Thursday: Warrior Priest, Tome Fanatic

I'm splitting my time about 60-40 between Syp and Thursday these days -- with Syp, I know that rank 40 isn't the end of the road, more of a mid-life crisis, and with Thursday, I'm discovering the joy of a pressure-free alt. My second time doing the leveling thing, I'm just not rushed to get her anywhere in particular, so I've devised a different approach to playing her than I did Syp (who was always more about XP and PQ/quest content chewing).

I've slowed down to read the quest text, which is generally nice and, yes, well-done. The problem that I experience is that you don't just read one quest, accept it, and hop off to do it -- in the interest of time management and efficiency, you accept many, many quests and try to do a bunch in a row. While this results in a higher XP/hr rate, it's just very hard to keep track of why you're doing what for what reason. If I have to actively try to focus on what story there is for each quest instead of letting them blur together, something's gone a little skewy here.

I maxed out Thursday's oRvR influence bar for T1 and picked up three nice blue pieces as a reward. This required some additional work to get her to renown rank 9 to wear it, but a few scenarios (because I need my daily dose of Destruction steamrolling us) accomplished that. In RvR, I spend about 98% of my time just healing, which is an odd yet relaxing change of pace. It really requires that you trust your teammates to protect you, because when someone starts wailing on me, I don't have time to break off my healing cycle to try to trade blows with whatever character's going to kick my butt anyway. Squared is an absolute essential mod for healing, in my opinion.

Finally, Thursday's biggest priority before leaving a zone is to unlock everything possible in it. Hooray for Tome Titan, as without it I'd be pretty much lost. I know it's a guide and many might view it as a "cheat" of sorts, but really, there's no way I would uncover all these unlocks on my own. Even with TT, it's a bit of a hunt, but thrilling even so. I criss-cross zones like I'm on a huge scavenger hunt, excited every time I find whatever item or area or person I need. It's pretty eye-opening how many of these little secrets are littered around -- for instance, the whole "Mission of Mercy" entry in Nordland, which consists of four unlocks (I'd only done one on Syp) where you run around doing nice things for folks. You're never explicitly asked, like a quest, to do them, but NPCs will hint as such. Since doing all these unlocks in the tier you're currently questing is efficient (versus going back at a much later date where the amount of XP is piddly) and the rewards (titles, XP, items, story bits) are tempting, Thursday's also doing all of the other T1 zones in Elf and Dwarf areas. I don't really care if it takes a long time, it's just a blast to do it.

I'm a little less-than-thrilled with the mastery paths -- although, to be fair, that's pretty much a universal reaction to every career's mastery paths.  There's just something missing from them, a "sexiness" that really makes me want to get more points and advance up into them.

As a side note, I looked at the list of guildies logged on last night and there were five Warrior Priests and two KOTBS.  That's it.  I guess WPs are very much "flavor of the month" right now, but a lot of these characters are alts -- when I first started in September, a vast majority of characters in the guild were either Witch Hunters or the Dwarf classes.