Small Thoughts, Small Complaints, Small Post

I am very surprised at the degree I continue to log in to Guild Wars 2. In a constant period unspoiled by content updates, expansions, etc., I usually flit around 2-3 MMOs. I don’t nibble as much as Syp, but I do enjoy small plates. Guild Wars 2 has continued to be my main MMO, and I am having a blast with alternate characters, which is something I rarely do in most MMOs. I will have to discuss my WvW-only character in a future post.

I am slightly frustrated having a necromancer main with the gear options. It seems there are a bunch of cool scepters and staves, but the artists seemed to have forgotten to colorize some for the necromancer. Are there any green-plague glow effects? Seems like fire and ice elementalists get a lot of love. I’ve decided that I love Memory of the Sky for my staff because of the dichotomy of light and dark with necromancer’s staff skills. I would kill for a green-tinted Wayward Wand as a scepter, but my choices now seem limited to ice, skulls, and eyeballs.

In Lord of the Rings Online I am finally hitting Rohan proper with the Norcrofts zone. Overall the Rohan expansion is really good for a quest-based MMO. The flow is exceptionally good. The stories are also nice with some decent gems scattered around. There is also some conventional silliness like a fell-beast cool with watching me burn down it’s roost or me having to constantly interrupt a funeral to advance a quest line. Still I am enjoying the expansion. I’ll have to discuss mounted combat, revisited, in a later post too.

I would play it a lot more if the client was not an inefficient woolly mammoth of a program. With my computer running Guild Wars 2 on max settings, I can be in the game in less than a minute. Lord of the Rings Online is at least a couple minutes. It is a shame too because the quests are so conducive to small bites of playing. I also hate that the client won’t run windowed unless it changes Windows 7 to basic view. I’m sure optimizing load times and compatibility with Windows 7 graphic mode is near the bottom of their engineer’s to-do list.

Guild Wars 2 Wintersday event is coming on December 14, and the Lord of the Rings Online Riders of Rohan 3-mans (Goblintown, Mirkwood, and Misty Mountains) have less than a month to be released. That is about where I am heading.

–Ravious

17 thoughts on “Small Thoughts, Small Complaints, Small Post”

  1. I never understood why Guild Wars 2 has no system to dye weapons. I was really surprised to see it missing this feature. There are a lot of weapons of which I like the skin but dislike the color composition and because of that become unusable for me.

  2. I’d like Deathwish for my necro, it’s a fancier version of the bone staff from GW1. The Pact staff is awesome too, a blue glow around a metallic looking skull. Still get a lot of use out of gnarled walking stick/wayward wand. I tend to go for more plainer stuff so really like the ogre staff, centaur staff or legionnaire staff. And if I’m in a really wishful mood then Eye of Rogort/Lidless Eye for a scepter. And if we are really going beyond the realm of probability then Final Rest, so rare no-one knows where it is found in PvE.

      1. It’s currently not in the game. (May be found in sPvP though not in the world) If it is indeed the game as some speculate, it has not been found.

        Why don’t you just use one of the other scythe skins?

  4. GW2 skins in general are rather bland. Even though the dye system is great, most armor’s just meh.. GW1 has a lot better options imo.

    1. I agree. I combed the dungeon skins looking for something I liked. As a sylvari I do like the racial armors, but it doesn’t fit with my character concept.

      I was just thinking on this though. I think I dislike many of the dungeon skins because they are skins that take too much from the enemy inside the dungeons. I don’t really want to look like a dredge or Flame Legion or Son of Svanir.

      Thankfully I got a really nice look with Shadow armor dress, Exalted top and head, and Deathly Avian Pauldrons.

  5. Do you think your extended stay in GW2, especially playing alts (which to me is just an indicator that your main is boring, but different topic), is in part based on the amount of pre-release hype you experienced and in some ways perpetuated?

    In a way you had more momentum going in because you had followed the game for so long, and pre-release hyped yourself up to experience X, Y, and Z, while the average player just went into it, experienced what it was on a character, and moved on due to the progression cliff?

    1. No, I play the MMOs where I have fun. I play games where I have fun.

      If I stop having fun, I stop playing. I did not have momentum to expectations of an “end game”. Only of what activities I would have fun doing. I did do those activities, the same as any average player. Now things have paused enough that the launch momentum has long been replaced by live momentum.

      For example, I thought that once people left Orr I would have a lot less fun there, but I am finding that as a solo-to-small roaming groups, I am having a blast with very challenging content. This was a surprise to me, and an enjoyable one at that.

      I am not quite to Bhagpuss’ zen, but I do find that fun + small progression (ectos, rare mats, etc.) is enough. If I want forced or artificial progression I can go grind rep and LI experience any day in LOTRO.

      1. Defragging the .dat files themselves has been an obsolete (and potentially harmful) process for at least a year and a half.

        There is just some reason that old characters take several minutes to load into the game.

        EDIT: to clarify, the 3rd party program linked will not do anything your normal windows defragger doesn’t do (except focus exclusively on the LOTRO file folder). The de-internal-fragmentation aspect is obsolete since some client update long ago, I’m thinking RoI. Turbine’s own defragger program is the one (not linked) that can corrupt your texture files since then.

  9. I really like the default skin on my Khilbron’s armor. It has nice patterns on it, snake heads, and the blindfold mask can’t be beat.

    Of course I tend to dislike the “ooOoOoooOO death, skulls, and green miasma” stuff that so many other necros go for on principal. Which is why my dyes are blue/gold/white and my staff skin is Emberspire.

    1. “ooOoOoooOO death, skulls, and green miasma” just made me think of a try-hard goth quaggan necromancer. Thank you so much for that hilarious mental image!

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