Guild Wars 2 – Page 44

AggroChat #172 – The Destiniest Destiny

May 21, 2019September 10, 2017 by AggroChat

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we have a bunch of stuff on the docket. We lead off with a discussion about Pax West 2017 that Tam, Kodra and Ashgar attended last weekend. From there we dive into some discussion about the Destiny 2 PS4 launch and how it has been consuming every moment of Bel’s game time. Another big accomplishment is that our Guild in Guild Wars 2 successfully captured the Guild Hall… and have unlocked a completely engrossing minigame in the form of upgrading it. We delve a bit into the mobile game Legendary Game of Heroes, and then veer off the deep end into some discussion about Sonic Mania and the Sonic Archie Comics. The insanity that follows continued long after the podcast… and ultimately had a bunch of us leaving the channel to avoid it. Lastly we talk a bit about Magic the Gathering Arena, their attempt to capture that Hearthstone goodness with actual magic cards.

Topics Discussed

Pax West 2017
Destiny 2 PS4
Guild Wars 2 Guild Hall
Legendary Game of Heroes
Sonic Mania
Sonic Comics
Magic the Gathering Arena

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Guildhalls and Shield Charge

September 5, 2017 by Belghast

Tonight is the launch of the Destiny 2 console editions. Technically it is launching on Wednesday but they are starting that clock at Midnight Eastern Time… which means since I am in Central time I might actually get a chance to poke my head in and check out the game at 11 pm tonight. I have not plans to do a late night marathon or anything like that, but today I am mostly wanting to show off the new artwork from Ammosart that I commissioned for my blog header. Since adding “LalaBel” to the header with the launch of Stormblood… I’ve been plotting to add something up there to balance things out. With the launch of Destiny 2 and my new love of the Sentinel Titan… I thought it would be pretty great to add a version of me charging with the void shield. The only problem here is… Ammo was working off a game that wasn’t out yet. I gathered up a bunch of screenshots from the PS4 beta, and attempted to augment them with as many relevant screenshots as I could find around the interwebs. I am super happy with the end result and she did a great job of capturing the whole “covered in void energy” aspect that happens when you are ping ponging between mobs while charging like Captain America. Now I have a version of myself as a Sunbreaker that she did earlier as my avatar… and now a really cool version of the Sentinel that emblazons the blogs masthead. I had hoped she would get it done in time for the launch and like a trooper she pinged me last night with the final version. I cannot express in words how great Ammo is at this sort of thing.. and like always you should totally check out her website and tumblr for more awesome stuff. These are of course paid commissions, so please please please don’t go pestering her for free work.

As far as other happenings this weekend… I split time between Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft. In truth I played way more WoW than I expected to be playing, especially working on assorted World Quests and Emissary missions. That said the bulk of my time was spent working on a bunch of scattered objectives in Guild Wars 2. About a month ago the AggroChat crew and friends managed to get a guild hall purchased for Greysky Armada the GW2 branch of our FFXIV guild. The only problem is… saving up the currency and influence was only the beginning because you have to in theory fight to take back the hall from the mo that had invaded it. We tried this with about five players shortly after purchasing the hall and failed miserably. I’ve talked about the process before, but functionally there are mobs that spawn in that you have to take out… and you have something like 3 mins from the moment they spawn to defeat them. The problem is that they could be anywhere on a rather large map. With five players, if we happened to be close to one of the Maws we could take it out without much problem… but the run time combined with the time to chew through the copious amount of adds meant that we were always behind the curve. Each time you fail to defeat a Maw the toxin levels increase… which is functionally a hard timer on how many attempts you have before you have to call it and try again. Monday afternoon we managed to gather up a bunch of folks and had I believe nine people working on this mission and that seemed to go so much more smoothly. I think there was one that we failed to get, but shockingly we kept knocking down Maw after Maw until we were rapidly approaching the final boss phase… where you have like 10 minutes to defeat the purple border Legendary mob that you can see me fighting in the above image.

We spent the rest of the afternoon pouring through our vaults and dredging up materials to attempt to purchase upgrades. By the time we called it a night we had a chest full and ready for a couple more upgrades… and have the guild sitting at Level 5. Basically at the moment we are favor locked, which is the currency you gain by doing guild quests. We did the Trek one yesterday which is pretty simple… and failed miserably at completing the bounty task. That one gives you 15 minutes to kill 3 mobs that are roaming around the world. Firstly the mobs are not static spawns and you have to go “find them”, and then some are spawned by doing other activities… like kicking suspicious barrels in a zone with about 300 of them. The real challenge though was killing the mobs fast enough because these spawn in as champions… and one of them was absolutely straight up one-shotting me as a Hammer Warrior which is pretty tanky in the grand scheme of things. Basically this again is a situation where we need more people on at a given time so we can spread out and then coalesce on a target when someone finds one and take it down quickly… then return to the hunt once again. I also need to see what the specifics about Hard Weekly Challenges are… to see if this is a thing we can actually manage to do. I am questioning it however given that it suggests that we have 15 players… and so far this suggestion number has been pretty right on the money.

It feels like opening up the Guild Halls has infused me with new purpose because finally I have a reason to be stockpiling all of these materials. I am just thankful that none of the materials are the ones that I have been needing for pushing Weaponsmithing up higher… which currently sits at 486. The other thing about me is I am notorious for taking the hardest route to get somewhere… and this has been true with Mastery points. For whatever reason I decided to keep focusing on the Pact Commander tree… and then once I realized what was at the bottom of that tree I just kept going. This put me in the position of needing 8 Mastery points to finish it out and gain “Advanced Logistics” that enables the Auto Loot checkbox in the options menu. What this does is allow you to stop feeling the need to hit F constantly to try and loot corpses after everything you killed. I know over the years I have left a lot of loot on the battlefield because I get caught in the heat of the moment and am busy whacking things with my hammer to notice that I had a prompt telling me to loot things. The only negative here is I am afraid this will be one hell of a way to fill my bags… but then again I have access to Mistlock for selling and banking anytime I like. Additionally as we build out the Guild Hall it will serve as a similar option some day. I’ve known for awhile that there were a bunch of Mastery points that I could get by running around Tyria and communing with certain locations. The problem is I never really did anything about it… until last night when I literally ran around and collected all of them. This gave me enough Mastery points to earn Advanced Logistics that I was after as well as enough to pick up the next rank in the Fractal Attunement tree. Overall this takes my Mastery rank to 29… which still feels like a complete newbie in the grand scheme of things. Every time you complete one objective in this game it seems to unlock a dozen more that you didn’t even know existed… which is I guess how it has kept people engaged over these last five years.

Convenience Items

August 28, 2017 by Belghast

Generally speaking I am pretty neutral towards “cash shops” in MMORPGs. I’ve come to look at them as a sort of necessary evil in a world where the subscription model is largely broken. When monthly subscription revenue stopped being able to support MMO titles… they were forced to branch out and look in other directions to figure out a way to pay for the development of new stuff. There are times where this feels largely okay… and there are other times when it feels exploitative when more limited time cash shop only content is coming out then patch content. All in all the model gets a lot of crap from the gaming community, but there are times when the benefit gained more than makes up for the generally icky feeling inside you get by having to deal with it. In the case of a game like Guild Wars 2 where there is no “player plus plus” sort of system to entice you to go back on the monthly subscription plan to get additional access to shiny baubles… it probably feels better than a lot of options. There is a lot of stuff on the gem store… most of it of no interest to me. Generally speaking the Guild Wars 2 shop is full of a bunch of convenience items and cosmetic items. The value of both is extremely personal, but this morning I thought I would talk about a handful of items that I have picked up over the years that have made my life in game more enjoyable. Something of note… in all cases I caught the items when they were on sale and did not pay the full market value.

Copper-Fed Salvage-o-Matic

This is hands down the single best purchase I have ever made in Guild Wars 2. One of the biggest problems I have with the game is that it has a constant upkeep cost… namely that you have to keep running to a vendor to buy more salvage kits and as I will talk about later… harvesting tools. Now there are times when I care about what I am getting from salvaging an item… in those times I either dip into my stock of Black Lion Salvage kits that I have accumulated… or my Mystic Salvage Kits that are extremely reasonable to make. However most of the time if the item is green or lower I just want to grind it into bits to get it out of my inventory. In those situations you are largely just going to use basic salvage kits that you can pick up off the vendor cheaply. What the Copper-Fed Salvage-o-Matic does is save you that trip and simply charge you 3 copper per item salvaged. This is ultimately a savings over the 3.52 copper per salvage from Basic Salvage Kits… but you would ultimately need to grind down something like 3 million items before saving enough money to have it “pay for itself”. The convenience however makes it well worth the normally 800 gem price… and when it goes on sale it is significantly cheaper.

Unbreakable Gathering Tools

In a similar vein to the Salvage-o-Matic… my next favorite purchase is something lumped in the general category of unbreakable tools. I harvest everything in this game, because you never know when you might need all of those Strawberries. As a result I used to have to constantly run to vendors and buy new tools… or in my case I used to carry around a stack of them taking up inventory space just in case one broke… and I was standing beside a rich mithril node. There are lots of different individual tools that have various effects on them… and I managed to pick up my first set of unbreakable tools by slowly snagging them one by one as they went on sale. As a result I have a mismatched set of a Clockwork pick, Molten Axe and Mad Scientists Foraging tool, but the functionality of never having to worry about running out of resources makes me extremely happy. They also have a way less frilly set of tools simply titled Unbreakable Gathering Tools that gives you normal looking versions of each of the tools that simply never break. This basic set normally goes for 2400 gems but over the weekend due to the Anniversary sales was going for 1680.

Mistlock Sanctuary Passkey

One of the things that Guild Wars 2 added in is a number of cloistered areas that require some sort of access pass. All told there is the Captain’s Airship Pass, Lava Lounge, Mistlock Sanctuary, Noble’s Folly, and Royal Terrace… and with Path of Fire they are giving us another one called the Lily of the Elon. Functionally they all serve the same role of giving you instant access to a condensed area that contains every possible NPC that you would need to interact with. What makes Mistlock interesting is that it doesn’t exist in the normal world map… so instead they give you a portal merchant that will take you to any capitol city in the world… or return you to the zone you were just in. I find this functionality to be amazingly useful especially when I need to just step AFK for a bit, and the ability to return me to almost exactly where I standing before is insanely useful. Where this really comes in amazingly well is on alts that maybe don’t have access to the rest of the world yet. There is one weird glitch however… if you take an alt to Lion’s Arch before the story actually takes them there… it will play the intro video as though you had just zoned in every single time you go there. The weird bit of Mistlock Sanctuary… is that it is rarely actually for sale. When it is you can pick it up for 1000 gems… but you have to watch the store like a hawk for when it is listed next. There are limited time passes available on a regular basis… but I personally only care about something like this if it is unlimited use. This may or may not be why I have a bank full of short term convenience items that I will likely never actually use…. and wish I could put up on the market board.

Shared Inventory Slots

I don’t really have a relevant image to this one… but one of the super handy things you can pick up in the game that is super cost prohibitive is shared inventory slots. Sure your bank is shared by your entire account but starting with Heart of Thorns they started giving us the ability to add a special bag at the top of our inventory with items that are shared between all of my characters. This becomes extremely handy when you say… put your Copper-Fed Salvage-O-Matic up there… or your Mistlock Sanctuary Pass. Then every single character you log into can easily benefit from access to these items. I wish the unbreakable gathering tools could work similarly… but unfortunately for those you either need to hot swap them between characters or own multiple sets. When I say these are cost prohibitive… you get one for purchasing heart of thorns and another for purchasing path of fire… then from there they cost 700 gems per slot with price breaks if you buy 3 and 5 at a time. You can in theory have 18 total per account… but I imagine most players have significantly fewer given the cost. Right now I largely use them as a way to give my Salvage-O-Matic, Mistlock pass, and my growing stack of Teleport to Friend items to all characters. In theory if I ever managed to pull one of the unlimited use bank or market passes… they would go there as well. Combined however all of these items have lowered the amount of day to day upkeep I have to deal with when playing Guild Wars 2… and as a result have greatly increased my overall happiness with my gaming experience.

Enjoy the Path

August 23, 2017 by Belghast

The first image of the evening is what happens when you catch the daily completion bonus train. I am still floored by the sheer number of people actively participating in events. One of the cool happenings of the night though is that I organically crossed paths with @vbarreirojr who was one event behind me in the progression. I sort of love the concept that happens in this game of the commander… because you can see the telltale icons on the corners of your map and generally speaking are a reasonable indicator of where some manner of activity is going on. I’m also starting to learn to get a bit better at watching chat. Often times as new events are starting up someone will link a waypoint to allow folks to jump to it relatively quickly. Through a combination of follow the catmander and waypoint jumping I managed to knock out the daily completion bonus in what felt like record time. I think part of it as well is I am starting to develop a little ancestral memory, as to which are the best areas to harvest resources and which are the easiest vistas to view to get completion and such. It’s funny how I almost look forward to the daily completion bonus because it ends to give me some focus… and from there while participating in it I come up with some other game play for the evening.

Early in the day I was talking to a friend who is contemplating trying to restart the game, and was questioning what sequence of things she needed to purchase. Firstly I think Guild Wars 2 is either something that feels good or doesn’t… and lord knows it took me five years of trying it to finally figure out the secret to being able to enjoy it myself. You can scan back through the history of this blog and you are going to find a bunch of posts that are pretty negative about this game. I wrote one in particular where I called it one of my five biggest MMO disappointments just so you have an easy reference. You are going to ultimately have to decide if the game works for you or not, because it absolutely did not for me for a very long time. However the truth that I finally landed on is that you have to forget everything you know about how an MMO works to ultimately make Guild Wars 2 work. What I mean by that is for the most part MMOs are very task oriented and involve you completing a sequence of objectives in order to move on to the next sequence of objectives. The quest is the most common version of this and that least to more quests and ultimately provides a ladder for you to traverse a given zone with. When you attempt to play Guild Wars 2 in this fashion… your brain rebels against you. There is no quest structure and the concept of hearts are what I tried to latch onto as the replacement. The end result felt like this grindy busywork as I attempted to complete my way across a zone so that I could then move to the next area, making sure to 100% everything in my path. In doing so I kept getting frustrated each time something took me off path or off whatever my current task was, and as a result I bounced exceedingly hard off of the game.

Instead I personally find Guild Wars 2 works better if you view it like an ocean that you happen to be floating in. If you allow yourself to move along with the current you get to experience all sorts of interesting things that happen along the path. Instead of staying focused on some large overarching goal… I find it works best to focus on whatever is presented in front of you. If there is an event spawning near you, go over there and participate because it often times leads its way to other events in the same zone. Instead of trying to traverse things in an A B C D E F manner… I find it just feels better to let the zone explore itself almost. Sure you end up often times going from A to F to G to C to E and eventually back to B and D… but it is done so in a more organic manner. The only negative to this approach is that I find it completely impossible to stay on task. Ultimately I started playing Guild Wars 2 like I play Skyrim or Fallout… just letting myself wander off into the horizon and check out the next shiny object in my field of view. If there is a commander on the far side of the zone… then I should probably head that way to see what all is going on. Sometimes this has lead me to zone events that I didn’t even realize existed. To some extent at times it feels like the game is playing you… but I think in this case it is probably perfectly okay. This game is full of these extremely intricate micro objectives and feedback loops to keep you caught in their gravity and constantly doing stuff. The fact that everything scales… means that you are never going to be doing stuff that isn’t potentially valuable or lucrative. Basically my advice to learning how to enjoy Guild Wars 2 is to stop focusing on the goal… and start enjoying the path.