Legendary Vanquishers!

In a feat that would put the Ministry of Purity to shame, Mousie and I have became Legendary Vanquishers! That's right folks, you name it we killed it; every baddie in every zone in hard mode has been eliminated!

Along the way we even found some areas we had never seen before, even after 6+ years of Guild Wars! Most recently, the troll cave in Snake Dance.

We would like to share some of our tips and tricks for gaining the Legendary Vanquisher title for any other brave souls attempting it or intending to attempt it now.

1. Find a build that works for you.

It's very important you design a team that makes sense to you, a team build that you can understand and run. Mousie and I were alone together with 6 heroes, and our build revolved around direct damage, massive AOE punishment and plenty of spirit / minion fodder. These are some of the most useful skills we found for Hard Mode:

Broad Head Arrow

Splinter Weapon

Volley

Whirlwind Attack

Mark of Pain

Enfeebling Blood

Panic

Mistrust

Defy Pain

to name but a few. Our general tactic was to pull a group (they would tend to clump themselves together for us, usually) and obliterate them wth our AOE attacks such as whirlind attack and volley while under a splinter weapon, with our target hexed with mark of pain. Not a lot can survive such punishment.

Don't underestimate the importance of a balanced team. These days, a lot of people tend to go with gimmicks they find posted on the PvX builds wiki rather than puzzling out their own build, but to think of your own team have them work in sync with one another is an amazing thing.

It's also important to remember that you won't always have the luxury of a party of 8. You need to find a way to make your team work for you when the limit is reduced to 6, or even 4 in some instances.

2. Know your enemy and exploit their weaknesses.

It's a good idea to visit the official guild wars wiki (wiki.guildwars.com) or use /wiki in game, to find some information about your intended vanquish area. For example, if you're facing an area full of water magic wielding enemies you may consider outfitting your team with Mantra of Frost! There's a Mantra for every element and they helped us immensely. Fire forest? Mantra of fire! Shiverpeak mountains? Mantra of frost! etc.

In Hard Mode, enemies receive a 50% attack and movement speed boost so you can use this against them. Skills such as Empathy and Spiteful Spirit will have them commiting suicide in no time at all. You could also choose to negate their bonuses by taking Shared Burden. Defy Pain was truly a life safer, too; I rarely took any damage from basic attacks, and even most spells were limited in their effects. Since I was usually the last to die in those instances we were to have a party wipe, I could easily shout "By Ural's Hammer!" to bring my entire party back with a vengeance. This can also be a good tactic to ressurect a wiped party; use Ural's Hammer! to ressurect one of your party with a renewable ressurect, and have them ressurect the rest of the team. You'll be back on your feet again in no time.

Unfortunately, since most enemies are of a much higher level (and likely have stronger armour) in Hard Mode, certain professions such as Elementalists may feel their spells a little underwhelming. I have to recommend that direct damage in the form of holy, dark or chaos damage is your best bet for a consistent battle.

3. Back to back vanquishes

This mostly applies to Tyria. If there are some tough zones coming up, and uh oh, you notice you can only have a party of four in them; you may be so lucky as to enter from another explorable zone from a different outpost allowing six. A perfect example of this would be the entire of Ascalon; It's actually possible to backtrack from Yak's Bend with a party of six and vanquish every single zone in the Ascalon area (usually a party of 4) with your party of 6. It definitely makes things easier on you, even if you need to be prepared to leave your computer switched on to finish the vanquishes the following day.

4. Sweet, sweet CANDY!

Honeycombs. Honeycombs, Honeycombs, Honeycombs Honeycombs. Oh, and if I forgot to mention it? HONEYCOMBS!

I don't know just how many times our scarred and charred butts have been saved by noshing a few of these beautiful things. Honeycombs grant your entire party a 5% morale boost, so they are incredibly useful for vanquishers in a tough spot. In some zones these are absolutely priceless, and they are cheap and readily available in any major city for between 100 and 200 gold a pop.

Although Honeycombs are the ultimate vanquisher's candy, there's plenty of other useful candies for you to consider using too. They can boost life, energy, attack speed, skill casting speed, and more!

Red Rock Candy

Pumpkin Pie

Candy Corn

Candy Apple

Rainbow Candy Cane (Honeycomb equivalent)

Birthday Cupcake

Some of these are rarer than others, but most of them won't set you back much gold at all and can mean the difference between a successful vanquish and a party wipe.

5. Don't give up!

If at first something feels horrendously difficult, or even impossible, take solace in the fact that it truly isn't. Many others have done this before, and you can do it too! 

The Mad King Cometh

Happy Halloween!

It's that spooky time of year and that means GW's Halloween event is underway! Towns are decorated, Trick or Treat bags are dropping and soon the quests begin. The new costumes are fantastic, one even looks like Dhuum!



They always do a fabulous job with their events and I can't wait! Here's the schedule of events:

Mon. Oct 24 the quests in Lion's Arch and Kamadan begin at Noon Pacific.

Mon. Oct. 31 The Mad King appears in LA and Kamadan every 3 hours starting at 12:01am Pacific. Be sure to visit both cities to get both hats!

Wed. Nov. 2 the event ends at 12:01am Pacific.

Bear and I hope to make a huge dent in our party/sweet tooth/drunkard titles this week. Wish us luck!

Guild Wars Apocalypse

Completely by accident, it would seem, Anet gave us an amazing and spectacular event within Guild Wars. They added a new "Flux" (global PVP modifier) called Minion Apocalypse; any time a player dies, all nearby creatures take 50 damage and a level 20 masterless bone horror would be spawned. Now, couple that with Dhuum, who likes to show up and ban botters... well, it was only a matter of time before the inevitable zombie apocalypse. Dhuum showed up at the Random Arenas and swung his scythe, slaying and banning the cheater; and from his corpse rose a bone horror! With all the people who go AFK at the random arena, wearing their nice squishy cloth armour, you can guess what happened next. The minion whacks away at one of them, they die and another spawns...and so on. Until we have a situation like this:

This was definitely a lot of fun, and I absolutely hope that Anet considers bringing this back for Halloween. Imagine the Mad King Thorn doing this? The entire of Lion's Arch dominated by a thousand bone horrors, chewing their way through all of his fans? Yes please!

If you wish to see a video of the bone horrors going to town on the Jade Quarry, Relyk has posted one here: http://www.xfire.com/video/4e844a/

See you all soon when the Mad King comes to call!

Dungeon Date

Mousie and I were looking for something to do, so we decided it was time to dive into a random dungeon; and this time we chose the Vloxen Excavations.

We had a great time traversing the depths; finding the master gears and placing them into gearboxes to open doors reminded me of the Sorrow's Furnace. I picked up a "Golden Machete", at which point I had to ask Mousie if that was like the Golden Gun of swords. So anyway, up until the final boss it was a routine and fun experience; I particularly enjoyed an ironic Summit Sage defeat; he was attempting to heal himself with Ether Feast, and was killed by a tasty Mistrust; thank you, Gwen!

We got to Zoldark and right off the bat he seemed rather weak. That is, until he used a bunch of skills making his minions into rapid attacking, life stealing, health regenerating terrors who tore us to pieces. After a fierce battle (and a few trips limping back from the res shrine), we managed to drop him to half his HP; at which point he vanished. Poof, hey presto, alakazam gone! I was surprised and confused about that; perhaps one of his skills which supplied him with extra health was temporary, and it had ended; still, there was no death animation, he just completely vanished, along with his pets. Still, we were happy, because that meant looting the chest! Mousie got a Cyclopian Wand and a Diamond, and I a Divine Staff and Onyx Gemstone. Fairly mundane loot, but we had plenty of fun getting there!

Happy adventures to you all!

You Look Mahvelous!

GamesCom 2011 has been going strong today and I came across some GW2 videos posted by AeronwenTrewent that are well worth a look. The videos show the Norn, Charr and Sylvari through the character creation process from start to finish and boy, what a lot of customization to be had! After race, gender and class, the screen goes to Body Features. You can then choose your height. Physique comes next, but this was disabled for the demos.

The next feature is fur for Charr and tattoos for Norn. The videos seemed to show about 14 styles of fur and 9 different tattoos for the Norn. While the video didn't show each one, they seem to be pretty different from one another.

Hair styles follows with 10 choices for Norn, 8 for Sylvari and 8 for Charr. Yes, Charr do style their hair! The choices in color seem endless and various combos can be made with head hair and facial hair.

After Hair comes Faces and Skin color with more than 20 available tones for the Sylvari and a good number for the Norn as well. The Sylvari video also showed ear choices! The Facial Detail tab was not available for the demos, but I'm willing to bet there will be a wide variety to that also.

One thing I really liked in GW1 was the dye system and this has been carried over to GW2 with even more variety. Three areas of each piece of clothing to dye with 24 colors to choose from for each piece make your character's clothes your own. No more looking like all the others! The ability to hide or show your headpiece has been included, yay!

The last thing is your character's story. Sentences are shown with a word to be filled in. Each race has different ones and the choices you make to fill in the blanks determines your character's "back story".

Character customization is something I always look for, and complain about if it's lacking, in games. These videos are really exciting and show just how much ArenaNet cares about players' feelings of uniqueness and variation. Kudos, Anet! Well done.

AeronwenTrewent's YouTube Channel

Fire Forest, You're Fired!

"Let's vanquish Sacnoth Valley?" Mousie asked me. I felt the world sinking beneath my feet, my head spinning and my gut wrench, since I knew that meant one thing: the Fire Forest. Burning Spirits, Flowstone Elementals, any kind of mean fire critter you could think of in one giant forest fire.

Mousie was confident, though, and I wasn't about to let her down; so all I did was add Mantra of Flame to all of my heroes to reduce the impact of fire damage and provide them energy. After some tough battles and lots of being burned half to death, we were able to destroy all the flame creatures of the fire forest! It was quite a relief I can tell you!

Eliteism in Heroes' Ascent

I'm Rank 6 with 1000 fame in Guild Wars now, so I like to think I know a thing or two about how the Heroes' Ascent works; but let me tell you it wasn't always that way.

Let me tell you the tale of my first encounter with PvP in Guild Wars, approximately 6 years ago. I was a monk, enjoying myself having made it to 20, beating Prophecies with my guildies and looking forward to more to come. Guildies had been pressuring me to get our guild more into PvP, and as their leader I felt obligated to check out the scene and see what I could do to satisfy their desires for player versus player combat. So I head over to the Hall of Heroes, as it was called back then, and try to find myself a team.

Straight away I notice how many teams shunned you for being unranked. I honestly struggled to even find a team for more than 2 hours, but finally, a team took me in because they were desperate for a monk. Upon entering the team, I'm hit with chat such as "hey u can run woh ok"? and various other meaningless acronyms to me at the time. I was nervous, so I didn't want to show my complete lack of experience by asking just what in the great blue sky they were talking about, so I sort of nodded my head and said OK. They took me in with them and we came up against some form of brutal lightning spike; most of the team died instantly, then they started to yell at me. I thought it might be a good idea to ressurect the other monk, so I cast Rebirth.. apparently a huge mistake to have brought that, because I was met with "OMG ROFL LOL WHAT A F**KING NOOB HAS NO CLUE WHAT HES DOING F**KING NOOB IDIOT MORON NOOB" which was at the very least disheartening; I left in a hurry to the safety and solitude of the Guild Hall and made sure I didn't set foot in the Hall of Heroes again for years.

I often look back on that first encounter now and wonder; was I wrong for not speaking up when I was unsure of what to do? Were they wrong for assuming I knew what to do in the first place, knowing I was unranked and picking me up from the Hall at random? Either way, I often feel their reaction to my failure was very cold, brutal and undeserving; I definitely messed up bringing Rebirth, but screaming at me in such a way was not in the least productive or helpful to anyone.

A few years (and many characters) later, a friend decided to message me one day and tell me they really needed a smiting monk for a dual smite build they were running. I thought "not a chance in hell" figuring it would be a revisit of the experience I had previous, but I felt compelled to help because he was a friend of mine, so I went. Luckily for me, they were a little more helpful this time around; they gave me a build and a general "here's what you do", and after that, I was sorted. We won multiple games, and in the first session with them I had earned half the fame I needed to make Rank 3. It was definitely much better than the last experience I had with Halls PVP (now renamed to Heroes' Ascent), but I couldn't help but notice just how grumpy and self-entitled the guild leader of this little team was. He ranted, raved, and screamed at his guildies like a child crying for it's bottle, and I honestly wasn't impressed.

Still, I needed the fame, or so I thought at the time; I figured it might be nice to get back at those brats who show their rank emotes over your corpse in the random arenas. I had a few more games with these guys, and managed to make rank 3 which I was very happy about because it meant I got my first rank emote: the Deer (Bambi).

pretty right? I was pleased for sure, but after we returned from the Halls to Heroes' Ascent outpost, it all kicked off. The guild leader refused to enter again until he found out who "screwed up", as someone had used their ressurection signet a little too late in the game. So he stomped, huffed and puffed, and threw a temper tantrum accusing any and everyone of being a "scrub" before he started randomly kicking people from the guild. At this point I had joined them, but found myself kicked in his temper tantrum along with half of the other members; and that's when it hit me. I breathed a huge sigh of relief and felt liberated as I was no longer in the guild, and it dawned on me I had been spending my time with the wrong people. I didn't owe this brat anything, and neither did his other members. They could continue to take his abuse for all I cared, but I was gone and had no plans about coming back despite the others asking me to.

After this, I realised just exactly what I wanted from Heroes' Ascent, and that's the feeling you get when you work together to face down and conquer a fearsome opponent. I wasn't getting that with my previous team, as they were all about the fame points and upping their ranks. So I decided, now that I had my "Bambi of honour" I could lead my own team, and I did. I invited unranked, inexperienced players to join my team, but I told them what I would need of them and what they could expect. We were prepared for the worst and together, overcame many obstacles and teams. By leading unranked teams into the Heroes' Ascent, I was able to gain my Rank 6 Wolf emote, and fulfill a promise to Mousie to get her the rank 3 Bambi. A few others got their bambis under my command, too, and I was very proud to lead them into battle. Heroes' Ascent had become fun for me, and despite us not being as good as the "elites", we had a great time. We even stuck it to a few of the well known guilds out there, and nothing was quite as satisfying to us as trampling those "big shots" underfoot.

So all in all, what have I learned from this? There is an aura of eliteism and narcissism to be found (and hopefully avoided) in the Heroes' Ascent, but you shouldn't let that stop you from enjoying yourself. In all walks of life, there will be those who brag the most, shout the loudest and boast incessantly about themselves, but if you can tolerate them there's plenty of reasons to stick around.

With that said, PvP in Guild Wars definitely has it's pluses. In the right situation you can have a lot of fun, some tremendous and unforgettable challenges, and even some amazing loot now (such as the coveted Mini Ghostly Hero). If you can stomach the negativity of the scene and find the good people in it, Heroes' Ascent is a place you can enjoy.

LDOA!

After many (nowhere near as many as we thought) hours of battling Bandits, Grawl and Charrsies, Mousie and I made Legendary Defender of Ascalon! It's quite exciting to be level 20 in the pre-searing, and we couldn't be happier to have made it there. Honestly we figured it would take months, but with careful fighting and farming, as well as daily quests, we did it in no time!

If anyone is interested in advice on how to do this effectively and efficiently, we do have a few tips. First of all, avoid the "Hunt 6 of X" daily quests unless you know your maps very, very well, because you may spend a long time searching for the last X. Also, make sure to utilize the full potential of the Farmer Hamnet quest as a repeatable, simple farm for exp. It's easier to do for the first two levels of each "tier", by which I mean when you hit a certain level, your enemies gain levels and become tougher.

10..13	8
14..16	11
17..20	15

That table puts it better. from 10-13, your enemies are level 8, and so on; so we used Farmer Hamnet to gain the first two levels of each tier, then did daily quests to gain the rest. Once we hit level 19, we went mad on the pre-sear quest lines, and did practically every quest we could find to gain roughly three quarters of the level to 20; then finally, we dropped Utini WupWup and turned in the quest to hit 20!

Below is a picture of the farmer hamnet farm; simply, leave foibles fair and head to the res shrine; the academy monk will heal you while you attack the two nearby bandits. kill them, rezone, repeat. It's easy, fast, simple and great exp; much faster if you use the Fire Imp summoning stone too (which I forgot to use for an entire level!)

Good luck to all of you trying for Legendary Defender of Ascalon and happy trails!

Sexy Sylvari

The ArenaNet Blog just released the redesigned Sylvari and I must say I'm impressed! They're sleeker, sexier and far less "cartoony".


Combining elf-like basic structure with plant-like features make this design far superior to the previous one.


The cleaner lines really improve the look and feel of the Sylvari making them more believable as a "plant" race. Add in the new clothing and the look is complete.


As for their personality, Angel McCoy on the blog writes this:

"A sylvari’s honor gives her a sense of propriety that the youth of other races do not have. In many ways, they are like the Arthurian knights (without the gender bias). They take their duties seriously, and they live by a personal code. Their justice system involves duels, and when duels no longer satisfy, then the wisdom of an elder sylvari prevails. While evil sylvari do exist, most stand up for what is right, and even those who succumb to nightmare have a hatred for the Elder Dragon Zhaitan and the horrors of Orr."

I was excited about the Sylvari from the first moment I heard about them. This redesign is the best thing to happen to the race. Kudos, Anet!

Plants vs. Heroes

After 5 years+ of playing GW, Bear and I finally decided to take on Urgoz's Warren. Could it be done with just the two of us and 10 heroes/mercenaries? We were about to find out. Our first attempt was disappointing. We got through every room relatively easily only to get to Urgoz and not be able to kill him. Disheartened, we took another look at our builds and tweaked them just a bit to include more degen and EoE bomb. That did the trick! The rooms were even easier and Urgoz went down in less than 10 minutes. Very exciting to finally have that trophy in the HoM!

How Very Charrming

I was so excited when Anet announced the 6th anniversary birthday presents: the tonics! I have a charr themed (and aptly named) character, who is now the proud owner of the Pyre Fierceshot everlasting tonic. Whenever Mad Mouse and I set about on our adventures, a simple double click and I can unleash my charrming self in all my furry glory.

However, since we can use these tonics in any zone or town, it would be so much more convenient if Anet could supply us with an allotted slot on our character where we can simply drag the tonic, and have it automatically activate for us when it's able. Similar to how we have the costume slots now; we can turn them on or off at will and have them easy to use and readly available in our inventory. (Not to mention the fact that it saves us a spot in our bags, too, and we always need space!)

For your enjoyment here I am all Charred and ready for action!

Charrming, right?

Guild Wars RTS Spinoff

I was recently in Pre-Searing, and looking down on the never-ending battle below, between the human forces and the Charr.

It got me to thinking that it might actually make an exciting RTS spinoff of Guild Wars! You could see it all in the picture. You had your melee units, the guardsmen, then the longbow wielding rangers, and your healer units the academy monks. The Charr enemies had fire elementalists and warriors, and of course some rangers of their own.

After watching the battle for a while I started to imagine it as an RTS and I found the prospect incredibly exciting! It's not unheard of, either. Anyone familiar with Two Worlds 2, the popular RPG, will know about their RTS spinoff called Castle Defense.

Can you imagine commanding the armies of Tyria?

Introduction

Hello everyone! I am Bullet Bear, and together with my partner Mad Mouse we will bring you our Guild Wars related adventures.

We're incredibly excited for the upcoming release of Guild Wars 2 and looking forward to sharing our adventures, trials, loot and experiences with you (and don't forget the Dwarven Ale!).

On behalf of both of us, welcome to the Sylvari Scribbles, and you'll hear more from us soon!