Location Taken: Just north of Yellowstone National Park, in Montana
Time Taken: October 2012
I’m a bit bummed right now. There’s a set of missions in Guild Wars 2 that your guild can do together. One of the options is the Guild Bounty, where you have to track down several rather tough enemies and kill them within 15 minutes. My particular guild has a participation rate where we can manage the top tier of the mission (where you have six enemies to kill in that time) only if we get the easier enemies in the list of possibilities.
Each time we try, we spend a good half hour trying to find some of the bounties before hand. Most of them are always on the map, even if the mission isn’t active, so you just have to head there and track them down before you activate the mission. Some of them are on very long paths, so finding them can take far longer than 15 minutes, so doing this makes many of the bounties possible for us to do with our smaller guild.
Yesterday, we tried to do the top tier. And failed. We got the worst possible one, Sotzz the Scallywag. He’s hiding in one of 300 barrels spread across a rather large map, some of them tucked in the most unlikely of places. And he disappears after a minute of you rousting him out of the barrel, so you can’t even find him in advance. It’s purely a matter of luck to get the right barrel quickly enough that you still have time to kill him. He’s not an easy fight either, since he can block most of your damage most of the time. We found the barrel with him about ten seconds after our 15 minute window expired.
The second time, we found all but one of the tough-to-locate bounties and decided that that was good enough. It was getting late, and well, there was only a 1/3 chance that bounty would even be on the list. Yeah, guess what, she was on the list, and despite the whole guild looking, we still couldn’t found her in time. Our guild leader later went and tracked her down just to see where the heck she had hidden herself. She was on a short little circle path far far from any of the places where we have ever seen her before…
Tonight, we tried again, but due to the bad luck last night, we decided to try an easier tier. Just three enemies to kill, far easier to do unless we got unlucky.
First attempt. We got Sotzz. We found his barrel with a minute left in the mission. We could not kill him in time.
Second attempt, no Sotzz! Instead we got Bookworm Bwikki, who is a pretty tough fight. He can put a debuff on you that prevents you from doing damage to him, and it’s really tough to get it off. Plus it’s tough to judge how many people to send. Send too few and all of them have the debuff up all the time and can’t kill him. Send too many and the in-game difficulty scaling goes nuts and his hit points go through the roof and you can’t kill him. We also got one we hadn’t had before, Yanonka the Rat-Wrangler. Since we hadn’t dealt with him before, we didn’t really know how bad his special shtick was. Yanonka is surrounded by a horde of pet rats and well, if you hurt them, they eat your face off. Unfortunately most of the skills of most of the players in this game have some sort of area-of-effect aspect (if only hitting something other than your target if that something gets in the way of your arrow). And this guy was surrounded with his horde of rats. And only two of them was enough to kill you. It hurt.
So yeah, four failed missions in a row. Some of them could have been managed with better organization, but the main fault was on the luck of the draw. It’s pretty demoralizing to fail so spectacularly, though.
So I’m just going to post this lovely picture of lovely clouds and lovely mountains and stare at it for a while until I feel calmer.
Ahh, such a lovely sky…
