Janthir Wilds Archives - Page 2 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Further Incomprehensible Nonsense

May 28, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. Last night I apparently remembered that I had the Endless Kodan Tonic and decided to run World Bosses while transformed into a giant bear. One of the particularly nice things about this specific tonic is that you can actually do combat while transformed. Most of them largely turn you into a useless lump, but this one even allows you to use your glider. This has always made me wonder if at one point, Kodan were contemplated as a playable race. Right now I am very much in a mode of having a whole slew of activities that I am working on, and then just sort of picking the one that fits my current level of engagement. Specifically I have a sub achievement for Klobjarne Geirr the Legendary Spear that requires me to do a bunch of World Bosses so I decided to knock out a few of those last night.

Another way lower impact achievement series that I have been working on is the Home Sweet Homestead series. These essentially just require you to pop into a zone and do a bunch of events. Each one also has the benefit of awarding you a recipe book related to that specific zone. Weirdly I had already picked up a copy of the recipes from the Dragon’s Stand version of this achievement, but have no memory of how I might have acquired it. At some point I want to make a real push into building some of my own structures in the Homestead. Right now I mostly have the default everything with a handful of placed structures just to sort out how the system works. One of my internet acquaintances build a really cool fully underwater Homestead that is worth checking out.

Spending time doing events in Auric Basic… led to me also starting to chip away at the No Mask Left Behind achievement. This one is pretty slick because it gives you an Aurillium Node for your homestead/home instance which will of course be useful at giving me a constant feed of little bits of that currency as I do my daily gathering. This however has led me to realize… just how little of the zone I have explored. I had no clue that Auric Basic had as much verticality as it does. Verdant Brink is immediately noticeable because half of the meta event takes place on rubble platforms in the sky. However with Auric Basic you are spending most of your time on the ground completing events leading up to the taking of the golden city. I was not expecting to find entire treetop villages in this zone, which makes me also realize how little of all of the other maps in the game I have probably explored. I was not a big fan of Heart of Thorns because it felt like a massive increase in difficulty… with lots of mob types that could just straight up murder you. However spending more time exploring is making me appreciate at just how interesting these zones are.

Since I seem to be settling into Guild Wars 2 for the long haul… I’ve finally engaged in the practice of alt parking. I am really only playing my Ranger regularly, and as a result I could be stashing all of my other characters at key locations around the map where I can gather resources daily. There are many different alt parking videos out there, but this one from Laranity covers alt parking as well as a few other gold farming strategies. Essentially right now I have a few different alts parked at various large chests in Bjora Marches and another parked at the jumping puzzle in Kaineng City. There are a few other areas that might be worth parking alts, given that I have a full compliment of level eighty alts that I am not using much. I’ve just added this to my reset routine along with farming guild halls and my homestead for resources and going to beat up a naked man for his lunch money. If you ever want to follow along in this nonsense and have Teleport to Friend doodads hit me up and I can log in the character at each location and let you park one easily.

Where we get into proper degeneracy however is that I have started farming a Black Lion Key each week with one of my free character slots. Essentially… there is a thing that you can do once per week that involves creating a brand new character… running it up to the level 10 personal story quest which rewards a free Black Lion Chest Key. Most of the time when you open a Black Lion Chest… it gives you useless stuff and I would never recommend buying them. However I am also someone who pulled one of the most expensive items from a chest and sold it to effectively fund everything I have done on my account since that point. Specifically I am doing the method where you run up a Human Ranger which seems to be about the fastest method to get through this process. I wish I had honestly been doing this all this time… but alas I was too lazy. Right now it seems to take me about 15-20 minutes to complete the process at a casual pace. This video covers the entire process designed to be as optimal as possible. Do I suggest you follow along in this path of madness? Probably not.

Yesterday we got the teaser trailer for the next chapter of the Janthir Wilds story which will be dropping on Tuesday June 3rd. Since I am very much in the mindset of “do Guild Wars 2” stuff I am pretty much primed to experience this as it goes live. Probably the thing that excites me the most is that it sounds like the new zone meta is going to be similar to Dragon Stand, where you have three lanes to push at the same time. I have to admit I was pretty disappointed in the Greer/Decima meta and still feel like that needs significant balancing given that after all of this time… it rarely succeeds with random groups. I like all of the maps in Janthir Wilds immensely… but there just isn’t really a fun meta right now. Mistburned Barrens has a few fun events, but nothing to the level of a proper meta. I am really hoping that they nail the meta for this last zone.

Dragon Bash will also be starting soon, which is a pretty fun event. Mostly I just try and make sure I do the dailies associated with it. I am not big on farming the pinatas, especially given that I have one in my home instance now. Then WVW Rush is happening in July along with the expansion announcement, which will be an ideal time to farm up a bunch of Gift of Battle just to have them at the ready. I might also work on some of the WvW Exclusive legendary items during this time. The only problem with all of this is… there is a lot going on in June. There will be a new Path of Exile league dropping on the 13th, and before that Dune Awakening launches its head-start on June 5th and I will be checking that out. I wish all of these events were about a month apart, because I have no clue what I will be doing. Hopefully 3.26 in POE is a banger of a league, but I also do not want to abandon Guild Wars 2 right now either. Yesterday I decided that I was actually glad I did not score a Nintendo Switch 2 preorder, because that only would have added to the battle for my time and attention.

Fractals with Friends

May 23, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. Last night I finished getting the wizard chore currency to buy the last of the three pieces available of the Ward Knight’s Armor set. One of the things I dig about this set is that the appearance works regardless of the armor class, which means I can be running around in leather armor but looking like I am wearing plate. This of course required me to dye several pieces of my set, which led to me changing up a bunch of things about the outfit while still keeping to my traditional red, green, and black color palette. Unfortunately the infusion I am using kind of muddies the waters when it comes to appearance, and everything is a bit more hazy than I want it to be. I could remove the infusion… but then I would just end up needing ANOTHER one that grants some buffs.

Last night was the second outing of what I am currently referring to as Fractals with Friends. I am sure we will vary that activity at some point… but we made it through five fractals before running out of time. Technically in a few weeks when the Street Fighter 2 collaboration happens in Monster Hunter Wilds we will be spending the evening doing that content and taking a break from Guild Wars 2. Additionally there are a bunch of dungeons that I think we want to run as well, so we will probably be weaving those in from time to time. However Fractals with Friends just has the magical power of alliteration so it is what I am using. This whole thing reminds me of how much more enjoyable it is to fail with friends, than execute perfectly with strangers.

I’ve taken a bit of a break from the whole Vision questline and started working on filling every Janthir region renown heart each day. At some point I would like to finish the Janthir Mastery quests, which I believe are a prerequisite for the Legendary Spear. It does not hurt that Janthir is quite possibly my favorite area of the map currently. The Janthir Syntri meta is still butts… and a bit too tight on timing. I was with a team that executed pretty much perfectly and we still only managed to down the encounter with roughly a minute to spare. I am hoping that when the next expansion goes in, that they water down this bit of content at least for the open world variant. I think the tryhard players are probably mostly doing this as a convergence instead of joining in the open world shenanigans. I only do it if I happen to be in zone at the time it is firing off… and only then if we have decent support on both bosses. Last night just happened to be a perfect storm and we got it finished.

The best of the Renown Hearts is the Journeykin Outpost, which is what the Bearfolk call the Warclaws. Sure there is a World of Warcraft poop quest where you gather the scat and take it to the composter… but most of your time is spent petting the big cats and feeding them. The whole thing is delightful, and I would happily take care of my big kitty friends every single day. Janthir is so fucking charming. It has Grizzly Hills vibes and even the later maps are pretty nice. Guild Wars 2 usually has this problem where the early maps are a lot of fun… but some of the later maps are pure hell. I am looking at you Nayos, Desolation, etc. So far all of the Janthir maps feel fairly charming, even though you start dealing with my absolutely least favorite mob type… Bloodstone Elementals.

I did the reset Taco as usual, and there was a point where I was hanging out on voice but cracking up at the fight. Someone decided to take their fishing boat and ram it repeatedly into Tequatl. The above screenshot was taken right before they decided to desummon it and start fighting legitimately. There is just something balancing about doing the server reset Tequatl fight, and folks are generally the most chill you have ever seen. The other night we had something totally dumb where someone asked every one that could tag up to do so… and we had like 20+ commander and catmander tags running on a single map. It is dumb stuff like this that really make me enjoy this fight.

I did encounter what appears to be some sort of a bug. There is a dumb crafting mini game involving fractals where you use one miniature to craft another miniature… over and over until you have created all of the named cat golems. I had three of the Mini Professor Mews sitting in my bank and from a fractal loot box I pulled the very rare Amber Quantic Dipole. So immediately I thought I would try and craft the next Golem in sequence: Mini Mister Mittens. However for whatever reason… the Mystic Toilet is not letting me add the last two ingredients… which I have plenty of: Obsidian Shards, and Crystalline Dust. I have no clue what is going on and have checked the wiki multiple times to make sure I am not missing anything. I am guessing it is just bugged. If anyone out there has an idea of what I might be doing wrong… please let me know.

In other news… I did in fact do the dumb thing. I created a purely free to play character named Belgratis. I might buy the base version of the game at some point for the account, but mostly the idea behind this character is to have something stripped down that I can use for the purpose of writing guides. I have a very basic guide in the works that I took a ton of screenshots for yesterday and will likely massage into something that makes sense over the extended holiday weekend. Not that it will be of any value to a seasoned player… but sometimes the Guild Wars 2 interface is a bit much for players who have come from more Wow-like MMORPGs.

Tyria Fits Perfectly

May 12, 2025 by Belghast

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.

AggroChat #506 – Games of the Year Show 2024 – Part One

January 5, 2025 by Belghast

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

Hey Folks! It is that time again when we pull together our list of favorite games from 2024. In theory, we each get three primary choices and an almost unlimited number of honorable mentions… which causes us to divide the show into two packed episodes. In this case, we have 36 games on the list divided into two shows of roughly 18 games.