A Poor Guide to soloishing the Ice wastes, the chaos plains, the bone pits, n pools!

Haha
Terra tank>UW!
Intro
I have been using terra tank to get up to 9 globs of ecto in one run of the Underworld. (greedy me)
So now out of boredom I have decided it’s not such a bad thing to let everyone in on it. Many people may have thought of this, to them I say congrats (thanks for sharing)
For those who have not simply thought of this you will probably slap your self when you see the ease and flexibility of the concept.

There are only about 3 things that a terra tank can not do in the underworld, solo bladed aatxes, solo charged blacknesses, and easily solo coldfire nights.
So for those of you with Nightfall just bring in 3 heroes and make them help you do these things! (no need for coldfires of course)

I use 2 monk heroes and 1 E/Mo hero to aid me and get me to where I can solo the Ice Wastes, The chamber, The Labrynth (in theory; I haven’t bothered), The Twin Serpent Mountains, The Chaos Plains, The Bone Pits, and the Spawning Pools.

My builds are sloppy, unrefined, and don’t synergize; they simply GET THE JOB DONE.
This means that any one of you who may want to refine my strategy, improve my builds, or just base a new strategy off of mine can….easily.

I will guide you through the trip in the UW. Remember that I don’t have very much time, so my guide will probably be NO GOOD. Remember that it will take some getting used to if you want to be able to easily make 50k idly walking through the underworld ONCE. Remember that this does take time and I do not suggest that it is better than grind farming with consecutive duo runs….this is mainly for the farmer who likes to afk a lot.

Please be kind, if you make this better, post your success and we will build on it more. (I don’t have the time to)

I am not responsible for any lost 1k’s and I do not take credit for using COMMON SENSE to explore this strategy.














Builds
Your Build: E/me Terra-tank
Equipment:
Armor Set 1:
Complete Geomancer Inscriptions
Normal runes, superior if you just don’t want to go buy 2 headpieces…no more than one superior though…..major or superior vigor
Max AL
(Use this for the Aatxes, it gives your monks more time to correct any slips because the Aatxes won’t kill you instantly)
Armor Set 2:
Complete Geomancer Inscriptions
Max AL
Superior Earth Magic Rune
Superior Fire Magic Rune
Superior Energy Storage Rune
Vigor
(You won’t be taking damage while killing anything but the aatxes and Behemoths so I use this set everywhere else)
Weapons:
I use galigord’s just because I bought it a LONG time ago. Anything with 20% enchantment will due, but HC/HR of earth or fire is smart. (Make sure you fulfill requirement because your weapon is useful when energy is low) duh
Attributes:
Inspiration: 6
Earth: 12+3+1=16
Fire: 8+3=11
Energy: 5+3=8
(Yes I am THAT lazy, I never finished my second 15 attribute quest..)
Skills:
Glyph of Swiftness
Obsidian Armor
Meteor Shower
Bed of Coals
Sliver Armor*
Stoneflesh Aura
Stonestriker
Mantra of Earth
*Variable….MANY WAYS, you can bring a different damage skills, you can bring glyph of concentration for grasps, ward of weakness to control aatxe dmg, anything you find usefull.

Monk1: Mo/X Idunnowaddacallit
Skills:
Protective Spirit
Spirit Bond
Dismiss Conditions
--------------
--------------
Life Bond
Essence Bond
Rebirth
Attributes:
Protection: 12+3+1=16
Divine: 12
Runes:
Superior Protection on the Head Piece
Equipment:
Whatever you want, his is how easy the build can be done, I use the equipment they CAME with…
Almost everything about this build is changeable, I just guess-and-checked with my monk builds until they could keep me alive while the Aatxes beat me and end degen from the behemoths.
Monk2: Mo/x Whatchamahealit :\ (seriously random because once again I guess-and-checked)
Skills:
Word of Healing
Dwayna’s Kiss
Healing Breeze
Protective Spirit (again)
Spirit Bond (again)
Words of Comfort
Essence Bond
Rebirth
Attributes:
Healing: 12+3+1
Protection: 11
Divine: 6
Armor:
Superior Healing on Headpiece
Equipment:
Same as Monk1 :$

Micro-manage your monks while fighting the blades…constant protective spirit is necessary to safely tank.


Elementalist: E/mo Secondary Damage
Skills:
Mind Blast
Rodgort’s Invocation
Meteor Shower
---------------
Castigation Signet
Retribution
Holy Wrath
Essence Bond
Attributes:
Fire Magic: 12+3+1=16
Energy: 8
Smiting: 10
(Probably not too smart)
Runes:
Fire Magic Superior on the Headpiece.
Equipment:
Starter will due ><

This hero will make killing the blades possible, and killing groups of charged blacknesses easy. While fighting blades just keep retribution and holy wrath on. Once agro is set on you then you may let him guard and use castigation sig/shoot the blades with his want. (same goes for the monks)
While fighting groups of behemoths, you may speed up the process by using his Meteor shower before you use your own and switch off, so recharge won’t hold you from the ectos too long.

Procedure:
The Chamber
Start by clearing the bladed aatxes. Only killing three groups is necessary. The blades on the stairs are useless IMO. Put all of the hero’s maintained enchantments on you.(Essence bond for each, Life barrier, Holy Wrath, and Retribution.) Flag your heros behind the ghost, Renault. This may help a little bit if you lose aggro of the blades. Make sure all of your heroes are set to passive, put up stoneflesh aura, stonestriker, mantra of earth, and glyph of swiftness. This is just incase there is a nightmare you can quickly use obsidian flesh and have time to kill him without being killed by the blades. Once you have aggro back up slowly to casting range of your heroes. From now on you can switch your heroes to guard and they will wand the blades doing a little extra dmg on top of your enchantments. You can let stoneflesh and stonestriker drop so the blades will do damage. This is when you want to micro manage protective spirit, if you do it right there is no way to die.

After the three groups of blades are cleared accept the quest “Clear the Chamber”. This spawns three groups of grasping darknesses. Cancel holy wrath and place your heroes far enough away from the staircase to the left that they will not grab aggro if you stand at the top (switch them to passive). Put up stoneflesh aura, stonestriker, and mantra of earth (0 damage) pull aggro from the first group while standing at the top of the staircase. Wait until the second group of grasps patrols into your aggro. Now move your hench into casting range. (switch to guard) Let your ele spam mind blast but shift+click all other skills. Manage his Rodgort’s invocation so he can maintain well energy and kill the grasps easily.
Repeat for the remaining group.


Now go through the door leading towards the mountains. Flag your hench significantly back so you can stand inside the door and wait for approaching grasps. Use your earth enchantments (obsidian flesh only if a nightmare is present) and wait for aggro. After aggro is on you just do as before, move your heroes up and let your ele nuke the grasps. Now there is one group of blades that stay in site, one group of grasps that patrol around, and one group of blades that patrol in and out from another exit in the room.
Eliminate each group using the strategies stated above accordingly. Remember holy wrath on the blades, not on the grasps.
This is one of the hardest parts of the run due to the wide open room. It makes it hard to hold aggro on the blades and you may have to make your hench run away and just take the dp yourself. It’s ok you brought rebirth and any dp will go away quickly, just always save your hero with res.

Twin Serpent Mountains:
This place is mostly a piece of cake. Charged blacknesses are the biggest threat to your party here.
Killing obsidian behemoths is simple. Remove all maintained enchantments from yourself. (you may lose aggro due to the range so essence bond is useless and nature’s renewal will take too much energy)
(while on passice)
Flag your hench just out of aggro range of the behemoths and cast Stoneflesh Aura/Stonestriker and mantra of earth. Walk close to the behemoths but not so far that you are out of casting range of your heroes. Once aggro is on you move your heroes up far enough that you can walk up to the behemoths and set off their traps. You are maintaining your 3 damage reduction skills so (in NM) the traps and all shots do 0 damage. Now switch your hench to guard, you may want to call their targets on separate behemoths to ensure that none get healing spring off but its not a big deal if you don’t. Use your hero’s meteor shower and cast bed of coals when it is almost finished casting. (If aggro breaks your monks should be able to handle it, but if you notice they aren’t doing so well just flag them away and back out of aggro, reset, and retry.) If this combination doesn’t kill them the first time then use Mind Blast / Rodgort’s to finish them. Move along the path alternating your meteor shower and your hero’s so the casting time will not matter as much.(use glyph as swiftness for faster recharge)


Charged blacknesses are the hard part and have killed me the most, these are why I decided to bring an ele. (while on passice) Flag your hench far enough back that they won’t grab aggro from the blacknesses if you walk up to them. Cast stoneflesh aura, stonestriker, mantra of earth, glyph of quickening, and obsidian armor then pull aggro on yourself. Try to maintain your enchantments but shock with knock you down and make this hard. When the charges are all grouped on you, move your hench into casting range to heal you, then cast meteor shower with your ele hench.) watch when the charges cast shock so you can cast bed of coals without interruption. If they don’t break aggro they are done for, if one does, then take out the one or two that remain on you with Rodgort’s. Then turn on the one that is scrambling your monks and try to regain aggro. If you can then just kill it as soon as you can, if you can’t then continue managing your eles rodgort and mind blast to kill it.

These will easily kill your monks so hasty retreats can never hurt. Get used to flagging your heroes a lot.

There are usually two groups of charges through your path on the mountain. Look for a map of UW to see witch way to the chaos plains. (I’m to lazy to get one and give directions)
Soon you will come to the chaos plains.
Go back to the chamber and flag your hench where you started.

The Chaos Plains:
Anyone who has ever farmed as a terra tank, especially those who have in Ursan UW groups will clear this area with ease.
Always use glyph of swiftness right before Obsidian flesh so that the recharge will be fast enough for perma-obsidian flesh.
Maintain all enchantments as well as you can, your priority is Ob Flesh…you have very little time for error on keeping this one up, due to the interrupts. Stoneflesh is second priority because without it you will be able to live longer depending on the size of your group.
While killing banished dream riders try to preserve energy, I don’t even cast meteor storm. Just sliver armor and bed of coals while wanding them. You will need your energy so don’t spam ANYTHING. If you are a beginner at this you may want to pull the dreamrider out of the path of it’s corresponding mindblades. This means that even if you do run yourself out of energy while fighting the rider you will be out of harms way when the mindblades spawn.

You may take more than one rider at once to save time and aggro twice as much but this makes it very dangerous. If you have 2 groups of mindblades patrolling and you die then your monks may not be able to reach your body to rebirth you. This would mean the end of the trip.

For Mindblades you just maintain enchantments, and use all your damage skills. Easy as pie. Using walls can help you keep the AI bunched. Just like normal farming.

Pay attention to spawns because there are random spawns that if you are not prepared for you will die. I will include a map of the chaos plain spawns that Cerb has kindly agreed to let me use . (credit to him)
(Everyone say, THANK YOU CERB)

EASY AS PIE and this is place is the NEW ice wastes! I have gotten up to 7 ectoplasm just in the chaos plains. Probably due to the large number of enemies here.

From hero you can go to the Spawning Pools or the Bonepits.

Go to the bonepits first….its easier

Ectos for one LOUSY RUN (the only time I bothered SSing)






Lol
6 is literally lousy

The Bone Pits:
Your heroes are flagged in the chamber, this means you may need to reset them if they come back into range but if you flag them correctly you won’t.

The bone pits are a repeat of the mindblades really. Perform as a terratank should and you will not die. Just remember your primary targets (if you can’t bunch them correctly) are MINIONS! :O :O :O :O If you kill a minions master before killing it or all of the threshers in the area they will cast their AoE hex and could possibly kill you. Second targets are dead threshers just because I don’t like ‘em they are harder to group together and they give you less energy.

Here you NEVER want to be shot by the threashers from ABOVE your character. Apparently guild wars knows if you get hit in the head, THEY WILL DAMAGE YOU.


The bonepits take longer for me and ectos seems scarcer here so I skip here if I’m too tired.

Spawning Pools:

This area is tough due to all of the charged blacknesses in the area. You will have to use the procedure mentioned in the twin serpent mountains section, but you will also have to make sure dryders stay away from your heroes. (HARD)
I do realize that you could just swap sliver armor for ward of stability and they would be easy. BUT I’m lazy, I guessssss.

Dryders are insanely easy as is most of the UW for a terra tank.
Clear the area if you want…
Then go back finish clearing your way to the Ice wastes and clear the Smites
(I believe they are over farmed just like Elona’s Reach but there’s still a nice chance to get ecto/golds)

Ice Wastes:
I think this is becoming redundant don’t you? Do the same thing as you would do in the Chaos Plains. Right now I take 3 damage from Zealot’s fire sometimes…IDUNNO why…I don’t care though, it hasn’t killed me.

Avoid coldfires if you can, they just aren’t worth it even if you do manage to kill them.
It’s hard to pull them out of Ward against Harm or whatever which makes your fire do little damage, and they can eventually kill you with Ice Spikes.



Conclusion:
Basically, if you think of it there could be XXX different hero/player builds to do this exact same thing.
I was lazy and just took one of the first I was comfortable with.
ANYTHING that could tank the chaos plains could do this…in theory.
Please don’t flame me and say this is all obvious…I know it is, and that stuff hurts, it took me days to find the time to type all this up (Sorry for having a bit of a life Gw)

Most of this is insanely easy I just had noticed during a stupid Ursan run that if I had a way of getting out to these different UW locations then I could solo most of it.

If you have one more tank I’m sure you can actually do all of the quests in the UW…I’m just curious about the four horsemen n stuff.


Please post any improvements you have to help others ruin the ecto economy
I only recommend for players who don't like to grind....

Enjoy

could you do a spinoff using the same idea to farm in hm?

Wow! Nice.

I don't think you can do this in HM.

I'm almost positive it's doable in HM
I KNOW it's possible to solo the bonepits/chaos plains in HM because I've done it before...

I just don't know how easy it would be to clear the twinserpent mountains in HM

It takes much longer in hm as well because you have a lot of AI movement on the monsters so if you go into HM your looking at an increase of at least half hour to your run..

BTW I don't have an official time of the run, I never do it all at once because I have school, a grilfriend, and I practice drums daily...you people who have time may be nice and give estimated time?

I do know that when you become experienced with the build you can go fast enough to take only 20 minutes to get to the chaos plains.

Whopsiedoo, now thats nice dude. Looks like I'm gonna have to spend more plantium to get to UW :P
gg

ITS NOT RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOING SOLO IF YOUR USING HEROS EPIC FAIL YOU WASTED VALUABLE INTERNETS MAKING ME LOAD THIS PAGE
/rant

Looks nice m8, but howlong does 1 run take?

If the charged blackness are posing problems ~ possibly consider taking on the prot monk?

Quote: Originally Posted by Infectious

DAMN guys youre bringing gw back to life! very good guide indeed kep on going guys!

Quote: Originally Posted by Zamochit

a poor guide -.-
its awesome,

Quote: Originally Posted by Infectious

Hey there, GJ on the guide

Just a little tip perhaps:

The behemoths will NOT attack you if you wear a melee weapon. However, if your allies do not, they should not but still might hit you (I still haven't fully understood their AI). Therefore, if you and your heroes wear melee weapons, you can successfully skip all behemoths and go straight for the Charged Blacknesses then Chaos Planes. =) (P-S: If you are to walk too close, make sure you are ready to trigger their traps)

Quote: Originally Posted by cerb

Quote: Originally Posted by cerb

Well i did a test run yesterday, it worked perfect, but I was a little bit disapointed, i just got 2 ecto's out of the whole run, and it took me 2 hours...
i think i am Nup but i thought i would get like 5 ecto's or so ,, well now i know how this run works so i won't stay for 50 minutes in the first chamber, reading your post

GG

Is Geomancer Insignia crucial for the build?