Hello again, friends, and welcome to the fourth and final installment of the Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns edition of Choose My Adventure. You may have noticed that this column is a couple of days later than usual. Sorry about that; it’s been a busy time.
At any rate, you may remember that last week, I asked y’all to vote on which tradeskills I should take and which zone I should conquer next. Cook took first place in the tradeskill vote by a fairly significant margin, while weaponsmith barely beat out armorsmith for the second spot. Meanwhile, for the zone poll you all decided that I should go sightseeing in Sparkfly Fen. So over the course of last weekend, I did exactly that. Here’s how it turned out.
I think it would be best to start off by saying that I, yet again, was unable to do a dungeon. But I still got a rather large amount done this weekend, and I suppose crafting is probably the logical place to start. It’ll also be fairly quick, because I don’t have a lot to say about Guild Wars 2‘s crafting, and of what I do have to say, very little is particularly good.
GW2 takes the generic “click a button and wait for the bar to fill up” approach, but with a small twist: When you first pick up a tradeskill, you can’t actually make any complete items; instead, you’re able to craft a number of components. You then take those components and combine them to discover new crafting recipes, which you can then craft to your heart’s content. For instance, as a weapon smith, I started with the ability to make blades, hafts, hilts and the like, each in various styles. So I could take a small haft and combine it with an axehead and ta-da, I’ve made a handaxe. But if I use a mace head instead of an axehead, then ta-da, it’s a mace instead. You can also add various stat-modifying items — in the case of weaponsmithing, inscribed wooden dowels — to give each item the combination of stats that you want it to have.
The whole experimenting with different combinations of components thing is fun at first, but it quickly becomes tedious more than anything else. Maybe it’s different for other professions, but for the most part, discovering the recipe for each new item is just a matter of combining parts according to a basic formula — handle + head + stat modifier = weapon. It got pretty tiresome when I wanted to just go ahead and discover the different axe recipes, having to do this little combination minigame multiple times, each time just switching out the stat modifier component.
One thing I did appreciate, however, is the fact that, when a large quantity of a single item is being crafted, the first few items will be crafted at more-or-less normal speed, but with each subsequent item crafted, it speeds up a bit, so you don’t generally find yourself in the situation where you have to get up and go make yourself a sandwich while that huge pile of iron daggers finishes crafting.
Ultimately though, the crafting system is nothing particularly riveting, and I didn’t even have enough materials to level up enough to make myself anything useful. You would think that after gathering materials for the better part of 50ish levels, I’d have enough mats to level up at least a significant bit, but no. It wasn’t the resources themselves that caused the problem; rather, it was the fact that, in addition to the usual ore and wood, I also had to use a variety of uncommon materials dropped from monsters (fangs, poison sacs, that kind of thing), and despite the wholesale slaughter of mobs of all varieties over the course of my playtime, I had remarkably few of them.
I did have enough coin to purchase a healthy amount of stuff off the auction house in order to help compensate for my lack of supplies, but in the end, it was just going to be far too expensive for me to buy the materials I needed to level up enough to make myself a nice, useful weapon, so I just put that on the backburner. Chef, meanwhile, was substantially more useful to me. Although the stat buffs from the lower-level foods aren’t especially incredible, the experience buff the foods provide is very nice to have, especially now that I’ve run out of the heroic boosters I bought near the beginning of my run.
I also, as the vote demanded, began my adventures in Sparkfly Fen. I wasn’t able to get 100% zone completion this time around; I think I finished about 50% of the zone, total. However, I did, during the course of my time in the zone, participate in one of the zone’s meta-events, which is a fight against the dragon Tequatl the Sunless, and I have to say, I don’t feel too bad for missing out on the dungeon this week, because that fight was plenty of excitement for me all on its own.
I was honestly pretty impressed by how well a huge group of random folks came together and organized for the fight. There had to be at least a solid 50 or so players involved in the whole event, but everyone grouped up, joined parties and squads, was assigned to perform specific roles throughout the event, and it went off without a hitch. I asked the player in charge of coordinating the whole effort to stick me wherever I’d be least likely to screw things up for everyone, on account of the fact that I was still slightly below the event’s recommended level and had no idea what the hell I was doing, so I was stuck on the north hills group, which was essentially responsible for little more than protecting the folks manning the catapults (essential for putting the hurt on Tequatl, I assume) and mopping up any adds who got past the first lines of defense.
It was a pretty frenetic affair, all in all, and basically one giant crash course in “don’t stand in the bad,” and although I was kind of unsure about whether or not I was doing what I was supposed to do at any given moment, things went pretty smoothly and in the end, Tequatl the Sunless was vanquished once more. Once he was down for the count, my inventory was flooded with a variety of chests and other rewards, and I ended up with an inventory full of fancy gear, including a few exotics (but naturally, only one of them was actually useful). All-in-all, considering my lack of playtime for the weekend, I’d consider that a pretty successful use of my time.
Unfortunately, however, that about wraps it up for the Guild Wars 2 edition of Choose My Adventure. I’ll be on hiatus next week as I wrap up the last of my finals, but I’ll be back the week after with a new game in which to have some new, exciting adventures. I do hope you’ll join me, and I look forward to seeing you all then. Until next time, friends.
Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Matt each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures — and you get to decide his fate. Be gentle (or not)!
