Frostmaw's Burrows, A First

For the first time, the crew defeated Frostmaw the Kinslayer in his burrows. Greg, Mart, Mike, and I teamed up to tear through the dungeon. Although we encountered more than a little resistance, we didn't wipe completely even once. Sorry to disappoint, Latham.

Although Mart's eyesight may never be the same.

Greg ran a very strong curses build using Spoil Victor as well as Pain Inverter. I used a pure damage build using Cleave along with Pain Inverter as well. Mart ran a very interesting assassin build using Way of the Assassin to continuously critical and Critical Defenses to continually block attacks. He said he could critical 75% of the time and thus block 75% of physical attacks. Mike went mostly pure damage as well and also ran Pain Inverter.

You catching on to the theme here?

Pain Inverter just wrecks the wurms and caster mobs throughout the dungeon. So many of them use area of effect spells and skills that Pain Inverter triggers multiple times for a single effect. It makes the one hex, judiciously applied, extremely effective.

As you can see in the video and screenshots, several times I used Pain Inverter to nearly solo a large level 24 mob simply because it hit our entire party as well as our four Norn allies simultaneously while under the effects of Pain Inverter. I can't believe Arenanet still has this skill as good as it is in the game. I guess because it's a PvE only skill balances it out and allows serious PvP players to ignore its uses.

Good for me.


The biggest danger came probably from the pop-up wurm mobs. These guys just come out of no where, and I know now that Arenanet just uses hidden treasures revealed by Light of Deldrimor to lure in suckers like me.

And Mandragors... The conditions were silly. Six out of ten conditions, not too bad. Never saw four bars of effects stretch on like that.

Unfortunately, the rewards for working through five levels of dungeon just weren't that good. Three thousand Norn faction and scattered Dwarven for killing on bounties pushed me up to new levels in each track. Two platinum in cash for the quest was nice, but the items were crap, and I managed to break two more lockpicks in a row -- including the one that I got from the chest. Boo. I didn't get a single yellow in the whole place.

Oh well, I guess the 19.5k from selling Destroyer cores will have to suffice.

But the dungeon was fun, even to just say we did it. Now maybe I can turn in an even-more nearly complete Master Dungeon Guide -- unless we man up and do Slaver's Exile.

But that's for another time.