Last time saw us discover that, once again, we are pawns in a Great Game, and with the intervention of a group of godlike beings known as 'Envoys', we have been directed to seek out The Oracle, who will guide us on the path to becoming 'Weh no Su', or 'Closer to the Stars'. This path to mystical enlightenment is the first step toward us being able to meet our nemesis, Shiro Tagachi, on anything like even terms. At the moment, he's cheating quite a lot, raising armies of mutated dead, being rather too good with the old twin daggers, and most irritatingly, is totally invisible, and its this last one we're off to address now.
Various rampaging street battles brought us through Kaineng to the next mission, #4 - Nahpui Quarter, where we met The Oracle, a fantastically grumpy wizened old man with an equally fantastic hat. Various arcane auguries were propitiated, and I'm not quite sure what happened next, but four entire constellations were seemingly brought down to earth, and let loose in the neighboring city district, which is frankly irresponsible, if you ask me. Not like the rest of the city didn't have enough troubles, what with mutants, ninjas, samurai and the rest!
The Oracle clearly has a different definition of 'Closer' than we do, and to become 'Weh no Su', we had to get in there and, err...kill all four of the constellations. These were quite neat actually; living creature models, but textured in such a fashion to still resemble stylised constellation shapes, with actual stars in them. There are four of them, dotted about the mission map, all bosses; Kaijun Don, the embodiment of corruption, Kounghsang, the eternal paradox, Hai Jii, the representation of the fiery eternity in the Underworld, and Tahmu, a reminder of atrocity, pain and anguish. All very Astral!
Not quite that straightforward though, (These things never are), as killing each of them causes the map to spawn a whole bunch of mini-versions of themselves, making the place busier and busier with each successive boss killed. We tooled up and set off into the place, via the teleportey orb things near the entrance, and got to work, with me in the lead. Suspicious in itself, as usually the Assassin, who has done all this before, takes point, knowing what way to go and such. I almost immediately saw why, and the map for the mission was confusing even by Kaineng City standards, with all sorts of rooftop paths, bridges, underpasses, walls and in general, the whole level was quite a three dimensional place, making it quite tricky to plot a useful route through it all, to take in each of the bosses along the way.
For Expert and Master completion, there is a time limit, which we'd long passed by the time we got to the last of the four celestials, with me having gotten us lost a number of times en route. I'm usually very good with spatial reasoning in these games, but the place got me all turned around several times, even with the 'U' Mission Map up, with it's helpful red dotted line. Eventually we got to the last fight, but massively overpulled and all got trampled. I blame Talon Silverwing - a Warrior Henchman who, in the purple gloom of the mission, looks almost exactly like the Star Blade and Star Sentinel lesser mobs about the place, which was confusing, and also has a habit of charging off to attack stuff before we're ready.
The second go went better - an extra healing henchman, and a swap of Talon for Devona. Much as I despise Devona for her glory-ninjaing ways, she is a very good henchman to have along, and seems to come pre-equipped with "Charge!", an all round useful warrior Elite.
Our technique seems to be coming together well now, with our typical routine consisting of me stopping just short of aggro range on the next cluster, setting up the spirits and then pulling with a vulnerability-to-spirits debuff (Painful Bond), and then digging in with the spirit heals, spirit position adjustment, and new spirits as necessary. The Ranger and Assassin then wade in with the melee, comprehensively supported my my own field artillery. I can see this basic strategy doing well for us all the way up, with little adjustment as and when new and interesting skills become available.
Skill of the Night was a great find for me; Essence Strike. While energy does regenerate far faster in GW, than in other MMOs, being able to sustain the fuel tank during the longer fights helps a lot. All classes, even Warriors, have, and use energy, so any skills that help replace it are always a useful thing to reserve a slot for in the skill bar. Various means to do this are available for all the classes, and often each of a classes Attributes has something that will help. I'm all into Ritualist Channeling at the moment, and Essence Strike is a Channeling spell too. It zaps the target with lightning, as do most Rit attacks, and if I'm stood near a spirit, as I almost always am, it gives me free energy back, which I can then use to do...well, whatever.
Prior to picking this one up, I was getting a lot of troubles with the 'click-click' out-of-energy, cant' cast, noise, but adding this to the skillbar greatly streamlined things and makes me much more able to go the full distance during the longer fights. Extra direct damage is always handy too!
Although the first go was a bit of a failure, it was useful, in that the second time through, I knew exactly where to go, and things proceeded at almost breakneck pace. Even so, by the time we'd waded through all the sparkly star-spawn and got the last dragon-thing, we'd still only managed an Expert win. Again, I suspect the average DPS of our group is less than that of a full party of eight players, which is probably needed to get this job done in time for the Masters.
I'm starting to suspect that all the Factions missions are like this - the mission itself and just 'doing it faster' as Expert and Master victory conditions. I hope not, as I always found both the Bonus objectives of Prophecies and the 'going the extra mile' approach of Nightfall to be more engaging than this simple 'racing'.
Still, Expert is good enough for me, and now we're Closer to the Stars. This serves as Factions' Ascension step, and now unlocks the ability for us to swap Secondary Professions about as needed. I'm not even using mine at all, so not terribly important for me. Now we're off to some other temple place to meet up with Master Togo and Mhenlo, and seek out some much needed guidance from Cantha's ancient spirits. Rather than do that, we instead went off to hunt down some elite skills. Quite important to get a few useful ones of these into the skill list.
We're L20, 20 and 18 now, putting what little 'grind' GW has behind us, and we have max-level armour and weapons that will serve usefully until the end of the campaign, and beyond. A much more civilised way to do things, and increases in power now, come mostly in the form of these elite skill captures.
On to the temple, next week!