Free to Play Cast: Dauntless Alpha Review, Going F2P with Stealth, and Closers Online Ep 232

I am actual familiar with the Strat-O-Matic line of sports board games from the 70s. Never played any myself but did play a lot of Avalon Hill games and still have quite a few. I have never owned a game console, to many PC games to play.

Da-Bomb to RIFT... again... or rather to new beginnings on it. I did something insane even for me. As you all know, I'm known to delete max level characters to re-level them because I enjoy the leveling experience far more than endgame. The hubby and I did that x100... deleted and re-created two accounts worth of characters to re-start because we decided to kick WoW to the curb and make RIFT our game. We had been dabbling in several MMOs including RIFT, and we will probably still dabble in TSW, but the truth was we needed one to call home and RIFT fit the bill. This was a long time coming and I'm having a blast.

A dabomb to Anet for the Path of Fire elite specs and a MASSIVE DABOMB to Anet for how they implemented mounts.

Most of the new elite specs have more flavor and new mechanics to play with than their Heart of Thorn's counter parts. It would have been nice to have more time to test them but the expack will be here soon enough.

When I first heard about mounts through the leaks I was actually dreading their addition. There are so many games (like Breath of the Wild) that make mounts a boring movement speed boost at the cost of the more interesting movement mechanics like platforming, climbing, gliding, etc. that make exploration far more fun. Since the primary reason Gw2 stuck with me was the platforming and exploration seeing that Anet gave each mount movement abilities and built platforming content around those abilities has completely changed my mind on them. Mounts in Gw2 are AMAZING!

P.S. to Troy: For most elite specs the new weapon is designed to complement the spec but isn't actually the meat of the spec so not only can you play the spec with a different weapon often older weapons are more effective. Most of the new skills and mechanics (the meat) you get with Soulbeast actually comes from absorbing your pet which lets you cast their skills using the function keys.

P.P.S. to Mike: Bearbow ranger (longbow ranger using a tanky pet like the bear) is the Gw2 pve equivalent of playing a pvp game against bots. ;)