Back to work in Guild Wars: Eye of the North, and after a emotional and fraught sojourn on the Tarnished Coast, we now strike out east, to the Charr Lands. Little Gwen is now all grown up, and many years have passed since the Searing destroyed Ascalon. She's found hate-fuelled gainful employment in the ranks of the Ebon Vanguard, a kind of commando regiment from what is left of Ascalon who make it their mission to take the fight to the enemy, and cause all sorts of ructions deep in Charr territory. Using the nearby Eye of the North as a base, a sizeable of contingent of them have gone missing, having left Gwen in charge. Luckily, we've stumbled past, and happen to be in need of a sizable army, so it's off to go rescue the Vanguard!
The Charr Homelands are a surprisingly nostalgic place, and once you get down out of the mountains, you might be forgiven for thinking that you've some how found a way back into Prophecies' Pre-Searing Ascalon - in particular, the Northlands zone. Not many people will have seen that particular land, as it is only available in Prophecies, and only in Pre-Searing, which you can never return to, and even then, requires another person in the team to do the gate switch thing - a kind of early lesson on team play.
But it's nice to have that back, in a fashion; wooded hills, rolling meadows, babbling streams - a return to the 'Traditional Mediaeval' aesthetic that gets lost very early on in Prophecies, never to return, with all the Jade Seas, Sulphur Desolation, Maguuma Jungles, and Icy Shiverpeaks. There are only three zones here, but all are quite large and share that epic sense of space that the EoN lands seem to have, where previous campaigns lacked a little.
Of course its not all county walks and these lands are home to the hyper-aggressive goat/dog/tiger things that trashed Ascalon in the first place, so its fairly hard work making our way across the place. Add to that, a large number of Mantids, a kind of man-sized insect that I thought was native to Cantha only.
Three missions here, along with connecting story, that we managed at a good pace, involving the usual Tuesday slot, along with some extra-curricular to make up for lost time last week. First off was a spot of tracking, in an attempt to find the missing platoon. This goes less well than we'd hoped and generally sees Gwen start having a psychotic episode, and the rest of us discovering, and then charging at, a Charr Warcamp. Quite a fun mission, and wide ranging, involving all sorts of sub-objectives that need taking out in order to weak the camp, before going in for a quite hectic final push.
Things get a bit murky next, and it turns out there are two kinds of Charr; the Shamans, who are working for The Destoryers, and therefore Bad, and some kind of bunch of misfit rebel Charr types, represented by Pyre Fierceshot, who are well up for a spot of civil war, something we can immediately see the benefits of, there being only eight of us, and about a majillion Charr! While little Gwen is busy shrieking and and having 'Nam flashbacks in the corner, we negotiate a very comfortable deal - we help him bust his party out of chokey, and they'll come and help us topple the Regime, and in the process, get our missing Vanguard back. For a supposed 'Mesmer', Gwen loses her composure an awful lot, I think.
The next mission is another dungeon crawl, this time in the Cathedral of Flames, the one beneath the Doomlore Shrine 'City'. This wasn't nearly as bad as most of the dungeons we'd visited so far, although wasn't really the Dungeon Proper. Throughout the place are various captive rebel Charr who all need freeing, and the evil...er...eviler Charr Shaman at the end was quite a technical exercise, particularly when he pulls two L28 Burning Wicker Charrs out of thin air to bolster his defences. Some excellent pulling by Koss managed to split those off for a beating and the Shaman was exterminated shortly after. Success!
Reunited, the Charr Warband take it upon themselves to put us through a rush training course in warfare, as we gear up for the Big Push on the Shaman Stronghold. mostly this is a great deal of fetching and carrying, although one highpoint is being given a 35ft long giant twin-tailed scorpion with boulder flinging whiplash action to drive about the rolling downs. Quite similar to the Jundu Wurms of Nightfall, this basically turns you into an enormous Devourer, and gives you a number of special skills with which to rampage about the place. Great fun, and a great deal more useful and intuitive than the wurms, I found. Gwen is frothing a lot at this point and close to apoplexy, which might be interesting, but time is running out, and we need to make the big assault.
The last mission of the three involves an all-out assault on a very fortified position indeed. this proved to be a bit of a nightmare, and took a couple of goes in the end, mostly stuck on the first bit where we have to use two Siege Devourers to bombard the ramparts of a fort, to suppress a large number of explosively-armed Ranger Charr, which in turn will allow our Plate Armoured Triceratops (Don't ask...) to make it to the gate to give it a good headbutting. All the while, six to eight extremely durable Warrior types are teleporting out into the battlefield in indefinite waves, trying to wreck our big scorpion things, and of course, us! I was about to quit for the night when one last go saw us through the gate, at which point, the mission becomes a lot easier, even when The Destroyers show up at the end.
Shamans overthrown, we also find our missing regiment, stuck in a pit, but conveniently alive. I suspect we'll be needing those soon enough. Pyre, rather than stay and become the new Charr Emperor, or whatever, decides to tag along with us, and is now a selectable Ranger Hero. I'm sure Gwen is thrilled!
Story arc completed, we reconvene for another Vision at the Eye. It shows us the big lair of the Evil Monster Boss Thing, and Vekk recognises where it is. However, before we can charge into the fray and save the world, again, Ogden tells us that we need to meet with King Jalis, and summon The Great Dwarf.
The end is in sight, but anything could happen in the next few missions...
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Something of an oddball build this time, once more, based on hexes, but this time a little differently, using the Necromancer's Curse spells to supplement the Mesmer's own Hexing abilities. It's also a bit of an experiment in Touch skills; spells and abilities that need to be delivered at point blank range.
The Encouragement of Failure
Mesmer/Necromancer
Inspiration 12, Illusion 12, Curses 12
Requires: Prophecies (#1,#2,#4), Factions(#3,#6), Nightfall (#5)
Equipment: Inspiration/Illusion Staff, and runes/masque to bump up the two Mesmer Attributes, allowing some spare points freed up for Curses. Not especially special.
Two parts here again, and the whole thing is essentially about causing and then exploiting the failure of others! Part one is about making them miss you. Distortion (#1) is a stance, but quite short in duration - throw that us as you're taking a beating - it will make enemies very likely to miss you with attacks, as the cost of some energy per miss. Offset this with Spirit of Failure (#2) - this causes you to gain energy when a given target misses you, and increases the chance that the victim will do so. Then, slap Reckless Haste on them (#3) - this makes them attack faster, and increases the chance they'll miss - spotting the pattern yet? Next is Price of Failure, which...increases the chance the target will miss, and hurts them when they do! Epic fail!
Part two is the more hectic bit and is about getting in close to the now-hopelessly incompetent enemy, and slapping them about the face. #5, Tease (Elite) roughly doubles all skill recharge times on the target. This ends prematurely if they hit you, but that is now somewhat less of a problem (See part one!) An alternative here might be Signet of Midnight, which blinds both you and your target for a short duration. This isn't really a problem for you, but the enemy will become even more likely to miss while blinded. Tease lasts a lot longer however. Enfeebling Touch (#6) does a moderate amount of direct damage, and also adds the Weakness condition, which lowers the target damage and attributes, in the unlikely event they do manage to hit you at all. #7, Plague Touch is a handy little extra - since you're at touch range anyway, using this will transfer two conditions from you, to the touched enemy - very handy around Charr Flameshielders, and in general!
#8, Parasitic Bond, is my self-heal, energy management having been taken care of by the #1,#2,#3 combo. Ether Feast works well enough here too, but this one causes health drain on the enemy for a short span, and then at the end, heals you. Its also very cheap and quick. Best used in liberal profusion just at the start of a fight - slap one on as many people as you can! Another alternative is the Blood Magic spell list, which contains quite a few touch health steal attack skills - Vampiric Bite and such.
Throw around a few preemptive #8, pick out a target, start with all the debuffs (#2,#3,#4), throw up #1 and charge in, slapping them with #5, #6 and #7 as appropriate. Tease works wonders in particular on chainhealing monk types on the back row, if you can reach them to administer the slap - sometimes the melee bodyblocking can be a little dense.
It worked out quite well in general, although does require a bit of micromanagement to get right - doing the right things in the right order and so on. Also, there are a lot of hexes to get on the same target, and in the case of the yard trash, they often die well before you can complete the set. Still, very effective against self-healers, and Boss types, who otherwise tend to endure a bit. The Touch skills are quite fun for a caster type, and require a great deal of ninja-like running into hectic melee, tapping the monster on the shoulder and running away giggling, which I personally enjoyed.
My EoN companion is also a Curses Necromancer, based around Spiteful Spirit mostly, and although I don't think we were directly 'competing', this did mean that most primary monsters ended up with 8-12 debuffs on them very quickly indeed, which might have been overkill. Deliberately going after someone other than the Necro's primary call saw the hurt distributed far more efficiently.
I suspect that a N/Me, ramping curses to 16, would do quite a bit better than Me/N me, but once again, I find myself surprised at just how different I can make the very moment to moment gameplay of Guild Wars, all without having to start an alt, simply by giving the skill icons a damned good shuffle!