Yeah, I’ve been slacking again… I’ve been spending a lot of time in MMOs lately, and they always make it easy to overlook spending some time on other games as well.
My mesmer is up to level 40 in Guild Wars 2 now. I haven’t really said much about it, but it has been different enough from the traditional MMO experience to remain fairly fun. The world events manage to keep me involved in group efforts and pull off what feels like meaningful wins without actually forcing me to group up with random yahoos. Crafting is interesting in that it rewards you for experimenting, but I’m also often left frustrated at not being able to figure out what the fourth ingredient in some recipe is, and the drop rate on the ‘fine’ ingredients leaves my crafting lagging behind. The personal story missions sometimes feel unfairly difficult — in one of them I had to face three waves of 5-8 enemies each wave and just kept dying over and over and over again while gradually whittling them down — but at least they’re trying something a bit more personally customized. Tactics can be quite different even within the same class depending on what talents and weapons you use; I’m doing well with both the staff and scepter/gun combos with my mesmer (scepter/gun is more of a glass cannon, unloading a ton of damage at once but then having to survive until cooldowns refresh, whereas staff is more about stacking condition damage), but could still stand to practice and experiment with other combos, too. Haven’t tried any of the dungeons or PvP yet either.
I’ve also been playing more LOTRO, getting my lore-master up to level 26, and I also created a few alts to do other tradeskills on, since components for them were clogging up my bank and bank slots are expensive. I’ve finally moved out of the ‘lowbie’ zones into the Lone-lands and North Downs, where spots of civilization are starting to become farther apart.