Good Morning Friends! This weekend I fell out of my ARPG grind and back into some Guild Wars 2. Diablo IV was largely a disappointment and while I got lots of hours out of the game, I can’t say that most of them were really enjoyable. I am still very much engaged with Honkai Star Rail, but there is only about an hour’s worth of play that I can get out of that game on a day-to-day basis without spending additional money or banked resources. I got my Spriggan in Last Epoch up to Monoliths but I can only handle so much of that at once because they end up feeling very repetitive in their current state. With the announcement of the Secrets of the Obscure expansion, it has stoked my desire to get back engaged with Tyria. While my Necromancer has completed all of the content but Living World Season 2, I spend way more time on my Ranger and I am using that character to complete all of the content in the order of release.
Over the weekend I finished up Living World Season 2 and completed all of the Heart of Thorns expansion. I have to say, it is a much more enjoyable experience having played through all of Living World Season 1 then seeing the characters evolve in Living World Season 2… and finally having the major events play out during Heart of Thorns. It all has so much more impact because when I did the content initially… I had no real clue what I was doing and at the same time kept trying to treat Heart of Thorns like a traditional MMORPG expansion pack. I also have a much more stable grasp on the lore of the world thanks to having completed all of it once before. Having already unlocked most of the Heart of Thorns zones through gameplay on the Ranger, it also meant that I could largely focus on only completing the story missions.
The other huge benefit of this playthrough is that I now have access to a SkyScale, which means that most content becomes trivialized by significantly greater movement ability. I thought maybe it would make Tangled Depths more palatable, but that isn’t really the case. I have come to love the zone for what it is, and I greatly enjoy doing the Chak Gerent event… but it is still a nuisance to try and figure out where the quest marker is actually sending me. I still do not feel like games in general do a great job of visualizing the Z-Axis when to quests, and there are many times that I just sort of had to rely on previous knowledge of the game to get me in the vicinity of where I was supposed to go. That said… there are some really cool areas of Tangled Depths like this cavern with glowing mushrooms.
Another thing that greatly enhances my enjoyment of the game has been having BlishHUD turned on. For example, in the Roots of Terror map, I came across this chamber filled with Chak. There was a handy Blish HUD reminder that I could get achievements for killing 1, 10, and 50 Chak… so I spent the next bit of time exterminating every single Chak in the chamber until I got the Mastery achievement. There have been a few cases where I was already doing one thing… that seeing how close I was to completing another achievement caused me to press on and go for it. I generally enjoy playing the Ranger more than I did the Necromancer, and as a result, I feel like I am way more likely to go back and retry some of these maps later to pick up the remaining mastery achievements as a result.
Last night I started Living World Season 3 before deciding that sleep needed to happen. I remember this season really fondly, at least in part because the map designs were so good. Bloodstone Fen is a bit of a butt, but with maxed-out gliding and access to a Skyscale, it should be pretty trivial. This is part of why I am excited about Secrets of the Obscure and giving everyone an easier path to the Skyscale. It just makes everything so much more enjoyable when you don’t have to fiddle around with frustration mechanics. Guild Wars 2 does this amazing job of adding different layers to the map, and then also makes it a bit of a slog to move between them based on Mastery mechanics alone. The Skyscale is admittedly a bit of an easy button, but for me personally, it is making my enjoyment of the content so much higher.
I think my ultimate goal is to get caught up on all of the content on my Ranger before Secrets of the Obscure drops on August 22nd. That is going to be a bit of a rapid pace to go through the content, but I think if I am ONLY focusing on the story… it might be doable. It would also serve as a bit of a nice refresher before the new content drops as well. I get that the new content is supposedly not going to require you to have completed any earlier content to understand, but it would still be nice to have everything unlocked fully on the character I am enjoying playing the most. I mean that might change when I can swap things up with new weapon options in the expansion, but for the time being… I like being a longbow/greatsword dude.
Good Morning Friends! One of the best things about Guild Wars 2 is the overwhelming amount of things that you could be doing on any given day. One of the worst things about Guild Wars 2 is that when I say overwhelming… I mean that literally because there are a truly staggering number of individual activities that are fighting for your attention. I know one of the big frustrations I had for quite a while was trying to determine what exactly I wanted to be doing on a given night when I was not either focused on the story or focused on zone completion. As a result, I thought it might be interesting for you to see what exactly I tend to do on a nightly basis when I am playing the game. Essentially I took some screenshots as I went about my evening, and am going to share some of the thoughts that go into the decisions I made.
My evenings almost always begin in Sparkfly Fen more specifically in the Splintered Coast region. For Guild Wars 2 the daily reset happens at 6 pm CST, and starting around 5:30 I will place myself in the zone waiting for the inevitable mass of people that gathers there to take down Tequatl the Sunless, one of the oldest and still most enjoyable Dragon World Boss encounters in Guild Wars 2. I do this nightly because it is worth at least a gold coin, rewards four dragon caches, and I’ve had the luck to see two different ascended weapons drop from the fight so it seems like a good gamble to get more. The fun thing about Tequatl is that you tend to see a lot of the same faces there every night, and I used to bump into guildies there without even planning for that to happen. It is a great way to start the evening.
Immediately after finishing Tequatl I will go someplace safe, like using my Mistlock Sanctuary pass… and evaluate the daily quests that are available. These serve as a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure and will span a wide variety of activities from PVP, WvW, PVE Open World, and occasionally Dungeons. Ultimately I am looking for the three that I can knock out the easiest because I never want to leave the 2 gold you are rewarded for getting the Daily Completionist chest on the table. If you are curious there is a massive list on the Wiki of all of the daily achievements available. If you truly have your shit together you can even hit the wiki and see what the next set of daily achievements will be, but I rarely have that much foresight into my activities. Essentially here are some of the ones I am looking for in the list in order of preference.
Daily WvW Big Spender– If you do WvW at all. this one takes mere seconds to complete because you can simply pop over to your Guild Hall (if your guild has one) and buy a single Badge of Tribute to complete it.
Daily Mystic Forge – Another extremely fast one to complete… throw any recipe in the mystic forge. I tend to gamble with weapons to try and get a precursor… which I realize is large a waste of resources but whatever. You can make literally any mystic forge recipe to complete this one.
Daily Harvesting Quest – There will always be some sort of “go to X zone and harvest X resource” quest. Do these because they give you a reason to go harvest resources which is always good, and also give you a big box of resources once you complete them.
Daily WvW Veteran Creature Slayer – This one can be completed extremely quickly and if you are doing it near reset, you are guaranteed to have a party of people who are in WvW to complete it as well. Essentially you want to kill either the Veteran Harpy, Warg, or Wurm located in WvW zones, see the wiki pages for specific spawn points. I have them memorized and you should probably do this as well.
Daily Zone Event Completion – There will always be a completion event for some zone in the game where you need to roam around the zone and get at least bronze credit (aka tag a single mob) in four different events. Generally speaking, your best practice is to pop into the zone and look for either a commander tag or a mentor tag on the mini-map. Follow these folks around and more than likely they will be running an efficient route of quests. Also watch your chat, because more than likely there will be someone calling out waypoints where events are happening allowing you to boop over there and get credit.
Daily Bounty Quest – Generally speaking if you look in the group finder for the zone this is taking place in, there will be one or more groups active. Join the group, transfer to the map they are all on, and get credit for the kill. These can be annoying if you do not have good zone exploration for the area or are missing your core mounts. Since the Path of Fire bounty quests reward you a lot of ancillary achievement unlocks needed for other quests, these are always good bets.
Simple WvW Objectives – There are a few really easy WvW objectives and these are “Land Claimer”, “Caravan Disruptor”, and “Master of Monuments”. They can be completed quickly solo pending you are not being harassed by the enemy players too much. I put this way down at the bottom of the list because I will happily do them, but I am going to look for faster and less focused options before I get to this point. “Mist Guards Killer” is also a solid option if you are actually going to be playing WvW for awhile because you will absolutely kill plenty of veteran guards during that process.
Last night specifically I went with:
Daily Desert Highlands Bounty Hunter
Daily Shiverpeaks Miner
Daily Gendarran Fields Event Completer
After I have set my focus for the night and which daily quests I will be knocking out, I generally look to see if any of my normal harvesting activities are going to complete a quest for me. For example, I have a number of resource nodes in my home instance that I have either collected through living world zones or purchased off the gem store. Since I know that “Shiverpeaks Miner” is one of the quests I am going to complete, I can go to my home instance in Hoelbrak and get credit for that quest. I am going to harvest all of the nodes in my home instance every single day, and by simply choosing to do it in the Norn capital which is part of the Shiverpeaks zone set instead of Rata Sum as I usually do… it means I will essentially get free completion without going out of my way to do anything extra.
After harvesting all of the resources in my Home instance, I go into each of the Guild Halls that I have access to and harvest all of the resources that are there as well. Since I am a member of guilds with halls located in Cantha and in Heart of Maguuma it means if there are daily achievements for those zones I am going to get credit as well. Generally speaking, I will follow the same sequence of Guild Halls every day with “Greysky Armada” the guild I am most active in being the last one I do every day. That way if I harvested any of the rare crafting materials that are used for guild halls specifically, I can dump them in the bank before moving on to the next objective for the evening. At this point, I generally check the message of the day to see what resources we need for our next objective and if I can dump any of those into the bank or actually complete an objective I will do that as well.
From there I will boop out to Bitterfrost Frontier and collect Winterberries. I’ve talked about BlishHUD quite a few times before, but one of the awesome things it has in the pathing module is the ability to mark all of the zone-specific rare resources on your HUD. I am not entirely certain if the above screenshot shows it well enough, but you will see in the foreground a number of clusters of berries overlayed over my map indicating the spawn point of two winterberry bushes with each icon. I can quickly zoom around gathering these up and because I have them all marked like this, there is zero chance that I forget one each day. The reason why I have been doing this every day of late is that Winterberries are a relatively easy way to get a stat selection ascended rings, a stat selection ascended earring, a stat selection ascended backpack and the only stat selectable ascended rebreather in the game far as I am aware. I have an army of alts and only three of them have any pieces of ascended gear, so I figure farming this every chance I get will be a benefit in the long run.
While I was farming the Guild Halls I completed the Daily End of Dragons Lumberer achievement, which meant that I only needed two more to get the Daily End of Dragons “Wandering Cantha” chest. So the next thing I did last night was pop over to New Kaineng City and work on “Jade Brotherhood Slayer” and “Kaineng City Taskmaster” which require you to fill any of the repeatable renown hearts. This required me to do a bit of googling because I am nowhere near as familiar with Cantha as I am with other regions and it looked like the best place to go for Jade Brotherhood was the Cobble Quarter from there I looked for a nearby heart to fill while doing events to kill Jade Brotherhood until I got the slayer achievement. If I wanted to keep the daily train going, there are ones associated with Living World Seasons 3, 4, and 5 as well.
Generally speaking, what I would normally do at this point is see what was currently happening in the game. Another addon that I have installed through BlishHUD is an event table that I can toggle on and off with Alt+E. If there is a zone meta about to start, I might pop over into that zone and begin helping with the precursor events. If I am so inclined, I can hop on the World Boss train as well and join up with the next boss in sequence also shown on that table, or the World Boss Portal Device that I picked up off the gem store. If I am in the mood for story content, this is also the point where I would slip into following the quest chains on one of my characters. For example, I am slowly working my way through Living World Season 1 right now on the Ranger because I have resolved to complete all of the content in the game on that character in the proper order this time.
What I did last night instead however is continue to enjoy the fact that I have a Skyscale, and flew around collecting Mastery Points that I previously deemed too frustrating to mess with. It was a chill way to end the evening, and I largely did exactly that… occasionally engaging in random events until I decided it was time to go be unconscious. Guild Wars 2 truly does have an overwhelming number of possibilities for how you spend your time in the game. It is one of those experiences where you have to figure out your own goals and how you want to accomplish them. For me… I like my daily routine as it tends to move me around the world and open up a bunch of possibilities for where I want to branch off and do some specific things. Often times while completing my dailies it will set something in my mind that I then want to focus on. The routine for me at least acts as a bit of an ice breaker, chopping up the insurmountable number of possibilities into a more manageable list of things that I might engage with.
While playing Guild Wars 2 there is always going to be a much longer list of things that I want to do, than I actually have time to do. For example, I had been sitting on the Skyscale quest for a few years with minimal progress there until finally something clicked in my brain and made me focus on it. I’m in a similar state with the epic weapon I have been working on, and at some point, that will become my core focus as well. The daily routine though gives me a framework to focus on and sort of opens my mind up to the possibilities that already lay in my path. I am not sure at all if this post will have helped anyone else out there to tackle the impossible amount of content in Guild Wars 2, but I thought if nothing else it might at least be an interesting discussion to start.
Good Morning Friends! I am so exceptionally happy to announce that I am part of the Skyscale Club as my friend Pixel put it last night. The truth is the entire process was way more of a mental barrier than it actually was to go through the steps to complete it. Had I tried to do this back when the mount went in, I understand it was a bit worse. Leading up to the anniversary of Guild Wars 2 they introduced a number of “return to” achievements for each of the zones that in turn reward you exactly the amount of currency needed to buy your Skyscale saddle. Sure you still need raw gold, but I was also lucky in that department because last year upon returning to the game I lucked into a drop that sold for several thousand and that has largely been able to fund any shenanigans that I want to get up to. Having gold has been a significant benefit to improving my enjoyment of the game because it has allowed me to simply buy my way out of a number of frustrations along the way.
The Jumping Puzzles were far less frustrating than I expected them to be. I thought that step in the process would kill my momentum entirely. I give a lot of credit to BlishHUD and the ReacTif marker pack which you can see marking the path I should take in blue in the above screenshot. Essentially you have to find your wayward Skyscale in 21 locations, two of which are world boss encounters I am exceptionally familiar with, and the rest are generally some sort of a jumping puzzle or in later zones a mount-based jumping puzzle. You have a way of buying yourself out of frustration in the form of an Extra-Pungent Skyscale Treat which summons the nearest Skyscale to your destination. Out of the 21 objectives, I completed 14 of them on my own and bought my way out of 7… after giving them an attempt and deciding it was worth the 4 gold to simply not have to care about it anymore. The game gives you one of the treats for free when you get the recipe and then I crafted 6 more at 4 gold each for a total of 24 gold that I did not need to spend.
I finished up around 7 pm last night and of course, had to spend some time carefully dying a mount skin the way I wanted it. I picked up the Branded skin for Skyscale well ahead of time because I love the other branded mount skins for their ability to have crackling energy in whatever color you choose. Then I spent the obligatory hour just flying around doing stupid stuff and not really making any forward momentum in any direction. It is going to take me a bit to optimize traveling on a Skyscale, because they are very much not just “GM Flight” as Tam calls it. You need to figure out places where you will land to pick back up stamina before ascending higher. At face value, it is much like a glider in that it slowly loses altitude over time. If you land on any flat surface for a short period of time while moving, you pick back up momentum and can ascend higher so you sorta have to plan your path to optimize places to land and places to ascend. What they do excel at however is hovering in place, and so long as you are not moving you are not losing altitude.
What I did not expect was just how attached to the Skyscale I would end up getting. I really wish that we were allowed to name ours and associate some general personalization to them. By the time you get your mount, you have fed them, cleaned up after them, taught them how to hide, and how to play catch. You’ve spent a lot of time getting used to your new friend, and even in the quest chain they become sullen when you are not around… immediately cheering up when you show back up. It is my sweet smushy faced baby, and I sorta wish I could at least bestow them a name. The Skyscale is essentially a Tamagotchi that you get to ride around, and it would be so much more interesting if we could see the names players bestow upon them. What I also did not expect is that I would now look fondly upon the journey I just completed. Sure it was a lot of tedious busywork, but the charm and personality of the quest chain really help to curb the annoyance of having to collect that 20th egg or scale.
The Final step in the quest chain involves riding your Skyscale in 28 different zones scattered around the game and studying reality tears. Essentially this means you need to fly up and hover in a tear until a bar fills, then move to the next zone and do the same thing. I fully expected this last process before you finally get your mount and have full control over it to feel extremely frustrating, but in reality, it felt like a bit of a victory lap. The hard parts of the quest chain were over and now you were getting to know your mount controls before the game truly took off the training wheels. I’d maybe cut the number of zones you have to visit in half though, because like most things in Guild Wars 2… it sort of outstays its welcome. I am looking at you every boss fight in the story quests that lasts two to three times more than it probably should.
Now I set my sights on finishing up my Griffon. I started on this some time back and am in the “Open Skies” meta-achievements section. This will go so much quicker now that I have a flying mount of my own to reach a few of the eggs that frustrated me. I am looking at you “egg at the top of the damned branded pyramid”. After that, I think I will sort out how to get my Roller Beetle and maybe get serious about trying to get my Siege Turtle. I’ve been growing and harvesting Kale in my home instance for a while now so hopefully, I have a goodly amount of that when it comes to feeding my “smol” shelled friend. I suppose after I wrap all of those up, I need to get properly motivated to work on an epic weapon and get one of those under my belt.
