Guild Wars: Designing Team Arena builds

Solid post by Divineshadows over at GWGuru on designing Team Arena builds.

Tags: gaming, guild wars, PvP, team arena

Windstorm

Giant windstorm = no power/heat/light/water at home since last Thursday night = no fun.

Did someone flip Mother Nature off or something?

Update: power and civilization is restored. Even got Internet service again last night. Just as well, I was about 1 day away from hunting down animals with a pointy stick.

Tags: whining, weather, seattle windstorm

Guild Wars: Reconnects and party forming UI

If you're paying attention, you already know about the new features but I figured I should probably mention it, given that both features have been near the top of people's wish list for... oh, I don't know, since release. It'll be interesting to see what the party UI looks like.

I think the PvE crowd's Xmas list had an auction house on it too and I've already seen whining about it.

I've got a metaphor for this. My 3 year old happily sat on Santa's lap this year and Santa asked him what he'd like for Christmas. He replied "a car that goes down ramps... a hammer..... and a dog". Santa replied, giving us a glance, "Well, we'll see about the car and the hammer, but I'm not so sure about the dog".

Tags: gaming, guild wars, reconnects, party ui

Guild Wars: Balancing shortlist followup

Back in August, I wrote a little summary of balance tweaks I thought needed doing. How did Izzy do?

1. Only Warriors do damage.

Hello, Searing Flames elementalists. Oh, and dervishes. Fixed. Pretty much.

2. Elementalist Elites

Instead of the previous you-can-take-Prodigy-or-Prodigy, now there's a bunch of Searing Flames, Blinding Surge, Glyph of Energy and Invoke Lightning eles around as well as the old Prodigy standbys. Fixed.

3. Assassin Elites

The new Shadow Prison and Shadow of Haste have actually displaced Aura of Displacement (pun intended). A few elites showing up here from "Coward!" to Shove, Moebius Strike and Shadow Prison. Admittedly, almost all the Assassin primaries you'll see right now are Shadow Prison. Still, at least there's options. Fixed.

I also mentioned that Eviscerate was the only axe elite being used, but now Shadow Prison has largely displaced it with Dismember being the deep wound skill. Fixed-ish.

Well, 3 for 3. Solutions for those weren't obvious. Tip of the hat to Izzy for that, but a wag of the finger for taking too long to nerf Energizing Finale. Yeah, we know, it was mid-season but sometimes you've got to do what you've got to do.

Tags: guild wars, PvP, GvG, skill balance, balancing

Guild Wars: Match calling in GvG

Great post by Lioka of XoO over at their forums on match calling in GvG, i.e. the high-level strategic view of the game.

It's at a pretty basic level but I personally suck at this so it was very interesting.

Tags: gaming, guild wars, PvP, GvG

Guild Wars: Making a build

Decent high-level article on build design by LightningHell over at GWGuru. I meant to link this a while ago but forgot.

Tags: gaming, guild wars, PvP

Natural Selection 2: Dynamic infestation video

As far as I know, this is the first video of the work Charlie and Max have been doing.

Very nice.

Max has some more info over at the NS blog.

Tags: gaming, natural selection 2, video

Guild Wars: Energizing Finale nerfed

Not a huge surprise, really, except that usually skill changes only happen between seasons.

* Aria of Zeal: Increased casting time to 2 seconds.
* Cyclone Axe: Modified so that it now requires an enemy target.
* Energizing Finale: Increased the Energy cost to 10 and reduced the amount of energy gained per shout or chant to 1.
* "Incoming!": Increased Energy cost to 10 and decreased duration to 1..5 seconds.
* Jagged Bones: Modified so that it may now be used on allied minions.
* Restful Breeze: Modified so that its behavior more accurately matches its description.
* "Stand Your Ground!": Increased energy cost to 10.
* "Watch Yourself!": Changed armor gain to 5..25, based on the Tactics attribute.

In case the "Watch Yourself!" change seems weird, it's because there were a lot of Paragon/Warriors using it with 0 in Tactics to trigger the renews-on-shout-expiration echoes. All the significant changes here are nerfing defensive Paragons. The offensive "Go for the eyes!" Paragons are still pretty decent. However, the offensive Paragons may well not see as much play now they're not triggering Energizing Finale.

Tags: gaming, guild wars, paragons, skill rebalance