The Clockwork Bard

And we continue from Part 1!

Guardian

Guardians are the first of the less stereotypical fantasy archetypes in Guild Wars 2, combining traits from the monk, ritualist and paragon from the first game.  The vaguely paladin-esque result is a nigh unkillable wall of party support and fiery wrath.

The centerfold material for the guardian is her Virtues.  Every guardian gets three virtues which convey a passive benefit to her.  Virtue of Justice causes every fifth swing of her weapon to light her target on fire.  Virtue of Courage grants her Aegis, which allows her to completely ignore the next attack against her, every 40 seconds.  Virtue of Resolve gradually regenerates her health.

This alone makes her a force to be reckoned with, but there’s more.  She can activate these virtues to sacrifice that passive benefit in favor of benefiting any friendly character within shouting distance.  Virtue of Justice makes the next attack of her and her allies inflict burning.  Virtue of Courage gives everyone (including her) the Aegis buff.  Virtue of Resolve restores a portion of everyone’s health.

In many cases, the guardian also tends to drop little healing clouds, circles of regeneration and assorted buffs around the battlefield, just as a byproduct of swinging her weapons.  And to ensure they keep doing it, there’s also a few survivability tools in her back pocket, such as abilities to block attacks and blind her enemies.

TL;DR: Solo.  Group.  Guardian has it covered.  Top tier durability and support.

Necromancer

Following in step with the guardian’s “will not die” theme, necromancer’s defy the “squishy clothy” conventions we were taught in RPG school.

There’s an RPG school?  What is he talking about?  Is this like that dream where you signed up for a class and then forgot about it, so you go to the final exam hoping nobody notices you were missing?  I hate that dream.

The key mechanic of the necromancer is a resource called Life Force.  Life Force is gained whenever an enemy is killed in the presence of the necromancer.  Several of his attacks also generate it.

With sufficient Life Force, he can activate his Death Shroud.  In this form, his skills are replaced by four skills specific to Death Shroud.  His Life Force then gradually ticks down.  Any damage he takes will come out of his Life Force, rather than his health.  If he runs out of Life Force, the Death Shroud ends.

The whole interface is very much like when your character is downed and dying, except the necromancer is up and kicking butt.  I mention this because that is thematic awesomeness right there.

When it comes down to it, this means necromancers have a second health bar enemies have to chew through before taking him down.  They are the bane of burst damage dealers.

I also found necromancer weapon skills interesting and varied, given their limited options.  Lay trap-like marks with the (wickedly scythe-looking) staff, tear it up in melee and steal health with daggers, rend through armor at mid-range with the axe or rain sustained bleed conditions at a range with the scepter.

TL;DR: Caster stereotype be damned, necromancers are comfortable anywhere on the battlefield and will take considerable effort to take down.

Engineer

If complete disregard for fantasy archetypes is your goal, then you can do no better than the engineer.  Up until now, I’ve completely ignored much of what makes up these professions.  Things like utility skills and traits could easily balloon these articles to zeppelin-sized proportions.  But for Engineers, I have to make an exception.  Their only weapons are rifle, pistol and shield, and, like the elementalist, they can’t even swap between them.  Even his class-specific mechanic ties into those other five non-weapon skills.  So, we’ll dabble very lightly for his sake.

The other five skill slots: The five skills after your weapon-specific skills are yours to choose freely from a pool decided by your profession (and a few from your race).  The first is dedicated to your choice of self-heal, the next three are utilities that can do just about anything, and the last is the “elite”.  The elite is just a really powerful utility with a long cooldown, and is unimportant for this discussion.

The engineer has four more “toolbelt” slots.  Their effect is decided by your choice of healing and utility skills.  If you pick the healing elixir as your healing skill, your first toolbelt slot lets you hurl a healing elixir, giving a random buff to everyone in the slash radius.  If you pick “Rocket Boots” (which launches you backwards, damaging anything caught in the exhaust) as one of your utility skills, the associated toolbelt slot becomes “Rocket Kick” (which does an explosive kick, burning enemies in front of you).  These all have their own, separate cooldowns, meaning Engineers basically get 4 more utility skills than everyone else.

This leads into the engineer’s hallmark mechanic: kits.  A kit is a utility skill that, when used, replaces your five weapon slots with all new attacks.  Using a Grenade Kit gives you 5 types of grenades to lob, with a variety of conditions to inflict.  Activate the Elixir Gun Kit to equip the Elixer Gun, with a plethora of chemical attacks that weaken enemies and aid allies.  Click the Flame Thrower Kit to leave enemies with a warm, crispy feeling.  There’s even a Med Kit that lets you leave health kits lying around on the ground.

Kits too have associated toolbelt utility skills.  Just by having Grenade Kit on your skill bar, you can periodically unleash a barrage of grenades over an area.  You need not have the Grenade Kit activated to do so.  Having an Elixer Gun Kit in reserve lets you emit a fragrant, health-regenerating mist.  Do you have a flame thrower in your back pocket?  Hit its toolbelt button and your next three attacks from any weapon will light people on fire.

TL;DR: ”Utility” describes the very foundation of engineer design.  They also have debuffing conditions and party support in a volume and variety that should keep any fight interesting.

Mesmer

I put mesmer off to last, because she is honestly a little hard to quantify.  Thematically, she is a caster profession that presides over the more cerebral domains: domination, inspiration and illusion.  Though predominantly a ranged character, her weapons carry a certain swashbuckling panache, adding blades and pistols to her repertoire.  The two-handed greatsword deserves special mention for being a purely long-range weapon in her hands.  Its primary attack, Spacial Surge, even does less damage the closer her opponent gets.

The mechanic unique to the mesmer is her illusionary clones.  Certain attacks of hers will spawn an identical looking copy.  These copies deal minimal damage and typically go down in a single hit.  Their use is centered on four abilities called shatters.  When used, all clones will sacrifice themselves to inflict the shatter’s effect: direct damage, confusion, daze or distortion.  Confusion causes enemies to take damage when they attack, daze prevents enemies from attacking and distortion puts the mesmer in an illusionary state that evades all attacks.  The more clones sacrificed, up to the maximum of three, the more pronounced the effect.

Most weapon sets and a couple utility skills can also summon a phantasm.  Phantasms count as clones in most ways, but have a ghostly appearance and are about on par with a pet in terms of power.  That is to say, they are actually useful.  Unlike a pet, they have no intelligence to speak of.  They will simply act out the same, single ability on your target until they die, the target dies or they are sacrificed in a shatter.

TL;DR will not be seen tonight.  In its place, please enjoy this small ramble.

Small Ramble: Mesmers, more than any other profession, exist in a very significant state of “not done yet”.  Much of this revolves around the clones and shatters.  Clones usually die in a single hit.  They also do almost no damage.  In fact, last beta weekend, my clones were dealing zero damage.  Lots of little zeroes popping up everywhere.  It was quite disheartening.  They do still function as distractions.  The GW2 aggro mechanics will quite happily slay a creature that is completely incapable of harming it just as often as it will attack you.  This buys precious seconds, but their obvious intent seems to be shatter ammo.

Shatters are all sorts of broke.  When you activate a shatter, all of your clones charge your current target and fall apart in a flurry of purple butterflies.  It’s difficult to say when in this process the intended effect happens, because it often seems not to happen at all.  I’m not certain if they aren’t reaching the target or if they even have to.  When the shatter does happen, the effect is minimal.  The damage is low and the effects only last a few seconds.  The confusion, for example, is usually over before the enemy even attacks.  You feel you should be getting more, when your ammunition for an attack keels over to a strong breeze.

Also annoying is that phantasms, those guys who actually kind of pull their weight, also sacrifice themselves to fuel shatters.  So the effect gained by shattering a phantasm is generally less useful than the phantasm you just nixed.

Mesmers need work.  But, I’m excited to see what emerges from the other side of beta-land.

End

I could have gone into a lot more detail.  For the limited skill bar size and customization–a common gripe from those coming from other MMORPGs–there is a surprising level of depth.  Though there is a wide range in how you can choose to play your character, they are not homogenized, samey-feeling professions.  There’s a lot to explore, and after release, I may do so.  Because class guides are fun.

We’ll have to wait and see.

GW2 Professions P2 will be up later, but I feel compelled to rant for a moment.

I consumed Final Fantasy products voraciously in my youth.  I’ve mentioned this before.  I don’t think I was alone.  It is mind boggling looking back, after the fact, and seeing some of the things the series did.  One thing that blows my mind happened with Final Fantasy VIII.

Firaga

What in the ever living Fira is a Firaga?  Blizzaga?  Thundara?!

This bothered me, even back then.

In the first Final Fantasy, we had magic spells like FIRE, ICE and LIT.  They had stronger versions, like FIR2, ICE2 and LIT2.  So on and so forth.  I think you see the pattern.   It wasn’t perfect.  (What the hell is an ARUB?  Oh, that protects you from RUB.  WTF is RUB?!)  There was a 4 letter limit, carried over from the fact that Japanese can convey an entire syllable in a single character.  So the translation team did the best they could with what they had.

By Final Fantasy VII, we had mostly ironed out the troubles.  We had Fire 2, Ice 2 and Bolt 2.  Short, concise, recognizable and sufficiently descriptive.

This changed in Final Fantasy VIII.  Fire 2 became Fira.  Fire 3 became Firaga.  Ice and Bolt were further mangled.  Ice 3 becomes Blizzaga.  Bolt 2 becomes Thundara.

I could briefly make the point that Thunder is a poor choice for a lightning spell.  Thunder is the sound of lightning.  Not many people die of thunder.  You’d have to be pretty rickety in the heart for that.  But let’s not nitpick.

Except for, you know, that other nitpicking I was doing.

Then again, Square-Enix never was particularly good at numbers.

There is speculation as to the reason for the change.  Of those I’ve heard, the one that seems to hold some degree of weight is that FF8 introduced a system by which you had to gather spells as a resource.  It was a horrible, ungainly beast of a system, but that’s not on trial here.  It remains that you could have, at any given moment, a certain remaining stock of a spell.  This presents the problem of presenting to the player that they have 2 of Fire 3, for example.  Whether this is actually the problem, we may never know.  Personally, I would’ve used roman numerals.  (Fire III x5, for example.)

My main problem with it is it isn’t intuitive.  It’s a blockade between player and game that serves no meaningful purpose.  The purpose of a user interface is to quickly and effectively trade information with the player.  (Admittedly, RPGs have been notoriously bad at this through out history.  Raise your hand if you knew what a +10 Vitality meant to your character in FF7.)  Yet, fans of the series seem to defend this convention fervently.  This forum archive captures what I mean perfectly.  The first third of the thread is people proclaiming how much more they like this naming convention, after which it breaks down into total confusion.

I guess it fits with what I said in my Final Fantasy Mystic Quest review.  People like to get lost in their RPG, and fun isn’t necessarily a prerequisite to that condition.

So, where does -ara and -aga come from?

I once heard that -ra means “second” and -ga means “third” in Japanese.  If you look at the Japanese games, sure enough, there it is.  Most of the spells are 4 characters, and if you look for ones that look similar, you’ll find many that share the first three characters in common.  Where they differ in the fourth character, many have either a ra () or ga ().  Seems legit.

My initial reaction was mild rage.  I paid for a translated version of the game.  You can’t just be leaving parts of it Japanese.

But, wait.  This sushi smells a bit fishy.  I looked at the spells that seemed to produce ice.  The first, “romanized” (converted to Roman letters, or romaji; hey, I’ve studied some Japanese before), was “bu-ri-za-do” ().  Burizado?  A quick dictionary search informs me that that is Japanese for “blizzard”.  It sounds kind of like blizzard too.  A lot of Japanese words are like that.  I’m amused and continue.

bu-ri-za-ra ()

This turns out to be gibberish.  But, wasn’t “-ra” supposed to be “second”?  Well, by this point, my weak-ass Japanese studies are starting to filter back into my head.  I remember that Japanese does have a system for something kind of like this.  It is, to put it in professional terms, complex as balls.  Even if it does mean that, by some quirk of the language, they just chopped off “-do” to make it fit.  It doesn’t even mean blizzard anymore.  It would be like if the English version was “blitwo”.  ”Bu-ri-za-ga” proves equally nonsensical.

Let’s try the other spells.

fu-a-i-a ()

I find faia (the ‘u’ sound is often quick to abandon its post in Japanese; frustratingly, romanized versions of words are very inconsistent in expressing this) in the dictionary–among many other words–for fire.  Interesting that, again, it is the one that sounds the closest to the English “fire”.  The higher versions are predictably “faira” and “faiga”, which are still gibberish, because the last syllable is still lost in the change.

sa-n-do– sa-n-da– ()

The last syllable () basically just means the last syllable before it has a long sound (it usually has a curly tail to distinguish it from a dash, but my only font lacks such frivolousness).  Sando and sandoo don’t seem to come up on their own in the dictionary.  However, I did find “sandobado”, which means “thunderbird”.  So, sando is used because it is, again, the phonetic partner to the English “thunder”.  Interesting.

Rebuttal Addendum #1 (Sep-13-2012): A friend much smarter than I shot me a mail today informing me I got my katakana wrong.  The third symbol is “da” not “do”.  Looking back at my dictionary, it even says “Sandabado” for “thunderbird”.  So, yup, I was just all sorts of wrong on that one.  There are also apparently dictionaries that do list “sanda” as “thunder”.  Sure, I don’t see why not.  I need a better dictionary.

One more, because this one really caught my attention.

ke-a-ru ()

This one is only three syllables and casts Cure.  Kearu… Cure…  Yup, they did it again.  And kearu is, as best I can find, not a Japanese word.  It is, literally, the English word “cure” force-fed into the language using a linguistic mallet.  Because this one only has three syllables, the updated spells don’t eliminate anything: kearura and kearuga.  But since the root word is gibberish, these are just gibberish+.  Gibberishra, if you will.

Rebuttal Addendum #2 (Sep-13-2012): In further Japanese education happy fun time, I was informed that “kea” translates to “care”.  Now if we can just learn the meaning behind the -ra and -ga hacking off of syllables, we’ve got this thing nailed!  Maybe find out what that -ru there is all about, while we’re at it.

Let this be a lesson, children of gaming.  Wise man once say: Seek knowledge and you may find it.  Be wrong on the internet and knowledge will hunt you down.

So, you’re telling me…

Yes.  Long before deciding to troll all of North America with Final Fantasy VIII, they were trolling their own country from the very beginning of the series.  I used to whine, because I couldn’t remember which was stronger between blizzara and blizzaga.  I had it easy.  There had to be Japanese people screaming, [wtf is a kearu?!]

Still not convinced?  There’s a spell in Final Fantasy 7 called “Full Cure”.

What did the Japanese get?

fu-ru-ke-a ()

…

Yup.

So, to all of you who told me you liked the newer naming convention, because it was closer to the spirit of the original Japanese names: you may be more correct than you know.

Bonus points to those of you who caught the Final Fantasy XI auto-translator reference.

Four out of Five doctors agree, three days straight of solid Guild Wars 2 is probably not good for your health.  It is, however, amazing for your fun.

Amazing for your fun?  What does that even mean?

I’m not as young as I used to be (which is good; no space-time anomalies), and I’m feeling last weekend like a bad hangover.  I’m pretty sure I remembered to eat, but I can’t make promises.  It’s all one big blur of wild particle effects and body counts in the hundreds.  You think I would’ve learned from the first beta weekend.

I did not.

I wasn’t really comfortable talking about GW2 after the first BWE (the official acronym for “beta weekend”).  I hadn’t played all of the professions and didn’t touch crafting.  Over a day and a half were sunk into tinkering with builds and running PVP arenas until my eyes fell out.  It was good for getting a feel on the game mechanics, but not for exploring the scope and depth of the content available.  After another weekend under my belt, I now feel qualified to at least talk about the game.

But before I do that, I need to get a certain Internet debate out of the way.

The Holy Trinity

Yeah, I wrote a whole article on it a ways back.  You know, the concept of Tank/Healer/Damage roles in MMORPG design.  December ’11 feels like a long time ago now.

Clockwork, you all hate on the Holy Trinity and stuff.  What do you think about Guild Wars 2′s eliminating the Holy Trinity?

Tch.  I don’t “hate on” the Holy Trinity.  (Yes he does.)  I just grow weary of it as a symbol of stagnation in MMO design.  It makes games come across as recolors of each other.  I brought up Champions Online in that article, because it was an example of one route.  It maintained, more or less, MMO conventions, but deemphasized the Holy Trinity by emphasizing diversity.  The Holy Trinity functions through characters specializing in a role, which was suboptimal in that game.  Heals weren’t spammable (at launch) and any sort of piling into a single area came with diminishing returns and losses in possibly important areas.

Guild Wars 2 goes about it another way.  ArenaNet designed a game that, from the ground up, disregarded those conventions.  That’s a whole different world.  It doesn’t approach the problem with any purposeful eye towards weakening the Holy Trinity.  It makes a game where you wouldn’t think to use it.

Think about a generic, first person, squad based shooter.  (Wow, looks kind of brown.)  Your squad encounters a brood of alien zombie nazis and a firefight ensues.  You and an ally are taking heavy fire.  He is the beefier of you, so he takes a nearby position and opens up with a heavy weapon, gaining their attention.  Relatively unharassed, you are free to peak out and squeeze off a few headshots.  Your buddy isn’t just soaking up bullets.  He’s smart about it.  But he doesn’t see a stray grenade, and it deals a nasty blow to him.  You both see a health pack on the floor, but its out in the open where anyone can be easily shot.  Knowing your friend needs the health, you toss a smoke grenade, blinding your enemies and buying him the opening he needs to dart out and grab it.

There’s no clear, defined roles involved.  There are character strengths and weaknesses, but you use them organically with the situation.  This is the kind of game ArenaNet set out to make, from its roots.  It’s not an avoidance of Holy Trinity.  Quite the opposite, it’s a design that would feel forced if they tried to make that convention work.

Talk, talk, talk.  I want examples.

Fine, an Example

Okay, here’s a very intense moment I had during this last beta.  I was playing on my Necromancer and happened upon a yet unchallenged dynamic event (it was fairly late at night).  I had to destroy five evil brazers in a cave, which I did with only minimal opposition.  Upon completion, a very powerful demon appeared and promptly began to show me my ass by way of my mouth.  I barely escaped with my loins in place and enlisted the aid of the only two players I could find nearby.  I, being stouter than the average caster, and the sturdy looking charr in chainmail took the fight to the demon’s face while the engineer hung back and rained status effecting bullets from behind us.  My healing spell, while on a long cooldown, had an area effect, and so we stayed strong by being evasive with the occasional extra top off from me.

The fight was going well until minions began streaming in gradually from all sides.  I, hanging towards the middle, only had the demon to contend with, but my allies, favoring the edges, were beginning to collect trash like golf cleats in a landfill.

The engineer went down.

It’s important here to mention GW2′s “Rally” system.  When your health hits zero, you enter a downed state.  You’re on your back with a limited set of skills and a gradually diminishing health bar.  If that bar hits zero, you die.  Dead allies can be revived by another player, but it takes more time than can be spared in a fight like this.  But if an enemy that the downed player is fighting is defeated, they rally back to their feet with maybe 25% or so health.

The skills engineers get while downed suck.  They can be debilitating, but they rarely kill anything.

So I switched to my pair of daggers, darted to the minion that had him downed and carved it like a holiday roast.  The engineer sprung to his feet.  I dropped my healing well on the ground to get him back in the game and rushed back to the demon.  Unfortunately, the melee charr had been left to tend both the demon and the minions in my absense.  I realized I shouldn’t have wasted my heal, because he needed it badly.

Necromancers have an ability to change into an alternate form called Death Shroud.  As they kill and maim things, they fill up a green meter called “life force” (no, not the Gradius spin-off).  In Death Shroud form, this green bar temporarily becomes your health meter and gradually ticks down until it runs out or you switch back.  It’s like having a second health bar and makes Necromancers very tough to kill.  Like the downed state, you have a limited set of abilities unique to Death Shroud.  One of those is Life Transfer, which is a massive area effect, blasting everything nearby and filling up your life force.

As a fun side effect, if you hadn’t pulled any monsters on you before, you’re probably in for a real big party real soon.

I could only keep Shadow Shroud up for about five seconds under the onslaught I inherited, but it bought my ally enough time to get his “not dying” situation in order.

The fight went on like this for a while.  The demon had a lot of health and minions sprinkled in on the regular.  Those two focused mostly on the demon, both getting downed but never dying.  I stayed away from where minions entered and bounced freely between them as extra muscle became needed.  When the demon finally fell over, I don’t think any of us had more than a sliver of health or a heart rate under 100 bpm.

Through it all, none of us “tanked” in the traditional respect.  The demon could easily three shot any one of us, given the chance.  And we sure as hell couldn’t “heal through it”.  Not when I was waiting 40 seconds between heals.  It took all of our tools; dodges, blocks, blinds, cripples, heals, weaknesses, damage bursts; acting on the situation as we saw it unfold.

So, Not the Holy Trinity?

Perhaps the biggest departure from a Holy Trinity based game is that of what your role is.  In a Holy Trinity heavy game, your role defines not just what you should do, but what you should not do.  Everyone can do damage, but not everyone necessarily should.  If you have a healing ability, but you aren’t a healer, you probably shouldn’t bother healing.  Now, obviously, there are going to be exceptions that a skilled player will find within the nuances of the game.  I don’t want to hear, “nuh uh, my ret pali so totally uses his heals and it makes me hardcore!”  There’s a logical fallacy for that.  We’re talking HT 101 rules here.

Your role in GW2 is defined purely by what you are able to do.  You only get 10 skills, 5 decided by your choice of equipment, and you need to make them work in the confines of the challenges presented to you.

My guardian uses a mace and shield to endure large groups pounding down on her.  But in one event, enemies are stealing eggs and running off with them.  I switch to my scepter, which I normally use as my backup ranged weapon.  It has Chains of Light, which instantly immobilize a distant target.  I can use that to pin down any runners that get away.  That becomes my role.

It isn’t “class homogenization”, like I’ve been hearing cried far and wide.  The diversity in professions is definitely there.  You just aren’t playing The Lost Vikings in RPG form.

(Reference Hint: The Lost Vikings was a puzzle platformer by Silicon & Synapse (aka, Blizzard; yes, that Blizzard) in 1992 in which three strangely specialized vikings must work together to fight enemies, cross stages and reach goals.  Each is largely worthless without the abilities of his mates, which combine in various ways to solve puzzles.  Yeah, my wit is boundless.)

“Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?”
– Benjamin Franklin

More GW2 talk to come.  Probably.