In typical ‘me’ fashion, I pick at a game trying to find out why I keep stalling then end up spending the next day playing it lots.
I settled on the Charr for a race. I liked the personal story and militant nature of them. This time I went Ash Legion instead of Blood Legion so there was a different start.
I went Ranger for class. I figure I liked having a pet in WoW, might enjoy it in GW2. So far I do like it, it is quite different from WoW.
You don’t have as much control over your pet – call back, attack my target, toggle aggressive/passive and trigger a single special ability. In WoW you could set up macros to handle casting a varied number of abilities (not sure how much that was impacted by Mists of Pandaria, but I suspect it was) so you had a little more control over them. I also haven’t sorted out exactly how it works for taming a pet. It seems a simple choice to “Charm” when you stumble across something that can be tamed. I see a panel of pets I could have charmed and what seems to be two actively available which I can toggle between with F4 – which is nice. Some pets are not available under water (makes sense) so you automatically dismiss the non-water pet and pull out the water capable one. It’s possible (and likely) the pet management window has two spots for land and two for water – I didn’t really look closely at this and it wasn’t shoved in my face since I have the tutorial tips off.
I have three pets at the moment: Devourer, Hyena and Bear. The Devourer (scorpion looking thing) is amphibious so that is what pops out when I go into the water. Its special ability is to drop a poison cloud effect on the ground (looks like it can be used in combos too). The Hyena’s special ability is to spawn a duplicate/ally that I have no control over and it seems to roam about agroing stuff when what I’m fighting was dead. The Bear has a roar special ability which (I think) is a debuff.
I think I found an issue with the pet naming system. I named the Devourer something, loaded up the Hyena in the second slot and renamed that. Then swapped the Bear into the first slot (in place of the Devourer) and the Devourer’s name stuck to it. I could rename it, just weird that it didn’t refresh back to the other name (or Juvenile Black Bear).
The are Abilities you can pick up that impact the pet; buff it, make it go faster, attack harder, or even eat conditions that are affecting nearby allies. I avoided those for now since I have a limited number of slots available.
Your Heal Abilities all affect you and your pet, with the exception being the Healing Spring which is a ground targeted AE and your pet will likely run out of range of it to fight with enemies (you can call them back and the mob should follow or you can wait and drop it where the mob is fighting).
The other Abilities appear to be traps (mainly) which are actually not bad. Some you plant where you are and other you can toss a short range out. I haven’t gotten too far into these to really see what they’re like. One non-trap, non-pet ability I picked up was a passive benefit to move speed of 25%… so says the Ability tip. The actual buff tip says 10% which seems pretty insignificant but I guess 25% increase was too much. The ‘active’ effect makes your pet attack a little harder.
I’ve got him up to level 14 or so.
As can be expected, pet classes seem a little more durable in PVE than others. With my Bear out, I can easily take on the Veterans, sometimes swapping the Hyena out, spawning an ally, then swapping back to the Bear (there is a cooldown on the swapping). If one happens to die, one key stroke and I have the other one out. It’s kinda nice. I hope I can expand the number of pets in that cycle but I think it’s going to stick to two.
After a few guild invites, I decided to see what was involved in creating a guild.
One lone silver piece. That’s all it took. So I created Clawed Defense Caste or CDC. Yes, that was intentional… it is me we’re talking about.
Seems the guild mechanism is interesting. It’s fueled by Influence which is gained by a number of ways (dungeons, PVP, quests – I think) including selling out some coin for amounts. I shelled out enough to buy the first level of Politics. That took 16 hours to complete – it just sits in a queue baking (mmm… bacon). So I hopped on last night for a couple of minutes to queue up the Emblem item which required the Politics first rank. That will enable me to create a guild emblem – which I just did. Go me. I queued up the only other thing I could, which was a banner to get me some Karma bonus.
Thing about banners (and why I mentioned ‘fueled by influence’ above) is that they are one shot – I think – some sort of limitation applies. I’m not sure if it’s consumed on use or if it is ‘carried’ by someone. I’ll find that out tomorrow at some point.
It doesn’t seem like guilds level at all, short of advancing in one of the four trees; Politics, Economy, War and Architecture. Scaling up in these open up other benefits and banners or effects. Architecture seems to open up Vault options for the guild. Politics seems to revolve around Influence, Karma and displaying Guild colors. Economy looks to be focused on increasing crafting related things. War focuses on rewards or impacts in PVP – duh.
Not a bad system really.
That’s all I have for now…
What server do you play in GW2? I have 4 characters (80 Sylvari elementalist, 64 Norn thief, 64 Asura necromancer, 8 human ranger) over on Anvil Rock.
Black Gate, though I almost never play. I always play it for a bit, then stop and never look back until a couple of weeks or months pass. I don’t know why I just can’t stick with it.