Fractals Guide

We finally got a solid group of 5 to complete Ascalon Catacombs last night, and it went pretty well! I think we'll do well in the other dungeons now. I'm looking forward to next week.

I saw this Fractals guide on Guild Wars Insider, and thought it would be useful for the next time we try that out.

Cooking Guide

http://www.guildwarsinsider.com/cooking-1-400-guide-on-the-cheap/

This method takes away all of the *fun* of leveling up cooking, and it doesn't fill out your recipe selection. But it certainly gets you to 400 skill cheaply.

New Players! And Cooking!

First, I'd like to welcome our two new players, both of whom I've known for a very long time. Glad you could join us! Sunday and Monday evenings between 7:30 and 9:30 are the semi-official group days. I'd love to see a group of 5 of us online at the same time!

Also, I just found this cooking page. It breaks down all of the recipes by what sort of benefits they give you. I'll be using it to help inform my rise to 400.

Lack of Furor

Zubon, over at Kill Ten Rats made an interesting point : No one has gone apeshit over the fact that Guild Wars 2 includes homosexuality and atheism. In fact, as he points out, the only monotheistic groups in the game are actually serving deceivers and demons. The game has sold 2 million copies already, so perhaps it's only a matter of time before the mass media gets wind of the potential controversy.

Keeping it Real

First, I'd like to say that I really enjoy this game. I'm having a lot of fun with it.

That said, we're all aware of some problems. I counseled a friend last night to wait to purchase it, since he was new to MMOs. The issues we've been facing might be severely off-putting to someone with less desire and/or patience.

I was selling the game to the same friend, and said that if he joined a few weeks later, it wouldn't matter so much, since our higher level characters would be bumped down if we came to run with him. This is true and not true, as Zubon posted over at Kill Ten Rats. And Zubon's post came from SynCaine's post about the same thing. The main points are:

• You downlevel not to the lowest level of the content, but the highest.
• Higher level characters will have more skills to choose from..
• Higher level armor will still protect more than lower level armor.
• Higher level weapons are more likely to have damage increases that won't be nerfed by the downscaling.

The gap closes as the lower character rises, however. And more importantly, I think real-world friendship can still bridge a lot of that gap. Is power-leveling so bad? We did it in Borderlands, and it didn't break our enjoyment of the game. And even when it wasn't to our advantage, we often came back to help lowbie alts in WoW. I don't think it's going to be a problem in GW2.

Other problems are still being ironed out by Arena.Net. Logins were spotty this morning. They've taken the in-game mail down a few times for some reason. The trading post has been down pretty much since the second day of headstart. Overflow is still wonky. But I've had an epiphany about that.

Each "zone" has its own capacity and overflow. The starter zones were chock full of new players, so of course everyone spent a lot of time in overflow trying to get their party together. But as time goes on, and people spread out into all of the zones, we should see less people being sent to overflow. That should make it much easier to party up. I'd say in another week, maybe two, it won't be an issue.

The queues for WvW are still somewhat disturbing, however.

So there are a few flaws. But then every game has them. And this game is far from "over". It's not shipping and then laying off its staff. It's a living game, and they're constantly working to make it better. And since it's already pretty damn good, that's good enough for me.

Combo Fields & Finishers

In list/spreadsheet/image form:
Fields: http://i.imgur.com/UAwyv.png
Finishers: http://i.imgur.com/RYj5h.jpg

Combo calculator:
http://mastodonte.fr/outils/tool-combo#en

Crafting Materials

Here are a couple of links detailing crafting material locations and enemies that drop them.

This worksheet is still a work in progress:
http://goo.gl/LfUAT

Map of crafting nodes:
http://gw2craftmap.bteamgaming.com/

Character name is Rovela Sori.

We Are The Two Percent [MILK]

There was no fight for our original guild name during beta, but within an hour of launch, someone else had stolen it. Such are the ways of the internet. So now we are The Two Percent. We're just as selective as before, but we've got higher caloric value now.