Tadaa! Something like a year after getting started, and while everyone else is digging into the Nightfall campaign of Guild Wars, talking up the forthcoming Viking-based expansion of Guild Wars, and talking down the furthercoming World of Warcraft based 'Guild Wars 2', I've finally finished the original Prophecies campaign. Woot!

It was supposed to be Tuseday N00b Club, but we had a prior cancellation, leaving the two of us unable to continue in Istan (due to The Pact), so we logged back across to our 'mains', in so much as the term has meaning there at all, my R/N with Beastmastery and their E/Me with the Air strikes, and it was off to Hell's Precipice, to take care of unfinished business; Mission 25, the last one in Tyria, in which a previous mistake is corrected, and a Nemesis learns the peril of lengthy exposition, as opposed to a swift execution when he had the chance.

We've had quite a few sorties in there now, a ruinous landscape of lava, basalt and the occasional firey missiles falling out of the sky. The Nemesis decides, for tactically very dubious reasons, to just ignore us and go and get on with The Evil Plan, leaving us to chase him across this volcanic landscape, battling our way through a host of lava creatures which have a nasty habit of splitting into two smaller monsters when you 'kill' them. There's also the frequent clumps of imp-like things who can really rack up the staggering powerful AOE fire spells if left alive too long, so all in all, it's quite a tricky technical exercise, making ones way across the fairly large mission area.

Our group was on the powerful side, composed entirely of the more advanced Heroes introduced by Nightfall, so probably had a bit of an easier time of it than was originally designed, but the real winner was actually me! Reasoning along somewhat Darwinian lines, it occurred to me that since these creatures were basically made out of magma, they'd be quite resistant to fire.

(Why does the End Game always end up happening in a volcano? Molten Core, Solusek's Eye, Ring of Fire Islands, that stupid fire planet in Star Wars Ep. III. I blame Tolkien, AGAIN. "Elves, check, wizards, check, magic rings, check, climatic fight inside a volcano, check..." Just for once, I'd like to have a climax on a glacier for a change! I digress...)

Going on a hunch based mostly on how things ought to work in a universe that makes Physical Sense, I added 'Winter' to my skillbar. This summons an AOE spirit thing that changes all Elemental Damage, to Cold Damage. Given that my cohort for the mission was an outrageously Fire-Specialised Elementalist with an already massive damage output, this subtle twisting of the battlefield meant that all fire became ice, which hurt us about as much as the fire, but really cut into the fire-creatures arrayed against us. I then summoned Greater Conflagaration spirits too, (all Physical Damage becomes Fire), which then gets overridden by the Winter, making ALL damage become cold-based. A cold day in hell, indeed, and a bad day if you happen to be made out of fire!

My 500lb enraged black bear pet came along for the trip too, (since he does seem to be becoming the real hero of our  Guildwars adventures), and the majority of my other hotkeys were pet-based, making him a Force For Awesome all the way through the mission. We fluffed the first go, with an unlucky pull near the portal area which brought the whole place down on us, but that run saw us complete the bonus anyway. With that ticked off for good, the second run saw us bulldoze our way right through to the end section, where our Nemesis tried a bit of psychological warfare, (which failed), and then got what was coming to him. Bad Nemesis!

And so the world was saved. The prophet showed up to do the usual smugly annoying 'all as I had forseen it' thing prophets tend to do in these stories, then we had to escape the exploding volcano, as usual, and the final cutscene saw us sailing off into the sunset. Bravo! Roll end credits!

And then we ended up in the chat-spam mundaneness of Droknar's Forge, and life continues as usual, only without plot-based motivation. There's some minor fire-creature based clean-up quests to do, but the oomph seems to have gone out of things a bit. Still, I'm only 13/25 on the Bonus missions, and you need them all for the title, so quite a bit of replay value there. Then there's the Tomb of Primeval Kings and the Underworld, missions in Sorrow's Furnace, and of course, Nightfall, although I'm still saving that for my N00b Club character to see and do first. And even -gasp- PvP perhaps!

I'm not too worried about growing out of Guild Wars though, because at it's heart, is the very simple and fun, casual friendly hack-n-slash sort of gameplay that made the Diablo and Dungeon Siege games so compelling and replayable. All I've done now, is fully unlock all the various maps I can now mindlessly rampage across at will.

By the sounds of things, the upcoming Guild Wars 2 is set to depart form the current quirky and unique place in the genre that Guild Wars currently occupies, promising all sorts of features that we're more used to seeing in the typical High Fantasy Levelquest (WoW, EQ2, et al.), and I think it's a real shame, as the main reason I'm still interested in Guild Wars at all, is that it's so different to those.

Still, with any luck, Nightfall, Factions and the Viking Campaign ought to be enough to last me a while...