Recently decided to start my account up again. Will probably take me a bit to get back into the swing of things, but once I remember my character name I'll let you all know it so we can party like people who party.

Damn you all, you're making me want to pick this up again now! What new stuff has been added since Nightfall anyway?

As far as the storyline goes, the Eye of the North expansion's been released and a series of quests acting as a lead-in for Guild Wars 2 has been up for a while as of late August.

No new professions, but there are new skills and title track skills.

Well, nightfall had it's rollercoaster of balance issues, dervs and paras had their share of being overpowered in PvE/PvP alike.

Paragons only have 1 meta build now, and it's imbagon, dervs are very nice DPS in PvE but don't necessarily fill the best role of a frontline anymore, in PvE. PvP they are not a great frontline compared to a sin deathblossom spammer or a warrior as warrior's KD functionality is one of the best things in PvP.

The most important things?

1) PvE-Only skills, skills SO POWERFUL that they even surpass elites, you can only have a maximum of 3, and they are usually powered by reputation to a faction such as lux/kurz, sunspear or norn/asura/EV
2) Many of the only lame character setups that were held back because they would imbalance PvP were split into PvP and PvE versions that automatically change when you enter those modes, so a PvE illusion mesmer is not viable and useful, and more importantly the spirit spammer.

Signet of Spirits is the most powerful build right now, it can solo roughly 50-70% of the game in normal mode, and dozes of areas in hardmode.
Basically, considering rits have DWG and SoS, they rule both the midways and end game of GW. Though because of the nature of DWG or SoS you can't have many in the party unfortunately.

Spirit Light has made a huge splash, it's probably my favorite hero skill now as it heals for over 100 for 5e with minimal attributes, great on MM's or whatever backline you bring.
A SoS and MM hero can often fill the rolls of the frontline and in hardmode only minimal damage mitigation is needed to complete it, making the old 1-3 frontline + MM standard obsolete, you usually don't even have a frontline anymore, at least not one made of players.

3) Vanquishing is a new thing, hardmode also might be for you, Vanquishing (aka VQ) is when you clear every enemy in an area in hardmode, it has a counter at the top and once it's filled up you get a huge bonus. This makes every explorable area in the game essentially like a mission to complete, it has a little incomplete symbol on the map.
Hardmode is something you can set in town in a campaign you've already beat with any of your characters, it makes all the foes around level 20-30, changes and upgrades their skill selections, and the patterns they are set up in to make the game fairly challenging even to experienced players at times. A group of skilled 5-8 human players might have 1-2 deaths of players per area, a group of 2 with heroes might have up to 10-100 deaths and some areas take 3-4 hours to clear.
Also, when in explorable areas you earn moral fairly quickly but if you hit -60 then your party fails as if you died in a mission.


How about a NPF GW night?

Also, sync why are ya not a xoobie anymore =P

Techincally I own it, but I've not really done anything with it. I got to lvl 20, but I haven't finished any of the campaigns, etc.

I will now spam you with guild invites.
 

What XoO was doesn't exist anymore. About three years ago there was a little bit of guild drama, some divisions started not seeing eye-to-eye, and a ton of people dropped out for other guilds (some to more competitive PvP guilds, others to separate PvE guilds or hybrid guilds; one of our elite PvE divisions essentially left together as a group to the same place, which was a big hit -- it seemed to come out of nowhere to everyone but them). Despite being an officer in one of the divisions, there wasn't much keeping me in XoO anymore; it's a shadow of its former self. Last I checked, it's been limping along as a division or a couple divisions within an alliance (instead of an alliance of Kurzick divisions with a few Luxon ones for giggles and Luxon faction farming).

In short, it held nothing for me anymore, and the folks that were still around didn't include a lot of the players I enjoyed speaking with and grouping with.


It was also around that time that I took a hiatus from GW, as all of my offline friends had stopped playing for whatever reasons. I started playing WoW then, and maintaining two MMOs actively isn't very easy. I believe I actually didn't drop from the guild but was kicked for inactivity [a standing rule in XoO] after enough time.

Then every few months I would get on a GW kick and play again for a while. More recently, a good friend of mine and I have been pairing through content and having fun doing whatever, and things like the bounties and Zaishen missions got my attention again, so for the past half a year I've been as active as I used to be, albeit without a guild backing me. Even more recently, the HoM being made more clear was further motivation to stick with it. We also pulled another good friend into the game, though I don't know if he will stay. He has a tendency to get gung-ho for an MMO and then never play it again after like two weeks...


tl;dr
Shit happens. Time passes.
I have my own guild for giggles (well, mostly the cape and a place to store my characters that's not a town) - Orrian Lifeguards.

Current xoo is 3/4 AU and no pvp capabilities, pretty decent environment, we have a weekly dnd session, pretty nice members.

I mean, it's got TS3 and forums, but if you "need" anything more than that then it's not a good place. Very good if you just have a super casual playstyle and want to ZM/ZB/DoA/ or have people to do whatever.

I'll be fine.
 

Ha, that actually makes sense given who was still around/prominent last I checked. Unless things have changed, Radicus was in charge of a lot of things when I gave the old forum a peek. Good guy.

e: Oh, wait, no PvP? That's a far fall for XoO.

I know right.

All of the leadership is in driving distance of each other and hang out often IRL.

But, we have Icy back (he gave us a cancer scare) as of last night so we'll be running an invoke spike pretty soon. That being said, yeah, XoO isn't the same.

personally I'm gonna wait for GW2 to start up any mmo-addictions.