Repetition is the Key

Greetings Traveler!

Welcome again to my little corner of the internet. Today I am going to talk a little bit about keys. Black Lion Keys to be precise. MMOs have always been inundated with random number generators (RNGs), from the damage you deal or are dealt when striking an opponent; to whether you actually hit the opponent at all; to how much and what kind of loot drops when they die. I suppose this is a reflection of the RNG inherent in tabletop games that use dice. But modern MMOs have harnessed that excitement of loot drops in a way that doesn't even require killing digital sprites: The Loot Box! Guild Wars 2 is no exception to this, having the Black Lion Chest, which drops as loot or rewards.

Of course, you can't just open loot boxes, they often have some sort of key. GW2 offers them through the gem store. An individual key is approximately $1.56, but you can get them for as low as $1.05 if you buy 25 (which would cost you $26.25 in gems). I am by no means discouraging the purchase of these keys; however, I have never bought one, myself. On the other hand, I do like occasion getting a key and using it to open one of my stack, currently about 150 chests. So how do I obtain these keys? Through Key Farming. You can obtain these keys several ways in game, some more efficient than others. That link back there has several strategies, but the one I have been using is to create a new character approximately once a week. Scooter has been really busy, so I spend time finding things to do in game to entertain myself without leaving her behind in a significant way. For example, the 4th(?) episode of the Living World Season 1 has been on a backburner for at least a month. But hopefully we'll get to it soon.

There are super efficient speed runs (see again, the GW2 Wiki page linked above), but I am basically going over choices for the personal story that I haven't seen or have forgotten. Most of these characters are just quick starts that I do very little to customize at the beginning. Which brings me to a couple recent characters I spent a little extra time on.

The first one is Benji, which I based on a RL friend and colleague. He's a ranger; a bit short with a prodigious beard; of the common folk. He always wanted to join the circus (one of the human story options), and finally gets his chance. The drake, he named Chompers.

I had Benji about a week, then retired him in Lion's Arch. I leveled him using Tomes of Knowledge to 40, equipped him, then played through the beginning of the level 40 story. You get akey at the conclusion of the level 10 story chapter. Then, you get a second key right after the Destiny's Edge reunion at level 40.

The Gwen Stacy look-alike at the top is Valeria Solkysten, my current "one-shot." A noble, this Hero of Shaemoor lost her sister when the sister's seraph (Kryta's army) unit was attacked by a centaur raid. I'm still in the middle of this one. Valeria is my fourth or fifth BLK toon just this autumn. I had been running around Cantha getting the elite specialization on all my regular characters. I'm honestly not sure how many keys I've gotten over all. Up till now, I haven't very systematic in my approach to seeing the various iterations of the personal story. 

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This article from I Have Touched the Sky is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If you repost part or all of the work (for non-commercial purposes only), please cite me as the author and include a link back to the blog.

Scooter proofreads almost all my articles before I post them, for which I am very grateful. However, any mistakes are mine and mine alone (unless otherwise noted). If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after publication. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Autumn Leaves

Greetings Traveler!

We've had a lot of rain for the past week or so. Which is great, because we missed out on a ton of rain over the summer. Also, the summer started with 100°F temps in May and it didn't really let up until August. That August was as cool as it was (still in the 90s) was a relief after May-July.

Of course, I've been playing GW2 and not much else. And not even much of that with school starting back up. Not that I am in school. But Scooter (a teacher) and I share an office, and my gaming keypad disturbs her concentration.

However, today I spent some time finishing out Herald (powered by the legendary dragon, Glint) on my Revenant, Angelonia Embersage. Most of my other level 80s have at least the two elite specializations from Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire, and I am running them through hero points in Cantha to get them the End of Dragons elite specs. Angelonia was missing most of Herald (from HoT) so I took her through that spec first.

I had forgotten that the HoT specs basically can't be played until complete because of the way the traits and skills were organized for those specs. This is especially true for the Revenant, since the entire utility bar changes, and you can't mix and match the utility skills from older specializations. In Path of Fire, they changed it so that you can have a full trait line for the new elite spec as soon as you have 90 hero points devoted to the spec and use skills from other specs to fill out the bar (again, except for Revenant).

In addition to completing Herald on Angelonia, I decided to use the total makeover kit I had in my inventory to, well, give her a makeover. You can see the changes in these pics. All that time outside has "tanned" her skin from a sage to a dark olive. She grew out her cinnamon leaves and dyed(?) them nifty desert dusk. I made a few other tweaks to her features, but she is mostly the same. Maybe a little more hardened from when she first popped out of the Dream. I changed her night-glow as well; it's now less like embers, and more like twilight. However, that dusky glow works well to really change her new do at night, as well. Meanwhile, her ember eyes remind you that morning will arrive soon enough.

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This article from I Have Touched the Sky is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If you repost part or all of the work (for non-commercial purposes only), please cite me as the author and include a link back to the blog.

Scooter proofreads almost all my articles before I post them, for which I am very grateful. However, any mistakes are mine and mine alone (unless otherwise noted). If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after publication. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Decisions, Decisions

Greetings Traveler,

Hey look! Here I am posting again, twice in a row. And it's not even Blaugust anymore. This is mostly just a follow-up to yesterday's post regarding the free mount skins. I was considering the Mastiff, but ultimately decided to go with my other choice in the jackal category: the Tidal Lightpaw.

Blaugust 2022 Wrap-up

Greetings, Traveler!

So I didn't actually do as well this year as I did last year. I have excuses, but none of them really matter. This is all just a hobby. Now, congratulations to all of you that managed to achieve something blogging related this month. Now, hopefully, I will maintain a modicum of momentum and keep posting here and there.

The Mounts I Have Liked Using the Most?

Greetings Traveler!

So I read a series of posts yesterday from Nogamara, Paeroka, and Syp (through MassivelyOP), about "What mounts do you like using the most?" Currently, I am playing Guild Wars 2 pretty exclusively. Though reading through blog posts, I am tempted by other old favorites.