Tuesday N00b Club again last night in Guild Wars: Nightfall, and time to decide on Secondary Professions. If Nightfall is anything like the original Prophecies campaign, we'll get the chance to change this choice later on down the road, but there's a considerable amount of Adventuring to be done until then, so it's quite a big decision, and a tricky one from my perspective, as I'm so used to thinking in terms of solo viability, and in any event, I still have trouble getting the hang of a truly hybrid character.
On previous occasions, mostly with my 'main', a Ranger/Necromancer, I mostly end up just ignoring one half of the combo entirely, having been taught by many MMOs, that diversification is weakness, and by spreading out whatever points, talents, achievements or whatever, across many different skills or disciplines, I just make myself not very good at anything in particular. Example being WoW Talents - I'd imagine very few builds consist of just one talent point in as many boxes as you have points for.
In Guild Wars, it's further hampered by each individual class; Ranger, Necromancer, etc, having three or four different sub-skills within it. Rangers have Marksmanship (bow skills), Beastmastery (pet skills), Wilderness Survival (traps and buffs), and Expertise (more buffs and energy cost reduction), and typically, you only get enough Attribute Points to max out two or three of these, depending on rune bufs, etc. Add another three, say, Necromancer skills; Blood Magic, Death Magic and Curses, and you end up with a choice of seven different areas, and only two or three of which can be maxed. Each attribute then has something like 30-40 hot-key skills that hang off it, and out of those, you can only actually use eight at a time. Somewhat bewildering for the long-time EQ/AO/AC2/EQ2/WoW veteran like me.
But the basics of a good build typically revolve around picking out two or three of these Attributes, ramping them up as high as possible, and then pick out useful skills from each to fill the bar with. This needn't necessarily be one from the Primary Class and one for the Secondary, but I always feel guilty if I'm not using my character's full potential. My Mesmer's life is even more complicated by the fact that it's not just my own survival and potency I need to think about, but being part of a successful team too, and between the three of us, there are quite a lot of bases to cover.
Anyway, after a bit of deliberation, here's what we all became:
Mesmer/Paragon: This is me. After last weeks outing, it soon became apparent that we really needed some kind of healing. I toyed with Monk, but Nightfall, and Paragons and Dervishes, are new to me, so went with Paragon instead. It's a ranged support class, with lots of heals and buffs - very much a kind of spear-throwing Paladin. The healing isn't as powerful as a Monks, but hopefully, the various shouts, echoes and chants will all help our offensive capabilities a lot more than a Monk would. How this will mesh with being a Mesmer, I'm still trying to work out, although Mesmers do get a lot of things that help with signet use - my main panic-heal is a signet, and could really do with being faster to reuse. I'm trying a Domination/Motivation build at present, but this will no doubt change a lot over the coming weeks.
Dervish/Ranger: Already a powerful up-front tank type of character, using magic where Warriors normally use Armour and Stances, our Dervish went with Ranger rather than Warrior, offering access to all manner of evasion and dodging stances, a decent regen-heal, and of course, a tameable, trainable tank pet, which will help no end on the front row. The bow attacks and traps won't be much use though, I'd think.
Necromancer/Elementalist: Our veteran Necromancer, already a good undead summoner, went for Elementalist, a class they're very familiar with from other characters, mostly for access to the big spectacular fire spells I think, letting them drop a rain of fire AoE on top of our Dervish's own spinning scythe AoE attacks. Elementalists are a lot more versatile than I'd thought though, and with Air, Water and Earth, can do much to protect and buff our group, and hamper and slow the enemy. Turns out it isn't always about setting fire to people's heads!
A diverse group, with lots of specialisation options we can experiment with, and which covers most of the possible jobs a group might need to carry out. It is a bit weak on healing though - the Necromancer can drain life, and the Dervish can use the Ranger's regen, and probably has some kind of self-heal on the Dervish list too - everyone in Guild Wars gets something that can heal themselves. My own basic heal on the Paragon side reflects the support nature of the class though and is a heal that heals the target, and me for the same amount, provided the right conditions are met.
Having got those picked out and skill-bars sorted, away we went, working on a bit of quest tidy-up in the Plains of Jarin, some overland questing and exploration in the Cliffs of Dohjok, and finally a go at our first real Mission - Jokanur Diggings, and to be honest, the whole experience for me at least, was quite hectic - more so than Guild Wars usually is. Very quickly, I ended up falling away from Mesmer work, and into Paragon Motivation heals skills and buffs.
It took a few minutes to realise that by default, there aren't hot-keys set for targeting other party-members. I'm a bit of a Clicker with these games - using the mouse to activate specials rather than the number keys, but this clearly wasn't working fast enough (or I'm just too slow with a mouse these days). Reassigning the F-Keys to Group Members helped a bit, but it was still pretty manic most of the time, keeping our Suicidal Dervish, and their Suicidal Dervish Hero Henchman, buffed and alive more often than not, so much so that I didn't really have time to loot, or read quest text boxes, or much of anything else really. Recharge timers on the heal skills were a bit too slow as well, making me worry about my future clerical ability, although I suspect some kind of Monk Hero/Henchman is likely to be a permanent addition to our little group on future forays. I could barely manage to set an auto-attack going with my spears, let alone try any complex offensive Mesmerism! Still, the other two seemed to be making up for my distraction with massive DPS output, and most of the time, we won. I tell you what though, being a healer in Guild Wars is nothing like the same job in WoW or EQ2, and is never boring...far from it... If nothing else, the fact that the game has little or no aggro-management (taunting, etc), and the monsters do notice you healing, spices things up no end.
I do remember some bits of last night though. A comically overconfident acceptance of some kind of 'Master's Quest', out in the Cliffs. "Can we take this?" "Yeah, no problem!" The NPC was clicked, and the next five minutes was a lot like Starship Troopers - the ground erupted, and the monsters just kept coming! We are clearly not Masters, by any stretch of the imagination, and sheepishly dusted ourselves off at the resurrection shrine. Then the escort mission where we lost the escort NPC. Actually lost, as opposed to 'got killed'. Then there was some kind of weird team combat thing, where we were trying to score points against a team of enemy soldiers, to impress some general with our ability to be trusted with a mission. Frankly, I was a bit too preoccupied to notice what was going on really, but if I were the general, I'd not hire us, based on the slapstick display of prat-falling we put on for him. Saying that, we still managed to win somehow, so must have been doing something right - mostly turning around suddenly, while holding long planks on our shoulders, I suspect.
Then there was the somewhat alarming tendency for the Dervish and the Necromancer to both spot different shiney things and go running off in opposite directions, leaving me, the healer, wondering who to follow. I think all three of us are still too used to soloing - not having the need to explain our plans to anyone else, merely to act silently and instantly on them without consensus. This doesn't work so well in Guild Wars Groups though, and it's best to keep together where possible. Clearly I need more points in the 'Command' Paragon attribute!
The mission itself was fun, involving not only rampaging through a very Indiana Jones tomb killing zombies, but also a bit of dexterity work to get through timed traps, falling weights, jets of fire and so on, and a bit which might have been an actual GW hallucination, or may have just been me cracking under the pressure. We found the tablets, put them on the altar and killed the big rock monster at the end, but it was touch and go, and we nearly all wiped.
We also missed the first place win (Nightfall Missions seem to have three levels of completion, rather than the 'Complete ' and 'Bonus' of Prophecies) due to the red mist causing one of our lot to butcher one of the supposedly innocent Ghosts stood about the place. If they were so innocent, my All-Knowing-All-Judging Mini-Map would have given them a green dot not a red one! If only all life's difficult moral questions could be subjected to the harshly objective glare of my Mini-Map...be a very different world then, I can tell you!
A success for us, and we called it a night there, but to be honest, I was more frazzled than jubilant at the end of it all. I think we need much more practice as a team before the whole exercise becomes less fraught, and I think a lot more experimentation with builds is needed on my part if I'm to become an effective healer...