GW2: How Inclusive Should the Molten Weapons Facility Be?

So… let’s talk dungeon. Specifically, the potentially controversial Molten Weapons Facility that has made an appearance as the next stage of the Living Story – Flame & Frost: Retribution saga.

The raging controversy at the above linked thread is the old debate about having the option to solo vs “forced” group content. One of the major beefs is the ol’ bait-and-switch over time, especially with the lure and promise of a narrative to be completed. Players are suckers for a good story, and want to see it from beginning, middle and end. Throw in a 5-man dungeon to cap off your story, and it’s the Personal Story => Arah Story dungeon WTF all over again.

Two other subsets appear to have issues with this. One, the antisocials and/or ‘friends and family only’ small group less than five folks who are rather dismayed at having this appear to cock block their story or achievement progress (and let’s not forget the tempting vanity shinies too.)

And two, the for-whatever-reason movement-impaired, ie. those who cannot dodge or jump well, possibly physically handicapped or having a disease or have poor ping, etc, who know very well that they will either soon be left out or excluded due to accessibility issues, or don’t want to deal with the emotional drama/stress/tension that is bound to arise from having a not-so-great player in the midst of a group focused on getting to the end as quickly as possible.

(Now before any of the above take major umbrage at my description of them, know too that I also habitually fall off cliffs, through gaps, fail dodges, and jump poorly, nor does it seem to be helped by having a latency all the way from South East Asia. At least it’s not Australia?)

I dunno. I think I have a point I want to make about inclusivity vs exclusivity, but it’s not quite well formed yet.

Oooh, that’s deep.

Instead, let me tell you about my experiences with the Molten Weapons Facility so far:

Round 1 – Random PUG, all level 80s, same server, on cookie cutter guardian

Since the dungeon had bugged out as the patch dropped, and I was simply too sleepy to wait any further, I tried to get on as soon as I woke up in order to catch the wave of people who still hadn’t done it yet. As pure random chance would have it, I did find such a group. Good, it’s my favorite way to experience a new dungeon, and just like the launch crowds only happen once, you cannot take away knowledge once it is learned.

We were all 80s, the group consisted of 2 warriors, a mesmer, an engineer and moi. The warriors were using shouts and banners, there was me on the ye olde AH shout hammer guardian, and I am not conversant enough with the other two classes to know what they were doing, but I am sure there was a good mix of control/dps/support going on. We learned the mechanics via experiencing it, there were barely any deaths, whole thing ran very smoothly. I had a hammer knockback, which was very helpful on the protectors, found my stability shout pretty heavily utilized, and made a mental note to take in hallowed ground next time as well.

Round 2 – Guild group, 4 level 80s and 1 lvl 40, same server, on cookie cutter guardian

For my next run, I joined some guildies, three of which were running it for the first time and one of whom, along with me, had done it once before. Group composition, mesmer, 2 necromancers, a lvl 40 warrior and me. I brought hallowed ground, swapping it back and forth with retreat as needed.

The two of us checked with the three who hadn’t done it to see if they were open to spoilers. They were, and wanted strategy tips but they didn’t want to rush through, which was a-ok with me because I loathe speed runs with a passion. (More on this later though.)

Noted the ore appeared to be on cooldown or a per-character basis. I’m still not sure if the karma items are on an account basis – I failed to receive one of them when my inventory was full and I’m going to be a little sad if I miss the little conversation snippet because of this. Thankfully, no achievement linked to it.

All in all, a relatively smooth run. A few more deaths than the previous round, and one wipe on the boss as folks figured out the mechanics. I believe most of the additional deaths came from trying to rez each other, because getting locked into place rezzing during a high mobility required fight is always tricky. We ended up finishing the ranged boss with two people, or one really, as I collapsed one second before it died (which joyously rallied me, even before the others rezzed up for the super-saiyan boss version.)

Round 3 – Random PUG, 2 level 80s, a lvl 52, a lvl 25, a lvl 4, same server, on experimental spirit weapon build guardian

Now that I had the facility under my belt, so to speak, I was curious to see if a new character would reset the ore or karma items. I was also curious to see if spirit weapons had been improved any. Well aware I was going to be a LOT squishier, I decided to chance it with a random PUG.

Group composition: Me, a lvl 80 engineer, a lvl 52 warrior, a lvl 25 elementalist, a lvl 4 guardian. I checked the achievement points of the lowbies, and they were all only at a few hundred. The engineer had 3000. I’m sure some of you are laughing on the floor right now. Me, I knew very well this wasn’t ever going to make it to completion and sighed inwardly. I briefly considered logging cookie cutter AH alt on to maybe soak more pain and give more group support than the more selfishly built one, but what the hell, it was going to be a test of how the designers had scaled/balanced their MWF!

The good news is that we managed the Molten Alliance veterans just fine. The bad news is that we popped a Champion Ember as the boss in the hall after the dredge tunneling machine, instead of a Champion Ooze. This, if you are not aware, spawns a great variety of Ember minions of normal and veteran quality and KEEPS spawning them. All of which throw a ground based lava font aoe.

This utterly decimated the team. Over and over. We tried pulling the whole mass back into the tunnel, which helped us take down everything not-Champion for a short while and dink 1/5 of the Champion’s health bar off. Concentrated ground aoe in that chokepoint is a killer though, and took squishy ol’ me out in four hits or so, once I’d used up all dodging capacity, blocks, invulnerable, the works. Let’s not even talk about how the lowbies fared, between not having developed dodge reflexes, underdeveloped traits/skills, and naturally very little toughness/vitality.

So we tried the Ember in the hall, which helped me survive it a little longer by virtue of kiting it around internally screaming my head off that this is entirely the wrong build for this sort of thing, except all the lowbies fell over in three seconds when the other Embers looked at them crosswise, and then I fell over when eight lava AoEs appeared under my feet before I could even hit the dodge button.

I swapped to projectile reflects and absorbs, which did nothing for the ground based aoe damage. I wasn’t traited for shouts, and had a grand total of maybe 200 healing power, so I doubted it would work either. Long story short, we called it. They did, however, very gamely give it their all over and over, and it was just very obvious that these were all inexperienced or new Guild Wars 2 players, while I wasn’t on a cheaty optimal group-focused build either and had been hoping to sneak in and get ‘half-carried’ by other stronger builds.

Round 4 – Random PUG, all level 80s, same server, on experimental spirit weapon build guardian

So immediately on disbanding, I jumped right in to another group LFM, and what do you know, the slightly less experienced level 80 engineer in round 3 had popped right in to the new group with me. I was quite gleeful about this, tbh, because this evened out the variance between dungeon experiments.

Group composition: 2 mesmers, a thief, the engineer and me. I took one look at the group and decided to pre-warn them that I wasn’t in your typical AH hammer guardian tanky build. Fortunately, the spokesperson of the group who had done it before was very accepting and said no problem, it was all about skill and knowing when to dodge/jump, etc.

As luck would also have it, we spawned the Champion Ember. This, I noted with some amount of vindication, did knock over one or two level 80s with the ground based aoes – BUT with the dps outputted by five level 80s (and probably some aggro tanking from mesmer clones) , I was able to survive long enough for the Ember to fall over before all my helpful survival skills ended up on cooldown. I did have to bounce between melee and ranged, instead of just face-tanking shit with a hammer though.

Veteran Molten Alliance seemed to go down somewhat faster. Protectors were harder to manage as the shield knockback doesn’t launch them far enough out of the circle, and the spirit hammer knockback is hard to control/precisely position.

The boss fight was on an order of distinctly more challenging. The two mesmers were very skilled and kited well with their clones and had the shockwave timing jumps pat. The engineer, as expected, spent most of his time facefirst on the ground. I wasn’t far behind from that, along with the thief.

Some of it just seemed to be bad luck though. The loudest, most skilled spokesperson still fell over when the berserker landed a chained up knockdown or some such on them. I come out of loadscreens a bit more slowly than most (either lousy computer or ping or both) so when the berserker boss superpowered himself, I had just enough time to see the flame circle sweep towards me but not enough time to react with a jump, dodge, or run away – which somehow one-shot me. Wonder if it critted. I did eat a few more shockwaves during the next go, because I was trying the ‘jump over’ method spokesperson was recommending, but I think ping was a problem. That or being on a charr or my overall timing. I had MUCH better success with dodges or blocks (or stability, which I resolved to slot in the next time, as the spirit weapons were just getting splattered by the boss – so much for hp buffing.)

Despite the multiple deaths, we did actually kill the bosses (two tries each) and complete the dungeon.

Round 5 – Picky PUG, all level 80s, same server, on cookie cutter guardian

I was actually hoping to be a masochist and subject one or two more random PUGs to my ‘horrible’ guardian. However, the only group advertising in map was someone looking for – I quote – “shout/banner warrior, AH hammer guardian or TW mesmer.”

As is my usual custom, I ignored such pickiness (like, I suspect, most people do) and watched the group leader advertise two more times. Then I decided I was bored enough to go do one more experiment for the sake of science (and this blog!) and also, I kinda wanted another try at the jetpack pop chance at the end of the dungeon.

It helped that the group leader had engaged in a civil mapchat conversation with someone who was expressing that their previous group had wiped on the last boss and was feeling the dungeon to be extremely hard, whereas said group leader said, no no, it’s very easy, here, join my group and I’ll show you. (Then promptly renewed his advertising for the new GW2 trinity.)

So I sent them a tell, told ‘em I’d log on Mr Cookie Cutter, and joined them.

Need I really say anything more about how it went?

Oh well, if you insist. Group composition: elementalist, ranger, necromancer, warrior and me. The necromancer had minions out, the warrior had banners and shouts going, combo fields were dropping left, right and center, almost no one’s hp bar moved except for maybe mine, which would just bounce up and down between full and half in the manner of AH guardians. One crisis moment of nearly dropping necessitated a brief backing off to staff empower up to 3/4 health, and there was one mind-blanked-out face-tanking hammer-humming moment which caused me to eat a flame circle and drop downed, because I plain forgot to even watch out for it.

—

So… what is the moral of these stories?

I dunno. It actually just makes me sad. I WANT to be inclusive, dammit.

I don’t want to reject non-level 80s from, what is essentially, an event dungeon group.

You know who those only-in-the-several-hundreds ArenaNet achievement points players are? They are our game’s new blood.

I’m sure people could probably “carry” one or two of them in a very strong dungeon powerhouse builds kind of group. But I wonder if they want to be “carried” or if they’d really rather just contribute.

I’d really love to take in non-standard builds to a dungeon whom ArenaNet -claims- that any group of five players can manage. And I gotta admit, I did complete the dungeon successfully with one. But I do worry about how much of a drag down I will be on the group as a result.

Then as icing on the temptation cake, I find that I actually crave the rewards that pop at the end of this dungeon. The jetpack looks pretty nifty, but I’d really kill for a mini firestorm and to be able to construct an endless potion of his berserker brother.

Now to perfect my miniature shrinking ray…

With THAT kind of goal in mind, and a 14 day time limit on this dungeon, doesn’t that add up to a distinct designer pressure for achievement-oriented players to run this dungeon back to back as many times and as quickly as possible?

—

I’m probably still going to bring my squishy Charr into MWF one or two more times, for the heck of it and because I’m going to master dodging and jump timing, dammit,  and I’ll apologize in advance here for any group wipes and repair bills and extended runs this might or might not cause some unlucky random PUG.

But after I get being stubborn and experimental out of my system, expect to see me on the Asura hammering my way to victory repeatedly for a few vanity shinies.

Taking bets now on when speed runs and the MWF farm become the only “proper” way to run this dungeon, and what the ‘expected’ strategy everyone is ‘required’ to follow ends up becoming.

GW2: Random Fun and Adventures in WvW

Lemme just state something up front. I find very little point in blogging about who took what keep on what hour of which day, or how many loot bags so-and-so has dropped, or which guild or server is all that or sucks. You can read that sort of stuff everywhere else.

To me, it’s a cycle. Some days you win, some days you lose. I prefer to keep at least a modicum of respect for my opponents, regardless of their behavior. And it all resets to begin over the next week anyway, even if the scores are recorded and it’s fun to play to increase it and improve oneself.

What I really enjoy in WvW, besides the improving oneself and seeing others work together and better alongside you aspect, is the fun, crazy, never to be replicated in quite exactly the same way shared memories of the players participating.

To pull a random example from another team game I played the heck out of, I remember reading a Natural Selection dev discussing their map design, how they tried to make corridors and elevators that would encourage the Marine players of one team to be walking together beside each other, facing the same camera direction and sharing that similar “Oh shit” sinking feeling when they see a giant Alien Onos player stomp around the corner and charge them. The goal was shared emotions and a feeling of camaraderie.

And I’d like to share a random collection of fun and funny stuff that’s happened while I was running around WvWing, in the hope you enjoy it too.

—

The featured pic at the very top of the post is the fireworks meme that seems to have been going around lately in our server. Some guy keeps dropping loads of fireworks, and you know other players can’t resist picking them up and playing with them. I like to think of the above shot as “Quick, use these fireworks to camouflage our trebs so they won’t know we are here!” “Sure!” “…Ohh wait…”

And you know that reputation Tarnished Coast has for being full of ERP? (You can look up the term elsewhere if it’s not familiar to you.)

This was the unexpected view I had when logging back into the game on my Asura, getting ready to go into WvW after previously logging off the day before from the Super Adventure Box. Dat portal exit…

I see there are perks to being short.

For some reason, our commanders seem to love us getting all up close and personal with them…

No homophobes allowed on Tarnished Coast.

The biggest killer of Tarnished Coasters also appears to be gravity. We are beginning to suspect the commanders have a betting pool on how many they can get killed jumping off a cliff. Our reigning champion so far:

I stand by what my asura said. “Lemmings.”

The exact scenario went somewhat like this: Endeavoring to maneuver around another enemy zerg, the commander looked down the cliff at the river and said “Quick, everyone over here, jump down into the water, hmm, does that river look deep enough?” Except one or two others had already leapt by that time, and the commander decided that meant it was safe and followed.

Being of suspicious and paranoid nature, and no doubt, it also looked bloody high for my miniature asura, I found a two part jump/slope that got me down safely. One of a few. Phew. Hooray for rezzing.

We have extra liftoff!

Today’s reset was incredibly fun, the highlight an hours-long three way battle in the KNBL garrison. I’m sure there’s footage of it elsewhere, but I found this serendipitously amusing.

It so happened I got on the front-row seat superior ballista (that’s also asking for being the immediate target if our opponents got their way in, of course) and you know, you’re just targeting -any- enemy in which direction you want to fire it and keeping those bolts flying. Check out random asura’s guild name – some internet meme or other, no doubt. Here, lemme help you with MOAR liftoff with this ballista bolt!

We had a close call with the bay keep mid garrison fight. An FA guild team was spotted trying to catapult the water gate, and those that weren’t in garrison and were in bay had our attention occupied with taking out their catapults. Being, as I’ve often said, of very paranoid nature, I couldn’t help but stare at the crossed swords ticking down on the keep and think what if there were more somewhere else masked by this?

So I went to check on the northwest gate near the veteran wurm while the others were cleaning up, and to my horror, saw it in the far distance sitting wide open with a flame ram visible beyond. Now my graphics settings aren’t the best and it was foggy up there so I wasn’t 100% sure I could believe my eyes, but I reported it anyway and did a 180 towards the nearest inner gate to check. Sure enough, a KN WM ninja team was in the midst of ramming down the door and had it at 40%.

A number of TC came back to respond to the bay attack, and that pulled a sufficient number of us out of garrison that FA was able to cap it. Shortly after the bay attack was cleaned up, we were back to knocking on the gates of garrison and managed to cap it ourselves.

Some time after, I chanced by the garrison’s southwest wall and nearly died laughing at the guild banner hanging from it:

Er, hi there.

I’m afraid I’m not too conversant with all the guild insignias on Tarnished Coast as yet, so I dunno which guild this was. But it was so hilariously unexpected.

Late into the night when things were less hectic, there was some time for crazy shenanigans like a blue dorito train:

Need moar tags.

It’s, um, practising a strategy for when there’s a dedicated commander assassin around. Yep… That’s it…

The perpetrators of this atrocity were made to line up and shot to death by firing squad.

They are so leet, they don’t even render on my computer. I hear there were yak transformations and stuff.

Folks were in pretty high spirits today, there was siege overkill on an innocent gate:

NEED MOAR TREB

And one of our commanders was even spotted RPing, though I think everyone else needed a Babelfish:

For Gondor! Oh wait, wrong game.

Extra nerd points if you recognize the reference. I didn’t, but it’s not at all one of my favorite series.

In more curious conjunctions of serendipity, I had an exotic trident drop for me in WvW today. Which is crazy luck for me.

Except it was the cheapest valued lvl 79 rampager trident of something or other that was only worth a little over a gold or so. Which is murphy’s law playing its usual part for me.

I’d normally TP it, but I was feeling a little rich today, so I thought, since the tridents are so cheap and I hear Mystic Forging exotics have better precursor drop rates, instead of earning 1 gold, I’d waste an extra 3 gold on a gamble. So I bought three more.

The tridents had mysteriously arranged themselves into some kind of voodoo pattern around a sigil from a rare I’d salvaged.

I’m sure the logical explanation would have been I was selling blues and greens, salvaging rares and depositing all collectibles just before my mystic forge try, but it was kinda spooky to see the tridents like that in my inventory.

Then I forged them, expecting nothing but another exotic trident worth another gold or so to cut my losses, and hoping a higher valued trident might pop:

It’s official. I used up all my luck in this game.

Enter crazy luck lightning strike number 2.

Along with murphy’s law smack number 2 – of all the precursors, an underwater trident. It’s only worth 22 some gold on the TP, something I could actually afford if I dug into my current gold stores.

I think I’ll bank it and work on it much much later. Kraitkin doesn’t look half bad to me. And I’m not allergic to water combat as much as most GW2 players appear to be. (But I kinda still have half my heart set on the legendary torch, though its use and show-offiness factor is almost just as limited as an underwater weapon. And meh, that kinda goal drives a person into bankruptcy, so it’s still not my primary drive for now.)

The last hilarity before I logged off, I accidentally clicked the Guild Bank vendor while looking for the personal Bank one and ended up rofl’ing too:

Somebody’s not happy…

Spec Ops: The Line – Random Thoughts

Just finished Spec Ops: The Line.

Wow.

I’ll try to avoid spoiler-ing anything here, because the game is indeed worth playing through for the atmosphere, the moral dilemmas set up in individual scenes, and some thoughtful thematic questions raised about war and what can possibly happen to soldiers and civilians in a situation where there are no clear-cut “good” choices.

Some of my screenshots are from later parts of the game, but I have tried to put them out of any kind of context whatsoever.

Just be warned that its overall theme is pretty much… War is hell.

Laying on the symbolism a bit thickly, are we?

And war, war never changes… (To quote another neat game.)

How to describe it then?

Narrative-wise, there’s a touch of Planescape: Torment with, unfortunately, a lot more plot holes and significantly more linear railroading. There’s some Heavy Rain flavor in one or two scenes, (no QTEs, don’t panic,) but I wish there was more.

It’s not Heavy Rain. I swear. There’s a certain eerie similarity of beard and likeness, perhaps.

One of my nitpicks is that in certain scenes, you are forced by the game into taking certain actions, or else the game simply doesn’t progress. I’m not so fond of that kind of narrative, it’s a bit of a lazy cop out. As gamers, we tend to do whatever the game requests us in order to see the end. Playing with moral and ethical questions regarding something the game railroaded us into doing… well, it’s a bit of a cheap trick in order to reap emotional impact – sorta like how horror game tropes are always play with lighting, play with pacing, play with scary sounds and flash something HORRIBLE onto the screen for a split second. Yeah, it gets a reaction out of us, but it’s been done.

It was interesting to observe my reactions as I played through the game. Knowing it was a game about morality, at first, I tried to be very careful about my actions. I never fired first. I waited for people to shoot at me before firing back in self-defence.

One of the nicer minor vignettes near the beginning with some moral implications. They’re not actively opposing you. Do you kill them in cold blood? Order your squad to do it for you, so your hands aren’t personally dirty? Or do you give them a chance to fight back by alerting them then shoot them while they’re holding a firearm pointed at you? Don’t think sneaking past peacefully is an option in this game though.

I even managed to avoid killing a civilian, who in one of those cheap-ish designer tricks does a sudden jack-in-the-box act in front of you, and you’re carrying a loaded gun in the midst of a firefight. (It was a near thing the first time though, I fired bullets into the floor near their feet from a combined sheer reaction of EEP and WAIT, NOT-TARGET, which was kind of fascinating to have happen.)

I like what they’ve done with this option game-wise. Sometimes when you shoot enemies, they don’t die immediately, but are still alive and may shoot back. Or simply lie there groaning.
You can choose to kill them. And opposite to Bioshock, where the goody-goody path is the obvious optimal choice in the long term, here, you get an in-game reward of ammo for the guns you’re currently carrying – as well as a violent execution animation sequence.
There was also a neat touch where the executions appeared to get more brutal after certain plot points, as contrasted with the start of the game, reflecting the state of mind the main character is in.

Unfortunately, after a couple railroading tricks where the main character acts in a way beyond my control, I started to sense that there was a narrative ride we were being sent on, like it or nay, and it began turning into a problem-solving exercise of getting to the next plot checkpoint, since I didn’t have any real options until I got to certain scripted scenes where I could choose stealth/shoot or one of two or three possible paths through a moral dilemma.

I would have much rather been faced with situations where there are no good choices, and you simply have to take one based on the available information you have, and deal with the consequences of your possibly failed intentions. (There were a few places in Spec Ops where they did appear to be trying for this, which was nice.)

The other nitpick is the story unravels a little at the end to become extremely ambiguous and open to multiple possible interpretations. Minor spoiler warning: It’s basically the ol’ unreliable narrator gimmick. Anything and everything might have been a dream after all. Oh, don’t get me wrong. The multiple endings end rather artistically. It’s not at all as bad as Indigo Prophecy where you end up going “da fuck?” after a certain point, but there’s a teensy degree of it where you’re still left trying to glue several story threads together attempting to have it make unified coherent sense. (I haven’t quite accomplished it, to be honest.)

That said, it’s a shooter that attempts to tell a very -different- kind of story about war.

If only for that, playing through the experience is worth it.

But I bought the game though. So I may as well play it to the bitter end, rather than choose not to play, eh?
Still, in a sea full of shooters who don’t even bother to reflect on deeper themes of war, a slightly incoherent, forced perspective commentary is better than none at all.