Gear, Dungeons, and Karma – Oh My! #GW2
stargrace 
My elementalist is now at a comfortable level 80. I reached 400 chef, artificer, jeweler, tailor, and huntsman. I love having the ability to swap out my crafts on a single character, it makes things much easier.
Combat Wombats kicked off the night with a karma banner and a 15% karma buff for 24 hours. I used a potion and some karma food and managed to open enough jugs and drops to have slightly over 200,000 karma, which gave me a great start on level 80 karma gear. I picked up the chest, legs, helm, shoulders, and back pieces. I have almost enough laurels to pick up my first piece of ascended gear, and I’m now working towards obtaining my legendary. I’m going to do it in stages, I figure. First I’ll work on getting world completion. While I’m doing that I’ll be saving up the karma required and dabbling in PvP. It will take time but we’ll see how it goes.
I joined up with two guild mates to attempt to pug a dungeon, and I discovered one really annoying ‘feature’ guild wars 2 has regarding their dungeons. If the person who started the dungeon group (ie: zoned in first and set the dungeon) leaves, you get kicked out and you’re forced to re-start the instance with someone else. We struggled doing path one explore of Caudecus Manor, two named down (with some helpful hints) no thieves or mesmers in the group to make sneaking around easier, and mid-fight a member left. Suddenly we all found ourselves outside the gate in whatever stage we had been in before we got kicked (ie: I was laying dead on the ground).
One person should not have that much control over a group. The person who left didn’t give us any time to find a replacement or even notify us that he was fed up and wanted to bail. There was nothing to do but either start over again or just give up. Since it was already after midnight I decided to stop for the evening.
Tonight the Combat Wombats are making another dungeon run, and I’ll be going along on my elementalist. I’m excited to see how it goes.
As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!