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Fan Made
Saturday, May 16. 2009
Returning to Guild Wars
Thursday, May 14. 2009
That Time of the Year
Thursday, November 27. 2008
My Own Guild Wars - Second Character
Thursday, November 27. 2008
This is the second character I'm presenting as well as the second character I ever created in Guild Wars. This is the Warrior/Necromancer Karva Wen. And incidentally, yes, I almost always play female characters.
I also have the cape hidden in that shot. The cape is your guild emblem, primarily used to identify your teammates and enemies in Player vs. Player combat. Which I don't do, so my guild uses the cape purely as a sign of unity and bragging rights.
The warrior class is your standard hack and slash hero type. The warrior has five skill areas: Axes, Swords, Hammers, Strength and Tactics. As you can see, three of those skillsets specifically enable certain attacks and abilities with one particular type of weapon. If you have many axe skills and very few sword skills, your use of the sword will be limited. You are, in fact, meant to use all three, as each weapon has certain strengths and weaknesses, as well as unique skills: The axe is the most balanced, but also has the widest damage range (low damage as well as high). The sword has a narrower damage range (higher minimum and lower maximum), but has a good skill set that utilizes the sword's ability to stab OR slice. A well-constructed sword warrior will do the most damage to a single enemy on a per-second basis. The hammer always hits for high damage and on average has the highest damage range, but is very slow and has a very limited skill set. It is also the only two-handed melee weapon, which means you can't use off-hand damage, energy or armor enhancements. What the hammer does best is cause knockdowns. With all that, you can see how your best bet would be to find a way to combine at least two of these weapons in your skill bar (you can pre-configure up to four weapon/armor sets and switch between them quickly, but your skill bar is fixed once you've left a town). However, with only eight skill slots, and a second profession to consider, it's pretty rare to find someone who utilizes all three weapons simultaneously.
Of the other two warrior skills, strength is unique to those who take warrior as their primary profession. Each profession has a key skill that can only be used if the profession is the "startup" profession. Strength has a pretty good selection of endurance, health-enhancing and damage-reducing skills; but it also adds armor penetration; 1% per rank of the skill. I've looked up how armor penetration works in Guild Wars before, but I can't remember for sure at the moment (and it took a surprising amount of time to find it the last time I looked). I think armor penetration reduces your opponents armor rating. E.G. if your opponent has an armor rating of 50, and you have two ranks of armor penetration, their armor rating goes down to 49. Not much, but where I am in the game, you could have your strength set to, say, 10, which would reduce the opponent's armor to 45, which will give you a few more points of damage per attack. Add to that weapons and accessories that increase armor penetration, and you get a big difference.
Tactics is a bit of a catch-all, a skill category that gives the warrior access to a few skills that aren't directly related to hitting things. Some of them are pretty neat, though. More than any other character, the warrior is designed to take advantage of a "last man standing" scenario, as well as the classic view of the "meat shield". Several Tactics and Strength skills allow the warrior to ramp up his or her power almost exponentially as his comrades fall. Of course, the downside of utilizing these skills is that you will have to displace skills that would be more useful while your comrades were ALIVE; but it's nice to have them anyway.
A quick note on the single most useful trait of Warriors, in my opinion: Adrenaline. Warriors can pick up a few attack skills (and a few recovery skills) that are fueled by Adrenaline rather than energy. You get adrenaline from hitting things, and being hit by things. So as long as you can swing that axe, you'll be able to pull off some special attacks, no matter who or what you're fighting.
Necromancers in Guild Wars are pretty neat. Necromancer is one of the most played classes as a primary or a secondary. Generally, they aren't quite as powerful as an elementalist, and it can take a bit of practice and study to get the most out of them. As a primary, the necromancer profession has one major drawback; they have neither the energy management skills of the elementalist, nor the energy tapping skills of the mesmer. (Monk skills are generally just cheap). They make up for some of this with their Blood Magic skill set; almost all of the BM skills draw upon the necromancer's health bar in exchange for being either very powerful or very cheap. In addition, the necromancer's Curses can complement a mesmer very nicely, and the mesmer can siphon some energy to the necromancer (or you can take mesmer as a secondary and suck it in yourself, which is thoroughly consistent with the necromancer concept). The necromancer can make up for his weak constitution and limited array of attacks with Death Magic and summon bone minions to create a (short lived) private army. To top it all off, the necromancer has the widest array of healing abilities after the monk, although most of them are centered on healing the necromancer. You will pick up some skills to heal others before too long, though. Be warned, though, that some of the necromancer's healing skills come with a price, usually to your health. Others heal for only moderate amounts at best. One of the best skills allows you to suck the life out of your minions (in massive amounts). The primary trait of a necromancer (that you lose if you take it as a secondary profession) is Blood Something, which allows the Necromancer to gain either healing or energy (can't remember) every time something near her dies. Cool.
So what does a Warrior/Necromancer do? Well, first of all, since I actually want to be able to use some of my necromancer skills, I need more energy. The warrior class has the smallest energy pool, and the lowest energy regeneration rate (two points per second base. Rangers have three, all casters have four). That's why my warrior carries an energy artifact rather than a shield (it's the thing in her left hand that looks like a flower with a knife blade):
The artifact I'm using gives me +8 energy, +5 armor, and -20 health. It requires that have at least four ranks of Blood Magic to use. I have another one that gives me +9 energy, +15 energy, -1 energy regen. I haven't made up my mind which one to keep; the extra sixteen energy is really nice, but your energy regen is your TRUE lifeblood in this game...having two regen is bad enough, but having only ONE can be very challenging.
So, now that I've got some extra energy, let's look at the skill bar again:
Number One is a "Shout", which is an instantly activated skill that typically provides an immediate, short boost to a specific attribute like armor or amor penetration. In this case, this shout provides double adrenaline gain for 20 seconds. Very handy if you're using adrenaline skills.
Numbers Two and Three are adrenaline-based axe attacks. Two does no extra damage, but will "interrupt" whatever skill is being attempted by my opponent. It's always good to carry an interrupt or two with you. Three just does a ton of extra damage.
Number Four is an energy-based axe attack, the trusty Cyclone attack. If you play an axe warrior in ANY game, you know that the cyclone/whirlwind/twister/tornado/spinning/360/whatever else attack is THE MAIN ATTACK that makes an axe warrior special. In Guild Wars, it hits all adjacent enemies and does the same moderate amount of extra damage to each. It has a fairly quick recharge, and a reasonable cost if you have a little extra energy.
Numbers Five - Seven are the Necromancer skills I'm using. They are all healing and curing skills. Five removes two negative conditions, such as crippled, slowed, paralyzed, bleeding, or poisoned from me and sends them to a targeted opponent. The main drawback is the slow regen time. When fighting hordes of undead, you'll get hit with conditions faster than you can remove them. Six is one of the main necromancer healing spells. At the cost of 25% of your health, you gain a bonus to your health regen, followed by a lump heal at the end. Very cheap; 1 energy. The major downside is that if you wait too long to cast this spell and have very low health, or if you're currently taking more damage than you can heal even with the added regen, you will basically commit suicide. Number Seven is another heal spell; when used right before number six, they both become much more useful. Number Seven, at the cost of 20% of your health, gives you a temporary bonus to your max health. If you cast this right before number six, you gain the max health bonus and heal up to the max level very quickly. The major drawback of number seven is a VERY SLOW RECHARGE. Two minutes, if I remember correctly.
Number Eight is the Skill Capture Signet. This Signet allows you to "capture" skills from defeated bosses. This is the only way to get Elite Skills in the game.
Now, I can duplicate most of the necromancer skills with warrior skills, but by using the necromancer skills I can use the energy artifact that gives me more energy. While my necromancer skills are carefully chosen to cost very little energy, I have two warrior skills that I need to be able to cast as soon as they recharge. So, I think it's a win.
The other major build I used for a while is a Minion Master build. This, obviously, focused on summoning bone minions during battle. While effective, this build is much more suited to a primary caster (whether it's a necromancer or not) rather than a warrior; as the summoning, directing, and maintainence of the minions is very time consuming. I've also used a couple of straight warrior builds; but mostly I'm still working on trying out different Warrior/Necromancer skillsets to see what I get.
All the models in Guild Wars are beautiful and perfect, but at least she's built like rock. A smooth, perfectly rounded rock, but a rock none-the-less.
I'll be back again with my third major character.
Karva is an Axe Warrior. Here is a shot with her current axe:
I also have the cape hidden in that shot. The cape is your guild emblem, primarily used to identify your teammates and enemies in Player vs. Player combat. Which I don't do, so my guild uses the cape purely as a sign of unity and bragging rights.
Here's a shot of the cape:
And another shot of Karva, to show you how angry she looks all of the time:
Here size is set pretty small, but it seems the Warrior class defaults to a larger range than the ranger class...Karva is larger than my Ranger/Monk. She looks like a petite human rather than an elf:
BTW, the armor is Gladiator. The Gladiator armor doesn't protect much of the body (although oddly enough it has the same armor rating as all other warrior armor). Very little of this outfit is dye-able (which makes sense as there is very little outfit). The boots, pauldrons and gauntlets all have silver inlays; the skirt has yellow accents. Here are a couple of shots, although the lighting is bad:
The warrior class is your standard hack and slash hero type. The warrior has five skill areas: Axes, Swords, Hammers, Strength and Tactics. As you can see, three of those skillsets specifically enable certain attacks and abilities with one particular type of weapon. If you have many axe skills and very few sword skills, your use of the sword will be limited. You are, in fact, meant to use all three, as each weapon has certain strengths and weaknesses, as well as unique skills: The axe is the most balanced, but also has the widest damage range (low damage as well as high). The sword has a narrower damage range (higher minimum and lower maximum), but has a good skill set that utilizes the sword's ability to stab OR slice. A well-constructed sword warrior will do the most damage to a single enemy on a per-second basis. The hammer always hits for high damage and on average has the highest damage range, but is very slow and has a very limited skill set. It is also the only two-handed melee weapon, which means you can't use off-hand damage, energy or armor enhancements. What the hammer does best is cause knockdowns. With all that, you can see how your best bet would be to find a way to combine at least two of these weapons in your skill bar (you can pre-configure up to four weapon/armor sets and switch between them quickly, but your skill bar is fixed once you've left a town). However, with only eight skill slots, and a second profession to consider, it's pretty rare to find someone who utilizes all three weapons simultaneously.
Of the other two warrior skills, strength is unique to those who take warrior as their primary profession. Each profession has a key skill that can only be used if the profession is the "startup" profession. Strength has a pretty good selection of endurance, health-enhancing and damage-reducing skills; but it also adds armor penetration; 1% per rank of the skill. I've looked up how armor penetration works in Guild Wars before, but I can't remember for sure at the moment (and it took a surprising amount of time to find it the last time I looked). I think armor penetration reduces your opponents armor rating. E.G. if your opponent has an armor rating of 50, and you have two ranks of armor penetration, their armor rating goes down to 49. Not much, but where I am in the game, you could have your strength set to, say, 10, which would reduce the opponent's armor to 45, which will give you a few more points of damage per attack. Add to that weapons and accessories that increase armor penetration, and you get a big difference.
Tactics is a bit of a catch-all, a skill category that gives the warrior access to a few skills that aren't directly related to hitting things. Some of them are pretty neat, though. More than any other character, the warrior is designed to take advantage of a "last man standing" scenario, as well as the classic view of the "meat shield". Several Tactics and Strength skills allow the warrior to ramp up his or her power almost exponentially as his comrades fall. Of course, the downside of utilizing these skills is that you will have to displace skills that would be more useful while your comrades were ALIVE; but it's nice to have them anyway.
A quick note on the single most useful trait of Warriors, in my opinion: Adrenaline. Warriors can pick up a few attack skills (and a few recovery skills) that are fueled by Adrenaline rather than energy. You get adrenaline from hitting things, and being hit by things. So as long as you can swing that axe, you'll be able to pull off some special attacks, no matter who or what you're fighting.
Necromancers in Guild Wars are pretty neat. Necromancer is one of the most played classes as a primary or a secondary. Generally, they aren't quite as powerful as an elementalist, and it can take a bit of practice and study to get the most out of them. As a primary, the necromancer profession has one major drawback; they have neither the energy management skills of the elementalist, nor the energy tapping skills of the mesmer. (Monk skills are generally just cheap). They make up for some of this with their Blood Magic skill set; almost all of the BM skills draw upon the necromancer's health bar in exchange for being either very powerful or very cheap. In addition, the necromancer's Curses can complement a mesmer very nicely, and the mesmer can siphon some energy to the necromancer (or you can take mesmer as a secondary and suck it in yourself, which is thoroughly consistent with the necromancer concept). The necromancer can make up for his weak constitution and limited array of attacks with Death Magic and summon bone minions to create a (short lived) private army. To top it all off, the necromancer has the widest array of healing abilities after the monk, although most of them are centered on healing the necromancer. You will pick up some skills to heal others before too long, though. Be warned, though, that some of the necromancer's healing skills come with a price, usually to your health. Others heal for only moderate amounts at best. One of the best skills allows you to suck the life out of your minions (in massive amounts). The primary trait of a necromancer (that you lose if you take it as a secondary profession) is Blood Something, which allows the Necromancer to gain either healing or energy (can't remember) every time something near her dies. Cool.
So what does a Warrior/Necromancer do? Well, first of all, since I actually want to be able to use some of my necromancer skills, I need more energy. The warrior class has the smallest energy pool, and the lowest energy regeneration rate (two points per second base. Rangers have three, all casters have four). That's why my warrior carries an energy artifact rather than a shield (it's the thing in her left hand that looks like a flower with a knife blade):
The artifact I'm using gives me +8 energy, +5 armor, and -20 health. It requires that have at least four ranks of Blood Magic to use. I have another one that gives me +9 energy, +15 energy, -1 energy regen. I haven't made up my mind which one to keep; the extra sixteen energy is really nice, but your energy regen is your TRUE lifeblood in this game...having two regen is bad enough, but having only ONE can be very challenging.
So, now that I've got some extra energy, let's look at the skill bar again:
Number One is a "Shout", which is an instantly activated skill that typically provides an immediate, short boost to a specific attribute like armor or amor penetration. In this case, this shout provides double adrenaline gain for 20 seconds. Very handy if you're using adrenaline skills.
Numbers Two and Three are adrenaline-based axe attacks. Two does no extra damage, but will "interrupt" whatever skill is being attempted by my opponent. It's always good to carry an interrupt or two with you. Three just does a ton of extra damage.
Number Four is an energy-based axe attack, the trusty Cyclone attack. If you play an axe warrior in ANY game, you know that the cyclone/whirlwind/twister/tornado/spinning/360/whatever else attack is THE MAIN ATTACK that makes an axe warrior special. In Guild Wars, it hits all adjacent enemies and does the same moderate amount of extra damage to each. It has a fairly quick recharge, and a reasonable cost if you have a little extra energy.
Numbers Five - Seven are the Necromancer skills I'm using. They are all healing and curing skills. Five removes two negative conditions, such as crippled, slowed, paralyzed, bleeding, or poisoned from me and sends them to a targeted opponent. The main drawback is the slow regen time. When fighting hordes of undead, you'll get hit with conditions faster than you can remove them. Six is one of the main necromancer healing spells. At the cost of 25% of your health, you gain a bonus to your health regen, followed by a lump heal at the end. Very cheap; 1 energy. The major downside is that if you wait too long to cast this spell and have very low health, or if you're currently taking more damage than you can heal even with the added regen, you will basically commit suicide. Number Seven is another heal spell; when used right before number six, they both become much more useful. Number Seven, at the cost of 20% of your health, gives you a temporary bonus to your max health. If you cast this right before number six, you gain the max health bonus and heal up to the max level very quickly. The major drawback of number seven is a VERY SLOW RECHARGE. Two minutes, if I remember correctly.
Number Eight is the Skill Capture Signet. This Signet allows you to "capture" skills from defeated bosses. This is the only way to get Elite Skills in the game.
Now, I can duplicate most of the necromancer skills with warrior skills, but by using the necromancer skills I can use the energy artifact that gives me more energy. While my necromancer skills are carefully chosen to cost very little energy, I have two warrior skills that I need to be able to cast as soon as they recharge. So, I think it's a win.
The other major build I used for a while is a Minion Master build. This, obviously, focused on summoning bone minions during battle. While effective, this build is much more suited to a primary caster (whether it's a necromancer or not) rather than a warrior; as the summoning, directing, and maintainence of the minions is very time consuming. I've also used a couple of straight warrior builds; but mostly I'm still working on trying out different Warrior/Necromancer skillsets to see what I get.
All the models in Guild Wars are beautiful and perfect, but at least she's built like rock. A smooth, perfectly rounded rock, but a rock none-the-less.
My Own Guild Wars
Thursday, November 27. 2008
No excuse for this post (you know, after all the political blogs) but I'm still blank on the vampire stories and have been wanting to post some stuff on Guild Wars. I'm also trying out the fancy editor, which I normally don't use. Just didn't feel like typing any html.
I decided to try Guild Wars after Shamus Young at Twenty Sided reviewed it. He didn't like it very much, but a few users pointed out that he had apparently missed that GW is about constantly rebuilding your character for different strategies, not about levelling and gaining more power (although there is a bit of that in GW as well). Towns are shared; all missions and quests are instanced. This cuts down greatly on the ass-hat factor. I've got my own guild, although it will be a while before it's really useful. Below I have some pictures of one of my three current characters (some people call them 'toons', which is presumably derived from the cartoony design of World of Warcraft and City of Heroes/Villians, the two most popular online MMORPGS.
If you are pretty new to Guild Wars or want to try it, and would like to join a small guild comprised entirely of reasonably mature adults, let me know. If you're an old hand at Guild Wars and are looking for a guild, you're welcome to enquire as well, just keep in mind that all of the current members have been playing for only a few months...very few experienced players like grouping with noobs.
Right now I'm spending most of my time with this character: Rista Kerkov, currently a 17th level Ranger/Monk. I generally run her as a primary Beastmaster, and then improvise from there, although I occassionally break out the bow instead of the beast. I only run as a full monk when grouping with other people; for solo play I generally configure as a Smiting Beastmaster. I'm not very far into the game; I've finished all of the quests in Kryta except one, then I need to finish the missions to get to the jungle. (This is in the Prophecies campaign.)
Rangers have four strong areas: They are the second strongest class after warriors; Rangers are the only class that have bow-related skills, which make bow attacks much more powerful and versatile; they are the only class with Beastmaster skills (beast attacks can be made VERY POWERFUL); and they are the only class that can lay traps. The traps are, in my experience so far, of limited use but are quite damaging.
Monks are the only dedicated healers and defenders in the game. While almost all of the classes have self-heal skills and some can even learn some skills to heal others, monks can learn a massive variety of skills that can heal anyone in almost any manner. Conditional heals, timed heals, triggered heals, transfer heals, heals tied to every class...etc. The monk can also learn a wide variety of protection spells that can reduce damage or convert damage to healing. These skills seem to be of a bit more limited nature, but if you're running a dedicated monk, some of them can be very useful. The third useful trait of the monk class is the smiting attack category. Smiting attacks are some of the most powerful, and can especially do MASSIVE damage to certain classes of undead. Beyond that, though, is the fact that HOLY DAMAGE is the only damage type in the game that ignores armor. There are some ways to reduce or block it, holy damage almost always hurts.
I decided to try Guild Wars after Shamus Young at Twenty Sided reviewed it. He didn't like it very much, but a few users pointed out that he had apparently missed that GW is about constantly rebuilding your character for different strategies, not about levelling and gaining more power (although there is a bit of that in GW as well). Towns are shared; all missions and quests are instanced. This cuts down greatly on the ass-hat factor. I've got my own guild, although it will be a while before it's really useful. Below I have some pictures of one of my three current characters (some people call them 'toons', which is presumably derived from the cartoony design of World of Warcraft and City of Heroes/Villians, the two most popular online MMORPGS.
If you are pretty new to Guild Wars or want to try it, and would like to join a small guild comprised entirely of reasonably mature adults, let me know. If you're an old hand at Guild Wars and are looking for a guild, you're welcome to enquire as well, just keep in mind that all of the current members have been playing for only a few months...very few experienced players like grouping with noobs.
Right now I'm spending most of my time with this character: Rista Kerkov, currently a 17th level Ranger/Monk. I generally run her as a primary Beastmaster, and then improvise from there, although I occassionally break out the bow instead of the beast. I only run as a full monk when grouping with other people; for solo play I generally configure as a Smiting Beastmaster. I'm not very far into the game; I've finished all of the quests in Kryta except one, then I need to finish the missions to get to the jungle. (This is in the Prophecies campaign.)
Rangers have four strong areas: They are the second strongest class after warriors; Rangers are the only class that have bow-related skills, which make bow attacks much more powerful and versatile; they are the only class with Beastmaster skills (beast attacks can be made VERY POWERFUL); and they are the only class that can lay traps. The traps are, in my experience so far, of limited use but are quite damaging.
Monks are the only dedicated healers and defenders in the game. While almost all of the classes have self-heal skills and some can even learn some skills to heal others, monks can learn a massive variety of skills that can heal anyone in almost any manner. Conditional heals, timed heals, triggered heals, transfer heals, heals tied to every class...etc. The monk can also learn a wide variety of protection spells that can reduce damage or convert damage to healing. These skills seem to be of a bit more limited nature, but if you're running a dedicated monk, some of them can be very useful. The third useful trait of the monk class is the smiting attack category. Smiting attacks are some of the most powerful, and can especially do MASSIVE damage to certain classes of undead. Beyond that, though, is the fact that HOLY DAMAGE is the only damage type in the game that ignores armor. There are some ways to reduce or block it, holy damage almost always hurts.
This is Rista, a 17th Level Ranger Monk. The armor is Druid.
Body Shot. I used white dye and red dye on the armor.
Current skill configuration. That's Merle in the background.
By the way, she's tiny. Elf-sized. The cat is about the size of a cougar.
Another shot.
Body Shot. I used white dye and red dye on the armor.
Current skill configuration. That's Merle in the background.
By the way, she's tiny. Elf-sized. The cat is about the size of a cougar.
Another shot.
I currently have two other characters; I'll come back and do some shots of them as well. It will tell you a little bit more about the game.