Taking Turret 3 : GW2

Lately, I've been doing the Tequatl event most days. I'd almost forgotten about it until the kerfuffle over the change to critical damage brought the once-notorious event back into the news. When that blew up I went to see what the fuss was about and ended up adding Teq back into my "must do" World Boss list. He gives good loot and the event is entertaining, especially when you get a disorganized map and everything goes to the wire.

When it was added, almost exactly two years ago, Evolved Tequatl became the first permanent, open-world event in GW2 to require major organization. In the days before Megaservers some servers couldn't beat it and most couldn't guarantee a win. The event was tweaked downwards in difficulty numerous times and even then, for a long while, it took half an hour or more to set up. It was wise to get there early.

It also led directly to the birth of those irritating cross-server guilds that use out-of-game voice chat and dubious map-stacking techniques to gain advantage. For a while they turned the event into a toy for a self-appointed elite. It was a dark time.

The coming of megaservers largely put a stop to all that, helped by the gradual learning process that eventually led to Teq acquiring "farm" status. Apart from the brief crit blip that's where he remains.

Unevolved Teq. I still prefer that fight even if no-one ever used a turret back then.

One of the more interesting aspects of the event is the wide range of player-created roles it has spawned. I can't remember any event in an MMO with quite so many named locations that require dedicated teams. I still have only a vague idea where each of them is. All of those were decided upon and named by the playing community.

As well as the key defensive locations and the big offensive zerg, usually led by a tagged-up Commander, which stacks at Tequatl's feet on the spot where attacks strike the dragon twice for double damage, there are the Turrets. There are six of these hylek-constructed devices, ranged in two sets of three.

Running a turret is a very specific task that daunts newcomers. I was wary of it for a long time, partly because of the endless yelling from the zerg that seemed to suggest most turret operators were getting it wrong most of the time.

Possibly because of this there are often calls for people to volunteer to operate a Turret. I eventually decided I couldn't do any worse than all these poor saps who were being shouted at so I thought I'd give it a go.

I think this is South Hills. I could be mistaken.

It was a little nerve-wracking at first but I took to it almost immediately. It was only after a few runs, when I'd begun to feel I was on top of my brief,  that I realized why it was all starting to feel so familiar. It's because being on a Turret at Teq is eerily reminiscent of playing a cleric in Everquest.

That's a very good thing. I played a cleric in EQ for several years and it's probably either my favorite or second favorite MMO role of all time (the other contender being the Disciple in Vanguard). Anything that feels like playing a Sit&Heal Cleric is fine by me.

Anet stirred things up recently, not only by referring to the upcoming raids as requiring specific, previously forbidden, roles such as "Tank" but by daring to mention the dreaded "T" word - Trinity. They claim, to the aggravation of many but with some justification, that the game has always had a Trinity - just not the Trinity.

For those who came to MMOs via WoW or its descendants, The Trinity means Tank, Healer, DPS. GW2 has never had that line-up. For those of us with longer memories, however, the Holy Trinity in Everquest was originally Healer, Tank, Crowd Control.

In some ways the GW2 version is a call-back to those early days. The three legs of this particular stool are Damage, Control and Support. Back in the Norrathian day, everyone was responsible for DPS, which was never deemed a separate role unless you were a rogue (and if you were...poor you). In Tyria everyone is responsible for their own healing. It's the Healer role that's vanished, rolled up into the general buffing brief "Support".

I'll take any turret but #3 is the best.

I'd love to play a true, dedicated healer in GW2 but it's just not going to happen, so driving a Turret at Teq is the next best thing. Not because the T-Op gets to heal - there is a heal among the skills on the Turret's bar but it's probably the least important. No, it's the cadence and the feels.

As a Turret Operator you have two main jobs: keep Tequatl's Hardened Scales buff to a minimum and Cleanse the zerg of poison. That means hitting Skill 2, Scale Penetration, every 12 seconds as it refreshes and skill 3, Poison Cleanse, every 5 seconds. The former is auto-targetted at the start of the fight as soon as you target the Dragon, preferably his head; the latter has to be ground-targeted wherever you want the shell to land.

In-between these you can do some DPS with Skill 1, Stake Thrower, which, on a one-second cooldown, is effectively an auto-attack. You might once in a while throw a buff on the zerg (de rigeur if you're still on the turret during a "Burn" phase, when everyone goes flat-out for maximum damage) or a heal, using skills 4 and 5, Hylek Elixir and Hylek Salve respectively. As they're both on a fifteen second delay, however, you have to pick your moments carefully.

The upshot is that using a Turret feels very much like the same decision-making process I remember from healing as a Cleric. Watching cooldowns,, doing triage assessment on the fly, manually swapping targets for cures, throwing in a nuke when you get a chance - all the essentials are there.

If the Turrets just had a resource to manage as well, the way a Cleric has to manage mana, it would be darn near identical. And if the six Turret Operators worked out a rota to manage their Scale Penetration so it didn't overlap wastefully, why, then you'd have the Clerics' Raid Heal Chain! They probably even used to do that when voice chat was still a thing at Teq.

The final cherry on the top, icing on the cake or nail in the coffin, as you will, is what I alluded to right at the start. The yelling.

Oh, the yelling! "Turrets! Use Skill 2!", "Turrets! Spam Cleanse!" "Scales too high!" Even "Is anyone on Turrets?" when we're clicking our fingers to the bone. Poor old Turret Operators can never get it right. If they're Cleansing they should be Penetrating and the other way around. Grenth forbid any of them should waste one second firing a stake. DPS is Not Your Job. Until the Burn, when it's "Turrets! Spam Skill 1".

When I used to Cleric for a living, so to speak, as Mrs Bhagpuss will gleefully tell you my catchphrase was "FFS!". I was a very calm healer as a rule but I was prone to fits of Not Being Able To Work With Chimps. Particularly if the chimps thought they knew better than I did how to do my job.

At Teq today I actually stopped firing at one point and yelled back in map chat "FFS we can't "spam" scales. It's on a 12 second cooldown". At that point I realized I was truly in the throws of a Clerical Flashback.

And it was flippin' great!

Tales Of Everyday Gaming: NBI, GW2

Jeromai (yes, him again) has been suffering from Blogger's Block. Rather than let ennui and inertia get the better of him he's chosen to offer himself up as an example for any NBI bloggers who may already be feeling the pressure to come up with something, anything, as they sit and stare into space in front of a blank screen.

His prescription for block-breaking is Freewriting and, leading by example, today he has a post up inspired by a dose of his own medicine. He finds himself taking a close look at the choices he makes when he sits down to play GW2, which is something I find myself doing a lot these days. Examining my choices, that is.

Before he launches into a lengthy, discursive, philosophical account of the ways he chooses to spend his gaming time, though, he wonders "Why should you or I care about what I did? What I incremented? What I achieved?" He means it rhetorically but I'm going to answer as if he was expecting a reply.

For me, it's always interesting to read the accounts of what others, personally, find compulsive and absorbing about the games they play. If the writing is strong enough, involving enough, idiosyncratic and attractive enough, then it scarcely even matters what the games are.

Ah, Silverwastes! Long time, no see and you haven't changed at all. Unfortunately.

It certainly doesn't matter whether they're games I've played or am ever likely to play. I follow Wilhelm and Stabs and Nosy Gamer's detailed descriptions and news reports and analyses of EVE Online, not because I have any particular interest in internet spaceships (I really don't) but because they're able to create narratives in word-pictures that open the game out and make it accessible and intriguing even for a disinterested outsider.

Indeed, were I to limit myself to reading blogs only about games I'm currently playing, most days most of my Feedly feed would go unread. The blogroll over there to the right is filled with blogs that, these days, mainly feature games that I've never tried or have long since abandoned. Yet I read them all with pleasure and with interest.

Think pieces (this is one) are all very well but the heartwood of MMORPG blogging is the telling of tales of everyday adventure. Be it The Sims, WoW or Ingress each everyday story opens a window not only onto another imaginary world but into this supposedly real one we all share as well.

Tip your waitress. I'm here all week.

That said, there's a special appeal in reading someone's thoughts on a game you know and love, especially when it's one you're both still playing. And it's rarely more appealing than when someone simply writes about what he or she does in the game itself.

GW2 is a very successful and popular game but it doesn't seem to generate many blogs. There weren't that many even when the game was new. There's a very active community on reddit and, for all I know, on umpteen other social media platforms but for a good while now the only people on my radar who write about GW2 regularly, in long form, are Jeromai and Ravious. I do miss The Egg Baron...

Consequently it feels very valuable when someone gets down to writing about what they actually do in the game, even when the activities on which they focus turn out to be ones that are peripheral for me. Jeromai writes "...every night, I look at the clock and make sure my butt is in the chair by 8.10pm so that I can kill the Triple Trouble Wurm with the oceanic arm of TTS. If I have time, I might join in by 6.30pm for Karka Queen, or try my best to squeeze my way into Tequatl by 7.00pm." Let's compare.

I have never followed the Three-Headed Wurm event to a successful conclusion. I tried a few times, back when it was introduced well over a year ago, when no-one knew what they were doing. That was clearly going nowhere so after the first couple of weeks I forgot all about it and I've barely spared it a thought since. It's a long, long time since I was last even in the zone when it popped.

Famous last words.

Tequatl I like a lot now everyone knows the ropes. If I notice he's due and I'm not doing something more interesting I'll waypoint down and take up my preferred place at one of the boats or on North Hill. It's a fun event, although not as much fun as the original, unevolved  version, which Mrs Bhagpuss and I did as often as we could manage.

Karka Queen is just another stop on the World Boss train, which I jump on and off as it suits me every day.

Right now the big ticket is Maguuma Wastes. Dry Top and Silverwastes, with their numerous achiever-focused grind levers, have remained popular and populated since they arrived with Living Story 2 (remember that?). The recent addition of a time-limited, region-wide, random drop of a Portal that flags your account for the next Heart of Thorns beta event has brought the crowds flooding in.

Jeromai reports that, such is the level of interest, Triple-Trouble is on hiatus. His own time in Silverwastes has proven well-spent. "One event or another finishes, a fort defence of some kind, or a bull escort, and I realize that I have new mail and a purple beta portal in my inventory."

Move right along the lane please. Plenty of room for everyone.

I liked Dry Top when it was new but got very bored with it after a month or so. Silverwastes always seemed like a weaker iteration of the same idea. I was done with that in a matter of days. With the incentive of the beta portal I went back for the first time in a very long while last week and as a result I have now done the Vinewraith event, successfully, twice. I'd never even looked at it prior to that despite its being arguably the most significant new PvE content drop of the last six months.

It was okay. Again it felt like another very weak iteration of an earlier, stronger, better-realized idea, the Marionette event from Living Story 1, which was possibly my favorite GW2 event ever. A couple of  hour-long sessions in Silverwastes turned out to be about half a session too much. I haven't been back.

In our house the big PvE events of the day are Frozen Maw and, especially, Claw of Jormag. Maw is always the best loot for time spent but Jormag is done for fun. We like to hang at the back in Phase 2 and compete to see who can get the most bags off the Champs. Mrs Bhagpuss is the current record-holder with 11.

#nornpriorities

I think I must have done Maw more than a thousand times by now. Most days I do it twice - some days I do it four or five times. Claw of Jormag probably runs somewhere close to four figures. I have done him regularly ever since my first character reached Frostgorge, long before there was any material reward. I just like the event and always have. It's deliciously annoying.

Outside of that I always do at least the minimum three dailies on all three accounts to get the Completion reward. I never miss unless I am physically unable to reach the PC that day. The bulk of the rest of my time is spent in WvW, of which a good deal is taken up standing around in Citadel sorting my banks or out in the keeps and towers, refreshing siege or just hanging around aimlessly on the walls, chatting and watching the map.

The thing I don't do as much as I would like is map exploration. I still don''t have any character (of more than a dozen) with more than 65% map completion. I don't care about the "completion" part but it does show how much of Tyria I still haven't even seen. Must do something about that. Sometime.

The thing is this: GW2 has long since ceased to be a game that I play. It has become a space in which I live. I have few if any goals there any more. I do the achievements, kill the bosses, hoover up the loot, all for no other reason than to store it away. I have tens of thousands of Ascended crafting materials and enough gold to buy a Legendary should I want one, which I do not. I have well in excess of 10,000,000 karma, 7.5m on one account alone. I have over 2000 Laurels and nothing I want to spend them on.

Of course there are many, many things that can't be purchased, things that I don't have; seemingly endless skins and pets and titles and achievements. It's not that there are no goals left to which I could aspire, far from it. It's just that none of my characters want any of them enough to make the effort worthwhile.

And in GW2 it really would be an effort. Nothing outside of the Gem Store comes without hard work. There's a thread on the official forums entitled "Why does GW2 feel like a grindy F2p?" to which the very obvious answer has to be "Because that's exactly what it is". Or, at least, it is if that's what you choose to make of it.

That's why it's never boring to read about other people's experiences in a game you play, even if those very experiences are boring them to tears. Choices matter and context really helps to place your own experience. There's no better context than the quotidian narratives of other players.

So, here's my nugget of NBI advice for what it's worth: never be afraid to tell your stories of everyday gaming for fear that you'll bore your audience. Explain yourself to yourself and let the resonances reverberate as they will.

But if you've read this far you'll understand that already.

Sunday In The Park: GW2

Over many years, on many forums and in the comment threads of many long-suffering blogs, I have banged on about my belief that any MMO can be either sandbox or theme park depending on how you choose to approach it. For all that I hold this to be self-evident, however, I have little in the way of personal experience to offer to back it up. The plain fact remains that I don't really know what a Theme Park is. In fact, before I learned the term through its use in gaming, if it meant anything to me at all it would have been something like this.

Such a lack of personal experience of the original has always left me at a disadvantage when the term gets thrown around in relation to MMOs. I could dimly apprehend its relevance but nothing resonated with my own playstyle, which tends towards the chaotic. I act often on whim and sometimes on whimsy. I create my own goals, pursue them for as long as they interest me then drop them without a second thought.

I am not, nor have I ever been, in the habit of slavishly pursuing any path set out for me by a game or its developers. The concept of moving from ride to ride, waiting patiently or impatiently for each to start, whirling around and around until the music stops then staggering off towards the next is alien to me. Well, it was until yesterday.

Last Friday my Thief dinged 80, the sixth of my Guild Wars 2 characters to reach that milestone. Rather than jump straight back on the horse with my Mesmer or Guardian I thought I'd goof around for the weekend. I spent all Friday night and Saturday morning sorting the bags and bank vaults of six characters. Then for an encore I organized the guild bank.

There were a lot of weapons and pieces of armor strewn around and in the course of tidying it all up it became apparent to me that I had a lot of level 80s dressed in level 50-70 gear. At best. I spent most of the rest of Saturday on the Trading Post, buying and selling. People will buy anything. I was amazed. Throw any old rubbish on there and it's snapped up in seconds.

Anyway, by late Saturday evening all six 80s were in what I would consider to be basic level 80 starting gear with upgraded Masterwork or better in every slot, but between the lot of them they could barely muster an average of one Exotic each. Now, I don't believe I they need Exotics to do anything I'm likely to ask them to do but I was enjoying playing Barbies so I decided I'd spend Sunday farming Rares to convert to Globs of Ectoplasm so that I or Mrs Bhagpuss (who has all craft trades maxed) could make whatever I fancied. That's how I came to see the true horror of the MMORPG Theme Park Experience in action for possibly the first time in my life.

GW2 has a number of open-world events that conclude with the dropping of a chest the size and appearance of a commercial freezer. Inside this chest can be, but rarely are, Rares. Not counting the Temple events in Orr there are six of these chest-droppers. Three feature lieutenants of the Elder Dragons: Claw of Jormag, Tequaatl the Sunless and The Shatterer. The other three are The Frozen Maw, Shadow Behemoth and Fire Elemental. They keep to a strict schedule which you can find handily recorded, tabulated and regularly updated at the Guild Wars Temple website.

People use this like a railway timetable. Each event has a margin of error, presumably in an attempt to create some spurious sense of spontaneity but in practice all of them pop at numbingly regular intervals. If you keep an eye on the timers you can waypoint from Frostgorge Sound in the Far Shiverpeaks to Sparkfly Fen in the Steamspur Mountains before bouncing back up via Queensdale to Wayferer Foothills and you won't be alone.

On a busy Sunday the resemblance to what I imagine a real Theme Park to be like was unmistakeable. A few minutes before the earliest point at which an event could begin people would begin to gather and mill around, becoming increasingly fractious the longer they had to wait.

With the exception of Tequaatl, who just appears at the ominous cry of "There's something in the water!", all the events require some chain of pre-events to be completed. If these are right at the main location, as they are for The Claw and The Maw, the whole zerg sets to with a will. If they happen somewhere out of sight, as at The Shatterer or Shadow Behemoth, everyone shuffles around where they stand, complaining that someone ought to be doing the pre-events.

Someone always is, and they are the ones who often miss out on the main event because of their public-spiritidness. By the time they hoof it over to the where the action is, the action isn't. The ride has stopped and everyone has has moved on.

The dragon driven out, the Maw quiet once more, the air is filled with the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the disappointed chest-openers. "Nothing but blues" is the common refrain. In Frostgorge you could get crushed in the scrum at the nearby vendor as everyone rushes to unload their worthless rubbish. Anyone lucky enough to pull a Rare out of the box is honor-bound to link it in Map chat, mostly to prove it really can happen. Sometimes the class clown will throw in a link to a Legendary. How we laughed.

I did this most of the day. The only event I didn't do was the Fire Elemental. Never done that. I did the Shadow Behemoth for the first time (the first several times) thanks to reading The Egg Baron's recent fine walkthrough. It's been bugged as long as I can remember but it's working fine now. I did The Maw, which pops about every 30 minutes or so, many times; Claw of Jormag and The Shatterer a couple and Tequaatl once.

I got half a dozen or so Rares, a couple of which were upgrades that I used. I blew the rest up for Ectos. It was a fun way to spend Sunday, but it really brought home to me how mechanical and gamelike GW2 can be. This morning I read J3w3l comparing the open world of Firefall to GW2 "...every time I try to level in GW2 it is just ticking off the check list of stuff to do so I can progress to the next zone. Fill in that heart, see that vista", she says. "It could have been an amazingly large, open and complex world but now it feels entirely compartmentalised."

It certainly can feel that way. Usually I don't even notice it but yesterday was a true glimpse into the Dark Side. ANet have said they intend to add more events so that any given event is seen less frequently. I would suggest they also remove Chest rewards from events completely. Increase the chance for better quality loot from any event instead. Encourage people to do events because they are interesting, intriguing, odd or amusing, not for the slim chance of a yellow weapon to destroy to make an orange one. Make it more about the park and less about the rides.

Still and all, I did have fun.