LDOA!

After many (nowhere near as many as we thought) hours of battling Bandits, Grawl and Charrsies, Mousie and I made Legendary Defender of Ascalon! It's quite exciting to be level 20 in the pre-searing, and we couldn't be happier to have made it there. Honestly we figured it would take months, but with careful fighting and farming, as well as daily quests, we did it in no time!

If anyone is interested in advice on how to do this effectively and efficiently, we do have a few tips. First of all, avoid the "Hunt 6 of X" daily quests unless you know your maps very, very well, because you may spend a long time searching for the last X. Also, make sure to utilize the full potential of the Farmer Hamnet quest as a repeatable, simple farm for exp. It's easier to do for the first two levels of each "tier", by which I mean when you hit a certain level, your enemies gain levels and become tougher.

10..13	8
14..16	11
17..20	15

That table puts it better. from 10-13, your enemies are level 8, and so on; so we used Farmer Hamnet to gain the first two levels of each tier, then did daily quests to gain the rest. Once we hit level 19, we went mad on the pre-sear quest lines, and did practically every quest we could find to gain roughly three quarters of the level to 20; then finally, we dropped Utini WupWup and turned in the quest to hit 20!

Below is a picture of the farmer hamnet farm; simply, leave foibles fair and head to the res shrine; the academy monk will heal you while you attack the two nearby bandits. kill them, rezone, repeat. It's easy, fast, simple and great exp; much faster if you use the Fire Imp summoning stone too (which I forgot to use for an entire level!)

Good luck to all of you trying for Legendary Defender of Ascalon and happy trails!

Guild Wars RTS Spinoff

I was recently in Pre-Searing, and looking down on the never-ending battle below, between the human forces and the Charr.

It got me to thinking that it might actually make an exciting RTS spinoff of Guild Wars! You could see it all in the picture. You had your melee units, the guardsmen, then the longbow wielding rangers, and your healer units the academy monks. The Charr enemies had fire elementalists and warriors, and of course some rangers of their own.

After watching the battle for a while I started to imagine it as an RTS and I found the prospect incredibly exciting! It's not unheard of, either. Anyone familiar with Two Worlds 2, the popular RPG, will know about their RTS spinoff called Castle Defense.

Can you imagine commanding the armies of Tyria?