Stoned Again

We're enjoying some very pleasant Spring weather here just now, which was why Mrs. Bhagpuss and I came to be driving out on a sunny March morning last week to take a look at the standing stones at Stanton Drew. There's no shortage of ancient stoneworks within a short drive of where we live and we've visited quite a few but this one was new to us both.

It's unfamiliar to a lot of people, apparently, despite being possibly the third largest stone circle in Britain, after the far better-known Stonehenge and Avebury. Julian Cope, ex-lead singer of the Teardrop Explodes and self-styled Modern Antiquarian, called it "undervalued" and it's certainly under-visited, especially when compared to its two big rivals.

We only thought to visit it because we'd recently been to the village to look at a nursing home for my 93 year-old mother. She's gone somewhere else but the home she didn't move into is right next to the stones so we thought we'd go back for a closer look.

And you can have as close a look as you'd like. Climb all over the things if you want. No-one's gojng to stop you. 

The three competing pre-historic attractions stand orders of magnitude apart in terms of access, with Stonehenge on one side of a massive barrier, literally and financially, with the other two a long way outside.

Stonehenge is fully enclosed and zealously guarded, thanks to decades of varying use and abuse, everything from would-be druids holding solstice ceremonies to the Convoy staging pitched battles with the police. 

As a child, I visited the henge on a school trip. I seem to remember it was already sufficiently commercialized even then to feature a gift shop but we were allowed to touch the stones and there was no fence around them, or at least not in my memory. 

Now you have to book in advance and pay almost £30 just to get inside the main fence as far as the next security cordon, where ropes keep you at a distance from the stones themselves. It's £3 to park your car, too.

If you want to walk among the stones, inside the circle, you'll need to buy the full "Experience". That'll cost you £70! And even then you still don't get to touch anything.

Avebury is a lot more relaxed and it's free, too, although if you use the car park it'll set you back £7. Plenty of free parking in the village, though, or there was when we last went, which admittedly was over a decade ago. You can wander up to the stones and lay on hands, too, which to my way of thinking is pretty much the whole point.

Visiting Stanton Drew costs £1 and that's only if you're honest. There's a box on the gate and you're trusted to drop a coin into it as you go through. If you don't, no-one's going to know because there's no-one there. 

Even with a nominal entrance fee it's still cheaper than Avebury because there's a free car park. The pound goes to the local farmer who owns the land on which the stones are sited. It's a working farm and there are sometimes livestock in the fields, which is why no dogs are allowed. (Avebury is dog-friendly.)

 The size of the car park gives you some indication of the number of visitors the circle at Stanton Drew sees. I'd guess you could get eight cars in it, if everyone parked very carefully. The morning we went, there was just one other vehicle there but a few more people wandered in on foot. It's the kind of place that attracts neo-hippies and ancient history buffs alike but the history buffs tend to come in cars.

Because we had Beryl with us, we had to take it in turns to go to the stones. It's a surprisingly long walk, not least because the stones are bigger than you think, so they look closer than they are.

When I went in, there were a few other people strolling about, moving from monolith to monolith, taking pictures. One guy was lying on one of the stones, his feet higher than his head, taking a photograph of another. 

As I said, if you want to climb up the stones and sit on top eating an ice cream, there's nothing and no-one to stop you. You'd have to bring your own ice-cream, though. There's no gift shop.

The whole place is extremely chill. Laid back. Relaxed. On a gorgeously warm, sunny Spring morning it's hard to think of anywhere more so. I'd have liked to have had a thermos of coffee and a good book with me. I'd have lain down on one of the flat stones and basked.

With Beryl not being allowed past the gate, we couldn't do anything like that, sadly, so we went to the pub instead. And in the pub garden are three more standing stones, a thousand years older than the circle, so it's said, although how they're dated I don't know.

Those stones are known as The Cove and I didn't take any pictures of them. They're big, though, I can tell you that.

We had a coffee in the pub garden while Beryl frolicked in the grass. Didn't take any pictures of that, either. Sorry.

And then we came home. It was a fine morning's edutainment, although really, for me, the main pleasure of visiting pre-historic sites goes to the senses rather than the intellect. I like to touch them and imagine a connection to the deep past. 

I used to hug trees when I was a teenager. Too much prog rock, I expect. Lucky I grew out of that. Bloody hippies!

When you play games in which stone circles frequently feature, though, it is interesting to see such places up close. If nothing else, it gives some context.

I'm surprised the Druids of Norrath haven't installed any gift shops. Then again, now I come to think of it, I think there might  be the occasional vendor hanging out at one or two. I guess the barbed-wire fences are only a matter of time.

#17= Cassice - Born 4 May 2003 - 4 days 20 hours -

This is going to be a very short post. No, really. I mean it this time.

It's going to have to be because I don't have much to say about Cassice, my level 48 Druid and #17= on the list. Other that I'm quite surprised she's made it that far.

If I could remember how it happened, I'd be glad to tell you but I don't really have much of an idea, which is somewhat worrying when you realize I must have spent well over a hundred hours playing her. There's no short-cut to the high 40s that I'm aware of, no Instant Forty-Five potion you can drink or boost you can buy. I mean, why would there be?

No, she must have clawed her way up to the dizzy heights of just shy of the original level cap by her own efforts. Or my efforts, anyway.

Not that it's so much of an achievment these days. It surely would have been, back when I started in 1999. In those days, Level 50 seemed like a dream that might never come true. My original Druid, Rachel, took years to get into the fifties and I still remember even today how proud of myself I felt to see her become my first character to make it into the thirties.

But then, Rachel was a real character, with history and personality. Even without my roleplaying them in the traditional sense, all my characters from the first few years developed distinct quirks, traits, foibles and ways of speaking that made them feel like individuals.

By the time Cassice came along, which was only four years after the launch of EQ, that was no longer necessarily true. As we'll see when I come to the next character on the list, I wasn't entirely done with inhabiting the characters I made but by 2003 the vein was was pretty much tapped out.

Cassice stands out as a bit of a transitional character in that sense. She really doesn't have anything that could pass for a personality but she's not a complete cipher, either. What she mostly is is a function masquerading as a form. 

I can't remember why I wanted a Druid back in those early days on Stromm although as I speculated last time it was most likely an attempt at a viable solo character. I was relatively experienced in playing a Druid, too, so it probably seemed like a safe choice.

If she ever grouped up and did stuff with the guild we had, briefly, on Stromm, I have no recollection of it. I suspect she mostly got played when I didn't want to be particularly sociable. And as I already said, how the heck she managed to get forty-eight levels under her leather belt, I have no idea. That's a lot of root-dotting and snare-kiting.

What I do know about Cassice, though, is that in latter years she took up a second career as a photo-journalist. Of all the twenty-five characters in this series, she's probably second only to Magmia in appearances here on the blog because she's long been the one I wake up and send out to take screenshots, every time I write about something happening in Old Norrath.

There are lots of great things about EQ Druids, second only to Bards as they are in terms of range of utility, but surely the greatest is their extreme mobility. Druids can go anywhere, pretty much. They get teleport spells from an early level that allow them to pop up in Druid Rings all across Norrath, at first on their own and later with friends (Or paying customers) in tow.

I think Wizards can port to more places but I never got a Wizard high enough to compare. I've been very happy with Druids as my travel specialists and Cassice has done me great service in that role over the years.

Despite never having been much of a character in her own right, even now, after more than two decades, she remains the one most likely to be asked to do something, when I'm in an EverQuest frame of mind. She's perpetually on call but also she doesn't carry the responsibility of the two or three characters I might actually care about leveling, any of whom would require much more in the way of commitment from me if I ever decided to take them out of their cosy resting place in the Guild Lobby.

I do sometimes take Rachel out for a spin for the same reason but she's loaded up with buffs and the moment she leaves the general vicinity of the Plane of Knowledge they start to fade so usually I don't. Cassis, though, is self-buffed, not least because not much from an MGB will land on a level 48, so she's free to come and go as she pleases.

That's why the pictures of Cassice that I took today, especially for this post, show her out in the world, not posing against a backdrop in either the Guild Lobby, Plane of Knowledge or Plane of Tranquility as usual. Instead, she's on the beach in North Ro because that's where the 25th Anniversary tower was and she was there last year, taking photographs. She still has some anniversary related stuff in her bags, too, because this is EverQuest and no developer has ever, in living memory, programmed any such item to disappear when an event comes to an end.

She has some stuff in her bag I can't entirely explain, too. Part of a key to something in Lavastorm, for example, which appears to be one of four for some quest she's been doing. I think that was back when something happened in the volcanic zone and I did a post on it. Maybe...

The most mysterious item in her bags, which I had a rummage through just before I started this post, is a rather nice two-hander called Pestilence, useable only by Paladins and Shadowknights. Not only can Cassice not wield it because she's the wrong class, she's also too low. It has a required level of 75. 

Where she got it and why she's lugging it about I haven't a clue.  I've tried to look it up but I can't even find where it drops so it's a mystery. I don't think I even have a character on the server who could use it. 

If I had to guess, I'd say maybe she saw it on an NPC vendor for a pittance and bought it to resell, which is something I used to do all the time. Or she could have bought it on the Broker, although why she (Or I.) would want it, I can't imagine. 

She has clearly spent a good while browsing the Bazaar, though, spending Magmia's hard-earned money, because she's kitted out in all kinds of things she couldn't possibly have gotten on her own. 

She's clearly had quite some care and attention devoted to her over the years.

Pity I can't remember doing any of it. 

Two In A Tower

It took me a while but this morning I finally got around to trying out EverQuest's 25th Anniversary Tower. It does have a more impressive, less lore-breaking name inside the game itself but "Anniversary Tower" is what the press release called it back in January and that's the name I have stuck in my mind.

I went to take a look at it just about as soon as it appeared but there was an access quest I didn't want to get involved with just then and what with Palworld, Nightingale and everything else it's taken me this long to find the right moment to do something about it. Ever the way with EverQuest. Even when we're talking about something as low-key as an anniversary event, you don't just pile in. Bad things happen when you do that.

So, anyway, after my second death this morning...

Tell you what. Why don't we begin at the beginning? 

When I went to log in right after breakfast, the first thing I had to decide was which character was going to be my guinea-pig for the day. I'd done a little reading in advance and it seemed the rewards might be worth having for a casual solo player like myself. Sure, the raiders were all complaining there was nothing in it for them but there were some "Thank-you, Darkpaw" notes from F2P players too.

The event scales to level so I could have called on any of my three dozen or so characters but it seemed like it might be best to take what passes for my "main" character these days, my level 115 Magician. I logged her in but even before I got started I ran into the usual problem I encounter every time I go to play her - her buffs.

For about the past two years she's been standing in the Guild Lobby, right in the middle of The Pile. The Pile is the spot where everyone leaves their characters so they can soak up the Mass Group Buffs generous players often cast before they log out for the day. 

As a result, Magmia, my Mage, is raid-buffed to an alarming degree and I daren't take her out of the Guild Lobby,  Plane of Knowledge or The Bazaar, zones where time stands still and buffs never run out, unless I know I'm going to do some serious leveling. Since she can't gain any more XP until I buy the most recent expansion and unlock ten more levels, that means she's pretty much grounded.

I thought about it for a while, then I said "Sod it! Cassis is already there. She can do it!" And that, I guess, is how she comes to have 116 hours played.

Knowing the event scales to level, I wasn't expecting too much trouble. I'd read that behind each tower door lay nothing more than a single room with five mobs, each of which could be fought separately. Most of the comments I'd read were complaining about how unchallenging it was and speculating about how it must have been put together an intern on their first day.

I also knew the access quest was a scavenger hunt, another reason I picked Cassis for the job. If you're going to go zone-hopping around Norrath, a Druid is your first choice. Well, unless you have a Wizard, maybe, but I'd still go Druid for the speed.

As it turns out, the scavenger hunt for each floor takes place in a single zone so there wasn't all that much porting required. Still more than you'd think, though, albeit for reasons more related to my own lack of preparedness than anything to do with quest design.

Playing EverQuest is like riding a bike... so long as you were riding a bike last Tuesday. It does all come back to you, eventually. It's just that there's a lot of it to come back and it might take a while. In my case today it took about an hour and a half and a couple of deaths.

Fortunately, death isn't what it was in Norrath. The days of corpse runs are long gone and even significant  XP loss seems to be a thing of the past. I'm not saying there is none - just that I died twice in a session and still came out half a level ahead.

In EQ you always expect to die but both Cassis' deaths were very unexpected. And entirely my fault for making several newbie mistakes, the worst of which was starting off thinking it was going to be straightforward. It's never straightforward. Nothing in EverQuest is.

I logged Cassis in, ran down the sands to the tower and took the teleport inside I spoke to the Merchant to get the quest and realized she didn't give it. There was no-one else to ask so I figured it might trigger when you click the door. I went up the ramp to the first entrance, where I spotted a blue ball of light on the floor. I clicked on that only to find I couldn't pick it up because my bags were full.

Absolutely typical first day back. Also why I picked a Druid for the job. I found something in my bags I could live without, got rid of it to make space, picked up the ball of light and watched it turn into a "Broken Key of Sands". I had two bag slots with single items blocking them so stashed one in the only other space left and put the Broken Key in the bag slot where I wouldn't lose it. 

Since I knew I was about to do a scavenger hunt, I thought I'd better make some more space for whatever I was going to have to bring back. I memmed Ring of Knowledge, ported back, turned myself into a wolf for the run-speed, loped over to the Tinkering vendor, bought two ten-slot Toolboxes and then couldn't find them. No error message saying I didn't have space, nothing on my cursor... turned out the "Key" I'd picked up was actually a three-slot box and both the new Toolboxes had gone in there because in EQ you can put a container inside a container.

With that sorted out, I went to the bank and stashed a bunch of stuff I have no idea what to do with in my vault alongside all the rest of the stuff I have no idea what to do with and then I had plenty of space. I memmed Ring of Ro and ported back down to the desert. 

The quest told me to check the orc camps in the south-east so I ran up there. Porting had wiped my wolf illusion so I cast good old Spirit of Wolf instead, plus Levitate for good measure. I could see the orc camps on the map (EQMaps add-on. Essential.) although I knew from memory where they were anyway. I figured they'd be about level 9 so I'd be able to stroll into their camp, pick up whatever it was I needed for the scavenger hunt and be on my way without a fight.

Yeah. This is EQ. Have you played before?

I trotted into the first camp and an Orc Oracle started casting some dumb orc spell at me. One Starfire and he'd be cinders. Except he wasn't. He shrugged it off and landed Malosi on me, followed by some heavy DoT. I was half health before I realized I was in trouble. 

I dotted him back and he resisted. I tried to root him and he resisted. By this time I was back-pedalling and he was chasing me. I tried to snare him and got a message saying he was immune. I tried to heal myself but Druids don't get good heals for a long time, certainly not at 48. By the time I decided I'd better run away for real it was too late.

Back at my bind in the Guild Lobby I checked to see what damage had been done. Not much, actually. All my stuff - still with me. All my spells - still memmed. All my buffs - still on, not that there were many because I hadn't bothered to buff myself. 

Okay, I know what to expect now, I thought. Let's go again.

Round two went much the same. Well, it did after I pulled an Orc Shaman thinking it was the Oracle and killed it in seconds because that one really was about Level 9. There was no sign of my real target. I wondered if I'd bugged the quest somehow but no, I just needed to go into the camp again to respawn him.

I did better in the rematch but I'd forgotten that they'd fixed DoT stacking a few years back so spells of different levels in the same line no longer add. Higher versions block lower ones so there's no point having both Drones of Doom and Drifting Death memmed. I couldn't stack enough damage to put the Orc down but he had no such issues with me.

Back in the Guild Lobby, I remembered my Merc. I also remembered I had buffs. I got the merc out, buffed him, buffed myself, went back and did it properly. Third time's the charm. With the mercenary tanking and the right spells loaded, I was able to stack fire and magic DoTs, nuke and heal from a safe distance. When I overdid it, which was pretty quickly because I'm out of practice at playing a Druid, I got the Orc rooted and we carried on from there.

The Orc went down and I got his part of the key. Drops, not ground spawns for the scavenger quest, then. Never thought of that.

The quest updated and told me to go look in the Sand Giant camp next. I was apprehensive but the giant was pure melee, which made holding him up with the Merc and Root much safer and easier. He dropped the second piece of the key and the quest moved on to Spectre Isle.

Either the Spectre was the easiest of the three or I was getting my groove back. The Merc and I disposed of the scythe-wielding psychopath with no problems. I put the final part of the key into the container, hit Combine and presto! Completed quest, completed key.

Back in the tower I clicked on the door and nothing happened. I clicked on the key instead and got another quest. Then the door opened. Inside, as promised, I found a single room with five mobs just standing there, glaring at me: two crocodiles, two skeletons and another Spectre.

I thought I'd start with the Spectre so I tried to root him, only to get a message telling me I couldn't attack him at all. Then I noticed my quest had updated. It was telling me to kill the crocs first.

Multiple comments on several forums had led me to believe the fights inside the tower would be almost insultingly easy. They are not. Not if you're an averagely-geared Druid played by an out-of-practice player, anyway.

I won't go through the whole play-by-play but it was tense. Druids tend to like large, open areas with plenty of kiting room. They don't shine in closed rooms with very little space to move around. Even less so when they have to fight mobs that can't be snared.

Still, the crocs weren't too bad. They came one at a time and the Merc had no trouble taunting them. I needed to med after each of them and the Merc needed a heal or two but it was fine.

The skeletons were harder and the whole thing almost fell apart when the second aggroed before the first was done. Luckily the one we were fighting was down to about 10% health so I nuked him hard and we got the other one under control. At the end of that fight, though, Cassis and the Merc both needed a good sit down.

That just left the Spectre, who worryingly conned yellow, meaning he was a level or two higher than us. And he was a bloody handful, let me tell you! 

The fight came down to Cassis frantically chain-healing the Merc with her only halfway-decent heal, Greater Healing, which only gave the Merc back about 5%  health a cast. I tried to keep my two good DoTs on but it was a risk dropping a heal to recast. In the end, it came down to the wire, with the Merc falling when the Specter was at about 5% itself and Cassis was not much better herself.

The scythe was swinging my way and I was casting what looked like it would be my final nuke when the Spectre just up and imploded. The combat log mysteriously reads "a withered memory hits a withered memory for 409 points of magic damage from Sweeping Scythe Slash" so maybe the spook clumsily cut his own head off.

Whatever, I won! I collected my winnings (More event currency.), looked out of the window (Sand.) checked the half-buried treasure chest (A prop.) and zoned out. I did go up a floor to collect the starter for the next access quest but I haven't done anything with it yet. All I know is it's in Lavastorm and they gave me a shovel.

I look forward to seeing what kind of trouble Cassis can dig up for herself next.

Healing For Fun And Profit. Okay, Forget The Profit : GW2

Over the long years since the dawn of EverQuest I've played most of the standard MMO roles but my favorite and the one I feel most competent and confident in is Healer. One of the famous, or infamous, decisions ArenaNet made when designing GW2 was to do away entirely with the Holy Trinity. At the time I didn't have particularly strong feelings about it one way or another but the one thing I really didn't like was way it effectively removed the role of Healer from the game.

In GW2 everyone's her own healer and everyone else's patch healer at the same time. Healing is your job, my job, no-one's job. It works well enough and I've certainly become used to it but it's never been ideal.

Consequently I felt that one of the more welcome additions brought to the game by the Heart of Thorns expansion was the introduction of the closest thing GW2 has ever had to a dedicated healer - the Druid. Druid is the Elite Specialization for the Ranger class. Rangers might seem an odd choice for the healing role but, as Zubon pointed out way back when, the Ranger started out as a good match for the then-favored "main" healing class, a Staff Elementalist in Water attunement.

Don't turn your back on me Rytlock. I'm tougher than I look. What do you mean, "You'd have to be?"

I played both a Ranger and a Staff Ele and I tried for a while to fit into a support role as a healer but it was never very comfortable or satisfying. It works best in World vs World, where dropping water fields on command has always been an integral part of gameplay. It doesn't feel like proper healing , though, and the game itself didn't recognize any form of healing as worthy of credit so it took a very selfless player to commit to a full-time healing role. Few did.

With the coming of HoT all that changed. The Druid was designed primarily as a support class, with the bulk of that support coming in the form of healing. On top of that, the rules were changed so that healing players during combat gave the healer credit towards whatever rewards might be on offer. True, you do still have to do some nominal damage as well in order to be recognized but some of the healing skills come with damage built in so that's simple enough.

Amazing how the arrows don't go right through.

It's surprising, then, that it's taken me six months to get around to trying the Druid out. Mrs Bhagpuss, who has had a Druid up and running for a good while, has been telling me for weeks I ought to give it a go. And it's not like I wasn't ready. I completed the specialization back before Christmas, along with the ascended weapon quest collection for Yggdrasil, the druid staff. And yet I carried on playing as a ranger.

In fact,three rangers: one a Charr, my first GW2 character, another, on my third account, a Sylvari, and in-between those two there's my Asura. A year or so ago, on a whim, I re-specced and re-geared the Asuran Ranger for pure survivability. He's all toughness, vitality and, most especially, healing power. His passive and reactive regeneration is so high that in most PvE fights his health barely appears to drop at all.

That made him the ideal candidate. Over the weekend I tuned him still further in that direction, put a staff in his hands and sent him out to learn how to Druid. It was a happy experience.

In open world PvE he is virtually indestructible. Packs of mini-raptors, hordes of mordrem, whole temples of risen minions of Zhaitan throw themselves against his healing and bounce. It makes traveling a breeze.

Hi, King Adelbern! Look, he's waving!

In WvW he is both an irritant and a salve. In the zerg his heals throw clouds of green numbers as far as the eye can see. It feels like contribution. It feels satisfying.

Roaming, something I have rarely managed to bring off with anything even remotely comparable to success before, he is a total nuisance. He may not be able to kill other players  - the downside of the healing build is DPS like a wet dishcloth - but boy, can he hold a ring.

When he turns up, a simple camp capture for a couple of invaders turns into a long-drawn out war of attrition as he dodges and rolls and throws out heal after heal that not only keep him and his pet alive but revitalize all and any of the camp guards that are still standing.

The longer the fight goes on, the higher the chance another player on my side will turn up to assist, and once that happens the tide just turns. Having a heal generator on tap frees up whoever has found the fight to blaze away while, as everyone knows, you have to kill the healer first and that was already problematic when the healer was alone.

This guy seriously doesn't know when he's beaten.

So, I spent a good few hours over the last few days doing that. So much in MMO gaming - gaming in general - comes down to muscle memory and being able to act without thinking. I am nowhere near being "good" at playing a druid yet but I'm beginning to pass the point where I have to think about everything as it happens. When instinct can take over performance will improve.

Off the back of this positive experience I had the bright idea, late last night, to see how the Druid would go in a dungeon. In all the time I've played GW2 I've done just one of the original dungeons and that but a single time. That was the final Zhaitan fight at Arah on Story mode, way back in 2012.

I've done around a dozen fractals and all the temporary Living Story and holiday dungeons but the regular ones, never. I thought I'd start at the beginning so I went to the entrance of Ascalon Catacombs in Plains of Ashford, knocked on the door and went in. Alone.

Rytlock Brimstone wasn't impressed. He thought I needed to bring some help if I was coming with him to find Eir Stegalkin. Apparently a three foot tall Asura wearing a child's cat hat and waving something that looks like a sapling he just uprooted doesn't equate to a full warband in the eyes of a great soldier like Rytlock.

Twenty-six silver? You're kidding, right?

Well I sure proved him wrong. I wasn't expecting to get far. The last time I tried that dungeon solo I didn't get past the first room. This time I progressed and kept progressing. I had a walkthrough up but I didn't really need it. I only died once and that was the fault of the in-game instructions, which put up a huge message telling me I'd disarmed all the traps only for all the traps in the room to fire at once as soon as ran back the way I'd come.

Other than that, none of the fights even came close. I was never downed. Rytlock, Eir and her wolf, Garm, fell over many times but I quickly learned that if you just run back a few dozen yards they pop back up at full health as though nothing ever happened.

The dungeon was gorgeous, insofar as a decaying, ghost-ridden crypt can be. The mechanics weren't too annoying. Difficulty felt almost identical to Advaned Solo in EQ2. Rewards were poor but it was interesting to follow another part of the story, even though it's more like history by now.

Rytlock's stormed off in a huff. Again. Everyone feels bad. Even the pets.

It opens up the prospect of doing more dungeons solo and of duoing them with Mrs Bhagpuss, who has already expressed an interest in running Twilight Arbor for tokens to buy the Nightmare Court armor. Researching that I found the beautifully designed guides at GWDungeon.net, a resource I didn't even know existed. I anticipate making considerable use of all their hard work.

I am not a fan of running dungeons over and over. I have always thought it a poor mechanic and a wrong-headed direction for designers to take. I do like a good dungeon, though - solo, duo or full group. It would be good to see them all and what's more, if I've been through a dungeon at my own pace solo or duo I'll be much more likely to take a run with a group. Even if you don't know the ropes it's nice to at least feel you know where the ropes are.

It's also made me more interested to play around with the other Elite Specializations and also experiment with builds. Who knows, I might even make some effort to put a character into full Ascended.

If I do, it'll be the Druid.

You Can Get The Staff : GW2

Among the really quite surprisingly large number of things I've found myself enjoying in Heart of Thorns are the Ascended Weapon Collections. Before the expansion launched I never gave them a thought but it seems that I should have. For once, ArenaNet seem to have found my personal Goldilocks zone .

The Collection system was intended to provide a framework for horizontal progression. Over the year and more since it debuted in the September 2014 Feature pack it has sprouted seven sub-sections including Basic, Rare, Black Lion and three flavors of Legendary but the only one that has really caught my attention is Specialization.

For my tastes, most of the Collections fall into the "pointless time sink" category, a place where a great deal of GW2's "content" seems to reside, but the Specialization Collections have managed to pitch themselves just the right side of busy-work, landing squarely in the realm of  "I could do this and it wouldn't be horrible". What's more, the final reward is something simple, straightforward and clearly desirable: an Ascended Weapon.

The Ascended gear tier has been in the game for so long now that the controversy that greeted its introduction seems almost forgotten. Working through the various routes to acquire a full set of Pink Quality armor and weapons has become routine for many players. I am  not one of them.

I'm happy to cherry-pick the quick and easy Ascended option where it presents itself. My
considerable Badge of Honor surplus (currently standing at just under 13,000 on the main account) provides instant access to all the rings, amulets and trinkets I could want. I've been lucky enough to acquire a smattering of weapons and armor pieces from drops here and there, something that has become a much more feasible means of acquisition since the change that allowed us to change the stats using the Mystic Forge.

The most straightforward way to fill out the set is, of course, by crafting. I do have some 500 skill tradeskillers who could get the job done but it feels far too much like throwing money on a blazing fire and I generally can't bring myself to do it. These new collections, though, are not just relatively economical, they're fun too.

There's a weapon for each of the nine classes. Each weapon requires the collection of fourteen "items". It sounds like a lot of work but since Collections are account-based and some of the items are shared between two or more classes the total is less daunting than it might be. Moreover, while a number of the items are gated by certain Masteries (primarily Itzel and Nuhoch language and Exalted Aceptance and Gathering), once those Masteries are in your book, getting your hands on the items themselves becomes trivial.

The first I knew of the existence of the Specialization Collections was when items I received early in the HoT Personal Story caused a window to pop up telling me I'd started one. I didn't pay much attention but then more updates appeared as I killed my way across Magus Falls and even Core Tyria.

That was when I took a look at the Collection and found myself thinking "Y'know, this looks doable". Over the last few weeks I've been picking away slowly at the first Collection I discovered, the Druid staff Yggdrasil. Other than a couple of trips to obscure Karma vendors around Tyria I haven't needed to do anything much other than things I'd have been doing anyway.

It's not to say that pursuing the vague goal of someday owning Yggdrasil hasn't directed my day-to-day choices at all. I probably wouldn't have Map Completion for Verdant Brink if I hadn't needed at least one Magus Falls map completed by a Ranger. I might not have bothered to do the sub-collect for the Machined Staff or the Mystic Forge combine for the Mystic Forge if they weren't needed for The Project. I might have taken some of the Masteries in a different order.

And so on and so on. The point is, though, that nothing I ended up doing was anything I wouldn't have done at some point, maybe, probably, randomly. All the collection required was that I change my focus: do this particular thing now rather than later. That's the kind of directed activity in MMOs that I find not just acceptable but welcome. If there's one thing I often need but find hard to find it's a bit of focus.

On Christmas evening I finished up both the Machined and Mystic Staff requirements and took possession of Yggdrasil. It looks rather good, I think. A neatened, tidied version of the exotic Druid's Staff that marks a ranger's transition to the druidic life and which appears to be a sapling pulled up by the roots from some public park.

Mrs Bhagpuss, naturally, finished her Yggdrasil weeks ago, following it up with the Thief's Bo, which, being a staff, shares some of the steps. Thief is the only class I don't have on the main account and I have no plans to add one so I'll probably move on to Ydalir, the Dragonhunter's bow, next. Of all the new Elite specs the Guardian's Dragonhunter is the only one for which I prefer the new weapon to any of the old choices.

Over time, though, I expect to complete all the Specialization Collections. They're neither too easy nor too hard. They're just about right.

New For Old: Hunting Hero Points Aross Tyria : GW2

When ANet announced a reduction in the number of Hero Points required to complete the new Elite Specializations I was mildly interested. The option to add a new weapon type to each of my characters and strut about calling myself a Dragonhunter or a Herald might be fairly low on my list of Things To Do When The Expansion Arrives but at least it's on the list.

The fuss and fury over the 400 HP requirement was frenzied for a while. It would have been almost impossible to play and not at least be aware there was an issue. Still, I hadn't really given much thought to what it would actually be like to try and get those four hundred points. More specifically, it hadn't hit home to me that the 400 came in addition to the 398 required to complete all the skills and specializations in the main game.No wonder people weren't happy.

Theoretically, those of us who've been paying attention have known for most of this year that we'd need all the Hero Points we could get when Heart of Thorns arrived. We've had the best part of nine months to go round all the maps, doing all the Hero Challenges and filling everything out. Unfortunately, doing that would have gone against all my instincts and preferences; so I didn't bother.

I have asbestos pockets. I don't like to spend anything unless I have a very good reason. I'd always rather have money in the bank and that attitude transfers to just about any and every kind of in-game "currency". As I level my characters in any game I tend to look at what they have to have to progress and leave it at that. I see spending any points on skills or traits I'm not using as a waste even though in practice those points rarely have any other function beyond being spent on a set range of options.

Consequently I came into HoT with a whole load of level 80s that appeared to be sitting on a pile of unspent points. When the requirement for Elite Specs was reduced to 250 several of my characters were there or thereabouts already. So I thought.

The extremely salient fact I'd overlooked, of course, was before you can start spending the 250 points on the Elites you must have spent the full 398 points on all the other stuff. That came as a bit of a shock, particularly since I only worked it out when I went to spend the 250 points I had in the bank. In a bleak moment of clarity my Ranger went from job supposedly done to finding himself still well over a hundred points shy of becoming a Druid.

Hero Challenges in Heart of Thorns maps are worth ten Hero Points each (Core Tyria challenges give just a single point per) so on the face of it that doesn't sound so bad. In practice, though, it's not as easy as it appears.

It's not entirely because of the supposed difficulty of the challenges themselves. It's true that some of them do spawn Champion mobs that are unlikely to be within the capabilities of most soloists but as previously discussed you generally aren't alone in GW2 even when you do solo. Someone will usually be along to help within minutes at worst. And in any case many, perhaps most, of the "Challenges" turn out to be "Communes", which require you to do no more than press F and wait for a few seconds.

No, the main problem is finding the darn things. Exploring in the new maps is incredibly good fun in and of itself providing you are doing just that and that alone - exploring. Set out to get to a series of specific objectives with anything like comfortable efficiency, however, and your patience can wear thin. Not only is it hard using a two-dimensional map to traverse a three-dimensional space but many of the locations require specific Masteries to reach, some of which I don't yet have.

Also, I'd already picked off most of the readily-accessible ones as I wandered about over the preceding few days. I spent about four hours hunting HPs I'd missed across all four maps on Saturday with some success but come Sunday morning I was still fifty-five points short. Diminishing returns had kicked in and I rationalized that it would be faster to find fifty-five single-point challenges in the Old World.

Which is how I came to spend eight hours in Orr. Over much of Sunday my Ranger found and completed every Hero Challenge in Straits of Devestation, Malchor's Leap and Cursed Shore. He'd done a few already but it still clocked in at nearly forty. And it was a real pleasure.

Orr may have been a nightmare in the old days but now it feels like a holiday. With time to stop and admire the scenery it becomes unmistakably clear that these are heart-stoppingly gorgeous maps, something Jeromai tried to tell us long ago. The art design is as good as anything in the game, which means as good as anything in gaming I'd say. Just stunning.

I took over seventy screenshots as I roamed and I could have taken 700. Or 7000. After a while you realize there's just no point - the wonders are never going to stop. When the HPs ran out I flipped around a few more maps and cherry-picked the ones near waypoints until I had my 250. Since that character had barely 40% map completion even after Orr there was no shortage of options.

So now he's a Druid, which seems fun so far. In more than three years I've never felt the least need or desire to work on map completion and I don't plan on starting now but the coming of Heart of Thorns has perversely kick-started a fresh desire to see more of the maps that came with the base game.

Just as well. I have half a dozen more level 80s lining up to be next and a couple more wannabes behind them. What with that and all the new collects and crafting it looks as though ANet's plans to keep the original maps alive has legs. And, as a result, the whole game feels more solid than it has for an age.

Make Way! Druid Coming Through! : GW2

Back when GW2 was still in Closed Beta I was feeling somewhat anxious. I knew it was an MMORPG I wanted to play but some of the aspects ArenaNet were promoting most heavily made me wonder whether they were making a game I'd find difficult to enjoy.

My primary area of concern was the emphasis on active combat and dodging. I don't like Action RPGs very much and at that time I had little experience of any that required constant ducking and rolling to survive. It sounded like a lot of work and not much fun.

I remember quizzing the Kill Ten Rats team, who at that time were quite deep in the loop, on how the combat felt and whether a traditional stand-and-cast player coming from an EQ/WoW background would be able to cope. They were re-assuring but it wasn't until the first open beta weekend that I got to test the waters for myself to find out whether they were warm and balmy or filled with sharp rocks and sharks.

As I wrote at the time "I was apprehensive about some of the things I'd read about GW2's "action combat" so I went with a class that could stand off a ways and see what was going on. That class, of course, was The Ranger and, as I soon discovered, a ranger in GW2 doesn't have to dodge at all. Not for nothing has playing a ranger in the open world been seen as playing the game on easy-mode ever since.

Staff envy

I stuck with my Charr ranger through all the beta weekends and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. When headstart arrived I simply re-made him and started over. He was the first character I leveled to 80 and he's still one of the key members of my team three years later.

Rangers have long had good utility in what ANet now likes to call the "soft trinity". They can stand in all three corners. They bring excellent "Control" (almost unsurpassably so, as was discovered to the detriment of many Mannequin runs) when using a bear pet as a tank. Damage is decent, with exceptionally good burst DPS on the Longbow and a range of conditions elsewhere. What has been less celebrated, although Zubon spotted it as long ago as November 2012, is their capacity for group healing.

Over the years a lot changed and it must be a very long time indeed since rangers were anyone's go-to healers in or out of a dungeon. GW2, of course, famously doesn't have a specialist healer class. The nearest would probably be an Elementalist in Water, a very common and required role in WvW, but there's never been anything even close to the kind of dedicated pure healer role of an EQ cleric or a WoW priest. Until now.

On Friday ANet lifted the veil on the final Elite specialization: The Druid. It brought the HoT wheel full circle. The Ranger was the very first class to have its Elite publicly named and its new weapon, the Staff, announced - all the way back at the start of the year. For once, when all is revealed, the method in ANet's mystery makes sense.

The Druid offers GW2's first and only full-time, full-on, full-function healing spec. Had that been made known back when we saw a ranger waving a stick for the first time there would have been uproar. Rangers get the shaft again. Why do ANet hate rangers? Well that's it - deleting my ranger now! And so on and so on.

Six months later there may not quite be a deafening roar of unanimous approval but there's plenty of love going around in the lengthy discussions and dissections of the new skills, traits and gameplay options offered by The Druid. The addition of raids to the game, the harder open-world content coming in the expansion and, most especially, direct statements of intent from the developers along the lines of "Upcoming content will have stuff that you can’t just dodge to survive" and "The Berserk meta is going away" make it quite clear that the class that gets the best healing is getting a plum job.

Not going to cut it in HoT. Allegedly.

Naturally that won't please every ranger. Not everyone wants to spend their play-session keeping the other folks upright. Enjoying playing a dedicated healer requires a particular personality. After three years in a game with almost no outlet for those tendencies is it likely there are even any would-be full healers still playing and if there are would they be playing rangers?

Well, I am. It's a long, long time since I filled the straight-up, main healer slot but it remains my favorite MMORPG group role. And what's more I don't just have my semi-meta zerker Charr ranger, I also already have a max-level Asuran Ranger, fully kitted out in Apothecary exotics and Ascended trinkets, who, when he hit 80, was specced with healing as his focus. Don't ask why. He just was.

What's more, in a piece of remarkable foresight (even if at the time it looked like a careless mistake) both rangers are on the same account and it's the one that's got HoT. I'm all set up ready for The Druid and I have to say the reveal has significantly increased my excitement for and interest in the expansion.

It was all so simple then. And we had hats.

It won't all happen at once. There will be an inordinate amount of theorycrafting and trial-and-error for weeks if not months before the inevitable codifying and concreting of The New Meta. Fun for those that like that kind of thing. Maybe in the end it won't turn out to be as spectacular as it looks on paper. Maybe it will be so overpowered it will die the death of a thousand nerfs.

I don't care. I'm just happy to see it tried. I've given the lengthy list of new skills and traits the once-over, surprising myself with just how many times I've nodded and smiled and murmured approval. For now I'm happy to wait until its time to test it out in the field.

There's one more beta weekend to come but I'm working the first day and going on holiday on the second so the first chance I'll have will be at launch. Can't wait!