Edition4
Gamer's Mantra It's been nearly a month since the last edition of Gamer's Mantra. The dearth of recent articles is not from lack of topics, but rather from lack of time. You can probably guess why. Like the rest of you, my free time is now largely dedicated to playing Guild Wars. With release, we saw a lot of changes from the beta. One of the most notable changes was the moving of skills. No longer are there just a handful of skill trainers w/ dozens of skills located in each of the major cities. Instead, most of the skills are spread out among quests and many new skill traders in smaller remote cites. In addition, all the Elite Skills must be captured from a boss monster by using the Signet of Capture. For those that played in the beta, this was a major change. No longer can you just play the missions and expect to find all the skills along the way. You now to have to explore. In the last edition, I presented a simple salvaging guide for Pre-Searing Ascalon. It was based on information gathered during the Beta Weekends. However, in the release version of the game, some of the salvage results have changed too. I posted this in the forums in a thread discussing salvaging, but I suspect many people may not see it there. Though this list applies specifically to Pre-Searing Ascalon, you will continue to find similar items in Post-Searing Ascalon that salvage this way when using a basic salvage kit. Pre-Searing Salvage Materials
One of the main changes to the list is for cloth. It had been able to be salvaged from certain wands or off-hand focus items. Now the primary source of those if from salvageable armor. Grawl Shamans seem to be a good source for that in pre-searing. Once you get into post-searing, you'll start finding a lot more armor that salvages into cloth, but for certain classes, it can be difficult to accumulate enough cloth to make your best armor in post-searing Ascalon right away. At some point, you will want to start using an expert salvaging kit instead, since that can yield steel, linen, silk or other rare crafting components from these same basic items. If you don't need crafting components, you should be selling that loot instead. However, during a mission or a long trip into an explorable region, you may have no choice but to salvage some of the items you find due to lack of carrying space. There were many complaints about Fur Squares being too hard to find. It can be salvaged by using an expert kit on a Charr Hide. However, the odds of success are rather poor, and you might burn thru 20 to 30 Charr Hides and an entire Expert Salvage Kit or more just to get 1 Fur Square. Fortunately, ArenaNet realized the problem here and has given us a way to get Fur much easier. In Post-Searing Ascalon City, there is a collector named Calissa Sedgwick that will trade you 1 Fur Square for 4 Charr Hides. This is far better odds than the expert kit. If you need fur, I recommend trading with that collector. The fur change was part of a very large update that happened last week on May 11th. I was logged in when the updated version came out, so I saw the message that a new build was available. When I logged back in, I spotted some of these changes, but only because I new there were coming. Had I not known about them, it would have been very easy to overlook them. Two days ago, I saw someone in Ascalon City trying to buy fur, and he indicated that he'd been unsuccessful in salvaging it from Charr Hides. Even worse, the only replies he was getting told him to just keep trying to expert salvage more Charr Hides. I kindly directed him to pay Calissa a visit, and he was totally amazed by the fact he could trade for fur. Obviously, this update has managed to slip by a lot of players. Since release, other things have changed as well. Some of the armor crafters have been modified, moved or removed. For example, there was a crafter just outside of The Wilds, but he is no longer there. Some of the quests have been modified slightly, and the monster drops have been tweaked as well. ArenaNet has also been quick to stamp out a trading abuse involving the Celestial Sigil, giving it a unique graphic to prevent scammers from selling a minor rune in it's place. ArenaNet is also going to be releasing two new explorable regions, so even more changes are coming soon. Updates in on-line games are common, but they usually don't happen this quickly or this seamlessly. Since these changes have come with little fanfare, players may easily overlook them. Thus far, the main source of information for these updates is ArenaNet's Game Updates page located here: I know I'll keep closely watching that page. Ever since the beginning, ArenaNet has been boasting how well their streaming updates would work, and we are now seeing the proof of it. Many of us probably assumed these on-the-fly updates would be primarily for quickly handling bugs or exploits. However, these streaming updates are also able to modify the game in other ways including new or changed game content. The result is that the game is dynamic. Just as gamers learn to adapt to play the game, the developers are able to make changes to Guild Wars, adapting it to us. Though Guild Wars is already a superb game, future changes are inevitable. Aspects of the current version of Guild Wars we are playing now will no doubt be different in the future. Changes the developers make will be done to further improve our gaming experience by adding new content or improving game balance. Though I may have to adapt to some of those changes, I'm looking forward to the future updates to Guild Wars. Whenever I see updates in Guild Wars, I'll be thinking of this edition's mantra... Embrace Change, Adapt. |
