Seems my Internet troubles are all better now, and last night saw an uninterrupted Guild Wars: Factions session, where we managed to make up for all the lost progress of Tuesday. This week sees a new addition to the Tuesday N00b Club, in the form of a Ranger/Warrior with some rather unorthodox ideas about Melee Axemanship which I was initially dubious about, but which seemed to be working quite well as it turned out.
I don't know a lot about Warriors, per se, never having seriously given one a go for any real length of time, but being a Ranger Primary melee tank isn't such a daft idea as it initially sounds. Ranger Expertise makes the energy-using attack skills cheaper to spam out, and being a Warrior (or Paragon), allows for some of the eight skills to be chosen from the adrenaline-powered ones as well, helping sustained and rapid skill use even further. Although not having quite as much armour, or access to the damage reduction runes, the Ranger does have a lot of evasion and dodging skills in Wilderness Survival and Expertise, which may help avoid much of the damage in the first place, rather than soak it up, as a primary Warrior would. All looks good in theory, but we'll see over the coming weeks how it works out.
The unraveling of the mysterious plague continues, with us following the ever tenacious Master Togo around several of the more ravaged city districts of Kaineng, in search of it's source in the city, all against a backdrop of ongoing inter-gang warfare between the Am Fah and the Jade Brotherhood. We're on important business though, and so mostly end up barging through their turf wars and indiscriminately slaying both sides as we go.
A few side quests later, Master Togo receives word that his Number One Student has received his message, and is on the way to meet us all. This turns out to be Brother Mhenlo, of Factions Fame, and his merry band of traveling glory-hunters; Devona, Cynn, Eve, and Aidan, constant thorns in my side. While actually being the more useful of the henchmen available, this gang of wannabe heroes have a persistent habit of turning up half way through a campaign that we've already done most of the hard work for, along with the poor low-end unsung henchmen of each continent - the Claudes, the Orions, the Hertas, the Lukases. Then these day-tripping tourists swan in for the mid-to-end game and then swank about in the closing cutscenes, like they're the big shot heroes all along! Twice they've done this to me now, and it looks like it'll be three for three by the time this is all over! Never mind that they get to be on all the box art and posters too!
Ahem. Irrational jealousy of computer controlled AI henchmen aside, the story required that we go to meet with them, at Vizunah Square.
The story is quite interesting so far, told as usual, in cutscene form. One particular thing that caught my eye about this one, is that it's now started splitting and as well as showing us, doing our thing in the present day, it's also cutting to a quite effective sepia-toned timeline, which looks to be telling the story of Shiro Tagachi in flashback. Clearly, this chap is shaping up to be our main overarching Nemesis, so it's quite fascinating to be learning how he came to be so, at the same time as learning the next bits of our own story too.
Not quite Oscar Winning Screenplay stuff, but I'm certainly enjoying it's novel approach, despite the often comical minor bugs in the cutscene engine - things like minions and pets lumbering across the screen during expositions, unintended NPC fighting in the background, characters talking in the wrong gender voice and all sorts of other unintentional slapstick.
Anyway, after a particularly harrowing run through The Undercity, which I suspect we really ought to be L20 for, rather than 17,17 and 14, as we were, we made it to the lobby and #3 - Vizunah Square. Our Assassin then started relating all sorts of cryptic horror stories about this mission. They've been through here quite a few times before and was trying to impress upon myself and the Ranger what an absolute nightmare of frustration it is. Ignorant Was Van Hemlock!
The basic problem seems to be the nature in which Arenanet have tried to integrate characters from Tyria (Prophecies), into the main story that Canthan characters are following. In Nightfall, this is done very simply...the Tyrian adventurer just hops on a boat at Lion's Arch, gets to Kamadan, is rushed through a very hasty initiation into the Sunspears, and away they go, on to the main track with very little fuss. Much easier, and probably in response to what must have been an overwhelming torrent of bad feedback from this one mission we were now attempting.
It works like this, apparently: the Canthan party (that's us) starts at one entrance of the mission, with Master Togo. We head to a courtyard; the rendezvous point and waited, fighting off a few waves of plague mutants. Meanwhile, and at the same time, the server looks through any parties from Tyria who are starting the mission, from their own 'Foreign Quarter' lobby, and when it finds one, adds them to the same mission instance, escorting Brother Mhenlo. They then arrive at the courtyard, meet up with us, and both parties are then supposed to work through the rest of the mission together. Both Mhenlo and Togo must survive, and for Expert and Masters completion, there is an overall time-limit too.
It's a clever idea, but one most likely designed with two full parties of players in mind, of complementary class makeup, who all know what they're doing, and most crucially, don't think that Other Players are scum. Given how badly the majority of random pick-up groups do in just the one team in most other missions, the odds of 16 complete strangers pulling off the instinctive and extended teamplay needed to get this thing done, are slim indeed. Matters are not helped with henchmen either, as their rudimentary AI has a habit of making them follow whichever player, of either team, moved last, which tends to scatter the hired help all over the place, especially if the two teams are running off in different directions a lot, or indeed, many different direction, on a per player basis!
I'm not sure I really understood my Assassin friend's alarm and pessimism really - it was all a bit confusing and new to me, so I just suggested we start the thing as normal and do a bit of a recon sweep; find out what it was actually about before making a serious attempt on it. So in we went, with Master Togo, to the first courtyard, and started defending. We did okay, with me setting up the 'fort' of spirits in the middle, and spending most of my time replacing them, healing them and throwing lighting about where I could. The Assassin and Ranger worked well as cavalry, racing about and whittling down the larger clumps of enemy casters as each wave appeared.
Then Mhenlo's group showed up, and by some lucky quirk of fortune, he had no players at all with him! Seems at that time of that night, not a single player from Prophecies or Nightfall was trying to get started on Factions. Presumably the server, finding no eligible Non-Canthan party waiting, just filled up the second party with henchmen instead; Devona and Co. This left us, in effect, as a party of three players with thirteen L20 henchmen, along with Master Togo and Mhenlo, who aren't too shabby either.
The rest of the mission went well, and consisted of running street battles against the various gangs of the city, along with several large plaza areas which require a solid defence, as wave upon wave of plagued creatures tried to storm our position from several directions at once. I lost track a bit, but I think we had at least three Ritualists raising spirits, including my own, and this all made the plaza defence steps much easier to cope with, and these bits, although incredibly hectic, were a lot of fun actually. My Skill of the Night helped tremendously; Spirit Boon Strike.
It's a lightning zap direct damage spell, which also heals any allied spirits near to me when it hits. The key here was 'allied', and I was spamming this out as often as I could, while standing right in the middle of the spirit fort. It heals not only my own spirits, but those of the other two Ritualist henchmen as well. Not quite so useful for the turret spirits, but for the various Union spirits it helped lots, as these absorb damage on any teammates inside their radius of effect, and lose their own HP in doing so. Me healing those allowed them to function for far longer, which indirectly, was helping the meleefolk up front. It also lets the turret spirits act as tanks of a sort, and many of the enemy melee mobs wasted a lot of time trying to slash up my turrets, while I was nonchalantly healing them from behind.
With only my usual two turret spirits out, it's debatable whether it's worth putting in the skill-bar, but with anywhere up to six allied spirits in play at once, it's a godsend.
There were a couple of deaths along the way, but nothing close to a wipe, and eventually we reached the last fight, against some new monstrosity I'd not seen before, a 'Shiro'ken', along with attendant rabble. This all went swimmingly, but just as we were celebrating, in cutscene form, Shiro turns up, invisible, and instakills us all, which I thought was rather poor sportsmanship! He stalks off in a very impressive Brooding Manner, but it doesn't end there and yet another pantheon of godlike creatures with a penchant for soap opera turns up. These 'Envoys', of which Shiro is supposedly one, are not happy that Shiro is breaking all sorts of Envoy Table Manners, but have one of those tiresome 'non-interference' prime directive things going on, and so guess who gets to be Universal Arbiter of Balance via Proxy, again? Hello there!
The Envoys throw caution to the winds, and break one small, but to us, very important rule of Envoy Club, and raise us from the dead and give us our souls back, which is nice. We're then told to seek out The Oracle, who can help us do some kind of twelve step program, which will ultimately allow us to actually see Shiro, which I suppose would be a good start in doing anything about him.
We finished with an Expert completion, missing the Masters by a few minutes. Possibly we'll have a better chance of that once we've got to L20, and a few Elite skills captured, both of which ought to increase our collective DPS to the speed necessary for the Master time limit. Of course whether we'll be lucky enough to hit the thing again at a time when no Team 2 shows up at all, is another matter entirely, and I'm going to have to go through the thing at least twice more, from the Foreign Side, if my Prophecies Ranger and Nightfall Mesmer want to get very far in Factions.
Next time, we may not be so lucky...