The holidays have kept people busy, but somehow Potshot and I seem to find time to get on and play, so we have been running alts ahead of the group while also figuring out how things work in the game.
Guild Wars Reforged
I thought I was ranging out ahead because I made it to Piken Square out in The Breach, but then Potshot said he was as far as Grendich Courthouse in the Diessa Lowlands, so I figured I had better catch up!
Potshot and I had been there before in our brief comedic test to see if, at level 6 and having just created a guild, whether or not we could walk to Lion’s Arch. We could not.
Yes, we wiped… a couple of times
The path that joins The Breach and Diessa Lowlands is pretty heavily camped… at least for us… and we learned that perhaps we ought not to just blunder into whatever mobs are wandering lest we attract everybody in the neighborhood.
So, having left from Piken Square on the journey with my henchmen… the whole group now level 8… so mighty… I took care on approach to the zone line, letting groups wander off on their own before tackling them.
The Charr hanging out on The Breach side of the crossing
That went well enough. Amazing what a bit of care and paying attention to the red dots on the mini map will do for you.
Then there was the question of where to go from there. Some excellent planning on my part. I did have a couple of quests from Piken Square to finish in the Diessa Lowlands, so I followed the first of those, The Duke’s Daughter, which led me on wide arc along the south side of the zone before I found her ghost.
I had another quest to slay Garfazz Bloodfang, but the mini-map arrow was pulling me further east for that and it *felt* maybe I ought to turn north at some point. I had glanced at the map online and had a sense of where it might be, so off I went. I figured that the zone, which like The Breach, tends to channel you towards specific destinations, would push me in the right direction.
And then I hit the bridge.
The Bridge of Trouble
In the middle of the zone the path wound under a bridge connecting a couple areas of high ground… high ground that was occupied by some wandering groups who, if they roamed too close, would start using ranged attacks on us.
In addition, there were a few of groups arrayed on either side of the bridge along the path. This looked to be the next gauntlet to pass through, and on the first try I managed to get us mired with the maximum number of mobs, causing a wipe.
Well, I wanted to go back to Piken Square to turn in the quest I had finished anyway.
That done I rolled out with the group again, made the crossing into the zone, wandered a while, and eventually showed up near the bridge again.
This time I tried to be careful. I took the groups on the near side of the bridge by themselves then, having cleared one side, watched the mini-map until the group roaming across the bridge wandered off to the right, at which point I tried to rush the group past the bridge and down the canyon to take the big group on the other side as quickly as possible.
Not quickly enough. We were still engaged when another group on the high ground wandered up and added their fire to the battle. Another wipe.
Ah, but we had made progress. Enough progress to try and finish things off with the death debuff? I ran the group back to find out… and no. With two rounds of debuff it was time to start again.
With greater care and patience I got the group past the bridge. This was only my fourth time running down the path, at least I seemed to be learning. I had mentioned this to Potshot on Discord and he had linked a map for me to follow.
The map to follow
He linked that at about 22:30 local time when I was off for another run and in Discord, sitting on my second monitor, in the dark, scaled down considerably, I really only registered the red line, which seemed to show I was on the right path.
So I pressed on… and arrived at something like a portal or zone line.
So what is this Flame Temple Corridor?
Well, the red line seemed to go this way, so off we went.
We’re in the corridor now!
That was a long series of fights, but at least there were some NPCs who picked us up and traveled with us… until they died. But not before we had passed by the urn with Althea’s Ashes for a quest. Handy. So something accomplished. But as I pressed on, we came to another zone line.
And now a Dragon’s Gullet?
I went into Dragon’s Gullet, but by that point it was clear that I had gone down the wrong path. I probed in a ways, then decided to call it a night as it was closing in on midnight.
The next day, when I had some time, I go on and set out once more from Piken Square to wander through Diessa Lowlands once more. This time I figured I would focus on my remaining quest and just find Garfazz Bloodfang.
I followed the arrow on the mini-map and wandered west and north, eventually finding the camp of Garfazz and, after quite a fight, finished him off. I and my pet were level 10 by that point. We did at least accumulate xp and items and cash. I had upgraded my armor to the second set in Ascalon City by that point and had found a better bow… and, of course, had more points to assign to boost skills.
Having done that, I started to wander, trying line up with the map Potshot linked, where I had finally noticed the green and blue paths that led to Grendich Courthouse. But aligning the terrain that I could see it was hard to judge where I really was, so I wandered some more.
Finally, probing around the map I got close enough that the map drew the swirl thing that showed where the camp lay. By that point I had wandered quite a ways. I took a screen shot of my path.
My fifth journey through Diessa Lowlands
From there I was able to make it and… Grendich Courthouse is kind of a dump. There isn’t a lot of “there” there. But it did have a merchant and a collector and bank access, so I was able to unload my bag.
Meanwhile, Potshot had been looking into missions. So after a bit of progress on the map, we grouped up and turned to those for a bit.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 