I mentioned a month or so ago that I made the legendary pistol HOPE. Well, to give you an idea of how long of a lag it is between when an event occurs in the game and I finally get around to writing about it... Here's the screenshots of that!

The effects when you fire the gun are pretty awesome.

Back at the end of the HoT missions, we received a shitty sword as a drop. Many people (most?) dropped it because it was worthless and had a shitty skin (which unlocked when we got the drop anyway). Some of us kept it, however, because Anet rewards the hoarder. Turned out it was right to do so.

In the Feb/Mar time-frame, they released an update which allowed us to take this shitty weapon and convert it to an ascended one with a better skin. In fact, it allowed us to convert it to a variety of weapon types. The process by which you convert it is pretty fun as well.

You start by visiting a statue honoring Trahearne and his sacrifice at the end of HoT. From there, you travel around Tyria fighting various specters.

Eventually, you come to the final battle, which takes place in an area in Orr I don't think I've ever been (it's unclear to me if they just added this new area for the event, or if I simply never visited it before).

The end result is the choice of weapon. You can repeat this for as many of the starting weapons you have (and you can repeat HoT to get more weapons, which is what Trix and I are doing).

As I've mentioned before, I'm in a guild called "EVIL" (in addition to SAND and my ClanAM investment guild). Back in Feb/Mar they had an anniversary complete with a massive celebration.

See, EVIL is huge. Really, really huge. They are multi-guild huge, and have likely close to 1k members. They also hail from the old GW1 days, and have many members from that game as well (they may still even play that game... I don't know.

At any rate, when they have a celebration like this it tends to be enormous. So, they basically took over Hoelbrak for a few hours. We even soft-capped the map, so that people couldn't get in. It was kind of crazy. They did a bunch of events, but I'll admit I didn't stay that long. I stayed until the started this uber confusing game involving the fence posts in the big ice area, then I left because... well... I had better things to do :-)

April saw the return of Super Adventure Box! Yay! (I think I've said it before, but SAB is easily my favorite event of the year.)

Here is Genova standing outside SAB at night time, I think it looks absolutely stunning:

And here's a small gathering of SAND-folks inside SAB's hub getting together to take a group picture:

If I have any complaint about SAB is that they (Anet) haven't done too much to improve it over the years. Sure, they keep adding new weapons (though, to be honest, they are just re-skins of the older SAB weapons) and this year they added a cat you could get, but other than that, nada. This is especially bad considering that SAB is unfinished- there's only 2 worlds available (out of 4 listed in the hub world) and you cannot actually finish the game-within-a-game. For content that came out once, then wasn't seen again for two years, and now seems to come back every April, the fact that it's unfinished really sucks.

At any rate, Trix and I spent some time trying to get the damned new cat from SAB. This involved a terribly tedious bit where you have to carry a fish across a lengthy series of difficult jumps. Oh, and the fish can despawn as you're holding it, so you have to constantly drop it and re-pick it back up. It's awful and annoying, and neither Trix nor myself could do it solo. Instead, each of us seemed to have difficulty where the other didn't. So, we basically did it together where he'd do the initial jumping part while I'd do the final arrow dodging part. It worked out, and we eventually got the cat.

The following screenshot is me standing atop one of the buildings waiting for Trix to make it through the initial jumping section: