Bit of a special guild outing this week, as the Tuesday Noob Club hit Nightfall's Treasure Trail. We alternate PvP and PvE nights of a Tuesdays, and as a leader of sorts, I'm always on the look out for interesting and novel things to do each week.
The basic game is interesting enough of course, the very episodic nature of the main storylines providing any number of mini events. A typical GW Mission can take from fifteen minutes to an hour or more, and all have a very set define task, along with extra bonus objectives to carry out along the way, all in specially designed maps, so a good staple of our PvE adventuring is nothing more complicated than simply asking around for who needs what missions next.
With the recent addition of a large number of completable books to the game, even long standing veterans like me, who thought I'd finished it all, have new incentives to do them all again, and in any event, there's titles to be had for finishing all the bonus/masters completions, which I've still not got yet.
I'm continually surprised how long Guild Wars has lasted for me. Regular readers will know how flightily I can be, when it comes to MMOs, and I often hop about titles, but I've had Guild Wars on the go for a relatively long time now - years, and I don't think it's just that it had no monthly fee. The basic gameplay has a certain immediacy about it that I don't generally find elsewhere, and the whole skill system in use there brings out the deck-builder and theorycrafter in me, which I enjoy. Lately I think it's just being in a decent guild.
This week we saddled up for a grand tour of the Nightfall campaign, with the specific intention of hitting all of the 'Buried Treasure' world locations. Clicking on these gives you free loot and cash, which is always nice, but you have to get to them first. I must admit to cheating outrageously this time, and looked the locations up on the wiki, allowing me to put together a route for our big road trip. Turns out there are twelve of these, and they're dotted about the world in progressively harsher places, making for a great scaling odyssey for us to have a crack at.
The first couple, in the starter island of Istan, were simple enough, and a good warm up. Moving on to Kourna and Vabbi saw us having to take it a bit seriously, and by the time we got to The Desolation ones, we were working at it fairly hard. The last couple are in The Realm of Torment and were really quite taxing, and I'm sure we wiped once or twice.
I was on healing detail for the trip, assisting our regular monk with my previously detailed Me/Rt Restoration build. Having two healers in a party of eight seems to be an optimum, and it went pretty well, although quite hectic stuff. Spent most of the evening frantically clicking health bars and trying to use the right heal on the right person at the right time. nothing like practice in the field for this kind of thing though, and i think I'm really starting to get the hang of the support role, something I've never quite gotten right before.
The very last Treasure Chest is located at the far end of the nightmarish Domain of Pain (Explorable, not the Mission), and really did test us all. The place has a global 'Take 20 damages any time you use a skill' effect, a vigorous population of pretty large L28 Demon and Margonite groups, and a quite tortuous route to get to the goodies, but we got there in the end. I think our teamplay is really coming together, and our happy band of interested but largely soloist members are really getting the hang of full-player, no-Hero grouping, always a challenge in that game, and one of the main reasons it's PUGs are so awful.
A magnificent haul for all involved, something like 20pp and twelve gold-grade items of varying usefulness, each. I got somewhat less, as it turns out there is a diminishing returns kind of thing on the chests, and if you hit enough of them, often enough, the cash and items become less impressive.
I don't mind though; as a guild activity, it worked very well for a Tuesday's entertainment, taking about three to four hours all in all. Lots of skill, dye and elite armour buying all round, I shouldn't wonder, and we even managed to get quite a few of the astronomically expensive Guild Hall Vendors bought and paid for. Turing into quite the Proper Guild!
Back to PvP next week!