River...

Either raise the abilities of the henches, or lower the difficulty of the mission. It is near impossible for myself as a ranger, to find enough competent people to run this mission with. I've been trying for the last two days and I spend more time trying to form a party to go at it, only to have someone not realize you need to leave the hero back in the second group...even after getting told...only to fail the mission in the same spot every time.

I'm about to just quit with this char permanantly and go work on my others.

It seems plenty of people have managed to finish this mission. Why not leave it as a challenge until you learn more about the game, or find more competent people to play with? If a game is too hard, you can always get better at it and get a sense of accomplishment if you found you improved yourself. If a game is too easy, there's not even the sense of accomplishment for finishing the entire game.

Reducing difficulty for a mission may help the few people who can't finish it, but at the same time it destroys the fun of everyone else who would've normally succeeded in the challenge - they'll end up with an overly easy and therefore probably dull experience. The people who couldn't finish the former mission will just get stuck in the next, and complain that the next mission needs to be made easier, etcetera.

Thirsty River is a challenging mission and it took me a while to understand it before I led of team of PCs(and Alesia) to complete it. In fact, they have already lowered the difficulty of the mission by not having the monk boss in the 3rd arena use Word of Healing...somebody claimed he doesn't use it anymore.

They are probably wrong....

But I have tried Thirsty River for the last two days as well. During that time, i've had no trouble finding groups (perhaps because I'm a monk ), but I've only had 2 really good groups. And even then, only the last (and the best) run I've had was when we reached the VERY LAST GROUP. And we lost (both monks died), and we didn't have a mesmer for that stupid healing boss...

I thought that last run was a very fun thing. Why? It makes me want to play Guild Wars a lot. It drives me crazy. Next time I get the chance, I am going to be back out at thirsty river (hopefully accompanied by a mesmer), and try it again. The thing that intrigues me the most about these Ascension missions is the difficulty. Before this, the most I had failed a mission was twice (Kryta I think; moron teams they were), but the other missions were pushovers. Making everything very easy (especially Ascension missions) would really detract from the game. People shouldn't get EVERY mission first try (unless they have an excellent group their first try ).

And eventually your other characters will get to thristy river... but, then again, they may have better luck

i agree, and i enjoy a challenging mission
but i dont enjoy sitting for hours at a time, for days in a row in town trying to form a team, only to have them destroyed 15mins in

You are either overexaggerating the time it takes to form a team, or you are on at the wrong time... Try going on at primetime when most people are on if the latter is the case.

If you do sit there for hours because you keep trying the mission over and over all in one sitting, then try playing your other characters for awhile, and then come back when you feel refreshed (or perhaps go and take a walk outside? Bah, that is madness )