Despite a rather up and down schedule over the last few weeks, I’ve still been managing to turn up most week for the Tuesday N00b Club, which is very much still alive and well. Well, alive in the ‘Ongoing Week to Week Interest’ sense of the word, rather than the moment to moment ‘All Aboard the -60%DP Express’ sense.

We do well most of the time, but aren’t so veteran that we can’t be steamrollered by the occasional end stage maps and challenges. Part of this is the simple business of having a team full of people, and no heroes or henchmen, and while a couple of the regulars actually enjoy Monk Based Healing duties, we often find ourselves a team almost entirely made up of DPS, and not a lot else.

I try to do my bit as often as I can, but despite repeated goes, being a Monk has never really clicked for me, and to be frank, I suck at it. One of the main problems is that I try this as a Mesmer/Monk, rather than rolling up a new alt for the specific purpose, and this is less than optimal, because of Divine Favor, or more precisely, my lack of it. This skill is only allowed to Primary Monks, and heals the Monk’s targeted ally for extra whenever they cast any spell friendly on them.

An example would be Orison of Healing, a standard Monk staple; cast at 12 Healing Prayers, it heals for 60 hp. With 12 Divine Favor on top, the spell would do an extra 38 hp; significant, and a must-have for any dedicated Monk. Poor old Mesmer me on the otherhand, can never use Divine Favor, and instead get fast casting, which is all very well, but makes me a poor Monk Stand-in.

But I want to do my bit, so have been looking into other ways to heal. I tried Paragon’s Motivation for a bit; this was my initial dual-class pairing; Me/P. I had some limited success with it, but only at the really early levels and soon ended up going single-class with it, in Mesmer. Motivation is a great ‘assist heal’ type of role, but you wouldn’t want a primary healer using it; it relies on ‘Earshot’ range AoE stuff too much, and people can be a bit unpredictable in their positioning!

The other option was Ritualist’s Restoration, which I have some passing familiarity with already. I was a Rit through my Factions adventures, and know the basics, although specialised in Channeling back then, which was more offensive than support.

One of the great things about Ritualist healing, is that it has no support attribute, like Divine Favor, and is very self-contained, as a skill set, compared to the Monk equivalents. Rits get Spawning Power instead, which makes spells and spirits last a bit longer and have more health – not essential for what I want at all.

A quick scoot around various Factions skill trainers and I came up with this early experimental healer build:

The Rituals of Restoration

Restoration 12, Inspiration 12, Fast Casting 3

[OQhiMwh8IOHnSzMW8MDG3uYA]

Preservation, Life, Mend Body and Soul, Weapon of Warding, Wielder’s Boon, Revealed Hex, Ether Signet, Flesh of my Flesh

Requires: Factions

Equipment: Inspiration Staff, Runes in Insp or FC; general purpose Caster Insignias and Runes to fill out.

Mostly, its all about the Restoration, and almost any Primary could do reasonably well at the role, swapping #6 and #7 for something handy from their own lists. Saying that, the ‘caster’ Primaries are likely to do better than Warriors or Rangers, mostly due to their higher innate energy regeneration and capacity

Ritualists typically work through one of three types of mechanic.

Spirits (#1 and #’2 above), which are summoned static deployables, and can help or harm. The Elite above, #1 (Preservation) acts like a static mini-monk, and will randomly heal a nearby friendly every 4 seconds, for 94pts a go. The random bit isn’t so helpful, but is still good if you’re rubbish at micromanagement like I am; simply set it up and it works as a decent back-stop.

#2 (Life) is like a timed AoE Healing Bomb; set this up ahead of time, just as the rest of the team are starting to charge into the fray. It’ll sit there and do nothing for 20 seconds, and then die, healing the entire party for 120hp each. The timing takes a bit of practice, but it works well as a big ‘spike-heal’, and the heal effect has a seemingly unlimited range, unlike most spirits. If killed before the 20s is up, it’ll still heal everyone for a bit less.

As well as their own effects, many of the other Rit skills function in a much improved manner if Spirits are nearby; #3 in this case (Mend Body and Soul). This does a straight, and very efficient direct target heal for 96pts, and for each spirit nearby (in my case, two usually), will remove a Condition from the target. Compare to an equivalent Monk heal; Orison again, which heals for about the same, costs the same, has similar cast time and recharge, but does nothing about Conditions, and requires two Monk attributes at 12, instead of just one for the Ritualist.

This efficiency is echoed across many of the Restoration spells; as long as you can fulfil the situational requirements of the spell, they seem to be a fair bit more powerful and flexible than straight Monk equivalents, and for Mesmers, this ‘If target is X, and Y, then Z…’ stuff is a very familiar and natural state of affairs. Like Mesmers, many of the Ritualist’s best work only happens in specific circumstances.

The second main Ritualist mechanic is the Weapon Spell. This is a buff, like an Enchantment, but on the ally’s weapon, not them. As such, these leave no yellow ‘up arrow’, and so cannot be removed with the large variety of anti-enchantment spells in the game. To counter that, they’re usually very short duration. #4 (Weapon of Warding) is one I picked from the Restoration list, giving +4 regen and 50% block, which is helpful enough in it’s own right, but is mostly there as an enabler for #5 (Wielder’s Boon), which heals the target for 51pts, and if they have a Weapon Spell active, for a further 63pts. All very efficient!

There is a third mechanic which I’m not using here, but am dabbling with too; the Item Spell. This summons a carryable urn of ash, which has effects when held, effects when dropped, and again, is supported by a large variety of spells that do even better ‘if holding an item’. More to dabble with there.

#6 (Revealed Hex) is an old favourite from Inspiration, removing hexes from allies and turning into that hex for your own use for 20s. I don’t tend to actually use that bit of it much, but the Hex removal is a good way to round out the build; Ritualists don’t seem to get much Hex Removal as far as I can see. It also provides energy. #7 (Ether Signet) is one I always find room for if I can; if Energy < 9, gain 18 energy. Win-win, although the timing takes a bit of practice.

#8 (Flesh Of My Flesh) is a fairly standard Resurrect, because you never know, and also, many people go silent with incredulity when you calmly remark that you’re the healer, but you don’t have a rez.

It seemed to work quite well as far as I’ve tested it so far. Could probably do with some tweaking, but the very Mesmer-like decision-making involved, and at the same time, the quite hands-off nature of the Spirits all made for a much more comfortable Healing Experience than any of my previous adventures as a Monk-wannabe, which just seemed to degenerate into a frenzy of party window clicking, culminating in me dying, because I’m so busy concentrating on healing folks that I forget to run away when the monsters start hitting me in the face with hammers. Ritualising just seems to flow more naturally for me, for some reason.

In general, I’m starting to notice that while the initial basic ‘Prophecies’ Guild Wars game has a very designed-in-from-scratch dual-class interdependency, with the basic six professions tending to mingle quite freely, the later added professions seem to be much more self-contained things, as seen in the Ritualist’s Single Attribute Total Heal/Support Package, or our TNC Dervishes using almost nothing from any Secondary, on a regular basis. It shows perhaps a trend away from the original concept of making a unique class of your own, halfway between one and the next, and perhaps a move toward something more comprehensible, more self-intuitive and ready-out-of-the-box. Who knows? I wonder what we’ll see for GW2?

Anyway, what I do know is that if you want to be a useful healer, and don’t want to roll a new character to do it, the Any/Ritualist with 12 Restoration is the way to go!

A missed session Guild Wars session last week, with both of us finding Real Life to be growing ever more intrusive of late, and I wonder if this gradual but suddenly noticeable shrinking of my spare time is just bad timing and bad luck, or something more fundamentally life changing; me growing up finally perhaps. Anyway, no such impediments this week as we plunged on into Destruction Depths, the next and penultimate step in the Eye of the North campaign.

Our various allies, who we’d spent much of the campaign trying to get on-board, are all now in place, and its time for the big push on the Central Transfer Chamber, which is a kind of hub for all these mysterious Asuran stargate whirling portal things, but more importantly, is right next to Destroyer HQ.

What followed was perhaps one of the most gruelling EoN Dungeons we’d faced yet. Several levels of the Ice Cavern architecture, including a number of modularly reused rooms I’d already seen in the Darkrime Delves dungeon, and others. The ensuing dungeon crawl wasn’t especially a technical exercise, but was still quite hard work, all in all, with lots of waypoint objectives along the route that saw us swamped with sudden ‘hold the fort’ multi-wave Destroyer ambushes. In particular, the cave where the Norns are making a stand was extremely brutal, and saw us quite comprehensively -60%’ed and quite harshly camped on a nearby shrine. Luckily, and unlike the usual ‘Mission’ format, there are shrines in here, so you can only really lose this romp if you run out of dogged determination.

The most problematic monsters tended to be the those big circular saw-blade Destroyers who hit very hard, and are usually at the core of a big double group of the more usual low-grade (ha!) L28 Destroyer Yard Trash. You get three golems to help, and those did to some extent, although it took a while to realise that setting them all to [Melee] was probably the best plan, rather than mucking about with the [Ranged] and [Defense] modes. They’re not bad fighters in themselves, but their real strength is in their sheer size, and three of them pushing up front to melee forms a pretty impassible wall, which many monsters are physically unable to get through. This makes life a lot easier for our predominantly Ranger Beastmaster Pets team.

A fair amount of dying (on both sides) later, we’d pushed to the gate and through, and arrived at the Central Transfer Camber itself. This is much more technical task and clearing this room safely involves a lot of precision work with pulling, waypoint flags, staircases and the like. The chamber is dominated by a L30 Elementalist disc Destroyer with Mind Burn – quite lethal, and it took a few goes to thin out it’s accompanying minions a bit. The final assault, when it came was greatly aided by the three golems going in hard and effectively trapping the boss between themselves. Our healing Monks were flagged just out of the disc’s reach, but close enough to heal the golems, and from that point, it was just a frantic DPS race against it’s own regeneration, which we won.

Well, I say ‘won’ – I spent most of that stage dead, having been burned to death while reactivating the golems, inert from the last failed push. Being dead allows one all sorts of tranquility with which to observe proceedings, and lets you work out what is actually going on without all that fleeing for one’s life distracting. I highly recommend it!

Luckily, at that point, we get another outpost – the Central Transfer Chamber itself, meaning that the somewhat intermittent network disconnects of the night (’007′s in GW parlance) won’t make me have to go all the way back to the Eye of the North and do the whole thing again. Here we find the main Dwarven attack force, now transformed into living stone. This makes them all go a bit berserk, and they’ve now all quite happy to throw themselves at the oncoming Destroyer army, despite our concerns about there being a somewhat infinite amount of Destroyers, and only so many Dwarves, fire-proof or not.

At this point, Gwen, showing an almost Mesmer-like presence of mind and insight, makes an interesting comparison between the Dwarves and the Destroyers, and hits upon a winning plan, which predictably enough, involves heading to the side-chamber, and last mission – A Time For Heroes.

The last mission turned out to be a lot easier than the previous penultimate dungeon romp, and indeed, a great deal easier than Nightfall’s big gigantic floating head boss level, significantly easier than the rambling and tortuous final lava level fieldtrip of Prophecies, and much easier than the Super-Mega-Shiro-AKIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRA!-Showdown, and only took us two goes.

The room is basically entirely made of lava. There was some nonsense about ‘try to stand on the hardened lava’, and our first failed attempt was spent mostly trying to find this supposed safe place to stand, all the while plinking at the odd Destroyer and getting burned to death. We couldn’t find it, and all got burned to death.

Second go went much better, as we decide to effectively ignore the environmental challenges of the room and just all pile on! Three healing monks with Light of Deliverance, a moderate power party-wide heal instead of the usual high-powered single target heal, seemed to be keeping comfortably abreast of the constant burnination, and a Motivation Hayda using Song of Purification seemed to be helping with the Burning condition too.

Once cheerfully ignoring fire, Burning and all such problems to do with the room itself, it came as a bit of a surprise that The Great Destroyer doesn’t pose a huge threat beyond the difficulty of the room itself. He has some quite powerful Monster skills, certainly, but he seemed either not to be getting many of them out, or was being interrupted, or something.

Mind you, when you’re already ON FIRE, being breathed on by an angry dragon-thing loses a lot of its sting, and I suspect a lot of the difficulty of this encounter was negated by having just so much spammable party-wide healing on the team. (And a massive overload of sugary buff snacks left over from the last hopelessly difficult mission of course! All hail, the Sweetshop of Success!)

Teeth pulled, The Great Destroyer crumbled within about two minutes, seeing us win! Huzzah! Mind you, not to get too self-congratulatory about it all – there were people out in the CTC offering to run the mission – basically go off and solo it while you wait just inside the entrance, which is a bit demeaning for an end-game boss. Egads…I’m advocating….making an EoN boss… harder?

The final cutscene was quite satisfying, and contains a few teasers, hints, clues and the like, for Guild Wars 2. You’ll have to complete EoN for yourself to see that, but Somebody Keep An Eye On Livia, is all I’m sayin’. Still, vague in it’s promise as it was, at least it wasn’t a just a trailer video of World of Warcraft, as my friend somewhat spitefully remarked.

We’re both quite concerned on that score, with all this talk of more ‘MMO-like’ communally shared Explorable Areas and so on, and one of the main reasons I like Guild Wars as much as I do, is that the kinds of unrelentingly offensive human detritus found chat spamming abuse in many of the busiest lobbies, can do only that – chat spam in a lobby. They don’t get the chance to ruin my gaming day in any important way, in a real zone, but in Guild Wars 2, well….we’ll see…

The Roll End Credits bit takes place in the Dwarven Camp in Battledepths, and the ghost of Droknar himself hands out a key to a number of profession specific chests, allowing the purchase of a souvenir green weapon. I went with Droknar’s Illusion Staff in the end, after much dithering. The Domination Staff is slightly better than the one I already have, (from the Epilogue of Nightfall in fact), but I don’t have a decent Illusion staff, and if I’ve learnt anything from this expansion, its that flexibility is a good thing.

The fireworks burst and all the NPCs we’ve met on our journey turned out to offer congratulations, in a way that most MMOs cannot ever offer. Here’s the obligatory Post Victory Dance Party!

We took our completed Hero’s Handbooks back to Gunnar’s Hold and handed them into the Dwarf Recruiting chap for enough Dwarf faction to go from rank 4 to rank 6 instantly, and were given blank empty new books, so we can do it all again! In Hard Mode! I’ve never been one for a second go at Repeatable Quests in any game, and it turns out that the entire expansion is essentially that! We’ve still got the Dungeon Book to fill in yet though before I can think of EoN as truly ‘finished’ to my own satisfaction.

And there we go, all current Guild Wars editions complete. There’s a bonus mission pack I’m missing somewhere along the way, I think – telling the story of Gwen and some of the other major historical NPCs, but story-wise, that’s pretty much it until GW2, which I’m not certain I’ll get anyway yet. Mind you – my Mesmer still has a lot of gaps to fill in – cartography, skill collecting and so on.

I’ve mostly enjoyed Eye of the North. Its been pretty difficult a lot of the way through, but then it truly is an Expansion; an add-on, rather than a side product like the first three campaigns. To get the most out of it, you will have ideally completed one of the existing campaigns, and have a fairly tricked out main character whom you know how to play well in a variety of different situations.

It also greatly expands on the ‘Things To Do When You’ve Won’, and each Dungeon is a similar kind of thing to the Underworlds and Domains of Anguishes and Tombs of Primeval Kings. The whole thing does seem to have been designed with end-game repeatability in mind more than anything else, adding an extra layer of, well, raid-culture I suppose, to GW, very much in line with current MMO philosophy. Unlike most MMOs however, this is still a kind of casual ‘raid-lite’ in execution and while hard work, I’ve not seen anything so far that two, three or four friends, couldn’t just roll up to one evening and do well at. Horses for courses, but personally, I do prefer something more accessible and less dependent on military precision and teamspeak shrieking.

Thank you for bearing with me this far – I’ve tried to make it as gruelling for you as it was for me! A special thank you to all members of the Tuesday N00b Club, past and present, many of those missions looked extremely difficult to solo, if not technically impossible, so I really couldn’t have done it without you all!

And now, it’s time to head off into the sunset of low-grade completionist box-ticking, and wary and guarded curiosity about Guild Wars 2…

The ‘winning’ build turned out to not be that special actually – a hybrid Domination/Inspiration thing, thrown together in a hurry after my previous Volfen build turned out not to be that useful in a place where ranged attack is better than melee. Mantra of Flame, of course, and Energy Surge/Cry of Pain/Backfire/Empathy – all solid staples of a plain old Damage Mesmer build.

So instead, here’s today’s build:

The [verb, present continuous tense] of [noun, plural]

Any/Any

Any 8-12, Any 8-12, Optional Any 3-8

Yes that’s right, flush with egomania at completing EoN on N0rM4l m0d3, I’m now putting forth opinion on every profession, all at once! Muaha! Well, kind of. More general build tips actually, and things to look out for when trying to pick eight useful skills out of a thousand.

Primary

If you are a Mesmer/Dervish, you are always going to be a Mesmer, but the Dervish bit can be changed. It makes sense therefore, to have something in the build that is based on your Primary, since you’re stuck with it anyway. Builds containing skills entirely from a Secondary Profession can work, but often require the backup of that class’s runes, armour, energy regeneration, or Primary Attribute to get the most out of, and are likely to be hard work for a Secondary alone. If you are an Me/A and desperately want eight Assassin skills with three that come from Critical Strikes, you probably ought to be thinking about making an A/Me alt instead.

Nothing wrong with Me/A mind you, but a Primary is slightly more than a Secondary, and it pays to play to your strengths where you can.

Primary Attribute

The Primary profession can put points into their Primary Attribute, which a Secondary cannot. These are listed here (the green exclamation marks). As well as adding power to skills that a Secondary cannot improve, the attribute often confers an extra passive bonus which may suggest one type of build over another. e.g Divine Favour adds bonus healing to spells that target allies – suggesting a healing type of support build for Primary Monks. Expertise reduces the cost of Attack Skills, Rituals and Touch and Ranger Skills – suggesting a fast, cheap spammable build made mostly of bow and pet attacks and such. This Primary Attribute needn’t necessarily be maxed, but since you are that Primary Class in the first place, it can pay to consider what tools you have that no-one else does.

Conversely, Secondary Professions should consider the other profession’s primary attribute linked skills very carefully before adding them to the build. With an linked attribute of 0, very few of these retain an effect useful enough to be worth using up a slot for.

Attribute Points

Once all the relevant quests are doled out and completed, you’ll finish up with 200 Attribute Points. These can be split several ways, but the rank of the attribute you split them into directly powers most numbers of a linked skill. It pays therefore, not to spread yourself too thin, or all of your skills become quite toothless. In general, look to specialise; two skills at 12, or a 10/10/11 split if need be. The higher the attribute, the more powerful your skills. Once these skill points are assigned, look to be using skills from those attributes only, where possible.

(PvE Rank skills are a useful alternative; Sunspear, Lightbringer, Norn, etc, maintaining a constant power based on your titles, but will not be allowed in PvP matches.)

Unattributed skills are something of an exception, requiring you only to have that class at all to be useful at full power. These are the ones with no green numbers in their text at all, but tend to be Signets, and other slow charging skills, and primarily concerned with Enchantment and Condition manipulation; rarely something to build a an entire skillbar around, although some of them can be very useful in combos. If it has no numbers in it’s text, it can neither heal nor hurt, directly.

Attributes

Consider what skills to bring from an attribute perspective. Each of a Profession’s Attributes tend toward different and specific kinds of roles. Healing Prayers vs Smiting Prayers is an obvious example. Domination Magic tends toward straight damage, while Illusion Magic is more about debuffs. Wilderness Survival is often about support and trapping, while Expertise is mixed bag of all sorts of skills. Water Magic does a lot with movement control, while Earth Magic is about defensive measures. Both do raw damage, but each has a different twist, as does Fire Magic and Air Magic.

Look for the overall themes behind each individual attribute, and especially when making dual profession builds, consider what themes work together, or complement each other well. Beastmastery is about pets. So, on the whole, is Death Magic. Illusion Magic and Curses are both quite similar sorts of thing. Earth Magic and Protection Prayers, and so on.

Having only two attributes maxed at 12 narrows down the possible skills considerably, allowing for a tight and focused build with enough ooomph to get a useful job done. There are enough different types of skill in each Attribute however, to still allow a bit of creativity.

Once a pair or trio of useful attributes are picked out, browse through the associated skills. Although cheating, it can pay to use the various wiki lists for this – it might be that there’s a perfect skill for what you’re trying to do, only it’s at an outpost you haven’t reached yet, or you haven’t gotten around to the specific skill capture you need.

A good skill bar should have:

An Elite Skill: You’re allowed one of these, and in general, if they aren’t outright I-Win Buttons, they’ll often be more powerful versions of normal skills, or cheaper, or faster, or party-wide or AoE instead of a single target. You can only have one of these however, so choose carefully, but unless working on a very specialised build, it pays to take something Elite.

Often this choice of elite skill will go a long way to dictating the shape of the rest of the bar, but if you can’t think of one to take, consider favourite non-elite skills and see if there isn’t a super-charged version of that. Empathy > Visions of Regret or Ineptitude, for instance, or Energy Burn > Energy Surge. In these cases, you’re allowed to take both the non-elite and elite counterparts for double trouble!

Energy Management: This is important for everyone, unless you’re a Warrior with eight Signets and Adrenaline Skills, in which case you’re wasting some of your potential! The amount and importance of energy recovery varies depending on the skill bar and native primary profession regeneration, but a good build will usually have one or two skills that help get energy back quickly. Often high Primary Profession Attribute can help with this for some professions. A 16 Expertise Ranger can generally avoid specific provision here, but for the rest of us a few direct hands-on skills can help, allowing much faster reuse of the rest of the bar.

Most professions have something that works here, although this may involve putting points in a support or non-damage attribute. The Mesmer gets most of these from the Inspiration Magic category, which doesn’t contain a great deal of offensive spells in general, so some compromise may be required. Elemental Attunements, Warrior Stances, Motivation and Mysticism – if the Primary profession can’t provide, make this a reason to be a particular secondary.

Energy Management comes in the indirect form of carefully picked other skills too – don’t go too crazy with all the 25-cost spells unless you’ve taken extra measures to power them. Consider 5-10 points skills and Signets (0-cost) unless you need a particular bigger skill.

Self-Heal: The monsters move fast and it is quite easy to become cut off from your tame Healing Prayers Monk, who might be busy anyway. In Random Arenas, its often possible to end up in a team with no healing whatsoever. I’m generally quite bad at this, but it’s a good idea to throw in a self-healing skill or two into the build, for that extra measure of redundancy and survivability. Obviously, Primary Monk Healing Prayers is the best at this, but again, everyone has something useful here.

Everyone is a healer – only the mechanism of the heal varies, so be aware of whatever conditions your heal comes with; Warriors lose AC while using their heal, Ritualists generally need nearby spirits to heal well, Paragons need other teammates in earshot, the more the better! Be aware of what you need, and again, this heal will often dictate some of the other necessary skills to go in the bar.

Look for straight heals where possible – these are easier to manage and control, but large and long regenerations are perfectly viable alternatives here, if a bit more haphazard and vulnerable to spike damage.

Self-Defence: This can be as simple massive self-healing, as above, but try to dedicate one or two buttons to protecting yourself a bit. Stances work best here – often cheap, fast and lasting. Enchantments are also effective here, although can be interfered with much more easily. Look to be increasing AC where possible, or reducing incoming damage in any other ways available – improved Dodge, Evade and Block for instance, or specific resistances to particular damage types. For a Primary Warrior, just being dressed is often enough here, but as noted above, even pure casters cannot guarantee being on the back row the whole fight – GW monsters are generally more picky than that, so being able to survive a few rounds of melee until the rest of the team scrapes it off can help tremendously.

Careful choice of appropriate Insignias is a must here too – pick out the most useful based on what you’ll be doing. In general these aren’t that expensive, and a fresh set of five can make a lot of difference to a different or new experimental build.

Combos: With all that out of the way, the bar can be put together in earnest. It helps to pick an overall ‘focus’ here – Damage, Support, Debuff, Healing, Interruption, etc. Guild Wars is a lot more forgiving and nebulous than most games when it comes to archetypal ‘Class Roles’, but they are sort of there still, in a way.

By now, you’ll have used up a few slots, but try to build at least one overly-clever combo sequence in the remaining space. Try not to get too extravagant here though – keep the runs to two or three skills at a time. Much longer combination attacks risk most yard trash dying before they can be applied, or in boss fights, something going wrong half way through (Interrupt, disabled, knockdown, energy running out, etc). Look for clever AoE effects where possible for day to day PvE work.

The trick here is in the details. There are very few ‘Do X damage to target’ skills, and most skill descriptions are stuffed with ‘whiles’, ‘ifs’, ‘buts’, ‘whens’ and so on. Examine all of these clauses carefully. A simple example is Sever Artery (If this attack hits, the opponent begins Bleeding for 5…21 seconds, losing Health over time) followed by Gash (If this attack hits a Bleeding foe, you strike for 5…17 more damage and that foe suffers a Deep Wound, lowering that foe’s maximum Health by 20% for 5…17 seconds.) Perhaps follow up with “Victory Is Mine” (Elite Shout. You gain 10…56 Health and 3…6 Energy for each Condition suffered by target foe.) on the now Bleeding and Deep Wounded foe – both of which count as Conditions – or the Mesmer’s Unattributed Epidemic, (Spread all negative Conditions and their remaining durations from target foe to all foes adjacent to your target.)

In general, the more complex the skill description, the more elaborate the accompanying combo has to be, but the cheaper the skill is to use in the first place, so this kind of showing off can be quite economical too. Many of Guild Wars’ best skills are conditional in this way however, so being able to put simple chains together is a must when thinking about builds.

Fill the remaining space with a few cheap standalone skills that augment your chosen role, heals, interrupts, bow attacks, melee attacks, etc.

(For the more advanced, Inter-Skillbar-Combos are the way to go, where it becomes about picking the best 64 skills, rather than the best 8. At its simplest, this can merely involve being reasonably sure that your friend is going to be Crippling the enemies a lot of the time, thus removing the need to bring your own Cripple skill, and letting you go right to skills that require a Crippled target. Greater Conflagration and Winter in one Ranger’s Skillbar, and Mantra of Frost in all the others, is another example of a team build rather than a single build. Mind you, as noted above, some degree of self-sufficiency is still helpful for those moments when you’re caught alone.)

Counters: A good build will have weak spots. It can’t be helped and is a part of the way the game works. It might rely on Enchantments a lot, and so be vulnerable to a number of enchantment removal skills. It might be entirely melee, and so be vulnerable to knockdown and cripple attacks, or plain kiting. Some of these holes can be plugged; throw in a stance or two to reduce enchantment dependency, become an Assassin secondary and use Shadow Steps to get about quickly, that kind of thing. With only eight skills however, not all of the bases can be covered, so the trick is to be aware of what might go wrong and if a simple solution can’t be found beforehand, just fade in to the background for those particular fights.

My favourite Build-o-the-Week is the Me/A Illusionary Weapon one, but if IW itself is ever disenchanted off me, or interrupted or disabled, I become essentially useless. When this happens, I just have to survive as best I can and let the other seven members of my team sort out that particular kind of monster. Once we’re onto something different, I’m back to it, hacking away with gleeful abandon. Even soloing, you aren’t the only person there.

Purpose

On a more general note, it’s worth considering the type of challenge you’re about to face as you stand in the Outpost, fiddling with the bar.

Locality; many enemies in Cantha specialise in Lightning damage, rather than Frost (Shiverpeaks) or Fire (Much of Elona). Pay attention as you rampage and you’ll gain useful tips on refine the ‘Standard’ build, for local use. There is a kind of logic to the Geography of GW – Fire creatures near volcanoes, ice monsters up in the mountains, and so forth. Use this!

PvE: PvE tends to come in two types – overland yard trash clearance, where all-out large AoE straight damage is the best bet – fast and furious, and Boss Fights, where interrupts, conditions and personal survivability become more important, and it’s a good idea to have different builds ready for each, depending on which lobby you’re about to leave.

PvP: My limited experience of the various PvP arenas suggests that other players tend toward the PvE Boss type more than anything else, but mobility becomes a much more important aspect – line of sight, runspeeds, and so on. Other players won’t just stand there and take it. Much of PvP is about potions and numbers, things the skill bar won’t specifically help with. Do remember to bring a Resurrection Signet with you if the battle type has no auto-res though; Random Arenas in particular, an area where all builds need to be fairly self-sufficient. See a lot of shouting about that!

Running, Farming, Soloing, Doing It Properly, etc: All these ways to play require different things from a build, and should dictate the above choices of Elite and normal skills.

Equipment

Fairly important and an often overlooked part of the build; make sure you have the right kind of weapons, focus, armour, insignia and runes to go with the build. This can be a bit pricey on a frequent basis, so best reserved until you’re fairly happy the build is useful and indeed enjoyable and that you’re going to be using it a lot.

Even with an especially clever build, don’t overlook basic weapon damage, a useful way to whittle a monster down while waiting for recharge times to align. Make sure whatever weapon you have is a Max Damage one, and look for enhancements that augment the kinds of activity you’ll be doing; +Enchantment Duration, +Health, +Energy and so on. Settling for a +18% Chance instead of a +20% Chance buff can save you a lot of money, and gives you most of the effect.

Be wary of overdoing it with Skill Runes – even Minor Runes that you aren’t using effectively could use up spaces for useful Vitae Runes. In general, one Superior Rune is about as much health hit as you’d want, if you need a specific attribute as high as possible. Avoid Superior-ing two or more. The health hits all add up, and do make a difference, especially when Mr DP comes to stay.

For particular favourite builds that pass muster, a dedicated set of armour kept in the in the Xunlai Chest is often worthwhile.

Experiment

Of course the real mark of a good build, is ‘Does it work for me?’, and the best way to find that out, is put it through it’s paces out in any number of explorable areas, or the Random Arenas, as appropriate. Only through a fair bit of romping about against a variety of different opponents, can you test this stuff out properly, and it might turn out that the killer PvP build you though would own Heroes’ Ascent, is in fact excellent for killing Shiro. Lots of testing, that’s the key! As regular readers will know by now, a lot of this stuff looks much better on paper than in practice…

Hot on the heels of the prestigious Van Hemlock Game of the Year award, it is indeed, back to Guild Wars: Eye of the North, and a bumper session this New Year’s Day in fact, which saw a number of things get done, many of which improved my faith in my own gaming abilities, and mood in general, given the shambolic failures of the previous session posted here.

First job of the night was the final sprint on my regular companion’s attempt at Legendary Survivor, a frankly ridiculous title if you ask me, which entails getting 1,337,500 xp (Leet and a half…ah…I see what you did there!) without dying ever. The average monster kill gives about 30xp, and a decent quest pays 2500 but are rarely repeatable, so this is no trivial matter, and the whole permadeath aspect adds a shedload of stress to me just being near my Survivor friend, so I can only imagine what it must have been like for them. The character was a quite specialised Ranger/Monk, based heavily around Symbiosis and Mending for a good solid health bar, which must help, and has largely been grinding away on the other nights when I’ve been off in other games.

10kxp to go and we hit Drakkar Lake, opting to go for Signet of Captures to fill some of that final push. A successful Elite Skill Capture also gives you 2500xp and there are four bosses in the lake area. A quite hectic session, which saw only one panickey ‘/resign’ (Which doesn’t count toward the survivor title failure), our main problems coming from the ice lake itself, which is crawling with Dervish Djinn types, and slows movement massively. Two captures in and we’re still short, but the ensuing tense monster scouring saw us reach, and meet the total. Bravo!

For reference, I have about 1.6 million xp on my main Mesmer, but have died about 850 times to get there, although wasn’t specifically trying to survive. Despite my personal distaste for the stress that gameplay entails, I remain genuinely impressed with my friend’s achievement.

This cements the title, meaning that further deaths from that point won’t take it away, and there are no Survivor ranks beyond Legendary. Job done! It also causes a gamewide broadcast message, which saw my friend lost in a deluge of random congratulations from complete strangers via whispers. We were both surprised at how much other people care about such an achievement by a complete stranger. I know I don’t tend to congratulate others when I see these messages broadcast, but then I am a bitter twisted old Mesmer, and such things simply aren’t done!

This title achievement also had the effect of granting the Favor of the Gods to the world, which had previously been lost. This is the replacement mechanism to the Hall of Heroes Victory Region wins. Now, Favor is granted by PvE ‘Legendary’ title achievements, rather than PvP prowess, which is probably fairer, as the Underworld and Fissure of Woe – two hardcore endgame raiding type zones – are only accessible if the world has Favor, and both these places are PvE content, not PvP.

To celebrate, (and to get my Legendary Survivor Friend killed as repayment for all the previous stress), we decided to go to the Underworld for the first time ever, and I stumped up the 1,000gp entry fee to the Avatar of Grenth at the Temple of Ages.

More on that place another time I think, but as a preparatory recon scouting trip, it didn’t go too badly. The place was full of L29 yard trash right from the word go, but we didn’t do too badly with 2 players + 6 Heroes, and it was a network disconnect that put an end to my trip in the end, rather than -60%DP resignation. Some thought on a tailored team build needed there, but the whole place is not nearly as insurmountable as I was expecting, although having L28 yard trash as standard in many of the EoN overland zones does help prepare one for the kind of challenge found there. We didn’t make my 1000gp back in loot, but I’m sure we’ll be back.

We then went and got my Masters in the Grand Court of Sebelkeh Mission, previously missing from my first go through Nightfall. I’m now only missing two Masters from Nightfall, which will give me the Protector of Elona title. Completionist nonsense, but Elona is my Mesmer’s home, afterall. A quick mission , win or lose, but requiring a lot of focused teamwork to get the rifts closed in the very short time allowed for Mastery. More details on that mission in my previous Guild Wars category.

We got that done just in time for the Wintersday Finale Event in Lion’s Arch. More on that here, but I’ve never seen a more methodical conspiracy in a playbase than here. Basically, its a kind of ballot between the spirit of Dwayna, whose manifesto is ‘Vote for me and there will be a Spring!’ and the spirit of Grenth, on the ‘Vote for me and Winter will last forever!’ platform. This violates everything taught to me by psychics teachers, Patrick Moore and Dr Who, but frankly, I think UN Inspectors are needed here, as in the district we were in, to a man, every player voted for Dwayna. I’m not fussy, and we got a rather busy hat with flowers and candles on for our participation.

We then hopped across to Kamadan, in time for the delayed event to run again, only this time, to a man, everyone voted for Grenth. Very suspicious, but I’m not complaining, as this time we got a rather fetching ice-crown wig combo hat! It’s all about the hats!

There were also lots of presents – openable boxes full of consumable sweets with buff effects and the like. This was all rather handy as it turned out, as our next job was Cyndr, again…

Last time’s nightmarish boss monster was giving us troubles, and we prepared in a number of ways. Firstly, an enormous packed lunch for the trip! In addition to the various buff-foods from the preceding winter event, I raided my Xunlai Chest and came up with: Pumpkin Pie, Pumpkin Cookie, Candy Apple, Candy Corns, Skalefin Soup, three types of Candy Cane, a Powerstone of Courage, an Essence of Celerity, and an Armour of Salvation. Just missing a thermos of coffee, limp ham sandwiches and some pork pies.

I do this a lot – save these seasonal items, just in case they’ll one day turn out to be useful, and then they sit there clogging up bank space indefinitely. Well, today was going to be that day, I decided. All of them have 10-30min buff effects when consumed, and my plan was Last Minute Picnic for Great Victory!

My other main preparation was having spent most of my Xmas gaming in GW learning what the Norn Blessing Elite skills are all about. More on that in the Build Masterclass section, below.

With an inventory overflowing with snackfood, we hit the dungeon once more, myself with a Volfen Blessing build, my friend with an Ursan Blessing build, three Beastmaster Rangers, one Interrupt Ranger (Zho) and two Healing Monks. An odd build, designed to bolster our numbers with hefty pet tanks, in addition to fairly powerful archer fire support. Getting to the Wurm was no bother, as expected, although I did managed to get trampled in the room where all the green zombies turn red at a once. Still, with this many ‘Get out of DP Free’ Candy Canes, it didn’t bother me an awful lot.

Once outside the last boss room, we got the checked blanket out and stuffed our faces with junk food until there were two rows of half-hour buffs on most of the party, many of which probably didn’t stack, but tasted great! Then we charged in to start the bomb dropping carapace game again.

I’m not quite sure what happened next, so hopped up on sugar in-game, and tension out-of-game, as I was, but as I watched, one bomb, two bomb, three bombs dropped, swiftly and without error, as we sprinted back and forth. The dreaded blobs of incendiary phlegm seemed not to be coming, or maybe we were just moving far too fast for him to hit. And then the carapace was gone and the first round of actual damage started. And, er, finished a few seconds later. The team composition was so powerful we managed to butcher the wurm in the first pass, before he could regenerate his carapace for a second round. Remarkable!

I put it down to the sheer brutality of the wolf and bear forms, and the four extra bodies, in the form of the Ranger pets (three black moas and a crocodile, as it happens), that we had all wailing away on the thing. If I had to pick one buff only, I’d say that the Essence of Celerity was the most useful in there – run-speed and skill recharge buff for the whole party for 30mins. You can get these by trading in surplus skill-points (of which I have about 80-odd now) at Rata Sum, although the story chain gives you one for free – save that.

Wurm defeated, we picked up the Hammer of the Great Dwarf we’d come in there for in the first place, looted the Dungeon Chest (I got a Diamond, rare crafting material) and found ourselves whisked back to King Jallis. He takes the Hammer and in a rousing address to his people does something mystical with it, turning him, and all his followers into some kind of sparkling living stone. That’ll probably help with fire resistance, I’d imagine. The Great Dwarf himself doesn’t appear, but instead seems to infuse all the dwarves with his spirit, making them all The Great Dwarf to some extent.

Meanwhile, our other allies all convene. Jora has found a whole five Norns for the final push, one more than she thinks we’ll need. Oola and Vekk have got the G.O.L.E.M. system all pimped up and ready for even ‘dumb bookahs’ to use. Gwen reports that the Ebon Vanguard are on standby, ready for orders.

Looks like its down to us to finish this once and for all…

—

I’ve tried to make this a series of Mesmer builds where possible, using a Mesmer Primary, and a Mesmer Elite, but despite my initial grumbling, I’m finding it increasingly hard to ignore the Norn PvE Elite skills. These are faction based, rather than profession based, and use your Norn Rank instead of a profession Attribute Score for power. There are three of these, and pretty much any player can use them well, regardless of profession, making them a useful alternative for some of the harder EoN stuff, for Mesmers and everyone else.

Saying all that, there are different ways to supplement these single Elite skills, using the remaining seven hotkeys. Here’s what I bring along:

The Aspect of Beasts

Mesmer/Any

Inspiration 12 (+1 Masque), Fast Casting 12, Anything Else 3. Slayer of Giants (Norn Rank 4)

Requires: Eye of the North (Bear/Wolf/Raven #3, #4), Prophecies (#1,#2, #7), Factions (#5),

Equipment: In all cases, large amounts of +Health and +Armor are critical, especially if a Mesmer. Avoid any +Attribute runes, even the Minors, as these aren’t needed and use a slot which could be used with a Vitae rune instead. A dedicated ‘other’ set of armour is useful if doing this a lot. A melee weapon is helpful here – even if you can’t use it very well, as it forces you into melee range, which is needed to get the most out of the Blessings. A +Energy Focus is very helpful too.

When changing into a Bear, Wolf or Raven, Enchantments are removed, but Stances are not, so this should be a key factor in a build based on the Blessings. For the Mesmer, this means Inspiration. #1 – Physical Resistance, and #2 – Elemental Resistance offer improved AC at the cost of reduced AC vs it’s opposite, so gauge which to use against which monsters. With an Inspiration of 13, these will last 82 seconds, which is well through the shape-change and into the first few fights. Don’t try to use both at once. For more specific adversaries, these can be swapped out with any number of Inspiration Mantras – Flame, Frost, Lightning, and so on.

(Other professions should look to see what Stances you get. Most professions have something that qualifies, although Rangers and Warriors will do well here. Look for durations in particular – the longer the better, as once transformed you won’t be able to reapply it until the rampage is over again.)

When changing back from the beast to yourself again, you’ll do so with 0 Energy and have to scramble to fill up the energy bar again, so #5 – Ether Signet is an ideal choice to help kickstart the power bar. Its a signet, so needs 0 energy, and if your energy is below X, it will give you Y energy immediately, in my case, boosting me up to the 20 points mark right off the bat, allowing use of the rest of the skill bar right away.

(Other professions should also be thinking of crash jumpstart energy regain here. Signets are usually ideal for this, but in particular, look for signets that increase energy in some way to help make the rest of the bar reusable again asap. Failing that, just signets that cause damage or otherwise make you useful in your normal non-aspect role – healing for Monks, interrupts for Mesmers, and so on, letting you stay busy while the energy recharges itself naturally.)

#4 – “You Move Like A Dwarf” is a good Norn-based all rounder, Knockdown Interrupt, and Cripple too. Use this for pulling, just before you transform. Again, this one is profession independent. Any other condition causing skills would work just as well here, able to both pull, and give you a bit of a head start in the ensuing rampage. Use this, and then hit the Elite and start mauling!

The remainder of the bar is optional. I’ve gone with my already high Inspiration attribute. #6 – Leech Signet, an energy free interrupt, that is also extra energy gain if done right, making it a good back up for #5. #7 – Inspired Hex, removes and becomes a hex that was on you or teammates. The stealing bit isn’t so useful, as we saw some weeks back, by the removal and energy gain are still both handy, even if you only have time to use it on yourself. #8 – Drain Enchantment – a personal favourite if I have high Inspiration anyway – self heal, energy gain and removes buffs from enemies.

(Other professions should be looking to build mini ‘Business As Usual’ combos with these three slots, since you won’t be transformed all the time. Use skills from the attributes you already have high points in. You are only allowed 3 PvE skills in a bar at once, so pick and choose carefully if you want further Norn, Deldrimor, Asura� or Ebon Vanguard Skills on board. Signet of Capture also counts as a PvE skill.)

With only a one point boost in Inspiration and nothing that must have high Fast Casting, anyone who can’t find a decent Blessing Support build in their own primary can happily use the above build in an Any/Mesmer Secondary capacity with very little loss of effect on the Stances.

Primary profession attributes that help with energy gain or costs are all particularly useful here; Energy Storage (Elementalist), Soul Reaping (Necromancer), Leadership (Paragon), Expertise (Ranger), Mysticism (Dervish) and Critical Strikes (Assassin)

Which leaves the main event, #3 (Elite). This can be Ursan Blessing, Volfen Blessing or Raven Blessing, and all three work in a similar manner, but with slightly different purpose. All three fill your energy bar, and then slap a -2 energy degen on you. Energy is gained if you do damage, or have damage done to you, making the whole ride a bit of a frenzy, much like the Adrenaline mechanic, or WoW’s Warrior or CoV’s Brute. Wait too long between fights and the energy runs out and you revert to human again. Plan the pushes and rest stops accordingly.

Your skill bar is changed while in the transformed state and cannot be customised. None of the transformed skills actually use energy themselves, so spam away, but watch out for the background degen.

Ursan Blessing

Gained by this quest, this is very much a tank type role. Passive bonuses are Max Health and Armor.

#1 – Ursan Strike is the straight melee attack, hitting twice for a fair amount of armour ignoring damage. Note that you need to already be in melee range for it to hit, otherwise it just ‘clicks’ uselessly. For this reason, even casters should have a junk-sword in a spare weapon hot-slot, as this will then automatically bring you to the right range when you autoattack.

#2 – Ursan Rage – A potent ‘Adjacent’ AoE knockdown which does decent damage too.

#3 – Ursan Roar – An ‘Earshot’ shout that Weakens enemies and buffs allies damage. Very handy.

#4 – Ursan Force – A simple self speed boost. Note that is not a Stance, so cannot be removed by the enemy.

#5 – Totem of Man – The ‘Off’ switch. Using this will prematurely end the Blessing, giving you your basic skill bar back, and reducing your energy to 0, even if you had lots left. Use this pace your assault, as once out of Aspect form the Blessing skill itself has a fair recharge time before you can transform again, meaning that it can be advantageous to end the thing early to get that recharge period out of the way during quiet spots, helping you to have the shapechange ready when you next need it.

Volfen Blessing

Gained here, this is a much more fast-DPS oriented role, and my personal favourite for solo work. Passive bonuses are Max Health and Health Regen.

#1 – Volfen Claw – A very fast recharge melee attack which also causes Deep Wounds. Again, you’ll need to get into melee range before using this. Avoiding using ranged weapons while in animal forms.

#2 – Volfen Pounce – A curious enchantment buff. When used, it gives you a run speed boost, and then the next enemy you move adjacent to triggers the adjacent AoE damage part. Eminently useable toe-to-toe, this also shines as a ‘charging into the fray’ type of move too – buff up with it prior to engaging.

#3 – Volfen Bloodlust – An adjacent allies shout, giving +33% attack speed. Very handy indeed, and almost continually spammable. Works extremely well in concert with Ursan Roar, above.

#4 – Volfen Agility – A self buff that causes all your Volfen skills to recharge 66%(!) faster. This is a huge boost, and makes the Volfen form so deadly. With this up, #1 and #3 become near-insta recast, and #2 speeds up noticeably. This also makes Volfen the easiest form to maintain, due the very fast attack speed keeping the energy topped up as long as there are enemies anywhere nearby to chew on. The Bear may do more solid damage per hit, but the Wolf hits far more often, largely due to this buff.

#5 – Totem of Man – as above.

Raven Blessing

Gained here, this is a much trickier blessing to use, and seems to function as a kind of assist ninja-debuffer, best used to dart in, lay down conditions, and get out. Passive bonuses are Max Health and Block Chance.

#1 – Raven Talons – The basic melee attack, it actually does no damage, instead applying the Bleeding and Crippled conditions to the enemy. This means no energy is gained for the hit, making the Raven form much more difficult to maintain than the other two.

#2 – Raven Swoop – A respectable straight adjacent AoE damage attack.

#3 – Raven Shriek – A Shout that removes Blindness from friends and causes it on foes.

#4 – Raven Flight – A Stance in which you become immune to knockdown.

#5 – Totem of Man – as above.

The three forms also interlock to some extent. You can only take one along, but with two friends, it is far more potent to take one of each, rather than three Ursan. In particular, the various shouts, all administered at the same time will end up with all of your melee types attacking faster, hitting harder and cured of any blindness that might be about, and fighting blind targets.

I’m not so sure about the Raven personally – it seems a bit feeble compared to the other two, but the extra conditions on demand may be helpful. Heroes cannot be equipped with these PvE skills, so its Players only for the actual Blessings. Aim to fill Hero and Henchmen slots with melee attackers where possible, (Warrior, Assassin, Dervish, Ranger Pets, Necromancer Minions) as they’ll get the most out of the animal shouting. Supporting Mesmers would do well to bring Epidemic for condition spreading.

Part of the success of our Wurm run was definitely a Wolf Shout/Bear Shout overlap, allowing our four Ranger pets to become extremely powerful sources of damage, in addition to my own speedy Volfen flailing and my friend’s powerful Ursan mauling.

Downsides to it all, whichever you choose, include a false sense of invulnerability. They’re all so powerful that it becomes easy to forget that none of the above skills heal you at all, and you will still need the usual sizable Monk entourage, which will need looking after. The constant degeneration puts extra pressure on too, and can encourage sloppy play and over extension. Self-discipline is needed here – the ability to stop yourself, and resist ‘just one more group’, instead using Totem of Man often to slow down and dictate your own pace, rather than have it done for you. Its also tempting to become over-reliant on these altered shapes, which can take the edge of your more usual favourite and honed profession builds, particularly as the Norn rank continue to increase, making them even more and more powerful.

EoN does indeed provide a number of very stiff challenges, but as my cohort mentioned in comments previous, it does also provide the tools to help you overcome them.

Bah! The Tuesday N00b Club slammed headfirst into yet another brick wall of adversity this week, this time in the form of another overpowered mega-boss monster, and all in all, left me in a rather despondent mood really. It exposes a certain hypocrisy about the game, I think, or at least the direction the game seems to be taking increasingly in recent expansions and campaigns. Guild Wars has been, for me at least, a fascinating exercise in almost collectible card game style ‘deck-building’ strategy, coupled with an extremely well executed variant on Diablo. But its the unique skill and class system that’s kept me so engaged with it all, for so long, I think.

The basic premise around which the game is built is captivating for me; something like 400 different skills, most of which can be put together in almost any way you like. These permutations offer varying degrees of success of course, some working better than others, but its the tinkering, the tuning and the refinement that I love, and for most of the game, there are a large number of possible solutions to the given problems of each map, land and monster type; some suggest themselves – an Interrupt Mesmer, or Minion Master Necromancer, for example, whereas some are more convoluted or unexpected – an Illusionary Weapon Mesmer Assassin, or an Elementalist Mesmer Stone Striker Tank. These later offer a wealth of satisfaction for the game mechanics explorer type, particularly when they turn out to work unexpectedly well in the field.

And then you hit a Eye of the North Dungeon, and discover that there is in fact only one team configuration that will get the job done, and all that goes out of the window. If you’re really lucky, that team build will actually require one of your class at all! Lately it seems to me that the unique and winning charm of flexibility is falling to the rigid and prescribed choreography of Certain Other Fantasy MMORPG Raid Based End Games. It makes me worry a great deal about Guild Wars 2, frankly.

Of course that’s in my introspective moments only, and mostly this week, I’ve been far too furious with Cyndr the Mountain Heart to be able to think that long term! Okay, it went like this…

Before we can confront The Great Destroyer, who seems to be our overall Nemesis at this stage, we need to summon The Great Dwarf. Love these names! To do this, we need to go to the bottom of The Heart of the Shiverpeaks dungeon, and grab The Hammer of The Great Dwarf, a holy and magical artifact. Standard sort of thing really.

The Dungeon itself isn’t too bad mostly featuring undead, but in nowhere near the power and potency of the Shards of Orr Undead, and allowing for a more usual flexibility of builds and strategies, such as today’s Comedy Mesmer Build, which I used on the first trip through the place. One room did cause a fair bit of trouble, containing a large number of mutually chainhealing ‘Chained Cleric’ monk enemies, which need a very large amount of spike damage to deal with. Mind you, they don’t need to be killed, and you can just run on past them if you can’t be bothered. Throughout the dungeon are rock walls that need blasting charges to get through and mid way through, you find a dwarf explorer chap who follows you about and hands out dwarven barrel bombs to do this with.

Eventually, you get to the large lava filled chamber at the bottom with the red skull on it on the area map, and huge ominous statues on the walls, and there is the Hammer – unguarded. Of course we’re not stoopid and sure enough, stepping foot in the place causes a massive L29 Elementalist ‘Wurm’ type monster to erupt from the floor. Even as ‘trash-mobs’ the Wurm type is annoying, acting as a hidden landmine until stood on, and then rising up to cause huge amounts of knockdown mayhem, before munching on Good Guys, and then vanishing underground again periodically, to erupt some place else – usually next to The Healer!

Well, this one does some of that, but is also a nightmarish boss with frightening power. Being Level 29 means he does 150% damage right off the bat. As an EoN End-of-Dungeon King-Boss, they double that up again, meaning that all his skills do three times as much damage as listed! Hexes last half as long on him and he gets bonus regeneration and all sorts of other ‘challenging’ advantages.

He gets Bed of Coals and Flame Burst, which are bad enough even before the quad damage is applied, but the real fun and games were his Monster Skill; Pyroclastic Shot, which is basically where he spits a gobbet of molten incendiary phlegm at you that does about 250 hp of direct damage (around half of my full health, at 0DP), and then cripples you (a snare effect) and sets you on fire (A 14dps Damage over time) for seven seconds. I can survive one direct hit, but the second will invariably kill me, and once at -60%DP, it is effectively an insta-kill. This all happens in an Area of Effect large enough to happily bomb you and all three of your Heroes at once, and he can do it once every six seconds, although sometimes intersperses it with the other two Fire skills, just to mix things up a bit. Flame burst in particular, hits for about 400hp. Fun!

Best bet is to just knuckle down, and wail away – the best kind of tank is massive DPS, eh? Not so simple, and he begins life invulnerable, happily ignoring any and all attempts to damage him, all the while raining down blast shots of almost atomic fury. To actually hurt him, you first have to break through his ‘carapace’, represented by and extra progress bar on the UI. The carapace is also invulnerable, except to bombs. The way you’re supposed to do it, we think, is you talk to the dwarf bomb chap who has been following you about the dungeon, get given a carrayable explosive keg, (which slows your footspeed down, making it even more difficult to dodge the Pyroclasts), run up to the wurm’s base (putting you nicely in Flame Burst range), drop the bomb and run for your life. If you are holding a bomb when the Pyrocalstic Shot hits you, the bomb itself also explodes in your arms, doing an additional 50pts of damage, and requiring you to go and get another one.

Assuming you aren’t instantly killed in the attempt, the bomb then hisses a bit and blows up, reducing the wurm’s carapace progress bar by a third. The bomb must be manually dropped, and simply dying and falling down next to the wurm while holding one is not good enough.

Survive long enough to do this three times and you can then have a go on the wurm himself, damaging, degenerating and hexing him in the usual manner. After a short span of this, he buries himself into the floor and erupts some place else in the cavern, with a fresh carapace, and the whole farce must begin again, but quickly now, as all the while you’re farting about with the bomb-dropping slapstick phase, he is regenerating his health at a fierce old rate and if you don’t get the second and subsequent bomb runs right on the first or second go, he is likely to have completely healed himself of the damage you managed to inflict the last time he was vulnerable.

We spent the entire session more or less, dragging bombs about, getting one-shotted and generally failing to get anywhere with the wretched exercise. There is a resurrection shrine just outside the room, allowing an infinite number of attempts on the creature, but once on to the old -60%DP Attrition Game, it’s difficult to even make it to the bomb guy before getting insta-blasted into oblivion, and even after retreating back to the Eye of the North, changing from Experimental Builds to Serious Builds, working our way all the way through the damned dungeon again and trying from scratch with +10% Morale Boost, we still failed utterly. I ended up logging of in a huff after a sudden bout of connectivity issues decided to weigh in, and so frustrated and enraged but the whole experience was I, that I basically just went and looked up the ‘solution’ on the Wiki Talk Page.

Turns out that the generally accepted Solution to this, ahem, ‘puzzle’, is a combination of bug and scenery exploit. Seems that the wurm is still vulnerable to Lifestealing skills, even with the carapace up. This same coding oversight is what lets Necromancers actually kill the ‘Indestructible’ Golem in the Oola’s Lab mission, and can’t possibly be intended behaviour. Some of these abilities are ranged, and work through walls, allowing the canny team to work the wurm to a spot from which he can be hit, but cannot shoot back. Trap in him a level design oversight, and exploit him to death with a missed coding loophole. Huzzah!

Ignominious, but frankly, I really don’t care, and just want this part of the story to be over, so we can get back to bits of the game that are still fun, and that adhere to the original design ethos of the whole Guild Wars concept, back before this obsession with Raid Bosses and Impossible Challenges for the Ultra-Hardcore.

Next week I imagine we’ll put together the ‘Correct’ team, go back down there and probably kill him in ten minutes or less, with only a handful of deaths, but I doubt I’ll take any satisfaction in it. And this monster isn’t even the final End Boss of the expansion. I have a growing sense of sour dread at the coming weeks…

—

Before we reached the Wurm, I was actually quite enjoying myself with a quirky and interesting Mesmer/Dervish build. The Dervish shares many many similarities with the Assassin, as far as I can tell. Both are light DPS melee fighters, not especially suited for out and out tanking work without a Warrior Secondary to draw from. Both rely extensively on a wide variety of personal Enchantment magics to compensate for lack of armour and to ensure survival, and as such lend themselves to the primary Mesmer’s ability to get spells out quickly. The main difference is that the Assassin seems geared toward large damage against a single target, while the Dervish is more suited to dealing less damage, but over a much wider area. The more obvious way for a Mesmer to tackle any melee role is through the use of Illusionary Weaponry, as seen in the Me/A build of some weeks back. This works as a starting point for a Me/D too, but the Me/D also has an alternative, but quite similar, route to try instead.

The Loss of Vision

Mesmer/Dervish

Inspiration 12, Earth Prayers 12, Fast Casting 3 + Rune/Masque

Physical Resistance,  Sand Shards,  Signet of Midnight, Aura of Thorns, Shield of Force, Epidemic, Vital Boon, Conviction

Requires: Prophecies (#1, #3), Nightfall (Dervish, and #2, #4, #7, #8), Eye of the North (#5)

Equipment: A Scythe with +Enchantment Duration, ideally. Like the IW Assassin, this built is designed to work best if you miss lots, so the actual damage stats on it are not relevant. Fast Casting Runes and Masque would be more help than more Inspiration, and the more health the better.

A very similar kind of design to the IW build, in that missing lots is a good thing. Start with Physical Resistance (#1), to beef up the fragile Mesmer’s AC a bit. (This can be swapped out for Elemental Resistance if you know you’ll be facing mostly elemental damage – Djinns, Frost Golems, etc, or a specific Mantra for even more specialisation; Mantra of Fire, Earth, etc)

Prior to engaging, throw up #2, Sand Shards. This is the lynchpin of the build, acting much like IW does in the Me/A build. Ideally this should be up the entire time you are actually fighting, and replaced as often as necessary. Then, charge at the nearest target, and slap them with the Elite, #3 – Signet of Midnight. This costs no energy (Signet) and recharges quite quickly, and blinds the touched enemy, giving them a 90% miss rate – excellent for indirect damage reduction. The down side is that it makes you blind too, but don’t panic! This is exactly what we want, and now if you flail about with the scythe, Sand Shards will kick in and hit every ‘nearby’ enemy (a range of about 10 feet in all directions) for 21 points of damage, for about 90% of your swings. This is about half of a pumped IW attack – 42, but is similarly consistent; ignoring armour, resistances, and attempts to block, dodge or evade, more or less guaranteeing a 21pt hit each time on all targets in range, unless you actually hit! Not as potent against single targets as IW, but really shines against dense groups of yard trash.

Even better, by using a Scythe, in hectic melee, you’ll actually attempt to hit, and miss, up to three times, and each time, causes the Shards to kick off, effectively causing 63 pts against all Nearby targets, per swing. Ouch!

Unlike the IW approach however, this one revolves around you effectively debuffing yourself, using the Blindness condition to great effect. Something I found early on is that you must stop AI Monks curing you, for it to work. Either don’t give them Condition Removal skills in the first place, or toggle them off in the little Hero control panels. Tell other Player Monks not to remove conditions on you before you start. Without Blindness in effect, your scythe swings will occasionally hit for 1-4pts of damage, if you’re lucky. Being blind is essential!

Once you’re both blind, follow up with a quick burst of #4� – Aura of Thorns, which throws Cripple and Bleed into the mix, then put up #5 – Shield of Force, which with a bit of luck will Weaken the chap you’re attacking. Then hit that chap with our old friend #6 – Epidemic, which should give all the monsters in the tangled melee scrum around you, all four of the conditions now in play. This should have a cumulative effect of making the surrounding melee types quite feeble and indirectly reduce the incoming damage greatly. Use #7 – Vital Boon, and #8 – Conviction for further armour and healing. Conviction needs you to be Enchanted to work, but there are several in the above build. These aren’t great heals, but help, and most importantly are quick and cheap, letting you get back to the blind swinging. Have a decent AI Healer in tow where possible.

Like the Me/A build, it is more important to be spending time here attacking, rather than casting. There is no energy management in this build, but all the spells are cheap, and natural Mesmer regen can cover the costs.

As expected, it didn’t really shine much against smaller groups, but a number of places in the dungeon saw us mobbed by 10+ melee monsters, and letting fly with the stinging sands of incompetence saw an entire screen filled with yellow -21′s flying upward, and although it took a while to hew through one monster, when it died, so did all the others! It’s a decent enough build for farming, and general purpose overland PvE travel, but falls short against individual powerful boss monsters, where the IW approach would be a better choice.

Downsides are mostly to do with survivability. While the IW Me/A has many Shadow Arts skills that heal or avoid damage unless you successful hit something, the Dervish doesn’t get much like that, and must find healing in other ways, making you a lot more vulnerable. The other main disadvantage is giving up all Condition Removal. Sure, you need to be blind, but you don’t also need to be on fire, bleeding, crippled, weakened, etc, and monk healers can’t pick and choose which to remove, so have to just leave them all on you.

A Dervish/Mesmer would probably do a great deal better with this one than a Mesmer/Dervish, as only one Mesmer skill is attributed, and that merely makes the Stance last a little longer. Runes in Earth Prayers on the other hand would greatly improve most of the skills used above. Fast Casting is not that important here, but the in-built health and energy gain of a few points in Mysticism might help with the survivability thing a bit!

Back to work in Guild Wars: Eye of the North, and after a emotional and fraught sojourn on the Tarnished Coast, we now strike out east, to the Charr Lands. Little Gwen is now all grown up, and many years have passed since the Searing destroyed Ascalon. She’s found hate-fuelled gainful employment in the ranks of the Ebon Vanguard, a kind of commando regiment from what is left of Ascalon who make it their mission to take the fight to the enemy, and cause all sorts of ructions deep in Charr territory. Using the nearby Eye of the North as a base, a sizeable of contingent of them have gone missing, having left Gwen in charge. Luckily, we’ve stumbled past, and happen to be in need of a sizable army, so it’s off to go rescue the Vanguard!

The Charr Homelands are a surprisingly nostalgic place, and once you get down out of the mountains, you might be forgiven for thinking that you’ve some how found a way back into Prophecies’ Pre-Searing Ascalon – in particular, the Northlands zone. Not many people will have seen that particular land, as it is only available in Prophecies, and only in Pre-Searing, which you can never return to, and even then, requires another person in the team to do the gate switch thing – a kind of early lesson on team play.

But it’s nice to have that back, in a fashion; wooded hills, rolling meadows, babbling streams – a return to the ‘Traditional Mediaeval’ aesthetic that gets lost very early on in Prophecies, never to return, with all the Jade Seas, Sulphur Desolation, Maguuma Jungles, and Icy Shiverpeaks. There are only three zones here, but all are quite large and share that epic sense of space that the EoN lands seem to have, where previous campaigns lacked a little.

Of course its not all county walks and these lands are home to the hyper-aggressive goat/dog/tiger things that trashed Ascalon in the first place, so its fairly hard work making our way across the place. Add to that, a large number of Mantids, a kind of man-sized insect that I thought was native to Cantha only.

Three missions here, along with connecting story, that we managed at a good pace, involving the usual Tuesday slot, along with some extra-curricular to make up for lost time last week. First off was a spot of tracking, in an attempt to find the missing platoon. This goes less well than we’d hoped and generally sees Gwen start having a psychotic episode, and the rest of us discovering, and then charging at, a Charr Warcamp. Quite a fun mission, and wide ranging, involving all sorts of sub-objectives that need taking out in order to weak the camp, before going in for a quite hectic final push.

Things get a bit murky next, and it turns out there are two kinds of Charr; the Shamans, who are working for The Destoryers, and therefore Bad, and some kind of bunch of misfit rebel Charr types, represented by Pyre Fierceshot, who are well up for a spot of civil war, something we can immediately see the benefits of, there being only eight of us, and about a majillion Charr! While little Gwen is busy shrieking and and having ‘Nam flashbacks in the corner, we negotiate a very comfortable deal – we help him bust his party out of chokey, and they’ll come and help us topple the Regime, and in the process, get our missing Vanguard back. For a supposed ‘Mesmer’, Gwen loses her composure an awful lot, I think.

The next mission is another dungeon crawl, this time in the Cathedral of Flames, the one beneath the Doomlore Shrine ‘City’. This wasn’t nearly as bad as most of the dungeons we’d visited so far, although wasn’t really the Dungeon Proper. Throughout the place are various captive rebel Charr who all need freeing, and the evil…er…eviler Charr Shaman at the end was quite a technical exercise, particularly when he pulls two L28 Burning Wicker Charrs out of thin air to bolster his defences. Some excellent pulling by Koss managed to split those off for a beating and the Shaman was exterminated shortly after. Success!

Reunited, the Charr Warband take it upon themselves to put us through a rush training course in warfare, as we gear up for the Big Push on the Shaman Stronghold. mostly this is a great deal of fetching and carrying, although one highpoint is being given a 35ft long giant twin-tailed scorpion with boulder flinging whiplash action to drive about the rolling downs. Quite similar to the Jundu Wurms of Nightfall, this basically turns you into an enormous Devourer, and gives you a number of special skills with which to rampage about the place. Great fun, and a great deal more useful and intuitive than the wurms, I found. Gwen is frothing a lot at this point and close to apoplexy, which might be interesting, but time is running out, and we need to make the big assault.

The last mission of the three involves an all-out assault on a very fortified position indeed. this proved to be a bit of a nightmare, and took a couple of goes in the end, mostly stuck on the first bit where we have to use two Siege Devourers to bombard the ramparts of a fort, to suppress a large number of explosively-armed Ranger Charr, which in turn will allow our Plate Armoured Triceratops (Don’t ask…) to make it to the gate to give it a good headbutting. All the while, six to eight extremely durable Warrior types are teleporting out into the battlefield in indefinite waves, trying to wreck our big scorpion things, and of course, us! I was about to quit for the night when one last go saw us through the gate, at which point, the mission becomes a lot easier, even when The Destroyers show up at the end.

Shamans overthrown, we also find our missing regiment, stuck in a pit, but conveniently alive. I suspect we’ll be needing those soon enough. Pyre, rather than stay and become the new Charr Emperor, or whatever, decides to tag along with us, and is now a selectable Ranger Hero. I’m sure Gwen is thrilled!

Story arc completed, we reconvene for another Vision at the Eye. It shows us the big lair of the Evil Monster Boss Thing, and Vekk recognises where it is. However, before we can charge into the fray and save the world, again, Ogden tells us that we need to meet with King Jalis, and summon The Great Dwarf.

The end is in sight, but anything could happen in the next few missions…

—

Something of an oddball build this time, once more, based on hexes, but this time a little differently, using the Necromancer’s Curse spells to supplement the Mesmer’s own Hexing abilities. It’s also a bit of an experiment in Touch skills; spells and abilities that need to be delivered at point blank range.

The Encouragement of Failure

Mesmer/Necromancer

Inspiration 12, Illusion 12, Curses 12

Distortion, Spirit of Failure, Reckless Haste, Price of Failure, Tease, Enfeebling Touch, Plague Touch, Parasitic Bond

Requires: Prophecies (#1,#2,#4), Factions(#3,#6), Nightfall (#5)

Equipment: Inspiration/Illusion Staff, and runes/masque to bump up the two Mesmer Attributes, allowing some spare points freed up for Curses. Not especially special.

Two parts here again, and the whole thing is essentially about causing and then exploiting the failure of others! Part one is about making them miss you. Distortion (#1) is a stance, but quite short in duration – throw that us as you’re taking a beating – it will make enemies very likely to miss you with attacks, as the cost of some energy per miss. Offset this with Spirit of Failure (#2) – this causes you to gain energy when a given target misses you, and increases the chance that the victim will do so. Then, slap Reckless Haste on them (#3) – this makes them attack faster, and increases the chance they’ll miss – spotting the pattern yet? Next is Price of Failure, which…increases the chance the target will miss, and hurts them when they do! Epic fail!

Part two is the more hectic bit and is about getting in close to the now-hopelessly incompetent enemy, and slapping them about the face. #5, Tease (Elite) roughly doubles all skill recharge times on the target. This ends prematurely if they hit you, but that is now somewhat less of a problem (See part one!) An alternative here might be Signet of Midnight, which blinds both you and your target for a short duration. This isn’t really a problem for you, but the enemy will become even more likely to miss while blinded. Tease lasts a lot longer however. Enfeebling Touch (#6) does a moderate amount of direct damage, and also adds the Weakness condition, which lowers the target damage and attributes, in the unlikely event they do manage to hit you at all. #7, Plague Touch is a handy little extra – since you’re at touch range anyway, using this will transfer two conditions from you, to the touched enemy – very handy around Charr Flameshielders, and in general!

#8, Parasitic Bond, is my self-heal, energy management having been taken care of by the #1,#2,#3 combo. Ether Feast works well enough here too, but this one causes health drain on the enemy for a short span, and then at the end, heals you. Its also very cheap and quick. Best used in liberal profusion just at the start of a fight – slap one on as many people as you can! Another alternative is the Blood Magic spell list, which contains quite a few touch health steal attack skills – Vampiric Bite and such.

Throw around a few preemptive #8, pick out a target, start with all the debuffs� (#2,#3,#4), throw up #1 and charge in, slapping them with #5, #6 and #7 as appropriate.� Tease works wonders in particular on chainhealing monk types on the back row, if you can reach them to administer the slap – sometimes the melee bodyblocking can be a little dense.

It worked out quite well in general, although does require a bit of micromanagement to get right – doing the right things in the right order and so on. Also, there are a lot of hexes to get on the same target, and in the case of the yard trash, they often die well before you can complete the set. Still, very effective against self-healers, and Boss types, who otherwise tend to endure a bit. The Touch skills are quite fun for a caster type, and require a great deal of ninja-like running into hectic melee, tapping the monster on the shoulder and running away giggling, which I personally enjoyed.

My EoN companion is also a Curses Necromancer, based around Spiteful Spirit mostly, and although I don’t think we were directly ‘competing’, this did mean that most primary monsters ended up with 8-12 debuffs on them very quickly indeed, which might have been overkill. Deliberately going after someone other than the Necro’s primary call saw the hurt distributed far more efficiently.

I suspect that a N/Me, ramping curses to 16, would do quite a bit better than Me/N me, but once again, I find myself surprised at just how different I can make the very moment to moment gameplay of Guild Wars, all without having to start an alt, simply by giving the skill icons a damned good shuffle!

Bit of a quiet week on the Guild Wars front, with RL getting in the way and making us miss a turn, as it were. Annoying, but we’re not in any particular hurry, so I don’t mind. I still got a few hours of solo questing in though; largely inconsequential side-jobs for cash and xp that don’t really count in the grand scheme of the ongoing story that much.

These were mostly in the ‘mid-game’ regions of Tyria and Cantha, as I play a bit of catch-up, bringing my Mesmer through the Factions story and outposts, only this time via the Kurzick side, which although perhaps not quite as enchanting as the frozen jade seas, does feature a subtly elegant petrified forest adorned with vast gothic cathedral-like structure high in the stone branches – a distinctly different take on the usual ‘Fantasy Treehouse Town #3′ kind of thing.

Being my chosen ‘Main’, its the Mesmer’s Hall of Monuments I’m working at filling with trophies gained from various titles, including the ‘have completed each campaign’ ones. This means a lot of revisiting of old places and missions I’d not done in a long time, and as different characters even then. The Heroes help of course, as does my much greater understanding of how it all works, making these retro revisits quite relaxing compared to, say….the Shards of Orr, and making this week’s adventuring a bit of a holiday from the hectic dungeon-work so far.

—

Still managed to find time to put together a Comedy Mesmer Build this week though! Despite being far too much in love with my own imagined cleverness and the ways of Mesmering, I’ve always been quite jealous of the Elementalists. While I’m doing all sorts of rather complex and confusing (to both myself AND my target) illusion and whatnot, Cynn, a regular choice for henchman, is basically setting fire to everything, in a very spectacular and apocalyptic manner indeed. Mostly, its the Fire Magic AoE stuff that looks the most fun, and Guild Wars being Guild Wars, there’s nothing stopping me from setting everything on fire myself!

The Reign of Fire

Mesmer/Elementalist (‘Mentalist’, if you will…)

Inspiration 12, Fire Magic 12, Fast Casting 3

Fire Attunement, Echo, Meteor Shower, Meteor, Auspicious Incantation, Rodgorts Invocation, Glowing Gaze, Drain Enchantment

Requires: Prophecies (#3, #6), Factions (#5), Nightfall (#7)

Equipment: Inspiration Staff, and/or anything that Halves Recharge or Casting of Fire Magic spells. Inspiration Rune and Masque. Radiant Insignias and Runes of Attunement will help as well – several of the above spells cost 25 energy, and Primary Elementalists get Energy Storage points, which Mesmers don’t.

Its a very back row artillery based build, with the two big hitters, #3 – Meteor Storm, and #6 – Rodgort’s Invocation. Both do a pretty large amount of AoE Fire damage, with suitably hectic particle effects and monster-murder! The Elite of the piece, is #2 – Echo, an unattributed Mesmer Spell which allows you to duplicate the next skill you use, into it’s slot, for 30s. Given that the bigger and more powerful spells available to the Elementalist take quite a long time to recharge, using this skill lets you have two goes at a favourite spell, in this case, either #3 or #6.

(Using this skill in concert with Arcane Echo allows three goes at a favoured spell, using what they call an ‘Echo Chain’, but what with the energy costs and Exhaustion, probably not ideal for this particular build)

With the 25-cost spells in the build, and not having the Elementalist’s native ability to increase their maximum energy via Energy Storage, energy management takes up a large part of the remaining slots. First, #1 – Fire Attunement, a buff that should be cast before engaging, gives back some energy each time a Fire Spell is cast. Then #5 – Auspicious Incantation, pays back energy after then next spell is cast – in this case, about 200% of the preceding spell’s cost, making a hefty energy gain and the main energy source here. #7 – Glowing Gaze causes damage on the target, and energy gain if they are on fire – use directly after #6 to ensure this. #8 – Drain Enchantment is a good choice for spare slots in an Inspiration build, offering self-heal and more energy, and strips enemy enchantments. #4 – Meteor, is a cheap one-shot AoE Knockdown blast, for 5-cost.

Definitely a more considered pace than many builds; the spells take comparatively long to cast, and recharge, and with #3 and #4, a new feature I’d not experienced before; Exhaustion. Almost entirely exclusive to Elementalists, some spells are so powerful, that casting them wears the caster out a bit. This manifests as a temporary hit to the caster’s Maximum power, a bit like receiving a Deep Wound does to health. This recovers a point at a time, but quite slowly, and particularly with Echo, it becomes quite easy to Exhaust yourself to the point where you no longer have 25 points to play with! A new way to play for me, and you soon learn to balance the types of spell, start with #3 and #4, and when the Exhaustion brings you down to about 30-25 points, switch to #6 and #7 instead.

Its also quite situational – the Meteor knockdowns seem to work best on stationary groups of ranged and casters, who won’t have moved out from under the giant space-rocks before they land. The knockdowns work well to interrupt casting too. Melee types on the other hand, rush about a lot, so the Invocation is a better choice – fairly fast to cast, and hits a person, not a patch of ground. The burnination follows them about too!

An Elementalist/Mesmer would actually do better at this build than an Me/E, as Energy Storage would mitigate a lot of the problems of casting lots of 25-cost spells, and the Exhaustion aspect, and possibly even make tripple-cast Echo chians workable. Fast casting helps a fair bit, but Auspicious Incantation would lose a great deal of it’s power. Possibly use a Glyph instead.

I don’t care though…sometimes, arcane entanglement and phantasmal trickery is no substitute for just setting someone’s head on fire and then dropping rocks on it from space!

You know, thinking back, I’m not sure if I can remember a time when Guild Wars wasn’t an emotional rollercoaster of rapidly alternating success and defeat. Last time saw me getting all QQ about the Eye of the North’s Shards of Orr dungeon, a rambling gauntlet of rather powerful and extremely angry undead – skeletons, zombies, and the like. A hardcore speedhump dropped somewhat casually in the path of our softcore story-based cruising, and quite irritating, all in all. Of course Irritation is my Fuel, and after the last post, I went away and got extremely obsessive about the whole thought experiment that was The Successful Shards of Orr Run. Plans within plans, grand designs, unlikely combos, all that stuff; fretting born of inadequacy, mostly.

(Actually, what I did before that – looking for a bit of reaffirming light relief – was go to the Siren’s Call PvP Zone in City of Villains, and get comprehensively owned repeatedly, but that’s a post for another day. Suffice to say, it didn’t help on the Self-Esteem Front.)

Meanwhile, while I was busy gnawing away at my sanity, wallowing in self-pity, and of course, writing about it all here, my companion in this particular venture, had basically spent a few hours experimenting, and subsequently figured it all out, arriving at a virtually flawless technique for beating the dungeon, the most difficult part of which was convincing me to step foot in the wretched place again for another go!

I like to pretend I’m the brains of the outfit, and my friend has the good grace to humour me on most occasions, but the strategy which unfolded was nothing short of eye-opening. Firstly, group composition. I joked last time about a WoW Raid aimed at 25x L70 Priests, but this is in fact pretty much exactly what we ended up trying:

• Mesmer/Monk (Me)
• Necromancer/Monk (My friend)
• Dunkoro, Tahlkora, Ogden Stonehealer (Smiting Monks/Inspiration Mesmers with Signet of Judgement, Mantra of Inscriptions, Bane Signet, etc)
• Other Dunkoro, Other Tahlkora, Other Ogden Stonehealer (Healing Monks – standard sort of builds)

So that’s six Monks, and seven really, as my own skillbar was basically the same as the Smiting Monks. I try to only use Mesmer Elites where I can – professional pride and all, but on this occasion, went with Signet of Judgement, a Monk Elite. Light of Deldrimor helped enormously too.

The real winner however, was the Necromancer, who was using something very complicated with the Ursan Blessing turn-into-a-Bear Elite. Also kept shouting ‘I Am The Strongest!’ a lot too, implying a build mostly made up of Norn PvE Skills, rather than anything particularly profession specific. And in some manner I’m still not quite sure I fully understand, was managing to actually tank!

Those unfamiliar with GW and more used to WoW, EQ2, etc, will be going ‘So what?’ at this point, but its a whole other barrel of monkeys in Guild Wars, and until recently, I didn’t even know it was possible to have all the monsters consistently attack only one chosen party member, in a reliable and lasting manner. There is no Warrior skill called ‘Taunt’, or Monk skill called ‘Hide’, and usually they’ll just pile on the first one of you to come in aggro range, or open fire at them, and then very quickly peel off, split up and start mashing on the people you’d least like then to be hitting – typically the Monks. GW Monsters are a lot smarter than the average MMO fare.

This being the case, most builds ideally include some degree of resistance to attack and self-healing, for everyone, and the traditional Tank, Healer, Crowd Control, DPS roles tend to be very nebulous, and often ignored altogether. I often play things fast and loose and don’t take a self-heal or resurrect of my own, relying instead on the Heroes and Henchmen to cover me, but that’s quite a cavalier way to do it.

Anyway, it worked like this; we’d stop about half a radar-circle away from the clump of monsters. We both plant the AI waypoint flags, making the NPC help stay on that spot. They’ll move a certain distance away from it to attack monsters or heal allies, but critically won’t follow players that move beyond that range. I waited with them, having long since demoted myself in my own estimation to ‘Henchman #5′ anyway. The Necromancer then moved off toward the clump of monsters, changed into a bear and aggroed them, pulling using Ursan Strike, then ran back towards us, but, and this is the crucial bit, stopped a short distance away from us. The monsters all piled on, but the Ursan form seems extremely good for personal survival, and due to the precise positioning of the spot chosen, the waypoint flagged henchmen, (and myself), were close enough to cast spells on the monsters and The Necromancer, but the monsters seemed to be slightly too far away to notice us. I imagine spamming out the other Bear skills helped keep the monsters too preoccupied to come after us Monks, Smiting or otherwise, as well.

All this had the effect of keeping every monster on one designated person, and despite the very large damage being taken, three healing monks, with only one tank to focus on, were easily up to the job of keeping them alive. Traditionally, all eight of us are taking a beating at once, and even with three healers, they can be everywhere at once. Meanwhile, me and the Smiting Monks were laying about with gleeful abandon, doing double damage (Holy vs Undead) in knockdown AoE bursts with the Signets.

I guess the technique would work almost anywhere else too, as long as everyone concerned gets the hang of the various distances involved. Swap the Smiting Monks for Fire Elementalists, or whatever the occasion dictates. Actual proper tanking, in Guild Wars! And the best thing is that the ‘tank’, relying mostly on PvE non-profession specific skills, can be pretty much anyone, although having high HP and Armor to begin with probably helps a lot.

It almost became a pleasure to fight as we worked our way down three levels of this stuff. Nothing went wrong, nothing seemed impossible, and there were a number of interesting puzzle elements involved too, mostly in the form of lighting braziers with timed torches. Some very good looking level design too, including one balcony over a circular glowing lava pit with huge chains in, that looked suspiciously like the Blackrock Spire Lobby bit in WoW.

Things went a bit south during the final boss fight though, with an ill-advised ‘all pile in!’ order that started us on the swift journey back to “-60%DP Town” again, although having got that far in, it wasn’t quite so hopeless playing the Attrition Game for the one last boss. Fendi Nin is quite a technical foe to defeat. He’s not so bad in himself, a L29 Curses Necromancer, but has an annoying habit of reincarnating, spawning a ‘Soul of Fendi Nin’ upon death. This stays around for a short while, and then vanishes, becoming a fresh ‘Fendi Nin’ again. It’s the Soul you have to kill, but fortunately, it doesn’t heal between appearances, and we got there in the end. The main difficulty we have was him calling in minions; phantoms and skeletons, upon reincarnating each time, and these all got a bit much, overrunning us, moreso at -60DP.

Still, eventually we beat him, and that’s Shards of Orr ticked off in the Dungeon Book, an din a manner that I’m happy enough to call a success! It’s repeatable, so we can hone the routine in future, but for now, it’s back on with the story!

Having recruited Gadd, we then had to locate Renk, the third of the Asura Eccentrics needed for the Big Science Project. (A Little Help) This turned out to be really easy – a short trip down to the coast in Alcazia Tangle, avoiding some of the worst dinosaurs, a small skirmish to free him from minor Destroyer molestation, and back to Rata Sum, for the final part of this chapter; Genius Operated Living Enchanted Manifestation. Our three Asura crackpots have now put their heads together and built a quite alarming golem factory, based, from the look of it, on the Big Ring Thing from the end of Contact. The device will manufacture an army of golems (Two) which we can use to drive off the Destroyer force menacing the Tarnished Coast.

Trouble is, its not quite ready when the assault starts, leaving it to yours truly to hold the fort. This wasn’t so bad, seeing the pair of us split up and defend one Golem-O-Matic each. Probably a bit tricky solo, needing to be in two places at once, but creative use of waypoint flags, and a bit of dashing about ought to cover it. We then get a Golem beacon thing and have to lead the assault. The Golems produced are L20 Dervishes, with all manner of very helpful Monster Skills, which follow you into the fray. After some initial confusion (Just because you have to split up for the first bit, doesn’t mean you should stay split up for the rest of it!) we led the Golems into the hive and drove them out. Yay! After the assault, we learn that Gadd, ignoring Vekk’s advice, has Crossed The Streams while sorting out the Golem machine, or something, and has been killed as a result of his egotistical pride. We also learn that Vekk is Gadd’s son, making the overall victory a touch more subdued than we are accustomed to. On the plus side, and contrary to my expectations, the golems did not in fact run amok and need killing!

In a spirit of contemplative mourning, we waved goodbye to the now-mobilised and battle-ready Asura, and legged it back to the Eye of the North, where the enigmatic Scrying Pool has new things to show me. Seems the Destroyers do in fact have a big leader type. Ogden calls it The Great Destroyer, and tells us that when The Great Destroyer and The Great Dwarf meet, it will be the end of the Dwarves, no matter who wins…

Now its on with the last of the three story branches; The Missing Vanguard, where we pick up the story of Gwen, the bitter and angry Ascalonian Mesmer, and her all-consuming fury at the Charr…

—

Something a bit more sensible this week, and another return to the basics of Mesmering; Hexes. Hexes are basically debuffs, almost all magical in nature, as opposed to Conditions, which are more natural in origin. Hexes are a subtle thing, and muck with the enemy in any number of ways, from basic health damage over time, to snared movement, to reduced hit chance and more. Hexes also include the staple of the, ahem, older Mesmer, whose reaction times aren’t quite what they once were, the ‘pre-interrupt’.

Pre-interrupts are Hexes that when cast on the enemy, will sit there until either a duration expires, or a set condition triggers them. A typical example being Guilt; reaction time is not a factor in this one – the hex will sit on the enemy, and for the next six seconds, if they cast a hostile spell, it will interrupt it, blow up and hurt them instead. The interrupt from one of these hexes is also instantaneous, allowing them to halt even the 0.25s skills which, as seen previously, mere human reflexes alone might not be fast enough to beat. Bravo!

On the down side, the enemy knows it is going to happen, and can, if clever enough, simply choose not trigger it. Saying that, even the most alert PvP opponent is now presented with a dilemma upon seeing the Empathy icon on their debuffs list; stop attacking and wait it out, or wail away and hope to take down the enemy before the Empathy does you in?

Pre-interrupts can also be safely defused via Hex Removal skills, and many are slow enough casting times to be interrupted themselves. This makes straight interrupts a better choice for PvP, for those who are fast enough. PvE monsters rarely notice or care about these though, and so they make a great alternative to the somewhat fraught world of interruption for the slower or more relaxed Mesmer.

The Joy of Hex

Mesmer/Any

Illusion 12, Inspiration 12, Fast Casting 3.

MantraofPersistence, Ineptitude, Clumsiness, WanderingEye, SoothingImages, ShrinkingArmor, AccumulatedPain, EtherLord

Requires: Prophecies (#2, #8), Eye of the North (#4, #6), Factions (#7)

Equipment: An Illusion Staff. +Energy and +Health are handy, but not required. Illusion Rune and Masque are useful as its mostly Illusion Hexes here and bumping that to 16 makes most of it more nasty!

In contrast to the interrupt build of a few weeks back, this one is mostly aimed at confounding melee attackers, showing that Mesmers needn’t necessarily be on Anti-Caster duty all the time. Start with the Mantra of Persistence (#1) prior to engaging. It’s a little costly, but extends the duration of Illusion Hexes by about half. #2 to #6 are all Illusion Hexes, so you do get your moneys worth out of the Mantra here.

#2 – Ineptitude is the big hitter, and will heavily damage, and blind, the victim the next time they make an attack. Blind is a particularly useful condition, causing a 90% miss rate while in effect. Migraine, seen previously, is the Anti-Caster Elite Hex of choice for this sort of thing, and Crippling Anguish is a good Elite Hex for a� more neutral ‘anti-everything’ type of build, causing degen and snare effects.

#3 – Clumsiness also causes damage if the victim attacks, AND interrupts the attack as well. #4 – Wandering Eye is similar, but causes lesser AoE damage instead of a big single�hit on the victim. These are all Pre-interrupts – for actual attack interruption, consider Signet of Clumsiness, Leech signet and Complicate instead.

Even Casters attack, interspersing use of skills/spells with wand/staff attacks, so these skills are of fair use against those too. #5 – Soothing Images and #6 – Shrinking Armour are more specific. #5 stops adrenaline generation on Warriors and Paragons. Use this as an opening move on the clump of enemies as they aggro. The warriors will break off and come for you, and dropping this on the lead one will usually catch all of them in the AoE effect, scuppering their skills greatly. Most warriors have some energy skills though, so don’t relax too much. It is of no real use on Assassin or Dervish melee types, neither of whom get adrenaline skills. #6 is a reasonable health degen, in a build that is short on actual damage, but more importantly, causes Cracked Armor, an AC reducing condition that is very useful against Warriors and Rangers.

#7 – Accumulated Pain is an attack of opportunity, use on anything with two hexes on. This is tricky to keep track of, as the target bar only shows one, or none, down purple arrows, regardless of how many hexes are on them. Use on the warriors after #5 and #6 for best chance of hitting twos; #2, #3 and #5 tend to be triggered too quickly. If successful, it will Deep Wound the target, always helpful on melee adversaries with lots of HP.

#8 – Ether Lord, is my energy management, although there are better skills for pure energy; Energy Tap for example. Ether Lord is handy as it hexes the enemy with energy degeneration as well, good for casters, or in combination with #5, totally locking down Warriors and hampering Dervishes and Assassins.

Quite accessible for a Secondary Mesmer, not using Fast Casting that much, although again, why give up entirely on the Primary? Sub-elements of the build could work well with other hex-based professions – the Necromancer in particular – for a similar debilitating effect. Lack of runes will make the Illusion Hexes a bit less punchy, but they should work almost as well.

It’s a fairly supportative ‘assist’ type of build, meaning that you will still need someone else to do the killing, but this is often the case with Mesmering in general, and on the whole it did seem to be making life easier for everyone else, allowing the other casters to spend more time attacking and less time getting beaten to death by the inevitable rush of enemy tanks. Energy is a bit tight, and perhaps swapping #7 for Energy Tap as well as #8 might help smooth things along. It really did shine against the Jotun warrior types and warrior Destroyers though – usually things go very sour once they get in close and start hoofing people about!

As expected, it did leave me a bit toothless against the casters, although the anti-attack hexes still proved useful, more useful than an anti-caster build would be against melee types. Still, can’t be responsible for everyone, and that’s why there’s eight of you, players or otherwise!

Oh alright then! The evening started out well enough, with me logging across to my Factions Ritualist to help a friend, who is attempting to be come a Legendary Survivor the Hard Way; i.e. playing through the missions properly, rather than find a safe cluster of mobs just inside an explorable area and repeatedly grind on them until eyes bleed. In this case it was #9(K) – The Eternal Grove, a challenging and tricky ‘defend the hill’ type of mission, a lot like Prophecies’ Thunderhead Keep and Nightfall’s Dzagonur Bastion.

To make matters even more awkward, my Survivalist friend insists on Master’s completion, so it took three goes in the end as I tried to remember how Ritualists work, and also cope with the added stress of having a ‘permadeath’ teammate. The Survivalist is a master of the lightning ‘/resign’ however, and deaths caused by resignation do not count as proper deaths where the Survivor title is concerned. Its an odd kind of sub-game, and one which is far too stressful for my taste, but each to their own.

Still, we’d done it and I was feeling pretty good about myself all in all, as we logged across to our main Tuesday N00b Club characters, the Mesmer and the Necromancer, reconvening in Vlox’s Falls, ready to continue with the next bit of Eye of the North; Finding Gadd. This went okay to begin with too; a pleasant and enjoyable romp through Arbor Bay, although this week’s Comedy Mesmer Build was beginning to cause discomfort already. More on that below. We’d made it to the south end of the map and encountered a ghost who had a quest, loitering outside the next step on the route to find Gadd, the Shards of Orr, so we clicked and grabbed that, most without reading it or thinking about it too much, and zoned on in. And that’s when the real fun began.

The Shards of Orr are one of EoN’s Dungeon zones, and after a considerable amount of reading around the subject, are anecdotally the most difficult one in the entire damned expansion. Cheers then! It consists of three levels, and is populated with large clusters of undead who basically OMFGBBQPWNed us repeatedly, and lollerskated over our corpses, throughout the evening.

Our first mistake, was activating that quest outside, which causes a significant number of extra ‘bonus’ monsters to be spawned into the place before our arrival. We weren’t even trying to ‘complete’ the place – work out way down to the lowest level and kill the insanely overpowered boss monster. We never made it off level one, and in fact, were just trying to get through the place, to Gadd’s Encampment on the other side so we could continue the story.

Its hard to pinpoint exactly where the main problem lay, as there just seemed to be so many things going wrong at once. My own build was utterly inappropriate. The rest of the team were not nearly tailored for the place enough either. We had the wrong henchmen and heroes. The monsters, despite ‘only’ being L24 seemed insanely powerful, with extremely damaging wizards using lightning attacks, necromancers with massive degeneration attacks, warrior zombies that hit like freight trucks and of course the mandatory chain-healing clerics and priests essentially negating our pathetic attempts at ‘damage’ entirely. We also had problems with secondary aggro, an unfamiliarity with the terrain and map, and for extra fun, a lot of the fighting seemed to take place around, and more usually IN, jets of green poisonous mist projected from traps.

Within minutes we’d started playing that dark, bleak and wretched variant of the game, the -60%DP Attrition Crawl. This is were even Guild Wars starts to take pity on you, and decides that it would be cruel to punish you for failure any further. Once down to -60% Death Penalty, there is literally nothing more the game can do to penalise you, and if, say, you’re a pair of bloodyminded and stubborn masochists who simply refuse to give up and come back with more preparation, training, research and experience, you can then continue to throw your barely-alive carcasses at the enemy over, and over, and over again.

Of course with only 40% of your Health and Power, it becomes hit and miss whether you’ll even survive the alpha strike and be able to land even one hit on the enemy before being cut down, and at these levels, most enemies can happily one-hit you at that point. But if you all time your kamakaze assault correctly, and all divebomb the healer at the same time, its just possible you might damage it a little bit more than he can naturally regenerate by the time you all return form the nearest resurrection shrine. Its wretched way to play, and can literally take hours to travel a hundred yards.

Its also extremely demoralising. How is it possible to fail any further? Answer; it isn’t, and realistically, if you and your entire party have hit -60%DP, you really ought to all ‘/resign’ back to the last outpost where the penalty is erased, and start the zone again, this time with better skills. One wipe (-15%DP) is unfortunate, but easily recoverable, and quickly worked off via xp earned. Two wipes (-30%DP) is a cause for concern and hard work, but not necessarily game over. Three wipes (-45%DP) is pretty much it though, guaranteeing the fourth, to -60%DP in short order. A typical player in GW usually has around 500hp at full health, most auto attacks do about 20-50hp, and spells and skills can easily do 200-300hp from some of the bigger Elementalist nukes, so -60%DP takes you well below the one-hit threshold for most skills and abilities, and makes the game almost unplayable. Intentionally so!

It was a shambles and eventually we did get the hint, resigning back to Vlox’s Falls for a rethink. I ditched the Comedy Skillbar in favour of last week’s Interruption Skillbar, hoping to be able to do something useful about the Skeleton Wizards maybe. Similar other team adjustments took place, although as it turned out, still not really tailored enough for the specific task. We then returned, pausing only to ditch the stupid Masters quest in there. This made life a bit easier – some of the monsters were now not present, but there were still more than enough to stop us getting though a very short and fairly simple route from one exit to the other. The Interruption skillbar, while a bit more useful, was still�no good. Problem being that as a Mesmer, I can perhaps lock down one enemy caster at a time, but the worst groups in this place consisted of four wizards (Elementalists), two Necromancers, and two Monks – far too many casters to keep on top of at once. Meanwhile, the wizards are all using very fast and powerful lightning spells which seriously tore us up; Shock, Blinding Surge. A Nightmare, and keeping perhaps one wizard out of four out of the fight wasn’t helping a lot. Dual redundancy on the chain-healing priests wasn’t helping a lot either.

Before long, we were back to the -60% Attrition Game again, only this time with our Serious Skillbars on. Humiliating. The Plan when it came, was ignominious to say the least, and basically consisted of us�trying to run past them, using the Heroes and Henchmen as a sacrificial distraction. This, eventually, worked, and the Necromancer managed to leg it to the far swirlery, and daylight. Gadd’s Encampment now unlocked, we can map travel around that godforsaken pit of despair now!

It was no good though – I was now in a very gloomy mood indeed. Regular readers will by now have picked up that I am quite obsessed with MMORPGs. I take the above kind of thing much more personally that perhaps I ought, and I’m sure I used the phrase ‘All I have are MMOs, and I’m sh*t at those too!’ at one point. Deary me, self-pity ahoy! Hissy-fit alert! Quite histrionic, I’ll agree, but I can be quite emo when the occasion demands! Nevermind, my friend enthused – lets just get on with the story. I agreed in a surly fashion; my friend puts up with an awful lot of this stuff on the whole, for which I am grateful. Maybe it was just a one off. Maybe it was just that place. We stepped outside into Sparkfly Swamp, and promptly got murderized by a roaming pair of high speed L28 Tyrannosaurus Rexes with Velociraptor support. WTF? I think if the hysteria hadn’t taken over at that point, I’d have had some kind of nervous breakdown there and then, and quite possibly even done something Permanent to my character and/or account.

I think there were Hekets, possibly a Paragon Hero. Hayda, was it? We may have met Livia and Gadd and gone to another dungeon. Something about Bloodstones. I was really past caring at that point, but one thing and another led to us finishing that leg of the story. Gadd is one of the nastiest Asura we’ve met so far, caring nothing for the well-being of his minions, helpers or test subjects, giving it all that about ‘Dumb Bookahs’ and so on and isn’t even Comical about it, like Oola, and the mood I was in, he’s damned lucky it is physically impossible to kill green-named NPCs – savior of the world or no. I’d just had three hours of the game itself telling me I’m rubbish! I do NOT need to hear the same thing from some jumped-up milky-eyed bunny-rabbit….thing!…with dental problems in a stupid hat! RAAGH!

And it didn’t end there! Annoyed but somewhat cooler of head, we had a Wednesday Noob Club too! Shards of Orr; This Time It’s Personal! That went about the same too. Some research (The wiki talk page)�showed that we were doing it entirely wrong, which we knew, and that actually, instead of, say, a well-balanced party of interlocking and complementary classes and skills, the Correct Team Build is in fact a crapload of Smiting Monk/Mesmers with Signet of Judgement, Bane Signet�and Mantra of Inscriptions. A build not too dissimilar to my Signet based build of a few weeks ago, in fact. Imagine a WoW Raid Instance designed for 25-man Priest Only teams…good grief. Still, ‘class’ is a far more flexible matter in GW than in WoW, so everyone can be a priest if they want, when they want, which looks like what we’ll have to do.

We’d tried a team build with some Smiting Monks, and me on my Illusionary Weapon Me/A setup. Trouble is…we got distracted on the way to the dungeon. Just outside Vlox’s Falls, we stumbled across another Master quest; O Brave New World, which we’d got entirely the wrong team build for, again, and was a bit of a nightmare, particularly the last bit with the seemingly unending Destroyer rush. I like my IW build, but so much stuff in EoN has enchantment removal that it is debatable whether enchantments are worth using at all. Anyway, another eventual ‘triumph’ for the ‘-60%ers’ which put me in another foul and despondent mood, even before we’d got to the Shards of Orr for the second go in as many nights.

We eventually arrived, with a slightly better build, which did indeed do slightly better, but still nowhere near ‘effective’. We left again, spent at least 10pp on extra skills and runes and came back. This time we had a lot more Smiting Monks, and I was using something similar myself. All that effort, research and practice had raised our chances of surviving each group encounter to 50/50! Woohoo! We still didn’t make it off the first level, out of three, let alone get anywhere near the big Boss of the place, and it was late, and I couldn’t wait to quit and go to bed, frankly.

I’m starting to understand what Eye of the North actually is. It is not really a campaign, or story that much. There is a story there, of course, but people say it is very short, compared to Nightfall, etc, and I’d guess that despite the failures and distractions, we’re about halfway through it already. No, what EoN really is, is a guided tour through a large and wide-ranging ‘lobby’ of sorts, which merely exists to connect together 13 or so ‘high-level’ Raid style instances, more in the nature of Domain of Anguish, The Underworld and the Fissure of Woe, along with a few other sideshow games – Polymock, Norn Tournament, Brawling, The Alemoot, Whatever Minigames turn up in the Vanguard storyline, and so on. And these end-game activities are designed to be very difficult, indefinitely repeatable, and last a long, long time. Long enough to keep us all occupied until Guild Wars 2, perhaps.

I think the story is just there to get all the jumping off points unlocked for all these various dungeons, and it’s those that are the real meat, and each of these is a separate game in its own right, with its own demands, requirements, builds and skills needed. I expect we’ll be back in time, but I suspect the whole trip through there, and the last two days of anguish and failure was simply a teaser – a taste of what things will be like when we’ve finished the current Story-based ‘Whistle-stop tour of the Facilities’. One does not simply walk into the Shards of Orr…or, as it turned out, even through them on the way to somewhere else!

—

Today’s build is mostly here to show people what not to do and I list it merely for pointing-at and laughing-at purposes. It is a classic example of a consistent personal failing of mine, and that is having far too much faith in the theory, and not nearly enough understanding of the practice; it looks good on paper, so that’ll do! Still, we live and learn, I guess. The basic premise was that with so many Mesmer skills which copy other skills, I could be every class at once! The Jack of All Trades! This violates the core tenet of MMO character customisation; Specialisation is Power – Diversification is Weakness, which frankly, I should know by now.

The Master of None

Mesmer/Any

Illusion 16 (Masque and Rune), Inspiration 12

Signet of Illusions, Arcane Mimicry, Arcane Echo, Arcane Larceny, Arcane Thievery, Inspired Enchantment, Inspired Hex, Ebon Vanguard Assassin Support

Requires: Nightfall (#1), Eye of the North (#8), Factions (#4), Prophecies (#5, #6, #7)

Equipment: Illusion Staff, but frankly, its going to take a lot more than a weapon bonus to make this work.Rune and Masque for Illusion, and a team of seven other people who actually have working and sensible builds!

It all hangs off the Signet of Illusions (#1), and the large number of ‘stealing’ spells. Stealing spells turn into other spells, based on who you cast them on, usually for 20 seconds. These spells can literally be anything, and using any attributes from any class, and in general, you have very little control of what you actually get. Most of these stolen spells will have green numbers which improve the spell’s effect, as your points in its linked attribute go up. Not having that attribute at all, can then be a bit of a problem, which is where the Signet comes in. When used, the next three spells you cast, use your Illusion score, instead of their normal linked attribute. In this case, 16, which is the maximum practical score you can achieve in any attribute. In many cases, you’ll be casting the spell with greater potency than the person you stole it from!

The stealing spells work thusly:

• #2 Arcane Mimicry – Copies a teammate’s Elite Skill. This is usually very powerful, but only ‘Spells’ are affected by the Signet, so avoid using it on the melee classes.
• #4 Arcane Larceny and #5 Arcane Thievery – Copies a random spell from the target enemy, AND disables it for their use while you have it. Two versions of the same identical spell.
• #6 Inspired Enchantment – Removes an Enchantment form the target enemy, gives you energy, and turns into that enchantment for 20s, for your own use.
• #7 Inspired Hex – As #6, but cast on teammates to remove and copy a hex spell instead. Also gives energy.

With all the above cast on different targets, its entirely possible to have a skill bar with skills from six different professions at once, and still be able to cast them with 16 Attribute. In theory anyway.

#3 Arcane Echo is handy if you snag a spell that’s particularly useful. Cast this first, then the spell you like, and this will turn into another copy of that spell for 20s, letting you have twice as many goes at it.

#8 is mostly there as a test of the PvE Rank skills (Friend of the Kurzicks, Sunspear, Lightbringer, Norn, Asura, etc). These are usually very powerful spells, so powerful in fact that they aren’t allowed to be used in PvP, or be given to Heroes. Trouble is, the power only really comes when you reach very high faction ranks, which can take ages and a lot of grinding. I’ve been plinking away at Nightfall since it came out and am only Rank 8 Sunspear. Signet of Illusions works on these rank skills also. It isn’t exactly 1 to 1, like normal attributes, but 16 Illusion converts to Rank 10 PvE Faction, making most PvE Faction skills extremely potent indeed.

In this case, #8 – Ebon Vanguard Assassin Support, calls in an NPC Assassin, who attacks for a short duration, then vanishes. At Rank 0 Ebon Vanguard, he’s L10 and lasts 20s. At Rank 10, he’s L20 and lasts 30s. My other favourite PvE skill, Cry of Pain interrupts and does AoE damage. At Rank 0 Sunspear, its 40pts, at Rank 10, its 100pts, so clearly, grinding the rep is worth doing if you PvE a lot, but Signet of Illusions is a good way to shortcut a lot of bounty point work, albeit for the next three casts only.

An Any/Mesmer would do just as well as I did (badly), although will be capped at 12 Illusion, without runes, etc, making the stolen spells all somewhat less powerful.

It all seemed to clever, so versatile, so… complex, which as it turned out was the main problem with it all.

I did indeed end up with six different profession’s spells on my bar, but alas, I hadn’t actually considered what I’d then do with them all. To date I’ve played only three professions to the end of a campaign, and it really does take that long to become familiar with even the basic skills and spells of each. There is at least half of the Mesmer’s skill list that I don’t really know a lot about, hence this series of Mesmer Build experiments. Its mostly so I force myself to learn and understand what they all do. I haven’t the faintest idea what all these Elementalist, Necromancer and Monk spells are for, and suddenly, they’re on my skillbar, in a hectic and demanding end-game grade dungeon environment!

The random nature of the thefts is a problem as well, making it a skill bar that requires total game knowledge AND incredible versatility. There’s a significant micromanagement exercise on the targeting too. Some of the spells need enemy spellcasters, some need enemies with enhancements on them, some need allies with hexes on them and some need allies with a spell-based Elite skill. And thats before they even changed ito completely alien and unfamiliar spells! #4, #5, #6 and #7, look good in theory, and might possibly work better on an AI Hero Mesmer, who automatically knows instantly how best to use each stolen spell for maximum effect, but for me, just caused a lot of headaches. The thefts aren’t always useful either – at one point I had two copies of Air Attunement, and no other Air Magic spells. Peachy!

#2 turned out to be one of the more useful skills actually, and being able to borrow my Necromancer Friend’s Elite, Spiteful Spirit, a very powerful repeating AoE damage hex, or their Monk Hero’s Light of Deliverance, a similarly powerful partywide heal, and cast either with Attribute score of 16 (Full Power), was very nifty. Unlike the other steals, you know in advance what you will be getting with it, and by echoing it beforehand, #3, I could have both! Unfortunately, unaided, #2 takes far too long to recharge for it to be reliably repeatable or quite as flexible as it would first seem.

#3 and #8 made a useful combo as well, something I increasingly fell back on as the general confusion of the build became apparent. #1, #3, #8, #3 (Which is now #8 as well), allowed me to call in two top-powered Ebon Vanguard Assassins, which did help a fair bit. Any other PvE Spell could be used here instead, and a better choice for the Shards of Orr would have been Light of Deldrimor, an AoE Holy Damage blast – cheap, fast, reasonable recharge, and does double damage to undead. Being able to echo it, and use it at full Deldrimor Rank (40pts at Rank 0, 80pts at Rank 10 and 160pts at Rank 10 vs Undead), twice in quick succession, might be a good way to go with the horror that is the Shards of Orr. Run into the clump, blast the ‘area’ with 320pts of damage per monster, then leg it back out and let the Smiting Monks mop up with Signets of Judgement. Hmm…

Another problem was the constant necessity to use the Signet every third cast. I guess I could get the hang of it in time, but time was something we didn’t really have. Also, being a Signet means that Complicate, Ignorance, Panic etc, all lock this build down a treat.

I think its a build that tries to do far too much, and probably could do without the stealing spell shenanigans. It might be salvageable with more static PvE Rank skills instead. A set and known skillbar stuffed with already overpowered PvE-Only Spells, all artificially pumped up to Rank 10 via the Signet, might not do too badly. Mostly though, as shown above, all it does is demonstrate that sometimes, I can be far too clever for my own good. All in all, I’d consign this to the ‘Fun Builds’ category; great for mixing things up and showing off with, but probably not a useful way to approach an EoN Dungeon, frankly…

Its off to the sunny and lush paradise of The Tarnished Coast this time, as we get to work on the second of the three big story branches in Guild Wars: Eye of the North; The Knowledgeable Asura. We’d used one of their underground gate thingies and arrived at Vlox’s Falls, an outpost just south of, but unconnected to, Sanctum Cay, and here learnt of the Asuras’ enigmatic ‘G.O.L.E.M Project’, which promises to be some kind of dangerously eccentric magical weapon system. The Asura are the classically absent minded and befuddled genius types provided for comic effect, as seen in a variety of other fiction as ‘Gnomes’, so at this point, I’ll just be happy if when we eventually Press The Button, it kills more of Them than Us.

But before all that, we have to walk the lands and round up a number of these nutjobs and get them to design and build the thing. We started by looking for Oola a gifted, if difficult, Golemancer, and to find her, we had to find her extremely embittered and recently sacked assistant Blimm, last seen in Rata Sum, the Asuran centre of operations and The Tarnished Coast’s Town.

Getting there was an enjoyable journey, involving the kind of overland exploration and roaming that I’ve always liked in Guild Wars. Party up, pick a destination and just go. The map travel feature is useful, helpful and appreciated, but I do quite enjoy taking the long route some times. In this case it was out into Arbor Bay, then across through Riven Earth, both rolling tropical highland types of zone, and very well crafted; massively more detailed than the old Maguuma Jungle zones to the north.

The fighting was tricky in places; pop-up bat things leaping out in the middle of already hectic fights with angry and powerful gorilla types, and winged snake-beasts, and in the later of the two zones, dinosaur attack! Neither expected, nor welcome, but you learn to cope with just about anything given time! Both fascinating zones that bear a great deal more pottering about.

A quick layover at Rata Sum to pick up the almost pathologically bitter Blimm, and onward to Magus Stones – a similar place, but hard work, mostly due to the very fast-moving clumps of Mesmer-based Wind Rider hover-squid things. Catch 6x Crippling Anguish in the face on initial aggro and you know about it! We pushed on through in the end though, and reached the main event, The Elusive Golemancer dungeon mission.

Blimm leaves us outside, warning us about the ‘Security System’, and in we go. This dungeon is mostly a puzzle based affair, stuffed with golems, few of which you actually have to fight in the traditional manner, and mostly, the various rooms are about working out what switch to pull, what socket to put what object in and so on. Interesting and different; +1, would play again!

Two points in particular stand out. The first was me getting very grumpy about an obviously bugged/broken part of one of the puzzles. I’d correctly realised that in order to survive one room full of fire dart traps, our party must activate a golem that then projects a ward-type ring about itself. While inside the ring, the darts do no damage. The golem then starts shuffling back and forth through the room. To get across, we needed to move with it, keeping in the ring. Easy enough.

Trouble is, half way across, the golem gets stuck, but the ring keeps going. Unsure if this was lag or a bug, or what, our party got scattered and a few Heroes got burned on down. This then causes those AI healers left who can resurrect to run back to them and stand still and try to cast the resurrect, which got them burnt to death, etc, etc. Bit of a farce really, and clearly not quite what was intended. We only got through because one of us made it far enough into the fire traps to ‘tag’ the next shrine along, so when we all died, we woke up on the far side of it all. Nice idea, but very sloppy.

The other was the “Indestructible” Golem, which my companion had worked out how to actually kill; another bug probably. The technique is extremely hard work though and needs very specific skills, as opposed to, say, picking up the Thing on the floor, charging it up in the glowing socket and dropping it next to the golem a few times, like you’re supposed to, which seemed not to have occurred to my Necromancer friend.

Traps defeated, we found a rather grumpy and unhelpful Asura at the far end of it all, who refused to help, despite the obvious threat of DOOOOM for Everyone that the Destroyers pose. A bit of light reverse psychology later, “Well, we don’t need you anyway!” Oola is on board, and we’re back at Rata Sum, ready to look for Gadd, another Asura crazy. Most Asura so far seem to be largely walking personality disorders, with a spark of genius buried somewhere deep inside. I will be very surprised if The Weapon actually works and doesn’t just make things worse, frankly…

—

I’m that Special and Precious type of personality that tends to overanalyse trivial failings and misfortunate happenstance, and rather than admit to simply Not Being That Good at an MMO, tend fall back to the comfort blankets of Research, Stats, Analysis and Numbers to help salvage some tatters of Self-Esteem and compensate for simply not being that 1337 anymore, if ever.

After last week’s abysmal failure to defeat the Remnant of Antiquities, I went back to the drawing board, and hard. I also went back to basics quite fiercely too. Elaborate mucking about with exotic Primary/Secondary Combos is fun, certainly, and its always very satisfying to make such a bizarre pairing of, say, Mesmer and Dervish work in some fashion, but when you get down to it, there’s one thing that the Mesmer is very much designed to do, and that’s Interrupt.

When targeting an enemy, you can see what he’s doing by looking at the top of the screen. On the whole, they use the same skills that players do, and take the same amount of time to cast them. A given monster will always have the same ‘skill bar’, although they don’t get eight slots and rarely get more than one profession to choose from.

When they use a skill, the icon appears, and the lil progress bar starts to fill, taking a varying amount of time depending on the skill’s activation time. If you can use a skill on him that interrupts, before that bar completes, his action will fail to take place, and when that action can potentially be a sodding great rock falling on you from outer space, or indeed, laying down a massive and distant AoE Cripple/Bleed field, as the Remnant likes to do, that can’t help but be a Good Thing! Pain Avoided! Yay!

One thing a Mesmer/Any can do that no other combination can, is increase ranks in Fast Casting. This makes the spells cast faster (duh!) which is useful generally, but in particular helps you beat an enemy caster to the draw with an interrupt spell. The Mesmer also has a large selection of Interrupt skills to choose from, most of which take only 0.25s to throw out. With FC at 12, that becomes 0.14s. The above Meteor spell example takes 3.00s to cast and is one of the easier ones to beat to the draw, but even so, there is still a significant human element to it all – hand-eye coordination and response timing.

Have a go at this:

Human Benchmark: Reaction Time Test (Flash)

I came up with an average of 262ms in 5 tries – longer than 0.25s. And that’s just ‘Click Now!’ Interruptions in Guild Wars also involve decision-making; What type of skill is this? Is it a Spell or a Signet or a Stance, or what? Will this one kill us all, or should I hold my interrupt in reserve for the next one?

All this means that there are a lot of skills that the enemy will use, which even the most hyperactive tartrazine-fueled teenager simply won’t be able to interrupt, so interruption is about choosing your moment, certainly, but the Mesmer can help even the odds somewhat. Here’s my custom designed anti-Remnant interrupt build:

The Interruption of Sp-

Mesmer/Any

Fast Casting 14, Illusion 13, Inspiration 11, Sunspear Rank 8

Migraine, Arcane Conundrum, Frustration, Cry of Pain, Web of Disruption, Leech Signet, Power Drain, Ether Feast

Requires: Prophecies (#1), Nightfall (#3, #4, #5)

Equipment: Anything really, although look for staves or wand/focus that ‘Halve the recharge time of spells, (x%)’. Halving the casting time isn’t so important as all of the above are very fast already, being in the 0.25 bracket mostly. Three attributes are needed, rather than two, so Major or Superior Runes in some or all of them would be helpful. Watch the health hits though, and go with Sup Vigor and Survivor Insignias to compensate.

Its an old school build, with one purpose only – to stop the enemy getting spells out. There are two parts to it; the Slowdowns and the Interrupts proper. The Elite, #1 – Migraine, is a reasonable degen, but most importantly, doubles the time it takes for the enemy’s activation bar to fill up, giving you twice as long to hit the ‘Stop! Mesmer-time!’ button. #2 -Arcane Conundrum is similar, has no degen, but does have an AoE effect. This is less important as you’ll be focusing on one enemy at a time mostly. #3 – Frustration, only increases the time by 50%, but makes subsequent interrupts cause damage, which is nice. Other spells with a similar effect that might work here include Stolen Speed (Elite), Enchanter’s Conundrum (Elite) or Confusing Images, all of which slow the enemy casting speed down in some manner.

Having slowed the bugger down, you now stand a much greater chance with the rest of the bar. There are a large number of possible choices for actual interrupts, but I’ve gone for Inspiration or Unattributed here. #4 – Cry of Pain is a decent choice in any build, particularly with high Sunspear Rank, and interrupts Skills rather than Spells as well as it’s hex-based blast effect; handy! #5 – Web of Disruption is an interrupt that does Skills too, and lingers for a delayed second interrupt after 10s. Nice, but hard to know what an enemy is going to be doing in exactly 10s time. #6 – Leech Signet is a Signet (costs 0 mana), does Skills and can gain you energy if used right. #7 – Power Drain works on Spells and Chants (Paragons mostly) and gains energy too. #8 is my Spare Slot here – I’ve gone with a self-heal, but another interrupt would work here just as well, or another Slowdown. The Norn Skill “You Move Like a Dwarf” would work well – a knockdown. Knockdowns also automatically interrupt.

Reasonably simple to use. Tab through the targets until you find a suitable candidate. You should probably prioritise in order of average casting speed, to give yourself the best odds of doing the job:

• Slowest Casting: Elementalists, Necromancers
• Medium Casting: Monks, Ritualists
• Fastest Casting: Mesmer, Dervish

And if all those are down, you can try your luck with unaided Skill interruption on Warriors, Assassins, Paragons and Rangers. Individual monster types may vary however; some Elementalist monsters use fast skills, and so on. Particular attention should be paid to specific Monster Skills, as these can often be extremely dangerous and/or annoying; Giant Stomp, Diamondshard Mist, etc, and keeping Boss monsters suppressed is core to the role here.

Once chosen, open with Migraine, and get ready on the interrupt section of the bar. Keep an eye on it’s hexed status (purple down arrow) and apply the next Slowdown when each runs out. (I’m not sure if the Slowdowns stack – must test it more!). As you work on each set of monsters, you’ll start to see which long spells each uses and which short ones. Casting time is something of a game balancing lever, so in general, the longer a spell takes to cast, the more devastating it will be when it finishes. You won’t have enough interrupts recharging fast enough to totally suppress most monsters, so choose which to use and when, carefully.

Adding a Ranger Hero or Henchman with Broad Head Arrow and other bow attack interrupts can help cover the gaps and provide total lockdown on the target monster. Zho is a good choice for this, and Acolyte Jin and Magrid the Sly both make excellent Interrupt Archers if set up right. As the Slowdown is a hex on the monster, not a buff on you, assisting Rangers get its benefit too, particularly helpful as many of their interrupts are ‘on the next shot’, further adding delay and difficulty for them.

Don’t worry about actually killing the monster – that is a job for the other members of your party. Your main job here is to identify the really dangerous enemy spells, and prevent them from happening. This can mean enemy heals as well as the big hitting enemy nukes. Do bear in mind though, given the reaction timing test above, some Skills you simply won’t be able to beat, even with the Slowdowns piled on. Stances are all insta-cast, and even with Migraine, you’ll be hard pressed to catch the 0.25s (now 0.5s) ones 100% of the time. It is definitely something that gets better with practice though, so don’t give up!

I guess a Secondary Mesmer could use this build, although I’m not sure why anyone would entirely abandon their Primary profession. A lack of Fast Casting points will make life more difficult however. Possibly a more mixed Ranger/Mesmer based interrupt build might benefit from the use of Migraine and similar? I’m less familiar with the interrupt opportunities available to non-Mesmer, non-Rangers however.

Downsides of the build are largely that you do very little damage, meaning that careful thought needs to go into Henchmen and Hero selection – someone needs to do the actual killing. That’s not your job however, and not why you’re here. It has little in the way of self-defence, and involves a lot of standing still and staring intently at the very top of the screen, finger poised on mouse-button, while all the other squishies are running away from melee beatings. It becomes easy to forget to Run Away yourself, so try to keep an eye on the action as well from time to time and leg it if necessary.

The biggest downside I found, is that it requires a much greater level of sustained concentration than most other GW roles – you can’t keep it up for hours at a time, as you can with more damage based PvE builds. You need to be alert all the time to get the most out of it, and this does get quite wearying. I found myself switching away from it to more regular builds quite often. In the right and specific place however, it becomes a party-saving godsend, and makes previously impossible things fairly straight-forward. If I ever find myself in that wretched last Factions mission again, this will be the build I’ll try.

Its a hectic kind of sub-game, but rewarding when you can get it right. For much of our second romp through the Sepulchre of Dragrimmar, myself and a BHA equipped Magrid managed to play merry havoc with the various spider Necromancers and ice monster Elementalists; spell after spell met the ‘click’ noise and purple stalled progress bar. It all paid off the most at the end however. The Remnant of Antiquities managed to get a few spells out – I’m quite new to this afterall – but it was nothing like the massacre of our previous trip, and eventually, with much patient and determined interruption, we were avenged! Score one more for the Dungeon Handbook!

Before setting out on the next leg of our journey, in search of Vekk’s Asuran compatriots and the magical knowledge they hold, we spent a fair amount of this weeks session filling in the gaps in the quest log for the various snowy Norn lands.

Many of these quests give out entirely new skills, in new tracks that any profession can use, and which work of reputation rankings, rather than attribute levels, a bit like the Sunspear skills. My own Cry of Pain is now prodigiously powerful, due to my PvE grinding of bounties during Nightfall and subsequent Sunspear Rank 8. I still work at rank nine in my spare time too, although this is only possible via Hard Mode bounties now. An AoE blast for 99pts is definitely helpful though, so it’s worth putting the effort in.

The Norn and Deldrimor title track skills look to work in a similar manner, costing no Attribute point spending to be effective, and after a sufficient number reputation points have been secured, these skills will always be powerful, regardless of build. Handy things to have on-board then, and we spent much of the night romping about the snowdrifts proving our Norn worth and Dwarven fortitude in a variety of minor ways. I’ve yet to sit down and have a serious look at them, and am purely in the magpie collector stage just now. Ooh! New Icon! Gotta catch ‘em all! I suppose it might be eminently possible to come up with a Me/Norn build, or a Any/Dwarven build. Certainly a lot of skills there – mini extra professions, rather than the odd extra.

Eye of the North also features ‘Dungeons’, and one quest sent us in to one of these; the Sepulchre of Dragrimmar. These seem more structured mini-zones, of multiple levels, with no worldmap coverage. Traps and switches abound, giving it a bit of a puzzle element, although nothing quite as specialised as DDO, and mostly it is still a game of Guild Wars you’re playing… the same large areas, multiple mob spawns and hectic combat. We killed the boss we’d been sent in there for, with not too much difficulty, but it turned out that this wasn’t the real boss, who is the ‘point’ of the dungeon, I guess. We carried on in to find him on the next level down, which is where the fun began.

Indeed! Another nightmarish Boss Monster; a L29 Remnant of Antiquities, complete with incredibly overpowered Monster Skill; Diamondshard Mist, an extremely large, brutal and frequently cast AoE nightmare, which he seems able to cast a phenomenal range away from himself. If he is in view, rendered, he can hit you with it, making getting to him difficult enough, let alone fighting him! We gave it our best shot, but I suspect that our eventual failure and resignation was mostly down to me. Here is a monster that needs a LOT of interrupting; usually the Mesmer’s or Ranger’s job, and I had some Comedy Skillbar (see below) containing nothing like that at the time.

Still, unlike Shiro, this monster does seem to be beatable in a methodical and planned way, but it looks to be very much a case of tailoring the team’s skillbars to match him, rather than just sauntering in with Standard Overland Skillbar #1 equipped. We poked our heads in one or two other Dungeons too, and they all seem to be very specific destinations in themselves, rather than things to just pop in on your way somewhere else, requiring very particular forethought and planning for each. This made me a bit cross; if I wanted elaborately choreographed specifics and repeated goes at the same deliberately difficult boss over and over, I’d probably have not given up WoW at L60, and the whole thing does have a faintly suspicious whiff of raid-like “WWBD?” about it, which personally, I thought Arenanet were above, frankly. Mind you, saying all that, I’ve still never given ‘The Underworld’ a go yet, the original Prophecies-based ‘raid’ zone. I think it’s the 1pp admission fee and lack of henchmen that put me off.

Annnnnyway, The Remnant does seem doable, and isn’t a huge hardship to get to; distance, attunements, anything like that, so I expect we’ll be back! With Interrupts!

Dejected, I followed along as we got back on with The Story, and we trekked down out of the mountains, passing through high alpine valleys, into a lush tropical basin, and into Asura country. Lovely zones to romp through that cheered me up a bit. Kept expecting to be assaulted by a cluster of Von Trapps. (Watch the Paragon variants…particularly nasty Arias!) Passing through the Umbral Grotto and into another mini tree-root themed dungeon, we found the Asuran Gate we were looking for and suddenly found ourselves half way across the world, in Vlox’s Falls, on the Tarnished Coast, another new addition to the Tyria map, this time in the large green bit to the south of Maguuma Jungle.

Here Vekk arrives to find his people deep in argument about The Plan. Some order is restored by our arrival, and The Plan is revealed. Using a variety of Magical Engineering disciplines, the Asura want to build some kind of super-weapon, with which to fight off the Destroyers. Given that every interaction with any Asura so far has left me with the impression that this bunch of rabbitey eared crazies are essentially Gnomes in a particularly successful disguise, I have my suspicions about The Weapon already. The exception to this slightly comical cavalcade of diminutive eccentrics, is Vekk, who actually seems to Have A Clue. Unfortunately, Vekk has had some kind of falling out with the others which complicates matters a bit. Old friends show up again here too, in the form of Livia, a Necromancer from the Shining Blade, the band of bandits and/or freedom fighters who feature heavily in the Maguuma Jungle bits of Prophecies.

Anyway, our job now is to track down and round up all these eccentric madmen and get them to work on The Weapon. No doubt there will be a great deal of new lands to discover, and depopulate, along the way!

—

Okay, so here’s what I thought; some of the Insignias are open to all; the Survivor, The Brawler, The Radiant, and so on. But, some of them are only wearable by a particular Primary Profession. So… one way to capitalise on the strength of being, say, a Mesmer/Something, as opposed to an AnythingElse/Mesmer, would be to look at the class specific Insignias and work with that. The Mesmer gets three; Prodigy’s (+Armour per recharging skills), Virtuoso’s (+Armour while activating skills), and Artificer’s (+Armour per equipped Signet). This suggests that the Mesmer is supposed to; have lots of skills recharging, be casting stuff a lot of the time, or be using Signets.

A Signet is a special type of skill, one that uses no energy at all to activate – a 0 mana spell, in other words. Conceptually, I guess it is meant to represent a powerful and reusable magical item – a ring in fact, rather than an innate spell, weapon attack, stance, etc. To balance this obvious over power, the Signets all have very long recharge times… much longer than normal spells, and can be quite slow to actually cast. However, in the Mesmer’s Fast Casting pool, are a number of spells that improve Signet use. Coupled with the Artificer Insignias, how far can you get with a predominantly Signet based build? Here’s the Fist of Bling I came up with:

The Rings of Artifice

Mesmer/Monk

Fast Casting: 12, Smiting Prayers: 12, Inspiration Magic: 3

Symbolic Celerity, Retribution, Bane Signet, Signet of Rage, Castigation Signet, Mantra of Signets, Keystone Signet, Signet of Capture

Requires: Prophecies (#6, #7), Factions (#4), Nightfall (#1), Eye of the North (#5)

Equipment: Artificer’s Insignas; the more the better. Inspiration and Fast Casting Runes and Masque. Fast Casting Req Weapons with ‘of Enchanting’ can help with #1, or ‘While in a Stance’ for #6. Avoid ‘+Energy’ bonuses – you won’t need it. Look for +Health instead.

There’s five Signets in there, which gives +15AC via the Artificer’s Insignias. The build is in two bits again, the Setup, and the Run, and the whole thing revolves around the Elite, #7, Keystone Signet, allowing the Mesmer to spam out 0-cost attacks as fast as they can be clicked for a good three goes through the skillbar.

Start with #1, Symbolic Celerity. This almost halves the casting time of the signets, greatly increasing the spamability of the build.

Now pick a target and launch into the first pass of The Run; #3, Bane Signet, #4, Signet of Rage, #5, Castigation Signet. Then hit #6, Mantra of Signets and #7, Keystone Signet. #7 makes #3,#4,#5 recharge instantly, and having hit #6 immediately before, makes #7 recharge instantly. Ready for the second pass; this time, #3, #4, #5, skip #6 as it won’t be ready yet, hit #7. This recharges #3, #4, #5 instantly, again. Now take your third pass; #3,#4,#5. Annnnd relax! Nine direct damage attacks, most of which will hit for 50pts of Holy, in about as many seconds, for a total cost of 15 Energy (#6, once).

So, it’s:

#1, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7,

#3, #4, #5, #7,

#3, #4, #5,

cha-cha-cha!

Quite frantic stuff, and although bigger damage is had with other builds, few are quite this efficient, giving the Mesmer large reserves of energy to spare, and making them quite immune to Energy Denial tactics. A Mesmer usually has +4 Energy Regen, and with the Monk Secondary, now has access to the Maintained Enchantments. These are buffs that last as long as the buffing Monk can pay the -1 Energy Degen constant upkeep. With most of the attacks costing 0 energy, I found it was easy to keep Retribution (#2) on three different tanks, indefinitely. Strength of Honor is a good alternative here, but do use something to put the spare excess energy to good use!

#8 is my usual optimistic trawling for Elite Skills, although Signet of Capture is still technically a Signet, so will count toward the Artificer Insignias, as would Resurrection Signet in this slot. Alternatively, swap this for Signet of Mystic Wrath, another Smiting Prayers Holy Damage Signet, making a run of four attacks, times three!

A Monk/Mesmer would have difficulty with this build, not having access to Fast Casting points, OR Artificer’s Insignias, although a Smiting Rune would up the actual damage a bit, per Signet. Divine Favor is not used even indirectly here.

Most other professions have signets; here is a list, and often these are unattributed, which can help fit them into a busy build. I went with Monk’s Smiting Prayers, as this seemed to contain the most Signets that do straight damage. Most of the other profession Signets are more utility based, although the above ‘Runs’ principle ought to work just as well for more support based Signet spamming in specific circumstances; e.g a 100% Mesmer Interrupt Build perhaps, ensuring that as many interrupts are available as often as possible. Interrupt Signets are by necessity, very quick to cast already, 0.25 sec typically, so #1 will help even more to be ‘first to the draw’ for that.

A bit of juggling to use the Monk Elite Signet of Judgement instead of #7 Keystone Signet may make for a more potent, if less repeatable, damage output. Fast Casting has a number of other Signet related skills, and experimentation with these, and Mantra of Inscriptions, might yield an even more rapid fire or flexible Signet assault.

Downsides include a long ‘down cycle’ between Runs, where all the signets are recharging normally after the third Run. During this period, you are left with the staff/wand autoattack, and not much else. There are a number of specific anti-signet skills out there too – Complicate, Ignorance, etc, and although rare, encountering monsters with these will almost totally shut you down. While it is an efficient build, but not many PvE monsters try for energy shutdown, as a rule. How it would work in PvP, I couldn’t say.

Mostly though, players are best tasked to damage, and AI to support/healing, in small Hero-based PvE groups at least. This damage output is less than apocalyptic overall, compared to say, a straight Domination Blast build, or even my Crazy Imaginary Assassin one. However, it is in the form of Holy Damage, which is usually armour ignoring, and very difficult to specifically ward against. Also, added bonus, it does double damage against Undead. This was really noticeable in a number of specific places during last nights adventure. Trouble is, it was hard to notice my contribution anywhere else, making me a bit too specialised, I think.

I think in general, Signets are a useful ‘extra’, and many builds could benefit from one or two, for those occasional ‘oom’ moments, but I’m not really sure a build based entirely on Signets is a good idea; even if you are a Mesmer…