Askgar

Well, I know I don’t post a lot but that’s mainly due to a very busy and hectic summer with some less than expected events (for anyone that cares see my “other” blog http://poozle.livejournal.com/6257.html ).

Anyway, today’s post is to be on Guild Wars… again. Primarily my continuing rediscovery of the game and how much I am starting to enjoy it again.  Thanks to Van Hemlock (www.vanhemlock.com), and his Tuesday Noob Club, which I discovered by accident after being linked across from Massively (http://www.massively.com/), I started playing on a weekly basis, every Tuesday night, for a few hours.  Initially it was just a few of us but gradually over the months it grew and grew, with our most recent night attracting 12 people (a record for us I believe).

My role in the guild started out innocently enough, I joined and played for a couple of weeks and while there were still just 3 of us in the guild I was “promoted” to officer.  Gradually over the months as more people joined it became apparent we could do with a forum for organising our evenings, with some web space I already had I simply set up a forum and posted it up for use.  A special offer on domain names (2 years for less than £2), resulted in our domain name, and another recent offer resulted in me having enough web space and bandwidth for the guild to grow massively, and for the forum to still exist when GW2 is eventually released (at least it should be out in 2 years I hope…).  It now appears I’ve ended up becoming the webmaster of the guild and “second in command”, a role I fell into and never expected given how I initially found the guild.

Now the guild seems to be meeting up more and more regularly, in fact most nights there is at least one other person around and usually more, generally everyone is willing to help out if anyone ever gets suck and its turned into a nice little community, and dare I say it… a proper guild!

Despite this, even without other people there, I have started getting more into the “deeper” side of Guild Wars, the wiki builds for example, with my current obsession being a permasin, the idea is to keep shadow form up permanently to prevent anything damaging you with targatable damage.  I might do a post about this more in the future but this isn’t about my permasin.

I’ve also got into other sections of the game, such as dungoneering and vanquishing, which I can do solo although is a lot more fun with other guildies.  These two are very much the “end game” of Guild Wars, not the very top level of content but the sort of activities to do once the campaigns have been completed.  Dungeons are very much like mini raids from other MMOs, they take a reasonable amount of time (1hour – 3hours) and usually have a boss at the end that may require special tactics (like a flaming ball of fire…).  Vanquishing on the other hand is in a similar vain to “kill 10 rats” style quests, except it is kill all the enemies in this zone… in hard mode, depending on the zone it can range from 1 enemy (usually with a bugged combo of quests) up to 400+ (again, due to quest influence but this time ADDING mobs to the zone), which usually take around an hour or more to do.

On top of these sometimes I just log in to trade… although this usually doesn’t last long because I get really bored of standing in Kamadan US 1 shouting:

WTS Mini Bone Dragon Unded

I’ve been trying to sell that for weeks now with no luck… I get the feeling no one wants it, or at least no one wants to pay for it.  However what I do enjoy doing fits in well with the guild, selling peoples items that they would usually vendor for more money (lock picks primarily), I usually collect up 6 or 7 after each dungeon run and then quickly jump into Kamadan, sell them for 1.2k ish and hand the money back, almost 500gold extra than vendoring them.

The main reason I trade however, is to be able to buy minipets, my current collection has filled up a whole character’s inventory (45 slots) and is now moving onto another character, I’ve got a complete year 1-3 minis set, along with some of the extra minis, with my Mini Kuunavang being my favourite (and was my first I believe).  I’ve hit a minor stumbling block now with my primary source of income having been stopped with no sign of it being reinstated, the Xunlai Tournament House.

And finally, the last reason why I’ve started getting into Guild Wars more and more is Guild Wars 2, the teaser trailer was recently revealed and its looking awesome, there have been some slightly worrying pieces of news coming out of Arenanet (like multiple servers) and I can just hope that the game is as good as Guild Wars and I’ll be happy, and if the Tuesday Noob Club moves over (or at least establishes there) then I’ll be even happier.