After making it through the searing, Potshot and I bummed around in the opening portions of the Prophecies campaign, fiddling about with mercenaries and happy to be able to allowed groups larger than two people.

One of the things I was keen to do was form a guild.  Always in a rush, I know… but this is GUILD Wars after all.

The most difficult thing here was, as always, the name.  But I got tentative approval for Crag Boars Reforged, so payed the 100 gold and a guild was formed.

Then there was the issue of adding Potshot to the guild, which costs 100 gold as well.  Well, the game isn’t too stingy with gold.

A quirk of the game is that guild membership is account wide, the way your friends list is.  This means that at least we don’t have to come up with 100 gold for every alt.  But in the guild member list, it only shows the character that people are currently logged on with… which I get, and has a logic to it, but it does seem a bit odd at times.  I am likely just used to the WoW or EQII guilds where every character has their own line entry at all times.

The real reason I wanted a guild was to have a guild chat channel rather than having to whisper everybody directly.

Though, honestly, that is Potshot most of the time, so maybe not an issue that needed to be solved right away.

It does also open up the possibility of us having a spiffy guild cloak, one of the perks of a guild.  The guild cloak designer even has a boar as an option, so we have a future on that front.

Look, we have a boar! Better than WoW already!

Granted, we will not be using that design.  We’ll let Ula drive that design as.  My sense of taste is mostly in my mouth.

Also, I read something about guild halls and needing to go to Lions Arch for that sort of thing, which led us to see if we could walk there at level 6.  That did not end well.

Yes, we wiped… a couple of times

We did learn a few lessons.  First, that we might need a few more levels… or be better at avoiding the locals rather than running straight at them.

Second, if you drag hostile mobs close enough, they will totally camp the respawn and kill you over and over.  Fortunately, the resurrect points tend to be on the zone lines, so I was able to drag us through before that became a habit.

Potshot asked how we got here

So we put that project on hold for a bit.

Back in town, I took a bit of my gold to the materials trader to get some iron ingots because I was already sick of the noob Ascalon armor I was wearing.  I traded it in for the full charr skin outfit.

Going full Charr

Now I probably look like a slightly different kind of total noob… but not the starter gear kind at least!

All of which was fine and dandy and we were slowly making our way into the game… and then ArenaNet threw us a curve ball with the game update that dropped on Thursday.

Updates for 20 year old games are a thing!

One of the key aspects of which was a new “reforged mode” character option.  That is currently mapped out with the following features, copied from the wiki:

• Activate Reforged Mode (Alpha) during character creation.
• For multiplayer parties, all players have to be in Reforged Mode to experience Reforged Mode content and balance changes. Mixed parties will see the standard content.
• This is an alpha feature we are sharing early to gather feedback. It is only presented in English.

So that is kind of neat.  Not sure I care one way or the other about the badge, but getting some bennies to speed things up and make a bit more gold… that can’t be bad.  And better henchmen sounds good.  Our little healer was quite taxes by our journey.

The problem is, we’re now a few characters into the lineup and, as the update say, reforged and non-reforged characters can group, but when grouped there is no reforged buff.

So there is the question of whether or not a reforged character is worth doing some new re-rolls and starting pre-searing again.  I mean, we’re not that far in… but just far enough to make it a bit of a chore.

We’ll have to take up the idea of a re-roll at the next general meeting of Crag Boars Reforged.

In other news, they also now allow four person parties in pre-searing Ascalon, so if we DO re-roll group characters, we can all group up to do the pre-searing stuff.

The update also included something called Dhuum’s Covenant, which is a pseudo hardcore or ironman challenge.  If you select this you get a badge on your character that you keep unless you are slain.  But, unlike things like WoW Hardcore, you can carry on playing your character, you just lose the badge… which is kind of an nice compromise.

Anyway, we now have to figure out how to move forward and if re-rolls are worth it.  The feature is only in alpha, so the bennies could change… for better or for worse.  But I kind of want better henchies, so will at least roll an alt in that mode this weekend.