One of my primary objectives (after completing the first installment of the expansion), was to permanently unlock the skyscale; I completed all of the objectives this weekend. I really appreciate ArenaNet for making this alternative method available (this is such a huge QoL increase especially for HoT maps; I spent Saturday getting to a lot of the mastery insights that required a ton of gliding with most of its mastery tracks unlocked).
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The skyscale saddle portion of the objectives was still a grind since I didn’t have any provisioner tokens (nor a lot of the mats to simply buy them from main city Factioner Provisioner NPC’s or the ones in the SOTO maps). These tokens are limited daily purchases and require different materials for each NPC (the ones in the SOTO maps require materials that only drop there like Static Charges, Essense of Despair and Pinch of Stardust). Fortunately, I had pouches of unidentified rare items from my 2019 playthroughs of HoT and PoF which I could salvage for ectoplasm (I could’ve just bought them from the trading post). I did buy some Reclaimed gear to salvage for Reclaimed Metal Plates as well as more Mithril and Orichalcum Ore, and spent several days accumulating provisioner tokens from these NPC’s. Most of the rest of my time was spent grinding Tier 1 Kryptis Rifts (for the Essences of Despair) as well as SOTO events for Stardust and Static Charge. You need a couple hundred (and only a small quantity is rewarded for each rift/event completion). Fortunately, doing all this killed multiple birds with one stone since it allowed me to level my Flight Training mastery tracks quickly; along with these achievement objectives, all 7 mastery tracks need to be completed to get the permanent unlock).
The egg infusion portion of the objective was easy since it was just going around various maps around the game world, and finding the location to perform that infusion. It also required doing 4 world bosses (fortunately, the games leveling design always means there are groups running them). But I effectively spent around 5 days grinding Kryptis rifts and SOTO events. Still, I remember reading about what needed to be done to get the skyscale the original way with Living World Season 4 (which requires the Path of Fire expansion), and that was a significant grind, time gate, and gold cost; kudos to those who did it the original way.
Since I am really not into this type of grinding anymore, I made sure to self-motivate myself to actually do this grind of rifts, events, and various SOTO meta events by purchasing the 2000 gem Synergetics Cyberscale skin (I liked it since it reminded me of StarCraft’s Protoss which is what I primarily played during my RTS days).
I do have to say that Secrets of the Obscure (bringing me back to Guild Wars 2), has been a good thing as far as giving me something to play (and worthwhile objectives to shoot for). I ended up purchasing End of Dragons (and am playing through it now) since the Jade Bot mastery will help in SOTO maps (like the zip lines). Having the skyscale unlocked has made exploring the EoD maps a lot more enjoyable. And as far as the rest of the game, I have so many HoT masteries that are incomplete (I’m only part of the way through the second track of gliding for example, and getting that entire mastery completed would make gliding even better). Likewise, the LWS4 skyscale mastery is another thing that would be beneficial now (turns out this isn’t applicable since you still need to unlock the LWS4 skyscale collection first in order to access that mastery; and checking the wiki, the three tracks are covered by the one for SOTO). So yes, there are plenty of objectives that I can shoot for where I think I will be playing on a more consistent basis.
