I recently started yet another new character. This time, a new Elementalist, so I can eventually do Weaver and do a Weaver sword build! (My original Weaver is a staff Weaver build for fractals.)

Her name is "Nobody Speak", which is from the Run The Jewels song, and she's a Char Ele. Here she is just starting the game:

And here she is towards the end of the game:

At the time of this writing, she's actually 80. It took me maybe a week to get her to end-game, mainly because I was pretty casual about it. My eventual goal is to craft Bolt and The Binding of Ipos for her, and maybe gear her up for some roaming WvW fun (though, I'm not certain yet).

Argh.... Argh Argh Blargle...

Back when I played FFXI, I played on my Xbox 360, and the frequent RRoDs I encountered made me have to put my FFXI gaming on hold for months at a time (see here and here.)

GW2 I've been playing on PC, and my PC has been pretty rock solid for the duration of GW2's existence. Which means when I take time out from it, it's my choice not my hardware's :-)

Well, until recently...

Last week, I was playing No Man's Sky (which Justin/Raprot/Meretrix and I have been playing pretty solidly since the NEXT update) and, mid-game, my system died. As in, it hard crashed and rebooted. Now, it wont boot. I think my graphic card might have died (I can boot into safe mode, and when I uninstall the driver for the card, it boots once, re-installs the driver, reboots, and then wont boot any more). The funny thing is, the PC I have had a 4 year warranty on its parts (I did CyberpowerPC because I have had bad luck building my own gaming rigs), but that warranty expired in July, roughly one month before the card died.

So, yeah, No Man's Sky killed my graphic card and now I can't play GW2 until I replace it... Argh...

Hopefully, it wont be too long before I can get it running again. In the meantime, I'll be doing my dailies on my laptop, but that system isn't remotely capable enough to really play the game, so beyond dailies, I won't be doing much. So I probably wont be updating this blog until I'm back for real. That being said, I tend to only upgrade this once a month, and I doubt it'll take me a month before I can get my system working again. So it probably wont alter my posting cadence any.

It's just frustrating because I have shit I want to do :-(

Small update, larger one incoming...

My computer has been repaired for a while, and I've got a pile of screenies to share. Expect an update soon.

One of the first things I did once my PC was working again was to join SAND on another Dry Top run. Here's my Soulbeast, Seven By Seven, on her killer puppy that looks startlingly like her.

The next living story came out, and it's easily the best living story chapter to date... and I'm not being hyperbolic. It's really something. It starts with a battle against a Shatterer that is invading a conference of folks (Note: "Shatterer" is actually a title bestowed on certain dragons in Krakakalakatorrik's army. We've seen one before in the world boss, and we usually just call him "Shatterer" even though that's not his name, but his title.)

After escaping this Shatterer, you find yourself in Jahai Bluffs, which is another area in the Crystal Desert. It's nestled between the Domain of Vabbi and the Domain of Kourna, and is especially cool because you can actually use it to travel from Vabbi to Kourna (we haven't had living story zones connect, contiguously, to other places since the Silverwastes in living story season 2). This zone is friggin' wild, as it has spacial and temporal anomalies everywhere that meld in regions of space time from elsewhere into the zone. For example, there's a chunk of Maguuma Jungle in there, there's a bit of old-Orr in there, complete with a Charr attack on Orr, and there's a location that doesn't seem to be from Tyria at all.

It also has some pretty cool boss battles and events that happen. Here's a Djinn event that takes place in a branded scar that splits the map in two:

These spacial anomalies, rifts, open up periodically and pull even more varied locals. These new rifts come complete with events where you need to fight back enemies and try to seal the newly formed rift. One of the enemies you need to fight back are the Riftstalkers, which are creatures that seem to keep the rifts open.