And Let Us Never Speak of It Again

Where there's challenge in games, there's opportunity for frustration. And I have been frustrated in games like WoW by a failure of a boss to drop a specific item, or repeated wipes in an instance. Guild Wars takes the cake, though. The sheer futility of pushing on with a maximum death penalty, killing one or two more enemies before being smashed down in one hit is astounding. There are times, I actually hate the game.

Whoever designed and approved the quest "An Unwelcome Guest" should be shot. I am not doing that fucking thing again. Ever. I better be satisfied with my ritualist, because I am not starting a new Factions character and going through that for the attribute points. Were I playing the campaign solo, I probably would have given up there and never come back to the game.

Comments

  1. foxwingApril 14, 2009 at 11:43 AM

    And you run into one of the main reasons I stopped playing Guild Wars...

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  2. tashiroApril 14, 2009 at 8:23 PM

    My sister just did 'An Unwelcome Guest' today, solo. She had vanilla henchmen and one Hero (MOX), and breezed through the quest with no real casualties to speak of. The kirin died twice, but came back fairly easily. Hmm... I wonder how come you had that kind of hassle?

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  3. ajeyaApril 15, 2009 at 8:17 AM

    I haven't done that quest yet, still trying to figure out how to ring the gong or whatever to summon the Kirin to get the quest from him... at least I think that's what I'm supposed to do because I don't see him in the Harbor town. But it reminds me of one of the assassin quests, where you do the 'secondary' or 'advanced' training and there's objectives like 'use your caltrops to slow down your opponent' or 'use your healing abilities to stay alive'. This one was using your debuff tools to take off a healing ability this Monk-type cast. Well I couldn't do it at level 7. I would take away his buff and he'd just recast it. And I couldn't do enough damage to kill him. I tried everything I could think of, tweaked my spec, attacked him in a sudden burst, tried to wear him down. In reading the discussion on this ability, it turns out that the healing spell used to be on a long cooldown before but was changed for better balance. Too bad that totally broke this quest. When I was level 12 I just came back and womped him even with his healing spell on. THAT is not very polished work. :(

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  4. marinredwolfApril 15, 2009 at 11:17 AM

    It's times like that which make me feel GW's lack of subscription MMORPG resources. Keeping things in balance when changes are made is an ongoing process, and these companies only have so many man-hours they can afford to those ends. The subscription fees and huge player base of WoW means they have a lot more people to go over everything. As for the quest I mentioned, I think I was level 12. I hasn't done much side questing, so I figure that's roughly the level you're expected to hit it at. It might be easier for certain professions, and probably would be easier with access to heroes (which you generally don't have if you're doing Factions and moving in order). Hard to say. Ultimately, I really dislike the game's Death Penalty. That's probably in the top three things that frustrate me about the game. If you're working along and you hit a rough patch and die... well, suddenly that spot is even harder because you'll die more easily. In many cases, you can manage to kill one or a few more mobs before you die again, so you are making progress, but it's slow and gets harder and harder. It doesn't take long to rack up a -60% penalty, and I was being two-shotted by the warriors who went straight after me because ritualists have low armor and caster weapons. I couldn't use anyone else to pull them effectively, because I didn't have that kind of control over henchmen. So, often I'd put up a spirit, pull, get partway through my casting, die, and sit idle while the rest of my party slowly got creamed. The miasma didn't help. Having to run back across the zone to get the kirin back didn't help. You can start over completely, but then you give up any progress you've made. So I really felt like I was beating my head against a wall for the better part of two hours before I finished the one quest. That's not fun.

    ReplyDelete
  5. ajeyaApril 16, 2009 at 12:18 PM

    I greatly dislike the death penalty too... and the solution is to what - reset the whole mission or have candy canes on hand? Well in the former that really sucks... remind me of old NES games where there were no checkpoints. And as for candy canes or other penalty removing items... sometimes you don't always have them on hand... I typically don't anyway.

    ReplyDelete

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