Shing Jae Soloed by a Sin

[FoxBat]

After having fun with Palm Strike in GvG, I finally decided to dig into the assassin class proper, and so Kiku was created. I've played my share of the "chain 12343434" moebius spam on my ranger already; what I wanted to learn was the hit-and-run tactics that the class was conceptually based around, which would also serve well in alliance battles or ganks. So Kiku would begin life as a Solo Purist, earning her passage to Kaineng city without any help from others. (And no, I didn't even want to THINK about soloing the rest of factions with all those dumb NPCs to defend- it might be possible given enough shadow form abuse, but that's boring.)

Exploring early shing jae as level 5 and down is fairly challenging. I had to do a ton of careful pulling, abusing walls against crimson bandits, and very careful play against naga and tengu who would squash me mercilessly otherwise. Often things were hit-and-run, trying to string enemies out, kill one, and then run away before dying. Often times I did end up dying and had to restart from scratch with a slightly tweaked build/strategy to erase excessive DP.

But I took it upon myself to do every quest on the island (including the secondary ones), which granted a ton of XP in quick order, making the surrounding areas increasingly easier as I could craft better weapons/armor and spend attribute points to effortlessly vanquish mobs. When I went to turn in all 7 secondary quests, at once, I rapidly clicked through the dialogs without looking, and thus ended up with monk secondary without even desiring it- I was considering elementalist for armor of earth, and relying on shadow arts for healing. The one downside to that approach would've been the inability to heal NPCs, which proved handy at a few points ultimately.

It was Canthan new year, so I did take Kiku through the quests. The Knights who say Nian proved very difficult- the three of them kept creaming me before I could hardly touch them. There was no way I could do enough damage to hit and run, and the mesmer possessed a snare anyway. I could negate the ranger and mesmer wands by hiding behind a hill, but the warrior's axe + mesmer degen still killed me. It took 20 tries or so to come up with an extremely defensive build, with healing breeze, way of perfection, and shadow refuge, lowering my dagger damage and relying primarily on bleeding from Jagged Strike. The battle is a long and hard one with so little damage and death on your door at any moment, and death isn't an option when the bosses will reset by the time you return while you are saddled with DP. Turns out tackling this early in the day, instead of late after being tired and flustered, made it much easier to manage the rhythm and finally defeat the warrior while "tanking" all that mesmer degen.

Another wall was hit hard transitioning beyond Seitung Harbor to Jaya Bluffs- I was taking a ton of damage with 25 AL, and had no idea where to find the steel ingot I needed to craft better daggers. The sensail tengu travel in huge packs of 6+, who made a quick mess of me regardless of approach. One time I lured a group up to the 4 NPCs who help you on the primary quest, and they completely massacred them! The only way I could defeat these foes was by pulling Yeti into their range, letting the two duke it out, and picking off the survivors- all why dodging the crippling daggers from the assassin tengu, as a cripple meant death was sure to follow. Even then, only Zho ended up surviving of my four henchmen, thanks to the afflicted killing me a few times.

Next I found myself stuck on a (in this situation) very difficult quest- The Rite of valor, where you needed to pull a hapless leeroy NPC to his yeti target, without killing either him or the boss he's supposed to kill. The first issue was a large group of Sensali right outside of the cliff you meet him on- I couldn't even reach him without luring enough yeti at once to wipe both sides out, which lead to several restarts when this wasn't set up correctly. Then I proceeded to slowly pull my comrade through yeti one or two at a time, trying the back path across bridges first. Sometimes that bridge was blocked by a Sensali spawn I couldn't do anything about, the other times I managed to get across, Gull would spout something before lerooying into a pack of 4 yeti, including boss: even when I would try to keep him alive between drawing fire, healing breeze, and blinding powder, he would avoid the one monk in the group, meaning the enemy wasn't dying and he eventually would.

Clearly going the direct route wasn't working, so I started thinking of sneaky approaches. I finally got the bright idea, noticing that when you approach the target pack, Gull will stop. When you talk to him, he'll leroy in, but if you don't speak with him, he will just quit following you and hang there. I had trouble seperating the boss from his minions and weren't sure if they were the same group, so first tried pulling them into some sensali, but those guys made short work of the boss, failing the quest. In another try, I succesfully seperated the boss, pulled him over to the still Gull, and healed him while he killed the boss: but that STILL failed the quest, because the requirements are technically to kill the bosses' three minions without harming the boss. On the final try, I left Gull standing in his place, seperated and killed the three minions, and

Out of a ridiculous number of tries on that quest, I did manage to "farm" a lot of armor from the yeti, which salvaged into the components I needed to upgrade to 55 armor- and what a world of difference that made! Somehow I also managed to expert salvage a steel ingot off a low-level wand, which let me upgrade daggers as well. Those tools are what I needed just to barely survive the afflicted and Naga in Haiju lagoon. Rangers annoyed with their throw dirt, necros were surprisingly deadly with bitter chill spam, and warriors blew up in frenzy very fast. And then there's the dreaded putrid explosions- too many times I cleared a mob, only to fall to the last one's death burst. The strategy I settled on for beating these guys was to charge in and kill the dangerous caster of the group, before more leasiurely handling the leftovers.

As for the naga, lightning touch was not that long ago updated to apply blind if the target was water hexed- and those naga stormcallers happen to carry tenai's prison. Where is greater conflagration when you need it? The combo of two of those guys + one ritualist was typically deadly. The best way to tackle it was to somehow get the ritualst far enough away from the stormcallers, that the stormcallers would not charge to use their touch spell when I went for the stormcaller. Death's charge was also very handy for negating the snare and killing something fast before I ended up dead.

So after alot of naga dying and me dying more, I moved on from that quest to the "main" one that would take me into zen daijun. This starts out with defending a small village (and the oh-so-great NPCs) against an afflicted assault. While I tanked 10 or so archers firing into a wall, and managed to still kill melee afflicted at the same time, the assassin boss proved too much: he took down two shing jae students before turning his attention to me and making mince meat. So a rez later and everyone in the town is dead, but I could then leisurely pull the remaining enemies and clear them out at my own pace- most of those left alive was a huge group of archers, which could be isolated by pulling them across the side of a mountain range. Alone the assassin boss wasn't much of a threat.

While I got credit for the quest, I couldn't get the reward and proceed on without respawning the zone. After doing this, I turned in my reward, picked up the next quest, and had NPCs following me around everywhere- I was still level 17, and this extra firepower seemed to useful NOT to abuse- so I delayed entering Zen Daijun, and pulled around this motely crew to help me XP up and complete some more quests. They made short work of that quest to save the miller, and were instrumental in defeating the difficult high-level pack around the pirate boss by Jatoro - albeit this took many tries - I had to pull the group, jump in and kamikaze with strength of honor on the pirate priest, because if he didn't die, none of the damage I could gradually do to the group would stick. I traded my life for his, Vhang, and Panaku's, but the trade was well worth it- the remaining pirates could be taken out with a careful hit-and-run approach.

One of the few mobs actually still giving me experience around here were the Dragon Lilies who are incredibly annoying for an assassin- you have to patiently wait out each diversion while your health bar whittles away and theirs barely budges, before you can get off a few skills before the next diversion comes in.

Anyway after completing the quests here, I was level 18 and close to 19- I wasn't about to release my "hired help" until I hit 20, which I figured I would need for the sheer difficulty of that infamous mission. There were a few quests in Tsumei village along the lines of eradicating the crimson whatevers, which were all quite easy at my level. Massacring hordes of bandits never gets old! :D Those together with turning in a few more quest rewards finally pushed me to 20, which meant it was time for Zen Daijun.

My primary concern before entering the mission was "how do I keep that idiot Togo alive?", as this was the primary cause of failing the mission any other time I've done it, and I could offer him very little protection. It turns out you can leave him in the dust by quickly dashing off to the side here- he will dutifully wait for you to meet him in front of the miasma cloud, even if you're long past it and going anywhere else in the mission.



It turns out though, that the majority of the mission is very manageable without getting togo killed at all- and the extra firepowering/healing he provides speeds things up. You simply have to be careful about pulling groups of three and four out of the mass of patrols everywhere. The first 10 to 15 tries involved a ton of frustrating deaths, but after that you learn all the patrol patterns down pat, and know where and when to take on enemies. I had a habit of rezzing Zunrae after every battle for the extra few hits the punching bag would take from the rest of the team, but in the long run he wasn't even worth the time to rez and at no point actually needed.

There's a particularly nasty spot just across the first bridge - on the other side are two afflicted rangers. When you get in their aggro range, they have a scripted behavior to run off in opposite directions, yell and grab help from other mobs, and then convene in front of the bridge in one large, completely unmanageable mob of 7+. I had to clear out the afflicted leading to a side path on the bridge, kill the warrior on the side path that the one ranger would recruit, then wake up the rangers, and kill the one ranger that ran to recruit the warrior who wasn't there anymore. Then finally, take on the necromancers, who were still a serious threat. It was important to lure them far enough that I could reach them outside the miasma, because it negated too much of my healing breeze, which again meant death.

The first boss at the enterance to the valley did manage to kill me and/or togo a few times- he packs a punch. You can however seperate a number of his buddies from him, which makes the whole thing manageable. Beyond that it's just some careful pulls, clearing out everything in your path for safety's sake. (As opposed to just trying to run past as I'd usually done!) Although I knew it to be slower, I did check out the cave path for once to gauge if it was safer: but there's a spot where some more ranger-scouts will go off, and grab wave after wave of afflicted convening on one spot, so I decided discretion was the better part of valor, and took the usual northern outdoor path.

While that outdoor path requires a specific path to avoid aggroing more than one group at a time, it becomes routine and fast once you get used to it. And I got real used to it, as I kept having to do it over and over, only to fail at the very end of the mission. The first try I somehow managed to kill Yijo and Xeng Jo together, at the cost of Zhang's life. The final mob is 6-7 afflicted plus a monk, far too much for me to reasonably take on, and they are all thoroughly joined together, as I found out the hard way. While I continued to fret how to beat this group, it didn't matter because I couldn't get back to them- Yijo kept killing me or togo. He has a wicked spirit burn, and the intelligent NPCs always stand in his spirit rifts. If I had a ranger secondary, I could distracting shot the skill, but I was stuck with monk secondary. Disrupting dagger is not avaliable until the mainland, and the 1s KDs are too slow to interrupt the faster boss casts.

After countless failed attempts, I decided to look up the guildwiki entry: which had ample tips from hard mode, from I guess a time when people hadn't figured out how to abuse necros, and hard mode was actually hard. The crucial point was that, even if engaged in combat, your trusty NPCs will still follow you if you've run far enough away. That made hit-and-run tactics possible despite having an NPC ball and chain around my feet- if only Rurik was so capable! So I put dash on my bar to get the NPCs moving faster, and off I went.

It turns out Xeng and Yijo are actually seperate groups, meaning you could split them by plink-and-run. Between several runs back-and-forth, taking his spirit out fast to disable the burning from Spirit Burn, and dashing around to get Togo out of the spirit rifts, Yijo did go down: and Xeng Jo was not much of a challenge by himself.

Still, the last mob of 7 + a monk boss remained.



This long lineup was achieved by an absurd number of times back and forth, plinking enemies, bringing them into NPC range, then dashing far enough to pull the NPCs. The mob pulls pretty far, all the way to the other side of the bridge, but no further. If you do this enough times, eventually you get one caster chasing after you while the rest of the group is running back, leaving that one alone and defenseless. All this time I was anticipating a horrible Ray of Judgement from the monk boss on top of Togo's head, fortunately they don't have elites at this low of a level...

Eventually the Monk was all alone, and he didn't have the damage left to do anything about it. His retribution damage did go a long way towards negating my healing though; dagger assassins hit for small amounts frequently, the worse possible combo for triggering retribution at maximum damage. Still, alone down he went, and Shing Jae would soon be left behind.





Good time no?

Thus ends Kiku's "official" solo carreer, and certainly her Purist restrictions. With shadow form made unviable on mesmers again, I'll still probably try some solo farming on this gal for fun, like the infamous solo through all of tombs. Although clearing all of factions on just assassin skills (aka Seven Assassins) still appeals to me- I might try with some hero setups if I can't gather the humans.

[Seijin]

you're a sick puppy. I don't think I'd even try to do this.

[Zed-F]

Woo! Good job. :D