Guild Wars 2

Oh just figured out that making ascended Viper was a bad idea because it requires tons of rare mats that some other set don't use at all. So it's easier to make a basic ascended set and convert the stats to viper. . I think I may have everything now, just need time.

Tonight I should get my last ascended accessories, an earring from Amber Bay. Either Wednesday or Thursday, I'll have my Ascended Aquabreather. Making Berserker Ascended and converting it in Mystic Forge into Viper is much easier. I did my boots last night, so 3 pieces of armor left.

The rest is going to be tricky, I have enough mats for 2 Pistols but I am out of Globs of Dark Matter which is required for all Ascended stuff. You get those from salvaging exotic gear. Salvaged like 8 pieces last night and didn't get a single Glob so the drop rate is pretty awful. So it's going to be a while before I can make the rest.

I'll probably end up with more mats that I need, they sell for a nice amount of gold on the TP, wonder if there's a nice profit to be made. Didn't actually look into the cost of making them so far.

I'm salvaging with the Master kit I think the yellow one you buy from vendor. It's the best you can buy I think. I think it's the same % as the Mystic one except you have charges.

Maybe it was just a terrible bad luck streak.

I get tons of ectoplasm, but not dark matter.

Grim1 said:

Login rewards sometimes drop Black Lion Salvage Kits. They have a better rate for getting dark matter. Be sure to log in every day even if you are not playing, the login rewards are pretty good.

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I know, I realized I had 2 in the bank last night. It's the kind of stuff I get and put in the bank and forget I had. I bought like 25 Rayna's armor(75 silver each), used the Black Lion Salvage Kit on them...got like 32 Dark Matter, 38 Ectoploasm and 25 Insignia which sell for like 1G 25S or so. So I was able to make 2 Pistols, and make a profit selling the insignias.

The 2 pistols are Berserker and not Viper, I don't have the Viper Insignia, I need to farm a bit of currency in Auric Basin to be able to buy it from the Exalted vendor. No rush, since Berserker is still pretty good for an Engineer.

I still have 1 kit, which I'll probably need to get more Dark Matter for the 3 pieces of Armor I still to make. No rush though, since I actually need to make the daily crafted pieces for those.

I did get my 2nd earring too from Amber Bay, I thought I could get the Aquabreather from Bitterfrost tonight, but I'll be short a few berries I think. So after that, I'm pretty much done with gear farming for now.

I'd like to get about 5 or 6 HoT mastery point before the expansion just to train the skill that's ready to train, not that I actually need it...it just annoys me to have something ready to train and not have the points for it. It shouldn't be too hard to find 5-6 achievements that can be done in an evening.

I still need to do a lot of the old world masteries too, but that will wait sometimes after the expansion I think. I really want the autoloot mastery though.

Even without doing Dungeons, Fractals or Raids...I still have tons of stuff left to do on my engineer, that's not including all the work I have on my alts, poor alts are so neglected right now.

Expansion today.

I got my ascended Aquabreather. So I'm done just in time with that.

I did farm enough currency in Auric Basin to buy the Viper Insignia so I can change the stats on my Pistols from Berserker to Viper.

I farmed a few mastery points in HoT to train the 2 Mastery which were ready to train, I'm at 108 masteries now. Still missing a few from HoT but I don't really "need" them. I just hated the idea of having stuff ready to be trained and not having the points for it.

Still need 3 pieces of Ascended made to be in full ascended. Not too bad, think it took about a month to do playing casually, so it's not too bad. I did have tons of materials though accumulated from all the time I've been playing on and off since release.

I'm really looking forward to the expansion. The mounts look pretty fun, enjoyed the Raptor movement when I tried the trial. I'm really looking forward to exploring the new zones, since HoT excluded, GW2 has some of the best zone design in my opinion, and definitely the most fun to just explore.

Good timing on the release too, since this weekend is free Overwatch weekend, meaning the game will be barely playable.

Ok, I'm still in the first map...almost explored all of it though.

I like the design, easy to navigate, a few areas with verticality but overall fun map to get around in.

I love the Raptor mount, it looks nice, has great movement, although I guess some people won't like the momentum it has, but I like it personally. It has some nice idle animations, at least 3 I think. It can be dyed with any dyes you have, only one part of it though but that's still pretty cool. It is fun to travel around on, there's a few place you can only reach with jump but not enough to be annoying, what is fun is that there are a lot of place where you can just jump over stuff for small shortcuts of a few seconds.

Holosmith, I think I'm going to like this...a lot, I still need to get some practice with it to get the hang of the mechanics, and I need to figure out a nice build and what gear to go for.

Story is serviceable so far, no complaints, nothing spectacular either, but I am just at the beginning since I got distracted with exploration.

Overall, after just a few hours...I get a better feel from it than I did with HoT. I liked the look of HoT, but getting around was annoying, and the events were very annoying if you just wanted to go around and do your own stuff, they interfered a lot with just playing around. I haven't seen any meta event in my first few hours. The zone feels a lot like the original ones, a few hearts, and random events here and there.

Miele

GW2 is a strange game, for all intent and purpose once you're 80 and in exotic gear you are pretty much done as far as character progression goes. And getting to 80 and getting exotic gear is very easy. Everything else is pretty much just playing the game for the sake of playing the game. It’s not like WoW where you’re on an eternal gear grind for progression.

HoT maps are required if you want to do season 3, as you’ll need some HoT masteries for it like gliding up to updraft at least, mushroom jumping and the nuloch travel. You can get experience and mastery points for HoT masteries in the season 3 maps btw as they are considered HoT maps...but way more fun. But if you want to skip season 3 then I think you can skip HoT stuff altogether. In the first map of Path of Fire i haven’t seen anything that requires HoT masteries, not sure if that changes but I doubt it since HoT isn’t required for PoF.

Your black lion salvage kit, only use them on exotic or better gear, do not waste them on yellows or lower.

Crafting is nice to gear craft yourself exotic gear with stats you want some of it is no drop I think and cannot be bought like the more advanced one like assassin, viper etc. If you don’t like crafting and are fine with the basic stats sets you can buy them pretty cheap on the auction house. Crafting at this point is really for ascended to be honest.

Ascended gear, this is a big materials grind, but it’s something that can easily be done just playing the game for the most part. Crafting it is expensive if you buy mats, but you can farm everything solo. Some of the insignias for some stats need to be bought from some merchants in HoT zones which include the season 3 zones btw. The big thing with it is that you’re limited by some stuff you can only craft once per day. I think it takes like close to 30 days to craft a full set if you have everything. So if you want that then it will take a while, and can easily be done as a side thing while you do something else. It is really not required though, exotic is fine for just about everything.

As far as advice as to what to do exactly, I won’t be much help except to say...do what you enjoy obviously and just try to focus on 1 or 2 thing at a time. If you try to do too much you'll probably get frustrated or bored. Want to do story, complete maps, achievements, crafting, dailies, etc...it’s all fine, everything is kinda meaningless but don’t try to do it all at once or it’s gets overwhelming.

If you want to buy PoF at some point to get the elite specialization for your thief, you'll need 250 or so hero points. You can probably get those in PoF itself, but that means you'll only fully unlock the specialization toward the end of the expansion, if you want it while you're doing the expansion, then farming hero points might be a good objective to have. That means map completion, well not necessary completion but might as well do it if you go around to get all the hero points.

Well I got map completion for the first map. Manage to go get my Springer and Skimmer mount, only missing the Jackal one now.

The mounts in general are fantastic, especially the Raptor, he makes navigating a zone so much fun with his long jump. I bound the different mounts to different keys to make switching easier. I am totally enjoying them.

These zones are a VAST improvement over HoT.

And Holosmith is a lot of fun, still trying to figure out a build and stats I want...I am still wearing my Viper set, and I feel a bit too squishy right now, I might just change the runes for now to something a bit tankier.

I did a Raptor race, finished 1st...yay me.

I got the Jackal this morning...200 contract and 20gold, the ability to use the sand portal is the rank 3 ability, so that didn't help me.

Got Raptor and Bunny to rank 3, Skimmer is just rank 1, haven't seen anything requiring the rank 3 ability yet, so working on getting the Jackal to rank 3 since there's sand portal all over the place.

Having completed 2 zones now, I'll agree with Zaphid that this is as good as the original, nothing like HoT. They used the verticality and mount abilities really well, never really feels frustrating like the masteries were in HoT. They learned their lessons.

I finish first in the Raptor race with about 10 contestant, so that was fun. I also finished first in the Bunny race in the other zone, but was only 3 so not as rewarding, that race is annoying tons of mobs attack you along the way, got kicked off my mount and had to kill something during the race. The fun part about the Bunny race though is you have some options as to which path to take, you can jump or take a slightly longer route that doesn't have jumps.

Really enjoying this so far.