Hisui's TW journal - First Strike

Saturday at 11pm EST, The Empire had the honor of fighting the first TW in Heavens Tear's Forest of Haze, with Genesis following a short three 3 minutes after in Southern Stronghold. The Empire originally came to a consensus that the war would start at 11pm PST, keeping in consistency with the TW bidding schedule. So when the sudden announcement came that war has already started the guild went into instant chaos. Many regulars were offline and resting for the war that they thought would happen three hour later. After a few "I told you!" and "OMG!" were thrown around the chat, the guild finally scrapped up as many people as we could. Every able player teleported into the instance from their nearest town and soon, around 15 of us were in.

With no time and man power to stick with the original strategy everyone got into random parties and started smacking away. But a small problem lies...

Most of us did not know the level of the mobs we were going to go up against.

[ certainly not in our job descriptions ]

We started to fall like flies until everyone finally got some order in the group around five minutes into the game. Because of the shortage in fire power and lack of clerics, our splits were not effective and were forced as a single group.

[ Together we all pushed down the middle path. ]

One by one the team was reinforced by newly logged in members who were clueless to the situation. They were summoned into the instance ASAP and supported the team right from the get go. At a point, we were killing monsters at a faster rate than what the time limit. However, it was not enough to make up the shortcomings we had in the beginning. We decided to push all the way into the enemy base and omit the two other paths.

[ The fortress wall is within sight! ]

But what was in that gate was quite demoralizing, as we were faced with an army of high level bosses and the one that especially stood out ..

[ ... was ugly to say to least ]

To pull the boss out by itself or take out the few surrounding big guys first? FB tells us you can't go wrong with the latter.

[ The situation is about to spark in here! ]

And finally, with a mission impossible to win the war, we decided to mess with the boss. when we got close to the vicinity, all we saw were the dead bodies of our teammates and soon ourselves. What?! RUN BACK!

Every squad fell into disarray as half of its members wiped. The remaining forces withdrew to our starting spawn area and there... we partied with the boss.

The boss has two primary attacks. I came up with easy to remember names for both.
1. Hulk smash with big tree thing on top of your head
2. Crazy ranged 360 degrees AOE burns your face

Alas, our zerging tactics weren't working due to the two mentioned devastating attacks. Many members decided to leave the instance and some of us decided to just go out and take some more screenshots. So for your viewing pleasure:

[ A house in the middle of the chaos ]

[ A nice pond washing off the dirt ]

[ The untouched "A" path ]

[ A bugged mob that never dies (so we couldn't have finished anyway) stands alone in middle path ]

[ And the conclusion... ]

- Hisui