Exalted Legionnaires [ExL]

Welcome to the Exalted Legionnaires' website. It is currently under construction and you may be noticing some large differences over time due to this being a REAL website, and not a free template. All images, buttons, links, gadgets and do-whackies were created by the admin (me).

This was once a GvG guild, we are no longer specifying our origin, however our interests have differed over time and we are now primarily a guild specializing in PvE, namely; the Elite Missions. Although we don't do The Deep quite as much as we used to, that is just because it is getting less and less worthwhile to get a Kanaxi item and its chests are full of Effigy's. We do however also hope to get a little GvG time in, just for practice and to have fun. We are not shooting for a high rank anymore, so if you are looking to be top50, you're in the wrong place. This is where players can come to simply have fun, farm a bit, trade around, make a lot of money, or just to pick up 12 and get into The Deep or Urgoz' Warren without hassle, with a proper - paid for ventrilo server, and competent, listening, experienced players. We only ask that you follow orders in combat.

If you are interested in joining [ExL], then you may apply here. We ask that you carefully read over the application and answer the questions to the best of your ability. We are beginning to get a little more strict about our members. If an application is even filled out poorly, we may just simply overlook it.

That brings up another point. We are a laid back fun-loving guild. We make jokes, we fool around. But flaming, pointing fingers, and simple comments that will offend our players are prohibited. You may find yourself kicked without notice. Please read the Rules section for more details.

This is a very newly constructed website, created in only minutes. Please report any broken links, bugs, errors, or even spelling and punctuation mistakes to an admin immediately. The site will be spiced up, but until we figure out what and how we want to add anything else, we will leave it plain and simple. It's user friendly that way.

Suggestions are highly welcomed, although we only appreciate constructive critisism in this guild. Thank you for taking the time to read this and for visiting Exalted Legionnaires' website.

Regards, Leviathan

October 22nd, 2006

Guild Wars: Nightfall hands-on

The third campaign in the ever-growing Guild Wars universe, Nightfall is set to deliver plenty of new content for spell-flinging, scythe-slashing gamers. New to this release are NPC Heroes, two professions, a bunch of missions and cinematics that follow an all new story, PvP Hero Battles, and around 350 new skills. On top of that, players can expect plenty of tweaks to item customization, more enemy types, and even a rideable sand wurm (called a junundu) with its own unique skill set. We recently got a chance to head over to developer Arenanet's offices to see how things were going and get some hands-on time with a near final build.

Though in both Prophecies (the original Guild Wars, also known as campaign one) and Factions players could enlist the help of henchman NPCs, they never distinguished themselves with any character or backstory. In Nightfall 14 Heroes can be recruited, all with their own backgrounds and motivations that actually play a part in the game's overarching narrative. As players journey across the desert lands of Elona they'll be forced to make choices as to who they want to bring along. In other words, at specific story points players will have to make a decision between recruiting one Hero or the other. To offer solace to obsessive collectors out there, we were told all 14 can eventually be recruited once the narrative has been completed.

From your hero pool only three can be in your party at any time. This was implemented for two reasons. First, to encourage players to seek out other humans online to fill out the rest of their available party slots. Second, because more than three heroes in a party can get confusing to control. Hero customization is a much more involving process than manipulating the henchmen of previous Guild Wars games. In Nightfall players can give their Heroes new weapons, assign all their attribute points, customize their skill hotkeys, switch around their secondary professions, and drop runes onto their armor pieces for added statistical benefits. Heroes can also be told where to go on the field of battle by selecting them and issuing move orders to the lot of them or individually. Which skills a Hero employs during battle can also be customized. Clicking on their name in the right hand party bar opens up a menu where skills on their hotbar can be instantly triggered, behavioral patterns like attack, guard, or avoid combat can be assigned, and skills can be deactivated should the situation demand it. One aspect of Heroes that can't be customized is their armor, which auto-levels with them.

When a Hero joins your party they become available in PvP, and you'll want to use them for the new Hero Battle mode. Arenanet felt straight up one on one PvP fights would be too unbalanced, so they implemented a mode where two players square off against each other with three of their heroes in tow. Properly assigning skills to the eight slot hotbar becomes even more crucial here, since instead of just worrying about your own you have to be concerned with 24 others. Add in the ability to control Hero movement during a fight and being able to customize their aggression levels, and things just got a lot more complicated.

Joining the much more robust NPC allies are two new professions, the Dervish and the Paragon. With a name like Paragon you may get the impression this profession is some kind of all-powerful ultra-killer. Not so. The Paragon's main benefit is party buffs, meaning it's a support class. From playing around with the skills a bit, Paragons seemed weaker than others with their attacks. Mostly, that's because it's how they were designed. They can toss spears at foes with all sorts of skills that add in bleeding and deep wounds on opponents that can thereafter be exploited by complementary follow up strikes. Paragons will have a number of shout skills that buff up nearby party members, as well as echoes that buff single allies. On top of that they'll have chants, which are a new kind of buff that lay dormant on characters until special circumstances activate them. When certain chants called refrains are active on a character, it functions to automatically refresh specific beneficial buffs once their timer runs out.

The Dervish profession is geared more toward close up combat, clearly evident from the giant scythe they wield. Capable of smacking multiple targets with one swing, Dervishes can augment their damage with a number of self-enchantments. Even more interesting are some of this profession's high level abilities. Eventually Dervishes can obtain elite forms that grant brief periods of great power along with aesthetic alterations to underscore the transformation. The Avatar of Balthazar form, for instance, nets you 40 armor, a 33 percent speed boost, and your strikes dish out holy damage on top of your attacks. By engaging the Avatar of Grenth players can with an attack skill use deal additional cold damage and remove one enchantment from a target.

When starting up a game of Nightfall with any of the game's classes, you'll find yourself playing the role of a Sunspear, one of Elona's protectors. Your character just so happens to be chosen for a leadership track. To gain Sunspear rank, players can talk to Sunspear scouts at any resurrection point. Doing so will give you bonus experience and promotion points for taking out specific creature types. As your Sunspear rank increases you'll receive Hero skill points that can be doled out regardless of class. While murdering monsters and completing quests, you'll also want to keep an eye out for recruitable NPCs. Once found these special characters can be sent back to a private quarters where you can put their skills to use. For instance, perhaps the only way to get a certain weapon is to recruit the right smith hidden out in the fields.

When we finally got to sit down and play the game, we smashed around a few lumbering mesas (giant stone enemies) with the new sand wurms in a mission called Gates of Desolation. These things can only be used in specific areas of the desert, but are extremely powerful. Their skills include a heal, a projectile attack, and something called a wurm thump whereby the creature lifts itself out of the sand and drops on foes for big damage. Players don't actually ride on the back of these things, but in their mouths. As a result, your own character model isn't visible while controlling a wurm. Instead, you just see the things head bobbing around in the sand and it speeds along. We also discovered wurms in Nighfall can dance. It's not much, just a sleepy shifting of weight from side to side, but it's there.

In an effort to increase the game's user-friendliness, Arenanet is including the ability to save your skill loadouts. This way you can store a number of hotkey configurations for easy access later on, instead of having to completely switch everything in and out when you want to change things up. An equipment builder for PvP will allow further customization, and those settings can be saved for later use as well. What kind of benefits powerful items bestow on players can now be fiddled around with to a greater degree. Item inscription allows for highly customizable damage effects on weapons and armor. From random mobs will drop something called armor insignias which can be applied to items for even more bonuses. Arenanet also mentioned they were decoupling stats from armor's visual appearance, which they believe should please hardcore fans.

Since many believed (including members of the development team) that Factions' leveling rate was much too high, Nightfall will offer players smaller chunks of xp. It'll still be more than in Prophecies, however. In case anyone was wondering, Arenanet has no plans to bump the number of hotkey slots over eight. It should also be noted that when the question was raised as to whether the appearance of rideable wurms in Nightfall signified some kind of mounts in a future campaign, the members of the development team we were talking to chuckled, smiled, and said they couldn't talk about it. Nightfall hits shelves in about a week, so look for our review soon.



Information provided by IGN.com

October 13th, 2006

For those of you wondering what the dervish looks like in black dye, here it is. It dyes pretty well, I can't wait to get my hero all black. Can you guess how high black dye prices are going to go? No of course not. It's unfathomable.

Updates

-Created a comment box for the website
-Created a Counter for the website

October 11th, 2006

Updates

-Updated the Lore Page vastly
-Reopened the forums for applicants
-Added several Screenshots to the Gallery

October 10th, 2006

This weekend, every Canthan boss monster that you slay will be three times as likely to drop a special, or "green," item. The start of this event will be Noon PDT on Friday and the greens will continue to drop at triple the normal rate through 11:59 p.m. PDT on Sunday. Good hunting!

Updates

-Added the Lore, Gallery, and Rules of Conduct pages to the website
-Added all new Nightfall Preview music to the Lore, Gallery, and Rules of Conduct Pages
-Changed the Screenshot of the Week; come on people, we need some screenshots. Go to The Gallery to send in some screenshots

September 28th, 2006

It's funny how something so small can turn into something so big. After realizing we needed some steel in preparation for the oncoming Nightfall expansion, we decided that Sorrow's Furnace would be a good place to farm them, but once we got to Deldrimor Warp Camp we decided to try it with only 3 players. While Sorrow's Furnace is said to be impossible with any less than 5 players, we were determined to prove people wrong as we have done so many times in the past. It was a little rough at first. Although Rockmoulder was easy (he also dropped The Rockmoulder, for me) Wrock Yakslapper was a bit of a pain, he would not go down. We actually had to let him live while we killed everything else outside the gate slowly. When we figured out that the enemies would not go down with Yakslapper around, we had one of us soak the damage and Crippling Anguish while the others ran inside. We were successful.

We then very slowly started to pick off the groups until the first room was clear, and continued to do so very slowly as we progrssed through Sorrow's Furnace. Our biggest issue was with the Priests, especially the one next to Grognar, but that is to be expected. After about a half hour of picking groups off, we ran into Grognar. It took about 10 minutes due to aggro issues and a Priest, but we managed to bring him down, where he dropped both of his items (for me, again. Heh).

Now we all know that Grognar's Blade and Defender aren't worth very much gold, but I'm happier about these drops than I am about the ones we get in The Deep and Urgoz' Warren, because we did something that was said to be impossible and I walked out with a trophy in my hand to show it. It might not be worth much, but I've never been prouder walking out of a dungeon, especially one I have next to no experience in.

August 9th, 2006

We finally have a taste of what the landscapes of Elona are like. I, for one, am excited to play in these environments. Tyria had so-so landscapes, and Cantha had downright ugly landscapes, but this is beautiful. If you look at the photo of the Dervish, it looks to me like a Guild Hall. You be the judge. Either way I'm looking forward to Nightfall, moreso than Factions.

Take a look at the landscape second from the top and take a look at the background. Recognize it? Now take a guess as to where Nightfall will be located Geographically.

Updates

-Postponed the regrouping of ExL due to some sudden unusual success in other guilds

August 8th, 2006

ExL is about to be sprung back to life, only this time with a more competative spirit. For a short while a good chunk of our players went their seperate ways to find some new experiences and to get involved in some competative Guild Battles; but kept in contact. The majority of us have found success in doing so, but have had a recent interest in some builds that have been thought up.

We will begin by testing the water with both our pet, and our smite builds. If either of these builds go well, we will make this a permanent build for this guild. Both builds are ridiculously powerful and land some serious overkill on enemies quickly, but has not been tested against the many counters to the builds out there. It will need to be tested against groups with interrupts, denials, and brute force. It is already plainly obvious that either of these builds can and will reach rank 500, and maybe even 300 even without having much or any practice with this build.

The build will NOT be posted on the public website, and preferably not the forums either. If you enjoy seeing the big green word in the above screenshot lots, get in on our team. There will be lots of that. I will update the situation when necessary.

Updates

-ExL rally is set to begin before Friday August 11th

July 20th, 2006

Updates

-Added music to the main page

July 19th, 2006

The two new professions' portraits are now public, visit The Guild Wars Gallery for more precise and higher resolution pictures.

Updates

-Updated the website; added the subpage "Alliance"

July 18th, 2006

ArenaNet®, developer of the world's leading subscription-free online roleplaying games Guild Wars® and Guild Wars FactionsTM, and NCsoft® Corporation, the world's leading developer and publisher of online computer games, announce today the title of the next game in the award-winning franchise, Guild Wars NightfallTM. Further, Guild Wars Nightfall has entered the beta testing stage and Guild Wars players worldwide are invited to participate in an exclusive, first-look player-versus-player (PVP) event, July 28 — 30, 2006.

During the PVP Preview Event, both Guild Wars and Guild Wars Factions® players will get a first look at Guild Wars Nightfall, and will be able to try out the two new professions being introduced in the game; the Dervish, a scythe-wielding holy warrior, and the Paragon, guardian angel of the Elonian people. In addition to testing out the new professions and arenas, players will also be able to compete for items that will be exchangeable for a variety of rewards throughout the weekend event.

The Guild Wars Nightfall PVP Preview event will kick off on Friday, July 28 at 12:01am PDT and will continue through Sunday, July 30 at 11:59pm PST.

Guild Wars, an instant bestseller worldwide upon its release in April 2005, and Guild Wars Factions, the number one game in both North America and Europe earlier this year, are global online roleplaying games. Guild Wars Nightfall will continue the tradition of inviting players to immerse themselves in an epic storyline centered in a vibrant fantasy setting, build personalized characters, compete in head-to-head battles with players from around the world, and find adventure in missions and quests, in a Guild Wars game unlike any players have seen before.

Go to www.guildwars.com for more info.

***Notice***

Regardless of your connection or relationship with any player in ExL, or the guild as a whole, it is now mandatory to state your reason when leaving the guild. Failure to comply with this will result in declining party requests in the future with our alliance. Though this may sound irrelevant, we do The Deep and Urgoz' Warren daily, sometimes more. We often make up a good chunk of the available players (at least the good ones) in the outpost. Therefore your chances of getting into a full group with experienced and knowledgable players will shrink by that much. Leaving a guild without notice is unprofessional and is not looked upon kindly. If nobody is on, then there's always our forums. To ExL, leaving the guild without notice is equivelant to rage quitting in a GvG. Thanks.

July 17th, 2006

As of Monday the 17th, our alliance has experienced its first failure in The Deep. Although it's a great shame, it was also an eye opener about how lenient we were being on who can play with us. It is now mandatory to have ventrilo, and it is mandatory that players in our groups listen to whomever the party leader at the time may be. Hopefully we will not make a silly mistake like this again. Our Urgoz' Warren streak remains unharmed - still without using cookie-cutter trap builds.

Updates

-Suffered our first ever loss in The Deep due to "Brick Wall" PUGs

July 16th, 2006

Updates

-Added a poll, although it is not operational at this time
-Added a Screenshot of the Week section
-Several new players recruited

July 12th, 2006

As you can see from the above image, our guild runs swiftly and smoothly from what should be some of the hardest aspects of Guild Wars. Urgoz' Warren was completed in just over two and a half hours. Furthermore, we did not use a trap group. This was entirely an experimental setup, and half the team were pick-ups. Here in ExL, we believe in real self-built, unique and original builds; as opposed to cookie-cutter builds such as Trap groups.

Updates

-Launched the ExL website
-Located the music file "Unwaking Waters Theme" and will be adding it once I've figured out the tag
-Some new players recruited

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