Curse

Ringoduk · May 13, 2005, 05:33 AM // 05:33

Well, after a long, arduous attempt to solo Althea Ashes, I have finally done it.

...but soloing this quest is NOT recommended for the faint of heart.

I do not think it's possible to do except for with a warrior. Well, at least not in the way I did it.

My first thought upon arriving on the scene was to run up, grab the ashes, and die. Then I'd just warp back to Piken Square.

Now I'm sure I'm not the first to try this. I ran into the same problem a lot of people do I imagine.

Specifically, the sheer volume of guys prevents you from getting to the ashes, regardless of the damage you are able to take before dieing.

After repeated attempts to run my way in without killing anything, I decided it was impossible.

Now I had a -60% death penalty, but I decided "what the heck?" I decided to continue clearing out guys until the crowd was thin enough to wade through.

The guys at the bottom of the platform were pretty easy to kill off, even with a -60% death penalty. (I'm a level 15 warrior with the 50AL suit by the way.)

But the guys at the top of the platform pose a pretty serious problem. There are 2 shamans who heal, 2 elementalists, 2 mind chaots who burn your energy, 2 hunters who shoot you, and about 6 axe wielders who will surround you and chop ya to pieces.

It seemed pretty impossible at first. There is no way I could do enough damage to kill anything with two shamans healing it constantly. Plus, I only had 154 health and 8 energy due to the aforementioned death penalty.

At this point, it is possible to wade through all the guys. It takes some practice to learn their paths and dodge around them, but it is possible.

Now all of you astute people would probably just pop endure pain and sprint, run in there and grab the ashes. At this point though, I didn't have endure pain with me, and I really didn't feel like running back to town to get it.

This is where it started to get interesting. Now for those of you who don't know the Althea's Ashes altar area, there is a raised dias upon which a bunch of guys rest. Then there are the stairs up to it. Right beside those stairs lies the graveyard. The placement of this graveyard makes it possible to kill the guys on top of the dias one by one.

Basically, you just run up and lure the melee axe wielders onto the stairs. (None of the other shamans/chaots/hunters will move from their locations. I tried to lure them for a long time. It just doesnt work.)

So with your 154 health, you don't have very long at all to live. Especially not with the 6 axe wielders and 2 hunters attacking you.

But what you can do is attack, then die.

You won't do much damage before you die, but you will gain adrenaline.

So then just pop sprint, run up very quickly, lure the melee onto the stairs, and use sever artery with all the adrenaline you gained just before you died. You have to time it almost exactly right, but you can keep your adrenaline between lives.

Also, even after you die, the monster will keep bleeding.

The problem is those pesky shamans, who keep healing everyone.

But as it turns out, the shamans only heal when the mob has about 1/3 of his total Health.

So at some point, after you do this severe artery/adrenaline/death ping pong enough, one of the mobs will be near the point where the shaman would heal him, but he will be just above the "healing threshold."

So then when you next lure him down to the stairs, he will only be at just above 1/3 of his total health. Then just run in and hit him very quickly with a power attack and a couple of regular hits. It takes a while to get all the "stars in alignment" so to speak, but once you do, it is possible to finally deal just enough damage to finish off one of the guys on top of the dias before you die.

So then just rinse and repeat this until you have cleared the top of the hunters and the other melee axe wielder guys. It takes a long time, but it gets easier after you kill that first axe wielder from the top of the dias.

At this point, you should be able to run in with sprint and reach the altar containing althea's ashes just before you die.

I welcome comments or questions or improvements on this pingpong adrenaline/bleeding/death thing. Would it work for any other quests?

And are there any other quests that would be very hard to solo? If so, I'd like to try them.

Ideally, I would like to solo the whole game. (Solo as in without henchies or player-controlled group members) Any thoughts on how to do this? I suspect that it is possible to do.

It seems like it would be fairly easy to do it with two good players. I'm not so sure about just one player.

/deaths before my attempt to solo this quest: 40
/deaths after: 133

As I said, this method is not recommended for the faint of heart.

baroqueworks · May 13, 2005, 05:47 AM // 05:47

what if you solo as a lvl 18 warrior/ranger with a bunch of henchmen? what do you think?

Gabron · May 13, 2005, 06:15 AM // 06:15

why do you want to do it alone anyway?

get a bunch of friends to form a party or something, then hack and die rinse and repeat

Zilm · May 13, 2005, 04:56 PM // 16:56

If you go through all that troulbe Dragons Gullet is right there behind the Temple!

sybban · May 13, 2005, 05:00 PM // 17:00

You can run past the enemies to get to dragons gullet instead of fighting. And whhhhhhhhy go through all the trouble? So you can say you did it? That's fine and all, but I prefer people helping me, not AI.

Epinephrine · May 13, 2005, 08:02 PM // 20:02

Wow, looks like these aren't the "Ironman" crowd. Congrats, thats a tough thing to do.

Have you tried wiping out the Charr north of the Wall in pre-searing? That's pretty tough too I hear, and I can't imagine doing it solo - you'd need a partner to open the gate for you and then they can warp back to town.

Nuker · May 14, 2005, 12:25 AM // 00:25

ive done ashes twice. i dont know why but everytime i get to the final res point by the stairs people want to leave. im like just zerg the **** outta it... buT NOOOOO some people cant stand not killing every single monster. Anyways its pretty easy solo or not once you clear that first group on the base of the steps..... you can easily run to the ashes

Pandora's box · May 14, 2005, 08:37 PM // 20:37

I just finished the quest at level 13. After all I read here I assumed it was almost impossible but it appeared to be easy

I took level 8 henchmen from Yak's Bend and traveled all the way back to the temple. Killed the small groups 1 by 1 and went to the stairs. Since it was so easy until this moment I made the mistake to attack there... And my party got killed very fast

. But not before I noticed that it should be possible to run straight to the ashes and take them while my henchmen were fighting the mob. So I did, and I was not attacked at all, in fact I had plenty of time to take the ashes, press 'M' and teleport back to the Duke

Silmor · May 14, 2005, 10:26 PM // 22:26

Althea's Ashes was recently made significantly easier by basically halving the size of each group of Charr, so the only way you can die is by actively upsetting at least three or more groups at once.

Solo'ing something still means you do it without dying, though. Any class can abuse resurrection shrines to clear an explorable area, it just requires a love for tedium and plenty of spare time. Althea's Ashes actually spawns you right next to where you need to go after death, so launching suicide attacks from the resurrection shrine almost seems encouraged.