Guild Wars: Mind Blast Arena

Given that my computer has decided to melt whenever I try to play Bioshock, I was back in the Random Arenas last night. I was running a variant of a creative Mind Blast build I'd seen posted by Patccmoi:

E/Me Clumsy Mind Blaster

12+2+1 Fire Magic
10 Illusion
8+1 Energy Storage
Mind Blast
Glyph of Immolation
Liquid Flame
Fire Attunement
Clumsiness
Imagined Burden
Flame Djinn's Haste
Resurrection Signet

I subbed Liquid Flame for Fireball and Glyph of Immolation for Mark of Rodgort, because I'd rather avoid 2s casts and the Mark wasn't sticking a whole lot.
Easy to play, decent damage and melee shutdown and the all-important ability to kick an assassin in the nuts. I'm not sure that you really need Fire Attunement but it doesn't hurt to have it. No self heal, so knowing when to run away is pretty important. For the most part, you can just load up with Attunement and a Glyph and then just alternate Mind Blast and Clumsiness on a hapless melee type, while keeping another one near-perma-snared with Imagined Burden.
Don't forget your high energy (+30e/-2r) equipment swap - very important for Mind Blast builds.

Guild Wars: Shrines in Arenas

So apparently ArenaNet added Hero Battles maps to the Arenas rotation. It only says Team Arenas in the update, but apparently they added them to Random Arenas too. Not sure whether that's intentional or just a bug.

I'm curious as to how this plays out. Of course, I expect a lot of bitching right now no matter whether it's good or bad. Maybe I'll manage to get a few free minutes and check into the arenas this weekend. Oh, just in case you didn't notice the front page news, it's a bonus points weekend in the arenas too.

Update: according to Izzy, adding the HB maps to Random Arenas was intentional. It was the change log that had the mistake.

Guild Wars: Beating Costume Brawl

Since presumably Costume Brawl was pulled today at the end of Halloween, now seems like the perfect time to post a guide to how to win a lot. How2beet as the kids these days say. Well, I'm very lazy and Rex already wrote one, so you can go read his endless waffling instead.

My free time so far this week at home adds up to a grand total of nullminuten so I didn't get to play any more Costume Brawl. I for one think the Brawl will be back, so I'm not totally heartbroken. I bet the skill bars are different next time though.

Guild Wars: Costume Brawl

This Halloween, we got a new mini-game - Costume Brawl. In a nutshell, it's a 5v5 PvP format with random team selection and fixed skill bars per class on Hero Battles maps. The actual costume flavour seems very weak. You get the skin of a Hero of the appropriate sex and class. Given that it's Halloween, monster skins would have been a much better choice. I'm guessing that was what they wanted but presumably it would cause animation issues since players have a much wider selection of animations than monsters. Alright, I'm not a big flavour person so let's get down to the important stuff - game mechanics.

Personally, I think that the format itself seems pretty good although I didn't get to play it enough to be sure. The skill bars could use some tweaking but that's pretty par for the course at this point - ArenaNet's track record on preset skill bars is not good. Tactical splitting and play skill are definitely important in this format, and the lack of skill bar building makes it slightly (but only slightly) more friendly to casual players than the usual PvP formats with their near-vertical learning curves.

For average to experienced players, the Ranger is head and shoulders above the other builds. This is a capping and splitting format, so survivability and mobility are the order of the day - and just as in GvG, the Ranger has the best average 1v1 matchups of all the choices available. The other bars are generally at least playable with the exception of the Paragon, which I wouldn't recommend.

Note that this is a very violent format, with relatively weak healing options, so all the characters pack self-heals. The nice thing about this is that it fixes the good-monk-equals-win problem of Random Arenas - mixes of most character types are at least semi-viable, and player skill is generally more important than the class selection. That said, player skill is important enough that generally the key to winning or losing is who you get on your team, which can be frustrating at times.

One more tip:

RUN AWAY WHEN YOU'RE OUTNUMBERED.

In a splitting format, picking and choosing your fights is very important. If it's 3v1 against you, head for the hills and just try to stay alive. If you can escape without being snared, you'll either be taking up a bunch of their team, giving your team numbers elsewhere, or you'll live to collapse on that 1 other guy somewhere else on the map. I see bad players fighting helpless odds virtually every single match. Keep an eye on your radar and start running before all the guys in the area have you in spell range.

If I was a betting man, I'd say that this format is a testbed for some similar stuff in Guild Wars 2.

Still Not Dead

Contrary to some media reports, I am not actually dead. Just resting.

Or anyway, I wish I was.

Since my last check in with the online world, some personal drama happened that I won't bore you with and one other minor thing - I had a daughter. Turns out that babies don't have a pause button, especially when they have colic. This means that I'm watching a lot of TV and not playing much game-wise, which is all rather sad since I'd much rather play games than watch TV.

In a few stolen moments of gametime, I've squeezed in a bit of GW PvE in the new Eye of the North expansion, which is nice although rather grindy. I guess enough PvE people liked all the previous title stuff that they figured they may as well answer the call for more grind, but this time reward it with in-game significance instead of just visual differences. I haven't got to play any PvP at all since the baby was born, which is a great shame.

In other news, I've also been playing the ubiquitous Bioshock, about which plenty has been written. My verdict is that there's a reason "shock" is in the name, but nonetheless a wonderfully atmospheric game you have to buy simply to know what everyone is talking about if nothing else. I should caution you that it's a bit demanding on the machine, though.

One last thing for now - there's a new king of online game reviews. Highly recommended, if NSFW.

Guild Wars: Frontline tips

Here's a useful post over at the Mostly Harmless forums on playing frontline roles (warrior or dervish). I'm pretty terrible at playing in the front line, although admittedly I haven't gone back and tried for a while.

Guild Wars: Hard Mode

Does exactly what it says on the tin. No, really.

Guild Wars: Hard Mode

PvE Hard Mode is about to be released. Check out the official page for the details.

Edit: one non-obvious point they didn't mention - to get access to Hard Mode for a PvE campaign, you have to log in with a character who's beaten the campaign. After that, all your characters can play in Hard Mode for that campaign.

Guild Wars: Automated Tournament Thoughts

In large part, the AT stuff posted looks very good. I'm principally concerned with GvG here because I think the HvH format right now needs some love to make it more about fighting and less about capping. I'm not sure how much it can be rescued, to be honest. Fundamentally you have 3 not-very-bright heroes on each team and only one human, so overruling bad AI decisions via a clunky interface is always going to be a large part of that game. I'm not convinced that's ever going to be really fun.

I was hoping to play some more HvH while I was on vacation just to see if I would come around to the format but my wife's laptop was just too slow for PvP - so I finally got around to finishing Nightfall's PvE campaign instead.

Anyway, some thoughts in random order:

The posted schedule looks like ArenaNet was trying too hard to appear even-handed. The round-the-clock distribution of playing times is fine in theory but in practice the bulk of their players are in a few time zones - EST, GMT+1 and GMT+2 mostly, I'm guessing, from the number of European and American guilds. I expect the schedule to be revised before the system goes live.

Shiny "Barbie Wars" rewards for doing well are a nice touch. People always seem to respond well to e-peen stroking opportunities.

Sadly, 4 hours straight is a pretty big time commitment for anyone with a life. Personally, I'd rather have a round or two less (say, 16 or 8 guild pods) or skipping the final single-elimination rounds and just doing straight Swiss to guarantee a shorter play time. Previously, I'd thought about tournament options where you just played a match every week or somesuch but after the Celestial tourney I'm convinced this is a bad idea. Getting 8 people to show up at the same time who don't know each other closely is problematic and a big time sink. Anyway, I guess we'll see how long each tourney really goes.

Higher K-values: well, about time. Hopefully this will mean ratings will start reflecting real guild strength more closely. Once again, we shall see how this plays out.

One missing point that's not mentioned is map choice. Hopefully maps will be random to cut down on the 8v8 builds on Jade phenomenon, etc.

As for this:

We are always trying to move Guild Wars to the fore of competitive e-sports

Sadly, I think this is doomed to failure. GW is just never going to be a good spectator's game because the amount of knowledge required to enjoy watching is just too high. Without a lot of spectators, you have no real sport. Magic has a similar problem - unless you know the cardsets the players are using really well, you can't follow what's happening. That said, my current #1 feature I'd really like is to be able to download observer mode replays. I have a suspicion that that is technically very difficult to implement and so will never happen.

Overall, I'm excited. Hopefully I'll actually be on the OoX core GvG roster and get to play...

Guild Wars: Automated Tournament Details!

The official post just went up. System starts up in April.

I have some thoughts on this but not enough time to write them down now. Watch this space. For now, let's just say I'm excited.

Guild Wars: Celestial Tournament over

The Celestial Tournament is over, with Team Everfrost [eF] taking the crown over Esoteric Warriors [EW]. In what I can only assume is some kind of cry for help, Rex has taken it upon himself to blog about pretty much each and every game played in the quarterfinals and onwards.

In other not-quite-news-yet, according to the official site, apparently we'll hear more about the breathlessly-awaited Automated Tournament system "very soon".

Guild Wars: Celestial Tournament final rounds

Well, the Celestial Tournament is finally over for us with yet another forfeit. Rex already posted his verbose-as-always screed on the subject. In summary:

Wins vs. teams with a hench: 1
Losses vs. teams with a hench: 1
Non-hench savage beatings received: 1
Non-hench savage beatings inflicted: 1
Forfeits (win or loss): 4

Pretty sad. There weren't really any good matches for us. The only team we played that was really in our skill bracket had to play with a henchman. Since we were a PST guild and most of the guilds are European, they'd have to get up in the middle of the night to play us and hence forfeits were abundant. Well, I told you so. Admittedly, I didn't figure out the full extent of the scheduling horror until I saw the first round pairings. I think the whole 8-man roster fiasco overshadowed the time zone issue initially.

Guild Wars: Fixing Hexes

Phelann has an interesting post on fixing hexes over at the Guild Hall. Specifically, tweaking single hex removal skills to remove 1 hex per 2 hexes on the target, rounding up - so Holy Veil removes 2 on a target with 3, but only 1 on a target with 2. Makes covering hexes still have a point, but overwhelming hex stacks not so useful.

Could be one approach for fixing the all-or-nothing nature of hexes that seems to be a bit of a problem right now. Some hexes are fine - notably water snares and some of the mesmer domination line - but most are only worth it if the whole build is devoted to them. I'm not sure that this really solves the issue but it does at least provide a solution to the rock-paper-scissors metagame that narrow mass removals like Divert Hexes are currently providing.

Guild Wars: GW2 & Eye of the North official announcement

The announcement's over at GWGuru - it came in PCGamer.

Sounds like a more standard MMO-ish direction for GW2. Notably for the PvP fanatics in the audience, they're currently planning on having the current GW arena-style PvP as well as "world-style" PvP, which sounds like the Realm vs. Realm PvP of Dark Age of Camelot.

New skills but no new professions in the next GW chapter, due out at the end of the year.

In summary, the main points of the previously accidentally leaked details were correct.

Guild Wars: QQ vs EW

Go watch this match from the Celestial Tournament. If you're easily bored, skip to the last 3 minutes.

Music choice is a bit sketchy but the actual match is excellent.

Guild Wars: Izzy Interview

I finally got round to listening to Izzy's interview on Weapon of Choice. Here are some choice tidbits:

• ArenaNet made a conscious decision not to prioritize PvP balance testing in Alpha because it wasn't working well for them. The most competitive players didn't have a big enough incentive to play Alpha regularly to really bring out the issues.
  
• Balance changes don't happen overnight - it takes a lot of people and time (translations to a zillion languages, etc).
  
• Yes, Jade Isle needs some love.
  
• Right now they're planning on the Automated Tournament system having daily, weekly and monthly tournaments with prizes for different levels of play and support for different time zones. Izzy seemed pretty sad they didn't have the system from the start.
  
• The PvP priority from their point of view is building a larger PvP base and that's the point of the AT system - to energize the PvP community.
  

It's an interesting interview, and recommended if you're interested in the PvP game. I invariably agree with Izzy - I think he does a good job of moving the game in the right direction. Even though he has my fish.

Guild Wars: Dev Update

Q. What do ritualist spike and discord spike have in common?

A. They both just got nerfed in the face.

Thanks Izzy.

Shadow Prison, Wastrel's Demise and Blades of Steel also got a tap from the nerfbat. Hero Battles also got tweaked to hopefully fix the "holding" builds. I haven't played HvH for a long time since I'm always GvGing these days. I don't know whether I'll get to try the format again anytime soon.

Guild Wars: Celestial Tournament, Round 2

Second round pairings are up.

My division of the XoO hordes went 2-0 vs. Cheeky Monkeys in round 1, as Rex already noted. I suspect this round is going to be a whole lot harder - the next team actually has a reasonable rating. Not that the ladder's a great indication of a whole lot right now, but it does indicate that they probably aren't normally a 4 hero team.

Guild Wars: Celestial Tournament round 1 pairings

Pairings for round 1 are up.

We're up against Greedy Monkeys. They're presumably a guild created for the tournament, since they have no play history at this point.

Guild Wars: Dev update

Gaile posted another Dev Update. See the link for the PvE stuff. The main PvP-relevant content was what they're testing internally right now:

• Paragon diversity and balance. Once we’ve had more time to see the most recent changes in effect, we’ll see if further changes are needed.
• Bow skills for rangers.
• Ranger pet adjustments. We're pleased to say we have a rudimentary version of pet controls up-and-running on our test servers. We’re looking forward getting those into the live game as soon as we’ve examined all of the play balance issues this might introduce.