Some trepidation ahead of this week's Guild Wars: Nightfall session, given the rather nightmarish difficulties we had with the various crack Margonite assault squads were were encountering in both mission, and overland areas, but overall, the session went very well, which seems to be setting a bit of a pattern for these weekly outings; one week we'll be magnificent conquering heroes, and the next we'll be kicked up and down the continent like mistreated puppies.
This week turned out to be one of the decent trips, mostly to a great deal of post-mortem, research, adaptation and a lengthy meeting of our roving mercenary band's personnel department.
The early part of the evening was taken up in an entirely different fashion however, with me returning to my long abandoned Ranger/Necro, and helping a friend 'run' their brand new (and so far 'Survivor') Tyrian Mesmer, from Piken Square, to Lion's Arch.
In general, I don't especially approve of the concept of 'running' in Guild Wars - it seems a lot to me like cheating. It basically consists of skipping content, by getting your lazy and/or new character into a group with a high-level character with various run-speed and avoidance skills (typically a Ranger/Warrior), and then heading out into the explorable area you'd rather not bother fighting through. Then you just lounge around near the entry point, while your 'taxi' takes off, alone, into the wilds. Some time later, when they're dodges, sprinted, evaded and storm-chased their way to the far end, and careened into the exit swirley, the whole group, including your lazy backside, zones into the next area.
Do this enough, and you'll find yourself halfway across the world map, and in a much higher leveled town that you shouldn't really be at by now, complete with access to weapon and armour shops containing equipment much more powerful than you ought to have. Once the towns and outposts are unlocked in this manner, you can then map travel instantly between them at any point from then on. All a bit sordid frankly, but I'm not completely heartless, and in my friend's defence, this is about the eighth character they've created, so the intervening regions must be a bit samey by now.
It was also quite interesting for me. Rangers are ideally suited to this kind of thing, but I'd never really given it a go. One skillbar change later, I was jogging along the Northern Shiverpeaks at a fair old dash, and managed to get from Piken Square to Lions Arch with only two deaths - both in the Griffon's Mouth caves, where the Snow Ettins are a bit dense and managed to physically body-block me, and then beat on me enough to stop me getting my Troll Unguent (massive self HP-regen) cast in time. In spite of my high-minded principles, I'm quite proud of the run really, and many folks charge a fair old rate of gold for doing that kind of thing as a professional service for the indolent and bored ninth time around alt. 2k for Yak's Bend to Lion's Arch was a price I saw touted, although on balance, I'd rather earn it spending the same amount of time beating on monsters in Vabbi.
Interesting, but a diversion, and back to my Mesmer/Paragon, and the main story. Last time, you left us stuck in the Attack at the Kodash quest, and generally being owned by Margonites. A number of preparations helped turn the tables this week. Firstly, Lightbringer. In the course of our work as jobbing mercenaries, we've been racking up a tally of collect-n-save points with the Master of Whisper's Sekrit Club, rather like Nectar Points, I think, and without noticing, had gained enough for the 'Lightbringer' rank. I thought this was just a flashy title to wave about and didn't think more of it, but in the Chantry of Secrets, turns out we can cash these in for the above status effect buff. When displaying the Lightbringer title, we now get +5% damage vs demons, and -1 damage reduction from them, in particular, Margonites. Very handy, but we'd forgotten to go cash the points in!
Also, we had a word with Personnel, delivering some shocking appraisals on the performance, targets and team-player-ish-ness of our usual line up of Heroes and Henchmen, and now have a much revised roster, with three monks instead of two, and more Paragons, Warriors and Dervishes, which all helps tremendously. Between myself and the Necromancer, we have the arcane DPS covered, and it's tanks we needed. The quest went without hitch, and we then had another crack at last time's mission, the Grand Court of Sebelkeh, doing much better this time. We only got the Expert win, but that's good enough for me, and even knowing what you're doing, it's still a tough job doing it quickly enough for the Master. We'll be back later during the 'roundup', I expect.
Onward! The plot forks again here, Jennur's Horde with Koss, or Nundu Bay with Melonni, although this time we've automatically all got both Heroes, so can do either. We chose both, and again, found interesting missions in each case.
Nundu Bay is a return to one of the villages that had helped us in the past, and was now paying for it's foolishness. The mission, like many in GW in general, has much of the PvP Arena about it, only versus NPC monsters instead of players. In this case, it takes the form of a kind of capture and defend the flag, type of thing. You start in the village, and have to defend the Elder, while waves of Margonites charge at the place, including some quite beefy bosses. Then in the latter phase, you need to head on out and destroy their enemy boss demon things, which need hitting with a coordinated cast of a special mission-specific debuff, to make them vulnerable to attack for short spans.
It sounds complicated, but isn't really and we did well, although failed the first go outright, as unbeknown to us, the Elder is a healer and was following us into the heart of the enemy castle, dragged there by his urge to try and keep our Minion Master's naturally degenerating pets alive. We were about three seconds from winning, when we all suddenly died, instantly. Turns out the Elder had gormlessly wandered into the fray, trying to heal the disposable Bone Horrors, etc, and got wiped out, which instantly kills everyone. Stoopid Elder!
Second go, once we'd realised what was happening, I had a stern word with the MM, and after the first, defence, phase, got them to let all their pets die, (to much grumbling), leaving our party with no-one needing healing. We then headed pretty far out, and the MM made new troops from the next set of enemies. After that, the rest was quite easy, whether due to the Lightbringer Buff, revised team roster, or just a somewhat easier mission, I can't tell, but it worked, and we even killed off the two extra demons at the back, granting us the Master completion.
Jennur's Horde saw us revisiting the Gardens, featured in the bizarre solo diplomatic mission a few back, only here too, Things Have Gone Horribly Wrong, and there's more demons to slay.
This was definitely the harder of the two, I found, and takes the form of a kind of Rugby match, where the demons here can only be destroyed by dropping a carryable object next to them. When you do, a spirit rises in it's place, and it's only from these, that new balls can be generated. You get one ball to start with, and the spirits are easily killed by the regularly times waves of Margonite attackers, meaning that as well as pushing forward to take out new demons and raising new spirits, you need to watch the back too, and look out for flanking waves of enemies getting behind you, killing off your spirits and running you out of new balls. If this happens, it's all over. The very last demon to be killed needs three of these balls dumping on him, and to get the bonus, you need to deviate away from the main path of the assaulting waves for a dangerous amount of time to kill some extra demons up the stairs, so all in all, a very hectic mission, and one I'm glad wasn't timed!
We got it in the first go, Masters and all, but at one point, we were down to the last ball generating spirit, and spent an awfully long time dashing back and forth, alternately pushing forward to the next demon and dumping the light bombs, dashing back for new ones, and trying to beat off waves of enemies who came perilously close to trashing our last spirit. Some outstanding 'touchdown' dashes on the stairs too! A very hard fought mission, and quite satisfying to see the top result at the end of it all.
All this, and some less notable linking quests, brings our time in Vabbi to a close, and now, we're off to a new land, the enigmatically named 'Desolation', in hot pursuit of an evil madwoman, who is intent on opening Hell, and letting The Big Guy out for a breath of fresh air, and clearly needs to be stopped. We thought we'd give it a go - after all, we've not got much else on right now, but if I'm any judge of this kind of thing, it's all likely to get much worse before it gets any better...