So, when last you left us in GuildWars: Nightfall, we'd all fallen out over the classic 'Friend of my Friend is not necessarily also my Friend' type of conundrum, and somewhat lost track of where we were, and what we were supposed to be doing, and for a moment there, during the long dark teatime of the soul this week, I even considered on giving up on the whole thing and just doing solitary maudlin cyber-tourism in Anarchy Online on Tuesdays, instead.
Luckily, despite pretensions at being a brooding over-sensitive Byronic type in my online dealings (complete with big shirt sleeves), I'm generally a bit more grounded than that, so turned up as usual last night, and said my hellos, to find that things seem to have resolved themselves quite amicably during the week, with my Necromancer friend having picked up on my, and the Derishes 'Not Happy!' vibes form half-way across the internet, and taken it upon themselves to explain to The Stranger the real state of affairs.
I think that's when you know you've found a real friend online, as opposed to the more commonplace sort, who is a polite, and agreeable, member of a pick-up group or guild, and whom you might even see again and add to the Friends List, but whom you wouldn't necessarily tell anything about your Real Life outside of the game. I suppose Real Internet Friends are the ones that can pick up on the un-typed - the things you don't say, in this most calculated mediums of ours, the mostly anonymous, and extremely premeditated chat-window. I'm welling up here! SNORK!
Anyway, to cut a long story short, and to skirt around the subject of emotions entirely, as we Brits are world-reknowned at doing, everything went for the best, except for The Stranger, who apparently logged off in a hissy-fit some minutes before I showed up, which frankly, suited me fine. On with the show!
As a kind of deliberate reaffirmation of our intent; that we're here to enjoy the journey at, not exactly a leisurely pace, but a comfortable one none the less, we decided not to touch the Primary Quest Story at all that session, (We'd just made it to the Venta Cemetary Mission lobby) but instead just explore, and pick away at a number of Secondary Kournan quests instead, including the Building a Base missions in the Command Post.
These are quite neat actually. Having been on the run recently, we've now found a decent place to set up a base of operations for the (no doubt) coming war against the Bad Guys, and this area, the Command Post itself, has a number of quests you can do, to add features and facilities to it - mostly in the form of NPCs you go out and rescue or recruit, who then turn into useful vendors, trainers, and so on, available to you each time you revisit the base from then on. All very useful, and this seems to be Nightfall's equivalent of Ascenscion, unlocking the ability to change your secondary profession, albeit at a point much sooner than you seem to get in Prophecies.
Our Dervish has already changed from D/R to D/W. Given their rather alarming red mist moments, a Warrior's skills are probably more helpful than a Rangers, certainly. The Necromancer seems happy enough as Elementalist secondary, and I'm very pleased with Paragon secondary, and only wish Primary was changable too. You don't see a lot of Mesmers about, and the Rune Trader, who buys and sells Primary Profession armour upgrades, based on player trading, does Mesmer runes for the flat bottom price, so few people buy them. Nice to be special of course, but somewhat worrying too. Do Mesmers suck that much? I don't mind though...and find their playstyle interesting, if somewhat elusive at present, instead relying mostly on the Paragon skills for now.
We also did a bit of touring, questing and uncovering map areas in Sunward Marches, Arkjok Ward, Marga Coast and discovering the Dajkah Inlet outpost, which turned out to be something I'd not seen before...a 'Challenge Mission'. We gave it a go, and it turned out to be a sort of PvE Guild-vs-Guild Battle, where successive islands of Corsairs are assaulted, the object of which seems to be to kill as many Corsair Guild Lords as possible, for points, all against the clock. We scored about 30 points - the all time record was over 550! If I ever get that good at a computer game, I'll know something has gone terribly wrong with my life, I think. Apparently, you can also find/earn upgrades armour sets for your heroes in there, so it might be worth dabbling with again some time, but we've other fish to fry! The Evil Mastermind isn't getting any less Evil you know...
I expect it's on with the main story next week, but it was an enjoyable session, and something of an antidote to the stress of last week.