Guild Wars 2

So the season’s complete, the rewards have been handed out and have been found lacking. Half of that equation is what the rewards are, and there are plenty of threads on that, but I’m here to talk about the achievements needed to get the rewards.

As far as individual achievements go, the vast majority of them achieved a fair balance between needing to put in work over the course of the season vs becoming tedious. The two glaring exceptions to this were Supplies Severed (dolyaks) and Sentry Capturer. I get the reasoning behind the increased numbers vs, say, towers. There are quite a number of dolyaks falling per day compared to the number of tower captures per day. The problem is that the window to get credit for a dolyak kill or a sentry point capture is infinitesemally small by comparison. With a zerg coming up on one? Better hope you’re in the front 10 and you have a 1200 range weapon if you wanna get a hit in. Out on your own? Better hope no zerg rolls straight over it in the time it takes you to see it on the map and run over there. With dolyaks in particular, it actually provides a disincentive to take supply camps rather than just waiting for the next 2 dolyaks to spawn, or to defend them rather than just letting it turn into a dolyak-producing machine. Personally I would not recommend either of these achievements go beyond 150, maybe even scaled back a bit further to 125. Something that’s possible to get through focused play without having to drop everything else to grind.

There is one other achievement I’d say was a little excessive, but certainly not to the level of dolyaks and sentries, and that’s camps. Just tone it back a little. Maybe 80.

World ranker wasn’t too bad with a bunch of low-rank alts that could be brought up quickly, but given the upcoming world rank changes for that to be made accountwide, that might need a little massaging.

The other thing I’d like to see is the WvW-specific dailies count for something for the seasonal meta. Obviously making them count directly would be an utter mess for scaling the meta, so instead I would suggest making a new seasonal achievement that tracks WvW-specific dailies, and have that achievement count toward the meta once you reach, say, 25 (there are 3 WvW-specific dailies per day, so that shouldn’t be too arduous), while maintaining the meta at 15 needed. It makes it a little easier on those who don’t really want to spend all their time in WvW, it encourages people to keep coming back regularly, and it gives the dailies a little more meaning, without throwing the whole thing out of whack.

Sentries, yaks, and camps were probably my first 3 achieved after player kills. Try getting a group together and hitting smaller targets, rather than running with the zerg all the time. You might find you like it (and you’ll actually get to hit that yak before it dies).

I was with tiny groups or on my own almost the whole time I did my WvW achieves. We even specifically went after yaks and sentries for quite awhile. I still got all the other ones first. I did finally get dolyaks through a lot of camping camps and just waiting for them to spawn, but even that was a pain and took ages. I never did get sentries. I managed to reach 150 on the second to last day.

I love the idea of tying in the WvW dailies. It would fit with how the other living world metas work, and would help spread out the achievement hunters a bit. It would also be neat if we could have a category that required you to participate at least once every week.