Maia

I'm a lazy GW2 wealth accumulator. What do I mean by that? 1. I hate losing gold. I'll sit on investments for years if selling means I'll lose money. (Some day Winters day rifle, some day) Could I be using that money to invest elsewhere and make more gold? Probably. 2. This is a game. I already have a job. Therefore, anything that requires hours at the TP, spreadsheets, or intense market watching is out. 3. I like buying things that I want to own. Stacks of cheap ectos and gems pre AB multi loot nerf? Yes! Cool looking dyes that have temporarily returned to the gem store (I'm looking at you Winter Chimes dye kit). Sign me up. The only trouble here is you eventually have to decide whether to sell or keep and that can get dicey for a known hoarder like myself. What has that gotten me? I recently checked my account value ranking on GW2 efficiency, and I'm a little better than average for my play time. Overall, I'm in the top 10% of players. Now, depending on your life outlook, you might think: "Ehh. Not impressed. I can stop reading right here." That's fine. At first I was kinda disappointed myself. But then I thought about it again and realized a little better than average is not a bad place to be. Here's the list of things in game that make me smile: 1. My legendaries (Bolt, Bifrost, Sunrise, Howler) and legendary armor 2. Permanent black lion merchant contract 3. Shared inventory slots 4. Almost complete home instance (The price of those new nodes is ridiculous! Come to think of it the price of some of the old ones are ridiculous since the BL chest changes.) 5. Lion's Arch portal scroll (I use it all the time. My husband still doesn't understand why I like it so much: "You know you can just waypoint, right?") 6. Fused weapon skins sitting in my bank. I saved up tickets for years (literally years) waiting for them to come back. Most important: I'm happy. I spend my time in game doing what makes me happy, and I have the resources to do that. I don't stress if I don't spend all of my time in the most "gold efficient" content. What more do you want from a game? No matter how trite, I guess Sheryl Crow was right (YouTube if you don't know who that is-sheesh): "It's not having what you want, it's wanting what you've got." If anyone has some actually useful tips (unlike this blog entry) on how to make gold in game, I'd love to hear them in the comments!

Just wanted to let you guys know Tarnished Coast is now full.

Hi all. This is the next installment in my research on challenge modes. I've been looking onto Samarog and this one is no joke. I'm sure some of you know more about it than me, so please feel free to add to this post or correct anything I've got wrong. New mechanics: Invulnerable spears now appear in a set pattern every 5 seconds. After the entire grid is full, Samarog eats them and the group needs to avoid the red arrows that appear on the ground. Choose your friends wisely: The person who gets the large circle is now immobilized and the person with the small one needs to run to them. A spear spawns where the person with the large circle is standing, so the group needs to be aware not to stand on the large circle. Strategy: I found this lovely map by Derior (I think Mold will be a fan). http://m.imgur.com/gallery/P2N7tmi Druids: Considering the large amount of deadly area, S&R and spirit of nature seem helpful. Because tanking is crucial, we may want to assign people to take aggro (by standing furthest away from the boss as cc phase finishes). The tank should also make sure the swipe attack won't kill the person immobilized by the friends mechanic. A possible strategy is to have the tank move to the next position without the group and have the group follow after. Videos: Video from KING that goes with this map: I've got a few others. I'll post them ASAP.

As most of you know, I participated in WvW extensively before I joined NPC. I'm on Tarnished Coast with Osh and Khani (and my husband of course. I believe most of you know him as Doc). While I would love to WvW with NPC, I'm hesitant to leave TC. I've been on TC for several years and have had some good times here. Although TC has had some recent difficulties and fallen in ranking since I first got here, I think the community is competitive enough that you can grow and improve, but not so hard core that it's annoying. I also think TC has a good "never give up" spirit-even when we were stuck getting steam rolled in T1 I remember having a good time. That's not to say of course that everyone on TC is an angel. I also think we have some good commanders and guilds. If we are going to do small group roaming it's helpful to have a Zerg distracting the enemy's Zerg so you don't get steam rolled all the time. Based on what I've seen recently several of the pugmanders and guild commanders are good at and comfortable with coordinating with smaller groups. Another thing for us to consider is world status. Tarnished Coast is very high which means people could transfer in if they want. I have been participating in wvw this week and the EU queues are nonexistent. The NA prime queues seems to be in the 20s (maybe Osh and/or Khani can comment on that), but after this initial rush I think it will die down to reasonable but still very well populated. I also wanted to mention that I'd be happy to donate to help people move (even if we decide that TC isn't where we want to be). Also I have an alt account that is currently on FA (not that we could move there because it's full), but I might consider moving that one depending on where we go.

Interesting... So some questions: Nike doesn't gg in that video so I'm slightly confused about that part. What are the advantages? Is it to avoid the damage and havoc Sauls final alter ego does? As far as I can tell this strategy means you still have to deal with him, just in the last phase not the one before. But I guess you don't have to kill him, you can just kill Deimos? Is this something that can be done for Challenge Mode? Or is the loss of that person who goes down to kite too much for CM?

So Nike just posted a new video about the importance of the meta, blah, blah, blah. Not that I don't agree with him, but as I was watching his video I found something way more interesting than his argument. Does anyone else see something interesting around 11:44 in the Deimos fight? TL;DW: Nike takes the final green circle teleport by himself and appears to kite Saul's final alter ego around while everyone else focuses on killing Deimos on the other platform. What do you think? Legit strat or cheese?

Today I was in Auric Basin, minding my own business trying to turn in rare weapons for provisioners tokens. The map was on the phase when the chests are revealed under the city, and I hadn't done the meta. I didn't really care because I was just there for the tokens, but I noticed that one of the LFGs that I used said "come get your exalted chests." I thought to myself, "Really? I can just zone into the map, not do the meta, and go in there and loot the chests?" Turns out, yes, you can. You even get the Auric basin hero's choice chest from the first one you open. Does that seem wrong to anyone else? (Side rant: I don't even have words to express how annoying it is when the provisioners token NPC isn't available at North and South Watch. Aren't provisioners tokens bad enough without the NPC being unavailable half of the time?!? And No, this doesn't encourage me to do the events. It encourages me to map hop using LFG.)

FTFY

No problem Ser! I updated my build based on this video too. Still trying to hit the dps benchmark though. Seems like I never have long enough in berserker

I appreciate it when our meta overlords make an accessible, easy to understand video. Recently, Nike posted a video that actually explains the build in detail. I found his slow motion explanation of the rotation especially useful. Hopefully, this will start a new trend.

I wanted to put this out there as a PSA for those of you who don't know yet. The new guaranteed item in the Black Lion chests is the Zaishen War Paint Kit. This kit contains 2-5 unidentified dyes. It's basically crashing the dye market. However it does mean you can pick up some pricey dies for relatively cheap. Here are some examples: Abyss Last week (sell/buy): 23.75/19.19 This week: 13.18/10.5 Celestial Last week 60.92/48.01 This week: 32.96/25.2 I wouldn't be surprised if the prices went down even further because the chests just changed and they usually keep the same contents for 6-8 weeks. If you have extra gold sitting around you could fill out your unlocked dyes, which is awesome for those guaranteed wardrobe unlocks (you don't want to end up with a 20 silver dye from one of those if you can avoid it). You could even invest in the dye market. I'd caution you it would be a loooong term investment though because no doubts tons of people are doing exactly that. Good luck, have fun, and don't spend all your gold!

Wow. That's highly annoying. I'm sure it's not a bug, it's a feature. /s