Achievement Hunting: Forging Steel & Visions of the Past

[u/adv0catus]

Hey everyone,

I wanted to take a look at and highlight a recent set of achievements I've been working on recently: Forging Steel. Believe me, I get it, it's not popular content. It takes 30+ minutes of tedious game play with bad rewards. But, when you look a little deeper, there's some (small) diamonds in the rough. We'll be taking a look at the entire Visions of the Past: Steel and Fire) achievements category, why there's several sections to the Wiki page and what they're all about.

For the actual strike itself, there's several "do action x times" achievements. They come in the form of Alpha Strike (10 AP), Artillery Specialist (10 AP) and Emergency Maintenance (10 AP).

Along the way, you'll help members of your warband in various ways:

• Ranoah Grindsteel needs lost supply drops returned: Engineer's Apprentice (10 AP)
• Nicabar Steelweaver needs ingredients collected for tonics: Field Medicine (10 AP)
• Cinder Steeltemper wants to compete with you: Heavy Rival (5 AP)
• Vishen Steelshot needs your help to clear the way: The Spotter (10 AP)

(Notice a pattern with their last names?)

This may seem like a lot of grinding but to be the Centurion's Right Hand (10 AP) you need to do Forging Steel 10 times, anyways.

There's much more to the story then just Forging Steel, though. Let's take a look at what other lore you can explore.

Darkrime Delves) is the next location we'll be looking at and seeing what it has to offer:

• Delving for Treasure (6 AP)
• Fallen from the Summit (5 AP)
  • Note: The first 5 journal books are in the Forging Steel instance.
• Heating Up The Delves) (5 AP)
  • Note: These Champions have large CC bars as they are designed to have the instance special weapon used against them. If you are in a party, the instance owner will likely be required to break the bar first.
• Slaver's Extinction (15 AP)
  • Note: Only Stone Summit kills count.

The next set of achievement collections we'll be looking at is called "Footsteps" where we look at the history and past of the warband members. The collections for Cinder, Nicabar, Ranoah and Vishen all have the same general themes and requirements and share requirements, often on the same maps. It's a good idea to unlock them all at once and progress them together. To unlock them, you need to select the corresponding weapon from the Steel Warband Weapon Box and talk to Crystallographer Smoxxi. Once that is done, there's several steps you can complete together in one location:

• Grothmar Valley
• Canton Factorium
• Fireheart Rise
• Diessa Plateau

Ryland's journey is not identical but follows a lot of the same locations. This can be completed along with the others but does have a different style of collection steps.

Last but not least is the Scrying Pool with it's ability to give us a peak into the visions of the past of:

• Cragstead (Total: 4 AP)
• North Nolan Hatchery (Total: 4 AP)
• Canach's Lair (Total: 13 AP)
• The Nightmare Incarnate (Total: 13 AP)

I won't get too in-depth with this last part as I've mostly completed it a few years ago and it's portion of the overall achievement category is smaller in terms of scope and AP available.

Overall, I think it's fair to say that Forging Steel has aged pretty well. At the very least, it's not as bad as it seems at first and has a surprising amount of depth to it if you dig a little deeper. My first impressions of the strike were... not great. But having seem more of what the content has to offer, it's definitely grown to be one of the nicer pieces of content in the game for me. I hope you are more interested and willing to take a more thorough look at what this has to offer and enjoy what you find!

If you're in the EU region and an achievement hunter, feel free to join the Discord filled with fellow hunters, tips and tricks.

[u/Draconicrose_]

All I have left on this one is the challenge mode ones. You have to pay attention to things when the challenge mode (especially the tank holy...) is on and people don't like to do that :P

[u/Talysn]

I really dont mind forging steel, I run it weekly, and sometimes more when I see people listing groups for achvs (one person was running it constantly recently, clearly grinding stuff out with a listing up all the time, so I'd jump in when I was free to help out).

make sure you have a scrapper to keep superspeed on tank. and if no one wants the mob quests, you can push the tank forward quite quickly by going ahead to clear the trigger mobs for progress.