Daily & Monthly Achievements

By and large I'm a fan of the changes to daily achievements in GW2. Personally, I hated having to do the “mob variety” every single day. However, things haven't got much better: annoyance has been replaced with other annoyance.

Surely ANet would know that if you log on in, say, Orr or Kryta you're going to see more undead and centaurs than anything else and that you'll need to go pretty far afield to see anything else. That makes kill variety tough.

Underwater kills? I might have to go to an entirely different zone.

The worst, though, is Daily Healer. There just aren't that many dead people around. I guess the point is to encourage you to rez players, and to encourage players to wait to be rezzed, but I do that already.

That's not what it's supposed to be about, is it ANet? You don't want us to go out of our way to get this done do you?

Having a bunch of Alts helps.  Daily Dodger is very easily achieved with a Death Blossoming Thief and stationing a character at the Thaumonova Reactor is a great way to do Kill Variety.

Exotic

Being such a part-timer I have put off getting Exotics until I had chance to really look into it properly.  I love the fact that GW2 means all the gear of the same level and rarity has the same base stats and that means you're just looking at extra attributes and appearance.

I've been decided on what Exotic armour I wanted for some time: it's a combo of parts from Arah and Twilight Arbour.  However, since TA is not very popular I have subbed in some stuff from Citadel of Flame temporarily.  People always want to do CoF...

Mainly, I like the TA gear for the look but the stats are great for a Necromancer too.  The head and shoulders look totally lame though so that's why I have my sights set on the Arah gear for that.

This brings us to weapons.  I am a condition Necro, apparently.  I don't personally feel the need to assign such labels but it pleases the people that find spreadsheets part of the fun.  My weapons of choice are scepter/dagger and staff.

Up until recently I had stuck pretty much solidly to scepter but when it came to defending a Dolyak or fighting a boss I used staff.  When you do Dynamic Events with a group the AoE of staff helps you get much more involved, otherwise other classes will burn the mobs down before you have chance.  With bosses it usually pays to stay at range.  In short, my staff was not used THAT often.  As a result, I'm not proud of this, I carried a Masterwork staff.

However, joining a new guild has carried me beyond PvE and with more varied play has a come a desire to tweak and "work on my build".  I started to read around and one build caught my eye.  It was for tower defense in WvW (no idea what that entails) but it emphasised starting each encounter with staff to lay your marks and then switching to your other weapon for the nitty gritty.  Maybe you'd switch back to staff to re-lay your marks if you got chance.  The benefits of this were immediately obvious to me and I realised that I was totally neglecting a big chunk of damage.

Since then I have focused much more on switching regularly between weapon sets.  It's really boosted my damage.  This has been most noticable in dungeons where is has become normal for me to get hate from a boss.  Not a huge deal but it at least means I am competing for damage done.

Things brings us back to my search for exotic weapons and an upgrade for my neglected staff.  Yesterday I spent a decent chunk of time looking at weapon models and picked a lot I liked.  Cross-referencing on the TP it became pretty clear what I could afford and there were some good choices.

In the end I plumped for a Carrion Legionnaire's staff, which I upgraded with a Sigil of Battle.  I never really appreciated those "when you switch to this weapon" sigils until now.  Twenty seconds of Might for doing something that's already a regular part of my combat?  Sounds like a deal!

This left me with a scepter and a dagger to find.  I hit the jackpot here.  Searching the TP for Exotic Level 80 daggers I find Claws of the Desert.  Looking at the dagger gallery on the Wiki I see it has a nice skin.  It also has Condition Damage as it's main stat and it comes with a Superior Sigil of Battle.  The knife itself is cheaper than the Sigil alone.  Ker-ching.

Since I am not sure what benefits you can get from an off-hand Sigil anyway, this is perfect.  I can now have 6 stacks of might at pretty much any time during a big fight.

What is not to like about that?