Nemesis' Necro Hybrid for cheapskates

Following this post by Anatoli Ingram I got in touch with him to find out which builds he referred to as "a traditional dark caster" and "a blood ritualist".  He very kindly replied and linked me to Nemesis' Hybrid Build and Succubus respectively.  These both look like fun builds but the latter is maybe a bit too much like Clott's Daggermancer, which I have been running (with mods) for quite a while, and since I really wanted to try an axe build I decided to investigate the Hybrid build in detail.

Having watched Nemesis' video thoroughly (and hopefully understood it), I started looking at what it would cost to buy the build.  I quickly realised it would take a BIG chunk of my modest wealth to replicate the build exactly.  Those Runes of Divinity are more than "a bit expensive" and since I recently splurged on an alt I don't have the Laurels for the Celestial Ascended trinkets either.  Aside from that I'm a "try before you buy" guy.  I'll happily drop 100g on a build if I think it's worth it but I have to know if I like it first!

A quick search revealed that I could probably avoid the Celestial trinkets, which would let me keep the Berserker stats, and that in turn would help avoid the Divinity runes.  I used the gw2skills.net builder to experiment (intothemists.com has some notable errata) and I present, after a few hours work, The Nemesis' Hybrid for Cheapskates aka "the ghetto version". Let's be absolutely clear: I am in no way saying this is a better build. It is a shit load cheaper, though!  Probably.  The main differences are:

• Rabid instead of Rampager armour (obtainable with Karma and BoH)
• Keep Berserker Ascended trinkets (everyone has those, right?)
• Use random mix of orbs instead of the Runes

Stats-wise this build has a tiny bit more power, a tiny bit less precision, less toughness and  a lot less vitality, healing and condition dmg (-2.5 bleeding dmg by my calculations).  It's a pretty logical outcome of using Berserker over Celestial but even with Celestial trinkets, Divinity runes are the only way to boost Crit Dmg % and Condition Dmg in your armour slots.  So, on balance, it's a nice way to try out the Hybrid build.

If, like me, you are coming from Clott's Daggermancer you can make a significant change by replacing your Cavalier's Rings directly with Celestial and exchanging a few orbs. This makes a better Hybrid than pure Zerker trinkets, boosting your vit, toughness and, most importantly condition damage.  Loses a bit of power, though.  Natch.

Crafting on the cheap in GW2

I heard about http://gw2crafts.com/ from the GW2 Reporter podcast and it's a really well executed idea and a really clever bit of work.  But is it the cheapest way to level a craft?

No.  It's not always and here's why.

Firstly, the clever thing about the site is that it gets you to craft the items that give the smallest loss while preparing to craft items in the next tier.  So, in Tier 1 of each rank you convert raw mats to processed mats and components.  Makes sense, right? No, not always.

I am currently using the site to level Huntsman.  To get me from 225 to 300 it had me set to do the crafts in Figure 1.  Now, what you can't see here is that, today, Hard Longbow Staves sell at a decent profit.  As do Darksteel Rifle Barrels.  Most of the other things that it asks you to make are a net loss.  You can use gw2spidy to check these things, for example.  To level from 225 to 250 in the cheapest way possible you should probably just convert logs to planks, make longbow staves and sell them at a profit.  Yes, that does mean you won't have any components to craft in Tier 2 but it might be cheaper to buy them straight from the TP anyway! It is today and that's the thing about GW2 it pays to research.

Figure 1 - Huntsman 225 - 300

Secondly, to get to level 400 gw2crafts NEVER recommends you make an item using a vendor purchase recipe.  As you should know, in the last "tier" of your current "rank", usually what I would call Tier 3, you can make Rare weapons using recipes bought from the crafting masters with karma.  These recipes are nearly always profitable because they either make unique looking weapons and/or are best in slot for that level.

What that means, again, is that the components you crafted in Tier 1 might not make the most profitable Rare weapons. So what the guide recommends for Tier 1 may not even be useful if you decide to craft Rares instead.

Thirdly, in my case, levelling Huntsman, you would never know from gw2crafts that you can make unique Rare weapons at level 250 using a Sun Beads. If you make 6 of these weapons you'll be at 275 and they sell for a profit.

For my final push to 300 the guide recommends making 8 Sigils.  These will cost me 34.46s a pop to craft.  However, looking at gw2spidy again, I can see at least 7 recipes I can make that will yield a profit instead of a 2.59g loss.

Like I said, it's a great site and a pretty convenient way to level a craft but even the "slow" guides could lose you a small fortune and if money is tight it's a mistake you can ill afford to make.

Duck and Cover

This weekend I reached level 80 on my Engineer.  Hurray!

One of the best parts about getting to 80 is deciding what your build will be and how your gear will look.  I decided on my build a LONG time ago so this weekend I spent some time on the look.  As a human engineer allied to the Vigil I wanted to include elements of both the cultural armour and Vigil gear.  That was easy enough to work out but the coat was going to be a problem.

My build is focused very much on movement; damage mitigation through evasion, so having a long trench coat is impractical and thus immersion breaking.  Looking at the female medium armour galleries there are only a few short coats.  The best I could find was the Ascalonian Catacombs body and it was pretty much perfect!  A quick check of my wallet reveals I have 69 Tears in the bank. Time to start running AC!

So, last night, after our guild event, the call for dungeons went out.  I immediately piped up and said I needed to do AC and off we went.  I haven't run AC many times so I apologised in advance.  I should have been a bit clearer that I wasn't at all sure what I was doing but it was only when I got the achievement at the end of the run I realised I hadn't done the path before!

It wasn't the best run.  It wasn't helped by the fact that one of our other party members AFKed suddenly, and for some time, mid-run but I generally felt more of a hinderance than a help and I think this came down to my build.

It's not a Berserker build but it's certainly not a tank build and it seems the strat for much of this path is to stand still and get battered by the bosses.  Knowing that I won't bother doing AC Path 1 on my Engineer again.  It's just not worth it.  What was needed was just pure damage.

Sometimes I wonder if I should run dungeons more often but this makes me realise why I don't.  I'm not an RP player but (as you can see from my gear choices) in my mind my toon has a character.  If the rest of the community forces me to play "out of character" in order to participate in "content" then I think I'd rather not bother.

Of course, I could put some time into thinking about a boss/dungeon build, as opposed to a PvE trash mob build, but since PvE is where I spend 90% of my time I'm not going to make a priority.  In the meantime I'll just run AC on my necromancer.  Only an idiot dies on a necro.

Green is for Necromancers

Why do we all have such small imaginations when it comes to clothing our avatars?  I mean, if we each had a gold for every scantily clad, staff-wielding Elementalist or each Guardian disguised as spiky metal behemoth, we'd all be able to buy a Legendary.  I can't really speak to what goes through the minds of people that play other classes but I can certainly speak for myself.

Spiky...

I swear I didn't go looking for this...

When I first created my character I was very frustrated by the lack of armour variety.  Instead most of the gear seemed to have a lot of fur trim.  That was not too immersion breaking for me being a norn; very hunter/gatherer.  But I really wanted to make my toon look like he raised the dead as a key part of his livelihood.    I was inspired to use a lot of green.  And look for stuff with bones on it.  Yeah, inspired. It's easy to blame the concept art and the UI design.  The concept art for Necromancers included a LOT of green and quite a lot of deep red.  The Necro weapon skills are mainly green as are a lot of particle effects.  I'm sorry I keep saying green, it's kind of a theme, though...

So, why green and, less so, red?  Well, the red is easy: blood and viscera.  The green?  Well, we associated green with corruption and decay, yet most of the vitality we see in everyday life is green! How often do you see things that turn green when they go bad?  In my experience they generally go a darker version of their original colour and then they go black.  Also most of the pus I have ever seen has been a creamy yellow; calling it green would be a stretch.

Given the paucity of gear early on I decided to leave the real customisation to the elder game.  Also, since you level so fast, it would be a quite a chore to maintain a look with an ever-changing armour set.  I started looking at the gear you could get from dungeons and quickly found the awesome that is Arah.  The Arah light armour is a necromancer's dream.

Arah Light Armor

I can't imagine anything fitting a class better.  I asked around and quickly discovered my chances of getting that much gear from Arah were slim so I looked for compromises and quickly found parts of the Twilight Arbour set combined well with Arah.

Mix and Match - TA everything except head and shoulders

I'm not alone.  If you look at any “share your necro” thread you'll see people post that combo.  It's realistically achievable and looks pretty cool.  But I never even made it that far.  No-one wants to run TA. I compromised again and came up with this
[Arah TA COF combo]

Since EVERYONE wants to run CoF this seemed much more likely.  However, I'm really starting to strecth the look here.  Then I discover runing Arah is even harder than I expected and I end up looking like this:

The compromise

This apple has fallen so far from the Arah tree it might actually be a different sort of fruit altogether.  Maybe a lemon?  Having said that I was happy with this look for a week or so but it soon became quite immersion breaking.  I just didn't like how I looked.

So, when I decided to switch from a bleed/condition sceptre build to a power/crit. dagger build it was a great opportunity to have a gear re-think.  In search of inspiration I began trawling the aforementioned “share” forum threads and I found some fantastic looks.  It seems that charr and sylvari make particularly good looking necromancers!  Here are a few of my favourites:

Amazing charr necro (but still Arah gear)

Sort of Shamanic sylvari necro

Still a lot of green and black, eh?  I didn't see a lot of norn in those threads so I looked to the normal sized humans for inspiration and found this.

Now, that's more like it.  If you're going to get up close and personal with a dagger in someone's face you don't want to be sporting a skull encrusted dress, it's just not practical.  Inspired I set about earning my exotic gear (rebuild remember) and looking at skins. I still have one piece of gear to get, a coat from Honor of the Waves, but other than it's complete.  I'm very happy with it.  At least for now.

Things about MMOs that GW2 made me forget

Before GW2 I played FFXI for a few years, the Aion for about 9 months, then back to FFXI until about September 2012. Last month I was very taken with the idea of playing FFXIV.

This was notable for several reasons:
a) I played the alpha of 1.0 and it was, bar none, the most broken, poorly conceived disaster I have ever experienced.
b) SE always struggled to meet my expectations with regard to communicating important information the player base.

But, inspired in no small part by the efforts of the new producer, I decided it was worth a second look.  I pre-ordered, downloaded, couldn't get on the server my friends were on, I waited, I missed the warning about registering your boxed code, I waited, I finally got on the server with my friends, I didn't register my code, my account was deleted, I got a refund from Amazon.

However, just that week long daliance with idea of playing FFXIV bought back some horrible memories that GW2 has banished for good:

• Mob claiming
• EXP reduction in parties
• Timed spawns
• Shared loot pools
• RNG-based skill progression
• Forced group content
• Being drip-fed skills
• Mana pools
• Subs!

I could probably go on but that's enough.  How could I have ever enjoyed playing games with mechanics like that?! You'd have to be some sort of masochist.

A kindred spirit in Tyria

My last post was one of frustration, disappointment and a bit of anger.  I don't really like to be that guy. But when you feel like that nothing really makes you feel better than someone expressing exactly the same feelings.

Enter Justin 'Syp' Olivetti, whom you may know from his blog "Bio Break" (linked on left) or, more likely, as a writer for Massively and host of Massively Speaking.

Justin had this to say about the Living Story at around the same time I was expressing my frustrations: Guild Wars 2: Living story, dead interest.  That post echoes so many of my own sentiments; validation is good for the soul.

Then episode 259 of Massively Speaking rolls in a Justin enthuses about the new Living Story event, the Queen's Jubilee, and how they have changed the Living Story achievements system so you can avoid some of the "harder" content to still get the overall reward.  He wrote another post about that here.

I was intrigued and decided to return to Tyria, albeit about a week after the show, and was surprised to see the Queen's Jubilee was still running.  It seems another change, that had passed me by, was that the story instalments now overlap.  In other words, it's fortnightly releases but no longer just a two week window, which is MUCH more suited to my play time.  Hurrah!

The Crown Pavilion

So, when I logged on the new instalment, Clockwork Chaos, had just launched and I was initially frustrated to find I needed to complete a large chunk of that before I could get back into the area where most of the Queen's Jubilee stuff was happening.  That turned out not to be too much of a chore and, in fact I really enjoyed it.  I mean loot was dropping like rain all around me and that's always a cheerer.

I was all but given up on GW2 but after a 6 week break I find myself back to wanting to log on everyday. I had wanted to write a post about just how much I had enjoyed these two instalments but once again Mr Olivetti had beaten me to it:

If the Bazaar of the Four Winds and that weird election represented a low point of my recent interest in Guild Wars 2, then the combo of the Queen’s Jubilee and the Clockwork Chaos represent a rebound of tremendous proportions.

You can read the rest of his post here: Guild Wars 2: Die Die Die, Die Die and you can follow him on Twitter @sypster

Schrödinger's undead dragon in @GuildWars2

I haven't played GW2 since I spent an hour trying to kill Frizz with a PUG during Sky Pirates.  I had been really quite enjoying the Living Story until then.

The main reason I liked the Living Story was because I could take it all at a decent pace that was compatible with the amount of play time that I get.  Then the two week schedule comes in and suddenly if I can't log-on for the first week I'm out in the cold with the PUGs because everyone else has done it already.  Oh, and there is no group finder.

As the Living Story was the main reason I was logging in, as soon as I got behind I gave up.  Admittedly I haven't finished my personal story but that's because, well, who the fuck is Zhaitan? You never see him in the actual game because he's Schrödinger's cat, right? He's defeated/not defeated at the same time.  The only time he definitively one or other is when you're in a Personal Story instance.  It's stupid.

Also, the thing I liked most about GW2 was that it wasn't a gear treadmill.  When you have subs you can use a gear treadmill to keep people subscribing.  Anet's solution to player retention is an Achievement treadmill with a tacked on story and gem store merchandising.  It's genius.

Sadly, I don't care about achievements, weapon skins, cosmetic gear or minis.  But then, I thought I was playing an RPG?  Aren't they supposed to be about story and character development?