There are nine dungeons in Guild Wars 2 if you include fractals. Each dungeon has two modes — story and explorable. If you complete a story mode it will unlock your ability to enter the explorable mode. You could also just piggyback on a player who already has it unlocked to enter the explore mode. While in explore mode you get to certain parts of the dungeon where you have to pick a direction, usually up or forward. This is what you call a path, and each dungeon has multiple paths.
Rewards
You are rewarded for each path completed per day with 60 tokens that can be used to purchase exotic quality gear from vendors. Some paths are harder than others, but all of them reward the same amount of tokens. Each boss apart from the last one will drop a chest you can loot. When the final boss is downed you do receive completion rewards including Karma and the tokens.
The impossible path
Speaking to the articles title, there is a dungeon in GW2 called Twilight Arbor. Inside there is a path not-so-fondly known as F/U. What this means is the first time you are prompted for a direction to take you select ‘forward’, and at the second prompt you select ‘up’. I have recently tried this path myself to a somewhat enormous failure. Regardless of what path you take in the dungeon you still end up at the same final boss, aptly named The Nightmare Tree. The main difference between the paths being what abilities he has. On this path the tree has the uncanny ability to spawn massive amounts of veteran level spiders. A veteran level enemy is simply one that has enhanced attributes over a normal one. Most MMOs enhance their dungeon critters in this way in order to promote the fact that they are a challenge to be undertaken by a group.
If you tried to complete the dungeon yourself you will be utterly stomped into the floor — kind of like this little Mesmer is about to be.
Now the problem here is not so much the spiders or that they are veterans, but rather the amount of them. It seems like every time you get within range to hit the boss, he spawns about 40 spiders. My group was able to kill the waves of spiders after a massive effort, and we did so time and time again. The issue was that every time we did this he had filled his area back up with 40 more. So we attack the boss once and the entire room would chase us down again.
Conclusion: this is an impossible fight.
You are probably saying at this point:
“This guy is a damned fool, why didn’t he just look up a guide?”
Well I did, but one I found says that you need at least 3 mesmers in your party with reflection builds in order to stave off the massive amounts of spider spit flying across the room while stacking your group on the tree.
‘Stacking’ means you all stand on top of each other at one spot. The other method of attack I have seen is your group stays near the entrance of the room and uses ranged weapons to attack the boss. This is the method I attempted in my group, but as I mentioned the entire room attacked us if we hit the boss just one time.
Dev Standing
I recently read a post from the GW2 devs laying out their future plans for 2013. Within this article was a lot of uplifting and inspiring words about the future of the game, and the spirit of cooperation. Here is a short excerpt taken from the article.
“We want to remove the choice players are currently being forced to make on their gear: “Do I go with better stats, or better loot?” This isn’t in the spirit of cooperation that Guild Wars 2 is all about. As such, we’ll be removing magic find entirely as an item stat and turning it into account stat that improved the odds of rare drops for all your characters.”
I am aware that this is specifically talking about the Magic Find stat, however if you read the entire article the message therein is relevant. So with that in mind I have to ask why would they keep this dungeon as it is, and not fix it so that all may enjoy it? Why are they forcing groups to have a specific makeup in order to complete this path?
Part of the massive appeal that GW2 has is the fact that there are no specific tanking or healing classes. Each player is responsible, largely, for their own health and safety. So with this ‘spirit of the game’ in mind it makes no sense why this would not get changed. You can read the full dev post here on the official site.
Have you completed a TA F/U dungeon run? Do you think it is in the spirit of GW2?
Follow me on Twitter @wrist_oosah.
