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[mellicious]

Mel the Monk
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

Elevator-related gripe of the day: When the 5 people on the elevator are going to 5 different floors. (Yes, I know they can't help it, but that doesn't make it any less annoying.)

(This is what happens when I write my LJ posts first thing in the morning. I am very grouchy in the mornings.)

Explanation of the latest GuildWars picture behind the cut...
OK, so the picture above is my third GuildWars character, the monk, creatively named Mel (and meaning, of course, that I inevitably call her Mel the Monk all the time). She is now out of pre-Searing and has a new set of armor which is a very demure-looking little dress. It's tan-colored, and sort of pretty although I think I will probably end up dying it some other color. (Most likely, whatever color dye one of my chars happens to get as a drop.) You may also notice that she has one side of her scalp partially shaved, and tattooed. The tattoo is her "headgear" and has, well, what passes for armor protection with a monk. Monks are as bad as elementalists about the weak armor. With the post-Searing monk armor you got to choose from various tattoos which were all sort of similar-looking, as far as I could tell, but had different properties as far as an extra skill point for smiting, healing, divine favor and so forth. I chose the smiting one. Monks are weak enough as it is, every bit helps. You may assume pictures of the new armor will be forthcoming, since I seem to love posting screenshots, for some reason.

I also deleted my useless Factions character (since I haven't bought Factions and don't intend to until I finish playing the original) and made a ranger. I have no real intention of playing her a whole lot right now, but I like creating characters, and I like the way she looks, so I will probably keep her rather than starting over. She is red-headed, and I dressed her in orange and brown - it's a very striking combination. (And the fact is, I will probably end up playing her more than I think - at least, that's what happened with Mel the Monk.)

Columbine wanted to run our characters Io and Rima to Temple of the Ages last night, because he said we'd need to do it eventually (he also just likes doing the runs, and really so do I!), but this one turned out to be a serious bitch to do. He said he didn't have near as much trouble doing it before, which may well have been my fault - that is, the areas we had to go through had a lot of undead sorcerors and things like that, and they may have been drawn to Rima the elementalist. At least, that's the theory. No way of telling, really, but in any case, we died several dozen times, and seriously considered giving up before finally persevering and making it through. Every time you die on the same expedition, your party loses some strength; after a while it maxes out at 60%, but that's a serious hit when you're trying to fight really strong mobs. What ends up happening is that you kill one monster, you die, you resurrect at the shrine, which may be a good way back, and you run back to the same place and hope you can kill one more monster before you die again. The monsters don't resurrect during this process, so if you can keep killing off one monster at a time, you will eventually get them all. Some of these sorceror-types can spawn big parties of minions, though, and a couple of times the minions started attacking us right on the resurrection shrine, so that we would die, ressurect, die, ressurect, several times right in a row. The only way out of that loop is for somebody to run away and draw them off - usually you die doing that, too, but at least on the next go-round, the minions won't be sitting on top of you when you resurrect. It was crazy. But sort of oddly fun.