Guild Wars Solo Challenge - Thunderhead Keep

Channel:

Saradoc

Subscribers:

14,800

Published on March 10, 2021 4:44:17 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GX8RJkQMGU

Game:

Guild Wars (2005)

Duration: 16:27

1,257 views

41

10 (ten) years ago as a young lad I set out on a quest to finish as much as possible of the Guild Wars Prophecies campaign fully solo. I knew that it's impossible to actually finish the whole game, because of the mandatory Thunderhead Keep mission, in which you need to protect the dwarf king NPC from approaching enemies at the end. Playing solo entails having a very tanky build, carefully luring enemies and slowly grinding them down one by one. It is absolutely impossible to kill the approaching enemies at the end fast enough for them not to kill the king first. So I accepted that that is the hard limit for the challenge and tried to do as much else as possible. In the end I finished every mission up to Thunderhead Keep including every bonus besides Thirsty River, discovered all the outposts and captured all Warrior elite skills besides those exclusive to Ring of Fire region which I couldn't access. At this point I declared it over and I also quit Guild Wars altogether around that time.
Some day I just randomly looked up Guild Wars 1 stuff again and I saw that an "Ironman Challenge" is very popular today and some people even do it solo like I used to do. And to my shock I saw that they also beat the Thunderhead Keep mission somehow. Using enemies to clip through gates allows you to skip over the intended goals, kill the required bosses in the endgame without the king present and actually finish the mission solo. I reinstalled Guild Wars and after several failed attempts I managed to do it myself too. Everything I did this in this video I took from SomewhatProfessional on Twitch, who was the first to do this mission solo in Ironman Mode as far as I know.

Rules of the challenge:
- no interaction with other players besides chatting and buying/selling from the NPCs
- no item transfer through the Xunlai chest
- no consumables
- no traveling outside the Prophecies camapign (I actually broke this rule, but only got less than 100 exp out of it)
- no hard mode
- no preorder bonuses or anything like that

Now the standard "Ironman Challenge" has one more rule that I did not obey in my challenge: It bans buying previously unlocked skills from skill teachers. Only those that are already available at a skill teacher with a completely vanilla account are allowed to be bought. I think this rule makes a lot of sense, but to my defense those rules were made up 8 years after I started my challenge.

I'm going to try to continue the challenge and hopefully complete the game. I'll try without looking at the strats or builds of the people who did it before at first.

btw audio is just the OST because I'm lazy
(previous upload had an error)

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