Beat Factions last night
Yay, so last night I recruited some guild mates to assist me in beating Guild Wars: Factions. The last stage occurred in the Imperial Sanctum where we had to defeat the resurrected assassin Shiro, and let me tell you, this guy was no joke to beat! If the fight goes on long enough, he starts sucking up some major health from all the players. You'll see his health below 50% -yours at full-and think "Yay, just a tad more to go!". Then suddenly he uses a move called:
Battle Scars: This is a stance that enables Shiro to regain health by stealing life as he attacks. The life he steals is based on the highest damage he takes while under this stance, which means the higher the damage he takes, the more life he steals. So it's quite frustrating to see your health dip to 1/4 and his return to full within mere seconds.
Other skills he uses:
Echoing Banishment: This skill will replace targeted player with a bound foe of the same profession, and banish the player to a nearby island. The player can here choose to run the long way to the teleportation orb and rejoin the rest of the team. Or wait in safety for the team to destroy the bound foe which will cause the banished player to return again.
Impossible Odds: Shiro starts using this skill once he drops in health to about 30%. It can be curse as it gives him an incredible attack speed and allows him on inflict tremendous amount of damage in a very short time. He also transfers any conditions he might have to the players he attacks. It can also be a way to get him down fast since it will trigger any skills that involve attacks such as Empathy or Spiteful Spirit.
Meditation of the Reaper: This skill gets more and more dangerous the longer it's allowed to continue. While in this meditation he will absorb the next 700 damage done to him and can only be ended by dealing that damage to him. When he comes out of this meditation he will steal 20 health from each player for each second it was active. If it stays active for its full 30 seconds he will steal 600 health from each player, which will result in a complete party wipe.
Riposting Shadows: This skill is nasty in combination with Impossible Odds. It will allow him to shadow step to any player and attack and in combination with Impossible Odds it will cause him to jump around from player to player dealing significant damage without any warning.
Some guild mates said somewhere down the line of updates Shiro was nerfed and made made more difficult to defeat since they don't recall having as much trouble when they did it. Regardless, he almost wiped out our party of 8 quite a few times before we got him to go down. Anyway, his eventual defeat marks the last chapter in Guild Wars I needed to finish. I can now say I have beaten Guild Wars. This includes the chapters Prophecies, Factions and Nightfall as well as the expansion GW:EN (Guild Wars: Eye of the North). I will most likely keep the account open and play some Hard Mode waiting for GW2 to release in the future. No reason not too since it's a free to play online game. For now, I'm taking a small break and went back to playing F.E.A.R. again....up to Interval 8 in that one already but that's for the next blog. ^_^