Halloween Event Tips

The trail of tears

How To Mad King

Halloween draws near and that means the last handful of days of the Halloween event are drawing near. I know many players play Guild Wars 2 at a more casual pace, so I thought I’d offer some tips on how to finish up some of those Special Event achievements.

Only missing Bowie and Connelly

The Labyrinth is found inside the Mad King’s realm. In order to gain access to this realm, you must enter it through an unlocked Haunted Door. In order to unlock a Haunted Door, your server must have cleared the pre-event chain involving the pumpkin power sources. If you’re looking to get into the Labyrinth quickly then Queensdale may be your best bet. Due to the community’s population numbers, there are more human players than that of the other races and this means Queensdale normally has better activity levels than the other starting zones. Gendarren Fields may be a good bet as well due to its nearness to Lion’s Arch.

The Labyrinth has three things that will help you get your Halloween achievements: Pumpkins to carve, events to do, and Halloween creatures to hunt. On top of this, there’s plenty of Candy Corn to mine and then devour for the October monthly achievement. If you haven’t finished off your creature hunting achievement then running the Labyrinth for an hour might take care of that rather quickly. In addition, if you so happen to need to do the pre-events to open up the Haunted Doors, you’ll knock out more creatures and events. As for the events inside the Labyrinth, they tend to pop up every 5-10 miutes on a small scale and then a Champion boss event shows up ever 20-30 minutes.

In an hour’s time, you may be able to finish off the entire Halloween creature hunting achievement and bang out four or five events. As an added bonus, the Champion boss chests have a chance to drop exotic level items.

You can also enter the Labyrinth at any level and be up-leveled to 80. Some use this to do a couple of events on each of their characters, get two treasure chests for each character and call it a day.

The Scavenger Hunt

The Scavenger Hunt is a quest that runs during the Halloween event. You may have gotten an in-game mail from the Asuran NPC that hangs out by the Lion statue in Lion’s Arch. Though somewhat vague, the general gist of the scavenger hunt is to find ghosts and use the clues they give you to find the other ghosts. Doing this will assemble a collection of stories that you can hand in for a book. The first half of the hunt goes up to Gendarren Fields and may be done by more adventurous low levels. Since the entire community is doing this hunt at the same general time, you may find others to be quite helpful.

The keys to finding the ghosts are the hints provided, the use of the magic device your given and the mass of other players. Once you find out what the clues are hinting towards and you get yourself to that general area, following the rest of the playerbase can often lead you right to the ghost. In WoW-parlance, this quest is not phased. If one player finds the ghost and makes it appear then all nearby players can interact with the ghost.

As for deciphering the clues listed on the history collections, the best strategy is to look for key words in the clue that are close to the name of places on your map. For the first half of the hunt, the areas you will belooking in are limited to the city of Lion’s Arch and the first three human zones. This includes Queensdale, Kessex Hills and Gendarren Fields. Since it’s more fun to figure out the clues yourselves, I won’t give a step-by-step guide. I will give one correction for one of the clues. The clue referencing Provenric is not in the “hills”, but in the “fields”. This means that it may be near a hill, but the previous Hills clue is aimed to reference Kessex Hills, while this other “hills” clue is actually in Gendarren Fields.

The second half of the scavenger hunt requires venturing into higher level zones and will require a higher level character. While this is unfortunate for new players at low levels, the reward tied to the second half is of higher level than the first book you are rewarded with for the first half of the scavenger hunt.

Mad King Tower of #$#%@@!@

My only advice for the Mad King’s Tower is to look up youtubes, watch them, learn them, and be prepared for many attempts. Like the Labyrinth, the Tower jumping puzzle is accessed by entering a Haunted Door to gain access to the Mad King’s realm. If you know exactly what to do this event is quickest achievement to get, but by no means is the Mad King Tower easy.

The Mad King pays a visit to Lion’s Arch

The Monster Himself

By the time you’ve done the scavenger hunt and faced the hordes of trick-or-treat based monsters, you will have come to learn that old Oswald the Mad King is quite the heinous being. In Act 3, the Mad King himself appears by busting through the Lion statue in Lions Arch. This opens up an instanced dungeon where you fight the Mad King.

There are two things to know for this encounter. One: Yes, people can solo it, but I would recommend at least three players on your first try, but ideally five players if you want a successful run. If you have someone who knows what they’re doing, its easily doable with three players, and those that feel like challenging themselves can try soloing the instance.

The second and quite important note is that there is a treasure chest that appears at the very bottom of this dungeon once you beat the Mad King. Many players miss this chest due to its placement on the very bottom of the dungeon. At a certain point, the Mad King will teleport down to this lower level and then likely teleport back to the level above him. Getting to this bottom rock requires some daring jumps that will inflict fall damage, so don’t try these jumps unless you’re at full health.

There’s always people around the Lion Statue who are forming groups to do the Mad King and this makes completing this achievement rather painless. Just follow the others when its time to jump down to the lower levels and you’ll be okay. Never be afraid to say, “this is my first time.” The dungeon itself is a mix of fighting the boss, fighting adds, and moments of platforming. Also, for a treat, you can see the clock tower whirl around you at the bottom level of the dungeon.

It’s Candy Day

One of the achievements listed for the Halloween event is “attending the Mad King’s party.” This event is Act 4 of the Halloween event and will open up on Halloween. So log in o Halloween and check out what the shindig is about. I imagine it will be less combative and more nonsensical fun.