On the dungeon scoreboard one line has been embarrassing for days: Gui Mu, about fifty deaths a run. On 29 October we went through it properly. This is what Gui Mu asks of a party, why our test parties kept failing it, and what else changed on the board that we have not written about yet.
As always: these are test parties, characters raised to the right level and geared for the job on the old shared realm before the fresh start.
What Gui Mu asks of you
Gui Mu is a defence. Your party stands at the God's Eye and protects the Widow's spirit while waves come in, about twenty monsters at a time, every couple of minutes. Each gate ends with a boss, and once a boss is engaged a fifteen-minute timer runs. Lose the spirit or run out the clock, and the run fails.
The waves are level 150. You do not beat them with your own skills. You beat them with auras: you earn Celebeans during the run, buy auras with them, five hundred beans an aura, and the God's Eye with its area hits does the heavy killing. Gui Mu is an economy as much as a fight.
Forty-five runs, zero good ones
On 29 October the test parties ran Gui Mu 45 times. The median run cost 48 deaths. Not one run stayed at three or fewer. Every member died about ten times.
The deaths looked like a combat problem. After dying, a member came back exactly where the wave was standing by then, and died again within five seconds, with 18 to 39 monsters within ten metres of the tank. Rallying back together did not help: five or six characters against thirty or forty level-150 monsters is not a fight.
But the real question was why the waves were still there. The answer: our parties bought no aura at all, or one, and late.
Why there were no beans
Two things, both invisible from inside a fight.
The big bean quests were closed to everyone. The best source of beans is a bonus quest you take for a Bean Sprout: 360, 520, 680 or 880 beans depending on the tier, up to four per party. In the game data we run, the first three tiers' bonus quests require level 150. Every member got "Insufficient Level", and the party went into the waves without its bean income. The owner agreed to open them; the change is already applied on our test realm, and the main realms get it with a later update, together with a small client fix, because the client checks the level too.
The valley was empty when our runner arrived. The valley monsters that drop beans, and the Garden's NPC, appear only five minutes after the waves start. Our bean runner went there two or three minutes in, found nothing, and came back. Since 28 October almost no run killed a single valley monster. Now the runner goes at the right time; the first run with the fix killed 8 of them, brought back 193 beans and found the Garden.
Earlier the same day two smaller things went too: in the higher tiers the party could stand for up to 48 minutes waiting for a boss it did not recognise as one, and the lure that is supposed to pull a waiting monster walked past them without pulling anything.
Where Gui Mu stands
Still not a single run at three deaths or fewer. What changed is that the parties can now earn the beans the instance is built around. Buying auras in time, and a better place to come back after a death, are next. That is days of work, not hours.
The rest of the board
Things that moved and were not in a diary yet:
| Dungeon | What happened |
|---|---|
| 51: Secret Frostcover Grounds | 20 of 23 deaths in one batch came from one boss's 15-metre area hit, and the Cleric was standing at 14 metres. Healers now keep out of a boss's reach. |
| 79 | First clear, at levels 80–84, with no deaths. |
| Cave of Sadistic Glee (80–95) | Both bosses killed in four runs, no deaths. |
| 99: Seat of Torment and Abaddon | The first door opens only when one particular guard dies; the parties now know which. A healer fell four hundred metres when a pull ignored a member on another level; fixed. The party now reaches the last boss and wipes to its adds. |
| Twilight Temple, acts II and III | You do not enter an act through a portal: you claim a quest standing in a box in the corridor. Earlier parties did the whole chain and then nobody walked into the box. On 29 October a party entered act III on the first try, all five, and started clearing with 12 kills and no deaths. |
| Lunar Glade (95+) | Entry, team quest and teleport work for all six. The first fights went badly, six deaths in 93 seconds, healer first: the members walked in with the health they had when they logged in. Now the leader tops everyone up before each pull. |
None of this is finished, and some of it will look worse before it looks better: a dungeon nobody could enter has no deaths on the board. The target stays the same everywhere: three deaths or fewer.