Guild Wars 2

First part was yadda, yadda, yadda… then we get ‘sucked in’….

I am not a fan of Tree-boy, and this scenario made me thrice so. I want to hurt him. I want to hurt everyone he ever loved. I want to cut down the pale tree and use it to BBQ his useless asparagus corpse.

The instance area is narrower than the fighting spaces in the first few encounters. So I regularly got the ‘leaving the instance area’ warnings when just trying to be the only effective fighter in a group of 8 or so ‘allies’. When I tried to restart from a checkpoint after my inevitable death I once again ran into the boundaries while trying to find my group of dead friends and nearly timed out because the directions were not at all clear either.

Meanwhile, Risen CONTINUE to spawn left, right, and center, even though I am now alone.

I finally fight my way back single handed to the spot where Tree-boy is standing quietly twiddling his thumbs while within spitting distance of a dozen Risen and even closer to a heap of fallen comrades. This is at the ‘base of the stairs’ more or less where you are going up to the Eye. So, I begin to try to dodge Risen and raise friends. Tree-boy, happy in his invulnerability, only deigns to fight if attacked. When I made a little bit of progress going up the stairs it did not matter, because: 1) the Risen were spawning at the rate I could kill them or faster, and any ally I did manage to get raised were almost immediately dropped; and, 2) Grandmaster Tree-boy stalwartly refused to take one step up the stairs no matter how far I got away from him. I would try kiting a few of the Risen back to him in the hopes of knocking him loose. If he deigned to attack them (not always) he would go back to his woolgathering as soon as the dropped.

When I died for the third time at Tree-boys feet, the Risen ignore the heroic Marshal Tree-boy who is flailing and whailing and not doing a #@#$% thing and make sure to beat up the mostly dead mesmer at his feet.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrr……..

Edit: I finally calmed down enough a few hours later to go back and slowly eat my way through it. Tree-boy never left his spot where he spawned after being sucked through the mirror. I made sure to talk to him so that there were no dialogue cues needed. He just sat there at the base of the stairs much like Marlin Perkins watching Jim wrestle the alligator from the helicopter (you have to be of a certain age to understand).

After I completed the instance the Risen CONTINUED to spawn and fight. This leads me to wonder if the “ambient spawning” for the world is not turned off in the instance. In any event, if someone had a mind to do so they could sit there in relative comfort and farm level 73 kills with the help of 8 or so NPCs.