfortable building groups in the game. I don’t have a commander tag, but if I can get comfortable doing some lower-stress grouping, I might pony up for the 300 gold and buy one. I did the math yesterday and a commander tag is about $15 in gems so in reality it would probably be worth that to me to have one eventually. There is a version of me from the past that would absolutely be leading zone meta events, but that is a version that was not responsible for managing human beings in his daily life. Moving into management in the work world decimated my desire for any sort of responsibility in game.

Desperately Seeking Turtle

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Hey Folks! Welcome to a new week… or at least I am going to try and take a positive stance even though I feel like I did not get enough sleep at all this weekend. Partially it was that I stayed up way the heck too late reading a book most nights, but even when I did stop… I still struggled to fall asleep. This has ended up creating a situation where I am fairly out of it this morning. That said it was still a very enjoyable weekend as a whole and I spent most of my time screwing around in Guild Wars 2. I also played some multiplayer gaming of a game that is under a very strict NDA, which I can’t talk about but wish that I could. Most of my gaming for the weekend was of the directionless variety, I would let a single activity direct me somewhere and then latch onto whatever happened to fall across my path.

The first of these was doing the Chalk Gerent with a big group. I don’t remember specifically how I ended up latching onto this commander, but it was during another event that I just happened across and decided to join the tag. When there is a commander in the zone, you can click on their “tag” in the map and choose “join squad”. Often times a single commander may be doing a handful of metas and when one finishes they will post the waypoint for the next one they are doing in sequence. This was the case and what ultimately led me to Tangled Depths and to do the Rata Sum lane for the first time. This is without a doubt the best lane because you get to watch a giant robot fight something resembling a Kaiju. Through their tutelage, I actually stayed around after the event and learned that a new area opened up for us to loot, and doing so gained me a new mastery point.

Similarly, I happened to be in the Seitung Province to knock out the End of Dragons daily quest and happened upon another Commander that was organizing the zone meta. Which led me to kill the boss of it for the first time and with it gained another mastery point. These are really my happiest moments in the game where I allow the chance to direct my gaming for a while. Now when I group up like this I might stay for a dozen metas or only a couple, and the free for all nature of grouping in the game makes it so that when I eventually do fade away it isn’t a big deal. I love the casual open grouping of Guild Wars 2, and it allows me to feel like I participated in something epic… without the stress of finding a group and interacting with other human beings directly. Now that is not to say that I won’t chat while we are doing things… but it is also very easy to disappear when I have become “peopled out”.

The bane of my existence right now however is Dragon’s End. This is the big meta zone at the conclusion of the End of Dragons content. This is likely the most difficult meta event in the entire game, and legitimately takes two hours’ worth of prep work before you can successfully get to the final encounter. As a result, this one is much harder to get into a group for, and when a commander starts something in group finder… it is almost instantly full with no ability to get on the same map as the rest of the team. This proves the weakness of the world event system, in that you can’t limit who is on your map to only people participating in the event. As a result, there are always going to be stragglers that are just there to smell the roses and complete some objectives… and this is really the first event where that is a critical problem.

Ultimately I want to complete the event so I can get my Siege Turtle egg… and unlock that mount which is now starting to be required for some content. In Gyala Delve, for example, you have to use Siege Turtles to break down walls and unfortunately, unlike Dragons End, there are no NPC-controlled ones that you can mount to break things down. There are ultimately two ways to get the egg, either complete the meta all the way to its final conclusion or collect 200 Writs of Dragons End and purchase one from a vendor. So while I continue to fail at getting a viable group going in Dragon’s End, I am at a minimum spending time there each day completing events that will at some point add up to 200 writs. I currently have 70 after a single day of actually purposefully trying to farm them… so in theory, by this time next week, I should at least be well on my way to a Siege Turtle mount.

Other than that I spent some more time working on Living World Season 1 on the Ranger. Since I had finished no content at all on the Ranger until recently… I decided to use this character to play through ALL of the seasonal content in the appropriate order. I was stalled out for a bit on the Tower of Nightmares which is a completely miserable place. In order to get the credit you have to do the first two floors in a public group, and this really means you need to be doing this during prime time in order to fill a team. After a half dozen false starts where I was one of only a handful of people in the zone, I stumbled into a team of around a dozen people doing the same quest… and I hung onto them for dear life. While I could have bailed early when I got quest completion, I held out and followed them all the way up the tower and got an achievement for completing it.

I also completed the story mode version of the Marionette fight, which was really freaking cool. I want to do this legitimately at some point and will need to hang out in Eye of the North looking for a group at some point. From there I am leading up to the attack on Lion’s Arch and might knock that out tonight. I’ve enjoyed Living World Season 1 quite a bit, but I think I am ready to move on with the story and revisit Living World Season 2. I remember when I first ran it, I was confused as hell as to who all of these characters I was now interacting with were. I am ready to approach it with fresh eyes after already coming to love all of the members of what will eventually be Dragon’s Watch. It was really weird to see how much of a little shit Taimi was at the start. She rapidly became one of my favorite NPC characters, but she was such a butt in these early quests. Jory and Kas used to annoy me… or more so how airheaded early Kas is, but revisiting them with the love I already have for the characters has blunted that edge a bit. Braham is still… well… Ka-Braham… and doesn’t become a fully fleshed-out character for a very long time.

I think for me at least part of what makes Guild Wars 2 so special, is that it took so damned long for me to realize what a magical game this was. I hated it for so many years because I did not understand it. I kept trying to get into it and being frustrated that for whatever reason it was not grabbing me in the same way that it seemed to grab others. Ultimately it was a frame of mind that shifted and allowed me to understand it better. So long as I kept trying to lump it in with the other WoW-Like MMORPGs, it never really worked for me. When I realized that it was way more like the Diablo-Like ARPGs that I love so much, I finally was able to grasp how it functions as a game. I wish I had been able to grasp that a decade ago… but I guess I am thankful that I finally do nonetheless.