While Sirian's Rogue Revival team is being organized, I thought I'd share some thoughts on my newest character, a Blue Rogue/Light Jedi called Tyraiel. Though Sirian stipulates that there should be "no variant within the variant" in team play, I thought this might be an interesting dual class to try, with the following modifications made to the two base classes:

1: Sirian's rules advise against using a crossbow, but the Jedi rules state that only swords, staves, and crossbows are legal weapon types. The first compromise I made between the variants, then, was equipping Tyraiel with a crossbow instead of a normal bow.

2: The Light Jedi rules state that a Blaster (Crossbow) cannot be used against boss packs until the boss itself has been killed unless they are physical immunes. However, as Tyraiel quickly discovered, it's asking a lot to send a sorceress with 45 HP against Coldcrow and her minions. Therefore, I would amend this rule to allow crossbow use against bosses with ranged weapons, though perhaps only if the character in question is a pre-Energy Shield Blue Rogue: this might also be justified as the influence of the Rogue half of the dual-class.

3:The list of potential primary and secondary magic skills gets slashed down to only a few spells, because of the Jedi variant's restrictions. The basic Teleport, Energy Shield, and Cold Armours are still there, though, so it isn't completely unworkable... however, due to the Jedi rules once again, the primary-secondary skills would be restricted, especially GS, which can only be fired once per missile hit the character takes. I wonder whether such spell restrictions would have enough of an impact on the dual-class that they should be removed.

I think this should be a fun variant, even if it turns out not to be viable through Hell difficulty. Please note that it's in the process of playtesting, so I'd really appreciate comments and suggestions. Thank you for reading, and in advance for your reply.

Rogue Guardian Phoenix

I've used this one a lot, but only on a boon monk, and in certain situations.

I swear it used to say it only applied to the FIRST attack, and now it says it applies for 8 seconds.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Did it ever only apply to the first attack? Or has my grasp on reality slipped even further?

Does it now REALLY apply for 8 seconds?

That would be.......HUGE.....

--CyConfused

Hi everyone,

It's been a long while before I even posted here at RB. Man, this place has really changed over the years.

Some of you might recognize me under the name of BloodyHand (I still do post at Jim's).

Since I just joined the RB guild on Guild Wars, you can find me there under my current character, Grimera Mulgath.

Looking forward to having fun, whenever I have time. School has been keeping me really busy.

After having read on GW Guru about people able to go down to the Underworld with just 3 people, I thought that might be something fun to try. Unfortunately, most of the times that I wanted to try it, America lost the favor, and the plan got put on hold. Well, this afternoon we finally had the favor and Green Gloom (as Ram Paige) and I (as Remy Borla) went down. I got the protection build on Ram and we went after the first two Aataxes.

We got smacked down.

After trying a few more times, we decided it wasn't going to work with our current skill sets and with just the two of us. Luckily, both Shao Lyn and Somewhat Zen were on at the time and decided to go with us. Ram switched to monk secondary and I tweaked my protection build, with Zen and Shao getting their builds set, and we went down again. As a 4 person team we were easily able to take apart the Aataxes that appear before you take the quest, which was quite nice. Unfortunately, once the squids (Creeping Darkness) appeared, they wouldn't stay locked on just Ram and came after all of us.

That didn't work out very well either.

At this point, Zen had to leave and it was just the three of us. Ram switched around some armor so that she could have a lower maximum health value, thus lowering the damage she received. Shao switched to all necro skills, including Mark of Pain. I kept the same build, only changed around how I did a few things. We went back down.

We kicked serious tail.

Ram ran up ahead and got all of the aggro, at which point Shao put Mark of Pain on the target, making for some great AoE damage. I kept myself just as busy as always with the protection. Stuff was dying really fast. When the squids came out, Ram got their aggro and this is where stuff got even easier. Without aggro on me or Shao, my energy was hardly ever not maxed out, except when I was casting Healing Seed to keep Ram at max health, and then it went back up to normal. I even I lagged a bit because there were 5 squids dying at once. After clearing all the patrols and whatnot, we went after the Dryders. That was a little nerve wracking, since they were using Mark of Rogdort and I wasn't sure if Ram would make it a few times, but she did. We cleared out and got the 5000 experience from the quest.

Next we decided to head to the Lost Soul village. We went through the squids on the way with just as much ease as we came to expect by then. It wasn't until we hit the Coldfires that things got a little dicey again, but only for a minute or two. Ram wound up getting the aggro of a group, as well as 2 patrols and, needless to say, there was a death involved. I Rebirthed her, but thanks to the spinning camera, she wound up dying again trying to get out. Fortunately, she was now far enough from aggro that we could Rebirth her into a "safe" area where the patrols didn't come. Once the protection went back up, we lured a group back and proceeded to lay the smack down on them. After about a half hour or so, we had cleared out pretty much the entire village. All that was left was a group with Behemoths running Nature's Renewal. We all decided it would be a bad idea to try that, so we went back to the Crypt Phantom guy for another quest.

This is where things got a little bad again. The enemies that appeared were Mesmers. They didn't break the enchantments, like I was expecting them to do, what they did was hit me with Conjure Phantasm, Migraine and Ineptitude when I went to cast Healing Seed on Ram. Things kept going downhill from there. Once I died, it wasn't long before Ram fell, and even though Shao was able to stay alive, the NPCs we were escorting decided to fight as well. As soon as one of them died, it was over.

All in all though, it was a very successful run. We got at least 10k experience and close to 1 platinum each. I had a lot more fun going through the UW with the small group of RB'ers than I did in the larger group of pubbies, even though I had a good time then too after a few players left (Soul Flayer should know what I'm talking about, I think Xyn was with use then too).

I told Shao I'd post the Monk build I was using, so here it is:
Healing: 10 +1
Protection: 10 +4 (Protection needs to be at 14)
Divine Favor: 11 +1

Healing Seed
Peace and Harmony
Blessed Signet
Protective Bond
Life Bond
Essence Bond
Balthazar's Spirit
Rebrth

To set things up, cast Peace and Harmony on yourself, then Balthazar's Spirit on yourself. Then, and this is the important part, put Protective Bond and then Life Bond on the person who will be tanking. The order is very important, because if it goes on in the other direction (Life then Protective) you'll have one dead monk on your hands. After this, put Essence Bond on the tank and if you want to, Balthazar's Spirit. If you maintain all 5 of those, you'll have 0 energy regen with Peace and Harmony active, meaning your energy source is now Blessed Signet, cast every 10 seconds as needed for 15 energy.

The good thing about Protective Bond is that it doesn't matter who tanks or what their armor is, because all damage will be reduced to 5% of their maximum health. Throw a few superior runes on and that becomes less than 20 per hit. Now, the most important thing is for the protection monk to stay very far away from the battle, except when casting Healing Seed on the tank. Once all the aggro has been put on the tank however, you can get into spell casting range so you don't have to keep moving up and back to put Seed on.

There you have it, 3 people going alone in one of the hardest places of the game. I'm not sure how well this would work in the Fissure since I don't know if there are enchantment removers there. I do know that there are monks who stay back, which probably wouldn't do a lot of good for the team. I'm willing to try it whenever we have the favor though.

So is this what our old friend has been up to? :

http://www.charisgames.com/



(disclaimer: not an owner or customer or anything, just curious)

Wanted to say hello to everyone, long time no so for some of you. look for me as Maven , Naoa, Kharessa . Maven is the only one i have post searing rught now but close to gettting Naoa there just need to do over the wall.

Yikes. I had no idea the bots were that sophisticated!

Today I took Somewhat Zen up the cold and chilly mountains to go bag myself some infusion to keep those pesky Mursaat off my case and encountered possibly as many as three bots in the space of two games. First up was Bas something who the group quickly identified as a bot early in the rescue Evennia mission. Bas quickly became the butt of much joking, after dying at the hands of some Stone Summit dwarves and nobody felt particularly inclined to rez the damn thing.

By the time we had finished that mission and the infuse run/kill Markus mission next, we were all fairly certain that one "Prodigy Of Death" was also a bot and there were strong suspicians concerning a certain "Hfa Ng", whose lack of communication seemed to coincide much more with a lack of human thinking power than a lack of English.

There's Something About Bas

How the hell this thing got into the group I don't know, but Bas made our day by waking up more than she could handle and then running off into the arms of a waiting mob where she promptly died. This of course was only a few minutes into the level and caused much celebration. Bas started to show how sophisticated bots can be by pinging the the compass several times on her location.

Anyway after the Yak stampede cutscene brought Bas back, to our horror, she died yet again under fairly predictable circumstances. This time we were more alert to the overall 'botness' of Bas, so it was a mild shock to see first the word "coma" and then "pals" appear from her festering corpse. Makes sense eh? Bots with basic dialogue to trick you into believing there's a person back there somewhere and this would account for 2 of the 3 pieces of dialogue I would read from one during the day.

Bas got kicked pretty quickly after the successful completion of the mission. She was easy to spot too. She had stripped down and start dancing, whilst spamming team-up tags around. She got kicked, she immediately tagged us, she got declined, she immediately tagged us.

We tackled the next mission and unfortunately picked up Prodigy Of Death who evidently did not have the AI to handle the concept of an "infuse run". Prodigy wanted to kill stuff and that was fine by me, because he only lasted as far as the first pack of Zealots vs. Stone Summit. After the cutscene resurrection Prodigy quickly got locked up in the caves when some numbskull went north after the seer had specifically instructed us to go east. I stopped, on account of not actually being a moron, and the three players who had not experienced this level before, along with two who had, went racing off to find out why I was frantically typing "STOP!".

The good part about this was that Prodigy Of Death couldn't handle the team split and just stopped. Wonderful. The only one following orders and it's the bot who's only doing so because it has worse following AI than Alesia. Needless to say I had the fun job of trying to figure out how to resurrect the entire team out from under a pack of Mursaat, a process which got me trapped between two groups of them with two other now-upright characters and one character clear to play Mr. Bait. He found a Monk boss shadow thingie and proudly boasted about how he'd dragged it back to Prodigy Of Death before dragging his new pet monkey back to the Mursaat so the rest of us could get clear.

And we successfully completed that mission too.

Later on I went back to the staging area with another character and who did I see standing in the middle of the place? Prodigy Of Death. "LFG Mission" appeared at least once on the screen. Hfa Ng was there too and surprise of all surprises somebody wrote "Don't take Hfa Ng. He doesn't speak English." I haven't mentioned Hfa Ng in the anecdote yet. He died in the wrong turn Mursaat suicide action and we left him there for reasons of suspicious bot-like behaviour, but I can't be sure either way. The name alone gives reason for the lack of communication, so I can't be certain either way.



But anyway, how bad is the bot problem? Has anyone else here had some crazy or exasperating moments courtesy of some script kiddie's program hunting for something while he's in school?

That's me. I post/lurk around the Lurkerlounge mostly, but maybe I'll start to do that here too! Hello, anyways, and.... I'll talk to you all in-game I guess!
My characters (so far) are Snick Superfist and Ian Anchorface.

In the immortal acronym of Charis, OMGWHTTE? (OMG what happened to the Epics?) Is this really our fiftieth Epic?

Yes, it is, and Sirian's cooked us up a little something special to mark the occasion- Epic Fifty: Wine, Women, and Song.

I wanted to take this opportunity to say thanks to those of you who have been around since the early days, and who helped to get the Epics off the ground. Every one of you has shaped this event into what it is today.

That said, thank you to all of the new folks who have come along and helped to keep the Epics rolling.

You know the drill. Post your reports to this thread, please.

-Griselda