I decided to give the legendary journey for the Chuka and Champawat short bow a go (at least, up until the point of demanding ridiculous amounts of time-gated ascended materials that I would rather accumulate slowly over months, after recovering from the Predator expenditure.)
I deliberately used my tiger charr for dramatic parallel.
I must say, even though I vaguely kinda had heard of the story arc behind the Chuka and Champawat “quest,” the first appearance of the Legendary pair of tigers took me by surprise.
There was a “TWO of them at once, are you kidding me?!” moment for sure.
Of course, all legendary journeys would be anti-climatic if the battle ended right there. It was scripted so that the next step would continue after bringing them to a certain health percentage, so it wasn’t -that- bad.
Part 1 was rather nice, making slightly more logical sense than the apparently random somewhat similar themed item collections of other legendaries.
You make a journal to record your sightings and tracking of the tigers, who pretty much lead you on a merry chase across much of Tyria.
Acres of continent are crossed and criss-crossed, following special item “tracks” that show you the path the tigers took, creating a sense that you’re tracking them. Every so often, the tigers jump out and attack you, you fight back (perhaps out of self defence, perhaps out of desire for their defeat) and whittle them down slowly.
The male takes the brunt of the injuries first, and dies. The female turns tail and leads you on another desperate chase… that starts to feel rather sad (especially if you have an inkling of what’s coming next.)
I felt more than a bit bad when the female died.
(Then again, all the places you visit report that they mauled and killed various people/charr as they passed, so they did have to be stopped, once they started.
Ah, but then again, apparently they only started attacking people when you disturbed them in the first place, so… oops.)
The first part is worth attempting for anybody who owns Heart of Thorns, I think. If only to see how the Anet designers managed to shoehorn something that felt like a traditional quest into GW2, using a mix of collections and items.
I’d love to continue with Part 3 and 4 and do the story bits, but I read a bit ahead and besides a short road block of 10 odd elonian leather bits and pieces, Part 2 is going to require a significant investment of resources – just one of them being something like 7800 elder wood logs.
Ugh. That sounds like me having to park a dozen alts by Pagga’s in Malchor’s Leap, harvesting robotically daily, and/or feeding in every last drop of gold I earn in the next couple weeks to buying wood from other people harvesting robotically daily.
Suffice to say, I am not in a hurry to get industrious on that step yet.
Some day, when I am in the mood, I’ll draw out a checklist and all, and tick down the days of progress happily.
But not today.
