Good Morning Friends! While I think it is sort of cute, I don’t really love the springer mount. I mean it has its uses but unlike the raptor or warclaw (the other two mounts I have so far) it is just harder to use “on the go” when running away from a pack of mobs. It’s gimmick is that it can leap up super high, but you have to stop what you are doing and hold down the space bar to make it do this trick. That means you sorta have to have already cleared an area so you can attempt to execute some precision maneuvers. I super dislike jumping puzzles that require the springer, and I just had to do one as part of the Path of Fire main story mission. It made me want to punch puppies, but I suffered through it. Mostly the way this mount works feels way less precise than the raptor is for horizontal jumps. I am working on unlocking more mastery points and hoping it improves over time.
My core focus right now is largely pushing the Path of Fire story forward. Mostly I find myself in a position where I want to unlock more mounts and also at the same time unlock more zones to roam around in. Part of the reason for this forward momentum is that I want to unlock the Icebrood Saga zones so that I can have access to strikes, which are sort of mini “puggable” raids. At some point I hope to be doing the current content in Canta, but my obsession with doing things in the order they were released means that I am enjoying Elona at the moment. Nightfall is the campaign in Guild Wars 1 that I spent the most time in, so it has been interesting seeing the areas again.
One thing that happened last night however is that I needed a break from questing and decided to work on my dailies. One of them was doing events in Dragon’s Stand which is the final region of the Heart of Thorns story area. What happened instead is that I got caught up in the meta progress and instead of bailing after getting my few events completed, I stuck around and attempted to finish the meta. We failed, I think in part because folks were popping in, getting their handful of events completed and then popping out. However towards the very end of the meta we got super serious about trying to complete it. This led us to fail and then immediately restart the timer with most of the folks sticking around for a second go.
I had learned enough during the failed attempt that I mostly knew what was happening and as a result was way more effective at moving things forward. Essentially the entire Dragon’s Stand map is a giant MOBA arena, but we the players play the role of keeping the lanes clear. Essentially the map involves a few phases but most involve escorting a payload to a specific destination, and then holding that location until all three teams have completed their push to that destination as well. There are giant wurm minibosses, a fight with one of three tower guardians, and then eventually it culminates in a giant cinematic fight against the “Mouth of Mordremoth”. During this phase you have to guard a number of platforms and use wind currents to travel between them… that is if you are a scrub like me that does not have a skyscale mount.
I mostly rode one platform until a burn phase happened because each platform had to be protected from a number of events. Flowers would spawn or roots would take hold, and someone on that platform has to destroy that objective to keep the way clear. Every so often the mouth will destroy a platform, which requires everyone to shift quickly… and hope you can get into a wind current in time to pop over to another platform. Like all big meta events the “on death” reset time is pretty quick so when I failed to transfer platforms I was able to get back into the action extremely quickly. The sheer amount of loot that I walked away with was staggering from a failed attempt and a completed attempt. Granted most of it ended up getting salvaged, but I view that as just a mad influx of materials and not as a loss.
I have no frame of reference for how long it takes to drop the Mouth of Mordremoth, but apparently I got an achievement for doing it quickly. This rewarded me an inventory item called Ley-Energy Matter Converter which opens up a vendor screen and gives me access to purchase one item each day. The first tab just contains a bunch of the keys for zone activities, but the other tabs can apparently be unlocked by spending 100 of a given zone currency to open new things that I could purchase. I had a freaking blast and would absolutely do this event again, pending I happen to notice it is firing up. I’ve done Auric Basic a number of times and have done I believe Verdant Brink once. I need to sort out what the other Heart of Thorns metas are and try them as well. Metas are easily one of the coolest ideas that Guild Wars 2 has come up with, and ultimately I get why folks will spend their entire evening popping from one meta to another.
It was a great night. I think the sheer variety of things I could be doing is what is giving this game life for me. I spent a very small amount of time playing around on my Mesmer and putting on a few levels as well. I am hoping at some point I can try some of the more serious group activities and see if I can hang with them. I would love to explore more of the dungeons, do some of the deeper fractals, and maybe even try a raid. In order to do some of these things I would probably need to branch out and add a much larger guild to my repertoire, or at least one with more folks available on my time frame.
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