This has been a very painful time for our guild. We moved into the
elemental planes and found that there were only a few mobs we could really
kill. And these mobs, of course, don't drop the really *good* loot. Even
when we do kill mobs, the victories seem more pyrrhic than anything else.
So far we've been concentrating on clearing the Earth rings, trying to make
progress in Air, and farming mobs in Fire. The Earth rings are actually
pretty easy, although only once have we managed to clear all of them and
spawn the arbiter. Then we tried to clear to him in time and failed - just
was we got him in sight, he despawned.
Then there are the fire mobs. The charm birds we kill pretty regularly.
Magmatron is killed more often than not. We seem to go about 50-50 on the
Generals at each castle. The Arch Mage we haven't figured out how to kill
yet - that mana-draining dot with the 300 range just gets us every time.
The frog we seem to be able to handle. Anything else - forget it. Our
biggest problem is lack of clerics - our server's resident uber-guild has
been recruiting every 65 cleric in sight in their drive to get the numbers
required to kill the Rathe. Our guild tends to be very selective, although
I can't help but wondering if that will change - we'll need to ramp up on
some key classes if and when we move on to the Rathe.
Air is annoying. Endless clearing of endless mobs, with more wipes than I
feel comfortable with. Spider island seems to get us each time - we can't
get the Avatar to spawn. We're still working out our strategy and we're
making progress, but... it's wearying. Very very wearying.
Basically, we wipe an awful lot. A *lot*. More often than not. And that's
dreadfully tiring. EQ has become a chore - a mind-numbing chore at that.
The changes to the Elemental boss mobs have reduced our raid targets
significantly. The mind-blowing AE's and the insane damage output of the
mobs are almost impossible to deal with, leaving us stressed out after each
battle, even if we manage to emerge victorious.
Also, our leadership has decided to stop farming Vex Thal - more for pride
than anything else, I think. "We're in the Elemental planes, we don't need
VT anymore! Let the lesser guilds farm that." I'm not sure I like that - a
day of raiding VT leads to a couple of dozen drops. Last night, we were in
Fire for seven hours and got a grand total of two drops. Not my idea of the
kind of risk vs. reward I like to see. I wish we'd unbend a little and give
Vex Thal a couple more attempts - just so that the wealth is spread out a
little bit.
Oh, we did do one major thing - we finally combined guilds. Winter's Light
and Crimson Twilight had been raiding together for over a year and had
become so intimately intertwined that we were, to all intents and purposes,
one guild anyway. So after lots of discussion, we decided to merge. This
led to the second, and much longer discussion: deciding on a new guild name.
Alas, Verant has a policy that once anyone anywhere uses a name, that name
is no longer available. Doesn't matter if the guild lasted a week three
years ago; we can't have it. So all of the names we liked were taken. In
the end, after trying endless variations on various themes, our guild
officers chose the slightly oxymoronic "Silent Tempest". Not the greatest
name, in my opinion, but it could have been worse; there was a lot of
sentiment for names with negative connotations, and this is at least
neutral.
So we merged. "Silent Tempest" is unique, to my knowledge, in that we have
two guild leaders. That is, if you do a /guildstatus Bruuss and a
/guildstatus Madrone, they both show up as guild leaders of Silent Tempest.
Dunno how the GM's managed that, but it's nice - neither had to lose face
being "demoted" to a mere officer. Now, at last, we have one common guild
channel and one common loot system, which will make many things a lot
easier. We're going through some adjustments - guildchat has already seen a
few personality conflicts - but we're managing.
Merging guilds provided a brief spark of interest for me, but it was quickly
subsumed by the dreariness of wiping to Elemental mobs over and over. I had
to do something to revive my interest in EQ.
So I started in on my alt. Marrtuk was a paladin I created after Legacy of
Ykesha came out. I got him up to level 5, then abandoned him because
raiding and getting AA's for Monual was much more important. I picked him
up again and went shopping. I'd already twinked him out a bit, but now I
dove in with both feet. I bought a Cloak of Crystalline Waters and a
Windblade and made him some Heraldic armor. OK, the Windblade was nearly
useless when I got it - adjusted for Marrtuk's level, it was a 10 / 44 item.
But still, it was something to build towards. I also bought a Poison Wind
Censer. This 2HB is 20/28 - with no level restrictions. It procs an AE
poison rain - but it only does that if you're level 50 or higher. Perfect
for me, because almost all the time I don't want it to proc. Basically, an
awesome twink item.
With all of this, plus buying KEI and begging guildies for Virtue, Marrtuk
has died far fewer times than Monual did during his early years. I stayed
around Innothule to begin with, then made my way to Paludial Caverns. My
objective was to solo as much as possible - I kinda wanted this time to
myself. Monual had already experienced the grouping side of things; I
wanted a new perspective. PC was a bit painful at first since I was only
level 12 when I went there. But I learned how to fight, and KEI meant I
could spam-heal to my heart's content and never run out of mana.
Even with my very first character, I've always been anal-retentive about
getting skills maxed out. Playing a melee took that to a whole new level,
since that meant I had to get five different weapon skills up. And weapon
skills go up very, very slowly. I started out using nothing but 1HB and 1HS
weapons, since the damage cap meant that my 2H weapons did the same amount
of damage, only much more slowly. Once I got past level 20, I moved
exclusively to my 2H weapons, and now they are both maxed while my 1HB and
1HS are just above 100. I've never actually used a Piercing weapon but my
skill there is also over 100 since I've been dumping all of my training
points into that.
I've also made it a point to max out my casting skills each level. That
meant that, after dinging, I'd spend quite a while stunning myself,
summoning a hammer, and casting True North in order to get Evocation,
Conjuration, and Divination maxed out. Only last night did I actually look
up all of my Paladin spells and realized that only three spells require
Conjuration - two spells that summon really bad hammers, and one spell that
summons a Halo of Light. In other words, I've basically been wasting my
time - I'll never ever be casting a Conjuration spell except in the rare
instance when I'm on a corpse run and need the Halo to see in the dark. At
least I won't fizzle away all of my mana in that instance. Still, I'm gonna
stop maxing out Conjuration. Ditto with Divination, since its only
practical application is Invisibility to Undead and Improved ITU. At 170,
I'll risk the occasional ill-timed fizzle since I shouldn't often be in a
situation where I need to cast ITU in a hurry.
I would wager that I have amongst the highest Conjuration skill of any
Paladin on the server. That's highly contingent, of course, on how many
people are as anal-retentive about skill-ups as I am. I wouldn't be
surprised to find more than a few who have taken the time to max out
Conjuration.
Paludial Caverns turned out to be a really good XP place, as advertised. I
spent a grand total of one minute in a group, during which it was realized
that inviting the first six people to zone in doesn't work so well when one
is level 14 and another is level 26. All the rest of the time I spent
soloing. At first I stuck near the zone line, but that turned out to be bad
since I was often trained, and people would grab my mobs with no compunction
at all. I didn't even get mad when folks blatantly KS'ed me. There are
lots of other mobs, and getting into a protracted conversation was more
trouble than it was worth. I just moved deeper into the zone - there are
tons and tons of mobs in PC.
I found that I terribly missed being able to bind wherever I wanted to bind
and gate away whenever I wanted to. I bought a five-dose gate potion, but
at 2000pp apiece that could become an expensive habit in a hurry. I've
learned to simply accept having to run everywhere. And with the PoK books,
it's really not a chore. The only thing I've done is bought a lot of SoW
potions to make the running go faster. I may buy some TBoots in SolA
eventually; I'm not sure.
I'm not looting much - I destroy fine steel weapons rather than go through
the trouble of lugging them back and selling them. But I do keep the
stackable stuff, and Marrtuk is actually making enough money to keep him in
KEI all the time. I gave up on the Virtue habit quickly, since I've learned
that my own buffs and careful management of pulls is more than sufficient.
After Paludial Caverns became light blue, I moved on to a small place I
discovered with Monual a couple of years ago - the brute caves in Warsilik
Woods. These are a group of stationary mobs that are not social and don't
cast, so it's easy to pull and kill them. They're almost always uncamped,
and the only time I had contention for the mobs was when someone was waiting
for others folks to arrive so they could XP in Dalnir, and he quickly gave
way to me. The only really annoying thing about these mobs is that they
tend to fall through the world when they flee - I lost a few that way,
getting them down to 10% and then having them disappear into a wall and
vanish. I didn't mind so much, since these were the guys that I got my 2HS
and 2HB skills maxed out on - I figured it only meant I'd get more of an
opportunity to catch up on my skills before I leveled up.
After the brutes, I moved on to another seldom-used XP area - Najena. I
found some undead mobs around a pool deep inside. These skeletons were
tough to kill, but they were good experience. Plus they dropped a part of
the Ghoulbane quest (yes, the Ghoulbane can be quested as well as dropped
off the Shin Lord in Upper Guk), so I could get XP *and* camp for part of my
epic. I quickly got a hilt of nobility but I still hung around Najena a
lot. Najena wasn't as empty as WW had been; there were folks who seemed to
know the zone inside-out and would regularly patrol the whole area, pulling
mobs as they went along. Once I was standing outside the room of the Ogre
Guard Captain, healing myself up before I used Calm to single-pull the mobs
inside. Without so much as a by-your-leave, a mage sent his pet right past
me into the room, quickly killed all the mobs, and left without a word. I
didn't make an issue of it, and again I wasn't even really mad. I just
shook my head at the lack of consideration - even back in the day when I
didn't know a thing about camp ettiquette, it never occurred to me to pull a
stunt like that. Ah well.
Having gotten one part of my epic, I decided to go to Unrest to get a ghoul
heart for the next bit. Jeeze, Unrest is *hard*. The pathing there is
screwed up beyond all imagination - stand in the wrong place and you can
aggro the entire house. I died a couple of times with something like a
dozen mobs beating on me. Several times I trained a bunch of mobs to the
zone line. Fortunately Unrest seems to be a popular power-leveling places,
as there were always high-level folks shepherding low-level folks. They
usually took care of the trains, which also had the effect of breaking the
spawn for me. Not that I deliberately created the trains, of course. It
took considerable trial and effort, but I learned to use Invisibility to
Undead to run to a safe place on the second floor, then judiciously used
Calm to single-pull mobs. Sometimes I would get an add or two, but with my
Armor of Twinkedness I could handle it all right. I finally got my ghoul
heart and hightailed it out of there, swearing that I would never ever ever
EVER return. Too dangerous.
Emboldened, I moved on to the Crazed Goblin camp in Butcherblock. Here I
would find my Blade of Nobility, the next piece of the Ghoulbane. Alas, the
Crazed Goblin camp is only three mobs, so the XP was slow. And there are no
other mobs in the zone that give XP, unless I wanted to kill dwarf guards -
and I very much dislike taking those kind of faction hits. I went from 29
to 31 over the course of two solid days of camping these mobs, and never got
my Blade of Nobility. I eventually gave up; while the Ghoulbane would have
been nice, there are much better weapons out there that I can buy. It just
wasn't worth the aggravation of continuing this camp. I may still give it
another try or two - clear the camp when I return to PoK to refresh my KEI.
But I don't expect to ever complete this quest.
I did have one unexpectedly nice encounter: one time when I returned to the
Crazed Goblin camp, a 44 shaman was sitting there killing the mobs. I
didn't say anything, just sat down and considered where else I could go for
XP. He hailed me and asked if I wanted the camp. I indicated that I had
been hoping to try and get my epic drop, but that he was there first and it
was his for as long as he wanted it. He replied that he was only there to
build up his skills, and since I could get XP off the camp, I could have it.
He then buffed me, wished me luck, and left. An outstanding example of
class and consideration; I wish more people were like that.
After giving up on the crazed goblins, I moved on to SolA. I'd never done
XP there, but everyone told me it was a great place to XP in your low 30's.
So off I went. I decided to fight my way to the Bar since I was told that
was an easy camp to hold. I had to clear my way there, of course - lots of
mobs along the way. The first time I tried to get there, I ran through the
camp of a cleric who sent me a testy tell asking why I was killing her mobs.
I explained that I was just passing through and that I had no intention of
killing her mobs. This mollified her - until I over-aggro'd and had to run
for the zone. My train didn't hit her fortunately, but I had to fight my
way back again, setting off another exchange of tells. I swore that I would
never over-aggro again and never kill her mobs, and I was able to placate
her again. Still, makes me wonder what's in store for me during my soloing
career; I wonder how many camps will be contested and how angry folks will
get if they perceive I am infringing on their camp.
Oh, and SolA is fantastic XP. The goblins are easy to kill, and with KEI
and my self-buffs I can keep a fairly large area clear of mobs. In one
night I jumped from 31 to 33. In fact, I leveled so quickly I outstripped
my ability to keep my 2HS and 2HB skills maxed. I've switched back to my
Windblade, which is now a 29 / 44 weapon, and it does some pretty awesome
damage. Pretty soon I'll be high enough to give LGuk a try.
Playing Marrtuk has rekindled my interest in EQ. Every day I can't wait for
our raids to end so I can go back to playing Marrtuk. I don't think Marrtuk
is going to become my main, but he is a lot of fun. It's nice to be able to
go off on my own and have fun. It's good to see EQ from the perspective of
a tank and a soloer. (Yes, I know that long-term I can't exactly expect a
paladin to solo as well as a bard.) Maybe this enthusiasm will leak back
into Monual and I can start feeling excited again to play my cleric as well.
We'll see. For now, I just die all day as Monual and solo all night as
Marrtuk, and that's all right. =)
--
-Richard
Monual Lifegiver
Archon of Rodcet Nife
Silent Tempest
This page is Copyright by Skaarak; Everquest (TM) is property of Sony Online Entertainment
All stories and art work are Copyright@ by the origial owner/writer.
Most, if not all stories, were taken from newsgroup alt.games.everquest (AGE), I recommend that anyone who gets a chance to read it should!