Guild Wars 2

This has to be the buggiest, or worst, quest in the game.

During a four hour stint at trying to complete it, I’ve noticed several bugs:
1. You can run past the various traps, be completely clear of them, and still get hit by them.
a. There is an area along the wall by the spike traps that you can walk on, but they still get you.
b. During “Restart at a checkpoint” after dying, sometimes the traps are active, sometimes they’re not.
2. The first boss (a veteran risen thingy) regenerates so fast that once he or his mob have killed just a couple of your helpers, it’s an inevitable party wipe. (And coming back to rez your helpers is a suicide pact.)
3. Once you get to the final chamber, if you ever do, Ranger’s lose their pets, and all of your weapons become a single special greatsword.
a. The skills of the greatsword only occasionally work, that is, if they work this time you’re in the chamber they will work the whole time. If they don’t work they never will, and might as well restart.
4. The final boss regenerates so fast that if the greatsword’s skills are on the fritz, it’s a party wipe.
5. The final boss spawn’s 3 risen when you enter the room. (and here’s the fun part, throughout the battle.)
a. When the great sword’s skills are working, you can sometimes interrupt him spawning help.
b. I’ve had times, even when the greatsword’s skills weren’t working, when he would either only spawn risen when you enter the room, or he’d just eternally spawn them. (Think I had a dozen or so a couple of times. Hard to tell when you’re downed.)
6. IF you can draw the final boss, or his guards, out of the final room, prior to entering, and thereby losing your weapons and getting that greatsword, the npc’s helping you just stand there doing nothing but taking damage.

After hearing how folks have completed this quest, I have, on two later dates retried this quest. Except for the traps being active about 100% of the time, I’ve seen no differance.

I finished that quest 2 days ago and had no trouble at all. Skills worked properly, no bugs with traps (but i had this bug in another durmand priory quest). Didn’t saw any trouble with killing the boss…

I retried this quest a few minutes before I posted it here.
I am wondering…
Are you using Heritage armor from HoM? (I am)
There’s got to be some reason I’m getting these bugs and no one else is.

I’m also stuck on this one.

I found help on the internet for the first veteran boss. Draw him back into the trapped hallway and let the traps kill him. Thereafter the traps in the hallway disappear.

The greatsword seems to be seriously underpowered, and I was not able to do any significant damage to the main boss. I have no ideas on how to get past this one.

I had to get a guildie to help me get through this quest. It’s a pain in the behind!

I recommend taking out the adds first then focusing on the bosses. Normally your NPC helpers like to run right up to the boss and attack him, ignoring the other stuff.

There was a large update today, but same problems.
Switched my Heritage armor for Rawhide, and removed everything from my inventory except the HoM stone. Same results.
Worse in fact.
I lured the Veteran Risen into the spike traps, but even though he stood in the middle of one, and it hit him continuosly, it didn’t kill him, and his regeneration was so fast that he repaired what little damage they did within a second or so. My pet bear, and the NPC’s didn’t seem to do any damage to him, only my longbow was hurting him, but the skills recharged so slow that I couldn’t prevent a party wipe 5 times. Not to mention the fact that my Ranger’s downed skills did no damage to him at all.
(This all just happened a few minutes ago.)

Ouch. I have an elementalist, and was able to kill the veteran risen using the trap’s help (I’m just an average sort of player). Your trap skills and stun skills (if any) would help. I’m not even interested in trying this again unless my character has a way to defeat the main boss.

I was also rather annoyed when all the NPCs set off the initial fire traps at the entrance, which killed my character. After I finally learned to avoid the trigger stones. Sort of pointless having them along sometimes.

I just updated my bug report with the previous attempts bugs. The original report was done 8/31/12. I wish they would look into it soon.

After reading the “Bugging Best Practices” Post I decided to add the following:
1. Character Name: Abizea Sylvari Ranger was level level 28 or 29 during first attempt is level 35 now.
2. Has an Arctodus bear pet.
3. Uses a Longbow, but also has dual axes.
3. I’ve never done a quest with friends.
4. Abizea is one of those characters that didn’t get a HoM stone upon creation.
5. As can be seen above, I am getting bugs that few others seem to encounter.
(I hope I do not have to recreate her as she was one of the first, at 9:07pm Pacific on the 24th of August, characters in the game, and she is at level 35.)

I removed the Hall of Monuments Stone from my inventory and ceased to have any bugs during this quest.
Unfortunately, I am still unable to complete it.
Without my pet, or my Longbow and it’s skills, Abizea is utterly useless.

Have you tried using the lightning skill on the sword? I just set that to auto attack and strafed left-right-left. I can’t remember too well, but I believe the sword only replaces your 1-5 skills right? I could be mistaken though.

I seem to remember using Take Root (Sylvari elite skill, grows a bunch of turrets) to draw some aggro for me.

Remember to res your allies!

My elite is Take Root
attempting to rez=instant death
yes, it only replaces the 1-5 skills – except for 2 healing skills, 2 tier 3 utility, the mistfire elite, and the 2 tier 2 elites, I have every skill available. I’ve tried them all.
Have no clue as to how to autotarget

Well, I’m pretty sure what I did was I set the lightning skill to auto cast (ctrl + right click the icon).

Then I just tried to dodge as much damage as possible via strafing. If I needed to res someone, I’d first lay down my turrets and let them take aggro before starting to res.

You can also break off of ressing and dodge/heal as necessary. Your progress on the res stays.

Take root also makes you invulnerable for the duration of the channel. It’s invaluable at bridging the time to your next heal. If you’re heal is about to come up and you find yourself in a situation where you’re going to take a lot of damage, use Take Root, you’ll dodge most, if not all of it.

I was playing my Ele and between Take Root, my default heal (25 sec cd or some such), Mist Form and strafing/dodging, I didn’t have many problems with staying alive myself after the first few fail attempts.

Taking along some sort of healing for your allies is also not a bad idea. Iowerth is pretty good at holding his attention.

I agree I do not strafe as much as I should. I had the spell on auto cast, but that spell is so slow and does so little damage, it didn’t do much. Attempting to rez is indeed instant death.

And I have no idea how you get him to take aggro. The instant I got within range, he’s after me, abandoning any other fight he’s in. Whereas Iowerth was good, he certainly didn’t hold the boss’s attention. I’ve actually found this to be true in other personal story lines, other characters. The boss will go after me specifically.

While it’s true that the lightning skill doesn’t do as much damage, it is still damage. It can be consistent damage if you can keep shooting it while staying out of harm’s way. That damage does add up. It’s not a fight that will be over in 3 minutes.

As for the turrets drawing aggro, it’s not something I can control. Sometimes it happens and he starts attacking them, sometimes he doesn’t. But either way, they do a fairly decent bit of damage and also stack bleeds.

It is harder if he starts to chase you, but I find between all my utility skills that I’m able to stay alive while my NPCs do damage to him. What I’ve noticed he does is switch between attacking me with ranged, attacking my NPCs and chasing me in melee form.

There are two other things I can recommend to you.

1. Respec your traits so you focus on staying alive more (pick the traits that give toughness, vitality, healing power etc.)
2. Check your gear and upgrade it to your level if you haven’t already. (Pick up +toughness and +vitality if that’s what you need. Putting it in your armour lets you put more offensive specs in your traits)

I’ve never had to resort updating my armour but I saw this suggestion in another thread. It makes sense, my gear is usually 10-15 levels behind my character level, perhaps more.

Edit: Also never run directly away from him when he starts to chase you and take free damage, turn your camera slightly and keep strafing sideways away from him. If you get the camera angle right, you can run away from him while still firing off your skills.

Reading this i think ‘lightning reflexes’ might also be a good skill to take, as it increases the amount of dodges you can take. Another thought may be the wilderness survival trait that gives you vigor (also increases dodges) on a heal skill. In all this will likely give you double (if not more) the amount of dodges you would have by default, include the invulnerability of ‘take root’ and you have a lot of damage mitigation…

Other skills that might help, Frost trap (as it slows the boss down, as well as slows his recharges) that can be combined with the sword’s leap combo finisher to get ‘frost armor’ further lengthening the freezing condition.

For the last utility i am thinking a spirit might help (fire or streight up damage buff), not only does it give yet another target for him to go after, if he doesn’t it buffs your NPC helpers & your damage output, either in flames or with extra damage…

It may also be an idea to get to the Charr capital and charm a Hyena (they are pretty much just outside the capital near the first heart you can see), the ‘howl for an companion’-skill doubles the amount of pets you have, giving more damage and more targets to take damage (there may be other pets (doglikes) that have this skill).

For your second pet i am doubting between the bear (as it has great staying alive skills) or a red moa (that has a might buff). Seeing you can’t use the warhorn to buff using a red moa could give you that little bit of an edge.

Last thing would be your runes on your armor, it would likely pay off to spend some time thinking about combo bonusses that could help you out (although i do get a feeling that some of them are bugged?), but f/e 2x Rune of Vampirism could give you some extra healing. And there are likely more rune-sets that can enhance your character’s output or defense…

ps. I have this quest lined up for tonight, though admittedly i will have to prepair for it myself first (mainly get some of those pets, and unlock a spirit). But i will tell you how i fare. I also didn’t receive a Hall of Monument Stone originally, so i will carry the one i bought from the pirate with me on the first runs, to see if it duplicates some of your original issues…

^^ That’s the spirit to get in! I got murdered the first time I did this quest too . Crashed out of the instance too. Had to restart.

Also, if you could enlighten me, what is this thing about the HoM stone you’re talking about?

My character that did this quest also did not receive the stone on creation and bought one from the pirate. I also don’t carry my HoM stone on my person. I keep it in the bank.

Well, I managed to finish it w/my elementalist (lvl 32 now). I upgraded all armor and weapons w/malachite for toughness.

I used the glyph of elementals for my elite (I don’t think I had an elite the first time I tried this). I think that helped a lot with the veteran risen. Not sure if it helped much with the lich.

The strafing movement is a distinct help to avoid the lich’s ranged attacks. I only used the #2 attack (ranged) w/the sword and had it on auto.
I did use the seed turret, and I think it did help aggro some of the adds.

The NPCs seemed better behaved this time. A couple stayed in the doorway and used their ranged attacks, so they never died.

I think I died about four times. Those stupid fire traps get me every time. Repairs were less than a silver.

Ok, i completed this quest with 3 deaths:
- first was the fire traps that just blew up in my face the moment i moved forward, either my pet or some NPC triggered them, as i was entirely ready to dodge through them but was just a moment to late
- I got downed two times on the spike traps even though i dodged, i guess i can’t ‘walk as light as a ghost’, luckely the NPCs helped me to get back up.
- The first boss wasn’t realy a problem, i used my axes/warhorn/torch and my hyena (x2) as well as my ‘take root’ elite, together with the frost spirit and frost trap. Used healing spring to keep some NPCs alive. With this many ‘stuff’ around (including NPCs) i hardly got targetted

Nr1. The first death by the lich was due to me being overwhelmed, based on this thread i thought my pet would be with me, alas, and having that sword all of a sudden kind off threw me off ‘not knowing the skills’, that together with the chaos that started, well i was down to half my health b4 i even got a hit in :P
Nr2. after the respawn i took some time to read the skill discriptions properly, dodged passed all the traps, and luckely the lich didn’t summon reinforcements in my absence. I took no time to rush at him and use 3 to knock him down, just in case he was trying to summon the reinforcements as i came in (like it went on nr1.) then i persued on dodging and using my trap and spirit. Traherne spawned with me and concerned himself with ressing the NPCs, while i kept the lich busy, knocking him down with skill3 as soon as it came up. Still though, i died, but i managed to get his HP down considderably.
Nr3. Now being fairly used to the sword and my skill setup, i again continued to hit on him, dodge around and use my other skills, and i managed to kill him off…

I will say that ‘take root’ realy helped, as it provides 5 turrets that both do damage as well as provide additional targets. Instead of straving and skill2, i used the more direct approach and used skill3 to keep the lich down or disrupted. The frost trap and frost spirit-activate did their job, atleast i think the -66% recharge on his skills realy helped reduce his output. The extra dodges were welcome, spurred by lightning reflexes and wilderness survival ‘gain vigor on using heal’. The pet suggestions were reasonably helpfull in taking out the 1st ‘boss’, but as the pets disappeared during the real boss fight, not so much there…

I did carry my HoM stone the whole way, but didn’t seem to be effected by it, this doesn’t mean there is no issue with it, as the OP already pointed out that it caused some sort of ‘chance’ effect on the sword skills working. My sword worked, so i may have been lucky…

Last thing, i didn’t notice a fast regen of health on either boss, this may be due to them being altered already (?) or my setup and speed to get back into the battle were fast enough to not let the lich recover that much health.

Interesting & hard quest this one, and it will be hard to not die a few times doing it, but not as impossible (for me atleast) as the OP makes it sound, then again the quest may have already been tweaked (esp. in regards to the regen on the bosses). The skill setup i proposed worked fine, and it’s upto ‘you’ to decide to strave/range the boss or to get in his face. The observed change of pace the boss utilizes (going from ranged to melee) may be used to change these two strategies as fitting, but you would need to be able to keep cool and observant to do so, and with the chaos going on a ‘Vigil’-approach with some armor repairs seems more suited…

Sweet, I’m glad to hear you guys made it through! On to bigger and better things! (And more dangerous hehe ).

It’s interesting to see the two different approaches with the sword working as well. I personally found myself too squishy to go with the direct approach. Not that it stopped me from trying a few times haha.

As for the regen on the bosses. The seed turrets also have a “hidden” ability of stacking bleed, so they actually help mitigate or even nullify his regen. Each “shot” from a seed turret puts on one stack of bleed. So if all five hit the same target (the boss) he gets five stacks of bleed. The longer the turrets are up, the more bleed damage you get .

This is one of the better strategies for defeating foes with high regen. Keep stacking burning, bleed and poison. It works much better than just applying direct damage.