Sledgstone

Lol. I've watched all the LoTR and Hobbit movies multiple, multiple times.  Mostly because of them being on movie channels on TV when there is nothing else on, I'll put on one these while going to sleep.  Although, I will never watch the last movie all the way through anymore. All those ending scenes are too much for me.  

The Helm's Deep battle was definitely better in the book. I have high hopes for the battle of Gondor, so far its awesome.

This was my first memory of this series.

Mine too. lmao!  Classic.  

The jumping puzzles are done. I ended up crafting 5 of those pungent foods to skip a few. lol. I made the saddle last night. All I have left is to do those 28 rifts.. This collection was beyond massive. What I don't get is Anet said they didn't want to do anymore legendary collections because they spanned multiple maps and could break.. yet heres the skyscale collection that is so big and spans so many maps its crazy to me. If they could do this they could have done more legendary collections. oh well. Its been a fun although extremely time consuming experience. But I'm definitely feeling more bonded with this mount than the others because of all the work put into getting it. And to top it off, anet really wants to sell skins for it.. one dye channel for the entire default mount skin? wtf. But I bet the skin sales for this mount will be far less than the others. I can only imagine the amount of people that got burned out on this collection and won't finish it. And if a large chunk of players don't finish it, then theres less incentive for anet to make more skins for it.

The problem with the legendary collections was they were lazy and just put a bunch of random crap to do, including alternate events that required a fail from other certain events... that didn't fail very often in the first place like the Arah defense. It only took them months if not longer to make the Arah defense also count... butt hurt people that will never get a leggy just sat around defending arah all day on purpose until they fixed it. I got Luckly with Astralaria... the stars aligned when 3 people were AFKing for the Melandru defense for whatever leggy they were working on and it failed for me to get the event I needed... so not only did some require failed events, but some required competing events. That's not even going into the multiple busted events there are. They can do all the big collections they want so long as they completely leave dynamic events out of it. JPs, Vistas, World Bosses, hidden chests, mini dungeons, etc. There is so much they can use that don't bug, but they always want you to do their mundane dynamic events that aren't worth doing after the first time you experience them. The Skyscale was done relatively right and some of the multiple map stuff was things they made for the skyscale like the rifts. That's where the real problem is. creating new content for a whole set of weapons. People got burned out because of the time gate more than the actually work you needed to put into it. Which was also stupid of them to do. Casuals timegate themselves, so running into a timegate off your own terms is a put off, especially if someone has as limited time as you have. Even without a timegate, burning through the collection would have still taken many many hours. It was just completely nonsensical. timegates make people log off, not play, and therefore not buy gemstore stuff.

For me it wasn't just the time gate.. it was the saddle collection. I'm glad I started late on the collection. I only had that 2 hour delay instead of a full reset. But the biggest hurdle was that damn saddle. If I didn't buy all those jorbreakers and trade them in weekly for those multiple batches of 50 season 4 currency every week during the dragon bash festival I would have given up. Theres no way in hell I would have had the patience to farm 250 of each currency from each map. It would have taken me a year at my pace. I spent just over 100 gold on jorbreakers, but I'd have rather done that than farm all that currency. I still didn't have enough for a couple of them and kept buying the currency from the dragonfall vendor for the limit of 5 per day until I hit my numbers. Thankfully that world boss event rewarded even more of the currency. With that I was able to get all 250 I needed for all of them.. I'm just glad I had the time to participate in those events and knew that saddle collection cost before being surprised with it after those events ended.

I got my Skyscale last night.  Now I can actually check out the festival.

One thing I noticed is the skyscale collection as well as the Sun's Refuge collections are similar in that they place markers on the map if the collection is activated. I'm guessing this new collection interface is far superior to the old ones they made for the legendary weapons. The legendary weapons collections all had map specific things, like nevermore had ravens in different maps, no markers at all, and even if you weren't doing the collection, those ravens were now permanently there and part of the map now for everyone to see and interact with. But the Sun's refuge and Skyscale are account specific based on if the collection is activated or not and only show on the map for the player that has the collection active. I'm guessing this makes those collections easier to manage and not break like the old leggy weapons versions. The only part of the skyscale collection that seems to be permanently part of the maps is the rifts. But those seem like they're in place now like updrafts and aren't tied to any events so I doubt they'll ever break.

I'll try fucking with the image size because I'm still getting the 504 Gateway Timeout error every time I try to upload a screenshot of my character (which might be the problem since it is 1920 x 1080).

I also have no comment on the absurdity that has proceeded this comment (I really should check the show out but its just to weird, even for me).

Not gonna lie, One half is male sailor moon on LSD, the other have is a deep, emotional story.

504 error. I'll look into it! 

but it's almost completely free if you dont take any short cuts. While it sucks, for what you get it's worth it. World Completion is now a minor inconvenience rather than a large undertaking with this mount.