The last time I talked about Guild Wars 2 I was in a bit of a slump after being my own worst enemy and basically turning the game into a chore to get through rather than a journey of pleasure. I took a few days more or less off which helped to clear my mental palate, and over the weekend jumped back in.
This time I went back to playing the way I favor which is, yes, to follow the “My Story” quests but to travel from one to the next on foot, allowing myself to be constantly distracted by events and vistas and whatever else pops up as I slowly uncover parts of the map. I really enjoy this style of play and I am not looking forward to having the whole map revealed, but I guess I have a ways to go before that is a problem.
If I AM going to have a real issue with Guild Wars 2, it might be due to what many people see as the game’s strength: the horizontal progression aspect. Right now my character is level 80 but her gear is not. Some of it is. Some of it is lower level than that. Then there’s the question of tier quality. The game pushes you towards having Exotic gear in each slot and I’m not there yet. The top 3 gear tiers are Exotic, Ascended and then Legendary but everyone says Legendary offers quality of life improvements but not better stats. So level 80 Ascended gear has the best stats in the game. And I’m already being urged to equip level 80 Exotic, which is just 1 tier down.
Thing is, I actually like the gear grind and farming for better gear and making my character more powerful. I have a ways to go before I have all level 80 Ascended gear, unless I watch one of the many “How to gear up fast” videos and follow along. But I DON’T want to go the trading post and just buy gear that some other player has crafted or found; where’s the enjoyment in that? Getting your gear is half the fun of MMOs for me!
So I was kind of in a dilemma and then Stargrace shared a game-changing tip with me. (PixelOne had told me about this earlier but it went right over my head because stuff goes in one ear and out the other with me.) There’s an item in the shop called the World Boss Portal Device. It costs 400 Gems ($5 US assuming you buy them for cash) but OMG it is awesome. You use it and it tells you what world bosses are close to spawning and it will portal you to their location. And just to make it even greater, you can set it up so it notifies you in text chat 10 minutes before a boss spawns, too.
For guildless, friendless players like me, this is a game changer. I used it to do two boss fights in a row and my only “gripe” is then I had to spend a bunch of time sorting through all the loot that I got from doing them! Most of it was salvage or trading post fodder but I did get a couple of upgrades from it, and that was from just 2 bosses and maybe an hour of playing. So now I know that whenever I want to change things up and work on getting some good gear “drops”, I can use this device to jump in a zerg attack on a world boss. Super fun stuff! Oh and it just so happened one of the bosses was Tequatl again, and this time I was actually contributing thanks to having a rifle in my bag.
I still worry a bit about what will keep me engaged once I DO get all my gear, but that’s really just borrowing trouble because it’s a long way off and I do still have a bevy of alts to level up and gear up. I feel like I’m happiest in Guild Wars 2 when I just do my thing and don’t worry about the future, though that can be tough for me. I’m a born worrier.
So yeah, still enjoying myself now that I stopped fixating on getting through the content as quickly and efficiently as possible. We’ll see how long I can balance Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft but honestly if I AM going to play 2 MMOs at once, this feels like a good pair since they scratch different itches. Guild Wars 2 with its more action-y combat and vast world that is about ‘go do whatever, whenever’ and WOW with its tab target combat and strong quest lines to follow along (and yes, it’s lovely gear treadmill).
I tell you what, there are worse problems than having TWO games you’re currently enjoying!
I did do the “buy Exotics from the AH” path because I have no patience for the number of hoops that GW2 wants players to jump through; in fact, I looked at what it would take to craft Legendary stuff and I bailed out on the first step of just ONE piece of gear because I’d have to go back and essentially re-do several Living World story parts. But I feel that I really _should_ not because the community says I should, but because in Janthir Wilds I feel I’m so far away from the “logical point” where I should have first concentrated on getting to that quality that it might be ham-stringing my own performance in everyday questing.
Everything I read says Legendary just gives you “quality of life” features though I have NO idea what that means in terms of gear in an MMO! Feels like something for people to do when they’re out of everything else to do and are just waiting for the next expansion!
The ‘what do I do next’ part is what gets me, in GW2. I’m so used to doing the gear grind that when I don’t have that to pursue any more I’m at a loss. Thankfully, there *IS* a ton to do still, it’s just a matter of finding it.
– achievements (this includes so many categories it’s insane). Things like jumping puzzles, map completion, story completion, etc.
– collecting cats
– collecting gear appearances
– unlocking mounts
– slowly working towards legendaries (look at the rewards for doing weekly/daily, there is a legendary starter kit, and it bypasses a lot of the obnoxious stuff legendaries required in the past).
– housing (eventually, I know you’re not there yet)
– unlocking converters (did you know there is a whole bunch of quests / achievements for items that let you convert overflow items to something else?!) like Princess, Herta, and Mawdrey II (you can look these up if you ever get to the point of needing one).
– farming world bosses
– profit?!
Then that doesn’t even touch on the dungeons / pvp / wvwvw / etc that is out there
Plus there’s always holiday events, with their own slew of “stuff” (currencies, rewards, achievements, etc).
GW2 has so much *stuff* I think it’s just bad at telling me what I can work on when I am not sure what direction to head.
I’m about 90% sure if I didn’t have you and Jazz and some other folks helping me out over on Mastodon I would’ve wandered off by now just because I was unaware of all of this stuff. To be fair the Wiki is a GREAT resource but you have to kind of know what you don’t know to look stuff up, if that makes any sense.
Like I was at least vaguely aware of most of the things you just listed, but converters are 100% unfamiliar to me. And I bet there’s other stuff like them that I still haven’t found!