I got back into Guild Wars 1

I don't seem to be alone in this either, through my travels I've seen a number of people saying "haven't played in years, how's this thing work again?" in chat.

It's still mostly desolate, but there are definitely more players online now than there were a few years ago.  Everyone's playing with hero parties from the looks of things, but... whatever.

That said, what the hell am I going to do in a number-of-years-old online RPG that I've already played to death?

Well, to start with, realize that there's still a lot I haven't done.  What follows (after the break) is a list of tasks for my latest gaming project.

• Get the festival hats I'm missing: Complicated by asinine restrictions on how many you can get per year.  I get that originally you could only get so much per year, but at this point, the restrictions no longer make sense.  Basically, see you in 2026 when I finally get the last festival hat that I'm missing, because I've plotted it out and it's really going to take that absurdly long.  Dragon Festival is the one that's going to drag it out until 2026, because I basically didn't participate in it in the early years.  I adopted the practice of farming the items needed to obtain hats and saving them.  This way, in the future I can just pull those items out of storage, turn them in, get my stupid hats, and be done with it.  It just so happens that, as of two days ago, I have everything I need to get the rest of the hats, and I just have to wait for the festivals to come around.
  
  
• Farm Lucky/Unlucky points: Perhaps better known as the "AFK on a circle lol" titles because they were originally only progressible when the Shing Jea Boardwalk was open.  Thankfully, opening chests with Lockpicks now contributes to one or the other depending on whether or not your lockpick breaks.  Lucky even modifies the chance for the lockpick to break.  None of us are the Lock Picking Lawyer, so we break lockpicks regularly.
  
  
• Get all skills for each of my characters' primary professions: The benefit to this is two-fold.  Versatility in setting up those characters' builds, and unlocking all the skills for use on heroes.  Looking back on it, a lot of my frustrations with Hard Mode and certain end-game content probably would have been alleviated somewhat had I had more skills available.  This task is divided into two parts, getting the non-elites, and getting the elites.  The elites are already unlocked for heroes courtesy of me having done Legendary Skill Hunter years ago, but that doesn't magically teach those elites to my other characters.  Elite Skill Tomes exist, but they drop stupidly rarely in Hard Mode, and otherwise cost Zaishen Coins (or fluctuating amounts of actual in-game money to trade with other players).  Unfortunately, I came back to the game well after the 2020 Anniversary Celebration, so I had to wait until the 2021 Anniversary Celebration to get the Proof of Triumph so I could capture the ten new elites they added in 2020.
  
  
• Do the Zaishen Bullshit to get Zaishen Coins to get some of the new stuff that costs way too many Zaishen Coins because apparently regular in-game money isn't good enough: There's new more better Runes of Holding that expand your inventory further.  Because reasons, expanding one inventory container costs a ridiculous sum of Gold Zaishen Coins.  Never mind that normal Runes of Holding are far less expensive, I guess ANet really hates fun.  By the time I get my ranger's inventory expanded to the new maximum, I'm going to be exhausted, and I have teneleven characters...
  
  
• Farm enough Kurzick faction to get my Kurzick title to rank 6: ANet rebalanced all the title-based skill tracks a while back so that you don't need the max title rank to get max benefit from the skills.  As a result, you only need rank 6 Kurzick/Suxon for those skills, and rank 5 of literally everything else.  This is harder than it should be because ANerf removed all the good farming methods years ago, including removing Hero Fast Faction Farm on my fucking birthday.  There's "speed clear" setups for various areas but nobody's doing them anymore and I don't have the necessary stuff to participate in those anyway.  Nobody ever designs a speed clear setup that lets rangers participate, or publicizes hero builds that make Hard Mode easier.  That said, I've found a zone I can easily vanquish with the Kurzick faction blessing active, and I can turn in faction points during Faction bonus weeks to progress the title stupidly quickly.  When I came back to the game I was rank 4, I'm rank 5 now and closing in on 6.
  
  
• Work on my eleventh character: Casually reading through the list of skills one day I realized there's an Elementalist spell called "Double Dragon".  Which is, of course, the name of a series of video games starting on the NES.  The first one is infamous for misspelling one of the characters' names, so I made a character in reference to that.  He basically has Double Dragon stapled to his skill bar, and I'm going to be trying various ways of theming a build around its effects.  Double Dragon is actually a really good spell...
  
  
• Get Hero Armor for all heroes on my ranger: The "easy" part of this is already done, since I got back into the game I got my Nightfall heroes their set of armor from the challenge missions, and yesterday I got my Eye of the North heroes their armor from Glint's Challenge using that 7 hero "AFK" build on PvXwiki because I got tired of trying and failing the mission normally.  It's not really AFK because some things can get stuck well out of aggro range of the heroes, so they never run over to kill them; but it does work extremely consistently.  All that's left now is the hard stuff: Primeval Armor (Domain of Anguish) and Deldrimor Armor (Slavers' Exile).
  
  
• Get the Vanquisher titles on my ranger: I think I'm beginning to climb over the brick wall of unfair difficulty in Hard Mode.  He's gotten almost all of the Ascalon area zones vanquished now.  Since coming back to the game I've gotten a few more zones vanquished.  I'm prioritizing the Ascalon area right now due to its stupid party limit of 4.  The foes are designed for parties of 8, and you're just expected to manage, because ANet thinks that's fun...  Yeah, it's possible with 6 or 8 if you have the patience to fight from a town with a higher party limit.  I fought from Yak's Bend with a party of 6 when I got Ascalon Foothills and Diessa Lowlands.  The only two Ascalon area zones he has left are Flame Temple Corridor and Dragon's Gullet.  After them I think I'm going to prioritize zones without an adjoining town so that everything remaining will be reasonably accessible.
  
  
• *sigh* Do Winds of Change: War in Kryta left such a bad taste in my mouth (had to staple Frozen Soil to my skill bar and spam consumables to make it bearable) that I haven't wanted to do Winds of Change.  All the same, it yields two heroes (Miku and Zei Ri), and they're the only heroes my ranger lacks.  I kinda wish that, once you unlock a hero on one character, there was an alternate way of acquiring them on your other characters (perhaps for a reasonable fee).  Some specific professions are tucked away deep into Nightfall or have unusual unlock conditions in Eye of the North (or even the chapter of Guild Wars Beyond between War in Kryta and Winds of Change, Hearts of the North).  Getting Zei Ri necessitates completing Winds of Change on Hard Mode, which I know I'll find... fun.

I originally started this post towards the end of 2020, so some of the things I originally put here I've finished.  I've gotten back to 100% pets in the Zaishen Menagerie and unlocked all evolutions of every pet.  Levelling up pets is really easy and combines well with getting Sunspear/Lightbringer title progress using the bog standard farm in The Sulfurous Wastes.  People swear by the death levelling method that's done within the Menagerie itself, but that only works on one pet at a time whereas this works on eight at a time.

Getting characters through Factions presented a roadblock that I've since solved: The Eternal Grove.  I arrived at the realization that I was doing some things wrong, and when I started doing them right, I started clearing the mission.  tl;dr don't flag your heroes out too far, stay closer to the center of the Grove.

The things that have been definitely been holding me back in terms of Hard Mode progress are that I'm not very familiar with setting up builds for the Factions and Nightfall professions, nor am I very familiar with a lot of the skills for core professions that were added in Factions and Nightfall.  Most of my Hard Mode progress is locked behind getting all the non-elite skills for each of my characters' primary professions.  I've started branching out into party builds that lean more heavily on non-core professions, namely the Ritualist.  Soul Twisting with Shelter, Union, and Displacement is too good to pass up.  The sheer amount of damage that my party doesn't take with such a Ritualist following me around is truly astounding.

No, seriously.  Look back at that screenshot of me having taken 16 years to complete To Sorrow's Furnace.  I've got Xandra in my party running that specific build.  The quest I'd just finished was the one where you have to collect the explosive stones while defending High Priest Alkar because he gets attacked while you're off collecting the stones.  In order to finish that quest, I ran a 6/2 split: I left Xandra (the aforementioned Soul Twisting protection build) and Olias (Aura of the Lich minion master) with Alkar (who himself is a healer), and took off killing things with the other heroes.  They were able to hold off each group of foes that attacked Alkar long enough for the six of us to get back and assist in killing them, which is all I could really ask for.