Guild Wars at Level 20
As I mentioned last post, I finally hit level 20 in Guild Wars, and shortly after started in on some of the higher-end stuff.



So, my feelings are now a bit more mixed about Guild Wars than they were originally, but I still think it's a great game. Like most MMO's, it's a great repetitive game, and so it's a testament to the underlying design that I still obsess over tweaking skill combinations, and still a great rush to go into combat.

Now, I haven't actually been playing Guild Wars nonstop since December -- in fact, I went for weeks at a time without playing it. This, in fact, led to my being kicked from my guild, which was okay by me -- technically, by their policy, I should not have gone more than 7 days offline without being kicked, and that was really not a very good match for my lifestyle. So I've been mostly playing PvE, grouping with random people.

The game is tough. That was true near the outset, and it gets only more true as you reach the level cap. The monsters are essentially like players with a smaller selection of skills, and the ones wandering the countryside around where I am now range from level 22-24 -- and they come at you in groups! So it takes coordination and good skill selection to win even with a human-based party. The NPC henchmen, unfortunately, not only don't have the variety of skills that players would, but they are also lower-level for most of the game. This makes running most missions with just henchmen nearly impossible. Oddly enough, their intelligence is just fine, even admirable -- the NPC healer makes smarter healing decisions than many players. They're just not strong enough to really be a viable alternative.

Once you hit the level cap of 20, the incentive for fighting random monsters also goes way, way down. Money and time are valuable, but actually killing non-boss monsters is not. This combined with some peculiarities of the game mechanics leads to a weird phenomenon, which the player first encounters on chat channels in most of the towns: people who are LFR, or "looking for run." Essentially, some players adjust their characters so that they can't really kill anything, but who will probably survive so long as they just keep running from the enemy. They then charge people to be taken on runs to the next city. The rest of the party doesn't have to make it, because when one member of the party makes it to a new town, everybody does. The town is then instantly accessible from the map screen to anybody who has visited it at least once.

I've made a running build for my character -- you can readjust your stats and skills whenever you're in a town -- and while I haven't charged anybody for a run, there is a certain appeal to bypassing a heck of a lot of random monsters, and just barely dashing into a city with the horde of monsters you would have fought all chasing after you, having already killed your henchmen.

Missions usually can't just be run through, since the goals often involve a big fight at the end. While having an overarching story to an MMORPG struck me as a really cool idea when I was first starting -- it's really neat when the world gets destroyed as an in-game event for your character -- unfortunately the plot is pretty boilerplate, uninteresting stuff. This is exacerbated by the fact that there isn't an engaging character to be found anywhere in the plot. The party can skip story cutscenes if everybody unanimously clicks "skip" -- I used to be one of those holdouts that made everybody sit through it, because I was curious, but I began to find that I really wouldn't be missing anything. MMORPG with plot: good idea, lousy execution.

What's not lousy execution is the skill collection. Around level 20, you stop being offered quests for regular old skills, and start having to use Signets of Capture to capture Elite skills from bosses. It's really quite satisfying to defeat a boss and take its cool skill, even if you don't end up using it. Since you're only allowed one equipped Elite skill and seven normal skills, the vast majority of skills end up not being used much -- but it's still cool to collect them and try them out.

Once you hit 20 and finish the "Ascension" series of quests you can also switch your secondary class for something new. I found that I really wasn't using my Necromancer class at all -- as it turns out, counterspells and raising undead minions don't really have much in common -- and so I finally went with the crowd and picked Monk, the healing class, as my secondary profession. Basically everybody needs to equip some kind of resurrection skill so that the party can still finish the mission if everybody but you is wiped out, but Monks are the only people that can resurrect more than once a mission. So I knew it was worth at least one skill, and it's also awfully nice to be able to heal yourself when the party monk isn't paying attention. Plus, Monks are the people that really have the tools to run effectively, and I hate senseless random encounters.

The skills usually don't seem to combo much at all. The spells that are designed to combo are already overpriced, because the designers already thought of the combo (or else players discovered it and the designers fixed it). In a way this is too bad, but it also makes the combats themselves a little more interesting. In Magic, combo decks are basically solitaire and repetitive -- you just hope your combo can go off before your opponent messes it up somehow. In Guild Wars, skill choice is more a function of evaluating the utility of different effects on their own merits -- more like draft Magic than constructed, say. That's not to say that your skills don't interact at all -- you still have to make tradeoffs as to how specialized in a particular school of magic you want to be, and make sure you have things for both early and late in the fight.

The skills themselves are pretty creative, though. I particularly like the one that knocks out the enemy's skills for about 6 seconds, but knocks out your own for 5. It's slow to recharge and has a range of touch, so you have to choose wisely when to use it. That's the kind of decision that's different from one battle to the next, and keeps the game interesting -- and that's why I'm still playing Guild Wars.