Nightfall Part I: Lessons Learnt

Guild Wars: Nightfall just launched. Given how much I had enjoyed Prophecies and Factions, I decided to have a go at Nightfall. Nightfall brings to the game two new professions of the Paragon and the Dervish. The second I don't care so much for, but I find the Paragon an interesting addition, although I did have a Dervish along in my henchman party for a while.

I believe Anet is slowly moving away from the "Holy Trinity" model. This I consider a good thing. The most obvious part of where they they are attacking the Trinity is from the "healer" angle. Healing is certainly an art, and there are good and bad healers, just like there are good and bad warriors. But I dislike the Trinity model. It is just what we have to work with, and the alternative is letting people in the group die.

No longer.

I believe Anet designed the ritualist (Factions) and paragon (Nightfall) to break this model. The ritualist uses a mixture of spirits, weapon spells and healing to protect the team, while the Channeling aspect provides good offense. Practically it is hard to invest points in both defense and offense, so there are a lot of Ritual Lord (spirit spammer) builds. Nevertheless, this is an alternative to monks. Ritualists are also very hard to bring down when they have enough spirits up due to the caster-inclusive coverage of spirits. This is quite unlike many of the healer monks out there, who bring a bar-full of healing spells and dress for maximum energy, but can only run away when a mob comes after them. I don't play a monk so I'm not sure why they are so fragile, given that many builds can spike heal up extreme amount of damage.

The Paragon is just as interesting as the Ritualist. Firstly, due to the nature of its shouts, it has to position itself nearer to the battlefront than a traditional monk. Therefore, it is given the ability to wear warrior-class armour. Secondly, its shouts are also caster-inclusive buffs. Lastly, damage comes from its equipped spears with the damage buffed by the caster-inclusive buffs, so even if less points are devoted to Spear Mastery, the Paragon can put out a decent DPS

The Paragon isn't a tank, but it's not a piece of tissue that can be ripped apart by a stray mob. A group consisting of Paragons with stacking buffs would not need a tank, since everyone is a tank!

One other interesting thing about Paragons, Ritualists and of course Monks: they have lots of abilities to remove conditions, that are usable upon themselves. It makes sense that someone that is so good at helping others should be able to help themselves. On the other hand, a warrior is not too good at removing conditions. Hexes and conditions are often the downfall of a warrior without skills from a secondary profession to help with them.

In this aspect, CoX has completely failed. Not only do the tanks and scrappers have the most hitpoints and damage mitigation, they also have damage and the best mez protection available in the game. Consider the defender, which I would call the "Paragon counterpart", which was supposedly designed to be a mixture of buffs/debuffs and ranged damage taking part in the team battle (compare it with the intention of making the Paragon a mixture of buffs/debuffs and ranged damage) -- the defender has low hitpoints (less than controllers), low armour (they cannot self-buff), laughable base damage, and above all, no mez protection.

In actual fact, I don't play a monk. I started out as a Mesmer/Ritualist, and now play a Mesmer/Necromancer. A mesmer has a lot of interrupts and hexes. Conversely, it is actually very hard to interrupt a mesmer due to the profession's attribute of fast-casting, and hard to hex a mesmer -- if he brings his hex removal tools (which I don't, teehee), which "eats" hexes for energy, steals the hexes for personal usage, or what the 2 second hex-removal elite spell that removes not one, but two hexes at once. How do you hex someone who removes hexes faster than you can ever throw them (assuming no tricky Catch-22 setups that PvPers have come up with)? Warriors, on the other hand, don't remove hexes and don't have hex protection.

If you hex people for a living, you have the skills get get rid of hexes from yourself. If you interrupt people for a living, you are hard to interrupt.

In fact, I've given up interrupting due to the my lag these days. Anet has kindly given the mesmer class some AoE damage spells which enables me to set myself up as an armour-ignoring chaos nuker since AoE damage is what is needed in PvE anyway. I don't need an elementalist, although I bring an earth elementalist for the wards (the irony). A mixture of hexes and damage sounds like the CoX dominator, doesn't it?

Both the dominator and the mesmer are fragile. Both are endurance intensive -- but the mesmer has energy management tools while the dominator just sucks wind until stamina and SOs. The mesmer does more damage than the dominator (don't use fire/fire as an example, consider the mean). Outside of 90 seconds of domination, the dominator is complete mez-bait. The mesmer is better designed.

This has to do with the binary nature of controls in CoX too. Either something is controlled, or something is free to rampage around. If a stray warrior mob comes rushing at my mesmer, for example, I can cast empathy on it and put on distortion. Does it die first from empathy, or does distortion run me out of endurance first? Or I can hex it with ethereal burden and just run away while it crawls towards me at snail's pace. The warrior mob cannot dehex itself, and isn't going to hex me. Warriors hit people, they don't hex people.

In CoX, if you can't mez a mob, it just comes at the dominator and kills mister squishy. Anything that you can't mez in one go (fortunatas, bosses without domination), can often kill mister squishy so fast we basically go "huh?". At least in guild wars, the elementalist boss casting meteor on you has a slow windup that can be interrupted. If I got one-shot, it's because I can't interrupt my way out of a wet paper bag. Hexing or interrupting someone does not turn them into a statue, and it doesn't turn a battle into "fighting statues". It is a very dynamic and interesting business.

City of X needs more non-binary controls. They need to stop having every hobo mob cart mezzes. An armour toggle without mez protection drops away when a mob blows at the squishy. The epic armour available to the squishies are unreliable. "Warriors" should not have mezzes. One just needs to examine dominator total focus versus everyone else total focus to realise a terrible irony. Apparently the control AT is less good at mezzing than everyone else. Therefore they should have subpar hitpoints, damage mitigation and damage dealing capabilities. On the other hand, the ATs with just about every other advantage but having the "disadvantage" of lacking range and therefore supposedly being in a more dangerous situation have epic blasts, epic snipes, epic holds...on top of impale, focus, and other short range "melee" attacks. No wonder people believe defenders should not blast, just stand behind and heal the people "doing the real work". (I won't even comment on the fact that most of dominator damage is in melee.)

CoX can really take a page out of Guild Wars regarding balance issues.