This week, the newest part of Guild Wars 2′s Living Story, the Secret of Southsun, was launched. New events in Southsun! A new storyline! New items, both in the gem store and as drops! A new activity!

Of course I went to check it out as soon as I got home from work the day the patch went live.

The first thing you will notice, if you haven’t been back to Southsun Cove in some time (which I had not; I stopped going there for anything but Guild Bounties when they removed the rich orichalcum node), is that things have changed some. Actually, you’ll notice that before you even get there – when you talk to the NPC near the ship in Lion’s Arch, you will no longer get a choice of waypoint to be transported to, but instead you will arrive through a waypoint located on Pearl Islet. An asura gate there back to Lion’s Arch is certainly a very welcome thing.

The biggest thing is the island is far more built up now – settlements for the refugees are all over the island, the previous outposts are larger, there’s a fancy new resort on the southeast part of the island, and Sawtooth Bay is now dominated by a Crab Toss arena. There are also a number of new NPCs around, and talking to certain ones will get you different buffs – talking to a Consortium Negotiator gets you a gold find buff, while talking to a Settler Negotiator gets you a 200% Magic Find buff. These only work while in Southsun, but are handy to have – and not just for the buffs themselves!

Part of the achievement list for Secret of Southsun.

Several (well, many) new achievements have been added as part of this section of Living Story, and this is the main way that players are guided through the content. This part I actually dislike quite a bit. Let’s be real – the achievement list here acts as a standard quest log, but with less information about what you’re doing and why you are doing it. And the fact that it is presented in such a way means that players will simply treat it as a checklist – okay, need to do five events with the Consortium buff, done, move on to the next. It’s an easy way to keep track of what there is to do, yes, but I am not a fan of the way they chose to present this.

That said, the rewards you get for two of the achievement tracks are worth it, in my opinion – backpieces that have unique skins and an infusion slot. For collecting ten of the eleven samples, you get the Fervid Censer, and for completing 25 Southsun achievements (a far easier accomplishment than you’d think), you get the Sclerite Karka Shell. Both are account-bound, which is quite nice.

I won’t lie, as a sylvari lover, the Fervid Censer is my favorite new item added to the game. I promptly transmuted mine onto my ascended Fractal Capacitor so that I could wear my pretty flower and keep the correct stats, too! Sure, I can’t infuse it further…but as I didn’t want to anyway, no loss there!

Liusaidh is a pretty pretty flower <3

Among other things, it’s worth checking out the diving goggles in the karka hive again – they have a hilarious new achievement of their own, the resort south of Pearl Islet will have you encounter a certain noble from the human personal story wearing not a whole lot (with some very interesting conversation), and crab toss is entertaining, if not completely confusing. The Southsun Supply Crates are a rare drop that are quite neat – I got one as a drop the first day and got a mini – and they can also be bought in the gem store. Veteran karkas are now guaranteed to drop karka shells, and there are new Blooming Passiflora that are guaranteed to give Passiflora flowers.

That said, it isn’t all perfect. First of all, I feel like Secret of Southsun has fallen into the same trap that the previous Living Story releases have, which is too little released at one time. If you’ve got an hour or two to spend in-game, you can power through what’s available so far – I had 25 achievements completed and both backpieces in no time whatsoever. The content so far is very story-light – certain things are happening but thus far there’s no hints as to why they’re happening. You get some backstory from talking to NPCs, but not a whole lot. There are new events around the island…but the ones I’ve seen consist of “destroy the crazed creatures”, “defeat the instigator”, and “protect the victim from attack”. They really don’t differ from that at all, and they’re all on very short cycles which will often lead to multiple events going on at the same time in the same area – not always a fun experience. The events scale pretty well, but you will be fighting a lot of veterans and champions, and they hit hard, so events crossing each other can be quite painful.

The other big issue I have is one I had before with Flame and Frost, but I think it bothers me here more. Once you complete the achievements, you’re left going “okay, what now?” The frequency of events, amount of drops, and the fact that you’ll be running around Southsun with either a high gold find or magic find boost has effectively turned the entire island into one big farm. Follow the events, kill the things, get your money and loot, rinse and repeat. It’s highly reminiscent of how groups will follow events through Orr, or do nothing but chase metas. As someone who does not enjoy farming, and gets bored extremely fast hopping from event to event and meta to meta, I do not enjoy this at all. The next part of the Living Story release is on the 28th, but having completed what’s on Southsun so far, I don’t see myself really going back there a whole lot between now and then.

Overall? I do quite enjoy the Secret of Southsun. They’ve certainly learned from our previous trip to Southsun Cove, and things have improved quite a bit since then. At the same time, though, I wish we had more meat to this story, as right now it feels like we’re just snacking on sweets – it’s tasty, but ultimately it’s made of nothing. It’s definitely worth making your way down to Southsun if you haven’t yet – if for nothing else, to get those backpieces! What do you think of the Secret of Southsun so far?

It is done. As of this morning, this is what my character select screen looks like:

Yes, I have completed my Legendary, that I wrote about wanting to get not too long ago. I made Kudzu, the longbow, for my Ranger, and along the way learned a lot of things! Not just things about how to make money quickly in-game, but also more about my playstyle on various professions, and also things to do when you just need to take a break from the work.

First of all, it did not take nearly as long as I had expected. I started working on it back in mid-January, and as I had written in my previous post, my goal had been to finish by August 25th. It is now March 12th – it took me just under two months to complete. Having done this once, I think I’d be able to do it again…which is good, as Bifrost has caught my attention again. Most importantly, I’ve learned a few important things about how to go about getting a legendary in an efficient manner.

My first tip is to pick a legendary that you like. If you’re going to be spending this much time and money on a weapon, pick one that you like the look of – even if it means that you’re getting one for an alt instead of your main! My main is a Mesmer. I am not fond of the legendary greatswords, Bolt and the Minstrel do not suit her at all, I don’t really use scepter or torch at all, and Quip is…well, Quip (I actually do not think it’s as ugly as most people do – I think it’s a hilarious weapon. However, again, it does not suit my Mesmer at al). Bifrost I love, but I had started that one before and stopped for reasons I’ve written about already. That, and I don’t use staff too frequently on my Mesmer anymore. Kudzu has always been my favorite of the legendaries, so it’s no surprise that’s the one I chose to make, even though it required leveling my Ranger.

On the flip side, if you do decide to make yours for an alt, make sure it’s a profession you enjoy playing! Luckily I fell in love with my Ranger once she hit around level 50. Just like you shouldn’t make a legendary you hate, don’t make one for a character or profession you dislike.

Yes, that’s my pet on the wall behind me…no, I don’t know how it got up there.

Second, finish map completion ASAP. You need 100% map completion to craft a legendary, so you may as well get it done early. You get a good amount of money from completing all of the hearts, not to mention the zone rewards. In higher level zones you will receive exotic armors, which can be sold for gold (or if you get particularly unlucky like I did and get ones worth 40s, salvaged for ecto). You are also going to need all of those skillpoints for the bloodstone shard and for getting your mystic clovers.

Learn to at least tolerate World vs. World early on. I am not a fan of WvW. I have not had good experiences there. But completing that 100% is part of map completion…as well as those pesky badges of honor you need. There are multiple ways you can go about getting those. Some people have good luck with getting them from fighting and taking on groups. I personally have never had any luck with that…and I don’t enjoy it anyway. Where did my badges come from? The jumping puzzles. There is one in each borderlands, as well as the one in Eternal Battlegrounds. Completing them brings you to a chest that gives you a number of badges depending on your level – at level 80 I was generally getting 4-5 from the borderlands puzzles (as low as 3, as much as 6), and between 13 and 18 from the EB chest. The borderlands puzzles are very easy to do; the EB puzzles is much trickier, being probably one of the hardest jump puzzles in the game. However, the way it is set up means that a fall doesn’t generally mean you have to restart. And if there are friendly Mesmers around, even better – a well-placed portal can skip you past the vast majority of the puzzle!

Just be careful, though, because while my experiences are that most people consider the jump puzzles neutral territory (I have definitely done a borderlands puzzle run alongside someone from Sea of Sorrows and another from Sanctum of Rall with all of us just letting the others go on our own way), there’ll be the occasional fight that breaks out. My advice: if you see someone from another server, make a friendly emote at them (/wave or /bow). If they don’t reciprocate, it may be better to  back off until you have some allies with you. If they do, then it’s generally safe to proceed.

Chuck it all into the Forge…and get a shiny!

Work on mystic clovers first. These are, no lie, one of the most frustrating parts of the process. I’m not a fan of the Mystic Forge – I think it’s a cheap cop-out way of doing things. And I’m not fond of how so much of this game is RNG based. Clovers are, at least, one of the kinder RNG gambles in the game – if you don’t get the clover(s), most of the time you get tier 6 mats in return. This isn’t guaranteed, of course – there are also mystic coins, ecto, lodestones, crystals, obsidian shards, and bags of treasure in the loot table for what can come from a failed clover attempt – but most of the time, if you don’t get a clover, you’ll get some number of t6 mats out of it, and having a decent chunk of mats already helps greatly when it comes to getting those stacks completed.

Connected to that, use the 10 clover recipe as much as possible. Yes, throwing 10 ecto at a time into the mystic toilet can be a painful experience. However, the rewards are much greater – 10 clovers, or up to 40 mats. Once I started seriously working on my clovers, I got far better results out of the 10 recipe. Still, it’s all probability, so everyone’s results will vary.

Save, save, save! You need a lot for a legendary. Full stacks of each tier 6 fine crafting material, tons of karma, 100 gold for icy runestones, on average two stacks of ecto…and that’s just the common ingredients. As tempting as it may be to sell these things for quick cash, don’t – not unless you’ve got all you need! At that point, of course, sell away.

Try leveling an alt. This may seem like weird advice, as leveling characters is not always cheap. However, hear me out here. First of all, if you have a short attention span like I do, playing on another character can help refresh you and keep you interested in your goal. It keeps you from burning out on always playing the same character. And, you’re going to want those skillpoints. I used my main, my Mesmer, to get the bloodstone shard (200 skillpoints). I used my alts for the skillpoints required for the crystals and philosopher stones for making mystic clovers. It’ll also be very helpful for the next tip:

Mix things up a bit. Don’t just farm the same things over and over and over – not only will you get bored, but you’ll hit diminishing returns quickly. Find a few things you enjoy doing that are bringing in money, and rotate between them. For a while I did lots of CoF. Then fractals, then Orr, now the meta-events, while swinging back towards Orr with regular dungeons mixed in…it will be a grind. There’s really no other way to put it. But sometimes it’s best to sacrifice a small amount of efficiency to keep things fun.

Don’t be afraid to take a break or splurge a bit. Saving up all that money is hard. But don’t feel like it can’t ever be touched for anything ever and you can’t ever treat yourself. I bought my thief the human t3 top not long ago, because I’ve been wanting it for her since before launch, and why not? Last week I spent about 15g on my necromancer, buying armor skins and unlocking dyes once she got to level 80. Did it set me back a bit? Sure…by like three days. But it was worth it, because not only did I get two characters looking awesome, but like anything, treating yourself occasionally is a good thing.

Last, and completely optional, work on it with friends if possible. Myself and my two [TWIT] co-leaders have been doing our legendaries together. I probably would have given up on mine long ago if I didn’t have both of them working on it alongside me. Not because we’ve been helping each other out (which we have been – I wouldn’t have finished today if they hadn’t helped!), but because if you get frustrated at something, you have someone else that’s doing the same things you are, and understands why you’re frustrated, and can sympathize. It’s not monetary support that’s most important here – it’s the moral support.

Also, it’s really helpful when you’re manically running dungeons to get those tokens.

Now, this isn’t really a guide or anything, and knowing me I’m sure that there’s something I’ve forgotten. Rather, it’s just a collection of tips based on what I’ve learned in crafting Kudzu, things that I can make use of to be better prepared for when I do start actually working on Bifrost (that one will be a truly long-term goal as, having completed one legendary, I’d prefer to just take my sweet time on a second). The most important advice of all is to set goals, but to not worry too much if you don’t meet them, and don’t work so hard on it that you begin to hate it. If you stop collecting for a while, the stuff you’ve gotten will still be there.

Good luck – trust me, it’ll be worth it in the end!

Since people have asked about the precursor: I purchased mine on the trading post. Any gold weapons I got as drops I salvaged, any exotics I sold, and I simply saved up the 360 gold that Leaf of Kudzu cost. They can drop from meta-event chests, and since those guarantee a rare or better now, they are more than worth doing, but the best thing to do is just save money and hope for the best.

As I mentioned not long ago in a blog post, I am working on a legendary weapon. In fact, several of us in my guild are currently working on them in tandem – AJ is making her Dreamer and just needs her precursor, I need about 135 Badges of Honor and the precursor for my Kudzu, Optimus and Greibach are both working on Kraitkin and have their precursors and several gifts, Elixabeth’s closing in on her Flameseeker Prophecies…and those are just the people with blogs I can link to. We’ve also got a Bolt, Rodgort, Predator, and Frostfang in the works, that I can recall off the top of my head.

There are components that are universal to each legendary weapon, and among those are the tier 6 fine materials. You need a full stack of each t6 fine mat. I can tell you right now, that that is a very daunting and expensive task. There are specific places you can farm each, but they are rather rare drops, so building those stacks by simply farming the mats is going to be a long and boring task. Thus, several of us turned to a different source, one that was made far more common in the January patch: Heavy Moldy Bags.

There are a variety of the heavy bags available, each dropping from different types of mobs and containing a different set of materials. Heavy Moldy Bags are generally the cheapest of the heavy bags – most of the other types of bags have a chance of dropping cores and lodestones, whereas the moldy ones just drop fine crafting mats; their ‘rare drop’ is Giant Eyes, which, while nice, are neither as pricey nor as in demand as lodestones are. Between the facts that moldy bags are easily farmed and have a decently high drop rate, are cheap, and contain only fine mats, makes them very desirable.

And this was the route that several of us decided to use to make up the bulk of our t6 material stacks.

There are advantages of going about it this way. They are not terribly expensive. When their price peaked recently and I was putting in buy orders of 3s10c, I was still paying under 8g total for a full stack. Anything that you get back out of the bag that you do not need can be resold to recoup a decent amount of money – when I started buying the bags, selling back the T5 mats, gossamer, and leather was making me back about half of what I paid for each stack; by the time I was finishing my mats, I was actually making a small profit on each stack I bought. And you do, indeed, get a good number of T6 mats out of the bags.

How good is that number? Well, after AJ and I had each gone through a few stacks, I had the idea that we should start tracking the drops that we were getting out of the bags that we purchased. I had noticed some trends, and wanted to see if that was just my luck, or if more data would correlate with these trends. And so began our little project!

Our data currently consists of the bags that four of us have purchased; as of right now we’ve opened just shy of 7700 Heavy Moldy Bags. So, as you can see, this is no small number that we’ve gone through here. At the end of each stack (or two or however we bought), we’d record in a spreadsheet how many bags we bought, as well as how many of each mat we got out of the bag. From the bags we’ve opened so far, we’ve gotten a total of 9880 materials, giving us an average of 1.29 items per bag; the chances of getting more than one item per bag are, thus, pretty damn good. Out of those 9880 mats we’ve gotten, 7831 have been tier 5, while 2049 have been tier 6.

A ~21% chance of getting a tier 6 material is, indeed, very good, considering the money you’re putting into buying the bags, as opposed to just buying the materials straight-out. And those chances get better when you take a look at the individual mats that you get:

There’s no denying that most of what you get will be silk, both leathers, and gossamer. The silk and thick leather are basically the garbage drops of these bags – they’re so common that you can’t even sell them on the trading post. Still, if you’re leveling crafting, it’s worth keeping some around; I wound up merching most of it after I wound up with three stacks of silk scraps. Gossamer and Hardened Leather are nice because while they’re not worth as much as the other T6s, they’re still a nice bit of money back, as both are needed for crafting exotic armors, as well as some legendaries. The T5 mats are going to be, on average, worth between 1.5 and 2s apiece, so you will make back a good percentage of money from reselling those. The T5 essences themselves are worth a nice amount – around 5s on average – and are worth far more than the T6 essence.

The raw data from our drops.

The real surprise, and something I had noticed on my initial bags before we started tracking this, was the spread of T6 mats and how common each type is. I had noticed I had been getting very few Ancient Bones, a larger number of Powerful Blood and Elaborate Totems, and middling amounts of the others. Which was perfectly fine by me! Ancient Bones are relatively common as drops if you spend any time in Orr, at one point selling for as low as 20c apiece back after launch, whereas Totems and Blood are the priciest of the T6 mats; Totems tend to stick in the 20s+ range (they’re actually significantly down right now!), and Blood spiked up to 30s recently, after having dropped to about 17s a few weeks ago.

Doing a little math, the bags that we purchased cost about 230g. The approximate value of the T6 mats gained from them is between 193 and 211g (calculated with the current and usual value of Totems); the T5 mats, minus the silk and leather, average to a bit more than 66g, and simply merching the silk and leather gains another 3.25g; the total value adds up to between 263 and 280g.

Thus, overall, this does work out to be a rather viable way of gaining T6 mats! You won’t fill out your stacks entirely this way, most likely, but it is a good way of padding them a significant amount; I combined the bags that I personally went through (3250 heavy moldy bags) with the mats I got from failed clover attempts, drops I got in fractals, dungeons, and Orr, and low-balling some buy orders to finish up everything to get my stacks completed. Sure, it wasn’t cheap. I probably poured about 150g into that. Still, it was significantly cheaper than buying the mats straight-out; about 75g cheaper than just buying the mats themselves. And that doesn’t even count how much I made back from selling off my T5 mats, and then the T6s I was getting after finishing that stack! All told, my T6 mats cost me approximately 70-75g, after reselling materials. Not bad, not bad at all! A fraction of what buying them straight-out would have cost, and much preferable to farming until my eyeballs fall out.

The prices listed here will, of course, fluctuate over time. I can’t guarantee that the approximate costs will always remain about what they are as of posting this. Still, when prices on an item fluctuate, they don’t tend to spike sharply in price and stay up for very long – when something spikes, it’ll come back down pretty quickly as well. Same for when an item dives in price; it’ll generally go back up after not too long. And if you’re working on gathering T6 mats, it may well be worth looking into purchasing and opening a few stacks of bags – because it does help, a lot!