Choose My Adventure: Desert delves, shield skills, and goblin bothering in Project Gorgon

I often attempt to encapsulate the entirety of my experiences when I write the titles for these Choose My Adventure columns. Some days it’s easier than others, and some games are just so far-reaching that it makes it hard to find the highlights. That’s certainly how it went with my latest foray into Project Gorgon, as my best friend and I once more went into the desert.

But first, I had a skill line to try to level up, which saw me roaming around and once more brought some new-to-me points of interest to poke around in. For better and worse, but mostly for fun.

With the polls from last week firmly in favor of learning more Shield abilities, I decided to wander around in the Serbule Hills area to both figure out what my abilities did and to see if the secondary weapon would be a good fit. I tend to prefer tanking, so I was pretty confident it would be, and I was also still full of buffs from the poetry slam I had attended at the end of my last journey.

Indeed, those buffs were likely the sort of thing that carried me forth through most of what I was encountering, though my high levels in swordplay were certainly a boon as well. Mostly, though, I was attempting to sort out how Shield abilities were meant to play out and figure out if there was something of a rotation.

I didn’t really get to a point where I could perhaps figure some of this out until I wandered across a goblin woodworking camp, which was full of the little buggers but not so full that I didn’t think I couldn’t handle it with some cautious pulling. And for the most part, I was right, though yet again I still feel as if most of the poetry slam buffs were having more impact than anything I was doing with my shield.

It ultimately came to a head as I got jumped a couple of times, with several goblins coming down on me and laying me out. Each time, I felt as if I had begun to sort out a useful rotation for the Shield, until there was a point when I was able to stand up to waves and waves of gobbos. I still died, but I ended up taking quite a few of them with me.

So survivability certainly seemed like it was assured, but now it was time to see how tanking would go, so I waited until the next day when my bestie Britarnya would join me for another poke at the goblin nest. Yes, I know we were told to go to the desert, but I had to satisfy my curiosity.

Our movement through the lumberyard went pretty smoothly, but not because I was particularly any good at tanking. On the contrary, it seemed as if Brit’s monstrously powerful fire magic was doing most of the work, and I was just not able to keep threat away from her for the most part. Still, we were succeeding, and the camp didn’t end up having anything of use for us anyway. I did land a couple of nice drops, though. We also each got ourselves a horse to ride around in, which felt like a major game changer.

With our interest in exploring the goblin workshop satisfied, we headed back to Serbule to empty the pockets and head back into the Desert Dreams zone. The objective this time around was to destroy 10 agonizers. We recalled seeing one of them in the ghost town previously. So off we rode.

Approaching the ghost town, we saw some tombstones of other slain players littering the front door. And soon we would find out why, as the ghost town was absolutely crawling with enemies. Enemies who moved in big huge packs. Big huge packs that ran us over.

Brit changed some of her skills, deciding to equip a couple more AoE abilities, while I once more resolved to try and draw threat as effectively as possible. I had gotten a set of gloves that changed one of my sword skills into a PBAoE, so ideally that would help. Yet again, we were successful, but only just barely – and not because I was actually doing a good job of taunting foes. Clearly I was missing something.

We slowly did our best to thin the herd, managing to stand up to groups as high as three to four. While I don’t think I was doing a good job of tanking, I was doing a good job of surviving, which at least meant that I was able to pull my DPSing weight. Once the entrance to the city cleared, we tried to sneak in to a nearby building… and were bum rushed once more.

Since ghost town was proving to be too insurmountable of a hurdle – at least for just the two of us – we decided to instead roam the desert a bit to see if we couldn’t find any other agonizers. We came across some ruins that were also pretty packed with foes, but these were basically chickens and dogs, all of which we managed to handle. We even found one of the agonizers!

All the same, the desert’s dangers began to pile on. We ran into some high-level enemies that were either floating pairs of lungs or clouds of fear gas, or otherwise were finding our old enemies the scorpions again. At one point we were surrounded by these threats, but some nearby spiders proved easy enough for us to fight through to clear ground.

Our time in the desert ended with another couple of attempts at taking down scorpions, and while we were victorious, their poison ended up being far too fatal to ignore. I death taxied my way out of the desert, facing a scorpion one-on-one. Again, I was doing well in surviving and probably would have come away with the win were it not for the poison.

So yeah, our attempt to push deeper into the desert ended up being a failure, but we were both still laughing and having a great time regardless. Part of that is certainly helped out by the generally low stakes in dying (although traveling back to where you were can hurt), but part of that was also because we were both learning. I more closely read my tooltips to attempt to sort out how taunting worked, and she came to the conclusion that fire magic is just way too aggro.

I don’t know. I still think I’m missing something. Probably one of the skills that I learn from the Shield trainer. So that means I have to do some favors to earn the right rep.

…which incidentally is one of the choices on our poll! We’re in the final stretch of our shared adventure in Gorgon, and I’m basically opening things up to a wider – and vaguer – selection of things to do. We could wander. We could delve dungeons. We could do favors. Or we could perhaps try to make the trip to the trainer I need to speak with in order to perhaps learn how to use this hammer I got.

Either way, it should be a fun adventure for us. But I leave where that adventure goes up to you all, as always.

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Polling will once again wrap up at 1:00 p.m. EST on Friday, February 27th. In the meantime, I managed to pick up this Geology skill line that I kind of want to figure out.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.