It was a very Guild Wars weekend and I am apparently in full swing with this game right now. I spent a bit of time Saturday afternoon running around with Ashgar on his Mesmer knocking out hero points in the Path of Fire areas. Up until this point I had yet to really play the class in the manner that I had originally planned… aka the Shadowknight/Deathknight equivalent called the Reaper. One of the odd things about Guild Wars 2 is that each expansion adds a new specialization… for those familiar with World of Warcraft, think of this as a Talent tree.
With this also comes the ability to unlock a new weapon type that the class previously did not have access to, for example Reaper gives Necromancer access to the Greatsword and with the most recent expansion Harbinger gives access to Pistol. However to unlock a new specialization it takes the collection of 250 hero points… which requires a bunch of running around and completing specific mini activities. At the time of the release of Path of Fire there were a grand total of 904 available in the world so more than enough to get both of the Elite specializations at that time. With the release of Cantha and End of Dragons there are even more Hero Points up for grabs. My focus however has been to unlock Reaper the Elite Specialization that shipped with Heart of Thorns.
Speaking of Heart of Thorns… it only took me almost seven years to do it but I have finally finished that content. When I say “Finished” I mean the story because there are still so many things that I have yet to unlock from those zones. I have to say there was one part that I barely made it through. Growing up I never had any issues with motion sickness and I could happy draw or read in the car while zooming down the road. However there is something that games specifically do that completely triggers a motion sickness in me that is brutal. I first experienced it in Warframe and in Heart of Thorns there is this rotating corkscrew plant tower that you have to climb and fight things as you go up… and the constant spinning and motion of the camera… I barely made it up in one piece. The only other real complaint that I had is that the Mordermoth fight was roughly three times longer than it needed to be.
In other news I am one step away from my Warclaw mount in World Vs World, and quite honestly the only thing remaining is just to push through a lot of reward tiers and spend 8 gold. When we last talked about this I think I was down to just missing a Keep capture and the item that you get at the end of the reward track. Yesterday I managed to get in with a rolling group of blues lead by a commander that saw us take a ton of objectives.
This nonsense friends is roughly fifteen siege golems being piloted through the canal system to “sneak up” on the enemy. It was a purely nonsense sight to behold but we managed to take the two big keeps on this map with this parade of magitech glory. By following other players I am starting to learn the ropes of how to navigate the maps efficiently. I never would have thought to swim my way to the final objective, but sure enough there is a connecting series of waterways that gets you there rather quickly. I have to say after having experienced a bunch of different versions of this… I greatly prefer the underwater combat of Guild Wars 2 because it just works flawlessly. I wish we could use our REAL weapons while underwater but I understand WHY we can’t.
I ended up wasting a fair amount of time on Saturday and Sunday working on the personal story missions… only to realize that I can’t actually get anything of value through the quest sequence. I did however get a wee bit misty when I got to the quests involving “old” Lion’s Arch. I will admit that I greatly prefer the modern layout of that city, but there was something cool about the way it looked before. Lion’s Arch now feels like a proper capital city but previously it absolutely felt like the smugglers den that I think it was originally intended to be. With that… you have pretty much my weekend in gaming. I did not expect to be spending all of it in Guild Wars 2, but I guess the heart wants what the heart wants.
In other news I am starting to sift through the photos I took years ago, but never did much of anything with. My hope is that as it warms up I will get out again and start doing some photo shoots. I am not sure WHY something has triggered a desire to do this again, but whatever the case I am going with it. In order to support this nonsense I decided to spin up an Instagram account devoted to this project. My goal with “Bel’s Confused Fotomat” is to post something each day. I have a mountain of images that I am working through, but in theory new stuff should start flowing in as well. For those of a certain age they will probably recognize the Fotomat concept, but for those who are a bit younger or did not have one in their area.
Fotomat was a chain of film development places… that set up as tiny drive through businesses in parking lots. I remember as a kid being completely enthralled with the concept and wondering how they did all of the development work in such a tiny building. In truth all the “booth” had was a filing system for film and a cashier and everything else got trucked in every night from a professional film development shop. My child brain however imagined an web of pneumatic tubes and a vast underground vault where all of the film was stored and the development processes took place. As with so many things as an Adult you find out the truth is way less interesting than our imagination.
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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we start off talking about the weird game Babylon’s Fall and how it potentially had the worst launch ever of a big budget looter style game. With a steam launch of concurrent users in the neighborhood of 350 players… we talk about what went wrong. From there we discuss Warhammer 40,000 and the release of new Craftworld army lists. So in a weird turn of events… Bel apparently likes Guild Wars 2 now? He finally lands on a class that feels the way he wanted Warrior to feel… and it is apparently a caster. We also talk a bit about End of Dragons expansion and how well Cantha appears to be received. From there we dive into a topic that is sure to anger many listeners about what it means for Open World gaming to be done “Right”. This mainly involves a discussion of Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring, Horizon series, and even some discussion of things like open world Assassin’s Creed games.
This present fascination with Guild Wars 2 continued last night. I have to admit that I am really enjoying this whole Necromancer thing. The class as a whole is an odd blend of the Warlock from World of Warcraft and the Necromancer from Diablo 2/3. You can see my delightful family of horrible children pictured here. Right now I am running a build that is using three pets… two of which that I can use as walking bombs if I so choose to. My gameplay tends to be running around and picking up a bunch of things and then letting my children and a series of curses decimate the entire pack. There is something stupidly fun about this and I have to say… Guild Wars 2 is far more enjoyable as a ranged character than it is as a melee character.
Last night I went down a different sort of rabbit hole. The last time I was extremely active in Guild Wars 2 was back in 2017, and at that time I used an addon of sorts called TaCO… or Tactical Overlay. It offered a number of things in game that you would normally have to tab out to in order to check, like event timers as well as a large variety of map markers for things like jumping puzzles. I had one of those moments yesterday where I suddenly remembered it was a thing that existed, and set forth in an attempt to find it and install it. It turns out that in late 2020 there was an issue that caused a good chunk of the code base to be lost completely. Then in September of 2021 the project appears to have ceased development and is now largely in a defunct state.
That is fine however because apparently someone has decided to pick up the torch and carry it forward. There is a replacement for TaCo called Blish HUD and honestly… after only a little bit with it I would say it is a sizeable improvement. There are two huge benefits to this over TaCo, the first being that it runs as an icon in your system tray so you don’t have to manually run Blish each time before you launch Guild Wars 2 like you did with TaCo. The next benefit is that it is more Framework than specific addon, and as a result there is an addon repository built into the application allowing you to install one or all of the addons from within game. It also appears to support all of the marker and trial packs from TaCo, but those need to be loaded in before launching the game it seems since they are external files that are being referenced.
The other thing that I suddenly remembered existing is GW2 Efficiency, which is a website that tracks all sorts of things about your account. In both cases Blish and Efficiency require you to set up an API key which can be done as part of the Arena Net Account management page. You can create more than one key, so I have taken the effort of making a new one for each website that I want to use. You can create very granular permissions and give a given site only access to the items that are specifically needed for that tool. As always you can check out a number of different resources in the Game Tools menu above on this website under Guild Wars 2. I vaguely remember using Efficiency to tell me what I was sitting on in the bank that I could sell for large amounts of gold… but I am uncertain what of the many sub tools I was using to do that.
As far as progress goes… I have officially made it further into the Heart of Thorns story than I ever have up until this point. Additionally I have collected enough Hero Points to be able to unlock access to the Greatsword… which is cool and all but without unlocking the rest of the skills there is not a whole lot I can do with it. I did play around for a bit with it and I do think that my future shenanigans involve this class and the power reaper spec. At some point I will need to cajole one of the more seasoned Greysky folks to knock me out a set of Berserker gear. I am also spending some time learning about how to upgrade my Reaper greatsword into the pink version through a long collection, so I might start chipping away at that.
I am finding a shocking amount of joy in this game, so we will see how long that lasts. At a bare minimum I needed something that I could play during the podcast on Saturday nights. I made some strategic keybind changes that seem to work better for me as well.
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Friends I have very clearly lost my damned mind. Originally I was planning on playing some Guild Wars 2 tonight because I would not have access to the downstairs television where the PlayStation 5 is connected. As a result all day I was planning on playing some more Horizon Forbidden West and moving forward with knocking some of the side quests out. Instead as it was fated I ended up having a late afternoon conversation with a friend about my struggles with Guild Wars 2. The problem for me is that “Warrior” has always meant tanky and the Guild Wars 2 warrior just does not feel tanky to me. So I went through this entire diatribe of explaining what I wanted out of a class and I got an answer I was not expecting.
Essentially my friend said that while I would not like the class fantasy of it… that it really sounded like I wanted to play a Reaper Necromancer which is the Greatsword based elite specialization that came with Heart of Thorns. I already had a Necromancer, but he is a Char… and I have to admit I don’t love Char for the same reason that I don’t love Tauren. They feel slow and lumbering, which is ironic given that when I re-rolled the class I also went with a large race… my favorite of the GW2 races… the Norn. So instead of spending a night in Horizon Forbidden West, I created a brand new character and returned to Guild Wars 2… a game with which I have an exceptionally checkered past. The initial problem is that even starting down the Reaper path is going to require me to grind out a bunch of Hero points, so ultimately I needed to learn how to play Necromancer in default mode.
Where things go really off the rails however is that Thalen who happened to be online mentioned that the WVW daily quest was really easy today. One of the required components was something that could just be purchased cheaply in the Guild Hall. In truth I have only participated in WVW once or twice in the entirety of Guild Wars 2 and the last instance I specifically remember is when I joined Liore and a few others and all joined together around the time the game launched. Suffice to say I am a newbie in such things… and as a result I asked an innocent question. “How the heck do I get access to my mount in WvW?”. This friends is an answer that ultimately dominated t he rest of my evening.
It began simple enough, that I had to rank up once and then purchase the Warclaw Mastery track. Then I had to complete that track, along with completing a collection of items that can only be found in WvW. That sounded easy enough, but essentially I legitimately spent the rest of the evening in WvW. That is enough time to see one skirmish finish and another skirmish get to about the halfway point. The truth is… while I suck at PVP interaction… the entire experience was pretty great. There are enough things going on in the map that much like Alterac Valley you can hang back and do useful things even if you are not with the vanguard charging up against the major objectives. Before I knew it I was starting to knock out these collection bits. For anyone who comes along before me… this is what is needed to complete the Warclaw Mount Collection:
Emblem – You get this through unlocking the Warclaw Mastery track
Tail Armor – This comes from defeating and looking any Veteran guarding an objective. Seems to have a non-100% drop chance.
Horn Spikes – Participate in the capture anything flagged as an enemy camp.
Saddle – Participate in the capture of one of the enemy towers.
Gorget – Participate in the capture of one of the enemy keeps.
Leg Armor – Purchased for 250 Badges of Honor from the Warclaw Tender
Body Armor – Purchased for 50 WvW Skirmish Tickets from the Warclaw Tender
Helmet – Gained from completing the entire Warclaw Mastery Track.
Lastly after doing ALL of this you need to go back to the Warclaw Tender and purchase your license for 8 gold. After that you have a new mount that you can use to zip around the battlefield in WvW. I believe you can also ride it out in the wild, but any of the mastery upgrades only really apply to PVP.
At the end of the night I managed to gather up 5 of the 8 armor pieces needed for the Warclaw Companion collection. Of the few that I am missing, the one that really concerns me is the Gorget gained through capturing a Keep. All night I was not able to find a map that had a keep that someone was trying to capture for team blue, seeing as Yaks Bend is paired with another server group to represent that faction currently. The body armor should be gained pretty quickly, I think I am 3 WvW tickets shy of being able to pick that up. Lastly the mastery track is just going to take a lot more WvW in order to get. I need to go rifling through my bank because I am almost certain to have some WvW tokens that I can burn through.
So there you have it friends. I set out with the mission of trying out Reaper for the Necromancer… and made zero progress towards that goal. Instead I wound up down this rabbit trail of trying to get access to a mount in WvW in order to make the daily quests go quicker. I am not proud of myself and I am confused about who I even am… seeing as I am supposedly allergic to PVP. I am even more confused that I actually found myself enjoying my currently pure caster Necromancer. I like my army of disturbing looking pets that I can explode for extra damage. I might need an intervention because I am not even sure who I am at this point.
If you find yourself playing GW2 however, I am over on Yaks Bend which does not really matter and you can friend me up with “belghast.5496”. I saw a lot of familiar faces like Ardua, Lvrfmsc, Rowan, and Sctrz at which point I remembered… oh yeah this is where they hang their hats these days. I was mostly quiet other than talking in guild chat to Thalen however, because I was apparently a man on a mission… just not the mission I had originally started on. It was a weird night, but a mostly enjoyable night.
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