My Review of Guild Wars 2

Greatest Game EVER!

that is all.

Final Countdown!

After 5 years of waiting it's almost here. I might pee myself in excitement when the servers go live. 24 hours to go, maybe less if they bring them up early like they warned they might. It's been a long 5 years and it seems like this last week has been moving in slow motion. I did everything I could think of to pass the time and prepare. I have a list of names I'm hoping I'll be able to at least grab a few of to save for my characters, I have my main's appearance settings jotted down, and I am working on my grocery list for the week and hope to get to the store early tomorrow so I'll have to leave my house as little as possible once the game is live.

Some things you may like to know about Headstart and Launch:

You can skip to the end of character creation and quickly save a name you like and then delete that character and that name will be saved to your account for 24 hours. This allows you to quickly save names you like and then go back and delete them and make them all pretty without having to worry about someone taking your name while you create the perfect looking character.

Your Hall of Monument items that you've earned from original Guild Wars will be available to all your characters on the account linked to your GW2 account. More info on linking your accounts http://en.support.guildwars2.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/9028. You will receive a portal stone on your characters that will port you to Eye of the North where you can speak to an NPC who will let you claim any of your earned items on any of your characters you create on that account. Visit https://www.guildwars2.com/en-gb/news/claiming-your-hall-of-monuments-rewards/ for more info.

There are overflow servers in GW2. If you choose a highly populated server don't worry about having to sit in queue and not getting to play. If your server is full you will be sent to an overflow server until you reach the front of the queue where you will then be able to go back over to your server. Any progress you make while on the overflow server will move with you to your home server.

Don't forget to eat, drink more than energy drinks (water is helpful) and get some rest. I know saying "game safely" may be silly to some, but people have died playing games and neglecting the most important thing in life, their health. A lot of us have been waiting a LONG time for this game but it's not going anywhere. Being world first to lvl 80 isn't something to get sick over.

Have fun everyone. I'll see you in Tyria. If you'd like to join me I'll be on Jade Quarry server in my little guild Tyrian Artistry. http://tyrianartistry.shivtr.com/

Guild Wars 2 Guild

I decided to start a Guild Wars 2 branch of the guild I ran in Rift. Here's a little about the guild and where to sign up to join me.

[Tyrian Artistry] is a Guild Wars 2 guild on the Jade Quarry server. TA was started back during the headstart of Rift as Telaran Artistry. It was a very popular guild on the Faeblight server that ran roleplaying events like craft fairs and story telling nights. I left Rift about a year ago and so left TA, but after waiting 5 years for the release of GW2 I wanted to start TA up again and bring the artistry to Tyria. Tyrian Artistry will not necessarily be a role playing guild but after feeling out the community in GW2 we may hold similar events to the ones we held in Rift.
Ages 18+, adult language and topics may be used in guild chat.

This is a very casual guild and we have players of all styles. Some who log in for several hours every day and others who only log in for a few hours each week.

All play styles are welcome. This is a great guild for soloers who just want to take their time, quest, and discover all Tyria has to offer without pressure while meeting new friends.

We are a zero tolerance guild. This means be nice or you are no longer welcome. Derogatory statements towards another player, joking or serious, are not tolerated. We welcome all genders, races and sexual preferences and never discriminate and do not allow any of our guild members to be disrespected or disrespect each other.

I hope you will join our quest in making Tyria a more beautiful place to live, work, and kill bad guys. Please visit http://tyrianartistry.shivtr.com/ to join us.

Contemplating World of Warcraft: Looking For BFF

As much as I've been enjoying TERA I haven't made up my mind if I'm going to stick with it and subscribe after my 30 free days. I'm coming up on the 6 month mark of my break from World of Warcraft and at the 6 month mark I always get the urge to go back. I'm guessing Mists of Pandaria will come out by the end of September. Before the expansion there should be a world event with the destruction of Theramore which starts the all out war between the 2 factions. I definitely want to be back playing WoW by the time this event happens.

I am able to put in a LOT of hours of game time each week but it's while I work and I get interrupted a lot. This makes it hard for me to group unless I have a tight schedule where I know a couple days a week for a set couple of hours I'm raiding or grouping. I can schedule work stuff around that. But doing more than one raid or dungeon a day is pretty much out for me. I'm primarily a soloer. I love leveling characters and working on crafting and achievements.

MoP seems like it will have a lot for the casual player to do, so as a soloer I'm looking very forward to it. There will be pet battles and tons of new daily quests (possible lifting of the daily quest cap), a train your own mount task, and farming which seems like it will be similar to Free Realms farming.

I really want to go back to WoW and have fun again so I'm willing to start over from scratch. Over the years I've server transferred multiple characters (PvP server> a different PvP server> PvE server), faction transferred them all once (Horde>Alliance), and race changed at least 3 of them (pretty much made every one of my characters Worgen).  I've landed on the Alexstrasza PvE server on the Alliance side. I've been here for a couple years with a couple breaks of several months to play other games like Rift for 5 months and my most recent break of 6 months for EQ2 and TERA. I was in a small guild with real life friends who no longer play. We merged our small guild with another small guild of real life friends and all were happy. Unfortunately 99% of the guild hasn't logged in since December. All the other people I knew on my server have done the same.

So here is my "proposal"... I'm placing a sort of looking for guild ad but even more than that it's sort of a personals ad. It will sound cheesy saying "Looking for friends to play WoW with" but that's exactly what I'm doing. I've decided rather then logging on my old server with the same old people and trying to make friends in game I would rather try to make friends out of game and I will go to them. I am willing to start over on a new server. I have no preference of faction or server type though I would probably prefer a PvE server since I'm fail at PvP but I did play on a PvP server for the first year and 1/2 of my wow "career" so I can probably deal with that again.

If you are a current active WoW player who will definitely be playing up to and during MoP and would like to be my new WoW BFF please let me know. Initially I'd make a new character on your server to make sure that all is good but then closer to MoP I would be willing to server and/or faction transfer some of my characters over to the server. If you are able to play a lot and are in a casual guild those are definitely bonuses. I think starting from scratch might give me that little jump start I need to love the game again. Please contact me by leaving a comment here or by messaging me on Twitter @Girlygamersite. Thanks!

My Tumblr

I decided to start up a Tumblr for TERA screenshots. The link is HERE. Feel free to follow me there. While I'm leveling up and learning the game I may not be posting very often to this blog so make sure you follow me on Twitter @Girlygamersite.

Level 30 and Counting

I've been playing TERA pretty much non-stop since Headstart began. It's a blast. The world is beautiful. My character is adorable. There's tons of quests. You get a new spell almost every 2 levels so you're constantly working in new abilities and figuring out what you like best. I wanted to share some new screenies of my little Twinklin. I'm loving Sorcerer but can't wait to get to 60 and start a brand new character.

TERA First Impressions

It took me a while to convince myself to participate in the TERA open beta this weekend. There was so much drama from the beginning about the ex NC Soft employees stealing trade secrets or whatever. I decided to put all that aside and try out the game. I've spent the majority of the past 2 days running around exploring, trying out classes, and crafting. For the most part I like the game, in fact I like it a lot. I'll do a rundown of my current pros and cons. Keep in mind I have only played a couple days and it is still in beta so there are things I may not have figured out and I have only explored a small percentage of the content the game offers.

Character creation is nice. I enjoy the races though I am sad that some of the races only have male OR female and not both. I love the Elin race even though a lot of people have been discussing how they are borderline creepy. I adore them. They remind me a little of Tarutaru from Final Fantasy though I've never played a FF game. There is only a female version of Elin and they look very much like children with big anime eyes and you get to choose a style of animal ears and tail for them. The reason there is discussion on them being creepy is that they have thick curvy woman type legs and wear very short dresses and high heels. I can see where looking at it from a certain perspective they can be a little creepy but I see them as super cute. The character feature choices are pretty good. It's no where near as detailed as Aion but there's enough variety in hairstyles and facial feature adjustments that everyone won't run around looking like carbon copies.

The prologue to the game is very cool. When you start a new character you begin questing as a level 20 version of the class you chose. You are given a handful of spells and are set out to kill some monsters with a group of NPCs. The reason I like this is because normally in order to get a glimpse at a class you need to level to 20 just to get enough spells to see what you can do. This prologue allows you to play around with the lvl 20 spells and see if you are interested in continuing. When you finish the prologue you are dumped in a newbie land just like every other game and you begin from level 1 with minimal spells. From what I saw once you have completed the prologue on a character any other characters you create on that server get the option to skip the prologue.

Movement and targeting are interesting to get used to. I don't even know how to even describe it but movement is similar to DC Universe Online and combat is sort of like a 3rd person shooter with crosshairs to target mobs. You still get hotbars for spells but like in DCUO you don't have the ability to click with your mouse in normal gameplay mode. You do get a mouse cursor when you are in UI mode like when you open your bags or any other menu. It took me a bit of practice until I was comfortable with it but I'm already a pro. It's a new play style for me and I'm loving it. After 8 years of tab targeting and spamming hotkeys it's refreshing to say the least.

Armor is awesome. It's a sort of cross between Rift and Aion styles. Armor seems to vary in appearance depending on what race you are. The little Elin girls wouldn't be caught dead in some of the skimpy stuff the other female races wear. When I say skimpy I am NOT joking. I am all for sexy armor but some of these get ups might take it a little too far. The game IS rated M for mature.

You get a quest for a free mount at level 11. I LOVE that. From what I can see the world is HUGE and not having a mount from early on would take it's toll for sure. A feature I like about the mounts is that the "grown up lady races" (not the Elin) ride side saddle. One thing I dislike about mounts is that you need to dismount before you can enter combat or gather. Setting your mount to a hotkey makes this faster but it's still kinda annoying.

I spent a little bit of time crafting. It's a very simple minimal combine system and seems to go pretty quickly. I wish it was more detailed personally but it has it's nice features like that fact that you can choose to level up every craft if you want to and are not forced to specialize like most other games. I won't go into too much detail but the enchanting system is fun too. Many items you craft have special bonuses, in order to activate these bonuses you need to enchant the item. The more you enchant the item the higher the base stats go and you unlock the special bonuses.

When you kill a monster if it has loot for you it drops it on the ground. If the loot is coin it's a little pile of coins, if it's a potion it drops a little bottle, they also drop scrolls and little boxes for armor and weapons. It's a nice feature to see actual loot on the ground and not just a sparkling corpse. It's been a while but I believe Guild Wars is similar and actually went as far as to drop the actual weapons on the ground. I like little things like that.

There are PvP and PvE servers which I am very grateful for. Playing Aion I get frustrated because there's only PvP servers. I dislike PvP but I read up on it a little and found out that since there is no factions in the game (Horde/Alliance Good/Evil) the world PvP on the PvP servers is free for all.

One thing I am iffy about is the political system in the game. From what I've read and watched in videos there will be a sort of ruler of the world who is a player. In order to become this ruler you need to be a guild leader and have a guild who is willing to help you along the way. You can choose to fight your way to the top through arena type battles or by asking people to vote for you. The ruler person will get to change things like available merchants and portals and I think even taxes. The journey to the top won't be for everyone but this popularity contest doesn't seem like a very good idea to me. We'll see after release if it effects the general public of the game very much or if you can pretty much ignore the whole process and the "leader".

There's a lot of other little things that please me about the game and because of my participation in this beta I think I'll be jumping on the TERA bandwagon on May 1st or sooner if I preorder. I'm not sure why some game reviewers have such bad opinions of the game but I really enjoy it and my opinion is to try it for yourself. Even if you have to wait for a recruit a friend trial or whatever En Masse will offer to recruit new people after release. Don't let the negative people make up your mind for you. I almost did and I would have missed out on all the fun I've been having.