Good Morning Folks. I am writing this morning largely to make sure everyone is aware that a Fractal Incursion event is going on right now in Guild Wars 2… and it is phenomenal. Not only do you get starter gear sets for new characters from a vendor in the area, but you can essentially run most of the t1 fractals instantly through a really cool group finder functionality. This event started on September 9th and is going to be running for almost a full month ending on October 7th. During this time there are a few things happening. Firstly there is a new quest chain that starts from the Fractal portal in Lion’s Arch where just talking to the Mist Stranger NPC gets you a free 20 slot bag. In addition to this there is a new beta group finder tool for Fractals where essentially you get instant queued with a bunch of strangers and they have specifically narrowed the category down to only the fractals with a high chance of success with no prior knowledge.
They are bribing the hell out of us to get into game and run a lot of fractals. My guess is that they are using this to beta test a brand new group finder functionality, and I am fully on board with this. I want to see this same thing make its way to other parts of the game… specifically strikes. If I had a group finder like this for the easy Icebrood Saga strikes, I would run them every single day without question. The bribes though… are really strong because just by chain running fractals you are going to get access to unlock a set of legendary gloves. I’ve heard rumor that there is going to be a way to unlock multiple armor types during this event, but even if it is only a single armor weight… you are saving countless resources to make this happen. Additionally Fractals themselves are hyper lucrative. I really started participating on Sunday and in the few hours I spent running fractals I easily made around 50 gold.
All of the progress towards this event is tracked in the Incursive Investigation and Fractal Incursion achievement categories. Mostly this involves chain running fractals through the new group finder, or with your own fixed groups. You are collecting this substance called Fractalline Dust and you get this through either running quick play fractals, doing fractal incursions in the world at the top of every hour, or by completing achievements. It seems like you end up with 3 to 5 per fractal and in order to complete the three long grindy achievements you need to gather up a total of 450. In a single afternoon of running a bunch of these I pretty quickly ground out around 200, and that was with frequent stops to clear out by bags and do other things. In theory over the coming nights I should finish grinding out the 450 without much issue. What is awesome though is not only are you given a bag for starting down this path, but when you hit rank 9 you are given an extra bag slot. Additionally you are given tokens along the way that you can turn in for pieces of exotic gear, so this becomes quite possibly the best way to gear out an alt character.
There is zero doubt that this has been wildly popular. That first shot is folks hanging out in Lion’s Arch before 8 am on a North American week day. The above image is folks gathered for the Fractal Incursion boss that appears in Diessa Plateau that was going to spawn at 8 am. Folks are amped about this particular brand of nonsense and it makes me exceptionally happy. Even if you are only a casual Guild Wars 2 player, now is a great time to get in an experience fractals. For World of Warcraft players… think of Fractals as Mythic plus dungeons… but way more chill. Players are likely not going to speak a ton during them, because they are very much solved problems… but just follow the crowd and you will do fine. If nothing else it is going to give you a level of familiarity with the content so that even after the event ends… you will probably feel way more comfortable joining fractal groups. We’ve been doing this as a weekly thing on Thursday nights for awhile and having a lot of fun slowly raising our fractal levels.
I am so on board with this update. If you want to get into the game and need help getting adjusted… feel free to ping me. I should be in most evenings grinding Fractals and am more than happy to have you tag along. My Guild Wars 2 account is belghast.5496, so feel free to friend me up.
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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We start off the show with a discussion about the hidden episode of this season’s Game Changers over on Dropout TV. Bel regales the group with his adventures in the endgame of Destiny Rising and how it really is a better Destiny game than anything we have gotten in years. Grace instantly sells us on Star Birds just by telling us its from the folks behind Dorfromantik. More than that, it has the art style of Kurzgesagt so you adventure the galaxy with adorable birbs. There is currently an event going on in Guild Wars 2 where you can run random fractals with complete strangers, and it is delightful and stupidly rewarding. Bel talks a bit about Borderlands 4, and while it is probably the best Borderlands since the second game… it has some massive performance issues on PC. Kodra talks about the recent board game A Place for My Books, and most of the crew dives into further discussion about Silksong.
Good Morning Folks! I did not post yesterday because Thursdays have become a giant mess where I have to pull together this significant report first thing in the morning. I was in a position where it was 11 am and I was still waiting on some of the contributions… for a thing that was supposed to be done and submitted by noon. So essentially… I find myself in a position where I really cannot devote the effort to blogging. In other news today is the “Dateaversary” for my me and my wife, and at this point we have been together twenty nine years. We are old… and are starting to feel it. I got up this morning and got fancy cronuts, and they were delightful. With next year being our 30th year… we should probably plan something more special than chilling out as per our normal.
Last night was another round of Fractals with Friends, and it was pretty delightful as well. I am having a blast doing these each week with Ammo, Sita, and Sol. I think maybe starting this next week we might get a Thalen as well, which could see us turning our focus to dungeons. We actually learned things from the previous round because we did a few that we had already done as a group… and they went SUPER fast. I think we might actually reach a point where we can rip through more than five in our allotted time period. I’ve been scheming about other activities we might do as a group, because I know that Sita specifically needs the Nightmare Tower for Living World 1, which I managed to solo… but was a massive pain in the butt to do so.
I was actually smart and focused on the daily fractals… which means we finished up a several daily achievements and got bonus loot as a reward. At some point I kind of hope that we can manage to get together a group for some strikes and knock out some of the dailies there. In theory I could use my Commander powers to post a daily fractals group and just force them to happen for me every day. I really should get more comfortable being a Commander… or in my case a Catmander. There is a whole lot more than I could be doing in the game were I willing to seize the reigns and lead groups. I always feel like I just don’t know enough about the game to comfortable direct people through it. I am eternally lost… and while I could absolutely lead something like Tequatl that I can do in my sleep… the things I would actually want to do I don’t have a ton of experience doing myself.
I did actually use my Commander tag last night for a brief moment in Dragon’s End. Essentially we were on a map that was going to lose. Zero progress had been made towards buffing the defenses of each area, and there seemed to be only a handful of us on the map. I only really popped into the map to farm void mobs for the weekly quest, so I decided to tag up and see if I could get at least five of us so that we could do the three escort events. By the end I think we maybe had eight total… so not enough to do the meta event, but enough to actually do some stuff and have fun in the process. I made a few new friends, specifically one person who was with me in the notion that we would fail beautifully together. It was honestly a heck of a lot of fun… which is what makes me think I should actually put myself out there more often.
I am really looking forward to the patch drop next Tuesday and the assorted quality of life changes that come with it. The big thing will be reclaiming all of the shared inventory slots that I am currently using for teleporters. It does make me wonder what exactly I am going to use for the rest of the space. Having an all in one “gobbler” makes me actually want to start working on collecting more of these. Quality of life changes honestly are my favorite changes in any game, because I love convenience items. The less friction I have towards doing what I want in a game… the more likely I am to keep playing that game. At some point though I do want to dive into the housing system and actually build some proper structures in my Homestead.
I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, and if you make it into Guild Wars 2 say hi.
The post Failing Can Be Fun appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Last night I finished getting the wizard chore currency to buy the last of the three pieces available of the Ward Knight’s Armor set. One of the things I dig about this set is that the appearance works regardless of the armor class, which means I can be running around in leather armor but looking like I am wearing plate. This of course required me to dye several pieces of my set, which led to me changing up a bunch of things about the outfit while still keeping to my traditional red, green, and black color palette. Unfortunately the infusion I am using kind of muddies the waters when it comes to appearance, and everything is a bit more hazy than I want it to be. I could remove the infusion… but then I would just end up needing ANOTHER one that grants some buffs.
Last night was the second outing of what I am currently referring to as Fractals with Friends. I am sure we will vary that activity at some point… but we made it through five fractals before running out of time. Technically in a few weeks when the Street Fighter 2 collaboration happens in Monster Hunter Wilds we will be spending the evening doing that content and taking a break from Guild Wars 2. Additionally there are a bunch of dungeons that I think we want to run as well, so we will probably be weaving those in from time to time. However Fractals with Friends just has the magical power of alliteration so it is what I am using. This whole thing reminds me of how much more enjoyable it is to fail with friends, than execute perfectly with strangers.
I’ve taken a bit of a break from the whole Vision questline and started working on filling every Janthir region renown heart each day. At some point I would like to finish the Janthir Mastery quests, which I believe are a prerequisite for the Legendary Spear. It does not hurt that Janthir is quite possibly my favorite area of the map currently. The Janthir Syntri meta is still butts… and a bit too tight on timing. I was with a team that executed pretty much perfectly and we still only managed to down the encounter with roughly a minute to spare. I am hoping that when the next expansion goes in, that they water down this bit of content at least for the open world variant. I think the tryhard players are probably mostly doing this as a convergence instead of joining in the open world shenanigans. I only do it if I happen to be in zone at the time it is firing off… and only then if we have decent support on both bosses. Last night just happened to be a perfect storm and we got it finished.
The best of the Renown Hearts is the Journeykin Outpost, which is what the Bearfolk call the Warclaws. Sure there is a World of Warcraft poop quest where you gather the scat and take it to the composter… but most of your time is spent petting the big cats and feeding them. The whole thing is delightful, and I would happily take care of my big kitty friends every single day. Janthir is so fucking charming. It has Grizzly Hills vibes and even the later maps are pretty nice. Guild Wars 2 usually has this problem where the early maps are a lot of fun… but some of the later maps are pure hell. I am looking at you Nayos, Desolation, etc. So far all of the Janthir maps feel fairly charming, even though you start dealing with my absolutely least favorite mob type… Bloodstone Elementals.
I did the reset Taco as usual, and there was a point where I was hanging out on voice but cracking up at the fight. Someone decided to take their fishing boat and ram it repeatedly into Tequatl. The above screenshot was taken right before they decided to desummon it and start fighting legitimately. There is just something balancing about doing the server reset Tequatl fight, and folks are generally the most chill you have ever seen. The other night we had something totally dumb where someone asked every one that could tag up to do so… and we had like 20+ commander and catmander tags running on a single map. It is dumb stuff like this that really make me enjoy this fight.
I did encounter what appears to be some sort of a bug. There is a dumb crafting mini game involving fractals where you use one miniature to craft another miniature… over and over until you have created all of the named cat golems. I had three of the Mini Professor Mews sitting in my bank and from a fractal loot box I pulled the very rare Amber Quantic Dipole. So immediately I thought I would try and craft the next Golem in sequence: Mini Mister Mittens. However for whatever reason… the Mystic Toilet is not letting me add the last two ingredients… which I have plenty of: Obsidian Shards, and Crystalline Dust. I have no clue what is going on and have checked the wiki multiple times to make sure I am not missing anything. I am guessing it is just bugged. If anyone out there has an idea of what I might be doing wrong… please let me know.
In other news… I did in fact do the dumb thing. I created a purely free to play character named Belgratis. I might buy the base version of the game at some point for the account, but mostly the idea behind this character is to have something stripped down that I can use for the purpose of writing guides. I have a very basic guide in the works that I took a ton of screenshots for yesterday and will likely massage into something that makes sense over the extended holiday weekend. Not that it will be of any value to a seasoned player… but sometimes the Guild Wars 2 interface is a bit much for players who have come from more Wow-like MMORPGs.
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