Meanwhile, in Guild Wars: Nightfall, the Tuesday N00b Club forges ahead, and an end is in sight. Night has fallen on Elona, and the world slowly but inexorably slides into a twisted version of it's former self, made hideous by the taint of a chained, maddened and vengeful god. Only a small band of plucky and driven heroes stand between the end of all things, and the slim hope of salvation, restoration, and victory.
I'm getting quite excited by it all actually, largely because of the clever way in which the Guild Wars Campaigns, and Nightfall in particular, are constructed.
Threaded throughout each campaign is a linear, albeit somewhat generic, story, and it's this that gives a sense of structure to the sessions in there for me. Without this ingenious cutscene and mission driven path, play in Guild Wars might easily degenerate into a somewhat uninspired set of killing sprees, varied only by the ecology and climate of each zone, and the level of the creatures therein.
One of the nice things about having a blog, is that you don't have to remember quite as much stuff from the past. Checking back in the Tuesday N00b Club category (sidebar), it comes as a bit of a shock to see that we actually started on this little jaunt a little under five months ago - regularly scheduled sessions of perhaps three or four hours, once a week. That's probably quite slow, and is one of the reasons I'm not too worried about my absentminded lack of spoiler warnings here. I figure that anyone who really wanted to complete Nightfall would probably have done so by now.
But back in that first post, I speculated that deliberately rationing the content on a weekly basis, despite all of us having the time and willingness to play more frequently, might keep the thing fresh, and I feel now that I was right. Perhaps I wouldn't be nearly as excited about our progress, and indeed, accomplishments, if we'd have just gone berserk and finished it a fortnight after it came out, and right now, I'm really savouring it, as a result of our own self-imposed limitations. Might this work for other MMOs, or is this only really something that works because of Guild Wars' pseudo-episodic nature?
Anyway, another decent session this week, but hard work, with another two missions, plus linking travel and quests, ticked off. This seems to be the standard rate of progress for us these days, and therefore means that next week, if all goes well, we'll win!
First a bit of mucking about with the sandworms again. I've still not quite got the hang of these, but have noticed that they seem to work better if you don't use the special attacks, which are mostly melee-based, and just hang back and spit rocks at the enemy instead (the default attack). Things get a bit better once you pick up the...er...sandworm Elite skill, which is a massively powerful ranged shot for 400pts, but in general, the worms seem not to survive too well in dense melee furballs.
This worming about eventually lead us to the Ruins of Morah mission, and a final confrontation with the evil warlord demon summoner person we'd been chasing since Vabbi. This final reckoning proved to be a particularly difficult mission, with a deceptively simple objective; kill the warlord. The bonus ranks are to be had by doing this quickly, but it must have taken us at least six goes to get any kind of win at all.
The mission area is a quite small bowl type arena, in which the warlord is trying some bad juju ritual designed to punch a hole in reality and let Abaddon, the evil god, out of his prison dimension to wreak havoc. There isn't a lot of room in there, and the warlord starts off with three quite powerful healer minions in attendance, and is herself a pretty powerful Dervish type. In many ways it's a textbook classic 'Boss Level' of the old school, and killing her is fairly straight forward as long as you can take out the healers first - standard drill, although they all get Spell Breaker, which is a bitch versus Mesmer-me. Trouble is, she doesn't stay dead, and her evil patron sends her back again, transfigured, and also sends evil minion muscle along with her, and it was this second stage that caused all the fuss, frustration, gnashing of teeth, and repeated goes.
Most of the troubles came from being swamped by the various demons that arrive and start patrolling around the central area. These come in all the professions, and are mostly L28 each themselves. Trying to keep the respawns of these under control, in addition to dealing with an enraged and now Paragon-classed warlord is hard work and kept wearing us down. We went through a number of builds and party compositions, again highlighting the need to be flexible with one's character design, and pick the right tools for the job. In the end though, we did manage to crack it, mostly with clever luring and positioning, and a party with no melee heroes or henchmen in at all. This allowed us to just pull the boss out of the confusion without setting all the minions off, and having singled her out, we gradually executed her with ranged attacks and spells.
I ended up completely respeccing for the job in the end, going with the Inspiration/Illusion build that I normally use for dabbling in Random Arena PvP. More on that another time, but the spells and skills most ideally suited for mucking about with other player's heads seemed to be more useful against a L30 Paragon NPC Ubertank, than my usual mob-whacking Domination set, so it was all change. The Rank 2 Lightbringer skill, Lightbringer's Gaze, earned by general side-questing and altar bounties, helped tremendously here too. We struggled through and in the end, achieved an Expert Victory (2nd rank out of 3), which we were too exhausted to try and improve upon. Another time!
Despite winning, things still went badly, and what with one thing and another, we next found ourselves falling through a vortex in reality that opened up anyway, and now we're in hell. Well, The Realm of Torment anyway, but looking around at the fantastically imagined darkness, peppered with bizarre, spiky, unsettling and often pulsing organic floating fragments of solid land, peopled with maddened lost souls, and demons, it amounts to much the same thing. We killed off the warlord before the ritual could be completed, but the damage has been done, and I believe the idea now, is that we should go to hell anyway and kill Abaddon there; just to "make sure". I'm holding out for at least time-and-a-half on this job, along with substantial hazard pay.
A lengthy romp across a twisted version of the Jahai Bluffs (Nightfallen Jahai), which was eerie in it's familiarity, and we eventually reached the River of Souls, where those crazy Margonites were up to no good again - this time damning the souls. By this I mean the 'constructing an obstruction across a river' sense, rather than the 'condemning to an eternity of misery' sense. Terribly literal these Margonites. Having almost no regard for the metaphysical ordering of fantasy cosmology, or the practical necessities of having a punishment in the afterlife, to promote virtuous living in this life, we decided that since we were in hell anyway, we'd do what we could to improve things, and the next mission, the Gate of Pain, saw us doing just that - rampaging about freeing souls from torment, regardless of whether they actually deserved it or not!
Compared to the previous one, this was much easier, and a return to the more overland exploring type of rampage that I tend to prefer as a mission. A fairly large area, and numerous, but manageable enemies throughout. Mind you, not one for the squeamish, as a large part of the early section seems to take place inside the intestines of something quite large and gloopey. This particular visualisation of hell is well done, and follows the bio-mutant-nightmare theme in large parts - all pulsing pink glistening organs, inexplicable teeth and bone everywhere, and strange twitching nodular growths across the floor that it makes one nervous to get too near, in case of... burstage...
The mission has a global hex that hurts you for 20pts each time you use any skill, making some of our weaker and faster-casting Heroes a bit prone to collapse during the action, but didn't pose a huge problem overall. Some technical challenges further in though, with the Elementalist spider-type creatures. Like the Ruby Djinn of previous, these travel in pairs, and are capable of putting out a terrifying wattage of fire-based hurt if unopposed, even to the point of sudden party wipepout from just two of the buggers. I'm getting the hang of my craft now though, and managed to interrupt and disrupt with enough accuracy and regularity to prevent too much in the way of apocalyptic burnination, and we pushed on through to the end without major incident.
The bonus here is pretty straightforward too - kill off a number of additional demon emissary things, although we only got the Expert Victory again, mostly because we accidentally triggered the end cutscene before we could go back for the last emissary. They weren't terribly difficult to take out though, so going back through again to fill in this blank won't be hard work, during the big Round Up Sweep, after we win it all.
And now we stand at the Gate of Fear, as we work progressively further and further into the heart of darkness, the Realm of Torment itself. Two missions remain, meaning that unless something nightmarish and game-haltingly difficult happens, next week will be the final installment of "The Tuesday N00b Club vs Nightfall"...
Will Abaddon break free and consume the world? Now that Night has fallen, will the sun ever rise again? Will the stroppy Mesmer get all Emo at the threshold of victory and cause drama with the group? Time is running out, and only eight motley party members, of varying complexities of AI, stand between the darkness, and the dawn...
Tune in next week for the dramatic conclusion, of Guild Wars: Nightfall!