Thursday Night FIsh Fry

That blur above is my Elementalist, killing a shark. I suppose I should really call her my Tempest. She's been using the Heart of Thorns elite specialization since it first became available. I still think of her as a Staff Ele. She carries a staff and mostly uses core Elementalist spells. She only uses Tempest for the Overloads. She doesn't even have the Tempest's signature Shouts in her build at all.

I dabbled with the Weaver elite specialization when it was added to the Elementalist's toolkit with Path of Fire but although it was powerful I found it a bit too hands-on for my tastes. I don't like to have to time things to perfection and the Weaver needs a certain amount of finesse to shine.

Then, the Elementalist has always been reckoned a fairly challenging class by Guild Wars 2's admittedly lenient standards. It makes it a strange choice for someone as self-avowedly lazy, not to mention old and fat-fingered as myself. 

Over the first year or two of the game's life I tried all the classes, spending probably the majority of my time with the notoriously easy-mode Ranger but once I started playing World vs World regularly, for reasons I can't now remember or even easily reconstruct, the Elementalist became my favorite. I think I just like setting things on fire. Especially other players.

Fire looks different underwater. I guess it would, wouldn't it?

Luckily for her - and me - she hasn't even started to look at the latest elite spec, Catalyst, yet. According to the latest patch notes, people were just having too much fun with it so it had to be nerfed into the ground. 

I will get to it. All in good time. I'm working steadily through my End of Dragons to-do list and it's on there, somewhere.

Yesterday I completed the fourth and final EoD map, Dragon's End. I'm sorry to have finished. I wish there were more. The first two maps were relatively straightforward but Echovald Wilds and Dragon's End were so convoluted I would still be working on them if I hadn't had the benefit of advice from some helpful people on YouTube. 

I would strongly recommend getting outside help when doing map completion in GW2. Either that or hire a local guide. Unless you enjoy spending hours examining maps with a magnifying glass, that is. And even then, you can't know just by looking whether a particular point of interest is locked behind some event that needs to be completed or accessed via a tunnel, whose only opening is on the far side of the map.

Why yes, I bet I do look good on the dance floor. Thank you for noticing.

If you like both puzzles and exploring, though, it can be good time.  I've certainly been enjoying it. After finishing the Dragon's End map I gave myself a little victory lap by finding all the PoIs in the new hub zone, Arborstone. It doesn't officially count as a "Map" in the completion stakes. There's no reward for filling out all the blanks other than your own satisfaction but in a way that makes it even more appealing.

Also, that last PoI, the one that's seemingly impossible to find? It's Canach's casino and it's a nice treat when you get there. I won't spoil it by telling you how find the way in but I will say it's not through a broken stained glass window. Been there, done that, got the splinters.

The vendors at the bar sell all the fish recipes I'd been looking for, there are moa races and a some gambling machines and if you have the patience to collect a thousand of Canach's coins (I got about thirty in an hour so it'll take a while.) there are a few rather spiffy backpacks you can buy.

That really is a long-term project. I'll get back to it. Right now I'm working on my Masteries. That's how I came to be killing sharks.

Sharks, Naga, I'm not fussy.

Back in Heart of Thorns, the last time I worked on Masteries with any intent, I found the easiest, albeit not the fastest, way to get the necessary XP was to buff up with every XP bonus I could grab then go find some mobs in an out of the way place that hadn't been killed for a while and slaughter the lot. 

There's a huge bonus for fresh meat in GW2 although the exact nature of the calculations involved isn't always entirely apparent. Some mobs in the same spot give massive bonuses while others give less or sometimes none at all. Kill em all anyway is my motto.

It took me a while to find a good spot. I tried Echovald but it gets hectic there and it can be too easy to get more mobs than you bargained for. As usual, the neutral, non-agressive animals that everyone ignores are great for bonuses but for every crane and deer I killed, I got a bunch of rebels or jadebots of various kinds shooting at me from a distance. It was good xp but exhausting.

6.5K XP Bonus. That's the bunny!

After a while I jacked that in and tried Dragon's End. The meta had just started so I joined a tag and ran with the pack for a bit. The XP from the big mobs and events was good but there was too much downtime moving from place to place for it to feel efficient. Then we failed on the penultimate phase and the map closed and we all got kicked out so that was the end of that.

It's no wonder people are complaining non-stop about the Dragon's End meta event. I like it but it is very badly judged. It takes a long time, requires a great number of people, has a lot of moving parts and multiple fail states. As someone said in map chat just before we failed, it would go a long way in a two-hour event if there was some reward for trying. There isn't. If you fail you get nothing. That is not a great way to motivate people to keep coming back and if they don't come back they'll never learn to do it better.

Not that it's all that easy to work out how to do it at all. Belghast, a recent convert to GW2, pointed out how badly the game explains just about everything and it's absolutely true. It's always been that way and this latest meta demonstrates that, whatever else ANet have learned over the years, how to let players in on the secret of what they're supposed to be doing isn't one of them.

Naga in the hole!

Killing fish might be a lot less exciting but it's easy to understand and it's steady work. That's what I ended up doing, rather poetically, to fil out the XP for my final Fishing Mastery. I took the waypoint back to Seitung Province and spent a couple of hours in the calm waters just off the coast.

I had the place to myself. Judging by the multi-thousand XP bonuses for every tuna and jellyfish I killed, no-one had been there for a good, long while. I didn't see another player the whole time I was down there. 

What I did see, apart from countless fish and a lot of coral were plenty of chests to open. The sea bed is littered with them. I found an event, too, while I was poking around in a little hole. A bunch of Naga spawned and tried to eat me. That was fun. I did wonder what optimistic developer decided to put an event trigger down a coral tube on the bottom of the sea and just who they thought would set it off but then I thought, well I just did, didn't I? I guess they knew what they were doing after all.

Just as I emerged from the waters like the world's shortest Venus to claim my reward, the final Fishing Mastery, the map meta event kicked off right next to where I was standing. Someone tagged up and started a squad so I joined in just to see what it was all about.

Unlike Dragon's End, the Seitung Province meta takes about twenty minutes, most of it good, knockabout fun. There are even rides! It ends with a big boss fight that we won quite easily. The crowd was in a good mood throughout and everyone went home with presents. That's how to do a meta.

Okay, it's one way. Dragon's End will be a lot more memorable when it's tuned more sensitively and players understand what's expected of them. If anyone's still interested by then, that is. GW2 history shows players will learn if they feel there's a fair chance of success but also that for most of them the bar needs to be set relatively low before they'll make the effort. There are only so many elitie gamers to go around, after all, and right now I imagine most of them are still playing Elden Ring.

Next up on my dance card, Jade Bot Mastery. I'm about three-quarters of the way through. I think that should be something like five thousand sharks.

Window Of Opportunity

I spent very nearly the whole day playing Guild Wars 2 today. I'd guess I've played more GW2 since End of Dragons than the rest of the year put together. 

It's not just the expansion, either, although I have spent a great deal of time in Cantha, mostly doing map completion, which I've found to be far more enjoyable and compelling than usual thanks to the extreme verticality of all the maps and the strong element of puzzling involved this time around. I know from map chat that some people absolutely loathe it for the exact same reasons but they had boring old Path of Fire - now it's my turn!

I also did the hyper-controversial new endgame meta again today, just because I happened to be in the map, the appropriately-named Dragon's End, when it started. It was my second run and it finished the same way the first did, with the dragon stil about 25% health when the timer ran out. 

It was a full map, give or take, and we had maximum NPC support and an experienced, if not very successful commander. He said he'd had about forty tries so far and won thee of them. Far from reducing anyone's confidence in his ability to lead us to victory, the general sentiment seemd to be that, with a seven and a half per cent success rate, he was doing better than most. 

The whole mood of the map stayed cheerful throughout, even when it became obvious we were going to lose. People did start to bail towards the end but with no complaints that I heard, only a few rueful comments along the lines of "We'll get it next time". 

I haven't read up on the tactics and the entire event from start to finish is so mind- boggling chaotic I had very little idea what was happening, let alone what I was supposed to be doing. As with Dragon's Stand, the Heart of Thorns meta it's modelled on, there are three lanes, all of which have to progress down the map, beating various bosses and completing diverse tasks before everyone comes together on a platform for a gigantic death match with the dragon. 

Both times I've done it I've taken the center lane, so I now have a rough idea of the nodal points of that one but I still have no real clue what the mechanics are. At any point where I was supposed to be doing anything other than killing mobs what I was actually doing was watching other people to see what they were doing. Didn't help much. Most of them had no idea, either.

Dragon's Stand was just the same when it started. It took me half a dozen runs to get the hang of it and maybe a dozen more before I got to be competent. After that, I was the one yelling in map chat about what we ought to be doing. I never could keep my trap shut. 

The reason I did Dragon's Stand that many times wasn't because I was desperate for the rewards.  It was because it was a whole lot of fun, particularly on a wet Sunday afternoon, which seemed to be when I usually found myself there.

Someone piped up in map chat today to say Dragon's End was the best meta the game's had since Dragon's Stand and several people chimed in to agree. I certainly think it has that potential, once ANet tune it a little and a critical mass of players understand the rules. I'll certainly be going back for another try, anyway.

The meta took about forty five minutes, with a two-hour lead-in but that was nothing compared to the time I spent reorganizing my banks. That's GW2's real end game. 

I've been at it for days now. I started with the guild banks, all three of them, then I moved on to my main account bank.

I long ago expanded my storage to the maximum number of vaults. I'd very happily give ANet (imaginary) money for more but they won't take it so I had to get creative. I considered buying a new characeter slot to make a dedicated bank mule but then I realised I had the ideal candidate already.

When HoT added a new character class, the Revenant, and gave us a new character slot to play one, I felt honor-bound to give it a go. I made the class and tried to play it but I couldn't get on with it at all. 

Revenants have turned out to be quite popular but mine has been standing on a patch of grass in Lion's Arch next to the NPC who ports you to the daily Activity for years. I only ever do that daily if it's the best of a bad bunch or if Sanctum Sprint is up. I like Sanctum Sprint. 

It occurred to me that if he was just going to stand there, he could mind everyone's stuff while he did it. I converted some of my vast pile of gold to Gems and bought him a couple of extra bag slots, then I gave him some twenty-slot Halloween Pails to put in them, plus a few more to replace the smaller bags he was using. 

That reminded me my Elementalist is also a tailor and she can make bags up to the largest size GW2 allows, thirty-two slots. They cost a fortune to craft, though, so in the end I made a twenty-eight slotter, which itself cost almost as much as the Gems I'd bought. And then I decided the Ele would get more use out of it than the bank mule, so I swapped it for one of her twenty-slots and gave him that instead.

After that it was on to the hard part - sorting through seventeen thirty-slot tabs of largely unrecognizeable icons, trying to decide what to stash on the mule, what to sell, what to use and what to leave in the bank. I even did my best to organize all seventeen tabs into some kind of coherent pattern.

I was doing it in the Citadel in World vs World, which is where I do everything practical in the game other than craft. I was about half way through when some gang of thugs from another server decided to take our Garrison. I was so wrapped up in my bank sorting I didn't even notice until the battle had been raging for about twenty minutes but as soon as I realised what was going on I left off what I was doing and legged it to the keep to help.

The battle went on for nearly as long as the Dragon's Stand meta. There were about double the number of the enemy as there were of us but we kept harrrying them and kiting them and chipping away like an annoying cloud of gnats until finally there were only about even numbers left, at which point they gave up and ran away. 

It was a famous victory! And then, about five minutes after I got back to my bank-work, the whole thing kicked off again at our keep in Eternal Battlegrounds, so I got to do it all over again. We won that too!

Put all that together and I think I've been playing GW2 for about seven hours today, at least. I only really stopped because I wanted to get a post done. I haven't finished sorting the bank, either. I'll have to do more on that tomorrow.

Yeebo has a very good post about how expansions in mmorpgs don't mean what they used to and both he and Tyler F.M. Edwards, who has a post over at MassivelyOP on much the same subject, pick out the recent Star Wars: the Old Republic expansion, Legacy of the Sith, as a prime example. 

Yeebo makes the point that some mmorpg companies seem to have figured out they can get away with taking money for stuff they used to give away for free but also that the promise of a good expansion brings people back to the game. If the expansion lives up to that promise, those players don't just whip through it and leave, they remember why they liked the game in the first place and stick around for a while. 

That's exactly what End of Dragons has done for me. Okay, I hadn't technically left GW2 but I had checked out emotionally. Now I feel re-invigorated and ready to carry on and find out where the game goes next. If EoD had disappointed the way the SW:tOR expansion apparently has, it might easily have been the final straw, not just for me but for many.

Luckily for me that isn't how it turned out. Like Belghast, who seems to have had a kind of damascene conversion to the game, I'm having a lot of fun in GW2 right now and for once I can imagine it continuing for a while. 

Having put that in writing, I imagine next week I'll be here pounding out two thousand words about some other game I've magically started playing but until then expect a few more postcards from Cantha. I have to do something with these hundreds of screenshots I've taken.