A quite hectic push forward in
GuildWars: Nightfall this week, seeing us tackle two quite tricky missions in our own inimitable style, and then trying them again properly and succeeding. Due to a previous misunderstanding about choice of Heroes, we're now currently splitting up at several points along the story, and ending up having to different missions, depending on whether we picked Magrid the Sly, or the Master of Whispers to be our own personal lackeys.
Each of these two supporting characters in the overall epic drama that is the Nightfall campaign, has their own little story arc, and it seems we're getting to do both sets of missions, while most soloing through it would only have access to one. (Until much later, after we've 'won', when apparently, the whole thing unlocks for revisiting anyway). So we ended up doing both 10a (
Dzagonur Bastion) AND 10b (
Dasha Vestibule), and in a way, I'm quite glad, as they turned out to be quite different types of gaming experience, and both a lot of fun, if frustrating in their own ways. Between them, they took up most of our session, for only half the overall progress, but I'm not in any real rush to complete the campaign - it's the journey, not the destination, for me.
First off was the Bastion, which turned out to be a quite rousing mini war in it's own right. We found ourselves in a desert fortress on the edge of the kingdom of Vabbi, which was lucky for the local Prince as it turned out, as our arrival coincided suspiciously with that of an invading army of evil winged demon things, along with assorted human troopers. See!? Heroes = Trouble! After a rather Braveheart-esque cutscene that got me quite fired up, we charged out into the valley to take on the advancing hordes. Possibly I was too fired up, because things went a bit pear-shaped quite quickly, and we all got wiped out.
Going in to these missions blind isn't helpful, and unless you've seen what's going on in a bit of detail, it's difficult to pull off a Complete+Bonus in the very first go. Still, the experience was instructive, and showed what was going on. The second go went much more successfully as a result.
The valley is breached by several purple swirls, which serve to teleport new enemy troops in in waves, at various intervals, while at the other end, the fort you're trying to protect has some fairly powerful bombard catapult tower things. Also, as this is the enigmatic Master of Whispers' mission, he provides members of his sekrit society as extra troops. Clusters of these can be assigned simple orders, and with the towers too, the whole thing almost feels like an RTS type of game. Intelligent use of these resources is clearly the key, but you still have to spend a lot of time running about the terrain to help whittle down each advancing wave of troops, which come at you from several directions at once,making for a very energetic mission all in all, with mini-map pings and arrows going off all the time.
It's a mission that favours the Minion Master specced Necromancer, while my anti-caster skillbar, while useful in places, wasn't as helpful overall as it could have been, since most of the rank and file were melee or rangers. Still, we did it on the second go, killing off the General bosses to end the siege, and much to our surprise, got the Masters too, which consists of keeping the tower defences alive as well. We lost one during the assault, but turned out you need to lose two or more to fail the bonus. Huzzah!
Meanwhile, the other mission also proved tricky, and possibly the harder of the two. The Vestibule is more of a traditional dungeon-crawl type of game, traps, treasures, riddles and trials - all that - and it Magrid the Sly's mission, who clearly fancies herself as some kind of 15th century Persian Lara Croft. Things went south quite early on in this one, mostly due to the sheer power of the various spellcasting monsters in the place; mostly djinn and magical ether-tiger things; Elementalists, Mesmers, Paragons and Dervishes, by profession, and while all of them hurt terribly, the Ruby Djinn in particular. These are creatures made of fire, carrying swords made of fire, who have Elementalist powers, and have a nasty habit of setting fire to everything within about three miles of our party, every 10 seconds or so. So summing up, MY GOD, THE FIRE!
I exaggerate a bit, I'm sure, but these creatures, if left unchecked can cause a total and sudden party wipe in very short order. Being wailed on by two Sapphire Djinn dervishes at the same time doesn't help much either. And don't get me started on the Roaring Ethers either - large Mesmer cat things who basically use all my clever tricks, only faster and more accurately than I do, AND have resurrection signets too, which isn't fair. Monsters shouldn't be as capable as players, it defies the Natural Order!
As elemental monsters, these tend not to leave corpses for the Minion Master to raise and turn into troops, so in this mission, I found my own anti-casters skills of greater use - a reversal of the Bastion mission. Even so, it took several goes for us to get it right, and a number of skillbar revisions for the whole party until we found a winning combo. My own concessions to the job at hand were Ether Feast, my self-heal, which I don't normally bother with, and Mantra of Flame, a situational stance that adds damage reduction and energy gain from one chosen type of damage - in this case, fire....so much fire... Between these two, I managed to counter my somewhat fragile basic nature and have a much easier time of it staying alive. Reconfiguring Acolyte Jin to be better at causing interruption helped a lot, but I was still run off my feet trying to keep the big pyromaniac fire-monsters from setting the whole world on fire, through well-timed use of my various interrupt skills.
Being able to consistently interrupt enemy casting is a key skill for the Mesmer, and to a lesser extent, Ranger too, and I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. One of our failed runs saw us get right to the L28 Super-Fire-Monster Boss Djinn-Thing at the end, only to be completely incinerated by some sort of Arcane Tactical Nuke it has, in one cast. The successful run, I managed to stop him getting a single spell off. Interrupting is about speed - literally being able to see him start casting, and hit your own hotkey before he can finish, and I worry I'm just not that fast at games these days, so that was reassuring to see. I guess for real practice at this most deft of arts, I ought to think about PvP.
The mission also saw a few puzzles - a nice touch. One was based on knowing the Lore of GuildWars, which I got right first go, marking me out as really needing to get out more, and the other was a number puzzle which took a ridiculous amount of time, mostly because I complete over-analysed it and went off on one. "Prime Numbers? No...Happy Primes? No...Fibonnachi Series? It's Square roots! Hmm...Factorials...." While the Minion Master, who has done all this before, just giggled a lot. The solution, which turned out to be fast more straightforward than that, made me very cross indeed, but then I guess I forgot where I was for a moment in my own self-inflated arrogance. It's GuildWars, not the Open University. Ho hum...
A good, if challenging, session all round though. Looking forward to the next!