Hitching A Ride : GW2

In the eighteen years since Mrs Bhagpuss and I took up MMORPGs as a hobby we've played both separately and together, solo and in groups, in the same guilds, separate guilds and no guilds at all. We've played the same MMO at the same time, the same MMO at different times and different MMOs at the same time.

When we first started in EverQuest we played together and apart all at once. We shared characters on the same account so we couldn't log in at the same time. Then for a while we had two accounts and one computer. Finally we had two computers, two accounts and before long we weren't even on the same server!

Mostly, though, we have played in the same virtual space, knowing some of the same people and doing many of the same things. Over the years we duoed more or less extensively in EQ, EQ2, Vanguard, Rift, Wizard 101, WoW, Warhammer, The Secret World, FFXIV and the original Guild Wars, just to name the ones that come immediately to mind.

For the last five years we've mostly been playing GW2. It's an MMO that doesn't particularly encourage close, individual co-operation between specific individuals. It's more of an all pile on affair, all the way up from small events to map-wide metas.

So ingrained in the design philosophy was the zerg dynamic that it was something of a surprise that dungeons were included at all, less of a surprise when development on the five person instance faltered and stopped. Dungeons had tended to be where we did most of our duoing in other MMOs.

At the beginning of the game we duoed a couple of maps for map completion. It wasn't exactly what you'd call efficient. Much later we did duo some dungeons, which was quite good fun, although not so much that we did any of them more than once.

Mostly "duoing" in GW2 has consisted of one of us jumping into the other's instance to help out on one of those unbelievably tedious Living Story boss fights or running around in a party of two surrounded by anything up to a hundred other people in a huge amorphous zerg. There's no reason to be grouped in a situation like that other than that it's companionable.

There's another kind of duoing that crops up occasionally in various games but which GW2 is seemingly made for. It's a sort of asynchronous partnership that allows one player or class to benefit directly from the acquired skills of another.

The most obvious and prevalent example is the Mesmer portal. Mesmers can open a gate from where they are to a spot some distance away, a trick that allows them to transport other players to, let's say, the top of a jumping puzzle. This, which could easily be treated as an exploit in other MMOs, is intended behavior in GW2, a part of the social, co-operative approach ArenaNet designed into the game.

Today Mrs Bhagpuss belatedly began exploring Path of Fire. Specifically, she'd found out Druids get new pets and she wanted them. This led to opening up all the maps and getting mounts and masteries.

It also led to a small epiphany on my part. Mounts, that key element of PoF, as well as being transportation, provide access to areas that otherwise would be difficult or even impossible to reach. Masteries expand that scope. Mounts and their masteries, once acquired, are shared across the whole account.

All of which means that, having done the grunt work last month on my Druid, I can now use my Mesmer as a glorified taxi service. All the effort and time it took to get the bunny with the high hop, the poison-proof skimmer and that Swiss army knife of mounts, the Griffin is now paying off as I run my Mesmer through all the maps, jumping, flying and skimming to the hard-to-get Masteries or the inaccessible pets so that Mrs Bhagpuss can waypoint in, take the portal I drop and hoover up the benefits.

I rarely play a Mesmer but whenever I do I wish I did it more often. It's enormous fun to be able to open portals for other people. I'm not in the least surprised so many Mesmers do it.

I'm not sure this was what ANet had in mind when they hid all those POIs and Hero Points and Masteries away on pillars and buttes or surrounded them with poison gas. They can hardly complain, though, given the established role of Mesmers in the game, not to mention the existence of the Teleport to Friend item that turns everyone into a Mesmer for a moment.

I guess so long as everyone involved had to buy the expansion it doesn't make much odds to ANet how they use it. Just so long as they do.

Giving It The Old One Two: Rift

 
I'm still playing Rift most days but Mrs Bhagpuss has largely returned to her full-time job building houses in EQ2. I woke up one morning last week to find her still in front of the computer, having pulled an all-nighter doing a loft conversion on a Halas two-room. When I told her it was seven in the morning, the sun was coming up and I was off to work she said "Oh I thought it was only about three", as though staying up 'til "only" three in the morning decorating an imaginary house would in some way be recognized as normal behavior in an umpty-ump year-old mother of three grown children.

She still has an active Rift account however, and last weekend she managed to pull herself away from the workbench and forge for long enough to run through two Chronicles with me. The Chronicles are the new dungeons that arrived with patch 1.5. They are apparently tuned to be duoed by fresh level 50s or soloed by well-geared level 50s. Or something. I found that part a bit wooly.

There are three Chronicles. The first, "Meridian/Sanctum (delete as applicable): Ceremony of Attunement"  offers a solo instance of your capital city where your character is feted by the great and good of Telara for service to the nation.

Pig and cake. Breakfast of Champions.

It's an award ceremony so toe-curlingly embarrassing that the sudden appearance of arch-villain Kain and his Death plane cronies comes as a welcome relief.

Kain! I thought you'd never get here!

I'd already done that one on all my max level characters but I wanted to do the other two as a duo. While Mrs Bhagpuss was planing away over in Norrath I ran my Guardian through "Greenscale's Blight: The Fallen Prince" just to get a feel for the difficulty. I was using my usual Pyro/Ele soloing build, which has a mighty tank pet that I can chain heal literally until the heat-death of the universe. It also has massive single target and AE DPS.

Dressed mostly in crafted purple gear, the only thing that gave me any real trouble until the third named was my own sadly atrophied pulling skills, which had me running back from the altar quite a few times. If I'd had any self-healing I probably wouldn't have died, but that build has none.

The third boss was an extremely close fight. I actually killed her and one of her werewolf pals, but lack of self-healing defeated me when second werewolf was almost down. When I returned from my ghostwalk the whole encounter had respawned at full health so I called it a day for soloing. 

Mrs Bhagpuss then joined me over on the Defiant side. I was in my Pyro/Chloro build and she used her Necro/Warlock. Skeleton tanked. We did "Hammerknell: Runes of Corruption" first and it was fun. Those characters aren't quite as well geared as my Guardian and I thought the difficulty level was about right.

I can see right up your nose from here.

We cleared everything, killed the nameds, oohed and aahed at the dwarven workmanship, felt our teeth rattle in our heads whenever The Faceless Man spoke. The boss fights were straightforward with an absolute minimum of stupid dance moves, thank heaven. Loot was clearly aimed at fresh 50s. Nothing dropped that was an upgrade.

Triple somersault without a net!

The whole thing took about 45 minutes or so and we both felt ready for a second course so we moved on to Greenscale. With the exception of the same named that I stalled on solo, who was still a bit of a handful even with two of us, I didn't find Greenscale that much harder than Hammerknell. There was a bit of hopping about when the Prince used one of those annoying circle-on-the-ground things that I hate but nothing very taxing. Greenscale himself was a pushover.

The best thing about the Greenscale Chronicle was the interchanges between the various NPCs, some of which had me laughing out loud. The voice acting was excellent. Whoever did The Prince would be right at home in the cast of any 1970s British sitcom. It was well worth doing Greenscale just to hear him.

I do think these solo/duo instances are a good idea. They are hardly innovative, of course. EQ2 has had them for many years. I hope that Trion add a few at lower levels too, but I doubt they will since they seem to be determined to build a whole new game at 50 on top of the one they already have. Still, gift horse, mouth and all that. Looking forward to more, even if they are all stuffed up against the level cap.