It’s funny how things work out sometimes.
On Friday, I was talking hardware with one of my co-workers, and showed him an article from Ars where they pretty much said “AMD sucks”. Now in 2010, I purchased an AMD processor for my computer. So I felt like enough time had passed and I was due for an upgrade, and I can’t hit max settings with GW2 using my current hardware (which includes an nVidia 560 ti). So after some deliberation, and consideration of Windows 8, I pulled the trigger on a new processor and motherboard. It should be here on Tuesday.
Now Saturday morning was the advent of Guild Wars 2 live. I’ve been playing the beta for the past few months and it’s always been fun. I’d scattered my characters across all of the different racial homelands, and so I have a familiarity with them all, up until about level 15, at which point I’d switch to another character. In the most recent BWE I made it to level 20 with a rogue.
So when live started, I chose to start a Norn Mentalist. He’s level 21 now. Yes, I played pretty much all day long.
One of the things that escaped me during the BWE was the fact that the crafting experience is actually a subset of the main experience pool. By this I mean if you perform a crafting action, you get “real” experience points. These experience points can be had from acquiring resources from nodes scatted across the maps, as well as crafting items with those resources. For example, as a low level character, if you stumble across a copper vein and take your pickaxe to it, it will yield about 15 total xp. As a level 20 character, you get 15xp a whack, which is usually 45xp. Now, xp yielded for killing a mob is about 10-15, with bonuses for killing things that haven’t been killed in a while (often triple the base xp).
This results in a completely interesting situation: I am incentivized to keep an eye on my minimap and harvest as many resource nodes as I can. This does not clutter your inventory (for long), since you have the ability to simply send craftable material “away” to storage, where it will be available at the crafting stations. I find myself seeking these nodes more than mobs, in most cases. If a mob is in my way, I will kill it to get to the resource node.
Paring this with the fact that the nodes become unavailable once tapped (per a per character basis), and the fact that you get experience simply for exploring (reaching “points of interest”, vistas, and waypoints), and I am rewarded for exploring. I love to explore, and it’s great that it’s actually giving me xp to do it.
As a Mesmer, I’ve chosen Artificing and Jewellery. It’s kind of funny, since my original EQ character was a jeweller of some small repute. I really wanted to get into cooking (since that has benefits across the board), but it looks more expensive and I simply don’t have the funds at this time. My character’s sitting on around 30 silver right now.
I realise at this point I’ve gone on quite a tangent. Back to my hardware situation: after ordering a new barebones on Friday, on Saturday my computer fritzed out. Just shut down and wouldn’t power back on. The box was mighty hot, but all the fans were blowing (I may need more fans!). To start it back up, I removed all of the components from the motherboard and put them back in one by one. That did the trick.
For a while. Today, it died on me again. When I took the cover off and tried to restart it, actual FIRE showed itself on the motherboard, along with the smell of burning circuitry. Undeterred, I waited a little while and started it back up again. While it did work, it didn’t work for long.
So I’m on unstable computer ground for the next couple of days, which kind of sucks because I have a “3 day head start” (whatever that means, the servers are already packed) for preordering.
Here’s to new hardware! May it never catch on fire.
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