Still a man down this week for the usual Tuesday outing, leaving our GuildWars: Nightfall characters somewhat stalled outside the Venta Cemetery Mission. This is part of the trouble that has always plagued any attempt I've made to maintain useful or meaningful MMO Friendships. Every time you add one more personal connection, it multiplies the amount of determination, coordination and patience required for all of you to remain comparable in level, or at the same place in a story, or generally equal in any useful way. There's only three of us in this particular Regular Group and already it's proving difficult to keep level, due to one thing or another meaning that one or more of us can't make it that week.
Still, I'm not in any particular hurry, and if anything, this deliberate rationing is making me appreciate the game a lot more than if I'd have just gone at like usual; i.e. fanatically, 4+ hours a night, every night, just long enough for the free month to run out, followed by a massive and spiteful burnout, and hate-filled bitterness making me never play again thereafter!
I guess the trick in this case, is to keep busy with other aspects of the game, so this Tuesday, we two that could make it, have been Surviving! A kind of added challenge, the idea is that you're to get your character from 0 to Level 20 without dying ever, something that my veteran friend enjoys doing quite a bit, having quite bad altitis. So with this very specific goal in mind, we rolled up two fresh characters, starting in Istan, rather than Pre-Searing Ascalon, and got to it.
For this exercise, I'm a Warrior/Dervish, although to be honest only picked Dervish because I don't have one at all yet, and want to unlock some of their skills for use by my Heroes. Mostly I'm doing my usual thing of ignoring the Secondary completely, and just trying to get to grips with the five different aspects of the Primary; in this case Strength, Tactics, Sword Mastery, Axe Mastery and Hammer Mastery. The last three are easy enough - I just need to pick a weapon and ignore the other two, but Strength and Tactics are both full of useful sorts of ability. (My companion went with Elementalist (as usual) and /Ranger, mostly because I found a quite cool looking tameable Crocodile on our last go through Lahtenda Bog, and they want one as a pet.)
Warrioring is a quite cathartic change of pace for me, as so far, both characters I've played with any real dedication have been ranged, using Bows and then Spears, leading to a very turret-like existence all in all, whereas the Warrior is a melee class, so this time I was spending a lot of time charging about the place beating monsters in a very hands-on manner, which made for a much more dynamic game - lots going on and much less setting up on a spot and picking stuff off. I'm also suddenly much more aware of movement in general - snares, sprints, distances and so on, most of which you can safely ignore if you're just going to stand in one place lobbing sharp sticks, only moving to get out from under the odd AOE effect.
It also makes for quite a risky way to be a Survivor, galloping about the place and going toe to toe with the enemy, and a number of time throughout the session, it was touch and go, and I nearly got killed. It's not really Permadeath per se, as I'm sure we'll just keep on playing about with these characters even if we do blow it, but it would be a shame to fail at the main objective. Who knows...with a bit of luck and skill, the advanced Survivor titles might be worth pursuing - at further xp totals, Indomitable and Legendary Survivor titles are available. I'm not sure we're taking it that seriously, but if we make it to Survivor, why stop there?
Having already done the early Istan stuff 'for real' helps a lot, I'm finding, and while the challenge of not dying at all makes this particular run-through interesting, along with the novelty of being a Warrior, there's not the extra pressure of having to discover new things and work out what the hell is going on in the plot at the same time!
It's a distraction, just like picking up on Prophecies, in Tyria with the Lions Arch stuff with our Tuesday Characters, or backtracking to Ascalon City to unlock outposts with them. There's our older Tyrian 'Mains' too, with dozens of Elite Skill Captures to complete, and a numbe rof missing Prophecies Bonus missions incomplete, and yes, even the occasional go at Hard Mode. Lots to be keeping busy with, but I do hope our third member gets back to it soon - still a large part of Nightfall I'm waiting to see!