Witches.

One of the things I like to do from time to time in the game is to attempt to play characters in guilds and associations that don't get played very often -- Porphyria originated as an attempt to make a viable character that remained an adventurer her whole career (an idea I revisited later on with a tuatha character I got to about level 32 and then deleted), I've gotten two brutes to hero-level... Obviously, I also enjoy playing the more popular guilds as well, but I have found that just about any guild can be playable (and enjoyable), no matter how much some people might talk about a certain guild 'being broken', 'sucking' or 'needing an update'.

So my latest real project character: A zenun Maleficus. My first impressions of the Ordo Maleficus guild were not at all kind. It is, amongst all else, a Den guild, which means it has help files that aren't quite as forthcoming as those for other guilds, it has hard level requirements for the use of a couple of the higher-level powers, some of the powers have rather serious cooldown requirements (if a ringwielder can pop off hundreds of area attacks an hour, why does my only real area attack have an hours-long cooldown?), and it hasn't had much dev-love for quite some time. I've run a few characters through the gauntlet of this guild, not really getting anywhere, and even got frustrated and deleted a level 30-something tuatha with a psychic healer talent who I brought over from the Elflords.

With this character, I've finally been able to find a play style that works for a witch... For the most part in the past, I was bummed that the witches, on their own, did not seem to offer a whole lot of bang for the buck -- Most of the damage-dealing powers cost a lot of SP, blood foci are hard to maintain, and witches are inherently pretty squishy (they get little decent combat specialty access).

(Will continue in next post)