As for Guild Wars 2, well... I do have this little guild, they want to do stuff, our most active core members are exactly five people (including myself) AKA the exact amount of guys you need for dungeons and stuff. And for as bored as I was with the game, the guild is nice, I don't want it to break apart due to lack of activity and after our long break since sometime around Xmas, I invited the guys to do something together as a group again. We decided to tackle Arah, which is something we had put off for a few months now.
If you don't know about Arah, it's the game's final dungeon. If you want to see the ending of your character's personal story, "beat" the game, get it all done, then there's no way around this place. Also, parts of it are so ludicrously difficult and frustrating, the whole experience is about as pleasant as eating a broken bottle. Through your butt. Or so it was until they re-tuned all the dungeons. Now that was a surprise!
Long story short, story mode dungeons on Guild Wars 2 are now very casual. After finishing Arah posed no problem whatsoever, we made another visit to the Ascalonian catacombs and breezed through there in about 15 minutes with no wipes or major casualties. It's almost a bit too easy.
It makes perfect sense, though. A major part of the game's story is experienced during cutscenes and events, which happen inside the dungeons. And while our guild has managed to finish them all before they lowered the difficulty, some of them would take lots of time to beat and some of them were so annoyingly tough, we didn't really wanna go back there after finishing them for the first time. Some players got so annoyed with the whole thing, they skipped most of the dungeons completely - and a huge part of the story along with them.
Now you can get through there with relative ease and that's alright. The game still has its tough challenges, such as the fractals of the mists. And something tells me that the explorable dungeon modes (aka hard modes) haven't been nerfed much, if at all. We're going to find out tonight.
They've also added a new carrot on a stick, which is surprisingly fun for now. Surprising, really, considering they're presented as daily quests, something I really, seriously hate most of the time. Every day you're offered a mix of ten or so different tasks, such as killing a certain amount of baddies in a certain area or taking part in a set number of events. You pick the five things you want to do out of that list, finish them and get rewarded with a token ("laurels"), which can be traded in for the new endgame tier "ascended" gear. These items are maybe one or two per cent better than the exotic stuff, which you can just find, craft and buy on the tradepost (auction house), so they're more about the feel-good factor than actual progress. But it gives you something to do. The difference between this stuff and the daily grind on, say, WoW is how you're never limited to the same tasks in the same area over and over again, but you get to choose what you want to do, you get to do stuff all over the game world and the whole thing doesn't feel all samey. It helps that you can now loot level 80 rare items off of any random level 20 baddie, thanks to the level scaling. Kill, explore and do quests anywhere you want and always get good loot. No more need to farm boring old Orr 24/7 for your gold. Me gusta!
Another cool thing is how they've greatly increased the drop chances for useful loot from guys like him:
Dragons are now much more likely to drop exotic gear and the much sought-after legendary precursors, which look awesome and sell for triple digit amounts on the tradepost. Sadly, two out of the three dragon battles are really just a mindless massacre, but the whole thing never lasts more than five minutes and everyone just wants their loot, so it's another daily activity with a chance for extra gold and gear. Which, once again, beats having to grind the same old spot every night and day as everyone did not too long ago.
Now that I'm back on there, I'm also faced with the greatest dilemma of my personal MMO history: Choosing the right 'main'. On the one hand, there's this dude:
Grimclaw the Slayer, my guardian. Look at that fucking chainsaw! The flaming plate armor with menacing spikes and shit! This guy deals so much damage, he can jump right in the middle of a dozen baddies, hack them all to bits in mere seconds and walk away completely unscathed. When I log on to this guy, people send me messages to tell me he's the coolest character they've ever seen. He deals nearly double the damage I could dish out on the ranger, whilst sporting a much smaller health pool. And being the heaviest hitter in the group is fun, but being the first one to kick the bucket... not so much.
I tried rolling other toons, but... meh. Really. Don't get me wrong - all the races and classes are really great, but I'm too lazy to get yet another toon all the way up to level 80 and once you've become really attached to a main character or two... well, you know.
Problem is, I can't figure out for the life of me which one of these two I should stick to. Sure, I can play both of them just fine, but you know how it goes. At some point you find that one ultra rare item and you have to decide who gets it. You gotta figure out which one of your toons you like best. Figure out which of these guys to kit all the way out. And with daily and monthly quests required to obtain most of that stuff, gearing up both of them at the same time simply isn't a possibility.
I really don't know what I wanna do right now, so I guess I'll bring both toons to the dungeons and guild activities now and see which of them is more fun to play.
Still, it's nice wanting to come back for more in the first place. I almost forgot how much I liked Tyria. Having to decide which one of my characters I like best is certainly not the most horrible problem one could have.
-Cat
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