Sunrise, the Legendary Weapon, is mine!

Hello my friends! It is a good morning for me, as after years of first wanting a legendary weapon, this happened just this morning.

Here comes the sun, dee da doo da!

That's right . . . after years of wanting a legendary weapon, I own the Sunrise!  Here's how it went down for me.

Waaaaay back when Guild Wars 2 launched, I was all onboard. I was one of those that played the Vanilla game to the ground and during that time I crafted my Gift of Mastery.

So excited I'm leaving behind pee puddles everywhere I run

To earn this you need to combine a Bloodstone Shard, 250 Obsidian Shards, the Gift of Exploration and the Gift of Battle in the Mystic Forge.  The big one out of those four is the Gift of Exploration. It's something you only receive upon World Completion -- that's filling every heart, conquering every hero point, finding every waypoint, viewing every vista, and chugging past every point of interest in the original world. 

I felt pretty good about that when I put it into my bank a decade ago, and it planted a seed in my mind that someday . . . someday I would return to it and craft the other, seemingly insurmountable tasks. That's why it feels so good to now come back to Guild Wars 2 and finally finish this thing up.

As for the other three parts . . . well it all went pretty quickly once I bought the precursor weapon and put my mind to it.  I spent a lot of time in the past hoping that a precursor would drop from one of the World Bosses and started hitting the world boss tour over and over and over.  It became "the thing to do" and really kind of burnt me out. Just outright buying that was about a billion times easier.

I must give a shout out to my guildmates and especially John and Clara from Team Spode. When they heard that I was make a push for a legendary, they dropped a bunch of stuff in the guild bank for me to help cut costs.  My Gift of Fortune was as much theirs as it was mine. They also spent a night helping me get reacquainted with World vs World PvP so I could get some dungeon tokens that I needed for one of the recipes.

Thank you Zommoros! I declare this a fair trade

The Gift of Sunrise requires another sheer show of fortune in that you have to buy 100 icy runestones for a total of 100 gold. The real bears in that formula for making the Gift of Sunrise are the Gift of Metal and the Gift of Light.  One requires a 400 weaponsmith rating to craft. The other takes a 400 armorsmith to craft.  I had the weaponsmith already thanks to my earlier efforts.  The 400 armorsmith required an afternoon of grinding recipes on my alt, which I finally finished up last night.

When you finally craft the legendary weapon, the game plays fanfare music for you for a good while as you beam to yourself.  What a fantastic moment it is!

A light in the darkness!

I really love how bright this sword looks as you run around the now darkened-for-Halloween version of Lion's Arch. I spent a good 15 minutes just running around, stashing the weapon, pulling it back out, trying skills with it . . . good times!

Don't mind me, just admiring my glowy blur

Now that THAT'S finally done, I think I can concentrate on all the myriad of other things there are to think about in this game.

Happy Dueling!

Finishing Path of Fire -- Onward to . . . Legendary?

 And just like that, I finished up the story quests for Path of Fire in Guild Wars 2!

No need for praise, just throw money . . . thank you thank you

That's right! Five years after its release date, I'm here to save the day! Praise me, commoners! 

It's a fun story that all starts with you encountering the Herald of the God Balthazar. Balthazar is one of the six gods in the Guild Wars 2 pantheon and looks over the affairs of war . . . um, and fire . . . and uh, challenge. So I guess he's the god of PvP and Gene Simmons basically.

No need for forgiveness, just throw money . . . thank you thank you

I skipped Living World Season 3. As I understand it, if I hadn't done that I'd have more of a reason to hate Balthazar since that's where he's first introduced as an antagonist in your story. Jumping to Path of Fire wasn't too bad though as I was caught up to speed pretty quickly with what's going on. Old Balthy has been pretty busy turning the souls of the dead into a kind of automaton known as The Forged . . . basically his own personal army.

Since your journey is all about bringing balance back to Tyria, you ain't having none of Balthazar's nonsense and take down his herald . . . and then get the smack down by the god himself. OUCH.

No need for my destruction, just throw money . . . thank you thank you

It's cool though . . . he doesn't outright kill you . . . yet.  That's reserved for your second encounter with Balthazar. Instead Vlast, one of Glint's good guy dragon kids, jumps between you and Balthazar and sacrifices itself for you.  Old Balthy is super hyped about that cruel twist of fate.

When Vlast sacrifices itself for you, it explodes into a bunch of crystals that contain its memory, and you go on a pretty neat quest following all the clues and hearing all about Vlast's history and thoughts.  It's a lot like reading Vlast's personal diary, but instead of pages, they're crystals that talk.  

No need for warnings, just throw money . . . thank you thank you

Balthazar's end goal here is to create a Warbeast and power it up by using Aurene, the other good guy dragon kid of Glint, as a kind of Double A battery. As he sees it, once he's got the Warbeast, then he can lay the smack down on Kralkatorrick! Who's Kralkatorrick (Is it just me or does that name sound like a halitosis condition for a kraken)? It's ANOTHER Elder Dragon that's, I don't know, also pretty bad? (More to come in some follow on post in a few weeks I'm sure)

Anyway . . . Balthazar kills you to draw out Aurene. In fact, he kills you so badly that you completely forget who the heck you even are.  

What's money?

After undergoing a couple quests in the underworld, you finally figure out who you are and what you're doing.  It's a pretty cool sequence where you run into Palawa Joko, who's a legit proper necromancer that commands an army of undead and is basically the King of a little rectangle of Tyria known as the Domain of Vabbi. He's . . . not a nice person . . . which makes it feel even better when you steal his army of undead soldiers.

Can I have these guys follow me around all the time?

Legit jealous of this army of undead as a necromancer player in Guild Wars 2.  I WISH I could command my army of summons as good as this crew. 

At the end of Path of Fire, you find yourself commanding Palawa Joko's army of undead, and your old charr buddy Rytlock Brimstone hands over his uber weapon for you to take on Balthazar a third time . . . and hopefully not die a miserable death this time. 

Whoops . . . Um . . . wonder what consequences that's going to have *big wink*

Spoilers . . . you win.

That final battle with Balthazar and his Warbeast was pretty epic. I had a lot of fun with that, and overall I might even say this was my favorite story arc in Guild Wars 2 yet!

. . . and that leaves the question, what's next?

Woot!  

Spoilers . . . I bought the precursor Dawn at the auction house.

So until next time I'll be gathering the billion things you need to craft the legendary sword Sunrise and finally check off "get a legendary weapon in Guild Wars 2" from my MMO list of things to do.

Happy Dueling!

Finishing Heart of Thorns -- Onward to Path of Fire

I just finished up the storyline content for Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns last night. It was an epic battle to defeat the dragon Mordremoth from the inside out by attacking it within its mind.

Press F for Delivering the Death Blow AND Respects

I am, of course, seven years late on this content since Heart of Thorns released way back in 2015. I went back on my timeline and decided to look and see what had my attention instead of this expansion, and it looks like Team Spode had just made the decision to jump into DCUO again after our stint in Guild Wars 2.

Really, it's Team Spode that has brought me back in to Guild Wars 2 all these years later! It's where we're playing on Sunday nights these days. Last Sunday we were checking out the re-released Living World Season 1 content. It was a huge flashback to those old days. I did all that content back in the day, but apparently they've brought it back (it was limited time previously) and attached new rewards to it.

Guild Wars 2 -- it gives me that old Taimi Feeling

I gotta say, most "rewards" are a bit meaningless to me all these years later. My bank is chock full of trinkets and things I'll never use but earned as a reward sometime in the past. It's that very thing that makes me look at the achievement list for Heart of Thorns and think . . . yeah . . . do I care about that anymore? I mean, it might be cool to earn an exclusive back item for completing all the hard to do story achievements, but it'll just end up as another meaningless trinket in my bank.

Now that I've finished up the story in Heart of Thorns proper, next up is Living World Season 3 content and Path of Fire. I'd decided to skip Living World Season 3 for the time being and just jump into the Path of Fire. I want to get that hopping mount and the skimmer mount from working through the story. Now THOSE I want.  Not the billions of toilet paper rolls and skeleton illusion potions I'm getting in game for Halloween. That stuff is just bank fodder.

Setting sail to Path of Fire -- Man that makes me pine for Eberron and DDO

Anyway, just thought I'd do a quick post to say, yes, I'm still alive and look at me, I'm playing Guild Wars 2! LOL. 

Happy Dueling!