Kill Ten Rats

Rewards for the “Wanted by the Shining Blade” daily quests are a model of elegant design. If you complete the full cycle of quests in hard mode, you receive 255 war supplies. You need 250 for an oppressor weapon, which leaves you room to skip a day, not run them all in hard mode, save/sell them, or add them to the confessor’s orders you collect to get a royal gift.

The simple excellence of this design leaves little except to point at it and say, “do this.” On the Explorer side, we have a daily activity on a three-week cycle, taking you into eleven zones and revamping old content. There is a lot to see there, and this creates an Explorer bread crumb trail through the War in Kryta content. An the Achiever side, this is exactly one unit of Hall of Monuments progress. You want at least one oppressor weapon, and you can earn that through the Wanted cycle or even from repeating partial completions. I expect that someone has worked out the optimal war supplies/minute quest selection. In terms of grind, this is the level I want to see: try everything once, and you get the reward; if you like it, you can repeat it for more rewards; if not, you have other options for both this check-box and the rest of the category. This one is entirely optional anyway, because you can get an oppressor weapon or two from the story arc (or buy from other players).

Potential improvements: don’t make the number of cycling quests a multiple of 7, because each quest will always be on the same day of the week, which is a problem for some players; I have no idea if the rewards are balanced between quests, as they range from 4 to 22 war supplies.

It is easy to pick out the good dwarves from the villains in Guild Wars: they have faces and quite often names. The Stone Summit dwarves are faceless and nameless and therefore it is okay to slaughter them in groups, while you are supposed to care about the Deldrimor dwarves with names and faces. Also, it is almost always okay to kill the red dots, while the green dots are your friends. Morality is baked into the UI.

See also the Cracked Star Wars explanation for why evil empires want closed-face helms but how that potentially hurts them when everyone turns out to be more empathic than previously suspected.

: Zubon

The Falls is an example of poor design in monster spawns, at least as they interact with the vanquisher game mechanic. If you were just passing through, having a zone of highly consistent and tightly themed enemies would be great. Needing to kill all 300+, I was nodding off at the 20th group of pop-up spiders.

Like Talus Chute, you get a bit of regionalization, but it is not as effective. Perhaps it is the uniformity of terrain or the low number of pathing options, but even having several different categories of enemies feels same-ish, particularly when you are killing several hundred of them. Any feeling of variety is weakened by the overlapping groups. If you mix trolls in with other enemies, there is no “troll area,” even if there is a troll-heavy or -exclusive area. The spiders do more of what I wanted the Talus Chute nightmares to do, only too much and too uniformly.

On a spawn design note, you have root behemoths with pop-up healers around them. That’s good. You have an obvious threat surrounded by hidden support, not severe enough to be a “gotcha” wipe but something to watch for, and it is consistent enough to reward basic pattern recognition. Root behemoths can spawn closely together and near other healer pop-ups so that you get many healers. That’s bad. If you approach it carefully, you can get the enemies 1 or 2 at a time and burn them down before the healers become annoying. If a pet, hero, or lag spike leads to having 5 healers clustered together, there is not enough damage there to make it threatening, just so much healing that you get bored hoping your heroes coordinate a damage spike. There is a command to focus fire on one target; sometimes you hit it and your heroes respond, “We will certainly take that suggestion under advisement, thank you.” There are direct counters to mass healing, beyond damage spikes, but you might not have brought one unless you read the wiki first. In a zone with existing tedium issues, a battle of attrition against healers in not to be encouraged.

You may or may not like the zone’s twisting paths. Vine bridges give an impression of 3-D, but remember that some things shoot through walls, and Z-axis issues mean that someone on the bridge can body-block you from crossing underneath.

Going back to the first paragraph, any annoyance you might have with the zone is compounded or alleviated by its distant location. There is one entrance to the zone, and that attached zone has no outpost, so you must zone multiple times just to reach this zone that is completely unneeded for the main quest line. Except for visiting for a few quests, this zone is just here for looking around or for vanquishing, and vanquishing highlights all its problems by forcing you through every single spawn.

: Zubon

I had cited Sunqua Vale as good low-level zone for spawn variety and placement and Fissue of Woe in the end-game. I would like to add Talus Chute in the late-game to the list of zones with good enemy selection.

A few monster types control the regions of the zone. This is enough to differentiate the areas and provide variety without becoming a mass of randomness. You also have the giants’ cave and ridge, which seems less like a ruled area than a no man’s land. I think it would have been marginally stronger to spread the ice imps more generally, less mixed with the dwarves and more of the “wildlife” of the region, and to have the nightmare pop-ups also a bit broader, making their boss spot more like a Tolkein-esque seat of corrupting evil in a natural area that has turned against the people.

The spawns are a bit dense along the frozen river, which is not an overwhelming challenge but seems like an irregular difficulty curve. You have several spawns packed together along with several patrols, although maybe it was just my bad fortune that had several patrols in synch while I was around. This also shows off the Z-axis problems in Guild Wars 1. Spells ignore vertical distance, melee cannot deal with it, and arrows are stellar from above and weak from below. If you have a party of fire elementalists, you can abuse this madly; if you are not watching the mini-map, you can fall victim to a dozen water elementalists who are blasting you through cliff faces.

: Zubon

Eye of the North is more of a sequel to Prophecies than any other campaign, and coming from Nightfall, running Prophecies explains a lot of things that are taken for granted. For example, there is a quest in the Asura lands involving the White Mantle. I completed it with no idea who these people were or why they hated us so much. There are clans of dwarves, and I am for unexplained reasons allied with the first ones and fighting the latter to the death, although that’s normal with dwarf clans. There is Gwen, who I recognized from having tried pre-Searing Ascalon years ago on a friend’s account but who loses some of her impact if you never saw her there.

Because of the semi-random order in which I have seen Prophecies, I am sure that I am missing part of the story, but it seems like there was a big switch between Acts I and II. We open with charr and bandits, then the Searing, then the charr drive you out of old Ascalon, then the charr completely disappear for at least 60% of the story. Joining Prophecies as a character from another campaign, there are no charr around at all unless you revisit the early missions. Nothing. It is all about the White Mantle and the secret masters behind them. Unless you started with Prophecies, you could plausibly beat all three campaigns and never meet the charr outside the Ebon Vanguard arc.

Continue reading [GW] Sequence Breaking

It is quickly apparent that there won’t be situations where I can just close my eyes and AoE until everything I over-aggro dies simply because I am 10 levels above. Missed or overleveled content will actually have to be played.
— Ravious on Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars is known for having a flat leveling curve, capping early at 20 and staying there. You can feel the change in that design philosophy as you go back in time to Prophecies. In Nightfall, you are near the level cap when you leave the first region. In Prophecies, I was almost to the last mission and still steamrollering almost everything. Levels were lower and the expected player resources were, too.

There are huge zones full of enemies I can’t care about, and it is just an annoyance to cross them in search of some bit of early content. The first mission involves scouting a charr invasion, one that I could single-handedly end given the level differences and my AE skills.

This is the game most famed for its flat leveling curve, but where the curve exists, it really exists. I get sloppy rampaging through these, and I am looking forward to hard mode so I can try them at a meaningful difficulty. In the meantime, I am seeing how many level 10-16 enemies a group of level 20 heroes can aggro without any threat.

: Zubon

I have mentioned playing Guild Wars with the wiki open. Here is a great example of why, one I wish I knew about before heading in.

“An Avicara near Mineral Springs may spawn behind portal requiring to rezone.”

That is what you are seeing in the picture: at the far side of the zone, a group of enemies can spawn outside the zone. Those tricks you’re thinking of to possible reach it? They don’t work. There is no outpost on that side of the zone, so to vanquish Tasca’s Demise you must cross the entire zone, and if that spawn is outside the world, you must leave through the far portal, come back, and keep re-zoning until those enemies spawn inside the zone.

This bug has presumably existed for years and absorbed hundreds of hours of time from players who stumbled upon it while trying to vanquish the zone without having read the wiki first. No one ever prioritized fixing a bug that made part of the content impossible without repeatedly restarting.

: Zubon