I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 lately and I absolutely LOVE it. That’s actually an understatement. I may have a problem. Guild Wars 2 is SO awesome. It’s the first MMO RPG I’ve ever seriously tried outside a brief try at WoW, so I don’t have anything else to really compare it to. But this guy does! So if you’ve played other RPG’s before, or you’re wondering what Guild Wars 2 is all about, check out this Guild Wars 2 Angry Review for perspective. tl;dw: he loves it, which is RARE. Warning, there’s some amount of cursing in this review, sadly.

Anyway, Guild Wars 2 is AWESOME. It’s a single, very inexpensive, price up front and no monthly fees. I won’t get into how much I love the game or why right now, but “IMMENSELY” and “IN EVERY WAY” are good descriptors. We’ve been playing as a family too and that’s been a whole lot of fun, when school, work and busy-ness don’t intrude.

I found an awesome Guild to be a part of. We do dungeon speed runs, which get you lots of gold quickly, allow you to quickly level up characters, and are tons of fun when you coordinate as a team. One of the dungeons we speed-run is Ascalonian Catacombs (AC). AC path 3 has a part where you have to take out a sequence of 15 burrows that pop up and spawn gravelings. If you don’t kill the burrows quickly, you DIE. So what you want to do is memorize where each of the 15 burrows are going to spawn and then get to that spot before they spawn and take them out immediately (Ice Bow #4 from an Elementalist is our preferred way of doing this).

But it’s really stinking hard to memorize the pattern where the burrows are going to spawn. I’ve seen people describe this pattern in terms of standing in a particular spot in the dungeon, like this page does:

 

… but that’s super confusing to me. Maybe I’ll have to learn it that way eventually, but I wanted to try a different approach.

I found this top-down map (copyright Oranisagu), which shows the graveling burrow locations. And I thought that if I overlaid the map with a simple 3×3 grid, maybe I could memorize the grid location sequence.

So here’s my stab at it. All I did was take Oranisagu’s map and overlaid it with a grid:

My thinking is that I can memorize the spawn locations by grid ID. Like:

1. 2
2. 5
3. 4
4. 8
5. 7
6. 6
7. 2
8. 6
9. 5
10. 8
11. 9
12. 1
13. 3
14. 8
15. 3

So, the graveling burrow spawn sequence, by grid ID would be 2548-7626-5891-383.

I don’t know if that’s helpful for anyone, or if it’s even going to work for me. But I haven’t seen anyone else try this, so I figured it was worth a shot. We’ll see how it goes. It occurred to me that it might also work if I use a clock (1 – 12 o’clock, etc.) as a positioning system, but I think that would be even harder than this.

Any thoughts?