Getting Ready For Guild Wars: Hard Mode

As I said earlier, I tried Hard Mode for the first time a while ago. It was implemented shortly after the last time I left the game so while I've heard of it, I hadn't had the pleasure of supercharged AI going over my colon with all the subtlty of a jackhammer. It was pretty rough.

I went to Ascalon to start off - figured I ought to start back at the beginning - and that was probably my first mistake. I haven't had to put together a solid four person PvE team since....well, probably since the test. And I was a bit at a loss. Since I was on my Ele, (she's finished all the campaigns so it was easy to unlock the hard modes with her) I decided to play it simple and just go with SF spam. A prot Monk, and 3 fire breathing E/Mos to spread some of the defensive duties around. No tank but I figured we'd roll over enemies fast enough that we wouldn't need one.

Yeah, it didn't work so well.

The mission I tried was a catastrophic failure. Before I got DPed out, I did nearly clean out one EA, good Old Ascalon which was probably my second mistake.

I've run through Old Ascalon enough in the past to know the place by heart. Not during the test, actually, but during the E34E event. I farmed that place to exhaustion and I can still remember the routes and paths and packs of monsters. My familiarity bred some complacency and thanks to the damn pop-ups while I was checking my map or alt-tabbed out, I often found myself facing off against a group of six or more enemies when I had pointed my small but powerful horde towards a more managable, smaller group. I never really had a wipe but my DP was steadily worked up even as I killed nearly 200 enemies. Then, I ran into the Grawl Monk boss. He had another Monk with him and they were both a weird smite/heal combination that only works because of PvE trickery - Banish is pretty good when it hits for 150 damage, you know. We just didn't have the damage to punch through their healing and we couldn't hold up against their damage.

Powder - Tahlkora - went down and I tried to order a strategic withdrawal, full on double-arse mode. But the speedier Hard Mode mobs chased us down and finished us off. That Monk boss had to be the last critter in the whole damn zone so after the rez, I marched right back and it didn't go any better wheh I had even more DP. That was it, all my guys were 60ed out and it was back to the outpost.

After that, I switched to a more balanced build - a Warrior to tank, me on the ele to nuke, an supportive Paragon to pump out the chants as well as some DPS, and a Monk. Tried another mission, again, didn't go so well. My mistake there, I think, was making the Monk ito a healer instead of keeping her as a prot. Prot gets better the smaller your group is. Mitigating that damage is a lot more important than recovering from it but, oh well, I had an idea I wanted to try out.

I managed to get one of those skill trainer tombs out of the run, though, so I don't consider it a complete loss. It's a Warrior one and I'm not sure just how to make the best use of it - I've got four characters that suck up Warrior skills, after all. So I'm just going to salt it away for the moment.

It took me a while to make that run, though. I can see why Hard Mode would appeal to people as it's a good way to get more mileage out of the content. For myself, though, the thought of having to exhaustively slog through all those missions and areas again is a daunting one.