Three missions remained when you last joined us, but we got through a lot last night. The story so far had the Kurzick and Luxon finally putting aside their differences, and the whole lot of us, under the direction of Master Togo, heading off to the Harvest Temple, a ruined edifice at the far southern end of Cantha.
This temple is something of a historical focus, as the cut-scenes explained; the site of Shiro's initial downfall, and first defeat two hundred years ago - an act so apocalyptic that it turned the seas to jade and the forests to stone. In a cinematic masterwork, we got to see the whole gamut of human emotion, in slightly sepia-toned flashback.
Anger (Clutching his head and waving it about a bit, while groaning), Turmoil (Clutching his head and waving it about a bit, while groaning), Betrayal (Clutching....you get the idea...), Self-doubt, Angst, and Madness, all took a hand in driving the poor Doomed Imperial Bodygaurd bonkers, although the whole regrettable incident seems to have sprung entirely from the rantings of a street fortune teller, but mostly Shiro's own deep-seated paranoia, rather than any actual nefarious sorceries or betrayals. If adequate mental health diagnosis had been available, there might still be a navigable ocean and living forest occupying the south of Cantha! In a way, none of it is really his fault. I find it difficult to hold much sympathy for the nut-job undead assassin spirit chap though, but we'll get to that later.
First mission of the night then took place; #10 - Unwaking Waters. The temple turns out to be the home of a large Celestial Dragon type of creature, who would ordinarily be a useful ally in against Shiro. Unfortunately, Shiro got to him first, and now we have to beat the thing to death, to er...free it from it's current corrupted state.
This was another of those two-party co-op missions that I silently dread, but it was late, it was midweek, and no-one showed up from the Kurzick side, leaving us three players with about thirteen henchmen again, which is always nice. If the world map was anything to go by, I think all the Kurzicks were busy in the Alliance Battles, making a determined push at turning Cavalon blue.
The map was interesting...a large spiral of jade, descending in a whirlpool manner, to the base where a large ruined temple rose majestically out of the centre. Floating about the central space, is a massive L30-ish evil dragon thing, which had to be reduced in multiple stages. As it's HP wore down to each new stage, it would fly off. A gate opens and we can progress further down the ramp, while beating off the more usual Afflicted groups. Eventually, we made it to the bottom, and found ourselves in the temple itself for the last bit.
Fairly tricky stuff, but not too awkward. The dragon uses some quite powerful chain lightning attacks, and spawns these peculiar egg monster bomb things among us, but my Spirit Rift was doing a fair job of clearing those up before they could burst or do anything unpleasant. Some minor troubles in that only Ranged folks could actually hit the floating dragon for most of the time, but it did come near enough to the rim at times for the Melee folk to get a go too.
We made good time and got the dragon beaten...er..."cleansed"... quickly enough for a Masters. The dragon, now freed of the corruption, gave us all sorts of helpful tips and pointers, and offered to help us in our next task. Turns a out that Shiro is trying to make himself mortal again, which seems a bit shortsighted to me. Mortal = Killable. Anyway, to do this, he needs one last component - the blood of the Imperial Royal Family. It was taking an unauthorised amount of this that got him into this mess in the first place, two hundred years previous, so I guess that makes sense. To the palace, post haste! Luckily, by this point, we've got it all mapped out and its just a single mouseclick to cross the leagues to Kaineng City and #11 - Raisu Palace.
Things are coming to a head now, and we arrived to find the palace under siege form a pretty huge army of Afflicted, and Shiro-ken construct things, along with a number of bigger dragon monsters too. This turned out to be one of the more straightforward missions in the campaign; simply requiring us to bulldoze a path to the Emperor, who is slowly having his life force sapped by Shiro, to complete his ritual. Even so, we were perhaps a little overcautious on our push through what is actually quite a long map, and despite all being given nifty Celestial Skills to help out, we still took far too long to get to the end of it all, bagging only a Standard win!
The Celestial Skills vary by profession and the one that I got given, Celestial Summoning, seems to replicate the dropped effects of both the Spear of Archemorus and the Urn of Saint Viktor, at level 5s, both detailed elsewhere, which was quite handy. The Assassin got a thing that summons friendly monsters on successful hits, and the Ranger got a hefty party-wide stance and regen, all of which helped a fair bit and probably meant we could have barreled on through the mission a lot faster than we did.
The plot segues directly into the next mission, so rather than try again for a Masters, we pressed on. Plenty of time to come back and redo that one later.
We got to the Emperor in time, and...well, you'll have to actually play through it to find out what happens next as the plot came to it's conclusion, but one thing leads to another, and into #12 - Imperial Sanctum, where we find ourselves in a final showdown with Shiro, among the pagodas and arched bridges of the Emperor's private garden, and frankly, the whole affair made me very cross, quite bitter and extremely disappointed.
The mission is ostensibly quite simple - 'Kill Shiro'. Master's and Expert's completion are 2.5 minutes and 5 minutes respectively. So in we go, grab our Celestial Skills again, and set to it. Its the Final Fight, and the big End-Game Boss, so I'm expecting it to be difficult, certainly. Challenging, even! What I didn't expect was the utterly ridiculous over-powered excuse for a Boss Mob we ended up throwing ourselves against repeatedly for the next two and a half hours, numerous times.
We had a fair mix of classes, skills, spells, tactics and so on. We've all got this far, and further still in other campaigns. In short, we generally Know What We're Doing, most of the time, despite the self-mockery of calling it The Tuesday N00b Club. But Shiro cheats, plain and simple. He has a number of 'special' skills and abilities.
First off, if he doesn't like the look of you, he'll just teleport you to an entirely different section of the map! No saves, no resists; poof! This prison island is covered in L24 spirit turret things, which can be dealt with solo, but take a while to do so. Meanwhile, back where all your friends are still dying, etc, you have been replaced with a 'Bound [profession]' NPC monster, which suddenly starts attacking your teammates with gleeful abandon, or if a Monk, starts chainhealing Shiro. It is recommended to take only Mesmer or Warrior players, heroes or henchmen into this mission for this reason, or to solo it entirely, as a lone player is mercifully not targeted by this thing
I gather that my 'Bound Ritualist' replacement was particularly nasty, as it started dumping out all manner of spirits almost immediately. You can come back from this oubliette IF your pals manage to kill the replacement, OR, you manage to fight your way, alone, through the spirits on the island, to the exit TP at the top. If you do it this way, your replacement does not then vanish when you reappear. One attempt at it saw me singled out for this five or six times in a row, almost as soon as I reappeared each time, meaning I may as well not have bothered being there. Rage! Taking! Over!
Next, he has a habit of frequently just going bat-shait-crazy-loco, launching into ten seconds or so of quad-hit small AoE condition transferring laceration, which has a habit of clearing all of my spirits out, and quite often me and the other squishier henchmen too. Considering he teleports about the map like some kind of quantum grasshopper, this assault tends to catch almost everyone for a decent mauling before it wears off.
When things get a little bit much, he likes to shout 'Stop! Shiro-time!', float up into the air in lotus position and then have Tranquil Thoughts for 30 seconds, at the end of which, he shouts 'AKIIIIRAAAAAAA!' and steals a typically fatal 600hp from each and every warm body in the place; i.e eight, healing him for about 4800hp (About 2/3s his total) and generally wiping us out totally. It can be mitigated a bit by doing 500 absorbed points of damage, ending the thing early, but hell, its not like we were holding back here as it was, you know? Every second its up, is an extra +160hp for the Shir-meister once it ends. Often he doesn't need to resort to quite such extreme measures of uber-self-healing, and indeed, his scars themselves are so damned cool that they actually heal him!
As far as we were able to tell, these 'Monster Skills' seemed to have none of the recharge or energy/adrenaline cost problems that we typically have to cope with. He's also immune to Knockdown, and his skills cannot be Disabled.
It was horrific. It was as if the Level Design Team had waited until the QA Team had gone home one night, and then rummaged around in the 'Don't Be Stupid!' bin for all the crumpled up monster abilities that had been rejected for being ridiculously overpowered, unfair and unbalanced, dug them all out, and given them all to Shiro! The sheer leap from the gradually increasing level of difficulty in the missions leading up to it, and this one fight, was breathtakingly inconsistent, and amid our team's between-beating-analysis and general surliness, the words 'timesink', 'placeholder', 'cheap' and 'disappointing' were some of the more repeatable non-expletives. We each cope with frustration in our own ways, and I swung wildly between hysterical, forced and sarcastic over-enthusiasm, and sullen, dogged withdrawal. A number of times I considered giving up there and then, not dignifying the debacle with participation and just moving on anyway, calling Factions "finished" to my own satisfaction. "Shiro doesn't count!"
We kept at it though, mostly because well, what choice did we have? The campaign and story, demand it! Over and over we repeated the mission, venturing the odd change in skill bar here, the odd change of henchman there, and each time, we'd bog down, and eventually get wiped out 20-30mins in. At some point, we picked up another player, an Mo/Me and got to watch with a certain dogged amusement their outrage at the thing; "Monk Person! Banished! Again!" calls out Shiro. "WTF!?!?" calls out our new friend, and we nod and smile bitterly, then have to suddenly work extra hard to eliminate the new 'Bound Monk' now granting Shiro even more immunity.
I'm not entirely sure what happened next. It must have been our eighth go...or maybe our fifteenth - I lost track about the same time as I lost my will to live. I don't think we did anything that different. My own skills were the same anyway. Whatever happened, the mission started as usual, one or two of us got banished and returned, and then we all managed to pile on the guy in such a fashion that he didn't quite get his heals off. Perhaps it was just a rare conjunction of anti-phase in the random number generate he was using for a brain, but finally....he went down. It all seemed so arbitrary to me - it wasn't particularly our skill, or skillbars, that did this thing in any kind of methodical manner. He just decided to die that time, and not any other. Is that the 'Technique'; one massive Alpha Strike and hope he doesn't banish anyone useful? Bah!
Extremely unsatisfying, but probably just as well - I could easily see me writing about failed Shiro attempts here, week in, week out for the next few years. Is it me just being rubbish and whiney? Or is Shiro really quite broken as an MMORPG set-piece? I certainly don't remember Abaddon, (Nightfall's End Fight), being anywhere near as difficult to cope with. It took a couple of goes, of course, and some careful thought with skills, but certainly wasn't anywhere nearly as painful as this repeated brick-wall head-butting exercise.
Annnnnnyway, calm, deep breaths. Our ultimately successful attempt happened well within the time limit for the Masters, meaning that I'll never have to do that crap again. Unless I want Elite Canthan, Elite Imperial or Elite Exotic armours, of course. Yes, that's right, the post-fight End Credits area has the armour shops in, again, meaning any time I want some of those pieces, we get to do the Shiro Squaredance, again! I'm going for Elite Kurzick or Elite Luxon for this express reason; both of those are available elsewhere.
Rage gradually subsiding, we picked up our green souvenir weapons, meandered along the corridors of the Divine Path as pretty much every NPC we'd previously met all turned out to congratulate us, and finally, got personally saluted by the Emperor himself, amid copious fireworks, and the increasingly familiar 'Rolling End Credits'. By the time we'd reached the far end of this accolade, I was almost calm enough to actually notice my surroundings and appreciate what we'd done; won!
Here we are at the post-Factions dance party. From left to right; The Ritualist (Me), The Assassin (plus Collector's Edition Backing Dancers), Emperor Kisu, and The Ranger. With a screenshot moment like that, its hard to remain too grumpy about the whole Shiro thing really. N00b Fever, N00b Feveeee-eerrrrr!
So, another one down! All in all, I'd rate Factions somewhat above Prophecies, but not by much, and significantly below Nightfall, an all-together more polished experience. Pretending 'The Shiro Fight' never happened, there's still a lot of nice touches and interesting ideas, peoples and places in Factions, but on the whole, it does feel a bit of a rush job, and short, compared to the streamlined excellence of Nightfall. Lessons learned, etc. I don't regret buying and playing through it, but would definitely recommend that anyone out there coming to Guild Wars for the first time, goes right to Nightfall from word 'go'. More one for the dedicated fan than first timer.
The Tuesday N00b Club will return after a bit of a break, in Guild Wars: Eye of the North...