GW2 – Doing Dailies

Now that I know GW2 dailies give out gold, I started doing them.

They aren’t very fun to do. :) Talk about mindless busy work. No wonder I’ve been ignoring them.

I’ve never been a big fan of “doing dailies” in any MMORPG, and I usually leave a game for something else when I get to the point where that’s all there is to do. So it takes a lot of mental energy to push through these completely arbitrary, meaningless tasks.

I can deal with the ones where you simply harvest stuff on a map, because that doesn’t take very long. Well, I say that, except it does take some time when they ask you do that in Heart of Thorns territory, because sometimes you can walk for 10-20 minutes and not find a single harvesting node. (I did just that. No trees to harvest in certain parts of the jungle, apparently.) Not to mention how difficult it is to walk around in some of those areas, which I’ve beaten to death before.

My favorites are the ones where you have to go to a Vista on a map. Super easy especially with the new mounts. Sometimes I do them “the old way” just for the fun of it. These are also great because sometimes it takes me to a map I haven’t completed yet, so I can get a bit closer to World Completion while I’m at it. (I’m up to 83%!)

The dailies where you have to complete Events on a map are a bit more engaging, but can be onerous in their own way if you have to go to one of the terrible maps. Like, you know, Heart of Thorns.

The first one I tried to do asked me to complete Events in the Tangled Depths. I tried. I really did. But I gave up. I saw Events around me on the map, and I tried to get to them. I really did. But it’s not like you can teleport there; they only provide like two Waypoints in Heart of Thorns. I got stuck in a cave underneath the event with no way to go up. I got stuck in an endless tunnel filled with mobs and no exits. I got stuck in a lake that almost killed me because it was toxic. I literally could not figure out how to navigate that maze of a map to get to the event location. I finally got to what looked like some kind of an event underground, by accident, but I was there by myself fighting waves of chak and I got killed several times. (There were “revive-bots” there which healed me.) Yuck.

No daily for me that day.

One time, a daily had me complete a Bounty on the Vabbi map. [Stop changing Vabbi to Rabbi you stupid MacBook Air!] I dutifully teleported over, found and clicked on a Bounty Board, ran over to the Champion Whatever standing in the middle of another group of mobs (including veterans), and got utterly facerolled. One other guy happened by and we tried together, and we couldn’t defeat the Champion Whatever before the event timed out.

So no daily for me again.

But I keep trying. Each morning I assess whether it looks doable or not. You have to complete three out of the four choices, two of which appear to be easy (harvesting or vistas). The third one tends to stretch the limits of my patience (usually events and bounties), and the fourth one I just don’t even bother pursuing because it sounds impossible (mini-dungeons and jumping puzzles and whatnot).

I seem to remember there used to be a lot more options to choose from for dailies. I tried going through the big list of Dailies and doing some of the other ones (like Daily Winterberry Collecting), but it didn’t appear to “count” toward the 2 gold daily. I’m kind of hoping someone is going to kindly stop by and say, “Oh, it’s much easier than that, you just do X, Y, or Z.” (Which sort of makes me wonder why it doesn’t say that in the instructions up there on the screen, but that’s another issue.)

Then there is this: Two gold each day doesn’t really seem to be worth the effort. It’s like a minimum wage that isn’t a living wage. Five or ten seems more enticing to me and more in line with the prices in the game. Which is undoubtedly by design, so I’ll give up and just spend cash for the gold.

Incidentally I went back and started replaying Living Story Season 2. Wow, what a difference! For all the complaints I had about Heart of Thorns and Living Story Season 3, and the minor gripes about Path of Fire, they are light years better than Season 2 was.