Nomadic Gamer

Guild Wars

Gaming

How Did I Miss All This?! #GuildWars

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My newly created Guild Wars Monk / Warrior is climbing through level 8 (a short jump away from 9 at this moment) and I’m having a blast – I realized one very odd thing. Some how, I had climbed to level 15 in Prophecies on my main (3 year old) character without doing a SINGLE mission or primary quest. In fact I didn’t even know they existed. How on earth I managed to do that, I don’t have the slightest idea. When I started working on Eye of the North quests I was impressed by the cut scenes and story – not realizing that Prophecies has a great story and cut scenes too, I had just some how never managed to stumble into any of them.

This time with some guidance and help from Ninga (a 20 Ranger / Monk) and the Guild Wars wiki, I was able to work my way through the Ascalon missions which were incredibly fun. Each mission has bonus stages that you can do (or not, they’re optional) and you earn a lot of extra experience for completing them. I left off last night by helping Prince Rurik save the city of Rin, and before that rescued soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Charr. They had been captured for two years (some even longer) and of course it was all left up to me to help fix!

I’m trying not to pass by the story in hunting for my Hall of Monuments achievements, and trying to drink everything in all at once. It can be a bit overwhelming and I’m kicking myself for not doing this or getting more involved in the game years ago. Now it feels a bit like I’m rushing – granted there’s absolutely no reason why I HAVE to earn 30 pts in my GW1 HoM, but it’s something I’d really like to do. I love the way games tie together in this way, and I think it’s great motivation to give players something to do while they’re waiting for GW2 to release.

I’m happy with the 4 pts I’ve earned so far, but every point after that would be nice too. We’ll see how it goes. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Gaming

Picking Up My Second Tapestry #GuildWars #GW

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In my effort of ‘catching up’ my Hall of Monuments so that I’m ready for Guild Wars 2 I actually discovered a few things. First of all, I apparently picked the worst class combination for PvE ever. The Mesmer / Ranger combination (with Mesmer being my main ‘profession’). I was looking for some builds for this combination and about 99% of the posts I found were all about how this was the worst possible combination ever for PvE and is made for a PvP setting. Great.

I thought about how much effort (long term) I had put into reaching level 15. Not that much, in fact barely a weekend when all is said and done. So I decided to start over with a combination that was more suited to my play style. This time I took the easy road, and made a monk / warrior combination. I absolutely adore the monk, and when I’m playing with my friend Ninga Turtle, I make great use of my heals. When I’m soloing I switch the spec around a bit and stick to being a warrior with mercenary and a few heals. I need to be level 10 before I can do the quest to unlock the Hall of Monuments (again), but at least this time around I’ll know what I’m doing. I also already have 4 points, and they accumulate account wide so it’s not like those will be wasted. Four points unlocks a few pieces of gear according to the calculator.

Since I used my first tapestry from Gwen after visiting the hall for the first time in the wrong monument (not wrong per say, but not the one I wanted to unlock) I decided (before making the new character) that I’d unlock a second one. Thankfully there’s a great Guild Wars Wiki that I made much use of. I decided to work on ‘Northern Allies‘ since it was one of the new quests I had picked up, and after a lengthy quest chain I was rewarded with a lot of experience and the new tapestry, which I used to unlock the miniatures monument.

Of course now I’ll have to do that all over again once the new character reaches 10, but at least I’ll know what to expect. Ninga was also brave enough to run me all the way from my starter city over to Lion’s Arch, so now I can port there. It was quite an adventure, too. Hopefully I’ll get caught up before too long. It’s been neat getting back into the game. I feel a bit more confident at my ‘skill’ and I’m having more fun this round than the first few times I played. One huge enormous bonus to me is the fact that the game has no subscription fee, and during these times I really appreciate that I can pay for the base game and then not have to pay anything extra. Granted, Guild Wars does play much more like a single player game to me than an MMO, but the ability to group with others is there.

I’m looking forward to sharing more of my adventures, as always!

Gaming

Starting My Hall of Monuments #GW #GuildWars

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I’ve played Guild Wars off and on since 2009 – not that long, I know. I own all of the expansions, and have never before made it past level 9 in prophecies. Something always held me back, and I never really gave the game a ‘proper’ chance. When Guild Wars 2 announced that trophies from your Guild Wars monument would carry over in some fashion to the new game, I instantly thought to myself “oh! I’ll need to work on that!” and then never did. Of course now the game is almost ready for release, and I’m just getting started. Not only that, but I’ve been completely in the dark about everything Guild Wars related, and didn’t have the faintest idea at all of what I was doing. So grabbing my trusty google search engine, I set forth to figure out what this whole ‘Hall of Monuments’ was about.

First, I discovered it’s in the expansion ‘Eye of the North’. Great, I owned that at least. First step down. Next I found this great FAQ which answered most of my basic questions. Most importantly, the NPC I needed to talk to to get started in this whole adventure. Since I was still in prophecies I was off to talk to Len Caldoron in Lion’s Arch. Good thing my friend brought me to Lion’s Arch a few years back, or else I would have no idea how to get there. As it was I was able to instantly port, and found myself in the Eye of the North. Continued on with the quest chain. I picked up henchmen and along the way earned my first two heroes. Heroes are like henchmen but better. You choose their skills, and you can give them gear. Other than that I haven’t figured it out yet.

When you do the main chain to access the Hall of Monuments, you’re given a tapestry. This tapestry is then used to unlock one of the monuments, either devotion, fellowship, resilience, and valor. Honor is already unlocked. Each one of these monuments holds a particular ‘thing’ from your character. For example, devotion is miniatures. I made a mistake and didn’t understand this whole concept, so I unlocked the monument for armor sets, which of course I have none of. Then I spent the rest of my weekend working to unlock another tapestry, so I could place my miniatures, which I do have a few of.

The quests were fun. Because I had so many heroes and henchmen working for me I barely got any loot but I didn’t mind because I was there for the story, not for neat items. The experience gain was crazy. Eye of the north basically sets your character at level 20 (but without any extra skills) so my level 11 character was level 15 before I knew it. I got involved in the story, helping the Norn become my allies, and loved the introduction to my heroes. All in all? Great weekend of gaming!

 

Gaming

Finding Myself in Guild Wars 2 #GW2

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I’ve never been one to ‘spoil’ games by participating heavily in betas – although don’t get me wrong, I love betas and I do take part in them. I just tend to stick to specific testing grounds instead of ‘completing’ the entire game. For the past few months my inner circle of blogging / twitter / G+ friends have been talking about Guild Wars 2 and I showed very little interest. I always had plans of picking the game up, but I would get distracted with Diablo 3 (briefly) or Wurm Online (constantly) or something else would come up that prevented me from looking very far into the game.

Until this weekend. I could hold back no longer. I pre-ordered the game, which automatically allows access to all of the beta weekends. It was a fast download (for me at least, 3 mb/s) and I was ready to go when servers opened on Friday. The problem initially was that my friends had already picked a server and by the time I logged in ready to create a character – it was full.

Gah!

I hate the idea of servers. I always have. The main thing any one person wants to do in game and I have said this countless times is be able to play with their friends without limitations. New friends and old friends alike. No matter when someone has started playing the game. In GW this was easy, there are no servers only districts and you simply port to a new one and ta da you’re with your friends. I hear there are ways around this in GW2 with guesting and server transfers, but they’re still just band-aid solutions to the greater issue (imo).

Looking past this – I was incredibly impressed with character creation. My character has a history. A ‘life’. She is not just made up of statistics and dye colours, but has a background. I instantly felt bonded with this beta character, sad by the prospect that hey, it’s beta. Having played a mesmer in GW, that’s what I created for GW2. Then I spent the next hour running around, exploring. I didn’t do anything else. I don’t know how anything works in game. I was enthralled with the spell graphics, and with all of the graphics in general. It runs wonderfully on my machine, and looks amazing. For now, that’s all I need.

I can’t wait for this to go live.

Gaming

Holiday Events In Our Games of Choice #MMORPG #EQ2 #WoW #Rift #W101 #GW

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Hard to believe that today is already December 15th – where does the time go! My apologies for those who may have been trying to access MmoQuests these past few days. My host was hacked and so the site has been less-than-stable while they resolved issues. It looks like everything is a-go now, so I should be able to get back to posting here on a regular basis, so long as something shiny doesn’t come along and distract me along the way.

There are numerous holiday festivals taking place in MMOs this time of year, and I love hearing about them all. A few of my favorites happen in Guild Wars, Wizard 101, EverQuest 2, Rift, and of course World of Warcraft. That by no means lists all of the events out there though, so make sure you take a peek into your GoC (game of choice) and take part in the yearly events (if there are any, not all games have these).

Dragon Flight (my Argent Dawn alliance based guild) managed to take down a few more encounters in some Outlands raids last week. This was quite a feat for us because we’re still only three people (actually, now we’re five, but two of them are too small to participate in these raids). We’ve been doing them for appearance gear and my shaman won herself a pair of neat shoulders that have a graphic of glowing broken up molten infused rocks.

Aside from that I’ve been working on leveling both a DeathKnight and a Druid. The druid managed to grasp on to level 62 tonight, and the DK is 61. I do have a recruit a friend account, so they’ve only got a few hours played if that. While getting to ‘end game’ is not everything, I’ve taken my time and enjoyed the ride on a handful of alts and this time I just wanted to get to Cataclysm content.

In true nomadic gamer style I haven’t really settled on a ‘main’ although I tend to play my shaman more than my other characters. I also spent some time playing Plants vs. Zombie, and Skyrim. The majority of my friends are all playing SWTOR – and it’s been really hard to hold out and not just pre-order the game for myself. In fact, there is a copy in the house, belongs to my other half. He’ll be playing and I can make a character on his account and play while he’s at work to see if the story actually does suck me in as everyone says it will. A few friends have pointed out that Star Wars has very little to do with ‘space’ and has far more to do with fantasy and magic, which is a big point in its favor (for me at least). I even sat down to try to watch the Star Wars movies today, so who knows, give it some time and perhaps that will be my GoC.

In sadder news, Beckett MOG shut its doors today. For those who don’t know I’ve been writing MMO related articles for them for a number of years now, as well as moderating their forums and writing news articles for the web site. They just weren’t pulling in enough money (or so I assume) and in this age of digital media, it’s not a big surprise. I hope that everyone who is now searching for new work (I’m looking at you, Jason) finds the job of their dreams, and I personally am incredibly thankful for the experience I’ve gained while working there.

As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!

 

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