My fifth Guild Wars character (and my first Factions character), a Mesmer.

I’d love to say I chose the profession for its intricate use of subtle but insidious magic but it’s really about the dance emote. Be it in Cantha or Tyria, Riverdance never fails to crack me up. My other reason for creating a Mesmer was I kept getting purple and gold Mesmer gear as drops for my other characters and I took this as a sign I was meant to play a Mesmer.

I can’t say I’m very adept at it. Interrupts seem particularly difficult for me at the moment. I do have points invested in Fast Casting but my interrupting ability leaves a lot to be desired. I’m not sure whether it’s due to the latency of my connection or the fact I, well, suck.

One of the goals I had set for myself when I created my Mesmer was to obtain the Survivor title, a challenging achievement requiring zero deaths from character creation until at least 140,600XP. This ambition didn’t last long. To be more specific, it lasted 1 hour 27 minutes after character creation. I’ve died 39 more times since then. Achieving the Survivor title is possible — I’ve seen at least one Mesmer in Cantha with the title — but I suspect it would take a lot of assistance and babysitting from fellow players. I seriously doubt it’s achievable solo or with NPC henchmen.

I haven’t got far into the game but Factions seems to have a quicker pace compared to Prophecies. Levelling is definitely faster. My Mesmer is now level 19 with 15-plus hours played. I got access to better armour a lot quicker as well. I was chagrined to find AL45 armour shortly after I had splurged for AL30 armour. In addition, characters get access to the Xunlai Storage agent quickly so it’s easy to trick out new Factions characters with items and gold from your other characters.

In terms of annoyances, there have been some aggravating FedEx quests especially in the Wajjun Bazaar area.

The route above looks simple enough but I had to traverse it far too many times for several quests. This was not fun. It was pretty damned far from fun, actually. Suffice to say, if I ever meet the quest designer(s) for this particular area, I will kick them where the sun don’t shine.

And speaking of dark areas, I found the Undercity area quite irritating. I do get it. It’s under the city. It’s dark and foreboding. But does it have to so dark and foreboding that I have to dramatically boost the gamma setting just to avoid bumping into walls regularly?

These annoyances aside, I’m enjoying the game. It’s nice to have new skills, characters and missions to play around with.