The Tuesday N00b Club reconvened this week, and remarkably enough, had all done our homework. The bulk of the required 10,000 points was made up from a number of PvE overland quests, scattered about the various outposts and Luxon home regions, with all three of us variously making up the shortfall with forays into Fort Aspenwood, and the Alliance Battles.
Not quite sure what went on in there to be honest, as I only made it as far as the lobby for those. Unlike Fort Aspenwood, which is eight randomly lumped together players going at it with anonymous abandon, the AB stuff seems a bit more premeditated. As far as I can tell, you need to form up a team of four, before hitting the 'Pwn Me, I'm Ready!' button, which opens up the whole self-doubt, insecurity, noob build anxiety, random PUG PvP, post-match accountability, thing. All a bit much for me really, so I just made do with Fort Aspenwood instead, leaving the big blue-and-red wavy line on the map to the more self-confident and professional PvP Ubermeister.
Aspenwood doles out about 800 points a win though, and remarkably, most of the matches I joined, we won. My skillbar was mostly unchanged throughout; a variety of Channeling turret spirits, spirit support skills and various small-aoe lightning discharge spells which seemed to help in the very siege-busting action of the Luxxon end of the match. I'm curious to see what the place is like from the other end, so hope I can work my way down the Kurzick side of the map to their lobby and have a go, if not now, then after the story is over. I'm quite mercenary really, and fancy defending for a change!
We all gathered and ticked off the main quest, and even got to keep our points to spend in the Luxxon shop. I went with rare materials for armour, now banked. Quite happy with the stuff I'm wearing at the moment, but there's other characters to shop for in due course. Elder Rhea, suitably impressed with out devotion, then sent us off on a new task, to track down a stolen shipment of turtle eggs. The Luxxons rely heavily on the somewhat improbable giant marinelife for their way of life; immense hermit crabs and the like, used as wagons, beasts of burden, and even houses. In particular, their use of giant turtles as siege engines, as seen in Fort Aspenwood, seems vital to their war effort. This makes the eggs particularly precious, and a stolen box of the things is serious business, and their retrieval something only to be trusted with the most highly recommended allies, such as ourselves.
Tracking down the missing eggs and liberating them was no hassle, and led us eventually to the big mission of the night; #9(L) - Gyala Hatchery.
(Any evil Kurzicks playing along at home will instead have to go and do #9(K) - The Eternal Grove, which I know nothing about, so you're on yer own. See you again for #11!)
This mission turned out to be an escort mission, which I hate, and it quickly became apparent that it hated me too. All in all, a bit of a nightmare. You start at the top end of the map, with a convoy of Luxxon NPCs, including three large siege turtles, complete with back-mounted mortars, and most crucially, five lil baby turtles. This convoy winds it way slowly along a caravan route between the Hatchery proper, and the Leviathan Pits, where presumably, the lil flippers are looked after until they grow up.
The convoy is largely scripted, and its up to us to keep it safe as it makes it painfully slow way through a petrified jade sea. Of course its never that easy, and throughout the region are a huge number of Kurzick troops, hell-bent on turtle fin soup. Some are idling clusters of mobs, as found outside missions, but most are hidden away in teleport circles across the landscape, and literally pour out of the things when our meandering gang of ramblers get to certain points along the route.
On the plus side, we get three carryable, reusable Smoke Canisters, which acts as a target marker for the three siege turtles, calling down a fairly potent knockdown/interrupt over a quite generous area of effect when dropped. On the minus side, the Kurzick have Juggernauts, large tree golem things who get their kicks from flipping siege turtles on their backs. Canthan Cow-tipping, I guess. Naturally, this puts the cannons on their backs out of action.
In addition to these, each wave of ambush contains enough Kurzick Warriors to make even King Leonidas decide that perhaps he ought to pop home to check if he left the gas on. All of these sword wielding Fields of the Nephilim Fanboys make a beeline right for the helpless little turtles, all of which register as 'R 15' on the party window, and frankly don't stand much of a chance. Add to that the usual supporting cast of irritating Mesmers, curse-crazy Necromancers, AoE-fetishist Elementalists and of course, the just-out-of-reach chain-healing Monks, and it all made for quite possibly the most difficult mission the Tuesday Noob Club has faced in Faction so far.
Masters here is 'Get all five turtles home', but frankly, we were struggling with getting just one half way across the map, and it took a number of goes. The first one went badly, seeing us mostly worn down by attrition, losing too many Siege Turtles at each ambush point, seeing us all die horribly about two thirds the way across, overhwemled. The second go was even worse - all five turtles wiped out at the first ambush point! By the third go, we'd worked out that careful placement of the smoke canisters was Very Important, but got too far ahead of the convoy, in a rash attempt to preemptively clear some of the traffic up ahead a ways. Unknown to us, our convoy was side-swiped by a previously unseen ambush wave. Goes five, six and seven were mostly waspish '/resign' suicides, and tempers were starting to fray a little.
I think I was experimenting with a hopelessly underskilled and unpracticed Communing/Restoration build, which didn't help. Trying to healing the turtles and frantically placing Shelter, Union and Displacement spirits looks good on paper; these are defensive ones designed to absorb damage, increase armour, and increase blocking chance, but they're all a lot more expensive in energy to keep throwing out, and I wasn't managing my blue pool very well. I'm also not very good at the micromanagement needed to be a good PC healer in that game, and I suspect I'd have to be a proper Monk to get away with that. It also turned out that my normal PvE build does actually do a lot of damage, damage now missing from our total group DPS output.
Another horrible failure later, I snapped and went and looked the thing up on the GuildWiki. I'm not proud, and the 'Alternative Strategy it suggests sounded much better, which is basically, as soon as the mission starts, we all abandon the convoy before it gets going, legging it hard right to the map edge. This suspends the NPC's scripting, stopping their doomed shuffle into the ambushes before it even begins. We then jogged down to the end of the caravan route, and worked backwards through the ambush points.
I suppose it probably cheating, but bear in mind that we still had to eliminate each ambush, in it's entirely, ourselves anyway, which brings different challenges. On the one hand, we didn't have to worry about the turtle massacre auto-killing all of us and sending us back to start again half an hour in, but on the other hand, no Siege Turtles to lay down artillery fire. Just we hapless eight against the hordes. Turns out we're much better at the Offence than Defence, and although it still took a good hour or two, filled with tense pulling, hectic digging in, and inspired footwork, we managed far better, without the civilian casualties to worry about. If the Turtle Guy had just sent us on ahead to clear the route in the first place, we'd all have saved ourselves a lot of time!
Anyway, eventually we worked our way back to the start, waking up the convoy. Of course even doing it the 'Alternative' way, the first ambush is still unavoidable, and that was a tense moment, as the familiar squad of kamikaze Turtle-Mashing Warriors piled in, but we'd got the smoke layout right, and were uncharacteristically on the ball with target prioritisation, cleaning them off with no ecological catastrophes. We then slowly followed the convoy on it's normal route. Just as well really...we still got jumped half way along by a wave we'd somehow missed, but there was nothing like the pandemonium we saw on the first few goes at it; "Then we fight in the shade!" Bah!
I think with a full party of players who all know what's going to happen, it might be doable 'properly', but I certainly won't lose any sleep from not having to try this same mission over and over for the next six weeks! GW:EN is out, and I'm falling behind here! We got the Masters, but then again, doing it the way we did, it's hard not to really.
Turtles successfully saved from extinction, we arrived at the Pits, only to see a huge Kurzick army pile in, in cutscene form, and it all got a bit hectic there for a bit. The Kurzick were driven back, but just as they were trying to flee, our old friends The Afflicted showed up, in force. I guess Shiro must be back from his beating then. We were suddenly jerked out of cutscene to actually fight the newcomers, but compared to the mayhem on the caravan trail, this wasn't too tricky.
Then Master Togo finally shows up, and starts giving all it that about civil wars and Greater Threats. I think the phrase 'fighting like schoolboys' was actually used, and shamed and worried in equal measure, the two clans have now agreed to put aside their differences.
Divisions temporarily put aside, we're now off to another mystic temple, to again find some form of Shiro-Slaying magic. I really hope this one actually works...