Guild Wars 2 Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Tequatl and Phrecia

June 24, 2026 by Belghast

I am still playing a heck of a lot of Guild Wars 2. Last night I spent my evening doing sibling time with Ace, and I feel bad for how not into GW2 they are…. yet I continue to talk about it. I managed to catch Tequatl last night, which always makes me happy. This is, without a doubt, my favorite event in the game. I think it was legitimately one of the first events that I stumbled onto on my own, and I have loved it ever since. I have also had better-than-average luck at getting ascended gear. In fact, I have a few coffers in the bank waiting to be used by someone. At some point, I need to start properly working on legendary armor sets.

I, of course, had to set loose the Pineapple Choya. These are, without a doubt, the best parts of the Castoria housing, and I have to set them free anytime I am in housing collecting my harvest nodes. Basically, right now I am only playing Belgraves, my hunter, for dailies and assorted reset collection. I have my housing, then three guild halls to collect resources from. Additionally, I have a bunch of characters parked at various chests around the world. These are mostly for collecting rare resources that can only be gotten daily. The level of detail in this game and the systems within systems is one of the things that attracts me. However, in talking with Ace, one of the biggest problems is how far behind you feel when you are just starting out.

I’ve been spending most of my time on Belglorian, my spearbender guardian. At this point, I have completed four of the Human zones, four of the Norn zones, and last night I spent the majority of my time doing world completion. I am currently working on the final Norn zone, and at some point will return to the Human lands and pick up the final zone there. This is still the chillest activity in any game, I swear. There is just something relaxing about following the marker to all of the objectives that I have not completed. I think I am over halfway through the zone I am working on.

Over in Path of Exile II, I have now made it far enough to collect the free passive skill that comes from a player having sacrificed their level 100 character to the void. I really think this concept is cool, that one player in each league can sacrifice themselves to give everyone an extra passive. I have been grinding away on my Raven RF Witch, trying to get it to level 90 and knock out one of the achievements. The build works well enough, but is nowhere near as broken as some of the other popular builds in this league. I had to drop one of my minions, which was a bit of a bummer, but I picked up Morior Invictus to greatly increase my survivability. It is unfortunate that this one chest piece is better than pretty much anything else in the game.

All of this said, I am very likely dropping POE2 entirely tomorrow when the Trial of the Ancestors Returns event happens in Path of Exile. The big thing about this event is that we get back Trial of the Ancestors, but with the Phrecia ascendancies. The big thing about it is that we are getting these alternate ascendancies without the bullshit that is the Gauntlet, and without the Idol-based Atlas passives. I played a Poison SRS build on the Servant of Arakali build during the gauntlet and had a lot more fun, but would have had way more fun if I could have just played it in a normal league. As a result, I am resurrecting BelLovesArakaali and seeing how far I can take it without all of the restrictions. The event starts at 5 pm CDT, and I am hoping I can get back from chemo, take a nap, and be ready for the launch.

Have you made a return to Guild Wars 2? Are you still playing Path of Exile II? Are you going to try the upcoming Phrecia event tomorrow? Drop me a line below.

World Completion Still Chill

June 19, 2026 by Belghast

Good Morning, Folks. The other day, I talked about easing my way back into Guild Wars 2. In theory, at this point, I am fully back and having quite a lot of fun. I had been playing my Ranger Main and mostly focused on World Bosses. However, last night I swapped to Belglorian, my Spear Willbender Guardian, because I realized that I needed more gifts from world completion to start working through my backlog of legendary weapons. I honestly have a bunch of fun with this character, and I think at some point I started working on zones, because I have more unlocked than I was expecting.

A lot of my nights still focus on the Wizard’s Vault daily and weekly quests. Right now, the reset is at 7 pm CDT, so as soon as that happens I essentially recieve new marching orders as to what to focus on. Last night was pretty straightforward, as the daily quests generally are. The days that I like the least are the days that ask me to go someplace in the world and kill mobs. For whatever reason, this tends to be Cantha a lot, and for some reason, that seems to be the place I am least likely to be. Thankfully, you can get an easy port from our guild hall. It is not that I dislike Cantha; I just like the zone metas far less than some of the other areas of the game.

Last night was Thursday Funday as it has become known, and around reset, we all joined up in Guild Wars 2. It has been a very long time since we were all playing the same game, and it was nice to run around as a group. Since Summer Games Fest and the Weekly both required event completion in Orr zones, we opted to do that for a few hours. This meant that not only did I knock out my dailies, but I also finished up my weeklies. Generally speaking, I dislike Orr… but Sita loves it so he was seemingly happy as a clam to be leading us around Cursed Shore. Mostly, I dislike that everything in the zone is hyper aggro, which makes sense given that this was the original Endgame for the base content.

At some point, I tagged out of the group because my stamina for all things is pretty low right now. At that point, I returned to the super chill process of World Completion. Admittedly, it is only as chill as it is because I have a skyscale. Thankfully, the process of obtaining that mount got a little easier with Secrets of the Obscure. However, even if all you have is the Raptor or Warclaw, you can have a pretty great time zipping through the zones from objective to objective. This is peak Guild Wars 2 for me, honestly, just roaming around aimlessly and completing random stuff. I am wondering how many days it is going to take me to get 100%, because I did not even finish Queensdale last night.

That is what I have been up to in Guild Wars 2. Especially on Thursdays, if you are in the guild and see us doing stuff, give us a holler, and we would be more than happy to loop you in. If you need a good guild home, and we are mutuals in each other’s orbit for a while, hit me up as well. We got plenty of room in [GREY] for new folks, and it would give you a reasonably well-appointed Guild Hall to farm each day.

Easing Back In

June 16, 2026 by Belghast

Good Morning, Folks! It has been a while since I played Guild Wars 2. Around the drop of the current expansion, I flaked out and stopped playing. My guess is that this correlated with the launch of a Path of Exile league, but whatever the case may be, it has been a bit. We had a regular Thursday night group for months, and it was glorious, but as we all sort of faded away, we started playing other games. The activity of getting together on Thursdays has continued, but the unified game that we were all playing has mostly stopped. I am not saying that I think we will band around Guild Wars 2 again, but lately I have found myself missing it. The glider gameplay of Spirit Crossing feels very similar to movement in GW2, so it made me nostalgic.

The thing that I love the most about Guild Wars 2 is the drop-in nature of activities. As a result, it was super easy for me to get straight into the action, and I spent a bit of time doing World Bosses. These are probably my single favorite activities in game, and were ultimately the thing that sold me on Guild Wars 2 as a whole. I missed Tequatl, which is hands down my favorite event, but managed to catch the boss in Queensdale and a few others. I figured a good way to ease back in was to focus on the various Astral Ward weeklies. There is apparently a legendary kit up and available that I do not have, so in theory, I should probably pick it up if for no other reason than providing me gifts to complete other legendaries.

I also spent quite a bit of time last night in Desert Highlands, hoping that someone would fire up bounties, but it never happened. I realize I can easily do bounties since I have a commander tag, but I was not feeling social enough to make that happen. Instead, I worked on various events that spawned and slowly chipped away at the alternate conditions for that achievement. I did manage to gather up a bit of a group, but we never formalized it with a commander tag. Again, I love how easy it is for others to tag in and follow along and get completion on events. This is really the strong point of Guild Wars 2, and I am hoping that when we get Guild Wars 3, it will have this same functionality.

I had quite a bit of fun, but ultimately ran out of steam around 9:30 pm when I headed to bed. This is the problem that I have had with gaming under chemo, is that gaming exhausts me in the same way that literally anything else does. I wonder if it is mental exhaustion as much as it is physical. I have two more rounds of chemo in front of me, so the end is in sight. I am just hoping that I bounce back pretty quickly. I know I will be rolling into radiation pretty quickly, but it sounds like it will not be as extreme as chemo has been. I think Guild Wars 2 might be my speed, because it allows me to engage as deeply as I want to or as shallow as I might need.

AggroChat #555 – MMOs and PSOLikes

February 1, 2026 by Belghast

Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Thalen

Good Morning Folks! We are down a Tam this week and had some topics that were sitting on our list for a bit. We start off talking about the official end of Anthem and the Mark Darrah video that effectively provides an autopsy for the game. Loosely related, we talk about the impending death of New World in January 2027. This forces us down the path of talking about what the heck even makes an MMO anymore, and how we largely agree that it requires random interaction with other players to count. We decided that the lobby-based games are PSOLikes since the first game we can remember that was that way was Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast. From there, we talk a bit about Shape of Dream,s another Roguelike that Ash and Kodra have been playing. Bel shares his thoughts on Legacy of Phrecia 2.0 in Path of Exile, and Kodra shares his endgame thoughts about Path of Exile II. We wrap the show up talking about the impending patch in Guild Wars 2 that is going to add quickplay for raids and the new Fashion Plates adjacent system.