State of the… Bleh…

It’s been a miserable few days in the Wolfy household, mostly because everyone’s down with some variant of the flu.

Yours truly hit a high of 38.9 degrees Celcius (or 102F) on Day 1 and while it has gone down since then, one has still been marveling at the capacity of the human body to sustain a fever temperature in spite of liberal doses of paracetamol.

Blech.

The only good news is that one had a bit more gaming time in between naps, even if it was mostly woozy gaming time.

Without much capacity for thought, it’s been a bout of maintenance mode on Guild Wars 2.

I finally managed to collect all the Ambrite weapon recipes, courtesy of a 6 hour DTOP-organized event on the weekend. So it was a matter of digging through my stash to see how many fossilized insects I had, and using up a ton of orichalcum and ancient wood to make all the shiny skins.

Oh, I guess I also have nearly an entire collection of Nomad stat weapons too – though I haven’t any clue how I might ever use them. It’s not like I command in WvW and need to be unkillable. I need me my Power or Condition Damage stats. Perhaps I’ll make a troll ninja medic thief one day or something, but that’ll only use up a few weapons at most, heh.

Just four more to go.

That mostly means running around in Dry Top opening chests, but it’ll probably take a few more weeks since I can only usually attend one of DTOP’s regular weekend runs.

I also did a bit of bank cleaning, though it mostly meant taking advantage of the character slot sale to buy a couple more slots, and make a new mule character to carry all the account-bound souvenirs and skins I’m reluctant to trash.

Some day soon, I need to make another one to carry all the Ascended and exotic junk of various stats that I hardly ever use, but who knows, maybe one day they’ll be useful… how can one bear to throw away an Ascended chest anyway…

…but I wussed out for now because that’s a big mess to sort through and I already have sufficient free bank slots again.

My recent PvP craze has also been useful, in that I’m planning for the mule characters to do double duty as PvP characters. Kinda sick and tired of seeing all those delicious class dailies go by and me with no ready character to just hop in and score a daily with.

I’ve also been hurling myself into a ton of matches… which is interesting when you’re running a fever, I might add, but I just feel remarkably free on the ranger. Imo, no one really expects anything from a ranger. Chances are likely they’re all pewpew power rangers anyway, right?

By the time someone realizes I’m condi, they probably already have 20 bleeds on them and have vines around their ankles and are on fire too, so yay.

I do my best to help teamfights go our way and win/survive 1 vs 1s and the rest is up to the team to figure out if they can coordinate and actually win fights elsewhere.

On the list of other classes I need to try/learn in PvP soon-ish are the warrior (god, I hate hambows, I need to be one of them at least -some- of the time), the ele (good eles are pretty annoying) and the engi (ditto turret engis, though since I play two condi characters, I know I can usually attrition them down with condi eventually.)

Oh, and for the first time, I actually pleveled a character in GW2 the other day.

I noticed my Tomes of Knowledge were piling up, and I had the thought that maybe I procrastinated on dungeons because my dungeon running warrior is a) not quite meta, and b) has always a nearly full inventory from also being my TTS Teq/Wurm character.

So enter new warrior, 100% meta compliant.

It was surprisingly easy.

A Scroll of Experience took him to level 20.

I had 53 Tomes of Knowledge at the time, so I just piled on 50 levels and kept back three.

Then since there were ten levels left to go and I didn’t feel like even doing a bit of open world or EOTM, I quick-crafted cooking.

With just a few levels shy of 80, I rummaged around and found some hoarded writs of experience, which I ate a bunch of, then just did a bit of low-level artificing until he hit 80.

Gearing was mildly more problematic because I didn’t want to use WvW or karma armor on someone I was planning to be all meta-compliant and putting expensive stuff like Strength or Scholar runes on. So it was a matter of running from one dungeon vendor to another, trying to find enough tokens for things. Mostly it all came from CoF, with a few spare Arah boxes from PvPing.

Alas, the truth is that I’m STILL procrastinating on dungeoning, mostly because I still have to run him to the zones that the dungeons are in. *wry chuckle*

Also, I feel terribly naked in PUGs without a way to constantly clear conditions. I’m beginning to suspect there was a very good reason why I adapted my old warrior to use warhorn and quick breathing…

We’ll see. Perhaps I might end up switching to a Phalanx Strength build at some point, and that will give me a good excuse to slot in a warhorn again. PUGs don’t really need that extra mace vulnerability if the whole team is gonna drop dead from bleeds before that, right?

The other game that I more or less had the mental capacity for was Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes.

Since I’m still too miserly to pick up Endless Legends until it drops further in price, experimenting with this game was the next best thing and they had a free weekend.

It’s not too bad.

The detail is quite fun, all your building constructions are actually depicted. Up north/top is my Onyx Throne, which reduces unrest in all my cities. Yes, worship and despair! Mwahaha!

It’s an interesting mix of Civilization / Masters of Magic meets tactical RPG. And I stress the RPG pretty heavily.

The ruler of your civilization is not just a pretty portrait, but an actual champion hero that you get to move around as the head of an army.

He even gets an origin story. It’s a nice touch, makes it more Alpha-Centauri-esque, in a way. More story in one’s Civ game.

Alpha Centauri players might recall that the game had a bunch of crashed drop pods to which you could move units to ‘explore the tile’ and get bonuses.

Fallen Enchantress takes this further with many different sites that only your champion can visit – sometimes you’ll find loot and equipment for your champions to use, sometimes you’ll have to fight off neutral mobs / monsters before you get the treasure, and sometimes you’ll even get extended quests, RPG-style, where a little story pops up wherein you talk to a NPC, they ask for help and point you to another tile to go defeat ‘teh evil monstah’ and so on.

Oh look, a shiny!

And yes, there’s even a shop with which you can buy more stuff to gear up your champions with. Where do you get the gold? Well, your cities are earning it for you. (Kinda hilarious, really. Do you spend the gold on rushing upgrades or training units for your cities, or upgrading your army units… or buying shiny gear for your champions? All valid choices.)

Yes, they also level up and have a skill tree.

The nice result of this RPG intrusion into a Civilization game is that you can still actively move around units and be engaged in fruitful combat, without necessarily being at war with any other faction. You’re basically interacting with the world, and I believe there’s actually a quest victory where you have to complete a string of epic quests to win the game.

Combat also has tactical turn-based aspects, as each encounter brings you down to an isometric map, unless you choose to auto-resolve it (safe enough if your army massively overpowers the other, but you’re usually better off manually controlling things when fighting against even or higher odds, unless you -like- taking a huge amount of casualties.)

Surrounding a unit with your own units appears to give some sort of attack bonus, so there can be quite an intricate dance to choke point or swarm the enemy for a better outcome.

It’s set in a fantasy world, so there’s also plenty of magic infused into the game too.

I’ll have to admit that I haven’t fully tried this aspect out, as I went straight for the warlike warrior/fighter faction *cough* (which turned out to have the weakness of not being able to build -any- ranged units at all, jeez) and decided to prioritize the War and Civilization parts of the tech tree over the Magic portions.

Your champions can cast magic, from strategic spells that affect the map or your cities, and tactical spells in battle, a la any standard RPG where you get things like fireball or shadow bolt or drain life, etc.

You can research up the Magic side of the tech tree, which appears to unlock various magic-related buildings from your cities, and presumably gives you more and better spells and enchanted weapons/armor/gear, along with eventually enabling a Magic victory of some sort, where you harness the elemental forces of magic itself.

Finally, you can also design your own units. They can carry various weapons that give various bonuses and changes their style of attack. Axes, for example, enable a unit to cleave up to 3 units. Swords give a unit a counter attack ability, where they will strike back at any units attacking them. Shields give a shield bash ability that knocks another unit back, and so on.

They can wear various types of armor, leather, chain, etc. and put on cloaks that give elemental resistance and hold various accessories that give variious stat bonuses. You can even put them on mounts, like horses and wargs, if you have the right resources and research.

All this, of course, adds up in production cost, so… balancing it out becomes an optimization puzzle for those interested in it. Else, there is always using the default units or making a couple of super units when your cities can manage to produce ’em.

All in all, it has the addictive “one more turn” nature of a Civ game, mixed with a hefty helping of fantasy and RPG. Not too shabby. Worth picking up if you see it on 75% off.