Bestiary Unlocks: The Road Less Traveled

Like many people, I've been conserving my energy for patch 1.2 and the preparation of a new class, so I haven't been playing Syp as much as I should've. When I have logged onto her, I always queue up for scenarios (our motto is now "oRvR? More like Sasquatch!" which doesn't make any sense) and then doggedly work down Tome Titan's Bestiary unlocks.

First of all, to anyone who says that using Tome Titan or other ToK guides are cheating and going all easy mode, pthhbbbt. Seriously, there is no way anyone could ever find even half of these unlocks through natural gameplay, and even with TT it still takes me gobs of time to find each entry and accomplish them (a lot of the time it feels like I'm doing quests, just ones where you get rewarded in the middle instead of having to turn them in). I've long since abandoned my ambitious plan to do all of the TT unlock lists, narrowing them down to Bestiary unlocks alone. My reasoning for this is simple: only (at least to my knowledge) Bestiary unlocks give you rewards besides XP, such as trophies, titles, cloaks, tactics and pocket items. Yeah yeah, you can get titles in other ways, but really, the other sections of the Tome aren't as hardwired into rewards as the Bestiary is.

Even so, it's been an adventure. I'd say Syp is only 15% through all the unlocks, and that's with me doing them to the exclusion of other content. It's madness, but also great fun, because for those who complain that WAR's PvE quests are blah, I challenge you to check out some of these Tome unlocks -- you end up doing bizarre and crazy things all the time. It's not the typical day's work, is what I'm saying.

But this brings me back to a slightly older topic of Tome tactics. A quick recap for those who've recently joined us: Tome tactics are PvE-only tactics that are obtained solely through special Tome unlocks. And despite a previous patch feature that was supposed to clarify Tome tactics to us, they still remain frighteningly obscure to obtain and understand:

• Tome tactics, as mentioned, apply to your PvE game by giving you advantages over certain races you might encounter (undead, chaos, beasts, etc.). There are three tiers of advantages, based on how much of a tactic you've unlocked, which ranges from a shorter aggro radius in those critters, to fewer AP spent fighting them and less damage received from them.
• Each tactic is gained by unlocking "fragments" of a particular unlock. After a certain amount of fragments unlocked, you get your first tier of the tactic, then the second and third. Each tactic set differ in the amount of fragments needed -- some take as many as ten fragments for a tactic, others are far less.
• Once you've unlocked enough fragments, you have to visit a special vendor in your capital city who will finally sell your tactic to you via an overloaded interface. Then you equip the tactic into your final slot as you would with other tactics.

The biggest problem is that you are never instructed in game as to what these tactics do, why they're important or how to get them. Because fragment unlocks are so very random and usually out of the way, no regular player going at the game without a Tome guide will be able to find even a fraction of them.

The second biggest problem is that even with a guide, by the time you'll have obtained enough fragments to get tier 2 or 3 tactics, you'll most likely be 40. Ergo, these PvE tactics have little relevance in your leveling game, planting them firmly in the arena of end game instances and highly situational open world uses.

Like many things we grouse about on blogs, this isn't the most pressing issue for the game or the dev team. And yet I feel compelled to bring up the issue again after having placed a priority on getting these tactics, because tactic loadouts are one of the more interesting character customization features in the game to me, and it's an incredible shame that one part of this is virtually ignored, misunderstood or dismissed by a huge swath of the playerbase. It seems counter-intuitive that these "least important" tactics are far, far harder to obtain than the RvR or career tactics, both of which are pretty much handed to you on a plate.

I'd like to see clearer instruction all-around for Tome tactics in the game, and perhaps multiple methods of obtaining the same tactics. Keep the weird, obscure unlocks, that's fine -- but give us a second option that might take longer, but we know for sure how to do it.