I Will Survive

The Tuesday N00b Club: Survivor Edition

Last night saw the beginning of a worryingly hardcore endeavor: reach 1337500 XP in Guild Wars without dying. Not once.

To add to the fun, this is in Nightfall, which I've not done yet, so I don't know the tricks to the missions to do them without dying.

Fortunately, some of the less n00bish of the Tuesday N00bs do know what they're doing, so I guess I cede to their superior knowledge. Or something.


I actually started this rather daunting task last week, creating a fresh dervish and running him through the tutorial zone for an easy level up, and to start out on my explorer track as well, as you can't get back into the Factions tutorial zone. 'Might as well,' thought I, 'at least it gives me a backup title if this one goes tits up.'


First thing on the Survivors to-do list was the first mission. Actually, the first thing was to form groups. Off we split into two groups of four, or a group of four and one of three. And then we jiggled, and shimmied - well, maybe not shimmying - as it turned out you need to take a hero into that mission. Then the mission itself, which was easy as falling off a log.

Next up was The Ferry: getting someone to take us into a later zone. Apparently, there's some glitch in GW where higher level characters can take lower level characters in their group into certain zones they shouldn't be in by that point using a quest. This zone then has a vendor for endgame armor, which is handy when you're second level and don't want to die.

Unfortunately, some of the noobier of us didn't really get what was going on at this point, and, besides, didn't have the gold required to buy the awesome armor anyway, so I just let the group leader map travel around until it was time to start killing things again.

Then we killed some things, and did some quests. Yay for things I understand! Very careful killing of things, with some slightly nervous pulls at times, but nothing our intrepid trio plus Koss couldn't manage, and after carefully managing our XP gain, we found ourselves having killed enough that the quests we had would push us over into level 5 once we handed them in, which is considerably safer than killing things, so we did.


This is where we stopped for the night, but now comes the tinkering of secondary professions. Several people advocated a monk secondary for some heals, but the dervish is already the veritable mage-tank of yore; strong in melee with a bunch of heals, if not the healing focus of the monk. It seemed a little like overkill to grab monk for heals as well, especially as I suspect most of the survivors will do the same. So that decision's still to be made, but I've got a couple of ideas ruminating, and by next week I should have it all sorted.

Also for next week, I need to find some better songs from which to pinch lyrics for the blog post titles for the series.