So there I was, pottering about in Cavalon, the Luxon Capital and hub of the Jade Sea area of Guild Wars: Factions, early Tuesday night, without a care in the world. Indeed, the most pressing concern I had at the time was 'Will my Mesmer's bum look big in Luxon Armour?' Turmoil! Then my regular Tuesday night colleague comes bouncing in with a cheery 'Oh! Cavalon! Let's try The Deep!', and it all went downhill from there really.
Each of the Guild Wars offerings has an area like this. When you've beaten the story, and won, you're still not quite done yet; there's still the Elite Missions; the Endgame. In Prophecies, it's The Underworld and Fissure of Woe, Nightfall has the Domain of Anguish, Eye of the North has the Slaver's Exile Mega-Dungeon set, and for Factions, its Urgoz's Warren for the Kurzicks, and where we were headed; The Deep.
To get there, you need to spend 1000 Luxon faction for a special scroll which has to be used in Cavalon only, and this teleports you into an entirely new map. Much grumbling and confusion as we worked out that you need one of these per player, rather than per party, which ought to give you some inkling of how prepared we were for the trip!
I knew it was going to be hard work, but arriving in The Deep lobby area and seeing an almost unprecedented Max Party Size of twelve(!), rather than the eight you see almost everywhere else, did rather set the alarm bells ringing. The Deep is a vast yawning gulf caved out of the ubiquitous blocks of petrified jade ocean, likely some miles beneath Cavalon itself. An impressive sight actually, although I'm not sure it's quite worth the 1000 Luxon points on the basis of sightseeing alone.
The lobby area overlooks a rather complex network of bridges, gates and teleporters, looming away into the dim green light, and contains only one merchant, one Xunlai Agent (Bank Box), and no henchmen at all, which again was a bit worrying. There were two of us, each with three Heroes that still seemed to be allowed, but clearly it was expecting twelve bodies to form up before the Enter Mission button is pressed. I mentioned my concerns, but what I lack in optimism, my friend has in spades, and anyway, we'd used the scrolls now - might as well give it a go.
The job here is to defeat Kanaxai, a demonic entity who is building a nightmarish army of fish creatures, Outcast Luxons and Oni, and intent on the destruction of Cavalon. The mission itself is actually quite cunningly designed and as the debacle unfolded, I couldn't help but be impressed at the level of complexity it so clearly demanded of those imaginary twelve experienced and prepared players that we so clearly weren't.
Of course that appreciation didn't come until later...
The first thing that happens is that all twelve of you end up on the first platform and are confronted with four teleporters, only one of which is active. This puzzled me briefly, but my friend and I just plunged into the lit one without thinking about it too much. I think Dunkoro made it through as well, but no-one else!
On arrival at the next platform, we faced five of the indigenous Jade Sea mutant fish creatures, of varying types and L24, (I think), along with an 'Aspect of Kanaxi' boss (L28). Which isn't anything we can't normally cope with, (give or take -15%DP), and we plunged on it with our usual hapless gusto, entirely unaware that five of our already underpowered party were still stood about on the first platform. So that's 5xL24s plus a L28 boss, of varying types, with just three players? I'm not sure we even noticed the persistent global debuff effect, in all the pandemonium!
After a couple of wipes we started to realise quite how serious this particular location ought to be taken. You do need twelve members, and ideally, twelve actual players at that. This Dirty Dozen then needs to be divided beforehand, and by mutual arrangement, into four squads of three, each squad capable of entering its own teleporter and taking down the above mentioned party of monsters.
Once each squad's monsters are taken down, a gate opens, allowing each squad into the same next room, where more horrors await, but at least all twelve of you can reunite again.
We didn't get much further than that, as might be expected, but even that first set-piece quite took me aback, once I'd worked out how it should be done, and it seemed almost entirely unlike the rest of the PvE game of Guild Wars I'd seen so far, where usually, eight people of any old mix of classes can just head on out into the wilderness and rampage with gleeful abandon. This stuff needs choreography; planning, practice, voice-chat and a pretty big guild. I'd only ever heard of this kind of complexity required in the endgame of World of Warcraft. In other words, it was a Raid...in Guild Wars!
Mind you, given that we only saw one other person in the lobby during our hour or so of futile wiping, I don't think The Deeps, and by inference, Urgoz's Warren, (which must be quite similar), are very popular places. There are several reasons for this, I think.
For a start, Guild Wars as a whole, isn't really about raiding, in the accepted sense. I've always found the basic gameplay to be much more demanding than is typical in much of WoW; reaction times, skill building, physical positioning, all that. Perhaps that's all required at the top of WoW too, but the basic business of Killing Monsters has always seemed a lot less hectic in WoW by comparison. Even at the early levels of GW gameplay, everything is so much less predicable, so much more in flux, moment to moment. Given all that, its possible the average player is a lot more comfortable with the eight-man overland rampaging, than complex choreographed set-pieces.
Then there's the age of it. Factions has been out a while, and Nightfall and Eye of the North have come along since, each offering endgame experiences that on balance, seem if not easier per se, then a lot less awkward to set up and attempt. We've both had goes at the Domain of Anguish and Slaver's Exile as well. While we've managed to complete neither (yet!), we've done much better at each, duoing with Heroes. The staging areas for each see a lot more players too; Gate of Anguish and Umbral Grotto respectively.
Another reason perhaps, it that neither of those last two have a fee to enter - you can just show up and have at it!
There's a walkthrough here if you're feeling brave and organised, or are just curious to see what the rest of the place is like: GuildWiki: The Deeps (Mission)
I'm not sure we'll be back unless we suddenly get a massive influx of membership to the Tuesday N00b Club some time soon. Perhaps a purely reconnaissance trip to Urgoz's Warren might happen soon, but I don't imagine our group of 2 + 6 Heroes will do much better in there either.
Whatever the reason, one does not simply walk into The Deeps, and eventually, even my accomplice decided that perhaps the place was a little beyond us for the time being, so we scarpered off to Doomlore Shrine in the Charr Lands for a go as something that we were supposed to be able to do; the Catacombs of Kathandrax. This is one of the 18 dungeons listed in the Master Dungeon Guide, worth 40,000 reputation points when completely filled in. This what the Tuesday N00b Club mostly spends it retirement years doing these days - working at full Dungeon books.
This one is a bit of a pain to get to; two full Explorable Zones away from the nearest outpost start point, full of Charr. We got there in one piece eventually and set to it. The job here is to retrieve a powerful Dwarven weapon for the Ebon Vanguard, currently held by Ilsundur, Lord of Fire. Bring protection vs Elemental damage!
Quite a fun dungeon, consisting of the usual three levels. Levels one and two were nothing that special - lots of Nightfall type elemental monsters about the place; Djinn, Roaring Ethers, and the like, and LOTS of fire dart traps, which can cause trouble if you loiter too long in one place. These can be turned off, per level, by finding and taking out the stone tiger monster, and this is worth going out of your way to do - helps lots.
The final level and Ilsundur himself, were hard work, but hysterical too. He's a L29 Elementalist Fire Djinn type, and is in this large ring-shaped chamber, giggling, I'm sure of it. When you approach, all hell breaks loose. First off, two enormous Indiana Jones style rolling balls, appear, only MADE OF FIRE! These start doing circuits of the ring, and will just roll on over the unprepared Mesmer and both flatten and incinerate them without slowing down. My bum didn't look big in the Luxonwear after that, I can tell you.
That was the first wipe, although I couldn't be that cross on account of my constant giggling. Now aware of the great balls of fire rolling all about the place, we had at it a second time. Getting somewhat closer, and we discover that Ilsundur's Monster Skill is an almost nonchalant tendency to summon a timed explosive incendiary device and casually pass it to one of the party. This carryable object blows up after five seconds, so whoever receives it has to leg it a safe distance away, drop the thing and get clear really jolly quickly indeed, and with henchmen and Heroes in tow, well...I think I blew Koss, Hayda and Dukoro to bits quite a few times in the confusion. My bad! Ilsundar has the usual array of Elementalist fire spellls too, but I'm not sure I noticed in the mayhem. Rolling balls of fire! Bombs! Fire Spells! All in all, the subsequent ten minutes was a comical farce of the Benny Hill kind, and lacked only Yakety Sax playing in the background to make the moment complete!
Luckily, he doesn't regenerate, so its just a matter of perseverance and trying not to giggle so much that you have trouble operating the hotkeys. Top marks for the most entertaining Dungeon Boss we've seen so far!