Small Party + Tempest Spine?

[PentegarnDarras]

We're a small 3-man team (P10-W10-C10).

At what level would you expect we could complete Tempest Spine?


TIA!

[Lateralus]

10 if you're used to working with each other as a group, which i assume you are.

[Impaqt]

I concur. Actualy, I would of said l8 or so on normal.. Tempest spine is long, but there arent a lot of real demanding fights except for the end battle. Just take it slow and pick your battles.

[Irongutz2000]

U could do it at lvl 10 on normal, U just need to use some tatics, an have someone know the quest. The only hard part will be fire an ice....if u can make it past that u should be home free, make sure the wiz has knock though

[Zenako]

Gonna also depend some on how you are geared up. I suspect that if you are a 3 man show who just runs stuff together and do not have other higher level characters to hand you down stuff, the challenge will be a lot greater than some of the other posters have inferred.

You need to be able to face HIGH AC warriors (ie hit them enough to matter), Giants, Elementals, Rusties, etc. And the final fight will be hard to handle as first timers I would say.

There are plenty of shrines throughout so the casters will not have to hold back much (and on normal you could reuse them with enough time passage as well.).

[PentegarnDarras]

Awesome feedback (and good news)!


Thanks All!

[Talon_Moonshadow]

I think Fire and Ice will give them some problems. Doable, but lots of mobs/respawns complete with knockdown and death spells.

[LOUDRampart]

I think Fire and Ice will give them some problems. Doable, but lots of mobs/respawns complete with knockdown and death spells.

My son and I two manned fire and ice way back when. He was on his ranger/rogue and me on my pali (back when I played a pali). What I'm saying is that it is doable. Just use some smarts...

[WaltzInBlack]

There are at least three wipe guarantees for 3 10th level characters who have not been in there before the boss and frankly i cannot see how they would survive the end fight without multiwipe on the first time.

3 twinked lvl 10s who know ts inside and out yes but my advise for a first time 3 man would be to wait till lvl 12....

[Zenako]

Of course they could just try and see how far they get, plenty of chests along the way to earn some loot anyway. Was often a problem in days of old making sure to have enough empty slots to hold all the loot.... (before the days of gem bags, quivers, etc)

[DoctorWhofan]

Awesome feedback (and good news)!


Thanks All!

THe first shrine is behind Fire and Ice, the toughest fight in the Quest. Remember that!

[DoctorWhofan]

There are at least three wipe guarantees for 3 10th level characters who have not been in there before the boss and frankly i cannot see how they would survive the end fight without multiwipe on the first time.

3 twinked lvl 10s who know ts inside and out yes but my advise for a first time 3 man would be to wait till lvl 12....

I agree. i would get a group together.

[Junts]

THe first shrine is behind Fire and Ice, the toughest fight in the Quest. Remember that!

the ability of people to screw up fire and ice amazes me every time i run a lowbie.

last time i ran it on elite with my bard, after the group had messed it up twice, i gathered all the aggro from both rooms, fascinated it all, and then vorpalled both demons and left the rest to sit

course, then some idiot caster firewalled them all and everyone else died.

but i mean, seriously

[Lateralus]

There are at least three wipe guarantees for 3 10th level characters who have not been in there before the boss and frankly i cannot see how they would survive the end fight without multiwipe on the first time.

3 twinked lvl 10s who know ts inside and out yes but my advise for a first time 3 man would be to wait till lvl 12....

Never claimed they'd burn through it and succeed on the first try, in fact it's highly doubtful if they know nothing about the quest. It may take several time consuming trial and error sessions, but there's only one way to learn. I took the question more as a "when should we try it" than a "when can we easily do it". If they try now and decide they're in over their heads they can always wait a lvl or two and come back, knowing what to expect, but it's never too early to try if you enjoy challenging yourself. As far as i know they're not playing permadeath.

[PentegarnDarras]

Thanks again everyone for the feedback.
Fire prots, summoned earth elementals, and cone of cold made the first section pretty reasonable. We still had to kite a bit but nothing we weren't used to.
As expected we made it as far as fire and ice and then got confused.
We entered the fire area and after killing a bazillion fire giants and the fire reaver, we could not find our way back out (perhaps we missed a step) and eventually got wiped after both I and the Cleric ran out of sp.

What are we supposed to do in there?

[Junts]

theres a fire reaver on the fire side and an ice flenser on the ice side - you have to kill both within a certain amount of time of each other (its relatively generous; you have a couple minutes, unlike future kill-simultaneous situations where you get roughly 10-15 seconds).

the other mobs are trash and respawn constantly, they cannot all be killed.

its probably designed for groups of 6 to go each way, but most groups do one of two things:

send their two best tanks, one to each, to just dps/vorpal them quickly (if they feel totally unthreatened)
send one person to each to get aggro and kite them to the middle, where the group can kill both demons at a relatively similar time and everyone is in range to be healed.

it is the hardest part of the quest, and you guys will probably need to do something like the second option to make it work, as theres only three of you, the timing in running from one to the other would be quite tight (my advice; go ice first, get him down about halfway, drop a haste, have your caster drop a firewall on him and the other two sprint to fire, have the caster finish ice in the firewall/with scorching ray, then sprint to catch up with you and use a coc to finish off fire, then run back to the entry portal and kill whatever's chasing you as it straggles up (the respawns are at their original points, so anywhere from the junction back to the portal it wont know you are there after it respawns), as you can jump through the portal to heal yourselves if you are in a bad spot

remember death ward, becaues the giant shamen have destruction and slay living, instakill spells.

theres a shrine right after (and then another 5 shrines in the quest) so once you have done that, barring a very split up party in various parts of hte mountain, you should not have problems reaching the end fight (or unless one of the beholders fingers your caster and neg levels everyone else so much they cant kill him or recover the soulstone)

[Talon_Moonshadow]

the ability of people to screw up fire and ice amazes me every time i run a lowbie.

last time i ran it on elite with my bard, after the group had messed it up twice, i gathered all the aggro from both rooms, fascinated it all, and then vorpalled both demons and left the rest to sit

course, then some idiot caster firewalled them all and everyone else died.

but i mean, seriously

Mostly this comes down to the age old problem......people cannot NOT kill something!

[PentegarnDarras]

SO, let me make sure I have this straight.
The Fire Reaver and Ice Flenser that attack you as soon as you kill the first Iron Golem and open the portal are NOT the two previously mentioned that you must kill within x seconds of each other.

PS: Whats the point of the hole in the floor after the golem that just leads to a door back outside?
Is there a shortcut jump out there or anything?


Thanks Again

[Zenako]

Tempest Spine is perhaps the single most affected quest by the lack of a good mapping system. There are lots of twists and turns and tunnels that you must navigate to get to the end. While it might not be your first choice, what might be reasonable is to give it a few cracks, to see how well you can do, and then either join a LFM for it or start one with the caveat about being new to it. Even vets who have run it a bunch of times can get lost.

I know I spent one evening for an extra hour or so after completing it and having cleared out the quest, going back and making my own map of the connectivity of the quest. Helped a lot for my future runs.

Likely to see some posts for the quests at times, since it is still one of the sweet experience quests in the game.

[PentegarnDarras]

We made it all the way to the end only to discover that we needed three runes (we had found one by accident) in order to complete the puzzle and remove his invulnerability.

Oh well, maybe next time.