Nightfall WPE 9/22 - 9/24

[Lurker Wyrm]

A few first impressions after playing for a couple hours...

The AI is still miserably horrid. The healer hench will stop healing in the middle of combat and res someone who's fallen, even if there are res sigs around; and well, that update that said it improved hench ai seems as though it did nothing at all. They're still ridiculously pathetic. The only plus in NF is that you can set a spot for them to go to and they won't move from that spot. This lets me pull, res, run away, etc. without them getting in the way. That's nice, but it's a very small step.

As far as heroes are concerned, they've got the same ai as the henches so unless you watch their skill bars constantly you're going to be aggrivated by the order they use them. I gave Koss a hammer and the good old Devastating, Crushing, Fierce combo, with Counter Blow thrown in for defensive purposes. Unfortunately, he would just use Fierce as soon as it was ready, without waiting for Devastating's weakness to increase the snot out of its damage. Not only that, but he'll often use Crushing without targetting a knocked down opponent. I'm glad I didn't give him Hammer Bash or any other skill that removes adrenaline otherwise he would probably never get to Devastating. I find that I have to leave Devastating checked as soon as a battle starts or he just does stupid noob stuff like that. It's a bit aggrivating since it's one more thing you have to pay attention to.

Unless I missed something, I didn't see any skill quests other than the starter ones. That's a bit disappointing.

The monster balance seems to be a bit off. I'm outside the first town and am fighting level 1 creatures, which is easy, but ok. I take about 10 steps towards Sunspear Hall and I'm suddenly fighting level 8s that are killing me in seconds. Umm... huh? One of the quests in Sunspear Hall has me follow some guy on a patrol because they think he's a spy. Ok. I follow him and when we get where we're going I have to fight him. A level 15 him. I'm level 4. Needless to say I've got lots of DP after this fight.

Once I hit level 5 I get my secondary (I'm now a D/Mo, raise your hand if you didn't see that one coming) and do some other quests, etc. so I'm now set to go get my second hero. So I leave the Australa... whatever with the level 6 henches and my level 5 Koss. I start heading in the right direction and have to fight 3 monsters, 1 monk and 2 paragons. No problem, right? Wrong. They're all level 8 and I can barely make a scratch on the monk before I get slaughtered by the Vicious Spears from the Paragons that not only hit hard but also Deep Wound me. Yay, I'm blocked from going anywhere by a group of 3, so now my choice is to make a mad dash which will never work or go back to the Sunspear HQ to to mindless leveling until I make it to level 8 myself and have salvaged enough for another set of armor. Oh well.

Overall, the PvE feels like it's halfway between what Prophecies and Factions were. It seems like they're trying to be more gradual with the levelling a la Prophecies but the learning curve is still really steep a la Factions. I haven't found any collectors who'll give me armor yet, so if someone knows where they are please do tell so I don't have to stay with this 10def stuff that's getting me killed faster than I can get to an enemy. Tanned Hide is currently sold out at the trader as well so I can't buy any from them either.

Close ranged monster screeches are a bit on the loud and piercing side, probably going to have to turn the sfx volume down for those.

Well, enough with the bad.

The music so far is really nice. African drums and tight orchestration make this my favorite soundtrack so far. I wish Soule had used a few more African instruments in his compositions (wooden flutes and such) but the sound is a lot more authentic than the supposedly Asian influenced Cantha.

The art and scenery of the surroundings are really nice, as we've come to expect from Guild Wars.

Characters finally have personalities and aren't the bland boring duty-driven bums seen in the previous games. My favorite quote thus far come from Koss: "No. There are only two corsair ships, and three of us. We outnumber them!"

If you're outside town, henches and heroes will dance or play instruments alongside you if you start dancing or whatnot. Interesting touch.

Some of the new skills for the classes are really nice. I'm especially happy to see Glimmer of Light, a new healing elite that has a 1/4 second casting time and only a 1s recharge. At 12 healing it heals for 73, which is only slightly more effective than Orison, but yet sooooooooooooooooo much better. Holy Haste is another spell worth taking along for heal builds since those don't usually have many, if any enchants. I wonder how it'll synergize with Revitalize (i.e. 1/4 casting from 1s heal spells?). Warriors finally have an adrenal attack speed boost (Flail) which is great. The moving 33% slower downside doesn't bother me in the least. Headbutt seems more like a joke skill than anything else but if you're W/N you can plague touch the daze onto a monk. Destructive Chop is a crappy version of Eviscerate, but I suppose it gives non-Prophecies people a substitute. For Rangers, Dusrupting Accuracy can be potentially lethal if you're an A/R archer with high Critical Strikes and Critical Eye active.

Well, that's enough for now.

[WarBlade]

As far as heroes are concerned, they've got the same ai as the henches so unless you watch their skill bars constantly you're going to be aggrivated by the order they use them. I gave Koss a hammer and the good old Devastating, Crushing, Fierce combo, with Counter Blow thrown in for defensive purposes. Unfortunately, he would just use Fierce as soon as it was ready, without waiting for Devastating's weakness to increase the snot out of its damage. Not only that, but he'll often use Crushing without targetting a knocked down opponent. I'm glad I didn't give him Hammer Bash or any other skill that removes adrenaline otherwise he would probably never get to Devastating. I find that I have to leave Devastating checked as soon as a battle starts or he just does stupid noob stuff like that. It's a bit aggrivating since it's one more thing you have to pay attention to.

Hench AI was never designed to handle such elaborate skill choices. Generally the workaround with the adrenaline trick shot stuff fr Warrior heroes is to set up the skills in ascending order of adrenaline costs to achieve the combo results you want. And yeah. Forget hamer KD combos.

As for monster balance, it's not so bad once you get used to it. There is plenty of real estate to avoid fights in, so the best bet under the current build is to make sure of the levels you are waking up. The 3-player RB team last night was able to take on the level 8 monsters on the plains, although it was a bit of the struggle with only me doing the healing and Serpent took a dirt nap because of it. Those creatures get a bit too rough if you're just henching with Koss.

[Lurker Wyrm]

Ok, so a few of the gripes have eased out. Tanned Hide was back in stock and I bought enough to get a new set of armor (going from 10 to 25 really makes a difference) which let me live longer in a fight. I also later ran into a collector which got me a higher end chest piece, so now that has 40 armor and I can tank relatively well with 3 enchants and the self healing afforded by Dwayna's Touch. It would be nice if one of those enchant spells (Balthazar's Rage and the like) offered a boost in armor.

As for the overpowered monsters: as it turns out I was taking the wrong path and went into a higher level area by accident, so that explains that.

I ran into a locked gate. That was annoying.

This whole "you must be a certain sunspear rank before you can continue" thing is pretty annoying as well. It makes you go through mundane and useless tasks, some of which I'd rather not have to waste my time with. It seems as though ANet is doing everything it can to force you to play the game they want it played, rather than let you decide how you're going to go through the world, which is somewhat discouraging since GW has not had very enjoyable stories thus far.

In Prophecies you could pretty much go wherever you wanted; the only restrictions were Sanctum Cay for desert access and THK for Ring of Fire access, but you could skip more than half the game. Then comes Factions and you can't skip any missions but you can still work around the boring and mundane fetch quests that have you going back and forth for hours getting little else accomplished. Now, with NF, you're being forced into the mundane quests and I'm not sure how I feel about that. For people who are just starting GW with Nightfall, I can't imagine having to go through all that with 4 (or more) characters.

Aside from Koss, I have yet to meet someone with a personality that doesn't bore me; either because they have none or it's being forced to the point of uneasiness.

One other minor urk. I switched Koss to W/R, gave him Charm Animal and went out and had him charm a Flamingo (it seemed to fit). When I went to a town and then out to another fighting area the Flamingo was gone. It'd be nice if heroes could hang on to their pets.

[Havral]

Hey, like I said, I'm completely and utterly hopeless when it comes to healing :P I know my strengths, and making sure that the party is healthy isn't one of them...

Anyway, just before I head back in, I thought I'd share with you what I consider the Best Quest Acceptance Dialogue Ever. The "accept" button text is just perfect.

[WarBlade]

Hey, like I said, I'm completely and utterly hopeless when it comes to healing :P

He speaks the truth.

Even a quarter of the skill bar devoted to heals and another Paragon shouting, "Use the signet!" failed to budge him.


:hat:

[Lurker Wyrm]

After about 17 hours or so on newbie Island I've finished all of the quests and missions and have obtained the Sunspear Commander rank (6) at level 18. To be honest it's a little disappointing that I made it to such a high level in the starter area, that just means ANet is probably going to want to throw high end content at us fast, just as they did with Factions. I think level 12 would have been a nice place to stop there (i.e. no monsters over level 7), but oh well; I guess they didn't want another Ascalon. Also, going from a 4 man team to an 8 man team seems to be a bit unnecessary. The later parts of the island seem easy enough that 6 could handle it without issue.

Some of the quests were unnecessarily tedious. "Down on the Bayou" was one that I was planning to just write off because a level 10 NPC in a level 12-17 area was just doing nothing but dying. The easy solution is to just clear the place before taking him around, but when you don't know all the places he needs to go yet, you can't do that. There are still a few too many fetch quests that have you going unecessarily back and forth. "What do you do with a drunken" something has you go rescue a group of soldiers by killing a lot of bad guys, but it then makes you escort them back out. With no ambushes or anything. And they move sloooooooooooooooooow. That was unneeded tedium that added about 15 minutes to an already long quest. The 7 or so fetch quests for that scholar investigating the plague of Fahranur were just plain ugh. The guy kept sending you all over the map doing redundant searching. I wouldn't have minded so much if we were still able to get exp and promotion points from it, but by the time I got to the quest I was over level 15 and the level 6-10 enemies that I had to fight over and over and over were just a nuissance (side note: there should be a game mechanic so that monsters who won't give you exp because they're too many levels below you should not aggro onto you).

All in all I'd give what I've seen so far a 7/10. Great music, the Dervish is right up my alley, nice locations, and a semi-smooth leveling curve are a pretty nice offering. Unfortunately, ANet still has a problem with bland NPCs (although at least they're trying as evidenced by Koss) and boring/mundane/tedious quests that have you going back and forth in the same area incessantly. I still haven't tried the Paragon as of yet, but I'll try and get to it at some point. I'll probably go ahead and order the CE with starter kit. I doubt I'll pick up the PC Gamer mini-pet since the Giant doesn't really seem worth it (file that under would have been nice if it were free but not for the newstand price).

As far as bugs go, I had a lot of error 7 issues yesterday when loading new areas to go along with the added lag (and it wasn't on my end because I tested my connection and had 5500 kb/s down but GW was reluctant to go over 10 and was often running at 1, as though I were on dialup). There were a couple times when I couldn't leave town without getting an error 7 and having to restart the program. Also, on several occassions the names of quest NPCs I ran into on the field would revert to "Istan Peasant" instead of displaying their name (didn't affect gameplay, just the name). The game only crashed on me once during the first day and that issue was fixed about an hour later.

[Swiss Mercenary]

I took a look at it, but after the root canal of 'Do a lot of the inane 500 exp escort quest stuff before you get to what is supposebly a better part', I quit at around level 4.

[Lurker Wyrm]

You don't really have to do any of those. Thanks to the plant/insect/mandragor/corsair hunts, you can get double exp and sunspear points for kills. Once I figured out that every res shrine had one, I was getting at least 100 Sunspear points each time I left town and was able to make it to level 19 pretty fast. Level 20 would have been obtainable if I had left all the quests until after hitting 18 or so. When the game is released I'm pretty sure I won't be wasting my time with (probably more than) half the quests I did this weekend.

[Seijin]

Well, something new, something different at least.

I didn't play all of it and I did start to get tired after playing about 7 hours straight today. Well, I took some breaks in there.

Nice graphics. Tedious, long winded quests though. The characters' mouths actually move now when they talk in cut scenes. I wouldn't mind seeing more skill quests. And the whole accumulating sunspear pts gets kinda boring. I hope there are quests later that give more than 10-15. I did hit 1000 by lvl 14, but that was only because I chose to run around and explore a lot. There seem to be a few NPC's in each explorable area with quests.

I liked the hero henchies, they weren't too bad. Not great either, but not bad. At least you can give them 8 skills instead of the 5-6 henchies get, plus customize their attribute pts and give them secondaries. I can actually have a pure healer that doesn't use healing touch! Koss didn't do so bad as a sword/axe warrior. I just tried not to give him anything he'd have to use in succession like sever-gash. I did notice the hero's liked to use up their energy, or maybe that was just my heros.

Overall I liked the new additions. I love the dervish. I can't wait for Nightfall just so I can use a Dervish again and see what other skills they have.

[WarBlade]

I liked the hero henchies, they weren't too bad. Not great either, but not bad. At least you can give them 8 skills instead of the 5-6 henchies get, plus customize their attribute pts and give them secondaries. I can actually have a pure healer that doesn't use healing touch! Koss didn't do so bad as a sword/axe warrior. I just tried not to give him anything he'd have to use in succession like sever-gash.

Gah!

Sever Artery: 4 adrenaline.
Gash: 7 adrenaline.

Remember what I posted earlier about adrenaline costs. That combo actually does work because Sever Artery becomes 'ready' before Gash.

I did notice the hero's liked to use up their energy, or maybe that was just my heros.

No, that's right. If a hero has energy to burn and a skill to use it up on they will generally use it up unless there's some bit of code to stop them. The trouble there is that the AI is only a preprogramed response totally devoid of our human capacity to make judgement calls, so as you've found you need to be a bit careful about what you equip them with.