Bah! The Tuesday N00b Club slammed headfirst into yet another brick wall of adversity this week, this time in the form of another overpowered mega-boss monster, and all in all, left me in a rather despondent mood really. It exposes a certain hypocrisy about the game, I think, or at least the direction the game seems to be taking increasingly in recent expansions and campaigns. Guild Wars has been, for me at least, a fascinating exercise in almost collectible card game style 'deck-building' strategy, coupled with an extremely well executed variant on Diablo. But its the unique skill and class system that's kept me so engaged with it all, for so long, I think.
The basic premise around which the game is built is captivating for me; something like 1400 different skills, most of which can be put together in almost any way you like. These permutations offer varying degrees of success of course, some working better than others, but its the tinkering, the tuning and the refinement that I love, and for most of the game, there are a large number of possible solutions to the given problems of each map, land and monster type; some suggest themselves - an Interrupt Mesmer, or Minion Master Necromancer, for example, whereas some are more convoluted or unexpected - an Illusionary Weapon Mesmer Assassin, or an Elementalist Mesmer Stone Striker Tank. These later offer a wealth of satisfaction for the game mechanics explorer type, particularly when they turn out to work unexpectedly well in the field.
And then you hit a Eye of the North Dungeon, and discover that there is in fact only one team configuration that will get the job done, and all that goes out of the window. If you're really lucky, that team build will actually require one of your class at all! Lately it seems to me that the unique and winning charm of flexibility is falling to the rigid and prescribed choreography of Certain Other Fantasy MMORPG Raid Based End Games. It makes me worry a great deal about Guild Wars 2, frankly.
Of course that's in my introspective moments only, and mostly this week, I've been far too furious with Cyndr the Mountain Heart to be able to think that long term! Okay, it went like this...
Before we can confront The Great Destroyer, who seems to be our overall Nemesis at this stage, we need to summon The Great Dwarf. Love these names! To do this, we need to go to the bottom of The Heart of the Shiverpeaks dungeon, and grab The Hammer of The Great Dwarf, a holy and magical artifact. Standard sort of thing really.
The Dungeon itself isn't too bad mostly featuring undead, but in nowhere near the power and potency of the Shards of Orr Undead, and allowing for a more usual flexibility of builds and strategies, such as today's Comedy Mesmer Build, which I used on the first trip through the place. One room did cause a fair bit of trouble, containing a large number of mutually chainhealing 'Chained Cleric' monk enemies, which need a very large amount of spike damage to deal with. Mind you, they don't need to be killed, and you can just run on past them if you can't be bothered. Throughout the dungeon are rock walls that need blasting charges to get through and mid way through, you find a dwarf explorer chap who follows you about and hands out dwarven barrel bombs to do this with.
Eventually, you get to the large lava filled chamber at the bottom with the red skull on it on the area map, and huge ominous statues on the walls, and there is the Hammer - unguarded. Of course we're not stoopid and sure enough, stepping foot in the place causes a massive L29 Elementalist 'Wurm' type monster to erupt from the floor. Even as 'trash-mobs' the Wurm type is annoying, acting as a hidden landmine until stood on, and then rising up to cause huge amounts of knockdown mayhem, before munching on Good Guys, and then vanishing underground again periodically, to erupt some place else - usually next to The Healer!
Well, this one does some of that, but is also a nightmarish boss with frightening power. Being Level 29 means he does 150% damage right off the bat. As an EoN End-of-Dungeon King-Boss, they double that up again, meaning that all his skills do three times as much damage as listed! Hexes last half as long on him and he gets bonus regeneration and all sorts of other 'challenging' advantages.
He gets Bed of Coals and Flame Burst, which are bad enough even before the quad damage is applied, but the real fun and games were his Monster Skill; Pyroclastic Shot, which is basically where he spits a gobbet of molten incendiary phlegm at you that does about 250 hp of direct damage (around half of my full health, at 0DP), and then cripples you (a snare effect) and sets you on fire (A 14dps Damage over time) for seven seconds. I can survive one direct hit, but the second will invariably kill me, and once at -60%DP, it is effectively an insta-kill. This all happens in an Area of Effect large enough to happily bomb you and all three of your Heroes at once, and he can do it once every six seconds, although sometimes intersperses it with the other two Fire skills, just to mix things up a bit. Flame burst in particular, hits for about 400hp. Fun!
Best bet is to just knuckle down, and wail away - the best kind of tank is massive DPS, eh? Not so simple, and he begins life invulnerable, happily ignoring any and all attempts to damage him, all the while raining down blast shots of almost atomic fury. To actually hurt him, you first have to break through his 'carapace', represented by and extra progress bar on the UI. The carapace is also invulnerable, except to bombs. The way you're supposed to do it, we think, is you talk to the dwarf bomb chap who has been following you about the dungeon, get given a carrayable explosive keg, (which slows your footspeed down, making it even more difficult to dodge the Pyroclasts), run up to the wurm's base (putting you nicely in Flame Burst range), drop the bomb and run for your life. If you are holding a bomb when the Pyrocalstic Shot hits you, the bomb itself also explodes in your arms, doing an additional 50pts of damage, and requiring you to go and get another one.
Assuming you aren't instantly killed in the attempt, the bomb then hisses a bit and blows up, reducing the wurm's carapace progress bar by a third. The bomb must be manually dropped, and simply dying and falling down next to the wurm while holding one is not good enough.
Survive long enough to do this three times and you can then have a go on the wurm himself, damaging, degenerating and hexing him in the usual manner. After a short span of this, he buries himself into the floor and erupts some place else in the cavern, with a fresh carapace, and the whole farce must begin again, but quickly now, as all the while you're farting about with the bomb-dropping slapstick phase, he is regenerating his health at a fierce old rate and if you don't get the second and subsequent bomb runs right on the first or second go, he is likely to have completely healed himself of the damage you managed to inflict the last time he was vulnerable.
We spent the entire session more or less, dragging bombs about, getting one-shotted and generally failing to get anywhere with the wretched exercise. There is a resurrection shrine just outside the room, allowing an infinite number of attempts on the creature, but once on to the old -60%DP Attrition Game, it's difficult to even make it to the bomb guy before getting insta-blasted into oblivion, and even after retreating back to the Eye of the North, changing from Experimental Builds to Serious Builds, working our way all the way through the damned dungeon again and trying from scratch with +10% Morale Boost, we still failed utterly. I ended up logging of in a huff after a sudden bout of connectivity issues decided to weigh in, and so frustrated and enraged but the whole experience was I, that I basically just went and looked up the 'solution' on the Wiki Talk Page.
Turns out that the generally accepted Solution to this, ahem, 'puzzle', is a combination of bug and scenery exploit. Seems that the wurm is still vulnerable to Lifestealing skills, even with the carapace up. This same coding oversight is what lets Necromancers actually kill the 'Indestructible' Golem in the Oola's Lab mission, and can't possibly be intended behaviour. Some of these abilities are ranged, and work through walls, allowing the canny team to work the wurm to a spot from which he can be hit, but cannot shoot back. Trap in him a level design oversight, and exploit him to death with a missed coding loophole. Huzzah!
Ignominious, but frankly, I really don't care, and just want this part of the story to be over, so we can get back to bits of the game that are still fun, and that adhere to the original design ethos of the whole Guild Wars concept, back before this obsession with Raid Bosses and Impossible Challenges for the Ultra-Hardcore.
Next week I imagine we'll put together the 'Correct' team, go back down there and probably kill him in ten minutes or less, with only a handful of deaths, but I doubt I'll take any satisfaction in it. And this monster isn't even the final End Boss of the expansion. I have a growing sense of sour dread at the coming weeks...
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Before we reached the Wurm, I was actually quite enjoying myself with a quirky and interesting Mesmer/Dervish build. The Dervish shares many many similarities with the Assassin, as far as I can tell. Both are light DPS melee fighters, not especially suited for out and out tanking work without a Warrior Secondary to draw from. Both rely extensively on a wide variety of personal Enchantment magics to compensate for lack of armour and to ensure survival, and as such lend themselves to the primary Mesmer's ability to get spells out quickly. The main difference is that the Assassin seems geared toward large damage against a single target, while the Dervish is more suited to dealing less damage, but over a much wider area. The more obvious way for a Mesmer to tackle any melee role is through the use of Illusionary Weaponry, as seen in the Me/A build of some weeks back. This works as a starting point for a Me/D too, but the Me/D also has an alternative, but quite similar, route to try instead.
The Loss of Vision
Mesmer/Dervish
Inspiration 12, Earth Prayers 12, Fast Casting 3 + Rune/Masque
Requires: Prophecies (#1, #3), Nightfall (Dervish, and #2, #4, #7, #8), Eye of the North (#5)
Equipment: A Scythe with +Enchantment Duration, ideally. Like the IW Assassin, this built is designed to work best if you miss lots, so the actual damage stats on it are not relevant. Fast Casting Runes and Masque would be more help than more Inspiration, and the more health the better.
A very similar kind of design to the IW build, in that missing lots is a good thing. Start with Physical Resistance (#1), to beef up the fragile Mesmer's AC a bit. (This can be swapped out for Elemental Resistance if you know you'll be facing mostly elemental damage - Djinns, Frost Golems, etc, or a specific Mantra for even more specialisation; Mantra of Fire, Earth, etc)
Prior to engaging, throw up #2, Sand Shards. This is the lynchpin of the build, acting much like IW does in the Me/A build. Ideally this should be up the entire time you are actually fighting, and replaced as often as necessary. Then, charge at the nearest target, and slap them with the Elite, #3 - Signet of Midnight. This costs no energy (Signet) and recharges quite quickly, and blinds the touched enemy, giving them a 90% miss rate - excellent for indirect damage reduction. The down side is that it makes you blind too, but don't panic! This is exactly what we want, and now if you flail about with the scythe, Sand Shards will kick in and hit every 'nearby' enemy (a range of about 10 feet in all directions) for 21 points of damage, for about 90% of your swings. This is about half of a pumped IW attack - 42, but is similarly consistent; ignoring armour, resistances, and attempts to block, dodge or evade, more or less guaranteeing a 21pt hit each time on all targets in range, unless you actually hit! Not as potent against single targets as IW, but really shines against dense groups of yard trash.
Even better, by using a Scythe, in hectic melee, you'll actually attempt to hit, and miss, up to three times, and each time, causes the Shards to kick off, effectively causing 63 pts against all Nearby targets, per swing. Ouch!
Unlike the IW approach however, this one revolves around you effectively debuffing yourself, using the Blindness condition to great effect. Something I found early on is that you must stop AI Monks curing you, for it to work. Either don't give them Condition Removal skills in the first place, or toggle them off in the little Hero control panels. Tell other Player Monks not to remove conditions on you before you start. Without Blindness in effect, your scythe swings will occasionally hit for 1-4pts of damage, if you're lucky. Being blind is essential!
Once you're both blind, follow up with a quick burst of #4 - Aura of Thorns, which throws Cripple and Bleed into the mix, then put up #5 - Shield of Force, which with a bit of luck will Weaken the chap you're attacking. Then hit that chap with our old friend #6 - Epidemic, which should give all the monsters in the tangled melee scrum around you, all four of the conditions now in play. This should have a cumulative effect of making the surrounding melee types quite feeble and indirectly reduce the incoming damage greatly. Use #7 - Vital Boon, and #8 - Conviction for further armour and healing. Conviction needs you to be Enchanted to work, but there are several in the above build. These aren't great heals, but help, and most importantly are quick and cheap, letting you get back to the blind swinging. Have a decent AI Healer in tow where possible.
Like the Me/A build, it is more important to be spending time here attacking, rather than casting. There is no energy management in this build, but all the spells are cheap, and natural Mesmer regen can cover the costs.
As expected, it didn't really shine much against smaller groups, but a number of places in the dungeon saw us mobbed by 10+ melee monsters, and letting fly with the stinging sands of incompetence saw an entire screen filled with yellow -21's flying upward, and although it took a while to hew through one monster, when it died, so did all the others! It's a decent enough build for farming, and general purpose overland PvE travel, but falls short against individual powerful boss monsters, where the IW approach would be a better choice.
Downsides are mostly to do with survivability. While the IW Me/A has many Shadow Arts skills that heal or avoid damage unless you successful hit something, the Dervish doesn't get much like that, and must find healing in other ways, making you a lot more vulnerable. The other main disadvantage is giving up all Condition Removal. Sure, you need to be blind, but you don't also need to be on fire, bleeding, crippled, weakened, etc, and monk healers can't pick and choose which to remove, so have to just leave them all on you.
A Dervish/Mesmer would probably do a great deal better with this one than a Mesmer/Dervish, as only one Mesmer skill is attributed, and that merely makes the Stance last a little longer. Runes in Earth Prayers on the other hand would greatly improve most of the skills used above. Fast Casting is not that important here, but the in-built health and energy gain of a few points in Mysticism might help with the survivability thing a bit!