Guild Wars: Factions first impressions.
Here are my random notes after playing about with Guild Wars: Factions over the weekend. I didn't end up playing for long, as I found out what I needed to know pretty quickly.
The ritualist is not at all what I was expecting. The Spirits sounded like pets, but they function more like "Wells", ie, Necromancers well of blood and the like. They don't move, and simply stay there and affect the entire party. Yes, this is just like the Ranger spirits you might say - but I hadn't seen a lot of those due to the fact that not many people use them too much. Guess why? Right. The premade pvp build for the trial was completely about teamplay - a support char with 0 offensive abilities, so it was useless for any solo testing. This might have been fine with a group of a few people testing, but I was solo this run due partly to my timezone, and partly due to the rest of #misty being lightweights.
The assasin is very similar to a warrior. It has a couple of cool abilities, such as the Shadow run thing (can't remember the exact name) where you increase speed by 15% (I think) for 15 seconds or so, and when the ability wears off you teleport back to the location where you activated the spell. Other abilities include a short term defense bonus, and the ability to mimic any stance being used by an enemy. The offensive skills seem to rely heavily on order and chaining or existing effects on the enemy (ala sever artery + gash for warrior) which makes it kind of hard to see how it's very different from the warrior? Add to that the weapons - the dual wielding aspect is kind of lost as you run about holding what look like 2 x kitchen knives. Come on, take a leaf out of FFXI's book here - the weapons in that game are great, granted they're all incredibly oversized, but think how cool 2 x huge Katana would look, especially if they could have a fire animation like the Firey Dragon Sword or something along those lines. Anyway, the weapons for the assasin could have been so much more than they were in the preview -maybe something for the final release, maybe not.
In the middle of my notes at this point, I have "crashes a lot" - there's not much more to add. The retail of Guild Wars always seemed pretty stable to me, and this one was crashing quite a bit. Again, it could improve when Factions goes retail, or not. Who knows.
It was pvp only, and it did say that. but I have to say the way items were unlocked with faction seemed kind of stupid. You unlock the item, but dont get it! However you can access it next time you make a new character (using their prebuilt templates) were stupid. I didn't see what this was trying to encourage, and I don't know if thats the way they plan it to be in retail - if I have a character I'm playing a lot, then I want to spend faction and buy skills for that character. It's not that complex really.
It would have been nice to have been able to test other combos, such as Necro/Spiritualist. I was curious to see if this combo would work or not, as it sounded like it might be worth experiementing with, however you were limited to using their premade builds so this wasn't going to fly. That said, I initially didn't think that the Necro/Spiritualist build would work too well - although it would depend somewhat on the healing range of the spirits, and what other sorts of spells the Spiritualist might have available to it.
It's worth pointing out here that I do have a weird tendancy to enjoy pet classes (in Legend of Mir I loved it when my Wizard had a full entourage of fully levelled Black Maggots, in DAoC I loved my Spiritmaster, in Diablo 2 I had a couple of different minion based Necros, in Starwars Galaxies my very first mastery after the initial game release was Creature Handler, and so on and so on), and so the gimped nature of the "minion" based Necromancer has always bugged me somewhat. The fact that all the minions are on a timer as well as taking damage is very frustrating. The speed at which their health decreases seems to be annoyingly quick - if you were trying to limit the number of minions, then why not have a limit on the number of active minions at any one time, let them take damage, and let them have the chance to gain 1-3 "levels", to encourage the Necromancer to try and keep their pets alive, and give them more opportunities to actually use corpses for explosion / teleportation / life giving effects. I think the Flesh Golem might kind of help this, but it feels to me that if they took some of my suggestions on board then they wouldn't need to have the Flesh Golem at all.
So on that theme I decided to try their Necro "minion" build, which is Necro/Mesmer. I stopped playing my Necro/Mesmer at level 15. She just wasn't fun anymore, and after getting the "must have" skills for the Minion build and respeccing my points it still totally sucked, so I wanted to try their level 20 version with all the recommended trappings and skill points. The build is kind of weird. Granted I didn't play it for long, but:
- Why have high (almost maxed points) Inspiration magic just to use one spell, which is an energy tap? Yes, Necromancer spells are a bit energy draining, but surely some points put into Soul Reaping will help this somewhat. I know that energy is valuable, it just feels like a waste of skill points.
- If you do put some of those points into Soul Reaping to get similar functionality, then you can dump the rest into Blood to help your minions, or to use life siphon which works nicely as an offensive spell as well as helping you.
- or, instead how about putting the points into Illusion and using Conjure Phantasm - which stacks rather nicely with Life Siphon for a nice degenerative combo. There's also Etheral Burden, which is an Illusion hex, which gives you a burst of energy when it ends. Not quite the same, but still.
Either way, their build is kind of weird.
So what did I think of Factions? Not much really. I had some hopes for bigger arena pvp, instead of the same old pvp but with faction points added. Chances for some larger battles would have been nice, but it seems it's just more of the same but with a chance to play about with 2 new classes (of which, 1 will be more popular than the other) and a few updated skills for the old classes. Graphically it's quite nice, what I saw of the island and it's backdrops was visually appealing, but then Guild Wars always was. I couldn't see much of a theme to the new armor, and it definately wasn't there in the weapons (let me say again, steal from FFXI here people!), however everything still looks very nice. It's frustrating, as I think Guild Wars has a lot to offer - there's so many things it does very well.
In summary, if you like Guild Wars, then there's no reason not to get the expansion. If you want to try it, then I can't really say how the PVE portion of Factions will play (as it is purchasable as a standalone game, you dont need the original). I honestly can't say if I'll buy it or not - to enjoy the game you need a good active guild to pvp with, combined with a Teamspeak or Ventrillo server, and I don't have those things right now - so I'll have to wait and see.
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