Fear Not This Night

 Say hello to the Elder Dragon Zhaitan. As a matter of course, this post contains spoilers for the end of the story quest to Guild Wars 2, both in the story mode of the dungeon and the final quest of the base game. You have been warned.

 

The Gates of Arah is the highest level dungeon in Guild Wars 2, and the entire premise is seiging Arah, where Zhaitan built his stronghold. Together with Destiny's Edge, now reunited  (see also: every other dungeon in the game), you board an airship and fly into the ruined city. Above is pictured the Humble, Destiny's Edge's own airship. On board the humble, you slay three of Zhaitan's champions; Ogravos the Moonslayer , and together Fafnarin the Heartslayer and Horrogos the Soulbreaker. You do this by firing at them from those cannons there. Those cannons then break.

Don't worry, there's a bigger airship.

You're gonna need a bigger airship.

Fighting Zhaitan happens in a couple stages. First, you must defend Zojja while she repairs the giant fuckoff cannon. Once it fires, it sheers off Zhaitan's tails. He then promptly smashes the cannon. And the front end of the airship.

He's kinda pissed off.

 After his tail is damaged, the Pact's flak guns drive him down to his nest, where you promptly unload all the cannons on him until he's dead. Because you cannot actual hurt him with your normal weapons. Zhaitan falls into the ocean, and dies,  leaving Tyria free from one of the greatest threats to it's safety.

You return afterwards to Fort Trinity to party. The cutscenes therein are some of the most gorgeous designs I've ever seen, in vibrant color rarely seen in them, creating a wonderful cinematic effect. It's protaganized you and your party in a fantastic way, and wraps up the personal quest without ending the game.

Plus, the most gorgeous music plays during the end of Arah and the final part of Fort trinity; Fear Not This Night, which gets a lot of use in the last stages of the game, but with damn good reason.

All in all, it was the best Valentine's Day ever.

Howling Voice Guild: Ascalonian Catacombs

 Welcome to Ascalonian Catacombs.

Guild Wars 2 has, at launch, 8 dungeons that players can go through in groups of five. Starting at level 30, each dungeon involves the story behind Destiny's Edge, the guild of signature NPCs from each race, eventually putting aside their quarrels and getting back together to face the threat of the dragons once more. Ascalonian Catacombs is the first of these dungeons, unlocked at level 30.

It is also the dungeon most richly filled with lore and tie-ins to Guild Wars 1.  The dungeon goes through the catacombs of the broken kingdom of Ascalon, fighting a great number of angry ghosts and eventually fighting and putting down the ghost of the last King of Ascalon.

 

The dungeon itself is immensely and beautifully detailed,with eerie blue and green lighting and a definite sense of a lost and holy place. You run up broken and crumbled stairs, through deteriorating halls and statues of the human gods, through dimly lit corridors full of traps and angry, angry dead people.

Now, this is the third time I've done Ascalonian Catacombs, and the time I've gotten the most caps of the dungeon. All dungeons, after their 'story' run is done, have the option of an 'explorable' mode, with a different set of mobs and, I suspect, a less structured approache.

I want a AscCat exploration time. The detailling in all of the dungeons, and indeed the entire game, is absolutely spectacular, but this one counts as true scenery porn. And in true respect for the scenery, of course, the Howling Voice Guild danced on the dead king's grave.

 

 You know. Like you do.

 Of course, the very best part of the dungeon was the shiny new hat I got upon completion. The drop hats for each dungeon look the same, with only stat differences appropriate for each leveled dungeon, but I don't care. Got pirate hat. That is all that really matters.

Going in with an engineer was a very different experience from going in with my vaunted elementalist, Rufflebutt the Barbarian,   seen here with her exotic and most ruffly of butts. Engineers themselves are an odd class to play, focusing mostly on creating additions to the battlefield, be they dropped potions, conditions, or turrets, and setting up combos. It didn't help that I kept trying to default to my elementalist's playstyle, which pretty much boils down to "heal everything, burn everything, run from everything, repeat", which was really also the way I played Skyrim, come to think of it.

That said, it was fun, even if engineer's going to take a little more practice to get right in groups.

Tune in next time for a stunning rendition of Caudecus' Unrelenting Shitfest: A musical in the key of "fuck you".

My Father's Daughter

My father plays video games. For that matter, so does my mother. They have for as long as I can remember. And consequently, so have I. The first was duck hunt, which I still have nightmares about to this day. I have forgotten the terror of Jurassic Park but I still cannot get over that damn dog. I was a strange child, really. Then came gameboys, and pokemon. Then the N64, wonder of wonders, master of my childhood.

I never stopped. Never grew out of them. And why should I have? While I played Majora's Mask, or later on, Wind Waker, my father was raiding dragons in Vellious. When WoW came out, we all rolled horde characters together, to play as a family. Civilization, Skyrim and Dragon Age went through our family like infections; one of us would play, and the others would slowly pick it up for themselves to do likewise.

My father's first character, and for the longest time, his main character in Everquest was not Toldain. It was Aquino, Slayer of Puppies, and he came from tabletop, upon which my sister and I were raised with a steady diet of games and stories. My tabletop characters have a way of finding their ways into MMO characters; and worse (better?) yet, my MMO characters have a way of finding themselves in tabletop, or in writing, or in doodles in the margins of the sketchbook I was meant to be doing homework in.

I've played across a spectrum of kinds of games-my friends have dragged me into Persona 4 Arena, which is a different breed of fighting game than Super Smash Brothers, which was different from Soul Caliber. Rune Factory and Harvest Moon sit alongside Skyrim and Dragon Age II, which are across from a stack of the sims and my cases of DS and 3DS games, with Pokemon Black and White slotted across from Devil Survivor 1 and 2.

My father started a blog years ago, before I left truly for college, before I wandered off into the wilderness that is San Francisco, to find that art students have red bull and tea instead of blood in their veins. I thought it was a dumb idea. I thought it was a silly idea. I worried he didn't know the internet well enough to know what he was opening himself up to.

I thought "Well, if he's having fun, why the hell not?"

I got a Google+ a year ago. It remained mostly untouched until I got Guild Wars 2. Now the only updates between my homework assignments are about our guild's tours across Tyria, meeting new and interesting monsters to murder in mass numbers.

I got asked if he could quote a post in his blog. My phone rebelled telling him sure whatever. I went and looked up the blog later. I still thought it was kind of dorky. There was a 'create journal' button over in the top corner.

Being dorky or dumb didn't mean I was immune, clearly.