Good Morning Friends! I spent an awful lot of the weekend in Tyria, or more correctly Elona. I wrapped up the story line to Path of Fire and I have to say I am very impressed by the way things came together. This entire ending however feels very much like the ending to Empire Strikes Back, where we are trying to put a positive spin as we know just how bad things are about to get. Carrying forward immediately with Living World Season 4, we see just how bad and how fast things truly do get. I think this is the challenge of playing catch up in a video game, you are not given the benefit of time to spend addressing what just happened. I’ve seen this in the folks catching up to the phenomenal story in Final Fantasy XIV and not really having the benefit of time to process their emotions before throwing themselves back into the grinder.
I’ve been very impressed so far of what I have experienced in Istan. I mean this is where the Guild Wars Nightfall campaign begins, and in part this is the area of Guild Wars 1 that I am the most familiar with. I did not feel like the Path of Fire story took as many trips down memory lane as it could have, but Istan is absolutely drawing deep upon the well of nostalgia. I am very much here for this. I am not extremely far into the story, or at least not far enough to move past this first zone. Path of Fire in general feels like a real turning point for the way that the narrative is being told in Guild Wars 2. This began with Heart of Thorns and Living World Season 3, but it feels like they have improved upon it greatly in the years they spent working on The Elonian content. It really makes me look forward to getting caught up and playing through Living World Season 5 and End of Dragons.
I’ve spent a bit of time playing “mount catchup”. I never managed to get my Jackal during the storyline, so I did what any self respecting MMO player would do… and googled it. The sequence of events required to get the Jackal was fairly benign and just involved collecting a bunch of magic essences while mounted… without falling from the rather tall tower you are in. This may or may not have tweaked my fear of heights a few times but I pushed through and managed to walk away with my doggo mount. Now I need to spend time leveling it up and collecting more mastery points so I can finally use the stupid sand portals. I’ve also unlocked the beginning of the Griffon mount quest, but I have to say one of the eggs in Crystal Desert was pissing me off enough yesterday that I needed to walk away from it. I will return to this madness another day, but mostly I wanted to get the collections as I know a number of events are required to complete it and I might as well start getting credit for those.
In my travels I finally happened to be in the zone at the right time and managed to do the Chalk Gerent event, which I needed to complete a collection. Having experienced the other metas, I have to say Tangled Depths is probably my least favorite. I think this is in part because moving around the zone is way more of a pain in the butt than the other metas. Dragon’s Stand is without a doubt the easiest because there are three clear lanes that you need to follow. The second best is probably Auric Basin because again… simple objectives and simple paths. Verdant Brink on the other hand is also annoying as hell because there is way too much “over and under” nonsense going on in that zone. Tangled Depths is the worst though because no one seems to be willing to ever do it.
It did however allow me to complete my Rytlock cosplay, which I immediately equipped on my Charr Revenant. During the tail end of the Path of Fire campaign you get to run around with Sohothin, the flaming sword that Rytlock uses… which incidentally is the twin of the sword Magdaer that caused the Searing of Ascalon. Having gotten to play with this sword… I want to use it more! It was silly amounts of fun to run around the battlefield broasting everything with my flames. The elite skill with that weapon was what I can only describe as an orbital bombardment. Sadly I do not think there is any way we the player can use this weapon in a more permanent manner… or at least use the appearance. As a result my Rytlock cosplay will always be slightly incomplete.
I finished out my weekend doing what I do so many times… and joining a big squad of players as we burned through World Boss events. I am always slightly impressed by just how many players these events summon forth. They make the world feel thriving, in a manner that I am just not used to from MMORPGs lately. In World of Warcraft, if you have a dozen or so players in an area it feels active. This instead is more akin to the 40 player raid days of that game. Now granted it is unlikely that everyone on a given map is ever going to be focused on a single event, but while things are going on it absolutely feels like that is the case, especially when you have three commanders leading three very full teams. I would love to have a commander tag at some point, but I am uncertain if that desire is worthy of the 300 gold price tag associated with it.
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