GW2 – Doing Dailies

813 words.

What's this then? A ley-line anomaly guy?

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.

Related

This page is a static archival copy of what was originally a WordPress post. It was converted from HTML to Markdown format before being built by Hugo. There may be formatting problems that I haven't addressed yet. There may be problems with missing or mangled images that I haven't fixed yet. There may have been comments on the original post, which I have archived, but I haven't quite worked out how to show them on the new site.

Archived Comments

bhagpuss 2017-10-30T22:46:54Z

I think I might do a guide to doing dailies. I love them. I do them every day on three accounts and apart from when I’m on vacation I have never missed a single day. On a work day I try to do at least one account before work - on a good day I can finish all three accounts in 15 minutes.

Here’s the thing: the dailies are different depending on whether you have just the base game, the base game plus HoT, the base game plus PoF or the full set. As far as PvE goes, the dailies are harder to do quickly and easily the more expansions you have. If you just have the base game they are always a pushover but add an expansion and you will usually get at least two bad ones out of four.

Consequently, to avoid it being a horrible chore, you need to branch out. Several of the WvW ones are really PvE ones in disguise . One is just buying items from a vendor, one is standing in a circle for a minute, one is killing a single NPC guard and standing in a circle for 20 seconds, one is killing a static mob, two are killing a static or moving mob, one is killing five NPC guards and one is repairing a structure. As far as I recall only a single WvW daily requires you to engage with an enemy player. On most occasions I never even see an enemy player when I’m doing dailies and I’m not even trying to avoid them!

PvP Dailies obviously do require you to fight people but several of those pretty much just need you to turn up and wait out the timer. Of course PvP players might notice you doing that and call you on it so I wouldn’t recommend it. WvW players categorically will neither notice you are only doing dailies or care if they do, though.

Anyway, good luck with them and thanks for putting the idea of a guide in my head.

Shongaqu Symata 2017-10-30T23:57:33Z To tag onto bhagpuss’ thought, The Different game mode dailies are hidden in the achievement window. To view the WvW and SPvP dailies left click on the daily list and it will bring up all your alternatives. While Jumping Puzzles and some mini dungeons are usually a pain they are usually some of the easiest dailies because most of the time a really nice Mesmer or five are sitting at the end waiting to provide portals.

Athie 2017-10-31T14:01:41Z The secret is PvP dailies. Every day you can easily get at least one that way and sometimes more. Plus you can do it in a friendly cooperative way! On the spvp tab, hit the game browser and look for a game named “Dailies Room.” Those are games set up explicitly for players to help each other out with dailies. They are super scripted and 100% non-competitive, and will get you 1-3 dailies in a few minutes.

Orthom 2017-11-02T08:30:04Z

As someone else mentioned before the jumping puzzle nearly always have a mesmer who ports people.

The PoF bounties are easy if you join a squad via the group finder. If there is a bounty daily in the map there are always multiple squads doing them.

And for the HoT gathering daily. If you are in a guild who has the harvesting nodes in the guild hall unlocked you can do the daily by just harvesting all the nodes in the guild hall.

Sorry, new comments are disabled on older posts. This helps reduce spam. Active commenting almost always occurs within a day or two of new posts.