Good Morning Folks! I realize that I have been talking a lot about Diablo IV and Path of Exile, but I have also been playing quite a bit of Guild Wars 2. I dinged 95 last night in D4 and then treated myself to some super chill Tequatl game time in Guild Wars 2… that ended up being an entire evening of “faffing about” doing random things. I feel like first it is very important for you to encompass the majesty of this cat chair that I got from the wizard chore currency. I did not expect that each of the cats would be animated individually. The void kitty in the chair in the upper left quadrant for example arches its back and yawns periodically. The Siamese below them spends most of the time peering directly into your soul. It truly is a wonder of gaming kind and I feel like I might never use any of my other equally amazing chairs while waiting for events to spawn.
Yesterday I crafted my second legendary weapon, but admittedly it feels a bit like cheating. For those who do not know the Wizard Vault has been selling these seasonal boxes for 1000 astral currency that gets you most of the way to crafting a legendary weapon. I missed out on the first box but I picked up the second and crafted the legendary sword named Bolt. This time around I picked Frostfang the Axe from the third starter kit set because I could see myself using an axe on several characters more than the other options. This box gave me the precursor weapon, a Gift of Frostfang, and a Gift of Might. That meant that in order to finish things up I would need to craft a Gift of Magic which cost around 300 gold worth of components and then assemble it with the Gift of Might, 77 Mystic Clovers, and 250 Globs of Ectoplasm into a Gift of Fortune.
The last step would be assembling a Gift of Mastery which requires 1 Bloodstone Shard which costs 200 Spirit Shards… something I have plenty of, 250 Obsidian Shards, a Gift of Exploration, and a Gift of Battle. The Gift of Exploration comes from getting 100% exploration on all of the old world zones and thankfully when you complete this you get two copies… so I had one sitting in my bank. However, I probably should go ahead and finish up World Exploration on my Ranger so I can get a pair to replace the one I used. That left the Gift of Battle which can only be obtained through the Gift of Battle Item Reward Track in WvW. I was about halfway through the reward track as generally speaking it is my default choice when doing WvW content, so over the last handful of days I have knocked out the rest of that reward track.
The thing that always floors me about WvW is how much I really truly do enjoy it. I spent most of Sunday afternoon hanging ut with a group of folks and taking down objectives in the Eternal Battlegrounds. It is one of those activities that I always enjoy, but because of my mental block against all forms of PVP in other games… I just rarely think to do it. I am way more likely to ride the World Boss train on any given evening than to pop into the battlegrounds and see if there is a group rolling around. Realistically it is an activity where you absolutely need a group, but they are common enough that you can pretty much port between realms until you find a commander tag and then seamlessly blend into the nonsense. Some groups will claim that you need to be on Discord or be kicked out of the squad but I have never personally had this happen and for the most part… you don’t REALLY need to know what is going on. Stay on the tag… and play your role which for me is Longbow Ranger and harassing the enemy from long range with AOE volleys targeting the entire team.
One of the things that I don’t love about Guild Wars 2… is that it has probably my favorite kit from any game, but it is rarely considered the optimal way to play that character. I love Longbow/Greatsword Ranger and specifically of the Soulbeast variety. While this is a great build for the open world and for world vs world… it is generally frowned upon for any serious group content as it does not provide useful buffs to the party. Longbow just feels so damned good because it does great ranged damage, has good AOE, and some fun buffs with good mobility. Unfortunately, it provides neither Quickness nor Alacrity which makes it “selfish” in the eyes of squad builders. I have this problem where in order for me to enjoy something the weapons have to “feel” good… and honestly Longbow and Greatsword feel the best and as a result, I will keep playing them no matter how bad they might be. I sort of feel like this is a problem that Guild Wars 2 needs to solve… so that every weapon combination can provide something that party play would actually want.
I got my “Catmander” tag in theory as a way around this… I thought maybe if I organized my own groups it would not be that big of a deal that I was the “selfish” player given that I was the one taking the time to organize things. Unfortunately, I have just not been able to push myself forward into taking that level of responsibility. I feel like there are just too many things that I don’t fully understand about the game and would end up just making a mess. Guild Wars 2 is a game where people give blind faith to whoever is wearing the tag… and I don’t want to feel like I am leading folks astray. Maybe at some point I will become the Catmander of my dreams… but for now I am still taking a backseat and watching.
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Good Morning Folks. I am not entirely certain that Magic Find as a concept is for me. Running the same two maps over and over is exceedingly repetitive. I guess the good news is that I am “over-sustaining” maps, meaning that if I hop back and forth between a Crimson Temple and a City Square, I am always walking away with more of those two maps than I went into the process with. The bad news is… I have the layouts of both zones and most of the variants memorized at this point. It feels to me that magic find as a concept involves trying to sand down all of the rough edges on the map running process and then speeding through them as fast as humanly possible in the hopes of winning the jackpot.
When you DO win the jackpot it feels absolutely phenomenal. I hit yet another Divine Orb dropping map last night and it was only tarnished slightly by the fact had I gone down the right path first instead of the left path… I would have also hit a duplication altar to go with my Divine Orb dropping one. However, any map you walk away with eight Divine Orbs feels phenomenal. The only negative is thus far I have yet to really see anything exceptionally rare. I still have zero Apothecary cards, and while I have gotten a couple of copies of The Fortunate… I’ve not really seen more than I did previously. I guess I expected to start seeing better uniques than what I have gotten to this point but that hasn’t really worked out. I am not expecting to see a Headhunter or a Mageblood drop, but I did expect to start seeing more tier-three uniques and maybe a few tier-two ones.
There is no denying however that it has made a sizeable difference. If you look at my PoeStack this morning, I have officially dug myself out of the hole created by pouring forty Divines into this build. Granted a lot of currency is locked up in pools that are a bit harder to liquidate, but still, I am almost back to the same amount of raw Divine Orbs that I was previously and have enough Chaos to comfortably cash it into Divines as well as a haul of Delve merch that I could sell quickly. It isn’t so much that Magic Find… at least doing so outside of a party who is also magic finding… is that dramatically different from other methods, it is more than it adds up over time. I am consistently getting more of everything which also means that I am seeing more rarer items as a result.
I still greatly prefer Delve to Mapping, but I’ve always had to at least rely somewhat on maps to fill back up the Sulphite tank. Now instead of just running a bunch of random maps, I am approaching the sulphite refill process a bit more methodical as I burn through the maps quickly on my Magic Find Lightning Arrow character. I do somewhat wonder how viable it would be to try and build a Magic Find character in the Guild SSF private league we are considering. The core magic find items are common enough, that I would just need to devote a tab to collecting them for the three to one recipe until I wound up with something good. I do wonder if Deadeye and Lighting Arrow are going to eat a bit of a nerf considering just how wildly popular that one build was in this league.
In other news, I ran my first Trial of the Ancestors in well over a week and was rewarded with a Divine Orb in the next to the last round. I guess that means I might be getting up high enough to start seeing good rewards. Kodra has managed to run a Sanctum all the way through, and that is one thing Magic Find has produced more Sanctum Tomes. I am contemplating trying one out with the state of my Lighting Arrow character to see just how fast I can burn through it. It is really good at making things explode and is also VERY fast moving. I feel like my POB is probably underestimating how much damage I am dealing because other than tanky bosses… I am pretty much making entire screens evaporate.
Anyways! Tuesdays are hard. I hope you all have a great day and are having a pretty great week. The weekend seems so far away at the moment.
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Friends… I’ve been struggling with something for the last couple of weeks. For the Trial of the Ancestors league, I decided last minute to make a shift in my normal routine and start the league as a Lightning Arrow Raider. I spent time right before the league launch leveling one as a test, and then ultimately decided I could live with the consequences of playing a much faster… but much squishier build. The truth is… I could not. I almost immediately missed being able to spend my time farming my favorite league mechanic… delve. Before the end of that first week of the new league, I had already started leveling another Righteous Fire Juggernaut and was happy as a clam farming delve. For the most part… I had considered the Lightning Arrow Raider a bit of a failure and that I should have stuck with the tried and true Juggernaut.
On some level, this made a lot of sense. I love the Righteous Fire Juggernaut so much that I have now played it for three leagues, and even went so far as to get my friend Ammo to draw my particular chosen appearance for the blog banner. What makes this even more complicated is how intrinsically attached this character is to my favorite game mode… because I love spending my time bopping from node to node down in Delve. It is super hard for any other build to compete with this… pending it is not also a super tanky build that can survive down there. The thing is… I knew going into the Lightning Arrow Raider that it was going to be a deeply mapping-focused build and as a result, I knew that it would have limitations. While I considered it a failure… it did manage to gather up enough currency to be able to outfit itself in gear, and fund all of the starter gear I needed for the Juggernaut and then still some to spare… as well as unlocking over half of the Atlas of Worlds. That really does not sound like a failed state to me if I view it through a bit more neutral lens.
To some extent… it also isn’t really the problem of the build because I knew there were some glaring holes in my itemization and I was not really willing to invest the time, effort, and more importantly currency to fix them. I can deal without Chaos Damage being capped given that I am mostly zooming around maps. What I could deal with significantly less so… is the fact that I was doing nothing to fix my ailment problems and at the same time invested NONE of my Divine Vessels into actually unlocking a proper pantheon. I treated the character like it was disposable… which as a result produced a feeling that I was playing something impermanent in the way I approached it. For as little effort as I really put forward to fixing its problems, it probably performed even better than it should have.
So last night and this morning I swapped around a bunch of gear, in an effort to try and solve some of those problems. Essentially up til this point, I had been using Wurm’s Molt to solve some of my attribute problems since this build is STARVING for Strength and Intelligence. Essentially most of the gear swaps were an attempt to stop using this damned belt and move over to something more fitting like a well-rolled Prismweave. One of the first steps was a necklace swap because I needed some raw attributes as well as some minus mana cost along with a less-than-ideal anoint that I am using to fix intelligence problems. This led me to look at quivers and I stumbled onto the extremely interesting Shattered Divinity which gives me a pet Harbinger that casts useful buffs on me every 4 seconds. I made the swap from Shadows and Dust which gave me Rampage and Unholy Might over to Tanu Ahi which I had in my vault which gives me Adrenaline and Onslaught.
Lastly, I finally spent a large chunk of currency and picked up Ancestral Vision which makes me officially elemental ailment immune. All of this combined with finally taking the time to get a Cast when Damage Taken/Immortal Call set up in my gloves has led me to a point of dealing noticeably more damage and adding a few more layers of survivability. I am officially off the radar at this point and veering further away from what most of the other Lightning Arrow builds look like, but I am also adapting it to feel more like something I want to play. I have to say all of these changes have breathed new life into the build and made it enjoyable to run around once again. Hopefully, I can stay alive long enough to pour on a few more levels and pick up an additional frenzy charge.
Sometimes a failed build… is really just a build that I gave up on. I think I was simply homesick to be back down in Delve, and cut this off a little too soon. We will see how things go from here because I am just about out of liquid currency and need to spend some more time making it before I dive further into my Storm Brand Inquisitor.
The post Sometimes a Failure Isn’t a Failure appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday I made it through the campaign on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and by the middle of the night I was back delving which makes me very happy. I burned through a lot of my available currency kitting out my character in gear in order to make my resists work. I purposefully tried to overcap resists by a bit because at some point I hope to swap out to a Brass Dome with +5 to maximum elemental resistances and that will mean losing the resistances that I currently have on my 5-link corrupted chest. Other than that I could probably due for a sceptre upgrade at some point, and then I definitely need to find a pseudo-six-link helm. Those however can wait because for now… I need to get my money printing machine up and running that will fund the rest of my adventures.
I’m very much in the early stages of breaking into Delve and getting my resistances up enough to go down further. I’ve been down to around depth 85 and have done just fine, but my resists are a bit puny for me to go diving down dark tunnels as I am used to doing. Once I get down to around 100 I will finally start seeing a lot of content in the side tunnels and hopefully some cities. There is one already on the map but I have to figure out how to approach it as there is no direct path that I can see. I think that is probably why I enjoy Delve the most, because it offers bite-sized adventures with promised loot at the end. It feels way more stable and reliable than mapping does in general.
When I last talked about my map progress I think I was around 73, and as of this morning, I am sitting at 88 of 115 maps completed. Essentially each time I shift over to run maps for sulphite I am trying to unlock something new. I’ve actually managed to get quite a number of the unique maps out of the way which feels really good. I did miserably fail one of them, but it was a T16 unique map which is always painful. Mapping still feels good on Lightning Arrow Raider, but she is way squishier than the Juggernaut which is to be expected because there is a massive difference in killing power.
Since I am spending way more time in Delve, I am starting to pivot away from Essences and towards Niko missions and Sulphite. I think I think once I finish picking up Niko nodes, I will shift towards picking more Legion on the tree or maybe Blight since the Raider can do those a lot better than my Juggernaut ever could. I think what I dig about having a proper map blaster is that if I decide to dive into mapping a bunch, I can pivot back without much issue. However what I have missed the most is the reliable currency generation of Delve, and the Raider just was not a Delve-friendly character. So much of what comes from Delve comes from careening down dark tunnels looking for treasure, and you really need something sturdy to be able to do that.
I am also still doing the occasional tournament for the league mechanic, and those mostly go smoothly. I’ve not won a tournament outright since crossing the 200 rating barrier, but I am also not really using a mechanic to cheese things. I do well enough to get several rewards though, but last night I saw my first six-link and missed winning it by losing the final match. I did pull a five-link earlier, so it seems like I am starting to get into better rewards territory in general. I feel in this weird place so far in that I have two highly functioning characters but am also mostly broke. Hopefully, a week of focusing on just doing some mechanics to get some stuff will help change that trajectory. Once I have more currency to play with, I will probably start rolling some more side projects.
All told though I am having a lot of fun. I feel much better now that I have my Tankyboi back in the repertoire of characters.
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