Guild Wars 2

As I wrote a while ago, we started doing Living World Season 4 and I am completely unhappy with it. On the weekend one part of a story instance didn’t properly complete for me (someone else’s instance) although we made sure were close together and waiting when going for a next step and now I guess I have to repeat a (long) part, this has happened for the third time now. So basically in all three acts we did I had to repeat a very lengthy part now and I don’t see how much more attention I have to pay, maybe having both computers next to each other and actually listening to the audio of the instance owner before wandering off for as much as a few steps.

I’m literally still pissed, I was looking forward to finally not having to play solo anymore and now we’re bordering on 2h wasted just to repeat something. People on the subreddit told me it shouldn’t be bugged per se, but I don’t know how much more coordination you can do… The story is nice, the rewards are good, but man do I hope needing to rerun it instantly because it bugged out…

For now we’ll probably stick to me starting the instances so that at least not always the same person who needs to repeat everything. Also if it was only a short part I wouldn’t even complain. But the three parts where it happened (The First City, The Road to …, Forearmed is Forwarned) are really long. Bah.

Not too long ago I finished Path of Fire after rejoining with my leveling partner after a few years 😛

I liked the expansion and it was fun, although it was actually a little too easy with two people. Maybe we’re still a little traumatized from Heart of Thorns at launch where we’d regularly die to a single pack while just trying to get to a pojnt of interest…

Only the final boss fight is really annoying and we died a lot, but I wouldn’t say it’s ‘hard’ hard, just.. bad? Maybe you can find out how to position yourself better and to kill what in which order, but it’s not very intuitive. I had the feeling I was always standing in something on a melee char if I wanted to hit something, the Mesmer had it slightly better.

Also what’s with the story instances and only the main person being able to click anything?

Anyway, we also found out that you can get the Jackal if you don’t have the third Skimmer skill yet (higher jumps) if a Mesmer gives you a portal to get onto the ledge so you can run up to the Heart quest (or teleport to friend also works, I guess?). I was so looking forward to this and now I’m happy.

Next up is Living World Season 4 that we plan to tackle as a duo next week, then probably try to catch up with the story, but I haven’t thought End of Dragons yet and I think we have Season 4 and Icebrood Saga to go anyway.

Today I caught another Hero Point train, sadly I was too late to get the HoT intro done, guess I should come prepared for next weekend, as those only seem to happen on the weekend. They’re advertising them as EU/NA so maybe I couldn’t actually join the NA ones?

Anyway, the Guardian now has all HPs for the full Dragonhunter spec, the Mesmer has full Chronomancer and Mirage (never tried that one) and the Warrior has Berserker unlocked. So I guess I’ll try the Necro next, as I’m not really interested in completing Spellbreaker or Firebrand at the moment, and not even entertaining Thief or Ranger.

I ground out enough Winterberries this week that I could buy an Ascended Trinket, so that’s only Backpack and one Trinket missing for a full set. Guess I should continue with the PoF story now as I am supposed to get a Backpack there.

Been focusing a little on WoW this week, but GW2 is still fun every time I log in. I really love that there’s no rush. In WoW I’d be saying “if I grind out my gear slowly it might be moot in 3 months”. Well, I actually am kinda grinding out gear in ZM, but whatever 😛

Wow, the weekend kinda flew past and there was some Guild Wars 2.

At first I just wanted to do a few events in HoT zones so I could get enough XP to complete the Mastery track I was missing, but then one meta event led to the other and I got tons of loot and achievements and the time went by so fast.

Sunday afternoon I caught another Hero Point train, for Path of Fire – and went on my Mesmer again. Also this time I managed to jot down the Discord address so I might not miss the next HoT one on my Dragonhunter.

I also noticed I kinda had enough mats to craft my Ascended Heavy Boots and nearly enough mats to also craft the gauntlets which would complete the set. Now I just needed to decide whether to give all the pieces to the Warrior (who is actively doing PoF, so it would make sense I guess?) or to the DH. In any case, his current set of Exotic/Ascended gear had 6 Rage runes so I’d have to redo the whole set anyway. This might be a bone-headed decision but I don’t see the huge difference of some rune sets that cost 6x 6g over some that cost 6x 20s if half the stats are the same or at least also “good” for that build.

I ended up buying the missing mats and also crafting the gauntlets on Monday, giving everything to the Warrior and then setting out for the big goal – finishing the Knight of the Thorn instances on my Mesmer to get an Ascended Weapon – Caladbolg. Oh boy, that included a whole of dying but in the end I made it. Bought some sigils and infusions for the weapon and gave it to the Warrior.

Ascended trinkets on the other hand are really not so easy to come by, but someone on the MetaBattle discord linked this page to someone else, unrelated to my conundrum and it’s the actual missing manual for GW2, I think. It tells you what to grind and how and I guess I might be able to get one of those with just 4-5 days of a 10 minute round for Winterberries and Unbound Magic in Episode 3 of Living World Season 3 on my Ranger, and I parked him there now. Getting the Unbound Magic means buying a special set of Harvesting tools for Karma, but I have 1.7m of that, so that’s no problem. Maybe I was already farming that back then. I certainly remembered the two zones I ported to, whereas I had completely blanked out on having started LW S3…

Ah well, the Molten Greatsword looked better with the armor, but I’m not ready to transmog Caladbolg away just yet.

On Wednesday evening I completed chapter 2 of the Living World Season 2 and again it had a horrible boss fight, but this one was at least more manageable than chapter 1. Starting to wonder if my play style with the Mesmer simply doesn’t fit this kind of content or I’m just bad. On the other hand it’s not like I’m dying all the time, it’s just not particularly fun. The story itself is great, that’s why I’m continuing (not sure the mastery points alone would be enough of a draw after this… ok, maybe until I get the third that I desperately need).

After that I did my dailies (fine as usual) and then decided to tackle PoF content on my Warrior. I’m dying less (not never) and I want to see how the story continues. The problem was that I was now blocked on the story mission in chapter 2 because I ran into a bit of a catch-22. I had spent 3 mastery points into Raptor Riding (the only thing that’s unlocked so no problem here) but I needed 3 more to unlock the Canyon Jumping (i.e. long jump) to continue. Like… hard blocked on the story. So I looked around for a single mastery point (as I had 2 of the 3 needed) and then I got a little mad at the game again. I saw a few on the map but I couldn’t get to them without the second mount, the Springer. Which was supposed to be 5-10 minutes after I had unlocked the long jump for the Raptor. Really aggravating. So in the end I went to the wiki and just looked at every mastery point in order and tried to find out if I can get them – and lo and behold, I had missed one right at the start… Grabbed that one, trained my Raptor, could jump over the cliff, got my Springer mount. That was a little painful and actually weird, but whatever. Went on a little exploration tour after than and now I have 6 spare mastery points which will be enough to unlock the first two tiers for the Springer…

Thursday night saw me finishing the third chapter of Living World Season 2, finally earning that last mastery point I needed to unlock the third tier of Fractal Attunement, so now I have a little breathing room to accumulate XP in old Tyria again. This one didn’t have a horrible boss and I continued to unlock PoF on my Mesmer because I honestly forgot how it started, having played that over 4 years ago. Apparently I’d done only the intro scenario on my Warrior in 2017 and then stopped, seeing as the Mesmer is now on the exact same story step as the Warrior was a week or two ago.

Speaking of the Warrior, I did continue a little in PoF, but not overly much. And I did notice the ‘Invitation to the “Lily of the Elon”‘ in my bags, which is a Lounge pass I got for the PoF Ultimate edition. Oh, and reading some old posts I apparently also bought the Ultimate edition of Heart of Thorns. So I guess if I either run out of gems or finish PoF in the next days/weeks and am still as enthusiastic as I was the last two weeks… maybe I should buy the Ultimate edition of End of Dragons, just to keep up with the tradition?

I am generally really enjoying the jumping puzzles in GW2 (and FFXIV and mostly in SWTOR). Unlike other games (for example some in Zereth Mortis in WoW) they were built in from the start and just feel right. Maybe sometimes a bit too lenient in regards to where you can land and not fall off, but I’m not complaining.

But I started Living World Season 2 recently and there are a few crystals to pick up which give you a 8-10s super jump and boy do I hate it. I don’t have time to think, if I am not fast enough I have to jump down and restart, and worst of all, they change your main bar so if you accidentally pick one up in a fight you might be wondering why you’re not hitting anything anymore if you’re looking at the telegraphed ground AoEs and dodging.

And then there was the “Cornered” step of the first chapter where you fight a boss and have to use those gimmicky crystals and it’s the first time since I started playing again that I wanted to rage quit and leave it. I wouldn’t even say it was hard it just the most annoying stretch of game play I have witnessed in a very long time, as a non-ranged class. First you need to grasp that you should ignore all the adds on the ground that your friendly NPCs are engaging, then you need to gimmick-jump onto a pillar and either sometimes jump to the boss’ pillar or wait for him to come. I think I needed 15 minutes for that fight and did I mention it has a few one-shot mechanics?

Seriously, this sucked so much I’m not exactly looking forward to continuing right now, but I desperately need the Central Tyria Mastery Points, so I guess I should finish chapters 2 and 3 quickly. Sigh.

Friday night I finished the Personal Story for the first time, 7 years and 1 week after I started playing and now I only have 5 of my 6 Level 80 characters stuck in Act 8. Everything up to Act 8 was kinda fine, and I did that dutifully, but Orr… there’s just something about dark, zombie-infested areas that I hate in MMOs. Flashback to WildStar’s Level 50 zones. Eastern Plaguelands wasn’t that bad for some reason.

Anyway, one thing down from my todo list but I just noticed that my chars are all over the place here. None have started either Living World 2 or 4, or the Icebrood Saga. I completed 4, 11, and 13 of 16 steps in HoT and I noped out in Act 1 of PoF. Weird. So I guess it’s: World Completion, then finish HoT, then work on PoF. And ignore the char that has done 2/3 of Living World Season 3 for now.

I also noticed that my Masteries are very weirdly distributed. I am 4/5 done with the last step of the Pact Commander tier, but I am missing 2 points to finish it then. For some unknown reason I did 2 of 4 in Fractal Attunement already while never having set foot in one, as far as I remember. In HoT I have 15 points and 2 steps in different tiers half trained and just having finished a third… and no idea why. And then in PoF I desperately need 1 Mastery Point to finalize my Raptor Mount 2. As I said, no focus and no idea.

Yesterday I actually managed to finish World Completion on my Warrior, but it nearly took until 1 am. On the plus side now Berserker is fully unlocked and I even have 15 Hero points spare.

And then again I wondered why Jeweler and Scribe only go to 400 when the rest goes to 500, and then proceeded to level Weaponsmith from 401 to 440.

Today I finished everything up the last chapter of HoT on my Mesmer and then proceeded to die horribly. Then I stood in front of the story instance entrance with an LFG up for over 20 minutes and no one joined, but I saw at least 10 people in groups of 1-2 go in there. After logging out and doing something else, then coming back 20 minutes later apparently the advert was still up and someone joined just to help. Awesome people exist. If I read the party tag right they had 455 mastery points and, like they said, had everything done in the game and were mostly helping others now. Thanks, stranger! We aced the story instance with no problem, so one of my two toons has now also finished HoT.

Then someone advertised a “hero point train for HoT” in general chat and I joined on my Mesmer. We managed to blast through 3 zones and (I think 33) hero point locations in 56 minutes. It was so disorienting that I missed a few in the first zone and still one in the second zone (had to skip one in the last because of a missing mastery). I guess I’ll join again if they do that, it’s such a time savior. So thanks, Zander the Mesmer!

Finally Belghast invited me to their guild because to our surprise this works across the ocean, despite playing on different Megaservers. Weird, but we’ll take it. Thanks, ArenaNet!

That’s the thing about Guild Wars 2. Every time I come back I play all day for a while and already now I feel the urge to buy End of Dragons and throw money at them, for letting me fully enjoy the game where I last bought an expansion in 2017.

Sometimes having a blog is really handy because there’s just no way I would remember what I was doing (as in my goals) in a game, 5 years ago – but here we are and I can read where I was in Guild Wars 2. Although I actually did remember some of the things form 4.5 years ago, and the Story Journal also provided some hints. Also, gw2efficiency is awesome.

• My Warrior still hasn’t done the last step of the personal story and the last 2 steps of HoT, I want to finish those
• Four Level 80s are at the exact same step in Chapter 8 of the Personal Story, no idea why – and the Necro is close to that, so I’m gonna bring here to the same step and wait it out then
• I had forgotten that I had progressed the Mesmer into HoT
• The Ranger has done most of Living World Season 3, he’s the only one for that
• I was already working on map completion
• The 4000 gems from buying the Ultimate edition of the Path of Fire expansion have lasted until now (have 600 left)
• Need to check what “Anomalous Occurrences” is
• maybe bring my 400 Crafting skills to 500 and then sell some leftover mats, apparently I am sitting on hundreds of gold in mats

But I’ve also found and achieved a few new goals already:

• finish crafting my Ascended Heavy gear set and maybe reroll my Helm to be Zojja’s as well
• replace the non-Exotic gear with Exotics for some chars (I honestly wonder how I managed to do HoT with 72 Exotics on my 80 Mesmer back then, apparently I was a better player or they are about as good as 80 greens?)
• 100% map completion on Warrior (86% now) and get enough Hero Points to have Berserker completed (6 missing)
• try to do the daily challenges every day where I have time to play GW2
• Unsure whether to roll a Revenant and insta-ding 80 (because I have the Heavy Armor) and atm I am not liking the Charr I made (sitting at Level 2) at all, I do have enough level boosts after all. But then again I have enough chars atm…

Overall I’m just coming back into the groove and having a lot of fun.

Now if only I could decide whether to open my Carrion Ascended Weapon box, as those stats are only good for the Necro, or if I should grab a Greatsword and reroll the stats to Berserker…

Also kind of funny that Belghast and I rediscovered GW2 at about the same time, with no mutual input. I think he started a week earlier and I didn’t see that for a week.

Been feeling a little meh regarding FFXIV lately, so I ramped up my time in WoW and… Guild Wars 2, which is a little surprising.

First of all I crafted two Ascended items, Zojja’s Chest and Shoulders, in Heavy – which means they have the Berserker prefix, which seems to be the best for a shocking amount of classes and specs, especially my Warrior/Berserker and Guardian/Dragonhunter – and I can use it on both! So for now I gave the new pieces to the Guardian because her equip pieces in those 2 slots weren’t as good as the Warrior’s and it’s not a huge upgrade over Exotics. So both of them now have 2 of 6 and I need to craft 2 more. Also I seem to drown in Laurels so I bought a second set of Ascended Amulet+2 Rings so I don’t have to trade everything around. I still have a bunch of chests I could open for Ascended crafting mats…

Then I spent 10 Tomes and brought my Necro from 70 to 80 because leveling that stretch is kinda pointless when I am drowning in Instant-Level up items. She’s still on the Level 60 part of the story anyway, gotta catch that up at some point. But seeing as most other 80s were already kinda geared I took the opportunity to open all the Chests of Loyalty that had piled up. They give 76-80 Exotics which are Account Bound, so might as well feed the Necro who needs Condi gear and not the Berserker gear that I already stockpiled in my bank. So it’s salvaging the sub 80 pieces now, using Condi for the Necro, and keeping the other 80s, for now.

Then I went off and respecced the main toons according to MetaBattle and then I’ve started to work on World Completion. My Warrior was at 79% already and I’ve since pushed that to 82%. Slowly, one zone at a time, and not more than an hour per day. I also got back into doing the 3 daily challenges for a bit, those 2g are nice, as I had to spend some on the Ascended crafting already. (I know there’s no real point in doing this, but if I have 90% of the mats already, it’s a nice goal to work towards – and I don’t really know what to spend my gold on anyway… I will surely not buy Viper’s pieces for the Necro for 16g each…)

My Thief has pretty good gear, if I trade her the Ascended Rings+Amulet the only thing sticking out are 2 Green 80 Rings, if I could get 2 Exotics here I’d call her done. Which is kinda nice, declaring gearing done, no matter if there’s a new expansion coming along. Oh, and for the Necro there’s more to do – first of all I don’t plan on getting the “perfect” Viper’s or Celestial set, a mix of “it’s an 80 Exotic with Condi” is fine for me, I can figure that out – but it’s still Chest, Hands, Offspec Weapon and 2 Accessories missing. The rest I managed to do in 2 nights, that’s stockpiling for you… The Ranger is mostly ok stuff (but no Exotics), but I’m ignoring him for now, same as the Mesmer. Maybe I am setting my goals a little too high already, for this casual thing…

While I’m not actively playing it, I am logging into Guild Wars 2 for the daily rewards quite frequently, which means I have a ton of the things they hand out for that. Not that I was lacking those things back when I was playing actively, it’s always the same stuff after all…

So today I log in and see not one, but two of the blinking twisting animated icons in the bottom right corner.

“Preorder ‘End of Dragons’ and get a free Level 80 boost!”

Hmm, couldn’t you have made it in any way less interesting?

That’s my bank. 1 Level 60 boost, 2x 50, 1x 40, 7x 30, 12x 20. 604 x “grant one level”, that would be 7 more Level 80s on their own. If I combine them in a smart way I could boost 13 characters to Level 80 right now, and the leftovers would be one more Level 34. (then I discovered 109 writs, so that’s another 5 Levels more)

I didn’t have to make this ridiculous calculation, but come on, ArenaNet – could there be ANYTHING less exciting for anyone who has played in the past than a Level 80 boost? Even an ugly mount skin would have been more interesting.

But this wasn’t supposed to be a complete rant and finger pointing. I’m probably over my GW2 days but I am genuinely happy there will be a new expansion, for all the people who still play it. I meant to keep getting back into it, but the other games seem to just be more interesting to me right now (and the last 2-3 years).

If you’ve never played GW2, you should actually try it. Sadly I won’t be able to hand you one of my 13 Level 80 boosts, but you should try leveling in a normal way anyway. At least if you’re like me, who kinda stalled out more on the whole “horizontal progression” thing at the end, that’s why I have 5 Level 80 chars (without much or any boosting), one Level 70 (with quite a bit of boosting), and 1 lowbie.