gw2

Catmander Magic

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Good Morning Folks. Last night I spent most of the evening chipping away at my Griffon mount quest. This is the only mount that I had not unlocked, and given that I did not have other pressing matters I figured it was time to quit stalling and knock it out. I was on the step where I had to complete each of the Open Skies achievements per Path of Fire zone. These involved some rather costly expenditures at 25g per pop, collecting griffon eggs, and knocking out a few specific event chains. Many of these had a Champion or Legendary mob at the end of it, which is when I learned the magical power that is the commander tag. There were several times when I tagged up, shouted to map chat that I was on an event chain for the griffon, and shockingly … people would just materialize. Hell, there were many times when I was thanked after the fact because apparently there were folks milling around in the zone who needed it but did not know how to get started. One can get used to having the power to herd cats… literally.

As of this morning, I am on the step “Sunspear Wisdom” which involves going into a story instance and collecting a bunch of tomes. I am not sure I can do this step yet on my Ranger, because I have not completed Path of Fire. I will have to do some further research to see if it actually works. After that I think all I have to do is return the writings to the Sunspear Sanctuary and then pick up my shiny new Griffon mount. I’ve put this off in large part because it was a good chunk of gold to spend on a mount that I was not sure I would actually use much. I use my Skyscale all the freaking time, but Griffon in general just seems like a less good version of that. Griffons however are MUCH faster and there are times when it would be handy to zip across a zone quickly when chasing a meta train.

I wish that Guild Wars 2 had something akin to the Fantasia’s from Final Fantasy XIV. My Guardian is an Asura and quite honestly… no matter how much time I spend on them I cannot get into them. There is just something about the movement being jerky similar to the World of Warcraft Gnome, that I cannot abide. So this morning I decided to use one of my spare character slots and create a brand new Guardian with the purpose of making it a Heal/Alac Hammerbender. Right now I am leveling the old-fashioned way because it has been ages since I did any of this content “legitimately”, once I get closer to the later levels I will use my boost on the character and run around in a full set of celestial gear which should be reasonable enough to at least get started. Then the question is whether or not I buy one of the Hero Point boosts so I can dive straight into Willbender or if I try and join one of the Hero Point trains. Hell, I guess if I so desired I could start my own…. given that I have that Catmander Magic.

Recently I kinda got back into playing the Warrior given that I was using it for unlocking a Gift of Exploration. I gave him a bit of a facelift the other day, and this morning I decided to continue that glow-up with a bit of a dye session as I have begun to lean into the whole fire aesthetic. I really love what you can do with the branded-themed mount skins and the color trails. I wish there was a branded Warclaw and Turtle so that I could just keep with that same theming. Springer is probably the mount that I like the least but even it looks cool with the branded skin. Right now I am playing around on Spear, which is to mean that I am not actually using a spear at all given that I spend most of my time in gunblade stance.

The other thing that I am trying really hard to get used to is making sure that I have parked my characters in my Homestead before I leave for the night. The experience buff is just too good to ignore, and given that I want to try and grind out another Gift of Battle this weekend, I am hoping to go into that adventure with as much rested experience as possible. I think the anniversary buff ends on Sunday at some point, so that means Saturday is going to be WVW central for me. All in all, I am having quite a good time in Guild Wars 2, and am hoping to maybe get some fractal and maybe strike groups going. If you are playing right now and interested in doing some group content, hit me up. Maybe we can figure out a time when it works for everyone.

ANet Customer Service Is Awesome

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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

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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

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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.