All Blog Entries

My ranger is huntsman/leatherworker. Picked without research because those two professions made the most sense to me to level as a ranger. The crafting system in this game is far-and-away the best I've encountered in my mmo life so far. There are niggles though.

There is a huge disparity between the frequency of drops of the base materials and that of the 'activators', (bone, blood, venom sacks etc) that you need. I can be sitting for ages stuck on one tier because I'm stuffed to ...

My third try at Wv3 fell somewhere between the first two experiences. I went into Eternal Battlegrounds. I didn't hate it. I didn't love it. It was fun in parts. It sucked foetid donkey whatsits in others. I hooked up with some other folk on teamspeak and we had a solid try at taking some territory back from the other two sides. We took Stonemist Castle back 4 times in five minutes and then held it for nearly an hour. At one point I was the only person on TS acting as eyes in the castle and ye-gods, ...

I've had two experiences of WvWvW so far. The first was an exiting mish mash of players all rushing off to cap or defend a point. I followed, kept out of the red circles on the ground and got my 50 kills for the month in about 6 hours of very enjoyable gaming. It was fun, we played it like we used to play that Zerg fest horde versus alliance match in the ore-farming zone in WotLK. I just lost half my readership, but bear with me. I am coming to a fair point. It was fun. I had fun playing PvP - and ...

My baby ranger is a fully flighted level 80 now, and it has made absolutely no difference to the way I'm playing the game. I haven't finished my personal story yet (it's at level 77) but I don't feel any compulsion to rush through to the end. I'm playing her now exactly the same way that I did when I created her at the headstart, except that she has some shiny things to wear. I have the same model of bow that I found at around level 30, because I've not found a prettier model. Her gear is nowhere ...

Back in 2005 I set my Ranger's foot outside Old Ascalon in pre-searing. Things tried to kill me, but I wasn't actually paying any attention to gameplay. The trees along the path were dropping autumn leaves and the light was astonishing. I blew survivor right there and then, a death to the Scale in the river, watching the texture of the grass and the flowers, the quality of the light like liquid joy to an artist's eye. I was playing on low settings on a cruddy old PC on a dial-up internet connection ...