Welcome to Guild Tech!

Sorry about the delay on posts everyone, it has been a hectic month for myself.

Today is all about skills.  Guild Wars has the most robust skill system out of any game I have played.  While you are only limited to 8 skills on your bar, you are able to combine any two classes together to create a seemingly infinite number of combinations.  Thus, skills can be very intimidating.

Welcome to Guild Tech!

Central to any RPG game is character creation.  Guild Wars is no different in this aspect.  In all my years of playing RPGs and MMOs, I have seen extremely restrictive systems and systems that are so diverse that it makes your head hurt with all the options you have available to you.  Guild wars falls into the latter of the two.  In fact, outside of RIFT and Ragnarok Online, I would say Guild Wars has the most diverse class system available.  Even the creation aspect gives you unique options that are unavailable in any game I have ever played.

Hello everyone!  Welcome Guild Tech!
Today is a tutorial on how to play Jade Quarry in Guild Wars 1.

First up, what is Jade Quarry?  

Most often it is referred to as JQ.  JQ is a pvp map where 8 players engage in combat to retrieve jade slabs from the 3 quarries located around the map.

How does it work?

Jade Quarry is a hybrid of Capture the Flag and King of the Hill.  Players are charged with capturing the 3 quarries around the map.  You capture points by (at first getting to them) killing all of the Luxon/Kurzick NPC’s that are located directly on the point.  Whenever a point is captured, NPCs of whatever faction you are currently representing spawn there.  Once a point is captured, a Turtle or Juggernaut will spawn (based solely on which side you are on) that will carry a jade slab from the quarry to your base.  Once a slab is retrieved, the carrier will continue to take the slab back to the base, even if the opposing team capture the quarry.  However, the carrier will not go back to the quarry until the point is captured.  Note, the only way to prevent a team from gaining points is by taking quarries from them and killing their carrier.  In addition to the quarries, there are also various outposts that will spawn 3 archers that can be very fatal to the carriers (they use Pin Down).

Welcome to Guild Tech!  How was everyone’s SOPA strike day?  Did you get any of your homework done?  

Today is a day of Heroes!  Well, not really, I just said it is to make this sound more epic.  So lets begin our discussion!

Heroes are a system that allows you to fill up vacant slots in your party with characters that you meet throughout the story.  This means you really do not have to “solo” content so long as you have a sufficient amount of heroes to fill up your vacant slots.  This is a system that we saw heavily in Nightfall with Henchmen being introduced in Prophecies as a mean to address people unable to complete content without knowing a lot of people.  The difference between Heroes and Henchmen is that Heroes are just as customizable as player characters.  You share all of your collected skills with your heroes and can unlock other skills through a hero skill trainer or through PvP by turning in faction points at your local Balthazar Priest.  All of the attributes are as customizable as your player and you can even dual class them.  Currently, there are 3 of each class of hero and 1 of them (Razah) can change his primary class at will.

Welcome to Guild Tech!

Today, I am going to talk about the Mission system in Guild Wars.  On a basic level, Missions are the same thing as dungeons as in any other MMO RPG within the past 8 years since World of Warcraft was released on the unsuspecting world.  But missions do something very different than traditional dungeons.  

The Missions in Guild Wars are infused with story and required to press forward in the various campaigns.  This is the fundamental difference between Missions and Dungeons.  However, this is not the only difference.

Welcome to Guild Tech!  While this has nothing to do with the rest of the column, I figured I would introduce myself and the column to those who have not really frequented my home page theferalengineer.wordpress.com.  My name is Feral, I am a fat American (really, I am quite large) who enjoys gaming and basically has been since I was 8.  I am now 23.  The primary topic of this blog is to cover various systems and mechanics found in both Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2.  Since I am still learning Guild Wars, it will most definitely be about that most of the time until Guild Wars 2 comes out.

I just started to play Guild Wars and I would be lying if I said that I was not enjoying it.  While the game came off very intimidating and a lot of those things that we as gamers get comfortable playing with are not there, I adapted to it and it actually makes the game far more enjoyable in the long run because I like that challenge.  In fact, I love the way the zoning works, I love the way questing works and I love the missions.  Probably my favorite thing about Guild Wars is the bounty system they have implemented.