Ygdrasill.9135

There were parts I could barely do with working hands so major props to OP. I hope something can be done for you. It really is something a friend or family member could probably do without a lot of problem. You just go to the center of the possible ball landing places (there are only like 5) and go back to that after each catch. Even on the fast speed it would be pretty trivial for somebody to help with. Don't give up!

If you have multiple level 80's, make sure they all get access to each of the LW4 areas. Then you can grind the heart quests on each. Bear in mind you'll need around 2600 karma for each 5 mats you buy from the heart vendors so if you don't have a huge supply you'll need to pause occasionally to farm those. To make that easier, I suggest buying at least level 1 Karmic retribution in Kourna and Dragonfall and level 2 or 3 would be better if you have enough vol magic and gold. I just got level 2 in Kourna tonight and should be able to keep enough Karma going without too much time invested doing the Corsair camp supply and front lines hearts (you get karma for finishing those even once you have enough shards. This will also work for the future since you'll be able to get the bonus item gather tools to help farm wood, plants, and ore for crafting or to sell. You saw what the saddle parts will take so plan accordingly for gold and volatile magic. I've been focusing mainly one one mat at a time and doing as many additional heart quests in other areas as I have time for since I can't just stay logged in for 8 hours doing this. Maxing out the hearts and nodes (where applicable) for one mat make me feel like I'm making real headway. Don't give up. It's not a race.

There are some themed skins I'm sure they will do for the skyscale. I'm sure an Aurene skin would be popular but I'm not sure Anet will want to do that although there's already a mini of her so who knows?

You need it for 3 storyline steps and then you can ignore it exists. If you have a griffon and springer and were good at controlling both, you could probably do the content faster than those using the skyscale. It's flight mechanic can be slightly on the irritating side if you are in a hurry to get somewhere. Nobody is going to be using it for general open world travel.

Griffon - Most versatile general use mount. The one I'd keep if I could only keep one.Raptor - First mount and I love it. Without the gryphon, this would be my most used mount. Best general traveling mount.Springer - Second most used and adds to the griffon's capabilities. Probably broke more gave content than any other (skyscale may beat it on that one)Skimmer - For moving over the water, this is pretty much required. The water version of the raptor.Jackal - Can get you past big groups of mobs. Best for long falls if you don't have a glider. There is content you can't do (including getting the skyscale) if you don't have one.Skyscale - This may move up once I have more time with one, but it's a pretty special use mount as near as I can tell. Still more useful than the last twoRoller Beetle - Silly mount. Fun to use occasionally. Not very practical most of the time.Warcat - Only for WvW. In open world it's pretty useless.

So don't get it. It's not even close to the most versitile mount in the game.

I'm a relatively new player who started this year. Now I've had some experience with other MMO's so the basic concepts weren't new, just some of the mechanics. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through grinding the mats for the saddle. I have the other mounts other than the Warcat since I don't do WvW. Here are my thoughts. The collections, scavenger hunts, etc have too many steps. What would have been fun to do at maybe 12 just turned into going down the list on the wiki or video walkthrough. It didn't engage my interest that much, but at least it was mostly pretty fast to do. The food and one toy having to be crafted wasn't much appreciated since I hate crafting in MMO's but at least I was able to buy them. I didn't really mind the time gating on feeding because it gave me time to get the treats and grind some saddle mats. Also, it was fun to play with and interact with the hatchling. Seeing her grow up was kind of neat. Anyone who tries to do things in order rather than concurently is really going to have a long haul. Lost Skyscale was mostly ok. I hadn't been to most of the jump puzzles before and was able to figure out most of them. I ended up buying 2 sausages in addition to the one given at the start. I skipped Goemm's Lab, Griffonrook's Run, and the Ley-Line Anomaly. I'm mediorcre at best at jump puzzles and those two were ridiculously long. I had no desire to do the Ley-Line thing again. I almost skipped the second visit to Augury Rock, but managed to get there when it opened. I don't think one should have to do any given world event or meta more than once for something like this. I think the saddle pieces costing 5 gold each in addition the the materials and volatile magic is a bit much. I should be pretty close to having enough, but if I'm short, I'm just going to hold my nose and sell gems for gold at the crappy exchange rate to get it done and over. That will end any farming/grinding I'll be doing for a good long time.

I sort of see why there is some time for the hatchling to grow up. For most of us that's minor in comparison to the days of collecting gold for the food, toys, and saddle parts and mats for the saddle parts. Since I only have so much time per day to play, the collection sections took me at least a day or two each to run through and I've taken some days off grinding mats to do other things. There probably are those who could and would have run through the whole thing in a day, but they are in the small minority. There have also been several parts that could be done concurently. You can get toys and treats while waiting on the feeding part to be complete and could start collecting saddle mats right from the start. It might have been good to have a note about doing that given the amounts involved. Anyone who's not aware of that may well be really upset when they finally unlock that and see what's needed.

Hey, chill. People are are understandably happy when they finally get one of these. I know I will be when I finally earn mine. Seeing them around helps keep my motivation up.

Is it bad that I really want Claw of Aurene as a title now? And maybe that's why we get mobbed by enemies in PoF? They're coming to fight the dragon champion for spoons. (Although I'm on EU, so for me it will be more 6-11pm GMT, it tends to drop off by midnight.) I want a cloak broach of a dragon claw holding a sword pointed down to go along with the title. ;-)

I just realized something. With the Skyscale, this is an infinite elevator though a slow one. Get to the highest point you can with the skyscale/springer, jump with the springer, Bound of Faith, glide, mount the Skyscale (that's the first mastery and works just like the Griffon). Use your new flight bar to go up, hover until Bound of Faith cools down, repeat. Unless you lose as much or more altitude gliding before you can re-mount, you could go as high as you wanted this way.

I've been grinding in between doing the other tasks for getting the mount. Is it a bit grindy? Sure, but it could be worse. I'm figuring about a month to actually get mine. Considering I spent the same amount of time for a much less cool mount in WoW at one point having to do far less interesting tasks, I'm ok with it. It's not a race. By the time I get mine, it won't be the unusual site it is currently, but that's fine. I'm not getting it to impress anyone else.

You should be able to solo PoF for the most part depending on class and build. I'd highly suggest checking on the builds for the character you're playing for whatever your goal is. There are a few where you'd be better off using your PoF hero points for the HoT elite skill and then going to HoT. That goes even more for PVP, Dungeon, Raid, and Fractal builds, but I doubt you'll be interested in those. I wish I'd done this with my Elementalist. I ended up grinding in Central Tyria go get enough for my HoT skill. HoT is hard mode. A fair number of the Hero points really are a lot more doable with at least 2 people depending on class, build, and your skill. I mean if you have a Necromancer and already got Reaper elite from PoF? Yeah, go in and faceroll it. Mounts make things easier. Raptor isn't overly useful in a lot of HoT. The Springer definitely helps. The Griffon also. I'm working on my Skyscale to see how that works there. Train gliding and the updrafts skill as fast as possible. Gliding is really handy since you can go into glide even while in combat. If you're doing the story you'll be constantly having to go train other masteries which can get annoying. On the plus side, they used some of those for chapter 6 of LW4. I really wish they'd done more of that with PoF in general because it really felt like everything in HoT other than Gliding was going to be useless after finishing it.

if your referring to the opening flight paths ability... they added these flight paths to many of the core maps as well... and the final collection will be using these flight paths im going to guess so it wont be useless outside of the new map... that of course doesn't mean the mount is good... you were just incorrect on that one detail. I wasn't talking about flight paths. I was talking about the vertical up/down aspect. Mounting in midair would mean being able to jump and go into a hover to assess options without worrying about steering to an end point. Good to know about the flight paths though. It's a bit moot at this point in any case. Between the collections needed for things like the saddle, the gold farming I'll be doing to afford the purchased items, food, grow lamp, and maybe treats, it's going to be months for me to get this. I'm also finding out that not having done a lot of the achievments previously is going to come back to bite me so there is that too. The included time gating is pretty much trivial compared to the rest of this. The griffon, which is a far more capable mount, was far easier and ultimately less expensive to get since I refuse to level crafting just to make the crap for this mount. The time involved makes it even worse since a good part of it appears to be having to do things I didn't do previously because I didn't really want to do them. Doing them now will be motivated by eventually getting the mount, not because they are fun for me to do.

My advice (nowadays) would be:Earrings: Do Guild Missions to buy them from guild vendor.Rings: Use fractal relics to buy them.Amulets: Stick on exos as long as you don't get drop. Amulets do not have infusion slot, so exo is fine even if you strive for high level fractals. If you are in desperate situation, then, maybe, consider buying amulet from laurel vendor. My advice would be not to spend laurels on trinkets, even if that sounds tempting. Laurels are hard-to-gain currency, better use something you can get easier. If you infuse and attune rings, with backback you will have 9 infusion slots. With +9 infusions and Tears of Alba you will reach 96 AR, which is enough for T3 fractals (IIRC). So, you start needing ascended armors only when starting to do T4 fractals. At that point you probably already have some drops, which you can stat-swap, so you don't need to craft all the pieces. This would be great advice if I were currently interested in doing fractals or guild missions or whatever which I'm not. Since I'd been saving the laurels, had plenty, and all three of my current characters can use the accessories for their main builds, it seemed like a good use for them. If it turns out not to have been, by the time I need more, I'll have more since I'm not spending them on anything new at this point.

What? You don't want to get to ride Aurene into battle more than once? It's not like the unlock is that far into the story.

It would be nice if the cooldown timer were ticking whether you were logged in or not (real time, not game time), but even so it's proved fairly useful already

I doubt it's going to change. I think 21 scales and 21 eggs were excessive especially since there was no in game way to find them. You have to use the wiki or similar. I'd have rather had half as many with one of those scanner items to find them. We'd have gotten the experience and maybe actually enjoyed it rather than feeling like it was a total grind (which it was). Unless you're a crafter, it's not going to be much cheaper than the griffon was by the end of things. Considering the limited utility of the mount for many if not most until the next expansion (I'll be using it in HoT which I got after PoF), I can understand the motivation to grind it out being lacking. It would have been nice to have owning one be a meaningful part of the story content, but given that can be completed in two hours or so, there wasn't much chance of that. It could be worse, they could have made it impossible to finish the story until you got the mount.

The other problem with DPS meters is they often get used to bully/harass/ostrasize other players. I can't count how often I saw that in WoW when I was playing. People would be mocked for their DPS (even if their total damage for a dungeon or raid was better than the one mocking them). It was very nice to be able to join group events in GW2 where it's assumed you're doing your best with the skills and gear you have and nobody really keeps track. Amazingly enough, events, raids, and dungeons still get completed just fine.

It looks like the treats are just optional 'skip this event' items but not mandatory. Unless the price drops significantly, I'll be doing most of the activities. May skip the Ley Line boss and the jumping puzzles which I'm really bad at. Not a big deal. Time to do some gold farming though.

I don't mind the time gating. I don't even mind the gold outlay. Assuming you don't have every alt able to craft the food/grow lamp you will be spending gold on those. We get to use borrowed ones and those are pretty easy to come by so at least they could play a part in the main story. The part I'm a little disappointed in is the lack of even an attempt at making it game immersive. If we have to go on 21 item snipe hunts, at least give us scanners so we could do some of that strictly inworld. As it is, everybody is going to have the wiki open going from item to item down the list trying to place their personal waypoints in the right place and then heading over. I was doing it along with my girlfriend so at least we could share the finds and the frustrations. Without that it would just have been pure grind and no fun at all. All this for a mount that most won't really have any use for. In my case, I'm not very far in Heart of Thorns so I look forward to using it to my advantage in the jungle.

It's not hard. A few things are frustrating. I'm just glad the 10 events at the camps were any 10 events and not specific ones. I don't even mind the time it's going to take. I had the gold and already have my food and grow lamp. My main complaint is actually that there is no reasonable way to do those collections without using the wiki. It would have been nice to have a scanner item like they've used in the past so you could go into an area, use the scanner and narrow down to where the items were. As it is, there's no chance of game immersion. It's just looking at a map on the website and matching that to where it is inworld. Nobody is just going to fly around until they happen upon them.

Played in the game with my Girlfriend as we went through the scavenger hunts for the Skyscale. Showed her a new build for Necromancer that let us take breaks from egg gathering to go team kill champions (well either of us could do it solo but it's faster with the two of us). Finished eating unstable magic.

I'm looking forward to being able to use the Skyscale in HoT since I'm not very far into that yet. The main issue I see is the second mastery skill seems pretty much useless Since they didn't add a general mastery chain in addition to the one for the mount, when would I ever come back to use that? It's very definitely a mount for specialized uses, but I'll likely be using it a lot more than the Jackal or Roller Beetle.

I'm doing the collections with my Girlfriend and am really not in a huge rush. The part that may slow you down more is having to craft the food or grow lamp if you don't have the gold to buy them off the TP. People complained about the Griffon costing 250g. You'll be paying around half that IF you already have all of the season 4 Living World chapters. Otherwise, you'll be buying any of those you don't have as well.