rezzing
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Flameseeker Chronicles: Guild Wars 2's tower flower power hour
I'm super into the idea of open-world endgame zones, which is admittedly strange because my experience with them hasn't been great. They usually involve a lot of dying in terrible places, kill-stealing, and people tripping over one another in a way that creates centuries-long mutual hatreds. Guild Wars 2's Tower of Nightmares zone manages to mostly avoid the latter two by virtue of ArenaNet's core game design choices, but the first appears to be a defining feature of the content. If you haven't yet found yourself pushing up toxic daisies while Scarlet's minions casually play board games on your corpse, you haven't... uh... lived. It's pretty awesome. That might sound strange, but when everything comes together the tower plays like a big, magnificent dungeon where parties can form on the fly. It follows, then, that it's a lot less painful when approached as a dungeon rather than as a zone where the goal is to race to the instance at the end.
Hands-on with The Secret World's Darkness War dungeon
What do Vikings, Excalibur, native Americans, and Mayan hell-beasts have in common? They're all part of The Secret World's Darkness War dungeon, of course. The instance's story setup is pretty slick, and I don't think we're treading too far into spoiler territory if I reveal that you'll be taking a peyote-fueled trip through time and memory to experience a traumatic event from the annals of the Wabanaki tribe that dwells in the game's Blue Mountain region. Earlier this week I took my own trip through the dungeon -- as well as parts of Egypt, Transylvania, and New England -- with a trusty Funcom guide and a pair of similarly enthralled game journalists. While it wasn't necessarily mind-altering, it was bizarrely enjoyable in a uniquely Secret World sort of way.
Battle resurrections may get increased cooldowns
This was actually an offhand remark of Ghostcrawler's a few days ago, but it didn't seem to get much attention. In a thread devoted to the possibility of extending buffs like Blessing of Kings to additional classes in Cataclysm, Ghostcrawler mentioned the following: Ghostcrawler Obviously things like Rebirth can't just be handed to out to more classes unless we did something like a second exhaustion mechanic for battle rez or whatever. For now we're going to try the cooldown at 30 min again. In Icecrown's world of limited attempts, a 30 min cooldown likely meant you just cooled your heels until the cooldown was available again. In Cataclysm the hope is sometimes you'll have the benefit available but not every time, which scales back on how much of a game-changer it is. An alternative to a longer cooldown for Rebirth is something where one druid using it would trip everyone's cooldown for a few minutes. That it's a bit gamey, but might solve the problem. Also keep in mind that Rebirth is much more useful in today's game where people tend to die from massive damage. In a world where people sometimes die because the healers have run out of mana, then Rebirth doesn't buy you quite as much. source
Get in line! Rezzing order and you
So someone moved, someone pulled aggro, someone didn't heal fast enough, or you just don't have the DPS. It's a wipe. Everyone's dead on the ground, and the raidleader calls for a Shaman to pop, or for someone to use their soulstone. I'm a resto Shaman, so this happens to me pretty often: I Reincarnate and I'm standing over 24 dead people. Who do I rez first?Obviously, the first people I go for are those who have a rez to use, so we can do some chain rezzing. Priests, other Shamans, and Paladins. But after that? Caralynn lays it out: while your first instinct may be to rez your MT or your friends, you should really be rezzing pet and buff classes before melee.Which makes great sense. Warlocks and Hunters need to drink and resurrect their pets, and that's a lot of time wasted if you rez them last. Mages and Druids use all kinds of mana casting those buffs, so they usually have to drink, rebuff after a wipe, and then drink again. And Warriors and Rogues are easy to refill-- Rage doesn't refill, and I wish my mana filled up as quickly as Energy did.So it's Other Rezzers > Pet Classes > Buffers > and then Melee. There are other schools of thought on this (one player says to rez RL girls first, wink wink say no more), but this plan seems to be the best. Plus, Caralynn points out that this has the added bonus of not having melee standing around trying to pull while clothies are rebuffing. If you time it right, everyone can be ready to go again at the same time. And this time, watch that aggro!
"Now rezzing %t... stand back, this could get ugly."
Some people say "Liiiiiive agaiiiin!" Some people make jokes. Some people, as they're rezzing me, just say "Rezzing %t in 10 seconds" (useful, but boring). Invidiously over on LJ is looking around for a rezzing text macro. It's a little /say that you stick on the casting of a rez spell to let other people know they're about to come back to life.There's an art to writing stuff like that, really. A few mods do it automatically (I believe Castparty will send a /party chat for you, and Serenity is mentioned in the threat), but the best ones are homegrown and customized. Invidiously has some good answers to choose from: "%t, your subscription to Life has expired. Would you like to renew?", "Warriors now have a Feign death. It just requires a Priest reagent, right %t?", and "Now ressing %t. Please don't anyone else try because we could end up with half each, and that would just be awfully messy" (for the noobs, the "%t" in a macro just substitutes the target of your spell; in this case, the person you're rezzing).But some of the best text macros aren't even for rezzing-- tonight I had a mage in the party that cast Polymorph: Pig with the simple "Water into wine, enemies into swine." And warlocks go crazy whenever they summon people-- I've seen paragraphs of text coming from them, everything about who to call if this summon goes bad (a lawyer, obviously) to "Click on this portal to summon someone to do your job for you!" (that one comes from a mod, I believe, but not one I've used). Some warriors (I used to do this, in a previous MMORPG) even shout out a macro when they're pulling something, just to make sure the party is ready.For my characters, a normal "Sheeping %t..." or "Rezzing %t..." seems to work just fine-- it's quick, utilitarian, and to the point. But some people go all out, and I do chuckle when I see the good ones. What do you think-- waste of screen space or fun way to keep other players informed? And of course, what are the best ones you've seen?
