Guild Wars 2

Clockwork Chaos #GW2 #GuildWars2

stargrace August 22, 2013 No Comments

This week I started playing Guild Wars 2 again, which coincides with their latest event, Clockwork Chaos. Scarlet (pictured above) is a little bit crazy, and every hour on the hour an invasion of hers begins in Tyria. Basically an entire map turns into a mass of enemies and you and your friends (or anyone on the map) will have to split up into groups of 10 or so, in order to defeat. The reason you’ll have to split up is simple. There are too many groups to take them all down unless you split up AND the more people are in an area, the larger the single fight is. Split up and the encounters are slightly easier, meaning you can obtain the objectives quicker. You are on the clock after all!

Whether you defeat Scarlet or not, hang out on that map until the timer is up and you’ll be given a reward as well as rewards for participating in each individual fight. You’ll earn more rewards the further along the event you are, and as a word of warning, keep your bags empty. You may even want to be able to summon a merchant or banker while on your travels.

There are (as always) a ton of achievements associated with this event. I’ve been working on them slowly but the hardest one requires approx 13 hours invested. The achievement wants you to shut down 13 different invasions on 13 different maps. So far I’ve completed 5 of them. The event runs from August 20th until September 3rd (I believe) so you should have enough time even if you only complete one or two maps a day. A lot of people are running this continuously because the rewards are just that good and I don’t mean the clockwork rewards but the random blues greens and yellows that you’ll get from countless chests. It’s quite easy to go in and walk out with a few gold each time although if you’re anything like me you’ll want to turn map chat off.

As always Dulfy has a collection of guides and information on this live event, but the majority of them are pretty straight forward. Unlike the Queen’s Jubilee and the Gauntlet patches which I am still trying to figure out since they’re running at the same time. So far it’s been refreshing to be back in game. I like the simplicty of the game and my tiny asura is just as cute as ever. When I left I had only completed 55% of the map, and I still haven’t finished off my personal quest yet so perhaps I’ll be able to finish those off before my attention wanders once more. We’ll just have to see. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Super Adventure Box Time! #GW2

stargrace April 2, 2013 1 Comment

While I avoided most of the social media yesterday for April Fools, I did manage to spend a few hours playing Guild Wars 2 and their Super Adventure Box zone. It was a lot of fun, even if I had to run the zones in “infantile mode” which made happy little clouds spawn with magical rainbows to carry me and Hampooj to safety.

I thought the zones were a lot of fun, but they would have been almost impossible for me to do without the use of those happy little clouds. The only issue I have with any of this event is that you have to sink in (what appears) to be a lot of time in order to earn enough baubles for any of the appearance skins that Moto sells. I personally feel that the time required doesn’t quite match up to the rewards given, but perhaps that’s because I’m particularly bad at these sorts of jumping / secret room puzzle games. I could easily spend multiple hours on multiple days just to earn enough for a small handful of rewards.

Still, a huge glee of excitement from me for this event. Pictured above is me fighting the end boss, a giant frog King. The mechanic was simple enough, smash the amulet he wears, pick up the shards, then when his tongue goes into spasms, throw the shard into his mouth to stun him so that you can damage him. All the while he’s spitting out rounds of poison that seep along the ground in various directions. The smart way to do this fight is to move from lily pad to lily pad, hitting him as you pass. However, since I played on infantile mode the best thing to do was to hang out on the rainbows in between hitting the amulet and stunning him so you could hit him. It took some time, but eventually we killed him.

Have you tried the Super Adventure Box zones yet? What did you think of them? Let me know in comments below! As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Gear, Dungeons, and Karma – Oh My! #GW2

stargrace March 23, 2013 No Comments

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!

The Half Way Mark #GW2 #GuildWars2

stargrace March 21, 2013 1 Comment

At the half way mark, my elementalist is sitting at a comfortable level 40. Last night as I was running around trying to get my daily done, I embraced a few facts about the character. While it may have been alright for my guardian to romp around Tyria wearing gear 10 levels lower than her, if I want to stay alive on my elementalist, my best bet is to upgrade her gear every 5 levels or so. Not a big deal at this stage of the game, gear is barely a silver per piece. So when I realized I was wearing level 18-24 gear at 39, I went and upgraded every single piece.

It made a huge difference in my ability to survive, which in turn makes a difference in my attitude as I play. Dying over and over again is not really fun.

I haven’t been quite as dedicated with my crafting this round as I was with my guardian. I’ve chosen to go the artificer / huntsman rout because an artificer is what I need to create the legendary staff I want one day, and huntsman was next on my list of “crafts I want to have maxed” – I have plans to max each of the crafts (slowly). With the guardian I made sure not to move on to the next zone until I was finished with the tier I was crafting, but this time I haven’t bothered to do that. Maybe I should. Actually now that I think about it, that was a much smarter way of completing things since I personally have more than enough time to farm components.

I really want to get into some dungeons, but I’m not sure where people go to look for a group. I also have no idea what a lot of the abbreviations I see in Lion’s Arch stand for. Fractals are another event I’d like to get into but finding a group for that has also proven to be difficult during my play times. I’m sure I’ll get to experience all of these things before too long!

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!  (Also, this weekend will be filled with Neverwinter beta goodness, so expect a few posts about that in the upcoming days)