The Potterer's Guide To The Shadow Behemoth : GW2

Where is it?

Godslost Swamp in Queensdale

Nearest Waypoint?

If you ask in map chat everyone will say Godslost but I prefer Swamplost Haven. It's almost as close, it's drier and you can shop there.

   
Will we be here long? I think I'm getting trenchfoot.

You might. Shadow Behemoth only shows himself every couple of hours or so. Also, he has a tendency to bug out. If you've been waiting a long time he might not be coming.

Anything to do while I wait?

Not really. There's a vista. That'll kill ten seconds. Also a skill point, there's another ten. You could help Historian Garrod investigate the swamp, but there you have the nub of it: you're in a swamp and swamps are not known for their wide range of leisure activities. Unfortunately you have to stay here because the text message vanishes if you wander much farther and you risk missing the whole thing. Oh, if the Ambient Killer daily is up, you're in luck, One thing swamps do have in abundance is frogs. And flies.

Making a virtue out of necessity, because there's so little to do in the swamp but no-one dares leave, there's often plenty of player-made entertainment like costume brawls, feasts, flamethrower tag and suchlike high-jinks to pass the time. It's only matter of time before there are buskers and a pie stall.

How do I make sure I don't miss out?

About the only clue is the text. When it says "Underworld forces have been spotted outside the swamp" that's your cue.

Wait! Now I do have to go outside the swamp?

You could but I don't advise it. The forces in question are at The Heartwoods, Elvin Monastery and Taminn Foothills. They look close enough but by the time you run there and back the big event will be over. Stay in the swamp and let someone else do it. They will.

Then what happens, exactly?

If you want "exactly", ask The Egg Baron. If you just want the high concept version... Some portals open; you blow them up; a ginormous creature appears and waves his very long arms about a lot a few times, then he dies and you get the Chest. Oh, and lots of red rings appear all over the place but they don't seem to do anything so you can safely ignore them. If there's a way to get downed in this event I've yet to find it.

Sounds peasy.

It is. Probably the easiest of them all. Certainly the one with the least running around, providing you don't attempt to engage the "forces".

Sum it up for me. Is it worth doing?

Very much so. It's by far the most visually spectacular of all the low-level metas. The Shadow Behemoth is huge and really quite scary. Worth doing just to see him. And once the novelty wears off it has "quick" and "easy" to recommend repeat visits. Provided he shows up, that is.

The Potterer's Guide To The Great Jungle Wurm : GW2

Where is it?

Wychmire Swamp in Caledon Forest

Nearest Waypoint?

Falias Thorp, but it's very frequently contested. If it's not available next-best is probably Caledon Haven.

Is this going to take long? These mosquitoes are as big as basketballs!

Could be a while. You have to wait for a cabbage called Gamarien to decide he feels like wandering around the swamp and he only gets the itch once every couple of hours.

So what is there to do while I wait?

Fight the Nightmare Court. Over and over. They want Falias Thorp so badly they send eight waves of grunts to take it every ten minutes or so. Sometimes they even win, which can lead to a nasty surprise if you logged out there thinking it was safe.

Other than that, the area's a bit short on entertainment. It's a swamp.

How will I know when it starts?

A big orange blob appears over Gamarien's head. That's a bit of a giveaway. Also the meta-event text changes to some variant of "Shadows grow long in the heart of the swamp". Spooky! Gamarien does speak but only to ponder to himself not broadcast to the whole map so you'll only hear him if you're quite close. 

And my role in all this?

Guess. Your job is to follow Gamarien and make sure he doesn't get eaten while he strolls about orating portentously. There are a number of stages, all of which end in mass slaughter as you prevent a range of wildlife, locals and mindless undead from doing what you'd so dearly like to be able to do yourself, namely shut Gamarien up for good.


That sounds like a lot of walking.

Gamarien walks. You'd better run. There are several discrete events, each of which gives karma and xp but they pop very quickly, as do the things you have to kill, which all seem to have very few hit-points. Unlike The Maw, the terrain mitigates against your getting to all of them in time. Pick a target and stick to it; if you tear around trying to get all of them you'll most likely get none. And when the Wurm appears, don't stand there gawping. He dies as fast as everything else.

Or you could avoid all the running bout and go wait at the corpse of the dead worm from last time. You can see it from where Gamarien starts. He just walks in a big circle.

Sum it up for me. Is it worth doing?

Definitely and not just for the rewards. The Wurm when it appears is spectacular but if there's anything like a crowd waiting he'll be dead before you can really appreciate him. He stands repeated viewings. Apart from the frankly ludicrous early stage when Gamarien and the Nightmare Court determinedly run through their lines in direct contradiction of the reality around them, the whole thing is fast, furious, frenetic and fun.

The Potterer's Guide To The Fire Elemental : GW2

Where is it?

Thaumonova Reactor in Metrica Province

Nearest Waypoint?

Muridian.

Will this take long? I think I'm starting to glow.

Not too long. The event chain leading up to the Fire Elemental runs just a tad slower than The Maw, about once every thirty minutes.

What is there to do in the meantime?

Explore the Thaumanova Reactor. It's a fascinating, if radioactive place. Frequent events run inside and it's a great spot for several Dailies. Comatose Asura researchers sprawl in every corridor for Healer,  the wide range of creatures roaming the halls are perfect for both general Kill and Kill Variety and there are several Veterans scattered around. There's also a rather challenging skill point round the back of the reactor.

How will I know when the main event starts?

The text will change to "Rooba is outside the eastern entrance, preparing to enter the reactor's remains" . There's no audio clue and you can't see the text if you wander very far, so stay close to the building.

What do I have to do?

Follow a whirling dustbin around the reactor. Make sure it doesn't "die". Stand in a ring for ages while a dustbin whirls about. Make sure it doesn't "die". Listen to an Asura give a masterclass in overconfidence about why her whirling dustbin won't "die". Watch the dustbin die.

Finally, finally! fight a Fire Elemental while dodging pools of lava and reviving people who didn't.

Sounds like there's a lot of standing about.

There is. Also walking at the pace of an arthritic tortoise, which appears to be the benchmark speed for Golems in this part of the jungle. The Fire Elemental event, or Thaumanova Reactor Fallout to use its Sunday name, is the only one with a fixed duration, since the part where you stand in a ring lasts exactly five minutes. This is very handy if you want to go make a cup of tea or boil an egg.

Sum it up for me. Is it worth doing?

For the rewards, of course it is. As often as you can.

The story itself is amusing, at least the first time. If you do it right from the start (there are other pre-events as well) it takes ten minutes or so, which is a lot longer than any of the other low level chest-droppers, or maybe it just feels longer, what with all the standing in one place.

The Fire Elemental is moderately spectacular although its hard to appreciate the view when he's doing his best to incinerate you and the actual fight is great fun. After the first couple of runs you might want to cut to the chase and arrive just before the ring event ends, in time for the payoff.

As a bonus, someone will often offer to use "The Key" by which they mean the Matrix Cube Key. It opens that portal you ran past earlier and probably wondered about. Jump down the well and land on a floating platform outside. There's a Champion Steam Ogre. Beat him and get another chest, although just an ordinary one this time.

The Potterer's Guide To The Frozen Maw: GW2

Where is it? 

Frusenfell Creek in Wayfarer Foothills. 

Nearest Waypoint?

A toss-up between Krennak's Homestead and Vendrake's Homestead. The event starts at Krennak's but if you arrive late Vendrake is closer to the final battle.

I'm freezing! How long is this going to take?

Not long. The Maw has the fastest turnaround of all the Big Chest events. It pops roughly twice an hour. If you ported in and just missed it you might as well stay for the next one.

Is there anything to do while I wait?

Plenty!  You'll probably be asked to gather wurm eggs, build a snow army and fight the ice dragon's corruption. If you don't fancy good works or chores there are a couple of nearby skill points and a cave with a chest at the back to keep you amused.

If I'm off doing all that, how will I know when it starts?

You should be close enough to see the message change. If it says anything other than "The Maw is quiet", it's started. If you're right by Scholar Brogan you'll hear him complain that someone riled up the Grawl again, a useful audio reminder if you're tabbed out, so long as you remembered to leave the sound on.


Ok, so it's started. Now what do I do?

Kill some grawl, follow the pompous Norn "scholar" across an ice field, kill some more grawl, smash an ice sculpture, listen to another pompous Norn rant for a while, kill a few Norns (non-speaking extras but almost certainly pompous too) smash some portals and, finally, kill the Shaman. There's some other stuff but usually everything dies too fast to notice it.

That sounds like a lot of work.

It would be if you had to do it on your own but mostly you'll have your work cut out getting from one phase to the next fast enough to get credit. Don't try and do everything. Just follow the crowd and shoot what they're shooting and it will all come right in the end.

Sum it up for me. Is it worth doing?

For the rewards, of course it is. As often as you can.

Without those you probably wouldn't want to do it very often.The Maw is the least interesting of all the meta-events. All you get to fight are the same ordinary mobs you see all over Wayfarer's Foothills - grawl, ice elementals, Sons of Svanir and there's no huge reveal at the end. He's supposed to be summoning a giant ice elemental but he'll be dead long before you ever see it. It's a cheerful romp in the snow and that's about it.

Decisions, Decisions

I spent most of yesterday trailing my many characters around Tyria opening up the necesary waypoints so that each of them could hop to any of the Big Chest events at an instant's notice. I had a great time and while I was on auto-run I had time to come to a few decisions:

• I am not stopping at eight. Even with a Mesmer not yet finished and a Guardian barely started I am already itching to make a new character. I have two free slots and they are both going to get used.

• My next two characters will be an Asuran Ranger and a Charr Engineer. Yes, I have two Asuras and two Charrs already. Yes, one of them is a ranger and the other an engineer. That's not good enough. I want them both ways round.

Ignore me at your peril

 

• The Asuran ranger will level up mainly south of Lion's Arch. I have barely touched Metrica Province and Caledon Forest and it was apparent running through them several times as I did yesterday that they must be fascinating places to explore. My Asuras should know their adopted homeland as well as my Charr know theirs but both of them have barely set foot there. The new one will be different.

• I've been toying with the idea of writing some "Potterer's Guides" for a long time. Nothing serious, as befits the title. Just a surface skim of MMOs or parts of MMOs from the perspective and for the benefit of players whose motivation is mainly to wander about and amuse themselves without having to put themselves out very much. I will turn my whimsical thought-project into something a little more substantial.

The first of these decisions to be acted upon was the last. I've drafted the first four Potterer's Guides, one for each of the low-level, chest-dropping meta events. The first, The Frozen Maw, is finished and I'm posting it immediately after this. The rest should be up in a couple of days. After that I plan to do the dragons. Yes, all this information is already widely available, but never mind that. They were a lot of fun to write and that was why I wrote them although I hope they are also entertaining to read. If anyone finds them useful, well that's just sugar.

Or Google Head Office as we know it

That seemed to be more than enough decisions for one day. Then I read Syp's post on the demise of Google Reader, followed by a whirlwind of similar outraged, upset or glumly blog posts found, ironically, in my Reader. The whole sorry show has been discussed enough so I won't go on about it, other than to say that it prompts me to more decisions:

I will fully archive Inventory Full. I was doing this but I got out of the habit when it began to take days rather than hours. I will run HTTrack for a month if need be but I will get it all stored away out of the cloud.

I will begin to move anything that matters away from Google. I wouldn't give twopence for Blogger's long-term survival. I'll hang on here while it lasts if only because when it goes maybe there will be some deal made to carry history over to other platforms. I will look into the possibility of migrating before then, though.

I will also look into alternatives to Gmail. I don't care about losing it as an email service. Those are ten a penny. The issue is that most MMOs now require an email address as log-on ID and I have lazily created a seemingly endless series of Gmail accounts to satisfy them. If Gmail goes, so do most of my MMOs.

Like many, I used to positively like Google. When it wasn't all that well-known in the UK I recommended it to people often. I still like what it does but I can no longer trust it. There are plenty of alternatives and I will make an effort to find and use them. Eggs in a basket? Not so much any more.

Go Play Outdoors! : GW2

For quite a while The Nosy Gamer has been publishing a league table of MMO log-ins garnered from X-Fire under the name of The Digital Dozen. I think I first came across it back when I took my blog-reading cues from VirginWorlds and I haven't done that since before I started Inventory Full.

It's a controversial enterprise because who really knows how many MMO players use X-Fire, Raptr or any other third-party launcher? I'm 99.9% certain that if I'd asked in any guild I've been in in the last decade there'd have been tumbleweed blowing across the chatbox. It would be pushing the envelope to ask most people I've played with over the years to find the official forum of the game they were subscribed to; downloading and installing a third-party app so they could log into a game that had its own perfectly serviceable launcher would be looked on as a sign of insanity.

You said "in the water" !

Nevertheless, by dint of persistence alone, The Digital Dozen has become both useful and instructive. It may not tell you how many people are playing MMOs in general or the commercial success of any MMO in particular but it does provide an internally consistent benchmark of one against another, at least insofar as users of X-Fire are concerned.

Since Guild Wars 2 launched it has been pegged in second place behind World of Warcraft. The numbers go up, the numbers go down, the positions stay the same. GW2 is not going to overtake WoW as the West's leading MMO any time soon.

That said, the direction of travel I alluded to recently seems to me to make it more likely that the gap between them will gradually close. As GW2 shifts ground towards the territory staked out out by WoW, so will more barriers preventing players who came to MMOs through WoW from making a comfortable transition drop. And should Blizzard choose to borrow some of GW2's clothes and retro-fit GW2 conveniences to WoW in an attempt to stave off disloyalty and curiosity, that in itself may go some way to buttering defectors paws in their new home.

Hire more tellers!

Both Mrs Bhagpuss and I remarked this week on how very, very busy Yak's Bend has become. There seem to be players pretty much everywhere we go at all times of day and night. I couldn't even see the banker in Lion's Arch through the crowd for most of Sunday and the sewing line at the Tailoring station was six deep.

Part of this may well be more actual people logged in; new players, returnees, regular players playing more. ANet have certainly been very bullish recently both about their sales and their concurrency. One thing that's definitely making the game feel buzzy and busy and bustling right now, though, comes as the direct result of the loot changes in the February update.

Prior to that, the place to be was grinding in Fractals or Dungeons, instanced off out of sight. With everyone farming for Ascended or Legendary progression the outside world risked becoming a place to pass through on the way to Map Completion then swiftly forget.

Never has nuclear clean-up seemed so...worthwhile.

That wasn't really going to happen, of course, because plenty of people have other things on their mind than vertical gear progression. The open world was busy enough with explorers and wanderers, the casual and the curious. Big ticket events were already funneling in the hordes for a crack at the slim chance of finding something worth having in the Big Chest.

Post-patch, that funnel has turned into a fire-hose. Maps with events featured on Guild Wars Temple's Dragon Timer now go into overflow as often as not. If you want a shot at Jormag's Claw you'd best be there before the 75-minute window of opportunity even opens. Latecomers can cool their heels in an alternate Frostgorge with only some bonus Orichalcum for consolation (although they may be lucky as I was to find the Claw screeching his defiance even in Overflow).

Barbecue at the beach...

There are rumbles of discontent, albeit mild ones. Guesting is currently taking the brunt of lock-out bitterness as disgruntled locals complain that incomers are taking all their dragons. There's some occasional graveyard humor about GW2 becoming the world's first AFK MMO. In general, though, people seem to be enjoying themselves.

The run up to every chest-dropper is like a little mini-event in itself, with impromptu costume brawls, dance parties and heavy map banter. The spirit is good because, by and large, people are getting what they want and they don't mind waiting for that. The effect on the surrounding world is positive, too, with plenty of players spreading out around the area as they wait, working on Dailies, doing events and generally making the place look lived in.

The new loot route may be as unimmersive and artificial as the one that preceded it, but having it happen out of doors makes all the difference. The guild bounties and missions are equally artificial but they too occur outdoors and that matters. If game design tends to direct players towards certain paths of achievement, it's much better if those paths are out in the open where anyone passing by can join in.

...barbecue at the bank.

So, it's hard to tell if GW2 really is pulling in more people but there's absolutely no doubt that it feels that way from the inside. Subjectively, the game is heaving and it feels great. And if curious heads do poke in from the MMO world outside, how much better for them to find us all having one enormous party rather than looking at a ghost town and wondering where everyone went.

Patch Day Blues

So far this morning I have patched :

Everquest
EQ2
Rift
The Secret World
Vanguard

As I write this I am patching:

Lord of the Rings Online.

I was already patched and up to date on:

GW2
Regnum
The Missing Ink
DCUO

I would patch the following, but for various reasons I can't right now:

Fallen Earth (on a dodgy portable hard drive I no longer trust)
Dragon Nest (on a USB stick I can't lay my hand on right now)
Argo (waiting for supposed new "global" version)

Apart from TMI, which is a beta, those are all MMOs in which I have characters that I care about and that I am still theoretically leveling up and/or working on. It's not an exclusive list, either.

Taken 2013 - could be 2003

All this activity was prompted by Syp, who re-started his monthly "What are you playing?" poll last month and just posted the results. I completed the poll and was shocked by how few MMOs I'd logged into even once during February. That, compounded with Wilhelm at TAGN making the disturbing observation that guild leadership in Rift passes automatically if you don't log in regularly, determined me to make more of an effort to drag myself away from GW2 and get out and about more. (Virtually out and about, that is. It's bloody freezing outside!)

While all the others were patching away in the background I spent an hour and a half in Everquest. I started off doing what I almost always do when I log back in after a few weeks or months away, namely wander round Plane of Knowledge randomly checking vendors for bargains.

Now this is the kind of change I like

It's at this point that I usually realize I am so out of touch I have no idea what a bargain looks like any more, so off I go into The Bazaar where I open the /barter window to see what people are buying. From there it goes to looking in my bags, then comparing my gear with what's for sale to see if a new wave of expansion trash drops has completely out-dated whatever I'm wearing and that's how a morning passes.

This time I did at least kill a few Sand Giants in Oasis, which was hardly much of an ask for a  level 84 Beastlord, but hey, Sand Giants = plat pinatas. Challenge not required. And speaking of pinatas, after EQ it was on to Rift.

Eeny, meeny, miny, mo... oh sod it, kill em all.

All my level 50s there (and yes they are all still only level 50 and likely to stay that way) are in those New Lands of which I have yet to learn the names, or care. Couldn't face that so I woke up my warrior in Meridian and had him bounce around on balloons for a couple of minutes, after which I lost the will to live and logged out.

Kudos to Kaozz for keeping it up for a couple of hours. I wholeheartedly agree that Rift is going in a terrible direction. The attitude of the Dev in the linked thread appears to be "last year it was easy and you all got what you wanted. Well, we'll soon put a stop to that!" If his approach is in any way representative then I think all hope is already lost.

Dignity? What's that?

Patching technology appears to have plateaued at a highly acceptable level. Everything went very smoothly and quickly. (Well, not always quickly. Nothing happens when it comes to LotRO - it's still patching as I write this, although to be fair to Turbine I haven't logged in for over six months). Keeping all these MMOs patched up shouldn't be a problem but playing them obviously will be. Nevertheless, I mean to give it the old Innsmouth Academy try.  

For now though, it's back to GW2. Dailies to do, dragons to loot, and most importantly fun to be had. So. Much. Fun.