By now I imag­ine many of you have tried out the new Skir­mish sys­tem. I pur­posely avoided a lot of the more detailed infor­ma­tion on Skir­mishes and was able to go in pretty fresh. My gen­eral thought? They’re awe­some.

In a lot of ways many of them feel almost like a Tower Defense game. You have areas to pro­tect, while ran­dom groups of ene­mies and lead­ers make their way in to push you back. It’s quite action packed and I think it finally gives PvE play­ers a sense of being in an actual war. Plus, it’s just awe­some to see famil­iar areas in dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions. Bree cov­ered in tons of snow and being invaded by brig­ands is not some­thing you’re used to seeing.

I espe­cially like the amount of con­trol you’re given over the sys­tem. Once you com­plete the entry quest (which is rel­a­tively sim­ple, but kind of a downer) and the tuto­r­ial, you can join a skir­mish at pretty much any point. These can be adjusted by area, level, dif­fi­culty (there’s three tiers of this). The way it’s designed, there’s almost no real way to get tired of it aside from over­ex­po­sure. Con­sid­er­ing there are some addi­tional skir­mishes that were in the beta but are still being worked on (as noted at CStM), I think we’ll have a good amount to do for a while.

The Skir­mish Marks you receive dur­ing these bat­tles are barter tokens. You’re given a sol­dier to help you out and these tokens can give them new abil­i­ties. You can trade for all sorts of items for your char­ac­ters as well, includ­ing class quest items. There’s some unique items as well, some of which I’ve got my eye on. Even so, I’d  cer­tainly rec­om­mend mak­ing your sol­dier as strong as pos­si­ble early on. The stronger the sol­dier is, the eas­ier it’ll be to amass those marks.

Casual Stroll to Mor­dor also has an excel­lent post with answers to com­mon Skir­mish ques­tions. I really sug­gest you check it out if you find your­self confused.

How has every­one else’s expe­ri­ence with this been so far?