Guild Wars Nicholas the traveler sighted

Nicholas the Traveler is directly south of Piken Square in Ascalon at the wall. He is fairly easy to get to and if you are above level 10 all you should have is a healer in your party. Levels 15 and above could do this solo. He is requesting 1 charr hide (maximum of 5 per week) for his gift and these can be obtained from drops in the area. The gift could be anything from a green (highest level) item to alcohol or sweets. This is a lot better deal than the recent festivals because charr hides are pretty easy to get and even the sweet items can be used in explorable areas for various boosts. He will be in this area through noon PDT on Monday July 20th.

My 5 gifts were:
- 10 sparklers (used in "towns" only for Party Animal title track)
- 10 aged hunter's ales (used for Drunkard title track and to boost the Drunken Master spell)
- 10 honeycombs (used for Sweet Tooth title track and to give a 5% morale boost in explorable areas)
- 5 red rock candies (used for Sweet Tooth title track and for 30 minutes in explorable areas gives 33% boost to movement speeds, 33% boost to attack speeds, and 33% reduction in skill activation times)
- 5 mysterious summoning stones (for 30 minutes or until its death in explorable areas gives you a random ally of your level, only 1 can be used per hour)

a few corrections on Guild Wars and some new stuff

In my July 8th post I mentioned hero professions that you could get in Eye of the North. While I was doing some research on another subject today I read that a hero from each of the 10 professions can be obtained there.

In my July 10th post I mentioned that the Wintersday in July festival had begun. I actually misread the date. The post has been corrected to show the new date of noon on Friday, July 17th till 11:59pm on July 19th (all times PT). I also mentioned a difficult quest to get the Eye of the North, Deldrimor spell named Drunken Master. It seems that this spell is given to you at the beginning of the quest and abandoning the quest (as I did) does not take it away.

The "new stuff" - I had been playing a bit this weekend (thinking it was Winterday and wondering why I was not getting the special drops) on both our characters......
Lady Coriander (Cindy's) got a bit further through Kryta in Prophecies and got new maxed armor with a dye job to match our guild's cape. It will be a while to get the gold to upgrade her runes and insignias though. While doing some research on PvXwiki Elementalist/Necromancer builds I realized it will be a while before we can get her the spells for any rated builds there......
I also played a bit on Outs Ranger (mine) doing some quests/lots of exploring in Nightfall and completed a couple of Zaisen challenges. Much more exciting to me is I am only 3 spells (4 days of Balthazar points) short of getting ALL my heroes the spells for PvXwiki "great" hero builds. However after that there are still a LOT of weapons, runes, and insignias to acquire.

more Guild Wars foolishness

The Guild Wars Wintersday in July festivities will start Friday, July 17th at noon PT and runs through the weekend. The snowball fights may be fun, but all the prizes and special drops are mostly ho-hum. Mostly sweets/alcohols that only can be used for Sweet/Drunken titles. The alcohol (and much later Drunken title) can help if you have the Drunken Master (Deldrimor-EN) spell. You can use the fruitcase to increase your speed, so might be able to use that next time we are playing with Brian to run from the trouble he usually gets us in (and then come back to rebirth him). LOL

Jill and Brian - The armor you can get in Boreal Station (first outpost in Eye of the North) may not be as fancy, but it is as powerful (stat-wise) as anything you can get in Droknar's Forge.

Lady Coriander reaches lvl20 in Guild Wars

I decided to get Cindy's old laptop updated and ready for our next LAN party. Had a little bit of a problem getting Norton updated, but finally got it and Windows all up to date (including Internet Explorer 8). It is having intermittent problems running Internet Explorer (both 7 previously and 8 now), but Guild Wars seems to run fine. It is still a little slow when loading new files in Guild Wars, but the area changes seem to be much faster.

Last evening I started to get Cindy's Guild Wars character a little bit further along. Started at level 16 in Lion's Arch and finished early this morning at level 19 3/4 with the Norn primary track pretty far along in Eye of the North (EN). Played for a bit this morning (on my computer while her laptop was updating) and got her level maxed, the Norn primary track done, and got her to the starting area for the Ebon Vanguard primary track. She still has most all of Phophecies from Lion's Arch on to finish and I probably will start working on that just to get her armor upgraded.

Some answers for questions that Marty asked me:
1) You can go to EN when you are under level 20 and with the huge amount of experience points you get for quests there I would recommend it. One restriction is that you can not add attitibute points you get for leveling there, but a map move to Lion's Arch does let you do that.
2) You get a Monk and an Elementalist hero at the first outpost in EN and after a short ways to the EN outpost you get a Mesmer hero. About 3/4 of the way through the Norn primary track you get a Warrior hero. If you do the Ebon Vanguard track after that you get a Ranger and Assassin hero before it ends. A Paragon hero is found in the Asura primary track and I think a Necromancer shows up there also. That just leaves Ritualist and Dervish and I am not sure when/if they show up.

Update on my Diagnosis

I got a call at the ungodly hour of 9 am. My "New Patient Supervisor" Patty, informed me that she had a problem with Aetna. She had tried to get my Sept 15 with the Rheumatology Associates group pushed to an earlier date. Aetna informed her that they would not accept my referral because it came from a "specialist."

Well, he was not acting as a specialist when I saw him at the urgent care clinic; just the doctor on duty at that time. But, of course Aetna does not give a flying fig!

So Bob got on the computer and tried to find us a Primary Caregiver. We found a few that were both taking new patients and practiced within a two hour drive. After phoning around (the first was a CPA, second and third numbers were disconnected, 4th was out of town for the week.) I finally found a woman who would take me as a new patient, accepted our insurance and could see me on July 22. Phew! Now I just have to find Patty on the stupid phone tree at the clinic to get back to her, lol.

Hopefully, she will give me a referral to the Rhematology group after she gets a look at my feet and hands.

In other news - we had a great dinner with Bob's brother and his wife last night and are planning to go down to his Mom's for her birthday the weekend of Aug 8. I always enjoy seeing her, she is such a wonderful person.

I am so sad about the poor kid that died on the Monorail. He seems to have been the most wonderful person. My heart goes out to his family and friends. Like his girlfriend said on Facebook - at least he died doing what he loved best. RIP you lovely boy.

Guild Wars' Dragon Festival

From last Thursday around noon till last Sunday at midnight (PT) Guild Wars had their annual Dragon Festival. This was my first and let's just say I was mostly very unimpressed.

The double experience points were nice for my heroes that were not yet already maxed out in level, but did nothing for me and the majority of my heroes that are. The plentiful victory tokens that you got from drops were nice, but the things you could get with them weren't all that great. I got a little over 350 tokens in about 10 hours of gaming. It took 250 tokens to get a dragon mask, which is only good for decoration purposes and this was done without your consent if you had the tokens on you when the "emperor" showed up on Sunday. The other prizes were all either 5 or 10 tokens and consisted of sweets/fireworks that only go toward sweet/celebration titles, alcohol for drunken title or buff for "Drunken Master" spell, and a cupcake that gives you temporary increased stats in the wild.

The part of the celebration that I was most looking forward to and was the most disappointed in were the battle reenactments that we got to participate in. There were 4 different ones where you had to take 8 areas from the enemy and 3 different ones where you had to hold the enemy off from taking an area. I may not be the best of gamers, but I thought my 3 heroes and I (all maxed in level and with PvXwiki "great" builds) might stand a chance. However in the 5 times I tried the capture area and the 1 time I tried to hold an area I never got past 1/4 of the way to finish. I would not be so disappointed with this if I at least got some decent purple/gold/green drops before I died, but that never happened either.

more Guild Wars (can you say OCD)

Got back into playing Guild Wars the last 2 days. Mostly Nightfall campaign, Zaisen challenges, and Temple of Balthazar random arenas. Getting quite a bit of gold and drops to sell, even while doing as little fighting as possible to complete missions/quests.

I salvaged a Vampiric bowstring and a bowgrip of Fortitude from a couple of drops to finish my Ranger/Monk character's weapon. I think I have almost all the gold I need to buy the runes and new Tamer's Mask to finish his build.

I got a nice Gold weapon from a drop for my Monk hero, so his build is now complete. I also finally salvaged a hammer handle of Fortitude from another drop to complete my Warrior hero build. After I finish my Ranger character I will just need more gold to get my Ranger hero a couple more runes.

Other heroes are getting weapons/armors updated as items are dropped/salvaged and getting spells as I gain Balthazar faction points. I think in about 4 more days of random arena battles I will have all the points needed to get all the available spells needed for a complete set of heroes (1 from each profession). It however will be a long time to get the gold needed to buy the runes/insignias for all these heroes.