Cooperative Missions

There are a number of Cooperative Missions in post-Searing Ascalon, starting at the Great Northern Wall, which is adjacent to Ascalon City itself. Cooperative missions will require a group of four to eight players to complete, and will usually take anywhere from half an hour to an hour of time. This are objective-based missions, much like the ones ordinarily given to you by NPCs, but a bit more in-depth and detailed. The rewards are greater, as well, with each mission being worth 1,000 experience and a single skill point, which you can use at a skill vendor to purchase new abilities. In addition to the main quest, each cooperative mission will have a Bonus quest associated with it. Finishing the Bonus quest will net you another 1,000 experience, so it's well worth the time to track them down and finish them off.

The best thing about cooperative missions is that they'll often end by warping your party to a new town, and sometimes right to the next cooperative mission zone.

We're not going to be able to give you details on all of the cooperative missions - most of them are fairly straightforward hack-n-slashes anyway - but we are going to include mini-walkthroughs for the first four missions. Completing all of these will take you to Yak's Bend, the second major town in post-Searing Ascalon.

The Great Northern Wall

The Great Northern Wall is a fairly straightforward kill mission: all you have to do is cut your swath through a number of foes until you reach an outpost a bit north of the wall. Head left when you hit the tarpit and go up the ramps. You'll know you're there when you cut down a Charr boss enemy. When you reach the outpost, the mission automatically ends. Congratulations, you just managed to cause the breach of Ascalon's defensive wall! Way to go!

Bonus: A ghostly warrior is off on the northern end of the mission map. When you find him, he'll ask you to bring him four pieces of his armor that were lost long ago so that he can gain passage to the afterworld. These armor pieces are scattered around in Wreckage piles around the map, so be sure to hit them all and prod your teammates to pick up these items when they happen to be reserved for them. You can keep the armor pieces through multiple mission attempts, and apparently all you need are four pieces, not all four separate parts, so eventually you should be able to pull this one off, even if you have to grab all the pieces yourself across multiple missions. It's not that difficult to do in a single try, though, if you have a decent team.

Fort Ranik

You can use the trebuchets in this area to blast the entire Charr army to pieces.

Fort Ranik is another fairly straightforward mission, where your goal is to push your way through many, many Charr until you reach the armies that have broken through the Northern Wall and into Ascalon, then push them back across the wall or just destroy them outright. Most of this level is hack-and-slash, but when you reach the plain at the end of the mission, you'll have to reassemble one of the broken trebuchets with parts found from nearby wrecked catapults and use that to destroy the mass of enemies waiting for you. There's another trebuchet closer to the wall; if you have a hearty Monk or Warrior that doesn't mind dying for the cause, they can run up to the ramp leading up the wall, grab aggro on all the enemies, then lure them back to the fire near the bottom of the ramp. While the Charr are wailing on your sacrificial lamb, fling the trebuchet at the fire and you should take out the entire group. Since you're near the end of the mission anyway, you can just res your dead ally (they'll get killed by the explosion if they're anywhere near it), run up the ramp, kill any remaining enemies, then end the mission.

Bonus: We recall this as being fairly simple. There's an NPC trapped in a cage by two Charr Overseers; he's up a switchback ramp near the canyon that leads to the trebuchet field. You should spot him on your map while you're running around, so head up the ramp and free him for your bonus experience.