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.
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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.
The post The Skyscale Club appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! My life over the last several days has been devoted to Skyscale misadventures. For those who are not initiated, the Skyscale is the closest Guild Wars 2 has to a normal flying mount. It is behind a massive quest chain that takes a truly dumb amount of time and resources and ends up rewarding you with an account-wide mount that performs much like Dragonriding does in the latest World of Warcraft expansion. In order to qualify for the mount, you have to have fully completed the Path of Fire expansion and Living World Season 4 as it requires a lot of specific items sold on vendors in those content areas.
The quest starts on the Dragonfall map, and the early chains will involve you roaming around this area and collecting a lot of resources. Shown above is the map for the locations of the various Skyscale scales which is effectively the first long collection. After completing that you gain enough faction with each camp in Dragonfall to purchase five medicines. From there you have to roam around and treat fourteen sick Skyscales scattered throughout the zone, before twenty-one eggs… which are frustratingly often beside a location you already had to collect a scale at previously. After completing the meta collection the rest of the quest continues in Sun’s Refuge where Gorrick sets up a lab as you attempt to hatch and raise a Skyscale.
The next sequence sees you taking your egg to work with you, as you attempt to expose it to various elements. There are twelve in total and each step in that chain involves four or five individual sub-steps. Most of these are not terribly taxing, but I spent around two hours fully unlocking the Derelict Delve in Desert Highlands. This involved collecting a number of runestones and then slotting them one at a time into doors… which open the next piece of the delve. Effectively you need something in the second delve and the final delve, and something I learned a bit too late is you have to finish each individual delve in a single setting. I thought slotting a rune would be maintained between trips, and as a result, I had to do the final delve twice because I needed to leave halfway through. One positive is that I got really good at navigating the sequence of teleporters while moving around this area.
The quest step that took me the longest by far was the final bit of the Skyscale of Courage. This involved doing what I now know is the entire meta event in Elon Riverlands. You essentially need to fight the boss inside Augury Rock, and I spent quite a bit of time just milling around at the camp where the first step in the meta event spawns sequence spawns. Finally Sunday morning at about 11 am it fired off and I was able to complete the sequence and finish that step in the quest chain.
This moved me on to the phase where I actually spent time raising my newborn Skyscale. Essentially I had to collect a number of special treats by killing specific monsters scattered around the Crystal Desert region and waiting for a “Tasty” item to drop from them. I also had to spend quite a bit of fold buying “Toys” for the newborn, the most expensive of which was the grow lamp that goes for 22g currently on the market. Sadly I did not have my jewel-crafting skill high enough to make the item, nor did I really relish the thought of grinding it up. Lastly, I had to feed the Skyscale specifically crafted food and could feed a maximum of 4 pieces per day. Fortunately, I wrapped up the previous step before the daily reset so was able to get 8 feedings in within a single calendar day. Normally this takes three individual resets in order to get past the feeding step and more time if you did not already have a stash of materials ready to craft the food.
Now I am staring down the barrel of the bane of my existence. I have what is effectively twenty-one jumping puzzles to complete in order to find my Skyscale who has run away from the nest. I can craft something called Extra-Pungent Skyscale Treat to skip a jumping puzzle, but it comes with a hefty cost. Essentially it requires a reagent with a daily cooldown and an item that you can only purchase from a vendor that costs 4g. So in order to brute force my way through this… it would cost me a minimum of 80g as you get one for free when you start the quest chain. I think I am going to at least attempt some of the jumping puzzles and then fall back on making the treat if I get too frustrated by them. I tell reminding myself at any point I get angry, that I will only have to do this once.
I have to admit though, that I never would have made it this far without Blish HUD. There is an addon called pathing that you can install within the Blish HUD interface that marks various items on your in-game map. More specifically the pathing module that I would suggest using is ReActif EN pack as it seems to be the clearest to follow. For example, when doing Scales or Eggs in Dragonsfall I just had to roam around and follow the scale icon on my HUD until I finally found its location. Similarly, now that I am on the jumping puzzle step, it should in theory show me the correct path to follow the reach the top. That is what I tend to have the most trouble with while doing jumping puzzles is determining what areas I can actually stand on versus which areas are not valid terrain.
I expect tonight to start on the first of the jumping puzzles and then determine if I will buy my way out of this frustration or keep at it. While doing this however I am spending a lot of time farming Living World Season 4 content, because I need stacks of zone currency to complete the final step. I know I am lacking Branded Mass, Mistonium, and Inscribed Shards but I have the others already. Basically, I am focusing on this problem in a few ways firstly by doing the hearts each day and buying the amount of currency that I can from the karma vendor. Then I am spending some time roaming around Bjora Marches looking for Eternal Ice, as there is a Karma vendor there that will sell you the season 4 currencies in exchange for that resource. My hope is that by the time I finish chewing through the jumping puzzles, and the steps that follow them… I will have earned enough currency to be able to buy all of the saddle components shown above.
Basically, I guess I reached a point where I was tired of being grounded. So many of the meta events in Guild Wars 2 are just much easier with a Skyscale. As I’ve started working my way through content on the Ranger, I reached several points, especially in zone completion where I wished I had access to one. I knew eventually I would set my mind to churning through this quest, and it seems to be a solid activity to do while I am consuming an audiobook. All of this effort will eventually pay off though, and it will make all of my characters from that point forward much more enjoyable to spend time on. In the meantime, however… I have a lot of pain in front of me before I can settle into the joy of having the best mount in the game.
The post Saving the Skyscales appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I am on my fourth day this weekend and as a result, it has made me terribly late to sit down and write a blog post. When last I shared my progress in this year’s bookish journey, I had finished my tenth book. As of about 11 pm last night, I have now finished my thirteenth. I find myself in a position currently where none of my holds are available and I have nothing currently checked out of the library. So once I finish writing my morning post, I will begin the process of sifting around and trying to land on my next novel. I have a handful of ideas but ultimately it will be determined by what is actually available. I acquired the Iron Druid series from something other than Amazon or the Libby app, so I might start down that road next. I am thinking about starting an audiobook section of my Plex Server so that I can use that to keep track of my progress and shift between machines while listening to the same book.
The goal of this weekend was to acquire two shiny new library cards. That did not exactly work as expected, because thankfully I consulted one of my librarian friends first. It turns out that most of the smaller libraries are all signed on to the “OK Virtual Library” which was a way of allowing smaller communities with smaller budgets to be able to afford the trappings of full access to digital materials. However, this means that one Library card at the OK Virtual Library system is effectively the same as any other card, meaning that if I really want a third card to expand my access… I will need to make a trek down to the Oklahoma City Metro Library system. I’ve already noticed a difference in what I have access to through Libby however, so our trip to Bartlesville is definitely a net positive. I also got to hang out albeit briefly with my friend who is a Librarian there which was also extremely good.
When last I shared my journey through books, I mentioned that I was about to start Heroic Hearts. This is a collection of short stories from various authors, but the primary reason I was interested is it includes another tale that takes place after the events of Battle Ground involving Major General Toot-Toot Minimus and Lacuna… and to a much much much smaller extent Harry Dresden and Will the Werewolf. The story itself was fun, but I stuck around and consumed a number of the other tales including one set in the Iron Druid Chronicles focused around the dog Oberron and his point of view. Probably my favorite of the stories was The Dark Ship by Anne Bishop… which means I need to do some searches to find out what else that author has written. I think this is why I have always liked these anthologies of short stories because it gives you a view into the world of a lot of authors in a short condensed manner. I have to admit from the short focusing on Oberron I am thinking the Iron Druid Chronicles might be a little too “captain planet” for my tastes, but I am still willing to give it a shot since it was suggested by a good friend.
Next up I dove into Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis. This has been on my list of books to read for a long while because I am a big fan of Lindsay’s long-form YouTube video essays, and wish that was a thing she was still doing. I remember listening to some podcast discussion centered around the creation of this book and how one of the things about being a popular YouTuber is that book deals appear out of the woodwork, and how she waited for the right one that would more or less give her free reign. What we get in Axiom’s End is a nostalgic trip through that particular brand of internet weirdness that was the late 2000s, more specifically 2007. Effectively this novel is Dubya-era nonsense blended with Wikileaks scandals, a bit of the X-Files, and the movie E.T. centered around a fully adult cast rather than a group of kids.
It takes a bit to really get engaged in the setting because it starts throwing out what sounds like important vocabulary without really explaining what any of it means. It reminds me of reading Dune for the first time and having to interpret a lot of things through context clues, the key difference being there was a thick glossary at the back of that novel… which is lacking here. I like the central character of Cora Sabino and the journey she goes through during the course of the pages. It is a bit of a weird romp, but well worth your time sticking around until it properly grabs you. There are a few unanswered questions that you sort of have to roll with because I still have no fucking clue why the first events of the novel actually took place. There is a logical sequence that never really resolves that you sort of have to hand wave away, but the rest of the novel resolves neatly.
Most recently I finished up Dead Man’s Hand by James J. Butcher… who is the son of Jim Butcher the author of the Dresden Files series. While digging around to catch up on the Dresden series I stumbled upon the existence of this novel which immediately placed it on my radar. My friend the aforementioned Librarian said that they were reading the novel, and funnily enough, my hold kept them from extending their own old so I technically finished it first. At its core… Dead Man’s Hand is the most generically competent urban fantasy novel you have ever read. That doesn’t necessarily make it bad, but it feels like a setting you have been to before with highly regulated magic users and a not-quite-ministry-of-magic governing them and their actions. I guess one of the things that do make it more interesting is this is a post-unmasking society where “usuals” and “unorthodox” have learned to live together in a somewhat unsteady peace.
One of the cardinal sins of this novel is that it has some truly awful character names like the primary protagonist of Grimshaw Griswald Grimsby. At face value, it is a slightly awkward first novel from an author that at times feels like a caricature of his father’s writing style. That is probably unfair however because if I did not go into this expecting at least some similarities due to my extreme familiarity with the other’s body of work… I would likely judge it more positively. The novel did manage to make me care about the characters and make me interested in hearing more about this world. The second book in the Unorthodox Chronicles series has already been announced and will be called Long Past Dues releasing this October. I am interested enough in GG Grimsby, Huntsman Mayflower, and Wudge to definitely throw that on the list of must-reads. If you like magical detective stories, and more specifically like the buddy cop dynamic of a completely green rookie and grizzled grumpy veteran, then this is probably worth a read for you as well.
More than likely I am going to be starting book one of the Iron Druid Chronicles at some point today. The series begins with a book called Hounded, which I am guessing will dive into the bond that the main character has with the hound Oberron that I met in the short story discussed earlier in this post. I liked Oberron quite a bit, so if nothing else I think I can limp through a novel just based on that alone. My friend mentioned that it felt a lot like Dresden Files and even though the story I read was from the point of view of the dog, I can absolutely see some similarities. It still floors me that I am thirteen books into this journey with no real signs of slowing down. I know at some point I will probably stall out at least for a bit as I will want to play some narrative games this year, namely the new Jedi Survivor game coming out in April. Tomorrow I will likely share my progress in Guild Wars 2 that I made over the weekend.
Hopefully, you have a great week and as always feel free to drop me any suggestions for novels I should explore. I will say that I am not terribly interested in anything with a more romantic focus. That isn’t really my jam, as I tend to skip through romance scenes in novels because I find them exceedingly awkward most of the time. I might have to dive into a few at some point because I happen to be friends with several romance authors, but I am largely putting that off for now lest I get bogged down.
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