A few weeks back, some [SAND] folks and I did a few fractals. We did some challenge motes for them, which made them super difficult. Thus, we struggled.

For Snowblind, in particular, we had reduced healing, slower stamina regeneration, and reduced movement speed. It made the boss battle really tough, and we wiped a few times, with certain party members growing more and more cross as time went on.

We did ultimately win, but that win was rather intense. Everyone except two of us died, and the last two of us managed to kite and attack until we finally won. As I said, it was intense, and I managed to be streaming at the time, so I was able to edit down the exact battle and upload it to Youtube:

We then had a similar experience in the Aetherblade fractal. Once again, on the boss, everyone wiped.... Except for me. I then proceeded to kite the boss while killing it. It took a couple of minutes, but I was victorious. Once again, I trimmed the stream down to the exact fight and uploaded it:

All in all, it was undeniably the most intense night of fractals I've ever had.

I recently joined another guild. I wouldn't say this new guild will replace [SAND] (in fact, if I had to pick a "main" guild, it would be [SAND] and it would take a lot to change that), but it'll be nice to have another group to do stuff with. My original main reason for joining this other guild was to gain access to the other guild hall (I really want some of the Tenebrous weapons), however, I really love some of the weekly activities they do (such as straights of devastation runs and silverwastes farms). My new guild is [EVIL], specifically the "Generation Of Shadows one.

As I mentioned, I've been doing straights runs with them. They are hella-fun, even if they aren't altogether very lucrative.

If Balth is up while we're running, we usually do it too. Which means some epic battles:

Betsy Singer, my weekly-deleted character for key farming, sometimes witnesses some pretty unusual things. One week, I ran into a guild of musicians!

They are known as the Musician's Guild of Tyria, and they are pretty good. I sat and listened to them for a bit, and even donated gold to them.

If you ever get a chance to hear them in person, I'd recommend it highly.

I've become, once again, completely hooked by WvW.

See, I used to play WvW quite often as my Guardian. The problem was, there really wasn't much of a reason to play WvW other than to play WvW. The rewards were centric to WvW, with the exception of the item used in Legendary crafting, which meant there wasn't much motivation to stick with it other than to experience it. Thus, when they didn't bring back their annual tournament, and when they made some bad decisions regarding WvW patches, I kind of just stopped playing it. Recently, however, they've fixed some of the problems they had introduced and added reward tracks similar to PvP. The end result is I'm back, and I'm loving it.

I do play at odd hours, however, which means finding groups to play with can be tough. That being said, I've had some luck on that regard, and been a part of some awesome and epic battles, including this massive golem rush:

The new chapter of season 3 of the Living Story is out, and it started with a bang. In it, you go back to Rata Novus and enter into a combat simulation for Taimi. Taimi was aided by Moto (of Super Adventure Box fame) in this, which had the end result of there bing some pretty peculiar bosses in it:

The battles were also pretty intense:

After the simulation, you are sent to the new zone, Ember Bay. Ember Bay is down in the fire islands to the south of the Maguma jungle (and to the west of Orr), and, apparently, was the location of the final expansion in the first Guild Wars. It also has some pretty intense and interesting locals and enemies.

For example, here's a lava wurm which has an associated event with it:

And here's the, totally metal, skull mountain in the center of the zone:

There's actually quite a bit more to do here than there was in the last new zone, Bloodstone Fen, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It's good that there's more to do (and, thus, more reasons to keep coming back). But it's bad that it's taking so much longer to get 100% of the achievements for the new zone (in Bloodstone Fen I finished my achievements before the end of the first week, but in Ember Bay we're a few weeks in and I'm hovering at around 45%).

Finally went out with Trix to finish up our HoT missions together. We had made it to the final boss, and then kept failing when we tried to duo it. But we managed to enlist a bunch of [SAND]ies to help, which ensured our victory.

Next, I managed to finish up the Primordus Weapons collection, which had a killer scythe as a reward (Great Destroyer's Talon):

I put the scythe on my Elementalist, who has a fire-theme, and I think it ultimately looks pretty bad-ass.

I do Teq nearly every day. I usually try for reset, but if I miss it I sometimes do it at 11pm eastern (the next spawn after reset). I've managed to get Teq's Horde a couple of times now, as well as several ascended weapon boxed (no pre-cursors from Teq yet, though). With Teq, as long as you show up 15-30 minutes beforehand, you can expect to win.

Well, a couple of week's back I encountered one of the rare exceptions where getting there early didn't translate into success. We lost the mega-laser during the defense phase, which caused Teq to send a massive tidal wave out that killed everyone in the area:

I had no idea this was even possible, it certainly never happened to me before. Oh, I've been on fail-maps before, but usually they fail long before the defense phase. Apparently, there's an achievement for jumping over the tidal wave with the jump-pads, but I didn't know about it, so I didn't get it. Alas.

I mentioned I'm now part of the [EVIL] guild, well, they are decidedly different from [SAND]. [SAND] tends to be pretty mature and supportive, while [EVIL] can be pretty juvenile and often noobish. This isn't a bad thing, it's just a thing. Anyway, here's a sample of [EVIL]'s humor that I thought was kind of funny.