So this week, we got a pretty big update in Guild Wars 2. The biggest part of the update was guesting being added in, but there were a lot of other changes – dungeons being changed a bit (no more graveyard rushing!), fractals were updated to prevent disconnects ending a run and so you can do levels higher than you are, and daily achievements were reworked.

Guesting is awesome. I’ve been able to do PvE stuff, other than dungeons, with guild members that are not on Jade Quarry. I like the changes to fractals – being able to reconnect if you disconnect is nice, and the fact that I can do fractals at level 10 means that my group can still get their daily rewards and I can progress, and everyone wins! That allowed me to finally reach level 10 myself, which made me happy. The dungeon change was…interesting. I’m not sure it makes things more difficult…but it does certainly keep you more on your toes. I still have some quibbles with it – some of the encounters that were supposedly reworked feel no different (such as Detha’s chain in Ascalon Catacombs), and I think that if you die in a place you cannot be ressed you should be able to waypoint out…but it’s a change that happened.

And then of course there was the changes to daily (and monthly) achievements. Now, I do my dailies nearly every day. I use it as a way to help level up alts, and I definitely enjoy the bonus karma you get from them. And I actually liked how before it was always the same thing – it made it very easy for me to get them done if I was short on time, because I knew that simply running from Snowblind Waypoint to Icegate Waypoint in Gendarran Fields and then back again would complete them for me.

On the other hand, for how easy it was to complete, it could be very mindless at times. I do, however, very much like the new system, and I especially love the new reward system.

I get the feeling from some of the dailies we’ve had so far since the change, that ANet is subtly saying “Hey, you’re supposed to do these things to play the game well”. Things like ressing dead players and dodging attacks. The crafting one is super-easy for anyone that’s a crafter already…and a way to introduce crafting to people who haven’t tried it yet. And then there was the one that was to simply talk to the laurel vendor.

Laurels, by the way, are a new currency that you earn for doing dailies (and monthlies). Each day you finish your dailies, you earn one laurel; you get 10 for completing your monthlies. They are an account-bound currency that functions like karma; it’s not an actual physical item and is non-tradeable. And I have to say, I really like the addition of laurels.

Some of the items you can buy with laurels.

There’s a pretty big variety of things you can buy with laurels, and the prices are actually surprisingly reasonable! Five laurels, for example, gets you 10 Unidentified Dyes. Three will get you three Obsidian Shards. You can buy bags with three fine crafting mats for a single laurel (there’s a bag for each tier). You can buy WvW siege plans. There are two whole panes of ascended items – all of the ascended rings that can be obtained in fractals can be purchased here as well, for 35 laurels. And then there’s the ascended amulets, which thus far are only obtainable here, and are 30 laurels each.

Everyone who doesn’t like fractals but wants ascended gear: your wishes have been answered. Frankly, this is something that should have been in once ascended stuff was introduced. There always should have been another way of getting them. Not everyone likes fractals, but wants the extra stat boosts. You can also get a variety of infusions with laurels, ranging from the standard stat bonus ones, to magic find and gold find boosts. These infusions do not add agony resistance, but for those who don’t care about or don’t enjoy high level fractals…it’s a much, much easier way to get infused ascended items without being forced to grind out fractals.

I really, really like this. I’m not a huge fan of fractals. I do them fairly regularly, and I was very happy with the update as it meant I could do stuff with my primary play group again, but it’s not my favorite content. I still prefer regular dungeons to fractals any day. As I’ve only just reached level 10, I’m already at a disadvantage as I have no agony resistance, I have no ascended items. I’m not counting on anything to drop for me, and I’ll probably be saving pristine relics to buy a ring. However, this gives me another option for getting these items. All of us will be getting an ascended amulet at the same time. I won’t feel left out or underpowered there.

Oh, and that everlasting cat tonic? Yeah. Just saying. Soon as I have my Bud of the Pale Tree…I’m saving for that.

Also, don’t forget – you still have time to enter in our signed CE giveaway!

There are times I look at what I’m doing in Guild Wars 2, and tell myself “Verene, you’re crazy”.

This is one of those times.

I’m Legendary hunting again.

Back in November I had decided I really, really wanted Bifrost. AJ had also decided she wanted it, so we decided to work together. Mats had been dirt cheap at the time, so we both were able to buy up a lot of it – I had everything for the Gift of Energy, all of the Opal Orbs and half of the Crystalline Dust for the Gift of Color, a decent number of unidentified dyes, both Artificer and Cooking maxed out early on…I was making decent progress. We both were. The stickiest parts were going to be the badges of honor, getting the precursor, and of course that pesky Gift of Zhaitan – we’d done Arah Explorable once and it was not a fun experience.

And then the price of T6 mats and dyes skyrocketed. Once dyes reached 16 silver apiece, we decided that getting that staff was a pipe dream that would never happen. We sold off all of our mats, making a huge amount of profit. And I, personally, decided that a Legendary was never going to be in the cards for me again.

Fast-forward to now. Mat prices are still high, but have come down a slight amount since we sold off everything. We’ve both gotten our map completions, meaning that there’s only one badge on the login screen that’s not filled in – equipping a Legendary weapon. For me, that one open spot is going to bother me until it’s filled in. Then AJ decided that she needs the Dreamer for her Thief…and as I get weirdly competitive at times, I went looking at Legendaries again.

And fell in love with Kudzu again.

Kudzu has always been, from the start, my favorite of the Legendaries. I had the Dryad Bow in Guild Wars 1, and it was my favorite bow skin. I make a point to re-skin my ranger’s shortbow to the Living Shortbow whenever I get a better one.

However, there are so many reasons I’m hating myself for this decision.

First of all, I have two Rangers. Neither are level 80. One is a level 30 norn, and the other is a level 11 sylvari. Sylvari will be more appropriate for this bow, but I want to give it to my norn. However, this means that I don’t even have a character leveled up to use it.

Second, Ranger is definitely the weakest of the professions. Sure, I could level my warrior and give Kudzu to her…but there’s not a chance I’m giving that gorgeous bow to a teeny asura. I’m really hoping for a Ranger update to make playing mine more palatable, being as I’ve got 50 levels to go still.

Third, I had the precursor before and sold it. I had gotten Leaf of Kudzu out of the end chest during Lost Shores. I had sold it for 75 gold at the time, as it wasn’t going for much. It’s now up to about 400 gold, last time I checked. I am kicking myself so hard for that.

Fourth, I have a habit of selling off excess mats and items regularly for cash. Not a week and a half ago I had sold all of my T6 mats, ancient wood, and mystic coins. Yup, regretting that one hardcore.

Fifth…Mystic Forge and my luck with rolling the dice. I am now up to about a dozen attempts at Mystic Clovers, between when I was working on Bifrost and now. I have four Clovers. AJ has said that she had better luck using the recipe for 10 clovers, but I’ve gotten nothing from that. The T6 mats you get when you don’t get Clovers are nice, but I have this sneaking suspicion that I’ll finish my T6 mats before I have all of my Clovers.

Current mat progress for gifts – one day of farming. Not bad.

Still, I suppose I’m not doing horribly. I finished up Master Crafter quite a while ago. I did finish my map completion a couple of weeks ago so I’ve got the Gifts of Exploration. I’m about a quarter of the way there on my Badges of Honor, and if I do the EB jump puzzle a few times a week those’ll build up quickly – more quickly than actually trying to kill stuff in WvW. I’m sitting on about a half-million karma, between the jugs I’ve been hoarding and what’s available on the three of my four level 80s that have been to Orr. I do my dailies every day so my coins will build back up. I’ve got fractal relics I can turn in for obsidian. Once the update goes in where we get achievement tokens for doing dailies, that will make getting the obsidian shards even easier, as I’ll have three sources to get them from. I’ve got more than enough gold for the Icy Runestones at the moment. I’ve got nearly enough skill points on my Mesmer for the Bloodstone Shard (I’d have enough if I hadn’t bought every skill available), and I’ve been using my other 80s to get the Clovers. If I do one more run of Twilight Arbor I’ll have my Gift of Thorns, which is so easy to be a complete non-concern at this point. And I’m slowly making progress on my T6 mats. I’m a good chunk of the way into my Gift of Wood and Gift of Nature – the hardest part for those will be the total of two stacks of ancient wood I’ll need. I have plenty of orichalcum I can sell off for that, though, so I’m not hugely worried. They’ll likely be the first gifts I complete.

I’m not even worrying about the precursor yet. I’ll continue doing my dungeon runs and fighting Claw of Jormag, but I’m not expecting anything good out of the chests – I’ll still be socking away my cash to buy it. Maybe the scavenger hunt will come in before I get enough for it, but I’m not holding my breath on that one. Still, precursor will be the last thing I buy for this, I think.

It’s definitely a long-term goal, but it’s one where I can see the end in sight. It won’t be done this month, or the next, but it’ll be done. If I have it done by August 25th (the one year anniversary of the game), I’ll be happy. If I have it done sooner, even better!

Now, to level that Ranger…

So we just got a new Guild Wars 2 blog post…announcing something that pretty much everyone’s been waiting for since launch. Guesting is finally coming! It’ll be in as of January 28th.

However.

There’s a very big “but” included with that announcement.

Guesting is still locked to the data center that your home server is on.

This means that if you play on an NA server, you cannot play with people on an EU server, and vice versa.

I’m not going to lie. That does really bother me. I have a ton of friends on EU servers – including the friend I played through all of Guild Wars 1 with. We were all waiting for guesting so we could finally do stuff together.

So much for that.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m really excited and happy that guesting is finally in…but that fact really sours it. The community is international – my guild is hugely international, with a lot of people on EU servers. When guesting was originally spoken about, it was implied that there’d be no restrictions on what worlds you could guest to. I understand there are probably technical limitations for it, but being as the trading post, character names, mail system, and so on are all fully universal across all worlds…why not this?

Yay for guesting! However, boo on still being locked out of playing with a large number of my friends.

So, I have this theory. I reached this conclusion recently during one of the many dungeon runs I do on a regular basis, after opening yet another chest.

Treasure chests in Guild Wars 2 are really nothing more than the garbage cans of the enemies we’re fighting – full of mostly junk, with the occasional real piece of gold that got tossed out on accident. Sure, you might get a rare weapon or piece of armor, or maybe a core or lodestone…but chances are, all you’ll find is blues, with a disproportionately large number of pieces of pirate armor.

I think that this is what made me come up with that theory.

See, the reasoning for this is because drops and chests in Guild Wars 2 work on an RNG (random number generator) system. Whenever you kill an enemy, or open a chest, the GW2 gods roll a giant billion-sided die. Whatever number it lands on corresponds to a specific piece of loot and ta-da, you get your goodies!

That may be a slightly simplified explanation, but sometimes simple is the best. Also it gives me the mental picture of the Tyrian gods playing D&D, which is always funny.

Anyway! I’m not opposed to RNGs in general. I’m a tabletop gamer, I know the capriciousness of the die and I can appreciate how a single roll can change things. However, that doesn’t keep it from being really, really frustrating at times.

I’ve always been known for having terrible luck when it comes to dice rolls. Generally, if someone’s going to fail a roll in my group, it winds up being me. One time a fight I was in was stretched out about five times longer than it should have been simply because I kept failing roll after roll. So I’m used to it, and the feeling that the dice are always weighted against me has definitely followed me into Guild Wars 2. However, here it has slightly different consequences.

For example, last night I got two rare items as drops, and a third for completing a story mode dungeon for the first time on a character. These are the first rares I’ve gotten in about a week and a half. Whereas the rest of my group generally gets at least one per dungeon run; sometimes more *cough*Opt*cough*. I have yet to get a single exotic as a drop, outside of the Lost Shores chest. Globs of Ectoplasm are required for crafting exotic weapons and armor, rare and exotic jewels, legendary weapons, and a number of other things. The only way to get ecto, other than buying it on the trading post, is to salvage rares and exotics above level ~70 and hope for the best.

The nature of the RNG means that rares and exotics are, well, exceptionally rare as drops, and that means that it’s difficult to get ecto, which makes it hard to craft or buy exotic-level weapons and armor.

An example, from my guild. Opt, who is quoted above in the screenshot from chat, has exceptionally good luck with drops. He’s been able to make exotic jewels for all of his level 80s. Whereas I have very poor luck with drops, and thus far have been able to make exactly two pieces of exotic jewelry. I was able to craft a set of exotic armor for my Mesmer, but that was back when rare mats had plummeted in price, ecto were 13s, and I could afford to buy the mats I needed. If I had waited until I had enough ecto to craft the set, I’d still be waiting.

Some people say that magic find is the answer. I have a set of magic find armor. I have piles of Omnomberry bars. The truth is, our experiences have shown, is that magic find does not help you all that much. Increased chance for drops also means increased chance of garbage drops. White armor above level 80 has a chance to salvage into t6 mats, but I really don’t need a stack of porous bones whenever I go out into Orr – which seems to be the only thing that I see increase in drops when using magic find.

Rather, I’d like to see a tweak of the RNG that’s used in dungeons – or at the very least, for chests. Rares and exotics drop with (relatively) high chances in the Fractals of the Mists, even low level ones. For a while every chest I opened in Fractals gave me two golds. Of course, even that changed quickly so that all I was getting was greens, but even so. Make it so that chests in dungeons and after defeating dragons are actually worthwhile. Increase the chance of getting a rare out of there. If you’re doing high level content, then you should be getting rewarded for it.

The other solution could be to adjust how ectos can be gained. I don’t necessarily mean make them be something that can be dropped from enemies (though that would be nice), but maybe something like a small chance that they could be salvaged out of high level greens. That would then make items that otherwise would just be garbage/vendor trash actually worthwhile and useful.

Treasure chests shouldn’t be trash cans. They should contain actual treasure. And right now, because of the RNG, they don’t.

So this past weekend in Guild Wars 2 was the Lost Shores event, a large update that added a new level 80 zone, a new dungeon, new stat and item types, a refer a friend trial weekend…and a three day event chain.

Now, I love ArenaNet. However, it’s pretty clear that they tend to both vastly underestimate the number of people who will be concurrently playing their content, as well as being highly ambitious – overambitious even. And it’s both of these things that came together in a nasty snarl this weekend that caused the events to not go off as they should have.

Things kicked off Friday afternoon with an attack on Lion’s Arch. Awesome idea, I must say. LA is a large city that is essentially a trade hub that links all of the main five races together, as well as many of the minor races. Of course any attack on the city would be immediately defended! However, where this fell short was the fact that the entire event took place in a very small area. Lion’s Arch is huge – and yet the entire attack event happened in a small area around Claw Island Portage Waypoint. Because of so many people in such a small area, this resulted in a huge amount of lag and disconnects for people. At one point there was a tweet from the Guild Wars 2 account saying to try mapping out of LA and then back if you were encountering a lot of lag.

That did work…to an extent. You have to break combat to waypoint somewhere, and all it was effectively doing was moving you to another overflow. Parties weren’t joining overflows together, this meant that you lost your event progress…and even the least laggy of overflows (we eventually got on a good one) was still full of lag.

The followup scavenger hunt was also something of a mess; the first step was utterly vague and we had only stumbled on what to do on accident. The next steps had other issues – one had so many people surrounding it that the “intimidate the NPC” event would not trigger completion for many people who then had to sit there through several more attempts, and one NPC broken entirely. I eventually completed it, but now I have three useless items in my inventory, with no idea if I should keep them or delete them.

The Saturday event I was not able to attend due to work, but from what I’ve heard from guildies, it was essentially a non-event; it didn’t go off at all on many servers or bugged out. I had been annoyed about having to miss it initially but it bothered me less afterwards due to how it went. I missed another mini scavenger hunt but I’m also not fussed on that.

Sunday’s event though…this is where underestimating and ambition crossed to make things a horrible mess. The idea behind the event was awesome. The mechanics of it were amazing. A huge group event that ranged over half the zone that consisted of planting explosives in a karka hive cave, finding the Ancient Karka (basically the broodmother/queen), chasing it back home through a number of smaller events, weakening it with the explosives, fighting it even further, and then one of the coolest finishers to a boss fight ever…by all means, the event had the potential to be great.

However.

It was just too big. It took two and a half hours to complete on the overflow I was on. There were major issues during the first stretch of the fight where massive numbers of karka would suddenly render, oftentimes right on top of you, and instantly kill you. Rolling karka were frequently impossible to notice until they steamrolled you down. That part alone probably over an hour, simply because no one could see what was going on and people were dying too quickly to res and hence there was a lot of running back from waypoints.

A very common occurrence during this event.

Stage two was finding the Ancient Karka and driving it back home to the cave so we could blow it up. The process in which you did this was actually very cool – the Ancient Karka itself could not be defeated directly at this point, so you had to start out by getting it’s attention by literally dropping a tree on it. Another step was destroying nests to pick up debris that you threw into steam vents to bombard the karka. Between these steps though, were the ones that were a mess. Defeat the reinforcements!

Oh dear.

This is where the biggest problems, for many of the people I was playing with, happened. There were so many reinforcements and so many people fighting them that the lag hit…and this wasn’t lag like before. No, this was lag where attacks and skills were not firing at all. This was lag where different people had different amounts of event progress showing. This was lag where you would have no idea what was going on or where you were, and suddenly drop to defeated from full health in an instant because you’d been getting beat up on for some time but simply weren’t aware of it. This was lag where /say, /party, /guild, /squad, and etc. chat were not working. This was lag that I had never seen the likes of before – I’ve had lag issues before in Claw of Jormag fights where it’d take a second for my skills to trigger and go off…but never lag so bad where I would break out of combat between attacks or skills going off. Essentially this was lag where it rendered the game unplayable.

Eventually, a few of us did stop, found ourselves a nice safe cliff face to sit on, and claimed it as Mount Twit.

Optimus’s armor broke…and yes, I had to screenshot this. Teehee.

The final phase – destroying the webbing covering the explosives, chasing the Ancient Karka down to the bottom, beating the crap out of it, and then finishing it off – was the smoothest part of the event, ironically enough. I don’t know if this was because of people simply giving up and leaving, or because of the speed of it – that entire phase took maybe 15 minutes tops…but I have a sneaking suspicion it was for a third reason.

Disconnects. Many, many people DCed from the game around this point, and were unable to reconnect. One of our party members had this happen, and said that he was unable to access the login server. Posts on twitter show that this was a common issue – and seemed to be the most common with EU players that were participating in the event, regardless of what server or data center they were playing on. There have been issues with the EU servers from the very first BWE, but really…by now this should be something that has been cleared up. Especially since people who got disconnected were unable to claim their rewards for participating in the event.

The reward chest made me feel better about the mess…to an extent. From what I’ve gathered, it seems that everyone at level 80 got two exotic weapons/armors, two rares, as well as a 20 slot bag and an exotic accessory that had +25 to every stat. Very nice. Doubly nice because precursors for legendary weapons were in amongst the exotics that could be gotten from the chest – I got Leaf of Kudzu myself, and a friend got the Lover. I generally have absolutely abysmal luck with drops and rewards in this game, and everyone who was in vent with me at the time can attest to my reaction. Sure, Kudzu isn’t the legendary I’m going for, but selling that certainly helped on the quest for the legendary I am working on (Bifrost).

At the same time…I feel really, really bad for the people who disconnected during their event and could not get their rewards. The rewards for this event were amazing, and justly so. The event itself had potential to be amazing. But as it turned out…it was such a mess. I got very frustrated with it at about halfway through the “drive the karka back to the hive” segment and was considering logging, but we decided to stick it out just to see what the rewards were going to be. I’m glad we did. At the same time, though, I fully understand why so many people were so upset with how it went down.

I do recall it being said that server populations were being raised for the weekend due to the trial weekend. I believe that this could have caused many of the overcrowding issues that then caused the severe lag that happened in the events. Raising the server caps lead to there being more people in shards and overflows, which made things way too overcrowded. As annoying as the “this world is full” messages were when we were trying to get everyone in our group together on one overflow, lowered overflow populations – having fewer people in an area – would have likely helped immensely. One of the theories we had on how it was taking so long for the event to complete was because people could not see what was going on due to rendering and culling issues, and could not attack due to lag. The event was scaling up for the number of people in the area, but many people were essentially unable to participate, and hence it became much, much harder and longer than it should have been.

Still, it wasn’t all bad. A new level 80 zone is always welcome, though it was definitely scarce on resource nodes (where are the resource nodes?!), and a bit more variety in the enemies would be nice. Southsun Cove is in fact incredibly pretty and has a nice variety of landscapes to explore through. The new dungeon, Fractals of the Mists, is very cool and has a lot of neat mechanics to it that make it definitely an interesting experience, though I think I learned last night that my limit for a day is a single cycle of 6 fractals plus the boss fight after number 6. The Bags of Wondrous Goods you can get from bosses in dungeons are also quite awesome, as well as the new items we’ve found as drops – I got several rings with new stat combos on them, as well as backpieces, which were not useful for me but I can definitely see them being useful for others (I say, thinking of a friend who was bemoaning a lack of Magi accessories at level 80 just last week, and now those can be gotten!).

The event was a rocky one, for sure. I wish that it had gone smoother so that it would have been more enjoyable for people. I wish that the game hadn’t fallen into the trap of underestimating and overstretching their ambition again (come on, where’s guesting? The complete silence on that topic is starting to really annoy me – the game’s been out for nearly three months now!). I’m hoping that the good is kept, and the bad is learned from. And while I’m not really against one-time events like many people are…if you’re going to give out such good loot, make it so everyone has a chance at it, not just people who are lucky enough to be in the right time zones and don’t have previous obligations.

Learn from this. Please.

Dungeons are one of those aspects of Guild Wars 2 that I didn’t expect that I’d really ever do much of, primarily because I didn’t think I’d ever really have a group of people to regularly play with and I’m not a fan of PUGs, that I’ve found that I actually do a lot of. Especially now that I’ve been level 80 for some time.

Not that I’ve done too many dungeons so far, really. As of right now I’ve done Ascalonian Catacombs, Caudecus’s Manor, Twilight Arbor, and Citadel of Flames all in Story Mode, and I’ve done one path each of Explorable for AC and CM. We attempted Sorrow’s Embrace story, but the fire golem boss stopped us dead.

One issue I’ve run into, which is why so far I’ve only done Path 2 on AC, is that they can be buggy. Path 1 and 3 for AC, for example, are difficult because of the fact that objects have incredibly buggy hitboxes. If you’re in melee range, you can be hitting something at one moment only to get messages of “obstructed” “miss” the next. Ranged attacks have similar issues. AoE works…so long as you don’t have tons of enemies spawning from said object (I’m looking at you, graveling burrows) that trigger the cap on the number of things an AoE can hit before the actual object’s been damaged at all.

I mentioned that we tried Sorrow’s Embrace, but we didn’t get further than the fire golem. The issue here is that the fire golem boss does very quick projectile attacks, deals tons of condition damage…and any conditions you inflict on it turn to healing. Now, the game all but encourages using conditions to deal damage. So many attacks – including auto-attacks – inflict conditions as well as damage. And considering our group was a mesmer, a necromancer, a thief, an elementalist, and a guardian…there were many, many conditions flying around. We tried to pull back and change our traits to be less conditiony, but there’s really only so much you can do with that without completely respeccing. Combined with the fact that that dungeon is pretty long…it was a bit frustrating, to say the least.

I also somewhat find myself questioning the level requirement for many of the dungeons. For example, the other day my guardian reached level 35 and I went and did a run of AC path 2 with some fellow guild members. Now, I know AC path 2 very well. I’ve done it nearly 10 times now. And that? Was hard. It didn’t help that the cave troll spawned, but even without that, it was far more difficult. I can’t imagine how hard the dungeon is for someone who’s level 35, in a group with other people of the same level, and are not familiar with the dungeon already. The lack of traits really hurts more than I had expected it to, and having done it again on my guardian about 10 levels higher, it was already significantly easier.

I have a small quibble in that the runes you get as drops in explorables are soulbound (they really should be account bound, I think)…runes of the monk are basically useless for my Mesmer, but they would be great for my Guardian. Still, they’re cheap with tokens, so it’s not a huge deal…just a really minor annoyance.

Still, I do enjoy them. We’ve got AC and TA story down to a science, as well as AC explorable path 2. And while the rewards for the explorables will take time to get…they are worth it. Earlier today I completed the final AC explorable run I needed to get to 390 tokens, and I bought my mesmer the ghostly greatsword. I fell in love with it because of how it looked in the previews…but at night when it glows? It looks so amazingly awesome. Screw the legendary greatswords, this baby is all I will ever need!

“Why hello, my lovely new toy…”

I may have to get an AC weapon for my guardian as well. Hammer or mace, most likely. I also need some more CM runs for the runes of the noble (sad that the merchant is bugged and where there should be major runes offered, there’s just a second minor rune listed but priced at 30 tokens, which is what a major is), as well as something like 40 Twilight Arbor explorable runs so I can get armor and weapons from there for both my mesmer and guardian.

Oh dear.

This is going to take a while…