Guild Wars 2

My thoughts on the Nevermore quest ~

Nevermore I: Ravenswood Branch
- Nice introduction to ease people into a legendary journey. Good to see that the game recognizes our past achievements so we don’t have to do the same things over again (some Protectors). It makes sure we have completed or have access to all areas of the game, Central and HoT.

Nevermore II: Ravenswood Staff
- A Crafting Odyssey. Time Sink. Gold Sink. Gets people to buy gems if they don’t want to spend 120+ hours of their lives harvesting + the months of 1-A-Day Gobs/Planks. Aye, you can buy them with gold you earn in the game. So on one level, those with enough time and patience and lack of anything better to do with their lives can do this all in-game by themselves (that’s not really a criticism of the players like this, I was there once too in my younger days).

On another level, it promotes involvment in the economy by allowing purchase of Spiritwood Planks on the TP if you want to move things along faster. And, of course it gets Anet money from those with jobs who buy gems and convert to gold to just buy the Planks outright (thereby affecting said “economy” for non-gem buyers).

BUT. It’s really overdone. There needs to be more ‘adventure’ involved in this. If there’s ever a way to make the game’s timegating and TP/Gem focus more noticeable, this is it. You can at least sprinkle in some more side stuff here. A spoon full of sugar does help the medicine go down. It’s better to use honey than vinegar. -Insert favorite applicable adage here-

Nevermore III: The Raven Staff
- This was fine with me. A little bit of crafting in the beginning to create a tool to find the raven spirits and a scavenger hunt. In this case the crafting was very appropriate to the use.

Nevermore IV: The Raven Spirit
- Why amd I doing DS meta again, when I already did this in Nevermore I? (Protector of All / Flight Lessons: Air Combat)
- Why am I fighting SB again, when I already did this in Nevermore III? (Chaos Treatment / Chase the Spirit through the Ages / Phantom Residue)
- Why am I doing Urban Battlegounds again, when I already did this in Nevermore III? Note: Since Fractals are already a “replay” of past Tyrian events, this isn’t as bad as the other ones. (Chase the Spirit from Ascalon Past / Bring the Red Iris Fower to Rest)
- Why am I doing Cliffside Fractal again, when I already did this in Nevermore III? Note: Since Fractals are already a “replay” of past Tyrian events, this isn’t as bad as the other ones. (Chase the Spirit from the Cliffside / Ancient Cultists Texts)
- Timed Quests Without Timers – I did all but two so far so it’s doable but no fun. It really helped that I partied up with someone else doing these, so we were both map hopping like crazy looking for active events. 0% immersion doing this. 0% fun. If you’re going to have this many timed events required and they’re on 3-hour timers, would REALLY help to have some indication In-Game of how long it might take. Some events, like the Battle in Plains of Ashford have a handy status line that says the event has been done recently. Something like this should be on all of them for the legendary so we don’t have to AFK for two hours hoping.

There is more content in GW2 than this collection is giving credit for. I really don’t understand why the repeat bosses and fractals. We have so many others. At least try to give the illusion that once a player has killed the Big Bad, that they really did it once and for all.

Now, after I’m done with Nevermore IV I need to get my 250 ectos and t6 material stock back up (I canabalized my stores just to get this collection stuff done). The Amalgamated Gemstones are going to be a chore any way you approach it. And the Clovers, well, they’re Clovers. Most people giving this Legendary a real shot know about the Clovers… So the real thorn is the Gemstones for me. Seems a bit excessive.

But at least I get to have my 100% chance for my Precursor and Gift when I haven’t had a Precursor drop or get forged in all of the time I’ve played this game.

Anyhow, that’s my feedback on this collection line for what it’s worth.

~ Lys

I made both HOPE and NEVERMORE. And those are the only two legendaries that I have after 3+ years of playing. I made them because I had an overflowing material storage and, most importantly, I did not know what I was actually getting myself into.

I echo your sentiments. HOPE quests, imho, was worse of the two. Jump Puzzles like Goemm’s lab can drive anyone nuts.

Amalgamated Gemstones are way overdone. Cost aside, double clicking 250x 5 times is just plain insane.

100% agree on Amalgamated Gemstones.

Bad enough the markets have been royally manipulated. This only makes it even more annoying.

Couldn’t have made this a unique item earned via playing content…nope.

The Gift of maguuma mastery is a pain to get. You have to farm crystalline ingot and additionnaly, some golds for buy amalgamated gemstones.

I’ve seen a guy with 6 gifts of maguuma mastery. I don’t know how this is possible. It’s just insane. Maybe he just takes the opportunity when fulgurites wasn’t account bound.

Anyway, I’m done with the precursor, the gift of nevermore, and almost done with the gift of maguuma mastery. I still need the xp for mastery.

Personnaly I think the journey was “okay”. It’s still more original than others legendary journeys in my opinion.

Khyan.7039:

Personnaly I think the journey was “okay”. It’s still more original than others legendary journeys in my opinion.

Agreed, it’s an acceptable journey for a game like GW2. When I have time to play the game I don’t post, so it’s not like I have enough problems with the collection line that I stop playing to vent I hope that the devs read through these posts for feedback as they work on future content.

I didn’t mind the Gift of Maguuma that much, since it went along with the HoT mastery grind. Once you accept that you have to spend a lot of time in the four HoT maps to level the HoT masteries it’s just a matter of doing them in each map to get the currencies for the key/acid/whatever for the nodes/cargo/pods.

Amalgamated Gemstones aside (which is another conversation in itself) I think I was a little disappointed that the collection involved a few repeat bosses but didn’t touch on the dungeons or other content.

One thing I wondered was why they didn’t make you go to some super-secret crafter, perhaps even a master craftsman at the end of a dungeon, in order to get some of the recipes for Nevermore II. That would have added a little more adventure and made the crafting more interesting or purposeful in-game. Dungeons might be phasing out but they’re still in the game, might as well use them. Doesn’t have to be a repeat 10-times trip either. Just one dungeon trip to get to the crafter would get you the recipe. Or, only let you craft a particular component in a specific location perhaps due to the environmental factors (like a ley-line infused crafting station in Rata Novus in TD?)

Precursor crafting has been bullcrap since it was first introduced, kinda late catching up…
Sadly, being the bs they are i doubt i’ll ever craft any of the new legendaries. Which is doubly bad because most of the original ones were crap to begin with.
Why the kitten would you want to run around with a disco ball or shooting unicorns? Someone in Arena net had a little bit too much fun in the 70’s…

Legendaries/Precursor crafting was kittened up to begin with, having precursors cost more to craft than to buy, having precursors be as expensive or more than the actual legendary step wasn’t that great either, but kinda in-line with the previous experience.

The new legendaries just made it worse, because those precursor don’t drop. Which means, for me, at least, that i’ll never get one of those, unless they seriously rethink the crafting steps.

Worse part yet is that the old precursors sucked balls, i mean a bow that shoots unicorns? A toy gun? A freaking disco ball?
Someone had a bit too much fun in the 70’s.

Nevermore is just nuts… did not have to do 1/2 of this… or spend 1/4 of this for Kuldos… and I promised myself I would not make another one after Kuldos…
We will see… this may just end up driving me to quit the game…
Considering what i spend on gems… that would be a real loss for them… I’m sure I’m not the only one…

I started crafting Nevermore in earnest yesterday, and have found this to be the most expensive exercise I have ever undertaken since I started playing after launch. I cannot understand how the cost of materials is so open to exploitation with everyone trying to get rich at their fellow guildies expense. I have crafted 9 Legendaries already, and at this stage would have been cheaper to BUY a precursor and Craft for less Gold. Surely Anet, this was not the intention to make this more expensive than standard crafting. The whole point of the exercise as far as I can remember, was to give the average player a chance at crafting his own legendary. Somehow, it seems you have lost the plot, because it is probably going to cost me over 3000 gold to craft my very own, wow!!!

Frankly, I think this is why they gave up on making more legendaries. The “scavenger hunt,” in development for years, turned out to be… really, really boring.

I pretty much agree with the OP, save that I’m only on Step 2. Step 1 was pretty cool. Got me to go back and do a lot of events I hadn’t done in a long time, and forced me to do some that, at the time, I didn’t know existed (Corpse Grove).

But Step 2 is just SO much… when I realized I needed 4,500 elder wood logs JUST for the Basic Staff Requisition… I pretty much instantly lost interest and haven’t worked seriously at it for months. No one is going to gather than many freaking logs on their own (it would take months, unless you’re super hardcore or are deliberately out just to chop trees). You’re basically forced to use BLTC… and I thought the whole point of this in the first place was to give you an alternative to being forced to use BLTC (i.e., buying a precursor).

Again, the whole point of this was to make the whole process feel exciting and meaningful. I don’t feel like they achieved that on the whole. Buying a billion elder wood (or spiritwood if you’re not processing yourself) is equally as boring as buying a precursor straightup… if not more so, because I have to click “buy” several times since the max stack you can buy at a time is 250.

As the OP suggested, I think just breaking up Step 2 into more incremental steps with more to do would help. Having to save up 250 Elder Staff Heads and 250 Elder Staff Shafts before you can make any progress is boring. Even “bring 10 staves to so-and-so on the frontlines in the Mists!” 25 times would be better… at least it would feel like incremental progress.

I’m working on Nevermore, I’ve finished all four tiers. I would suggest they make some of the event quests into instances. Like the personal story and living story, it can be soloable or invite friends. I was waiting around for the bunny event and decided to click on the npcs around and was able to buy Friends of Rabbits, but I don’t mind chasing rabbits if I didn’t have to wait.

Amalgamated gemstones. I’m guessing players are buying T5 dust to make orbs, last I check had buy orders of 42k and 70k at two price points. I need to buy another 7000 dust to get my 250 gemstones with the new recipe.