Gift of Exploration

Hakuna Matata

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There are so many little things in Guild Wars 2 that you just sort of forget about half of them until you happen upon them again. For example there is a spot in the Crystal Desert where a Meerkat, Warthog, and Lion Cub just happen to cross the path in front of you. Last night one of the daily quests was to do an event in the Crystal Desert, and I roamed around until I found an escort that was about to start. It just so happened that while I was guarding a bunch of refugees the Lion King themed random encounter happened in front of me. I’ve always greatly preferred this style of easter egg as compared to the World of Warcraft slapstick style that just sort of beats you over the head with it. I remember these sort of minor easter eggs in Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot as well… and they always felt like a sly nod more than a big sign screaming… “Get it? Get it?”.

In other happenings, Mistlock Sanctuary is sort of where the fancy folk go… because for years it was the best of the VIP clubs because it granted you access to way more stuff. Still to this day it is sort of the place where the folks with wild outfits go to dance and be silly. I had never seen the bow that shoots rainbow unicorns until yesterday… and then I happened upon four of them out in the wild with another one here in Mistlock. I had to look it up because at first I thought it was something new… but no it turns out it is a Generation One Legendary Weapon called The Dreamer. It’s a short bow instead of a long bow, which is in part why it has never really been my focus. At least with Ranger… I am not a big proponent of Short Bows because its a Condition damage weapon and I tend to mostly focus on Power builds. Still really cool… but the sound effect would drive me nuts quickly.

Yesterday I completed several more zones and now have brought my total world completion up to 81% over yesterday’s 72%. The needle moves rather slowly considering I finished I think four zones in total… but in all of those cases I was taking them from roughly 60% all the way to 100% which isn’t as big of a leap as it seems. Mostly I just have to keep my head down and let myself get caught up in the zones themselves… and not really think about how much further I have to go. That is sort of the key to completing anything in a game… allowing yourself to lose focus on the goal and just have fun with the individual objectives. It is wild revisiting all of these zones because each time I do it… I am consistently amazed by just how large they are and how much minute detail there is in each of them. The whole Hylek city that is entirely underwater and hidden in a cave system that you would never find… if you did not specifically go looking for it is pretty wild. However when you are just trying to pick up points of interest, it can be a bit frustrating trying to figure how to get to the dot you see on your map… but see no real path towards.

I made significant progress in World vs World last night and pushed my progress from 13/40 to 30/40 or from roughly 30% to 75%. I could probably AFK in zone and grind out the next pip before I ran out of contribution juice, but I would rather wait until this evening and find a group and do some objectives. On one hand I feel like I should probably seek out a WvW specific guild for my final slot. That said… I have not exactly been super active, nor do I want to switch to a specific build. I like my Longbow/Greatsword Power Soulbeast thing that I am doing now, and I don’t really care how optimal that is. Right now I am using Greysky as my WvW guild, in case someone else from the guild wants to tag along. We are part of Throne of Balthazaar which seems reasonable enough. There are a few pretty decent guilds, but they are all the sort that want you to join discord and run invite only squads. This always feels counter productive, because wouldn’t it be better to just sort of have EVERYONE in the squad?

That is the only real complaint I have about returning to the game, is that the WvW folks seem way more bitter than I remember them being. Seen a lot more folks yelling in map chat and blaming others for letting objectives fall. I’ve also seen a lot of folks baiting others into leaving the Eternal Battleground which seems like a dick move. There is a thing you can do called an Emergency Waypoint, which is intended to get reinforcements into an objective when you are just about to be sieged. At several points last night I saw folks firing these off and spamming chat, trying to get reinforcements… at a node that did not have any activity going on. They were effectively just trying to get folks to leave the battlegrounds that had queues… so that they could get into them. This might just be a problem with my own battle group and not more widespread… but it does seem like a kind of cruel trick to pull. The biggest problem is that we seemed to have no commanders… and while I could tag up… I have no clue what the hell I am doing really. My WvW tends to be to hang out on the periphery and apply pressure to zergs to get them to run into the main force… not actually standing in our own zerg and pushing where the commander should be.

For any annoyances there are with the WvW community… the Open World community still seems pure and genuine. I logged in this morning to get some screenshots and saw someone asking for help with a T3 Rift in Bloodtide Coast. Within a few minutes there were a handful of us over there helping out, and another person threw up a tag to make it easier for folks to find the objective. This feels like the community working as intended, and it always makes me happy when I see it in action. This happens so often as folks ask for help and get it regularly. I helped a random level 7 character out the other day with a Hero Point because they rolled up just as I was finishing it… and asked if they got credit. They did not, so I fired it off again to make sure they could take down the Veteran that spawned. There is just a nurturing aspect to the way the game has been designed and I love it so much.

So I have been allowing myself to think that the Gift of Battle and Gift of Exploration were the only real challenges that I was dealing with. That is very much NOT the case. The problem with crafting four legendaries after going years without crafting any… is that I have effectively decimated my crafting material reserves. I am pretty close to the required 250 Globs of Ectoplasm because I religiously salvage my rares. I am back up to 46 Mystic Clovers… but need 77 so that is going to be a challenge. I can buy 10 per week… but that recipe takes Mystic Coins… which I am completely out of but at least those can be bought on the market. Obsidian Shards are not that big of a deal since you can get them after a specific event with Karma in the Straits of Devastation. I have almost 4 million Karma and will probably convert most of that when I am working on zone completion there. Basically there are things I can do to fix all of these problems but it will be a much slower burn than knocking out these two big components that feel way more satisfying. Really I need to get better about doing a daily Ley-Line Anomaly to bank up some coins.

Guild Wars 2 is a game about long grinds, and the most effective way about doing this… is to do a little bit of a lot of things every single day. GW2 Efficiency is a phenomenal site that shows you roughly how much something would cost to craft, and according to it… with the items that I currently have it is going to take me 224 Gold to finish up Kudzu today. That is the Legendary that I am working towards so that I will have both a Longbow and Greatsword for my Ranger, or honestly any other class that will use them. I am probably going to buy the mystic coins… keep farming the ectos, and then convert karma for the obsidian which will lower the total costs by a bit. The worst part of a Legendary is the Gift of Magic and Gift of Might and you get one of those from each Legendary Weapon kit, so every two kits you buy from the Wizard store… you just don’t have to worry about the Gift of Fortune that much.

Anyways… this is the long game and I am deep into it since I have crafted Frostfang, Bolt, Twilight, and Juggernaut… and am now working towards Kudzu. I also have a starter for Frenzy… but since I stole one of the gifts from it to cobble together Kudzu it will be a bit before I am willing to fund another Gift of Fortune.

Tyria Fits Perfectly

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Good Morning Folks. Last week I talked about thrashing around in a nothing quite fits gaming mood, as I bounced from game to game. Over the weekend, I found the thing that fits… at least for this moment. Guild Wars 2 and I have a sordid past of being an alpha tester, resigning from said alpha test because I did not understand the appeal of the damned game… and then years later falling in love with its particular blend of free range objective game-play. My brain was very much WoWified and this game was effectively the anti-WoW at the time in the manner in which it structured game-play… or more so didn’t structure it. I played heavily last around the launch of Janthir and through its first patch, and then tagged out in an ARPG fueled haze for half a year before finally returning over the weekend.

I was essentially two patches behind, thought I had at least started on Godspawn a little bit before wandering off last time. I spent a bit of time on Saturday catching up on the story… not necessarily because I wanted to play the story… but because I wanted access to the new zone. Why did I want access to the new zone? To tame this fuzzy chonker of a Bee for my ranger that I named Sir Buzzington. Not only is the Bee pet cute, but it has a rather solid kit of abilities which I am pretty happy with. The best of these is Honey Toss which provides the negative effects of slow and cripple… but is also just sort of funny to think about in the first place. Once I got the bee I hit one of the common walls where I needed to skill up a new faction ability for the zone, and I never quite returned to the quest chain after getting that. I am sure in the coming days I will do so.

I spent a lot of the weekend knocking out things on the daily and weekly wizard chores because I was trying to build up 1000 of the wizard chore currency to buy the current legendary weapon starter kit. I missed the first couple of these, but I have been pretty much buying each additional one as they come out because if nothing else… they give me a free gift of might or gift of magic. Essentially I have everything that I need to craft Kudzu the Legendary Long Bow except for a Gift of Exploration and a Gift of Battle. The first comes from doing a full old world Tyrian zone completion and the second from the World versus World mastery track. Luckily when you do a world completion, you end up getting two of the Gifts of Exploration, but given I have none of them available… that means I have apparently crafted four legendary weapons at this point. Time flies when you are literally burning through gold on crafting.

During the podcast on Saturday I chipped away at world completion and I have pushed the Ranger up to 72%… which is easily the highest of my characters who have not completed it yet. Then last night I spent a chunk of time in World Versus World and ground out roughly a third of the mastery track. This really is the perfect dichotomy of a deeply focused activity, because doing World Versus World means you need to be following a squad and participating in structured game-play for multiple hours at a time. On the exact opposite end of the spectrum you have World Completion which is just ticking off boxes in a zone, and doing a bunch of meandering activities until the tracker stops pointing you in a direction and the game awards you a loot box telling you that you hit 100%. I really like that there are things in this game that scratch both itches for me, where I am laze about aimlessly doing things that also work towards objectives, or I can be super serious and also be ticking off boxes.

I think that is the thing that Guild Wars 2 does better than any game out there… is it gives you a bunch of low barrier of entry “default activities”. One of the challenges that I have with other MMORPGs is easing back into them, because it feels like have to remember way too much about the game in order to be effective at doing anything. In Final Fantasy XIV for example you can always pop back in and start the story… but you will quickly hit a gear check wall where you either have to buy your way to freedom or spend some time grinding dungeons to gear up enough to complete the next quest. In Guild Wars 2… I am as geared as I will ever be or at least at this point gearing is really just a matter of minutiae. I can pop back in and join a World Boss train or choose a zone that is about to start its meta and know that I can immediately and seamlessly merge back into the world and be doing stuff without having to think a lot about it. For others they probably spend time roaming around zones and harvesting resources which again… super chill activity that feels purposeful given how damned well the trade system works.

Most MMORPGs feel heavy and cumbersome… like they require too much effort to remember what the hell you were doing last time you played. I never really have that problem with Guild Wars 2 because it sort of scratches the same itches for me that playing an ARPG does. Sure there is story and absolutely it is well written and enjoyable… but I can also just hang out in a zone and do a bunch of objectives as they pop up and feel like I am doing something… without having to care too much about what it is that I am doing. Granted I am over a decade into this game and have purchased all manner of quality of life improvements… like a device that just shows me what world boss is next to spawn, or infinite use gathering tools or the Copper-Fed Salvage-O-Matic which limits my need to keep going back to town. Even in the base version of the game though… the horizons are pretty broad for what all you can do. Really I need to spend some more time in the map metas for the expansions because there are all sorts of goodies that I could get there that I do not have.

Anyways for now I am having a lot of fun, and it is always shocking to me how much I actually enjoy World vs World. I do get annoyed how many private squads there are and how insistent they are that you join their discord. Instead I tend to just look for the tag and follow it around and assist as best as I can… because I have no interest in joining yet another discord. We had a pretty great series of skirmishes in our home borderland last night as blue kept trying to take Dreadfall Bay from us. Admittedly I spent most of my time up top the rampart either using one of the Arrow Carts or raining down my own AOE arrow attack. Occasionally we would go out and push the nearest objective, because they kept trying to starve us resources from the nearest camp. It really was the optimal farming stance for objective tracks, because it made sure that my participation was maxed out at all times. While I am here for the Gift of Battle, I am trying to still make myself useful by doing some of the non-glamorous work of guarding objectives.

I figure this is probably going to hold my attention at least until the release of Path of Exile 3.26 which is supposedly in June.