GW2 Video Reception!

As you may have read earlier, I put together a time lapse video during the last Beta Weekend. (If you don't know, well then you should go check it out because apparently the whole internet is talking about it!)

Wow! First off I couldn't be more happy with some of the comments I'm getting. You people are amazing! And secondly, 16,200 views in 4 days is no laughing matter! I had an idea that people would like what I was putting together, but this goes way beyond what I could have imagined. So thank you to everyone who's watched, reposted, shared, talked about, or in any other way contributed to spreading my video around the internet. You are all gentlemen (or women) and scholars. I salute you.

Also, I figured I'd take this opportunity to answer a few questions that keep popping up.

How do you hide your character in a screenshot?
Hopefully ArenaNet will change this and allow for a first person view mode, but if they don't it's actually quite simple. 1) Type /sleep. 2) Zoom in the camera a little. 3) Your character should now be hidden. If your character is still in the screenshot you may have to play with the viewing angle a little so they are hidden, but it shouldn't take much. I've found that using a Human works best since out of all the races right now they're the smallest and the Charr's horns have a nasty habit of getting into your screenshots regardless what you do to hide them.

How did you take that many screenshots!?
I used a handy program called chronolapse. It's super easy to setup and you can set it to take a screenshot at whatever time interval you want. Then you set a folder you want it to save the screenshots to and voila! There you have it! 10,000 screenshots, every 3 seconds, all saved in one place!

On the usability side I did find out that in order for chronolapse to actually work right you have to set Guild Wars 2 to "Fullscreen Windowed" mode, under screen resolution, otherwise for whatever reason chronolapse will just take screenshots of your desktop, which is very much not what I want everyone looking at. Also, once I had taken all the screenshots I did reorganize them so that each location was separated into it's own folder, this made for putting the final video together a lot easier since I could edit each segment individually instead of having to cut up one clip a bunch (23 to be exact) times.

Why did you take screenshots instead of video?
The short answer is: I wanted to save disc space. 10,000 screenshots comes out to about 2GB, whereas 8hours of uncompressed 1080p video is on the upwards of 1.4 TERABYTES!

The long answer is: If I'm taking 1080p video at 30fps and then speeding it up to the rate at which I made the time lapse I would effectively be cutting 89 of every 90 frames out of the videos. That's a lot of wasted footage. If you do the math, 8 hours of video is 864,000 frames and I would only be actually using 10,000 of those. So instead of wasting all those (854,000) frames, I chose to cut out the middle man and just go straight for the screenshots. This speeds up the editing process, since I'm using smaller file sizes (2GB of screenshots instead of 1.4TB of videos), and I don't have all this extra footage wasting my disc space that will eventually just end up on the cutting room floor.

Where is this Sylvari area?
It's in the southwest corner of Kessex Hills. Lychcroft Mere.

In the end all I have to say to everyone is:

Thank you for your support and yes I will definitely be making more videos down the road.

GW2: The Beauty of Tyria

For this Beta Weekend Event I decided to do something a little bit different.

I made a time lapse showcasing Tyria, and how amazing the land is to look at. I realized that I'll have plenty of time to play the game later, and since all this effort to level up and build my characters will eventually be wiped it made since to take a more casual approach to enjoying the BWE. This way I could have something of value to take away from the BWE that's more than just a couple screenshots, or some shiny new shoulders. And you can enjoy it too.

The one thing I didn't think about, but got a good kick out of once I started putting together all of my footage, is how often people would unsuspectingly photobomb my video. In the actual video you hardly notice them, but some of them are quite funny if you take them completely out of context.

GW2 a Mesmer's Role pt.2

Previously I went through a small history on Mesmers and Guild Wars so in part two of this Mesmer bonanza I'm going to look at the new Mesmer and how she fits into GW2 ecosystem.

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If you're part of the 13% of the Guild Wars 2 population who's already decided that a Mesmer is the class for you then that's awesome. I'm glad you're here. But maybe you're on the fence and haven't decided? Maybe you previously played a heavy class and are considering changing it up with a caster this time. Maybe you really love casters, but are put off by the complexity of a Mesmer? Worry not weary traveler by the end of this you'll have a better idea of what a Mesmer is and be fully capable of experiencing one of (IMHO) the most rewarding classes in GW2. So hang on to your butts kids because we're going for a ride.

Mesmers, an Introduction

Mesmers are casters and as such they aren't specifically designed to stand on the front lines and deal with their foes directly That being said, they sure do have plenty of ways to evade, redirect, interrupt, and avoid damage. I've even made an argument for their viability in melee before. But in their purest form Mesmers are actually unique form of hybrid support class. I feel that best way to put it is as follows.

The Mesmers' primary role is to prevent their foes from fighting effectively and to increase the effectiveness of their allies.

Though their support methods can be strange at times primarily Mesmers function to distribute boons, spread conditions, interrupt attacks, or trick foes into killing themselves. There's a number of different ways Mesmers can achieve this goal and Illusions are definitely one of my favorite.

These are not the Mesmers you're looking for

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Illusions are amazing. Illusions deal damage, cause conditions, and can buff your allies. They love distracting enemies, and they're more than willing to die in order to save you. Through traits Illusions can be augmented to do any number of awesome things. Some Illusions even tank damage for you. And the best part is you don't have to get your hands dirty to use them.

Say your party is getting annihilated by Ettins? A timed diversion will interrupt their attacks and prevent them from doing anything for another second. Plenty of time to send them to the grave. Or you could change it up and run for the hills while your Illusions act as a distraction to help you escape. OR you could start the fight entirely differently. Summon the Illusions first and then make your party invisible and sneak up on the Ettins. Kill em before they saw it coming! That'll show those pesky Ettins!

The options are endless. I love having options. The problem is, for a new Mesmer, understanding how to make sense of all this madness. There's currently 17 different skills that create Illusions. Many of them are bound to weapons, but plenty of them are utility skills? Mesmers have a TON of utility skills. Heck, you could fill your bar with just Illusions and still have some leftover. So how do you even make sense of all this?

Well here's a good rule of thumb I've developed.

Focus, Focus, Focus


Find a play style you like and focus on it. Despite what your mother always told you. Do put all your eggs in one basket. Don't diversify your portfolio. Specialize on one thing and do it right. If you're ok at everything, you'll be great at nothing. Be great, be amazing, be spectacular! As an example, if you find yourself always rushing headlong into fights then pick skills that work for you. Fit in skills that stun, stealth, interrupt, and daze. Make sure that your foes are attacking you for as little time as possible. That way you can stab them in the face without retaliation. Lovely!

And when in doubt. Turn it into a moa. Everyone loves roast moa for dinner!

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Originally I had only planned to make this a two part series, but in my writing, rewriting, and revising, I realized that I had enough different content to merit a third part! Lucky you! So stay tuned, next time I'll be looking at how to maximize your Mesmer and even give you some build suggestions as you level through Tyria.

GW and Mesmers. A short history pt.1

I've realized that I'm developing a common theme among my posts. It's definitely Guild Wars, and probably Mesmers. I don't want go and say that for sure all I'm going to write about is Mesmers, but given that's what I have the most direct experience with right now, I'm going to make the most of it and work towards developing this trend. So let's get started properly and work through a some lessons on Mesmers for those of you who are new to the Guild Wars universe, or for those of you who have been here a little while and are only just now considering rolling a Mesmer. In this first installment we're going to go back in time and take a brief look at Mesmer background and history and how they pertained to Guild Wars from the start.

First of all: What are Mesmers, exactly?

In as few words as possible the Mesmer is an Arcane Trickster, my single favorite class description of all time. It gets right to the point. They're not Elementalists, or Mages but they are magic users. At the same time they're also deceivers intent on causing confusion and misdirection. They do damage, but not directly. They have plenty of hexes, but usually the hex comes with a caveat. Something like, the hex will only work if your foe performs and action, or doesn't, or whatever. Though their amazing interrupts and energy denial made them a staple in the PvP format. You can, of course, make a Mesmer revolve around doing direct spike damage and that furthered their roles in structured PvP, but even the Mesmer spike relied on your target having energy to deal it's damage. If your target could hide their energy then most of the spike tended to fall short.

Mesmers: Tyria's Neglected Child.

All these factors served to increase the confusion of  "why bring a Mesmer" specifically in a PvE situation it didn't make sense to bring a character who could only deal damage under certain circumstances. Even with all their usefulness the Mesmer tended to be very contextual. Mesmers were a class that was complex by nature and the massive pool ArenaNet had developed with their skill system (1319 total skills to be exact, of which a player could use any 8 from 2 different professions. Giving them anywhere from 222 to 281 skills to pick from at any given them) only worked to compound this complexity. Furthermore there wasn't typically something that a Mesmer could do that another class couldn't also do. After all, with the secondary class system anyone could take a Mesmer skill if they wanted. And in PvE, when the goal is to kill mobs as quickly as possible, people usually just went for the damage. It just made more sense.

You tank the mob, you heal the tank, you kill the mob.

A Mesmer was a big question mark in that equation. On their own, were too niche to handily fit into the standard Holy Trinity template. They were great for soloing, and specific builds, but general PvE didn't have a place to fit them in. Mesmers were almost too specific of a class.


If you're interested in some deeper reading on the Mesmer's lack of a role in PvE I suggest this post, it's quite lengthy but it goes into great detail on the issue.

Introducing ... Hard Mode.

Turn the clocks forward to the Hard Mode update. The days of Normal Mode and mass nuking were over. Previously all that the party needed was tanking, healing, and damage. They could clump up the mobs and decimate them all in one swoop. Elementalists were great at that. The introduction of Hard Mode improved monster AI dramatically, and increased their health and damage. Packs of mobs no longer stayed clumped up under meteor storms. They would scatter and avoid damage. Nuking, in the old sense, was no now impossible.

The group now needed a way to control the mobs as well, mitigate damage, reduce their healing, and shut them down. So much so that if you're going to run any Hard Mode PvE content today you'll always want to consider including Mesmers. It turns out that the way most Mesmer abilities worked made them perfectly suited to exploit Hard Mode and the mobs' increased attack speed and altered AI. Since Mesmers had always done damage best whenever mobs performed actions, now that they were performing actions 33% faster it meant that the mobs were actually now killing themselves 33% faster as well. It became a perfect situation for Mesmers to flourish. Then take into account Mesmer's amazing interrupts, they became crucial to killing any mob that had a lot of healing potential. The Mesmer could shut down the healer and the rest of the group could do their job and finish off the pack.

That's where it turns out the Mesmer fit in after all, by controlling how and when their foes perform actions. When you can't act, you can't fight, and when you can't fight, you die.

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I hope you enjoyed this short lesson on Mesmers. In the next part I'll be looking at the new Mesmer and how she fits into the Guild Wars 2 universe.

RNG Achievements. A rant

Achievements for me are a love hate thing. I love them because it's a fun way to know how much of a game I've finished. I hate them because it's a terrible way to remind me how much of a game I haven't finished. Thanks Xbox for eternally changing (ruining?) the way people play games.

Why do I bring this up? And what's the significance of RNGs here? Well it's taken me quite some time to get around to it, but I've finally queued up Borderlands in my wait for my next Guild Wars 2 hit (tip of the hat to Ravious over at Killtenrats for helping me realize I'm a GW2 drug addict), and generally Borderlands is 100% superfun. I grew up on Diablo so dungeon grinding and loot whoring is familiar territory for me. Also I sure do love me some good ol fashioned FPS frag fests. Borderlands delivers on that end, completely. So combined all that together and you've got yourself a recipe for one awesome game, and it is awesome. The killing, murdering, exploding, hilarious vulgar humor, and spectacularly great gun design.

But then they just had to go in and add totally retarded achievements. I've probably killed the entire Claptrap population twenty times over and I have yet to get all my goldfish, or panties, or pizza, or oil cans, or .... whatever. Heck I'm certain I've made the Hyperion corporation mine out an entire sector of space to build, and rebuild, all the Claptraps I've blown to bits over my search for stupid robot fish. The worst part is that even after you've collected all your pointless 3D glasses they continue to drop. It's like the Claptraps, even in their death, continue to taunt me, "Look, here's some more 3D glasses! Too bad what you really need is our panties!" The worst part is, naturally, that there's no Achievement tracker. I don't even know, for certain, if I've already collected all the panties I need and since they keep dropping I keep picking them up because maybe with the next one I'll finally ding the achievement over and be done with this torment in RNG robot hell.

Oh yeah, on a final note, I hate you stupid robots in Portal 2. Why can't you be better at rock-paper-scissors. I swear from now on I'm sticking to fantasy titles. It's obvious robots aren't good for my health.

GW2 The value of 100%

I'm hooked! It's like drug. I just have to do it. After I finished Queensdale there was no turning back. I've become a completionist.

I'm a perfectionist, maybe it's my biggest flaw, so when I get a reminder every time I zone of how much of an area I have left to complete I always have the nagging urge to get that one last heart, or find that final way point. It's a nice reminder though, Guild Wars 2 doesn't force you to do anything if you don't want to and there's no rush either. Completing a zone in 15minutes won't get you any extra rewards and the journey to 100% is where all the fun is anyway. 

For example, I was on my way to get the last heart in Diessa Plateau and ran across this guy laying waste to the Town of Nageling. There was a number of Charr, Norn, and Humans all working together to fend off the giant and many of them were already dead on the ground by the time I showed up. A dynamic event like this, with it's promises of loot, experience, karma, and gold is just too hard to pass up. How could I not help out? After all, I am the awesome level 33 Mesmer who vanquished the Centaur Horde from Kessex Hills. Lending a hand is my duty.

For my troubles was rewarded with a badass sword. It had +condition damage, great DPS and since I was in dire need of replacing the crap sword I had been running around with for what seemed like an eternity, well I couldn't have been happier.

Did I mention the sword was badass? Just look at the spikes.

The crazy part is that to get 100% in Diessa Plateau the Champion Giant is totally optional, and yet completely necessary. Having a "questing structure" (I don't know if I should even call it that, you never actually accept a quest apart from your personal story) that creates habitual exploration like Guild Wars 2 has done means that by venturing out to complete a zone you feel obliged to help every little villager who's running into an issue. You're a spectacular hero saving the lands from subjugation and ruin, and by doing so getting handsomely rewarded in the process.

Oh and if that wasn't reason enough, once you finally do get that coveted 100% the Tyrian Explorer's Society mails you gold, and loot, and praise. It's all win and I'm loving every obsessive moment of it.

GW2 Mesmers and Melee

I figured I'd preface this post with a little bit of background, over the last few betas for GW2 I've been playing a Mesmer almost exclusively. Sure I've leveled up some other classes (Guardian, Warrior, Engineer...) but the class I've been having the most fun with has definitely been the Mesmer, which honestly surprised me a lot. Back in the original Guild Wars days I went full tilt with a warrior (40/50 Hall of Monuments and all that jazz) and definitely enjoyed every minute of it. I had tried plenty of other classes, but the warrior was one that I always kept coming back to. So going into GW2 I was almost convinced that for sure I'd end up going with a warrior or guardian. I just like heavy classes, even in WoW I had warrior a deathknight mains. There's just something about plate mail that gets me excited, maybe it's the shoulder pads. Also I definitely enjoy hitting like a freight train. With that in mind, you can imagine how it would be hard for me to fathom playing a caster, a cloth wearing, squishy, fragile, paper thin caster. And not only that, but a support caster no less. Up until this time my entire gameplay experience has been based around getting up in the thick of battle and carving my way through the horde like Paul Bunyan felling a forest of bodies. I enjoyed the feeling of combat. All this wishy washy magicy stuff just never was my thing.

Boy was I wrong. What I had not considered is that it tuns out I enjoy deception EVEN MORE.

Now, for those of you who haven't quite gotten your feet wet in Guild Wars the Mesmer is what's being referred to as an "Arcane Trickster" and they are amazing. It's a class that revolves around controlling the battle, through either conditions, clever use of invisibility, or the ability to control who has boons and who doesn't. They also have the unique advantage of being able to create Illusions, clones of themselves, which can be used either for straight up damage or can be shredded to confuse, daze, or spike your enemies. The best part of the Illusions is that they're more than willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good, and with the right build they're never in short supply. Of course you're limited to only 3 illusions at a time, so you do have to be clever about how and when you use them, but with the right decision making shredding your illusions for a clutch daze can change the tide of battle in a millisecond. It's a highly complex class, so maybe the Mesmer isn't for everyone, but I'm always up for a challenge, and the satisfaction of being able to completely get into the head of your opponents in the way the a Mesmer only can is simply astonishing.

Now that you have some idea about how Mesmers work you might recall that I'd mentioned at the start I'm the most comfortable getting right up in the face of my enemies, and recently everyone and their mother has been complaining about melee in GW2 being underpowered. I figured, this being the beta, I would take that as a of challenge and see if Mesmers could actually hold their own in melee. Noted being a melee caster you can't tank a mob straight up unless you like being gibbed in a second so I wasn't getting my hopes up for some stellar performances, but with the Distortion mechanic you can completely negate the bigger hits mobs can dish out, combine that with the main hand sword abilities like Blurred Frenzy or the torch's ability to make you invisible Mesmers have a surprisingly high level of melee survivablitiy. Furthermore the sword's auto attack applies stacks of vulnerability and removes boons which gives your party a hefty damage boost. So far so good, it would appear that building up a melee Mesmer wasn't completely out of the question and actually complemented some of the other classes quite well.

For weapon and gear suggestions what I was tending to lean towards a sword/sword or sword/torch primary set with either a greatsword or scepter/focus secondary set. The sword/sword main set gives you a good level of damage output and distortion with a block option on the offhand to negate even more damage. Having the torch offhand grants you the aforementioned invisibility escape and a phantasm that stacks retaliation on all the allies in the area which can be useful in the right scenarios. Personally I felt that from a playstyle perspective the sword/torch works much better in the pvp realm than it did in pve given that invisibility isn't the best escape mechanic for pve and having the extra block from the offhand sword makes staying around in melee range much easier. The secondary set really depends on how your trait build is, if you're heavily stacking power and precision then the greatsword is a good option for it's damage output at range. The greatsword also has a good cripple and knockback for those 'oh shit' moments when you absolutely have to get away. On the other hand if you're leaning more towards a truer 'melee support' role then the scepter/focus option shines for its illusion generation and confusion stacking. You can also take advantage of some of the Inspiration, and Illusion traits to get some more utility out of your Illusions than you would normally. Since this build doesn't rely on conditions to do it's damage you are primarily going to want to look for toughness, vitality, power, and precision on your gear to make sure you can stay alive when you're in melee range and still be able to dish out enough damage to merit getting in close.

So for those of you who are looking for a little bit of a challenge, and something quite a bit different, I highly recommend trying out a melee Mesmer. You might be surprised at how much fun you end up having. And definitely keep checking back, in a later post I'm going to break down traits and builds to really get in and show you how to optimize your Mesmer.

GW2 What is your story?

ArenaNet recently posted an amazing story about the real world inspiration for Ameranth, a Sylvari NPC who's decided to venture every corner of Tyria. They mention that you can find her outside of The Black Citadel, which is definitely true. I stumbled across this particular Sylvari during the beta and was definitely curious why she was standing there on the steps of the Charr fortress. Not only was she completely across the continent, the towering structures of iron and flame were a massive contrast to the Sylvari standing at their steps. The designers have definitely put quite some time into polishing the GW2 world and living up to their claim to create a living and breathing Tyria.

To think that it's entirely possible that there could be any number of other characters in GW2 who have been inspired by such stores is great. We already know that the ArenaNet team is going to great lengths to build community for GW2, and given that they've said that they will be making sure to add post-launch content there's no question that any other stories or events worthy of praise could get included into the game with ease. They even go on to add that anyone could go out and have a similarly epic real life quest. You don't have to be superman, you just need to get up and walk out the door. ArenaNet keeps asking in GW2 "What is your story?" maybe now is the time to find out. After all, you could be next to be immortalized into Tyria, forever standing as a hero against the Elder Dragons.

Server Psychosis

The internet is going crazy. They can't get their fix of digitized mayhem, gore, loot and gold. If you know what the significance of the number 37 is then you're right in the middle of it. The Lord of Terror is causing devastation and death and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Barred on the other side of the wall, helpless, hopeless and filled with desperation.

It is happening now, it has happened before, and it will surely to happen again.

We've all been there in the past, when the servers crashed. Feverishly smashing 'log in' and hoping that the servers had fixed themselves in the 5 seconds since the last time and instead, without realizing, guaranteeing that our focused DDoS attacks would keep Blizzard down even longer. Kotaku summed it up nicely earlier today, and the gravity of the situation persists. This is, as it stands, not just a problem with how Blizzard has decided to structure their servers for Diablo III. It's a problem inherent in the online gaming world, and the problem is not going away. There is an extreme demand for online gaming, and the demand is growing, as casual games attract larger and larger markets the entry point into "gaming" has become so accessible to anyone that it's entirely possible your next door neighbor is cursing Error 37 right along with you.