Out of all the guilds on Evolution of Annihilation, the Angular Guild is one of the most exclusive. Not because the players are the highest level, or because they are the best. Well, they are the best, just not at anything anyone else cares about to challenge them at.
Recruitment is slim. It’s done by word of mouth, or by the Guild members following up the occasional rumor that someone had somehow cheesed a fairground game at one of EoA’s many festivals.
Really, for how serious of a name it has, this game is more lighthearted than anything else I’ve ever played. All VRMMOs are trying to entertain, of course, but EoA seems to be trying too hard at times. After a few hours of playing, I had to go play some other games, ones that require me to think and survive by the skin of my teeth, just as a palate cleanse.
But for the Captain of the Angular Guild, that’s never a problem. He played a bunch of games, of course, because everyone does, but EoA kept pulling him back. Not because of the graphics, which are average, or the PVP, which is decidedly subpar, because no other game had anything as sophisticated as Evo’s trick shot system.
He’d discovered it by accident, as almost all of the Guild had. There isn’t a menu for it, a skill, nothing like that. His first character on the server, who he never really plays anymore, had been raiding a bandit’s lair, and in a moment of desperation, he bounced an empty potion bottle off of a wall and into a lever, dropping a portcullis at nearly the right time.
He’d still died, of course, because not every Hail Mary play works out for the home team, but it had keyed him on to a secret mechanic. Lots of games had them, and the people who found them quickly became powerhouses on a server.
The Art of the Trick Shot isn’t as powerful of a hidden technique as the Immovable Shield Block of Redemption’s Rise or Dreadpoint’s warpscuzzing. These are mechanics that once discovered, everyone had to learn, or at least learn how to deal with. Trick shots were just… tricks. While they looked impressive, they didn’t change anything.
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Sure, an arrow could bounce around and hit a target in an impossible manner, but the damage was reduced to almost nothing. And the rate of fire? A trick shot might take ten to twenty seconds to line up. The standard rate of fire for a PVP quality combat archer in an VRMMO is one arrow a second
But the future Captain of the Angular Guild didn’t consider any of this as he rolled a new character, unaware that the pun-full name of Sin Tangent would leave a mark on video game marksmanship history.
It started as a simple archer build, taking advantage of trickshots whenever possible. And, here's a big difference between trickshots and the hidden techniques of other VRMMO. The opportunity to warpscuzz is rare. You have to be in the right sort of hyperspace and hope to have enough time to sync your pulse engine with the other player’s before they realize what you’re doing. But a trick shot? That’s something you can do on every arrow. And Sin Tangent got good at it. Really good.
Archery evolved into Arcane Archery, where the force of the arrow didn’t matter as much as delivering the payload. Experiments with alchemical concoctions and other esoteric ammunition proved fruitful. That’s not to say that Sin Tangent’s unique tactics changed the face of combat on Evolution of Annihilation, but any skirmish tended to go topsy-turvy when Tangent showed up.
While his rise to notoriety was done solo, he didn’t remain alone. Imitators and innovators discovered this hidden skill as well, all doing the seemingly impossible, bending the physics of Evolution of Annihilation to their will. At the time of recording, there’s still only twelve members of the Angular Guild. It’s a simple rule: if you can make the shot, you’re in.
There’s no level requirement, no balance of the classes. They aren’t a fighting guild or a crafting guild. They rarely do things together and when they do, it tends to turn into a spectacle, as each member tries to outdo the one before.
After the initial stir from Guild Leader Sin Tangent, and the small bit of chaos each new guild member, the meta of EoA has basically forgotten the Angular Guild. I don’t see them disturbing things in a big way, but if there's one straightforward fact about this Guild of Trick Shot Specialists, it's that whatever they do will come from a direction no one expected.
-Script from the mini-documentary series “Guildy Pleasures” by Banished Pepper