#vs aristocratic althea and street origin gwen

[anghraine]

My fun geek necromancer (GW2) is now level 36 or so. In general, I still do prefer my mesmer’s pink lasers (though it’s not quite fair as a comparison since my mesmer is my level 80 long-standing main, wasn’t even my first GW2 mesmer, and my GW1 main was also a mesmer, so I’m a lot more familiar w/ that class and have access to many more aspects of it).

In any case, I do enjoy a lot of the mechanics—the necro didn’t have a single death until level 36(!). I’m running through the Character Advancement tracks from the anniversary update, and it’s a nice way to have both concrete goals and decent rewards for them. I imagine it provides some help to people who aren’t as familiar with the game, also, since it can be a pretty complicated game at times. And I’m gathering just about everything possible (...even onions. so many onions) to funnel into crafting (or selling, in order to finance more crafting).

It is interesting that necro is considered one of the easiest classes by contrast to mesmer (or worse, elementalist). I do personally find mesmers much easier to play, but again, it’s probably not fair when my main is lvl 80 and decked out in everything I could afford or luck into (quite a bit via 10 years of laurels), and it did originally take awhile to adjust to clones and timing Diversion and such (and no Backfire, my absolute favorite skill in GW1 that would be ludicrously overpowered in GW2. RIP <3). But a whole second health bar does go a long way, ngl.

[ascalonianlightbringer]

Gwen is about to encounter Queen Jennah for the first time in the personal story!

IIRC, all human PCs are pretty much immediately railroaded into being uncritical monarchists. That was one thing for Althea, my aristocratic human PC, who I imagined coming from a firmly royalist family. But Gwen grew up in abject poverty on the streets of Jennah's capital, and one of her closest friends from the street origin story is an open revolutionary.

I've always imagined Gwen as not quite as extreme or prone to conspiracies as her friend Alice, but like her, skeptical about Queen Jennah and basically hostile to royal and aristocratic power. It's reinforced in her case by her strong Ascalonian partisanship; she's no Separatist, but like many Ascalonians, Gwen does not accept or appreciate Jennah's claim to be regent of Ascalon. In my headcanon, this was actually one of the ways she was at odds with her Seraph sister Deborah before Deborah went missing.

Gwen doesn't want Jennah dead and she's not actively working against her or anything, in part because she's more interested in fixing small-scale wrongs than in open revolution, and in part because her political feelings are mostly focused on hating aristocrats and Charr at the moment.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure her default feeling about some minister vs the queen is basically 🍿, so this is the first point where the story in my head really conflicts with what's going to be on the screen.