I beat the Aurora Glade mission in Guild Wars in Hard Mode last weekend to make it 16/25 towards the Guardian of Tyria title.
I found this mission quite frustrating when I first tried it two years ago but subsequent tries with other characters were straightforward successes. This, of course, was in Normal Mode. Hard Mode, as you might imagine, proved slightly harder.
The mission is divided into three distinct parts. For the first part of the mission, you battle some unbalanced mobs which don’t offer much of a challenge even in Hard Mode.
The second part of the mission, on the other hand, can be tricky. It involves a race between your party and a group of White Mantle to attune three different crystals.
If you lose, you fail the mission. If you win, you teleport to the third and final part of the mission which happens to be a cakewalk.
Run or kill
The two main approaches for second part of the mission are outrunning the Mantle or simply killing each Mantle runner.
In Hard Mode, the former is much easier to achieve than the latter as each runner is accompanied by a group that includes a healer and a nuker.
If your team focuses its firepower on the runner, the healer will be free to heal him. If you target the healer, the runner gets a free pass to attune a crystal. In the meantime, the White Mantle Savants will be causing havoc with their AOE spells.
It may be doable with a Hero/henchman team in Hard Mode but it would take a few tries, I suspect. I tried it myself with a Hero/henchman team but failed repeatedly. I even had trouble activating the bonus objective for the mission.
The bonus objective requires assassinating a White Mantle bigshot named the Demagogue and the bonus is only activated when player talk to an NPC named Less Longbow. Whenever I tried with my Heroes and henchmen there was a very strong likelihood that Less would be attacked by two White Mantle Knights near him and killed before I could rush to his assistance. On the other hand, whenever I tried the mission with other players, Less would either be left alone or would kill the White Mantle without player intervention.
PUG
I ended up joining a pickup group consisting of a Ranger, a Monk, a Warrior and two Heroes. We decided the Ranger would run the crystals while the rest of us used the backdoor to go directly to the Demagogue. This was a sound plan with one drawback.
What happened was the Warrior, Monk, the two Heroes and me went through the front door, aggro’d every red dot on the radar and promptly died. As we lay there face down in the dirt, we had a sneaking suspicion we had not done it right.
Upon discussing it, it dawned on us none of us had done the backdoor method before and more to the point, had only a vague idea of where the backdoor actually was. We eventually figured out where we went wrong and managed to bag the bonus easily on our next try. The actual battle against the Demagogue was comically short.
I had quite a lot fun with this mission thanks to the company. We were trading quips back and forth and even our failed attempt didn’t dampen our spirits all that much. The rest of the group continued on to the next Tyrian Hard Mode mission but I had to regretfully beg off because the hour was late.
