GW2: Dipping a Toe into Arah Explorable

Oh. Wow.

It’s 12 hours later and I’m still caught betwixt a mix of exhilaration and utter trauma.

I now much better understand Syl’s post about her experience pugging the Arah explorable dungeon paths. I gotta give mad respect for her jumping in and doing it, because I’m honestly not sure I will ever dare to join a PUG for this dungeon, now that I’ve seen what it’s like.

Mine was run in a guild group, which I suspect is what the difficulty of the dungeon is scaled to challenge. Two of us had not ever done it before, two had attempted and failed prior to this, and the last who had done it successfully was being awesome, leading us around and spelling everything out for us.

We were tackling path 3, which I hear is the -easiest- of the routes. *tries not to faint*

Story-wise, I’d have to say the premise is pretty intriguing from a GW1 player’s perspective. Each path appears to make reference to and trickle a small drip feed of information about the ancient races who fought off the dragons the last go around. That is, in no particular order, the Mursaat, Seers, Jotun and the Forgotten (whom we hear about in path 3) and the dwarves and a Tome of Rubicon reference make a sneak entrance at the introduction.

A guild group let the two of us newbies watch the cutscenes. I would seriously not DARE to even try that in a pug.

Our group composition was a good mix, two guardians, two mesmers (one of each was new, and the other pair had at least an attempt or two under their belts) and an elementalist (the only one who had a clue what we were in for.)

We got through the first few packs of ‘trash mobs’ decently well, with the sort of bouncy resiliency feeling you get when group builds are synergizing relatively well (kinda hard to describe, hope it comes across.) We don’t control people’s builds or require anything out of them, so it wasn’t perfect invincible super-synergy, but it felt decently resilient.

But DEAR GOD, did some of the mobs hit hard. A lot harder than anything I’ve ever felt. (I am a bit of a connoisseur on this as I tend to run tanky guardians that pull a majority of the aggro. Getting good enough to survive it though, is another matter.) The Risen Wizards and Risen Illusionists were apparently the major culprits involved in the damage spree, and though we targeted and focused them, I was feeling a decent amount of pressure trying to stay alive in the meantime.

I would love to go back in and study their attacks a little more some day. I’m sure there’s ways to mitigate more of the damage, be it through better reads of their animations and dodging, or countering whatever they’re specifically doing, but as a first timer experience, I was just sorta going in there and facing the brunt of it, then scrambling to heal up.

The first set of bosses weren’t -too- bad. The buildup as the experienced guy was explaining the mechanics was a bit more nerve-wracking. We settled on sending a guardian and the elementalist to deal with the Hunter where he was, while the three of us pulled the Crusher to where we were and the dancing at range began. Health bars were going down methodically (the bosses’, that is) and of course, this silly asura guardian was edging closer and closer into medium range (so I naturally get more daring and try to push limits, sue me) and WHOMP, ate a one-shot hammer shockwave from a miscalculation of the direction the guy was facing. Well, shit. And I still had aggro while downed, so a split second later, I was quite dead.

Fortunately, the other two had lots and lots of mesmer clones and were able to keep the Crusher very well occupied. Got slowly picked up (with plenty of time to resolve to myself not to be a fucking hero again and stay at goddamn max range), the other two finished off the Hunter and came over, and we worked over the rest of the Crusher’s hp. Had a little bit of relieved vindication when a few others also caught in the shockwave and had to be picked up (that’s the nice thing about a guild group, everyone feels human and there’s room for people to err, whereas I foresee a great deal of potential obnoxiousness oozing out of a pug for being ‘fail.’)

Lemme tell you it’s not quite easy to see what the hell the Crusher is doing when he’s covered with blue and yellow flames most of the damn time. (We can’t stop the pyromania either, says the guardians!)

Then came the running past trash.

The endless running through a very confusing layout through shitloads of angry red names, some of which read Risen Illusionist and Risen Wizard, and me being a fucking slowass guardian with probably the highest ping of the group and the highest armor/toughness.

This was not pretty. I think I have PTSD after the experience. I completely get what Syl said now regarding this…  She said:

Yet, my first few Arah PuG runs almost made me give up completely on my set goal (and humanity). They were spent group-rushing through large packs of trash, frantically spamming cooldowns and hoping to keep up with the others because no idea where I’m going. More often than not, they were spent being one-shot by said trash which either wiped the entire party or “the unlucky one” (as I like to call him by now), then re-attempting the same leeroy act, corpse-running over and over until somehow the entire party makes it through alive.

Yes, I was the “unlucky one.”

The elementalist leader was showing us the way, so we were all following him, and stuff would aggro initially on him as he entered their proximity, everyone would dash through the gauntlet while aggro fell right off him onto me trailing behind (slowing me down in combat even further) while having to dodge/run through the big ugly red circles that had popped up on the initial attack on the group.

This did not work. Quite a number of times. To the tune of 8 silver repairs or so. I’d gotten out of Knight/Berserker’s after the first two deaths, and swapped into the tankiest shit I had, Soldier/Clerics with runes of the soldier for condition removal on shouts, and it was still pretty ugly.

Mind you, this was a guild group, so I wasn’t being left alone here. The elementalist was kindly running with me and trying to lead me through, which was good because I HAD NO FUCKING IDEA WHERE ANYTHING WAS and was liable to run headlong into something horrible while trying to get away from the horror behind me.

After the next set or two of deaths, the -entire- group waypointed back to help with veils and speed (something I bet Syl will guarantee a pug would never do) and I made a big point of staying in the middle of the pack and running for my life. Which saved me and got me to the end, but the other guardian caught the brunt of it and died.

Whee.

Obviously I lacked any confidence whatsoever to go back and attempt it again, so I ended up standing around as part of the sad, asocial show. (Though internally it was more like, dear god, I don’t even dare move from this rock now. If I go back, I’ll just end up being THAT GUY again…)

With one mesmer going back to help him, and both of them probably having a better clue of where everything was, they eventually got through as a pair faster than I did. But wow, I am still more than a little traumatized and cannot imagine leeroying that gauntlet alone over and over in a pug. It really makes me wonder if killing the lot would be faster.

The subsequent Mage Crusher boss went a lot more smoothly than the trash mob gauntlet. We may or may not have been glitching by getting onto the boss in melee and coordinating to not move a single muscle (touching WASD was verboten)  in order not to trigger any of the necro marks that popped up around us. I dunno. But I thought it was interesting regardless in that it was challenging a group of five to not do something that is otherwise natural in GW2 (squirming about and dodging a lot) and required discussion beforehand and coordination as a team to stack and not move.

I suspect the ranged fight would not have been too annoying either, though with more accidental downs from Risen Hand knockdowns and stumbling into AoE and folks having to run to get each other up. (Pretty much like how most other big boss fights from range go, see Molten Facility stuff.)

And then there was Giganticus Lupicus.

So that’s what one of them looks like…

The typed explanation of his phases was ridiculously elaborate. To the point of my brain threatening to fry while taking it all in for the first time. (You may be able to tell that I’m not really a WoW raider. I found RIFT’s dungeon mechanics rather elaborately challenging also.)

Anyhow, the message that went through was:

Phase 1 – All stack together, attack him from range. Prioritize killing grubs. Locusts not so important.

We did that, and subsequently got pwned from an ever-growing stack of buzzing locusts that everyone was doing their best to ignore in their quest to range Lupicus and kill grubs. As usual, I found myself absorbing most of the damage, which steadily alarmed me to the point of thinking “I’m running out of heals and cooldowns here and this is not working…”

Eventually I fell over, and watched the damage stack up on the other guardian, who also eventually fell over, and then everyone else went down like bowling pins.

Whoops.

New Revised Group Plan for Phase 1 – All stack together, 1-2 melee the locusts/grubs, the rest attack from range.

I believe the two guardians gratefully went back to melee at this point. This went flawlessly. With me getting my hammer on, the protection symbol was pulsing, damage was getting healed up by shouts and stuff, everything was getting hit and worn down by AoE, and whatever the rest were doing, it was working well as the locusts got cleared quickly and grubs died fast, mebbe only one or two got away.

Phase 1 complete, enter Phase 2.

To be honest, it was mostly a blur. A great big blur of everybody scatter, and don’t die, and don’t step in OMG SO MANY RED CIRCLES ahhh dodge dodge heal ohgodohgod run dodge, shit someone’s downed, have I got aggro, no I don’t have aggro I can go rez him, FUCK so many red circles runaway runaway, well he’s dead now, run back to rez a bit more, how am I still autoattacking Lupicus, ooh, he’s shadowstepping to me, dodge dodge abandon rez, kite away and let someone else finish the rez, GAAH he just shadowstepped to them and one more guy is downed, but now he’s gone over there and I can dash over and get the downed guy up and we can get the dead guy up together, oh good, we three are up because the other two are now downed, and NOW I HAVE AGGRO oh shit ohshit kite away don’t die don’t die healheal oh god, give them time to rez up, YES THEY MADE IT, good because NOW I’M DOWN ow ow ow…

Somehow in the midst of this utter chaos, everyone eventually stayed upright at one point and we shifted his hp sufficiently to move him into Phase 3.

Where his aggro intelligence apparently defaulted back to the standard GW2 one of loving Mr High Toughness.

Miss a tanking experience from other games? Well, you can get it RIGHT HERE in phase 3 of Giganticus Lupicus.

My first hint that he had gone into phase 3 was when I noticed the big boy had gotten fixated onto me, and all kinds of damaging stuff was challenging my dodging and healing quite severely, and some guy in Mumble was clinically discussing what his poison death cage looked like as I backed away and fell down in an animation familiar to me via Ring of Warding and he ended with, “Oh there, Shudd’s in it now.”

Lovely.

Luckily Stand Your Ground was up, so I chucked on stability and got out of dodge before my hp fell any further and struggled to heal up.

Then he death caged me AGAIN while Stand Your Ground wasn’t yet up, and that was a frenzy of trying to dodge/heal/stay alive while in the stupid circle.

I had a pretty good front row seat to all the spell effects Lupicus was throwing in phase 3 and pretty much was forced to learn how to avoid them really quick and get my skill usage timing spot on. I believe I went down once, but someone got me up very quickly (and may have gone down doing so) but with his aggro fixated on me, the fight basically turned into me kiting Lupicus in a big giant circle near the Arena walls while everyone else stood near the center and ranged and lol’ed.

In retrospect after reading the wiki guide, I may have stayed a few seconds longer in his life drain AoE than I should have by backing away and continuing to scepter him, instead of turning and running. Anyhow, that portion of the fight was oddly satisfying, if rather challenging playing keep alive.

Y’see, that tanky mindset that never really goes away just loves to hog all the aggro, even up to the point of biting off more than one can chew. (But how else can one learn where one’s limits are, right? Looking for group willing to put up with suicidal tank.)

Down he went, which progressed four of us further than we had ever gotten before.

The last bit was pretty much cleanup. There was so much adrenaline pumping after that fight that a few of us ran headlong into the Wraithlord’s dias triggering the event (guilty!) even as the one experienced guy was going “wait, I need to explain the mechanics…”

Oops. But you said earlier that it was MUCH easier than Lupicus. Anyhow, we managed the explanation pretty quickly and got sorted out over voice that two tanky guys were going to kite wraiths out of the circles and the other three would chill in them. After that, it was mostly tank-and-spank. Which was a relief after the wild excitement prior to this, and we all collected 60 shiny Arah tokens. Some of us for the first time ever.

Time spent wasn’t too bad, bearing in mind all the newbieness to Arah-ness. We started at 6.52pm server time. Reached Lupicus at 7.43pm. Were out of the dungeon by 8.32pm.

It really feels like the dungeon is made to challenge a well coordinated guild group. The difficulty level is quite eye-opening (bear in mind I don’t run high level fractals nor do I run other dungeons on a regular basis.) But it does feel ultimately doable, and it makes me tempted to attempt the other paths too. Though I’m not sure when I’d ever have the opportunity.

Arah would be pleasant for folks who can regularly get together at a set time and crank away at it, I feel. PUGs seem like it would be very hit or miss with how challenging the difficulty is and how liable one would be to get veterans who may splooge obnoxious elitism all over the place.

In conclusion, I wouldn’t mind another Lupicus fight. With a good group (read: understanding and well-coordinated/synergized.)

Though I have no idea how I’m going to get there through the trash.

That’s exactly how I feel after finishing path 3, facing trash mobs and Lupicus. “Twitchy.” (Oh, and are all female Sylvari slightly unhinged?)

GW2: The Secret of Karka Island

…is that it’s a really good farming location.

I should farm to some reggae music. Monkey Island flashbacks…

At least, there’s where I was in the last days of the Molten Facility, having suddenly realized that karka shells were going for 8 silver a piece and passionfruit flowers for 50s(!)

Barracudas for Armored Scales was always popular (with the bots, especially) and Skelks for Blood and Mosquitoes for Sacs. Reef drakes and reef riders are generally too annoying to bother with.

I had assumed that when the Southsun patch launched, the sheer amount of people on Karka Island (that’s my pet name for it, I’m a Monkey Island fan) would send the supply ricocheting up and the prices tumbling down, so I was striking while the iron was still warm, at any rate.

Turns out that the devs had noticed the same thing much earlier than I did, with the introduction of Blooming Passiflora and a 200% magic find for supporting the settlers. (Well, that’s a good argument in favor of the refugees, unless and until a dungeon or similar pops up, I guess.)

That’s a 20s harvest right there! (For now, anyway. Prices to drop more soon, no doubt.)

I think the hope is that a few more or a lot more people look into farming at Southsun (instead of Orr 24/7) and bring some of the prices back into balance.

Whether this will last after the month is out and the buff goes away, I don’t know, it depends on how many people decide they like farming mats here, I suppose.

Some people really detest fighting karka.

I used to be one of them. But I took my experimental spirit weapon guardian even further lately, and bought him an entire set of Berserker’s gear since my other cookie cutter was doing so well on Knights/Berserker’s. (At first I wanted the same, but I wanted to see how much total damage output was possible. Turns out it was a good decision as I drop aggro to pretty much anybody and anything else – including the spirit weapons who now serve as decent temporary minion tanks.)

The new berserker set was also a good excuse to buy myself a rhino helm and dress up like a real Blood Legion soldier. But cooler. (T1 helm, shoulders, armor, T2 leggings and boots, Flame and Frost gauntlets. Wrath, Lava, Celestial and Midnight Rust.)

He now cuts through karka like his sword is a real fiery dragon sword, rather than a lukewarm butter knife. Casually comparing my performance with two other random parties who were also farming at the time, I was pleased to note that I killed a karka in about half the time they did. (One was halfway through a karka, and I started a new one and finished at the same time. Another two were in a duo and attacking one karka, and I started a new one, and again finished at the same time.)

Swapping either the armor or trinkets with yellow magic find gear drops the dps a bit, but ups the magic find. I’m still experimenting with the best mix. I found stacking pure magic find up to about 169% to be a bit more pointless, possibly because my kill rate was slower, or I was hitting DR faster, I didn’t know. Maybe it was a weird case of RNG.

Anyhow, I certainly plan on more experiments in Southsun during this new Living Story phase and have been contemplating how wacky it would be to invest in an exotic/ascended magic find set. Perhaps that can be a new stretch goal after I finish my arbitrarily decided goal of reaching 200 gold banked and the Golden title. (Without CoF farming, because the fastest way to personal burnout is repeating dungeons ad nauseam for me.)

—

And what do I think of the new Southsun content?

Southsun Before: Stole this picture from the wiki, since I wasn’t clever enough to screenshot it myself.

Southsun After: It’s nice to compare the permanent changes to the map. Big obvious new jungle settlement enroaching into the reef rider vent area. New bridge linking Owain’s with the main part of the island – thank goodness, so tired of climbing up that cliff to get Anders for guild bounty. More developed Captain’s Retreat area. New Crab Toss arena. Pearl Islet with more new resort hotness.

So happy to see this new bridge.

For the most part, I like it, though I have some nitpicks.

How Many Alternatives for Achievements?

I was really pleased to see a lot more options and alternatives for getting to the rewards here.

Some people have a moral stance against ever participating in any form of PvP? Great, don’t do Crab Toss, you still won’t miss out on the reward (assuming you catch and do the later Canach’s Lair bits.)

Some people can’t do the jumping puzzle and have some kind of moral imperative against interacting with a mesmer portal? Don’t get the Islet sample then, but you can still get the pretty flower backpiece.

Some people refuse to do anything that sounds like a dungeon ever? Well, you can already get both rewards even without ever setting foot into Canach’s Lair. (Which, I am hoping is more like an open-world dungeon or a mini-instanced hotjoin dungeon that brings in 15-20 people, but you never know, it may just be the same old 5-man dungeon schtick again. Guess we’ll see at the end of May.)

How Spoiled is the Story?

Some people have criticized the spoiler-ific quality of the achievement text and descriptions on the rewards. I don’t really think it’s a very big deal personally – if you catch a certain DE in the settlement at the center of the island, a settler instigator pretty much confesses to Ellen Kiel that a sylvari put her up to it, and the Inspector names him outright – a sylvari with a beef with the Consortium? Oh, it MUST be Canach we’re looking for!

And there’s all the weird yellow-green flowers that are springing up, and if you visit the karka hive, it’s full of yellow-green explosions of yucky spore-like stuff that personally aggravate me just looking at them, let alone aggravating wildlife…

It’s probably my graphics settings, but god, is this hive ugly. (I’ll crank it up, risk crashing and get better screenshots in the next two weeks, promise.)

Okay, so the story is being told in a non-linear fashion with a decidedly heavier hand than the slow linear time-constrained dripping trickle of information that Flame and Frost got us accustomed to, but whatever. We get the message. I’d actually posit a lot more players get the message than the ones who had the patience to talk to every last NPC (often screenshotting every dialogue because we’re anal that way) and watch the change happen over geologic time.

Different teams always produce different content. (See Call of Duty: Treyarch vs Infinity Ward, and for an example closer to home, GW1: Nightfall vs Factions.) You just roll with it if you like the overarcing game/universe.

How Chic is Conversing?

Welcome to Pearl Islet resort! Home of many easy achievements.

Ok, so it was a little startling to simply earn an achievement for talking to some of the named NPCs who are part of the Southsun story. Talk about your giveaway ‘chievos, sorta like talking to a Laurel Vendor for a daily.

But you know what? Who fucking cares. I do not need to feel special through artificial exclusivity. I feel special through having an eye for unique fashion styles and color, and being skillful at what I do. I feel special when I help other people and welcome and include them in my community, teach and learn from them.

You wanna be really special? Be Dulfy. Be a good WvW commander on your server. Be a regular mesmer portaller. I guarantee you that all these people helping their community have a lot more respect than you showing off some artificially scarce item that only proves you have plenty of RL money to spend (well, granted, thank you for supporting Anet and the survival of our game with your gambling addiction, I’m glad in the long term sense that you’re a sucker) or are lucky at the RNG.

But I digress. It’s a short sweet simple way to get people locating the starring NPCs and making sure they at least encounter the words that comprise the story, even if they skip past it all and fail to read it.

And judging by the questions over mapchat like “Where is Subdirector Noll?” it is apparently challenging enough for some. (Never over-estimate your audience, I guess. Or maybe he’s just too short to be noticed. /end Asura joke.)

Besides, some of it is pure fun if you do them serendipitously.

I was just wandering when I dropped into the water, and got a skinny dipping achievement at the same time that I noticed nearly all my clothes had fallen off. (At least I got fur.)

I surfaced to find the beach party and chat with Lady Kasmeer and Lord Faren, chuckling at the conversations, and hung out for a while to add to the eyesore factor while watching several lil ugly Asura running around ruining it further. (Apologies to the two sylvari lying down together by the beach and probably having ERP in party chat.)

I think that crab behind me has evil designs… (Besides folks chilling on the beach, there are two female Norn players bar-top dancing in the background. Don’t you love Tarnished Coast?)

How Delicious are the Dynamic Events?

Pretty good, I’d say.

The difficulty and scaling seems fairly spot on.

The aggravated wildlife did teach me once that it was a bad idea to be standing at a settlement entrance and lost in scrutinizing one’s map while in berserker gear. And going AFK safely has been a bit more challenging (climbing up to the huts is a good bet, imo.)

I enjoyed running around doing various DEs. The achievements for supporting either side were completed in a timely fashion. There were lively crowds around to assist, but not to the extent of so crowded that there was skill lag or being utterly unplayable.

Some of my guildies are already making plans for leveling up lowbie characters in Southsun this month, since things are upleveled to 80, the pace of events is good and there’s a current population focus here. I might try that out too at some point.

How Satisfying is Sample Collecting?

Mixed opinions about this one.

I liked that there was an obvious and suspicious looking flower serving as a sample right near where you got the quest and the scanner. That gives a wordless clue as to what to be looking out for.

It was slightly non-obvious how to bring up the scanner again once you put it down. Another person and me spent a while conversing with Researcher Levvi trying to get her to cough up another gun because we’d thrown ours down when some rampaging Veteran Karka attacked the camp. I did eventually think to check my inventory again and figured it out (and told the other person having trouble) but I don’t think we were the only ones initially puzzled.

I ran around randomly scanning and pinging and found maybe half of the samples that way before I started getting frustrated. The yellow glow should have been a little taller and more obvious, imo. The achievement clues weren’t that much of a help (do you know how many shipwrecks there are on this stupid island? Vents and geysers?! At least Cave I knew, and Sandpit was unique – though I didn’t put that one together until after the fact.)

Found the hive samples by myself. It just made evil sense to make players have to go there. Here’s the “I was there” flower for players to tell others about how they took down the biggest karka of them all…

So it was back to Dulfy. I’m sure a lot more people just went straight to using her guide and had a lot less pain that way.

Even so, I had a bit of a time trying to find the Vent one, there was just too much steam in the way. I had to try and match my minimap to pixel perfect correspondence with that on Dulfy’s before I finally saw it.

The completionist urge to get the Islet sample also got me to finally attempt and complete the Skipping Stones jumping puzzle, something I’ve put off for a very long time. All that SAB practice paid off, I think. And it was nice to see a resurgence of interest in the puzzle, be able to observe people who knew where to go and where to jump, and have friendly mesmers around as insurance. (One was portalling in stages as they attempted it too, which was handy for folks who wanted to do the jumps but got tired of having to repeat what was done before through a slip of the foot.)

How Crappy is Crab Toss?

Also mixed opinions on this one.

Me off ruining someone’s Crabtacular hopes by not being anywhere near crab or karka. (And also playing miserably.)

If it wasn’t for the ludicrousness of the Crabtacular achievement, I’d actually peg it as a decent enough minigame of ‘fun-in-the-sun’ themed non-serious no-consequences pvp with a very decent reward structure (a karka shell and a loot drop for participating, 5 karka shells and two loot drops for winning. And I’ve gotten greens and yellows from it, others did get exotics while I was there.)

First, it’s not very clear what is required for Crabtacular. Many people seem to have the impression it’s being the last one holding the crab at the end of the game. Some have even claimed that they scored the achievement that way. Okaaay. I dunno, I got mine by being the only one alive while everyone got rolled by a veteran karka. But achievements have been known to bug, so who knows.

Secondly, if your opponents have ANY clue what they are doing, and the goal in any PvP game is after all to attain and compete against others with at least a minimum of skill, they will not all courteously die at the same time for you to attain the achievement. There’s usually at least one or two people sensible enough to stay the fuck away from a karka roll, instead of zergling along chasing the crab carrier.

That makes it a stupid very luck-based achievement if you try to attain it normally. Or you could try the patient route and stay in a game endlessly until other people get tired and the number of participants whittles down to a more manageable number which might reasonably be expected to get unlucky and perish together. (Except those staying tend to be pretty decent at the game, decent enough to tolerate staying at any rate.)

Or, since the game unwittingly creates a Prisoner’s Dilemma for GW2 players who have been trained by other aspects of the game to cooperate together, the easiest way of finishing up this achievement is for no one to defect, and everyone to cooperate.

This was how I ended up getting Crabtacular and the last bit of my Crab Carrying achievement done. Simply hung out in a game until there were three people left, and one of them broached the subject of cooperation. I jumped onto the idea in support, and while it did take a while to get the last party speaking and cooperating (I suspect he was winning and wanted to get the Crab Toss Champion done, he didn’t say anything until he won that match – we’d stopped competing and were trying to get him on board), then we all took turns the following few matches to get each other Crabtacular and stuck around to get the last party his Crabgrabber and me my Crab Carrier.

Lag, latency or ping also seems to be a bit of an issue with this minigame. Against certain opponents, especially playing during NA prime hours, they simply seem to slip away too fast to ever connect with a melee steal or tackle. Playing during Oceanic hours, and I seem to do much better. It could be random pairing with someone skilled, but I’m willing to bet that there’s noticeable performance difference between someone with 30 sec ping vs 300 sec or 500 sec ping.

Still, as a no consequences sort of minigame, it isn’t too bad, though I found previous games like the Lunatic Inquisition a lot more fun. It did help me learn how to predict someone’s movements a bit more and plot how to intersect their path, rather than chase aimlessly behind them. But with seemingly random melee targetting once you get into a scrum, and hard to control facing and a dash that changes distance based on how long you press it (and possibly affected by lag), it’s just not very predictable nor or the skills very reliable – that takes away a good deal of the fun in having control of one’s character.

It might have been nicer as a fun game you could play with one’s guild or with teams rather than a chaotic FFA, but no doubt that will lead to (true) accusations of collusion and match fixing very shortly.

How Fast is it Finished?

A couple hours if you’re really focused. A day or so if you’re less intense about it. Maybe longer if you’re really casual.

Some people think that’s too fast.

I don’t really care. I think it’s fine to err on the side of too easy for something that’s only going to last two weeks.

Somehow the incongruity of this tickles the hell out of me. Brave macho Blood Legion charr with a flower on his back. Maybe growing OUT of his back. Parasitic flora infections ftw. It’s great that it’s account bound, I can swap the look between characters much more easily without buyer’s remorse.

At least this way, the content locusts will be done quickly with whatever they want to achieve in Southsun and be back to their regularly scheduled activities. WvW will see less PvE event disruption as people can quickly take time out for the event and get back to fighting their endless mist war. Time-starved or very casual people have a chance to reasonably participate and complete the content in a couple hours or a weekend without being expected to be online 8 hours a day for 14 days running.

And people who are still interested in what the island offers are not prevented from still staying after the achievements are all done and ticked away, and the shiny backpieces collected. There’s still dynamic events and materials to farm, xp and karma and loot galore if you want it.

Now to await May 28th and whatever Canach’s Lair has in store for us…

(…and speaking of store… I have $10 waiting for the Consortium harvesting sickle right here. I might drop another ten for a character slot this month too because chronic altholics can’t stop.)

GW2: Not Quite Weatherstock, But There’s Potential

I’ve written about Weatherstock in LOTRO before – a huge concert gathering of bands, a player-created social event made possible through the emergent property of having a really good music system in an MMO.

Ever since the choir bells made an appearance in GW2′s Wintersday celebrations, I’ve been hoping to see or hear a small echo of that in the MMO where my heart is.

Evidently, I fail to walk the same circles as those who have been sneaking it in under the radar – wrong server, wrong forums, wrong timezones, wrong hang-out locales (I’m still uncomfortable in Divinity’s Reach, I’m a Charr, dangit… and who the hell goes to the Ruins of Rin on purpose?) perhaps.

But courtesy of a guildmate who did catch a glimpse of a production by the guild Harlots and Harlequins [HaHa] and recorded it, I am thrilled to say that there is hope.

We apologize for the quality of the stream, which is not great, but you can catch the Lady Fularr’s three songs, beginning at 0:12, 8:40 and 24:12.

The Charr skit at 2:14 is really somewhat pointless so feel free to skip it over, but the Silence of the Dolyaks starring Dr Lekktor (I knew which race he was going to be right off! Mwahaha!) at 13:47 is moderately amusing.

These guys are amazing in working with what limited tools they have in GW2 so far. It’s pretty much RP walk, a few emotes, jump and one measly choir bell…

I especially like the use of the mesmer blink by the presenter / introduction person / I can’t think of the proper word for him right now (I shall blame the lingering flu.) It gives a magician’s showman quality to the performance.

Here’s their guild’s recruitment page that Google-fu brought up when trying to learn more about them and what they do.

Now what we need in general are:

• MORE INSTRUMENTS
• MORE EMOTES

And we might actually be able to match what LOTRO has been doing for ages…

I would really love to hear bands in GW2.

Please, ArenaNet, make it happen one day.

P.S. While you’re at it, please fix Ebonhawke pipe organ. I was sad when I was map exploring Fields of Ruins, found the pipe organ, tried to play the song and got no open door.

Googled to find out it apparently broke a long time ago and never got better. Very very sad. Sad sick charr has awful snuffles.