necropola

I know it's entirely my own fault, but I somehow feel I have to get the weekly rift hunts and weekly vault tasks done, before moving on to things I actually like to do in the game.

I see a lot of guides popping up which suggest that Rift Hunting is a good method of making gold in the game, but I completely fail to understand this. IMHO it's terribly boring and does not even have a good gold/hour ratio.

My understanding is that the main reason for doing Rifts is to get those Essences which you will need for the new Legendary PvE Armor, i. e. you do the Weekly Rift Hunting Achievements which give you a decent amount of additional higher level Essences (even from Tier 1 Rifts) and that's it.

Doing Tier 1 Rifts without receiving Kryptis Rift Extraction containers has very poor rewards and doing Tier 2 and/or Tier 3 requires very expensive Kryptis Motivation consumables which means you either need to join (leech) a Tier 2|3 Rift Hunting Squad (those appear to be rare) or organize one yourself and try to share the costs. But maybe I'm not quite getting it.

Addition: It appears that the gold making strategy is based on using the Essences you get from your Rift Hunts to craft and then sell Uncommon and Rare Kryptis Motivations on the TP which implies the following to make this actually work:

• You don't need thoses Essences yourself, i. e. you are not interested in the new Open World Legendary Armor which requires a LOT of them.
• There is or rather continues to be a market for those Motivations, i. e. people are willing to buy them to do (additional) T2 and/or T3 Rift Hunts for higher level Essences beyond the 5 x 5 Weekly Rift Hunts which grant them via reward chests.

Here are some gold making alternatives with varying levels of required skill/engagement.

• Fishing
  • sell Chunk of Ancient Ambergris
  • craft and sell Zephyrite Fish Jerky
• Daily (limited chests) Map Metas
  • Dragonfall, not on a fixed schedule, IMHO the best (most fun) map meta in the game
  • Istan (Palawadan + Great Hall), every 2 hours, use LFG to check for a squad and join the commander's map instance early
  • ...
• Daily Fractals
• Easy Daily Strikes, i. e.
  • Shiverpeaks Pass
  • Fraenir of Jormag
  • Voice of the Fallen and Claw of the Fallen
  • Cosmic Observatory
• Other Daily Strikes including Challenge Motes (CM)
• Weekly Raids
• sPvP (Automated Tournaments)

... from which you could choose the actual eqipped sets. This would allow for one Equipment Template for Power with all power weapons (stats) and one for Conditions or Support with all condition/support weapons (stats) and it would solve the weapon swapping issues with Legendary Weapons.

Basically Equipment Templates would have multiple weapon loadout variants. But I assume ArenaNet is more interested in selling us full Equipment Templates, even when those are merely used to store weapon set variants.

Just having 4 additional slots for a passive set would already go a long way. Assuming of course that moving legendary weapons between the active and the passive set would not remove their customization and upgrades.

@that_shaman@mstdn.social said:

Looks like you can actually equip Jade Bot Cores on a F2P account as well 🤔 (you do need a second player to send one to you)

• Which weapon skin did you choose using the Black Lion Weapons Voucher?
• Which skin/mount/... was randomly unlocked by using the Knife Tail Gang Hunting Bond?

I chose the Elegant Fan Focus Skin for my Elementalist (despite Warhorn being the offhand of chocie for pretty much all builds at the moment) and got the Equinox Staff Skin from the Knife Tail Gang member.

This is how Weeping Willow says Thank you, ArenaNet!

Amazing! Especially the navigation of Tangled Depths. Some of the transitions were breathtaking, too.

While it's clear that this kind of skill is far, far beyond my reach ... HoT maps are where I need to go and try out the new flying mount masteries.

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/138309-we-are-temporarily-disabling-the-ability-to-transform-quartz-into-charged-quartz-crystals-while-we-address-an-issue/#comment-2001604

We are temporarily disabling the ability to transform Quartz into Charged Quartz Crystals while we address an issue.

We'll update once we have addressed the issue and re-enabled this content.

Does anybody know, why?

While ArenaNet is struggling with Alliances and WvW Restructuring they've added a new game mode ... Wiazrd's Vault's Weekly Victim [WVWV].

Though not strictly a screenshot ... this shall be my entry for September 2023.

Power Creep allows even Perma-Noobs like me to help two-men-capture a Guild Hall. At least when guided by someone who obviously knew what he was doing.

Screenshot shows @lulztard on Mirage (right) and Me on Harbinger (left) after our successful first attempt.

So far we have completed

• Expedition to the Gilded Hollow
• General Merchant
• Repair Anvil
• Tavern Restoration 1
• Mining Excavation 1
• Aetherium Capacity 1
• Workshop Restoration 1
• Market Restoration 1

and the Mine is slowly producing Aetherium (up to 1500 for now).

There are no immediate plans to further upgrade the hall, though Material donations for some minor upgrades like Ore Synthesizer 1 and Guild Enhancement:Karma|Experience are welcome. Maybe it's fun to also restore the War Room and the Arena at some point (seeing that ArenaNet has announced some GvG features for the Guild Halls). It would be nice, if things would grow slowly but steadily. Just like this Guild Wars 2 Lemmy Community.

Keep the Fire Smoldering ... so to say.

... which pretty much ruins the skin for me.

I've also pretty much finished SotO:

• Story complete.
• Wizard Tower Teleportation Stone
• Map Completion
• All Masteries unlocked
• Observatory Strike done
• Legendary Starter Kit, Ascended Armor and Weapons boxes, Cheap Gold and Griffon Skin (I like it) from Wizard Vault
• Kryptis Skyscale skin

I'm only missing a few Achievements to get both Map Masteries and the final Strike mission.

Overall impression ... Mixed Bag. Feels rushed (as always) with many bugs, oversights and terrible optimization, especially in Amnytas.

I liked the Story (but please, no more unskippable voice-over) and most of the newly introduced characters, especially Peitha. I'd very much preferred Lyhr to die instead of Mabon, if only for the Dwarven Accent of Lyhr's voice actor. If ArenaNet is smart, they'll add Peitha's Walking Animation as an emote to the gem store. 😏

For someone who already has all previous Skyscale Masteries most of the additional SotO Skyscale Masteries (which are the only ones relevant outside of SotO) feel very lackluster or rather gimmicky. The exception is obviously Updraft use and Endurance restoration when using a flying mount in a map which has lots of verticality and updrafts, e. g. HoT maps. I might actually go back and try map completion of Tangled Depth (@Fox without using Blish HuD and Markers).

Combat Launch would be more useful when it were on a shorter cooldown or at least when it were impossible to activate it by accident. I have a dedicated shortcut for the Mastery and I don't want the 3 minute CD be wasted just because I mounted my Skyscale while I still had a condition on me. It's kinda funny or rather silly that ArenaNet added those Skyscale in Combat Launchers to the (meta) maps, because they felt the need to to put a hefty cooldown on the mastery.

Rift Hunting is a complete (design) failure in my opinion. Rewards are very poor when doing hunts beyond the weekly bonus and only ever worth the time, if you still need "Essences", i. e. those rewards are only useful for SotO (achievements) and clutter your inventory, because ArenaNet ~~forgot to add them to the Material Storage or Currency Wallet.~~ ~Fixed_2023-09-12~

I highly doubt that the SotO maps will see much play in a few weeks. There are a lot of places in the game that are both more fun and more rewarding.

The Wizard Vault rewards are probably the best part of the expansion. Especially when you are still gearing up your characters with Ascended or even Legendary gear.

I also like Weapon Mastery which IMHO could have been added to the game ages ago. For me it simplifies gearing up for multiple builds (less need for equipment templates just to switch to different weapons) and it shows that some weapons are just way better than others.

I almost forgot about Relics. I wonder why? Well, they have been added to the game. That's pretty much it.