Gamma Testing: Guild Wars Nightfall – First Impressions

Okay, got a few hours in on Guild Wars the last night. Overall, the game's playing great. Just like the last time I took a break, there's a bunch of little things that just leave me starry eyed that the people who've been playing all this time probably haven't even noticed.

Heroes, I imagine, are a bit controversial since they pretty much eliminate the need to ever group with another breathing being ever – I have henched just about every mission in Prophesies and a fair amount of them in Factions because it's generally easier than finding a good party, and I fully intend to do this with Nightfall as well. I, really, have no problem with this. It's not that I don't like people it's that I have this tremendous hate for idiots. Especially when I'm the one being the idiot. PvE is just mind-expandingly boring for me and the NPCs never yell at me for going afk for five or ten minutes. So, personally, I'm loving them. They're like mini-characters I get to deck out and improve without the fuss of actually having to control their actions – unless I want to. Since I've been complaining about the henchmen ever since they were introduced, I think they're an amazing addition.

Since I've been playing henchway I haven't had occasion to use the new party system. But just the idea of it makes me all happy inside.

The skill templates, too, have me blissing out. Haven't made much use of them but being able to store those builds and trade them is awesome in its implications.

Material storage I had no idea about going in and the only downside to it is the 250 stack limit. But that, right there, saves me an awful lot of inventory space.

As for what I don't like, well, they took out the premades. I've been complaining about the premades for as long as they've been in, too, but my complaint wasn't that they needed to go but that they needed to be better. Now, it seems, someone just getting into PvP has absolutely no guide about what to do and that's not a beneficial improvement, if you ask me. Oh, and sure, people can just unlock everything now and they'll be able to find builds floating around there but that's all out of game stuff. Ways of getting better that they have to opt into. And opting into a system is a barrier that a lot of people will never cross. There has to be some way of getting tutorial PvP information across – and premade templates are a great way of doing it. They just needed to work a lot smarter and a lot harder. So, sad to see them go because they had some potential.

My other big gripe at the moment is the faction farming or Sunspear Promotion grinding. I'm going ot have six characters to get through this campaign, you're telling me I have to go out and play “whack-a-rat” hundreds if not thousands of times for each and every one of them? I'm about ready to throw my monitor across the room with just the one – and I've only gotten about 20 points so far. ANet seems to do this about once every expansion. In Prophesies it was armor infusion. In Factions it was that one co-operative mission with the other party where you could lose just because they were idiots. Now, it's point farming or whatever it's called. But there's always a bottleneck that brings things to a crashing halt and a point where players have to do some specific, monotonous thing in order to advance. Having people do the same thing for hours when they don't want or need to isn't adding to the gameplay experience. Grr!

Hey, it's a blog. You weren't expecting some angry ranting every now and then?

Anyhow, my character, “Mend Our Chuck” - I call her Herman (Yeah, it's a girl avatar. Lara Croft principle – if I have to stare at someone's ass most of the game it's going to be one I find sexually appealing, thank you very much.) is now a level 4 Paragon. From talking to people I gather you need to hit lv5 before you can get a secondary. I'd have it already as I'm only a few thousand short but, well, point farming. And I'm still resolved to go with the Dervisher once I finally get there. I smoked the first mission, though, (I mean, I can't see anyone having any problems with it, but I'll take what I can get at this advanced stage of nubcrosis.) and got all three swords on the first try. Flush with skill points and sitting in town, I decided to see what I could get. The answer? Not very much. Still not impressed with any of the Paragon skills at low level. There's some interesting stuff but I don't have the attributes for it. What I'm interested in is the shouts and stuff so I picked up a few that looked halfway decent. No Hero points and I'm on an alternate account so all my Warrior swag's locked. That means Koss (I call him “Carson” as in Daley.) is rocking his defaults – Power Attack and Watch Yourself!, basically. Which, eh, not much better than what I'm doing so I can't really complain.

Since I'm using some attack skills I'm stuck with the spear. I'm not liking it much as the RoF is a bit too slow – I'm thinking it's somewhere between a sword and a hammer but I haven't really bothered to check (someone's probably already figured this out, so no need to get that specific) – and the damage is, of course, pitiful. I jacked up Leadership to the rank 4 breakpoint and the rest went into motivation. I'm going for a defensive/offensive support deal at the moment and it seems to be working. My bar looks something like this:

• Anthem of Flame
• Mending Refrain
• They're On Fire!
• Barbed Spear
• Wild Throw
• Lightning Spear
• Signet of Synergy
• Signet of Return

Which, yeah. Blarg. As I expected my best skill is Mending Refrain. It's still stuck at the one pip so it's 10 energy for 2hp/sec. But the thing is as long as I keep using shouts then the duration is infinite and, at low levels, two health a second is nothing to sneeze at. I put it up on everyone and just spam Anthem of Flame nearly as often as it recharges. Not only does it refresh the no maintenance Mending (At 5 en for AoF every 15 seconds or so, it's roughly a pip so it actually does cost me some maintenance but that's one pip to keep light regeneration up on four characters at this point as opposed to one pip to keep it up on one. I'll take it.) but with Leadership 4 it's good for two seconds of burning or 28 points of damage added to all the attack skills in the party. There's a little bit of overlap because of henchmen AI stupidity but considering even my beefiest attack skill – Lightning Spear – does about 11~13 damage that's pretty darned good. My favorite attack, though, is Barbed Spear because with AoF up that's a few seconds of -10 degen which is brutal to low level enemies. And at four adren it's easily spammable. They're On Fire is pretty weak because although AoF's going off a lot there's really not enough burning around and the damage being done to my team doesn't really care about the 10% or so reduction I get from it. It's there because it's another shout and I can use it to refresh Mending Refrain in an emergency but it's the first thing I'm dropping when I find something better. Signet of Return I use in place of rezsig because it might be suckier but it can be used more than once without needing to recharge. I dropped Leader's Comfort in favor of Signet of Synergy pretty early – I tend not to be enchanted so it lets me heal someone or heal myself. Not as big a heal but it's more flexible and, since I'm not a primary healer, it's just there to provide some breathing room when the Monk's in trouble. The no energy cost doesn't hurt it, either. So, if you'll hark back to my scheme here you'll see that it's pretty much been abandoned.

If I had the points or the skills I'd be dropping the attack skills besides Barbed Spear in favor of some more chants/shouts/echoes. I'd focus more on the offensive side of things to find things that go with the AoF thing as I think in a party of myself and a few offensive types that's where I'd be adding the most value. Two that catch my eye are Blazing Finale and Burning Refrain (It might just be me, but...I'm detecting a theme in the skill design.) - I have no idea where to get them but since they look halfway decent I expect they're buried way in the back end of the campaign. Glowing Signet could also be real nice as it's worth nearly a pip even without the attributes and that tiny energy pool gets drained fast if I'm not careful (If I'm calculating the progression right it'd be 8 energy at Leadership 4 which, popping every 20 seconds plus whatever it takes to cast is right about a pip – meaning I could afford to spam AoF all I wanted. Throw in the Leadership bonus and I'd be getting back at least a half an en a second. Hey, effective non-elite energy management, what a concept!). I'd still keep the Mending Refrain and some defensive skills but, basically, I'm thinking the kind of Paragon I should be making is a lot like an old fashioned Orders Necro (Which, sigh, takes me back to my old NecroWar in the test.) and most of my time should be spent making other people kill things faster. That's my current plan, anyway.