Whirly: good to go

I took my henchman team on a quest to scout the northern wall looking for an enemy army. It was a standard outdoor instance-crawl, lots of action. I died once, but it didn’t seem all that challenging, maybe because of my great technique, or my team’s excellent work.

I picked up an optional side-quest, in the instance, for extra experience. Two actually, but the second one was to run for my life which I was happy to do anyway. My team honerably died so I could keep running.

I don’t know how these missions work, if there is a progression of them, if they scale up as I level up, or will I be running this same quest again. I haven’t done any on-line research, choosing instead to discover the world as it shows up. As a result I have no idea what’s coming up. Hope it’s fun.

My biggest complaint, so far, is the short supply of button-bar slots. My skills already exceed the 8 slots available, so skills I don’t understand, or that don’t have a good graphics, are in storage. You can swap them around, but only in town.

I figured I didn’t need the “capture pet” skill as I already have a pet, but, with it off the button bar, I had no pet the next time I left town. Luckily my pet returned when I replaced the skill in the bar. I’m trying to work with the limitation and hoping I get more slots later.

The henchman group is working great. They all do exactly what I want, instantly; no human group could possibly manage that. And, they are all willing to play when I want, and go where I want. They aren’t very funny though. The boys are funnier, but the only thing they do instantly, and willingly, is give me guff.

An interesting feature of Guild Wars is henchman. Apparently I made it through the academy last night as I’m loose in the world now. I received a quest and the quest giver suggested I pick up an NPC healer. I found the one he suggested and added her to my group. I figured, while I was there, I’d add a Warrior and an Elementalist as well, all NPC. They follow me and attack anything I attack. They are called henchman.

It works surprisingly well. Even when I died the group kept fighting. It was the best pick up group I’ve been in in a long time. I finished the quest quickly, but decided to continue working the zone as my group was so good and it was my instance after all.

This game seems to have fun potential. I believe you are forced into PvP later. We’ll see how that goes, if I get to the later.

Last night I installed and played Guild Wars. I started my adventure with a Ranger. A bow using, pet handling Ranger. The interface is straight forward and easy to manage for a WoW player, though the button bar doesn’t have very many slots. A nice feature is that you can draw on your mini map for the whole group to see.

First quest was to find my Ranger trainer. He gave me two abilities, in my button bar, power-shot and a self heal, and sent me off to kill some things. Fighting and looting was easy enough and I looted a wand. Helpful hints pop up occasionally and one told me how to switch to the wand. I found that I could equip and use it, but Rangers don’t use wands, ick.

My next task was to get a pet. The pet trainer gave me two more skills, a pet heal and a capture pet, then told me where to pick one up. I was now level 2 and my new cat pet was level 5. The pet seems to fight what I’m attacking. I don’t seem to have any control of him. I don’t know if he would change targets if I changed targets. He dinged level 6 later.

When ever you leave town you are in an instance. The world outside is for you and your party only. Once you’ve been somewhere you can open your map, click on that location, and travel there instantly.

It was getting late and I’d done all the quests assigned to me, including picking a second skill, I’m a Ranger/Elementalist, when I clicked on one more guy and accepted his quest. A timer pops up and my mission will start in 58 seconds. 58 seconds later I’m in the academy with 3 other people in my group and another count down timer until our mission begins. You’ve got to feel sorry for my group mates cause they have an absolute newbie Ranger in their group. I believe 2 of them were people and 1, the healer, was an NPC automatically added to round out the group.

The gates opened and we rushed in to meet our challenge. I’m not sure if we won or not, it was kind of a blur to me. I died a couple of times; I don’t know if there is a death penalty.

The learning curve hasn’t been too-bad, so-far. A little frustration, but I’ve overcome most challenges. I need a little more time to figure everything out. I wonder if I can talk Mike into playing Guild Wars on Saturdays?