GW2: Not Quite Weatherstock, But There’s Potential

I’ve written about Weatherstock in LOTRO before – a huge concert gathering of bands, a player-created social event made possible through the emergent property of having a really good music system in an MMO.

Ever since the choir bells made an appearance in GW2′s Wintersday celebrations, I’ve been hoping to see or hear a small echo of that in the MMO where my heart is.

Evidently, I fail to walk the same circles as those who have been sneaking it in under the radar – wrong server, wrong forums, wrong timezones, wrong hang-out locales (I’m still uncomfortable in Divinity’s Reach, I’m a Charr, dangit… and who the hell goes to the Ruins of Rin on purpose?) perhaps.

But courtesy of a guildmate who did catch a glimpse of a production by the guild Harlots and Harlequins [HaHa] and recorded it, I am thrilled to say that there is hope.

We apologize for the quality of the stream, which is not great, but you can catch the Lady Fularr’s three songs, beginning at 0:12, 8:40 and 24:12.

The Charr skit at 2:14 is really somewhat pointless so feel free to skip it over, but the Silence of the Dolyaks starring Dr Lekktor (I knew which race he was going to be right off! Mwahaha!) at 13:47 is moderately amusing.

These guys are amazing in working with what limited tools they have in GW2 so far. It’s pretty much RP walk, a few emotes, jump and one measly choir bell…

I especially like the use of the mesmer blink by the presenter / introduction person / I can’t think of the proper word for him right now (I shall blame the lingering flu.) It gives a magician’s showman quality to the performance.

Here’s their guild’s recruitment page that Google-fu brought up when trying to learn more about them and what they do.

Now what we need in general are:

• MORE INSTRUMENTS
• MORE EMOTES

And we might actually be able to match what LOTRO has been doing for ages…

I would really love to hear bands in GW2.

Please, ArenaNet, make it happen one day.

P.S. While you’re at it, please fix Ebonhawke pipe organ. I was sad when I was map exploring Fields of Ruins, found the pipe organ, tried to play the song and got no open door.

Googled to find out it apparently broke a long time ago and never got better. Very very sad. Sad sick charr has awful snuffles.

GW2: Molten Weapons Facility “Solo”

By some definitions of it anyway.

I’m a perfectionist. A real solo to me means flawless victory, no deaths, one straight run, utilizing skills and wits and reflexes to defeat one’s enemy.

This is not it.

Nor is this for the faint of heart. There were many deaths. Quite a bit of repairing that ended up totaling about 20 odd silver. One brief popping out of the instance to go find a trading post for more food buffs, praying the stuff wouldn’t reset.

Inclusive, this is not. I suspect that you’d have to tweak your build, use food buffs, and have a good understanding of what your profession can do.

Nor do I know if all professions can achieve this. But I suspect they can, because I’ve seen a video of a warrior that has done it, and I was 75% of the time being ranged on a guardian, so I’m going to guess that other ranged classes probably have a significant damage advantage over me.

The basic idea I got from watching the video is that one just needs to do sufficient damage fast enough to take out at least one mob in the spawn, before dying, if you must. By being sheer pigheadedly stubborn and whittling them down one at a time, repairing up from the friendly repair guy inside the Molten Weapons Facility, you will eventually get through the whole place and “solo” it.

Of course, there’s plenty of room for a lot more clever finesse than the above tactic, but that seemed to be the baseline.

Question is: Could my guardian do enough damage?

I figured I’d just have to test it out. Hammer is kind of a slow control weapon though, if safer from the protection symbol it throws up.

I considered greatsword, as that seems to be a favored weapon for guardians who like to do damage. My personal issue with greatswords is that I just don’t seem very good or familiar with it, and that I tend to take way too much damage from using it – walk into a whole bunch of mobs, pull and spin, and somehow half my hp disappears even as I’m doing a ton of damage to them. Still, it was going to be an option, and I did have one.

I needed a better ranged weapon. Staff is right out. Confession time: I’ve been using yellow scepter/focus rares before this idea struck me – I just keep ‘em around for the once in a blue moon times I wander into a dungeon and need to switch out to range. Since I don’t run dungeons on a regular basis, I got no tokens. Fortunately, WvW is now another alternative, so I pulled out some badges of honor from the bank and bought berserker scepter/focus exotics. I chucked on a superior sigil of accuracy for 5% extra crit chance and a superior sigil of blood for a chance to lifesteal on crit (mostly because I’m broke, and I was building up to the idea below.)

I don’t own a berserker set of armor, else I might have tested it to see just how much damage is possible. Working with what I had, that’s Knight’s armor (exotics go without saying) and Berserker trinkets of mixed exotic/ascended quality. That gives decent toughness, power, precision and crit chance/crit damage.

The vague idea I had was to up my damage via crit and crit damage, while using lifesteal on crit food – which seemed like it would do a bit more extra damage to whatever I was hitting, plus give me back some health. (Extra sources of healing always sound nice to guardians.) To give myself the best chance of success, it was going to be the expensive Omnomberry Pies at 66% chance to lifesteal on crit.

I’m running 0/0/30/20/20 – nothing shocking on the guardian. I switched out Glacial Heart for Retributive Armor at first, since I wasn’t using a hammer, but switched back midway when I decided to go hammer again. And jumped between Master of Consecrations (when using a consecration) and Unscathed Contender (for lack of any other ideas on how to up damage). Other traits were Purity, Altruistic Healing (yay, cookie cutter), Superior Aria, Two-Handed Mastery, and Absolute Resolution.

With that, it was dungeon time.

1) Molten Alliance Ambush

Jumped in with greatsword, and shortly after went, Ow ow ow, because I apparently suck at using one properly. And because the Molten Brawler popped up. I think I did take out one guy. Then I ran away.

You’ll find that tactic comes up a lot. Cowardice is the better part of valour and all that – running far away to break aggro and/or maybe pull one guy away from everything else to take down.

Then I went ranged to plink them down one by one, while letting the NPCs get in the way and die over and over.

It sounds nicer than it is. There were one or two deaths in here while experimenting with the best tactic to deal with them.

2) Drill Tunnel

Greatsword took out the mobs just fine here. Though the picture above shows the problem I ran into, if you can’t kill stuff fast enough. I think it’s a mechanism to make sure you can’t skip these mobs and run past.They flood out and rush you themselves.

I really hate embers. Especially embers in the tunnel. While still getting beat on by devourers. I dunno, maybe I just don’t know how to use a greatsword properly.

Anyway, when you lose aggro (or die), this is what happens to all the loose mobs in the tunnel. They all collect at the entrance looking threatening and intimidating. My berserk approach fortunately controlled the population some, and there was a period of pulling with scepter, backing off and trying to get only one mob over, kiting it around while hitting it with scepter, and closing in to melee whenever it looked safe. You can get the NPCs to help somewhat too, revive them if they’re within reach.

3) The Random Hall of Champions

I was terrified that it was going to be the Champion Ember. I honestly don’t know if I can take that one down, even now.

It was the Ooze.

Cue another learning and death period of experimentation, trying to pull them into the tunnel and failing, getting pulled instead and squished by a big blob of ooze. It was pretty ugly for a while.

The thing I really enjoy about a solo challenge though, is that it forces you to improve and think things through and you have the leisure time to do it. (As contrasted with a group when everyone just dives in and flails away.)

I eventually hit on attacking at range in the hall, and suddenly observed what the ooze attacks look like at long range. They have two, one simple boomerang and a triangular shotgun-like boomerang. If these hit you, you get pulled in. It’s pretty easy to avoid at really long range. (Maybe ranged classes are busy laughing at me for not figuring this out earlier. You know melee people, they don’t see shit but the big weapon they’re thwapping the mob’s head in with.)

And they turned out to be also -projectile- attacks. (Ding! Bright happy guardian lightbulb goes off!)

Enter wall of reflection, and spirit shield for the shield of absorption to make my fail dodging life easier. (And lemme tell you, the reflected four-prong triangular attack does -sick- damage onto the oozes.) Alternating between those and concentrating on survival during the downtime = successfully sceptering down the oozes one by one.

4) Weapons Test

Went back to hammer from greatsword here for Banish. I love Protector golf.

Wall of reflection (to block shamans while killing core in peace), Stand Your Ground and Hallowed Ground for stability laziness. Went without a hitch.

5) Supercooled Rooms

Not hitchless. Involved a lot of experimenting, a lot of pulling back away from the debuff, trying to figure out the best timing of wall of reflection, hold the line and stand your ground for best survival chances, alternating between melee and ranged, screaming at brawler/gunner simultaneous tag teams, being forced by self-preservation to really observe the brawler’s animations and learn how the fuck to jump/dodge its shockwave and ditto with the gunner’s attacks.

My only suggestions from very painful learning are to pull slowly, back around corners to LOS if yer gonna melee, and if you see the tag team, go ranged, backpedal like hell and take down the brawler first, gunner’s projectiles are easier to dodge at really long range.

I’m sure some of the deaths were from me being stubborn and wanting to figure out if I could kite/move in melee more efficiently. May have improved a bit, may have not. Ranging them down is, I believe, the much safer option.

Here’s the nice thing about soloing. You can take your time to /sleep and take pretty screenshots. (Everything was pulled and cleaned up except the effigy.)

6) The Prisoners

You think it’s lengthy when you’re in a group? Trust me, it’s much worse solo.

The NPCs will help you over-aggro everything. Maybe it was a bad decision to be in knight’s armor, because that promptly dragged attention to me. Lots of running away and leaving the bookahs to die. Some dying. Lots of pulling. Lots of experimentation with utility skills – and eventually ended up with wall of reflection and spirit shield again to soak some of the projectile pain. Very lengthy training process forcing me to get better dealing with brawlers and gunners. Lots of using corners and running around scenery and trying to figure out when it was safe to go in with melee to speed things up. Lots of reeling back going ‘ow ow ow fuck ow’ and trying to heal it up.

Then to add insult to injury, the prisoners will bum rush the protectors and swarm it to the point where you can’t launch it properly out of the fire shield. Or you’re staring at them in the distance, knowing you can’t go down there in melee because that’s going to aggro a shitton of other stuff, so you just have to autoattack with scepter and wait endless moments for the shield to fall.

On the bright side, as you accumulate more and more prisoners, they form a very nice meatshield vanguard of minions – who will even rez each other. I figure this will make proper ranged professions with good damage very happy.

7) Berserker and Firestorm

This challenged the shit out of me.

My original plan was to take down berserker first, leaving the much simpler firestorm (so I thought) for later.

So I kited berserker around, and when firestorm enraged, shit became fucking real. Those fire circles hurt if you accidentally stumble into them, and when you’re trying to dodge/jump berserker’s shockwaves at the same time, accidents happen.

I worked on getting the enrage stacks off as I just had no confidence I could keep dodging the super-intense versions of both of them for an extended period of time. Berserker kept getting in the way of my slow ass scepter orbs. Run around some more, dodge all the things, heal like mad and throw on swiftness whenever.

I came real close to berserker going down twice, near 15% of its health left, then I landed in an enraged firestorm’s multiple circles of fire the first time, and got knocked off the platform by berserker the second time.

I leave out the other multiple attempts where I didn’t quite get that close. It wasn’t at all frickin’ easy to kite when you’re the only one and berserker keeps shadowstepping to you.

My last omnomberry pie wore off and I had to step out to go get more.

Eventually, getting tired, fingers cramping, I decided to change plans and targets and see if firestorm was easier to take down. What was really killing me was the enraged firestorm circles, which hurt like hell, and make the whole place a major hazardous minefield to avoid (while still trying to jump/dodge away from berserker’s shockwaves.)

He stays more stationary too, so smite was easier to land on him, though berserker kept getting in the way as usual.

Turns out the enraged berserker gets some manner of interrupts and chain knockdown/backs. Luckily, Save Yourselves is a stun break, so it was easy to save that for the times he caught me, use it, and dodge the hell out of the way. (And at least if I dodged into a fire circle now, it wasn’t OW OW FUCK OW SHIT type of painful.)

Got the firestorm down on the first try.

Enraged berserker turned out to be quite easy and methodical to handle. And no, I didn’t crawl between his legs. What would be the point of soloing MWF if I did that?

By now, I was super familiar with how to read the berserker’s animations. When he jumps up, ground shockwave coming. Dodge forwards, or jump forwards. When he claps his hands, air shockwave, do nothing.

I just kited him around on the outer edge of the platform, handling the lesser shockwaves as appropriate. When his flame circle came up, just double dodge and ran the fuck away in the exact opposite direction to the other edge.

He helpfully walks out of his fire circle toward you, while getting hit by your ranged attacks, then shadowsteps the rest of the distance to you. Bang down smite, and begin kiting again.

I even dodged a flame circle or two because I felt like living dangerously.

Pop went the berserker. And popped open the chest, I did.

No jetpack, of course. But at least it wasn’t a food recipe. I think I would have cried if that happened.

I don’t think I need to cover the epilogue. It was just fetch and carry.

Though I did try out the other path that I would normally never use in a group. (For fear of missing a jump and falling horribly into lava and looking more of a fool than I am.)

The whole thing took 5 hours from start to finish. I -was- taking my time, resting and AFK in places, taking screenshots and being experimental with tactics though. Someone more focused on speed, with more damage and better with their combat reflexes would probably get done faster.

I highly doubt that it would match a group’s pace of an hour and under, so it’s no threat to farming.

In fact, it kind of reminds me fondly of those solo adventures in GW1 trekking slowly around the Underworld and the Fissure of Woe or banging one’s head in the Domains of Anguish, just without any controllable heroes. It’ll never match a group, but it’s a hard challenge for a soloist.

It’s a pity that it’s only sticking around for a limited time. Because it makes me count my hours and want to farm it endlessly in a group instead, whereas if it were here for longer, there’s more leeway to take one’s time on it.

So for the antisocials who refuse to group, if you are hardcore enough, you might indeed sorta kinda get through the Molten Weapons Facility by yourself. Given sufficient time and the ability to not freak out at multiple deaths and a scary repair bill.

The important thing is persistence, observation of mobs, learning from what went wrong, and knowing your skills/builds/profession pretty well.

I leave you with this hilarity from the FIRST time I tried to solo it, two days ago, and decided it was impossible.

Off to a bad start

Yes, I talk to myself and to NPCs.

This is why you must kill fast in the tunnel. (You can also run past them, but it’ll get ugly if you encounter problems in the champion’s hall. And the dead NPCs may be in inconvenient locations.)

Pwned by champion ooze and wussed out

I was wrong. It can be done.

Not easily.

Not inclusively.

Not in a timely fashion.

But it’s not impossible.

GW2: How Inclusive Should the Molten Weapons Facility Be?

So… let’s talk dungeon. Specifically, the potentially controversial Molten Weapons Facility that has made an appearance as the next stage of the Living Story – Flame & Frost: Retribution saga.

The raging controversy at the above linked thread is the old debate about having the option to solo vs “forced” group content. One of the major beefs is the ol’ bait-and-switch over time, especially with the lure and promise of a narrative to be completed. Players are suckers for a good story, and want to see it from beginning, middle and end. Throw in a 5-man dungeon to cap off your story, and it’s the Personal Story => Arah Story dungeon WTF all over again.

Two other subsets appear to have issues with this. One, the antisocials and/or ‘friends and family only’ small group less than five folks who are rather dismayed at having this appear to cock block their story or achievement progress (and let’s not forget the tempting vanity shinies too.)

And two, the for-whatever-reason movement-impaired, ie. those who cannot dodge or jump well, possibly physically handicapped or having a disease or have poor ping, etc, who know very well that they will either soon be left out or excluded due to accessibility issues, or don’t want to deal with the emotional drama/stress/tension that is bound to arise from having a not-so-great player in the midst of a group focused on getting to the end as quickly as possible.

(Now before any of the above take major umbrage at my description of them, know too that I also habitually fall off cliffs, through gaps, fail dodges, and jump poorly, nor does it seem to be helped by having a latency all the way from South East Asia. At least it’s not Australia?)

I dunno. I think I have a point I want to make about inclusivity vs exclusivity, but it’s not quite well formed yet.

Oooh, that’s deep.

Instead, let me tell you about my experiences with the Molten Weapons Facility so far:

Round 1 – Random PUG, all level 80s, same server, on cookie cutter guardian

Since the dungeon had bugged out as the patch dropped, and I was simply too sleepy to wait any further, I tried to get on as soon as I woke up in order to catch the wave of people who still hadn’t done it yet. As pure random chance would have it, I did find such a group. Good, it’s my favorite way to experience a new dungeon, and just like the launch crowds only happen once, you cannot take away knowledge once it is learned.

We were all 80s, the group consisted of 2 warriors, a mesmer, an engineer and moi. The warriors were using shouts and banners, there was me on the ye olde AH shout hammer guardian, and I am not conversant enough with the other two classes to know what they were doing, but I am sure there was a good mix of control/dps/support going on. We learned the mechanics via experiencing it, there were barely any deaths, whole thing ran very smoothly. I had a hammer knockback, which was very helpful on the protectors, found my stability shout pretty heavily utilized, and made a mental note to take in hallowed ground next time as well.

Round 2 – Guild group, 4 level 80s and 1 lvl 40, same server, on cookie cutter guardian

For my next run, I joined some guildies, three of which were running it for the first time and one of whom, along with me, had done it once before. Group composition, mesmer, 2 necromancers, a lvl 40 warrior and me. I brought hallowed ground, swapping it back and forth with retreat as needed.

The two of us checked with the three who hadn’t done it to see if they were open to spoilers. They were, and wanted strategy tips but they didn’t want to rush through, which was a-ok with me because I loathe speed runs with a passion. (More on this later though.)

Noted the ore appeared to be on cooldown or a per-character basis. I’m still not sure if the karma items are on an account basis – I failed to receive one of them when my inventory was full and I’m going to be a little sad if I miss the little conversation snippet because of this. Thankfully, no achievement linked to it.

All in all, a relatively smooth run. A few more deaths than the previous round, and one wipe on the boss as folks figured out the mechanics. I believe most of the additional deaths came from trying to rez each other, because getting locked into place rezzing during a high mobility required fight is always tricky. We ended up finishing the ranged boss with two people, or one really, as I collapsed one second before it died (which joyously rallied me, even before the others rezzed up for the super-saiyan boss version.)

Round 3 – Random PUG, 2 level 80s, a lvl 52, a lvl 25, a lvl 4, same server, on experimental spirit weapon build guardian

Now that I had the facility under my belt, so to speak, I was curious to see if a new character would reset the ore or karma items. I was also curious to see if spirit weapons had been improved any. Well aware I was going to be a LOT squishier, I decided to chance it with a random PUG.

Group composition: Me, a lvl 80 engineer, a lvl 52 warrior, a lvl 25 elementalist, a lvl 4 guardian. I checked the achievement points of the lowbies, and they were all only at a few hundred. The engineer had 3000. I’m sure some of you are laughing on the floor right now. Me, I knew very well this wasn’t ever going to make it to completion and sighed inwardly. I briefly considered logging cookie cutter AH alt on to maybe soak more pain and give more group support than the more selfishly built one, but what the hell, it was going to be a test of how the designers had scaled/balanced their MWF!

The good news is that we managed the Molten Alliance veterans just fine. The bad news is that we popped a Champion Ember as the boss in the hall after the dredge tunneling machine, instead of a Champion Ooze. This, if you are not aware, spawns a great variety of Ember minions of normal and veteran quality and KEEPS spawning them. All of which throw a ground based lava font aoe.

This utterly decimated the team. Over and over. We tried pulling the whole mass back into the tunnel, which helped us take down everything not-Champion for a short while and dink 1/5 of the Champion’s health bar off. Concentrated ground aoe in that chokepoint is a killer though, and took squishy ol’ me out in four hits or so, once I’d used up all dodging capacity, blocks, invulnerable, the works. Let’s not even talk about how the lowbies fared, between not having developed dodge reflexes, underdeveloped traits/skills, and naturally very little toughness/vitality.

So we tried the Ember in the hall, which helped me survive it a little longer by virtue of kiting it around internally screaming my head off that this is entirely the wrong build for this sort of thing, except all the lowbies fell over in three seconds when the other Embers looked at them crosswise, and then I fell over when eight lava AoEs appeared under my feet before I could even hit the dodge button.

I swapped to projectile reflects and absorbs, which did nothing for the ground based aoe damage. I wasn’t traited for shouts, and had a grand total of maybe 200 healing power, so I doubted it would work either. Long story short, we called it. They did, however, very gamely give it their all over and over, and it was just very obvious that these were all inexperienced or new Guild Wars 2 players, while I wasn’t on a cheaty optimal group-focused build either and had been hoping to sneak in and get ‘half-carried’ by other stronger builds.

Round 4 – Random PUG, all level 80s, same server, on experimental spirit weapon build guardian

So immediately on disbanding, I jumped right in to another group LFM, and what do you know, the slightly less experienced level 80 engineer in round 3 had popped right in to the new group with me. I was quite gleeful about this, tbh, because this evened out the variance between dungeon experiments.

Group composition: 2 mesmers, a thief, the engineer and me. I took one look at the group and decided to pre-warn them that I wasn’t in your typical AH hammer guardian tanky build. Fortunately, the spokesperson of the group who had done it before was very accepting and said no problem, it was all about skill and knowing when to dodge/jump, etc.

As luck would also have it, we spawned the Champion Ember. This, I noted with some amount of vindication, did knock over one or two level 80s with the ground based aoes – BUT with the dps outputted by five level 80s (and probably some aggro tanking from mesmer clones) , I was able to survive long enough for the Ember to fall over before all my helpful survival skills ended up on cooldown. I did have to bounce between melee and ranged, instead of just face-tanking shit with a hammer though.

Veteran Molten Alliance seemed to go down somewhat faster. Protectors were harder to manage as the shield knockback doesn’t launch them far enough out of the circle, and the spirit hammer knockback is hard to control/precisely position.

The boss fight was on an order of distinctly more challenging. The two mesmers were very skilled and kited well with their clones and had the shockwave timing jumps pat. The engineer, as expected, spent most of his time facefirst on the ground. I wasn’t far behind from that, along with the thief.

Some of it just seemed to be bad luck though. The loudest, most skilled spokesperson still fell over when the berserker landed a chained up knockdown or some such on them. I come out of loadscreens a bit more slowly than most (either lousy computer or ping or both) so when the berserker boss superpowered himself, I had just enough time to see the flame circle sweep towards me but not enough time to react with a jump, dodge, or run away – which somehow one-shot me. Wonder if it critted. I did eat a few more shockwaves during the next go, because I was trying the ‘jump over’ method spokesperson was recommending, but I think ping was a problem. That or being on a charr or my overall timing. I had MUCH better success with dodges or blocks (or stability, which I resolved to slot in the next time, as the spirit weapons were just getting splattered by the boss – so much for hp buffing.)

Despite the multiple deaths, we did actually kill the bosses (two tries each) and complete the dungeon.

Round 5 – Picky PUG, all level 80s, same server, on cookie cutter guardian

I was actually hoping to be a masochist and subject one or two more random PUGs to my ‘horrible’ guardian. However, the only group advertising in map was someone looking for – I quote – “shout/banner warrior, AH hammer guardian or TW mesmer.”

As is my usual custom, I ignored such pickiness (like, I suspect, most people do) and watched the group leader advertise two more times. Then I decided I was bored enough to go do one more experiment for the sake of science (and this blog!) and also, I kinda wanted another try at the jetpack pop chance at the end of the dungeon.

It helped that the group leader had engaged in a civil mapchat conversation with someone who was expressing that their previous group had wiped on the last boss and was feeling the dungeon to be extremely hard, whereas said group leader said, no no, it’s very easy, here, join my group and I’ll show you. (Then promptly renewed his advertising for the new GW2 trinity.)

So I sent them a tell, told ‘em I’d log on Mr Cookie Cutter, and joined them.

Need I really say anything more about how it went?

Oh well, if you insist. Group composition: elementalist, ranger, necromancer, warrior and me. The necromancer had minions out, the warrior had banners and shouts going, combo fields were dropping left, right and center, almost no one’s hp bar moved except for maybe mine, which would just bounce up and down between full and half in the manner of AH guardians. One crisis moment of nearly dropping necessitated a brief backing off to staff empower up to 3/4 health, and there was one mind-blanked-out face-tanking hammer-humming moment which caused me to eat a flame circle and drop downed, because I plain forgot to even watch out for it.

—

So… what is the moral of these stories?

I dunno. It actually just makes me sad. I WANT to be inclusive, dammit.

I don’t want to reject non-level 80s from, what is essentially, an event dungeon group.

You know who those only-in-the-several-hundreds ArenaNet achievement points players are? They are our game’s new blood.

I’m sure people could probably “carry” one or two of them in a very strong dungeon powerhouse builds kind of group. But I wonder if they want to be “carried” or if they’d really rather just contribute.

I’d really love to take in non-standard builds to a dungeon whom ArenaNet -claims- that any group of five players can manage. And I gotta admit, I did complete the dungeon successfully with one. But I do worry about how much of a drag down I will be on the group as a result.

Then as icing on the temptation cake, I find that I actually crave the rewards that pop at the end of this dungeon. The jetpack looks pretty nifty, but I’d really kill for a mini firestorm and to be able to construct an endless potion of his berserker brother.

Now to perfect my miniature shrinking ray…

With THAT kind of goal in mind, and a 14 day time limit on this dungeon, doesn’t that add up to a distinct designer pressure for achievement-oriented players to run this dungeon back to back as many times and as quickly as possible?

—

I’m probably still going to bring my squishy Charr into MWF one or two more times, for the heck of it and because I’m going to master dodging and jump timing, dammit,  and I’ll apologize in advance here for any group wipes and repair bills and extended runs this might or might not cause some unlucky random PUG.

But after I get being stubborn and experimental out of my system, expect to see me on the Asura hammering my way to victory repeatedly for a few vanity shinies.

Taking bets now on when speed runs and the MWF farm become the only “proper” way to run this dungeon, and what the ‘expected’ strategy everyone is ‘required’ to follow ends up becoming.