Kill Ten Rats

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

A month and a half ago, Heart of the Shiverpeaks was a wall for me. I had jumped to Eye of the North on a bonus reputation weekend, and Eye of the North makes some assumptions about the resources you have available to you as a player. I did not meet that expectation.

Today, I went back to the Heart of the Shiverpeaks with some touch rangers. We rolled through the place and over the boss. We continued through the rest of the campaign and crushed the Big Bad. I turned on hard mode, and the Great Destroyer still fell in less time and it took to run to him.

Nothing changed, but everything’s different now.

: Zubon

Playing a ranger in Guild Wars, you develop the appropriate hatred of enemies that have strong counters to physical attacks, such as enemy rangers using Lightning Reflexes. Assassins have a skill called Flashing Blades that lets them block attacks and return damage every time they do so.

This works at a range. You shoot an arrow from a longbow at maximum range, the assassin deflects it with a dagger, and he slashes you as a part of the block. That is a very flashy blade.

: Zubon