Kudzu

Rampant Growth

by

Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I completed my third World Completion since playing Guild Wars 2 and with it came two shiny new Gift of Exploration. This meant that when combined with my Gift of Battle that I farmed up earlier in the week, I could pull together all of the elements and craft a Gift of Mastery, one fourth of the total components needed for Kudzu, the weapon that I have been working towards. That left me with a choice… do I be patient and wait a few weeks buying 10 Mystic Clovers at a time… or do I spend some gold and buy resources to try and craft them and finish out my shiny new weapon right then. Ultimately I had acquired everything else that i needed… but was short by just under half of the clovers needed to craft my Gift of Fortune.

Essentially for those who have never gone down this road… there is a recipe for the Mystic Forge that can produce Mystic Clovers. However 66% of the time on average… it will create something else. Now these other things that get created are generally really useful as well. For example I believe it can generate all of the items required to create a Gift of Magic and a Gift of Might in small quantities, so even if you fail to get a Mystic Clover you usually end up with something of value. Two of the components can be bought from the market, but are not exactly cheap so this is a great way to burn through your gold without achieving your end results. I needed to craft 31 Mystic Clovers… and I decided to go for it instead of waiting the 3 weeks it would take to purchase those in a more reliable fashion. Essentially I was this close to finishing and got impatient… which in Guild Wars 2 is always a costly situation.

So last night I was able to craft my fifth legendary weapon, and added it to my vault. So right now I have a Greatsword, Sword, Axe, Hammer, and Longbow. I have some of the materials to craft the harpoon gun, but it is extremely low on my priority list. I think maybe next up I would like to potentially target a Staff, since that is another weapon type that I find useful on a few different characters. I would also really like to have a spear and I believe there is one that you can get through through Janthir… but I don’t really know all of the details behind it. The easiest staff is probably Bifrost, but I don’t really like the look of it. I would far rather have Nevermore, but it is a Heart of Thorns legendary weapon and seems like it requires roughly twice the materials of a Gen1 Legendary. I should also really work on some of the Legendary armor and accessory slots as well, and figure out what is required to get those.

I admit… I had just planned on transmogging the appearance of my bow because I am generally not really one for the whole Rhok’delar-like appearance. However after playing around with it and seeing it in action… it is growing on me. I especially like the graphical effect when I draw the bow and have a burst of vines and such springing up around me. I wish it had more wood on it… rather than the impossible appearance of just flowers floating out in the air. I will use it until I get tired of using it… and then change it over to whatever other bow looks cool for the moment. Since I am playing my Ranger 99.9% of the time… this is honestly the first Legendary I have immediately swapped over to. I had a few upgrade extractors and swapped out the stuff that was on my ascended longbow and placed them into Kudzu. While I was dealing with it I did the same for my Greatsword and swapped them into Twilight so I had that at the ready as well.

More important than ALL of this… we actually got a group up and running last night in a time-frame that I could participate in. One of the biggest challenges that I have had over the last decades, is that a lot of my regularly party members moved to the west coast and as such… now can only really do things when it is way too late for me to be involved. However apparently there was a team ready to go… that I just never realized. I credit my friend Sita for planting this idea in my head, but it quickly blossomed into us having a group and doing a dungeon. Last night we pulled together a group compatible with central time consisting of myself, Ammosart, Sita, and our “guild mom” Solaria who also just happens to be Ammo’s real Mom. This is a group that I have do so many things in the past, and honestly… makes up a good chunk of our sometimes reoccurring treasure map group from FFXIV… but it just sort of never dawned on me that this was a ready group to go do nonsense with more often than that.

At the end of the night I even snapped a pretty solid group picture of us all. Now if I can just convince Ace to join in these particular reindeer games… we would have a full five player party to do nonsense. I know not everyone plays Guild Wars 2, but apparently Sita and Ammo have also been playing quite a bit of Monster Hunter Wilds so in theory I can probably convince Ace to join in some of that. After running a dungeon we popped in and did a single fractal before I needed to bail and call my father. In theory we only have a few hours to play with, but especially if you do fractals you can make a lot of progress in that time. I would like to run all of the dungeons however so we can unlock exploration mode and try some of that. Additionally there is the possibility that at some point we might even try some strikes.

All told it was a pretty great night, and now I need to figure out my next objective because I have found that at least in Guild Wars 2… when I don’t have some larger goal that I am focused on I tend to fade away. In theory we are also probably about to get the next expansion announced pretty soon, so that will be interesting.

Hakuna Matata

by

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.