Wednesday 23 October 2013

Raiding By Myself

I was playing Aarklash last night and it really reminded me of raiding.  In particular there was an enemy that had an ability that killed everyone who was more than three meters away from him.  Then he also used area attacks against people close to him.  I'm pretty sure on harder difficulties you would need stand just outside the area and run in to not be killed.  He also had an attack where he hit someone and everyone close to them for a bunch of magic damage, so you had to spread out around him or run people away when they were targeted.  Again, on medium difficulty there was room to make mistakes, which I was glad about because it took me a few tries anyway.

But then I started to realize how much the other parts of the game are like raiding as well.  There are stationary packs with patrols nearby so sometime you want to pull a pack away from where they are standing to fight them.  You fight large numbers of enemies with diverse abilities and have to decide which to fight first and how to control the dangerous ones.  One fight that took me a few of tries had the following composition:

A melee fighter with a stunning charge and a small aura that shuts off attack abilities.
A melee fighter who buffs himself with high criticals and who comes back to life a few seconds after the first time he dies.
A melee fighter who buffs itself with increased attack speed and mana drain and can heal himself to full by banishing himself and slowly regenerating.
A caster who casts a long duration stun and a charm and who, a few seconds after his death causes an area effect fear around his corpse.
Three archers who have an instant cast heal on a long-ish cooldown.

The tank I have relies on an attack ability to keep himself alive - he can blind enemies in a small area around him about 25% of the time, so that no-attack aura makes him take a lot more damage.  One of my damage dealers is melee range but he has one ability that he can use every 30 seconds that makes his next three attacks do a huge amount of damage, so he could activate that before running in to get a lot of damage on the no-attack aura guy but that ability is also my only silence effect and that charm/stun caster is obviously a huge problem.

My mage character has an area knockdown but it affects allies.  I could use that to interrupt the caster once at the beginning of the fight to hold off his charm for a while, or I could use it with good positioning to knock down the melee and save a bunch of damage from the tank.  I can customize her to either have a lightning spell that hits multiple targets or a single target one that does a lot of damage but not both.  She also has a heal spell but the way mana works means trading off heals for damage done.  My healer character has two heals, one targeted and one that infects an enemy and then heals allies in an area around that enemy when it ends.  The targeted heal can't target herself.  She can also steal buffs from enemies every 25 seconds.

I started off by trying to take out the no-attack-aura guy but I decided the caster was just too dangerous so I used the silence ability of the rogue and lightning bolt to take it out first through the heals from the archers.  I tried taking out the no-attack aura guy next but it was just too hard to take him down with the healers and the rogue not being able to be fully effective.  So I ended up using the multi-target lightning bolt spell to work on one of the healers at the same time as fighting the caster and finish it off before the healing cooldown came back up.  The rogue then went to take out another healer while the mage switched to healing duty to keep the tank alive while the healer's AoE heal ability cooled down.  Once I got the healers down and just had the melee left it wasn't that hard anymore but my resources had been depleted to the point that the fight wasn't really won until I had one of the melee down as well.  It took me several tries to get there.

If I'd been able to choose my party for that fight - it was at a point in the game where you have to split up - then it would have been much easier because I could have used the other tank who wouldn't have their survivability hurt by the no-attack aura.  Well, also the other tank just seems like a better tank to me, though I think she's just more my style.

In another fight there were two casters with damaging ground effects and two others who shot slow-moving, piercing missiles along with four or five weak melee guys and they all appear in a circle around you.  That fight wasn't nearly as hard but I had to move my team around a lot.

If this sounds like an awesome game then you have good taste.  It's like raiding but there are no other people.  It makes me want a version of this game where you have a 10-person party.

1 comment:

  1. Well, I like raiding and I don't like other people...

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