Ald Demo

Call it a hobby within a hobby if you will, but one of my favorite activities within the MMO landscape is collecting screenshots.  One particular type of screenshot that i love taking is of character names that catch my eye, and not in a good way.  It's more of a pet peeve than anything but i absolutely despise characters with terrible names.  It's an immersion breaking aspect for me, as silly as that may sound to some!

I'm not sure what possesses people to not give a damn about their names but they constantly amaze me with their creativity and more often silliness.  I guess i just don't understand putting so little thought into something they're going to be looking at for the next few years.  I suppose they don't care though, which is a shame in and of itself.

Despite not having played GW2 in over a year now, i amassed quite a collection during that time.  Some of them are actually quite clever, to be honest, while some are down right stupid.  I've posted these numerous times on our community forum but never on here for some reason.  So here they are in all their glory.  Which one's your favorite?

While i really haven't played much of GW2 for the past two months now, the Achievement rework patch had me back in for a bit.  Anet decided to retroactively give out a bunch of stuff, including Zenith weapons skins, based on your total achievement points.  This sounded great in theory until i logged in to see myself over 3000 points behind one of my friends.  We sort of had a nice healthy competition going for a while, which was pretty back and forth and quite fun.  Unfortunately now i see myself never catching up to him, which is perfectly fine, but also a real bummer.

Part of the problem i have with the game is this exact aspect.  Those points can never be made up again with all of the temporary content being released every 2 weeks now.  Sure this encourages players to log in more in fear of missing something, but it also punishes players for playing their way.  Needless to say I'm not a fan of temporary content, especially when it rewards what could basically be called GW2's endgame equivalent in achievement points.  The rewards looks pretty spiffy though!

Hammer

Hammer

Greatsword

Greatsword

Sword

Daggers

Completing 8 of the 12 possible Dragon Bash achievements rewards you with a holographic skin for your back slot.  It just happens to be a skin similar to The Shatterer's wings, which i always thought looked fantastic.  The achievements themselves are pretty simple, which always annoys me.  I'd prefer tasks a little more difficult that just running around and clicking on stuff or eating dozens and dozens on newly implemented treats.  I imagine every single player will have one of these by the time this event is over, and i suppose that's ok since it is just an event.  I'd still like the events themselves to be a bit more involved than they are though.

I had to toss my wings on my guardian since i just spent almost half of my money upgrading my thief's back slot with the fractal capacitor.  I don't mind though since it seems to fit much better with plate armor and color scheme I'm using anyways.  There goes the fractal back piece i had on him though!

I decided to jump right into the new Dragon Bash PvP mini-game called Dragon Ball.  What better way to do so than using the Jack Burton method of just running right in without any prior knowledge?  Absolutely no better method of course.  Not knowing what you're supposed to do or what the hell the objective is can be and usually is a ton of fun.  Unfortunately, with most PvP related games, it generally boils down to running around and killing people and Dragon Ball is no exception.  Regardless, it was still a ton of fun launching around and shooting fireballs at people.

More mini-pets is always a good thing.  Many players were greeted with a nice collection upon logging into the Dragon Bash festival.  Three came in the mail, while a fourth came from drops.  Unfortunately, i haven't had the chance to acquire the fifth one yet.  While neat and fitting of the theme, i find them a little difficult to see.  Nevertheless, being followed by a hologram is pretty cool.

Mini Holographic Risen Knight

Mini Holographic Branded Minotaur

Mini Holographic Corrupted Wolf

Mini Holographic Axe Wielding Destroyer

I've made it no secret how much i absolutely love GW2's dye system.  I'm crossing my fingers and hoping all future MMO's adopt the quantity and ease of use of this system.  Being able to dye multiple parts of every piece of gear at any time is just amazing.  No need to go to an NPC or home town or anything like that, just click and you're done.  Glen Danzig would approve.

• Starter Dyes - 21/21
• Common Dyes - 181/181
• Uncommon Dyes - 119/119
• Rare Dyes - 45/82
• Flame & Frost Dyes - 0/12

I'm not sure what possessed me to log onto GW2 after a month off and plop down half of my gold on a back piece.  I'm blaming it on my incessant need to organize and clean up my inventory, which was a mess the last time i logged in.  My bank filled with not only fractal currency but row after row of fractal rings that I'll never do anything with.  To be fair, i had all the mats including 250 ectos for the first upgrade so all i had to buy was a second stack of them.  Who am i kidding, it was for the shiny, or in this case for the sparkly.

Sparlky Unicorn

Ready to propose to a bunch of people

Well done Anet, well done.  You've managed to successfully take me back to the laste 80's and my childhood Nintendo days.  This new mini dungeon is amazing and put a huge smile on my face the moment i zoned into it.  Almost made me bust out my old Nintendo Power magazine for cheat codes and secret content walk-through.

What does one do after acquiring a legendary weapon on his thief?  One rerolls to a far superior class of course!  Don't get me wrong, i absolutely love thief to death, but better is better.  I hadn't noticed how lacking in group dynamics thief really was until i made it to higher level fractals.  The difference is night and day in survivability, group composition, and overall synergy.

I should specify that i play thief quite differently than the normal glass cannon, full dps, don't care about anything thieves out there.  I normally group with a greatsword ranger that tanks everything and i make use of his Healing Spring to basically heal the crap out of everyone while doing massive damage.

Unfortunately i can also do that on guardian with a little less frequency but also keep protection up on everyone.  33% less damage to the group with a double splash AoE heal every 4 seconds while also hitting 5 mobs is just too damn good.  I won't even get into the other group heals i have along with passive boon heals since it's a recurring theme here.  The bottom line is, guardians are just too damn good!

It never dawned on me to open up the character sheet while doing the underwater dolphin path fractal.  So in the middle of our path, Pims says to us "hey guys check out your model".  It was instant hilariousness and not only because of the picture.  We spent the next 5 minutes dying over and over due to laughter.  Kudos Anet for this one.

After 6 months and a lot of work, it's mission accomplished.  I haven't grinded by butt off for something in  a game for a long time, going  back to FFXI.  I told myself i wouldn't grind for anything again, but it's a freaking bow that shoots unicorns for fucks sake!  How could i not go for it?  What makes me even for ecstatic is that i completed the entire process legit without resorting to what i know many players devolved into doing.  You know what i mean.

Many thanks to everyone that came out and grinded countless events in Cursed Shore and numerous dungeons with me.  Without them i think i would have lost my mind.  How many Plinx events can one man run over and over for money?!  That damn Abomination can piss off.

I realized shortly into the process just how terrible and flawed the entire system of acquisition is.  I would say 75% of the required parts for a legendary are straight out purchasable and I'm not even counting the legendary itself.  It's completely ridiculous that anyone can open up their wallet and achieve the current top goal in the game right now.  It makes the final goal completely meaningless.

The way Anet should have gone with legendary's should have been to eliminate any gold requirements and make the process a very long and intricate quest that requires difficult group tasks to be completed.  Farming materials from normal mobs is not legendary.  Terrible drop rates on precursors is not legendary.

The Lost Shores event, or what we called "The Lagfest for Precursors".  Once we learned that those were possible rewards for completing this event, the alts and second accounts were broken out.  Unfortunate for me that i had neither!  Our guild was able to acquire 6 total precursors, of which none were mine.  Still happy to see some new weapons in the near future though.

New content is always good, but a new climbing dungeon with many levels of increased difficulty is even better.  I'm having flashbacks of Nyzul Isle from FFXI here.  My initial enjoyment of this new dungeon escalated once we got to the Snowblind Fractal and the forest we were running through turned almost completely dark and eerie.