Part Two of the Tuesday N00b Club Sorrows Furnace rampage went well, seeing us complete the last bit of To Sorrow's Furnace; Noble Intentions without too much mishap and roll on to the finale of the interesting but underused Sorrow's Furnace quest set; The Final Assault.
It isn't a new place by any means, dating back to September 2005, long before the addition of the Eye of the North dungeons, but the place functions in a very similar manner; a large underground map whose contents can alter depending on currently active quest states. I'm not sure why it had taken me this long to give the place a serious look; possibly a mistake assumption that it was Hardcore Endgame Raiding, when in reality, a team of two players with six Heroes, or even one player with seven NPCs, could probably do very well in there with a bit of practice. Enemies seem to consist mostly of very angry dwarfs and those strange Dredge mole-men from Factions, all in the L24 range.
Like EotN, it also features a big end boss set-piece which was the focus of the last quest and this turned out to be a Giant Robot!
Everything is made more awesome with the addition of Giant Robots (with the possible exception of Planetside), and this one was very nifty, roaring a lot, swinging big robot arms about, dropping big spikey metal balls on us, and periodically bathing the slower or more unfortunate members of our gang, in molten steel. Good times!
The molten steel attack hurt very much, but was the final necessary step in the ongoing Black Moa Chick minipet treasure hunt some of us had been chipping away at, and several thousand degrees of heat later, this hatched!
...which was nice. Blowing the giant robot's head off and decommissioning the angry evil dwarf weapon factory also resulted in this rather neat trophy for the Hall of Monuments too:
The place seems to drop a disproportionately large amount of Guild Wars' 'green' unique weapons too, which I ended up with several of. Guild Wars isn't really about gear, so these don't have mind blowing or game breaking stats on them, but are often interestingly skinned and more appealing from a collector's perspective, than a powergamer's.
All in all, well worth a few evenings pottering about; challenging, but not being so technically difficult that casual players need not apply, and being neatly divided up in to a number of manageable tasks that can be fit in to half-hour and hour-long sessions. Head for the Deldrimor War Camp and find the Dwarven Prospector just outside, to get started.
Having a guild of competent and even seasoned veterans means that this kind of end-gamish activity is now a lot less remote a prospect than it once was and in future weeks, we'll be looking into some of the other big events available; Fissure of Woe, Tomb of the Primeval Kings, Domain of Anguish and similar, but next week is going to be The Great Nightfall Treasure Chest Ransack Roadshow again, because everyone likes money, and as guild leader, I'm sensitive to complex psychological motivations like that!