Para-gons, para-gons, rah rah rah!

The first dress rehearsal of a very ambitious and frankly quite dubious project in Guild Wars this week, the 'Parateam of Win Hard Mode Marathon'. If this isn't a gimmick team, I don't know what is, but the basic premise seems to be that the whole Tuesday N00b Club rolls up Paragon characters in a spare slot and attempt to single-class steamroller the entire Nightfall Campaign in Hard Mode. In any other game, this would be madness; such flagrant defiance of the classic Tank-Healer-DPS composition should get you nailed to the floor the first time you leave solo-mob country, but Guild Wars is quite a different beast really.

Partly out of a defiant lack of respect for the conventions that Guild Wars so often gleefully ignores, but mostly out of morbid curiosity, I've dedicated several of our normal PvE nights to the idea and it might just work. The Paragon in Guild Wars is a kind of ranged paladin type class, using thrown spears instead of swords, but retaining many of the support aura type abilities, in the form of 'Shouts' and 'Chants'; short duration AOE buffs in all manner of abilities and statistics. Paragons also gain energy any time one of these abilities affects an ally. While duplicate shouts do not stack, there are more than enough available shouts in the skill list to ensure that a correctly set up team of eight Paragons, all bellowing various different motivational things the entire fight long, end up as a ridiculously powerful, and self-sustaining, force of spear throwing awesome. Or so the theory goes!

Our Paragon Czar had detailed eight such complementary builds on the little forums we have and we all set to, picking out roles, much like the Spice Girls, and in many cases, dressed very similarly. I'm Command Spice it seems and had this build:

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Which you can feed into this page to see actual skills and whatnot: Guild Wars Gamependium: Template Viewer

It's largely a support build aimed at helping the chaps who are doing the damage do more of it, and also help mitigate incoming damage to the team and dish out useful debuffs on the fly. Other members of the team include Damage Spice, Healing Spice, Utility Spice and the 'Imbagon' among others. I've seen this across most of the professions of Guild Wars actually, a designed in flexibility in the different Attributes that a class gets, seemingly intended to re-purpose that class into a number of different roles.

Certainly on paper, the overall team build does look like it will work far better than it ought to, but as ever, paper and practice turned out to be different things and a number of us had yet to complete the prescribed builds, not having reached the more advanced outposts where certain key skills are sold, on these characters. In addition to our own incomplete preparations there are other things the Paragon needs to watch out for; specifically Necromancers, who get a lot of 'Silence' spells specifically designed to stop Shouts and Chants working. In the case of this team, these will spell utter collapse and ruin, so we'll have to see how that goes. Also, the whole thing only works if all eight Paragons are within earshot of each other, requiring a lot tighter footwork than we're used to, and potentially making us vulnerable to incoming AOE attacks.

Mind you, there were whole sections where it did all come together, even with our incomplete team build and those were very impressive. The party seems to do fairly low DPS as a whole, but just goes and goes and goes, taking practically no damage at all from immense and otherwise group wiping overpulls throughout the Eye of the North trek from Boreal Station to Sparkfly Swamp; very much a thing of endurance rather than outright power. When it does work, it is indeed impressive, and can only improve as our missing skills are located. Then we hit the Shards of Orr and the whole thing went to hell, but that doesn't discourage me; everyone has trouble with the Shards of Orr. We got through in the end in the manner most do, strung out, fed up, -60%DP and mostly a lucky tagging of the far end rez shrine. Inelegant and proper attempts at the place usually involve a party of eight Monks, not Paragons.

Once the build is more or less complete, we'll be trying the Nightfall missions and I'll be fascinated to see if the preposterous paragon party can perform as predicted. If not, it'll probably be Plan B; eight spirit spamming Ritualists through HM Factions!