lmao the moment the teaser started playing on Summer Game Fest I knew that was the look/sound of a GW game, but still started clapping despite being completely alone in my bedroom :P
I was so excited I didn't even include the trailer with the ORIGINAL six human gods!!!!
I've always been a bit salty at how much the gods seemed undermined in GW2 and very much a "justice for Orr and Ascalon" fan, so getting the earliest early days back on Orr is more than I ever expected tbh.
I've already seen some people say it doesn't look like GW, aesthetically/artistically, but I was sure it was them in about a second and a half just from how familiar it looked, so I'm hopeful!
Taking a brief intermission from Star Trek to have feelings explosions about
:･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧ ✿ GUILD WARS ✿* :･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧
20 years after the first game rewired my brain, it got updated today and naturally I justified a new character slot because, well, the chai I'd been going to get was actually free today and would cost more than the new character slot, so really it didn't leave me further behind at the end of the day than I'd anticipated this morning!
And obviously I chose to start in the original-original campaign (Prophecies) even though the vast majority of my characters are Prophecies characters and I already did the whole campaign and all the bonus missions back in the day. And naturally I chose to play my favorite class, mesmer, despite having many characters of that class. And I'm going to do the Legendary Defender of Ascalon route, even though I finally earned the title for my account a few years ago. ANYWAY
Mesmers are my favorite class (both in GW1 and GW2, though they're quite different in each game!) and I've always especially enjoyed the more damage-oriented mesmers. I loved playing Domination Magic-focused GW1 mesmers with Backfire, Empathy, Power Spike, Energy Surge, Cry of Frustration, etc (I actually learned how to play GW1 on a Domination mesmer, which was ... a steep learning curve, but a blast once I got the hang of it). In GW2, before the Mirage specialization got nerfed to hell, I loved my Condition Damage mesmer/Mirage, and Power builds + greatsword are always really fun on core mesmers and chronomancers.
(I can't speak to Virtuoso—I've heard great things but I can't bring myself to give up my emotional support clones.)
My main, Gwen Velazquez, originally went from a very damage-oriented core mesmer to a sword-based Power chronomancer—fun in groups, but squishy in solo play unless she manages to kill everything first.
However. My family has played the GW games together since Prophecies and my mother's main is an even squishier Power elementalist who does huge amounts of damage but often dies. So I was trying to think of ways Gwen could help my mother's character survive—and then, after all these years of ArenaNet nerfing the originally superb support/defense chronomancer into oblivion, they buffed the defensively-oriented chronomancer back into effectiveness. This was months ago now, but I was working on my dissertation and only recently got the chance to really try playing Gwen as a chronomancer built around defense and support rather than strike damage.
Holy shit, it's so fun.
Yeah, it takes her a lot longer to kill things, but now she can afford to pick fights with much harder foes all by herself. She's gone from glass cannon to regularly soloing champions if I'm even somewhat paying attention to what she's doing (and chronomancer is a complicated enough class that I'm usually paying attention).
Another player showed up to one of the champion fights I was soloing and advised me to stop using ranged attacks (all that Gwen has now) because those also would reflect back to me, and I didn't have the heart to say it made zero difference because it wasn't getting through Gwen's blocks and she hadn't even needed to heal yet. She's using scepter/shield + staff and it's just like block, block, dodge, block, set down her AOEs, get a chaos aura by teleporting out, oh look her blocks are back and she's got her healing and stability mantras for emergencies.
I gather that the rifle chrono is even better, but defense with a Chaos/Inspiration/Chronomancer build actually being good again makes the scepter/shield+staff chrono feel incredible. Love playing a light armor chaos mage as an unkillable god.
Speaking of GW1 and GW2 ... I've had plenty of complaints over the years about how GW2 has chosen to handle and retcon human-centric GW1 lore, the framing of the human gods, etc. That said, I've recently been appreciating that GW2 has retained a particular element of GW1's treatment of humanity and their gods that I've always really liked.
Humans in the GW universe are not really generic everymen, as humans so often are in fantasy settings. Nor are they so wildly varying and unpredictable that there's no sense of humanity having its own distinct flavor like the other playable species do. In many ways, they occupy a vaguely "elvish" position in the world—they've been on this world for a very long time and used to be a major power, or rather, made up many major powers with various warring factions that sometimes found common cause.
But in more recent eras, many of the ancient human civilizations have dwindled and/or suffered various atrocities and/or lost their minds. And culturally, humans tend to have a strong affinity for the mystical and even more for the divinely mystical, which their political power in previous eras was directly tied to. The vast majority of humans in this world are faithful worshippers of a human pantheon of six gods (formerly five).
Not all humans are magical or religious, to be sure, but a lot of them are, to the point that this seems their most distinctive cultural quality. Minor NPCs tend to have background dialogue invoking the gods ("By the Six!"), or referencing one of the gods (often but not only the goddess Dwayna, leader of the Six). The main human NPC of the core game, Logan Thackeray, continually references the gods, as do most of his military fellows.
Most interestingly, though, if you choose to play a human, you will automatically be a devout adherent of the faith of the Six regardless of any other choices you make. In addition, human PCs are blessed by one specific god among the Six whom you choose at character creation.
This mostly has minor flavor effects in practice. A priest of the god you chose permanently hangs out in your home district, and sometimes other priests of your god can perceive some mark of their deity's favor when they look at you.
Howeverrrrr, when I say "their deity," I don't mean that they exclusively worship the god they've dedicated their lives to, or that "your god"—the god whose favor you enjoy as a human PC—is your god in any remotely monotheistic way. Humans faithful to the Six are faithful to all the Six until one of the gods falls to evil. And when that god becomes the villain of the second GW2 expansion, various human NPCs are shown going through a crisis of the soul regardless of whether he was their particular patron or not. Having a more specific personal tie to one of the gods, or being particularly blessed by one of them, or being specifically devoted to a life of service to one of them, does not in any way prevent humans from devotion to the rest of the pantheon.
Mechanically, this means that no matter which deity you choose as your particular patron, your human PC starts the game with the ability to pray to Dwayna, goddess of life and air and healing. When you pray to her, a blue image of Dwayna materializes, heals you, and vanishes. As you level up, your human-based skills will extend to prayers to the other gods.
Praying to Lyssa, goddess of illusion/chaos magic and water and beauty, confounds foes by inflicting random conditions on them and random blessings on you. Praying to Kormir, goddess of spirit, order, and truth, will free you from negative effects like immobilization. The final prayer you can use, iirc, and the most powerful, is the prayer to Balthazar, the god of fire and war who ends up going super evil. If you're playing a fragile class like an elementalist or mesmer, praying to him is actually great, because he blesses you with two fierce hounds made of flame who fight alongside you and soak up damage. (Praying to Balthazar does feel a lot weirder in retrospect, I'll admit.)
In any case, the point is that you can pray to ANY human god and receive a brief visitation from that god, because the entire human pantheon are your gods even if you're only special to one of them. A similar dynamic is at work for NPCs as well. A recurring NPC in the core GW2 story, for instance, is Rhie, a priestess of Grenth, god of cold, darkness, judgment, and death (he's not evil, just goth). Even by priest of Grenth standards, Rhie is greatly favored by him, and as a result is able to perform powerful rituals dealing with the boundaries between life and death. But there's no expectation that this means she should abjure the other gods in any way, and she certainly does not (in fact, she provides a Human Religion 101 rundown about the gods in general in her first appearance in the human storyline).
And it's so common in fantasy, I feel, that polytheistic cultures are conceptualized as giving adherents a wider choice of gods to be the one they actually worship for real, often with the implication that worshipping one god in the pantheon naturally translates into hostility or apathy towards other gods in the same pantheon. And so I do enjoy playing a religiously devout character who has a special patron deity blessing her and who is emphatically polytheistic throughout her entire original storyline.
Even apart from religious practices, a lot of the most central human figures in the main story are aligned with magic/mysticism in some way. Gwen Thackeray, Lady Althea Barradin, Queen Jennah, Countess Anise, and Kasmeer Meade were/are all mesmers (chaos mages/illusionists). The maddened King Adelbern is remembered as "the Sorcerer-King" for cursing his people into eternal undeath; Vizier Khilbron of Orr used evil magic to obliterate Orr and return as a lich; the (spectacularly stylish) villainness Varesh Ossa had holy magic.
Originally the closest thing to a protagonist figure in GW1 was probably the monk Mhenlo—a cleric in all but name, with an annoying but powerful elementalist girlfriend and a friendship with the Canthan ritualist Master Togo that provided the transition between the first two GW1 games. The most important NPC in the third GW1 game, Kormir, absorbed the immense magical power of a god and became the sixth god of humanity centuries before GW2. Logan Thackeray is the main human figure in core GW2 and a Guardian (a paladin type with a mixture of heavy armor, martial skill, and fire, radiant, and defensive holy magic), while the main human NPC role later mainly shifts to Marjory Delaqua, a noir PI necromancer.
Humans are not innately magical as a species—some of them don't have any link to magic or particular connection with the gods, and the devs have said something to the effect that humans only developed magic after being brought to Tyria by their gods. Their link to the mystical is cultural and historical in-story, not racial, but also reinforced by the narrative choices to link the human story to the mystical, magical, and divine.
Ooh, found out there's a free Black Lion Key for "sale" in GW2 right now, and the normal ones are on sale along with outfit and weapon and glider vouchers!! :D :D
I had a bunch of gems from a present, so this was fantastic timing—I got some vouchers and ten keys, and ended up getting the rare fifth item three times, including this very cool skin:
(Although this is a preview, my main actually does dual-wield swords, so getting a fancy Tyrian-style lightsaber skin was super exciting.)
I didn't let myself do any daily achievements (much less weekly ones), even the log-in daily achievement, until I made progress on my dissertation ... and then by the time I made sufficient progress on the dissertation by the deal I'd struck with myself, I had no time for anything but the dissertation, and there was also a move, my mother's hospitalization, etc.
BUT. All of that has turned out okay as of today (passed my defense, submitted my revision, my mother's recovering, etc) so I logged in today for the log-in daily reward (a Momentous Occasion). But when I went to click on it, I realized I could do the other dailies easily, so I did them all while trying to remember how my chronomancer's powers work (lmao), then logged on again this evening for the post-5 PM log-in daily, and realized I could also do those dailies easily as well. And then it turned out that doing them advanced so many of the weekly achievements that I figured I'd go ahead and finish all six weeklies with the help of a few world bosses and bandit champions.
I used to almost always do as many dailies as I could without disrupting the progression of Gwen's (my main's) storyline, but I don't think I've probably done a full set of dailies and weeklies for at least a year. It was really satisfying! And it might be silly, but doing them all the way I used to felt a bit like my world was back to normal, at long last :)
DAMN I just saw the PC Gamer video revealing more of the details around GW2 housing and I'm genuinely astonished. I was a little worried that so much work went into land spears that homesteads would be a bit light, but um, that does not appear to be the case.
It's like ... getting your alts and mounts and resources and boats and legendary weapon displays and cat friends and different emotes for your statue of yourself and 300-800 decoration pieces over the course of the expansion with all sorts of scaling and the ability to give other players control as well ...
I've finally progressed Gwen's storyline to LWS2 and Belinda just died via giant thorn thing.
I do like how contained Marjory's grief is—it'd be easy to overplay, especially given that we barely know Belinda. But there's something muted about her that seems very Marjory thus far.
I think Gwen is fairly professional in her dealings with the new gang—she likes them, but at heart she's pretty emotionally guarded, and only more so after Claw Island. But given her history with her sister Deborah's apparent death/disappearance/enslavement in the "Missing Sister" arc, I think she'd have a particular sympathy for Marjory here.
I mean, it happens regardless of your personal story, but there's a particular resonance there I like for the narrative in my head!
I hadn't realized until yesterday that you could actually max out Astral acclaim and won't be able to get more unless you use some of it up. I'm definitely a "save for a rainy day" kind of player, so I was sort of flailing.
Forcing people to use up the acclaim is an interesting mechanic, anyway—I can see why they might have done it, but idk.
