Raphia’s BWE2 Journal: Day Three

Earlier entries are here and here.

Have I mentioned how much I’m loving both the Trading Post itself and the ease of putting things up for auction? Between that, and the ability to put raw materials and ingredients directly into storage from anywhere in the world, it’s almost completely solved my packrat-induced storage challenges. In Guild Wars, inventory management is a constant pain as I collect too much stuff and need to clean out my inventory frequently while playing. In Guild Wars 2, however, except for pausing for a minute to dispose of unwanted items and stash things in storage, inventory is really not a problem.

I spent some time on Sunday morning levelling up my new engineer, getting a few more turrets unlocked and finding ways to deploy them before I was neck-deep in centaurs. Turrets really can be useful in controlling the tempo of the fight and forcing enemies to switch their attention away from you. The only time I found the turrets to be less useful was on an escort mission, where the attackers were coming in waves just far enough away from one another that the turrets were out of range, but quickly enough that I couldn’t pick them up and redeploy them fast enough to be useful.

Engineer is one of the classes I didn’t think I’d find interesting to play, but I was wrong: it’s a great support role player and I can see myself having an engineer alt after the game releases (ranger and mesmer are professions I was definitely going to play after release). Now the challenge will be forcing myself to try another profession or two during the next BWE, because I’m having too much fun playing the characters I’ve already created. Between getting my mesmer up to level 10 and my engineer up to level 12, I forgot I needed to get my ranger up to level 30 if I wanted to get into the catacombs dungeon (so there’s an item for next time).

I briefly teamed up with Scathac (one of my fellow guild leaders in our temporary GW2 guild) in the Norn lands, fighting against the Sons of Svanir. It got a bit zerg-ish at times, as the dynamic event in Svanir’s Dome drew a lot of players to fight, and the final enemy was very tough to take down. Playing on my ranger, I started to miss those engineer turrets … the extra firepower would have been handy during the fight. Scathac had to log off shortly after the event to attend to real world priorities, but I continued exploring the area and taking part in other dynamic events.

About half an hour later, after I’d picked up a couple of skill points in the various challenges, I was fighting alongside a bunch of norn when I noticed a fellow guild member join the fight. After we finished the event, Thunderbow the Grey joined me in a party and we attempted to complete the next event in the chain. This is where we discovered that norn may be great at defending a tavern but they’re lousy at attacking another location. They zerged in, engaged all the grawl in sight, then decided it was too tough and conducted a sloppy retreat, leaving Grey and me to finish the job. Because there were only the two of us, the respawn rate wasn’t too punishing and we eventually cleared the camp.

We even tried doing the next event after that, but with just two players and those utterly useless norn, we couldn’t even make a dent in the shaman whose efforts apparently triggered off this event chain. With both of us and our bear pets, we didn’t seem to be able to do more than scratch his health bar before we were all downed and almost instantly defeated.

There is — or should be — a special place in hell for people who run past downed or defeated players and don’t stop to help. Just saying.

Oh, and a belated “thanks!” to those players I temporarily worked with on getting to skill point locations and other too-tough-for-one-player areas. Because we generally didn’t form a team, I’d sometimes turn back from a side fight or gathering activity to find that the others had either gone on or dispersed. I do love the way the game encourages casual teamwork.

My alliance’s first server was pretty strong in WvW ranking (Sorrow’s Furnace). When we moved to a server that allowed our other guild and alliance members to join us, we dropped down the WvW rankings a long way. Cavalon apparently doesn’t have a lot of WvW players. When I checked the standings on Sunday night, it was not a pretty sight:

• Jaya Bluffs — 178,794
• Cavalon — 2,133
• Seafarer’s Rest — 1,612

I think I waited too long to try WvW. I tried sneaking around to find something useful to do. The best I could manage, as there didn’t seem to be any other Cavalon players active, was to hunt down a supply dolyak. I found one, but it was too close to a Jaya Bluffs position, as just before I could kill the dolyak, I was swarmed by red NPCs and quickly defeated. I gave up with the WvW score at:

• Jaya Bluffs — 183,302
• Cavalon — 2,241
• Seafarer’s Rest — 1,646

I had planned to stay online during the finale, but I found I was just too tired at about 1:30 so I had to log off. I hope those of you who stayed in to the end had a great experience.