Hunter's Insight – A Guild Wars 2 Blog

Cooking is a Thing

I was thinking about ascended crafting the other day and it seems pretty likely we’ll have ascended jewelry before too long, we’ve had the Xunlai Electrum Ingot storage space for ages. What I haven’t seen a hint of is ascended cooking. Surely there will be some form of ascended foods right?

Well the short answer is not necessarily. There are no ascended potions from artificer, and no ascended crafting storage spaces for anything that looks like food. Which is a damn shame really, ascended potions and foods could be a way of fixing a bunch of things that I don’t like or are missing from foods and potions.

For instance I want longer lasting food and potions. Most level 80 items last 30 minutes, but I think the majority of content in Guild Wars 2 tends to last longer than a half hour. I’d like to see more foods with 45 minute and 1 hour timers. This could be a way to progress cooking up to 500, with 45 minute recipes helping people get to 450, and 1 hour recipes at 500.

Then again I wonder what effect the Metabolic Primer cash shop item would have on that idea. It specifically makes foods last longer. Great for those 12 hour gameplay sessions. I joke, but yeah, I’ve done that.

Another thing I’d like to see foods and potions do is shed the experience gain. The vast majority give you +10% experience, +15% experience, no experience gain at all, or a very few give +5% karma. I think there is a lot of room to grow here.

First of all why not open up the number of foods that boost karma? The few that do universally also give +Healing Power. There are plenty of stats people might want to use with a karma food. Not to mention with significant nerfs to karma gain, there would be no harm in more karma foods.

And why not expand on the number of things these foods might boost. Omnomberry Bars boost gold find, along with a small number of other foods. But we could also add percentage gains to such things as World XP, Guild Influence, a Gathering Bonus maybe even agony resistance. I’m sure there’s quite a few other stat combinations and proc possibilities that could be used as well. There is no lack of experience in Guild Wars 2 so I’d definitely like to see more variety.

On a more speculative note, most high level foods have 2 stats and an xp boost. Would there be more room for celestial foods, for 3 stats and a boost, other combinations? More Dragon’s Revelry Starcake please.

Finally I think trays, pots, and feasts could probably be cleaned up a bit, with more affordable recipes, and a larger variety of choice. Not to mention so little documentation, I can’t even find Pot of Meat and Winter Vegetable Stew on the wiki. Can we throw some of the recipes out as a reward once in a while? The recipe for Pot of Orrian Truffle Soup costs over 4g for the Bottles of Elonian Wine alone.

And of course, why are there no kegs for potions? Why can’t I share my potion wealth without having to organize who sends what potion to who due to in game mail suppression. And why don’t potions count towards the Thirst Slayer achievement? And Metabolic Primer doesn’t work on potions? Potions really get the short end of the stick. Ridiculous.

I don’t see any reason cooking shouldn’t be given the ascended treatment, or why potions have been left out.

There are plenty of food and potions that could use a kick in the pants in the demand department. Ascended cooking would certainly mean an opportunity to start consuming cooking materials. For example I think potions could use a daily feast type daily. There must be hundreds of thousands of potions selling below the costs of their production, he said without having done a single minute of any actual research at all. Although I doubt higher grade potion ingredients really need a jump start to their prices.

I’m sure lovers of this particular crafting profession are keen to see some action. To be honest I’m keen to make some money off of price spikes since my cooking tab is nearly full. That doesn’t mean I’m not 100% behind it on principle of course. Come on Arenanet, don’t forget about cooking and potions.

Final post script, perfect opportunity to add Fishing to the game!? Probably not.

Keeping Tabs

As a follow up to my post about bank slots, I said I’d make a post about my collection tabs. I think I’ll skip which miniatures I have, and crafting materials tend to have a less involved story for how I got them, but I’ll still hold to the same basic format as the previous post.

Common crafting materials.

As you can see right away I’ve been trying to fill my collection tabs to maximum. I’m the rare type of player who feels a weird obligation to max these things out. Obviously with some types of drops this is harder to do, but with common crafting materials it’s entirely plausible.

Anything not at maximum capacity at this point is due to my efforts in ascended crafting, in particular silk, leathers, elder wood. Most of these are naturally collected, but when crafting I’m not above buying cheap materials.

Hardest things to fill, for me especially while trying to max crafting professions, are soft wood and iron. But at least I can go out and gather those, the leathers and cloths are what bother most people I think, since they mostly only come from drops and bags.

Fine crafting materials.

Tier 1 and tier 5 fine crafting materials are the easiest materials to fill to 250 I would say. After maxing out every crafting profession, sometimes multiple times, the mid-tier materials have been hard to fill. At one point I was buying out cheap mid level container bag drops off the auction house. I wanted to see if Rare Crafting Materials (as in the next tab down) dropped enough to make them a good investment. Typically they don’t (I certainly got lucky with the spike in linen prices but as I saved the linen, I didn’t profit abundantly) but, it certainly helped fill up some of these slots, not to mention fill out linen and some of my leathers. It was a good deal before everybody figured out it was a good way to get linen.

I would say the main reason my tier 6 materials are as robust as they are right now, even after maxing out some ascended crafting professions, is due to Mystic Clovers. I’ve been using the 10 clover recipe which has been remarkably rewarding, but perhaps I was just lucky.

A few oddities worth mentioning. My engraved totems sit at about 11. These do not appear in any bags, drop only from 4 mobs in two zones, and currently sit at about 2.50 on the auction house. Wish I had more, don’t understand why they’re quite that rare compared to every other item in this tab. I’ve been doing the karka queen on a regular basis so I’d say I have quite a few shells compared to most. And if you don’t have a full stack of watchwork sprockets, I don’t know what you were doing wrong during the Scarlet invasions.

Rare crafting materials.

This is a collection tab I’ve resigned to never filling to capacity. Unless I buy everything in it. As you can see I have small numbers of the low level shards, fragments, and slivers. Some are rare drops, some from bags I bought. Cores and lodestones come from all manner of sources, dungeons, orrian jewelry boxes, champ boxes, chests, you name it. I’d probably have more of all of these except I foolishly use them towards crafting on occasion. It’s never worth it but I do it anyway to level up.

I also gave away many of my charged lodestones and cores to people who were looking to make a legendary with those, since they’re quite expensive and I’m a fucking great guy.

I used to sell the vile essence and putrid essence and only recently stopped in order to fill them to capacity.

The ectos are technically at capacity for the moment if anyone saw the bank account post. I keep the slot mostly empty so that I can deposit at will.

The large skulls were something I happened to speculate on, long ago, when their price dropped a bit. Should probably buy the remaining 12 as I’ll never get them as drops.

I’m slowly turning my extra quartz into charged quartz, but I’ll probably never max those out either.

The obsidian at one point was far more than maxed out. I had at least 350 or more from saving up my karma potions and using karma boosts while buying orrian jewelry boxes, it was such a good haul. Those have gone away due to Mystic Clovers and ascended crafting.

I do dailies and monthlies regularly so I have plenty of mystic coins.

My first full stack of pristine toxic spore samples was a tedious amount of farming.

I suppose I could spend the karma on 250 sun beads. For the longest time I didn’t think they were even in the game, but they’re a karma heart item in Sparkfly Fen.

Ascended crafting materials.

Right so, another tab I’ll likely never fill. Except maybe the bloodstone dust and bricks. The only empty slots are the future ascended jewelry materials (I assume) and the only full slot is thermocatalytic reagent. I would say the only reason I have as much dark matter as I do is that I salvaged many of the exotic weapons I made with huntsman when leveling it to 500.

Jewels.

The majority of jewels in here came through gathering, with a small percentage through bags. Thanks to mining orichalcum and ancient wood (and nodes in their vicinity) on a regular basis I can easily max out tier 5 and tier 6 jewels. I did have to go out of my way to harvest a lot of coral to max both those out, and it will be a long time before I max out anything in the low and mid tier ranks, but the only thing I don’t think I’ll be able to max out is azurite, as it’s now only available from one fractal.

It’s funny to think I only have this many pearls because I wanted to max out clams in my food tab, or how I maxed out opal crystals long ago because I farmed the temple of lyssa for charged lodestones and cores a few times. I wonder how much those passion flowers are worth? 26 gold.

Cooking materials.

A lot of these came fairly easily. I think stuff like carrots, mushrooms, blueberries, it was just a matter of not selling them when I got them. Other things I outright bought with karma or cash, because essentially that’s the only way to get them. The only things you won’t see maxed out are either karma items I haven’t gotten around to buying or materials that are rare as all hell.

For instance, yams. They’re so rare I don’t even remember where to get them, I have to wiki them right now to tell you they are from root vegetables in Hirathi Highlands (1 zone!) and bags of pilfered goods.

If it’s near an ori or ancient node however, I likely have plenty of them. All of the high level harvesting nodes whether they’re rare or not from turnips to snow truffles to passion fruit, if it’s commonly close by I’ll harvest it. Seaweed mostly came out of my pursuit of coral however, and items that only come from specific patches had to be targeted until they were done, cauliflower, lettuce, sugar pumpkins, and I’m currently working on spinach and cabbage.

Lemongrass is yet another rare one, but in pursuit of it I’ve managed to max out my cayenne pepper and start selling it for profit, along with work towards coriander seed.

Oranges were a very common drop from one of the types of bags I had been buying.

Leeks and green onions are by far my most hated materials, worthless but always nearby.

Festive materials.

I actually think that they give out way too much candy corn and too little of the other Halloween materials. You have to really want to farm that stuff or just buy it, which isn’t fun for some people. And you can see how they repeat that mistake with Wintersday items too, plenty of Giant presents but no small or medium ones unless you aim for them, which I did.

It’s at the point where a great reward would be High-Quality Plastic fangs (which take 1000 plastic fangs to make) would be a good reward. Only they don’t give them out as rewards.

It’ll take a long time to fill some of these out, and likely never for the rare and exotic versions.

And the rest is mini’s which is even less interesting than the above.

Intelligence Gathering

My boring gathering routines.

With Ascended crafting the profitability of gathering has shot up over the past few months and I’ve been spending a lot of my time doing that. I find it relaxing and sometimes contribute to my servers page over at GW2Nodes.com. What strikes me as interesting is the large number of ways one could spend their time gathering and still make money, instead of it being a total waste of time in lower levels as in some games.

Probably the best way to gather is to park all the alt characters you don’t use in an area with tightly packed orichalcum, ancient, or other valuable nodes and just log into them one by one to gather what you can.

Although efficient, I tend to find that boring, so I usually wander around on my thief, sometimes just following the GW2nodes map, sometimes branching out. My thief is ideal due to being able to stealth into a mobbed up area and then just leave without being slowed down by CC or combat movement speeds. I’ve also put all my infinite mining tools on my thief due to this.

Of course I tend to get tempted by nearby nodes quite a bit. I mean so many nodes are valuable these days. If I’m in Orr, why wouldn’t I go get that omnomberry? Orrian Truffles, ghost pepper, and lotus are all decently profitable. I’ll even go for coral most of the time. They don’t sell at all on the AH, but a green coral tentacle is a guarenteed 1s, and a coral orb is 2s. Most of the time that’s more money than a mithril or cypress node.

If I go to Southsun for the ori or ancient, why wouldn’t I go after passion fruit and passion flowers? The fruit is selling at over 1s and it’s tightly packed near pearl islet. If I can find a Blooming node, that is 20s right there. Yet I never see anyone else gathering in the area. There are usually 3 or 4 Blooming nodes in the zone, but the place is deserted on the Northern Shiverpeaks server.

A popular place with Twit Guild is a location in Mount Maelstrom they like to call “The Patch”. It’s a reliable location for 4 or 5 verdant herb nodes southwest of the Crucible of Eternity. Vanilla is the big attraction, which can make a quick trip there worth around 30s if you’re lucky. Myself I actually start a bit west, near Ashen waypoint, travel north, then south, collecting hard wood and platinum (if I need it) along with verdant and mature herbs, down along the coast to the artichoke (80c) patch, then turn north towards “The Patch”. It usually turns out pretty well, though sometimes all I come away with is tarragon (40c).

A few weeks ago when I really needed to stock up on platinum I started going to northwest Sparkfly Fen a lot. Between the cauliflower patch (worthless but I usually gather when I see a patch because I see it as an opportunity to try for an unidentified dye) and the vista to the south there is a chance for as many as 3 rich platinum nodes to spawn. There’s always one, and sometimes a few regular nodes. Platinum is at about 2s, not super expensive but if you spend your money in the AH when you could be gathering it for free, that’s the reason you’re poor.

Lately I’ve been pretty low on softwood, and looking all over Tyria has yielded few results for large numbers of softwood in a small radius. There doesn’t seem to be anything reliable from one server reset to the next when all the nodes relocate. I’ve ended up going to Forlorn Gates waypoint outside Ebonhawke quite a bit. It’s not great but it’s more reliable than any other location I’ve found thus far. I’ll start there and head northeast eventually ending up in the grape patch in ogre territory to the southeast. Old Gate waypoint in Diessa is a possibility but it’s a bit hit or miss. I’m still looking for a good spot.

Another thing I’ve been doing lately that Shongaqu turned me on to was gathering from herb patches in northeast Straits of Devestation. Start at Fort Trinity and go north and west, you’ll run into a lot of asparagus, herbs, cayenne pepper and artichoke. I have a strange OCD obsession with filling my collection storage to 250 (no I’m not getting the collection expander. Crazy, but not that crazy) and some of the things here are on my list of things to get. It’s a pretty quick run so I’ve been doing it quite a bit. The more profitable aspects are the cayenne pepper and coriander seed, both selling around 4.5s, and the lemongrass (although much rarer) at 13s.

About the only other spot I go to on a regular basis is the Terra Carorunda waypoint in northeast Blazeridge Steppes. I spiral out from that waypoint in a clockwise direction collecting kale, zucchinis, seasoned wood, but mostly iron and herbs. I can get chili peppers, dill sprigs, and plenty of other rare and profitable herbs.

Probably the most surprising things to me that are still worth gathering are carrots and onions. They’re the most basic vegetables, found everywhere, only one crafting profession uses them, and yet they’re still worth around 1s each. I don’t know any really lucrative gathering spots for them, aside from maybe just north of Lion’s Arch where I sometimes get my Daily Variety done.

I think a lot of people don’t check in on prices a lot, so they don’t see when things happen like the cooking recipe that became really popular and spiked carrots up to 3s a while back. That and it’s so common in other games for low level materials to become a worthless waste of time. I guess another reason people don’t take advantage of these profitable situations is because overall gathering is pretty boring. Well, perhaps that’s the main reason.

Halloween So Far

I’ve been having a lot of fun with Halloween. Guild Wars had a pretty solid history with its Halloween festival, slowly growing the number of activities until after a few years it felt like an extensive and hard to beat festival. Guild Wars 2 has started out on the right foot.

To start with there are a number of really clever ideas. The Costume Brawl is just genius. You can fight virtually anywhere, no special arena required. And there are all sorts of ways to join in. Already existing tonics have had skills introduced, you can interact with cauldrons to grab a costume, do the jumping puzzle in Lion’s Arch to be transformed into something, or buy a costume from the gem store.

As a result the costumes are quite varied and the amount of fighting going on is impressive. I don’t imagine it will quiet the PvP types who moan about dueling but hopefully it will quench their thirst. There is even a community achievement for becoming King. This requires getting off 25 hits on opponents without losing all of your hearts. I have to admit I had to resort to sniping with a ranged skeleton to manage to get past the first tier and won’t be going further.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any real rewards which disappointed me. It’s fun, which is the important thing, but the only reason to do it is the achievement and that isn’t enough to motivate me.

Another problem with the Costume Brawl is that people who buy a costume seem to have a clear advantage over those who don’t. Not only are the costumes amazing to look at and have some amazing effects (you ride around on a broom as a witch and can melt, as the mad king you can let loose a litany of audible jokes) but you usually have better skills than those simply using tonics, cauldrons, etc.

One of the things I really love about the festival are the doors found in various zones. They appear somewhat randomly out in the countryside of Kryta. Approaching one will allow you to interact, receive a Trick or Treat bag and then it spawns a mob. Much fun was had the first night when many of these doors started to infinitely spawn monsters. Immediately people camped these sites and farmed up dozens if not hundreds of trick or treat bags. They’re fixed now unfortunately.

Another way to get trick or treat bags is simply by going out into PvE anywhere in the world and mining raw candy corn nodes. Use your mini-map to mouse over mining nodes to see if you’re near one. You’ll get mostly candy corn but there is an achievement, the monthly, for eating 150 pieces.

Probably the most fun was the scavenger hunt. There is an NPC near the portals in Lion’s Arch that will give you a scanner that allows you to talk to ghost. After talking to the ghost by the NPC you’ll get a memoir of the mad king with clues to the other locations. It’s not particularly difficult but I enjoyed the clues and the locations I had to go to. It hints that there is more to come so I’m looking forward to just running around with a group finishing this up.

Although the short and sweet jumping puzzle in Lion’s Arch is a bit of fun, the newly added puzzles in Dredgehaunt, Timerline, and Mount Maelstrom were far more interesting to me, and I’ll add them to my guide within the next couple days.

I think the one thing that makes me wonder about Arenanet are the unique skins. Arenanet often gets so much exactly right and then makes such obvious mistakes.

There are unique skins available in the black lion chests. You have to gamble to get them, buy the keys from the store to get a random chance at something valuable. I heard a few people complaining that they had opened 10, 20, 50 chests and received nothing. Don’t get me wrong, you can get the skins off the auction house, but at what cost?

The chain sword skin is going for 6 gold. The shield for 30 gold, the rifle for 3 gold, the greatsaw for 39 gold, well it goes on like that. The ghastly shoulderpads are more affordable, clocking in around 1 to 2 gold depending on the skin.

These are supposed to be festival items are they not? Themed skins for halloween? Are they supposed to cost a fortune and only be available to some elite few?

I was also checking out the skins available from the NPCs in Lion’s Arch. You can rent them for 6 silver or 150 candy corn. For 4 hours. I remember in Guild Wars the candy cane sword or mint shields were quest rewards weren’t they? Why the change in attitude from freely available holiday themed skins to unreasonably difficult to get skins that cost a fortune to buy or craft.

The crafting part is such a joke. The recipe alone for Arachnophobia costs 11 gold. If you add up the further costs of crafting one of these skins it gets ludicrous. It doesn’t cost anything close to what a legendary costs but it certainly prices everyone but the most dedicated players out of seriously considering getting one of these skins. Unless you want one for 4 whole hours. How generous.

Rewards have definitely been the weakest point in Guild Wars 2 overall and that continues with this festival. There’s plenty of time left with more stages to the event so I’m hoping things improve, but so far all I have to show for my efforts are some foods, crafting materials, candy corn and a low level backpack I might transmute.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m having fun, and visually everything is a treat, but the only permanent things I’m walking away from this festival with are the free devil horns and a book. And few ways to show off my Halloween spirit aside from temporary tonics and costumes.

Try backstabbing me now thief!