Guild Wars Factions
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Guild Wars Factions is a 2006 computer game created by ArenaNet and is the first stand-alone chapter expanding on Prophecies, the original Guild Wars game. Factions introduces the player to the continent of Cantha where two warring factions, Luxon and Kurzick, battle for domination. Players are able to join in this conflict, assisting their chosen faction in claiming towns on the game map.
Factions has a new PvE campaign, two new professions, new skills and armor for existing professions, new gameplay modes for both PvE and PvP and also addresses some of the criticisms of the original game.
Buying Factions as a stand-alone game does not allow access to the original game continent, Tyria, and PvE campaign. The professions from Prophecies are available for Factions players to create. However some skills from the original campaign are not available, but new skills for these professions are introduced. Most of the PvP content from Prophecies is available to Factions players.
A player with both Factions and Guild Wars Prophecies can link the games which allows their characters to travel between the two game's continents and the player may maintain two more concurrent characters.
Story
The story is only loosely linked to that of the original campaign, the original games NPC's being the most notable link.
Many centuries prior to the character's time, the Canthan Emperor's bodyguard, Shiro Tagachi, murders the Emperor after receiving an ominous omen from a fortune teller and calls great power to himself. The champions of the Luxon and Kurzick factions, Archemorus and Saint Viktor respectively, and Vizu, an assassin, are able to kill Shiro. However, before dying, Shiro gathered up all his malice, hatred and rage and his death wail triggered what became known as the Jade Wind, turning everything to stone within a hundred miles and turning the sea to jade. However, this was not the end, as Shiro has returned from the Underworld, using his powers as an Envoy to create an unholy army known as the Afflicted in a bid to regain his mortal form and rule Cantha.
New characters join the Shing Jea Monastery for training. During their training the initial impact of Shiro's attempts to return becomes apparent through the illness which is starting to travel through the islands inhabitants, turning them into the vile Afflicted. Once the danger is confirmed the players accompany Master Togo, a revered training master and half brother to the current Canthan emperor, on his travels to Kaineng City to warn and petition the Emperor for his assistance.
Master Togo also expresses his concern to one of his Tyrian students, Mhenlo, an NPC from the Prophecies campaign and requests his assistance. Characters from the original campaign accompany Mhenlo as he travels to Canthan mainland to assist his master.
It becomes clear that Shiro is abusing his power as an Envoy for the dead to meddle in the affairs of the living and turn the souls of the dead into his weapons. Other Envoys approach the players and ask for their assistance to stop Shiro, saying the players need to become Weh No Su (closer to the stars) which will allow them to see and fight beings from the spirit realm.
Vizu, the spirit of the assassin who was key in slaying Shiro the first time, reveals the way to stop Shiro is to use artifacts of the Luxon and Kurzick heroes who originally killed Shiro. After acquiring these artifacts the players are able stop Shiro forming an army in the city, destroying his constructs and closing spirit rifts he had opened. Shiro himself however is not destroyed. The players then choose a side; going with Mhenlo to convince the Kurzicks that Shiro returning is more important than their ongoing war with the Luxons, or travel with Master Togo to convince the Luxons to stop fighting the Kurzicks.
Once the players convince their chosen side players from Luxon and Kurzick meet again to seek advice from the dragon, Kuunavang. However they find that Kuunavang has been corrupted by Shiro, but when defeated Shiro's corruption ends and Kuunavang is able to assist the players on their quest. It is concluded that Shiro is putting together a spell to return to the mortal realm and needs only one more ingredient, the spilt blood of someone descended from the Emperor he killed centuries before.
Shiro raids the palace and kidnaps the Emperor as the players hurry to his aid. The players rush to save the Emperor through Shiro's army of fearsome Shiro'ken. Seeing that the Emperor is no longer a viable target to regain his mortality, Shiro targets Master Togo instead. Shiro kills Togo and returns to a powerful mortal form. In doing so, however, Shiro loses the one thing that kept him from being defeated in the first place: his immortality. The players rise to the challenge and take on Shiro. Shiro is defeated, his mortal form sealed in Jade, and his spirit is given a special place to serve penance in the Underworld.
New professions
Assassin
Introduced with Guild Wars Factions, Assassins rely on stealth, trickery, and swift strikes of their two daggers to subdue and confuse their enemies. While physically slim, the assassin's strength lies in using his enemy's weaknesses to his advantage, making the Assassin a unique character in the world of Guild Wars.
Assassins are a kind of hybrid class; though differentiated from the other classes, the Assassin combines the elements of a damage dealer and a spellcaster. Assassins also have a more complex attack system; a substantial amount of skills are categorized as Lead, Off-hand, and Dual attacks, with some skills requiring activation in sequential combination to be effective. An assassin's skills can be highly effective in dealing damage when combination attacks are successful. Dagger Mastery and Critical Strikes attributes affect skills that enable players to swiftly penetrate their foe's defenses to land damaging blows, the Shadow Arts attribute provides players with defensive, stealth, recovery, and teleportation skills, and the Deadly Arts attribute provides players a wide array of spells and tactics to damage or confuse their enemies.
- Critical Strikes (Primary attribute): For each rank of Critical Strikes, the assassin gains an additional 1% chance to land a Critical Hit. The Assassin also gains energy whenever landing a hit in this way. They gain +1 at rank 3 in this attribute, +2 at rank 8 and +3 at rank 13 and above.
- Shadow Arts: Shadow Arts skills primarily provides the Assassin with defensive stealth skills and health recovery skills, as well as access to the unique shadow step skillset.
- Deadly Arts: Deadly Arts skills harm the enemy through hexes and conditions that either injure the enemy or make them more susceptible to attack.
- Dagger Mastery: Dagger Mastery provides a 2% chance of double-striking per rank of Dagger Mastery and increases dagger damage. Dagger Mastery skills are often attacks to deal more harm to the enemy.
- Unique Skill Sets:
- * Attack system: Many Assassin skills are designed to follow a pattern, with certain attacks opening the way for other attacks. The system goes in the following order; Lead Attack, Off-Hand attack, and Dual Attack. Therefore, effective Assassins open the way with a Lead Attack, follow up with an Off-Hand attack, and then use a Dual Attack. Some combinations of these attacks allow a lengthy attack chain to be formed. There are also some skills that enable the assassin to begin a combination with an Off-Hand attack.
- * Shadow Step: This skill set allows the Assassin to teleport on a whim via Shadow Arts skills, allowing them to strategically plant themself in enemy territory and deal some damaging blows to an unsuspecting quarry, or strategically return back to his allies or a previous location.
Ritualist
-->The other new class introduced with Guild Wars Factions is the Ritualist, a class which employs spirits that heal allies or spread death and destruction amongst foes. They also use the ashes of the dead to deal a wide range of effects.
The Ritualist skillset resembles a combination of the existing Guild Wars classes Monk, Necromancer, and Ranger. Ritualists offer an alternative, or supplemental, healing class to the Monk, as they are also able to heal and resurrect party members. While Necromancers use corpses to raise armies of undead minions, the Ritualist summons healing or damaging spirits, similar to the Ranger's Nature spirits. They can also sacrifice health for some skills and sometimes siphon resources from ally spirits, or even enemies, to empower themselves.
- Spawning Power (Primary Attribute): For each rank of Spawning Power, the health of summoned creatures (spirits or animated undead, if secondary profession is Necromancer) increases by 4%. Spawning Power also increases the effectiveness of skills related to spawning spirits.
- Restoration Magic: Ritualist skills related to life stealing, self-preservation, healing and defense become more effective with a higher Restoration Magic rank.
- Channeling Magic: Ritualist skills related to lightning damage and energy become more effective with a higher Channeling Magic rank.
- Communing: Ritualist skills related to summoning spirits become more effective with a higher Communing rank.
- Unique Skill Sets:
- * Binding Spirits: These beings are chained to the Ritualist's will and perform a wide range of tasks, from damaging, blinding and knocking down enemies, to healing and boosting allies' performance.
- * Item skills: The Ritualist can use a wide variety of ashes, enabling them to perform many tasks, from healing, increasing maximum health and life stealing, to blinding and damaging enemies. Ashes have an area of effect while carried by a Ritualist, and perform an additional effect when they are dropped.
- * Weapon Spells: Ritualists have a variety of skills which improve allies' weapons, with effects such as increasing the weapon's damage output or a player's health.
New gameplay
Factions follows many of the same game mechanisms as the original Guild Wars, making modifications and introducing new types of gameplay.PvE modifications
Cooperative missions in Factions are different from their equivalent in Prophecies. In Prophecies players complete a main mission and an optional bonus mission. Cooperative missions are easy to avoid in Prophecies as most areas are accessible without completing missions. Factions makes all missions compulsory for accessing new areas and completing the game. The bonus mission has been removed and replaced with a tiered reward system based on the time taken to complete the mission. Gold, experience and a skill point is given at each reward tier. Several new concepts for co-operative missions have been introduced, such as missions with two teams of eight and missions specifically for killing a single boss.
The time taken for a new character to reach the maximum level of twenty is reduced and most of the areas are designed for level twenty characters. Experience, and therefore skill points, are easy to acquire once level twenty is reached. This means that the time taken to unlock skills through PvE play is reduced from Prophecies. Skill acquisition is modified also, most skills must be purchased from Skill Traders, rather than received by completing quests.
Boss enemies now do double damage and take half the time to use spells and skills in addition to having shortened hex and condition durations.
Factions and alliances
Factions introduces two factions which players and guilds may side with;- Kurzick - respecting art and social order, the gothic Kurzick dwell in the Echovald Forests
- Luxon - respecting strength above all else, the Jade Sea dwelling Luxon are often compared to pirates
An alliance is a group of up to ten guilds aligned with the same faction who agree to join in an alliance under the name of a single lead guild.
Each faction has a number of towns which they own, the control of these towns is given to alliances with the highest standing with their faction. Standing is earnt by the alliance by accepting donations of faction points from the players in the alliance.
A player may earn account based Kurzick or Luxon faction points while they are playing Factions. Faction points are earned doing PvE quests for a faction, competing in Alliance battles, in Competitive Missions or some Challenge Missions. If the player does not wish to donate faction to the alliance, or if they play for the faction which the guild isn't allied with, they can trade their faction points for armor crafting materials. A player is considered Luxon or Kurzick by having a majority of unspent faction points for the faction they support. To change faction a player needs to acquire a majority of factions points for their new faction.
Competitive missions
Factions provides PvE players access to two competitive missions, a new game type for the Factions campaign. In these missions, two random teams of eight compete to reach specific objectives. If a player dies they respawn in the base and are able to rejoin the fight to meet the objectives. When the match finishes the players are returned to a waiting area to start the next battle.
- The Jade Quarry is a point capture mission. The common goal for both factions is to capture the jade quarries so that jade can be dug from them. Each jade shipment that successfully made its way back to the Faction's base is worth one point. In addition, there are several Watchtowers to be captured, giving strategic advantage to the owner when attacking the jade shipments.
- In the Fort Aspenwood mission the Luxons must storm a Kurzick base and kill three NPCS known as Gate Guard Radick, Gate Guard Poletski and Master Archtecht Gunther, a Kurzick engineer, to stop him from making a new weapon for the Kurzicks. Additionally, the Luxons must intercept amber shipments to slow down the development of the Kurzick weapon and base repairs by the Kurzick team. The base must be defended by the Kurzicks long enough for the engineer to complete the weapon.
Challenge missions
These missions are a new gameplay type introduced in Factions. They set specific scoring objectives for a team to meet, offering rewards of gold, experience or faction points dependent on the teams performance in the mission. The best teams over all time, each month and each day are recorded for players to view online. There are five different missions each with different objectives. For example, Dragon's Throat requires the players to kill as many enemies as possible over a period of time and Amatz Basin requires the players to save as many NPC adepts as possible in a set time.
Alliance battles
Alliance Battles are where the Luxon and Kurzick factions battle for control of towns on the game map. Each faction is represented by a team of twelve, split into three squads of four. Players form squads of four which are randomly teamed with two other teams for the match.The objective of the battle is to be the first faction to reach 500 points. Points are rewarded for capturing and holding strategic map points and player kills. Players do not get a death penalty and are automatically resurrected. Players on both the winning and losing side are rewarded with Kurzick or Luxon faction points.
The battles are fought on a series of five maps which are weighted from strong advantage to the Luxons, through neutral to strong advantage to the Kurzick. The map played on depends on the land held by the faction. For example, if the Luxon are holding a lot of land, the maps played on give advantage to the Kurzick.
Editions
In addition to the Standard edition which includes the games CDs, basic Account Creation Code and Manuscript Book the following editions have been available for Factions.Pre-order edition
Players who pre-ordered Factions were able to get a bonus CD. The disc included;
- concept art
- unique pre-order only weapons
- early access to Factions game play
- access to beta events
Collector's edition
A Collectors edition is available for players to purchase. Players purchasing this edition will receive in addition to standard edition materials;
- Soundtrack CD
- Art Book
- Sticker Set
- Mouse Pad
- Desk Calendar
- Factions Poster
- Special dance emote for Assassin and Ritualist characters
- Code for free Factions Music mini pak
- Cloth picture (European edition only)
- A Minipet Kuunavang (Miniture NPC Dragon that follows the player)
Special Events
Dragon Festival Event (30 June - July 5, 2006)
Emperor Kisu dedicated a new Dragon Festival to commemorate the survival of the Empire of the Dragon. In this event there were new quests and festival mini-games which involved the gambling of tickets (You could cash in 25 tickets to win festival prizes which would result you in getting Five Jade Wind Orbs, rice wine, red bean cakes or even 1,000 gold). On the last day of the celebrations, the Emperor himself made an appearance every two hours and would reward a Dragon Mask to anyone who had 250 Jade Wind Orbs in their inventory. The Dragon Masks can be sold but new owners can't use them because they are customized to the ones who earn it.
A special PvP arena named "The Dragon Arena" was also introduced during the festival. In this PvP arena everyone's stats were evened out and everyone was allocated the same three skills. The objective was to be the first to reach twenty kills. If your team won a bout, you would be each rewarded with five Jade Wind Orbs.
After the event, a collector was added who could give a Dragon Mask for 250 Jade Wind Orbs, for those who had been unable to be there for the event.
External links
- [The official Guild Wars website]
- [The official Guild Wars ladder]
- [ArenaNet, the makers of Guild Wars]
- [Complete list of Guild Wars fansites]
- [GuildWiki], a Guild Wars wiki
- [Guild Wars Guru], an Elite Fansite
| | |
|---|---|
| Video games: | Guild Wars | Guild Wars Factions | Guild Wars Nightfall |
| Characters: | Aidan | Cynn | Devona | Mhenlo | Prince Rurik | King Adelbern |
| Other: | Character builds | Equipment | Locations | Professions |
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