So, are you excited about Drop 5, and ready to try out the new Adventure, Bay of Betrayal?

You’ve come to the right place! I spent a bunch of time on the PTR focusing on just the Bay of Betrayal with some amazing guild members, and wanted to share my findings/strategies to make it easier for those trying the Adventure for the first time.

Before an information dump, however, it is very useful to note that you will need to be in a group you are comfortable communicating with. This is a very quick Adventure, and you can fail in as little as fifteen to twenty minutes if people aren’t communicating.

Also, don’t get discouraged if things don’t go right the first few times. Even in full raid-gear on the PTR playing classes/specs/roles we main on Live, it took us at least ten hours to get to the point we were in the video below. It is for sure a challenging place, but it feels highly rewarding to get through each challenge.

A disclaimer: We were so involved in things that we didn’t pay attention to spell names. It is that hectic-feeling of an Adventure, especially when you don’t have it on “farm”. I try my best to describe abilities and items. I will gladly edit this with correct spell names if people happen to have them.

First “Hallway”
Kill the mob attacking Herald Anku’mar (hur hur Carbine!) to start up the event, and talk to him to begin after his little spiel.

Keep your DPS (and if you’re feeling confident, your tank and healer) fully charged using the battery rods the entire time (your charge will diminish over time if you do not use it). You want to avoid as many mobs as you can to beat the two other “groups” to the next room. If you do happen to run into mobs, you want charged people (in turns) to activate the various items in the area. Jump spells are also useful to keep moving quickly after killing mobs.

Bombs – These look like a relic node. They will one-shot anybody, including a tank (unless they have a defensive cooldown running). They’re the most effective way to kill mobs.
Tether – There are rods that emit a tether. Most of the time the tether will aggro mobs once it is activated so you should be able to run away from them and leave them there.
Sentry – A folded-up robot that will activate and patrol, aggroing mobs to the best of its ability and smashing them. The second most effective way to kill mobs, as it will help you smash mobs if you have aggro.
Opportunity – There are other rods that emit a circle that provides an elongated Moment of Opportunity (MOO). If you are not fully charged, and you stand in the circle, you will not be able to attack. The best option is to have the tank drag the mobs into the circle, and then stand on the edge. Melee DPS will have to also stand on the edge unless charged.

First “Room” – The Augmented
This is an AoE heavy room. While you can use the Charge to mind-control the adds in the room, we found that just straight burning them down yielded better, and faster, results. This might change depending upon group makeup, gear level, communication, etc.

Mini Boss: Team Alpha
At this point, you have the opportunity to attack one of the two teams if you were fast enough in the first room. Avoid mobs getting to the team, and burn down the healer. We found that one of the teams had an Aurin Esper named Shan Barkheart, and encountered that team as the first group to kill both times we had this opportunity. We don’t know if this is the case every time or not. These are AI mobs, so try to focus down what is doing the most damage/healing like you would in War of the Wilds, or even PvP. The burn order depends on your group makeup, but we found that burning the healer down first made things ultimately easier.

Second “Hallway”
After burning down the team, you encounter more mobs while heading to your next objective. The birds put a debuff on that slows you, so make the most of all the bombs in the vicinity and destroy stuff and run.

Second “Room” – Varmintron and Gopherzoid
There is a battery in the center of the room. Designate two people to be the battery drainer/mind controller–one per boss. We obviously found that marking them and designating symbols was easier for communication purposes.

The object of this boss is to burn down both of them simultaneously, and then mind-control them simultaneously to have them dig a hole to the next area. It sounds simple, but the coordination took a while to establish, especially since the battery regenerates so slowly. This is why we designated two folks as the drainers. The bosses themselves are fairly tank-and-spank.

The battery will fill up three quadrants of the room, and you need to get into the fourth quadrant to stay safe. Once the battery has been drained, this will stop, but it is suggested to wait to drain the battery until the bosses are very low on health so the Charge isn’t wasted (remember, it goes down if it’s not being used).

Varminton casts The Canimid Express every so often where he burrows underground, comes back up, and then shoots a line of dirt and rocks out in front of him. Fairly easy to dodge. He will also cast Eldan Excavationand the group will get a warning that says, “Varmintron is tearing apart the terrain!”. These are huge circles that appear, and are a little more difficult to get out of, but didn’t seem to do too much damage so long as you got out in a reasonable amount of time.

Gopherzoid casts Whirlwind and you will get a warning that says “Gopherzoid is creating a whirlwind!”. He will focus on one member and slowly walk towards them. Easy to run out of the group so long as the person being chased keeps to the edges of the open quadrant. Gopherzoid also seemed to send out lines every-so-often, but it didn’t feel as frequent as Varmintron.

DPS them down until you get the group warning that they’re able to be controlled, and control them simultaneously to dig a hole to the next “hallway”.

Mini Boss: Team Beta
As before, you will have another opportunity to run upstairs and kill the second team if you completed the boss fast enough. Killing teams gets you more time to complete the Adventure, however, it makes the final boss stronger. This is an AI team, like before, so focus down as you see fit. We had a difficult time discerning who the healer was, so we ended up choosing to burn down Lia Zalkadec. From there, things seemed much easier to burn, so we assume she is the healer.

Third “Hallway”
This hallway is completely different than the first two. It requires a lot of communication with your team. Everyone should Charge up and have a jump spell just in case. One person will need to control the first thumper. A second person will need to control the second thumper, and a third person will need to re-control the first thumper just before the first person’s Charge dies. Having a fourth person control the second thumper before the second person’s Charge dies is also useful.

Congratulations, you’ve passed the first part of the hallway. Rinse and repeat all the way through the thumpers! As you can see in the video, we had a more difficult time on the second set of thumpers, but a few tank cooldowns and jump got us past them instead of having to do both sets again.

After the thumpers, rinse and repeat as you had before in the first two hallways–use the bombs and rods to your advantage. Especially since the Shamans do some wicked crazy telegraphs. You can take the third hallway slower than the others assuming you have beaten the other two teams, as it is no longer a race against time.

Third “Room” – The Elder Vault
This is more communication-heavy. We had a difficult time with this because of how short the timer is for selecting items. There are tether balls at the top of the room that you will use to jump to get the first panel. However, you will need to have someone control the middle pillar so one person can use the tether and turn off the Security Control Panel. From here, we had a bit of difficulty figuring out how to get through the red, and resorted to using a jump spell, cooldowns, heals, and a Scientist summon. Of course, we figured out it was much the same as the thumper hallway once we had gotten across. Go up the hallway and turn off the last panels.

Fourth “Room” – The Trial of Endurance
This is essentially a gauntlet. You want to burn down the mobs ASAP, because more come out constantly, and they can get a bit overwhelming with all the red on the floor. We didn’t try mind-controlling the robots, but think it is possible because of the batteries in the middle of the floor. However, you also need to drain the batteries to destroy the panel with the Charge.

Fifth “Room” – Security Hub Sigma
This is the final boss, Calidor Antevian. He’s a tad difficult at first, but we soon realized a pattern in his spells. There are four batteries around the outside of the room, and you will want to assign four people to them to drain for a specific phase of Calidor when he drains them to heal himself. You’ll also need six interrupts for this fight for a specific spell.

Variance Protocol – This centers upon one person. They will need to run out of it and other people will need to avoid the tendrils. Don’t waste your interrupts on this.
Point of Division – This needs to be interrupted with those six IA spells. This gives you a nice MOO to burn him down. If it’s not interrupted it will send very large lines out from him constantly until the spell has finished its channel.
Fractured Symmetry – We called this “Medic!” whenever he cast it. Because it looks like a medic spell. This was the most difficult part of the pattern to figure out. If you watch the video, you see it goes in a “waltz” pattern, almost. Run towards the side ramps for three beats, then back in for three beats. It’s a little difficult to describe, but once you see it (and practice it) it makes a bit more sense. If you get hit by this, it disarms you and does a fair bit of damage.
Siphoning Power – This is when Calidor drains the batteries. Send your designated folks out to drain them and then continue whacking on him. I suggest having the tank and healer as some of the drainers, and keep a DPS on him to help burn through the shield he gets while he casts this to make things easier afterwards.

August 2019 Note: This post is (15/31) of the Blaugust 2019 event! You can find out more about Blaugust over at Belghast’s blog. I (Chestnut) created a Twitter list of all participants. UltrViolet created an OPML file of all the bloggers to import into your feed reader.

First, a quick list of some benefits for linking the two.

• Hours played from playing on Steam show up, providing an indication of how popular the game is
• You get Steam Trading Cards, Badges, and your Achievements link—EPEEN!
• Easier upload of screenshots to the Steam servers, also showing off the creativity of the community and enticing more people to play
• On the Community page, there’s a nifty little counter saying how many people are in-game at the time—a great way to show that yes, people still play this, and yes, there is a population for people to come hang out with

The game boots up. The first time you play you need to accept the User Agreement. It’s always a good idea to read through these. You can choose your language from the drop-down box at the top. When finished, click I Accept.

Select the Language and Game Region for your installation. Then click Install.

The game begins installing. This is the part where you link your current account with Steam. Click the box at the top that says Log in with your NCSoft account to link with the currently active Steam account.

A new window appears. Enter your login information, and select whether you want the launcher to remember your email. Click Submit when finished.

Your game is now ready to play! Congratulations, Steam will now spam you with achievements!

Algoroc Eats

Celestion Comestibles

One of my goals for this weekend was to make matrixes for the class/race combinations since there have been very few floating around the community. The only one that I have seen, which is somewhat outdated if I recall, was one in a gaming magazine from last year. Since I haven’t seen any others pop up around the community, I put some together as a guide for those interested in what they could play.

If you plan on sharing these, please link back to the blog. I did put a lot of effort into putting these together for people to use.

Hope they help some people out! (Click to enlarge.)