GU 53 – Part II – Chronomagic
stargrace 
Lets get back to talking about GU 53 and more of the wonderful goodies that are headed to go live some time in September. These changes are already on the test server, so be sure to check them out for yourself if you’d like to explore them.
I already talked about the achievement system that’s being implemented, now lets spend a little time talking about Chronomagic – also known as “auto mentoring”.
There are Erudites set up in Qeynos, Freeport, Neriak, Gorowyn, and Kelethin and they will allow players level 20+ to speak to them and mentor down from their level in increments of 5 (10, 15, 20, etc). This one pictured on the right is in Qeynos harbor. They do not currently show up if you hit alt+w (waypoints) but you can always ask a guard to locate ‘time’ for you, as it’s part of their name. One thing to keep in mind, if you auto mentor you will not gain the bonus aa that players currently receive from mentoring an actual player. We get quite a large chunk of experience (aa) from doing that, so if it’s important to you you’ll want to keep mentoring little ones in order to keep that bonus. When you speak to the Erudites, they will pop open a window and ask you which level you want to be.
As you can see to mentor has a small cost associated with it, 5 gold and 100 personal status. The experience reduction is based on my characters level (80) so it may show as something different to others.
Now, Kiara had posted under the test notes that there are also 37 new missions that work like TSO missions and send players out around Norrath to battle specific bosses in zones all over in all levels. I couldn’t actually figure out where any of these missions were (the Erudite does not give them out) but as soon as I do or if anyone else knows please feel free to post. I think these missions are a great idea, but I’d also love to see them given to players who are actually mentoring and not just using the auto mentor system. Maybe they work that way I don’t have the faintest idea.
You will stay mentored until it’s canceled (right click on your own name and there is an unmentor option, it’s already in game for regular mentoring). You have to go back to the NPC if you want to lower your level once more.
One really important thing here for the PvP servers – auto mentoring works the same as regular mentoring which means no pvp combat while you are auto mentored. This makes it very dangerous to use on pvp servers.
I decided to check out whether or not you could effectively gray out your own shard instances in TSO because there’s plenty of people who already mentor down to 50, enter a TSO instance, unmentor, and then complete the zones that way. This has been talked about on the forums as being an unintended bug, and players should probably refrain from doing it (as per forum posts) so I was curious if there would be something implemented to prevent it. As of yet, there is not. You can mentor down to 50, pick up your TSO missions (such as the ones in Commonlands) zone into the dungeon, right click your name, unmentor, everything turns gray, and you can complete your shard quests that way. Of course you get no loot, and this only works in specific zones (Commonlands, Lavastorm, Everfrost) and who knows, perhaps something will be implemented that prevents you from unmentoring during the TSO instances.
I think this system will be a great thing to add to game, if you happen to want to take down a raid zone (Courts anyone?) and want everyone to be level appropriate, if you want to go on a named killing binge for aa, if you just want to hang out with your friends in game but don’t want to actually be their exact level. You keep all of your spells, your gear, your aa, and traits, they just reduce in effectiveness, bringing you to ‘around’ the same effectiveness as someone else that level.
It’s a nice way to get players to experience the older content, and to prevent them from out leveling zones (which I have ranted about before in the past as being something I simply don’t like, why on earth would you ever want players to out level your zones). It will give players an option of ‘something else’ to do. I’m not sure how people who are NOT mentoring will feel about this – it can bring around a lot of griefers who are level 80 and rush a zone taking all of the named out from under the little groups who are in there exploring. Most of the time these level 80’s will move on once they’ve finished getting what they want, but I can certainly see a lot of farming lined up for the future. At least this will be an easier way of obtaining appearance gear (there’s some fantastic black chain in Fallen Gate) without having to find someone to mentor, not to mention you could farm the zones 1-20 to get masters that are on smart loot if you’re one of those people who enjoy being ‘fully mastered’
It will be interesting to see how it all works out in the end. Anyone else super excited about this feature besides me?
My one concern with the achievement system is that if you are a fairly active gamer, and have been for the last four years – and if you’ve completed numerous quests, raids, and crafted through each of those tiers when you log in you may find yourself already earning 300+ achievements out of a total of (currently) only 489.