BOOM!
Small Town Hero
I have these moments during the beta weekends where, after I have just finished a few Events or Hearts in a small area, I stop to look around and ponder what to do. I am mindful of the idea that if I talked to more scouts in the world, I’d have somewhere marked out on my map as a next destination, but I have avoided scouts for my own reason. I like to explore. The times where I’ve filled up my tasks and think I have nothing left to do tend to lead to my favorite moments.
Blurred Frenzy versus the poor pink Moa
At a certain point in the beta, I turned off the UI and began fighting moa birds without the UI to assist me, taking screenshots of the combat without the combat text or UI to explain what I was doing or what was being done to me. I did this to have some clean combat shots for this blog, but I also did it to become better at reading combat and using my skills. This was a moment where I was not pursuing a quest-like goal, but doing whatever I wanted. It just so happened that I was fighting Moas by the lake in Kessex hills. This is where a fishing village had been repeatedly attacked by Krait slavers. I knew I needed to learn more underwater skills, so I took my blind combat into the lake.
I quickly found that I actually liked the Mesmer’s trident weapon skills more than most of the Mesmer’s land-based skills. The Trident is about the only thing in game that makes the Confusion condition matter. I noticed that the lake had an opening on the far end, at the opposite shore from where I was fighting the moa birds. I swam off in that direction, picking off krait slavers along the way, and learning my trident skills.
At the lake opening, I found a shallow tributary with some fish and crab, along with those kraits. I swam my way through this watery avenue until I came upon an even greater lake than the previous one from which I had came. I turned my UI back on, and saw that a heart had opened up somewhere near me, along with a skill point challenge. I tried to find a way back up on land, finally locating a low ledge to my left. When I got onto the ledge, I noticed a watery cavern was just below me. I hopped down into the cavern and found a Hylek waiting for me.
I am going HAM on them truffles.
What I had come across was the “pig quest”, a heart in which the Hylek shaman turns you into a pig and you forage the cavern for truffles. I had seen youtubes of this event before, but had no idea where it actually was. I was excited to find it, and found the heart a nice bit of fun. While doing my little piggy truffle shuffle, I heard some Hyleks talking in the water. I hopped into the water, found an underwater passage and followed it all the way down and around, until I came up into a hidden cavern that was home to a tiny Hylek encampment.
After finishing the heart, I found my way back out and tried to find the skill challenge nearby. It took some climbing, but I did run across a stinky Asuran engineer who had some weird stink bomb contraption. He challenged me to see if I could handle his invention and we proceeded to battle. His “stinky” contraption lobbed poison all over the ground and the fight was rather challenging. I did manage to take him down and receive my reward. Looking over my shoulder, I saw what looked like an Asuran outpost on the beach.
I swam over to this outpost and found that it was full of strange races, some new and some from the first game. There were Asurans, but there were also Caromi, Sylvari and Quaggans. The Quaggan seemed to be the locals of the area, and a rather annoying one kept begging me to do something about the Sea Witch. I finally said yes, and a boss Dynamic Event popped up in the middle of the lake.
Frogs live in the coolest spots.
After selling off my junk items, I dived back into the lake in search of this Sea Witch.
Inside the lake was another heart, and another Quaggan. This task consisted of checking crabbing traps and fighting crabs, krait and the rest of the things that probably scare Quaggan. Given their perosnalities, I think everything scares the Quaggan. While i could handle the previous lake’s Krait warriors, this lake was decidedly more reinforced with Krait militia. As I tried to complete the heart and find the Sea Witch, I kept running into more and more foes. Once I finally found the mouth of the Sea Witch’s cave, I saw that it was guarded by veteran Krait that proceeded to run me out of town. A nearby player helped me escape, but I decided to put the Sea Witch on hold.
After I went back to the crabbing work, I found another opening in the underwater geology. Wandering in, I came to a new dynamic event. I had found a Quaggan town underwater that was being attacked by slavers. This was one of my favorite events, but also one of the more vile events, and for the same reason. First, I was doing it alone, and I was doing it all for the Quaggan. I fought off wave after wave of Krait, stopping to free the Quaggan that had been shackled by the slavers. This event allowed me to use all the underwater skills I had just learned, and my reward for completing it was hearing a chorus of Quaggan conversation.
The Quaggan look like manatees and talk like rejects from a really bad children’s show. When I had run off the Krait, the town mayor remarked “Stwoopid Kwait!” The villagers looked to blame someone and rambled on about recovering something. They celebrated and discussed what next to do. I felt like I had, by myself, saved these poor Quaggan townsfolk, but then again, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to hang around and hear them talk like babbies.
Major Tests of a major issue
I was not happy to hear about the change to traits that ArenaNet had made for the Beta Weekend Event. I am a big fan of the previous system which allowed you to pick any major trait in any major trait slot. In Guild Wars, I was a build maker and tester. Even when my guild was not doing any PvP matches at the time, I was busy testing out ideas and theories. Even to this day, I try to break the system and find something crazy to do. This means that tiering and restricting traits is not something that fits my playstyle, nor is it something that really, truly helps balance. You either are good at balance or you’re not, and you don’t really know what your balance is until the public gets its hands on your game. This BWE2 was a prime example.
In the previous BWE, there were at least a few good Mesmer builds. I messed with a staff build that high survivalbility, and I played around with creating a Mind Wrack shatterbombing build, trying out a couple variants on that same idea. I tried to create confusion based builds, but the condition was and is still lacking.
This BWE, I wanted to try out a new Glamour+Confusion build idea that I had made in the various build calculators available on the web. The new trait system had changed some things up, but I was still able to replicate the
Being able to solo Forest bosses equals easy points.
build. Unfortunately, the build required I take three glamour utilities and I quickly became aware how much I depended on kiting people through those glamours. It wasn’t horrible, but it was extremely situational. My glamours blinded and confused foes entering them, and my blinds also applied an extra confusion. As I played, I noticed my Duelist from my pistol off-hand was doing some good damage. It was mostly the Duelist and my Confusing Images that were being effective.Word was getting around that Phantasms had been buffed. After a few runs with my first build idea, I reworked the idea and sacrificed all the blind and blind creates confusion traits for pure Phantasm pumping buffs. I started to see obscene numbers from my Duelist, and then I tested it out on the Golem dummies, seeing the obscene damage numbers replicated. As it turns out, Phantasmal Haste was basically removing the cooldown from Phantasm attacks and turning my illusions into machine guns. By the end of the day, I had adjusted everything into a build that most would call “broken”. I still retained the Glamours cause confusion and longer lasting glamours, but now they worked with my Duelists by their strength as a combo field.
Anyways, by the end of the first night, the public had found an overpowered build in the new trait system designed to mitigate such things. Not a damning thing, but not an impressive thing.
Speaking of the Mesmer..
I thought they were reworking the Mesmer, but ANet hadn’t really changed much, and what they did change, I am not sure anyone likes. Clones now do zero damage, but can take an extra hit. This makes them slightly more durable for shatter purposes, but also makes them even less a deceptive tool. Phantasms now pose legitimate threats, but still get overwritten by the weaker clones. As for shattering, the previously powerful Mind Wrack was nerfed through its traitline, deep into the ground. A mind wrack now hits the same as my MH Sword attack. Not all that impressive or worthy of consideration. Since Phantasms outwork shatters, I stopped using shatters in PVP and used them less in PVE than I had in the previous BWE. Overall, the Mesmer is in worse shape now than it was in the previous BWE. They have all the same major issues, but feature fewer viable builds and tactics.This may be why I began my second character this BWE while playing Mesmer for the entirety of the previous betas.
That Finale
The finale for this BWE was bewildering and awesome at the same time. What was going on wasn’t as apparent as I expected, but once I figured out what was going on, it was one of those “AWESOME!” moments. Unfortunately, the finale really needed two hours instead of 45 minutes. Many servers had the event start late, and no server that I know of took the event to completion.
I became a crystal assassin.
The basic premise of the finale was this: The Crystal Dragon has appeared in the sky and sent in its forces. The Flame Legion has joined the dragon legions and begun to set up camp outside The Black Citadel. The first part of the event featured fighting off the Flame Legion, but after about 10-20 minutes, these crystal shards started showing up around Waypoints in the Charr starting area. Our massive zerg ran from Crystal to the next, fighting corrupted Charr legions. At a certan point, strange crystal creatures started showing up with names that looked like player names. My event notifier told me to destroy them, so I did. I still couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. Our zerg kept going from Crystal spawn to Crystal spawn, while Rhytlock roamed through the Ascalon Foothills, looking for a fight. Finally, I died in one of the giant battles. When I clicked on resurrect, I showed up at one of the crystal corrupted waypoints and found that I had been corrupted and turned into a crystal creature. I had a new set of skills and a new job to do: kill and corrupt all the remaining players. Now the game had turned into a giant game of kill-tag. We got to about 80% of the playerbase corrupted before the event ended.
It was fun, but I really would have liked to seen what happens at the end. Do we fight Rhytlock? Does the dragon come down from the sky? I mean, come on!
Absolute Chaos.
Other things
I did do a bit more WvWvW this weekend, but again, our server was severly outmatched and running into a meatgrinder was in no way or shape fun for me. At a certain point during the first night, we had taken 60% of the map and I was part of a group that was clearing keeps and killing Keep Lords. This was enjoyable, though it didn’t involve much fighting other players. Once all of us Americans went to bed, the second place server went to work overnight, capturing about 90% of the map and never looking back. There needs to be something done about the way every WvWvW turned into a pure domination. The third server in this matchup was never ever a factor. We wiped their zone out and then the other server wiped us out.
I did play some engineer and found it to be a supportive, wacky, fun little class that I can see functioning in the background of combat. I’ll have more thoughts on it later.
I got my crafting p into the 80s and made myself some gear. I also got some cool threads from wandering into the new zone and fighting higher level mobs. I got a good amount of dye drops and don’t have a problem with the drop rates or the dye system so far.
I unfortuantely didn’t get to 30, which is what happens when you try to do everything there is to do. This means I still have no dungeon experience to speak about. I hope they don’t reset characters for at least the next BWE so that I may be able to experience the dungeon and finally do a write-up on the game’s dungeon design.
That’s it for now. Long live the Moletriat.
Looking good.
The Moletariat - A Guild Wars 2 Blog 