Gilled Horse Chew
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https://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/1/11/Mini_Old_Tom.jpg
So there's this minipet of a cat robot I got from an achievement by putting 4 other cat robot minipets (each using 3 of the previous along with a few expensive items to make) into my account wardrobe.
The thing is, Mini Old Tom is HUGE. Not as big as actual Old Tom from the Uncategorized fractal, but...
Compare that to Tequatl the Sunless, a goddamn dragon. My body is about as thick as the real one's fingers, if not a little thinner.
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VIDEO GAME ECONOMIES
A little backstory: Just over a year ago, Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns was released. Included with the huge set of changes was a change to the recipe for the item that grants armor its power.
- To sync armor crafting with weapon crafting, and to help maintain the value of leather, masterwork, rare, and exotic inscriptions will now be crafted with patches made from leather and cloth.
- To account for the added leather cost, the amount of cloth required to make an insignia is reduced.
Instead of requiring 5 bolts of gossamer and 20 spools of gossamer thread for each of the six pieces of armor in a set, they changed the recipe to require 5 gossamer patches.
Gossamer patches can be made in groups of 5 by combining 10 hardened leather squares, 25 spools of gossamer thread, and 4 bolts of gossamer.
And because most of the activities that result in gaining cloth also result in gaining leather, and vice versa, making leather required out of nowhere and making cloth less demanded has two results that should be obvious to anyone that ever walked past an Economics 101 class. Demand goes up for leather, which leads to people farming more leather, which leads to the supply of cloth going up, and because the demand for cloth went down instead of up, cloth is now worthless and leather is more valuable than gold.
Just to be even clearer: in the gossamer patch recipe, which is required for every piece of high level armor, hardened leather accounts for 97.86% of the price, and gossamer cloth accounts for only 0.51% of the price.
- To sync armor crafting with weapon crafting, and to help maintain the value of leather, masterwork, rare, and exotic inscriptions will now be crafted with patches made from leather and cloth.
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Guild Wars 2's economy is very realistic.
Head of Garlic: 10s45c
Sesame Seed: 15s47c
Pepper Steak Dinner: 2s30c
Candy Cane: 1s68c
Gold Ingot: 1s66c
Sugar Cookie 43c
Stick of Butter 2s32c
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avwqxSGaq3Y
If nothing else, I'm excited that they used the Battle on the Breachmaker music.
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@ben_lubar looks fun!
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Sp apart from two blues and a green, I got this from Dragon's Stand:
From top left to bottom:
row 1: six useless potions that increase "map rewards" and a Gift of the Jungle, which is required for crafting items such as the bow that shoots tigers instead of arrows and a stick which attracts ravens that you throw at your enemies and a fishbowl that you use to block attacks and also to carry your pet sea cow.
row 2-3: weapon parts for the machined axe, sword, rifle, focus, and scepter. I still need the parts for the pistol, dagger, and mace. I've finished the greatsword, hammer, longbow, shield, short bow, staff, torch, and warhorn.
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@ben_lubar said in Gilled Horse Chew:
row 2-3: weapon parts for the machined axe, sword, rifle, focus, and scepter. I still need the parts for the pistol, dagger, and mace. I've finished the greatsword, hammer, longbow, shield, short bow, staff, torch, and warhorn.
How many of those are equippable by your class?
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@PleegWat said in Gilled Horse Chew:
@ben_lubar said in Gilled Horse Chew:
row 2-3: weapon parts for the machined axe, sword, rifle, focus, and scepter. I still need the parts for the pistol, dagger, and mace. I've finished the greatsword, hammer, longbow, shield, short bow, staff, torch, and warhorn.
How many of those are equippable by your class?
I have a character from each of the nine professions, and all of them have the elite specialization unlocked, so... all of them?
Here's a chart: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Weapon#Weapon_usability_by_professions
There are no aquatic machined weapons.
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So I'm trying to get the Bitter Cold mastery point and I find a jumping puzzle that looks like it could lead me there. I try about three times to complete the jumping puzzle and fail the last jump each time. Someone else walks out of the area above me and says "just take the thermal tube". I turn back and sure enough, before the start of what I thought was a jumping puzzle is a thermal tube that launches me straight into the platform they were on and I die.
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Ugh, I apparently need 9500 unbound magic, 209 gold, 95 winterberries, 950 globs of ectoplasm, and 475 elder wood logs to finish the new achievements:
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@ben_lubar said in Gilled Horse Chew:
Ugh, I apparently need 9500 unbound magic, 209 gold, 95 winterberries, 950 globs of ectoplasm, and 475 elder wood logs to finish the new achievements:
Ah, apparently that one isn't required and I just need to kill the last boss without getting frozen to complete them.
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Ok, so the new zone has 4 daily achievements. All of them give the same reward:
Chest of the Bitterfrost Frontier Hero
It contains:
- Sip of Liquid Karma
- 2 Fresh Winterberries
- When eaten, grants 25 to 50 unbound magic.
- Can be used to make pie, ice cream, or a sauce that can be used to marinate a steak or dress a salad.
- Used as a currency for some vendors in Bitterfrost Frontier.
- 25 Unbound Magic
- Scrap of Maguuma Mastery
- Grants 12,700 experience points towards any mastery track that uses green mastery points.
So you can theoretically get four of those boxes per day. But you shouldn't. Let's go through the 4 achievements:
- A Torch in the Ice - Participate in lighting or defending a brazier.
- Berry Acquisition - Gather 5 winterberries.
- Daily Bitterfrost Frontier Magic Gatherer - Gather unbound magic in Bitterfrost Frontier.
- Elixir Addiction - Obtain cold resistance from the thaw elixir.
The first three can all be summarized as "do thing that costs time and gives reward, get additional reward". The last one is "do thing that costs items and currency, get additional reward".
When you craft a thaw elixir, Cold Resistance is applied to the current character until 00:00 UTC. It blocks the Bitter Cold effect in the northeastermost part of Bitterfrost Frontier[map], but there's no reason to go there more than once unless you like getting loot you could get anywhere else on the map but much slower.
There is no thaw elixir item, so you can't save it up. Crafting thaw elixir costs:
How do you obtain these items? Winterberries are picked from bushes and found in icebound chests and bought from heart vendors (2,688 karma for 5 berries, once per day per vendor per character). Frostbitten suet is found just by killing things in Bitterfrost Frontier. Cold resistant eggshells are purchasable from a quaggan standing about 2 feet away from a thing that gives you free cold resistant eggshells. Grawl firestones can only be purchased for 1050 karma from a heart vendor.
So by crafting the thaw elixir, you are effectively spending 7-8 winterberries for:
- 12,700 experience points
- 450 karma
Let's assume instead of doing that, you poke one dynamic event enemy and then stand perfectly still until the event ends while you write a forum post about how stupid that daily achievement is. What do you get instead?
- 14,002 experience points (assuming you get the bare minimum participation; otherwise up to 18,669)
- 284 karma (up to 378)
- A small number of coins
- Some unstable cloth, leather, or metal that can be salvaged for crafting materials
And if you have the Karmic Retribution account upgrade, you get 450 karma approximately once every 3.5 kills. So doing this daily is basically throwing berries away for
nothingimmunity to temperature effects in a place you have no reason to go.
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Status: Mailed some ice cream to @royal_poet and @Arantor so they can give it to Koollan, Joohan's son.
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@ben_lubar he has such a sugar rush when you feed it to him
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From reddit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQo0YHCIyV4
On an unrelated note, I'd like to thank ArenaNet for putting the only part of map completion that's locked behind story completion in the new zone in a place that you can get to without doing the story.
It's a point of interest, so all you have to do is use the thermal tube that goes to the mastery point above the frozen waterfall in The Bitter Cold and fall to your death (before or after you freeze to death).
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GOOD NEWS EVERYONE
@royal_poet and I re-attempted that fucking Hearts & Minds battle to kill Mordremoth. After a few rounds of dying, we got to the final section multiple times before triggering rift failing (and thus game breaking) bugs each time we got there. Worst occasion: we triggered the rift failing to weaken Mordremoth on the very last round of it (it happens 3 times, with Mordremoth on 5% health)
Fun fact: we learned the reason we'd struggled with the gliding so much... we were doing it wrong. We'd assumed the whole time that we were meant to jump into the updraft like a regular updraft, except we were meant to run into them and be thrown up into the air anyway. Once we figured that out... holy hell did it get easier (because it was the gliding that killed us most, then bugs)
So I made another bug report, with some extra details, including how the rift was still actually showing on the screen at the time, even though it had 'closed'.
Then we joined some other people including one person who'd literally never done story mode before, and we beat it comfortably, without anyone even dying including the person who'd never done it before. So now we finished Hearts & Minds.
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@Lorne-Kates said in 🎂The cupcake thread of celebrations.:
I bought a bunch of avocados on clearance, and used them all!
I bought a bunch of avocados from the only person in Tyria who sells them.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fallen_Angel_Makayla
Not to be confused with this person from Tyria, who is :
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Enter the lottery! (It's free to anyone with an API key, which can be obtained from https://account.arena.net/applications, and the items they had last year were pretty good.)
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So in order to craft legendary weapons, you have to twice before you can make the precursor. Yesterday I crafted Trust and Hypothesis and today I placed orders for the materials for Tooth of Frostfang Experiment.
I went for Tooth of Frostfang Experiment next because Frostfang is the legendary weapon with the lowest item ID (yes, I really am that boring).
Before Eureka and Shooshadoo, there were quest lines (basically consisting of a list of a bunch of themed tasks) for each of the legendary weapons, but then they realized that making content is hard.
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Apparently I'm Gold 1 (the bottom third of the middle fifth) in PvP. Which is weird because my guild leader is in Bronze and he's better at PvP than I am.
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@ben_lubar said in Gilled Horse Chew:
Which is weird because my guild leader is in Bronze and he's better at PvP than I am.
Update:
Also, there's this new match summary screen:
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I've been seeing this thread pop now and then in the recent list for a while now, and I occasionally checked in to see what it's about. I just now figured out that the thread title is a Mad Gab of the game's title.
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Status: Matchmaking means you win approximately 50% of your matches
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@ben_lubar Not enough players at your skill level?
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@PleegWat said in Gilled Horse Chew:
@ben_lubar Not enough players at your skill level?
Nah, it's 5v5 and you can only queue for ranked arena solo or with one other person, so I'm just going to blame it on forgetting to take my autism medicine yesterday.
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PLURALS ARE HARD
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Here's a house with a human near it:
That's not a camera trick. They needed a bigger house so they just scaled the model up:
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One of the dialog options for this NPC is "Where can I find the beached ships?"
I have no idea where you can find the beached ships. Could it be THE BEACH? WITH THE SHIP ON IT?
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Along the way, I threw a beehive into a well.
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@e4tmyl33t said in Gilled Horse Chew:
If I start running the new Legion content with a second character in WoW, I should do a thread with a series of those "diary" type posts like Ben had to chronicle their adventure...
Just realized I completely forgot that I had planned to do this when I started running my alts...now I have 4 at max level and in various stages of gearing for things. Poo. That could've been fun.
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Ok, so a new quest appeared today. You honor two sylvari firstborn by going into their memory and killing them. The final boss fight requires you to kill yourself. Then you get to choose between a dagger, sword, greatsword, scepter, and shield. If you get all five, you get a crappier greatsword. The day after you complete the quest, you get a letter from the nurse tending the spirit of a tree, and the tree's spirit gives you the title Knight of the Thorn.
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Ok, so I updated my item goals script so you can specify your own API key, like https://benlubar.github.io/useless-crap/gw2-item-goals-legendaries.html?access_token=806A2E66-D870-8E4F-BF35-840D64723775629D5348-A87D-4D4D-A90B-7BB3426B395C
I also made this page, which shows what you need to do to get a full set of best-in-slot gear for all your characters: https://benlubar.github.io/useless-crap/gw2-item-goals-ascended.html
@Arantor @royal_poet @Fox @FrostCat @blakeyrat create a (read-only) API key at https://account.arena.net/applications and post it here so I can spy on you
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@ben_lubar
I see he's starting small and reachable for his first list.
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Tempted to get back into the game, but then I remember why I quit every online game: terrible connection quality gets more irritating than the game is fun :(
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@Kian
If you ever want a second set of eyes to scope out your setup and see if there's anything you can do short of changing ISPs, shoot me a PM or something.
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@izzion said in Gilled Horse Chew:
@ben_lubar
I see he's starting small and reachable for his first list.Those are in ID order. @FrostCat started with Incinerator and is now working on Kudzu.
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Previous attempt fails at 2:04
Current attempt starts at 11:05
Boss uses first relevant attack at 14:43
Current attempt fails at 14:44
That's twelve minutes and thirty nine seconds of waiting followed by one second of fucking it up.
GAME DESIGN!
Edit: By the way, I'm uploading this on MilwaukeePC, so come back
tomorrownext month
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@ben_lubar
Hence why the canonical way to do that is to have a friend complete the mission why you lie down dead.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM8scVjm-LA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwpUkbfECs4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdSIhQ21ywoThe only story journal achievements I have left are in the instance that was buggy when @Arantor and @royal_poet attempted it and has apparently not been fixed. They're "do it without getting hit by the tracking projectiles you can't dodge" and "do it but in a mode where all the bosses deal a billion times as much damage and the instance takes 45 minutes if you're successful and don't have to restart at all".
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My progress so far in Guild Wars 2 PvP League Season Six, playing 10 matches per day:
(First match of the day at the bottom, last match of the day at the top.)
Yesterday:
Today:
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From that last match:
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So Stephen Colbert had a panel of experts figure out how much it would cost to build Trump's wall. They reached an estimate of $2,000,000,000,000.
According to https://gw2efficiency.com/currencies/gems, that's currently worth 26,544,000,000,000 gold in Guild Wars 2.
According to https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator/70733-Gold-Wall, that gets us 1,880,472,668,536 gold walls.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gold_Wall
I don't have a gold wall in my guild hall, but I do have what appears to be the same arch as you can see on the left of the wiki's screenshot:
The ability I used in that screenshot has a range of 480 units, which are approximately equal to inches[1]. The arch looks like it's half as wide as the gold wall in the wiki's screenshot, and it looks about half as wide as the ability I used in my screenshot. That means the walls are 40 feet wide.
That means we can build a 75,218,906,741,440 foot long wall for the cost of Trump's wall, assuming you don't have to pay people to play a video game.
My wall goes around the circumference of the Earth 572,098 times.
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Can you guess which match my Milwaukee PC router decided to reboot for 5 minutes during?
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@ben_lubar No, I can't.
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@ben_lubar You mean that's nothing to do with ice cream?
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@RaceProUK said in Gilled Horse Chew:
@ben_lubar You mean that's nothing to do with ice cream?
Unfortunately, no :(