Gates of Mathingy

So, the Gates of Maguuma trailer is up!  Setting aside the fact I am pissed off with how much press is coming out of Anet in video format I am pretty excited!

The main reason for my excitement is my brother.  Huh? Yeah. He bought GW2 way back at launch and didn't really enjoy it.  We're two out of four of an IRL Guild (sorta) and the four of us have played a fair few MMOs together.  Until recently we were scattered to the four winds: I'm playing GW2, one was heavily into FFXIV (legacy player) and two were out of the game altogether including my brother.

But he's back.  He recently moved into a bigger house and has claimed a man cave for himself.  He now has a PC to sit and play at and decided to give GW2 another shot.

He recently said this in an email to the "guild":

this is probably the second best RPG i have played

Hurray! Although we don't get, or expect to have, much play time together we've already had some laughs.  This mainly revolved around his lack of JP skill, WvW death and a totally spontaneous Evolved Jungle Wurm attempt (successful).

There's lots he has yet to try in the game including any Personal Story, holiday events, mini-games, Fractals and proper dungeon runs but the one big thing, the thing I have really missed not being able to discuss, is the Living Story.

So, hopefully come July 1st, we'll be able to sit down and get into it for a few hours and then we can have a good ol' fashioned speculate.  I do like a good speculate.

So, I levelled a Thief

I made a Thief a looong time ago and until last month his main purpose was to hang out in Metrica Province (he is asura) and complete dailies.  Metrica is great for kill variety at the Thaumanova Reactor, underwater and ambient slayer in Loch Jezt and cheap gathering around Artergon Waypoint.  I just played him for larks.

Señor Teatime (Mr. was taken)

Initially I didn't really enjoy the class.  The profession mechanics for Thief in GW2 are Initiative, Stealth and Steal and none of them really blew my skirt up.  Stolen abilities are often just flat damage and Stealth seems to last next to no time. However, Initiative is interesting.  When combined with the versatility provided by Dual Wield not having cooldowns on your weapon skills becomes very powerful.

Thief Utility Skills, though, aren't all that and tend to have long cooldowns for otherwise modest effects.  I guess this is a result of the need to balance the spammable weapon skills.  Venoms are a particular head scratcher, 40 second cooldown to apply several stacks of conditions that don't stack? I have to assume they have PvP in mind for that.  I mean Poison as a DoT is not great, it's the debuff to healing that makes it powerful but PvE mobs don't heal.

Prior to Thief my most played classes were Guardian, Engineer and Necromancer and I had a big problem with survivability starting out as a footpad.  Fighting even two mobs was 50/50.  I took to the internet and found this.  In the early days it was tough to find advice for levelling builds as most people we're still focused on perfecting a level 80 build.  This, however, was great advice. I became all but unkillable.  At least in Metrica Province.

Then disaster struck.  The Great Trait Rethink happened (in April) and suddenly I had 1 Minor trait on my level 30 Thief as opposed to 2 Minors and a 2 Majors.

The "Great" Trait Rethink

That sucked a lot of the fun out of the build I was running and Thief became tedious again overnight.  I started farming dailies on my Guardian, who, although only level 40ish, wasn't quite as reliant on Traits for fun.

Then, abruptly, at some point in early May, I decided to properly level Thief.  I'd decided to complete Brisban Wildlands on him (possibly inspired by the Season 2 teaser?) but I'd also started levelling weaponsmith and was creating Rare weapons for my alts to grow into.  Suddenly, I just felt inspired and in a little over a month he's now happily sat at 80.  In the process I levelled Cooking to 400 in less than 30 minutes (see here) and levelled so quickly from 60 to 80 it wasn't even worth buying new gear.

Hwo would my 80 build look?  Well, I'd always wanted to stay a condi Thief, I liked the bleed stacking from Death Blossom, so I read around for some build inspiration.  I had a good look at some builds using pistol but didn't really get on with it.  Maybe it was too much like Engy?  Finally I settled on a Dagger/Dagger (natch) and a Shortbow.  I'd recently tried and loved Koroshi's roaming Engy build, and thought it would be fun to do some sort of sustain/survivability PvE build.  I found this (Apothecary gear?!) and adapted it to my play style and end up with this!

I have some nice dagger skins

It's great in PvE I seem to be hard to kill (TM) and there are some neat switches you can make to Major traits without a full respec (bit of an old school concern).  I doubt it will be much use in Dungeons or WvW, but since I don't do Dungeons or WvW for more than a few hours a month it shouldn't be a concern!  Also, apparently, 3k toughness is the sweet spot.  Who knew? (This guy)

I think Orr will be the acid test for this little chap.

Hoarding is spoiling my fun

I'm a hoarder: in game, out of game.

We moved to our new home 2 and half years ago and we have very recently decided it is time to clear the spare room of crap that just got dumped when we moved in.  It's been quite the task but really quite liberating.

In the process I have realised I hoard two kinds of things.  Firstly, I've discovered loads of "I might do something with that one day" stuff.  Some of it is PCMCIA 56.6k modems... I don't even have a laptop with a PCMCIA slot any more.  This is mainly just crap.  Secondly there are a few piles of "this might be worth something someday".  I blame my Dad for this.  He calls himself a collector rather than a hoarder.  Lastly, there is a bit of overlap between the two.

This is the top two slots of my GW2 bank:

Why?

If you don't play GW2 that might be a bit meaningless but if you do you'll see a mixture of total crap, stuff I am saving for the proverbial rainy day and a few things I expect to have some future value.

The majority of this stuff is Account Bound, it can't be sold and it can only be used.  When? When am I going to use it? I could drop dead right now with 14 exp boosters unused.  What am I saving them for?  Why am I wasting a slot in my bank with that?

I have 19 Instant Repair canisters. Since repair is now free, they're pretty pointless. Also, since I saved  them for emergencies, what use are they in the bank? I have several Express Bank Access tokens... in the bank.

Why is this spoiling my fun? Because things I should have in the bank are actually in inventory, spread across multiple characters. It is not fun to run out of bag space. In GW2 crafting components have a separate bank but you can't put sub-components in it. It is not fun to log to one char to craft and realise you have sub components stored on another.  That stuff should be in the bank.

Also, the price of most things is going to steadily fall in this game.  There is a finite player base and supply will eventually exceed demand.  Any items introduced at an update should be sold immediately, rather than hoarded, you can buy them back later at a tenth of the cost.

So, don't bank it, use it or sell and, I assure you, it'll be more fun in the long run!

The sadness of the norn

<sigh>

If you're thinking about rolling a light armour class don't choose a norn male.  Pretty much everything looks like either a dress or tights and when you're as big as a norn it looks pretty incongruous.

I don't doubt it's similar for male sylvari and humans but I'm guessing your cultural armour has less fur.

At least with a charr you just look freaking whacky anyway but a norn, well, you just look like an abnormal human.  Maybe I just lack imagination?

If anyone has any inspiring looks for norn males in light armour let me know!

Dear Wildstar, it’s time we talked

I’ve been talking some smack behind your back and I need to apologise; it’s not you, it’s me.

I know we only dated briefly but I thought we really had something.  I thought you were gorgeous.  Sure, you’re kind of quirky but I liked that.  You were a nice break from all the plastic replicas.  I thought we had so much in common, you seemed to want the same things as me.  You had some whacky ideas and a great sense of humour and that’s something I love.

But suddenly something changed and everything you’d told me before seemed superficial.

I quickly realised I wasn’t enough for you.  You wanted to hang out with EVERYONE!  I’m sure some of those guys are really neat but they’re so loud and brash I just don’t dig those big group dynamics.  I thought we could spend some nice quiet time together, really get to know each other, and create some special experiences but popularity seems more important to you now.  I hope it brings you everything you want but I’ve seen people struggle to handle so many new friends.

Also, you weren't great at keeping in touch.  I know you write almost everything on twitter and your blog but I couldn't read that whole thing just to find out something that might be important; I needed more than that.  I needed you to contact me and let me know that I was special to you.  When occasionally something big was happening you'd let me know but too late, when I had already made plans.

Last but not least, you seem kind of high maintenance.  I felt like it was really going to cost me to maintain our relationship and I don’t need that kind of weight in my life right now.

I still think you’re great, you still have something special and maybe, with time, there’s hope for us in the future but for now I just have to wish you the best.

XOXO

Dibs

#GW2 World Completion

I have yet to do world completion on any character and I know exactly why that.

It's because I want to play the racial starter zones as the race in question.  Dunno why, call me a weirdo, it just seems right.

To then come back and repeat those zones on a different character is frustrating.  Why isn't world completion account-wide? It's technically simple to accomplish (count each time a zone is completed, calculate how many world completions have been achieved) and would greatly reward players that play a lot of alts.

Potential negatives "What if you delete a character?"  Let's not over-complicate things.  Keep it the same. Deleting character deletes all progression towards World Completion.

Or track it with infinite individual achievements for each zone and create a meta that tracks World Completion.

It really can't be that hard.

How often to update your gear?

Spent all day looking for this quote yesterday:

Weapons should be within 5 levels of your current level, and armor within 10 levels (unless you do dungeons, then armor within 5 levels) [1]

Obviously it's not a hard and fast rule but it's worked well for me. It's always noticeable when you go to a new zone with old weapons. Do you think it makes a good guideline?