As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been playing a lot of Guild Wars 2 with my husband and friends. It’s a Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game, and Guild Wars is one that’s buy once and then free to play. You can buy game items with real money, but you don’t need them to play.
Generally four of us play together – my husband, myself, my best friend, and my best friend’s husband. (Not to downplay the husband – I knew him before I even met my best friend, but there’s no easy way to refer to him other than as her husband for clarity. I digress.)
We’ve been focusing on quests lately, moving through the Heart of Thorns expansion quest line.
Last night we were stoked: we were going to fight the final quest and finish the expansion for them!
My husband and I both had the expansion completed already, so we knew what to expect, but they hadn’t done it yet on any of their characters. We had done it before with a random person who caught us at the entrance and asked to group with us because he hadn’t been able to finish it alone. It REALLY isn’t a one person battle.
Last time, I’d ended up dead, and my husband had carried the day and won the battle.
Is this spoilers? It’s probably spoilers.
The story of it is that we’re trapped in our minds fighting the mental/plant dragon, Mordremoth.
It’s a nuisance, honestly. You end up fighting the final boss along with avatars of the team mates that you didn’t bring with you. There’s various gimmicks, such as needed to open rifts to beat the avatars. But that’s reasonable and is just a grind.
It’s not that simple though. During part of the battle you have to catch up drafts and glide around because the floor becomes dangerous. Annoying, but not the end of the world.
What’s NOT reasonable is that if you die completely (there’s an intermediate stage where you can recover if you’re lucky) then you get transported to what I’d been jokingly referring to as the Bird Cage, and you’re out of the battle.
It’s a platform high up where you’re too far to help any of the others still fighting, and it’s infuriating.
My husband ended up being the only one alive, desperately fighting on his own, while my best friend and her husband watched. Her husband is clever though – he figured out he could send buffs down to my husband to help him out. So he was stringing buffs on my husband, as fast as he could cast them, and I was using the limited buffs on my Ranger that would give the enemy status effects.
Meanwhile, my best friend is going through her inventory.
So I turn around and startle because THERE’S SOMEONE IN THERE WITH US.
In a cowboy hat.
But as soon as I recover I realize that he’s just an NPC.
My best friend had called a Black Lion Merchant so that she could work on her inventory while we were trapped in there.
I mean, makes sense. It was dead time after all.
We’re watching my husband, my friend’s buffing, and mostly we’re just watching the boss’s health bar go down and hoping that my husband can float the battle… when my husband goes down.
He’s out.
And it’s at THIS point when we realize that if we all die, the battle restarts. We’re not kicked out. We don’t fail the quest. We just get to try again!
Which was THE BEST news.
The second time through we had a MUCH smoother run – when the up drafts started, we were prepared and glided around in safety until we could land without injury.
After a while my best friend was out again, but there was still my friend and my husband, and we were plugging away at depleting the enemy’s health bar. There was a rush near the end where the enemy summoned a TON of lesser enemies that chased us around while we tried to fight. You could kill them pretty easily, but the sheer numbers made it difficult.
It was really annoying.
But!
We persevered, and at the last moment my best friend was released from the Bird Cage so she could rush in and make the final blow on the enemy.
All’s great and fine, and we’re congratulating each other until my friend says, “I didn’t get credit.”
He didn’t.
He didn’t get ANY credit. ;_;
So, boo. We’ll try it again next weekend and work on figuring out what happened.
Still, we won! So HUZZAH and hats off to us!
Do you enjoy playing MMORPGs? What types do you prefer? Inquiring minds want to know!
