Maia

Hi all, You may have noticed already, but I'm taking a brief break from posting here and on YouTube. I've been busy and exhausted from some real life stuff (long term health issues suck), and I'm going on vacation next week. Hopefully, I'll feel up to posting more when I get back. It's been a lot of fun for me, and I appreciate everyone who takes the time to read my random musings and watch my poorly edited videos. Thanks for reading and watching! Maia

That was some serious cheese. I'm happy we will be able to do it with out needing to resort to that (even if it was still an option which it's not.) I forgot to add thanks Kintari for doing all the research on this CM! Much better than mine too because it's personal experienced based instead of a collection of other people's experiences and info. No need for me to do anything.

Hi all. I've found a few new videos that are helpful. Honestly I haven't found any strats that are significantly different. The chrono PoVs seem the most helpful.

I want the mini Eye of Janthir. I see no reason to buy it off the trading post when we can earn it ourselves. (I'm going to assume you all want it too.) Not to mention all the other cool loot you get from completing a challenge mode. Therefore, I'm putting together some resources for us for after we kill Deimos. Please add info if you've found some. New mechanics: Blue stuff: Every 30 seconds, blue stuff appears on four tiles on the floor. The blue tiles are different for every player. You must stand on one of the blue tiles as it expires or it's instadeath. Strategy: I don't think the movement and spikes are any different. To be safe you may want to bring a movement skill such as blink, lighting flash, shadow step, etc. (see povs below) Sometimes the blues and spikes are close in timing and you have to get to your blue square quickly at the last second. The blue color appears for approximately 5 seconds before it expires. Having someone call blues seems helpful (:05 ish and :35 ish) Videos: Mesmer tank pov Tempest pov: Condi Druid: https://youtu.be/Ww2eq90kj6I (that last minute Dad button!)

Probably daddy issues...

I'm so hyped over our victory last night! I want to thank everyone for their tenacity and creativity in putting together our winning strat. As most of you know, I've been lusting after the Eye of Janthir mini for a while now, and here it is: I've also uploaded my PoV to Youtube if anyone wants to relive our victory from another angle: On to Samarog!

Up until very recently I did not do SAB. For 3 years I had decided it was too intimidating and difficult. I'm not very good at jumping puzzles, so I thought would probably be bad at SAB too. However, this year before release I had the same attitude change that I had with raids and fractals several months ago. I decided I was going to do it, and not just a little bit- all of it including tribulation mode and getting an infusion. I'm not sure whether this all or nothing attitude is admirable or pathological, but it's how I work. From this experience I present: Tenish things I've learned from SAB 1. Sometimes suicide is your best option. 2. Don't trust anything no matter how pleasant or cute-looking it is. 3. Dodge jump is a powerful tool, but it should be used with care. 4. 16 seems like a small number at first but it gets bigger and bigger the closer you get. 5. Celebrate every checkpoint. 6. There are millions of ways to fail and only a few ways to succeed. Don't get frustrated if you find a new way to fail each run, blame math. 7. It's okay to laugh each time you select the option "Yes, I'm really into that. Don't judge me." 8. You cannot unlearn tribulation mode. Even in normal mode you will avoid flowers even if you know they won't hurt you. Just accept it. It's going to take a good amount of will power to pull myself away to raid. If anyone is in the same place I was: not ready to try SAB for the first time on their own, contact me in game and we can get a party together. YouTube Roundup Week of March 26 This was a sad week YouTube wise. Monday I had technical issues that prevented me from recording. I did get our Xera and Deimos kills from Boomslang's Wednesday raid. SAB had its claws in me by Friday, so I wasn't in on Pick up Snakes but the squad looked great on Kintari's stream. As a side note, I learned people like watching other people open Black Lion Chests. My video of opening 14 measly chests is my most watched video. It's either that or watching mediocre Druid gameplay is boring. I'm hoping it's the former.

I used to do "key runs" semi regularly before the nerf limited them to once a week and the Black Lion Chests were redesigned. Recently (a couple of months ago), I decided to give them another try. My new key farming strategy is this: 1. Collect as many keys as possible through personal story-aka key runs (there are a couple other methods too). 2. Optimize your wardrobe for the Guaranteed Wardrobe Unlocks (you probably only have to do this once) 3. Open your chests. I've decided to do this on the first day the chest rewards change. I'm happy to report the first cycle of my plan ended yesterday in success. I had 14 keys collected. The new once a week key farm is way more relaxed and feels like less of a chore. Of course, it's a experiment in extreme delayed gratification, but I did enjoy watching my collection of keys grow over the weeks. Here's what I got from my orgy of chest opening: I made my husband do this with me (that n = 2 experiment) and he got two elemental swords. Overall, I concluded that it's definitely possible to get all trash, but you will most likely get at least one uncommon or rare reward (it might even be something you want). I'll be starting the cycle again next week. I plan on doing some blog posts and a video about my key run strategies and wardrobe optimization as a refresher for interested vets and to help newer players who haven't had the time to think about this stuff yet. Stay tuned! SPOILER ALERT: Let me know in game if anyone wants to come visit my jackpot. My home instance is now missing only two nodes

Hey Bone. The permanent contracts are definitely the holy grail of most key farmers. I've never gotten one and I'm not even sure anyone (other than Arenanet) has an accurate idea what the drop rate is. However, one thing is sure if you don't open chests you will never get one unless you buy it off the trading post. That said, I have one character slot dedicated to Key Farming. Once a week, I level a character to 10 and get the key from the level 10 personal story and delete it. You can only get that one once per week per account. You also get a key from the level 40 and 60 story steps but I don't think it's worth making a throw away character for that. You can also scrounge up keys with your regular characters. Although you can only do it once per character, each of your alts can get a key from the personal story level 10, 40, and 60 as well as living world season 2 tangled paths, and Hot act 3 roots of terror. That's potentially a decent number of keys even without a dedicated Key Farming character.

Hi Everyone, Here's a round up of the videos posted on my YouTube Channel this week. I've made playlists by night if you want to watch all the kills from a specific night. Well, all the kills I have videos for. I need to work on my consistency as far as pressing "record" goes... Monday Night Boomslang (3/20/21017): Cairn, Mursaat Overseer, Slothasor, Bandit Trio Wednesday Night Boomslang (3/22/2017): Vale Guardian, Gorseval, Sabetha Friday Night Pick-up Snakes (3/24/2017): Matthias, Cairn, Mursaat Overseer, Samarog I also wanted to share my new credits for each of the raid squads. Boomslang: and for Pick up Snakes:

I'm either exceedingly cheap or old fashioned (or masochistic), but I hate purchasing things off the trading post that I can make or harvest myself. Recent case in point: pristine toxic spore samples. Those babies are 18 silver EACH! Now that wouldn't be a problem for me if you didn't need 10 of them to make the raid meta utility consumable for power and condi dps classes. Why are they so expensive? Oh I don't know, probably because you can only get them on a low level map no one goes to for any other reason. Not to mention they are scattered around that map so you can't efficiently run between nodes, and you have to harvest several nodes that give junk before you finally get a single pristine toxic spore.(If you're outrageously lucky you may get 5, but don't hold your breath. We wouldn't want you to die.) This sort of thing leads to some interesting player behavior. I recently read on Reddit (and saw this at every node when I was harvesting myself) players are standing at the nodes while semi-afking for hours in order to harvest them easily and make money. Turns out they re spawn every approximately 10 minutes so maybe it's not too bad, but it's not what I'd call "engaging game play" either. I've gone back to my old standby: bring out the alts in full force. I used to do this for lemongrass when I was the chef in my old WvW guild. Simply park all of your less used alts in the map (don't forget to pile on the gathering boosts first-guild hall and boosters) and log in every once in a while and harvest with everyone. Sounds reasonable, until I calculated I have enough gold to purchase enough of these to raid 9 hours per week for 10 years. That's assuming I actually play a class that needs these all the time--and I don't. Most people would stop doing it now that they know that. It won't stop me. Here's my feeble attempt to crash the market. If you're interested, this is a map of toxic seedling spawns:

Hi everyone! I'm happy to say I've decided to start my own channel on YouTube. The good news for you guys (NPC) is....you get to star in the videos with me (haha). Getting right to it, the channel is named "Maia's Memo" (yes, that's why I changed the name of my blog) and you can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTaUJCqnRufSlRpZfazaTWw I've posted a few videos already of our kills from Monday night's Boomslang raid. I also wanted to let everyone know I'm always open to: 1. Comments: Just keep them kind. 2. Concerns: If something I've posted bothers you please let me know so I can do something about it. The videos do not have our voices in them. I believe they are no less private than Kintari's stream. 3. Suggestions: I'm, of course, open to feed back and ideas of what you'd like to see. Just keep in mind I'm an amateur (actually, the term amateur is a little generous) video editor and graphics maker (I couldn't even type the term "graphic designer" without laughing). Honestly, I haven't developed much of a vision for this yet. Right now I'm enjoying the process and learning a lot. Needless to say this is a work in progress! If you have any comments, concerns, suggestions or questions please feel free to post them here on my blog or on the channel. Thanks in advance for your support!

Thanks Bone! I'm having a blast doing both. The blog will probably remain videos, situations, and thoughts about GW2 (from myself and others) that I find funny or interesting. I expect most of the YouTube videos will be raid kills, but I'd love to put in some fractal runs and other stuff. I admit I don't really have a specific audience in mind- I'm in it for fun-but I'm happy to hear someone else is enjoying it too.

I know this is a little ahead of where we are right now, but I ran across another possible use case for a Reaper/Necro build (not listed here) that involves Epidemic. Deimos challenge mode: Epidemic is useful to 1) immobilize and kill and Prides and Greeds that try to kill Saul by bouncing condis off the boss (obviously you need other condi classes and rangers with Entangle to optimize this strat, but we typically use those anyways) 2) quickly kill Saul's alter egos that come back to the main platform with the group after the transport phase. Mighty Teapot checked the DPS and it's close enough to what they were getting before to work on Deimos CM (see below for link). I haven't researched all the mechanics of this challenge mode yet, but I believe this strat is pretty powerful because LOD is using it to 8 man Deimos for sells: And Mighty Teapot and [SALT] used it in a recent Deimos CM kill: (They talk about the strat at 1:22:00 and the kill itself -they wipe a few times-starts at 1:45:00): https://www.twitch.tv/videos/128433263

I'm glad you like it. Mini Eye of Janthir here we come.