On my world, it means hope.

Because as much time as I've spent rambling about GW2, I realized that I've never posted pictures of my characters, so HAVE A PICSPAM. (Also I'm trying to avoid thinking about finals ;_;)






First, my lovely norn guardian. <3 She's my first character and arguably my main. I'm toying with the idea of a white/gold/black color scheme for the Carapace armor (though that would involve buying white dye, which is ridiculously expensive), and she also needs different gauntlets, but this is how she looks for now. <333







My rad as hell sylvari mesmer. The T3 cultural armor cost an arm and a leg, but it was super worth it.





My human elementalist. (This isn't actually the most up-to-date picture, because she now has Exalted gloves, but oh well.) I thought about reoutfitting her with the Carapace leggings and boots, but I still love the Exalted set a lot, so I'm still thinking about it.




And finally, my baby charr ranger, at just level 40, along with her trusty pet Reef Drake, Arthur Curry. <3 I'm sort of purposely keeping her at a low level so that (in theory) I could run around with friends' low-level characters without one-shotting everything in sight, but otherwise I'd love an excuse to play her more often. (I totally created a ranger for the sole purpose of running with a Reef Drake pet. XD)


I'm happy with my characters, but I really wish I had an asura. They're so adorable!

I've sort of reached the point at which I've accumulated quite a bit of money and I'm not completely sure what I'm hoarding it for. I'm not going to make a legendary (unless Dawn or Dusk literally falls into my lap), ascended weapons/armor seem too grindy, the Dreamthistle skins are now exorbitantly expensive, I don't need any T3 cultural armor (except possibly for my sylvari mesmer, but I'm happy with the armor set she has now), and I'm generally happy with how my characters look and don't really plan on buying a lot of stuff to gear them up with. (Also, crafting a Shadow of Grenth is still pretty far off—I have 300/1500 Bolts of Silk down and I don't even want to think about farming for Wool, Cotton, and Linen.)

There are always minipets, but I feel like I have most of the minipets I want now, and I'm not going to drop 100+ gold on a super-rare minipet.

I suppose I could always convert gold to gems for a character slot (I'd like to have an asura character, but I also like having a free character slot for farming/messing with character creation), but the thing is, I refuse to make any new characters unless the trait system is fixed. I just cannot imagine the horror of playing the game at level 80 with only a few traits.

I guess I could also be a good citizen and offer to buy the Mysterious Vine components for my sister that she's lacking... (I did offer to help her buy T3 cultural armor for her guardian, but her guardian is a long ways away from level 80, so that's going to take a while.)

*SHRUG*

In other news, I really want achievement points so I can have more awesome Zenith skins (I'm dying for the torch, shield, and longbow skins in particular), but hell if I know how to accumulate those quickly.

Also, I'm really looking forward to Wintersday! I loved it last year, and I really hope I have the chance to get the Wintersday minipets, because last year I was too dumb to get the Mini Plush Griffon in time. ;_;


Other random thoughts:

- Maybe I'll go for the Master Crafter title? I maxed out Artificing, Jewelering (?), Cooking, and Tailoring; I'm kinda close to maxing out Armorsmithing; and I still need Weaponsmithing, Huntsman...ing, and Leatherworking. I kind of want to collect some of the crafting-only weapon skins.

[I was able to speed-level Artificing and Jewelering (??) to max within, like, 2 days (thanks, vine backpiece, for giving me the incentive to do that), but then again they are on the cheaper side to get to max level, and also I totally used up my reserves of copper and iron, so I have to farm those now. D:]

- I have a fossilized insect that I'd love to turn into an Ambrite weapon. Problem is, I don't have nearly enough Geodes to buy the recipe and stuff, and the thought of grinding for 350 Geodes at Dry Top makes me die a little inside. Sigh...it's so not fair that such a nice-looking weapon set can only be obtained through RNG (for the fossils) + whopping tons of Geodes. (I wish I could have them all. ;_;)

I haven't played a dating sim in a really, really long time. Playing BP reminded me that dating sims are basically the equivalent of candy to me: good for a sugar rush, but very meh if you keep consuming it for a long time.

It's a long game. The in-game timeline spans an entire year. That means if you're really trying to get a certain romantic ending, you're stuck with your finger jammed against the skip key for long stretches of time.

So far, I've gotten the romantic endings with Adam and Matthew. I thought the one with Adam was kind of sweet, but I was puzzled as to why you had to get him to propose to Sian in order to count for the actual ending. The one with Matthew was surprisingly bland. Sian and Matthew become good friends, but I just didn't feel any kind of chemistry.

It's the grindy-ness of trying to get every single romantic ending that kills me most, and why I became frustrated with the game after a few hours. I wanted to see every different ending, but it just felt like so much work to get there.

Meh.

What I'm doing right now:

- Running Tequatl daily for the loot and money. (I'd run other world bosses but as a student, I don't typically have a ton of time to do that.)
- I'd like to buy the Toxic Nimoss mini, a Fervid Censer (though I need to level one of my non-80 alts to actually equip it), and I'm thinking of dropping 50+ gold to craft a Shadow of Grenth.
- (Also, I've been attempting to farm Dwayna and Ulgoth in the hopes of getting a Star of Dwayna or Anton's Boot Blade drop to sell. Yeah, not the most efficient way to make money, I know, but still.)
- My elementalist is level 65 and I'm thinking of speed-leveling her to 80 (via...world boss farming, maybe?) so I can deck her out in Exalted armor and backpieces and just look cool. Also so I'll have another alt for world boss farming. (I was a bit tired of playing an elementalist earlier, but now I want to play one again. D/D is definitely a lot more entertaining than Staff.)
- I'd like to get my ranger to 80 as well, especially since I picked up an exotic short bow yesterday, but I'd also like to have a low-level character to run with friends, so...I guess I'm not in a rush to do that. Maybe I should cach up on the personal story for my ranger, though.

- I'm one successful Triple Trouble run away from finishing the achievement, so I should try to get into a TTS map to finish that up at some point.
- I'm waiting on friends to become available so I can run more dungeons, as well, but that's something that's a bit out of my control.
- Some time in the future, I'd also like to run Fractals so I can craft a Mawdrey, but I'm not in a rush to do that. (And I have no idea how to run a Fractal right now.)

I ranted about the September Feature Patch on Tumblr, and I'll probably type that up in a more comprehensive form and repost it here, but since a lot of people have been like "Don't judge the new leveling system until you've tried it" I decided to give it a shot and level an asura necromancer.

Thoughts so far (level 1-5):

- The opening quest is now boring as hell since all you do is autoattack. You don't even have any incentive to kill the rampaging enemies because you can't unlock your other skills (I know, pre-patch, sometimes I would go after the enemies running around because I wanted to see what cool skills I could unlock. Not anymore).

- Because all you can do is autoattack, it feels like you get a massive DPS drop. This may be profession-specific (I know the mesmer now starts with a sword instead of scepter, so that's more DPS for mesmers), but as a necro, I was at 1 health for most of the boss fight, a.k.a. I should've died, and it was absolutely ridiculous because the opening quest is not supposed to be hard. I noticed some of the default heal skills changed as well, and it was pretty bad for necros in particular because now the default heal skill has a whopping 40 second cooldown.

- Seriously, why did they have to remove the rallying system? Was it too hard to have a tooltip saying "You're downed! Use these skills and if you kill your enemy, you'll rally!" Because the current system doesn't do a better job of teaching you what the downed state is, it just delays new players from having to figure it out sooner.

- Underwater combat is such a unique feature of Guild Wars 2. I sure am glad that they lock new players out of it at early levels so they can't experience the diversity of combat in the game early on. (/sarcasm)

- I also really really hate locking the profession-specific skills, because it was a great way before to give people a sense upfront that each profession was unique. Now I just feel like if I were a new player, I'd be thinking "So necromancers are different from other professions because...their skills are black and green?" Hell, they even changed the minion heal skill and the auto-generation of clones for mesmers with the scepter because apparently minions/clones are Too Complicated for new players to understand.

- At least in Metrica Province, they changed some of the quest locations around...because it will clearly be Too Confusing to new players to follow a map marker to an area farther-but-not-really-that-far from where they're currently standing.

- Because there are no more bundle items, the heart quests themselves are more homogenous and also more tedious at times. Really, if bundle items were really that confusing, they could just put a notification on the screen like "You've picked up x! Interact with y to help the NPC!"

- I absolutely hate the removal of the personal story until level 10. I used the personal story as a way of leveling, so if I got tired of heart quests I had some variety, and also the personal story was often pretty fun. I really don't understand why people were complaining about this, because in the previous system, you COULD bundle the personal story quests together if you wanted; no one had a gun to your head saying "You've hit level z, now you MUST do your personal story." My sister basically ignored her personal story because she didn't like the way it was broken up, but the thing was, you had a choice. Now? Everyone's forced to wait to do their personal story in 10-level bundles.

Again, what I really don't get is that if these were such significant problems, why didn't they beta-test this before launch? They marketed Guild Wars 2 as different from other MMOs. They had to realize that this would attract some people but also turn some people off. Trying to compromise by going back on their earlier promises to secure the crowd who doesn't like an MMO that isn't like other MMOs is terrible for their manifesto and PR.

I actually don't have all that much to say about Area-X so far. The demo felt short for some reason, even though technically speaking it's the same length as per usual for zeiva inc. games (2 chapters).

I think the writing has been improving a lot, both in terms of grammar and colloquialism. I like Elcia a lot as a heroine; she's more flavorful than Essi and a lot more assertive than Chi An. The art is gorgeous as usual; in fact, it seems to me to be even more beautiful than the latest zeiva inc. games I've played. I must also say that I love the music selection. zeiva inc. games usually do a great job with choosing interesting music that fits the situation/area perfectly, and Area-X is largely no exception. The only quibble I have is that the "Middle Ages" music, to me, seems a bit too Middle Eastern to fit, and Livan's theme music (?) seems vaguely East Asian (even though it is quite lovely).

The premise is fascinating, and the demo ends with a brutal cliffhanger, so I'm interested to see where the game goes (once I scrounge up enough money!).

I swear all dating sim (I hate the word "otome") games have the same guy archetypes:

- The older, "mature," cool guy
- The laid-back, friendly guy (& often childhood best friend)
- The socially awkward/shy guy
- The quirky/flirty/assertive & outgoing guy

...Any others??