Pumping Irony

Van Hemlock decided within the past few weeks to alternate PvE and PvP each week. Last week was PvP and I just wasn’t feeling it, so I bowed out. This week, I was up for some quality PvE and the rest of the Tuesday N00b Club was as well. They’d decided before I arrived to head into the Frostmaw’s Burrows dungeon way up in Jaga Moraine. We had a full group of players, so no heroes tonight. Most of the characters I more or less recognized, though the new one (to me) to the group was Sente from A Ding World. 3 of the 8 are bloggers, this could be heading into dangerous territory, though much less so than Casualties of WAR! :grin:

None of us bothered to check either the official or unofficial Guild Wars wikis — a rare thing indeed for GW players — so right off the bat was our first mistake: we chose Frostmaw’s Burrows under the assumption that it was a 4-level dungeon. Turns out it has 5 levels, so it will take even longer to get through. No problem for me, being here in the US, but most of the TNC is from the UK and it’s later in the evening for them. One of them in particular is always limited to a certain time, which was the case tonight, so at times it felt a little on the rushed side.

I played my monk, Benjeth, who was running his new favorite build based around the Healer’s Boon elite skill which allows all Healing Prayers skills to cast 50% faster and heal 50% more health. Van Hemlock played his mesmer, though not using the assassin secondary profession for his (in)famous shadow-tank-mage build, choosing elementalist instead. Sente was playing a necromancer/elementalist who tended to get aggro a lot so apparently he was using a pretty high-damage build that the mobs didn’t appreciate. The rest of the group consisted of another mesmer, a ranger, warrior, ritualist, and another monk. At the entrance to the dungeon, a Master difficulty quest is available which brings along an additional four NPC allies, three warriors and a paragon. Unfortunately, GW does not consider allies to be “part of the group” so any monk spells I’d cast that would affect on the entire group did not apply to them. This particular group of NPC’s were of the “Leeroy Jenkins” school of AI so were more annoyances than useful.

We blitzed through the first two levels with no issues at all, which led us to get a bit careless and over-confident. The third level of the dungeon is where we ran into our first snag, losing five of the group in a nasty battle. Frost wurms and siege wurms occur more often and usually along with a group of elementals or chromatic drakes, which can be problem enough on their own. That mix of enemies combined proved too much and Benjeth (and two others) had to use a tactic I haven’t used in quite awhile: turn tail and run like hell, abandoning the rest of the group to their fate. After all, the ones with the ability to resurrect need to be alive to use it, right? It was after this first near-wipe that I discovered what would ultimately prove to be the group’s fatal mistake: Benjeth was the only character in the group who could resurrect! I don’t usually call people out, and I’m not naming names so I don’t feel quite as bad doing this… The ritualist seemed to be using a dps build with little to no heals, but that’s fine since we had two monks. Or did we? It turns out the other monk was using a protection build. Now, Benjeth’s HB build actually works fantastic when paired with a protection monk. However, this monk had a PvP protection build loaded with only a single light heal! That build was nearly useless to the group other than removing conditions, did not synergize with Benjeth’s HB whatsoever, and to top it off: no resurrection! PvP monks typically do not resurrect, so that’s a perfectly normal approach but in PvE that doesn’t fly. So basically I’m doing all the work healing, and if I go down, no one’s getting back up without a complete party wipe.

Speaking of which, later in that third level we had our first wipe! When I first hooked up with the TNC it was a running joke that they spent most of their time with maximum (-60%) Death Penalty, but I was their first “real” monk and until now had kept them mostly alive and certainly nowhere near full DP. So, tonight was my very first wipe with TNC! Unfortunately, tonight was also my second, third, and fourth wipe with TNC! Yeah… later still in the third level we went down again. The fourth level was even worse, we went down twice in fairly rapid-fire succession. We nearly had a fifth wipe but I ran away into a safe area and was able to get a few of the group resurrected but everyone else went down close to a group of mobs who kept spamming Frozen Soil which prevents resurrection.

At that point, it was getting too late for one of the players to continue and there was no way to keep going without wiping the group again and continuing with a high death penalty. Benjeth had already removed some of our DP by using a four-leaf clover he’d gotten last year in one of the game’s “lucky weekends.” Of course, the xp in dungeons is pretty high and we would have been rid of the DP eventually. Most, if not all, of us dinged a new skill point during the run, and Benjeth walked away with some loot to sell and a black dye to add to his valuable collection! No gold drops to help his Wisdom title track, though…

Next Tuesday is PvP again, so I may or may not participate depending on my mood and availability. I’ll look forward to TNC’s next PvE adventure, though, whether we end up trying to tackle this dungeon again or something else.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Guild Wars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.