So with Alan Wake winging his way back to Gamefly, last night I hopped back into Guild Wars.

Now, I have to beg your patience, all you Guild War veterans… I’m probably about to cause you a great deal of eye-rolling.

I’ve added a few more heroes to my roster and each one brings some skills with them, and I’ve picked up the odd skill here and there. I could buy skills, but haven’t yet, since I read I can earn a bunch of them for free in one of the other campaigns, and so far I’m getting by with my limited selection.

But staring at those skill bars, and prompted by someone (my mind is like a sieve) mentioning how skills interact with each other and the best way to build a set for your skill bar, my brain suddenly switched into collectible card game mode. So all my skills…those are like my deck of cards, and part of the fun of the game is collecting more. The skillbar is like a hand of cards that I can put together and will eventually tweak depending on circumstances and companions.

Right? Am I right, Guild War vets? I mean, obviously there’s a ton more to it than just this skill collecting/arranging sub-system…

Anyway, another new thing I learned was that you can have more than one hero with you. I have no idea how I got it into my head that you could only have one. Last night I did a Mission with a party of 6, even though I was playing alone. I had my character +3 heroes +1 NPC who was part of the mission +1 Fire Imp ally. Crazy fun!!

Though, *gasp* at one point I thought “This would be better with friends.”

I unlocked the mission that in turns unlocks Eye of the North, but I’m sort of engaged with the Nightfall story now so I’m not sure I want to divert. And the mission I did had a bonus objective that I screwed up, so I’ll want to go re-do that.

Still having a lot of fun…still kind of bemused at how I wound up here after all these years.

My next goal is getting better about giving Heroes orders. Right now I let them run around in default behavior, which means swarming whatever I’m attacking. I was reading the Wiki and apparently you can ‘lock’ them onto a target, which, combined with calling targets, could be pretty handy if I’m a fast enough mouse clicker!