A bit of extra-curricular Guild Wars activity recently, seeing me poking about with nervous curiosity at the Great Temple of Balthazar and environs, mostly for a sense of completeness with the World Map uncovering. The various PVP-dedicated bits of the world of Guild Wars are largely campaign independent and mostly located on a separate island chain, where live the Zaishen Order, a kind of monastic order mostly concerned with the pursuit of enlightenment found by beating each other to death, and beyond. On these islands are a number of lobbies for various types of PvP event, along with the Guild Hall, which is itself a kind of PvP arena also.
The various map pin locations in The Battle Isles are quite interesting places in their own right, and even those with no interest in PvP at all might still enjoy a bit of a wander about the various lobby-island areas, most of which have a kind of far eastern, oriental theme - all pagodas, cherry blossom, terraces and misted roaring waterfalls. Being an isolated mini-continent of it's own, none of this counts toward any Cartographer title, but I still like uncovering as much of the blurred bits as I can. You can get there from any campaign, via it's 'Travel' boat menu, at whichever main city you'd also visit the other campaigns from; Lion's Arch, Kamadan, or whichever one it is in Factions.
The Temple itself provides a kind of mini quest driven path through the Zaishen Elite and Zaishen Challenge areas - arena fights against predetermined AI teams - and also allows access to an extremely well equipped 'testing' area - The Isle of the Nameless. This is all quite handy for both PvE and PvP purposes, and in particular, the Isle has a large number of stationary, respawning 'Masters'; Master of Resurrection, Master of Healing, Master of Interrupts, and so on, along with the AoE distance familiarisation rings, condition generating NPCs, and more. This allows you to experiment with, and against, all sorts of very specific skill, spell, attack and tactic, in a far more controlled situation than you'd find out in the PvE Campaign areas; Nightfall, Prophecies, Factions.
This Island Chain is where the PvP-Only characters live, battle, and earn their Balthazar Faction Points. However, these points seem account based, rather than per character, and can be spent on Unlocks, with the Priests of Balthazar. I've no idea where mine had come from, but I had 2300 or so Balthazar points - possibly from much earlier PvP dabblings back when Prophecies was new and fresh, and I soon realised that the skill Unlocks, although not applicable for my visiting PvE Mesmer/Paragon themselves, would apply to any of my accompanying Heroes, on any of my characters, PvP or PvE.
Powerful Heroes, or at least decently set up Heroes with at least one relevant Elite Skill to choose from, help enormously in all PvE endeavours in Guild Wars, and in particular, my Melloni, a Primary Dervish Hero, is very difficult to shop for. Paragon and Dervish Elites tend only to occur in awkward locations toward the far end of the Nightfall Campaign - unlike the basic six profession Elites, which we can use our old characters to go and track down skills for, from Prophecies.
However, a quick look at the Balthazar rewards list show that I can pick any Dervish Elite I like for her, at the modest cost of 3000 faction points without all that tedious trekking to the back-end of beyond to find the relevant Dervish Boss. You get these points in various measure for PvP Victory. I think it's 40 points per kill, 50 for a match win and a further 50 for a win during which none of your team gets killed. What do points make? Prizes! Time to hit the Arena!
It's not entirely about farming, mind you. My PvE Tuesdays have been characterised by a heavy Fast-Casting and Domination Build, designed mostly to issue a stern, health-ruining, energy-burning, beat-down on waves of NPCs. It works, but Mesmers get two other skills, Inspiration and Illusion, and these seem much more situational and specific; debuff and DOT-based. To be honest I still don't know what a lot of them are for, but one thing they do seem quite good for, is making life very awkward for bosses, and notably, other players.
So I threw together a 12/12/12 FC/Insp/Illus build, with appropriate equipment, a second set of armour with different runes in, and a somewhat unfocussed skillbar mostly designed to simply try out a lot of the more obscure Inspiration and Illusion hotkeys I'd been collecting so far. Despite being a secondary Paragon, I'm doing my usual thing of focusing purely on the primary. With all that set up, I hit Enter Battle.
The Random Arenas are just that. Eight people, randomly chosen from the pool of players who just joined the queue, are divided into two teams of four. The Objective is usually to kill off the enemy team, although some variations exist. Trouble is, you literally have no idea who or what is going to be on your team, so one's own build does rather need to stand alone, and have something for everyone.
Inspiration and Illusion seem quite flexible in this regard, including many stances, the Mesmer self-heal, some great movement hampering spells, and some fierce health degeneration, but you are still working blind, with no idea who the enemy is going to be, or indeed, the other three people on your own team.
For this reason, many folks in the Talk Pages of the GuildWiki don't regard RA as 'real' PvP. I can see why, to be honest, and the various matches did seem a bit arbitrary, often decided simply by the presence, or otherwise, of a Primary Monk on one team or the other. The winning team remains together to fight the next match, and the losing team are disbanded and dumped back out onto the lobby beach, ready to roll the group dice again.
The longest run I managed was four in a row, which was a team with a pretty decent monk, and a warrior too. Sometimes, players from either team, on seeing the lack of a monk in their team window, would just quit out instantly, making matters a great deal worse for those who stayed. I don't particularly mind, and we even won one of those! Three of us, vs four of them, and by some bizarre quirk of tactics, we ended up managing to keep them on the run and under control throughout the match, which just goes to show that it isn't always a foregone conclusion in those situations.
I do think it's important to be a good sport about it all though, and I seem to remember spending a good few minutes being camped on a resurrection shrine long after all three of my supposed teammates had quit the field in rage/disgust/shame, dying over and over on respawn, and generating 40 points a go for the victorious enemy team. Well, why not? Doesn't cost me anything and must be quite annoying to have the opposition just run away at the mere sight of you.
My own skill bar is a thing of continual evolution, and mostly, I just flail about and try to add Hex-based pressure to whichever member of the enemy team is nearest. It sort of works, but relies a lot on the enemy being strangers to each other too, and having a reasonably diverse team. One match we ended up with three Mesmers and a poor lone Assassin, a team build that probably could be made to work with a bit of planning, but not when meeting for the first time.
I quite like it's casual hectic nature though - for a start, there is a certain amount of 'fate' involved. You can tell just by looking, that a certain make-up of team isn't going to work very well and this takes a bit of personal pressure out of it, for me. It's okay to lose, because some of the team lineups just aren't going to win. I also quite like the unpredictability of it all. Hopefully, it'll teach me what skills are worth taking, and what aren't, and which ones to use against which types of target - a kind of crash course in many of the very situational Mesmer skills to be found in the Illusion spellbook. Things tend to move along too fast for many people to stand about smack-talking too, which is nice.
I'm a long way from being able to ramble with any kind of authority on PvP builds, but one of the most useful spells I had that night was Illusion of Weakness. Cast at the start of the match, before the gates have even opened, this hits me for 202hp of damage, and applies an enchantment, which will sit there indefinitely, until either dispelled, or I get injured down to 25% health. In either case, it gives me the 202hp back instantly, making it a kind of health 'battery'. 202hp is about half my hp total, and several times, folks overextended somewhat, trying to go for the kill on the fragile little caster, only to find me suddenly at 75% hp again, and now they're too far in, and taking a beating from a Warrior or Elementalist, or similar, as well as my own debuffs. Assuming I survive and get clear, recasting it will store another 202hp, ready for the next sortie. Natural HP regen in GW is often fast enough to completely replace the initial HP hit, before combat is even joined.
I'm sure there's better Mesmer combos to go for in this kind of arena, but part of the fun is the tweaking between matches, and before I knew it, I'd gained enough faction to buy Melloni Avatar of Lyssa - an Elite Dervish 'Form' Skill that helped our Tuesday PvE Campaigning, no end!
I'm not sure I'm quite World Championship material just yet, but a bit of light-hearted PvP RA dabbling is turning out to be quite fun, a useful way to learn some of the less frequently used things I can do as a Mesmer, AND a useful way to improve our party's power - through the Hero Elite Skill unlocks. And who knows, perhaps once I get used to all this, it might be worth giving the Hero Battles a go; 1 + 3 Heroes vs. 1 + 3 Heroes - effectively solo PvP matches, with a bit more pressure...