#pre-searing

[khorren]

I still love this little bit of pre-searing where you sort of come around a corner, and you see these sunbeams peaking through the trees and you're like "oh wow that's cool" then you see a statue of Melandru and it's like "oh WOW that IS cool"

[silverskulltula]

re: stupid video game challenges

(not so stupid because it's officially recognized with an earnable title ingame): reaching level cap in the tutorial area (pre-searing) in guild wars 1. there's a time-skip after the tutorial so you can never go back to this area and it's completely cut off from "future" players and has a tiny selection of skills, a much smaller item pool, limited gear, etc. it has its own economy too and certain kinds of items that you can easily get in post-searing are extremely valuable in pre. (there was an exploit years ago where people could briefly ferry items from post to pre through guild halls/account storage and it led to lots of bans but no rollback iirc) there's almost certainly still some illegal/unobtainable items in people's private collections but nothing widespread enough to be common or interfere with the economy.

originally you couldn't reach max level just from grinding or questing because enemies stopped giving xp and you'd run out of quests. so at first players had to reach the level cap by death leveling. death leveling is when you gather a group of enemies next to a resurrection shrine and let them kill you over and over for hours, possibly overnight, because in gw1 enemies actually gain xp for kills and can level up!!! so you'd let these enemies level themselves up off of you until they'd be worth xp and then kill them when you returned from being afk. it's a bonkers and frankly hilarious concept and there was a whole community/fan-site that would immortalize players that reached level cap this way. eventually the devs updated pre-searing and added scaling daily quests + more content specifically for those attempting the title so you could reach level cap and get it without death leveling. basically the original pre-searing is a unique bit of in-game history and an example of players pushing weird game mechanics far beyond what the devs ever intended. it's by far my favorite area in guild wars 1.

[tulapictures]

guild wars

[silverskulltula]

RIP GATE MONKEYS 2005-2018

thank you for your service for all these years

[crestfallenkingdom]

[crestfallenkingdom]

Daily Spitpaint: Aqueduct (30 mins) I miss Pre-Searing Ascalon so much :’( 

[singewood]

Took a Friend to the Northlands

in pre-Searing Ascalon. It was the first time I played Guild Wars with a friend in two years and thus, the first time I had ever been north of the wall, pre-Searing.

Honestly, it was really hard not to be like, "Holy shit this is Piken Square

"Holy crap, holy crap, I remember all of this, this is all going to go to hell."

And suddenly I'm beyond excited to get past the first ten levels of the Charr storyline in Guild Wars 2.

Headstart access cannot come soon enough.

[fherthus]

Guild Wars Soundtrack - Gwen's Theme 

It's been years, but I still get emotional whenever this gets stuck in my head. So many beautiful memories.