Thursday, August 22, 2013

Guild Wars 2 - Clockwork Chaos!

So I haven't written anything in some time.  To be honest, I've felt a great sense of malaise when it comes to the blog and putting material up.  I've just had a hard time feeling like I could say something that hasn't been said a million times already by other people, in ways probably more effective than I could.

But I have been kind of itching to put together some video of some sort.  It just seems like what everyone's doing these days, and other than the teasers I built for Atomic City Adventures, I really haven't done much creation of YouTube content well, at all.  And I wanted to try it.  So I did, and you can see the result below.  And I gotta say, I'm pretty pleased because essentially I took 39 minutes of video footage and trimmed it down to a brisk 3 1/2 minutes.  Well to be precise, I didn't do it per se, PowerDirector 9.0 did it, but you get the idea.  Now you might think this would produce something that is chaotic and disjointed, but actually, the Clockwork Invasion event is really just about that chaotic and disjointed!




So let's talk about the event itself.  I won't go to far into the backstory of the event, but essentially this update introduces a new villain - Scarlet.  We don't know much about Scarlet (except she's a mad Sylvari), but she has perverted the Queen's new automatons - the Clockwork, into twisted abominations that now do her bidding.  And in this new event, she attempts to invade a different zone, every hour, on the hour.  The zone that her invasion is taking place is announced at the top of the hour, and you have ten minutes to get into the zone (or one of the overflows) to get in at the beginning of the event.

You'll then be trying to close the portals in the zone by defeating all of the enemies at each portal location.  And there are a lot of them.  And you only have 45 minutes to complete the task.  Furthermore, the minions pour into the zone in waves (there are three in total) and with the 2nd wave, some reinforcements will show up in the form of villains from a previous update.  This may mean molten core, but more likely it'll mean Aetherblades, and if you know anything about Aetherblades, you know they can be a pain!

If you're running the event, there's a couple of tips you should keep in mind.  First, don't necessarily just zerg up on the commander.  If everyone follows a big zerg around, you won't get to all the portals in time, and you'll fail the event.  Try to use a toon that has the entire zone unlocked, if you can.  Each time you defeat a portal, look for the next portal location near you, and start heading to it.  If you can't fine one near you, then waypoint to one that is close to a waypoint.  Even if you're in overflow, you will be put back into the same overflow, so teleporting around is safe.  When you destroy a portal, don't hang around for the trash.  Get moving and head to the next portal location.  Unless there's a champion.  Kill All The Champions!  The only reason you're there is for the champion boxes, to be honest, so even if the portal is down, if it's spawned a captain - take it down! One final thing, Scarlet will appear from time to time at various portals, just as you close them.  Ignore her - she's just there to distract you, and will poof away as soon as her health starts to go down.  Don't look for her for real until the third wave is getting close to being finished off.  Then when she appears, you've got about 20 seconds to get to her, before she's down.

Overall, it's a blast of an event.  And it's incredibly lucrative.  I'm averaging around 3 gold per run just in silver and blues & greens that I vendor. And that doesn't include the tons of mats, clockwork sprockets, and karma flasks you accumulate.  Some people are saying they're going to do nothing but that event for the next two weeks, and I can't say I blame them - it's an incredibly efficient wealth accumulator.  Myself, I can only do 2 or 3 in a sitting, before I have to take a break and do something else.  I'm not really cut out for endurance grinding in an MMO - and to be honest, life's too short anyway.

In any event, hope you enjoy the video, and look for some more.  I won't say soon.. because well.. we all know exactly how I am.  And let me know what you think about the Clockwork Events!



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