Every Day Jugglin’

With each passing day, I am falling into a familiar trap of trying to juggle all the things in GW2.

My primary objective, always, is to complete the main daily quest. This rewards 2g straight up, not counting any other bonus loot from the component quests, and represents real, long-term wealth. Maybe there are better gold-farming techniques, but this is the best I have at the moment. Thankfully, the daily is not quite as onerous as it once was, between familiarity and Bhagpuss’ guide to completing it in WvW.

The secondary objectives are where things fall apart.

First, I would like to experience all of the story content. That includes the vanilla story and then, of course, the expansions. I kind of jumped ahead on the HoT story because I needed to unlock Gliding, but I do want to get back to the normal order of things at some point.

Second, I want to unlock the Elite specs for the classes I play. GW2 has a pretty asinine system by which you basically have to complete the expansion content before unlocking the Elite spec that came with the expansion, but there are ways of getting around it. Specifically, there are WvW items that drop which you can convert into a currency, which you then use to buy another item, which then randomly completes a Hero Challenge in one of three broad areas. It’s as convoluted and nonsensical as it sounds, but a side-effect is that it’s forcing me to do all the “easy” Hero Challenges, so that my random completion item is more likely to pop one that, say, normally requires a group to finish.

Third, I want to progress my character in general. And, perhaps, this is where things truly fall apart. If I am just doing my thing and notice that there is a Commander on the map with a zerg in tow, I drop what I’m doing and follow the zerg. Not doing so means I will miss out on the free loot of whatever encounter the group is about to breeze through. Plus, considering GW2’s “Mastery” system, it’s kind of required that you join these zergs because otherwise your ability to work your way through the expansion content will be that much harder and longer.

At the same time, I’ve been reading up on getting better gear once you’re at the level cap. Ascended gear is the highest-stat gear in the game, and has been for years. The best way to acquire a bunch of those pieces is to farm the Season 3 Living Story maps on a daily basis. I kinda lucked out because I was logging in regularly during LS3, so I get those “episodes” for free. But I haven’t been doing them, because I’ve been trying to do the Story in order. But by the time I get around to it naturally, I could probably have farmed all the necessary currency to get the Ascended gear, so I should probably be doing that right now. But that means doing even more story out of order, and skipping zergs…

What ends up happening is a pretty classic case of Analysis Paralysis. Unable to choose between all the things, I end up choosing nothing. Well, I choose the Daily, then nothing. Gotta get those dolla bills, y’all.

Posted on January 12, 2018, in Guild Wars 2 and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments.

  1. Glad the guide was useful. Have you familiarized yourself with GW2’s LFG system? Like most things in GW2 it’s all but invisible unless you’re the kind of person who opens every single widget on the UI and studies the result in detail.

    GW2 has become *much* more of a group game than it used to be and the very flexible LFG tool is where most of the groups get made. That doesn’t just mean the traditional 5-person Dungeon or Fractal groups – it means zergs. Since the addition of the Squad mechanic to the game, zergs are just a very large group or, if you prefer, a very low-key Raid.

    The LFG tool has tabs for a whole load of things, including Core Tyria World Bosses and all the HoT and PoF Zones individually. If you want to be sure of being in, for example, an instance of Verdant Brink that’s actively working towards the map meta, look at the LFG tool, find a squad for it, join the squad and then use the right-click option that pops up when you mouse over the squad icons to jump to whatever instance the squad is in. (There are conventions for that which i won’t go into here – just hop until you find the right instance if it isn’t the first one you find).

    If you want to do Hero Points, look for Squads called something like “Hero Point Train”. If you get on one of those at the start you can quite feasibly complete most of the HPs in Verdant Brink, Auric Basin and Tangled Depths in a single session – I’ve done that a couple, of times. Even if you come in in the middle you’ll get a good few, and open a load of waypoints if the maps are new to you.

    Again, GW2’s LFG needs a guide of its own and I might do one if I have time, not that I’m much of an expert on it. It can be game-changing for a solo player, though, if you were previously unaware of it.

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  1. Pingback: The Transitive Property (of Grinding) | In An Age

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