Harsh times this week in
GuildWars: Nightfall, and the thing definitely seems to be getting more difficult now. Either that, or we've missed something fundamental with the builds. Only one mission this week; the
Grand Court of Sebelkeh, and it took three goes, and even then we only came out with the 'Standard' award - i.e. the bare minimum performance it will grudgingly allow you to continue the story with. Oh the ignominy!
The mission is a contrast to many so far, in that the whole thing takes place in one relatively small room, inside the huge floating Temple of Lyssa, seen from all over the Mirror of Lyss explorable area. The room is quite tight, and consists of a central altar, and three short corridors radiating out from it. This altar is a kind of capturable flag, and at the end of the three corridors are more of those Chaos Portal things, which take turns to spew out a ghostlike creature called 'The Blasphemy', who makes repeated runs at the altar in an attempt to, well, er, Blaspheme it. This must not be allowed to happen, so in we go.
Not only have we to keep the altar itself secure, but also somehow make assaults on the portals too, to close them down, which all requires a lot of clever timing, and the ability to split the team somewhat, either by ourselves, or through creative use of the Hero waypoint flags. The Blasphemy isn't hard to kill, but tends to cause AOE hexes, and disintegrates into a cluster of evil chaos energy balls, which take quite a bit of killing each time. This clean up needs to be maintained, while we also need to somehow find time to charge the portals and close them.
The whole thing is severely hampered by the inclusion of chaos-angel-demon-things called Margonites, of various professions, which for some reason, our group is having a lot of trouble with - in particular the Warrior and Dervish variants, which pack a fair old punch, and take a long time to bring down, cuasing us fragile caster types to spend a lot of time either running away, or dying as the cleave their way to us. Not just this mission, either, but during the next linking quest after that, these pale abberrations are generally making life very difficult, and new tactics, and new builds, will be needed.
Possibly the main problem is that our group, having spent a long time dealing with Djinn and Roaring Ethers beforehand, seems to have fine-tuned itself mostly to deal with enemy casters. I know I have, and when faced with a tank, my skillbar doesn't have a lot of options at the moment, something I'm going to have to remedy soon. Another difficulty is that our Minion Master is a bit of a double edged sword. It's fine indeed to have a horde of undead horrors clearing you a path, but if for any reason, the Necromancer in charge goes down, or crashes, or whatever, the horde goes feral, all turning red, and then turning the tide quite harshly against us, adding a variety of monsters to the enemy forces suddenly. Even if we do manage to get back on top by killing them off, the Necro now has no troops, and you can't raise undead from undead corpses. It takes a while to get back up to full power.
The third time, we just about got there, mostly with the cunning use of flags, but were dismayed to get only the 'easy' completion, having taken about 16 minutes to do the job, what with all the running about and general pandemonium. To gain the Master's the whole thing needs to be done in less than 6 minutes, apparently. I'm sure that's possible, but we're going to need a completely different approach I expect, and a whole set of skills and spells specifically tailored to this one mission.
It's easy, coming as I do from more normal MMOs, to get a skillbar together, and get comfy with it, when I'm starting to see that this is complacency, and that ideally, the eight skills should be specifically chosen with the next task in mind, and then rechosen for the next after that, and so on. These aren't Talents, and cost nothing to 'respec', once you've bought the thing in the first place. Guild Wars is no place for the lazy.
I expect we'll be back in there soon, as frankly, a Standard Win isn't good enough, although I would settle for an Expert Win. (6-9 mins). It's one of those very 'PvP Arena-like' missions, which despite being conducted against NPCs, feels a lot more like a deathmatch flag game, than the more outdoorsey overland exploration that I prefer. Still, we did manage to get some of that done too, almost completely uncovering the Garden of Seborhin map, and in doing so, reaching the 60% first cartographer title, so some small source of pride there. Out of all of the titles on offer, the Cartographer ones appeal the most.
We're now currently stuck on the follow-on mission;
Attack at the Kodash, which shouldn't be difficult, but is, mostly due to the huge numbers of those bloody Magonites again! Grr! Still, I'm sure we'll figure out their weakness next time...