任是无情也动人

So earlier this Tuesday was the major balance update for GW2. Plus another Living Story update -- but the rewards for this segment doesn't interest me much so I don't care. The skill update on the other hand...

Elementalist - Cantrips got nerfed but that really only affects PvP and thus doesn't matter for me. Staff got buffed which is great for me since I've gone back full circle to main-ing staff.

Guardian - Mainly buffs, especially in WvW context. But nothing touching my build has changed. *shrug*

Ranger - Got nerfed, because of PvP. My poor ranger! Pets lost damage across the board (WTH Anet) and shortbow went down to 900 range. *cries*

Mesmer - Got nerfed too, but it's still Queen of endgame PvE so there's not too much outrage about it.

Thief - Nerfed. No longer has any 1200 range weapon. WTH. o_O

Engineer - Overall response from the public seems to be that engineers got buffed. Yay. Unfortunately mine isn't far enough to try out the traits that got changed, so I can't really confirm myself.


Overall, I'm glad I got my mesmer and thief to level 80 already. ^_^ My mesmer is also tricked out in his gear. I'm now slowly working on getting my thief her set of gear. No hurries. The engineer is sloooowly making her way toward lvl 50.

Well, they're calling it the Dragon Bash due to the fact that the official enemies are dragons. But it's still a dragon themed party. But, that's not the important part. The important part is this:

http://www.guildwars2hub.com/media/gallery/dragons-jade-weapon-gallery

*makes grabby motions*

I found the scelerite weapons in the last update too meh. The SAB skins were fun and I got a GS for the guardian and a staff for my mesmer. The Fused weapon skins before that were too hard to get (from black lion boxes... I don't gamble). So here's hoping these skins are more available. Cuz *grabby*

I want the axe & longbow for my ranger, the shortbow/sword (and possibly daggers/pistol depending on size) for my thief, the staff & focus for my ele (don't care if colors clash, or maybe I'll make a necro for it), and the shield to just sit in my inventory until I have a character I can use them on (engi?/future warrior?)

EDIT: Ok, preliminary reports on the RNG for these aren't promising. So looks like I will need to prioritize. And farm farm farm.
Priority: longbow > sword/staff > shortbow > shield/dagger/axe

EDIT2: Official patch notes thread

EDIT3: Event is now over. Only got one jade weapon ticket (via casual playing; I wasn't about to farm for it). Used it for a shortbow on thief (since it matches her color scheme).

Yeah it's time for the monthly update. Anet's actually pretty good about being on schedule about these. It's pretty much been the last Tuesday of each month for quite a few months now.

Eles got some buffs and some nerfs, so I'm kinda ambivalent. On the one hand, the upgrade to glyph of storm/elementals is nice since I do run glyphs pretty often in dungeons. On the other hand, D/D RTL got nerfed which kinda sucks for getting across the map quickly, and especially WvW. Though it's not too bad of a nerf combat wise.

Guardians got some buffs overall, which is kinda surprising since it's possibly one of the best classes in all arenas (PvP/WvW/PvE casual/dungeon). Especially surprised they buffed Shield of the Avenger, which was already one of the OP skills in several dungeons. Ah well. Not looking the gift horse and all that.

Rangers got many buffs! Huzzah! I might try running a signet build again. The pets also got some health buffs. I'm surprised they buffed HP and toughness on bears though... those were already the most tanky tanks in the game. Birds seem to be now identical in stats with cats, which seems an odd choice. Canine F2 skills got buffs, though that mainly benefits WvW/PvP I guess.

Didn't really pay too much attention to the rest of the classes since I'm not playing them too seriously or they're not high enough for me to have really dug into the skills/traits analysis anway.

The last part of the Living Story thing is also out, and supposedly will be there for 2 weeks. Presumably after that all the flame & frost things will be gone? I'm thinking about just playing through the new dungeon once for the achievements and leave it at that. Not too interested in the new stat type (Sentinel - vit/pow/tou) so no inclination to farm the thing.

And speaking of farm, it looks like existing dungeons are pretty much still untouched, so it's looking more and more unlikely they'll ever nerf CoF1. Which I guess is a good thing for people who need to farm money, I guess. Oh, I finally did CoF3 on Sunday and it was absolutely crazy. I think it took about an hour to do, with multiple wipes, and a point with the last boss there were just 2 of us alive and one person basically played tag with the boss while I frantically tried to rez people. It was kind of fun, in a OMGwhatdidIjustdo kinda way, but in no way do I want to do it again. :p

Super Adventure Box is the new minigame Anet introduced that going to be around for the month of April. Kind of an extended April Fool's thing.

On the one tentacle, it's actually more fun and less hard than I had feared, given there's a lot of jumping/platforming. With alts, it's not actually that hard to grind up the baubles for a skin or two. I'm looking at the greatsword and staff skin in particular for my guardian and ele respectively. Maybe scepter too if I can squeeze it in, but that's likely going to sell for fairly cheap on the TP by the end of the month.

On the other tentacle, it seems like everyone is doing SAB. A lot of places feel empty and there's less groups running dungeons than normal. I still need some more runs in Caudecus Manor, Sorrow's Embrace and Honor of the Waves to both finish up my exotic gear sets and to finish up my Golden title so I can stop saving gold in the bank (so...very...close). I don't actually need to run CoF and that's the only dungeon still busy.

On the third tentacle, I still want to do what dailies I can and I need to do the monthly. I might break down and just do it in WvW, possibly. >.>

Meh. I feel like there's way too much to do and too little time to do it. Ironically that means Anet's doing a good job with their skinner box.

I'm pretty sure the actual Chinese New Year is Feb. 10 this year. However, the Canthan New Year festival on GW1 is from Jan 31 to Feb 7. Huh.

On the bright side, they added a new quest where you can basically trade in 100 lunar tokens for a guaranteed celestial mini. One per account. No RNG needed. Also, you can trade in for any one of the twelve minis, so you can get stuff you missed or pick up stuff that you like better from "future" years.

There's 5 quests normally from Shing Jea, for a total of 125 tokens total, so it's more than doable. Just load up 3 heroes with Charge! (warriors & paragons preferred) and speed run thru the whole thing.

I picked up the snake mini cuz anyway. Looking over the images on the wiki, the sheep/monkey/dog minis are pretty ugly. (Why Anet! Why the ugly wolf skin for the doggy?!) The horse mini is a kirin skin, as expected. The rooster mini is a...phoenix skin?! WTF? But they do have actual roosters in game! Meh.

*reads the rest of the transcript*

Still ambivalent about the AoE nerfs, but I'll withhold judgment until the changes actually come out. I just really hope classes like ele who have practically nothing but AoEs don't get shafted. If they want single-target to be stronger, I agree that both bows can use some work (on ranger). But classes like thief don't really need a buff to their single target spiking.

Also ambivalent about ele bunker build being under watch, since the D/D build I run has a few bits of similarity to it (half the trait choices, IIRC). Especially if they're also going to nerf the AoE damage as well, which would cut down on the alternatives to fall back to.

Crowns/laurels daily change ... Jury is still out for it. While I like that it may put more people, I have a concern that the new options will force people to jump zones a lot (like do X jumping puzzles) rather than something they can do in one zone like the current dailies. This seems to make it harder for people who just have one character, who will have to either spend money to waypoint or a lot of time running between zones. Well, we'll see how it goes.

Good news about the changes to Orr. God the mob density of that place can be a serious pain. (Edit: Though I think it's slightly better in places during the "day" than at "night". I can't be 100% sure and it's not like I counted, but it's just a feeling I get. Of course, it's so gloomy all the time in western SoD and all of Malchor's Leap that you can't really tell when it's day. -_-)

Also good news about the possibility of additional hairstyles & cosmetic features. I bought a pack of makeovers when it was on sale a while ago and haven't used it yet. I might as well hold off on using any of it yet.


EDIT: Also, not a response to the interview, but I realized something today (belatedly). After banging my head against the last 3% of Cursed Shore, I took a break and went to map the WvW Borderlands and my server's part of Eternal Battlegrounds (also picked up the last pet, juvenile wolf, yay). There were crafting stations at the Borderlands base, so I dropped off the big chunk of change I'd been gathering in Orr. When I was done, I logged out to character selection and noted that my character's last location is still Orr. Logged back in, and yep, she's still where she left off in Cursed Shores. This means that you can actually have access to bank and all the other amenities of cities at any time by jumping over to borderlands and then logging out/in. Nice. (Though it makes all my portable bank access thingies I got from the black lion chests useless.)


EDIT2: Looks like the news page is out on gw2.com: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/january-2013/?update
That backpack is cute. *makes grabby hands*

So after the dramatics of the event weekend (half week?) is finally over, I thought I'd just put down my few cents on the issue.

(The tl;dr version: Halloween created some high expectations. Anet was able to add some great things this update, but they were generally less advertised and drowned out by the more controversial stuff. On the other hand, they may have also bit off more than they could chew in some areas as well.)

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In Other News:
Not related to the above. But I have finally gotten enough influence for the guild storage. It's under construction and set to finish by sometime 1-2 AM tomorrow morning. 50 slots for non-account/soulbound items only. I'll probably drop in some of my extra cooking stuff in there (not the interim ingredients I still need since you can't craft from the guild bank like you can from your personal bank).

I haven't had a chance to do this yet since my ranger is all the way out at Mount Maelstrom and it feels like a pain to get her back to LA and then have to get her all the way back to MM again, but I might just bite the bullet and do it. I don't want to use the other characters since the first quest line requires going into that crypt in Gendarran which I cannot do on my Ele and wasn't even able to do on the ranger when she was overleveled for Gendarran. Maybe with other people during this time...

Anyway, some resources on the various Halloween stuff:

Act 1
http://dulfy.net/2012/10/23/shadow-of-the-mad-king-scavenger-hunt-guide/
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/72797-guild-wars-2-halloween-event-guide/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bO3Rf9_9RoE

Act 2
http://dulfy.net/2012/10/26/gw2-shadow-of-the-mad-king-mad-memories-act-2-guide/
http://gw2.mmorpg-life.com/shadow-of-the-mad-king-mad-memoires-act-2/54702/

Other stuff
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/11zzng/earn_5_personalized_trick_or_treat_bags_for_the/
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/72823-secret-personal-treat-bag-locations/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/11yoh2/new_music_for_halloween/

http://www.guildwarsinsider.com/gw2-halloween-crafting-guide/
http://www.tyriantravels.com/event/2012/madking/cooking

http://i.imgur.com/AWPpW.png

Also, wallpapers
http://jeffufu.deviantart.com/gallery/39766169
http://i.imgur.com/c1yYZ.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/gAdYF.jpg
http://imgur.com/a/XrnPe#0

I figured I'd write something up about my thoughts about the game.

Just to give some background, I have a ranger that's closing in on lvl 40 (halfway through!), an elementalist that just hit 30 (31 after crafting her new clothes), a guardian that's probably going to sit for a while at level 20, and an engineer at lvl 13 (everything above lvl 11 from crafting).

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