(no subject)

[mellicious]

In GuildWars news,

I browbeat poor Columbine into doing the Riverside Province mission last night - it is a difficult mission, but it's also quite different from anything else in the game and I am apparently sort of irrationally fond of it - so we spent the entire evening on that, pretty much. We have not done a lot of that kind of thing in the last week (I'll get to why in a minute); however, we did do the Sanctum Cay mission successfully over the weekend, with Alessa, my warrior, Kaeleen the Mesmer, and a girl from Austin named Adden that I've been talking to a bit, who also plays a warrior. Actually, with two live warriors - and two more henchmen warriors - Sanctum Cay was almost a piece of cake. You only have to survive until the boat comes at the end, and we weren't anywhere near dying by that point. I was sort of amazed at the difference that made. (And then that makes me wonder if we're ever going to be able to get the rest of our non-warrior characters through it without using pick-up groups.) So anyway, Alessa and Kaeleen are past the Sanctum Cay bottleneck, and are adventuring in the desert, which turns out to be rather frustrating in itself, but at least it's something new!

GuildWars was having a "Dragon Festival" over the long 4th of July weekend, with games and prizes and things - but it was in the area for the new game, for Factions, so I gave in and ordered Factions so I could participate. (I don't think I'm the only person who did so, either, so from a financial point of view the weekend was probably a success for ArenaNet.) (Another factor in my thinking, two weeks ago when I ordered it, was the coming layoffs at work - I figured if I got laid off I would feel guilty buying it, but if I already had it I wouldn't have to feel guilty and it would give me something to do! - However, the coda to that is that I have found out in the interim that my job is supposed to be safe. Emphasis on supposed.) Anyway, Factions is a lot of fun and I'm glad I ordered it.

You get two new character slots with the new game, and there are also two new "professions" to choose from, as well as the old ones, so I had to decide what professions to make the new characters - I was pretty much deciding between the two I haven't used in the old game (mesmer and necromancer) and the two new ones (assassin and ritualist). I have been wanting to create a necromancer for a while, but I finally decided that really, the main reason I wanted the necro was for the cool fetishy outfits, and not for the things a necro can do, and I went with the assassin and the ritualist. (Alessa is a necro secondary, anyway, so she can use necro skills - and I ended up giving the assassin a necro secondary as well. I can get the fetishy outfits sometime in the future.) So far, I have played the ritualist much more than the assassin, but that's mostly because somewhere in all the changes they made for the festival (games, decorations, whole new quests) they apparently hosed the quest the assassins had to do in order to advance. I did finally get him up to level 11 yesterday - Gia the ritualist is level 16, and is close to being done with the beginner area.

Oh - I almost forgot to say that John the assassin is my first-ever male character. I tried a female assassin and I hated everything about her - I hated her hair, I hated her name (and no, I'm not telling what it was) and I hated how skinny she was. So I decided to try the male and see if he was any less annoying. (And thus he got named John, the most neutral name I could think of.) It is still disconcerting to me to have a male character, but I like him alright.

You can also take your Tyrian characters to Cantha and adventure. (The idea is that these games take place on two different continents: Tyria for the first game, and Cantha for Factions.) So far Rima and Alessa have been to Cantha to adventure, and everybody has been there long enough to at least get a partial set of armor, because the armor available there is better than what is available at the point they're at in the original game. Rima and Alessa both got full sets, but after that I ran out of materials and so Mel and Tamaya only got outfitted above the waist (which I figure is the most important part anyway) and I will finish with them later. I got 59 bolts of cloth out of salvage from Riverside Province last night, so somebody will probably be getting new pants tonight. (I have enough money - gold and platinum, in the game - to buy the cloth, but it just seemed wasteful to me. I knew I'd get it before long anyway.)

So (as you may have figured out if you actually read all of the above) I spent most of the long weekend playing games. I did go over to my mom's on Monday, and I also worked Monday morning, even though I was supposed to be off, because I was reformatting some spreadsheets that needed to be sent out. Other than that, we mostly went out to eat a bunch. I wasn't terribly interested in seeing Superman, so there wasn't a whole lot else we wanted to do!