Purple Haze : GW2

From the September 18 Patch Notes:

In order to reduce visual noise, many effects displayed when players hit will no longer scale up on large targets.

 The Scene: Jahai Flats, just south of Almorra's Stand.

A purple, glowing dragon the size of an aircraft hangar swoops down out of the sky, where anything up to eighty or so players are waiting. The dragon summons a vast army of purple, glowing creatures. Hundreds of them. The two sides commence to fight.

Among the dragon's allies is a herd of centaurs. They pound around and around in circles in a tightly-packed group, stunning and knocking down anyone who can't get out of the way fast enough. Among the players allies are several dozen NPCs, half a dozen fifty-foot tall Wurms and a team of giant robots.

As the mayhem continues, another, even bigger (but, thankfully, unseen) dragon perpetually calls down lightning strikes on anyone and everyone. The lightning is purple and glowy.

Throughout the event, which lasts around a quarter of an hour, more purple, glowy mobs spawn, inexorably and endlessly. Occasionally much bigger mobs, called Rifstalkers, spawn. They are purple. And glowy.

The dragon, the rifstalkers, the lightning and many of the creatures cover the ground with red and orange circles, arcs, crescents. Certain players find themselves experiencing flashbacks to the early 1990s.

Meanwhile, every player and every player's pet and/or minion fires off any and every spell, attack and ability they can think of and/or heals themselves and/or everyone around them and/or dodges and rolls about all over the place as if on fire. Which most of them are.

Just to add to the gaiety of nations, some people flap around on griffons, swooping into the frenzy in the hope of unleashing the special attack given to flying mounts for this specific event.

The overall effect is, I like to imagine, somewhat akin to being inside The Feldman Fireworks factory the day Frank Drebin happened to drive by. On mushrooms. You or Drebin. Probably both.

Seriously, I love this fight. It's insane! Doing it as an Elementalist in glass cannon berserker build is a crazed non-stop fun riot and that's just me trying to stay alive!

If this is what happens when ANet decide to tone down the "visual noise" I can't wait for the next graphical downgrade.

Simple Pleasures

Ah, the simple things in life. When I finally got the motor running on this thing a few weeks ago I was really hoping to get something up here more than once a week. Little and often, that was the plan.

What could be better, then, than an occasional series on the little things I often do when I'm playing MMOs? A series I could throw together in a few minutes instead of the usual two or three hours. Well, lots of things probably, but that's what I came up with in an idle moment, so here we go.

Simple Pleasure No 1.  -  Getting creatures to fall down in a pile.

Where d'you think you're going, bigfoot?

I never really got into quad-kiting in Everquest. It always took me longer to round up four rhinos up than it took to kill them one at a time. And four really doesn't make an impressive pile, anyway. Although, four rhinos....

As time went on and fights got easier, or we got tougher, other possibilities revealed themselves. Like running round and round a cave bouncing off every creature in it to rile them up and make them chase you, then stopping suddenly and hitting them with a big hammer. Or charging into a great camp full of monsters and spinning around and around until even the elderly goblin hiding in the tent at the back couldn't pretend nothing was happening.

I began to develop a soft spot for classes that could put out a lot of point-blank area-of-effect damage, preferably open aes that hit anything in range for added chaos. And all while taking a considerable pounding from extremely angry monsters who object to being slashed by whirling axes or singed by pocket volcanoes.

Plate-wearing berserkers or fire-throwing mages with powerful minions fit the bill nicely. The Vanguard Dread Knight, the EQ2 Berserker, the Elementalist/Pyromancer build in Rift all come to mind but most MMOs have someone who more or less gets the job done.

Hmmm. Pulling to the right a little...

Only after a while just killing the monsters isn't enough. It all starts to be about how they fall. If you're doing 360 degree damage you want to see a perfect circle. If it's it's front-facing you want the bodies in a line. And so a new art-form was born.

It's harder than you'd imagine, too. There's always that one orc that arrives late to the slaughter or the bandit that dies in midair on a knock-back. Even in death they're out to spoil your day.

As you can see, I have a long way to go before I perfect the art of Feng Shu-ae.

Where's my I Ching?

Luckily there's never a shortage of subjects for my art.