Though it’s been well over a month since I finished the PoF storyline and unlocked the griffon collections in GW2, and over a week since I found enough gold to pay for the mount, I didn’t start the process in earnest until this week.
This is quite the quest. If I wasn’t so bent on getting this mount quickly, it might have even been enjoyable.
But I want this mount. I want it noooow. XD
A huge thanks to Dulfy for her amazing griffon guide. Without it, I’d be completely lost.
The major blockers for me were the runes that you had to collect from Legendary Bounties or big events. I really didn’t know a lot about the process, but I held my breath and dove into the world of GW2 Party Finder.
I joined my first squad ever the other night.
Don’t laugh. I’m shy, okay?
So, figuring this out, I was able to beat the Legendary Corrupt Facet…
And the Deadhouse event, and the Djinn…
I’m at the point where I think I can probably solo the rest of the collections, which makes me very happy.
I’m also going to say that some of these jump puzzles to reach the different eggs are a pain in the tail. I just don’t have a lot of patience for jump puzzles anymore — part of the reason why I want the griffon! 😀
Anyhow, I powered through three of the collections over the past few days, and I’m a little proud of my progress. I know once I get my griffon and this is all behind me, I’ll certainly feel accomplished in the end. I’m hoping the end will be in sight this week.
I think the Griffon quest is the highlight of the expansion. I also followed Dulfy – I find walkthroughs generally increase my enjoyment of lengthy quests rather than the reverse – and it took me about four sessions, if I remember correctly, so maybe eight hours. An awful lot of that, though, was me flying about doing nothing really relevant to the quest, on all the griffons you get to borrow. It would probably have been nearer four or five hours if I’d just got on with it.
That’s really nothing at all compared to traditional MMO quests. To take an extremely apposite comparison, the quest to get Griffon in Vanguard was so lengthy and demanding that I never even came close to finishing it. I forget exactly how long it would have taken but it would have been measured in weeks, not hours. And the Unicorn quest that preceded it, which again I declined to attempt, took Mrs Bhagpuss at least a couple of weeks as I recall.
The jumping puzzle thing is odd. I would say I don’t like JPs in GW2. I’ve never been a fan. However, i differentiate very strongly between actual jumping puzzles, which I loathe and despise, and difficult-to-access terrain, which I love. The former (e.g. the stupid air jet one in Southsun or any of the dumb holiday ones like the Clocktower) are just gimmicks dragged in utterly inappropriately from another game genre. The latter (Breached Wall in Diessa, for example, or Deidre’s Garden) seem to me to be in the grand and honorable tradition of climbing in MMOs that goes back at least to the original EQ.
I found the Griffin quest to be one hundred percent acceptable from that point of view. Everything you need to reach is in the world and accessible by the normal means we use to traverse the world. Some of it is pretty hard to get to but none of it is, i think, unfair or inappropriate.
Good luck with the rest of the quest. That, though, is just the start. In my experience so far, learning to fly the thing effectively is considerably harder than obtaining it! I spent an hour trying to do the Desert Highlands Expert race this Sunday and never once got as far as the third hoop!
I’m just being impatient, but I really do think the griffon quest is well done. It certainly takes you to places you wouldn’t have otherwise gone (or maybe you would have, but not until a lot later). I remember spending hours of time working on getting slow mounts in older games, so this isn’t too bad.
I’m so-so with the jumping puzzles — I like them when I choose to do them because they look fun (I’ve done plenty of those — not the Clocktower, though!). I get frustrated when they’re shoved into something I want to finish, though. Then it becomes more of an obstacle.
I suppose it’s more of a frustration when I’m trying to work on the jump puzzle when enemies are swarming everywhere and interrupting my ability to think and organize my approach. This is one of those times I’m on board with you when you say there are just too many annoying enemies around! Leave me be when I’m trying to figure out jumps!! XD
I’ll get it sooner or later… hoping for sooner. I do know that I’ll feel pretty accomplished finishing it, so if that’s what the team was aiming for, they got it right.
I wouldn’t get your hopes up with the griffon and jumping puzzles, I found the springer way more help where high jumps to bypass annoying bits are concerned. 😉 Griffon gliding is pretty fun, though.
Almost there! And hopefully, joining the open squads weren’t too much of a pain…
I love the springer especially for that! No, joining the squads wasn’t hard, I just didn’t know that functionality existed or where to find it. Now that I do know, though, it makes a whole lot more sense how people are organizing things for the open world content.
I finished up the final collection quests tonight. Now I just have to fight my way through the Library, it looks like. Hoping to maybe get that done tomorrow!