Belghast

Good Morning Friends. I am moving in slow motion today because I ended up sleeping in super late. I am technically in vacation mode for the next few days but decided I should probably still blog. In Guild Wars 2 last night I made some movement in Living World Season 3. I also came to a decision with what to do regarding my Perm Auction contract. Ultimately I went with an instant sale and got it over with because just having to think about it was stressing me out. All of the third party ways of trading goods seemed super sketchy and I decided I would rather have “some” money hassle free as opposed to maybe getting zero money and jumping through a bunch of hoops. The first thing I did with the windfall was spend about 500 gold in materials to help the Guild Hall upgrade a little quicker.

This screenshot does not do this justice. I am sorta terrified of deep water, and one of the most horrifying moments in my life for me was traveling to the edge of the continental shelf in a submarine and seeing the seemingly dark endless abyss. As a result games like Subnautica trigger a deep primal fear in me at times, and yesterday Guild Wars 2 absolutely tapped into this. I was swimming through an area in Mount Maelstrom and saw this gigantic fish thing and for reference… I am maybe about half the size of its fin. It is very hard to really appreciate the scale while in a very flattened screenshot and not seeing it in motion. I did my best to avoid it because it was also a champion.

I did have a moment yesterday that made me want to throw my laptop. I was doing this mission where I was supposed to be bonding with Aurene the baby dragon. The final stage was to fight a Mordrem and there is an ability that I had to fire that caused both my character and Aurene to attack at the same time. Problem is we would collectively get the mob down to around 25% health and then it would instantly heal back up. So my original thought process was that I was simply not burning hard enough to be able to defeat it in the hard time limit. I fought this thing for over an hour straight trying to burn harder because it could not kill me, and I clearly could not kill it.

Eventually I AFK’d during the fight and started watching YouTube videos to try and figure out what the gimmick was. It turns out that it is impossible to kill it in one go, and it does this ability that causes it to regenerate health by damaging you and Aurene. However it also gains health for damaging your pets. As a Necromancer on average I have somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to ten pets up at any given time, so to me it seemed like the Modrem was just healing back to full health instantly because it was soaking in tiny bits of health… but from like 12 targets at a time causing it to jump straight back to 100% health. This is one of the frustrating things that can happen in Guild Wars 2 is that there are times… especially with older content that it is really bad at messaging what the hell is actually going on. Unfortunately with a Necromancer I have no control over my pets and once I have summoned them… I can’t dismiss them. So what ended up happening is I had to struggle to find a way to actually die on the encounter, and then restart at the check point and do the fight without my pets. After an hour of failing… the entire fight only took a few minutes once I figured out the gimmick that I had to follow. I really hate gimmick fights regardless of the game, but I hate them even more when it is deeply unclear what is actually going on. The post Rage Quit Averted appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Morning Friends! I have been piddling around the last few days trying to get my original GW2 main in order and see if I can salvage anything from it. Don’t get me wrong… I am still madly in love with the Necromancer Reaper but I do have some pangs of regret for never quite managing to love the Warrior. This has lead me down a bunch of paths, and one of these is to work on my build a bit. Right now it is in a state of flux but I am trying to settle in on an Axe/Axe and Rifle build. Rifle is effectively how I used to do big open world events and survive as a warrior, and seeing as I found a place I enjoy with my Guardian I am trying to make something solo work as a Warrior for shenanigans. Granted at this point I am sorta cosplaying a Revenant, but Rytlock does have a very classic look.

Part of this revitalization of the Warrior is that I pushed up Armorsmithing into the relevant 400+ range granting me access to make heavy armors as well as my existing ability to make light armor. All of the running amok I have been doing lately had mostly restocked my reserves of materials and it was pretty reasonable to grind up armorsmithing without much need to dip into the trading post. After that I had to add about 20 gold in materials but was able to bang out a full set of marauder gear to see if that improves things. I think the biggest problem with the Warrior is that I had no real design gear wise for him. He was wearing basically the cheapest exotic item that I could find in each slot, and I had no idea what I was doing and how likely that damaged his playability. Marauder is basically just higher survival Berserker gear, so I went with that and am going to be focused on a power build of some sort.

Other than this I have been spending a bunch of time working on World Completion. I find working my way through all of the old world zones to be extremely relaxing, and honestly lucrative given the number of events that I inevitably end up doing. At this point I am systematically working my way through the “Norn” zones after having burned through the “human” zones. I’ve knocked out a few other zones at random because I was just really close to finishing them already. I have a spreadsheet that I am keeping track of things in, but largely I have 16 out of 31 zones completed. I think my goal at the moment is to wrap up the Norn lands and then move on to Charr territory.

The other conundrum I am dealing with at the moment is that I seemingly won the lottery a few nights ago with a Black Lion Chest. There are a bunch of items that you can pull from these but among the rarest and I believe the most expensive is the Permanent Bank Access Contract. It is super easy to get time limited versions of this item, but the permanent version is apparently super rare. It has a theoretical face value of around 5,000 gold which is just a truly staggering amount. However due to auction house fees… I would have to have I believe 500 gold or so in order to post this. I am uncertain how direct sales work and if I really would get all of the 4,411 that it currently has as a direct sale price or if I would still get a huge chunk of gold removed from that as well. There are third party direct selling options but I am worried about fraud there, and have yet to really dive into the reddit/discord options for that. For now the item sits in my bank account while I mull over what to do with it. I feel like it is way the hell too valuable to actually use, especially given that I already have easy bank access through the Mistlock Sanctuary pass. If I ever sell it, I am going to give a chunk of gold to Thalen to help with the needs of the Guild Hall seeing as he actually has those systems figured out and I am yet to wrap my brain around them. It seems like 5,000 gold would be “set for life” territory in a game like this where getting gold is rather challenging. The post Rehabilitating the Warrior appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

I have been attempting to play Guild Wars 2 for a very long time, and I have to be honest… there are a lot of things that I never really grasped. I feel like as far as games go, this is one that does a fairly poor job of on-boarding the player. I feel like there are some direct hooks that some players go for, especially if you have always leaned towards playing a damage dealer but always struggled getting groups. As someone who has always played tanks I have struggled because while “being tanky” and “holding aggro” are things that exist, this is a game that has completely eschewed the holy trinity. This is great if you were not a support player, but for those of us who have spent their entire “MMO career” playing some support role… the experience can feel somewhat hollow. There are a lot of folks out there that do copious amounts of reading about a game as they start to play it. That is not really my thing. A game needs to hook me before I am willing to do much research, and then once it finally has its hooks in me… the floodgates open and I start diving for knowledge at an almost obsessive level. Since Guild Wars 2 never really hooked me until my most recent revelations, I never spent much time if any really digging for information. The game does not give it to you freely through the course of the game, and now largely realize I have been playing “wrong” for a decade. This morning I thought I would share some of the revelations that I wish I knew earlier.

Achievements ARE Quests

One of the things that I found initially alienating is that Guild Wars 2 at face value seems like it is a game without much in the way of quests. There is of course the main story but those are sprinkled few and far between as you move from zone to zone and are not really going to give you much direction. Inside each zone there are a number of “hearts” that ask you do do a specific thing for a specific faction, and filling one of these gives you some rewards and access to new vendors. However there really was not anything that felt like long progression. I have to admit I mostly ignored the Achievements section on all of my previous attempts because I am not really one to do things just to get a trophy. I am sure if someone were to look at the various games with achievements I would cause completionists a panic attack, because I am habitually one or two things away from wrapping them up. What I did not understand at all however is that Achievements are somewhat poorly named here and instead of a bunch of useless “make points get bigger” things, they are a treasure trove of targeted things that you can work towards. Need an Ascended Weapon? Well there are achievements for that. Want to get pieces of gear that you can choose your own stats for? We have achievements for those as well. Essentially this area of the UI is chock full of long term grinds, that end up rewarding very useful things. Not to mention every 500 achievement points you unlock a chest with some gear as well as some weapon skins.

Elite Specs are not tied to Weapons

One of the key focuses of an expansion is that it grants classes entirely new elite specializations. The problem is I assumed these were associated with a given weapon. For example as a Warrior with Heart of Thorns I got access to Berserker… but the first step of that unlocked access to Torches which were not a weapon that interested me in the least. With Path of Fire Warriors got access to Spellbreaker which again unlocked the weapon Daggers… of which I am vehemently allergic to using daggers. I had it hung up in my head that the weapon that you unlocked with a specialization is the weapon you were supposed to be using with it. Granted there is some synergy with the types of things that a given weapon does, but it is not a direct correlation. Instead I had to get myself into the mental headspace of just realizing that an elite specialization above all else gives me access to another “talent tree”. The main function of unlocking them is to give you additional tools to work with when crafting builds. There are plenty of ways to build using these new specs that do not include the weapon that they grant you. Additionally there are ways to use the new weapons that get unlocked… without using the elite specialization tree. The two are tied together but are not necessarily intrinsically linked. Instead I had to start thinking of them as being two separate actions, one which gives me access to a brand new weapon, and another that gives me access to a brand new talent tree.

You Can Self Join Commander Groups

So one of the cool things about Guild Wars 2, is that it allows players to self designate themselves as “leaders”. It is a costly process to acquire the ability to throw up a commander tag, and as a result when someone is running around the battlefield with one, players tend to just take advisement without questioning it. All of this time I have been following around commanders, never knowing that for the most part… you can right click on the tag of any commander on the mini map and choose to self join their party. Granted this requires the commander to have set the party to public, but still if someone is leading and event it is almost certain that they will have the group open. I feel like an idiot for not knowing this one sooner, but I literally found it out the other night. This has completely changed my interactions with how I do things in the game.

Living Worlds are Expansions

Guild Wars 2 technically has three expansions to the game that were sold as boxed products. However starting with season 3, one could effectively call every Living World season an expansion to the game. I did not realize this. I thought it was largely just story content that wove around existing zones, but instead I am finding out now that I have gotten into season three… that it is taking me to brand new zones. Each of these zones are completely filled with things to do and interesting events to complete. By not having unlocked these earlier, I am effectively limiting my access to a whole slew of new areas in the game. Effectively that means that Guild Wars 2 has had the equivalent of six expansions at this point and with that a whole ton of content to participate in.

If you also are playing Guild Wars 2, what are some of the things that you wish you had known sooner? For me the biggest is that I wish I had known sooner how to enjoy this game. I spent so much time fighting against it because it did not fit into the predetermined mold I was expecting from it. Now that I opened up to it, I am enjoying myself immensely. If you have any other revelations and tips, please drop me a line below because I am sure there are even more things that I have been oblivious to. The post Guild Wars 2 – Things I wish I knew Sooner appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.