Thunder head mission

Yeah, that is pretty annoying. It also irks me when people scream at the rest of the party members to stay around the king like magnets. I was firing off the catapults and the one guy was pinging the hell out of me. It takes like 2-seconds to run back to the king from the catapults. People get paranoid with this mission.

I think what's worse is trying to find a bonus group here. I only have like 3 left to do in the game with my monk and I can never seem to find a group to do this one with.

Well considering the bonus is essentially the same as doing the bonus, it is pretty silly to advertise for just bonus only (not sure how you are advertising it, but have seen people doing so). The bonus is really no harder than the actual mission. Biggest problem is that you aren't ever sure if you activated the beacons in time to trigger the bonus and just have to hold your breath once it is over and hope the sword shows up.

I need the THK bonus on two or three characters. If you are on american after 5:30 central look me up
<-- IGN.

Its not the looking for bonus only, its the 'Im scared of the mission so to hell with the bonus' thing.

What's wrong with go in there and die a few times, just to get the feeling of the mission?

i always get whisp from my guild m8 to help them with mission!! I hate that mission... i done it million times!!

I love to go in thunderkeep and just stand there with my monk, watching the suffering of young players who want to finish this mission... i am bad


Kidding.. i dont like to step there, no way for it... i remeber my first time i finish that mission (long time ago).... i had big problems with monks.. i hate when they leave the group at middle of the mission!!! Bad memories...

Another tip. If you want the mission to go smoothly, get yourself one or two good interrupters (make sure they have at least distracting+savage, perhaps conc. shot if they have high expertise and know how to use it effectively, or maybe even choking gas if they're good about that too)

Having a good interrupter nail all the Giant Stomps on a three-herder group (yes, one ranger can do it, all about timing), makes things so much nicer, and interrupting Chain Lightning really eases up on the monk (I hate it )

this is a good advice, but i was sure people looking for trappers rhere? when i did that mission for my ranger i was forced to be full trapper (which i dont like) and nobody wanted to hear anything about interrupts

PUGs.... what else can i say

I think people go the trapper route because you don't need monk primaries with a mostly trapper team. I've done the mission with a monk, mesmer, ranger and necro. Truth be told, the monk took up space. With the right damage dealers, you never have to even get into melee with the mobs.

I never force anyone to play a build they aren't comfortable with. I honestly haven't seen that many people advertising themselves or looking for trappers much in there. I actually don't care for pure trappers because we usually run an agro warrior and the two don't mix will most of the time.

We did this again last night to help a guildie and did the bonus. Before we started I asked the tank if he would mind setting up to be a torch tanker. He hadn't ever done it before but said sure, asked for some skills ideas.

Before we started I put on what I call the "bastard leader" mode and explained the plan on what we were going to do (camp the king, tank with the torch, monk talks to king at beginning and is the only one to enter the side gate to keep control of the king). Everything went perfect. Not one death and they all said it was the easiest they had ever done in the many attempts they had tried.

The only time anyone came anywhere close to death was when they would ocassionally run off to the cats and caught a bit of agro and got degen hexed. But they were smart enough to run back to the monks at the king

One funny thing happened though two of our people were lagging pretty seriously through the mission just before the keep. We saw one of our warriors running around in circles calling attack targets of things we had killed about 4 minutes before. WAs the strangest thing, like he was in a timewarp.

Because to be a good monk, you have to be smart. If you are smart, THK is easy to pass. Therefore all the monks pass on their 1-3 tries.

Yes THK is a noob filter, because it only takes 1 person to screw it up, unless you have shard on your team, then it takes 4 people to screw you up.
I monked my group through the whole mission even after we got 3 disconnects. Boon prot FTW!.

This is the trick to completing any mission successfully. Get the guys you want and tell them what to do. And yell if you have to.

I've had very few problems with my split-team method really. The bad thing about camping the king is that the monks can space out and he can go down fast. But I believe people that it might be the better way.

The ultimate skill of use at THK though is FIREPOWER. Kill the enemy fast, and you won't have any problems. I think THK really shows the weaknesses of crappy non-monk or non-warrior players. If you're in a bad PUG, you may notice that people just aren't doing enough damage (this is common throughout the game btw).

Need to be able to interrupt that monk boss too. Those mesmers have one or two uses.

I've noticed that a lot of the players in THK look like this:

Warriors:
W/Mo, lvl 20, 170 attributes, uninfused, tank with selfheals, full armourset, useless sundring sword of whatever, useless shield.

should be:
W/*, lvl 20, 200 attributes, infused, damagewar/tank with maybe 1 selfheal, 1 piece of knights/ascalon armour+rest full plate or gladiators or a mix, max damage +15% elemental/vampiric/furious/zealous axe or sword of fortitude/defense, collectors crimson carapace.

There is no excuse not to have 200 attribute points, no excuse to not be infused, selfheals are crap because you'll do less damage or your tanking will be less effective and you'll have monks to heal you.

There is no excuse not to have a max damage sword or axe with 15%^50 or in stance/enchanted. You can buy this weapon for 5k + some materials at the trader in droknars forge.

There is no excuse to not have a max armour shield with -2 damage absorb and +45 health in a stance. This shield is much more useful than your tall shield with -1 damage absorb (chance 3%). You can buy a shield with -2 damage absorb and +45 health in stance for 2k or for 2 bleached shells.

Perfect equipment is cheap. Using pretty things that don't do damage will piss off the monks.

Either be a tank or a damage war. Ask your team what they need. If you want to tank, remember this: wild blow is used by jade armours and it will cancel your stance, mending is an enchantment and will be stripped. Choose wisely.
If you want to be a damagewar (every noob will tell you to be tank and that in pve a warrior is supposed to be a tank). Try to bring stuff that does good damage. Swordwarriors with bleeding aren't very useful here because jade armours don't bleed. The deep wound of an axe is better here. Bring an interrupt skill. If you don't have these skills, go back and do the smaller quests or buy the skills. You're useless in fire islands if you only have sever artery and gash.
If you want to use axe, I believe there is a boss in THK who has cleave, it's an elite
If you're a damagewar, you can get away with bringing only 1 defensive skill. Bring something that lets you evade hits or something like that (look into War/mesmer, War/Ranger and War/Elementalist profession combos for this).
Bring balanced stance to not get knocked down when you're busy chopping the enemies into pieces. Knockdown makes you lose time that is better spent on doing damage.

However, if your team is halfway decent, all you need to do is stop enemies from reaching your backline (where the monks and eles and others should be). It's very common to see a full enemy group go down before the warrior even gets close enough to start slashing away at it. This means you might be better off as a tank..; it's a dilemma

If your equipment sucks, your build sucks and your attitude sucks, the monks won't like you.

I type too much.

Rangers:
R/*, lvl 20, 170 attributes, useless equipment...

Should be:
R/*, lvl 20, 200 attributes, useful equipment, useful build.

Same as with warrior. Upgrade your equipment. Using ugly weapons that are good is better than using cool weapons that are crap. If you really really like using fancy shmancy weapons, use them in a different mission, NOT THK.

Ask what the plan is and bring the right skills. High marksmanship is good to kill the boss. (everyone wants to kill the normal monsters first, you can kill the boss in the keep first and the monsters later. Of you do it this way, you won't get trapped between a shitload of monsters near the throne area.)

You should be able to snipe the boss with ranged weapons, warriors should use their own ranged weapons too.

If you don't snipe the boss but instead, you rush in, together with everyone else, and get degen on your butt... then the monks won't like it.



Eles, necros, mesmers

I used to play a smiting wammo in THK before the aoe update.
I don't anymore.
But eles do.

Aoe makes monsters run away, when they run away, some of the more stupid warriors will follow the monsters. They will then aggro everything, they will die, the monsters will target the casters, everyone is dead, monk has to heal like crazy, gets yelled at...

They don't like that.

Monks...
DO NOT BRING AN INVINCIMONK TO THK.
It's fun to see the entire team trying to res you but it doesn't really help...


It gives other monks a bad name and they won't like that.

I hope this answers your question as to why there aren't that many monks in THK =D

One thing I am sure of is that most pugs in thk don't do enough damage.
If you don't kill something before it kills you,... logic...
you're dead.

How to do more damage? Better equipment, better strategy. Groupbuild!

edit: I said selfheals are crap. I meant selfheals like healingbreeze and selfheals you don't really need. Healing sig is a good selfheal but you'll take more damage if you use it. Warriors should work on damage prevention and not on outhealing the damage they take. That's why equipment matters....

this is very usefull. i think evryone who goes throu THK first time should read this post!

btw- as a monk, after 3 warnings, i stop healing those scuisadle rangers who jump in thinking there tanks. 1 warning should be enouth, but im nice, so i give 3 :P
at this point in the game they should learn there not tanks, and yea, as you said, at this point they also had time to save money for a decent bow.

I must be 1 of the select few who enjoy that mission it seems. Guess its because my first account went quite well for it.

1st char (ranger) completed first time
2nd char (warrior) completed first time while lagging horribly and doing absolutely sod all for the 2nd half of the ending battle
3rd char (ele) completed 2nd time
4th char (monk) took f*cking ages!

The 1 thing that annoys me most about that missions is the words 'let the monk take the king' followed rapidly by the first moron of a wammo talking to the king...

The best build for a warrior on that is W/N i say. Enervating Charge = Plague Touch (to get rid of it) Devasting Hammer = Plague Touch + screws Armours over.

When playing monk though the words 'heal the king' suck... but not quite as much as that 1 moron of a wammo who isn't infused and is spamming Frenzy...

The only time i wasn't infused for that mission was because i changed scar pattern and forgot.

I'm just ashamed to say i'm finding Sundering to be a more and more useless mod everytime i think of the 'Just compared it to how often you hit with blind' quote...

All the monks that leave mid mission, or want to be paid to get a free ride do not qualify as 'smart' or 'good' in ANY mission, let alone this one. There are a lot of bad monks out there. I'm still learning (good enough for most pve, but not quite ready for infuse/SB in halls heh), but even I can solo monk this with menhlo support its just easier, with even a halfway decent team. and that's not with any fancy tricks OR catapult, just kill everything inside the gates, no splits, one trapper/interrupter to slow things down when they come in. Cake.

Edit: oh yeahs! In all my fun times in THK its never been bad monks that ruined the mission (well possibly once) so I'm inclined to agree with DonZ on damage output and the whole party using thought>motion techniques.

Theres nothing wrong with using the catties unless you don't know when you need to turn back or if your off the wrong profession. I've seen many a ranger think he can solo a Jade Bow and/or White Mantle Knight and fail miserably.

I only take on things on solo on that missions when i know i can win. Therefore my mesmer takes on all lone Jades and Mursaat Eles (necros don't ever seem to stop casting and attack).

Ineptitude > Anything that attacks in PvE

It does always seem to be monks who leave first on that mission though...

im sure its cuz they get fed up with wammos blamin them for death (get infused and dont use Frenzy, dumbass) and keep screaming HEAL KING!!! last time i had to sacre a guy into stop spammin me cuz he was really overboarding!!!! i end up sayin if you dont SHUT UP i will leave group. that worked like a charm ^_^

but yeah, thats why monks get anoyed

Of course, if people feel so strongly about others annoying them in PUGs, they should simply do the mission solo, with guildies, or with henchies. Not quit 30 mins into the mission cause some noob WAMO said "rez me!" I hate bastards that quit prematurely. If you are irritated with someone that much, ignore him--but go on and finish and not be a baby and screw the other 6 people.

?
Camping the king is used to prevent exactly this from happening. Your whole group is up in the top section in the center. This creates chokepoints on the upper portions of the stairs and sides for the enemy, all the while keeping you and the king within healing range of the monks.

The other monk I was the last time I did the mission was jokingly pissed because halfway through the keep he actually had to move to heal someone (a mesmer or ele that went off to the cats and didn't come running back after catching degen agro).

lol the bastard is not only saying rez me once, they spam HEAL HEAL HEAL, HEAL KING, MONK IS SLEEPING, HEAL HEAL HEAL all long the mission
i dont think they realise that a minimum cost for a spell is 5 mana (i dont use divine spirit) and by them using freny while not being full infused or whatever i have to cast it 5 more times (with divine boom in me and high divine favor)and blame evry1 for duying!!!!!!!

and i never quit until i see that 4/8 already quited, i just scare them that ill quit if they dont shut up.
and it works, they shut up. the game becomes pleasant again