There was pretty awesome news this week regarding precursors in the Heart of Thorns expansion for Guild Wars 2. For those not up to speed, the new system of post-80 progression (80 being the level cap) is Mastery points, which give you various perks to gameplay without ostensibly making your character more powerful. These Masteries include things like hang-gliding, learning native languages to talk with certain NPCs, and interacting with mushrooms to gain buffs. One of the big ones was a Mastery Line that allows players to craft precursor items, extremely rare exotic weapons that are required to craft a Legendary Weapon.
Legendaries are on the same power level as Ascended Weapons, but provide some cool effects to your character when you have them equipped. The longbow Kudzu will generate a arc of flowers whenever you fire it, and the scepter Meteorlogicus will cause your character to leave a trail of clouds and lightning in their wake as they tromp across Tyria. In addition to footfall and attack animations, they each have a unique look. Getting them is a grind, but the reward is worth it. The most frustrating requirement has always been the precursor item, which is a random and extremely rare drop unless you fork over hundreds of gold, often over one thousand, in the auction house.
The new system of precursor crafting changes a lot of this. In addition to making them all account bound, the Precursor Crafting mastery will require players to go around Tyria and perform various tasks. It's a grind, but it something that will uproot people from high level zones (even more so than dailies, map completion, and other events in GW2 already do) and get them back into those mid level zones which are often more sparsely populated.
A good example (perhaps itself a precursor) of this type of lengthy quest is one I'm completing right now, the Quest for Mawdrey. Mawdrey is an item that was implemented with the Living World storylines in Season 2. Playing through the roughly ninety minute long story chapter rewards you with, among other things, a Mysterious Seed, which you can cultivate in crafted Clay Pots with Magically Infused Plant Food to grow a malicious vine back-piece. In addition to the backpiece, you get another unique item that will eat Bloodstone Dust (an item that quickly accumulates from completing world events) a few times each day and turn it into a bag of good quality loot.
Running through the Living World Story and getting the Seed is the easy part. After that, you have to farm Geodes in an area of Dry Top to buy the recipes for your Clay Pot and Plant Food, which then requires a Master Crafter to use. You'll need several piles of Plant Food, of varying varieties, and each serving can only be crafted once per day. Growing Mawdrey also requires some steps that force players back into mid-level zones in often overlooked areas of the map. These steps include purifying a vial of Glacial Water with a shard of ice found in frozen ruins, and infusing Leyline Dust at an Asuran Labratory located inside of a volcano. Even though I have full map completion on Sebastian, my main, the Volcano Lab was a new experience for me that I didn't find when I was leveling, so getting to return and run through it made me feel like a zone I technically had 100% on still had some new things for me to discover. And it's that sort of experience that really makes a game immersive.
It's going to take me a while before I complete Mawdrey, and with the Feast of Abundance coming to Hex, I'm going to have to take some time out from the Silverwastes to hop into a few drafts and snag a playset of alternate art Concubunnies. I'm also going to try to run a Shin'hare deck through the Arena now that I have a few copies of Nori and some Roshi equipment. Even if you don't plan on drafting, make sure you log in to Hex for the promotional sleeves, and try your hand at the Frost Arena if you haven't.
No comments:
Post a Comment