Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 Post

Janthir Was Pretty Great

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Good Morning Folks! Last night I wrapped the Janthir Wilds main story and this morning I am going to talk about some of my impressions. Some of this discussion will probably get into spoilers, so I am giving you all a proper warning now. So once I got past some of my early complaints about pacing and story being gated by mastery tracks… the flow of the content went fairly smoothly. There were several “fill the bar” moments that I still do not love… and will continue not to love for eternity… but the story instances themselves were pretty great. After Secrets of the Obscure, this really feels like a return to peak ANet and I would put this up there with some of my favorite content like End of Dragons, Living World Season 3, and Living World Season 4.

The challenge is however that we only got what is effectively the first chapter of a story that is going to be doled out over the next year in three more chunks. The first half of Icebrood Saga was amazing… but the hamfisted reliance on Dragon Response Missions to tell the rest of the story essentially ruined the entire experience. Basically, I am saying that I have a lot of hope for where we are going… but that there is also plenty of time for it to be fumbled completely. I largely enjoyed the first content drop for Secrets of the Obscure but pretty much hated it once we entered Nayos. I am hoping that they can keep up the pace and gravitas of the story that is laid out before us, because there are a lot more characters now that I already care about than I did in SOTO.

A huge chunk of the story revolves around us mentoring Poised Arrow, aka “Poky” the son of the current Lowland Kodan Claw Stoic Alder. He is very much the role of the brash young warrior who wants to prove himself… and the story beats at times feel DANGEROUSLY close to how our relationship started out with Braham. The key difference is however that “Poky” has a loving family, and while he is missing his mother greatly… he has a surrogate mother figure whom he has bonded with. As a result, this leads to someone who can be reasoned with in ways that we never seemed capable of reasoning with Braham, and is not necessarily driven by an overwhelming sense of angst but more a drive to find ways that he can help his people. I admit I’ve grown fond of the “cub” during this expansion and am hoping that he joins our larger entourage. It is however making me miss the rest of my team greatly, and I am hoping at some point there is a “getting the band back together” sequence in our future.

Right now we have two maps, both of which are gorgeous and feature a ton of content… some of which are fairly well hidden like the Bee hive that I highlighted at the top of this post. I’ve completed exploration of both of them and gotten doodads for crafting legendary items at some point. There is a thick density of events, and a lot of them are champion-level mobs that take a decent-sized group to drop them. I do wonder how this content will age as time goes on and the quantity of players dwindles. No content in Guild Wars 2 ever truly feels dead, but there are definitely less popular areas. For example, it is pretty hard to get a Gyala Delve meta going these days, and the last several Dragon’s End runs I have attempted have failed.

Speaking of failing content, the centerpiece of this expansion is your battle with two Titans: Greer the Blightbringer and Decima the Stormsinger. When you get into Janthir Syntri there is a world event that fires off every two hours as a “storm” arrives and Greer attacks from the SouthWestern corner of the map and Decima from the NorthEastern corner. One of these is MUCH harder than the other… and I keep throwing myself at Greer in part because I know as ranged that melee is largely useless there… and it is also the one with significantly lower turnout. I feel like this fight needs to be tuned a bit because right now I have participated in three attempts… all of which with Commanders leading the charge… and all three have failed miserably. I feel like this is a lesson that ANet has not learned yet… and should stop listening to the most tryhard voices in the crowd and realize that Open World content is Casual content. Wasting fifteen minutes of your time failing an event is fun for no one.

It is also a bit of a harsh contrast to how these fights feel in story missions. You’ve “defeated” both Greer and Decima at this point and both of the fights were largely you going through the motions and coming out a winner on the other side. I am not necessarily saying that the World Boss version should be an absolute cakewalk… but if warm bodies show up and participate it should fall over like most of the other World Bosses do currently. Guild Wars 2 has a massive identity crisis because playing the game like you would literally any other MMORPG, means you are also putting out one-tenth of the damage output of the highest damage player. That gap should not be that wide… but it is because playing Guild Wars 2 means you are expected to do some unintuitive things regularly for the sake of optimization. This is the next major bridge that the game needs to reconcile because the chasm is too wide at this point between the haves and have-nots.

Last night I also completed the Falling Star questline, which is a new sort of thing that ANet is trying. Essentially you buy the Falling Star Quest License from the Wizard’s Vault for 1000 Astral Acclaim. This is the same amount of Wizard Chore currency that you need to buy one of the Legendary Weapon starter boxes for example. You are then started down an achievement path that feels significantly more like a normal MMORPG quest than pretty much anything else in Guild Wars 2, including quest markers on your map indicating where you should go for various steps of the process. Essentially doing the quest chain does not require a huge outlay of time or gold and will end up with you getting a pair of Meteor Wielder’s Ascended Gloves in your armor type of choice, the Falling Star Ascended Spear, and the Heated Core Infusion which triggers the molten appearance of the spear weapon. Technically the infusion comes installed in the gloves but I am itemizing it separately given that Infusions are so overwhelmingly expensive and this one comes with +5 Power and +9 Agony Resistance. Well worth the 1000 Astral Acclaim and in total it took me maybe an hour to complete because I did not have any of the required old world renown hearts unlocked.

All told I am pretty happy with the start of Janthir Wilds. It gives me two new playgrounds to roam around and three mastery tracks to start chipping away at. I am hoping that either the World Boss Meta event gets watered down slightly, or folks figure out how to push through the mechanics a bit faster so that collectively the community can start clearing it. I need to sort through the achievements and see what I can reasonably knock out. I’ve not done any of the mini-games yet, and need to at least get silver in each of them to earn mastery points. I am very interested in seeing how the next few chapters of this storyline go. It feels fairly similar to Dawntrail honestly, where we have taken up this mentorship role over a brash youth, and while the stakes are high… they are maybe a little less world-ending. However, I do really want to see us building our retinue of characters up again and moving towards the next major objective on the horizon.

Anyway if I were to give the expansion a numerical grade, I would give it a strong 8 out of 10 currently with the ability to top that out if they land the next content drops over the coming year.

Boisterous Bear Buds

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Yesterday was a rather rough day, and I never actually got around to writing a blog post. So this morning you get a bit of what I would have written about yesterday and a bit about what I would have normally written about today. So on Monday, I spent a lot of that post talking about how I was largely done with my alts in Path of Exile… then proceeded to spend a bunch of time leveling my Widowhail Deadeye and liking it quite a bit better. The heart wants what the heart wants I guess. Basically, I did some super chill yellow maps… got a bunch of levels… which started to fix some of the issues with the character. I still have awful defenses… and I wasted a ton of regret orbs trying to flip to a more crit-based version… but I am back and happy with precise technique and trying to keep my life totals below my accuracy.

I currently have the weirdest passive tree I have ever had for a bow character. I’m getting a lot of mileage from an Unnatural Instinct jewel currently, which is in part what has prompted some of the weird pathing. My hope is to respec things a bit, gain some more levels, and add in another elemental cluster jewel down in the lower quadrant, freeing up one of my other jewel sockets to maybe add in a Light of Meaning Jewel wherever it will have the most benefit either going for Life, Evasion, or Fire Damage. This build is a bit like trying to make “Fetch Happen” but I am having fun doing my own thing here that again… far as I know no one is actually trying. My life and defenses are still awful but it is softcore and I am mostly okay with dying occasionally on my alts.

In other news, I am creeping ever closer to my shiny pvp mount in Final Fantasy XIV. I have not been doing the daily roulette as religiously as I should, and I might spend some time this coming weekend just grinding it out the rest of the way to victory. I have to be honest… as often as I have run PVP Roulette for leveling… I really wish I had been cognisant of this rewards track before now. There is no telling how many things I just failed to collect and missed out on along the way. I am looking forward to raiding again this weekend because last Sunday we had the original four of Ashgar, Grace, Thalen, and me but then picked up Solaria who was piloted by Ammo because world travel was disabled. In theory maybe this weekend we can get Ammo on her off-server character giving us six of eight total players.

In Guild Wars 2 news, I am largely resigned to not making it through Secrets of the Obscure for the time being. I am basically at the end of the 5th chapter and then had a whole other chapter in Nayos on top of that to finish before moving on. This was such a weird content drop because some of it I liked quite a bit… and other bits I was not feeling at all. I feel like we were supposed to care about the Kryptis, but it reminded me entirely too much of the whole Vampire Courts thing from Dresden Files. In those books, Harry ends up aligned to the White Court at times for reasons that are deeply spoilery, but also in part because they are only sexually and emotionally abusive… as opposed to just straight-up murdering, devouring, and/or potentially wearing victims like fashion accessories. Guild Wars was trying to do something with this story of having a redemption arc for monsters… that just never really landed for me.

Janthir Wilds on the other hand so far seems amazing. I am all about hanging out with a delightful group of furries… err I mean Bearkin. I have a type when it comes to favorite zones… and this is absolutely playing directly into those interests. Grizzly Hills for example in World of Warcraft was such a pure joy to quest through, and I would go so far as to state that maybe Lowland Shore is one of the best zones Guild Wars 2 has at the moment. I’ve not gotten terribly far into it because I spent way too much time being a short-order cook last night for a bunch of hungry bears. I was hoping to get far enough to unlock player housing… but I did not even get far enough to unlock spears.

That is honestly probably my only complaint thus far is that the main story quest chain hits a brick wall when it asks you to level up the mastery that unlocks spears in order to continue. I was already working on the mastery that allows you to do more things with your bouncy kitty mount. So I closed out the evening hopping around the zone doing events, and hunting down a few of these mini-boss tundra beast encounters. I have no clue what the zone meta looks like if it exists, but I have heard it was pretty “spicy”. I am in no massive rush, but I would really like to get player housing as an upgrade to my home instance. I had enough Astral currency to pick up the next Legendary Weapon box… which has Twilight in it… which is probably the next one that I will craft because pretty much every character that can use a Greatsword is currently using one. I am building up a backlog of these because I never crafted the Juggernaut. There is also a weapon quest up on the Astral store, that I will probably devote the next 1000 points towards because from what I understand there is a really cool interaction between the weapon and the gloves that it comes with.

All told though, I am already feeling way more positive about Janthir Wilds than I did about Secrets of the Obscure. The zone design so far is just better. I get what they were trying to go for with SOTO, but flight-required maps are a bit frustrating given that it was not like they just handed you the Skyscale. It still took a lot of effort to unlock it, whereas from what I can tell here… you are pretty much just handed a Warclaw in a similar manner in which you were just handed the Raptor in Path of Fire. I already had my Warclaw from the WVW Track so this mostly amounted to me just getting a new skin to play with. It was cool that I got some cosmetics given to me for having already completed that before Janthir dropped. I will probably be back playing quite a bit of Guild Wars 2 in the coming weeks.

AggroChat #481 – Off Meta Fun

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, and Kodra

Hey Folks! We are down a few folks who are traveling this week.  Happy Father’s day to all the Dads out there.  We start off with Bel talking about the recent controversies surrounding New World Aeternum and the general marketing self-own of that announcement and seemingly ignoring the current player base.  We roll into a discussion about Steam Next Fest and a few games we have played, namely: Flintlock, Dungeon Clawler, and Beastie Ball.  From there we talk a bit about Guild Wars 2 releasing information about the new spear attacks for three more jobs and how fun some of the general off-meta weapons can be.  Bel talks about getting his confidence back and tanking once more for the first time in a few years in Final Fantasy XIV.  Ash and Kodra talk about their recent experiences playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon as a Tabletop Roleplaying Game.  Finally, we talk a bit about the influx of monster collection games including some more discussion about Beastie Ball.

Topics Discussed:

  • New World Aeternum
    • Marketing Self-Own
  • Steam Next Fest
    • Flintlock Siege at Dawn
    • Dungeon Clawler
    • Beastie Ball
  • Guild Wars 2
    • More Spears Released
    • Fun with Off-Meta Weapons
  • Final Fantasy XIV
    • Bel Got His Groove Back
  • PokeRole
    • Pokemon Mystery Dungeon as TTRPG
  • Monster Collection Games
    • More Beastie Ball

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Maelstrom Captain

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Hey Folks! I’m getting around to a bit of a late start because we lost power for a few hours this morning essentially throwing my entire day into disarray. I figure I probably owe you all an update to yesterday’s post, so I am going to attempt to condense things down a bit. I had an eye doctor appointment at 1:20 and they poked and prodded me and performed maybe the most powerful dilation I have ever had… to largely arrive at a conclusion. The viscous fluid in your eye hardens around the edges of your eye and when a chunk of this breaks off it becomes a “floater”. The fluid also hardens around the retina and when a chunk breaks off from there… it can cause all of the same effects of a retina detaching save for the permanent curtain of vision loss sweeping across your field of vision.

This is what happened to me and now I am dealing with the ramifications of having some pretty massive new floaters. Given time they should break down into smaller and smaller pieces to where my brain can largely ignore them… much like my other existing floaters. Until this happens though I am basically stuck dealing with the constant desire to wipe something out of my eye. Ultimately my eye apparently looks healthy… or healthy for someone who is hyper nearsighted and very much legally blind without correction. Basically, I am waiting to either get used to it or for the impact to lessen because there is not much that they can do to help me out.

In other news, I got my Maelstrom upgrade this morning and can now buy loot boxes… which means that I will start churning through more gear to clear out my banks. I’ve already dumped my first round of 60,000 seals into three loot boxes and got a few pets that I did not already have. Now I am going to start trying to ease back into tanking on my Warrior. Right now I am level 85 and have been mostly leveling through a daily pvp roulette and a round of hippo dailies. Of note this is a super chill way to put on a single level in a job every single day. However, I really want to dive more into some of the other roulettes and get back used to tanking for strangers. The whole full inventory and full on seals problem was an obstacle that I am now pushing past.

Instead of playing Final Fantasy XIV, I spent much of my evening roaming around in Guild Wars 2. Yesterday was the reset day for weekly wizard chores, and one of them this week was to complete 10 events, and more specifically to do 5 Bounties in the Domain of Vabbi. I figured the later in the week I waited, the harder it would be to get a bounty group. So I spent about two hours roaming around with a commander taking down bosses. I stayed far longer than I needed because I figured I would pay it forward a bit for folks just now joining the group after I got my five.

I have to say that Commanders are really what makes Guild Wars 2 community what it is. I see the Mentor system in Final Fantasy XIV and it is largely made up of people grinding away trying to get 2000 done so they can get a shiny mount and bragging rights. Commanders in GW2 on the other hand… really get nothing for their time spent save for the undying respect of their community. The effect a commander can have though is absolutely magical. We had a moment last night when someone shouted in map chat asking for help, and our commander veered us all to their rescue. It was fun flying in like the cavalry as a group of 20ish players on wildly differently skinned skyscales. When a commander is leading, they always have a number of players following in their wake who may not have actually joined the squad and we absolutely had some of this going on last night.

One of the other weeklies involved doing the Gyala Delve meta event, so I spent a good chunk of the night working my way through all of that with a squad. I did not like the Wizard chores at all when they were first released, but at some point, they updated to be a bit better. Now they serve as a bit of a guidebook in determining which areas of content I focus on, and I dig that. It had been months since I last set foot in Gyala Delve, but going through the motions made me remember how much I actually enjoyed this meta-event. It will never be as epic as something like an Auric Basin or a Dragon’s End… but it is still a fun romp filled with an outrageous amount of loot. So much so that when I indentified my gear I filled my inventory entirely.

Now that I have completed the Maelstrom unlock though, I think I am probably going to focus on some dungeoning this evening. I really want to work on getting Warrior geared up and ready for Dawntrail. There is something about stepping back into playing Warrior that makes me happy. It feels a bit like coming home. I liked Paladin quite a bit, but I had mained Warrior all the way through Shadowbringers and it is really a key part of my FFXIV identity. Especially now that Overpower is an AOE attack… it basically destroys any reason why I was so focused on playing Paladin. Removing the benefits of running out of tank stance was also a huge boon to me, because I was one of those players that hated stance dancing.

Anyways! Thanks to everyone who shared their words of support yesterday. I am going to be okay and I am slowly stepping down from the sheer panic state that I had been over the weekend. I think it will just take some time to adjust to having some more obtrusive “floater friends” along for the ride.