Weekday nights in non-NA primetime are, as expected in this week’s matchup, pretty deserted.
Not quite deserted enough for the Outmanned buff though, which is more than a little odd, considering the huge orange blob of dots I saw outside the nearest tower to our spawn in one BL. The buff kept flickering on and off, as if trying to decide to award it or no. Mostly, it was no, today.
I find I quite like the Desert Borderlands as a defender/roamer. The shrine mechanic rewards the defender quite significantly if they can maintain territorial control of the shrines of their keep.
I’m more used to both air and fire shrine effects, so since we were red team in this desert BL for once, I spent some time getting used to the effects of the earth shrines.
The asura launchpads for holding all three of them are quite fun to play with.
Also useful in the sense that it can both enable fairly quick travel across vast distances, and I presume (but am not sure) that while spinning around in the air, you should be able to see any enemies in the vicinity of the earth keep.
The launchpads land you directly in the vicinity of each shrine, so it is conceivable that an enterprising defender can monitor and maintain the asura launchpad network by saving the shrines (assuming not overrun by shrine attackers.)
I was taking my hastily refurbished thief out for a spin, and unabashedly surprised a mesmer taking on a ton of earth elementals and downed it.
Unfortunately, right after that, came another blue dot while I was busy chilling in the sandstorm, bathing in the asura lodestone that gave protection and stability, gloating at my newfound successful thiefysneakybastardness.
I stared for what seemed like 15 seconds at the new guild tag, wondering, “huh, that seems different from the mesmer I downed…” before realizing, “it -is- different. That’s a new guy up there that has cleared the elementals and is already cycling the control point. Oh shit, are my cooldowns even back yet…”
I ran up there, half in a panic, barely coordinating my intended stealth attacks. The surprise factor actually equaled another successfully downed tempest, but then YET ANOTHER blue dot jumped down and started to try and rez the tempest.
I went into stealth, thinking either I needed to stealth and whack the tempest dead, or stealth attack the second guy, and hadn’t quite decided on either when the shrine flipped on me because DUH, I’d gone into stealth and stopped contesting the control point.
Well, fuck me. Now there’s a veteran elemental friendly to their team, the second guy, AND the first guy that he has now rezzed.
NOPE. Chucked down a shadow refuge and noped right on out of there.
Welp, you live and you learn.
Fortunately, on a thief, you can do the former quite a bit more easily than a number of other classes I can think of.
Why I Game 