Guardian and Skills

The Templar Guardian class is the "tank" of the game, capable of using skills and equipment to withstand tremendous damage. You'll want one of these in your party. Guardians aren't just meat shields, though. They have plenty of useful skills and can kill effectively as well, whether with swords or pistols. Contents
Guardian Description
There are many differences between the two Templar classes, but both will work largely as melee fighters. Guardians are best at taking on big packs of monsters at once, while Blademasters kill very quickly, but can not take the damage from a mob. Guardians actually prefer mobs, with skills and auras that increase their healing rate, or damage, or other properties when there are more enemies nearby. Guardians can have a harder time with a single monster than with a pack, oddly enough.

Guardians can use pistols, and it's nice to have those handy for dealing with various running or flying monsters, but the class is best with a sword and shield.

There was early worries that the Guardian was too defensive a character and that Guardians would not be able to kill as quickly as other characters. They can't, if you measure only the actual damage output, but Guardians have such strong defensive skills that they seldom need to retreat or reposition, standing them in stark contrast to the various higher damage "glass cannon" characters. Blademasters might do more damage, but they spend a great deal of time running around to reposition and string out monster mobs, while the Guardian can just wade in and tank the lot, doing damage the whole time. Its more a difference in play style than doing "less damage".
Guardian Skills

The Guardian has 27 skills, mostly involving surviving in the midst of battle, without resorting to "tactical retreats" like Marksmen and Evokers particularly have to do. Skills are focused on healing, defence and keeping the foes to attack the Guardian, and not some fragile party member. The skills are roughly divided into four Skill Groups: Swordsmanship, Auras, Prayers, and Taunts. Skills in related groups are sometimes, but not necessarily, connected by dependency lines and have each other as prerequisites. Guardians have a lot of auras with all sorts of effects, including healing, damaging, and otherwise inconveniencing monsters. In addition to all the various auras, Guardians have a variety of shield skills, defence-boosting skills, and a few combat skills as well.


Guardian Equipment



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Flagship Responds to Subscription Issues and Other Concerns

The big issue on billing problems that we reported on yesterday is now dealt with according to Flagship Studios. Kaiser Hwang, Senior Community Manager of Flagship Studios says: "After burning several drums of midnight oil, we have resolved all current billing issues with our payment processing partners. We’ve completed our payment reconciliation process and players that were incorrectly billed will see paybacks credited to their credit card accounts in the next few days".

The statement goes on to say: "We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused, although it impacted just 3% of people that requested to become subscribing members. There is also approximately an equal amount of players whose subscription status has been approved, but their cards were uncharged as we did not process their payment until the issues were resolved".

"Again, we’re sorry to those of you who were affected by this," signed The Hellgate: London team.

ShackNews has also gotten an answer from Ivan Sulic: "We've contacted every single one of [the affected users] to work out the problem. We should be sailing a lot smoother from here on out".

While the problem never was a big thing on the Unofficial Site forums, the whole problem seems to have been subjected to a very small, unfortunate, and (understandably) vocal, minority of the Hellgate: London subscribers. Ten minutes later, Kaiser also gave all Hellgate: London players a second statement on what Flagship and Ping0 are working on right now:
Dear Customers,

We realize many of you are experiencing a variety of problems. We at Flagship and Ping0 are working hard to address these issues.

Our current top priorities are:

* Resolving any remaining problems related to billing and subscriptions.
* Fixing two known bugs which cause players to sometimes lose items (one related to dual focus/dual melee, and one related to loading issues).
* Making improvements to memory usage in order to reduce "Memory Exhausted" crashes.
* Fixing a known issue with the user interface which causes the application to lock up intermittently.* An issue which occasionally prevents characters from being able to load or switch instances.
* General chat interface improvements. (Many improvements are in the works).
* Random disconnects and lag.
* Allowing higher resolution textures and models for other players.
* Various known problems with being able to continue interrupted side quests.
* Remnant quest items not getting destroyed and "clogging" up inventory.
* Continued problems with saving / loading Engineer Drone items.
* Invisible party members.
* The nanoforge not correctly improving rare and better armors.
* Getting stuck on collision.

Some of these are issues which will be fixed as soon as possible and go live in upcoming patches, some will be in our upcoming content patch, and others are issues on which we will make gradual improvements to on a continuous basis.

Of course we also have a more extensive bug list as well as lot of general improvements and new content in the works. Everyone here is
working full-time to support Hellgate. We appreciate your patience.

-The Hellgate: London team

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Hellgate London Screenshots

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The Artists At Weta

Popular figures site, Figures.com has posted several interviews with the sculptors at Weta. These are great personal interviews with the folks who created the awesome Hellgate: London figures. Click the links below to check them out.
Eden Small (Male Templar sculptor)
David Meng (Cabalist sculptor)
Brigitte Wuest (Female Templar sculptor)
Also, in case you forgot, Weta is holding a contest where the winner gets their head sculpted onto a custom Hellgate: London figure! Check out all the details right here.
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How To Get On The Forums

So you live in the EU, have created an EU account, and are now wondering, "How do I get on the forums?"
First thing: Currently, all forums are located on the US version of the site (http://www.hellgatelondon.com/). Eventually there will be some sort of forum locally on the EU site, but this date is still TBA.
Second thing: To access the US forums, you'll need to create a game account on the US site as well. This is because we have separate account databases for US and EU players. It's free to create, doesn't take long, and you can use the same account name as your EU one if you wish (assuming it's available).
Sorry if there's been any confusion on this, and thanks!

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Beta Grace Period

Please note, if you are in the Hellgate: London beta, the grace period for playing the game without entering a retail registration key is almost up. As of Wednesday, November 14, 2007, we will require that all accounts have a registration code in order to play.
To continue playing, you need to enter the registration key from your purchased copy of Hellgate: London into your existing account management page. You do not need to make a new account, however. You also do not need to be a subscriber to continue playing from where your characters are in-game. Simply log into your account and enter the retail registration key into the registration key field on your account management page...
Account Management – [LINK]
Thanks for the continued support and feedback. We encourage everyone to check out what’s in the works whenever we promote patches to the Test Center servers by joining us there.
Again, no beta players without registration codes will be able to login and play after November 14, 2007.
See you online!

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New SP Update Coming

On November 8 at approximately 8:00am PST, we'll be releasing a new single player update for Hellgate: London. This update will not impact our online game servers. There is, however, a chance you will not immediately see the update tomorrow morning as we'll be throttling delivery to ensure a smooth release.
Fixed: Multiplayer starting on a black screen for a very small percentage of users that applied the 1.40 single player patch.
Fixed: Incomplete downloads for the single player and launcher patches. Please Note: This update is not a single player version of the Guy Fawkes patch, what we typically refer to as Patch 0.1.
Thanks again for playing!
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Forum Maintenance

Forum Maintenance
Howdy everyone! We will be taking the EU forums* down for maintenance tonight at 9pm PST for additional database work. The outage should last no longer than a couple of hours. We'll also be performing the same maintenance on the US forums at 7am PST this coming Saturday, November 10th.
*Note: Currently the EU forums only contain announcement posts that can be reached by clicking the "Talk About This Story!" link found at the bottom of every news post.
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Completion of Server Maintenance

Dear gamers,

we have successfully completed our first maintenance for the Hellgate:London online servers.

Here're the server maintenance notes:

1. Patch-0(including the Level Cap removal) has not been implemented on the game service yet due to minor glitches encountered during the testing.

2. All servers have restarted to ensure proper efficiency. All networks have been checked and flushed accordingly.

We are currently testing the Patch-0 aggressively to ensure that the patch will not create any glitches during its implementation. Following the completion of the test (expected to take at least 24 hours), we will schedule an ad-hoc downtime to implement the patch on the game service.

Thank you for your patience and have a good day gaming!

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Bill Roper responds to Hellgate: London criticisms

We speak with Flagship Studios CEO Bill Roper about the future of Hellgate: London, and give him a chance to answer some of the most vocal criticisms against the game.
GamePro Reviews Hellgate: London
Hellgate: Disappointing?

Hellgate: Disappointing?

Hellgate: London does offer some simple-minded entertainment, but it falls well short of its lofty goals

GP: Why don't you start by showing us what's in store for Hellgate: London players in the form of extra content and subscriber-only features?

Bill Roper: Sure. Subscribers get different gameplay modes, perks like extra character slots and a bigger item stash. But right around Halloween we wanted to have things that subscribers could get right away. There are three things. First, we wanted to have a repeatable quest -- trick or treating. There are different kinds of candy you can get, and some of them have gameplay effects. We also have a unique piece of armor called "All Hallow's Visage," a helm that looks like a flaming skull. It's a pretty rare drop. There's also a Halloween-themed pet -- the "Zombot." There's a recipe you can find, and you track down the components and build it.
Bill Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios

Bill Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios

Around the December timeframe, we'll be adding a new town to the game, with new surrounding adventure areas. It's all-new environment artwork. The new town will be set in Stonehenge - outside of London. [Stonehenge] is in this protected mystic bubble, so it still stands despite the demon invasion. The adventuring areas all around it will be outdoors, set in the wilderness. There will be new quests, new story points, and some other things that we'll share later.

GP: I've lurked on the Beta forums quite a few times, and I see you have quite a passionate community...

Bill Roper: [laughs] We definitely have a passionate community. That's a great way to describe it - the "passionate response" we get in our forums. If people didn't care about the game, they wouldn't say those things. But sometimes it's hard for us to read some of [those comments].

GP: I can imagine. I've seen some really withering criticisms in those forums...

Bill Roper: I think there was some confusion about what the game was going to be initially, [particularly] free play versus subscribing. I think there's still a lot of that. It's honestly confusing to me about the way people react to the subscription option in Hellgate. It's been more of a challenge to us than we anticipated. The whole idea was to give everybody what they wanted. Because we're doing this hybrid model, it's almost like people try to figure out how we're screwing them... but we're not! For subscribers, it's actually less than other MMOs like Tabula Rasa or World of Warcraft [$9.99 versus $14.99]. We're not trying to hose you, we're just trying to give people what they want.

But yeah, it can be tough to go on the forums. You try to explain things and interact with the community, but there's a small percentage of people that will never be happy no matter what. You could pay them $5 a month to play your game, and they'll complain that they want $10.

GP: It's pretty common in the games industry.

Bill Roper: And I wonder if it's unique to the games industry. I don't see people [complaining about and slamming] TVs and movies on message boards, but it's very much that way for games.

GP: One of the biggest complaints is about the variety of the levels: despite being in London, you fight in dungeons and basements and sewers an awful lot.

Bill Roper: We re-flowed the level layouts in the final version, with a focus on theming the Acts, so that should help. We probably have as many, if not more, level variations in Hellgate as we did in Diablo 2. The reason it feels different is because the game takes place in London or Hell. I think the Act changes in Diablo 2 were more striking - desert, forest, jungle - but if you look at the individual areas, it pretty much boiled down to forest, graveyard, underground caverns, and the Rogue's headquarters. That's pretty much Act 1 of Diablo 2.

But I don't wholly disagree [with the complaint about a lack of visual variety], and I think it came off that way because the levels weren't themed really well [in the earlier versions of Hellgate]. Theming Acts really helped things feel different. We didn't add any areas, but the game now feels far more thematic because we tweaked the layouts and graphic look for each Act. That's one of the big changes we made in the last month of development.

GP: Here's another popular complaint: In Hellgate, weapons are far more useful than skills -- my Marksman mostly used his gun, not his skills and abilities. Will you further tweak skills to make them more useful? Would you ever consider totally re-doing the current skills?

Bill Roper: We will never completely re-do skills, but we will always look at them. The final version has a seen many skill changes. What we wanted to do in Hellgate was to make the weapons into spell-delivery systems. Skills in Hellgate alter the way you use your primary weapon, such as the Marksman's grenades.

The other thing is, players have had a long time in Diablo 2 to figure out all the different character builds. Honestly, players haven't had much time to [experiment] in Hellgate with different skills and builds. In Diablo 2, a lot of the skills outright sucked. It's also very different in Hellgate, because skills grow with you as you level. In Hellgate, we didn't want people to regret putting points into early-level skills. Obviously we'll continue to tweak and balance the skills, but Hellgate uses a very different skill system from D2 and people will figure it out.

GP: You guys deleted some of the zanier humor from the characters for the final version. Was that in response to complaints from Beta players?

Bill RoperYes, that was definitely in response to people saying "this is too wacky and out of place" and "it doesn't feel as urgent, it feels too goofy." I've definitely pushed for the storyline to [go a certain way]. There's been Hell on Earth for 18 years...their perception is pretty twisted at this point. But there were some characters that were over-the-top. The way we handled it was to dial back the [crazier dialogue] from the NPCs so they are less likely to say them.

GP: Finally, what will Hellgate look like in six months or a year?

Bill RoperIt's going to continue to grow. For the first time, we have the opportunity to produce ongoing content and not say "let's wait a year for the expansion." It's been a lot of work...but in six months or a year, we'll have longer windows to produce [bigger] subscriber content. [For example], this December we'll be releasing a 300MB or so patch.

GP: Thanks, Bill.

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