Guild Wars 2

“Another mail? What do they need me for this time?”

“Krait…well, a Vigil Guardian’s job is never done.”

Okay…that looks much different from before. Better warp in at the local quaggan depot and check on things.

The new zone picture is…meh. I’m already missing the old one with those statues carved into mountains, which never actually showed up in the zone.

Okay—wait what? I’m already there instead?

So Kasmeer and Marjory are already further onward, while only Sergeant Walters and three other Seraph are here to assist against an as of yet unknown force. This won’t end well.

“Move in a group! There’s too few of us to accomplish anything by ourselves.”

“About that…why are there only 4 of you, Sergeant? I’d think a giant tower spreading darkness everywhere would get the attention of every nearby Seraph outpost at least. And Fort Salma’s not too far away from this, either.”

“Look, this was all we could spare, crusader. Between the centaurs and bandit resistance, nobody had time for the krait.”

“(Sigh) No matter. We press onw—By the Tree, Krait and Nightmare Court?”

“Heads up. We need that bridge to reach our people.”

The Toxic Alliance. I’m torn between saying “neat name” and “ugh, another alliance between improbable groups”. On the upside, they at least show some mechanics that enemies weren’t doing before: the down-state on the courtiers, and the krait actually reviving them (the krait still die normally). So hurrah for finishers actually having use outside of PvP and WvW now.

“What could the Nightmare Court and the krait possibly have in common?”

“Besides being evil, I’m not sure.”

“Their toxic new alliance is obviously the source of the strangeness happening here. What are they planning?”

“We can find that out later. Let’s find Lady Kasmeer and Investigator Marjory and clear out ASAP.”

“Answers will have to wait. Form up on me and we’ll cross this bridge and press forward.”

However, one of the sorcerers has a new trick for us.

“This just keeps getting worse.”

“Withdraw. We don’t have time for you now.”

“My time is more precious than this!”

“I won’t allow you beasts to trample us, not with so much at stake.”

“What centaur uses guardian powers? Snap out of it already!”

Well, on my own again. Probably better that way, what with the “toxins making NPCs hallucinate and turn on each other” thing. Let’s get a view of the tower and get a move on.

Oh, there’s Kasmeer and Marjory.

“Um…hello?”

“Shhh, not so loud.”

“Oh hello there, sir. Mind clearing the hostiles out so we don’t have to sit here?”

“..Right. I’ll take care of it.”

Well, everything’s okay now.

…or not.

So…what looks like the offspring of a Krait and a Hutt is attacking us. At least Kasmeer and Marjory are helping out this time, and they actually dodge/blink around and use more than just basic skills in this fight. It’s still not much, but it’s a much better showing than most other NPCs.

“That tower was veiled with illusion magic… until a short while ago.”

“I found the perfect spell. It was luck, really.”

“It was fantastic. The sky darkened, and—”

“I found the crack in its cloak. A magical poke in the right place, and it dropped like…

“Like a norn fart at a moot.”

So we can’t get in right now. And the base of the tower is thick with toxic spores, so we’d probably die before we could even try to find a way in. However, Marjory thinks she can develop an antitoxin with samples of the spores, so now we’ve got an objective of sorts.

So apparently Scarlet’s behind this too. Of course. Apparently she’s given them shards of a krait obelisk, which is apparently their most sacred object. This has managed to not only break their stubborn xenophobia, but get them to work with a faction of the Nightmare Court on equal terms (trying to revived downed courtiers and all).

I’m torn. While I like some of the new mechanics somewhat, the story is still rather nonsensical, with yet another improbable alliance with no clear goal besides just making things worse for everyone around them.

And now for the achievement grind, because every Living Story has one of those…

The meta-reward this time is a Krait Obelisk Shard (basically a commune point which you can use to get skill points and charge quartz crystals) for your home instance.

Being something useful, I intend to get it.

It requires 14 achievements to get , and there are daily achievements for it as well (only one per day, due to Halloween still taking the other), some of which you need, since there are only 11 you can gain outside of the daily ones.

Once again, some are okay, other are just irritating. At least most, if not all of Halloween’s achievements could be done by yourself. About half of these are only okay to do with a zerg train.

Toxic Spore Sampler: Give 50 Pristine Toxic Spore Samples to Marjory.

Pristine Toxic Spore Samples come from Toxic Seedlings which are spread about in many zones. (in groups of 3 or 4 clumped together in certain spots) They also appear from destroyed Toxic Offshoots and spore infected creatures.

This one’s…okay, for the most part. It’s nice that with the normal Toxic Seedlings scattered around anyway, you can do this yourself without relying on a group farm train being around for the Toxic Offshoots (although that does get more faster, especially in Kessex Hills.

Except…the regular ones will usually give you Mushed Spore Samples—another junk item. It happens with at least half of the open world Toxic Seedlings I harvest. (Thankfully, ones from Toxic Offshoots and infected creatures will always give the Pristine Samples)

The Mushed Spore Samples just feel like a cheap and unnecessary way to keep people from just exploring and gathering them all the time, thus encouraging players to attack the Toxic Offshoots for guaranteed Pristine samples. Still, this achievement is one of the easier ones..

The Nightmare Unveiled: Just do the story instance and you’ve got it. Nice and simple.

Toxic Weed Whacker: Aid in the destruction of 25 toxic offshoots. You pretty much stick with large groups in Kessex Hills for this one, since there are up to four of them at any given time in the zone (compared to only two each in the neighboring zones where they appear). On top of that, most are surrounded by Toxic enemies, with quite a few Veterans, even when it’s just a few people around.

It’s okay…while people are still zerg farming these things. When they’re not, it’ll be a pain.

Another patch, another blog post spam thread by Nilkemia which could easily be condensed into 2-3 posts (though blog posts shouldn’t be on the forums anyway).

GoldenTruth.2853:

Another patch, another blog post spam thread by Nilkemia which could easily be condensed into 2-3 posts (though blog posts shouldn’t be on the forums anyway).

I’m just posting my thoughts on it, trying to be as thorough as I can in one thread instead of spreading it out over lots of them. And since I take lots of pictures, might as well use them.

So what’s your problem?

Nilkemia.8507:

GoldenTruth.2853:

Another patch, another blog post spam thread by Nilkemia which could easily be condensed into 2-3 posts (though blog posts shouldn’t be on the forums anyway).

I’m just posting my thoughts on it, trying to be as thorough as I can in one thread instead of spreading it out over lots of them. And since I take lots of pictures, might as well use them.

So what’s your problem?

Because it doesn’t lead to a discussion at all and should be posted on a blog instead of a discussion forum?

And I am a bitter person at heart who is envious of your pictures.

Edit: And you also bump your posts far to much since they don’t invite discussion and could easily be pushed into very few posts. For example, why are you going over the achievements one at a time in separate posts when you could just combine them.

Well, it’s not my fault no one else has posted here up until this point. (shrugs)

Part of me would like to think it’s because they’re waiting for me to finish this, but I’m sure they just don’t care. And besides, it’s not like I can tell people to post/not post here, that’d be selfish and arrogant of me. (And I can’t even do that anyways.)

And apologies for the pictures making you bitter. I didn’t realize they could do that to people.

But, anyway….guess I’d better sum up the simple achievements before getting on to the irritating ones.

Toxic Siege/Demolitionist/Golem Gardener: Basically complete 3 each of the separate types of offshoot destruction missions for each of these 3 achievements. If you’re going for the “destroy 25 offshoots” one, you’ll probably get these without thinking about them.

Toxic Alliance Slayer: Kill 100 members of the Toxic Alliance. Simple.

Toxic Global Gardener: Destroy toxic offshoots in 5 different maps. Simple, as long as they’re actually up in those zones and people are there to help. Not so much otherwise.

Edit: And you also bump your posts far to much since they don’t invite discussion and could easily be pushed into very few posts. For example, why are you going over the achievements one at a time in separate posts when you could just combine them.

The main reason is that since attachments (the pictures, in this case) can only be placed on the bottom, below the text, and stacked on top of each other one by one. Condensing all the initial posts in here with the pictures would result in a huge wall of text, then a column of pictures, which wouldn’t look that good. As for the posts on the achievements, I though of putting pictures there later, and I wanted to talk about the more annoying ones separately anyway. (There is a limit to how big posts can go, after all.)

The picture part was me just joking around.

People aren’t going to post because they can’t really discuss a post like “However, one of the sorcerers has a new trick for us.” or “So Kasmeer and Marjory are already further onward, while only Sergeant Walters and three other Seraph are here to assist against an as of yet unknown force. This won’t end well.”

What are they going to say? “Yes I don’t think it will end well either”?

I remember you posted one on Scarlet’s Funhouse and the only post not yours was something along the lines of “Is this still in the game?” when it wasn’t. Likewise, the TA one was just a giant series of posts of you dying with some people saying they could help you (however, if all was successful I doubt anyone would have responded at all).

I’m sorry but I just find threads where someone spends 20 posts talking to himself nonsensical and not belonging to the forums.

Then I should be thankful that whoever is in charge of these forums is more tolerant/forgiving than you.

As for Twilight Assault, I’ve learned my lesson there: any dungeon involving Aetherblades is a huge waste of time. I’ll avoid them and never run them again.

And now for the not-so-great achievements.

Krait Bane: You have to kill three specific champion Krait Witches, in Caledon Forest, Kessex Hills, and Timberline Falls. All of them are very annoying to deal with, and in the case of the Timberline Falls one, annoying to get to as well (and it can summon other krait to knock you off the tower it’s on. Because that’s apparently fun.)

Toxic Krait Historian: Find (and commune with) 24 krait obelisks throughout the world. Another scavenger hunt. The only hint you get is that they’re wherever the krait are already. Of course, it’s not indicated how many are in each of the zones they can be in, nor is it indicated which ones you’ve gotten already, so better have a pencil and paper out for this one! Sigh…

Toxic Spore Cleanser: Kill 25 spore-corrupted creatures. Sounds simple, right?…

Except…

-Only certain veterans/champions get this spore corruption to begin with. No regular enemies seem to ever get it, so you can’t just kill any of the Toxic hostiles standing near the tower or anything simple like that.

-The chance of them getting the spores is completely random. And not just as in “they might have the spores when they spawn or not”. You have to wait anywhere from several seconds to several minutes after they they spawn for them to maybe get spore corrupted.

-While this can seemingly happen in any zone, only veterans or champions from dynamic events have a chance of these spores being on them (can’t just go for the local wandering veterans/champions).

So the only good way to do this so far is to just stay in Kessex Hills and wait for the farm trains to call out champions with the spores and run over there as fast as you can, since the waypoints they spawn at get contested.

Sigh.

For what it’s worth, I do enjoy your little “Nilkemia’s adventures” posts. I’m not sure if maybe it shouldn’t be on a blog as Golden suggested, but if the mods are happy with it, I’m more than happy to keep reading.

As to the Spore Cleanser achievement, you’ve seen my posts on the related thread, I believe. It’s annoying, but it can be done fairly quickly in the Queensdale Champ train, I hear.

Queensdale again? Eww..I don’t like that place. Fine..if I must.

Zaxares.5419:

As to the Spore Cleanser achievement, you’ve seen my posts on the related thread, I believe. It’s annoying, but it can be done fairly quickly in the Queensdale Champ train, I hear.

Can also be done quickly if you just wait for a Scarlet Invasion event and just go there (can easily finish it in one invasion). Though, since there isn’t an exact timer on the invasions it is somewhat unreliable. I personally haven’t done that one yet and am just waiting to be lucky enough to be on (and not in the middle of something else) for one of those invasions.

You need to be lucky with the invasions though. I did an invasion on the first night and got a grand total of 0 Spore Cleanings despite clearing about 15 or so events.

The Queensdale champ train and the Kessex farm run are at least reliable.

Well…my thoughts so far.

-The story instance was okay, it was nice to finally see Kasmeer and Marjory fighting (and doing better than even Destiny’s Edge). Sadly, it’s just too short—we help them, they go back to camp, and we give Marjory spores so she can eventually make an antitoxin to get us in. I’m already wanting to see the next story bit, but I’ll have to wait until November 5th to get a peek at the next bit.

That’s a problem with the Living Story. The “story” comes little bit by bit, enough to get me a little interested but never enough to leave me satisfied, always leaving me wanting a bit more.

-The Toxic Alliance are…meh. Nightmare Courtiers and krait, both groups that hate everyone else, suddenly working together because Scarlet found some shards of an obelisk.

-The achievements were…okay, besides the three really annoying ones. One upside is that you can just do the “event dailies” and get the krait obelisk eventually. Still, it felt more grindy than Halloween.

The new Dreamthistle weapons are kinda neat. I think these should’ve been in Twilight Assault instead of the “Aethermare” weapons we got. Sadly, they were put in the Black Lion Merchants instead. Seriously, how is the Black Lion Trading Company getting these? Are their agents able to loot the skins off of the Toxic hostiles we kill or what? Thus, with them being bound to Black Lion Tickets/Scraps/RNG, I will most likely never get those skins. Oh well. Would’ve wanted a chance to get them off the enemies themselves, or be able to make them from recipes from Marjory somehow, but no dice.

And the 3 new armor skins…I don’t care. I saw them and while they’re not bad, they’re not really good either.

I think that’s all, unless I missed something.

Edit: I did…Marjory’s recipes. Oh well, I’ll look at them later. (yawn)

I’m now forced to “Finish” an enemy in PvE? Great, a mechanic that was already flawed in PvP is being used in PvE too. Instead of only having to Finish a downed Nightmare Court, why not just make us Finish all enemy NPC’s? Why are we going half speed on bad mechanics? Let’s just fully FUBAR this and call it a day.

I first thought it was a neat thing, but now I’d rather not see it spread. If it sticks to certain enemies, fine I guess. But if not…well, it might just make things more irritating.