Back to work in
Guild Wars: Nightfall, with our injured member of the Fellowship now down to a dose of painkillers sufficiently low enough to allow the operation of a mouse and recognition of simple coloured moving shapes on a computer monitor. Not that we'd have particularly have minded them trying to participate anyway, and indeed, given that they're a Dervish/Warrior with an alarming propensity to go berserk if a monster even
looks at their skirt funny, it's questionable whether we'd have even noticed!
Still RL takes precedence, and all that, but we're reunited at last and are now moving on with the big Story, managing to romp onward through the
Venta Cemetery and
Kodonur Crossroads missions, and Primary Questing between.
Venta Cemetery went well, seeing us carry out the most rambling refugee evacuation in history. Our attempts to also tick off the Bonus (Master's) Objectives meant that the poor weary scattered Sunspear refugees we were notionally escorting to a hidden dock for naval extraction and dustoff, ended up joining us in a thorough scouring of the entire Sunward Marches map, and eliminating every guard post in the land; all in all, probably more fighting than they 'd seen in the entire war they were trying to flee from until we turned up. Poor things.
The Guardposts, the bonus objectives, are apparently quite tricky, as their guards need to be eliminated within a set timer once aggroed, or we get pounded by long-range artillery from the central fortress. It was amid this confusion I started to get some kind of inkling of what Mesmers are actually
for. Each tower group consists of a number of enemies - some Ranger and Paragon types, ranged attackers, some Monk healers, some offensive casters (Elemetalists, Necromancers and Mesmers) and some Dervish and Warrior types - melee. As we'd approach, the alarm would go up and each time, the following would happen:
The melee fighters charge toward us.
The casters would all stay where they were, and throw a few buffs out, then start either nuking or healing the fighters.
The ranged folks also stay put and start firing.
The whole lot break into two groups, effectively, scattered melee types in amoung our group, and a mid-ranged cluster of their casters and ranged, all near the foot of the tower. I had a largely random skillbar at the time, but lately I've been trying to up the amount of Mesmer-based Domination spells I have, and lower the amount of Paragon-based Motivation ones. We have plenty of healing Heroes and Henchmen on board now, who are generally a lot more on the ball than I am with heals.
One particular Mesmer spell turned out to completely alter our fortunes as we worked through these timed guard clusters; '
Mistrust', and the text reads,
"For 6 seconds, the next time target foe casts a Spell that targets a foe, the spell fails and all nearby allies take 15...63 damage."
In other words, drop that on one of the enemy offensive casters, and sit back and watch the fun. This works very well against the Elementalist enemies, who often try to cast very powerful AOE damage spells with a long charge-up timer, (that you can watch if you have them targeted). Many times, the Kournan Scribes would get 80% the way through a big hitter like Meteor, I'd land Mistrust on them, and then instead of the firey airstrike, all the other ranged enemies around him, i.e. the healers, necros, rangers, mesmers, and paragons, all get hit for 43 damage a piece. (I've not yet maxed my Domination Skill) Very satisfying, and for good measure I'd follow it up with a
Chaos Storm too - persistent small-AOE location based damage that they're too daft to move away from! Enemy Necromancers are also great for this technique, as they tend to spam out fast cheap offensive spells, often relying on such to drain health and stay alive. Buggering up that alone is worth it, and the supplemental counter-AOE is just a bonus!
And this kind of thing is what Mesmers are all about, I'm starting to see. A kind of magical 'karate' where you use your opponent's strength against him. Mesmering seems to be choc full of these kinds of twists, slights, interrupts, feints and warps, making the whole class a bit of a tricky one, being all VERY situational most of the way through. Nearly all the spells available to the class are only useful if you can find the right moment, the sudden opportunity or lucky opening. Find those and there are all manner of elegant ways to give the enemy the right kind of little 'flick' to cause them a total catastrophe, and usually, death, if not directly, then by making it very difficult for them to survive the onslaught from your more crude and less subtle sword-wielding friends, heroes and henchmen.
I'd tended to ignore my Mesmer half really, being basically a Paragon with gimped armour, but improved power regeneration. That's all going to change, I can tell, as I'm becoming increasingly fascinated with the art of skilled Mesmerisation, and the more complexity is revealed, the more I'm intrigued.
A good judge of a class's popularity in Guild Wars is to visit the Rune Traders and do a quick survey of prices. These are based on supply and demand from the playerbase, and every time I check, the Mesmer runes are always at rock bottom prices. I don't see many Mesmers about in the towns either - mostly it's Warriors, Monks or some combination thereof. For magical folks, Elemetalist is a more satisfying 'bang per buck' kind of playstyle. They work just as you'd expect an angry wizard would - fire...more fire, sometimes some ice, more fire, maybe an earthquake or two, and a bit of fire to finish. Mesmers are more fiddley, not very direct-damaged based and less popular as a result it seems, and it's probably no coincidence that the Mesmer 'look' is all Gypsy Tricksters and Masqued Elegance.
Anyway, we got through the entire set of 12 guard posts in this manner, quick enough not to trigger a single alarm, although some early confusion about who was on Disarm Trap Duty led to a lot of spikey pain and hilarity. ("Hands up anyone who took Disarm Trap?" Three hands go up...) Most importantly, we got the refugees out safely.
The Kodonur Crossroads mission went somewhat less efficiently, with one early wipe brought on by being a bit ambitious with a Bonus objective, and landing us in a fight with a cluster of mutally chain-healing Monks and a Monk Boss - nightmarish overhealing that just wore us down. A second attempt fared much better, with me getting a bit more lucky with my Mistrust and Chaos Storm target placements, and a well executed plan to confuse the Monk Boss into chain healing himself while the rest of our team picked off the other enemies. I was also using
Inspired Enchantment to 'steal' Monk Buffs and apply them to our own team, which is a bit cheeky and a lot of fun.
The final fight of the mission was a bit touch and go, twin bosses making life very difficult. Our Dervish went down, along with a few of our Heroes, leaving only half of the team, with no resurrects, to finish the job. We dug in and piled on the remaining boss and his cronies, and just about managed to bring him down, triggering the win cutscene. Nail biting stuff!
The story continues, and it's surprising to see that we're still only six missions down, out of seventeen in total. Plenty of action to come, and now I seem to finally
see what Mesmers are supposed to be, I need to buy up a whole neglected set of skills and get thinking about decent builds. Of course, I'm far from perfected, and the real epiphany will come when I can successfully bring together both the Mesmer's skills and the Paragon's, into one almighty and all-powerful, and most importantly, interlocking and complimentary build - Primary and Secondary in perfect harmony - something I've never managed to do to my own satisfaction with any character to date.