In Which I Return to Tyria

I was sitting around this past weekend staring at my computer, willing it to tell me what to play.  I wanted to play something, get lost in some game away from the real world, but the destination just wasn’t coming to me.

As noted, Runes of Magic lost my attention when my bag rental expired, causing an immediate inventory management crisis.  There wasn’t an op going in EVE Online and I wasn’t in the mood to rat or mine or do what amounted to more inventory management.

I fiddled with Steam for a bit and Swarm Simulator, but wasn’t really feeling it.  I was tempted for a bit to re-up for Daybreak All Access and jump on to the Agnarr server in EverQuest just to run around again. However, I know how that ends, with me not playing after a few days unless I find a regular group to run with.  Plus it was after dark and spending money online after dark is almost always a mistake.

I’d done a bit of World of Tanks recently, but that wasn’t grabbing me and I wasn’t up for the long patch process that launching War Thunder would no doubt entail.

I considered Elder Scrolls Online for a bit, they having sent me an email recently about how to solo through the game.  That seemed like something aimed at me, but that meant spending money on a game I wasn’t all that interested in outside of the fact that they sent me that email.

I was thinking about just pottering around in Minecraft, but went back to the list of installed games.

Down the list I passed Guild Wars 2.  I wasn’t even sure I remembered my account name, much less the password, but I launched it to see how long it would take to patch up.  I could keep looking while that worked away.

Still a damn fine logo

If you look at the Categories drop down on the side bar, you’ll see I made an entry for Guild Wars 2, which is about as firm a commitment as I make to a game ’round these parts.  There are even 37 posts listed under that category.  That doesn’t come close to the twelve hundred or so EVE Online posts, and is a mere tithe of even my Lord of the Rings Online posts.  37 puts it more in line with titles I take note of but haven’t really played all that much, such as Dungeons & Dragons Online, Pirates of the Burning Sea, or the late Need for Speed: World.

And even those post are merely about the game… usually me predicting that NCsoft will make ArenaNet put out an expansion due to declining revenues… rather than about playing the game.

I own the base game, which isn’t saying much since that has been available free since the Heart of Thorns expansion.  But I paid for my copy… which I guess says something.  Sucker, maybe?  Because in the almost five years since GW2 launched I have three posts from about four years ago that involve me actually in game and playing.

And yet there it was, still installed after all this time, requiring no cash outlay and with nothing else was calling to me.  So I dug out the login credential and once the patch process was complete… it zipped by pretty fast… I clicked on “play” and off I went.

I had two characters already created, both of the pseudo-human Norn race, one level 16 and one level 2.  Clearly I did not get far.  But time has moved on, I’ve changed, the world has changed, and I assumed the game probably had as well.  Still, I decided not to reinforce failure and rolled up a new character.

I figured that part of the problem with my past run might have been the race/class/zone combo, so I opted to change that up a bit.  Rather than a Norn melee class I went for a human ranger.  Ranger is never the wrong choice, is it?

I was tempted by the idea of ranged attacks and a pet, being swayed by images of the hunter class in WoW.  Having gone that route I entered the game.

Of course, I’ve forgotten most of what I ever knew about GW2, and what I knew was pretty minimal to start with.  For example, I realized after I was in the game that I couldn’t recall if I had picked a server or had even been offered a choice  Character creation seemed to be mostly about appearance and back story.  I’m a middle-class ranger whose sister ran off with her centaur boyfriend or something.  Also I have a pet bear.

The bear and I fighting a bear with another bear in the background

Later, at the character select screen, I noticed that I was tagged as being on the Henge of Denravi server, but could choose whatever world I wanted to play on.

So long as there isn’t a queue to log in, I am not sure that matters.  This is likely to be a solo affair.  But at least I think I knew what to say if somebody asks.

On entering the game I was presented with a row of wiggling icons in the lower right corner over the mini-map.  The first wanted me to please buy the Heart of Thorns expansion.  Given that my previous run into the game stopped at level 16, that seemed like a premature ask.

There was also some sort of “hey, you’re back!” reward for me, a cosmetic outfit which I put on because the starting armor included a quilted jacket that made me look like a zek from the gulag.  I chose the shiny outfit to hide that.

All shiny and ready for whatever

There was also a daily reward… because we won’t play MMOs unless we are rewarded for logging in every single day.  I’m not quite sure what I got from that daily, but I managed to make the prompt go away.

Then it was out into Queensland, the starting area for humans.  Like much of what I have seen of GW2, it was very pretty… and infested with centaurs.  I can see why my sister ended up running with that crowd, they seem to be everywhere.

My initial run at combat seemed to go as expected.  I shot the longbow I was wielding at something… a centaur most likely… then the bear would run out and grab aggro and keep the target at range while I pelted it with arrows until its health bar ran down.  Just what I wanted.  So off I went.

Have you seen my sister? Also, die!

I did see some things that were new… new to me, or forgotten by me so as to seem new… like a grand pop-up every time I made a level.

Level Three! Already?

I guess they want people to know what levels mean to them.  And I got a bag with that level, which was good because I was already sitting on a lot of drops and inventory management was looming already.

They also give you a preview of rewards to come, no doubt to entice you to keep leveling up.

Also a home version of the game and some Rice-a-roni, the San Francisco treat!

There is also the nice little arrow in the upper right that points to places of interest along with the map itself that also makes an effort to get you going in a direction where you might find some adventure.

So here I am in Guild Wars 2.  It might be a flavor of the month, the way Runes of Magic was in May.  We shall see.  I only have to get past level 16 to beat my past effort.

Fighters and Faxes and Capital Plans

I have had a carrier for a while now.  I picked up the hull back in September 2013 and managed to jump it home successfully on the first try.

First successful jump was to 0P-F3K

That was back in the then CFC when the big push to get everybody into carriers… specifically the Archon… was a thing.  That was also when an Archon pilot with Jump Drive Calibration V could hop 14 ly at a go and didn’t have to worry about jump fatigue.

I don’t think I ever got the Archon fully fit and I was still short a couple of skills so I couldn’t apply to CapSwarm until that was complete.  But I could get into CrapSwarm, the group for people who own capitals so they can get in on move ops but aren’t there yet for actual combat ops.

CrapSwarm!

Back then I “only” had 110 million skill points and there were still subcap skills I needed, so I put carrier skills on the back burner for a bit while I worked on those.  I had been in the coalition for nearly two years and there wasn’t really a war going on for us at the time, the Fountain War having wrapped up.  The Halloween war was brewing, but I had put my all into the last war and skated through that, though I managed to show up at B-R5RB.  Not in a carrier, just a neuting Dominix.

Then there was Reavers, which meant focusing on subcaps ever more so and then the Casino War, where the Archon helped me stay ahead of our crumbling northern empire as I jumped out of Tribute then Pure Blind just ahead of trouble.  That all culminated in the retreat to Delve, most of which I covered on my own, and the Archon carried a lot of my stuff with it.

Exotic stations under strange stars

Once in the south, there was the conquest of Delve and settling in to our new region before capitals and, more importantly, capital production became a priority again.  Then the call was for force auxiliaries, the capital log ships.  Only two of the four fax machines were recommended, the Minokawa and the Apostle, but since I had trained up for the Archon already, I was well on my way to the Apostle as well.  I put in an order for one after The Mittani pushed us to have a couple on hand, they being the apparent key to any supercap battle, and started back on the capital ship training plan.

About a month after I ordered it, I had an Apostle.  However, I wanted to wrap up training to be able to fit a tech II triage module to it, so it took a bit longer until I was ready to apply to CapSwarm.

Medical White Apostle, with a Minokawa in the background

Eventually I was trained up, had a fully fitted Apostle (I stole a lot of the modules from the Archon and its list of “required to have” items) that I really had no idea how to use.  I mean, I guess it is just a big logi ship, so that part is simple enough; put reps on big things that ask.  But capitals are also serious business, and I’ve seen a few “if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t go on capital ops” notes over the years.  I was also set back a bit by the “read this first” guides for CapSwarm, which seemed out of date and assumed you were in GSF.  Meanwhile, asking questions on Jabber got me “just jump in with the fleet and die quietly” level responses.  I don’t even mind losing the ship, I just don’t want to do so because I am clueless and I really don’t want to do something that screws up an op.  I’ve already had, “Oh my God” level responses for asking simple questions while on the move op to Rakapas.  So I opted to stick with supcaps ops, leaving my Apostle back in staging, hoping for a an updated guide or training op or something.

Now, however, there is a new call to train for capitals.  This time we’re back to carriers, which have been deemed especially effective against sub caps.  Somewhere along the line I had trained up fighters, because having a carrier and not being able to use its primary weapon system just seemed wrong.  I might have just ignored this new call to caps, but there was a statement about training… like the coalition is going to provide some so people actually feel good about using their capitals.

For just the suggestion that there might be training I got my Archon out and jumped it back to our staging system.

Archon, also in Purity White, hanging off a Fortizar

And then I checked it fitting and backup modules and found that I was well out of date on the basic fit and that I had, in fact, pulled a lot of the modules for the Apostle.  Also, while I have the skills to use fighters, I haven’t actually bought any fighters.  So I now have more than a billion ISK in modules and fighters being shipped out.

But that is fine.  I’ll be up to date again.  And I am willing to spend that on the off chance I will actually get to use my carrier in combat, or at least feel confident enough to answer the call and get into fleet should the situation arise.  Maybe I will even figure out the Apostle as well.