Back in the Game

First, an apology. I'd like to apoligize for an extremely long absence since my last post, and also for a post I made almost a year ago. In that post I stated my plans to write up one decent post per week going forward - these plans fell through, I lost interest again and went away. I'd like to say now, my stance on Guild Wars 2. This is a fantastic game which I have spent many enjoyable hours playing and hope to spend many more in the future. With that said, ever since the announcement of Heart of Thorns and that content drought thereafter which was about 8 months but felt like forever, I have never really regained my original interest in the game. I played a lot for about 2-3 months when HoT launched and I have played each of the Living World season 3 episodes quite a bit too, and I must say they have been great! However, as much as those patches interest me, they can only ever keep me for so long, and so now I will make an honest judgement on how I want to proceed with the blog. I enjoy blogging, but I can't blog about something that I'm not interested in or not actively doing. Since this is a blog about speculating and investing, and that most of my investments are long term, it shouldn't be too much of a problem only writing posts when I am active in the game. Going forward then, this will mean I will make posts not based on a certain time between posts, but more on game activity and patches. That means you can expect a few posts every time a major patch comes out, and you can expect a lot of posts when the expansion hits.

Now that's out of the way, let's talk about Head of the Snake. This is a speculator blog so no story spoilers here don't worry(it's great though, play it asap!). Firstly I want to address a few major changes since HoT. In the past, patches have usually been the go-to hotbed for speculators wanting to make educated investments. Whether it was speculating certain materials based on geographic locations, or potential components for new exciting items, these were opportunities for knowledgable investors to make serious gold. This has really been the case since GW2 first launched, and is the case in almost every other MMO too. However, season 3 of the Living World has adopted a new, refreshing style of reward systems which is making investing a lot more difficult. The reward system I am talking about offers unique new cosmetic items, combat tonics, fully stat-selectable ascended trinkets and more, all available for map-based currencies. Each new episode has added a brand new world map which has also added a brand new currency. Each new currency can only be acquired in its own map(aside from reward tracks) and is also only spent in the same map. There is also another currency seemingly tied to season 3 of the Living World - 'Unbound Magic', which can be gathered through various ways in any of the new maps and is required alongside the other currencies to purchase the new rewards. What does this mean for investors? Well, put simply it means new items are only obtainable using account bound currencies, and then those new items are also account bound, meaning absolutely zero investment potential in that specific area.

To add to this, the new legendary weapon formula also provides very few investment opportunites. Each season 3 episode has also added a new legendary weapon(bar episode 1) and each of these weapons is forged using the new formula. The new formula, instead of trekking all over Tyria for trophies, is comprised of insane amounts of Mithril Ore and Elder Wood Logs, along with the normals Gifts of Might and Magic etc. Now you could say that's great let's invest in Mithril and Elder wood then? You'd be partially right, this is not a bad investment. However, after 3 new legendary weapons, the value of Mithril and Elder wood has remained largely the same, with exception to a spike right after the first new legendary, Eureka(mace), presumably because of panic buying and eager speculators buying up large quantities. An important thing to note is the weapon types of the 3 new legendary weapons - mace, shield and now rifle. As far as weapon popularity by use goes, these are far from the top, with shield being used by 5 classes(and not very often on any of them), mace being used by 3 classes, and rifle used by just 2 classes. This makes them a lot less popular and thus a lot less demanded. What I am getting at, is that we may not know the true strain on Mithril and Elder wood supplies until some of the more popular weapons like staff and greatsword are released. This is why I said earlier that you'd be partially right, and I think those materials are a decent long term investment providing you have a lot of room to store them in.