Getting Ready For Guild Wars: Haunted By HA Sins

I'm still puzzling over the few matches in the Hall of Heroes I saw the other day. I should have paid more attention because I only got the briefest glimpse and now the details are slipping out of mind. But, basically, it was a threeway mirror match of teams running the exact same build. That spells one thing to me – the meta. Those teams were copying a popular build that's been working lately. There were some minor variations between them but I was intrigued since it wasn't anything I had seen before. Which isn't too surprising since the HA meta is like a rare and beautiful hothouse flower, it's really relevant only to itself and it changes at a moment's notice. But the Hall and its new mechanics confuse me and I quickly moved on rather than try to delve into it.

Which is a shame because I've become fascinated by the build they were running. They were all a bunch of Sins with some Monk support. When the map loaded, I was a bit disappointed since it looked like it was going to be SinWay. Just a mass of shadowstepping and canned combos with a bunch of people running around going “kekeke”. Just a scrum and the team that happened to have the best reflexes or the better healers would emerge victorious. Or not, because it's a three-way and the rules of the Hall could make a heads-up battle unwise, meaning that the arguably better team might still lose – again, that's just the way the Hall works. But, no, it seemed to be a kill count battle or maybe the traditional “hold the center at the end and win”. Not relic running or point control or something where people would be flying all over the map because the teams converged at the center dias and proceeded to wail on each other. I was watching the Monks – always like to watch a good, scrambling spike catch - so it took me a moment to catch it but I soon realized that something was off. And I couldn't put my finger on it and then it hit me.

All the Sins were running around with staves. Not swapping from their daggers for a quick burst of energy. Not one or two of them. All of them. Dashing around the place with staves and casting like mad. Blew my mind for a little bit. I switched to one of them and it was obvious what they were doing. They were Sins as casters. Some kind of Signet of Deadly Shock spike, combined with dagger skills and some choice pickups from the secondaries. As I said, I'm kicking myself that I didn't study it further because I've become enamored of it. But I'm sure the details are out there on the web somewhere, if I were but to look.

I'm not, though, because it's not really the build that I like so much as the concept. The actual build makes sense in terms of the Halls environment. Sins have a lot of run buffs and good armor to help with the odd formats, and a spike is a tried and true method of marching to the Halls – it's a build that's stretching to fit a lot of the needs of that place in a slightly unusual way but ultimately not something I really like. No, what's interesting to me is the Sins completely ignoring the blade dancing and concentrating on pumping out the spells. I've said it before but primary Assassins can actually make for decent casters. They've got four pips of energy and a bar just as long as a Necro or a Rit combined with better than average armor. The problem is that their primary attribute is Critical Strikes. And Critical Strikes is only good when you're attacking which means that a Sin is better off with a weapon in their hand, not running around the midlines. And that tends to be the Dagger because of the runes, although you can definitely build Sins to take advantage of ranged weapons or other melee options.

I've long been fascinated, though, with the idea of an Assassin character forgetting about the blades and working as a caster. I've never found a way to make it work myself, though. Nice to see someone has.

And the reason I'm glad to see it is because it gets to the heart of what makes Guild Wars such a compelling game. The diversity. You can have Sins who are teleporting ginsu knives. But you can also have Sins who are heavily padded casters. Both can be made to work. And so can other options beyond. The system is fluid, flexible and allows for a lot of creativity. At the same time, each profession has a clearly defined role or set of roles making it easy to pick one up and learn how to use it.

Which isn't to say it's perfect. You can have Monks that smite and that's great even though the stereotypical role is that they're defensive healers. But you also get things like Necros abusing the old Soul Reaping to pump out a bunch of overpriced spells from their secondaries. Bloodspike and the like. As the truism goes, whenever you get a team of people running around with the same profession, you've got a problem. Because the lamest and most annoying gimmick builds tend to come from someone coming up with a way of exploiting that flexible system and use a particular class to power out something from their secondaries. The key to Bloodspike wasn't the hammer of the life-stealing blood spells, that was just how they finished people off, it was in the SR powering the casting of the N/Mos (and others) to keep the team alive while they spiked you out. They could have used smiting or air or anything else, it's just the Blood line was the easiest to get.

There's not much difference between that, systematically, and a team of all Slash E. Everyone packing a Gale for some knocklocking fun. And that's what, I think, leads to suggestions that the game should somehow limit how many professions a team can have. Restrict them to, say, four, at most, of any one profession whether the character is secondary or primary. The idea would be to eliminate gimmicky groups like a bunch of W/Mos or ritspike by removing the ability for players to overload on one particular class or another. But it's not a good suggestion because it takes a systematic approach to fixing problems with the details while gutting the flexible system of mixing and matching skills and roles. The problem with Bloodspike and its descendants isn't that you have too many N/Mos. It's that there's a mechanic issue with Soul Reaping and you need the Necros to exploit it. The problem with Gale chains isn't that everyone on the team can become a secondary Ele, it's that you have an overpowered skill with a low attribute requirement and there's a loophole in the exhaustion mechanic keeping it from getting nuts. You can fix Soul Reaping or Gale – which the developers did – to take care of the abuse and still keep the diversity of teams in the system. You don't want everyone running around with a cookie-cutter build, after all, so they need the options and the freedom to step outside the balance box.

Class crossing characters are a feature, not a bug. There's not a problem with Rangers, after all, who frequently dip into other professions for a completely new template. You get your R/W Thumpers, your R/P Spear Chuckers and R/A, and R/D, too, I'm sure. Elmos, too. Although, at one time the Elmos were because they were overshadowing the primary Monks. There wasn't a reason to play an actual Monk and that's an issue because it takes away from that clearly defined role that each profession has to fall back on. But it wasn't because Elementalist shouldn't be casting healing spells. It was because the Eles had energy management and the Monks didn't. The Ele could power out spells while the Monks were sucking empty. The problem was fixed not by preventing Ele from taking the Monk secondary but through Divine Favor and runes which made Monks not more energy efficient but more energy economical (Monks still had problems with energy management which led to other craziness, but that's another story. The reason is that the developers and even the players took a while to catch on to just how important controlling energy would be.) as their heals would go farther for the same amount of energy, making a primary Monk as a dedicated healer a good idea. And Elementalists still hung around, picking up the big, expensive Monk skills like Heal Party and pumping them out with their better energy pools. The game is better off because of it.

Sins running around as casters seems at first blush like an idea that's ripe for exploitation. Like it's something that needs to be taken care of just like other profession blurring builds of the past. And I wish I could remember more about the build to reassure myself it wasn't an overpowered gimmick just an unusual spike. But they're not. They're just a different way of using that profession. Of putting them into a different role within the party. It's the kind of idea that makes the game what it is.