These Skillz are Pro

After a whirlwind tour through the Snowball Arena this Wintersday Festival, I was able to win enough games to earn not just the first Gamer title track rank, but the second - Pro Skillz. And don't think I didn't take a good, hard look at gaming enough to get my Numchuck Skillz on. There was, simply put, no point to earning this title. Unlike Fame or Gladiator or Champion track titles it doesn't add anything to my account. And I'm far from the first person to get it so it's not exactly something to brag about. And since, like Fame and Experience, it's a score you get that's builds up over time that means even people who plug away with extremely low winning percentages will get it if they spend enough time lobbing snowballs at one another, it's not exactly a good measure of my skill level. But the point was to prove to myself that I could. Oh, it's not the first title I've held - but it's the first one I ever set my sights on and made damn well sure I earned. So, it has meaning because it give it meaning, nothing intrinsic in and of itself. I like that.

Anyhow, once I hit that magic number that told me I was teh Pro and not n00b, well, I stopped to enjoy the rest of the Wintersday festivities. It's a great big party, after all, that I missed last year because I wasn't playing. New Year's Day was the culmination of the festival and a busy day in my waking world besides, but I made a point to be around an involved in things. Get ready for the slideshow because I have some pictures to share. I apologize for the poor quality of them, I like to run the game at lower settings so I get a decent framerate in PvP and didn't bother to switch for snapping photos - BaseStar One's a fine machine but it's getting a little long in the tooth, if you know what I mean.

Anyhow, here's a shot of my Gamer rank:

That's my PvP Ritualist (Extremely deadly in the Snowball Arena, by the way, if you know what you're doing.) beneath the festive tree. The name's backwards because, for whatever reason, I've taken to doing that for my PvP characters and naming them after different sauces, of course - so "Frozen Sauce" for snowballing was a given. Unfortunately, I managed to crop out the in game display that would be beneath my feet. But you can see it in the Hero panel. Along with my meager Fame - just barely enough to be able to /rank someone.

Here I am waving good-bye to the Wintersday Priest who was kind enough to transport me to and from the snowball fight.

He doesn't say much but I'd like to think we became passingly acquainted. And I felt I could give him the same knowing acknowledgment I give to those familiar people I don't really know - the butcher at the shop, the bartender at my favorite bar, that sort of thing - where you nod and exchange pleasantries but have no real idea what they're all about. You can tell just by looking at him that I was such a fixture, he's surprised I've told him I'm not coming back.

Here's some of the swag I earned snowballing it up.

During the even you could craft special weapons with peppermint skins. These weapons are all but useless compared to "real" weapons but, well, they look cool and the idea of thwacking someone with two or three feet of candy cane makes me smile on the inside. So I went with a Candy Cane Sword (The bow as a handguard is an inspired touch) and a Peppermint Shield which has an awesome transparency/shimmer effect. A two-handed weapon like a scythe or a hammer would have been more economical for my rapidly vanishing inventory space but I just couldn't resist the sword or the shield. Not only are they stylish, though, they're also rather useful in testing things - the sword, at least - because of their set stats and absolutely zero variance. I doubt I'm likely to any time soon but if I want to test out armor or critical hits or something, a candy cane weapon removes some of the guesswork.

You can also see some of my massive store of candy cane shards - used to craft such weapons among other things. You get 3 per win in the snowball arena and, well, I won 201 times. That's 603 shards. You're also not seeing all the ones I earned questing or just going about my business in PvE, that's easily another 150. Crafting the sword cost me 9 shards and the shield 12, so I spent 21 in total, still leaving me with three stacks of the stuff. And I suck at trading so they're still sucking up space. You can see why I'm getting worried about inventory at this point, maybe.

The other weapons there are the ones I actually fought with. I just liked to load up with the candy cane stuff to look cool. There's a PvP Staff which has the Switch and Enchanting mods along with the inscription "Don't Think Twice" which gives it 20% longer enchantments as well as a 20/20 chance to swiftly cast and recharge spells (Or roughly. Basically, I have one in five spells cast faster than normal. And one in five recharge faster than normal.). Both those mods, of course, work in the snowball fights and although they're only a slight advantage they're still enough of one that I grabbed them as soon as I figured out they worked. My other set's a PvP Focus likewise with the 20/20 mod and a PvP Axe of Enchanting with a Vampiric hilt which gives you health when you hit someone at the cost of constantly draining your own (Which isn't as bad as it sounds, if you hit someone consistently, it more than makes up for the drain and that health is stolen from the enemy, increasing your damage.). Now, weapons can't be used in the snowball fighting so all it does is slowly drain my health. But since you resurrect instantly with full health if you die, that's actually a good thing, and I kept it to switch too if I was at low health and wanted to finish myself off for a quick recharge. Why an axe? Well, it's the first weapon that shows up on the list that can be slotted with a vampiric mod, of course.

The snowball fights are serious business, in case you couldn't tell.

Anyhow, once I was done with the snowballing, I headed off to the main towns where you could wager your candy canes and earn special Wintersday headgear. My PvP character's restricted from traveling to these spots, of course, so I had to use one of my PvE ones. I picked out my character from the last expansion - Milanus Rex, an Assassin/Ritualist - who'd previously picked up another mask at a previous "holiday", the Day of the Tengu. Here he is modeling his Tengu mask (Tengu's are spirits in Japanese mythology, basically. In Guild Wars, they're a race of intelligent bird creatures.).

You can also see what I call his "Voldo armor" in that pick. One of the nice changes in Factions was that they separated the look of the armor from the effect leaving people free to find the skin they wanted. That one's not one of the fabled 15k sets or even FoW (or the highest of the high end which costs well over a million in crafting materials alone.) but it was a relatively rare one of the "normal" 1.5k sets because it was tucked away into an out-of-the-way place. It looks odd and I grabbed it pretty early so I got some questions about where it came from. I see a lot of 'sins these days walking around in similar gear so it's lost a bit of luster but it's still a favorite of mine.

The towns where you could find the headgear, among other things, were jam packed. I haven't seen them that full since the early days of release. Here's one of LA, the big town in the original campaign (At least, the easiest of them to get to and the one you travel to when going from chapter to chapter. So it tends to have a lot of people in it and it's a good spot to trade even though it's no where near the end content. But, then, with instant travel that doesn't matter.).

That's 113 Districts, each of which is created when the previous district is full. I'm not sure of the limit anymore but at least once upon a time that happened when there were something like 100 people in a district (Getting actually full to the point where people trying to enter would be turned aside was capped higher but once that number was hit people would default to going to a new district). So, that's something like 10,000 people standing around in town at one time. Multiple towns were doing this at the same time and as the day wore on I saw even higher numbers, 140 or so, I just neglected to take a screen. So, as you can imagine, it was one big party.

Anyhow, here's a picture of the game I played.


The way it worked was, in addition to everything else going on in town for Wintersday, on the 1st - the end of the festival, every three hours avatars of the two gods said to be warring to either prolong or end winter - Grenth and Dwayna respectively (Grenth is something like Pluto and the god who judges the dead - he's favored by Necromancers among others. While Dwayna is a god of healing and blessings who's a favorite of Monks. There's a whole lore built up around these and other gods and it's actually pretty well done, if you ask me. Now, where the reindeers and snowmen fit in, I have no idea) - show up and hold a contest. In each town there are nine squares laid out in a grid. One for Grenth and one for Dwayna. During the contest players stand on a square near each avatar and wager a single candy cane shard each round of the game. One square's chosen at random and everyone on it gets some candy cane shards and a wintersday present (A special item that you open for a random gift item) while those squares adjacent to the winning square get two shards. Just how many shards you stand in depends on where in the grid you are. The center, which will be adjacent to the winning square most often most often, gets three on a win. The four squares adjacent to the center get four. And the corner squares get a payoff of five shards.

At the same time when a square wins each candy cane shard wagered on it is counted towards that particular side's total. So, as the game goes on the side with more people playing on it gets more points. At the end of the game the god with the most points wins - winter either gets to end or continue - and everyone in the district gets a hat depending on who wins. If Dwayna wins there's fireworks. If Grenth wins then he spawns Grenches (As in stink, stank, stunk) who run around killing people. It's all to the good because they're instantly revived. Either way tons more wintersday presents spawn to be scooped up by everyone there. And, no, that's not a mad scramble because every drop in the game is reserved for the player it drops for - at least for a time - so there's no mad scramble to get gifts before anyone else.

Here's a picture of Grenth - the side I was on - totally pwning Dwayna. The imposing figure floating in the middle is Grenth's avatar.


That's a pretty average score, by the way, although the game's not quite over - the score board disappears as soon as you win so I snapped this beforehand.

See, the players quickly wised to the game and, apparently, just like last year designated even districts as Dwayna's and odd districts as Grenth's. People who wanted a hat - and there were four, one for each god and for Tyria - the land of the first campaign - and for Elone - the land of the new expansion - for each - could just warp to the district they wanted as people would crowd one side or the other. The hats were the Yule Cap (Dwayna's Tyria), the Freezie Crown (Dwayna's Elonian), the Jester Cap (Grenth's Elonian) and, of course, the Grenth Horns.

I picked up a full set. Forunately, they have new NPCs who'll recraft those hats for a small fee so they're not going to overburden my inventory at all. Sadly, I don't have any screens of them just yet but they're all pretty nice. Since the Kamdan festivities kicked off about fifteen minutes after the LA ones it was pretty easy. I spent most of the day doing other things but every three hours or so, I'd check back in and play the great game again. I figured I might be able to unload my candy cane shards or some other stuff - like the tonic that turns you into an elf. Which, just... ha! No such luck but I did manage to make some progress on the Lucky/Unlucky tracks (Not much since to be Lucky requires you to earn 50,000 "tickets", read: shards and that's a lot when you only earn them as much as 5 at a time.). I played in the corner squares because to get Unlucky is a lot easier than Lucky and I figured I'd lose there more often (The central circle has the highest payout, although I couldn't tell you exactly how much.). In fact, I didn't, as I ended the day having earned something like 100 shards while losing only 50. Earlier in the day the ratio was even better as I was getting something like 4 shards for every one I lost. The law of averages caught up with me the more I played, though. Since I was trying to get rid of my candy canes, that's not exactly something I'm sure I should be happy with or not.

Anyhow, it was pretty cool especially when compared to the Day of the Tengu, the last such event I attended. It was much smaller and didn't have nearly as much cool stuff to do. It was a blast and I hope everyone who could made a point of partying down at this year's Wintersday. I know I wouldn't have earned my Pro Skillz if I hadn't had such a fun time.