You sexy thing-- and by that i mean, tell me what plugins you are using for your character bar and the other information at the top please. My interface is a bit piece-meal at this point, so i am always looking for more improvements, being a customization junkie.
That's one frelling big lizard, by the way..
Oh, and for what it is worth, i am guilded with a group of local friends [and the blokes who started the guild] on Shadow Council, having started over there about a week ago. So far all i have is a level 12 Gnome Warlock [got them up to 24 on Hellscream before we changed]. It is likely that we will start some hordies as well, once we get another friend or so onto the server with us.
And so far, it is a blast, really. Back on Hellscream, we did a run through Blackfathom Deeps which was brilliantly fun and exciting-- up until the point where our meatshield and our healer got bored and logged out, leading to a very quick tpw.
Yesterday i spent about an hour climbing the mountains behind Ironforge, wound up circling the entire fortress, and then finding way back behind it this tiny little troll camp with a shadowcaster a spear-chucker and one guy riding a wolf[!]; i killed them off and then explored their tiny cave, but there didn't seem to be anything there of note.
It really didn't seem like the sort of place people were meant to go on a regular basis, given the difficulty of circuitously brute-forcing the mountain terrain for half an hour to get there. It was situated right at the edge of this immense drop off with a tiny path leading up to it, which trailed off a few yards out from the cave.
While attempting to look over the edge, i wound up falling off into the abyss for a good several seconds before i hit the wall as it sloped down and died. Then i had to go spiritwalk back up there, which got a bit tiresome, i have to admit, then jump down to my corpse. However, i managed to actually miss it and kept going down into the Wetlands, at which point i trekked out to the nearest coast, and started water-walking my way over to Stormwind for the next half-hour or so, discovering the abandoned Newman's Landing in the process.
I had been hoping to track down a priest in Stormwind and beg a resurrection from them, however soon i realized that when you rezed you got back to where your corpse was, which was needless to say, a bad place. So finally i had to resort to the GM Auto-unstuck feature to pop to the nearest graveyard and rez there.
Needless to say, it was quite the adventure, and by and large a whole lot of fun. However, that is the sort of thing that as a player i really dig, just trekking off and exploring dangerous or out of the way areas. So much so, thatn when our group went for the long trek from Ironforge down to Darnassus to meet up with our Night Elf friends and make our home there, i created matched travelling cloaks/shirts/kilts for us all, so that we could bank our cloths to avoid the inevitable damage-from-deaths that would occur in the wetlands to hapless level 10-12 folk.
Add in the layer of professions, being able to collect cloths and create all my own garb from tailory or leathering, or the whole auction-house economy supply-and-demand and all, being able to mine or forage or skin kills adds a great deal to the world, in my opinion. There are times where one of my friends and i have just sat down on a bridge somewhere and fished for a couple hours, and then had a massive fish-fry with new recipes we had just discovered. We keep talking of trying to sneak into Horde territory to go fishing in the Undead radioactive soul-sludge pools, but we haven't organized the expedition quite yet.
And needless to say the whole engineering realm is brilliant, even just simple things like hurling sticks of dynamite into a crowded fight [though sadly, we found you can't fish with it]. Sadly, i recently had to ditch engineering as my second profession [other being tailory], as i simply couldn't afford it at that level, so i took up leathering instead as my friend is a skinner. [I was /greatly/ distressed in Guild Wars, when i killed an ostrich and not only could i not loot feathers from its corpse, i couldn't even /skin/ the darn thing].
In my opinion, having instanced-- well instances, was one of the best ideas Blizzard had. It saves a great deal of hassle with not having to worry about people camping the spawn of the run you want to make, or other groups interfering. However, Guild Wars' instancing of basically /everything/ really sort of turns me off. For one thing it makes the world seem depressingly unpopulated, which i guess may appeal to some.
If nothing else, having the world to yourself sort of lessens the well world-ness of it; that is, if you go out and are fighting Murlocs and there are other people there too killing them off, it can be wonderfully useful to use that opportunity to go through an area you would otherwise have to fight through. Or even simple things like having to wait for a slaughtered village to repopulate adds a certaim something to the world. There is this idea of somewhat limited resources, for instance my friend is a miner and there are definitely times we will go to an area and someone else will already be mining there.
So having universal instancing, i believe, removes so many layers of interaction it seems. There isn't the chance of running into someone who needs help with the same quest you are on, or even the very common thing of people from other groups dropping buffs or heals on your group as they run past, or my habit of cursing mobs that people are fighting to make it a bit easier on them.
As to the issue of graphics, over and over, i hear Guild Wars' graphics being extolled as the most amazing thing ever, miles and leagues beyond those of WoW. However, having played both, somehow i don't see that. I mean, yes, Guild Wars /does/ look very nice, very pretty, some wonderful architecture and texturing and all. But a lot of what it seems to have is /lots/ and lots of Shiny, of blooms and flares and reflections /everywhere/ it seems.
This sort of ethos seems to be reflected in their char-gen prcess as well, it seems /very/ difficult to create a character which is even moderately unattractive, all the males at least tend to either be in the ruggedly handsome category or the other side which Flirbnic classed as "80's glam-rock". The female models more or less range from Ostensibly-Voluptious to [borrowing a kalimonster-ism] Suspiciously Cute(c) [here, i must admit that my Gnome Warlock in WoW falls under the latter category]. Now, those can be great, and it really is possible to create some incredibly cool looking characters and all.
Yet, there really are times in an RPG, where i would love to create a balding obese character with bad teeth, or a scrawny gangly one with acne or something, adds a lot of realism to a world when not /everyone/ is 17+ Charisma.
Moreover, WoW in my opinion does a marvellous job of side-stepping the
Uncanny Valley [which Guild Wars seems in constant danger of tripping and falling into, though not as bas as FFX which plunged headlong into it], by having an intentionally cartoony intentionally-low-poly deliberatly stylized basis to it all. [As well as allowing mugly characters, as per the above paragraph] Which, if nothing else, does a wonderful job of bringing consistency to the Warcraft series, it really truly does feel like one is running around in the Warcraft world as it were.
Finally, interface. After playing WoW for a couple months, i recently took a look at GW, and was appalled at their interfact, it just felt so gross and clunky and huge and intrusive. I am told it can be modified and shrunk and suchlike, but having become so used to a plugin-based blizzard-supported modular scheme for user interfaces in WoW, and being able to set multiple terminals around for different information and chats and combats with nice borderless tinted translucency and such, the one in Guild Wars seemed [apologies] positively Neolithic. Now, my friend who plays and adores GW tells me that can be fixed or i can make it work better how i want it and suchlike, however the defaults at least made me cringe.
Also, I can kill you with my brain.
