User:Quizzical/Prophecies Hard

The Great Northern Wall
Difficulty: ***

Early on, there are some pairs of grawls that run back and forth. Don't chase them when they run away, as they'll come right back, but if you follow them, you could end up fighting three groups at once.

Well into the mission are some gargoyles fighting three grawl. Either side could win here. Stay out of it a while and if a grawl dies, they'll all die soon, so start killing gargoyles. If a few gargoyles die and no grawls are dead, the grawls are going to win, and can be a pain to kill with three of them healing each other with heal area, so focus fire on a grawl to help the gargoyles kill one.

Skip the cut scene to get a head start on the charr, and run away. Don't stop to fight the devourers on the way, but just run past them, even though they'll follow and attack you for a while. You need them to survive and eventually turn around and go fight the charr, to detain the charr. If things get really bad, you can have one character stop to fight the charr and slow them down while everyone else keeps running.

Fort Ranik
Difficulty: *****

One healer is not enough for this mission. You can get by with one monk and one paragon or ritualist or whatever that is only halfway a healer. It's also good for a monk to bring some divine favor healing, so that he can still heal a bit if power blocked.

Charr necromancers have some fairly nasty hexes, so you'll either need to bring massive healing or quite a bit of hex removal to counter them. Expel hexes works nicely.

When you start, there will be some charr fighting some NPCs a little up the path. Stay back from them, as a different group of three charr will come attack you, and you don't want to fight more than one group at a time. There is another group of two charr nearby, but they'll leave you alone if you leave them alone. It isn't necessary to save Saberlin for the bonus.

The path splits when that first battle is done. Go left rather than right, as it's easier to pull one group at a time from that side out of the next mess.

After that is done, the path is clear for quite a while. If you go up a ways, you'll see group of three charr including a boss come charging down the path at you. Not long after that, another group of three charr will follow. The two groups aren't linked, but they run quite far. If you have some NPC allies with you, you can take both groups at once, but if not, you'll want to only fight one group at a time. Pull the first group way back, as in, further back than where you fought the previous battle.

Charr mesmers have power block, and if they power block your monk's healing prayers, you might then have no healer for 15 seconds or so. You can sometimes bait them into wasting it by having someone pull and use a nice long cast in an otherwise lightly used attribute. A dervish using watchful intervention works nicely, for example.

Charr monks have shield of judgement. If you can't remove enchantments, just switch to a different target if you're getting knocked down by it.

Fight on for a while until you kill the next boss. There will be three charr up on a ledge where you can't melee them. Have group members with ranged attacks shoot them while the rest of the group stays out of range, and the attackers can back off if they take too much damage or the healers get low on energy.

When you move forward a bit further, three charr come running up the alley at you. Pull them back, so as not to get attacked by the group behind them at the same time.

If you have some casters with non-projectile attacks, you can attack the next group of charr up on a ledge pretty safely from below the bridge. If not, there's room on the other side to run past them out of range without running into another group.

When you get to the bonus, you want to pull the two overseers apart so that they don't heal each other with heal area. Run up to them, run away until one or both moves, and run back, and see where they end up. If they're too close, then repeat until they're far enough apart; they don't have to be very far apart to be unable to heal each other. You can stand between them and they'll heal you, too.

Just north of where you turn off to do the bonus, a group of three charr including a boss will come up the alley at you. Stay back and wait for them, so that you don't fight an extra group at the same time.

After clearing the boss group, hug the right wall as you go around and up to the mobs that will attack you from above as you run up the alley. This will get them to mostly shoot the ground while you get by in relative safety.

Ruins of Surmia
Difficulty: ****

Early on, you fight devourers for a while, and a lot of the groups pop up out of the ground. Several pop up groups are not far in front of a group that is visible from the start, so advance carefully and pull the pop ups back to avoid fighting two groups at once. When you have to go up some stairs to a ledge in front of additional stairs, there are two pop up groups of devourers on that ledge, so pull carefully.

Rurik can be a pain and not like to let you pull mobs. If you have multiple players in the group, Rurik likes to follow whoever is moving, so you can have someone stay back and move back and forth to keep Rurik back while someone else pulls.

After you kill the first boss, you fight mostly charr for the rest of the instance. Rurik gets aggressive and likes to run ahead in some parts, so you'll have to keep up with him. Once you get to the bridge, leave Rurik there until you've cleared as much as you can on the other side.

For the bonus, wait until the charr ember bearers open the gate as in easy mode. They usually stop at the gate and wait to be pulled, but not always, so do pull them promptly after they open the gate, so as to keep the shamans on the other side out of it.

The charr flame keepers all have meteor shower. You can run around near them and often get them to waste it, before having the rest of the group move in.

Once you get to the lever on the other side of the bridge, don't touch it until the charr have been cleared. If you let Rurik across too soon, he sees a group of 12 charr on the other side, observes that that is a huge group and if you take them all on at once, you'll die. Rurik then proceeds to charge right into them and die because he is an idiot.

The group of 12 charr is the only part past the bridge that is hard to clear. It is 6 or so separate groups of 1-3 linked charr. It is not at all obvious which charr are linked, so if you try to pull two charr, you likely pull two groups. The shaman is linked to two martyrs. Pull carefully, trying to pull only one charr at a time, so as to get only one group.

If someone in your group lets Rurik across the bridge too soon, the situation is still salvageable. Rurik will partially follow whoever is moving, so you can have one person run in circles to get Rurik to stay back, while another goes ahead and pulls one group of charr at a time.

Nolani Academy
Difficulty: ****

It is often easier to shoot some of the charr guarding the gate from above, rather than later to try to get them from below.

At the bonus area, there are some pop up groups of devourers up above near the path through the spirits of the fallen that you take. You don't want to fight both of those at once, obviously, so clear the devourers up top before taking on the spirits of the fallen.

Devourers are hostile to spirits of the fallen, so a pop up group of devourers can aggro spirits of the fallen, which run around and attack. If this happens, run away and the spirits of the fallen will go kill the devourers.

Spirits of the fallen come in pairs that do not move and in groups of three linked mobs. They take double holy damage, so a dervish with avatar of balthazar helps immensely. They have skull crack, and if they get your healer with that, it could easily be a wipe, so it is important to keep healers out of the way.

Once you get to the charr siege force, kill the rangers up on the ledge first. Sometimes they'll trade hits with you, and sometimes they'll run around. If they run around to get off the ledge, let them, but don't chase, as you'll run into another group. Don't let pets or heroes chase, either.

After clearing the groups of rangers and warriors, head west up the path that the lost soldiers came down from. Kill a group of rangers up there, and then you can shoot at an elementalist and some warriors from above. They often separate and run up the long ramp to get you, but not all at once, which makes things much easier.

After this, it's time to clear the boss group. The boss fight isn't hard, but be aware that occasionally when the group dies, the doors open prematurely and the remaining group of charr rushes in to try to kill Rurik. They have to go through a couple other NPCs to get to Rurik, so you have plenty of time to save him, but be ready to rush in if you need to. Usually the doors don't open until all the besieging charr are dead.

After the cut scene, Rurik turns left. If you go with him, it seems easy for a while, but eventually he is likely to run into a large group of charr and die. Instead, the way to protect him is to ignore him and run right, going west then south. Go kill Bonfaaz Burntfur, the end boss of the mission, before Rurik can get himself killed, and you win the mission. There will be some NPCs fighting some charr along the way; just run past them without stopping to fight.

Borlis Pass
Difficulty: ***

The first boss comes with a typical group, in addition to the boss. Kill the shiverpeak protector first, or it can keep the rest alive long enough to cause trouble. None of the bosses that could spawn here are much trouble.

After blowing up the gate, head west before you head south, and approach the group south of the blown up gate from the west. There are two roamer groups in the area, and this lets you readily kill one by itself. Dolyak riders are potent healers, but readily destroyed if you can interrupt mark of protection, which is made easy by dazing them.

The next boss to the south has a roamer group nearby. If you want for the roamers to come well in front of the boss, you can pull and kill the roamers by themselves.

For the bonus, take your time and wait for energy regeneration between pulls. Health degeneration can be sneaky in eating up your healers’ energy.

There is quite a mass of mobs just before the fort Rurik is in. The ice golems aren’t very strong, so you can handle two groups at a time, but perhaps not three. It can sometimes be good to leave an engineer for last, so that you can get a morale boost in case someone dies.

After a couple pulls in the end sequence, there are a couple dolyak rider groups, one of which wanders, and one of which stays put. The roamer group comes well in front of the stationary group, making it easy to pull by itself if you wait for it. The dwarf allies won’t wait, though, and often end up fighting both groups at once. It’s better to stay out of that and just let them die.

The Frost Gate
Mission difficulty: ****

Bonus difficulty: *****

The bonus can be quite hard, so you’ll have to pick your group setup mainly with the bonus in mind. There are two groups of stone summit guarding the broken ballista, each of which have two dolyak riders and three warriors. If you focus fire on a dolyak rider, the two can take turns casting mark of protection and shielding hands on your target, and keep those enchantments on your target the substantial majority of the time. Mark of protection gets cast too fast for humans to reliably interrupt, but heroes can sometimes get it. If you daze a dolyak rider, interrupting it is much easier. The dolyak riders have hex removal, so don’t rely on hexes to kill them.

Industrial strength enchantment removal such as assault enchantments or avatar of Grenth can keep the key enchantments off of your target. Lesser enchantment removal skills can help some if a human uses them to clear mark of protection. Heroes aren’t terribly smart about using them, though, and tend to remove shielding hands rather than mark of protection.

Whatever you do, it’s going to take a while to kill the dolyak riders, though, and in the meantime, the three warriors tend to all focus on the same target and try to spike it to dead. The key is to limit the damage they do, with blocking, weakness, blind, and AoE attacks that scatter the mobs. An earth elementalist with ward against melee, ward of weakness, eruption, and other AoE can do all of this by himself. An elementalist hero can handle this reasonably well if you lock his target on one of the warriors, so that he doesn’t end up wasting his skills on the dolyak riders.

Having minions and pets to get in the way can help somewhat, but minions tend to get spiked to dead by the warriors pretty fast. The location of the bonus and the time it takes to pull it properly makes it difficult to get a sizeable minion army up when you get there.

For the mission itself, there are a lot of roamer groups, so it takes a lot of careful pulling. After you clear the first group of minotaurs, come up to about 2 aggro bubble radii from the next group and stop, and four minotaurs will come charging at you from behind the two you see. Shortly after that, you get to five minotaurs, three stone summit, and an ice golem. The minotaurs are hostile to the others, so if you wait a bit, they’ll fight and mostly kill each other.

When dealing with the ice golems and stone summit groups, before you pull a stationary group, look to see if anything behind it is moving. If so, it’s going to come up in front of the stationary group, so you can wait a bit and pull the roamer group by itself, rather than getting hit it while you fight the stationary group.

In the ice cave, take your time on frostfire dryders, as their health degen can drain healers’ energy. Starting a battle while the healers lack energy can lead to deaths or a wipe. Clear the dryders, but don’t talk to the dwarf yet, until you clear the way to the ballista.

Once you get to the area with the broken ballista, you have to pull the two groups far apart. If they’re kind of close when you try to fight them, the dolyak riders may move up to heal the front group, and then you end up fighting both groups at once. Unless you see it and run away promptly, that’s a certain wipe. Flag the henchmen way back, so that you have to pull the mobs well up a hill after going through the low point of the path. This also lets your ranged damage dealers have an elevation advantage. The mobs move at about the same speed you do if you have no speed boost, making it easy to pull them as far as you need.

Leave the engineers to the east of the bonus until after you’ve cleared the way to the ballista, unless you need a morale boost to recharge rez signets. Having a free morale boost there can help greatly.

Clear the area in front of the door that you shoot down before you use the ballista. Mobs from behind the door are hostile to at least some mobs in front of it, but if you try to get too many groups to attack each other, they could all end up attacking you instead, and then you die. It’s not that hard to clear the mobs in front of the door when they’re by themselves.

After blasting the door down, go near it and two groups of stone summit will run into the door area. Go back to the ballista and you can use it to kill the groups in the door. It takes about ten shots to kill them all.

For the three lever mechanisms at the end, the first one you activate opens a gate for mobs to come from the south. The second opens an analogous gate for mobs to come from the west. The third starts an invisible 60 second timer, and when that ends, you win the mission. The order in which you use the lever mechanisms doesn’t matter for these mechanics.

When you open a gate with mobs behind it, a group of three mobs (often including a boss) will come through it to attack you, then after a bit of a pause, two more mobs come. There is a longer pause, then two more mobs, and another small group or two after additional short pauses. The longer pause after the second group is enough for you to trigger one lever, kill the first two groups, then go trigger the other two levers and easily be able to survive the remaining 60 seconds. If the battle is going really badly after you’ve used all three lever mechanisms, you can survive by simply running away.

Gates of Kryta
Difficulty: **

Most of the mobs in this mission are undead, so they take double damage from holy damage. Dervishes with avatar of Balthazar work great. Any other martial weapon users should take a dervish secondary profession with heart of holy flame. Even at 0 mysticism, this converts all attacks to holy damage for 30 seconds. With martial weapon users hitting for about 100 damage on average, you’ll have enough DPS to breeze through most of the mission.

When you get to Justiciar Hablion, don’t talk to him. Unlike in easy mode, he’s lower level than the mobs this time, and has a tendency to leave his allies behind when he goes to fight, sometimes getting himself killed. Rather, go past him to the north and clear two masses of mobs. The first is four or so separate linked groups which are readily pulled one or two groups at a time, even without actually “pulling” them. The second is groups that start separate, but run to each other when players come near. They aren’t triggered to move when heroes come near, so you can flag heroes way ahead of your group to come near the group that moves and pull it, and the players can catch up as quickly as they can. This makes the fight far more manageable.

D'Alessio Seaboard
Difficulty: ***

All mobs except in some easy areas at the end of the mission are undead, and hence take double damage from holy damage sources. As with Gates of Kryta, having martial weapon users bring heart of holy flame helps immensely.

When you get to Hakewood, Benji will be attacked by a boss. Nizza the Sickle and Kemal the Deadened can kill Benji, so you’ll have to rush over to save him. Benji can survive indefinitely against any other boss. As soon as you save Benji, talk to him to get the bonus.

When you reach the gate to unlock to get out of the part where the offering to Melandru is, have all players stop at the gate, while you flag henchmen and heroes ahead. There will be a group of four grasping ghouls and a group of three. The group of four always spawns in the same spot, and flagging heroes ahead lets them get a head start on killing the four (which aren’t much danger to your group) before the three spawn when players arrive. If the three spawn on your side of the white mantle knight in the area, they’ll go kill him, which delays them getting to Dorian. If they spawn on Dorian’s side, they’ll go straight for Dorian, and he can survive a while, but you’ll have to hurry to get to him to help out.

Once you get to Dorian, mobs start spawning to come attack him from two directions. Three mobs come at a time. Skeleton monks have unyielding aura, a quasi-rez that can be a major nuisance if you don’t kill them promptly. The bigger danger, though, is that someone will run off and grab additional groups before they were supposed to come. Flag heroes at the shrine of mending, and make sure all players stay near it, too.

After you kill the second boss at the shrine of mending, Dorian indicates that it’s now safe, but he’s wrong. One more group will come try to kill him, a couple minutes later. You can wait for it, to head east to kill it on the way. Once that group is dead, then Dorian is finally safe, and you can proceed with the bonus.

Divinity Coast
Mission difficulty: **

Bonus difficulty: ****

Once you get a villager, you’ll have to be careful about pulling, as if you run away, the villagers won’t, and they can die. For all villagers after the first, mobs near a villager can start attacking once a player comes near the edge of radar range. Heroes coming closer does not trigger mobs to start attacking, so you can flag henchmen and heroes way ahead of your group and have them standing right next to the villager when mobs start attacking.

You may have to manually tell a healer hero to heal the villager to keep him alive. The only mobs that can attack villagers at their spawn points are warriors, so anti-melee skills can help immensely. An earth elementalist hero with ward against melee, ward of weakness, and eruption can help a lot. The warriors come in groups of three.

The second villager will be attacked by one group of tengu as soon as you come in range. The third villager may be safe, but will often be attacked by one group of tengu, and occasionally two groups. Sometimes there is also a group of tengu in front of the villager. If you have three heroes and two henchmen, including two healers and an earth elementalist, they can handle a group of tengu warriors on their own, so you can flag them ahead and let them fight. If there are multiple players in the group, you can still flag them ahead, but you’ll have to join in the fight.

When you reach the fork in the road, go west rather than south. You can try to save a merchant by flagging heroes ahead if you like, which gets you a morale boost and some practice, but nothing more. From the spot where the merchant spawns, to the west will be another merchant just inside radar range, and he will be attacked by three tengu and quickly die. Further west, just outside of radar range, will be another merchant and three tengu who will attack him when you come close. Just west of him will be a villager, who won’t initially be under attack, but once the second group of tengu kills its merchant, they’ll proceed to the villager.

If you’re alone, you may be able to clear the first group of tengu by flagging heroes and henchmen ahead to let them kill it, and make this part easy. If not, flag whatever heroes you have ahead, but once they come under attack, you’ll have to run up to help out. Go after the back group of tengu to save the villagers, but help with the front group of tengu, too, as they can kill the villagers you’ve already saved. This fight gets chaotic, and you may take some deaths, but it is manageable.

By the second merchant is a path south to the final villager. The last villager usually is not under attack, but if it is, it will be from ettins, which can kill faster than tengu. It’s safer to flag heroes ahead just in case.