Hey Folks! Welcome to a new week… or at least I am going to try and take a positive stance even though I feel like I did not get enough sleep at all this weekend. Partially it was that I stayed up way the heck too late reading a book most nights, but even when I did stop… I still struggled to fall asleep. This has ended up creating a situation where I am fairly out of it this morning. That said it was still a very enjoyable weekend as a whole and I spent most of my time screwing around in Guild Wars 2. I also played some multiplayer gaming of a game that is under a very strict NDA, which I can’t talk about but wish that I could. Most of my gaming for the weekend was of the directionless variety, I would let a single activity direct me somewhere and then latch onto whatever happened to fall across my path.
The first of these was doing the Chalk Gerent with a big group. I don’t remember specifically how I ended up latching onto this commander, but it was during another event that I just happened across and decided to join the tag. When there is a commander in the zone, you can click on their “tag” in the map and choose “join squad”. Often times a single commander may be doing a handful of metas and when one finishes they will post the waypoint for the next one they are doing in sequence. This was the case and what ultimately led me to Tangled Depths and to do the Rata Sum lane for the first time. This is without a doubt the best lane because you get to watch a giant robot fight something resembling a Kaiju. Through their tutelage, I actually stayed around after the event and learned that a new area opened up for us to loot, and doing so gained me a new mastery point.
Similarly, I happened to be in the Seitung Province to knock out the End of Dragons daily quest and happened upon another Commander that was organizing the zone meta. Which led me to kill the boss of it for the first time and with it gained another mastery point. These are really my happiest moments in the game where I allow the chance to direct my gaming for a while. Now when I group up like this I might stay for a dozen metas or only a couple, and the free for all nature of grouping in the game makes it so that when I eventually do fade away it isn’t a big deal. I love the casual open grouping of Guild Wars 2, and it allows me to feel like I participated in something epic… without the stress of finding a group and interacting with other human beings directly. Now that is not to say that I won’t chat while we are doing things… but it is also very easy to disappear when I have become “peopled out”.
The bane of my existence right now however is Dragon’s End. This is the big meta zone at the conclusion of the End of Dragons content. This is likely the most difficult meta event in the entire game, and legitimately takes two hours’ worth of prep work before you can successfully get to the final encounter. As a result, this one is much harder to get into a group for, and when a commander starts something in group finder… it is almost instantly full with no ability to get on the same map as the rest of the team. This proves the weakness of the world event system, in that you can’t limit who is on your map to only people participating in the event. As a result, there are always going to be stragglers that are just there to smell the roses and complete some objectives… and this is really the first event where that is a critical problem.
Ultimately I want to complete the event so I can get my Siege Turtle egg… and unlock that mount which is now starting to be required for some content. In Gyala Delve, for example, you have to use Siege Turtles to break down walls and unfortunately, unlike Dragons End, there are no NPC-controlled ones that you can mount to break things down. There are ultimately two ways to get the egg, either complete the meta all the way to its final conclusion or collect 200 Writs of Dragons End and purchase one from a vendor. So while I continue to fail at getting a viable group going in Dragon’s End, I am at a minimum spending time there each day completing events that will at some point add up to 200 writs. I currently have 70 after a single day of actually purposefully trying to farm them… so in theory, by this time next week, I should at least be well on my way to a Siege Turtle mount.
Other than that I spent some more time working on Living World Season 1 on the Ranger. Since I had finished no content at all on the Ranger until recently… I decided to use this character to play through ALL of the seasonal content in the appropriate order. I was stalled out for a bit on the Tower of Nightmares which is a completely miserable place. In order to get the credit you have to do the first two floors in a public group, and this really means you need to be doing this during prime time in order to fill a team. After a half dozen false starts where I was one of only a handful of people in the zone, I stumbled into a team of around a dozen people doing the same quest… and I hung onto them for dear life. While I could have bailed early when I got quest completion, I held out and followed them all the way up the tower and got an achievement for completing it.
I also completed the story mode version of the Marionette fight, which was really freaking cool. I want to do this legitimately at some point and will need to hang out in Eye of the North looking for a group at some point. From there I am leading up to the attack on Lion’s Arch and might knock that out tonight. I’ve enjoyed Living World Season 1 quite a bit, but I think I am ready to move on with the story and revisit Living World Season 2. I remember when I first ran it, I was confused as hell as to who all of these characters I was now interacting with were. I am ready to approach it with fresh eyes after already coming to love all of the members of what will eventually be Dragon’s Watch. It was really weird to see how much of a little shit Taimi was at the start. She rapidly became one of my favorite NPC characters, but she was such a butt in these early quests. Jory and Kas used to annoy me… or more so how airheaded early Kas is, but revisiting them with the love I already have for the characters has blunted that edge a bit. Braham is still… well… Ka-Braham… and doesn’t become a fully fleshed-out character for a very long time.
I think for me at least part of what makes Guild Wars 2 so special, is that it took so damned long for me to realize what a magical game this was. I hated it for so many years because I did not understand it. I kept trying to get into it and being frustrated that for whatever reason it was not grabbing me in the same way that it seemed to grab others. Ultimately it was a frame of mind that shifted and allowed me to understand it better. So long as I kept trying to lump it in with the other WoW-Like MMORPGs, it never really worked for me. When I realized that it was way more like the Diablo-Like ARPGs that I love so much, I finally was able to grasp how it functions as a game. I wish I had been able to grasp that a decade ago… but I guess I am thankful that I finally do nonetheless.
The post Desperately Seeking Turtle appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! This is a pretty exciting week on top of wrapping up Diablo III Season 28, we had the first content drop from Guild Wars 2 after the “roadmap” and “vision” for the game going forward were announced on the 13th. This new content patch came out on the 28th, but much to my chagrin I realized that I had a library book that was going to be due on the 1st… so instead of really playing any of the new content I pushed my way through the second book in the Gentleman Bastards series by Scott Lynch. That meant last night I was entirely focused on getting into the game on my Necromancer and trying out some of the new content.
For the last few weeks, there has been a certain amount of consternation from the community stalwarts about what exactly Guild Wars 2 looks like in a “post-living-world” environment. The pattern of things in the past has been that there would be a paid expansion followed by a sizeable gap while the content was being worked on with a living world season released and then another gap until either another living world season or the release of another paid expansion. The “roadmap” instead seemed to indicate that we would begin to see smaller expansions followed by quarterly content drops leading up to another paid expansion in a semi-yearly cycle. I think in the grand scheme of things this sort of release cadence is best for growing a population of active players, but I also think the quality and detail of each single map drop needs to be significant. Not all expansion maps in Guild Wars 2 are created equal so would this be a Bloodstone Fen that folks rarely revisit or something more akin to a Drizzlewood Coast and becomes an active pillar of the community?
Last night I finished the story as it exists currently, finishing with the “Deep Trouble” mission. Something of note, I have never played Guild Wars 2 current content ever. I’ve never been caught up enough with the game to play “Living World” content as it was being doled out, so I have no real frame of reference for what to expect. What is currently in the game seems to be four story missions that lead you down into the Gyala Delve, and introduce you to the situation that is happening there. My gut feeling is that I am waiting on some sort of timer before the next set of quests drops, but in reality, I might be waiting a few months given that the next content drop is expected “before summer” whatever that means for a timeframe. I enjoyed hanging around with Gorrick, Rama, and Yao and want more of the “Best Friends Detective Agency”.
So while the story left me somewhat wanting… the zone is absolutely phenomenal. If this is the sort of expansion map that we can expect to be seeing every three months or so, I think the community is going to be extremely pleased. Effectively the map unfolds over the course of four subregions, the first of which is above ground… and then the next three regions going deeper under the jade sea into a mining pit of a sort. The further down you get the more sinister things to end up being. There is a void haze mechanic that requires you to keep renewing a Jadebot Filtration system at each outpost. Being down in the complex of caverns and tunnels eventually will use up your filter requiring you to get a new one or risk taking damage over time from the haze. Visually everything is stunning, with probably my favorite bit being that you can see aquatic life frozen in the jade walls, for example, this big whale shadowed in the distance.
What I spent most of my night doing was doing bits and pieces of the meta event that spans the zone. Essentially this reminds me of a weird mix of Drizzlewood Coast and the Chalk Gerent meta. You are following Gorrick, Rama, and Yao as they retake sections of the cave complex and in doing so make them safe from the incursion of the haze and corrupted Jade Brotherhood members. Essentially you follow the red events and they will take you through the sequence as you leave the “safe” camp up top and head to various points on the map retaking them. During each sequence, there are a number of side bosses that spawn and a big battle to take back a base. Along the way, each encounter will spawn a number of Gyala Delve Mining Caches that you can open with Jade Miner’s Keycards.
The final phase of the event involves fighting three bosses on three different platforms, so you ultimately have to split your group in order to deal with all of them. I am uncertain how this is supposed to work, but in my experience so far everyone keeps killing their boss until everyone else has killed theirs as well. I assume there is supposed to be some measure of coordination, but it feels like right now we are largely brute-forcing this mechanic until we find out something better. Over time the community will learn the best way to do this, and I have a feeling this entire sequence is going to be popular for farming the Gyala loot boxes. I managed to pull one of the unique items from the loot boxes, a Mini Void Emberknight. Completing the final event also seems to reward you with two Luxon Hunter’s Weapon Caches which include brand new jade item appearances and drop with the Ritualist’s prefix.
All told I had a lot of fun doing the meta a few times, but realistically I need to get my Ranger caught up because I think I would rather do these metas on that character as opposed to my Necromancer. The Necro is a content soloing god, but it feels like I do a much better job at being a team player on my Soulbeast Longbow Ranger. So more than likely I am going to fall back to working on catching that character up through the story. I might pop my head into Gyala once a night and try and ride the meta for a single completion or something, but I would rather be there with a different character long term. In truth, I want to get the Ranger up because it seems like a better option for ALL team content in the long run. I mean I could always respec to a more group-friendly Necromancer build… but then I would not be as good at soloing content as I am now.
Now that I have finished with the story as it stands currently, I am going to venture forth today and check out some of the community opinions about how successful “What Lies Beneath” and Gyala Delve have been received. Until I completed the story I was staying entirely away from any content about the game because I wanted to experience it all with fresh eyes. I personally think this is a good course forward with the game and I look forward to more of these content drops if this is the quality of content we are going to get. The new meta is really fun and feels extremely rewarding. The only thing that would be better is if there was an albeit rare chance of getting ascended drops. I mean that might be the case but the wiki pages for Ravenous Wanderer are not filled out yet, so I am not sure we know the full drop table yet.
Have you dipped your toes into the new story content drop? What were your feelings about it? Drop me a line below.
The post What Lies Beneath appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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.
