Why the rush? – Blaugust Day 16

I was so close to level 18 with my spellslinger, that I headed off to a nearby quest hub, grabbed all the quests I saw, killed whatever had the quest-icon next to its head and ran back as fast as my Aurin’s legs could take her, just so I could finally get this new level. Then, immediately afterwards, I wondered: What for? What will I do when I’m max level? Why did I even start playing Wildstar?

It is quite silly to rush through the game. The main reason I play it is because I find the world intriguing. I love the game’s humour. But if I rush through quests, then this is exactly what I’m going to miss. I will not stop to sniff at the flowers (which then swiftly grow to three times its size and attacks me as the so-called flower was rather the whisker of some alien creature) and I will not get to know anything about the world because I don’t even know why I’m killing those mobs… except for the Dominion. I know very well why I’m killing these guys by now. Sadie will be revenged!

But seriously, my focus is not on the traditional “endgame” anymore in MMOs. I do not raid, I don’t even do many – if at all – dungeons anymore. I mainly roam the world and explore it. I focus on crafting, building and decorating my houses, chatting with friends and all that stuff. So instead of rushing through the levels, I should enjoy the way to maximum level as much as I can and try to do that slowly. If I remember correctly, Wildstar also has some pretty fun quests or at least, neat corners in the world that you wouldn’t necessarily find if you didn’t get off the (quest) path to explore what’s around the corner. Or maybe that was just because I was too inexperienced in the beta and just missed the quests leading to said corners. :p

This post is part of Blaugust 2015.

My gaming update

Day no. 6 and I already need to add a “filler post”. I had planned to post about my dimension in Rift tonight, but due to a horrible back ache, I cannot spend any lengthy amount of time typing.

So instead, I’ll just tell you what I’ve been up to lately in terms of gaming.

Guild Wars 2 had been on the back burner ever since they made a break from releasing new content. Without the constant living story updates, I just realized that – apart from said story – Guild Wars 2 currently isn’t offering me what I want from MMOs. Now with the release of the new map, this may change again. I am also trying to avoid any spoilers about the story as I haven’t played it through yet. I’m still mainly playing my warrior with my thief as a close second. I am trying to level my elementalist and after that, the necromancer, as those are the two professions I don’t have at level 80 yet, but I’m not sure I can do it. I find both of those professions lacking in fun when it comes to combat. Maybe I just haven’t found the right builds yet. Anyway, my goal is to play through the “living story” story before I get any spoilers.

Rift has released its expansion and with that (and the CE I had bought), I could finally boost my cleric to level 60. When I had started playing Rift when it became free to play, I had switched from cleric to warrior because I didn’t like cleric anymore – only to realize I actually like cleric a lot more once my warrior hit 60. Now that both of them are 60 (well, my cleric is 61 now), I’m wondering if maybe mage would be a better choice… thankfully, the game only has four callings. ;)

Trove is a cute side game that I’m mostly playing when I don’t want to play either Rift or Guild Wars 2. They just released a new patch (and went into open beta yesterday!) and released a new crafting profession. After gardening, you can now also delve into ring-crafting. I don’t really have any goals there other than wanting to have the crafting profession at max level. Just because I can. :p I am waiting for them to release the candy barbarian, though. No idea what that will play like, but it sounds like fun! It will also come with the candy biome and I’m pretty sure this one will be very bright and colourful.

Last but not least, I own a ton of games that I bought at some point but never played or hardly played. But let’s not even go there… ;)

I am the “eternal soldier” kind of Guild Wars 2 player

ArenaNet currently offers Guild Wars 2 for 50 % off until November 9 – and to celebrate that (or in order to direct more people to that site, I guess), they added a little quiz: What kind of Guild Wars 2 player are you?

My result was this:

You’re a…

Eternal Soldier

You know what makes me happy?

Smashing castle gates down. Raiding enemy supply camps. Wreaking havoc on the battlefield with a few dozen friends. These are a few of my favorite things.

War is my business – and business is good.

Good, I guess. The thing is that of course, since it’s focusing on the current Guild Wars 2 game, they cannot ask questions about things that aren’t in the game. If I had to guess, I would say they focussed on WvW, sPvP, personal story (or feeling like a hero), open world events and living story? It’s hard to tell. Of course, it’s also light-hearted and not a quiz to be taken too seriously. Still, I do wonder what others – you who is reading my blog post right now, for example – have gotten as a result. :)

The text above is exactly the kind of player I used to be in Warhammer Online. In Guild Wars 2, not so much. Once defending makes sense, I may have a look at it again. Back in WAR, I thought we had bad zergs. Now that I’ve played WvW in Guild Wars 2, I really know what a zerg is. :p

And if I had to classify my gaming type in MMOs, I would say: A little bit of this, a little bit of that. I like to alternate between questing and gathering resources and then crafting/earning gold (mostly through crafting except in GW2 where crafting is a money sink), I like to do dungeons every now and then, I like to play instanced and open world consensual PvP. I like owning a place I can call home and decorating it. I like collecting things like mini pets. I like to play different classes and create a ton of characters. I love exploring the virtual world. I don’t like doing any of the above exclusively for a too long time or delve too much into any one area. I want to be able to switch between all those modes. But there is one thing that I cannot stand at all: Being THE hero. Being one of the heroes is fine, though.

I still wonder if maybe a “What profession suits you?” would have been the better choice to advertise the game’s sale.

Weapon Master…

We have successfully moved and most of our stuff is in the new place. I have also been ill for the last three weeks – yes, my timing is impeccable. However, now that most things have settled, it is time to call for an end of our summer break and you’ll see me blogging here more often again. :)

Some time ago, I wrote about my favourite “profession” which is actually not a profession per se, but a weapon and a specific playstyle (especially in Guild Wars 2): The one-handed sword.

I’m very close to 10.000 achievement points and had a look at the various categories to see where I could get some more points when I found the weapon master tab. As I said in that post, I really love the sword, but I had no idea how much I love it, especially considering that I actually do have five professions at level 80 already!

Pondering about which profession to choose…

When I wrote about my favourite profession in Guild Wars 2, I was looking at the topic from a pure PvE point of view. This entry is about WvW now.

I used to play World of Warcraft on a PvP server and I always hated it. As soon as I got the chance to get away (because I founded a guild with friends on a PvE server and later transferred to join a guild that bookahnerk had been with back in Ultima Online who are also on a PvE server), I left and never looked back.

The ironic part is that I actually love open world PvP. However, and here’s the big caveat: There have to be “safe” zones and going to either (PvE or PvP) zone has to be optional. I want to decide when I want to PvP or PvE! I do not want some random player who passes by to make that decision for me. Especially since that usually meant players that were much higher in level or had much better gear and thus, much better chances than me.

Defending a tower.

I found out how much I enjoy PvP when I played Warhammer Online. For those who don’t know: The game has 4 tiers, which are basically four level ranges. Each tier had different zones that belonged to the different race pairings. For example, dwarves and greenskins. So there you were, a level 5 player in the dwarf/greenskin T1 area. You could either do your PvE – regular quests or public quests (events) – or hop into the RvR lake which was marked on the map with a brownish border. When you entered the area that was marked as RvR, you got a warning and had a few seconds time to run back in case you did not want to get flagged.

This is what I miss most in my current MMOs. The ease of joining RvR when you wanted to (PvE and PvP was on the same map in each zone) and do PvE if you wanted to do that. There were clear borders (on the map, at least, not in the world per se). Joining was as easy as setting a foot into the area.

All this long-winded history of my gaming habits is just here to explain what I love about “world PvP”. For some reason, Guild Wars 2’s WvW hasn’t sticked with me yet. I’ve been in there a couple of times (almost literally) and I enjoyed my time there, but it seems to be so distant from the rest of the game that I find it hard to get in there, but yesterday, ArenaNet talked about the upcoming WvW area Edge of the Mists, and it makes me want to get into WvW!

The problem here is: As much as I love melee and swords in PvE, I do not like playing melee in PvP. So, the warrior is basically out. I did think about taking my mesmer there, but I really dislike that she’s so slow… or I’d have to get builds that make use of the focus which is a reliable way of getting some swiftness. On the other hand: Maybe this weapon IS the perfect one to use in WvW?

All I know is that I want something tricky to play. The warrior is too straight-forward. I absolutely loved playing a frost mage in World of Warcraft’s Burning Crusade. That mage was about controlling, freezing, slowing, the enemies. Making sure they can’t hit you. Something like that would be great. And this is why I’m rambling about this topic. Maybe some of our readers can help me here. Which profession would resemble such a playstyle in Guild Wars 2? Maybe the engineer? Anything tricky that isn’t melee… it’s okay if it’s not easy to play. I get used to it… I hope. ;)