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.

I'm Going To Need A Bigger Boat

Less than two weeks after the launch of Guild Wars 2's third expansion, End of Dragons, I find myself in the unexpected position of feeling as if I've almost finished it. Given that it took ArenaNet nearly four and a half years to produce and that they've only managed three expansions in a decade, that would present a serious problem for me as a regular player. If it was true.

It's not true, of course. As I said, it just feels that way. It's just that I seem to have done a lot by this stage, compared to what I remember from the first two expansions. So far, I've

• Finished the storyline.
• Got the 250 Hero Points required to open all the skills on the new Elementalist specialization, Catalyst.
• Completed map exploration on two of the four new maps, with the third almost finished.
• Gained enough Mastery Points to complete the full Mastery lines for the three that interest me, Fishing, Skiff Piloting and Jade Bots

For many GW2 players that would barely count as a scratch on the surface but for me it already completes most of the vague goals I had in mind when the expansion launched. I'm not really a "goals" kind of player but even I need some kind of loose framework to keep my whims and fancies in check.

I didn't pay a lot of attention to the promotional push for EoD. I didn't watch any of the livestreams or follow any of the discussions on the forums or Reddit. I didn't play most of the so-called "betas" which, as far as I could see, consisted mostly of running around the live game exploiting a bunch of half-tested new abilities in whatever way would annoy other players as much as possible. I did try out the new Elementalist weapon, hammer, for all of five minutes but that was it.

Running flat-out!

Coming in, about all I knew about the storyline was the title of the expansion itself, which I figured had to be some kind of clue. I also knew we were getting some kind of boats called skiffs and that there would be fishing, possibly from those self-same skiffs. 

Other than that there would be an indeterminate number of new maps, I was guessing four or five, and a whole bunch of stuff I didn't give a damn about, like new Legendary weapons, the stupid turtle thing and some hub zone you were expected to waste time building up until it was nearly as good as whatever hub zone you were already in the habit of using.

The whole thing seemed less than thrilling. I figured I'd pick away at it over a few months, slowly fill out the few bits that interested me, then maybe, if it was any good, go back a few times with other characters over the next few years until ANet ponied up either a fourth expansion or Guild Wars 3.

What I didn't expect was to find the story both interesting and accessible enough that I wanted to finish it in a series of big bites. Nor was I imagining the maps would be so enjoyable to explore I'd find myself so close to map completion just poking around that it seemed rude not to finish.

Does the attitude come with the spec?

If I had any plans at all for becoming a Catalyst they revolved around playing World vs World enough to get the 250 points I needed there, which is what Mrs. Bhagpuss is doing. There's a handy vendor who sells them for the Testimonies of Jade Heroics you can get out of skirmish chests, dozens of which I stack up in a normal week's play anyway.

As for the Masteries, I liked the sound of the skiff and fishing seemed like something I might enjoy (Although I think, if we're honest, we'd probably all have to admit that fishing in most mmorpgs is hardly thrilling.) The one I was probably most interested in was the Jade Bot Mastery, if only for the on-call updraft it was supposed to add to gliding.

Based on my previous experiences, I didn't expect the mastery points to be all that difficult to come by but to get enough for three full masteries would, I thought, take either some time or some effort or most probably both. I seem to remember taking quite a few weeks to get enough points for the ones I wanted in HoT and working quite hard at it, too.

In retrospect, HoT, my benchmark for Masteries, now looks like something of an outlier. To fully complete all five Heart of Thorns mastery tracks requires 142 Mastery points. Path of Fire only asks for about half of that. End of Dragons probably comes between the two but a lot closer to PoF than HoT.

Someone really likes the idea of hiding mastery points on ledges. I  must have found a dozen at least.

If I sound uncertain on that it's because one of my End of Dragons' Mastery tracks is still locked. I do not have access to the Stupid Turtle. That suits me fine because I don't want the idiotic creature. I would rather have a Mastery track that allowed me to hide the damn thing on my screen when anyone else was using it. That would be a Mastery worth having!

As of now, Turtle Blight isn't a big problem in GW2. The big controversy of the expansion is the way access to the two-seater eyesore is gated behind the Dragon's End meta, a massive event that until several recent nerfs almost no-one could finish. Now it's been bug-fixed and toned down and a lot of people still can't finish it. Even if they can, then they have to do a hard mode strike mission...

From an entirely selfish point of view, that should at least keep the number of turtles to a manageable level for a while longer. They will be a huge problem when everyone has them. I saw my very first siege turtle at The Maw last night. The player riding it parked it right on the Shaman and it was so big you couldn't see the boss at all.

From an objective point of view, though, the hoops players are being asked to jump through to get the thing are ludicrous, something that seems to be a theme of the expansion. I looked at the Collection for the Catalyst specialist weapon today and was stunned to find out it requires you to complete the storyline as a Catalyst. 

 And if it can be in a hidden room off a ledge, even better!

Since I just completed the storyline as an Elementalist, that means I'd have to do the entire storyline again, on the same character! And then, if I wanted to get the specialist weapon for the other eight classes, I'd have to do the bloody thing eight more times!

Unsurprisingly, there's a thread about that, too. I would be surprised if there aren't adjustments to both issues over time, although ANet can be both extremely stubborn and glacially slow, so it might not be this year.

Luckily for me, neither issue is crucial or even tangential to my enjoyment of the game at the moment. It does speak badly of the underlying design, though, with many players already suspecting shenanigans. Like Wilhelm, I tend to favor cock-up over conspiracy but I guess we shouldn't really be surprised. In a game known for its soul-destroying grinds, what are a few more?

My own grind, such as it is, looks set to focus on xp, at least in the immediate future. I may have the Mastery Points I need, thirty-two of them at time of writing, but I also need another seven full bars of EoD experience to spend them all. Filling xp bars is something I enjoy so that's not likely to be a problem and seven "levels" shouldn't take more than a few sessions.

All worth having, I think, if only for the exta 2,500 hit points each one adds to your skiff. I've been sunk by sea creatures three times already today.

The real problem is going to be what then? I have a couple of minor goals - getting my two rangers their new pets, for example - and I guess I might fill out the mastery for that hub zone just for convenience. 

After that there's the question of which, if any, of the other classes I care enough about to get the Hero Points for the Specializations. I hear the Engineer spec, the Mechanist, is good. In fact, what I hear is that it's so good it's due a massive nerf. I should probably get that before ANet sand it down and take off all the sharp edges. 

If I'm realistic, though, despite having all the classes, some of them multiple times (There are eleven characters on my EoD account.) I spend about 90% of my time playing my Ele and I'm more than happy with the Tempest build she uses already. I just finished all the EoD content I listed above in that spec so why would I want to change it?

I do sometimes play one or other of my two rangers, one in the base game Ranger configuration, the other as a Druid, so I'll probably try the new Untamed spec for one of them. In fact, as I check on it now it seems that's required to get the new pets so I guess I'll have no choice but to get it for both.

Yes, it's a PoF pet. I only got it yesterday, four years late. It took EoD to remind I'd never gotten round to it.

That probably just leaves the Necromancer, whose new spec is the Harbinger, which is, at least, a decent name. I did try to play as both a Reaper and a Scourge, the two previous specs, but I got bored of both after a while and went back to Core Necro. Chances are the same will happen this time.

Other than going round and round the maps grabbing the same Hero Points over and over (Actually a more appealing prospect for me than I'm making it sound.) there's also Fishing to consider. If I'm bothering to master the skill, shouldn't I use it as well?

Fishing's one of those things, though, isn't it? It turns up in pretty much ever mmorpg ever made, eventually. If it's not there at the start you can bet someone will get around to adding it later. 

I first encountered it in EverQuest, where it was a single key press and a random result, a limitation that didn't stop most of us enjoying it anyway. EQ fishing got fleshed out a lot more later, with bait and tackle boxes and hooks and all sorts but it never turned into the kind of mini-game players expect in their mmorpgs today.

Finally! A use for all these jetties and piers.

GW2's fishing looks to be aligned with the industry standard. Lots of fish of different kinds and qualities, different baits and lures you can use, a variety of difficulties in sundry locations. You can use the fish for recipes and every new species you catch goes into a collection. 

Catching the fish or losing it depends on your skill with one of those mini-games I mentioned. It's about as enjoyable as any of them. I spent an hour or so fishing in various seas and lakes across Tyria this afternoon. I was planning on writing a whole post about it but then I ended up writing this one instead. In my experience that's what always happens when I sit down to write a post about fishing in an mmorpg. If anyone really wants to know how it works, I recommend this guide.

It was enough fun that I can imagine carrying long enough on to fill out those collections. That should keep me busy for a while. I think I have enough mini-goals to keep me going and no doubt new ones will occur to me as I play.

I don't think it'll be like Heart of Thorns, where I played non-stop, taking character after character through the maps and the weapon specs, but it's not going to be one and done like Path of Fire either. I think End of Dragons is settling down to be a nice, cosy, middle of the road experience, which I suppose is what you might have expected from an expansion that listed Fishing and Messing Around In Boats as two of its key features.

Just so long as you weren't expecting an easy ride on that turtle, I think it's going to be fine.

It's The Little Things

Guild Wars 2's third expansion, End of Dragons launches in less than three weeks. As the dread day draws ever nearer, ArenaNet's relentless assault intensifies. 

A few days ago we were treated to an hour-long tour of New Kaineng, "Cantha’s heart, a modern metropolis", hosted by Rubi Bayer, formerly Massively's Guild Wars/Guild Wars 2 correspondent, currently either GW2's "Social Media Coordinator" or "Content Marketing Manager" or "Content Marketing Strategist" depending which part of the wiki or her LinkedIn profile you prefer to believe.

I have not watched the video. I suppose I probably should. There's an expansion coming, after all. I don't just play the game, I've been writing about it for nearly a decade now. I ought to care. I ought to be interested.

It's an hour, though. That's a long time. 

Luckily, there's a shorter version. A lot shorter. The day before Rubi took us on the full tour, the official GW2 website posted a promo called "Explore New Kaineng". It's one minute and fifteen seconds long. (1.14 on YouTube - I wonder what they cut?).

I thought I'd be able to manage that, especially when I realised there's a seven second intro and a twenty-one second outro, leaving just forty-seven seconds of actual content. Well, I say "content". For about fifteen seconds all you can see is people fighting in the streets with no context or explanation, so call it about thirty seconds.

I'm not complaining. If I'd wanted more I'd have taken the full tour. Just over half a minute of fast cuts and captions was plenty. I know about as much now as I care to.

There seems to be a concerted effort going on to paint New Kaineng as some kind of cyberpunk city. Some people are calling it "jadepunk", which I thought must be a neologism but which apparently does have some degree of precedent. 

While we're not really on the subject, what is it with "punk" as a suffix, anyway? What's it meant to suggest? I was around for the birth of both punk as a musical movement and cyberpunk as a literary form and I never fully understood the connection even then. 

Now "punk" just gets bolted onto the back of any old noun, verb or adjective to make some kind of snappy portmanteau in which the first word does ninety-eight per cent of the lifting. Does it ever mean anything more than mirror shades, rivets and leather? And why is that "punk", anyway?

Ahem. 

Getting back to the point and accepting that language evolves, first and foremost, through usage, New Kaineng doesn't look much like a "cyberpunk" city to me. It has something of the surface texture familiar from every inflection of South East Asia by way of Blade Runner we've seen in the last forty years but GW2 already has cities far more worthy of the cyber prefix in Rata Sum and Rata Novus. The Asuran cities make New Kaineng look positively funky and down-home.

Again, I'm not saying it doesn't look good. New Kaineng looks as though it'll be an interesting place to explore. It's certainly more interesting than anything we saw in Path of Fire and I'm not saying the art there was anything other than excellent, either. What it looked like was never PoF's problem.

I think what I am saying is that New Kaineng looks okay but not much more than that. Maybe when we're able to walk around those streets in our own virtual forms instead of just looking in from the outside it'll have more impact. Let's hope so.

If I wasn't particularly impressed by my first look at New Kaineng itself, I have to say I was far more taken with the latest promo focusing on the new Mastery track, Jade Tech. If ANet kept this card up their sleeve right until the end because they thought it might not meet expectations, as I've heard said, well let me re-assure them: it exceeded mine.

Heart of Thorns, which introduced the Mastery system, brought gliding into the game and Path of Fire added mounts. Both of those were game changers. Literally. Gameplay changed radically after the introduction of each system, not only in the new areas introduced in the expansions but across every map.

Judged by those standards, the new Mastery does look somewhat trivial: customizeable "Bots" with the ability to enhance a variety of pre-existing systems. They're clearly add-ons rather than innovations. 

They do sound useful, though, and that's probably enough to make working on the new mastery feel worthwhile. They link to the new "Skiff" system to make your flat-bottomed boat skim across the surface faster, something no-one's likely to turn down. 

They have combat-related functionality, increasing your hit points by boosting your vitality and picking you up when you're downed, something rangers' pets have been doing since the game launched back in 2012. There's also some mention of "scavenging", although what they scavenge for isn't explained. There's already a mastery that auto-loots so it can't be that.

The trick that really caught my attention was the ability to create an updraft to lift your glider. I still love gliding in GW2. I use my glider as much as I can, often in places where a mount would be faster, easier and more efficient. There have been many times when I would have loved to be able to summon my own updraft to send my glider soaring over some obstacle.

Of all the End of Dragons features I've seen so far, it's the Jade Tech Mastery Track that interests me the most. Whether it will live up to the (Barely noticeable.) hype remains to be seen. but it's nice to have something in the expansion to look forward to at last.

Let's Submerge: GW2

I almost didn't bother doing "Finding Sabaha", Guild Wars 2's recently-introduced Skimmer Mastery Achievement. It's a mount quest and I've made no secret of how I feel about mounts in GW2. I wish they'd never been invented. What's more, it doesn't even get you a new mount, like the Roller Beetle or the Warclaw or the Skyscale, just a new ability for one of the old ones.

The original five mounts were always horribly unbalanced. Only one, the saurian Raptor, had any general utility. It was apparently intended as the basic go-faster model, with a useful horizontal leap to cross chasms, many of which had been helpfully provided by the art department throughout the Path of Fire expansion for that very purpose.

The Raptor's reign as mount of choice was short-lived, usually about as long as it took someone to finish the lengthy Griffon quest. The catbird was one of the slower mounts but it made up for lack of speed with its ability to hedge-hop like a wounded chicken, an inelegant lurch which still made it more practical for crossing terrain with an active z-axis than any of the others.

Only when faced with a sheer cliff face or a jumping puzzle the devs forgot to ring-fence would anyone employ the squirrel-rabbit known as the Springer. Operating as a jet-propelled pogo stick, the Springer was meant to be dragged out of the bag only when a swift vertical ascent was required and as swiftly replaced. Spring-heeled boots would have been a far prefereable option.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a Portuguese Man o' War.

As for the Jackal, it seems to have no purpose whatsoever, other than to complete certain small pieces of content written especially to demonstrate its capabilities. You rarely see anyone use it, although if people have a flashy-enough skin they might occasionally get it out and sit on it somewhere public, in the hope passers-by might be impressed. And they may well be - until they realize the creature under the glamor is just a stupid jackal.

That leaves the Skimmer. As the only mount that can operate on water, it does have some utility. It saves you having to swim, at least. Unfortunately, swimming in GW2 is exceptionally easy, so since the Skimmer corners like a drunk hippopotamus and has a top speed that makes you feel you're heading into a force ten gale, that's not as much of an attraction as it could have been.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about the Skimmer is that despite clearly being an amphibian it appears to be alergic to water. The clue is in the name. It skitters across the surface like a skipped stone. You can use it to get to where you think the underwater content might be but if you want participate you have to dismount and dive.

"Less scary largos" is like "less poisonous cyanide", isn't it?

Well not any more. As a little treat for the eighth anniversary, ANet added a quest (Yes, a quest. Do we really have to keep up the pretence?). It opens a new mount mastery, one which allows your skimmer to break surface tension and dive.

That did sound like it could conceivably be useful but I was wary of what the so-called "achievement" might entail. I read the ludicrous farrago of pre-requisites for the Skyscale again the other day and that was a hard "nope".  If it was going to be something like that then forget it.

Then again, I actually enjoyed both the Griffin and Roller Beetle quests. If it was something along those lines it might even be an entertaining way to pass a session or two.

The first problem was where to start. I'd have expected some kind of in-game prompt but I hadn't seen one, so I googled it. The wiki wasn't telling me anything but I found what looked to be a decent alternative to the much-missed Dulfy.

It's a website called Guildjen , run by "Jen... a female gamer from Argentina". It looks very new - the oldest posts come from the beginning of June - but it already has a lot of solid, useful content and most importantly it's bang up to date. Let's hope Jen sticks around. We could certainly use another Dulfy.

Trust me. It's a thigh-slapper.

Using Jen's walkthrough probably cut the time it took me to complete the quest in half. Maybe more. I finished it in under an hour. It isn't anything like the crazy collections ANet like to create for big ticket items like Legendaries or the aforementioned Skyscale, thankfully, but it does involve a lot of map-hopping and plenty of visits to obscure NPCs who aren't marked on the map.

Jen's guide not only has all all the steps listed, with precise and accurate details of exactly where you need to go and what you need to do when you get there, it also has all the waypoints, named and with their short codes ready to cut and past into the chat line. You don't even need to open your map.

Should you want to do the quest without spoilers, here's a short summary in bullet-points:

• Be on a character who's completed the Path of Fire storyline.
• Go to any major city.
• Read the note that appears in your mail.
• Follow the clues and go from map to map talking to various NPCs.
• Complete a couple of map events.
• Kill a couple of mobs.
• Get silver in a timed Adventure.
• And that's it.

Short, easy, fun. The best part was the writing, which is very decent. I genuinely laughed out loud at one point. Also I got to talk to a Largos who didn't try to kill me, which was a first.

At the end of all that, you still don't have a skimmer that can submerge, of course. You have a new Mastery track that adds that ability. It costs eight PoF mastery points so if you have those you're all set. I had two so I have some more work to do.

I'd all but forgotten Masteries were a thing.

Not sure if I can be bothered. Unless the new mastery also doubles or preferably trebles the Skimmer's speed, I can't see the point. If the time trial's any indication, the thing's as excruciatingly slow beneath the surface as above. I'd rather swim.

My only slight concern is that ArenaNet could be softening us all up for some major underwater content to come. They did that whole underwater combat revamp a while back and now this. And lest we forget in all the Cantha hype, one of the remaining Elder Dragons is Bubbles, the as-yet officially nameless Sea Dragon. 

Maybe End of Dragons is going to take place underwater. Some of it, at least. In which case, maybe we'll need submersible skimmers. Suppose I better go get some more PoF masteries, then.

Bleh.

Funny Weather We're Having: GW2

I spent pretty much the whole of today in Path of Fire. I started out in The Desolation, which is about as as nice as it sounds.

Actually, no, it's worse. "The Desolation" makes it sound like it might be empty, quiet, eerie.  Even, oh, I don't know.. desolate? I wish!

In fact it's crammed to bursting with vicious wildlife, poison gas, ley-line radiation, branded automata and two psychotic armies.Take your pick -  undead or cyborgs. Makes no odds. Everything wants to kill you, all the time.

I think this is "tundra", isn't it? Anyway, I'm no geographer but I'm pretty sure it's not "desert".

I was down there getting Mastery Points but after a while I tired of the heat and dust and headed North. To Desert Highlands.

Desert Highlands is not a desert as I believe I may have mentioned before, although I realize deserts can be cold as well as hot - endless snow instead of endless sand. Antarctica is a desert, technically. Desert Highlands is not Antarctica.

At one end it's all crags and monumental buildings and at the other it's... well, what is it, exactly? A lot of huts on stilts, boardwalks, rope bridges and pots the size of houses. And a coast. That's the part that's neither Desert nor Highland.

Flying through a blizzard to land under a palm tree. As you do.

Then there's a bit in the middle that's sandy and another bit that's purple. It's all a bit of a hodge-podge. Still, whatever it is, it's a big improvement on The Desolation - at least to look at.

When it comes to peace and quiet, though, you can forget it. Once again everything wants to rip off your arms and beat you death with them. It is quite literally impossible in most parts of Desert Highlands to find a spot peaceable enough to have a brief conversation. Every time Mrs Bhagpuss spoke to me it was five minutes before she got a reply because that's how long it took to get out of combat.

Over the course of many hours - I started around nine in the morning and finished about tea-time, with a break for lunch, a trip to the shops and a walk in the afternoon sunshine along the way - I eventually achieved Map Completion.

Who built this stuff? And for what? There's probably some lore about it somewhere...

I also ran down enough Mastery points to fill out all the special abilities for all the mounts. All that's left is the final Mastery for the Jackal and the Skimmer and all those do is share their buffs across the other Mounts. Nine more Mastery points and I'm done.

It was good fun but exhausting. Not to beat the thing to death but Path of Fire maps are just relentless. Heart of Thorns is like a stroll in the park - literally - compared to this endless gauntlet.

Mob density has already been mentioned but another issue is the extremely fast respawn rate. Because I frequently found myself detained for lengthy periods, trying to finesse my lurching griffon onto the top of a pillar the size of an occasional table, just as a for-instance, I had ample opportunity to study the life-cycles of the local predators as they tried to gnaw my legs off.

On the very rare occasion the developers stinted on the spawn they made up for it by dropping in an Elite. Oh, and two Veterans, which I've already killed. And a wandering spawn of half a dozen little ones...

I didn't think to time it but my impression was that reincarnation takes about sixty seconds. Maybe a couple of minutes at the outside. Frequently I was still fighting the tail end of the spawn when the early dispatches began to come back.

At one point - this was in The Desolation - I found myself in a battle that really did seem as though it was never going to end. I started off with a single Veteran Awakened Canid, somehow acquired some wargs and a Veteran spider and it escalated from there.

It was only after about a quarter of an hour that I realized I was fighting on what we used to call a "mob highway" back in the old EQ days. I don't think I've seen a genuine mob highway for a decade or more. Is it someone's idea of a joke?

Has anyone ever tried to come up with an explanation of how these chests get refilled every day?

Despite the unwanted attention, exploring Desert Highlands was a lot of fun. Mostly, I eventually decided, because it isn't a desert. I just like snowy, mountainous zones in MMOs. They are my favorites, I think.

There's a good deal of climbing fun to be had. Although I was set on ticking all the official boxes to complete my map it became apparent rather quickly that a lot of the points of interest I could clearly see around me weren't included in the tally. When you look up and see ruined buildings on the crags above you or look down and spot passages disappearing into the cliffs below you don't really need a marker on the map to know there might be something worth investigating.

The cartographers may have missed the point now and again but the developers rarely did. Path of Fire is littered with chests and some of the best coffers are in the highest or deepest or least accessible places. I came away with my pockets overflowing.

This is a log fire. There are large piles of logs on both sides. The Norn tells the Charr how lucky it is there's so much coal around because she's freezing. Did the writer and the artist ever talk to each other? Also, I know it's in the snowcapped mountains, but just outside the door there's an open lava flow. How cold can it really be?

I also found the start of the Desert Highlands Griffon Master Race ... er, wait a minute... that doesn't sound quite right... Master Course - Course, that's it! The flag is so very high, so hard to reach that just getting to it automatically qualifies you to enter.

It took me half a dozen tries to get Bronze but it's the first Griffon race I've done and I was seriously delighted just to finish. It also honed my flying skills more than somewhat. I was concentrating so ferociously I neglected to take screenshots of anything but the starting flag so here's Dulfy's video , which I used to try to understand the technique required. It's a lot harder than she makes it look, I'll tell you that for nothing!

In the end I got what I wanted: map completion and every Mastery in Desert Highlands. I even got to kill the Caffeinated Skritt when someone tagged up and called it, one of the more awkward requirements for the Soulbeast ascended dagger collection, which it appears I'm doing.

There are quite a few weird sights in Desert Highlands but this is the strangest by far. An ethereal city - or the plan for one - hanging in the night sky. I feel I should know what this is but I have no idea.

The maps weren't exactly buzzing but there were plenty of people around, mostly whittling away at collections or completion or filing out Masteries just like me. It felt relaxed, friendly, laid-back. It reminded me of a Central Tyria map maybe a year or two after launch. Not a bad thing.

The next thing I need to do is to take a close look at the new Elite specializations. I'm doing everything on my Druid because it's easiest that way but I really should think about which class would benefit most from having the full PoF specialization. Currently I'm veering towards Mesmer.

Better wait until tomorrow's big balance patch first, though. Those that were first shall be last and all that. Let's wait and see how the dust settles. However that pans out, working on specs should be something to chip away at in the dark, Winter nights, at least.

Hitching A Ride : GW2

In the eighteen years since Mrs Bhagpuss and I took up MMORPGs as a hobby we've played both separately and together, solo and in groups, in the same guilds, separate guilds and no guilds at all. We've played the same MMO at the same time, the same MMO at different times and different MMOs at the same time.

When we first started in EverQuest we played together and apart all at once. We shared characters on the same account so we couldn't log in at the same time. Then for a while we had two accounts and one computer. Finally we had two computers, two accounts and before long we weren't even on the same server!

Mostly, though, we have played in the same virtual space, knowing some of the same people and doing many of the same things. Over the years we duoed more or less extensively in EQ, EQ2, Vanguard, Rift, Wizard 101, WoW, Warhammer, The Secret World, FFXIV and the original Guild Wars, just to name the ones that come immediately to mind.

For the last five years we've mostly been playing GW2. It's an MMO that doesn't particularly encourage close, individual co-operation between specific individuals. It's more of an all pile on affair, all the way up from small events to map-wide metas.

So ingrained in the design philosophy was the zerg dynamic that it was something of a surprise that dungeons were included at all, less of a surprise when development on the five person instance faltered and stopped. Dungeons had tended to be where we did most of our duoing in other MMOs.

At the beginning of the game we duoed a couple of maps for map completion. It wasn't exactly what you'd call efficient. Much later we did duo some dungeons, which was quite good fun, although not so much that we did any of them more than once.

Mostly "duoing" in GW2 has consisted of one of us jumping into the other's instance to help out on one of those unbelievably tedious Living Story boss fights or running around in a party of two surrounded by anything up to a hundred other people in a huge amorphous zerg. There's no reason to be grouped in a situation like that other than that it's companionable.

There's another kind of duoing that crops up occasionally in various games but which GW2 is seemingly made for. It's a sort of asynchronous partnership that allows one player or class to benefit directly from the acquired skills of another.

The most obvious and prevalent example is the Mesmer portal. Mesmers can open a gate from where they are to a spot some distance away, a trick that allows them to transport other players to, let's say, the top of a jumping puzzle. This, which could easily be treated as an exploit in other MMOs, is intended behavior in GW2, a part of the social, co-operative approach ArenaNet designed into the game.

Today Mrs Bhagpuss belatedly began exploring Path of Fire. Specifically, she'd found out Druids get new pets and she wanted them. This led to opening up all the maps and getting mounts and masteries.

It also led to a small epiphany on my part. Mounts, that key element of PoF, as well as being transportation, provide access to areas that otherwise would be difficult or even impossible to reach. Masteries expand that scope. Mounts and their masteries, once acquired, are shared across the whole account.

All of which means that, having done the grunt work last month on my Druid, I can now use my Mesmer as a glorified taxi service. All the effort and time it took to get the bunny with the high hop, the poison-proof skimmer and that Swiss army knife of mounts, the Griffin is now paying off as I run my Mesmer through all the maps, jumping, flying and skimming to the hard-to-get Masteries or the inaccessible pets so that Mrs Bhagpuss can waypoint in, take the portal I drop and hoover up the benefits.

I rarely play a Mesmer but whenever I do I wish I did it more often. It's enormous fun to be able to open portals for other people. I'm not in the least surprised so many Mesmers do it.

I'm not sure this was what ANet had in mind when they hid all those POIs and Hero Points and Masteries away on pillars and buttes or surrounded them with poison gas. They can hardly complain, though, given the established role of Mesmers in the game, not to mention the existence of the Teleport to Friend item that turns everyone into a Mesmer for a moment.

I guess so long as everyone involved had to buy the expansion it doesn't make much odds to ANet how they use it. Just so long as they do.

Give A Dog A Bad Name... : GW2, EverQuest

Here's a controversial proposition: Heart of Thorns was a good expansion.

I know, I know...it stalled GW2's commercial progress dead in its tracks, almost killed World vs World for good and ended up having to be nerfed into the ground to appease the pitchfork-and-torch-waving crowd.

For an encore, six months later Colin Johanson, the guy responsible for HoT's design and direction and the game's prime mover, fell on his Legendary Greatsword and left the company. From that point on GW2 has been in recovery and repair mode, trying to fix the damage wrought by the first, botched xpack.

Or so the narrative goes. Factually that's not an inaccurate summary. Only problem is, it misrepresents almost the entirety of my experience in the jungle itself.

From the day I first stepped into the sweltering heat of the Maguuma heartland I was having fun. Yes, it was a tad over-tuned to begin with but not unusually so. Almost all MMO expansions come in hard and soften up later.

Benchmarked against the harshest expansion I've ever slogged through, EverQuest's notorious Gates of Discord, HoT isn't just a walk in the park; it's a sun-lounger on the beach with an ice-cold beer in your  hand and a chillout mix on your iPod.

Okay, unfair comparison. GoD was not just hellishly hard; it was actually broken. The developers knew that but released it anyway. John Smedley later called it SOE's "worst mistake in five years." and despite many unwitting attempts to unseat it since, GoD still  wears the crown.

Giant Bomb has an excellent overview of the expansion itself, with a coda that partially explains just why EQ players who were there recall the game's seventh expansion with a sense of horror:

"... the seventh expansion ... was largely unfinished with many encounters either not working properly or simply unbeatable. It was later revealed that the development team built much of the expansion's content with the idea in mind that the level cap would increase to 70, but that did not happen."

Well, that would make a difference, wouldn't it? What's more:

"GoD brought about an entire overhaul of EverQuest's graphics engine, issues with the world's geometry were affected throughout the world of Norrath, both new zones and old.

This is why Daybreak's new Undercover Classic server, Agnarr, stops at the sixth expansion, right before the gates to disaster open. A shame, really, because once they'd fixed it, and with its companion, eighth expansion Omens of War in place (the one that actually had the level cap increase) it turned out to be a pretty good era as Norrathian adventures go.

Too late. Too late. Reputation once lost is hard to recover, ironically.

The main reason I'm thinking about this right now is that I finally applied my half-price HoT code to one of my two base-game-only accounts. I figured with the second expansion almost certain to arrive before the end of the year, dragging free HoT access for all behind it like a White Elephant no-one's going to be allowed to refuse, I might as well get the benefit while there was still some paid value left.

I wasn't particularly relishing it. Not because I don't like Heart of Thorns; I always liked it. Check pretty much any of my many posts on the topic. The tone is bemused but happy. I never expected to like it but it turned out I did.

In the year and a half the expansion's been with us I've only completed the main story-line once. It's okay. About as good as any other ANet story. Faint praise, I know.

What I have done, though, is explore the entire jungle to a degree I have still never managed with Core Tyria to this day. I have Heart of Maguuma map completion in multiple zones on multiple characters and I loved doing it.

I've done the lengthy Ascended Weapon "collections" ("quests", translated from Anet Newspeak) on every class and I really loved doing those. I've filled out almost all the Masteries and the few I haven't I've only left because I don't feel I'll ever need them. Most of those, again, I thoroughly enjoyed doing.

There's more. On top of all that designated content I've spent hundreds of hours over the last couple of years just gliding the updrafts in Verdant Brink for sheer joy. I've spent happy winter evenings doing the ninety-minute Dragon Stand event, not because I needed anything from it but because it's bloody good fun.

Even so, I was a little apprehensive about returning to the Heart of Maguuma on a fresh account.

The thing about modern MMO design is that all your characters bar the first are twinked by design.
Once I'd run one character through the entire storyline and opened all the maps, every character on the account could take advantage of the enhanced travel and survival options. Not only did I know where everything was, I knew all the shortcuts and had all the passes and permissions. It got easier and easier each time - and as I said I dispute the widespread belief that it was ever very difficult in the first place!

Going back to yesterday's post on Survival games and how they key into progression mechanics that have always worked well for me, it shouldn't have been the surprise it was to find out that Heart of Thorns without all the shortcuts is even more fun than I remembered. Having to get around with only the most basic gliding skill, the one that only keeps you aloft so long as your endurance bar lasts and that's not long at all, turns out to be exciting, satisfying and entertaining.

Not being able to just bounce on a mushroom to get up a cliff, having instead to work out the paths, dodge roll past the Pocket Raptors and glug Elixir B like cooldowns were going out of fashion - is that frustrating? The hell it is! It's thrilling.

Naturally, in the tradition of every MMO ever, your goal in having fun is to acquire the means to avoid having to have the fun you're having ever again. As my Mastery points accrue and my xp bar fills (soooo slooooowly - must use boosts...) soon I'll be bouncing and leaning with the best of them.

That's fine. There's new kinds of fun to be had with each new skill. I'm already planning my path to becoming a Scrapper. I'll need all the tricks. After that my fourth ranger (or is she my fifth?) can get Druid.

One thing that concerned me a year or more ago was whether anyone would still be "doing" Heart of Thorns as the expansion aged. Back then it seemed unlikely.

The expected exodus may still happen one day, as the next expansion or the one after that arrives, but for now the maps are hopping - and not just with Itzel. Anet have done a sound job of tying desirable rewards to the content in both HoT and all the LS3 maps that followed.

Map chat is busy with people organizing Hero Point runs or calling out events. Better still, the improved LFG system successfully fills maps with like-minded players set on achieving specific goals. HoT's not the hysterical, overheated chaos it was for a few months after launch but it's a very long way indeed from being dead.

Tomorrow sees the latest WvW revamp. That's going to take up most of my game-time this week, I'd imagine. Then we're going on holiday for a while so I won't be playing at all.

My latest run through the jungle will have to go on hold but it's off to an excellent start. If this was Anet's "bad expansion" I can't wait to see how the next one turns out.

GW2 Second Expansion Not Announced! Release Date Not Revealed! Spoilers!

As we wait for the penultimate chapter of Living Story 4 to drop I have a short but welcome window to mention the upcoming GW2 expansion. There's going to be one. There, that's that done.

Oh, except, wait! What's this, coming over the hill?  It's the First Reddit Spoiler Division and they're waving screenshots! We're saved!

Everything from this point on is spoilertastic so if you feel ANet have been doing a bang-up job keeping the lid on and the very last thing you want to know is freakin' anything at all then now's the time to look away.

Shame about the screenshot at the top of the page but oh, well...

For anyone that thinks MMO expansions become more interesting when you have some vague idea what's in them, here we go.

All the dirty pictures are at this Imgur link.  

Massively OP summarized it thus:

The huge batch of images appear to show a partial set of new masteries for most of the classes, maps covering a large span of the Crystal Desert from Guild Wars 1 (including Vabbi and the Desolation, so we’re in Nightfall territory), and mounts. 

So, the second expansion includes some new overland maps, some new Masteries and more class specializations. Who would have guessed? Everyone, probably.

Mounts, though...that's a bit of a surprise, given that ANet have always said they'd have nothing to do with anything so common, dahling. I paraphrase.

Actually, there were already rumors about mounts making an appearance when we go to Crystal Desert in the next Xpack. The theory was that they would be limited to specific routes or areas and wouldn't make their way into the wider world the way gliders did.

This is the mount some think prove the leak is a hoax.
But it's a jerboa, I think, which would be entirely in keeping with the desert theme.

Those pics, though. And the associated skills. I'm thinking it's all a bit elaborate just for a bit of on rails travel in four or five new maps. Plus think of the potential Gem Shop sales...

MMOs tend to have excitable communities but GW2's is positively hysterical. Mounts have long been a hot-button topic (cf cloaks) with vehement defenders and opponents, all of whom seem to think that having your character's eye line raised by a couple of meters can either save or grave a game.

The dormant forum threadnought revived on this latest news and battle positions are being taken as we speak. Personally I'm one hundred per cent in favor of mounts. I find the arguments against them spurious, hilarious or incomprehensible.

One commenter found the prospect of not using his own legs so unmitigatedly revolting he confessed to "having a visceral response. I am disgusted. I actually feel vaguely nauseous". I'd make a crack only I know how that goes. I've had the same reaction a few times over changes in MMOs that turned out to be utterly trivial. As he goes on to observe, astutely, "I’m not even sure why I feel so strongly about it, but I can’t deny that I do." I hear that.

Mounts might not be universally welcome but big maps that aren't jungles? Those aren't going to get too many down-votes, I bet. Because the leaked images feature an overhead of the existing map of Tyria we can judge the size of the new playable areas and they are huge.

It's impossible to tell for sure just by looking at the schematics but I get the impression that we're done with verticality for a while. This is a desert and it looks flat. I wouldn't be surprised to find that gliders don't even work there, although really all they need to do is not put any updrafts in...

As for the new specializations, they look very interesting. Unlike Ashes of Creation's "Tank", they all have super-cool names like Renegade and Spellbreaker. My favorite has to be Holosmith. I think I have a CD by them somewhere.

It might all be one giant hoax but frankly, if anyone's gone to that much trouble, they deserve a good laugh at our expense. It all looks entirely legit to me and I'm going to go with it.

Official announcement and release date please, Mr O'Brien. You can have my money now for delivery in the autumn. Or late summer? Late summer works for me.