Guild Wars: Factions continues, and this time saw us picking up with the investigation of a sudden outbreak of a quite horrific plague on the island of Shing Jea. While the early symptoms seem to consist mostly of an irrational bloodlust, causing the afflicted to attack former friends and allies with impunity, the more advanced cases are something else again.
As we joined up with a group of Master Togo's more advanced students in the Jaya Bluffs and Haiju Lagoon, further isolated outbreaks required our investigation, and subsequent cleansing, and many nasty symptoms became apparent, including wholesale mutation of once normal men and women, into bulbous organic walking nightmares. Clearly our little band of Canthan CDC Investigators were getting close to the source of the outbreak, which turned out to be in the normally tranquil valley of Zen Daijun, a holy place, and the venue for the next Mission.
Before all that though, I did manage to get time to finish my advanced training at the monastery. While the very first introductory tutorial, just after character creation, wasn't especially helpful to me; "Click to move there", "Click the monster to shoot it with your wand", the advanced training was actually quite useful. Broken into several different lessons, it covers such diverse topics as Damage Reduction, Kiting, Combo Use, Interrupts, Condition Removal and more. All very useful stuff that becomes invaluable later on in all the campaigns, and better still, Instructor Ng doles out a large collection of free skills and spells to be able to do all these things.
Free skills are always nice, as they quickly ramp up to costing 1000gp each to buy, and one of the ones he gave me became my Skill of the Night; Cruel Was Daoshen. This was part of the Ritualist's version of the Skill Chaining lesson, intended for use in concert with another he gave me, Channeled Strike.
Cruel Was Daoshen is something I'd not come across before on other classes, an Item Spell. There seems to be a lot of these for the Ritualist, and all of them involve summoning an urn of ashes, of a long dead ancestor of legend. This is a carryable item, much like the various flags, levers, stone tablets and the like, lasts for a set duration, and either has an effect while being held, or when dropped, or sometimes both.
In this case, Doashen's ashes seem to be highly explosive, and when the thing is dropped, it does a large amount of close-AoE lightning damage. I think I'd have liked to have met him when he was alive! The cinders of other long dead heroes can heal, buff, blind and so on, and as shown in the lesson, many of the Ritualist's other spells tend to work even better if you're carrying something at the time, and some of the armour upgrade Insignias offer bonus armour points if the wearer is holding a carryable.
It allows me to set up a decent damage blast ahead of fights, and recover the spent mana before it all begins, although on the down side, holding any kind of carrayable prevents your standard auto-attack from working, so this kind of thing is best used for casting-heavy characters with no weapon-required skills anyway, (Axe Attacks, Bow Attacks, etc). Despite the more lumbering run animation, it doesn't seem as if carrying these actually slows my foot-speed down any. Works very well with the remote time-delayed Spirit Rift blast - if you can get to the rift in time and drop the ashes at the same time as the lightning ball goes off, hilarity ensues!
Something I do need to learn, and quickly, is not to do my usual repeated mashing of 'C' and then 'Space' during hectic fights, as when carrying something, this makes you run toward the target, rather than stand there and start shooting as usual. Not good if you're a lightly armoured caster, although saying that, I am holding a very fragile kind of Tesla Bomb, so getting real close to the target isn't always a bad thing! I probably ought to map the big blue 'Drop Item' button to an easy to reach key, too.
As a set of class mechanics, the Ritualist is definitely interesting and different, and I'm quite getting into it now, although from a lore perspective, I'm still a little confused as to where the Necromancer's role in society ends, and the Ritualist's begins. Ritualists seem more concerned with long-past ancestors, whereas the Necromancer deals with the dead of the present day, perhaps? I'll have to do more reading up!
Anyway, back to the mission, #2 - Zen Daijun, which saw us meet up with Master Togo again, to investigate the source of the plague on Shing Jea. This seemed the first 'real' mission, and this time there was little in the way of walkthrough or tutorial as we went. The rustic cultivated valley, again in the Shing Jea, pseudo-feudal Japanese style, was awash with malformed and icky mutant plague victims, often in large groups, and in a variety of powerful classes. We still haven't access to Nightfall yet, so had to make do with standard Henchmen, but despite this, we did well.
In particular Taya, and Sister Tai, the henchmen Monks available, seem even worse than Alesia in terms of general alertness, fragility and propensity to kamikaze suicide death. I can't wait to hook up with Dunkoro and Talhkora again! On the other hand, Professor Gai, the Spirit based Ritualist Henchman seems a pretty effective healer, and the spirits he summoned are allied to me, meaning a great many of my own spirit-based spells work with those too (Draw Spirit, Painful Bond and Spirit Boon Strike), greatly multiplying my own effectiveness. The Prof seems to be using the more defensive and healing spirits, (Shelter, Union) which complement my own attack spirits nicely (Pain, Bloodsong).
Dotted along the trail in liberal profusion, were low-lying clouds of pink mist - plague miasma, and when run through, these apply a fierce old health degeneration, and this effect shares the contagious nature of all GW Disease effects, making it a bugger to shift as the henchmen keep reinfecting each other, and us, and of course there was the usual supporting cast of Bosses all in our way too. The Master completion here is just a timed objective, and forewarned of this by the Assassin, who again is my native guide, I ditched the ranger traps I had previously, reducing me yet again to a single profession build; mostly Ritualist Channeling this time.
I give up! The trouble is, although some Primary/Secondary combos do indeed synergise together fairly well, none of them seem to do so with quite the clever design that a Primary tends to synergise with itself. On the whole, each of a profession's attributes seem to be a well thought-out and complete set of interlocking skills, and for PvE work at least, you can happily get all the way through a campaign with eight skills chosen only from one section of the skill list, particularly the 'Damage' based one each profession seems to get; Domination, Smiting Prayers, Fire Mastery, Marksmanship, etc.
I've done so twice now; a Ranger entirely specced to Beastmastery, and a Mesmer set to 100% Domination. Spare attribute points can be pumped into the Primary Class Unique Attribute to aid the used set (Expertise and Fast Casting respectively, for the above, and Spawning Power for the Ritualist) and it only needs to be deviated from for particular and specific mission situations, I find, making a 20/20 build, more or less. 12/12/12 builds offer more flexibility, but even there, the three chosen skills seem most effective if all from the one profession.
Maybe it's all different for PvP, where folks take a given Secondary purely for one very specific and useful spell or skill. Mind you, it is nice to have access to the Secondaries for just experimentation and variety, if nothing else.
We got to the end without major mishap, scoring a Master's on the first go, and found where the source of the plague was. It was identified by a very large and glowing calling-card of a sigil in the floor, apparently belonging to one Shiro Tagachi, a name that made even the usually unflappable Master Togo go a bit peculiar, especially since Shiro is supposed to have died, quite apocalyptically, some time ago.
(I should know, we've killed him already! At the end of Nightfall, but for the purposes of this campaign, I'm going to pretend that never happened!)
Troubling portents abound, Dooooom awakes, and now we're off to the big city on the mainland to find out more, and with any luck there will be a fair bit of Evil to destroy along the way!
(Better get my series-long spoiler warning in early; Warning! Contains Factions Spoilers for the next few months! Mind you, Factions is getting on for a year and a half old now, and we're going at this roughly a mission a week, so even if you're only starting it now, you really ought to get to the end before we do!)