GW2: Living the Living Story

I remember the first day I logged in to the Living Story. It was all rushrushrush.

Read mail. Check Achievements bar, aha, 75 event-related things to do!

Teleport to hometown, chat up the heralds, get pointed to the two zones in question.

Quick teleport to Diessa Plateau, run about, see a star on the map, find a Memento Collector. Find a sign post. Fix it. Screenshot it for later decoding. (Still haven’t gotten round to it. Prolly says something like Safety or Refuge, maybe.)

Run about along all the roads, following the signpost trail like breadcrumbs, see refugees, help refugees, see refugees get slaughtered by mobs under the aegis of insistent players begging others not to kill the mobs so they could keep reviving the NPCs for the ‘chievo.

Give up with mapchat and swap zones to Wayfarer Foothills to pretty much do the same thing – Hansel and Gretel across the snow, doing both rupture and non-related dynamic events along the way and scavenging mementos off fallen Norn like a hungry vulture.

Hit the 75 mark, admire shiny title (which I don’t wear since I prefer the GW1 HoM ones,) decide I’d seen the majority of the prelude event (Flame rupture, check. Frost rupture, check. Refugees, check) and log out for the day.

Content locust, much?

That’s how MMOs have trained us, no?

—

Sometimes, less is more.

Perhaps it only works for a certain type of player, but the slower-paced nature of this “event” has allowed me to rein back the Achiever and let the Explorer out to play.

I’ve been happy to take my time and amble around enjoying the scenery, content to let further discoveries happen at a more organic pace.

The next day, while wandering around Diessa Plateau at a more sedate speed to see if anything had changed, it struck me that there seemed to be a lot more obscuring dust and fog effects than I remembered seeing before.

Memory is a tricky beast, and for all I know, they could have been there since game launch. I could have sworn the cratered devastation where the Blood Legion wanders around wasn’t that foggy when I was doing the heart there. I would have been really grumpy trying to find stuff to pick up and separatists to fight through that kind of sandstorm.

Who would know, without screenshots? I failed to take any relevant ones earlier, so I can’t check back.

I’d prefer to think of the dust and fog as related to the ruptures though. It makes for a good story.

The next two days I spent in Orr on the grand screenshot project and didn’t check in on the two zones. I did however stumble across the Refugee Coordinator in the Black Citadel that I had previously missed and talk to him, learning about possible Flame Legion involvement.

Today, I wandered back into Diessa Plateau to check on things again.

I had the fortune to witness an entire roleplaying warband – some eight to ten odd members – slow marching their way out of the Black Citadel and headed to the town of Nolan on some business of their own.

At the same time, a Living Story dynamic event had started, so non-roleplayers (or the simply non-involved) were also kept busy fighting off earth elementals and sealing ruptures.

The Charr warband is on the road in the background.

Somehow, the conjunction of the two incidents helped me to immerse a lot more into GW2 as a world, instead of seeing it as a bunch of maps with a metagame overlay of orange swords and shields and circles.

Ambling further on my way to check out the north side of Diessa Plateau for any possible hints of refugees/source of troubles – Dredge and Flame Legion both, I caught sight of something incongruous through the trees.

Is it? Could it be?

Surely, those mountains were not steaming when I was last here as a lowbie.

Closer inspection suggested, yes, these are probably new and related to the Living Story. They looked rather like the same steam vents that pop up in the rupture events – with the kind of less textured detail one might expect from something quickly modeled for a temporary event, rather than permanent environmental background.

The dredge certainly seem to be brewing up something under that mountain…

I spotted no change in the dredge area of northwest Diessa yet, though I wisely took a few screenshots to record memories now, to potentially check later.

Meandering further along, near the skillpoint with the scorpions… Could it be, what is this I see?

More vents? More steam? They probably weren’t there before.

I sidetreked to the lake to finish up the aquatic combat part of the daily, then noticed that the Font of Rhand was open and there seemed to be a few people inside.

On a whim, I waypointed over to the Incendio Templum and headed through the gate. It’s been a long time since I was last there – beta and launch – and I loved both my forays into the Font mini-dungeon.

It was rather sadly obvious how newer players differ from those in beta. (During launch, one guy led the way with me as a backup to go get the statue’s sword and the rest following blindly.)

I’m not the kind of player to spoil secrets by immediately spilling the beans, so at first I held back from solving anything to give the others time to run around and explore. (It was also useful for me to see which exactly gates started out closed and what triggered each.)

It turned out that what they did was leave everything alone and run back and forth from closed chamber on the left to underwater chamber on the right and stare in perplexity at the un-pullable chain and the rock gate blocking the way to the next room that they knew they had to get into. One or two guys vanished, presumably given up or decided they’d seen everything.

Sighing to myself, I decided to trigger the first step before I ran out of fellow compatriots. (Spoilers to the Font of Rhand follow in story form.)

I headed back to the three old statues in the first room and attacked them to get the statue head. One other guy joined me.

As I picked up the head to bring to the mortar in the closed chamber on the left side, he dashed off and left before seeing what I did.

At the time, I -presumed- he knew, like me, what to do and had left me to go do it.

Which I did, stuffing the head in the mortar and letting it fire to bring down the ceiling, and ventured back to the underwater chamber on the right side – whose chain could now be pulled and the rock door busted down.

Two or three others had already swum into the corridor with the fire breathing heads and past into the chamber with even more fire-breathing heads.

They were swimming around and opening caskets in a frenzy, so again I presumed one of them knew what to do and left to go get the statue’s sword – the last key needed.

(Which, by the way, is in a side corridor down from the room with the three old statues. Kill the Flame Legion veteran, which opens the door behind him, and climb the pillars to reach and jump towards and pull the chain – which releases the statue’s sword buried in the rock below.)

I’ve always gone to fetch the statue’s sword, so I’ve always been just a mite fuzzy on what exactly to do in the room with the fire-breathing heads and the icy torches. Usually by this time, most of the heads are out and one guy is yelling at the others to get their act together and get the last few done.

To my immense bemusement, the other three players are -still- swimming around aimlessly and randomly firing at all the enemies that popped out of the caskets. All heads are still breathing fire.

Guess this was a perfect opportunity for me to figure out the exact secret of this room.

Not wanting to be like a drill sergeant, I left the others be and touched an icy torch for the hell of it. Immediately, I was surrounded by an aura of ice. Reading the tooltip that popped up for the aura, it said something like “reflect projectiles off bubbles and turns them to ice, creates icy aura of rejuvenation.”

Well, okay. Seemed clear enough.

I opened a few caskets, got a bubble to pop, switched to my trident which is a long range projectile and reflected it off the bubble (which is also conveniently described as “reflects missiles.”)

Immediately large, vivid icy snowflake effects shot up around the bubble and me. Nothing happened to the head yet though, but I wasn’t anywhere near it.

Sure enough, the moment I got in front of the head and got the icy aura near it, and then swam away, the head stopped breathed fire.

Well, there you go.

I wordlessly demonstrated by doing, six heads, willing the players around me to catch on and actually learn by example and observation.

Instead, one player vanished, another continued swimming around aimlessly and the last, hooray, the last actually touched an icy torch and was surrounded by the icy aura. But promptly couldn’t figure out what the heck one was supposed to do with it.

Seeing that a few of the heads I put out were firing again, and fearing I was going to run out of comrades before getting to the boss at the end, I spoke up and described exactly what to do.

“Touch the icy torches to get the aura. Use projectiles and reflect them off the bubbles to put out all the heads.”

I neglected the swim near the heads part, but I figured I had to leave -something- for them to figure out, right?

In the end, I think one of them got the idea, and between the two of us, we got all the heads put out and the gate slid open. As we swam in, someone asked, “Anyone know what to do after this?”

Ah, a straight question. I reply to straight questions. “Yes,” I said, “We need the statue’s sword. I put it down and lost track of it. Anyone picked it up?”

Silence.

One look at their player models said no, they were carrying their speargun harpoon gun thingmajigs. I had to keep swapping between the statue’s sword and the trident to ice the heads, so it was no wonder that eventually my luck would run out and the sword would disappear and respawn.

“Oh, okay, I’ll go back and get it,” I said. “Can someone hang around here and open the gate for me please?”

“k” was the one letter reply.

Retracing steps through all the above took a while, dragging angry red mobs behind me while I was in flimsy magic find gear, especially when I kept missing my jumps because I was in a hurry and the veteran respawned on me.

“Blazebane went to get the sword,” was what I overhead him say to the other.

A minute after that, I was hauling the sword back through all the stuff, apologizing for the delay to find only that one guy who had stayed to pull the chain and open the gate for me.

Where’s the other guy, I asked.

Silent shrug. Went out and left, apparently.

Sheesh.

Just the two of us? Against the Champion Rhendak the Crazed?

I remembered the crazy six to eight man fights where he’d go after us like a shark and get stuck in the ceiling swimming around, while the water boiled all around us and people got toasted alive by the fire breathing dragon heads at the bottom. On the bright side, he dropped a chest per player that downed him.

Well, this would be interesting.

My principles about spoilers don’t apply in cases of immediate self-preservation, and this was one of those times. “Ok,” I said, “Swim out to the outer chamber for revives. When he throws a fireball at you, dodge because the water will boil around you very shortly. And try to keep near the top because of the fire-breathing heads below. Let’s give this a shot.”

Turns out Rhendak has had some changes made to his encounter. (Or the tweaks happen automatically when fewer players are in play, but probably the former.)

For one thing, there were no fire breathing heads, for which I was very thankful, because it gave more room to dodge and maneuver.

He also used to spawn like a trap when someone opened the grand-looking chest – but this time, he was just there already.

I had quickly gotten out of my yellow power/precision magic find gear and swapped into my P/T/V exotics for better survivability. This had the amazing side effect of turning me into the main tank. Barely any fireballs went after the other guy. Hooray for highest toughness aggro mechanics.

It was an epic dodge battle of ranged tanking.

I slipped up once and had to bail out to the outer chamber to bandage heal up, and the other guy followed me – either to revive me or he didn’t want to tank it – which led to Rhendak leashing and regaining all his hp.

Following which, I decided to stop obsessing about doing damage and focus my best on swimming out of the way, dodging when necessary, and self-healing what I didn’t manage to move out of range in time. Basically surviving or heal-tanking, though it was more dodge-self-supporting.

That left the other guy free to unload on Rhendak.

And we downed him. Just the two of us.

Alas, he only dropped one chest (of blue loot), not the chest per player that I remember from way back when. The grandiose chest behind him though, contained some zone level-appropriate loot, instead of being the trap it used to be.

All in all, still fun. I am fond of the Font of Rhand.

That was a satisfactory cap to the day’s daily. Tomorrow, further ambling about the Wayfarer Foothills.

P.S. I am aware that much of the stuff I discovered over the course of several days probably all arrived at the same time in the one big update. That’s my point, that more time between each event change allows for a more organic process of discovery, if players can get used to this new style of “event.”

I need a better word. Event brings to mind something momentous and earthshaking over the course of a few days, which the Living Story isn’t. Yet.

Occurrence? Incident? Happening?

A Guide For Every Season

This post was sparked by a thread that popped up over at the Guild Wars 2 Guru forums.

(I know, I know, it is a cesspool compared to the official forums, which aren’t much of an improvement either, but drama at a distance is sometimes entertaining and one gets the occasional news/valuable tidbit that one has not heard about.)

Some guy asked for a leveling guide from 1-80 for Guild Wars 2.

Of all the-

I don’t even-

Hello? This is an MMO with a completely FLAT leveling curve! It’s meant to take an average of 1.5h per level.

It is clearly marked on the map which zones are appropriate to which level range.

Which is infinitely more sensible than a list going Plains of Ashford 1-15, Diessa Plateau 15-25, etc. because you don’t even see or know the name of the zone on the map until you venture into it.

The game downlevels you in any zone you’re too high leveled for, so that there is some difficulty/challenge remaining. You can practically go anywhere if you don’t like the proposed paths.

Hell, if you don’t want go anywhere and have other characters to be your materials supplier and gold daddy, you can CRAFT your way from 1-80. (Refer to ubiquitous crafting guides online, I suppose.)

Guides That Are Really Walkthroughs

Of all the ‘guides’ that pop up for various games, I honestly fail to understand leveling guides the most. What kind of person requires someone else to hold his hand, set his goals for him and tell him exactly where to go on each step of his journey to max level? Is it that hard to figure it out for yourself?

This is a rant against those who don’t want to think for themselves, who eschew discovery and learning, slavishly following other people’s instructions on how to do something.

There is an amazing number of them, just going by the number of hits I get on my page that is a simple map and directions and answers the questions “How do I get to Blue Mountain in The Secret World?” I fail to see how someone moving around the map doing quests can miss the Blue Mountain exit, but evidently, people do.

Little wonder why people put up all kinds of crap guides on websites, lace them with tons of ads to generate revenue, and let the Googling masses loose upon them.

Guides That Are Really Cheats

The countering defense to this is that for some people, they say that they are looking for guides that will show them the optimal path. They’re on a search for efficiency, the speedrun way.

A little questioning in the thread I brought up reveals that the original poster really wants, not just a leveling guide, but a FAST leveling guide, a power-leveling method. He wants to get his alt to 80 as uber duper quick as possible. He wants to find those weak spots of a game, such as a continually respawning dynamic event that will yield an abnormally higher rate of xp than the average, or perhaps mobs that return lots of experience to farm, and so on.

To me, it sounds like he’s looking for someone to share (ok, too kind a word, to give) knowledge of a near-exploit or a loophole for rushing to max level as fast as possible.

Putting aside the ‘why rush headlong into boredom and burnout quicker’ retort for now, we run into the ‘how stupid do you think those in the know are, that they will share this with you in a public setting, so that the developers can close it in the next patch?’

Little tip: Follow the bots. The gold farmers know where to be. It’s more than a game to them, it’s their livelihood. They -know-. And because of the way xp sharing works in this game, you can make use of their leet multiboxing hax skillz to kill stuff at a vastly accelerated pace.

Caveat: The above tip segues immediately into the ‘how much do you value your account’ argument, because ArenaNet is pretty fond of the banhammer for stuff they deem as exploiting and 72h suspensions for mere infractions, and they don’t even have to worry about losing your sub fee.

TL;DR: Follow my tongue-in-cheek suggestion at your own risk.

Guides That Are Really Guides (And Those That Are Not)

Ok, we cannot expect everyone to be number-crunchers or systems explorers, so there is some validity to the argument that writing guides that explain numbers and stats, esoteric knowledge, and shares and teaches strategies and general philosophies are kosher on the quest for the holy grail of min-maxing.

I don’t actually have an issue with guides per se. Especially if they are written with an intent to teach, or share, or discuss strategies or builds or what-have-you.

I tend to have a small issue with guides written like they are the be-all and end-all of all possible knowledge and treat-me-like-holy-writ-or-else, but I suppose if authors need that egomaniacal boost in order to get them to write in the first place, we can give them a little leeway for that.

But I do have big issues with people who do take them verbatim and everybody else is WRONG and we must all DO IT THIS WAY or else the sky will fall down and the earth will be swallowed in a pit of hellfire.

And there are an amazing number of people who don’t want to think and just want to follow someone else’s checklist or directions or list of ingredients or goals. Why in the world is that the case?

I don’t understand leveling guides, I think I’ve said that before. I find it terrifying to think that someone needs to be led around by the nose in this fashion. How are they going to manage more complex parts of the game? Find more walkthroughs? Pay someone to play for them?

I’ve taken a look at the odd crafting guide before, mostly from WoW, and some from GW2. A lot are just shitty terse checklists. From X to Y, do this. From Y to Z, do that. The only valuable thing in them is possibly that someone has counted up the number of materials you’ll need beforehand so that you can gather them first or buy them wholesale from an auction house, and one has to block a whole lot of ads to get that one sentence.

Probably the most comprehensive guide I’ve seen on the subject is an LOTRO guide for the Scholar, which besides an FAQ, includes suggested crafting node locations, though there is a hell of a lot of ingredient lists that are probably better off on a wiki somewhere.

I could point to the ATITD wiki for what proper crafting guides should look like, but practically no other game has that kind of complexity. Maybe Puzzle Pirates.

See, the really cool thing about this sort of guide is that even after reading it, it is not an instant “I win” button, you still have to put in time and practice to increase one’s performance, armed with better knowledge.

If, after reading a guide, you could program a bot or get your cat or parrot to do it and still attain 100% success, something is dreadfully wrong somewhere. I’m not sure if one should blame the game’s design, or blame the majority for wanting mindless button-pushing achievement.

A Guide By Any Other Name

I guess part of the problem is that every player’s definition of what is a useful guide differs.

I assume that people write and make the guides that they themselves would prefer. Which doesn’t bode well for the theory of crowd intelligence or humanity as a whole, given the number of cheats and straight up walkthroughs out there.

Either that, or they take the lazy way out and write down the least amount of words necessary, which boils down to a terse laundry list of “go here” “do that.”

Maybe the lazy man’s guide explanation is why there are so many unedited video ‘guides’ which are just playthroughs of a particular sequence. Extracting benefit is left as an exercise for the viewer to manage for themselves, which can be either slavishly aping what has been done, or pulling out the general principles to understand, utilize and possibly apply elsewhere.

Perhaps ‘a magician never reveals his secrets’ may be a reason why some people just write out the bare bones of what to do in order to gain the desired end result. They know that that’s what most people just care about, and in that way, they keep the superior edge of true knowledge.

But it really bugs me that so many people just care about the ends, and couldn’t care less about the means. This is why we have gold-sellers, why we have folks asking ‘where is the loot’ and looking for the next developer created shiny carrot to lead them on to the next, following guides written or filmed by other people.

Taken to an extreme, one may as well sell one’s copy of the game and just watch other people play the game from start to end for you on Youtube. Gaming as spectator sport.

Why? People, why? How special does it make you feel, if none of it is really what you accomplished on your own?

It’s borrowed fame. It’s pretense.

I can understand not wanting to reinvent the wheel from time to time, or even ‘skipping content’ to get to the good bits (though I personally think you’re skipping faster to burnout) now and then, but it’s so easy to run right down the slippery slope of not-wanting-to-do-anything-at-all-without-a-guide-showing-you-how.

TL;DR: Use Guides in Moderation

Ranting aside, at the end of the day, I guess I have to come to one of those Zen conclusions you tend to find on my blog.

Guides, like guns, are tools. It’s how you use them that really matters.

The objective and the intent behind using the guide is a big deal, and can lead to healthy or unhealthy consequences.

A little bit of self-discipline goes a long way to using them properly, and the lack of it leads to lazy dependency and misuse.

When in doubt, anything taken to an extreme is nuts.

Go play, and have fun.

TSW: Bogging Down in Blue Mountain?

Not really, but I couldn’t resist the pun. I’ve been having the time of my life in this zone.

(Some spoilers are going to follow, so you know what to do. Hell, stop reading TSW posts if you don’t want to be spoiled, because there’s no way to talk about this stuff without describing it.)

In no particular order:

Visited a half-built casino pyramid thing, and discovered it was full of red-con monsters that is probably either a lair or meant for group killing.  Hung around the scaffolding being very careful not to aggro anything, and watched a Templar try his lone luck on them. Didn’t work. If I ever get around to meeting people in this game, it might be fun to try them together some day.

—

Found two world bosses and a rare, the latter I killed, the former I gave a wide wide berth.

Little tip: All of them showed up as a yellow crown with a star. LOOK at their health bar before you try taking them on.

The average mob in Blue Mountain has anywhere from 5000-7000 hp, going up to 10k for the elite, champion-y, but still soloable types.

Mr Tide Lurker has 387,481 hp. I didn’t want to find out how much damage he could do. Not today, at any rate.

This gruesome undead bear drags itself around like a snail trailing green ooze. At 309,985 hp, I’m not going to be the one putting the Decomposed Kodiak out of its misery. Not alone, anyway.

8484hp? Only? Lemme at ‘em! Bastard of the Brine turned out to be a rare with an associated achievement, not just a named, which was nifty.

—

Encountered a mob named Sallowskin, iirc, that was a really good fight and challenge. He kept spewing these gobs of green poison. The first time I fought him with my usual melee tactics, didn’t see any white outlines and kept getting caught by the poison effect as I dodged out, and melted so fast I couldn’t believe it. The second time I dodged and kited a bit more, but was still having some trouble, because I was doing it by the rocks and water. It’s hard to see the poison radius in water, and the final killer was me accidentally dropping into deep water (no skills!) while he offed me. Bastard.

Finally, I came back, looked carefully at my surroundings and said to myself, why the hell am I fighting him where I am? Cleared the beach area of two zombies for a proper kiting venue and pulled him onto ground and kept a big distance from him. From range, it was suddenly crystal clear that his big ability was an AoE poison patch centered on himself, not targeted at me as I had feared. Kited with Anima Shot and Fire in the Hole. Took longer, but was in dramatically less danger. Suddenly, he was ridiculousy easy. Revenge was sweet.

—

The main adventure of the day was dying 5-6 times in the Moon Bog, while stubbornly returning with various build and strategies until I figured out how to kill every damn thing in there. Which was exceedingly satisfactory.

I could have just skirted the edges of the Bog and killed the easy mobs only. Or come back later overgeared. But the real point I was after was to understand the place and learn the challenge of it as I was.

The bog at night. Pretty dark. Might match Wurm Online, even. And me with no mining helmet, somehow all I ended up keeping from that faction quest was a dumb flare gun that doesn’t work anywhere.

It turns out that mastering the Moon Bog is all about positioning. (For me, at any rate. Your mileage may vary. You may be a lot more pro than me.)

First things first, the bog is full of pools of filth, leaving only thin strips of safe land and a couple valuable islands. Stepping in the filth applies a DoT to the final tune of 300hp and probably a debuff to rub salt in the wound. Staying in the filth allows the effect to stack. Not fun.

The weakest type of mob in there are the Infected Contaminators, Violent Infected, and other such mostly melee zombie variants.

Standard tactics work for these guys. Just pull, they run to you, you kill them. The only special trick they have is that they’re Filth-infected, so after death, step back from them, rather than rush up to gleefully check your loot. Else they explode the filth debuff on you, which is annoyingly inconvenient and delays your health regen a bit longer.

The Shades are more annoying. The first thing they attempt to do is Pull you to where they are, which is in the pools of filth with said debuff , and it’s a right pain to struggle out while getting attacked. They may also try to move out of melee range, though it is quite possible to slowly whittle them down with Anima Shot/Fire in the Hole. But that’s no fun, we want to chop them up with sharp edges!

Eventually, I ended up using City of Heroes tank-pulling tricks on them (it’s probably the same in other MMOs, mob AI is somewhat predictable.) Turns out they only drag once, they Pull at the very moment they get aggroed. So we use the line of sight (LOS) counter-pull.

1. Snipe

2. Hide Behind Tree

3. Swim, Shade, Swim!

4. Profit

One thing I’d say for The Secret World’s mob AI, it’s pretty immersive-real. They do try to adjust now and then, but two can keep playing the LOS game, and they want to shoot you as much as you want them to step onto dry land.

Jump-shooting and landing out of LOS also works in this game, just like in City of Heroes. Me happy.

There’s an Ender Thing that walks around in the swamp on a circular patrol route. Looks a bit like a mutated nightmare of a stitchglass weaver from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, makes a sound on dying that is reminiscent of Minecraft’s Endermen.

Its hp is nothing special. It throws a couple attacks, also not too big a deal, one is a targeted-on-you filth AoE and another is a cone attack of some sort, I think, dodging should be instinct by now. The main challenge is to keep the area that you’re going to be attacking the Ender Thing clear of all the other weaker mobs, so that they don’t also aggro while you’re busy kiting and dodging from it. Then wait for it to patrol back around to you. Hope nothing respawns in the meantime.

Mud Golems. Now, these guys, I was having some trouble with. And one of them was in the way of a side quest, which made me doubly interested in figuring out how to solo them.

They’ve 10k hp, throw up a big hard-to-dodge-out-of mud slick that hinders/slows you (centered around themselves, though, this is key), and once hindered, they get to slap you around silly and impair you seemingly every five seconds or so.

After some experimentation and death, I eventually figured that kiting was the way to go with these guys. Difficult as it is, in the bog. Prepare by clearing the weaker surroundings mobs to prevent excess aggro later. Make sure one has enough space to run around because there’s going to be lots of circular mud slicks on the ground later.

I ended up swapping out my blade elite Spiral that does impairment, and putting in the AR grenade Slow the Advance which Hinders, very helpful to keep these guys slow. I also threw out my regular AoE Fire at Will (who the hell wants to AoE stuff in here?) to put in the CC break/immune for 7 seconds utility skill, which is helpful to clear stacks if accidentally slowed or inadverdently stepped into bog filth and DoT’ed.

Then shoot and pull golem, Hinder as often as possible, and basically run around circle strafing it until it splashes its mud slick, and pull it to another clear spot on land and rinse and repeat.

‘

Executed well, it can die with nary a scratch to yourself. Okay, so there were a lot of half health battle struggles before I got the combination just right, but sometimes these games surprise me in just how well their RNG seem to read your mind. This very first successful kill dropped a blue Resilient tank bracer. Subsequent attempts didn’t yield much beyond whites and the odd green.

But I leave happy, and unafraid of the Moon Bog.

Unlike Ms Mortal Hypochondriac here.

What can I say? Too bad you don’t live in Paragon City where all the civilians never die. Not being a superhero in the Secret World is tough.

—

The other bit of excitement was dying, oh, I dunno, 15 or so times to the Jilted Bride in a side quest that is related to the Moon Bog. I’d previously encountered her in another side quest, where she basically chases you all the way to the manor, and she wasn’t at all a problem then. The only mention of her is in a Secret World forums post that suggests she’d been nerfed since beta… perhaps the developers missed a pass on this incarnation.

This particular incarnation was posing quite a problem, mainly thanks to the “Abandonment” DoT affliction she liked to throw up. It takes about 1-2 seconds for her to cast, so the interrupt window is very very short, and it subsequently slows you, impairs and deactivates all your skills, then slowly ticks down 250-300 magical damage per tick, to the tune of a good chunk of my 3300hp. One Abandonment from her leaves me at 1700ish. Not good at all. And she really liked to use it, with nearly as much frequency as an Ak’ab likes to Dash. She also leech heals or heals over time or something, which usually isn’t too much of an issue because I just unload more damage, but quite impossible when you’re melting at an alarming rate.

Now her, I’d suggest that she’s a touch… OP. I cheerfully contributed to the data metrics that will hopefully highlight abnormal death frequencies in a particular area, while I tried various means of defeating her.

I have a hunch that perhaps healing or barrier skills might help to mitigate the affliction, but as I confessed before, I’m not a very good healer – I didn’t feel like practising a whole set of new skills just for her, and a brief glance of the inner ring skills didn’t show anything that dispels affliction or DoTs (though I might be blind and have missed something.)

Instead, I tried consumable heals, consumable barriers and even went as far as to throw on all the tank gear I had, in the hope that the extra hp reservoir and the magic protection on a couple talismans might help to mitigate it.

Not really, though the 4800hp reservoir was helping the most, but my damage was promptly sucking as she kept healing it back up.

I tried to use LOS whenever the Abandonment spellcast came up, worked once, then didn’t work so well as the irritating spectre got stuck halfway in a wall that left her perfectly able to hurt me, but me unable to target her. Grrr.

Tried running down the stairs and leaping out of the second story window to break aggro for a bit – hilariously, this let me heal up for about 2000hp before she navigated her way out of the house and came for me in the garden. Unfortunately, the moment she got within range, she flung Abandonment, with foreseen tragic results.

I eventually ended up swapping out my assault rifle to use the recommended pistols to stack 10x corrupted debuff on her (which reduces the efficiency of her healing), and wearing tank gear to the tune of 4300hp or so, and got lucky in impairing and interrupting her first Abandonment, and managed to unload sufficient damage to kill her then. (I cannot remember if I used a consumable heal/barrier, I may have been cleaned out by this point.)

Ding dong, the witch is dead! *pants*

Her, I do not wish to repeat.

I’ve no illusions that I can manage a consistent kill on her. Not until I get a lot more AP and SP and gear. (I could have left her for later, but I was just feeling like being stubborn and testing beyond the limits of my current build.)