Current Activities in Gaming #6
Playing Melandru's Accord on GW1 has really re-contextualized what can be done in the game with standard heroes and no gear.
For those only following the various "Reforged" updates to GW1 in the last three months or so, they somewhat recently added a few game modes. Dhuum's Covenant is a survivor thing which I will never touch, the only time I get anything in survivor is by absolute accident, I can usually get the first rank of the three because I have a tendency to powerlevel with Kilroy in EoTn content. The Reforged mode itself means nothing outside of pre-searing, but it's something you can activate on older characters anyway. But then they added a Melandru's Accord which acts a bit like an Ironman run where it blocks out damn near everything from storage and trading vendors.
According to /age I've currently been playing my MA character for 26 hours. It honestly feels a little bit like playing a perma-pre character, except you have access to the whole game. So Kilroy's powerleveling is on the table, as are the storybooks for grabbing a max level gold weapon in around 10-30 minutes. (Gwen's story is pretty quick, but the last stretch of avoiding Charr is a bit annoying).
So far I've gotten to Vabbi and done a few EoTn quests for PvE skills. That's about it. Moddok Crevice was nearly a stopgap as my team had trouble dealing with the snipers near the two bosses at the end, a couple of my team dropped near instantly but we managed to hack it out and move forward. I've broken off to get some EoTn stuff and may delve a bit into other expansions to grab some basic skills. They halved the skill costs so mass buying Capture signets and skills is only 500g instead of a whole plat, which does help smooth the curve out a bit.
I was only just recently able to get a max level armor chestpiece but ran out of some hides. Earning platinum is much slower without access to rune traders, and I have to manually cap every elite I want my heroes to use, as well as manually buying every goddamn skill I need them to have.
My goal is to eventually build back into a sort of poor man's Mesway, which may also involve having to get halfway through the Factions expansion as well and I'm not looking forward to dealing with all the death explosions with no runes and non-max armor. I also don't have access to mercenaries so this Mesway is basically going to cap out at... two mesmers, and maybe Razah if I can find some help to get me through the Nightfall endgame, which I am not looking forward to with a non-runed party.
Playing a MA has also reintroduced vanquishing to my usual gameplay loop. I usually don't bother with it as the last stretch of finding one last little enemy patrolling some alcove I can't tell is even accessible from the ingame map, which is the problem I ran into the other day. Vanquishing a zone is a sort of "set aside a whole ass hour or more" activity which I don't find very fun or exciting, but it's a vital source of money and materials when you don't get access to half the game.
My opinions on the mode are mixed. It's weird to have a mode that's like "here's the game but like, a lot less of it." It has still been an interesting side project. Like I said before it 'feels' a lot like a permapre, where I'm just relying on random drops for my boosts in power. Getting a vigor or some +attribute rune is actually exciting for once, rather than making a new alt, and just making a beeline for the nearest rune trader and spending 10plat to fully gear up like three heroes. And watching what mods are on weapons I'm always keeping an eye out for those Strength and Honor scrips.
Hilariously, it didn't take much effort to build right back into a possible D/A dagger spammer build but I'm missing some PvE stuff, nor do I have the relevant rune headpiece, so I'm sticking with the scythe for the time being until I can build back into what's essentially my main dervish alt. Just severely underpowered in comparison.
My current goal is to do a few more early-game Vanquishes, especially throughout Istan, and net a bunch of money so I can start buying out my hero team skills that they're going to need.
