My last few posts/updates have been pretty serious and/or depressing. And if any of y'all know me at all, you know I don't much care to be serious or depressing for long. So I figured I might go ahead with an idea I was going to work on before the whole weekend event happened, with the flooding and the stitches and all that mess.
Besides, any time I even briefly mention Guild Wars and say how no one's going to care about listening to me go on about it, I get a crapload of responses back telling me how dead wrong I am, which mostly makes me think some people need to spend a lot less times living vicariously 'cause it's a computer game seriously.
Unless you just want to listen to me ramble. In which case don't tell me that 'cause it strokes my narcissism. And that's just all kinds of weird.
So Guild Wars is blah blah blah MMO blah blah game description blah blah blah blah general plot explanation blah. You have ten professions (or essentially ten primary attributes) and can switch between the other nine as secondaries whenever you feel like it unless you're already fighting crap, you get lots of skills, you pick eight of them at a time, preferably to synergise with the rest of the party, you kill crap. Not much different than regular MMOs except for being a F2P game it has really good support.
Started playing back in September. Almost went Ranger as first primary class, but stopped myself because that's what I start out as in every game I get the option to (except Gauntlet and that doesn't count), so I decided to screw it, and I was gonna nuke crap. You know. Lots of spells, high cast time for high damage, the universe is mine to command, TO CONTROOOOOL!!
Heh.
Also decided to eschew fire spells because everybody and their Hoverround-bound grandma goes IMMA PYRO, BRO and, like, come on. But since I had to do it twice, I figured for its purpose Ice was also great and would suffice, quickly earning the offhand remark from Desbreko that I was, quite possibly, the only elementalist in the entire game actually using Water Magic. This, of course, only served to prod the rebellious side of me into action, and so I completed the majority of the campaign pissing off large clumps of AI by robbing them of most of their movement speed and cutting them in half with vapor blades and the occasional instance of electrocution.
Which is fun.
I let myself shift to Fire for a while because in the second to last stage of the game you're in freaking Canada in the mountains in winter, and so I figured it would be a touch more effective. Also I'd recently captured a skill that allowed me to basically spam-cast as if I had unlimited energy reserves, and such spammage made it possible to almost indefinitely maintain a nice little defensive buff from the Earth line. That came in handy later, when a guild-mate was running me through the second to last mission and one of the team AI screwed up aggro and nearly wiped the party. Since I had a monk hero with me at the time and both of us had managed to escape the massacre, I had her sit behind and heal the snot out of me while I used the armor buff to win what was essentially a fifteen-minute battle of attrition.
Damned thing are resistant to fire. But I was resistant to them, so.
But yeah. Aside from the last two, I had help with two other missions; one of which was just a tad bit on the stupidly-difficult side for a guy with little game experience and less in the way of skills to choose from, and one really early on which was more me being dogged about finishing the bonus objective (which is also stupidly difficult) and the mission simultaneously. The rest of it was just me plugging along and jerry-rigging things as I went.
I go back now, of course, and it's like "Psshh, this level". But that's again with me having completed all three campaigns (one of them four times with different characters each time) and the expansion, and using the skills garnered therein. Plus, like, a crapton of asking people about how to make things work better.
Which, surprisingly, I got less than I would have liked since starting as an elementalist primary. And this is where the "heh" earlier comes into play. See, after completing a campaign on any character, all characters who have access to the campaign and who are of max level can switch to Hard Mode, which is just like the regular mode except hard.
Incidentally, people die when they are killed.
Anyway. Turns out that in HM pretty much all creatures have increased armor and more armor against elemental damage (which is slightly gay, I think), so because there isn't really an effective way to retain the elementalist's superior firepower any longer, it really doesn't matter what we run as long as we run something and roll our faces on the keyboard in a somewhat skilled manner—as skillful as that can be. Our damage is mitigated to the extent that we pretty much become supplementary pressure and, depending on our skill-bar's elemental focus, auxiliary toolbox players. Fire Magic can provide Area of Effect burning, which is essentially 14 hp loss per second, and we can reapply this almost constantly to various targets. Air Magic (lightning) has armor-penetration and, when used correctly, can pretty well apply damage as if the target has 40% less armor than they actually do, which in most cases almost doubles the damage taken—although the important thing is the application of Cracked Armor, which means the target has -20 armor against everything. Very useful for melee'ers. Earth Magic can provide knockdown, which is just as good at keeping foes stationary as it is preventing damage.
Water . . . makes you move a little bit slower.
So obviously in HM I was at an immediate disadvantage, especially since I had determined that the easiest way to get HM primary missions completed was to pug (pick-up group) on the days when there was a bounty out for that particular primary mission. Not really satisfying, though, since as a class which started out being about ways to damage the ever-loving crap out of you, damage was still what I wanted to do.
And then I found out about this nice little elite skill that basically said that as long as I was casting a particular type of spell on a foe, that foe would take X amount of words damage. And after toying around with the skill, come to find out that this additional damage is armor-ignoring, which means that no matter how much I'm striking for, the bonus damage will not change.
This is important to me. Especially when I'm using a skill that says it's striking for 75 damage, and the damage is mitigated through armor to be about 21. At that point, constant unalterable 31s become immediately more attractive, moreso when I can cast them over and over without much pause.
At first I was a touch worried that other players wouldn't take well to a home-brewed bar, but as I played more I was continually reminded (through either being told directly, or never being asked for my bar) that since I was an elementalist, what I ran didn't much matter as long as it worked. So I quit caring and started snaring.
You may now turn the page in your read-along handbook.
