Guild Wars: Nightfall

After a week playing the second expansion of Guild Wars, “Nightfall”. This expansion sets the story in the continent of “Elona”, in a place that looks like Africa and Egypt. Two new classes were added: “Dervish”, a scythe welding warrior, using wind magic to freeze enemies and “Paragon”, spear welding rangers, with holy attacks. In a way, dervishes are a mix of warrior and elementarist and paragons are rangers with monks, although there are no reused skills.

Another addition to this expansion are the heroes. Heroes are mercenaries-like NPCs: you can carry them on your missions and they will help you on your quests. The difference is that you can carry your heroes between quests and missions and select their skills. They presence also adds another deep into PvP games: since you can “buy” skills to your heroes, you open those skills to PVP characters. So you don’t need to build a warrior in the roleplaying mode to get the skills to play on PvP, a single warrior hero will help you get those skills.

Also, coupled with the heroes, you can now give them simple orders. You can select the type of behavior as attack, making them attack every enemy in the nearby area, guard, only attacking enemies when they attack the team first and do not attack, when they stay in the back of the team and do not engage any battles. Another kind of action is move: you can order single heroes to move to a location or the whole group, including the henchies. Once they move to the location you pointed, they will respect their selected behavior: attack, guard or simply sit there like a duck.

As in “Factions”, the first expansion, you start in an island and have to perform certain missions to get the chance to go to the main land. Differently from the the previous expansion, you don’t hit level 20 too fast. It seems that the developers decided to increase the ladder of experience decline over level. In your first levels, killing enemies give you a lot of experience. But, when you hit around level 10, the experience decreases a lot, so killing the same group over and over again is less rewarding over time. But you can still kill them to get promotion points. Those promotion points don’t give you much, except give you titles like “Sunspear commander”, “Sunspear sargent” and so on. I still don’t know if that affects the number of heroes you can take with you.

About the quests: the first quests and missions are quite straight forward and really nice. You manage to explore the whole island simply following the initial quests. Then, when you have explored the whole island, the quests start to suck. Quests that spawn over several districts, quests that requires that you move back and forth and stupid NPCs that you have to guide over the map that insist in getting in your front, preventing you to go straight or managing to get killed before getting in the end of the quest: you choose. Sometimes, more than one of the previous problems happen at the same time.

I’ve saw people complaining about bugs. I didn’t saw any problems while playing (except those listed above), but it seems the people at Arena Net are listening to players and fixing those bugs.

If you consider that Factions had a worst start, Nightfall seems to go to a good play.