These are my tales and thoughts from the weekend of playing Guild Wars 2. Everything from the achiever drive to possibly new content to momentum in the end game is on the butcher’s block.
100%
My immediate goal is to get 100% world completion on a single character. I am a zone or so over halfway. Not only do I eventually (years) want to get a legendary, but since my main character has the most momentum, this is a great time to get that achievement completed.
Last night on my level 80, I completed the charr starter zone Plains of Ashford. Never did it feel like a waste of time to check off some achievement that the achiever portion of my brain told me I had to, or it would itch. I was getting materials for future crafting, which would help alts rocket up to higher levels. I was completing my daily, which netted me a mystic coin and a repair canister. Every dozen kills would net me an item around my level. Each event was giving me a silver and some change. Sure, this was not going to net me as much gold as running Orr for the same amount of time, but I was not making some copper per hour pittance either.
Most of this was hitting the achiever itch. Yet, I have slowed down incredibly since I hit level 80. For my part, I no longer have the feeling of throwaway gear that accompanies leveling. My character was given a greater sense of permanence at level cap. Now I am taking more time to smell the flowers. I am talking to more NPCs, and finding great humor and great lore throughout this starting zone.
New Events
Was I also seeing new events? I had played the starter zones many times over during all the betas. I never remembered the bandits taking the windmill in Queensdale or the Flame Legion creating a lava spire fort right in the middle of the earliest levels of Plains of Ashford. I ran to the these “new” events with childish glee.
If these were post-launch additions, I would think ArenaNet would want some small amount of fanfare if it is simply even “adding events ^ ^†in the patch notes. Still they are new and fresh to me, and much welcome if I had just missed them between all the beta weekend events. It is getting me more excited to alt either way. Since my main will have been everywhere, man, I was a tad concerned that running through it on another character would have been much less shiny. With about 300 hearts in the game, that is some serious effort to even give each heart one new event. I hope ArenaNet shares what the Live Team’s plans are soon. Small additions add a lot of shine to previously known places.
Craftworks
If things do get boring on an alt, I know that I will have plenty of materials to craft through a dozen levels. It still is such a treat how much leveling experience I gain through crafting. Who knows how many extra skill points I have earned through leveling my main character’s first two crafting professions to 400.
My artificing is at 400, and I made my character’s first exotic item, a scepter. It was a great moment because crafting exotics requires a lot of “end game†moving parts. My cooking, on the other hand, made a final run to 392 before slamming in to a wall. I had done so much crafting and exploring that I had basically skipped most of the level 60-80 zones. This meant that I was missing out on a ton of karma food items, like eggplant and something near Mount Maelstrom, in addition to all the herbs. Oh, the herbs… I would slaughter an entire centaur village for a few leaves of sage.
I have a nice larder of Orrian produce, but I can’t use those until I hit 400. I think I will have to hit Fireheart Rise and Frostgorge Sound or throw money at the trading post to get to that point.
Exotic up
With a friend of mine crafting an amulet, I now have 2 slots of exotics. Between superior rune and sigil slots, each character has over 25 slots to fill to get “fully†geared. I will say that I hit Orr mostly undergeared with some 40 level rings and a few pieces of level 65 armor, and once I upped things closer to level 80, there was a huge difference. I imagine there is also a significant difference with a fully exotic geared character.
A legendary item though is much further off. I think it is doable except for the dungeon part. My goal “The Bifrost†requires 500 Arah dungeon tokens. I am honestly not sure how I am going to hit that without focusing all my playtime on that dungeon. Everything else is doable by adding sands of grain to the mold. Snag a glob of ectoplasm here, another skill point there, farm a few more rare items, an hour or so in WvW, and it all adds up.
Now that tokens are only received on the successful completion of an explorable dungeon (specific to the legendary), there are no sands of grain for the dungeon part of a legendary. There are only handfuls right now. ArenaNet has said that they want dungeon tokens to be a rare drop in dungeon so that there is some partial progress, but it’s still so different from every other reward system in Guild Wars 2.
I do admit that if I become pro at Arah’s explorable, 500 dungeon tokens is only about 10 runs (if players get 60 per run). That doesn’t seem too bad. Still the Giganticus Lupicus stands in the way of each explorable path. It is the one part of the legendary item I am not looking forward to.
The Hourglass
With legendaries and the trading post with the gem exchange, I feel that every action I take in Guild Wars 2 is rewarding. Even in the lowest of the zones yesterday, I felt that I was making good steps forward on the progress bar with my max level character. In no small part this is why Guild Wars 2 is a game made for its sales model. I own the game now for as long as servers are open, and whenever I come back to it there is progress to be made. I don’t feel a rush to get anywhere. I honestly feel a little bad for people that rushed to level 80 then rushed to a legendary weapon. That doesn’t seem as fun. I like my constant drip of fun rather than some binge. Now if I could stop myself from buying gems to get mini packs, I might actually make some headway.
–Ravious
Any reason, other than forcing yourself to ignore it, would you not buy lvl80 exotics on the TP for a few gold a pop?
If you can get it crafted by a guildie or yourself, you will save a good deal of money… usually about 30-50 silver per item. This is buying the mats from the TP. Obviously supplementing that with farmed mats will save you more.
And it’s not like the T6 materials (ori and anc. wood) are that hard to get. Running around a bit in Orr yields a good bunch of it, and contrary to many posts on the official forums, I have no problem just running through the most areas in Orr without getting drawn into fights, just harvesting the nodes. If you harvest the T5 materials as well until you get a full stack of them you can also use the Mystic Forge to transmute them into T6 materials.
Or get it crafted, sure. My point was not that exotics are expensive overall, but rather that you can get full BiS almost the second you hit 80. So if a goal is to get full exotics, that should be a rather simple goal, unless you ignore the TP to do it all yourself, as Bhag mentioned.
Exactly the same reason people make things instead of buying them in real life: knowing you made something yourself adds something intangible but valuable that can never be replicated by a purchase. Double that if it was made for you by someone you care for or you make it for them.
Of course if you don’t get that feeling, go ahead and buy!
In this game, more than any other, I do miss the “crafted by” item ID. I think with the TP and sell orders, this can make it all the harder on the databases, though.
Still miss it.
Speaking of gems, I dropped ten dollars with ArenaNet yesterday for a bank slot, and a dye pack. Not because I particularly needed the dye (I did want the slot), but just to say thanks at the end of the month.
Whereas in most such games I’m calculating fun-to-dollar-to-time ratios to decide whether I want to cut them off, never to return, at the end of each month…
If you can get it crafted by a guildie or yourself, you will save a good deal of money… usually about 30-50 silver per item. This is buying the mats from the TP. Obviously supplementing that with farmed mats will save you more.
It’s ulikely they added new events, since the repeated statement on the official forums is that stuff is being back-burnered in favor of fixing bugs, exploits and assorted stability issues. Your experience is probably more along the lines of the bandits barricading that first bridge to farmer woznames place in Queensdale (the one that is under constant attack by worms and bandits with torches). The bandits will, from time to time, set up barricades on that bridge that need clearing. I have seen that event once in all of the betas and in live, and I am getting close to having run 10 characters through Queensdale between all that.
My guess is that Halloween will be our first taste of new event content, and even then I’m not sure we will see anything except the holiday events. I’m fine with that incidently. There is plenty already and, judging by the profession forums, there is also still plenty of skills and traits that need fixing, not to mention some of the later zones seem to suffer from bugged or stuck events rather frequently.