Blame this on Seijin for asking about a "vanquishing" variant. ![[Image: tongue.gif]](http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/images/smilies/tongue.gif)
Concept: to vanquish select explorable areas of hard mode with a team of level 20 humans and/or heroes (not hench), using only what you are given. For you noobs, "vanquish" means to totally wipe an area, and hard mode will inform you of it when you've succeeded. One can set goals for vanquishing a chain of a few areas without any party wipes, for example The Breach -> Diessa Lowlands -> Ascalon Foothills -> Traveler's Vale. This can be done in select chunks by starting from outposts, such as Piken Square -> The Breach, Nolani -> Lowlands and Foothills, Yaks -> Vale. Competition and reports are also possible by tallying kills versus time spent.
The skills you may use beginning your Ironman run will be randomly chosen (let's say 80 for 4-man) just like a Sealed Deck PvP game. This is accomplished by generator software such as this. The team can only use skills from this limited pool, and may only use each skill recieved once. (If you recieve duplicates of a skill in your pool, you may use that skill once per duplicate) Res Sigs (not sunspear) are also permitted. In addition to this, we might allow any one non-elite/sunspear/lightbringiner skill to be used per player. We might also rig the random generation to produce at least X skills per 4 professions of the team's choosing. Heroes are recommended or maybe at least 1 should be required to further ease unlock difficulties. Once one area is vanquished and the team returns to an outpost to prepare for the next area, an additional deck (say 20 skills) is added to your existing pool and you may incorporate these skills into your builds, but you must stick with the same original primaries that you started the run with.
An Ironman run is begun under some equipment restrictions. Ideally players will "clean out" their inventory from all but the permitted starting gear. Players may bring one req 5 item purchased from Teipao or Saara. No upgrades may be applied to these nor may they be customized, and you can't bring any of your other items. Your armor must be a set of maxed "vanilla" armor, with no insignia. This can be attained from collecters, the half-price vanilla armors in droks/kaineng, or simply nightfall armor with no insignia. You may fill this armor with runes of vitae and no other runes. (This should make doing many ironman runs cheaper so you don't have to junk your armor...) You may purchase and bring along any number/quality of ID and Salvage Kits (as well as lockpicks? would make better gameply but are expensive), but you may not bring anything else, especially various one-use items. (In the event of a holiday, you can't use special holdiay items that drop during your Ironman run either)
As you progress through vanquishing areas, you are permitted to use anything the team finds, IDing and Salvaging as appropriate. Any upgrades, runes, or other items found during your run are fair game. These items will carry over into further areas on your ironman run. Insignias should perhaps be exempted because trashing your armor to remove insignias for subsequent runs may get too expensive. You may also use collectors in an area as it is being vanquished, if you can get enough drops. Between areas, only ID/Salvage/Lockpicks may be purched in town, no other purchases or collectors. For standardization, you may *not* take any quests in an area you are vanquishing, and must abandon any relevant quests before entering.
Finally, we may wish to limit rezes. Naturally use of res sigs is allowed, but for the true Ironman experience, we may wish to disqualify players that are ressed by a shrine. In this case the ressed player must either remain at the shrine or suicide down to 60 DP. If following this rule, hard res skills should probably be outlawed (and a skillset will be re-drawn if it contains one) The no-res at 60 DP feature of hard mode might be hard enough however. In any event, if the entire party is wiped and unable to res, the Ironman run has ended, and you will need to start a new one with new skills/items.
Those familiar with Diablo 1 will recognize the attempt to re-create the challenging, go-with-what-you-got, one-clear-through intensity of Ironman. The random skills are there to provide some of that fresh randomized sense that GW is lacking compared to D1, as well as encouraging underused skills (much like inferno and heal other in IM). Keeping this randomness from being too unfair or too dificult to employ due to PvE skill acquisition needs to be kept in mind (though D1 ironman could be quite unfair with the spell books/staves.) Aside from a discussion on the rules, I'd like to hear ideas for good area chains for vanquishing, as well as the number of players/heroes that should be used from them. These chains should be kept fairly small because this is intended to be a "fail much and succeed occasionally" variant. We might add that they should start from locations easily run to from port cities, to maximize the professions players can bring.
Concept: to vanquish select explorable areas of hard mode with a team of level 20 humans and/or heroes (not hench), using only what you are given. For you noobs, "vanquish" means to totally wipe an area, and hard mode will inform you of it when you've succeeded. One can set goals for vanquishing a chain of a few areas without any party wipes, for example The Breach -> Diessa Lowlands -> Ascalon Foothills -> Traveler's Vale. This can be done in select chunks by starting from outposts, such as Piken Square -> The Breach, Nolani -> Lowlands and Foothills, Yaks -> Vale. Competition and reports are also possible by tallying kills versus time spent.
The skills you may use beginning your Ironman run will be randomly chosen (let's say 80 for 4-man) just like a Sealed Deck PvP game. This is accomplished by generator software such as this. The team can only use skills from this limited pool, and may only use each skill recieved once. (If you recieve duplicates of a skill in your pool, you may use that skill once per duplicate) Res Sigs (not sunspear) are also permitted. In addition to this, we might allow any one non-elite/sunspear/lightbringiner skill to be used per player. We might also rig the random generation to produce at least X skills per 4 professions of the team's choosing. Heroes are recommended or maybe at least 1 should be required to further ease unlock difficulties. Once one area is vanquished and the team returns to an outpost to prepare for the next area, an additional deck (say 20 skills) is added to your existing pool and you may incorporate these skills into your builds, but you must stick with the same original primaries that you started the run with.
An Ironman run is begun under some equipment restrictions. Ideally players will "clean out" their inventory from all but the permitted starting gear. Players may bring one req 5 item purchased from Teipao or Saara. No upgrades may be applied to these nor may they be customized, and you can't bring any of your other items. Your armor must be a set of maxed "vanilla" armor, with no insignia. This can be attained from collecters, the half-price vanilla armors in droks/kaineng, or simply nightfall armor with no insignia. You may fill this armor with runes of vitae and no other runes. (This should make doing many ironman runs cheaper so you don't have to junk your armor...) You may purchase and bring along any number/quality of ID and Salvage Kits (as well as lockpicks? would make better gameply but are expensive), but you may not bring anything else, especially various one-use items. (In the event of a holiday, you can't use special holdiay items that drop during your Ironman run either)
As you progress through vanquishing areas, you are permitted to use anything the team finds, IDing and Salvaging as appropriate. Any upgrades, runes, or other items found during your run are fair game. These items will carry over into further areas on your ironman run. Insignias should perhaps be exempted because trashing your armor to remove insignias for subsequent runs may get too expensive. You may also use collectors in an area as it is being vanquished, if you can get enough drops. Between areas, only ID/Salvage/Lockpicks may be purched in town, no other purchases or collectors. For standardization, you may *not* take any quests in an area you are vanquishing, and must abandon any relevant quests before entering.
Finally, we may wish to limit rezes. Naturally use of res sigs is allowed, but for the true Ironman experience, we may wish to disqualify players that are ressed by a shrine. In this case the ressed player must either remain at the shrine or suicide down to 60 DP. If following this rule, hard res skills should probably be outlawed (and a skillset will be re-drawn if it contains one) The no-res at 60 DP feature of hard mode might be hard enough however. In any event, if the entire party is wiped and unable to res, the Ironman run has ended, and you will need to start a new one with new skills/items.
Those familiar with Diablo 1 will recognize the attempt to re-create the challenging, go-with-what-you-got, one-clear-through intensity of Ironman. The random skills are there to provide some of that fresh randomized sense that GW is lacking compared to D1, as well as encouraging underused skills (much like inferno and heal other in IM). Keeping this randomness from being too unfair or too dificult to employ due to PvE skill acquisition needs to be kept in mind (though D1 ironman could be quite unfair with the spell books/staves.) Aside from a discussion on the rules, I'd like to hear ideas for good area chains for vanquishing, as well as the number of players/heroes that should be used from them. These chains should be kept fairly small because this is intended to be a "fail much and succeed occasionally" variant. We might add that they should start from locations easily run to from port cities, to maximize the professions players can bring.
The Sealed Deck thing was a moment of inspiritation, though some may find it too cumbersome to try out, I don't see much else you can do to make repeated runs random and fresh instead of doing the same thing over and over. And of course I personally like the opportunity to play sealed in PvE. For most people's sakes we'll probably have to settle on something less than full randomness for starting due to PvE unlocks typically being more limited. 20 skills per area was just an arbitrary number based on Anet Sealed Deck size, 12 or something else might be more appropriate, and it's a good point that they may have to be adjusted to match the areas being cleared. (Shaoshing Trail or Ascalon Foothills are fairly small) I'll be trialing a few solo runs with 3 heroes on shing jae isle (eventually) to see how some of these rules work. (Wish the heroes would learn how to kite again..)
![[Image: crazyeye.gif]](http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/images/smilies/crazyeye.gif)