Although, like many of the casual hardcore club, I have kept my eyes on the prize of having a super-Saiyan Hall of Monuments simply because of the link between Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2.  This goal has conflicted with more fun Guild Wars gameplay like the recent War in Kryta mini-campaign or the inefficient Fort Aspenwood PvP map.  Other things like Eye of the North reputations have slowly been built up, my Sweet Tooth and Party Animal titles are about to break 2,000, and I’ve been hoarding diamonds for the hopeful market jump.  With upcoming Hall of Monuments news, this might all change.

The biggest “sleeper” hit for Guild Wars 1/2 coming out of gamescom was, in my opinion, about the Hall of Monuments. This reward system would comprise a point-system to unlock the goody bags in Guild Wars 2, and the Hall of Monuments guide was coming to ArenaNet’s website(s) “very soon.”

Until this news hit, I was pushing for some openness, but now that the golden carrot is peeking over the horizon, I have to wonder.  I am reminded about the now-cancelled ABC series Flash Forward, which as bad as it was in parts (like the main characters and their actors), it was a decent mystery placebo for not having LOST.  The whole premise of the show is that the entire human population gets a flash forward of themselves in the future.  The daughter of the main character says that because of this flash forward there will be “no more good days.”

For better or worse, having the link between Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 is going to have a big effect on how players will play Guild Wars.  It’s going to be a struggle between playing Guild Wars for the shiny Guild Wars 2 future or playing Guild Wars to… uhh, play Guild Wars.  This struggle has been present in the meta-conscious since the original Hall of Monuments announcement, but I feel that having an objective reward schedule will solidify the struggle in to a true meme.

Take the Guild Wars Beyond chapter the War in Kryta, for example.  There is very little War in Kryta content that relates to the Hall of Monuments.  The chapter was filled with new daily quests, some new mini-missions, and a nice story to push Kryta’s history towards Guild Wars 2.  There were even two new purchasable costumes that players could wear to commemorate this great addition to Guild Wars.  Now let’s assume we know all about the Hall of Monuments.  Would players be as excited knowing the hours they put in to playing War in Kryta was wasted for Guild Wars 2?  Would players be as excited to purchase the 2 costumes for $10 knowing that the $10 would never pay off for Guild Wars 2?

Of course, this is all my Achiever-ego talking.  The other three Bartlettes, and likely many intelligent readers, are scoffing at the struggle.  It’s a game.  Play to have fun.  If it is more fun to put in work to prep for Guild Wars 2, then do that.  If it is more fun to play through a well-crafted story, or do the dailies, or jump into some casual PvP, then do that.

ArenaNet’s decisions on the reward system will have the biggest effect on this Achiever struggle.  I am hoping that the top tier unlocks will be accessible to most dedicated players.  That way with a little effort a Guild Wars player can unlock all the Guild Wars 2 goodies, and then get back to just playing Guild Wars.  It will be interesting to see how much ArenaNet panders to the “elite.”  But, that’s an article to write when the Hall of Monuments article drops.  Until then…

–Ravious
echoes in eternity

HoM-rizon is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

As scissors says, “Rock is imba. Paper’s fine.”

: Zubon

Class Wars is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

The role of the necromancer in Guild Wars was not easily defined, as it straddled the line between hexer, minion master, and even melee.  The necromancer profession in Guild Wars 2 seems to be a streamlined version of the necromancer of old.  In re-defining the necromancer profession, what role do you intend for the necromancer to play in groups?

One notable difference in the new Guild Wars 2 necromancer is the apparent lack of true hexes or sustained hex-like abilities, like the always favorite Spiteful Spirit from Guild Wars.  Does the Guild Wars 2 necromancer have any sustained hex-like abilities, and what was the design goal in getting away from the hex mechanic of Guild Wars?

Marks, one of the necromancer’s unique type of skills, are ground targeted skills.  How are they different from the necromancer’s Wells and the ranger’s Traps?

Will Fear, the necromancer’s unique condition, work any differently in PvP? Can you compare Fear to a knockdown?

Lorewise, is the necromancer’s power tied to the Elder Dragon Zhaitan in any way?  Will the Guild Wars 2 necromancer replace or assimilate the Guild Wars ritualist’s spiritual powers?

Thanks for stopping by, Eric!

Guild Wars 2 Necromancer Interview is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Out of the four professions announced, the necromancer seems to have gotten more re-definition than the elementalist, warrior, or ranger. There are still supposedly two more professions based on Guild Wars professions (current belief is mesmer and assasin) and two professions that are entirely new (current belief is “paladin” and “alchemist/gadgeteer/gunslinger”), so the Guild Wars 2 necromancer might not be the furthest away from its original. However, the changes are significant enough to note.

The biggest change is that the necromancer no longer relies on corpses.  Minions and Wells originate instead from the necromancer’s own power.  However, balance must be maintained by taking away this limitation, and now a necromancer’s army is limited to [possibly] 7 minions (5 bone minions, 1 blood fiend, and 1 bone fiend) at a time.  Additionally, only one Well may be active at a time. (As an aside those little human-skulled rat-looking bone minions are some freaky stuff.)

The iconic Soul Reaping mechanic of Guild Wars necromancers has also been replaced with Life Force.  Life Force is a bar, separate from energy, that fills up when things around the necromancer die and when the necromancer uses certain skills.  Once the Life Force bar fills to a certain point the necromancer can go into Death Shroud mode.  In Death Shroud, a necromancer assumes a spectral form where health is replaced by Life Force, and the necromancer gets 4 new skills including the ability to summon a shadow fiend.  When Life Force is depleted through damage taken or time in Death Shroud, the necromancer returns to her original location where Death Shroud started to get dumped back in her body.

And, get this… instead of falling to the ground like a chump.  The necromancer’s downed state is going in to Death Shroud with full mobility! So, it is a risky maneuver, but the necromancer seems to get stronger in a way when he loses all his health.  That sacrifice, for me, defines the feeling of a necromancer.

The final big difference is the apparent lack of sustained hexes or hex-like abilities to put on an enemy.  The Blood and Curse line for a Guild Wars necromancer was hex heavy, and the Guild Wars 2 necromancer seems a lot more active without any sustained fire-and-forget hexes.  To kind of replace the missing hexes, a necromancer gets a unique condition to spread around: Fear.  Fear, as you can imagine, sends enemies running away, which has the PvP crowd kind of worried at the loss of control of their character when a necromancer targets them.  It is a condition, and thus removable; so it should be interesting to see how it gets balanced.

Overall, I am excited with the changes.  My two favorite Guild Wars professions are fairly passive, and I am a little nervous about the necromancer becoming a more active profession.  Yet, I think Guild Wars 2 is a more active game to begin with, and so times they are a changing justly.  I can’t wait to get my hands on one, and I already have a sylvari necromancer name in mind.

–Ravious
the line it is drawn;
the curse it is cast

I, Necromancer – Guild Wars 2 is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Before I do, one of ArenaNet’s programmers discovered a karma reward for completing an event chain in charr territory while playing with the gamescom demoers.  (I have an unfounded feeling that it might be part of the “kill ten rats”-type quest with the asura. See Pat Cavit’s comment below.)  The reward was donning a golem armor with new skills, and the programmer decided to stay in the golem for quite a long period of play.  That’s a pretty cool reward for sticking out an event chain.

Anyway… energy.

Energy in Guild Wars is an encounter-based resource especially for higher end PvE. Each character gets her own pool of energy, and when most skills are used the skill depletes an amount of this pool.  If there is not enough energy in the pool to pay the skill’s energy cost the skill cannot be used. Players can easily burn through their energy in a matter of seconds by using expensive skills or spamming skills over-aggressively, and so with energy-replenishing skills and, more importantly, the healing/energy web created in a synergistic party of 8, maintaining energy in Guild Wars is a resource mini-game.  Energy ultimately sets a tempo for a single encounter.

In Guild Wars 2, energy is now a long term resource for paying off a skill’s energy cost.  Instead of setting a tempo for a single encounter like in Guild Wars, energy will set a duration of active play.  Tempo is still important because a more frenetic encounter will shorten the duration of active play more than a calm, surgical strike on a mob, but it’s possible that a player’s energy could handle multiple spamfests of skills before expiring.

When I first heard of the new energy mechanic in Guild Wars 2, DOTA-style games like League of Legends mana popped in my head.  In that game mana (energy) is used to set the duration a player can defend a lane.  If the player is unopposed and just killing minions, he can push a lane for a long time because the calm rate allows him to spend mana equal to the mana regeneration rate.  If the player is constantly harassed by enemy players, he will lose energy much faster as they use more mana than they regenerate, and he will have to retreat from active play to regenerate.

I think this changeover makes perfect sense for Guild Wars 2.  First off, players won’t have their “8-headed hydra” of heroes and henchmen to create a web of healing and energy.  A single player can no longer constantly go full throttle in attack because the support of dedicated healers and energy providers is gone.  Players are now mainly in charge of their own health and energy.  So instead of wasting another one of the 10 skill bar slots with an energy replenishment skill, ArenaNet changed the energy mechanic.

Secondly, I believe that plenty of events and event chains will have a long duration of sustained activity.  For example, ArenaNet does not want a group to be required in The Shatterer event (that video is epic).  I believe they want LoneWolfJoe to join in without needing a group of people watching his back.  With the old energy system, LoneWolfJoe’s energy would go belly up in a couple seconds, and so would his activity and fun.  A long term energy resource would allow LoneWolfJoe to have a long period of active play without relying on others.

When energy runs out a player will have to replenish enough energy to sustain another period of activity.  Energy regenerates slowly on its own.  I don’t have any solid numbers to the period of activity or period of rest, but of all the videos I’ve seen from the gamescom demos, energy never seemed to be an issue.  I would guess that a player would have to be having a pretty continuous amount of sustained activity to hit bottom.

Now, here is the rub.  I said they didn’t add another energy replenishment skill to everybody’s bar, but they did add a mechanism for on-the-fly energy replacement in the form of potions, which are cheap to buy, drop from mobs, and refill a “significant portion” of the player’s energy.  Once used there is a recharge time to use another potion.  This  same mechanic is found, once again, in League of Legends, with the Clarity spell (3 minute recharge) to give the player just a little bit more active time in a lane (yes, I know they have mana potions too).

Many in the Guild Wars 2 community were outraged at the use of a direct resource potion in a Guild Wars game.  Most were worried that Aion Online’s pay-gold-for-everything design was creeping in to the Guild Wars game, and now it would cost gold (in the form of potions) to do anything.  Others were worried that PvP would become a potion spamfest.  Whatever the reason, it seemed potions carried a stigma that caused great prejudice before most people knew how they worked.  The most interesting response I saw came from a gamescom attendee that talked to a top ArenaNet developer directly:

“Later on I got the change to talk with Izzy about the reasons for and against potions which did ease my fears a bit. Izzy’s personal opinion is “I hate potions and want to bring them down with fire” but so far they haven’t found a better replacement for a long-term resource yet and until that happens they (including Izzy) will stick to them and try to convince people that energy potions will improve and not worsen gameplay.”

League of Legends has the Clarity spell, Kingdom of Loathing has food, and Guild Wars 2, at this moment, has potions to replenish the long term activity-metering resource in each game.  If you have a better idea or see a better way to replenish a long term resource from another game, ArenaNet is listening.

–Ravious
is a burning thing

Thoughts on Guild Wars 2 Energy is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

We’ve known for awhile that the first 5 skills are based on the weapons in the character’s hands.  Two single-handed weapons gets 3+2 skills, and a double-handed weapon gets all 5 skills.  Then the remaining 5 other skills can be chosen from a pool, similar to Guild Wars, with the exception that out of those 5 there is one elite skill slot and one heal skill slot.  One thing we learned from gamescom is there seems to be no conventional auto-attack.  Instead a player right clicks a skill for the auto-attack “slot” so when an enemy is attacked that skill will be repeated.

Although click-to-move may come back since the time ArenaNet said Guild Wars 2 would not have click-to-move, using a skill no longer seem to automatically put the character in range of the enemy.  Instead, I saw in a video, the spell will cast as normal, fly towards the enemy as normal, and then fall short.  As it falls short it then tells the player “out of range.”  I think this feature is going to be amazing in PvP, but I hope it is not frustrating to the more PvE-oriented players.  Of course, this feature may be subject to change.

The one change I don’t like is mostly regarding the elite skill.  The ones that have been noticed in the video footage so far are very powerful: become a tornado, become a plague cloud, rampage with your pet doing 100% crits, +100% move speed, and ignoring damage.  Except the recharge time is 720 seconds.

I hate skills like this in any game.  Skills with long recharges (over a minute) have long recharges because they are too powerful to be constantly active.  Using a recharge variable to balance the power of a skill is a tried and true method.  Yet, creating a skill that is an “I Win” button, and then letting the player only use the skill 5 times in an hour is poor design, in my opinion.  The power vs. recharge time does not scale in a linear fashion.  I would much rather have a less powerful skill that can be used more.

But, I’m sure that developers (and of course players) want to break out the nuke sometimes.  It’s kind of rebellious to the system.  Regular skills might have a very tight formation on, say, the availability of critical hits per minute, but a skill that could only be used a few times an hour could “safely” ignore the conventions because becoming a tornado for 20 seconds every 720 seconds won’t really destroy the overall tempo.  It just creates a loud symphonic spike with the persistent question of use.  A player will be constantly be wondering if and when to use the skill because 12 minutes is a long punishment for improper use.

My suggestion is to tier the elite skills in Guild Wars 2 if there is absolutely a need for nuke power skills.  Give each one three tiers at, for example, 120 seconds of recharge, 360 seconds of recharge, and the full 720 seconds of recharge.  The skill would become usable after 2 minutes, but at significantly reduced power.   At 720 seconds, it could get its full nuke power.  The critical point is that it is still available to use after a relatively short period of time.  It takes the elite skill away from that button we ignore 90% of our playtime, and puts it back into something that could be used nearly every event.

I hope ArenaNet reconsiders their stance on these nuke-button skills.  I loved that Guild Wars had only active skills.  Each skill in a Guild Wars toolbar was a constantly available tool.  I feel that this was the Guild Wars way, and once every 10+ minute skills are the old, busted, conventional way I thought ArenaNet got away from last game.

–Ravious
directive?

Guild Wars 2 Skills and Recharge is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

But does anyone really think that public quests are not good? When conditions are right for them to work, they work well. When conditions are not right, they limp along better than much non-instanced solo MMO content. They encourage socialization and teamwork. If you did not like particular PQs, fine. If you think the whole game is broken, fine, but this part works.

Steal this feature. Champions Online slots a PQ into the tutorial zone. If Guild Wars 2 and Rift are offering PQ 2.0, that will be an improvement from the current quest hub model (conditional on successful implementation). Are we just trying to reign in expectations about how awesome or revolutionary this is going to be, back to “good”?

Even if it is just putting sprinkles on ice cream, I like both sprinkles and ice cream, and that other place does not have ice cream on its dessert menu.

: Zubon

PQ 2.0 is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

The necromancer is the next profession for Guild Wars 2, and from this video, my favorite Guild Wars 1 profession is looking pretty cool.  ArenaNet says we will get a more official release of the profession sometime later.  However, it looks like a necromancer builds up “life force” and then goes in to some kind of shadow form called “death shroud” with a new skill bar.  I am very interested to see more details on this profession.  Many more professional sites (with video) are popping up with gameplay impressions from the early press demos at gamescom.

The live stream of gamescom has also started!  I don’t know what events will play today because there is no Wednesday schedule on the NCSoft gamescom site.  However, in channel they are announcing the next upcoming presentations.  An Aion presentation is first up.

And of course, the moment I post this ArenaNet puts up a new blog post with thoughts from the animators.

For the most up to date information, I would check out this forum thread or the Guild Wars 2 Guru front page.

–Ravious

Guild Morning, Gamescom is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Hopefully the personal story acts as a guide through the zones because that will be necessary. Players need more purpose than pure exploration… — Ravious

He is probably right, but I wonder.

The first generation of graphic MUDs had far less guidance. I started with Asheron’s Call, which had almost none. There was no quest book. Some NPCs would trade for something in a dungeon or from a monster, and that was how most quests were structured. Some locations had stories that you could follow. For the most part, though: here, have a world, go nuts. (I could not tell you the current state of Dereth.)

We moved away from that pretty immediately. Asheron’s Call 2 was organized by vaults the way The Lord of the Rings Online™ has its epic story, although it was a ways from the now-familiar on-rails quest hub structure. A Tale in the Desert added levels and EVE added certificates to help guide people. Can I hope that Darkfall is a last sandbox without a trail of breadcrumbs?

I understand the desire for guidance. I know the feeling of “so now what?” But I also liked the Asheron’s Call feeling of deciding what I want to do tonight. It was more of scattered attractions than theme park rides. And that left us wondering what else me might find if we ran fifteen minutes in a random direction.

: Zubon

Pure Exploration is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

At first, I was kind of bummed just because some naysayers put down the event quite harshly.  But, I thought about the differences.  Crucial differences.

First, it’s not a quest for you.  It’s an event for anybody that wants to help.  Honestly, though, that isn’t a very strong selling point.  Kill ten rats together is still… you know.  In hindsight, it really had to be expected.  They have over a thousand events, if not more.  In a game based largely on combat, I think it would be nearly impossible to make each event based on something other than kill count or item collection.  It is very unlikely that Guild Wars 2 can defy each and every convention in the MMO genre.  This one just hit close to home.

Anyway, the reason to write this post is the second difference.  When a player completes the quest for the asura by bringing back a handful of harpy jigglies, the world changes.  Perhaps the asura starts selling perfume to players for a short time.  Perhaps the asura tells each buying player that it was thanks to Legolocharr that he can sell perfume.  That’s the potential I hope ArenaNet taps to make their kill ten rats events a bit more special than what we are used to.

–Ravious

Kill Ten Rats Events is a post from: Kill Ten Rats