West Karana

The plan was to help everyone get to level 60 so we can start doing some of the two group raids in Kunark, Velious and Luclin — things like Velketor the Sorcerer, Trakanon, Venril Sathir and such. What better way, than through the hot zones? The hot zone for our level was (was) Riwwi in Gates of Discord. Not the best place in the world, but we made plans to go.

Then SOE came out with a new list of hot zones, and Riwwi wasn’t anywhere on it. Plane of Storms was the level 60 hot zone. Perfect! We’ll go to Plane of Storms!

Except that not all of us were level 55 or over, so that couldn’t happen. We went to the level 55 hot zone instead, Old Sebilis.

Old Sebilis had always been on the list of Nostalgic places to visit, but there are so MANY places to go and things to see that we’d just not gotten around to it. Now we finally had a firm reason — we would go there and level.

Back when Kunark was new, I don’t remember OS being all blue and light blue at level 55. I remember going there and grinding AAs there, when 60 was the level cap. But it was all blues and light blues last night, and even with Lesson of the Devoted on (double xp for half an hour) and it being a hot zone, I barely got a level out of it (level 56 now).

Since we had too many people for one group but not quite enough for two groups, we formed a raid and headed down to Trak’s Lair to farm some spells, kill some juggernauts, and see if Trak was up.

Experience dropped to 1% per kill.

That’s still 10x better than group xp per kill in Karnor’s Castle in EQ2’s Rise of Kunark expansion (which was 0.1% per kill). How the devs thought making an open dungeon with (a) no xp, (b) no loot, (c) difficult to kill mobs and (d) only a couple of quests would be the best way to introduce people to the expansion, I’ll never understand. We soon realized that SOE had decided to discourage grouping until the level cap. So Karnor’s was like a giant middle finger stuck in the middle of the Kylong Plains. Ah, bashing Rise of Kunark just never gets old, does it?

If you take a really close look at that screenie, it shows the first thing on my track list as “a fallen monk”, and there’s Sisca laying there dead. I thought that was a funny coincidence, in a macabre way.

Anyway, we (re)learned a few rules about Old Seblis. 1) Myconid adepts really suck. 2) So do Myconid priests. 3) No, they really, really suck. 4) People who flop past you to ninja the one named who was up that would have given one of the enchanters, at least, a cool looking robe which is absolutely valueless to anyone not in a progression guild, also suck.

We finally made it to Trakanon’s Lair. Trak wasn’t at home, and neither was Tolepumj, the enchanter frog who, until very recently, had been on track. Now he was mysteriously disappeared, yet all the golems that guard him were still up. How could that POSSIBLY have happened?

Sigh.

Okay, I NEED to tell this story about Crimson Eternity, my old guild back on Erollisi Marr.

Westleey was the guid’s lead rogue, raid leader, and guild leader. I liked him a lot, but he could rub some people the wrong way. But he was a good raid leader and took the guild much further than any of us ever thought we would go. Nonetheless…

One day, we’d headed down to kill Trakanon. Back then, Trakanon and Venril Sathir were on a scheduled guild rotation, to cut down on the race for the two most hotly contested mobs in Kunark. Trakanon dropped fangs for the Veeshan’s Peak key as well as all the Kunark class breastplates. Venril Sathir dropped all the Kunark class legs. So it was important that when CE came up on the rotation, that we drop the mobs as soon as we could, so that the next guild in line could schedule their kills.

It was more a contractual obligation thing by then.

Everyone who was online at the time, about four groups or so, headed down into the bowels of Old Sebilis. Monks split and pulled all the juggernauts from the lair. All that were left were Tolapumj and Trakanon.

Tolapumj, being an enchanter, can sometimes charm people. When an NPC charms you, YOU become an NPC. And, you can be killed by players, like any other NPC. When Westleey got charmed, he told the raid that he better not see ANYONE attack him.

As one, the raid turned to him.

Looked at him for a second.

And pasted him all over the cavern.

—

Anyway, once we cleared Trak’s lair of jugg’s, we split for the night.

Me, Tsukiko and Soaridor headed to the Plane of Justice to get Sejal flagged for the Plane of Storms (and the Plane of Valor) by completing one of the trials. We couldn’t think of any trial we’d want more to do than the Trial of Execution, and so that’s the one we did.

Way back when, until you finished one of the trails, you couldn’t progress to Storms or Valor no matter WHAT level you were. They later let anyone level 55 or over in, and suddenly the Plane of Justice turned into a ghost town. We had no trouble with the trial, finished it first time, and Sejal was the only death. Which wasn’t a disaster, because I had somehow morphed into a level 75 cleric on the way to PoJ.

Afterward, Sejal, Tsukiko and I went to the Plane of Sky and farmed island keys until we got to the fourth island, Pegasus Island. We could have cleared the island, but the weird spawn time for the Keeper of Souls (two hours after the first island mob and all the things it splits into were killed), plus the knowledge that the Keeper death touches and we had virtually no DPS, certainly not enough to kill it before it DT’d the three of us, prevented us from moving on up to the fifth island — to another mob that ALSO death touches.

Next week is Labor Day, so we’re off. The week after — PLANE. OF. FUGGIN. STORMS. Or maybe Blackfeather Roost.

Yeah, it seems really hard to imagine, but we have not yet ventured into any of the alternate planes of reality as a guild. We fixed that last night as we had our way with the Plane of Hate.

This isn’t your dad’s Plane of Hate. Once a viciously deadly raid zone, PoH has been gentled, and is now a fairly average place to experience. We had the guild hall portal set to PoH so people could come and go as they pleased, a huge difference from the old days where just finding a wizard to port you up was difficult, as the zone in was often a death trap. Early zoning strategy was to hope the monsters would be more interested in killing the other groups so that yours could get to the safe point, and then you could start the long, mandatory corpse recovery before you ever pulled a single mob. It could easily be an hour between zoning up and being ready to pull. Sisca, our monk, used to have the job in those elder days of zoning to Hate, feigning death immediately, then dragging the corpses once everyone was done dying.

Sejal had busted butt to get to 46 so that he could join the Friday group in Hate, and it was a good thing. A LOT of enchanter loot dropped — a defiant dagger and various bits of Insidious armor made him last night’s big loot winner.

Once we had a group together, we cleared our way through to the Maestro area, and guess who we found there:

“Bad touch” Rogbog? No, that’s the Hand of the Maestro playing one-fingered piano. The Hand is needed for the warrior epic. Ceipheid couldn’t make it last night, but we decided to go ahead and kill it anyway. When we had enough for a second group, we made a quick raid and entered the Cathedral to take the mob down. The Hand joined as we were killing the mob in front of it, so I offtanked that while everyone else killed the Hand and Qutey and Callendra, druids both, tried to keep people alive as the cleric, Coldheat, kept getting disconnected every couple of minutes. The Hand and the add died at about the same time.

We split back into two groups. Group 1 stayed on the steps, while the group I was in returned to the bridge and pulled for a couple of hours. It was fun, but after awhile it got a little boring. I can’t wait until we get to level 60 so we can get back to doing some raids. In EQ, Raids = TOTAL FUN, and there’s bunches two groups can do.

Ended the night with four more AAs, for a total of 30 now, with 20 spent and 10 saved. Nine of those are reserved for Endless Quiver when I reach 59. 44% through level 55. I’ll probably try to get into a Nadox group sometime next week to start heading for 60. This weekend, though — Fan Faire, but my son is sick so I dunno how that will work out.

Next week: Riwwi, the level 60 hot zone. Level grinding, but in someplace new. I used to see groups camped at the zone in all the time. Next week, that will be us.

The number one rule of Nostalgia the Guild is that we level together and nobody gets left behind (unless they stop showing up). Last night we had the twin goals of getting everyone up to our current cap of level 55, and to explore the sunken city of Veksar, deep beneath the waves of the Lake of Ill Omen. SOE introduced the original Veksar as a free content update in June of 2003, and are poised to do it once again in EverQuest II.

If you travel to the Lake of Ill Omen in the Fans of NASCAR zone in EQ2’s Kunark, you can see that the recent live update did more than enrage the void storms… that tremor was some power forcing the long-buried city back to the surface. Who knows what’s entombed in those ancient ruins?

Maybe we’ll find “Bad touch” Rogbog still molesting Iksar Golems. I mean, it’s possible, right?

The night started out slow, but people tend to trickle in and we have tricks like the campfire to help people get to the right place. Once we had a full group — me, Ceipheid playing his ‘zerker Rogbog, Warmunger showing off his shiny new epics, chanter Mantis, and Stargrace two boxing her cleric, Ishbel, and her beastlord, Nala — we headed in. No issues, no wipes, we made it without getting too lost to the shops/iksar behemoth area, placed the campfire in a safe place (as opposed to “under where the behemoth pops”, as SOMEONE suggested), fired up the Lesson of the Devoted and settled in for the night.

Callendra, Sisca and Binxs showed up awhile later, so I split off to be their tank, and we moved back to the pool room.

While we were in the other room, i was watching the first group on the web cast. It was pretty wild :)

The aim was to get everyone to level 55. All but Binxs and Rogbog made it. And that’s tenacity for ya. Veksar is not a hot zone and in fact the experience is pretty crappy, in general. It always was. Even back in 2003 when I was leveling my cleric there, we seemed to spend days there without making much progress.

But heck, we’re not in a race, and a lot of people had never been to Veksar before, so it was worth a look on the way up. Rogbog, who was like level 6 or something when he got there, ended the night well into his forties, so that was good. I made 6 AA, and that didn’t suck, either. I’m saving the first nine AA for Endless Quiver, but after that — back to Combat Fury and Weapon Affinity.

Next week is the Plane of Hate. That DOES have a decent experience mod, so we should be able to get most everyone to 55 and also a fair bunch of AAs along with it.

Afterward, I went and did the GU48 void storm quest, and now have seven notes to my name. Just fourteen or so more, and I’ll have the cool black armor :)

The clock on the cable box in the living room is twenty minutes slow; I *know* I shouldn’t rely upon it. I was trying to be clever and use my Asus Eee from the living room to SSH into my Linux box and copy the latest episode of The Middleman to my Vista laptop so that my PS3 could find it and play it. I have this crazy idea that I can use the Eee to control every piece of electronics in the house. I’d managed all that, when I noticed the Eee had a different time from the cable box — the correct time — and that I was late for the Tuesday Nostalgia group.

I ran to my room, jumped online, but nobody else from the group was there. I checked the boards and it looked like a lot of people weren’t going to make it; Hakiko may have been there and left already, I don’t know and nobody on had seen him. So I went to the Bazaar and thought about buying some gear to fill up all the empty slots in Sela’s armor, but after about an hour, decided to work on Tipa’s levels and AAs instead.

Since we raised the level cap from 52 immediately after killing the dragons last week, most everyone has been madly leveling … the three levels to the new cap of 55. Some people have wished for the cap to be 60 instead, but I want Nostalgia the Guild to be the kind of place you can come once a week and not fall behind. With AAs, there’s always something to do for those who want to play more.

I made level 53 the same night we removed the cap in the Crypt of Nadox, the level 55 hot zone. I made 54 in Akheva Ruins while we tried to do with one mid fifties group what raid guilds used to do with four level 60 groups — take on Va’Dyn, the giant rock monster who is one of Luclin’s first raid targets. We eventually managed to get him solo, but we could not take his damage. Still, made a level from the attempt because AR is, too, a hot zone.

Last night it was back to Nadox where I got 40% of the way through level 55 and my 20th AA, which I spent on Weapon Affinity. There are SO MANY AAs after so many expansions that it’s tough to figure out which to get. I have Run Speed 3, Innate Regeneration 3, Foraging (by mistake), Combat Fury 2 and Weapon Affinity 1. The last couple will increase my dps a lot.

The group I was in couldn’t keep mobs off me, even if I did nothing but auto-attack (I’ve a variety of nukes and dots I can add, including uber nuke Icewind that I quested for last weekend). I kept casting jolt, but finally decided nothing would work but to stay out of the fight entirely for the first few seconds. That helped some. Chain casting Jolt worked somewhat but was harsh on my mana.

The night was marred by the constant stream of high level monks who would go from camp to camp in Nadox looking for nameds to steal, bringing trains with them wherever they went, leaving death behind them. Sure, they could have feigned their trains off, but there was always the possibility that some level appropriate groups might get the nameds in their areas before they did. And there were plenty of level appropriate groups around. The fifties are the time you start coming upon the majority of the players. Most of the group was probably alts, but their twinkage was usually not high; I was the only one wielding epics, anyway.

So when I say training skills, I’m talking about the monks’ skills at training. I can’t tar them all with the same brush — we had two monks in the group who seemed very capable — but it certainly seems that if you want to be a real jerk, and you really care nothing about anyone besides yourself, a monk is the way to go. Once all the lowbies in the area are dead or dealing with your train, you can steal their named mobs.

Years ago, being trained would have really bugged me, because I cared about leveling and loot. Now that I realize neither of those things matter, I just take these things as they come. Being able to affect someone else’s game play, for good or ill, is just part of EQ. I got trained, and I died, but I got dragged to a friendly cleric, got a rez, full buffs, and an invitation to join their group. Being trained was bad, but I got to meet new, friendly, good people as well. In an entirely instanced game, neither would have happened. World of Warcraft, et al, by taking away the bad parts of open dungeons, took away the good parts as well.

Come Hell or high water, we were going to start leveling again after last night’s dragon raids. Everyone has been getting antsy about perpetually staying at level 52 solely to farm the dragons. Last night, we killed them both, and have killed each of them three times. Nostalgia the Guild has gone back in time nine years to when mega guilds used to roam the world, throwing themselves against the greatest monsters of the age. But now, we’re moving on to EverQuest’s first expansion. Next week: Veksar, the city hidden beneath the smoothly lapping waves of the Lake of Ill Omen. Nostalgians, remember that for the next two weeks, we’re meeting on Thursday instead of Friday. And that the new level cap is 55.

First up, Lord Nagafen. We had a fantastic turnout, but, unfortunately, were gnome-less :(. Soaridor had transferred his monk, Sisca, over (along with a lot of very nice arrows — THANKS!), so we had a puller once again. First pull was a disaster in slow motion. First came the two giants in the room. And then Magus Rokyl decided to join in. And then Warlord Skarlon and HIS friend join in (!!). And then, NAGGY. Okay, I was very nearly almost laughing. We got the first two giants dead and Rokyl most of the way there before the last of us died.

We rez up (I remembered this time to move the campfire to the ready room), and kill Skarlon and his friend. Sisca manages to split Rokyl, so we kill him, then rush in for the Naggy kill. It took a little longer to position him than normal, but we took the old lizard down — live! on the web!

Ceipheid was broadcasting our raid out on the web (I would have announced it here if I’d known in advance), and it was bizarre watching the raid live on my computer, and then watching the raid a few seconds delayed from the MT’s perspective on the other computer. Plus commentary from the random visitors who wandered in. One of them mentioned he could solo Naggy, I guess he must have been 52 or lower but he claimed to have 15K hit points. Well, okay. But we’re not raiding to be uber. We’re raiding to have fun. And to get a second Red Dragon Scale.

We didn’t get one. Naggy is being stingy. Someone asked if that meant we were coming back. Nope. It just means we’re heading to the bazaar. 7500 plat later, and Ceipheid got his GREEN scale, which means he doesn’t need to do the quest to turn a red scale green, which is a huge bonus.

Brown Chitin Protector — Guild Bank
Razing Sword of Skarlon — Ceipheid
Cloak of Flames — Binxs
Gauntlets of Fiery Might x2 — Guild Bank
Gold Plated Koshigatana — Guild Bank
Torn, burnt book — rot.

With Naggy dead, his love Vox would be pining away. She needed to be killed just to set her soul at rest. It would just be cruel to leave her alive, really.

The hardest part of the Vox fight was clearing the giants from her room, there was an extra one or two in with the pack that I guess we normally kill separately. Two ice giant priests and their complete heals made the whole thing tedious, but not particularly dangerous. After a few minutes we had them dead, and Sisca pulled Vox to our normal kill spot in the flag room (to the displeasure of the peanut gallery on the webcast, who wanted to see people get flung into pits by tentacle terrors as we took her down. Nope. There’s a REASON we don’t fight her in her lair.)

Without any mages and nobody to drain her mana, Vox took a much longer time to die, but we stepped up our dps just at the right time and she had no chance to either complete heal or gate away.

Both of them will be back next week after their forced vacation courtesy of Nostalgia, but we won’t be. It’s been absolutely wonderful to be able to raid them these past few weeks.

Dragon Bone Bracelet — Guild Bank
McVaxius’ Horn of War x2 — Ceipheid’s bard, Maromi
White Dragon Scales — Maromi

Afterward, we kicked Urtog, Gozad and Malfi from the Fellowship and added Callendra, Sisca and Warmunger in their places. Sorry guys :( We needed the spots, and those three are there every week. I wish Fellowships were larger. Nine seems to few; there’s no middle ground between campfires and guild banners. I’d just prefer to set up a guild banner someplace. Make it six people in the guild that need to be there instead of thirteen, and that would work out fine.

Lackey was tearing up the Crypt of Nadox with his cleric, and invited anyone to come join. I thinks I will, I said, rushed over there, turned on my Lesson and ended up 72% of the way through level 53 when the group split up. It felt good to be able to level. This morning, I returned to Nadox to do the Icewind quest. Lots of people claim this can take days, but it only took about an hour of killing before I got the drop, went back to Gunthak and am now the proud caster of a sooper dooper ice nuke.

I also got a pair of Steel Wrapped Leggings and three pairs of Gloves of the Fallen Spirit, coming soon to a guild bank near you.

Game Update 47 went live yesterday, though not without problems for me. I was a little apprehensive about the patch because it had consistently crashed my computer when I was trying to check it out on Test, but I patched (eventually) and logged in fine. Stargrace was after me to get on voice chat, and even after all her detailed, patient instructions, it just didn’t work. It would say “You are not in a channel” whenever I pressed the push to talk button, even though I had selected a channel. Midway through the evening, it suddenly began working. No, I don’t know why.

The chat quality was on par with Ventrilo, so that ws good. Unfortunately, voice chat only works when you are logged in to that game. Ventrilo, not being tied to any one game, let’s me chat with people from any game or no game at all. Since my Befallen characters are not on Najena, I couldn’t chat in the Nostalgia guild channel unless I logged over there. Which I did, logging in Brightknife while Dorah did her stuff on Befallen. And not Najena, because after four tries to transfer her over to Najena and getting a “Service Violation” each time, I gave up. Each failed transfer attempt looks to my bank like a hacking attempt and after awhile they shut down my card — that’s what happened last time I tried to transfer my Befallen characters to Najena. I got into chat with a tech support rep and he just cut and pasted useless stuff that didn’t help.

Some guides were playing around, trying to get people to get drunk and leap to their deaths. One of the participants claimed they were having fun, and a guide responded that this was just as much fun for them. I can believe that! In fact I imagine it was even MORE fun for them :) Honestly, if it was all that much fun, you’d see people getting drunk and leaping off cliffs just for the fun of it even without guides around, no? The guides could have been more creative, though, with their willing audience. “Okay, you there, you’re Mommy Cat, and you over there are Daddy Cat, and you in the middle there are the full moon on a warm summer night. Okay, GO!”

I kid :)

What else? Oh yeah, the new reputation crafting clothing. Naturally, I bought it immediately, but it just barely fit. Is this any way for a halfling to dress? I mean, we tend to simple, rustic dresses and broad-rimmed hats to keep the sun off.

I complained to the merchant there, and she said it was no fault of hers (naturally), but the dresses were tailored for gnomes and only barely fit on any other race. For barbarian women, there’s only enough fabric for a couple of tassels and a G-string. I dunno about that. But look how nicely it matches my tradeskill epic cloak!

I was checking through the guild hall supplies to see if there was any insufficiently guarded bits of stone or ore I could safeguard in my bank vault — for the glory of the Overlord, of course! — when who should happen by but Lord Blayze, who was pretty pleased with the work thus far, but went all Darth Vader at Death Star 2 on the engineer when he requested more materials to replace the extensive supplies of rare ores which had just recently gone missing (oops… what did I do! heh…) On time and under budget, that’s the Freeport way!

Swam out to have a look at it, and nice job thus far, folks! That has me wondering which city Nostalgia will have its guild hall in. Evil, spiteful, hateful Qeynos, or refreshingly honest Freeport? If SOE ever gets their act together and allows me to transfer my characters, we may yet find out.

I didn’t do anything with the new void storm quests. Still burned out from the 21 times I did the previous one to get all my armor, weapons and house items, and I hear you now have to do it separately for every person in your group, for no reason at all that I can think of.

After some false starts, the intrepid Tuesday group, full (for the first time in a long time) with the addition of Maromi’s bard, we made it up easily to the third floor of the Tower of Frozen Shadow, the servant’s quarters. Well, I shouldn’t say it was easy. Fada and Hakiko kept getting disconnected. But we did eventually make it with all hands, cleared to the butler room and settled in for a nice camp. Alas, things did not end well. The butler room repopped (two zombies) at the same time Bjoern was bringing back a skeleton and an armored shadow. But that skeleton brought friends, and by the time he got back to us, it was a barbecue. And THEN one of the butlers spawned the Enraged Shadow Beast that holds the key to floor 4, the home of the witch Cara Omica (who also holds the key to floor 5, the Wedding). Anyway, it was an unlucky pull and we wiped. But we wiped knowing the keyholder was up for the next floor.

We summoned our corpses and returned to fight our way back. As we cleared the second floor, we couldn’t help noticing that our healer, Hakiko, was still stuck at the mirror. Crashed again. So we decided to head up and try and kill the Enraged Shadow Beast for the key, anyway. We managed it with only one death — mine — and I got my corpse summoned and rezzed and returned to loot the key with only thirty seconds to spare.

Next week we’ll likely just stick to floor 3 and get some more levels (I got two, now level 38) before we ascend to the invisible mobs and pit traps of the fourth floor.

Sorry, no pictures :( Bad me.

Well, anyway, if you believe what NPCs tell you, then I am solely responsible for breaking Hate’s grip on the natural world and letting fields and forests alike grow strong and healthy. That’s right, that was me.

If you believe the NPCs, anyway. And heck, I do!

After running around for my epic stuff yesterday, I only had three things I needed — the Swirling Sphere of Color from the Plane of Sky, the Shattered Emerald of Corruption from the Plane of Hate, and the Soulbound Hammer from Jaeil in The Hole. The first two could be multi-quested, so I logged in Brita and went to Hate.

Hate is not the easiest zone for clerics to solo, since the spite golems are 100% resistant to magic like, say, the damage shield I use to wear down mobs, and my nukes. So I had to melee those down. Some twelve foot tall Shadowknight came after me and he had a zillion hit points, and on and on, but I was doing pretty well keeping four named spawn points clear. Second pass through, I got a named, it dropped the shattered emerald, and I was done.

Since the NPC in Plane of Tranquility who ports you to Hate now can port you to Sky, I took her up on that and landed on the first island. Sky is tricky. I got the first key from the thunder princess fine, but on the second island, Azerak island, I’d forgotten you had to kill all the Azeraks before the Protector of the Sky, so when Sirran spawned, he killed me. I respawned, summoned my body, rezzed, went back up there, and tried to make the key to the next island. No dice! I tried again. Nothing!

Ooops. I must have the keys in my bank. So I headed back to Norrath, found in fact I had that key and the next one in my bank, went back up and went straight on through to the fourth island, Pegasus Island. Stuff splits when it dies, I knew that, but it didn’t really sink in until I had three splitting mobs on top of me, as well as that druid named and some other named I didn’t recognize. It was all I could do to keep myself alive, and I barely was, while my DS took down the mobs. I checked corpses as soon as they fell, and when I finally got the swirling sphere, I grabbed it and jumped off the island back to East Freeport, just moments before I would have died.

That left only The Hole fight, a fight I could not multi-quest. I’d figured out this complicated plan to switch between Brita and Tipa to clear the way, but Warmunger offered to do all the hard work of tanking, healing and DPSing, so that worked out well, and Jaeil the Insane handed me the Soulbound Hammer, after a little urging of my swords.

After that, it was a bunch of porting around and turning in, and at the end of it, I held Swiftwind and Earthcaller and an extra AA (so that’s 18 AA total).

Picture is of Etha, my first character and my first epic, with Tipa, my latest character with my fifth epic. Druid, rogue, cleric, mage and now ranger. This is the first epic I didn’t do legit, with real raids. Well, I two boxed a lot of the mage epic, just as I two boxed most of the ranger one…

Anyway, glowy swords for the win, just the first epic of many, I can’t wait to see all of Nostalgia with shiny new glowy weapons :)

It’s weird, but whenever we have the perfect dragon killing strategy, the people who make it possible don’t show up the next week. Last week we used a gnome (we’ve determined gnomes are extremely important as bait) and translocate to pull Naggy’s room and port the puller safely elsewhere. With no izards last night, we were a little befuddled until Callendra suggested using the druid’s one translocate to Blightfire as a substitute, and this kinda worked when Soaridor put this into practice.

Things never worked out entirely as we liked; I ended up kiting Naggy while the others put the hurt on some giants, where I died. Then I snared Magus Rokyl while he and Naggy were beating on me so that they would split, so I died. But then I AM a ranger, after all. My job is to die in useful ways; I know that. But we ended up with Magus Rokyl snared in the lava and Naggy in his lair and half the group fighting their way back from evacing, and when Magus Rokyl decided he was tired of his refreshing magma bath and came after me, I was able to root and snare him until everyone was together and we could kill him, so that was nice.

As we recovered, a level 70 warrior came up asking to watch. PRESSURE! I don’t know what he thought when he saw all our looted corpses cluttering the ready room. We buffed up, hauled out our steadfast servants and headed in. And… no deaths. People were low on mana, REALLY low, and some people were very near death, but everyone was still standing when Lord Nagafen turned to run.

Fantastic tanking by Ceipheid and new uber warrior Warmunger, amazing healing by cleric-under-pressure Coldheat and druid-for-the-ages Callendra, and Soaridor for being the night’s sacrificial puller :)

Unfortunately, Naggy didn’t drop the red dragon scales, so we’ll be back again, and hopefully in greater numbers. He was otherwise pretty generous with the loot, though.

Cloak of Flames — Tipa, improving slightly on the RBB I won last week. RBB will go to guild bank. How I love non-attunable loot!
Gauntlets of Fiery Might — guild bank.
Bladestopper — Ceipheid, iirc.
Selo’s Drums of the March — guild bank.
Torn, burnt book — I looted to turn into a Book of Scales to sell for guild funds.
Treasure Hunter’s Satchel — Callendra

Terror — if you’re a dragon. Nostalgia the Guild set up a face-to-face for Naggy and Vox with old Veeshan, and I don’t think Queen Vee will be too happy with her progeny.

We’ve been tracking Lord Nagafen all week to see that he remained up. And shockingly, the elder guilds with their twink brigades didn’t move on the dragon, so Friday night, it was Nostalgia’s turn. We were short handed and had only one healer, the incredibly overworked Coldheat, but we weren’t going to be stopped. Also, we didn’t have a FD puller, but we weren’t going to let that stop us either.

We tried various ways to clear the room; the best way seemed to be to toss a gnome in first, and Gnewton performed amazingly as bait. I think that BBQ sauce-soaked robe he wears combines both fashion AND fine cuisine in an amazing way.

Eventually we got the fire lizard alone and we rushed in. Being very short on healers, we had our steadfast servants out for extra healing. We lost Coldheat and then Ceiphied, our tank. Thankfully, Urtog had come by, and he stepped up like a true dwarf and took the aggro and tanked, without healing, while the rest of us desperately tried to take Naggy down. Finally, the dragon turned to run — we had him. As long as we could keep him from heading into the lava and letting the molten rock from Norrath’s core heal him. He died with his head inches away.

Ceiphied got Red Dragon Scales for his epic.
Tipa looted the Torn, burnt book for her paladin’s Fiery Avenger.
Hierophant’s Crook and Blight, Hammer of the Scourge were looted for the guild bank.

Being only 8:30, we headed over to Permafrost and Lady Vox had apparently recovered enough from last week’s beating to set up shop again.

We had a couple of dirty pulls with Vox + some trash mobs, but on the first real pull we got her alone and took her down with no more trouble than we had last week.

Lady Vox was as kind with the epic drops tonight as Lord Nagafen had been. Are they trying to convince us to move on, or something?

Ceiphied looted White Dragon Scales for his bard’s epic.
Tipa looted Torn, Frost covered book for Sela’s Fiery Avenger.
Tipa also looted Runed Bolster Belt because apparently every melee there had same of better haste. WTF? Here I am feeling pretty cool about my FBSS and everyone else is laughing at me. So yeah, I looted it.
The guild bank looted the Dragon Bone Bracelet.

Well, we just need another set of Red Dragon Scales so we can do the quest to make them into Green Dragon Scales for Ceiphied’s epic, and then we won’t need to kill the dragons anymore. Raiding, though, is fun — and these past couple of weeks have been a real pleasure. As we level, we’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for other one or two group raiding opportunities. There’s a bunch of. Luclin has several single group raids; there’s the nameds on the near side of the chasm in the Deep, Ssra has Rhag 1 and Rhag 2, etc. We’ll see what happens. Two groups in good gear could do a lot of old world raids. Problem is, of course, that high level people in good gear can solo them, and often do…

Anyway, another triumphant night for Nostalgia. We aren’t a raiding guild, but when it comes time to do a raid, it’s good to know we can. That will come in handy as we try to finish our epic.

Mayong Mistmoore looks so hunky in that portrait! He makes ALL the inky ladies swoon!

I keep saying EverQuest isn’t hard, but what I should probably say is, EverQuest isn’t hard, if you have great equipment. I haven’t put the same sort of care into Sela’s gear as I did for Tipa’s, and it shows. Empty item slots, missing spells, statless gear in at least one spot… I suspect the same is true for the other members of the Tuesday group. This gives us quite a different experience. Instead of laughing off danger as we slice through enemies without thinking, we can, and do, get overwhelmed, and die.

The Tower of Frozen Shadow is particularly deadly to us. Though we all got in safely and up to the second floor in no time, when we started crawling through the Library in search of the key to the third floor servant’s quarters, a named who brought huge aggro, did us in. He wasn’t too bad by himself, but attacking him seemed to arouse half the spirits on that side of the room. So that was a wipe.

Being the only rezzer, I released and used the AA to get a full xp rez and my body back, and headed back to the Tower.

I’d THOUGHT I had gone through Allakhazam’s and gotten every spell for my paladin, same as I did for the ranger. But, no. I was missing some vital spells, and it was the lack of Invisibility to Undead that would kill me a second time. Lull just doesn’t do the job.

Bought the spell. Summoned my corpse. Paid one of the many clerics who do a brisk business in resurrections in the guild lobby to rez me (and she threw in a temperance for free! What a nice halfling!). Headed back. With ITU working, I got everyone’s corpses pulled and rezzed.

After that, it was smooth as anything, though it seems unless I am 100% focused on a mob and keeping it taunted, stunned, and warded (for undead), it goes right for the berserker, druid and mage. This is bad news for multiple pulls, because I can only keep one on me for sure. The others turn back to another victim when I turn back to my original target. The only sure way I have seen to grab aggro from everything is to start healing people.

After about an hour in the Library, we got ourselves an enraged librarian, who gave us the key to the third floor, which was nice of her. I do wonder why we had to send so many dead scholars back to their final reward before they got upset enough to send someone in after us.

Up we went to the third floor, backs to the wall as we awaited the armored patrol. We didn’t have long, and we fought the first and then the second one right after another. We moved from there to the cooks’ room and took on a few of these before calling it a night.

We ended up standing in front of Randall, the Fellowship guy, making the Fellowship we should have made weeks ago. This while make wipes easier to recover from, especially as we come to places not easily returned to, like the upper floors of the Tower of Frozen Shadow.

All told, I got a neat Defiant two handed staff, in which I had almost no skill. I ended the night with skill in the 40s. I’ll probably need to get a two handed slash and two handed piercing to work on, just so I have a wide variety of options. I don’t really like the staff — no bash. But I know I have to build skill in different weapon types.

Before we started, I did a quick check on Nagafen with Brita, so unless the people who seem to have been farming him can get a twink raid together to kill him before Friday, we may have a chance to add another dragon to our kill list, and hopefully find some epic drops in the entrails. I have no idea how we’re going to clear his lair. Our little trick to clear Vox’s lair won’t work here… and Naggy, like Vox, has line-of-sight aggro. If he can see you, he will chase you. Maybe, if you can still bind inside the lair, we can just have someone with the gate spell be the puller. Even if lull works on the giants, which I doubt, the Fire Giant Magus who stands next to Naggy will still be aggroed when he aggros. I dunno. Maybe someone can kite Naggy while we kill his friend, though that idea seems crazy.

Well, we’ll think of something. Rayzr and Ebonfang are 52 now, and maybe some old Nostalgians could show :)

I haven’t written up a raid report for YEARS. But I absolutely have never been as happy to do so. Tonight, ten people, level 42 to 52, waded through hundreds of goblins, dozens of giants, and a couple spiders and tentacle terrors, to take down the Queen of Permafrost, the ice dragon Lady Vox. The technique we’d figured out to get the giants out of her lair without having Vox come along worked wonderfully. We tried various pull spots in order to best bring Vox without the adds from her room, and Soaridor suggested the Flag Room, which turned out to be the perfect Vox-pulling spot.

Special thanks to Gnewton, who not only served as bait for most of the night, but also sucked Vox dry of mana so she could neither heal nor gate back. Ceipheid, who kept Vox on him the entire fight even though the rest of the raid was doing their darndest to take her away. Coldheat, for braving family and a bad cold to come heal. Rayzr, for sacrificing his own life to drag Gnewton’s body from the pits. Sevaran, for swooping in with his wonderful nuking powers. Callendra and Soaridor, for being the total professionals they always are. Ebonfang for those oh so sexy slows. Said for getting disconnected :/

I honestly never thought we’d get to the point where we could kill dragons. We had no high level buffs, nor any high level characters clearing the way. Just us, and most of us started from scratch a couple of months ago, stabbing spiders in the tutorial.

Now we’re killing dragons. If Naggy had been up, he’d be dead, too. I think he is being farmed.

Oh yes, special thanks to SOE for Defiant gear and the veteran reward, Infusion of the Faithful. Being entirely immune to her AE kinda helps.

Coldheat won the Warhammer of Divine Grace
Ebonfang won a Tobrin’s Mystical Eyepatch (the other went into the bank)
Rayzr won Kavruul’s Mystic Pouch
Ceipheid’s bard got the White Dragon Hide for his epic a nice cloak that has nothing to do with his epic ><.

It was a triumph for the guild and all the people who worked so hard to prepare for this night.

No, I totally don’t like this screen shot. My only excuse is this is the only one I took!

The Tuesday group may have found its home for the next few weeks. Yes, we’ve started exploring that den of mystery and key-farming, Iceclad’s most notorious dungeon, the Tower of Frozen Shadow. Eschewing the standard Velious all-purpose building material, velium, the vampire queen Tserrina built her fortress instead out of the same solidified shadow that so many Luclin buildings were made from. It’s seven floors of fun, and each is separated from the other by teleport mirrors that take keys. Really RARE keys. We spent half the night farming the key to the Library, floor two. That included me getting hilariously stuck in the pit and being unable to get out because the skeletons at the bottom kept stunning me (finally we killed them and I was able to get out, exhausted from all that jumping).

Once we finally made it to the second floor, we settled in for a long evening’s grind farming the floor 3 (living quarters) keys. They didn’t drop. Two or three pieces of Defiant plate armor dropped (yay me), a Defiant beastlord weapon dropped (yay Tesser), a bunch of cool augs dropped (yay other people), but no key.

So we’ll probably head back next week and just continue from the library. ToFS was meant for exactly this sort of group — a slow progression through the floors. Sure, once we reach floor 7, I imagine we’ll farm the daylights out of Tserrina just like everyone else does, but it’s gonna take us a few nights to get there, and all the time, we’ll be leveling so when we DO get there, we’ll be able to take her down.

It just wouldn’t be a good night if it didn’t start out with some hot Fada death action. And he was kind enough to die three times. Getting IN to ToFS is no easy task; it’s guarded by these bone, stick and ice creatures, and if you have one now, you’ll have a dozen in ten seconds and fifty half a minute later. Every strategy we tried to get outside and rez met with more death. Well, we eventually got everyone alive and inside… it wasn’t a great way to start, but this is EverQuest we’re talking about. “Easy” is for the other guys :)

We had a new Nostalgia member along with the Tuesday group; we were thrilled to meet and group with the iksar shaman Ebonfang. And we ALSO met a new rogue named Rayzr, both of whom seem to be headed for more dragon slayin’ action with the Friday group. WELCOME!

I haven’t blogged about EQ2 in about a month from never. Not because I haven’t been playing it — I have — but just because I haven’t really been doing anything of interest. Running around, exploring. Being without a guild on my main characters tends to limit the time I spend on them, since EQ2 is a group-based game at all levels but especially so at higher levels, and without friends to group with, there’s little incentive to log in. Part of that is due to having two jobs and entirely unable to devote the time to a raiding guild that would be required, since raid guilds are themselves a second (unpaid) job. I suppose a casual guild is the best thing I could hope for, but — I LOVE RAiDING. Logging in and NOT raiding would make me sad.

Luckily, I do have a guild for some of my characters — the EQ2 branch of Nostalgia is going great. Thanks to the tireless efforts of crafters, writ-takers and heritage quest-doers, Nostalgia on the Najena server is leveling fast. I hadn’t played there for months, but it was time I buckled down and did the void storm quests on at least one character, and so I woke up my Arasai assassin, Brightknife, from her slumber.

She was level 15, still had never left Darklight Woods, and her gear was best thought of as pathetic. I’d been meaning to get her out to Timorous Deep in order to do the far, far better armor quests but had never gotten around to it. Still, double xp weekend, a bar’s worth of vitality, and another 5% from being mentored by her faithful companion-hobbit, Sam Gamgee Verd Tanglewood.

The goal was to get to level 20 so she could wear appearance armor, and also get all the pieces of appearance armor, PLUS the Void cloak with the hypnotically shifting pattern, PLUS two new weapons since all the weapons offered were upgrades. Go figure. You mean that rusted dagger might possibly not be the best possible tool for the assassin trade?

All totaled, that meant repeating the storm cleansing quest 21 times, 63 storms, 189 fights against 189 void beasts of her level. She went from level 15 to level 21 just fighting those creatures, and she hit 22 in her first-ever group, in Stormhold. She’d been invited to join just out of the blue, so why not? In all her new appearance armor, she looked quite the picture of a professional killer. A look beneath at the actual armor would reveal that she didn’t even have all the armor slots filled…

Well, when your entire fortune consists of 2 gold (fighting void beasts gives no reward but xp; no drops, no coin, no nothing), the brokerage is not a friendly place. And even that money was eaten up by buying the apprentice II upgrades to the apprentice I combat arts. It’s very very hard starting off on a new server, without the comforts that a successful level 80 character can give.

Sunday, I grouped with Said and Mayadhros and we hit up Splitpaw. Given we had no real healer, we did fairly well. We did the prequests, fought our way through Upper Splitpaw, and time had run out so we only really had time to each take a stab at the solo Arena. Once inside, Said and Mayadhros unmentored me and easily won their challenges. I managed to last until the double gnoll fight; I simply cannot take a hit. I can pretty much stunlock a single mob, but not two. I’ll try again once I have improved my gear in Timorous Deep.

After that, I started work on my MMO DNA project and got quite far until a family emergency had us spending the rest of the day at the hospital (don’t worry, nothing serious and everyone is fine, full details on my personal blog).

Oh, there’s Verd. I originally got him the bp from the Imperceptible Beauty set — which has no graphic (Brightknife is wearing that armor on her upper arms to look sleeveless), and he ran around most of the day bare-chested with that glowy cape hanging from his shoulders. But I decided he deserved some dignity, so he got that night black robe, and that cool staff which was a good upgrade to his hammer. Since he had points left over, he bought Brightknife the chair and end table seen in the first screenshot.

Also, just a quick note here, I will be at the SOE Fan Faire in Las Vegas in August for Massively. Since I kinda used up so much vacation recently AND given that the date is really close to the Q3 release of the web app I help maintain as my day job, I’ll just be there Saturday and Sunday, but if you’ll be there, too, maybe we can say hi :) My son is also coming along. He plays EQ2 on the Befallen server as the brigand Scurvsnicker.

I had NO END of trouble registering for the Fan Faire. It was awful. Site wouldn’t work for me for days. The FIFTH computer I tried, worked.

We’ll talk about this picture in a little bit :)

Now that everyone in the Friday group is 51 or 52, it was time to stretch our wings a little bit and do something even casual guilds do on occasion — raid. And we being a Nostalgia guild, the only POSSIBLE thing to raid would be the scourges of the old world, Lord Nagafen and Lady Vox.

These dragons have some restrictions — anyone higher than level 52 gets punted from the zone. The condition arose when the Ruins of Kunark expansion let everyone level to 60, and the dragons suddenly became trivial to kill. So they added the level cap, and ever since, level 52 has acquired an unholy reverence, your one chance to kill the dragons before departing for more mundane challenges.

We’ve known for awhile that the dragons were on our list, and so we stopped ourselves at 52, and there we will stay until we have killed both these dragons at least a couple of times each.

I kinda knew we were going to be disappointed with Naggy when he didn’t show on tracking even as we neared his lair. Ssrath (Egat from Erollisi Marr and Crimson Eternity) earned his scales by learning how to pull the giants as we went along. By the end, we were getting just the number of giants we wanted just when we needed them — perfect! Though Naggy wasn’t home, most of his friends were. We got a lot of uber loot — uber for 1999. Unfortunately, none of it was any upgrade for anyone.

We’ll be back when Naggy is home. We know — KNOW — we can kill him.

How can we be sure? Because we nearly took down Vox in the worst possible circumstances. When we finished in Nagafen’s Lair, we made our way to Permafrost, because there was dragon steak on the menu and a restaurant full of hungry raiders.

While Naggy’s lair is fairly empty, Vox has a LOT of friends. Friends she cares about, and wants to help when they are hurt. Because she’s a cleric. and helping her friends is not just her job, it’s the entire reason she gets up in the morning.

We just could not separate her from her giants. Sometimes five or six would come along, sometimes she’d only show up later. One time, we got her alone, and were doing mean things to her, when her loyal friends arrived. We were so close, but we had no real way of stopping her from completely healing herself aside from just hoping she would run out of mana. The Infusion of the Faithful veteran reward AA worked fine, but nothing could stop her slowly stripping our buffs. It didn’t matter, the giant adds ate our healers and then everyone else.

Next time, we’ll have new strats for clearing out her lair. The traditional way to kill her is to drain her of mana so she can neither CH nor gate home. We’ll see how that goes.

A couple of upgrades dropped from random named mobs, and that is always a nice thing. We’ll get Vox. And we’ll get Naggy. These dragons are not beyond us; we just need to get the adds dead before we take on the dragons. Without Vox’s adds and complete heals, Naggy should be easy-peasy. If we can find him up.

We’d done what we set out to do — get some experience with the encounters. We didn’t expect we’d kill any dragons tonight. We wanted to see if it was possible for us to kill dragons. The answer was a definite yes. Vox never hit me for over 200 points — her friends and her CH is all she’s got. Naggy won’t even have those.

Still, we wanted to see Naggy. And with the Nagafen Monster Mission, you can. You and your group take the part of Lord Nagafen and five of his fire giants, and kill and keep killing everyone in this annoying guild that wants to kill you all. After a quick defeat on our first try, we figured out the winning strategy. I, as Naggy, would pick off the raid one by one while the warriors kept the clerics busy, and the fire giant cleric kept me alive (I didn’t do so well keeping HIM alive a lot of the time, but he’d respawn and anyway, there were sixteen people trying to kill ME). The clerics happily wasted their CHs trying to keep themselves alive while I breathed living flame all over the place. After six tries, the NPC guild gave up, and left behind experience and some caster gloves which Gnewton won and were an upgrade!

Next week is Independence Day, so we won’t be meeting. The week after that, though — dragon steaks for everyone.