Games. Tech. Musings.: November 2006

Guild Wars: Monking guide

An excellent monking guide by Makkert went up over at GWGuru today. Highly recommended, even if you only monk occasionally.

Guild Wars: Guild Wiki mirror

Guild Wiki has rapidly become the GW reference of choice. Sadly, after the release of Nightfall, the increased traffic has pretty much flattened it and the site isn't responding at present.

Luckily, someone (alas, I don't know who) had the bright idea of putting up a static mirror. Many thanks to whoever it is.

Guild Wars: Dervish scythe attacks

Useful analysis by Warskull over at GWGuru of all the Dervish scythe attack skills. Handy for all those people out there starting up dervishes (like me).

Guild Wars: Wreckingball (Necromancer PvE)

I played this build a month or two ago and it works pretty well. It's a very aggressive setup which suits my playstyle. Ensign is the wizard at work here.

Offering of Blood*
Order of Pain
Blood Ritual
Rotting Flesh
Animate Bone Horror
Animate Bone Fiend
Blood of the Master
Resurrection Signet / Hardres of choice

12+4 Death Magic
9+2 Blood Magic
9+1 Soul Reaping

Weapon with an enchanting part, armor of choice + Bloodstained Boots.

Your plan here is that being a MM is basically a matter of a couple of Animates + Blood of the Master, so why not be an Orders necro at the same time?

Note that this plan absolutely requires you to bring as many physical damagers as possible - warriors, rangers, paragons, etc. It should be even easier to arrange now you can bring Heroes. Note that Barrage + Order of Pain = good.

There's probably a nicer way to make this with some of the new Nightfall skills, but you may want to use it to go get those skills.

Guild Wars: "Go For The Eyes!"

Handy tip by the always-insightful Ensign over at GWGuru:

At 12 spec, "Go for the Eyes!" is worth (on average) 14 damage on a sword, 19 damage on a bow or spear, 24 damage on an axe or hammer, and 36 damage on a scythe.

If you have four physicals on your team with random weapons, the skill is worth around 80 damage as a minimum, and it could be worth over 100 per use with Scythers. That damage gets compressed into a spike as well. The skill is really good, no question - who doesn't want to spend 4 adrenaline for 90 damage a shot?

Guild Wars: Nightfall

It's been a couple of weeks of Nightfall now. I haven't been playing perhaps as much as I'd like, so I haven't got that far through the PvE since I'll usually play PvP if I can anyway. I wasted a bunch of time playing an Elementalist in the PvE before realising that I'd be better off spending my time figuring out what makes the new classes tick.

So, my reaction to the game: in a nutshell, great. The new Hero system in particular really adds a lot to the PvE but there are a lot of little details that add up. Artwork is gorgeous as usual - running around the sandy beaches, I caught a flash of a shark's tail in the deep water last night. The new "master difficulty" quests are a nice touch - although with my limited progress so far I haven't found anything too tough. The community reaction has been very positive and it's hard to find "hate" posts as there was after the release of Factions.

In PvP, the 2 new classes - Dervish and Paragon - are seeing a lot of play but so far noone has figured out anything totally broken. There's a few new skills that seem very strong but it's unclear if they're actually overpowered. Keep your eye on Rampage as One, Searing Flames and Energizing Finale. A polite golf clap goes to Izzy (Isaiah Cartwright, ArenaNet's skill designer) for managing to create distinctive and useful new professions. The metagame hasn't stabilized yet and so all kinds of crazy Dervish and Paragon builds are showing up. Fire elementalists with Searing Flames are all over the place right now which makes a pleasant change.

I'm playing a Dervish in PvE right now and it's a lot of fun. Paragon's up next.

The new PvP template feature released just before Nightfall - saving and loading skill and equipment settings - is really good too. There's only 2 things that need improving with the feature:
1) When you save an equipment template, it only saves the current weapon instead of all your weapon slots. This is dumb and wastes a bunch of time when you're re-loading a character.
2) Since you can't copy out of the GW chatbox, there's no easy in-game way to send a template to someone. This isn't too bad because you can just post it in the TeamSpeak channel or whatever, it's more of a quibble.

Guild Wars: Improving your guild

Nice little article by STINGER of KT on improving GvG play for newer players.

The only quibble I have is that creating PvE characters for PvP really isn't necessary any more. You'd be much better off spending the gazillion hours of farming you'd need to make comparable equipment to the free PvP stuff just playing PvP instead. This is especially true now that the faction flow in PvP is fast enough that unlocking skills through PvP is actually viable.

Games. Tech. Musings.

Friday, November 17, 2006