Thunderhead Keep Strategy

When you arrive at the fort in the Thunderhead Keep mission, clear out the top, and than clear out the bottom. After you have done that, man the catapults and take out as many as possible but never go down to the doors. It is very hard for monks and other players to do their job when the group is split up. The trick is that everyone needs to stay near the king because the stairs will be a choke point. If you stay near the king, it would be easier for the monks, necros, and eles to do their jobs. It would also be helpful to get a trapper in the fort to trap the stairs.

Wow, You've discovered how people have been beating that mission since the game came out!

Seriously - Just noobs and people just starting to try the mission think that manning the doors is a good idea. Mostly overzealous warriors that think their god but dont realize they' drop in 2 secs most of the time without backup.

Its a pretty easy mission. I just beat it with a full team of henchies by guarding the King the entire time.

ive always found thunderhead easy, done it with my necro with just 1 monkee

Guarding the doors can be pretty fun with a good group. I solo healed a team once and had to run back and forth the entire time. It was frantic but we got the job done. Good times...

I've done this mission three times now (always me + 1 player + henchmen), but never the bonus; aren't there supposed to be a lot more enemies that spawn if you let the dwarves in? Does that significantly change the tactics needed for it?

i've always done it with henchmen, and i just stood in the middle of the lower part (near the dead boss) for the entire siege.

i never had to go near the king...

every good player that is stuck there, is stuck there because of BAD-ASS PUGs. the mission is easy with henchies.

Quote: Originally Posted by Hector Illiad When you arrive at the fort in the Thunderhead Keep mission, clear out the top, and than clear out the bottom. After you have done that, man the catapults and take out as many as possible but never go down to the doors. It is very hard for monks and other players to do their job when the group is split up. The trick is that everyone needs to stay near the king because the stairs will be a choke point. If you stay near the king, it would be easier for the monks, necros, and eles to do their jobs. It would also be helpful to get a trapper in the fort to trap the stairs. Well done Sherlock, want another obvious mystery to solve?

i've always done this one with all hench team as i have a 99.9% rating of beating it then if i joined a PuG grp as with most mission especally the last one :P

Actually that's how I beat it - defending those gates. And it was on my 2nd attempt too, not 453453476456th. I was forunate to have a such awesome group who knew what they were doing and the shocking part is that it was a PUG.

Yeah, thanks for all the flames (Josh and Former Ruling, in particular). I was just posting for the people who are having trouble getting through the mission.

If you truelly wanted to be helpful..

you would describe a good team build

make your tactics more detailed

show each enemy boss etc etc

then maybe ppl will appreciate it

Whats the best way to deal with the Perfected Armor? It seems to decimate half the group before its killed... I consider this guy to be the one that starts to make the mission go sour. Should it be targetted first or should the rest of its' mob (the 2 mursaat elementalists etc) be dispatched first?

As a Minion Master I find that if I ignore the P.A he will trounce through my undead.

Quote: Originally Posted by Elrond Afil

if he wanted to be helpful he could of said 1 word, just 1 word













henchies

I've done Thunderhead Keep mission AND bonus with just henches... wasn't that bad at all. I just stood mainly in the middle ground area between the two doors. Called targets like crazy so the stupid henches would attack correctly.

Eh... I've only had a couple problems with henchies...

1) Cynn enjoys casting Firestorm... which tends to scare off the enemies right into Jalis's lap. Seriously, a major pain. And there's no way I'm bringing "Do-nothing" Dunham.

2) Lina and Alesia have an aversion to healing non-team allies like Jalis. And with myself as a mesmer, that's bad. But hey, all it means is that I have to make sure the enemies keep away from the king, which would be easy were it not for #1.

But yeah... T-Head is easy aside from the Mursaat. Get around them, and it's a cake walk. It just saddens me to see proof of the fact that henchmen are better than 2/3 of the players out there.

We had an interesting go at this mission less than an hour ago, we didn't succeed though.

We had 7 rangers, 1 monk and naturally a very trap-heavy strategy. We took our time, mostly managed to control aggro, and there weren't too many deaths. I handed out some cc's to get rid of DP when necessary.

All in all everything went pretty well until we got to the fort. Then everything went pretty much straight to hell I don't know about others, but it was my first time that far and I didn't quite know what to do. I went to the catapults, but didn't seem to have anything in range. Then I came back to trap the stairs but the trolls were too close already. Eventually we all got killed and so did Jalis. He didn't try to rush down the stairs though, which was nice.

The mission seems definitely doable, but I'm not touching the catapults since I'll probably screw things up Might as well go trap right away. The length of the mission is a pain though, sucks to go through it over and over again only to get killed at the fort...

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edit:

Tried it again with another, more diverse PUG and we made it! There were only 7 of us since one freeloader W/R decided to go AFK in the beginning of the mission, still, nobody died even once. We had 2 rangers trapping the crap out of the stairways, one minion master and two warriors providing firepower+cannonfodder and two monks looking after the king and us. Great team, and Jalis didn't do any Leroy manouveurs either.

Camping the king is a true and tried strategy.

Though, to add spice, I've done THK with the group splitting into two 4 man teams, and each team guarding one of the gates. One person sits by the catapults and comes down to help when needed. Only a couple of times, did a few have to come over to help with a boss. One group I was with even did the bonus successfully by splitting up.

Splitting the group, is more fun, in my opinion, but also a bit more challenging and requires more teamwork than PUGs usually have.