DEVS Ascension = GRIND

LOL so true... on the last part of thirsty we just waited for all the groups to engage and ganked the priests the mobs fell easily infront of our warriors w/ my support healing O.-

EDIT : and in response to the OP saying everyone else in my group tried alot before me .... no actually we came from sanctum cay together :|

well the evidence is in then...either i am a drooling retard that can barely tie his own shoes or you are an uber elite genius gaming god.

how can you even stand to engage in pve when it's so easy? if you did thirsty river in one go, then everything up to ascension must have been completely unchallenging and completely boring...just a big easy walk through.

thirsty river isnt tht hard.... took me 2 hours.

I did have a rough time the first time. The second time we knew what was there and developed the following plan.
There is plenty of time so dont rush.
One target
Just clear a majority of the people then drag them in with the priest. There is only one hard priest to kill and thats with the healing boss. Takes around 30 seconds with a tank heavy group.
Wait till the new two minutes starts to start on the next base.
You can stop the hero and make him stay. Kill things around the gate before you open them.
With a pug this mission took us from try one to finish in maybe a hour. We killed everything along the way. Dont try to rush the missions and heres a bit of advice for a mission after this one. Sometimes you cant kill them all

I beat it in one go, and Im no "uber elite gaming god"

You dont need to be a god to beat the river in one go, you just need to exersize common sence.

Wow im in shock. I did River and Dunes last night with a group with no problem at all. The fact that its taking some of you hours and hours or even days is like amazing to me. Either you are totally unprepared for these areas, or you had one hell of an unbalanced/crappy team. Perhaps better planning before heading out would have helped?? Unless I just got really super lucky or something??

Yeah i did river and dunes (including travel tiem to and from both areas) in about 2 hours...

dunes was retarded easy...with henchies i did it first try...elona's took me a long time but maybe that was because i wasted my efforts with crappy groups...took me about 4 tries with henchies.

thirsty river is last so i guess i'll try with real live people someday.

See, the ASecention quests aren't impossible. You just need to avoid bad groups, and people who think charging right away is a good idea. In retrospect though, it is hard to figure out whose good, and that's what makes them hard. I've had groups with people with good fantasy names be morons, while someone named "Pwner of noobs" was a great teamate at Elona.

If you have friends that you trust or guildmates that you know aren't stupid, try to do it with them. It's all stragety.

I must of got *uber* lucky with Rivers. I did it first try. To be fair it seemed everyone else in my group had failed 10 times and knew what the hell they were doing. We have even took the bot healer with us.

It became apparent to me that the Desert missions are meant to be run by people at or about to hit lvl 20.

Groups of lvl 17 - 18 will have a difficult time with these missions.

Best advice I can give you is to make sure your group has a minimum of TWO dedicated healer monks ... and I'm talking DEDICATED not a half a$$ed monk.

Second piece of advice ... in the desert the game changes from being one where you can just tank everything in site to a game more akin to traditional MMO's where you have to pull a couple mobs at a time. Pull more than one group .... game over.

It's generally one or two idiots that bring the whole group down. Get in a good guild and have your guildies help you through missions your having a hard time at. Pick up groups generally get slaughtered in the deserts because

a. They don't have enough healers
b. One or two noobs don't know how to properly pull (or even understand the concept of pulling period) and drag too many mobs onto your party
c. The desert content is geared towards lvl 20 players ... which is why it's so hard.

Content after you ascend only SEEMS easier ... it's really the same difficulty as the desert ... except you are now lvl 20 when you hit the new content.

I did Dunes and River in my first tries. Elonas took 4-5 tries though. I love how this game actually takes a little skill, unlike DII where I could make a new character and have it to lvl 80 the next day. You just cannot walk through enemies in this game and I like that.

in river, stop complaining, you can attack most of the enemies before you even enter the bases. just use a ranger or two. then kill priests. if you didn't know about killing priests first then i have no idea how you even made it past the dolyak in the shiverpeaks.
dunes was easy. you don't even need common sense to do it. you just walk. and attack. i guess if you had the sudden urge to attack nothing but seige wurms...
elona is the only one that really has a challenge to it. just start with the right side instead of the left side and again... use common sense and avoid what you can't kill. i think this thread is about dead too. 90% of it is saying the same thing.

ok i'm going to take back everything i said in this thread.

I respec'ed as a pure healer last night and tried thirsty river again with all henchies...i got to the 3rd one on the first try of the evening and failed...i realized i could do it if i just found some decent people.

I hooked up with a group that had tried it before so they weren't running around like idiots.
I was the sole healer and for 95% of the whole mission i was able to keep the entire party above 90% health. (with only one rez)
We did it on the first attempt.

Now one thing i must say is that the sniping part is most likely not how the devs intended us to do this mission, but it sure works like crazy. We would have been able to do it anyway, but i suspect the devs will one day "fix" this so the mobs are no longer snipeable.

The thing that ruined ascension for me, and caused so much frustration, is the fact that all the ascension missions act like a bottleneck for dimwits. And it can be very hard to find a decent group in a sea of tards. I bet the average player IQ goes up considerably post-ascension.

So ascension is not a grind, but finding a decent group can be.

It took me about 2 hours to complete all 3 last night and my mirror image. I dont know how people are saying that these are hard. We breezed through these. Though, the group I was in knew exactly where they where doing and it went so smoothly.

I was thinking to myself about people that are saying they are impossible, and at the same time we where doing these without breaking a sweat. Oh, and at all 3, we only had 1 healer. But, we had 4 War/Monks who could keep themselves alive aswell, so it made the job on the monk alot easier.

elona's reach took me 2 tries.. the first try we messed up really early on but then we knew exactly what to do. thirsty river... 2 tries. first try was with henchies, second with people. dunes, 1 try, very very easy. why would it take like 20 tries?

I found that henchmen teams could pull me through all the way to Ring of Fire. That last mission was too hard for me with henchies. Other then that though, everything seemed fine.

I did all three in 1 night. The only one that was hard work was Elona's.
That was mainly due to either
a) People dropping out! (No idea why!)
or more often
b) People not working as a team. Always someone wanting to rush off ahead and be the hero! It's always funny when a tank thinks they are amazingly hard in battle - right up until they attack the next group and notice the monk is out of range or everyone is still low on mana. (Splat!)

Having to do a mission again because you failed, is not grind.
Having to do a mission again to get your armor infused, cap an elite, farm runes, farm mods etc, is grind.

I disagree. I was able to complete Elona and Dunes with myself as the only healer given a party that knew what they were doing. With Sausaletus Rex Life Bonding me, I was able to prevent myself from dying and Blackace kept Blood Ritual up to provide energy for healing. We completed both Dunes and Elona in under two hours; one try for Dunes, two for Elona because we didn't expect the charge of the mobs following the death of the last boss. These missions are not as hard as people make them out to be, good teamwork will get you through.