Good Morning Folks! Last night I wrapped the Janthir Wilds main story and this morning I am going to talk about some of my impressions. Some of this discussion will probably get into spoilers, so I am giving you all a proper warning now. So once I got past some of my early complaints about pacing and story being gated by mastery tracks… the flow of the content went fairly smoothly. There were several “fill the bar” moments that I still do not love… and will continue not to love for eternity… but the story instances themselves were pretty great. After Secrets of the Obscure, this really feels like a return to peak ANet and I would put this up there with some of my favorite content like End of Dragons, Living World Season 3, and Living World Season 4.
The challenge is however that we only got what is effectively the first chapter of a story that is going to be doled out over the next year in three more chunks. The first half of Icebrood Saga was amazing… but the hamfisted reliance on Dragon Response Missions to tell the rest of the story essentially ruined the entire experience. Basically, I am saying that I have a lot of hope for where we are going… but that there is also plenty of time for it to be fumbled completely. I largely enjoyed the first content drop for Secrets of the Obscure but pretty much hated it once we entered Nayos. I am hoping that they can keep up the pace and gravitas of the story that is laid out before us, because there are a lot more characters now that I already care about than I did in SOTO.
A huge chunk of the story revolves around us mentoring Poised Arrow, aka “Poky” the son of the current Lowland Kodan Claw Stoic Alder. He is very much the role of the brash young warrior who wants to prove himself… and the story beats at times feel DANGEROUSLY close to how our relationship started out with Braham. The key difference is however that “Poky” has a loving family, and while he is missing his mother greatly… he has a surrogate mother figure whom he has bonded with. As a result, this leads to someone who can be reasoned with in ways that we never seemed capable of reasoning with Braham, and is not necessarily driven by an overwhelming sense of angst but more a drive to find ways that he can help his people. I admit I’ve grown fond of the “cub” during this expansion and am hoping that he joins our larger entourage. It is however making me miss the rest of my team greatly, and I am hoping at some point there is a “getting the band back together” sequence in our future.
Right now we have two maps, both of which are gorgeous and feature a ton of content… some of which are fairly well hidden like the Bee hive that I highlighted at the top of this post. I’ve completed exploration of both of them and gotten doodads for crafting legendary items at some point. There is a thick density of events, and a lot of them are champion-level mobs that take a decent-sized group to drop them. I do wonder how this content will age as time goes on and the quantity of players dwindles. No content in Guild Wars 2 ever truly feels dead, but there are definitely less popular areas. For example, it is pretty hard to get a Gyala Delve meta going these days, and the last several Dragon’s End runs I have attempted have failed.
Speaking of failing content, the centerpiece of this expansion is your battle with two Titans: Greer the Blightbringer and Decima the Stormsinger. When you get into Janthir Syntri there is a world event that fires off every two hours as a “storm” arrives and Greer attacks from the SouthWestern corner of the map and Decima from the NorthEastern corner. One of these is MUCH harder than the other… and I keep throwing myself at Greer in part because I know as ranged that melee is largely useless there… and it is also the one with significantly lower turnout. I feel like this fight needs to be tuned a bit because right now I have participated in three attempts… all of which with Commanders leading the charge… and all three have failed miserably. I feel like this is a lesson that ANet has not learned yet… and should stop listening to the most tryhard voices in the crowd and realize that Open World content is Casual content. Wasting fifteen minutes of your time failing an event is fun for no one.
It is also a bit of a harsh contrast to how these fights feel in story missions. You’ve “defeated” both Greer and Decima at this point and both of the fights were largely you going through the motions and coming out a winner on the other side. I am not necessarily saying that the World Boss version should be an absolute cakewalk… but if warm bodies show up and participate it should fall over like most of the other World Bosses do currently. Guild Wars 2 has a massive identity crisis because playing the game like you would literally any other MMORPG, means you are also putting out one-tenth of the damage output of the highest damage player. That gap should not be that wide… but it is because playing Guild Wars 2 means you are expected to do some unintuitive things regularly for the sake of optimization. This is the next major bridge that the game needs to reconcile because the chasm is too wide at this point between the haves and have-nots.
Last night I also completed the Falling Star questline, which is a new sort of thing that ANet is trying. Essentially you buy the Falling Star Quest License from the Wizard’s Vault for 1000 Astral Acclaim. This is the same amount of Wizard Chore currency that you need to buy one of the Legendary Weapon starter boxes for example. You are then started down an achievement path that feels significantly more like a normal MMORPG quest than pretty much anything else in Guild Wars 2, including quest markers on your map indicating where you should go for various steps of the process. Essentially doing the quest chain does not require a huge outlay of time or gold and will end up with you getting a pair of Meteor Wielder’s Ascended Gloves in your armor type of choice, the Falling Star Ascended Spear, and the Heated Core Infusion which triggers the molten appearance of the spear weapon. Technically the infusion comes installed in the gloves but I am itemizing it separately given that Infusions are so overwhelmingly expensive and this one comes with +5 Power and +9 Agony Resistance. Well worth the 1000 Astral Acclaim and in total it took me maybe an hour to complete because I did not have any of the required old world renown hearts unlocked.
All told I am pretty happy with the start of Janthir Wilds. It gives me two new playgrounds to roam around and three mastery tracks to start chipping away at. I am hoping that either the World Boss Meta event gets watered down slightly, or folks figure out how to push through the mechanics a bit faster so that collectively the community can start clearing it. I need to sort through the achievements and see what I can reasonably knock out. I’ve not done any of the mini-games yet, and need to at least get silver in each of them to earn mastery points. I am very interested in seeing how the next few chapters of this storyline go. It feels fairly similar to Dawntrail honestly, where we have taken up this mentorship role over a brash youth, and while the stakes are high… they are maybe a little less world-ending. However, I do really want to see us building our retinue of characters up again and moving towards the next major objective on the horizon.
Anyway if I were to give the expansion a numerical grade, I would give it a strong 8 out of 10 currently with the ability to top that out if they land the next content drops over the coming year.
The post Janthir Was Pretty Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I’ve been a bit frustrated the last few days, but that is only because I was trying to rush ahead to unlock my Homestead in Guild Wars 2. Out of all of the features coming with Janthir Wilds, that was the one that I cared the most about. Unfortunately, it is behind a few grinds and I already do not love the “fill the bar” mechanic when it comes to questing in modern Guild Wars 2, and the fact that it was holding back the feature that I really wanted to play with only served to make me a little hyperbolic. For anyone curious the order of unlocks that comes into the expansion is Warclaw which happens almost immediately, next up you have to learn how to use the spear, and then there is a whole ton of faffing about and learning the new Rift system for Janthir.
Finally, you get to visit your Homestead. I wish they had shifted up this order a bit because I personally do not care about the spear or at least don’t care about it right now. However, I am sure there is someone out there who really wanted to use it and was happy to get access to it so early. Also for reference immediately following the Homestead section you are going to be asked to earn a Mastery level with the Warclaw, so you might as well start chipping away on that in the time between learning that system and learning the Spear. Thankfully thought, Homesteads are well worth the wait and basically everything that I had hoped Garrisons would be in World of Warcraft back during Warlords of Draenor. Of note… if you are like me and have a ton of stuff that you have collected in your Home Instance over the years… you will need to leave and re-enter after completing the intro quest before any of that shows up.
One of my favorite dumb features of The Homestead is the fact that all of my characters are milling around doing random things. Granted in order to make this happen, you will need to get into the practice of logging your characters out in your Homestead. However, when you do so, they all show up and hang out there. The only thing that I really wish existed was a custom keybind just for popping up the instance portal. If you have it set as your active doodad, you can use the default keybind for that but I really don’t want to sacrifice my rift finder tool for faster access to The Homestead. Even though the Rift Finder tool appears to be broken… which in itself added a lot of frustration to the step between unlocking the spear and finally getting into your Homestead. I’ve honestly not dabbled in decorating that much, because I am also focused on leveling up the Homestead mastery so I can unlock the collection chests. At the maximum rank, you will be able to hit a single chest for each item type and collect all of the resource nodes that you have in your Homestead… which will greatly simplify my daily routine of gathering all the nodes. I am hoping we get something similar for Guild Halls.
I also love that all of my mounts with my chosen skins and dye jobs are milling around at the stable. It is sort of weird when you choose to mount up, because they will do a little spin and then disappear and reappear as your mount. Another really cool feature is the crafting bench for homestead crafting… works like ANY other crafting bench and gives you full access to your bank. This means if you have the Krait Obelisk you will be able to pull out Quartz Crystals without having to go find a bank. I WISH they would wire the Obelisk up to just draw from your bank directly, but given how old that is… who knows what that would require to make it work?
By default, the Homestead will have a day/night cycle, but you can talk to the Bear Bro at your teleport location in order to permanently set this to either day or night if you like. I have mine set as of this morning to perma-night largely because it has some amazing aurora effects up in the sky. I tend to be a night person anyways and there is more than enough light to navigate by. Eventually, I am sure I will utilize some lighting effects which will make everything look a bit more dramatic than flat ambient lighting. Mostly I am working on unlocking masteries before I fiddle around with anything too deeply. Each mastery rank you gain unlocks additional crafting options, and some of the later ones unlock additional areas of your Homestead that you can start using. However, that last rank and the collection boxes are my real objective. I am sorry Bearkin… but your nonsense is going to get leveled the last because I care the least about any of it.
One of the first things that I did yesterday once I found out it was a thing… was troddle off to go tame a Juvenille Warclaw, which can be found behind all of the buildings at the Warclaw paddock in Lowland Shore. I immediately named this Warclaw Josie after one of my cats, the one that is more “mine” than shared between the two of us. I can’t say the Warclaw is anywhere near as effective as some of my other pets, but I am very much using it by choice for the time being. I still have my Sky Chalk as backup, but how could I not use a cute Warclaw as a proper Ranger with a kitty-eared hood?
In the same paddock area, you can find a Warclaw Cub/Kitten in one of the pens and you have the option of petting it. Which of course is precious as heck and I did several times. I was hoping there was the option of feeding it… and inviting it back to my home instance and thereby my Homestead like you can with other cats in the world. I need to get serious at some point and collect the rest of these because while I have a handful of them… I by no means have them all.
Unlock order frustrations aside, I am having a heck of a lot of fun playing this expansion. The zones are really well designed, and the music feels like it is taking deep notes from The Witcher 3. There are a ton of Champion monster fights out in the zones and folks are regularly taking these down. A number of the fights require you to use your Warclaw in interesting ways. There is a lich/hag sort of monster that summons maggots and you have to charge around and stomp the maggots with your Warclaw to transition her between phases. There was a corrupted Reindeer that would charge off at various times during the fight and you would have to chain them down to fill a breakbar in order to transition back to a normal battle phase. Given that you are handed your Warclaw almost immediately upon entering the zone, this feels great… unlike mechanics that are centered around Skyscales and such in other areas when there is a clear dichotomy between haves and have-nots.
I’ve made it to the second zone and taken down the first of the big bads of this expansion. I have no clue how deep this initial foray is going to go. On the 20th ANet released a roadmap for the planned drops along the way during this expansion. Essentially the launch of the expansion aka this week, and whenever Update 1 happens… I figure in three months roughly… are going to focus on the story surrounding these first two zones. When Update 2 drops we will get a third map and then Update 3 a fourth map and the conclusion of this story arc. Lowland Shore and Janthir Syntri are both pretty large zones and have good layouts which should make them fun to bip around and run events. As far as I can tell there is no Meta for Lowland Shore and the major boss is the Lich/Hag thing I was talking about earlier. I am not far enough into the second zone to really know what the lay of the land is there, but I think there is a big World Boss there from what I have heard.
For now, I am focused on getting map completion, collecting all of the mastery points, and then obviously leveling said Mastery tracks. At some point, I need to finish up another World Completion on one of my alts so I can get the Gift of Exploration that comes with it. I also need to dive back into WvW and farm up another Gift of Battle, because those are the only things between me and crafting Twilight. I guess I now have a clear focus in Guild Wars 2 for the first time in a while. I am pretty freaking happy about that.
The post A Better Garrison appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday was a rather rough day, and I never actually got around to writing a blog post. So this morning you get a bit of what I would have written about yesterday and a bit about what I would have normally written about today. So on Monday, I spent a lot of that post talking about how I was largely done with my alts in Path of Exile… then proceeded to spend a bunch of time leveling my Widowhail Deadeye and liking it quite a bit better. The heart wants what the heart wants I guess. Basically, I did some super chill yellow maps… got a bunch of levels… which started to fix some of the issues with the character. I still have awful defenses… and I wasted a ton of regret orbs trying to flip to a more crit-based version… but I am back and happy with precise technique and trying to keep my life totals below my accuracy.
I currently have the weirdest passive tree I have ever had for a bow character. I’m getting a lot of mileage from an Unnatural Instinct jewel currently, which is in part what has prompted some of the weird pathing. My hope is to respec things a bit, gain some more levels, and add in another elemental cluster jewel down in the lower quadrant, freeing up one of my other jewel sockets to maybe add in a Light of Meaning Jewel wherever it will have the most benefit either going for Life, Evasion, or Fire Damage. This build is a bit like trying to make “Fetch Happen” but I am having fun doing my own thing here that again… far as I know no one is actually trying. My life and defenses are still awful but it is softcore and I am mostly okay with dying occasionally on my alts.
In other news, I am creeping ever closer to my shiny pvp mount in Final Fantasy XIV. I have not been doing the daily roulette as religiously as I should, and I might spend some time this coming weekend just grinding it out the rest of the way to victory. I have to be honest… as often as I have run PVP Roulette for leveling… I really wish I had been cognisant of this rewards track before now. There is no telling how many things I just failed to collect and missed out on along the way. I am looking forward to raiding again this weekend because last Sunday we had the original four of Ashgar, Grace, Thalen, and me but then picked up Solaria who was piloted by Ammo because world travel was disabled. In theory maybe this weekend we can get Ammo on her off-server character giving us six of eight total players.
In Guild Wars 2 news, I am largely resigned to not making it through Secrets of the Obscure for the time being. I am basically at the end of the 5th chapter and then had a whole other chapter in Nayos on top of that to finish before moving on. This was such a weird content drop because some of it I liked quite a bit… and other bits I was not feeling at all. I feel like we were supposed to care about the Kryptis, but it reminded me entirely too much of the whole Vampire Courts thing from Dresden Files. In those books, Harry ends up aligned to the White Court at times for reasons that are deeply spoilery, but also in part because they are only sexually and emotionally abusive… as opposed to just straight-up murdering, devouring, and/or potentially wearing victims like fashion accessories. Guild Wars was trying to do something with this story of having a redemption arc for monsters… that just never really landed for me.
Janthir Wilds on the other hand so far seems amazing. I am all about hanging out with a delightful group of furries… err I mean Bearkin. I have a type when it comes to favorite zones… and this is absolutely playing directly into those interests. Grizzly Hills for example in World of Warcraft was such a pure joy to quest through, and I would go so far as to state that maybe Lowland Shore is one of the best zones Guild Wars 2 has at the moment. I’ve not gotten terribly far into it because I spent way too much time being a short-order cook last night for a bunch of hungry bears. I was hoping to get far enough to unlock player housing… but I did not even get far enough to unlock spears.
That is honestly probably my only complaint thus far is that the main story quest chain hits a brick wall when it asks you to level up the mastery that unlocks spears in order to continue. I was already working on the mastery that allows you to do more things with your bouncy kitty mount. So I closed out the evening hopping around the zone doing events, and hunting down a few of these mini-boss tundra beast encounters. I have no clue what the zone meta looks like if it exists, but I have heard it was pretty “spicy”. I am in no massive rush, but I would really like to get player housing as an upgrade to my home instance. I had enough Astral currency to pick up the next Legendary Weapon box… which has Twilight in it… which is probably the next one that I will craft because pretty much every character that can use a Greatsword is currently using one. I am building up a backlog of these because I never crafted the Juggernaut. There is also a weapon quest up on the Astral store, that I will probably devote the next 1000 points towards because from what I understand there is a really cool interaction between the weapon and the gloves that it comes with.
All told though, I am already feeling way more positive about Janthir Wilds than I did about Secrets of the Obscure. The zone design so far is just better. I get what they were trying to go for with SOTO, but flight-required maps are a bit frustrating given that it was not like they just handed you the Skyscale. It still took a lot of effort to unlock it, whereas from what I can tell here… you are pretty much just handed a Warclaw in a similar manner in which you were just handed the Raptor in Path of Fire. I already had my Warclaw from the WVW Track so this mostly amounted to me just getting a new skin to play with. It was cool that I got some cosmetics given to me for having already completed that before Janthir dropped. I will probably be back playing quite a bit of Guild Wars 2 in the coming weeks.
The post Boisterous Bear Buds appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
As I talked about in yesterday’s post, we were essentially in a holding pattern waiting for the announcement to drop for Guild Wars 2 Expansion 5. This sort of leaked out in drips and drabs throughout Monday and Tuesday morning, and then finally landed with the trailer showing up officially on YouTube around 11 am CDT. The leaks seemed to be entirely correct, most of which came from a Polish magazine article that jumped the embargo. I gotta say right off the bat, I don’t love that the expansion does not follow the X of Y naming scheme. It should have been “Wilds of Janthir” but pushing that eye twitch aside… I freaking love the logo. I especially love the animated version that shows up in the trailer. Mostly JW is going to be an awful abbreviation and I am scared of what the community at large is going to call it.
The trailer is super good, however, and I gotta say that they nailed the features of this expansion. I will elaborate on those in a bit. A hype trailer needs to evoke a sense of mystery and make you want to dive into that expansion. It also needs to tease enough features to begin you daydreaming about each of them, and I think this trailer nails that in spades. We got enough of a sketch of the plot to hold us over until the expansion drops in August. I think it is interesting that we saw Caithe and I kinda wonder if each of these micro expansions is going to essentially feature one or two characters that we know from the dragon cycle while introducing characters to new or lesser-known characters. I thought it was cool that we are apparently going to be running around with Malice Swordshadow and Countess Anise again… which should be a hilarious combination. Anise is legitimately one of my favorite characters in Guild Wars 2.
First up… let’s talk about my favorite expansion for the feature. PVE Warclaws are a great idea and I admit that I have found myself riding one around on more than one occasion because “Battle Cat” is a strong desire for anyone who grew up with MOTU. More than this though I feel like this is going to be awesome for players who want to dip their toes into the World vs World game mode. WvW without a Warclaw is sort of miserable. We all did it and we all limped along behind the mass of players trying to collect all of the bits we needed to finally craft ours. This is going to flatten that curve significantly and make it much easier for folks to get started into the fun side of that game mode. Few things feel cooler than riding in a clump of players thundering across the plains on their Warclaws. I would love to see this mount take up a similar role to the Siege Turtle in PVE combat of helping to break down objective obstacles.
Next up we have the Homestead… which honestly I thought was maybe a bit of hopium. ANet has already said that our home instance nodes are going to transfer to this system, which I hope means that we can maybe place them in a single area for efficiency’s sake. More than that I am hoping that we will be able to earn resources for our new “home” instance. I am assuming this is going to essentially be a baby version of the Guild Halls which hopefully means we got a good deal of control over the placement of cosmetic items. It would be cool if these had a similar evolving system that uses the Scribe tradeskill to upgrade your home. From a profit standpoint, this should unlock all sorts of things on the Gem Store for players to buy for their “player housing”. This is a cash cow in other games and I cannot see it being anything but that here as well. I am hoping all of the trophies that you can earn for your Guild Hall, can be placed in your player house as well.
Probably the piece I am the least excited about is the addition of a new weapon for each class. I never really liked using spears in underwater combat, because melee underwater felt like ass. However, it does seem like they are playing heavily with the definition of what a spear can be based on the varied class-specific animations that they show off. Like I am assuming that the charging wolf slash thing has to be a Ranger-specific ability for example. We will have to see how this shakes out in the long run, but as someone commented on Mastodon yesterday… we’ve not really had good spear skins for a decade now so there is going to have to be a lot of catching up cosmetic-wise to rival the feel of other weapons.
As far as the zone look and feel goes… I am getting DEEP Grizzly Hills vibes not just in the types of terrain but also the musical choices of the trailer. I am hoping this was absolutely intended because that is still one of my favorite zones to spend time in while roaming around Northrend in World of Warcraft. I love that we are getting more Kodan goodness… or in this case “Bearkin”. I love me some Stoic BearBois and am ready to help them out. I am hoping this also means we have Quaggan however… because the symbiotic relationship between those two races in the Shiverpeak Mountains is always something I have loved. It feels like there is going to be a lot of verticality to these zones which should be really fun for Skyscale riders, but less fun for pretty much everyone else that has not gone through either process of unlocking that mount. I am amped to see what the zone metas might look like in these areas… because really at the end of the day that is the “special sauce” of Guild Wars 2 that no one has managed to capture.
I am super happy that the team seems to have been able to nail the yearly cadence as the new expansion is dropping on August 20th. The preorders are up with $25 for the Standard edition and $50 for the Deluxe edition which comes with a set of tentacle monster themed unlimited use gathering tools, an extra character slot, and some sort of special table that we will be able to use in our homestead. As always there is a $75 Ultimate Edition available which essentially comes with $50 worth of Gems for the cash shop allowing you to basically get those for half price. I gotta be honest if you are new to the game that $75 pack is probably worth it because you can then turn around and use those 4000 gems to unlock various living world content which is essentially like their own expansions. A set of infinite gathering tools is roughly $30 worth of gems so even there… you are getting a pretty good deal by bumping up from the $25 Standard to the $50 Deluxe. I am probably way more free with spending money on Guild Wars 2 since it does not have any sort of recurring subscription fee.
You will notice that I did not mention raids, and honestly… that is mostly because I have yet to do ANY of the previous seven “wings” as the community refers to them. Maybe at some point, I will get into that, but for now, I don’t have enough friends playing regularly and at times I could participate in order to embark upon that system. Maybe my new found boldness from Pandaria Remix will translate to Guild Wars 2 and I will actually start using my damned Catmander tag. Even without taking Raiding into account and the announcement of some sort of new PVP Game mode… there is more than enough here to make me exceptionally hyped.
Have you been following the Janthir Wilds announcement? What were your thoughts? Drop me a line below.
The post Janthir Wilds Announcement appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
