Man, even though I'm playing I'm really sucking at keeping this site up-to-date. Admittedly this isn't a new problem (I had the same issue for my FFXI site back in the day) but it feels worse these days.

Anyway, I'm still playing. I desperately need to add my new characters to my character page, but I'm still doing stuff.

The Super Adventure Box is going on again, which, as I've said before, I love. Here's a tweet with video of me playing it:

You know, for years I've been using Genova Ray in SAB. This is because she was the one I was playing the most when SAB first came out and she's the one with all the upgrades in SAB (realistically, you need those to do the SAB dailies consistently). But I kind of regret using her. She's not the easiest to play jumping puzzles with, her snowflake shoulder skin can make precise controls hard, and she's a bit big for tiny maneuvers. An Asura would probably have been better. But oh well.... I'm not doing all the upgrades again on another character...

I crafted another Legendary. This time it's Bolt, which should finish up the look I have for Nobody Speak.

Here I am crafting it:

I don't normally like buying cosmetics from the BLTC with real money. They are often overpriced, and generally not better than stuff you can get in-game. But for mount skins, it's a bit more complicated.

See, you can't, really, get mount skins in game (there may be some achievement-based skins I'm not remembering, but if there are, they must be forgettable). So the only source of mount skins are ones you buy with real money. And, let's be clear, the mount skins you buy with real money do tend to be amazing. The problem is (as I mentioned way back here) these mount skins are incredibly expensive and often involve nasty, predatory, RNG.

The end result is I really don't like paying money for mount skins unless a) they come in a pack containing multiple skins for your money and b) there's no RNG (meaning you know what you're buying and you get exactly that). Well, with the Warclaw WvW mount (which came out when I took the following pictures) they sold a Warclaw skin pack that included like 3 or 4 skins. They were pretty sweet skins, so I picked it up.

Here's Kanjincho with a mount skin that really looks stunning with her aesthetic:

OMG... I just realized why I saved that screenshot in the last post...

Read the chat... it's a guild where people roleplay as rednecks in the RPG... that's fucking funny... I should have joined that guild...

Going to try to catch up with some of my pictures that I uploaded and never wrote about. The following is actually from 2019-03.

One of my new characters, Samba Tranquille, is intended to be a superb solo character. I took one of the "unkillable necromancer" builds and extended it to make it my own. I wanted something I could do things solo that you, otherwise, aren't expected to be able to solo.

One of the things I wanted to be able to solo was all the dungeons. Getting a group together to run a dungeon is hard since the rewards are usually so poo-poo, and since we have things like Fractals and Raids which are so much more popular. I could, sort-of, solo some of the dungeons with my other characters. But I wanted something that would let me solo all of them.

So here I am, with Samba, soloing Sorrow's Embrace:

Here's a screenshot that... uh... fuck if I know... Either I'm thinking the highlighted character's guild name is funny, or I'm showing off (rather poorly) one of my bag-openers... I don't know... Here's a screenshot!

Clearly I haven't updated in a while... But the rumors of my demise (or my quitting the game) aren't entirely accurate...

So here's what happened. 2020 was an awful year. We all know this. It sucked. The level of global anguish and tragedy that happened in 2020 was something none of us have experienced before in our lifetimes. In addition to this, I, personally, went through additional tragedy, including the loss of my mother to COVID...

When the pandemic started, I was already getting a bit bored with GW2. They hadn't announced a new DLC and we were living in perpetual living story hell. So, when the pandemic hit, and we all started sheltering in place, I quit the game. I wasn't intending to come back, exactly, but I had no definite plans to leave the game entirely either. It very much wasn't like the final, deliberate, ending to FFXI I had, it was more a "drifting away".

Then, in August 2020, they announced a new expansion to the game. This one teased things I (and many others) had wanted for a while: Cantha, Bubbles, a satisfying conclusion to the dragon saga. So I started debating about coming back... But I didn't right away. It took me several more months, and I came back in Jan 2021.

[Intrepid readers will note that this story is a repeat, I actually left the game for 9 months back in 2014 because of boredom over the perpetual Living Story, only to come back once an expansion was announced...]

Anyway, I'm back... again... And I hope to update this page more. I've got characters and builds not featured here that I need to update. I've got more things I've done that need to get written about.

I, honestly, don't know how long I'll be in GW2. At least until the third expansion. Possibly beyond, depending on how good that expansion is, or (more accurately) how good the content after it is.

At some point I crafted another legendary, the Binding of Ipos focus. I can't recall if I wrote about it here, and I'm too lazy to go back and look. One of the most interesting things about it is that when you're on a mount the book floats open in front of you... which is pretty bizarre:

Then, there was this funny joke from SAND guildies.... it's kind of hilarious how well the entire thing was set up by random internet strangers:

Finally, there was this really bizarre bug where a bunch of spark-mobs remained glitched long after the branded spark event was over. They were still there, but you couldn't target them, you couldn't see their names or HP, they weren't moving, and they wouldn't aggro or attack you or any other NPC. It was really fucking weird, and something I've never seen in this game (and I've seen many glitches):