Kill Ten Rats

This Van Hemlock post inspired my ranger’s use of conditions. Fleshy foes are fun targets for Apply Poison-Hunter’s Shot-Epidemic. Oh look, that entire clump of enemies is poisoned and bleeding. (As I have mentioned, I really hated non-fleshy foes when I was using that build.) Broadhead Arrow-Epidemic-Volley is a fun way to oppress groups of casters. I have grown fond of spreading conditions, so I love having heroes that spread them further. “You move like a dwarf!”

I’ve read Saramago. Blindness is totally contagious. I don’t see why cut hamstrings should be any less so.

: Zubon

Each Guild Wars campaign has a title for various 100%s. Completing the campaign nets you a Hall of Monuments trophy but no title. Completing all campaign missions with all bonuses is the Protector title, then Guardian if you do so in hard mode. Kill every monster in every zone in hard mode to get Vanquisher, and uncover the entire map to get Cartographer. Capturing every elite skill is another.

Then there are meta-titles. There are titles for getting all the Vanquisher titles, all the Cartography, all the elite skills, and for combined Protector and Guardian. The real meta-title is “Kind of a Big Deal” through “God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals,” based on your number of maxed titles. Maxed titles plug into the Honor monument, points for your Guild Wars 2 rewards. All of these are good and fine, to the extent that they are sane.

Add Eye of the North to that. Do you need to conquer this new campaign in all ways to complete the meta-titles? What happens if you already have one? And how do dungeons factor in? The developers handled all that with a combined Master of the North title. Missions, dungeons, vanquishing, and cartography add points.

This is poor because of the effort to reward ratio for Eye of the North versus other campaigns. I can take Factions to 100% complete and get six Honor statues in the Hall of Monuments (plus progress on meta-titles), or I can do the same in Eye of the North (with dungeons instead of skill-capping) and get one. Eye of the North has multiple reputation titles, but those are less readily available for the Hall of Monuments than the Factions or Nightfall titles. On the other hand, Eye of the North is rather shorter than, say, Prophecies’ 25 missions and 54 zones.

It is good content, which is intrinsically rewarding, but the extrinsic rewards for 100% completion are lacking relative to the base campaigns. Most of the extrinsic rewards come from the new PvE skills, which make it easier to gain those base campaign rewards.

: Zubon

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