December was spent primarily in Guild Wars with only brief forays into other games such as Archlord and making sure Hellgate: London and World in Conflict remained current in terms of patches and maps. I’m terrible at WiC but it sure is pretty! I’ll add practicing this one to my resolutions for 2008.
A good friend of mine, Daniel, recently picked up Guild Wars and it happened that we each had Mondays off all month, so we set aside the first few Mondays of December strictly for Guild Wars. He made a few characters but his favorite is his Elementalist, Wisnani (yes, female… Daniel is 100% mangina — I have never seen him with a male character in any game), so we took that character through the first half or so of the Prophecies storyline. The final day we had a chance to game we completed all three missions in the Crystal Desert which attuned his Elementalist for Ascension. Once the final mission was completed, I wished Daniel luck and took my monk, Benjeth, along his merry way while Wisnani completed her Ascension. The Ascension in Prophecies is a solo affair where you have to battle an evil or “dark” doppleganger of your character; one armed with whatever you’re armed with. The trick is to select some skills that the doppleganger’s AI will use that will actually wind up helping you, hurting itself, or both. I think it took 3 to 5 attempts before he gleefully announced his success over the alliance channel! So congrats to Wisnani! Since he’s enjoying Guild Wars so much I gave him Factions as a holiday gift. He took Wisnani over to Cantha just to check things out, then created both an Assassin and Ritualist. I also made a Ritualist and look forward to getting that one up to speed someday.
Benjeth also completed the Factions campaign early in the month with the help of several members of the Knights of Echovald, one of the guilds (formerly) of the GLU alliance. Last week Benjeth completed the Nightfall campaign as well! I did not select an end-game reward weapon from either campaign yet, so Benjeth will have to repeat the final missions to gain access to the end-game reward NPC’s once I decide what to get him (or his heroes). Oh! Speaking of Heroes, between Nightfall and Eye of the North I’ve gotten all but one Hero for Benjeth now. The final is Kahmu, a male Vabbian Dervish unlocked in the Eye of the North expansion. I have to compete in mano y mano combat in the Norn Fighting Tournament, which is easier said than done considering I always run Benjeth as a healing/protection Monk. To that effect, I took Benjeth through all the content (including creating a new character just to obtain a special item) to use a “55 Solo Monk” build, where you gear and equip your Monk so that he ends up with a total of 55 health, relying on certain skills and enchantments so that he only ever takes a maximum of 5 damage per hit, and with a high health regeneration. Most 55 Monks are Monk/Mesmers but Benjeth is a Monk/Necromancer. I can pay 500 gold to change his secondary profession but for now I stumbled across a “Dark 55” build which is strictly for Monk/Necromancers and I’m slowly learning how to use the build effectively. “Slowly” is the key word there, as I am nowhere near effective enough yet to win even a single fight with it but I’m gradually beginning to understand the finer points of 55-ing. Kahmu will finally join Benjeth’s roster of Heroes soon…
As I mentioned previously, the Guildcast Listener’s United [GLU] guild and alliance disbanded after Shawn announced he would be bringing the podcast to an end. I, along with many other GLU members, joined the Knights of Echovald [KoE] guild which had been a long-time member of the GLU alliance. It truly was a shame to see GLU come to an end, especially seeing the effect on the members, but it’s great that most of us will remain in the same guild. KoE is possibly looking to form an alliance with two other guilds who were GLU allies a long time ago, so we may just wind up with the majority of the GLU family, both old and new, reunited along with some new friends!
On the 31st I actually played Hellgate: London for a change and managed to get my Marksman, Traeginn, to level 10. Solo, unfortunately. HGL is still very cool, but so much can be soloed there isn’t really a need to group. That said, Traeginn nearly had his ass handed to him several times and burned through a great deal of health injectors on a few bosses. Groups would certainly help in those situations, especially since as a Marksman, Traeginn is most effective at range but has no stopping power so he takes a beating once the bosses get into melee range. I think HGL would be a great one (along with Team Fortress 2) to have a little friendly blogger community to group with. Maybe I’ll pester Cameron once he decides to return to HGL…
Also on the 31st I logged into Vanguard and after many failed and frustrating attempts at quest completion, managed to get Dolndruth to adventuring level 19! Nearly halfway to level 20 in adventuring for that matter! I had said awhile back that I would break from Vanguard until Update 3 in its entirety went live, and it has. So I look forward to renewing Dolndruth’s adventures in Telon, and getting to know Jaye and the rest of her most excellent Revelry and Honor guild which she was kind enough to induct me in just prior to my break from the game a couple months ago.
I also changed Dolndruth’s secondary crafting profession to quarrying and started working on getting his quarrying skill up, but did not actually work on crafting. He remains level 5 in crafting and level 7 in diplomacy for now, though he does have several diplomacy quests in his quest log.
Speaking of quests! I don’t know why it took this long but the new quest icons in Vanguard are a stroke of simplistic genius! Previously, all quest NPC’s had a shield icon. Now the shield signifies adventuring quests, while NPC’s with crafting quests have a glowing anvil icon and diplomacy quests are indicated with glowing unfurled scroll icons.
Now that (hopefully) Vanguard’s transition phase is in the past and they have a dedicated team at last, here’s to hoping 2008 finally sees Vanguard leave its paid beta state and become a viable and release-worthy game in its own right. Despite the huge list of bugs, glitches, incomplete content, performance enhancements, etc. the game is in dire need of, it was great (despite Troy’s complaining he’d rather they stick to bug-fixing) to see the team implement Vanguard’s first (I think?) holiday event, the Festival of Glorian, complete with a flying mount, Randolph the Reindeer freely available to everyone! The new dynamic weather system is also a nice touch, but I still think the entire weather system needs an overhaul. Oh, and sorry guys, but the new snow effect is among the worst I’ve ever seen. But I’m also spoiled by the beauty of Guild Wars’ snow, nothing else has ever come close to matching that, much less surpassing it. But hey, it’s a great first effort and more importantly demonstrates to us that you’re actively concentrating on developing Telon at the same time as new content and optimizations. I, for one, appreciate that greatly!
Jaye also created an EQ2 branch of Revelry and Honor on the Guk server. I’m tempted to join as well, but have thus far been unsuccessful in finding any enjoyment of EQ2 whatsoever. I will likely stick with Guild Wars, Vanguard and LOTRO for my MMO needs in 2008, although I may just give Tabula Rasa a chance later in the year, once it’s had time to mature and develop a bit. Otherwise, the only two titles I have any interest in are Guild Wars 2 and whatever it is that 38 Studios is working on. I’m hoping with the all-star cast of developers and R.A. Salvatore at the writer’s helm will bring us a great game with depth, persistence, and finally great storytelling as well. Hopefully the 38 Studios team with their high profile author has better luck than Codemasters’ ill-fated Dragon Empires a few years ago, which featured Piers Anthony as the writer and creator of the game’s world and lore.
Looking forward…
For 2008, I’m hoping to develop the site a bit more. I’ve been working very off-and-on with the designer of the Mandigo theme — featured here on PI.net and several of the high-profile blogs — on a particular feature I want to have on PI.net, and I’m hoping that gets accomplished within the next couple of months. I’ve also been meaning to get a screenshots gallery up, but I’ve been lazy about converting, resizing and FTP-ing the images so its content is extremely sparse at the moment and thus not ready for public consumption. Finally, I’m toying with the idea of adding a new character journal category where I can chronicle the adventures of my favorite characters. I’m still toying with how I would handle the writing. All the character journal blogs I’ve read (admittedly, not many) are written from the perspective of the player. Do I follow suite, or do I write from a totally in-character first-person point of view? A more traditional third-person perspective might be even better. Or, a random combination of all the above! Given my penchant for switching things up, I can see the latter occurring regardless of any official choice I make on the matter, but we’ll see how — or if — I end up including character journals in my writing here.
In any event, here’s to the coming year! Here’s to no more server crashes! And here’s to finally regaining my lost readers and hopefully picking up some more along the way. Preferably the type who like to comment… *cough*
Entries (RSS)
Heh. Give me a month or so and I should be bored with WoW again.
Let me know! I’d love to see what HGL is all about with a decent group for a change.