Encountered an ArenaNet Guild member (basically, an employee of some sort) in Silverwastes. Yay! Wahoo! Ahem...

Soon, it was the third HoT beta weekend, and I immediately created my beta Revenant, Dont Hurtem Hammer. This is actually a preview of things to come as I plan to name my permanent Revenant the same and intend her to also be Sylvari.

I then took her into the new zone, where she started the preview of the HoT missions. The new mechanics introduced in the beta were pretty different. For example, enemies now have a bar under their life bar, its purpose is something I'm yet to understand.

The new mission preview was pretty fun, and included at least one barfing vine-monster. It also introduced several new enemy types, including ones which rode on the backs of other beasts and who could be knocked off, resulting in two enemies attacking you.

I also got to see what my Revenant will eventually become, as I equipped her with all the gear I ultimately have planned for her. All-in-all, the beta was pretty, friggin' awesome, and I'm very excited for the HoT release.

One other thing I've been doing lately is running PvP dailies via rank farming rooms.

Last month I talked quite a bit about the first season of the Living Story. Well, I discovered there was a great re-cap of season 1 in-game. I recorded it for posterity, and here it is:

I purchased an account booster pack which was on sale in the gem store. It included a bunch of keys and unidentified dyes. I decided to record myself opening them all.

Been doing Triple Trouble quite a bit lately. For those who don't know, Triple Trouble was an event added sometime in Living Story season 1, and has become, arguably, the most difficult single event in the game.

The basic idea is that there's this great, big, three-headed wurm that lives underground and is wrecking havoc in Bloodtide Coast. Three Vigil crusaders gather together at a campsite in the middle of the map, and discuss the wurm (this is actually the start of the event chain, and you can stand next to them and hear their conversation.) They agree to split up and each travel to a different incident location. This spawns three escort quests, where players need to escort each crusader to their destination. Once at their destinations, they set up investigation equipment.

Soon after this, the three wurm heads surface at each location, and the goal is to first whiddle the wurm head's life down to nothing, decapitating it, then fighting the, now free, head until it's dead. Simple, right?

Well, not really. In actuality, it's friggin' hard as hell. Each wurm head has a different tactic involved in killing it. The wurm heads are far enough apart that you can't easily run from one head to the next, instead you need three zergs at each head (following the specific strategy for that head). There are evil husks and smaller wurms that spawn to rampage through your zerg. There's wurm spit, wurm spin, and all manner of evil, nasty attacks the wurm can do. Then, once a head is decapitated, there's a time limit for killing all the heads, which basically means you need to decapitate them all at basically the same time in order to ensure success.

Long story short, Triple Trouble is very tough and really requires a full map of coordinated, capable, people.

Back when Triple Trouble came out (this was before the mega server system), my server, Maguuma, never had a successful triple decap. Further, I was never able to get on a more populated server when they had a successful run. Needless to say, it took me a long while before I had a successful Triple Trouble run!

So my first, recent, attempt was in a pick up that seemed pretty organized. Here we are stacked on one of the commanders leading it. And here we are fighting the Crimson head:

Unfortunately, we didn't succeed in killing him.... Not even one head. Alas...

One of my current goals in GW2 is to gather together all of the Ambrite weapons. These are cool-looking weapons constructed using amber with various giant bugs stuck in them. They are obtainable in the Dry Top zone, after doing a semi- convoluted series of things. First, you must find Unidentified Fossilized Insects from various chests in the zone. Then you need to earn Geodes to buy the weapon recipes (Geodes are rewarded upon completing events in the zone, opening chests, sifting through sand, and doing the Dry Top PvP reward track). Finally, you need to buy the recipes and have the fossil identified (and buying the recipes has this whole other mechanic by which the price is determined by the tier which Dry Top is currently in). The reward for obtaining all ambrite weapons, aside from having the weapons themselves, is an ascended armor chest.

Anyway, this means I've been spending a lot of time in Dry Top. I've gotten to where I pretty much know the event chain, and have my favorites. For example, I love the Inquest Leader event, which most people hate, simply because I've discovered a nice place to stand that reduces the chance of being knocked off the pillar and which also allows me to solo him:

Now, if you want the absolute best prices on the weapon recipes, you need to be in a tier 6 Dry Top. Back when Dry Top first came out, everyone was in the zone checking it out, and we got tier 6 all the time. Unfortunately, these days you can't expect to get past tier 4 unless the map is very organized.

The [SAND] guild is one of two (that I know of) which routinely run events in Dry Top and get it to tier 6. So I joined them on their run last weekend! Here we are at the start of the evening. We had a helluva time doing the events, and we were even joined by an Anet employee.

Before long, we hit my first T6 Dry Top in over a year:

I had been saving up, and had 5 fossilized insects to convert into weapons! Here I am buying the recipes for those fossils. I was completely thrilled.

The other cool thing that [SAND] does is fight the Legendary Sand Giant. See, this giant is friggin' hard. In the vast majority of Dry Top maps, people don't do him because they can't do him (they lack the numbers needed to take him down). But in [SAND], they have the numbers, and are more than capable of taking him down.

By the end of the night I had done three runs, and they were still going strong. The entire night reminded me a lot of my old days leading FFXI ClanAM, and it was great fun.

As I mentioned previously, I've been spending a lot of time lately doing Triple Trouble. I've been joining the TTS Guild as they've been doing some of their runs (truthfully, they have multiple runs per day for different timezones, and I've only been joining them at specific times, and even then, not every day). For those who don't know, TTS is a guild that exists to do Triple Trouble and Tequatl runs.

For my first run with them, we were almost successful. Here we are fighting the Amber wurm. And you can see us fighting the wurm's sphincter here:

Unfortunately, we didn't succeed. We managed to decap two of the heads, but the third didn't pop in enough time to successfully kill it.

The next day, we tried again. This time, I fought the Coblat wurm, which, honestly, is my least favorite to do. Here you can see it spitting on the zerg. This time, we were successful and managed to get a triple decap! Hurrah!

I then went with them and had a Tequatl kill.

Now, I should note here that, technically, you no longer really need a coordinated guild for Tequatl. People seem to know what to do these days for that boss, so I usually see maps succeed on him (provided there's enough folks). That being said, it's still nice having a guild like TTS on the scene and it means the boss will go that much more smoothly.

Been playing a lot of the new expansion lately. I have screenies to upload and you can expect full posts on them in the coming weeks. But for now, I'll be brief :-)

First, Druid is even cooler than what I had experienced during the beta. For one, "We Heal As One", which previously was a large heal for yourself and your pet, has been drastically altered. It now heals you, your pet, and those around you in a decent sized AoE heal. It also adds a bunch of boons to you, your pet, and the people around you. Basically, it's a friggin' monster of a heal now, and, since it doesn't lay down any field it doesn't conflict with others the way that "Healing Spring" does. In fact, it may very well be a better heal than "Healing Spring" now... it's really that good.

Second, I didn't play Warrior during the beta. This was because I, honestly, had been underwhelmed by Warrior in general. Moose (my Warrior) had sat largely unused for a couple of years now (her only use was crafting ascended armor for Molina). Well, I finally gave the new Warrior specialization, Berserker, a try and damn if I'm not impressed as hell.

It doesn't seem like much, but those two extra skills you get from off-hand torch are supreme. They, honestly, are very reminiscent of the Ranger's off-hand torch skills. The first skill (number 4) does a ranged torch move, just like Ranger's. The difference is that it's a ranged AoE move, sending bruning out in a column in the direction you're facing. The second skill (number 5) is, just like Ranger's, an AoE burn affect that is applied to the ground around you. The difference, however, is killer- Warrior's AoE burn travels with you as you move whereas the Ranger skill sticks to the ground where it was laid. This is awesome as it means you can fire the skill, torch a bunch of enemies, then leap to the next cluster and torch them as well.

Plus, you now get a new "berserk" mechanic which, when activated, greatly increases your attack speed (among other things.)

All told, I'm now hugely interested in Warrior, and have been playing it quite a bit lately. I even put a bit more money into Moose's look. I managed to get my hands on several poly-luminescent undulating refactors for TP- investment purposes, and decided one of the orange ones would look cool on Moose:

I especially like the extra glow she gets from holding the Ambrite torch.