Mad King Destroys Lion!

I was there yesterday when the Mad King busted through the L.A. lion statue and towered over us all in all his flaming punkin-y glory! It was a pretty cool cut scene. If you missed it, press that link to see the YouTube video.
Snapped a few screens while I was there, of course. Then found 2 peeps to go into the instance and we kicked ass. A fantastic fun fight, plus some nice loots!

Me, Dezi and Lia! We met in LA to wait for the event.
It was cool to stand together with our LOST tag. :)

Screenshot from the cinematic of the Mad King busting out!

Fighting the Mad King himself! Lia is over on the left, Dezi I think is right up under him, and our two new Charr friends are in there somewhere too! It was a fun fight.

I guess by the wording on the reward, we can only get this reward once a day. There was also a big chest to loot!

Halloween Act II

Just some quick screenshots from Act II. Having a lot of fun! It helps to be bingeing on Rockets at the same time. :)

The evil clock tower jumping puzzle. Haven't been able to complete it.

Mistress Madheart, my human necro, in her first Champ Candy Corn Man fight.

Playing Lunatic Inquisition as a villager.
Just found a bush and lay down. Cuz I'm a sylvari, I guess I was pretty much invisible!

My first face-to-face with the Mad King himself.
This is in the Lunatic Inquisition when you're on the Lunatic side. 

Zephrayne bought the Halloween mini pets! The ghost is my fave.

Zephrayne as a demon. We did our achieve for Costume Brawl together. We just stood there and took the hits until we got Champion. Yeah, I'll take a demon punch to the face for a guildie!

Another Champ Candy Corn Man fight. In the middle of that mess are Pol (on Lillyn), Dezi, Zeph and me!

CM Explorable Attempt

Bunch of us went into Caudecus Manor to try for the explorable path, The Missing Seraph. Turned out to be a bust, as crashing and patching issues prevented us from completing it, but we learned a lot and had some fun fights along the way.

I ate a Halloween candy and became a ghost!

Our group started with Warmad (on Warhall), Ynney, Alcanar, Majyst (on Carnelion, not in the picture) and me.
None of us had done the Seraph path, so we chose that. It's always fun to do a new path, as you never know what's gonna hit ya. Yeah, we got hit a LOT! Bandits all overs. Nasty bandits. With nasty nets. But we slaughtered our way through the house until we found Rosie or something. She said they made her "do things". Gasp! She seemed okay, no torn bodice or anything, so we moved on.

Poor Majyst had to drop party cuz his connection was borked. (A big F-U to China! Let our friend play, gosh darn it!) Kjarri, our new guildie, stepped in, and we were glad he did. Somehow in the middle of a fight, he managed to keep his head on straight and realized that the spikes coming through the floor and poking us to death were only coming through on the hardwood. Nice call! We all stuck to the rugs and did much better.

Jump jump jump!

Ynney had noticed the clickable pillows in the room and wondered what to do with them. We figured it out soon enough! Toss the pillows on the floor so you can jump across the spikes. Totally funny!

Ended up outside the manor and killed a big doggie and his two bomber companions. We got white loot. Oh. Yay. Just what I always wanted. Whee.

The next part was a bit perplexing. It seemed there were endless bandits racing out of a house to kill us. We fought and fought and fought, and then Ynney decided to actually READ what the text said. Oh, we're supposed to bomb the doors. Whoops! Thanks, Ynney, for paying attention!

The Bomb Squad!

I found the bombs on the side of the barn and we all grabbed one. Now, what to do? After several failed rushes, Warmad decided to climb the roof of a bulding nearby. Damn Charr and their feline parkour skills! We tried to follow but were not that successful. It was a great idea though!
We paused and War googled for a solution. (GW2Guru has a great video.) Apparently, you're supposed to toss bombs so that the bandits get distracted trying to pile them up again. Um, OCD bandits? Interesting.
We coordinated ourselves, put on some sweet Guardian speed boosts, and... BOOM! Simple as that! Gates are down.
Oh, except then we ran through the gate and got ganked on the other side. Respawn, repair, regroup. Try again. Mad Martha was targeted and terminated. Boo-rah.

Had another group switcheroo as Kjarri had to bail due to RL aggro. Majyst stepped back in to help us take down the final boss, Turmaine.
Unfortunately we never did get to finish him off. As we were fighting him, I crashed out (big F-U to Rogers Cable!) and then an automatic patch started. When I got back into the game, I couldn't rejoin the group. Then Majyst had the same problem, and he couldn't rejoin either. The remaining three debated taking on the boss themselves, but decided against it. Very frustrating, but I think it was just a one-time fluke. We just happened to crash out at the exact time a patch was loading. I feel bad though, cuz you don't get any tokens or gold or XP if you don't kill the last boss. It was an expensive dungeon run. But we can always make more gold, I guess, and then we'll be back to take Turmaine's head off next time!

Halloween Act I

Shadow of the Mad King has arrived in Tyria and I've been having a blast! Been too busy to blog even. Sorry about that. However, I always have time to press PrtScn!

Costume Brawl chaos greeted me when I arrived at L.A. That's me, the glowy ooze. I still have no clue why people are doing this. Maybe there's an achieve? I couldn't find any reward for doing it.

Kinda obvious candy corn nodes.
Also you can see I've got the rented spooky staff.

I'm working on my Master Carver title.
What do you think? Not bad, huh?

Haunted doors are all over!

Nice view of the universe.

This haunted door got stuck open and kept spawning endless candy corn men.

Of course, I had to discover all the recipes right away! These are just a few of them.
Sometimes when you eat one, you turn into a Halloween person. I turned into a candy corn man after eating a candy apple, and turned into a ghost after eating an Omnomberry Ghost.

I've lost weight!

It was a bit confusing to just jump into Halloween. There were no instructions really on what we were supposed to be doing. We all just kinda clicked on things to see what would happen.

I spent quite a bit of time jumping up the broken stairs to be able to throw myself in the Mystic Forge Cauldron. I thought something cool would happen or I'd get a reward. All that happened was that I turned into this lovely green skeleton. I mean, that's nice and all, but I was hoping for more. I guess it's just because it took me so long to get up there! Some other people might have found the jumping to be easy, I guess, and wouldn't have been disappointed.

I found all the ghosties and collected their stories for the scavenger hunt given by the Asura near the fountain. I'm proud to say I did most of the clues on my own, although once I got to the location, there was a mob of people to help guide me. The book that you get at the end is actually a visible back slot piece, but it doesn't have great stats. We'll see if that quest continues into Act II.
(If you'd like a guide to the scavenger hunt, Dulfy has one.)

Too...much...candy...

What else have I done? Oh, I've been carving pumpkins but haven't quite finished the achieve yet.
I threw toilet paper in Queensdale and watched a fake Mad King tell a story.
I've eated a bazillion candy corn and dealt with the consequences. (It's actually a combo finisher, projectile. Kinda funny.)
I've been in a food fight, although once again I don't know why.
I've been transformed into a pig, an owl, a leopard, an ooze, a skelly, a ghost, a candy corn man, and a plastic spider.
I've gone "oooOOOOooo" at the baby quaggans dressed up and running around the fountain in L.A. Freaking CUTE. The asura kids are hilarious too; the little cannibal is just adorable! You can talk to any costumed kid and they will trade you a treat-or-treat bag for candy corn. I've been trading 50 candy corn to get 8 bags.
I've tried out the new Mystic Forge recipes for a chance at a weapon skin, but didn't get anything. For those who haven't heard, the recipe is 1 Candy Corn, 6 Mystery Tonics, and 2 boosts from your Black Lion Chests. Split the boosts so one goes in each slot. You'll get a Mad King's chest that doesn't require a key to open.
Also have been reading around the web that you can craft permanent versions of the weapons, but the mat requirements are insane. Guild Wars Insider has a guide.

So far, I've been very happy with the Halloween events. And it's only Act I!! Just walking around L.A. looking at the jack o' lanterns, the bat lamps, the floating candles, and the costumed crazies makes me smile like the Mad King himself!  :D

TGIF, Faithful Readers!

This screenshot has no relevance to the blog post.

Thank Grenth it's Friday!
Had some serious computer issues this week and have been pretty ticked off. Very close to reformatting the damn thing, which would most likely just turn it into a paperweight. Or a cat bed. My hard drive is already full of her hair, so really it's not much of a stretch.
I said to my guildies that I feel like I've been grounded, but I didn't do anything wrong. I'm a good girl, honest! (Stop laughing, guys.)

Anyhoo! Since I haven't been able to play much, I've been reading blogs and articles about GW2 to keep my withdrawl tremors to a mangeable level.

First of all: GW2Hub is hiring! OMG, really? You can get paid to blog about Guild Wars 2? Madness. That's selling out to the MAN. I'm not doin' it. But you can, if you like. I won't shun you. Too much.
(Plus they have a giggle-worthy comic on that page, so go visit!)

Second: Very easy-reading casual article by Shayalyn about why she'd Rather Be Playing GW2. If you're trying to convince a friend to give GW2 a try, this is a great read. Or just hit them upside the noggin with whatever is within reach. Your call.

Third: Erik Kain is my brother from another mother. His article basically reflects my attitude about Guild Wars 2, in that you have to get all Simon & Garfunkel while in-game and not fret. I think I've blogged before about how GW2 really wants you to slow down and enjoy the sights, not just stampede around like a class of 8-year-olds at the butterfly conservatory. Erik was skeptical of the game, but it has grown on him and he explains why.

Lastly: a picture of a lava ball. Why? Cuz I can. :D

Lava Ball -- do not touch.

Now stop reading this and GET IN THE GAME! NAOW!

Are You The Majority?

Pretty coloured graphs!

I grabbed this picture from GW2 economist John Smith's post on Sept 14th regarding the state of the game's economy. The article itself is kinda meh, but this graph at the end jumped out at me, not just cuz it's super-pretty, but cuz it shows some neat things about the game population.

The top pie chart is simple. More dudes than dudettes. Doh. What I'd like to know is: does the pie chart represent male and female toons or male and female players? I'm guessing toons. (Did some research and yeah, it's toon gender, not player gender.)

The graph on the top left shows the distribution of professions. I'm surprised that ranger isn't number one, seeing as how all the bots use rangers. Warriors being number one is a bit of a surprise to me as I found them kinda...flat. Traditional. Boring. Slow. But maybe they're more useful and interesting than I believe, or maybe it's just that the blandness of the name gives people confidence that they can play it. Does that make sense? What I mean is everyone knows what a warrior DOES. They swing swords. They kill stuff. Not everyone would be willing to choose necro or guardian from the list. They sound more complicated and less familiar.
Spiral is a mesmer, tied for the least played profession with engineer. I can understand why folks don't choose mesmer to begin with. It's an odd name and the mesmer description sounds vague and, well, pansy. There's no mention of power or strength or awesome-sauce. It talks about deception and illusions.
On top of that, anyone daring enough to make a mesmer finds out pretty quickly that they are a difficult class to play. Took me a long time to feel like I had the hang of it, whereas jumping on a thief or an ele or a warrior, you "get it" right away.
On top of that, mesmers are really a support class, I'm finding, and when I play my alts I realize how slow she is at killing mobs! But I don't care. She's mine and she's my favourite and I love bringing my mesmer skills into dungeons and group events to shake things up.

The bottom left graph is the races. Humans is represented by the tall green bar. (I think that's an icon of Divinity's Reach.) So...why are so many people choosing humans? Honestly, I thought they were the least interesting of the races on looks (my friend, Fearil, called human males "foppish"), and were the only race playable in GW1. Peter Fries, a GW2 writer, saw this graph and tweeted about it, saying the Asura and Charr storylines are pretty freaking awesome and those lame-ohs playing humans are "missing out".
Besides the storylines though, why wouldn't you choose to be an entirely new race? I mean, we're gaming to escape reality, aren't we? Why not be a cat or a tree or a midget or a giant?

The last graph on the bottom right is the crafting professions. Hmm, big hate on for Artificer. Wonder why that is? Weaponsmithing is number one, no surprise there. The rest are pretty balanced. I thought everyone and their uncle was a chef, judging by the pack of toons clustered around the cooking station everyday, but I guess chefs are no more popular than leatherworker, jeweler and tailor.

Anyway, do you fall into the norm of these graphs? Are you an outlier, playing a female Asura Mesmer who makes scepters? Does seeing this graph make you want to make an alt? It does for me! I gotta go...

Free Townclothes Headpiece

Here's some brief instructions on how to find the free townclothes headpiece, Iron's Tailpipe Bandana.


Iron Marches - quest for Riff Sootclaw and the Iron's Tailpipe Bandana

First go to the Warhound Village waypoint just outside of Harvester's Glade in Iron Marches.
Next, run around and gather plants and open up POIs and get distracted by events and help some groups defeat a boss and go do that vista that you haven't unlocked and finish up a heart quest and...
Next, realize that you had a goal and get back on track!
Then, find your own path to get to where I am on the map, circled in red. Me, I ran over and jumped down a cliff while being chased by nasties. You could take the flatter route and go a bit north-east and run down the ramp and through the gorge. Your call. :)
Greet this handsome furry dude.

Riff Sootclaw and his broken tank.

The conversation will tell you that his tank is borked and you can prove yourself to him and his warband if you can fix it. Sure, why not? A little grease on the fingers never hurt anyone. Well, unless it's hot fry grease. Then ouch!
After you fix the tank...wait, what was that, Marigold? You want me to tell you how to fix the tank? No way, nuh-uh! I can't give away all my secrets!
All right then, sigh. Go watch this video from Youtuber Vasqwar to find more detailed instructions. It's possible there is more than one way to fix the tank, but I just did what he said and it worked like a charm.

Riff Sootclaw welcomes me to the 632nd Armored Death Warband! RAWR!

So...after you fix the tank, Riff gives you his warband's signature bandana, although he's not wearing one, so perhaps it's not so signature after all. Maybe it just chaffed his ears?
It'll show up at the bottom of your screen going into your loot bag, like so -->

Now the silly thing was, after all that, the bandana doesn't show up on my toon! I put it on and nothing changed. Maybe it's my spikey hair-leaves, I dunno. I put in a support ticket cuz I'd really like to see what it's like on me. A blogger named Caria was nice enough to post a pic of the bandana on a human. Kinda funny looking. But whatever, it's free townclothes! Quest succeeded!

Rx: Perform Once Daily

What category is this thing? Fugly? Ah, just kill it.

I'm big on achievements. I love getting that pop-up that says "You done good!" Rewards float my boat, if ya know what I mean. :)

So I was curious this morning about the daily achievement. Normally I just run about killing stuff and doing events until the reward chest appears, but I was thinking that perhaps I could be more efficient in my rampaging.

So I Googled the most obscure of the four categories: Daily Kill Variety. This is the one that you have to kill 15 different types of animals. I've been paying attention (somewhat) to the types of animals I have to kill to get this section done, but some days it seems like it is pretty random. The other day I completed this achieve by killing a white rabbit. Huh? What category does that belong to? Cute and defenseless? Unlucky mammal? Got-In-The-Way-Of-My-Greatsword?
My web search came up with the GW2 Wiki page, Slayer, thanks to a tip from Shjak, a dude I have never heard of, on Gaming Stack Exchange, a website I have never heard of. Yay for the internet!

So anyway, there are actually 39 varieties of mobs in GW2, so it should be easy to find 15 of them to do this achieve.

centaur, drake, harpy, spider, bandit, skale, bat, shell, devourer, dredge, elemental, ettin, ghost, giant, grawl, griffon, hylek, Flame Legion, fish, imp, Inquest, insect, jotun, krait, minotaur, Nightmare Court, ogre, ooze, pirate, plant (oakhearts), raptor, skelk, skritt, Son of Svanir, troll, wind rider, wurm, Zhaitan's army (anything labeled "risen"), and white mobs no matter what species.

Apparently there are some anomalies to this list, so check out the Slayer page on the Wiki. Or just do what you've been doing and kill everything that crosses your path or looks at you funny or whose name contains a vowel.

Why do the daily, you ask? For the Mystic Coin, of course!
And why do you want Mystic Coins, you inquire with innocence and noobishness? Well, to craft the most awesome butt-kicking face-melting toe-curling panty-ripping legendary weapon of all time! See here.  :D

Heart-Pounding Moments

Okay, maybe it's cuz I'm a little over-reactive, or maybe it's cuz I'm a girl, or maybe it's cuz I'm hopped up on sugar and caffeine most of the time, but this game gives me some serious heart-pounding moments!!
Let me show you. :)

I think he's looking right at me! EEEKS!

Okay, so this was my second time fighting The Shatterer, but my poor little ticker tick-tocked pretty darn fast. I got to shoot a mortar, which was total fun, but did eventually get down into the thick of things. That's even worse! Cuz then he flies up and looks DOWN on you, and I feel like a little bunny about to get eaten.
What's funny is apparently Majyst doesn't feel as stressed as I do during these big fights. Click on the picture to make it bigger and read his chat! You crack me up, Maj! :D

Most difficult vista (so far)

Dezi and I on the vista, woot!

These two pictures are of the Breached Wall vista/skillpoint/swearing practice. I think it took us about an hour to finally succeed at this, and it was pretty thrilling at points. Imagine: you've jumped 20 different ledges and you're lining up to leap across a chasm while ghost warriors are spawning all around you...you run, you slam the space bar down with all the immense power of your thumb, there's that sickening moment of suspension in mid-air...then you miss the ledge, your poor toon starts screaming and you hit the ground with a THUD. Aaaannnd repeat!

The Windy Bridge. Priory initiates will know what I'm talking about.

I hesitated to even post this picture here cuz it brings back such awful memories. This is the Windy Bridge, part of the Priory personal story line. Can you see me in the pic? Yes, I'm on the SIDE of the goddamn bridge. I got blown there by the freaking Grenth-cursed wind that I could never see coming. This quest was a whole lot of heart-pounding excitement, but also head-pounding anger and frustration. Turns out, all I had to do was turn my graphics to super-low to get enough FPS to actually see WTF was going on. 

Modra learned this lesson as well, when he had to replace his graphics card and suffered with a lower version for a while. He swore he wasn't going to try any more vistas until his new card arrived. And poor Dezi and Kyle...we won't even go there! (But grats to Dezi on her new CPU just yesterday. Feels good, doesn't it?)

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a ... cow??

Heart-pounding moments don't always have to be about stress! This was one of the funniest scenes I have encountered in GW2 so far: the Cattlepult! I thought it was a joke! I couldn't actually belive this Charr was tossing cows. Too freaking hilarious! And we actually got to go in it, to reach a far-off vista, but sadly there was no animation scene of my leafy body hurtling through the sky, just a loading screen. Too bad. :(

Really?
REALLY?

Just a few days ago, I ventured for the first time into the lands of Orr. Horrifying apparitions attacked me at every turn. Ghosts, zombies and vicious predators threatened my very life-sap! And then this little guy came along. Really? A risen chicken. I have no words.

Screens From the Past Few Days

I'm getting a build up of screenshots again so I'm dumping them here for all to admire. :D

Agga Gemseeker, my Asura thief, taking aim AT YOUR FACE!

A vista in Queensdale. Little Agga is on top of the thatched roof. 

I finally got a chance to party with Ejov and we adventured through Iron Marches.
Found a face. Very strange.

Ejov and I also found The Tree of Life! Well, it's not called that. I think it was called God's Hand or something. We didn't realize how big it was until we stepped back and looked up up UP!!

My Illusionary Duelest decided not to shatter and stuck with me long enough for a portrait!

Clan of the Lost Minds -- first time in Twilight Arbor. Woot!
We didn't quite finish, but it was only because it was too late for people who had to work in the morning. 

A bit overwhelmed in WvW

Finished my monthly achieve for the first time.
Have to say I was disappointed. Not sure if it's worth the effort.

A guild was having a recruitment party in LA. Pretty cool. Can't wait until we can do this!

OMG this guy, Jimbrah, had transformed into a Quaggan calf! So squee!

Oh my! Who do we have here?? Yes, it's The Shatterer!
Freaking amazing, isn't he? Almost a shame to kill him.

Getting up close now. My heart was thumping and my face was grinning and my fingers were stumbling over my keys trying to fight and dodge and screenshot. :D

Ah, peace at last.
This is the view from a balcony on Rata Sum. Totally in awe of this. Some artist took the time to make a galaxy of stars for us to ponder, on the off chance that a player (like me) would chance to look up. Thank you.