f13.net

http://www.guildwars.com/events/ingame/factionspreview.php

You don't need to have purchased the game to try out the preview. There's also a Factions cinematic here:

http://www.guildwars.com/gallery/video/default.php

Hm, cool. I may check it out.  I had fun the first time.  Hope we get some different templates made available, though.

I'll be playing this weekend.

I hope they did something about that Ra/A build that can stun-lock someone.  Stun-locking has no place in PvP.  Interupts are bad enough.

I'll be there.

As will I. Maybe get you that guild invite, Mes.

Holy FUCK the Factions battles are fun. I still don't know all the mechanics of taking and controlling towns as our guild leader's not logged on yet but fuck a bunch of Heroe's Ascent. Alot like AB in WoW except MUCH faster paced and chaotic. Stupidly fun.

Damn you people without jobs.  I'm not event sure I can get on tonight without drawing huge wife aggro.

Trade you my Crohn's Disease for your job?

How get to them?  It lacks documention.  I played some before work but all I found was a bunch of pve quests. Assasins still pwn :( Ritualists are still ineffective. :(

I've seen some scary ritualists.

You have two choices:

1) Take a Factions PvE character through either the helping the Luxons or Kurzens quest. There's a guy whose title is Alliance Battles. Take to him. Or, one of your existing toons take to the Guild Hall and you'll find a battle rep there.

I tried it, then remembered why I stopped playing.

Whats the moral here?  Stay on the Alzheimers meds?

You can't go home again, Thomas Wolfe.

The community is still ass. PvE is still sort of meh. I find it's a good game so long as I don't play the fuck out of it. I treat it just as I would treat a FPS: good for some quick PvP action.

Wait, so, uh, infopls?

I played GW up to 20, found it fun, never did anything uber in it.

Does this mean that there's now a GW PvP "world", beyond instanced landscape and then tiny arenas?

Or are the city battles simply glorified arena battles, with 16 vs 16 sides or something?

Nope. It's still the same game but they've added some new features with the expansion pack. The website can do a better job of explaining than I can.

You unlock 100 skill?

I finally when rt/prot so I could turtle when I came under attack.  After which things were better, but just okay.

So I played a couple dozen rounds of the faction arena. The two issues:  It changes the balance of the whole game.  Monks and Direct Damage are weakened, and Necro Minions and AOE are greatly strengthened.   Yeesh Meteor Shower is an "I WIN" button in many battles.  The other issue is quiters.  It not so bad in random arena, but it a huge problem in these longer battles.  Some of these motherfuckers quit even when the battle is competitive.  I am hoping that once the game is live, that faction may have some value.  But there still needs to be a penalty for quiters.

So, what's the largest scale battles that exist?  And are the environments you fight in about the same size as the current arenas?

I guess what I'm asking is, does this new expansion pack add anything for people who are more about coming upon battles where they may, taking targets of opportunity, than straight, head-on arena fighting?

> taking targets of opportunity
griefer.

Faction arenas are 12v12 but you can only join in groups of 4 max. So you have to team with at least 8 random folks. Since there were 7 control points on the 2 maps I saw, people were very spread out and disorganized.  I am sure one could find mis-matches and pwn them.  But in guild wars all classes have the skills to defend themselves and its up to players to decide if they want use them.  This weekend, my smite elementalist got destroyed by assassins unless my shield of judgement up so I could run away. But my build wasn't meant for 1v1.  Other elementalist could have handled the assassin with ease.

Dick Cheney, is that you?

No, but you can still go outside and push kids around I guess.

I had a serious opportunity to body-check a girl on crutches today, but I decided against it.  Restraint!

Probably had trivial loot anyway.