Eternity

Kinfall and Eternity

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Good Morning Folks. I had a really fun night with Ammo, Ash, Sita, and Sol running fractals and actually attempting to finish our tier 1 progression. The problem with that however is that I took exactly zero screenshots while we were doing things, so instead you get this generic placeholder that I took this morning while finishing off yesterday’s dailies. Our Thursday night shenanigans have been something that I very much look forward to each week. Occasionally they also extend out into Friday night nonsense, but not every single week. I got to test out my new headset which worked pretty well, save for the fact that it blocks out a lot of external sound… making my voice sound odd in my own head while I am talking. I went with a Corsair wireless headset, and the only reason why I had never used something like this previously… is I always tried to keep my headphones pretty open ear in case my wife needed to talk to me about something. If nothing else it beats the heck out of the lid mic on my laptop when I am downstairs.

Since I never shared a photo of me actually USING Eternity, here is that thing. I actually used it quite a bit last night because we tried the new Kinfall Fractal and the final boss is a bit of a damage sponge. I had to rapidly flip between my two weapons so that I could do sufficient breakbar damage to keep us alive. We got better after our first attempt, because we went into the fight completely blind. Mostly it is a melee fight because everyone has to stay stacked up in range of these two bubbles that protect you from environmental damage. Greatsword has two breakbar abilities, and Longbow one… and I needed all of them in order to burn through that bar as quickly as possible, especially in that final invulnerability phase. It was fun… but probably had about 50% more hitpoints than it needed for a Tier 1 Fractal. It wasn’t so much that the fight was complicated… it just got busy over time.

I’ve knocked out all of the weeklies already, but one of the aspects I love of them is there is always one that requires you to kill 100 enemies of a specific type. This often causes me to rack my brain trying to figure out where I could do this most efficiently, and this time around one of the types was Inquest. This immediately made me think of the Living World Season 4 zone Sandswept Isles, which is the last time we had any major involvement with fighting against the Inquest. There is an entire area of the zone that is pretty much nothing but Inquest mobs. While I was out there an event was firing up to defeat a boss named Zohaqan which is something that I had never participated in. The weeklies specifically often put me in these situations where I am getting exposure to content that I have never actually taken the time to do. When I was clearing Living World Season 4, I was burning through the content so that I could move on to Icebrood Saga. This is the thing about playing catch up in a game like this, is that you really do not spend as much time experiencing the content as you would when it is fresh and new. The Wizards Vault is this excellent way of forcing you to go back and focus on things like this.

The bite sized nature of the game makes me way more willing to just lean into content that is happening in whatever zone I happen to be in. That really is the secret sauce of what makes Guild Wars 2 so good. You start out with one goal in mind, but then are set down a path of doing a bunch of other interesting things… because you just so happen to be there at the right time for them to be firing off. Events fire off at a consistent enough schedule that you CAN seek out specific events, but you can also just pop into a zone and ride along with the current doing whatever the heck happens to be going on at that moment. I often operate in both modes while playing these games, and I am happy that this one supports a gameplay style where I don’t have to have a fixed purpose… but can still find purposeful things to do.

Anyways! I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I will probably be diving into another book and playing some more Path of Exile since I am less than three pips away from level 100.

Voltron Sword

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Good Morning folks. Yesterday was the beginning of the WvW Rush event in Guild Wars 2, but first I feel like you all need to stop an appreciate how amazing this Skeletor themed Charr is that I saw last night. I admit I was mostly not feeling like playing Guild Wars 2 yesterday, but I decided to pop in for a few minutes and see how much progress I could make in WvW after knocking out my dailies. I have been trying to farm down my dailies every single day and at least make some modicum of progress towards the weeklies so that I am not stuck doing all of them on Saturday and Sunday. Last night was a comedy of errors because I forgot to turn off my monitors upstairs before going downstairs to play from my laptop… which meant that I was playing at 1440p on a 1080p screen… so all of the text was super tiny. This also meant that when I got into World vs World I could not read a single thing that the commander was saying. Thankfully you can mostly just follow the tag and everything will be just fine.

I played for less than an hour and just happened to time it perfectly as the squad was making a push for Stonemist Castle. For anyone who does not understand how WvW works in Guild Wars 2… there are essentially 3 zones that surround a central zone called the Eternal Battleground. The three zones belong to each of the three factions and the Eternal Battleground is at least in theory this important objective that all three are fighting for. At the center of this zone is Stonemist Castle, and it is effectively the thing you capture for bragging rights and try and hold it for as long as possible. There was a 30 player queue for the Eternal Battegrounds, and I was able to knock out all of my daily quests while waiting to get in. I was not sure how the WvW Rush event worked… but when we captured Stonemist I was flooded with loot boxes and effectively had my Gift of Battle track completed two and a half times. Everything that is highlighted in my inventory came from that single capture event.

It also instantly completed the WvW Rush Champion achievement that also comes with its own reward track. Basically what I am saying is… if you need anything from World vs World, now is the time to farm it. You are going to need a Gift of Battle for every single Legendary you might want to craft, so in theory this is a good time to bank these up as they stack in your inventory. Awhile back I had purchased the starter kit for Sunrise, and pretty much only needed another Gift of Battle in order to craft it as I had a Gift of Exploration banked from the last time I did a world completion. I guess that also now means that I need to choose another character as tribute and start working on another world completion so I am ready for the next time I want to craft a legendary. This is the thing that I enjoy about Guild Wars 2 is that it gives me these broad overarching things to be working towards. So much of the endgame centers around legendary items that there is always something I can be doing to work towards my next one.

So essentially I jumped through a bunch of hoops this morning before sitting down to write this blog post. I did not have both gifts for the Gift of Fortune, but I did have one of the tokens that comes from the starter kit that allows me to choose one. So I popped open my handy GW2 Efficiency to see which one was cheaper for me to craft at that moment, and crafted a Gift of Might. This allowed me to consume the token for a Gift of Magic, but that left me short on Mystic Clovers meaning I had to use the crappy recipe to try and craft the last seven that I needed. I had already bought the weekly clovers that I could as well as the ones from the wizards vault. It cost quite the chunk of gold but I was able to complete Sunrise without much issue this morning adding sixth legendary to my armory.

Then because I had crafted Twilight already… the entire reason why I picked up the Sunrise starter kit was to be able to make Eternity. Essentially when you craft either of the great swords you get a memory that you can use in lieu of the weapon to craft Eternity, a sword that combines the visual effects of both weapons based on the day/night cycle. I could have sold the finished Eternity for roughly 3300 gold on the trading post… but alas cosmetics are the true end game and I wanted it for myself. Thankfully once you have gone this far down the rabbit hole… finishing the craft is pretty damned easy because it requires the Memory of Sunrise, Memory of Twilight, 5 piles of Crystalline Dust, and 10 Philosopher’s Stones. Now I own the fanciest of fancy greatswords… and as soon as I stop being lazy and swap all of the crap over from Twilight I will be wielding this on all of my characters that care about such things.

I am not sure how much I am going to be doing the WvW Rush event, but honestly I would like to grind my rank up as high as I can because that also seems to be greatly increased. I got eight ranks from that one Stonemist Castle capture in addition to all of the other rewards I got. At some point I would really like to make Warbringer the legendary WVW backpack but it requires Rank 350 to buy some of the components. I get that there are other options available that are probably easier… but I like the look of Warbringer.