I was sick yesterday and took some sleeping pills to force myself to sleep.
They worked and I slept until 8pm. I got up and logged on to EQ just as we
were finishing up the mud ring in Earth. I get there just as the final mob
is engaged. I heal lots of people and eventually it falls and gives us that
neat bracer and two-handed sword - his best possible drops.
Afterwards, we contemplate our goals. Time is currently being cleared by
the uber-guild. There are two other guilds that are currently
Elemental-enabled and raid during our same raiding period; one is in Air
trying to figure that out. Eventually the officers give us the rest of the
night off. I can only imagine what it must be like on other servers that
have a lot more elemental-enabled guilds.
We scatter to the four winds, with quite a few people logging. I
immediately send out feelers for a Tak LDoN group - I'm trying to save up
points for that nice Tak breastplate, and I have a *long* way to go.
Eventually I get a decent group together. It takes a while for them to all
gather in North Ro.
While I'm waiting, suddenly our guildleader starts swearing in guildchat.
We ask him what's up. He then says, "Hail, Guardian of Coirnav". Alas,
it's too late to call a raid given how many people just logged off. But we
reassure him there's nothing to worry about; the uber-guild will take a
couple of days to clear Time, and no one else in the server is capable of
taking Coirnav down. So chances are very good we can get Coirnav tomorrow.
My group arrives and I choose a collect mission. Since the word got passed
around that these missions have been fixed, I've been doing more and more of
them. They *are* really easy, and I can finish them very quickly... except
this time. It takes us an hour and fifteen to finish, and we clear just
about the whole darned zone before we get our twenty-fifth and final drop.
Mildly frustrating; I'd been hoping to get at least two LDoN's done in that
same hour.
Most everyone has to log, and I try to get another group together. Alas, I
can only get four: myself, a shaman, a warrior, and a rogue. We decide to
try it by ourselves, and I luck out and get a slaughter right away. We zone
in and the warrior immediately starts rushing the rooms. We get three or
four people and the shaman and I are burning through mana quickly. I ask
the warrior to let me pull, and with pacification I'm able to single-pull.
I've had practice with this, and I'm able to keep a pretty constant stream
of mobs incoming - having one ready to attack as soon as the last one falls.
We manage the pace of about one mob dead per minute, which gives us plenty
of time to finish.
The group breaks up at that point because it's so late. I'm still wide
awake, so I ask if anyone is doing any XP - I still want to catch up on my
AA's. Nope, everyone's doing their own thing.
I contemplate what I can do. I could solo for XP, but that's very slow and
tedious. I decide instead to spend some time on Marrtuk, who's been
languishing because of my sudden drive to do LDoN adventures and gain AA.
It's time I revealed the truth about something I've been keeping hidden
about Marruk. When I created Marrtuk, I chose the model I liked - the
orange and black models seemed too ostentatious, so I settled on a pleasant
green. I leveled Marrtuk up through level 40. One day I was screwing
around in the character creation screen, looking at different models for
different races. I pulled up the male frogluk models, cycled through them -
and found that, to my surprise, none of them looked like Marrtuk. I logged
on Marrtuk and played with the % commands - you know, %t gives you the
target name. %s gives you the personal pronoun. I targeted Marrtuk and
typed in %s and got back "she".
Argh.
What must have happened is that when I went to make a froglok paladin, the
character generation screen must have assigned it the random sex of female,
and I simply didn't notice. There's nothing inherently "feminine" about the
female froglok models unless you compare them to the male froglok models,
which tend to be bigger and more muscular. So for forty levels I'd been
playing a female toon without realizing it.
I certainly didn't want to start over from scratch, so I kept Marrtuk. I
still refer to Marrtuk as "him". Still, the secret's beginning to leak
out - like, late one night we decided to whack Vindi for one of our main's
brother. I brought Marrtuk along just in case any armor pieces dropped.
The chanter in Marrtuk's group decided to cast Illusion: Dwarf so that
Marrtuk would look like our guildleader, a male dwarf paladin. Now everyone
saw a clearly female toon with Marrtuk's name, and I got some good-natured
ribbing over it. I try to tell everyone about the new enchanter illusion
that changes gender, but no one is buying it.
Now, Marrtuk's been leveling up in Lower Guk. He's been able to solo there
pretty effectively, if somewhat slowly. After I moved him to a different
account and started two-boxing, it became feasible to take Marrtuk to other
places and level him up much more quickly. But I've decided to stick with
Lower Guk so that Marrtuk can get faction as well as experience. While I am
not one who enjoys pretending to be a woman - thus the reason I have no
female toons - I do find amusing the idea of having an Illusion: Wood Elf
mask that I could use on Marrtuk.
Marrtuk and Monual make the journey to Lower Guk. I make my way towards the
Lord camp, which has a nice long hallway with lots of dark blues for
Marrtuk. Alas, a 55 beastlord is already prowling that hallway. I fall
back on the Frenzy camp, which has a mixture of dark and light blues.
I'm pretty lazy about two-boxing. Marrtuk does most of the work; Monual
just buffs, heals, and throws out the occasional dot. After a few hours it
occurs to me that after Marrtuk gets the mob below fifty percent, Monual can
throw in a nuke to finish the mob off and still let Marrtuk get the XP. I
start doing this, and suddenly the kills are a lot faster. I end up
clearing everything around Frenzy, incluidng the Sentinel camp. I get lots
of loot that used to be worth something once.
I run into an SK officer of my guild, who's slaughter frogs for faction. He
respects my camp, which I appreciate. At one point he sends me a tell
saying "Oops." I do a /who all and he's in Tranquility. I drag his corpse
and rez it; he finds the whole thing quite amusing and gives me a litany of
excuses "I stubbed my toe. I forgot to swing my weapon." I forget it all,
but it was quite funny.
I've got it timed pretty well; I know what will pop and when. I move to
this one hallway where three mobs in alcoves spawn. I pull two back to
Frenzy, then when they're dead I go back and pull the third one plus a
roamer. When I get there this time, only one of the alcoves is up. I start
engaging him, and get him down to about twenty percent when the other mob
pops. I aggro it, then turn and run smack dab into the roamer, which has
also just popped. I run back to the Frenzy hallway, turn, and find two
full-health mobs behind me. Where's the other guy? I kill the two mobs and
go looking, but I can't find it anywhere. Ah well, maybe the SK got him.
There's a pause in the action while I'm waiting for respawns. I check
Marrtuk's skills and notice that he's got a 100 Froglok language skill. So
I group Monual and Marrtuk and set up a hotkey that spams text into
groupsay. Monual learns amazingly quickly, and in no time at all Monual has
a 100 skill, too. I try and have Monual teach Marrtuk Elder Dragon (which I
got Monual up to 53 in for no readily apparent reason). Marrtuk, alas,
proves to be dumb as a brick and only gets three skill-ups. I give up and
decide to wait for Marrtuk's WIS to get higher.
A druid shows up and asks if I'm going to be holding the camp much longer.
It's getting towards the time that I have to get ready for work, but I want
to get Marrtuk to ding 54. I tell her it will be about half an hour. In
the meantime, I get pops in the Frenzy room - the Frenzied Ghoul itself. So
Marrtuk pulls it and Monual throws a heal on him and waits for the Frenzied
Ghoul to get below fifty percent health.
Suddenly, two bok knights and the *Ghoul Lord* appear and start attacking
Marrtuk along with the Frenzied Ghoul. My eyes bug out; how the heck did
*that* happen? The Ghoul Lord spawns *waaay* far away. My first thought it
that the druid trained Marrtuk in order to get the camp, but I see her
standing there, watching. If she wanted to train me, she could have done a
much better job. Plus she starts helping out by healing Marrtuk. Marrtuk
definitely needs healing - he's getting hit by Ykesha procs on top of
everything else.
Still, I should be able to handle it, and I get down to the task of keeping
Marrtuk alive. It's really nothing to panic about. Monual kills the Ghoul
Lord's pet. As Marrtuk kills the Frenzied Ghoul and moves on to the Ghoul
Lord, I suddenly remember the mob I lost track of a while ago. I must have
dropped it below twenty percent and it started to flee. It must have then
wandered through the empty hallways - my SK guildmate probably had them all
cleared out - and gotten all the way to the Ghoul Lord. The Ghoul Lord and
his two buddies then ran all the way back to Marrtuk. In a way I was
lucky - the train could have been a lot worse.
Eventually Marrtuk kills the Ghoul Lord and one of the bok knights. In the
heat of the battle the druid pulls the other bok knight away and kills it,
which I really can't complain about as it was clear that wasn't an
intentional pull on my part. At the end I look a Short Sword of the
Ykesha - man, this used to be uber - and leave the Ghoul Lord's scalp
rotting. I send out /ooc and /guildsay comments, but no one wants it.
I soon get Marrtuk to ding 54. I run him out to the PoK book and sell the
droppables except for a few of the nicer drops, including the SSoY. Those I
put into the gnome warrior I created for the sole purpose of being my
sellbot. I set up some very cheap prices then leave him up and head to
work.
Marrtuk is now kindly considered by the live frogloks of Guk. Still a long
way to go until warmly, but by the time he dings 55 he should have the
faction needed for the WE mask. That will be... interesting. =)
--
-Richard
Monual Lifegiver
Archon of Rodcet Nife
Silent Tempest
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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!