My weekly column at GuildMag is now posted: http://www.guildmag.com/this-week-in-guild-wars-2-12. This week, there’s less raw gameplay footage from the press closed beta weekend and more analysis and further spectulation as we wait for the next Guild Wars 2 beta event later in March. More than a million eager players are watching their email inboxes for one of those treasured beta invitations (although a million applied, ArenaNet is inviting an unspecified number to take part in the next beta event).
After the leap of faith, I’d posted a recounting of my most recent vanquish in Guild Wars to Facebook and thought one or two of you might be interested…
I had a weird, but eventually successful VQ last night [that is, Tuesday night]. I’m trying to finish off my Eye of the North title and Arbor Bay was one of the two remaining areas I needed to vanquish. Last time I tried it, I literally hit max DP on the final mob and wiped.
This time, I remembered to take some DP removal. It went pretty well for the first hour or so (Arbor Bay is home to around 500 enemies), then I had a party wipe against a Krait boss and two mobs. At the resurrection shinre, I broke out the 4-leaf clovers and remembered I still had a few lunar fortunes left from Canthan New Year. Opening the fortunes gave me typical stuff: a couple of sparklers, a couple of bottle rockets, and … a mini celestial dragon. I was delighted, so I fired off the last fortune and got a curse: I spent the next two hours with my display looking as if I was on a rice wine binge. It made it quite tough to find where I was going. (After I posted this to the SPQT Facebook page, Chris Jacobson pointed out that I could have just turned off post processing to get rid of the blurring.)
Fortunately, I’d mapped the area on the first attempt, so I just needed to look for red text and go in that direction. For another two hours. It stopped being amusing very quickly.
Making a long story a bit shorter, by the time I’d hit 500 kills I had done a complete circuit of the outside of the map and just needed to find a couple of remaining mobs. I back-tracked on the assumption that the mobs I’d missed were probably patrolling and found one of them quite near a resurrection shrine. I charged over, started to set up for combat and … disconnected.
By the time I’d run down to the basement, reset the cable modem and the router, it was a few minutes later. I was able to reconnect to the session, only to discover that my party was nailed to the rez point in range of the simian mob, and had accumulated 45 DP while I was away. As soon as I loaded in, I burned off three more clovers and died. When I resurrected, I tried running away from the rez point, but died again. The next time, I fired off another couple of clovers and ran in a random direction (remember that curse is distorting my display … and when you disconnect, you lose the useful red track of where you’ve been in the mini-map).
The mob followed me (there were actually two mobs, plus incubus pop-ups, which is why my party was doing so badly). After two near-death experiences, I managed to find a route to another rez shrine and died — but only one mob had followed me that far, so when my full party resurrected again, we had enough firepower to take them down. Just. The healthiest of my heroes was at 47 DP.
Tracking down the final mob and the last two of the pop-ups was a bit anti-climactic after all that.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so relieved to see the success banner displayed on any VQ!
