West Karana

EQ2: Icy Keep: Retribution

Tipa — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 12:01:17 +0000

There’s “snow” time like raid time!

Why has Tipa’s storage room been transformed into a skating rink? Because she went on a raid. Yup, after many years, my ex-raiding troub who was abandoned when I quit the raiding life was back in raid chat once more. Sure, it wasn’t current content, and Tipa is not yet max level or AA, but all they really needed for the raid were warm bodies… or more accurately, warm _hands_.

Tipa finished the Withering Lands quest arc, still somewhat short of the magic level 92 that grants access to Chains of Eternity and Scars of the Awakened, the two current paths to level 95. With a good half level to go, I did a quick Chelsith run — _sans_ mercenary so I’d get the full xp — and then I ran out the xp potion in Sebilis. There were surprisingly few people in Sebilis, for a weekend. The entire lower Sebilis was mine for as long as I wanted it. I had a chance to finish a few quests I’d had sitting in the quest journal since 2007. Chasing some nameds I saw on track, I clashed with another soloer in upper Sebilis, but I got what I came for — level 92.

Vrrrewx

I wasn’t really eager to start on Chains of Eternity _or_ Scars of the Awakened. My berserker, Scatter, is so stupidly overpowered for all the solo content in both areas that I’ve seen all of both that I want to see. Nonetheless, I started on the CoE access because Tipa’s got to get to 95 somehow. She’s aided somewhat by all the level 92 gear Scatter’s been farming for the past several months, which instantly boosted her to > 42K health when she leveled. Hence the change from the comfortable clothing she was wearing to the bad-ass outfit she now wears. Also, note the flamey sword she wields? That’s a Soulfire blade — _another_ quest finally finished, with help from a couple guildies. Hilariously, none of the Soulfire quest rewards have scout stats, since the stat readjustment awhile back made agility and stamina the only important stats for scouts. None of the scout-ready rewards had any agility at all. INT or STR, sure. No AGI.

The Withered Lands dragon

Anyway, was starting on the CoE access, and reading on 80-89 chat where someone was trying to get a raid together to finish Icy Keep: Retribution. This is the raid at the end of the Frostfell winter content, taking players through a variant of Permafrost where you are to rescue a baby dragon from evil forces seeking to control it. The solo and heroic versions end with the dragon recaptured; the story finishes in this raid. Since this raid cannot be soloed, and requires at least six actual real players to complete, nobody does it anymore. The raid leader had been trying to complete the achievement for years. He was so desperate that even a level 92 dirge would be welcome.

All I would have to do was pull a switch at the right time.

That worked out pretty well. He shared the quest for the warm gloves necessary to allow the switch pulling, though I missed out on the larger quest through the zone itself. We worked through several bosses with a couple wipes as we learned the encounters, and our lack of any sort of heals (the healers had gone link dead, which is how there came to be spots opened up for Hamal and I) wasn’t a real disadvantage — until we met Vrrewx once more, and watched him transform from a cute baby dragon to a vicious killer intent on eating halflings, and anyone else.

This was not a fight that worked well without healing. I switched from dirge to inquisitor, and a kitty warden who’d gone link dead suddenly returned. With two healers, it was over fairly quickly. I combined the Epic E’ci tokens won both by Tipa and Dera and bought a lot of ice-themed stuff for Tipa’s inn room. And that’s how her storage room became Zamboni Land.

For those about to die…

I was going to catch up with DCUO and Neverwinter in this same post, but I’ve rambled on too long about EQ2 for that. I’ll have to post about THOSE adventures another time.

EQ2: The Sad Fate of Tserrina Syl’Tor

Tipa — Sat, 25 May 2013 16:19:48 +0000

This isn’t how it went….

We had a bunch of people hanging out in the Lunar Wolves guild hall last night. We’ve been threatening to, someday, form a group and go DO something for months now, but with everyone on their own real life schedules and our vastly differing levels of gear and skill, we just never seem to be on the same page at the same time.

But the desire was there, and soon enough we found ourselves at the bottom of the Tower of Frozen Shadow in the Great Divide. We were going to take on the Vampire Queen herself, Tserrina Syl’Tor. I was on my mage, and… wait… no… just had an EverQuest flashback. I used to camp Tserrina with my mage again and again, trying to get her robe. Even though Tsuki has a Plane of Fire robe, I’ve just always wanted to wear Tserrina’s.

And it’s more a flash-forward than a flashback, since I logged in to EverQuest this morning to take her on. Having not played an EQ1 mage for five years or more, it was a learning experience. There were deaths. Some of them, mine.

She didn’t drop the robe. But, we were talking about EverQuest II.

An Accursed Wedding

With most everyone possessing several capable alts, it took awhile before we found a combo that worked for everyone. I volunteered to heal the instance with my inquisitor. Ejay was barding, Treadmill tanked with his pally, Weej was on his swashbuckler, Malforia on his necro, and Hamal being stabby with his assassin.

We didn’t really expect the tower to be any real danger, but it was worth the trip to finish some quests, get some more gnomeskin for our wardrobes, and just have some fun.

The wedding was wonderfully done. Oh, wait. Backing up.

At some point during the lower floors, Tread, the tank, succumbed to exhaustion and went to bed. Nobody else wanted to play tank, so I offered to switch to Scatter, my crap geared berserker, and we would use a mercenary for healing. Healing is pretty easy when you’re in a good group, but tanking — for a good group — is incredibly challenging.

Nonetheless, this isn’t the hardest zone in the world, and we worked up to the wedding without too much trouble. Now, the wedding back in the original ToFS was just a wedding being endlessly replayed by the hapless wedding party and guests for centuries for the amusement of their vampire masters.

The story is a little different in the EverQuest 2 version. In this one, the undead wedding is interrupted by the vampire queen Tserrina Syl’Tor who is continually angered by this wedding while her love goes unrequited. Her love, Mayong Mistmoore, soon shows up to banish Tserrina once more to the top of the tower.

Saved by the Dain

After the wedding were a couple floors of topsy-turvy where we fought vampire nobility and collected mirror shards. We placed them in a particular way at the very top of the tower, where they opened the portal to Tserrina’s lair. She is a two group fight, and this is usually where tower runs end.

Not this night. With a crap geared tank and an NPC healer, we decided to give it a shot. The merc died midway through our run. Scatter has a lot of self-heals and death saves, so I could hold Tserrina and her advisor at bay while Malforia rezzed the dead. The end of the fight, though, has a fully-healed, invulnerable Tserrina and there was nothing we could do but to wipe and try again.

Someone took a cheat peek at the wiki for the fight. Turned out we were doing everything pretty much as it should happen, except that the missing Dain, whom Tserrina has imprisoned in her tower with her for some reason (probably explained through the Coldain Ring quest) would take care of the vampire queen if we’d just bring her close to him at the correct time.

We replayed the scenario, except without so many deaths. I figured out when annoying adds were going to pop and managed to gather those before the dying started. The healer merc stayed alive, and when the advisor was about to aggro again, we dragged him to the Dain and killed the advisor at the dwarf king’s feet. A furious and fully-healed Tserrina swooped in to finish us off, but was instead trapped by the Dain’s power.

All that was left was to loot and gate back to the guild hall… and have a little chat with the mender.

There’s so much older content in the game that is just every bit as much fun as the day it was released; we’ve seen that in our Emerald Halls run and last night’s Frozen Shadow adventures. When you’re with friends, almost anything is fun.

Crayon Chronicles: A Roguelike for your Inner Second Grader

Tipa — Fri, 24 May 2013 12:10:04 +0000

Crayon Chronicles

I should have called this “A Child’s First Roguelike”. Or, “How to get through school with only an Owl on a Stick”. Whatever. Outer Grid Games’ “Crayon Chronicles” is a short, sweet RPG that combines a whimsical art style with easy gameplay and a few chuckles to make the best roguelike I’ve played all year.

Roguelikes are games based off the old mainframe RPG Rogue. Games of this sort share some tropes; randomly generated levels, turn-based gameplay, a single life and a near-unobtainable goal. These games can be won, but the point is usually to survive longer than you did the last time. Winning is almost beside the point.

Outer Grid Games successfully funded Crayon Chronicles on Kickstarter last month. I loved the art style, and I loved even more that the game was essentially done already and would be released soon. So many Kickstarter games are so far in the future that it’s easy to forget they exist.

Bad report card :(

In Crayon Chronicles, you play a middle school students whose friends have been kidnapped by some unknown villain. Even though nobody else seems that upset by this turn of events, you decide it’s your mission to go find your friends, rescue them, and then see what’s on TV or something.

You’ll choose from an arsenal of weapons you’ll find along the way — a saw, a warhammer, a ruler, a slingshot, an owl on a stick, a dustpan — and protect yourself with awesome armor — like a wool sweater, a paper-bag helmet, a beanie…. You’ll gain incredible abilities (like game face, or puffy face) to befazzle your foes, and treats and bricks and cherry bombs for emergencies.

You’ll only be able to carry and use one melee weapon and one ranged weapon at a time, though. Same for armor, you can only keep what you can wear. The four slots of inventory are used for consumables, like moldy bricks to throw, or treats to eat for health.

Ranged weapons are recharged via melee attacks. You’ll find ranged weapons that recharge quickly but don’t do much damage, or ranged weapons (like the hand cannon in the first screenshot) that do awesome damage, but recharge very slowly. Hint: don’t use those. When you’re facing a room full of range-using monsters, you’ll want to respond in kind. Plus, the range-monsters cheat. You can only toss things in the eight cardinal directions; they can toss things at you from any direction if you’re in range.

You gain health from eating treats, opening doors and killing monsters. Determining when to open doors and in which order to kill monsters is one of the hidden strategic bits in the game. Bad resource management leads to situations like the one that killed me in a graveyard, where range-using monsters pelted me from a distance, and I had no more doors to open, nor treats to eat, and the nearest monster was too far away.

In a genre known for its complexity, Crayon Chronicles is a simple, fun game that will be a go-to game for quick fun around here for quite awhile. It supports both keyboard and gamepads, and will soon be coming to the Xbox Live Arcade.

EQ2: Wuoshi Must Die

Tipa — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:34:01 +0000

Can you find the tank in this picture?

The real slap in the face came when I won a Fae Wing Cloak. How is this even a THING? I suppose I should weep for all my unwinged brothers and sisters who now have to walk on unfamiliar ground because their wings have been turned into outerwear, but for me, a Fae, to wear one… that’s like wearing human leather boots with babyskin gloves.

Afterward, I respectfully declined lottoing any other Fae Wing Cloaks.

We were in the Emerald Halls for several reasons. First, to pick up a unique appearance weapon for Hamal. Second, for the nostalgic fun of duoing an annoying raid that used to take several nights, back in the day. And third, because Wuoshi just really, really wanted to die.

I’d forgotten everything I ever knew about the raid; even which guild I was in when we did this raid. (A look through the archives of this blog reveals our first kill was in December of 2007, and the guild was Eternal Chaos on the Befallen server). A lot of the mobs in Emerald Halls stun, leading to a few fights were we could only watch helplessly as our hit points dropped to zero. We broke off the first night after making little headway against the Farstrider Unicorn, whose adds kept us helpless.

Throughout the next day we texted strat ideas back and forth, got back in game and Hamal offtanked the stun adds while I whittled down the unicorn. Things broke free toward the end, but we managed to get the win and to go on to finish clearing the second floor.

Wolves and Debauchery

Third day was the third floor, and we got a little help from members of the Debauchery guild, whom I’d just helped click statues for the Assassin epic. We all chrono’d down to level 80 and headed in to kill the dragon.

But first, we’d have to clear the level of everything EXCEPT the dragon, without aggroing the dragon. We’d already lost the chance to clear out some of the lesser trash by not having a mage to accept the challenge fight at the beginning of the level. We hadn’t had a player priest for the first level; Hamal easily won the scout challenge for the second level, but the problem with duoing raids is, when a specific class is needed, probably that’s not going to happen.

After a couple of accidental aggroing of Wuoshi that summoned every mob on the third floor to kill us, we became VERY paranoid and respectful of the creature. And oh my god, there’s a bunch of trash up there. I remembered why nobody liked this raid very much.

When we’d killed every other mob, we pulled Wuoshi to the island in the middle of the zone. I vaguely remembered us kiting her around that central pillar. And when she popped two adds, I vaguely also remembered that we used to offtank those somewhere far away while the rest of the raid killed the dragon. When I got teleported into a river, I had nothing. I didn’t remember that at all. But I was a troubadour then, and my actual connection with raid mechanics was minimal at best. I was there to make mages look good and that was pretty much that.

I had solid aggro, though, thanks to some recent shuffling around of abilities such that the super aggro ability, Adrenaline, was way more available. With that running, it is impossible for any non-fighter to pull aggro from something I want paying attention to me.

Wuoshi Whacker!

We were all pretty pumped about the kill. Raiding this old stuff is FUN. No longer require a full raid, there’s not the endless cycle of death and discovery that comes with doing raids at level, it’s raiding with all the frustrating bits removed. I know there’s people out there who could solo the zone in three pulls, fifteen minutes tops, but speed and loot was never the real goal here.

It was always and ever about having fun with friends — that’s the hidden heart to any MMO. Grouping up with friends and going off to kill a dragon is what keeps me logging in, running solo instances again and again so that I am geared well enough to be the tank for whatever anyone chooses to do.

Now that we have a group, we can do a lot of the old school stuff that it’s impossible to do these days. Finish my Soulfire quest. Kill Trakanon. Hamal mentioned the Djinn Master. Soloing these things is pointless, but chrono-ing down, grouping up, working on strat and moving in for the kill — this is the stuff from which stories and memories are made.

Sure, I’d love to work on current content, too. Who knows? That could be a thing that happens someday.

Neverwinter: Playing to Neverwin

Tipa — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:09:44 +0000

Lolth commands you to rate this highly

We continued our Neverwinter grouping experiment Monday with another Foundry episode, “Visitors from the Underdark”. The Foundry adventures are, we figured, our best chance of finding duo content. In “Visitors”, Lord Ebonrend and his family have gone mysteriously missing; our job — to find him and arrest him. If I remember right, he was thought to have gone dark in order to instigate a plot to rule Neverwinter. In Neverwinter, not checking in with the government often enough marks you as a traitor. We get to his mansion and find the place magically sealed up, but with an animated suit of armor to help us dispel (de-spell?) the shields.

Turns out the missing Lord Ebonrend had sealed the place to stop an invasion from the Underdark! A portal had been opened in one of the many sub-basements, and drow and their minions had poured from it, killing and pillaging and causing all sorts of mayhem. And now, we’d just opened the way for them to attack Neverwinter from within.

So, I guess Lord Ebonrend WAS guilty of treason? But no, it was his half-brother! That’s okay, we’ll kill him for you. And everyone else we come across. At the very portal to the Underdark, Lord Ebonrend catches up to us, and he’s making jokes and having a lot of fun, while Kasul and I are staring at him, agog and aghast, wondering how he can be having a great time when his family has been slaughtered, his treasonous half-brother not only just betrayed him but was also just killed, and there’s a PORTAL to the UNDERDARK in his BASEMENT. But no, he’s decided it’s open mike night at Lolth’s Bar and Grill.

Clerics are Lord Neverember’s hatchet-men

The mission tried to get us to head straight into the sequel, but we were dubious. We returned to Neverwinter and continued on to the Tower District.

This orc-infested area steeps players in the lore of the Many-Arrows orc clan. It includes the Orc Assault skirmish and every player’s first actual group dungeon, the Cloak Tower. The content outside of the skirmish and the dungeon were meant for a solo player; with the two of us, progress was pretty quick. We did the skirmish a couple of times, me trying each time for the tank ranking and Kasul for the damage ranking. We each did respectably.

Just before we headed into the Cloak Tower, we reached level 16 and were able to hire companions. I chose a healer, and Kasul chose a wizard, ~~and Lord Neverember branded us as traitors~~. We and our level 1 companions queued up for the Cloak Tower, a place of enduring silence. It is said that the player that utters even one word in the Cloak Tower will be ~~marked as a traitor by Lord Neverember~~ shunned by all the good people of Neverwinter, but all our reputations ended the night intact, and with me on top of the tank chart and Kasul on top of the damage chart, our rightful spots.

Next week: I believe we have some city plots to work through before we head to the bandit hills. And also, more foundry! Maybe we’ll do the next chapter of the Underdark arc.

DCUO: The inmates are running the asylum?

Tipa — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:01:33 +0000

Arkham Asylum

Before we get started, I want to draw your attention to the right bit of the screenshot above. Where we see the entrance to the Arkham Lobotomy Theater. With marquee lights to attract passers-by. They sell snacks and Soder Cola at the door, and tradition has it that you’re supposed to hurl popcorn at the doctors when they make poor incisions.

Commissioner Gordon had sent us to the asylum because, apparently, three of its most notorious residents — Drs Pamela Isley, Victor Fries and Jonathan Crane — AKA Poison Ivy, Mister Freeze and The Scarecrow — have not only escaped, but turned the three wings of the Asylum into their own private playgrounds. Lore scattered through the place implies that their common attending physician had been driven crazy by the three and mysteriously disappeared after giving them their freedom.

Number One: If you’re a scientist or a doctor in Gotham City, you’re probably going to go insane and start killing people.

Number Two: No matter how many people you kill in your mad rampages, the full resources of the city will be given over to see that you get the care you need so that you can be, someday, set free to kill again.

Number Three: Gotham City provides little to no oversight over the incarceration of the people who have brought murder and terror to the city.

Number Four: Naming your hospitals after places from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos is somehow a reasonable idea.

This Tier 3 instance opens with the super villains having taken over Arkham Asylum. Commissioner Gordon sends a team in there to restore order; they are not heard from again. He calls upon Batman and Robin; Batman is captured and not heard from again. Robin just sits, lonely and confused, in the lobby, waiting for ~~Dad~~ Batman to come pick him up. Gotham’s Finest have failed their city. Time for Team Spode to take the lead.

The Scarecrow taunted us throughout his wing of the hospital as we murdered his minions and freed staff and constables. The fight was familiar from the T2 solo instance. It’s only been a couple of days, but I don’t remember anything special about it.

Mister Freeze was a little deadlier; his minions tended to mob us. During his final fight, we had to remember to bring mobs, and the good doctor himself, near to the open boilers to weaken them, but we didn’t have any real issues with the fight.

Poison Ivy also was familiar from her T2 solo instance. There were some close moments, but we were never in danger of a wipe in any of the three wings.

In the night’s least surprising twist, the three villains fled to the lobby to await us together. I’m not sure if we were required to kill them in a specific order or it just happened that way; it seemed to me that only one took damage at a time. Whichever. It was a fairly long instance, and we didn’t have a chance to do another T3 that night, so we had to just accept the thanks of a grateful Commissioner and a useless Boy Wonder and call it a night.

Teal Lantern was able to get another piece of Tier 2.5 gear with the marks earned from the instance and some Center City dailies, but she’s still stuck at CR 56. Lord Spode and Stingheal are sitting at around CR 70, and are likely the reason the instance seemed easier than expected. Kaptain KY’s CR is probably near Teal Lantern’s.

STO: Where’s my TIMESHIP?

Tipa — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:42:20 +0000

Computer, freeze simulation Tipa alpha six

Sooooooo I log into Star Trek Online after being away for several months. With the Romulans coming, I’d better get familiar with the game again, right? My monthly stipend of Zen (cash shop currency) for being a subscriber has built up enough that I could get the three-pack of Andorian escort ships I’ve been wanting since pretty much Day One for free. Free in a sense, given I’ve been subscribing to a game that I haven’t been actively playing. But, I wouldn’t be out any _additional_ cash.

But… Romulans as a playable faction are something I’ve been wanting ever since I maxed out Tipa D’zoph’s level, but with that not available, played through the Klingon storyline with my sexy old school Klingon captain.

Now, though, they’re on their way! And with a whole bunch of new ships!

Problem is… I can only play two MMOs at once, and that is one more than I probably SHOULD play. Before Neverwinter, it was EQ2 and DC Universe Online. When Neverwinter launched, DCUO dropped to our Sunday night game. I am really hoping that The Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar would be considerate and space themselves out enough so I could finish Neverwinter before moving to one of those two…..

…. And then yesterday’s bombshell: Rift, my most recent “Play just one MMO, for a year” experiment, has gone F2P. I’d dropped the game when I’d finished all the group content at the time and had found, again, that the raiding lifestyle is not something I can deal with any longer. They’ve added a whole lot of new content since then, but once gone, it’s not easy to return, especially since I’d be pulling out the checkbook to even check out the new stuff.

In June, that won’t be an excuse.

I just have no idea, whatsoever, where I’m supposed to get the time to return to the game. But, it’s definitely worth checking out once more.

Neverwinter: I just met you, and this is crazy…

Tipa — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:04:25 +0000

Nina and Kasul at the Job Board

This is a Neverwinter experiment, and it could be one that has never before been attempted. We don’t even know if the game supports this style of play, but what if… what if two or more characters always grouped, and never soloed, through the PvE content of the game?

Most of the content in the game is designed to be completed either solo, or solo with a companion. Two characters (and, eventually, two characters and their companions) would necessarily make that sort of content even more trivial. But two characters aren’t enough to do the actual group content. Even if it were possible to run the dungeons and skirmishes as a duo, leveling up entirely by repeating the same dungeons and skirmishes until the next were unlocked would be a pretty dull way of playing the game.

However, there’s one kind of Neverwinter content that scales to player level and can be designed to support duos and other unusual playing choices — Foundry missions.

Old Jerry?

(The above is a screenshot from the first Old Jerry Foundry mission, which assumes nobody reads NPC dialog).

Kasul of Shattered Blog (hey, what’s the update on Nethack?) decided to take a break from EverQuest and give Neverwinter a try. We thought it would be fun to try grouping in a game that does not promote that style of play. I deleted my halfling Great Weapon fighter and rerolled her as a half-elf Guardian fighter, and Kasul rolled an elf Trickster rogue. We figured that would be a decent combo — the fighter takes the aggro, the rogue, with combat advantage, does devastating damage. Heals will be the job of the eventual companions.

The solo quests and instances go incredibly fast with two players. The uber sword and purple striker wolf companion I got from the Founders box doesn’t hurt things, either. We queued up for the game’s actual group content as soon as we could; we’ve done Blacklake Skirmish several times.

But the best of it all has been the Foundry missions. Our first was one specifically designed for two characters. Someone had designed a bar filled with members of his guild, who came under sudden pirate and demon attack. Our job: save them.

This guy’s guild is filled with super people, but they can’t fight worth a darn. If my guild had to be saved from complete devastation by two low level adventurers, well, I’d have to have a talk with my recruiting officer.

There were a lot of really decent fights in that mission, though. It’s fun to see how people build out their dungeons. Some are utilitarian affairs with no flair; some are filled with extra bits and pieces, like the one we did last night — clearing the Nasher Sewers of the Master and his undead legions — which included special accolades for leaving the glowing path and going exploring.

1.49999 elves walk into a bar…

We’re only meeting once a week, so it’s going to be a couple of weeks before we hit the Cloak Tower, the first actual dungeon. We’ll be forced to move through it super-fast, because that’s how random groups move — Neverwinter will have trained everyone, by then, how NOT to work within a group.

Not us; we’ll know.

DCUO: League of Assassins Stronghold

Tipa — Mon, 13 May 2013 10:56:28 +0000

Kaptain KY shows off his jerkin

That pun wasn’t mine….

Anyway. Since both the good Kaptain and I had both squeezed into Tier 3 over the past week, we spent the first half hour or so of our DCUO night enjoying all The Flash’s home town, Center City, had to offer a collection of tired but scrappy group of superheroes from the mean streets of Gotham City. We took down a bunch of Paradox Reapers, strange creatures from the nooks and crannies of Time, and then their boss. No screenshots! Argh.

Once everyone had their connection problems dealt with, it was off to our first Tier 3 group alert. The daily double was the League of Assassins Stronghold. How hard could it be?

The League of Assassins is led by the evil Ra’s al Ghul, a near-immortal super villain who uses the power of the rejuvenating Lazarus Pits to… just be evil, I guess. Our job: go to the source of al Ghul’s power, the Lazarus Pits themselves, fight our way through his assassins, and kill the unkillable.

Do not get between Team Spode and a greenie…

Aaaaaand that’s what we did. A couple of the encounters initially took us by surprise, but we’d figure them out and win the next time. Tier 3? Tier 3 ain’t nothing. We killed R’as al Ghul, he regenerated and lost his shirt in the Lazarus Pits, we killed him again. Got some ungodly number of marks from it, too, enough for me to get two pieces of Tier 2.5 gear from the street vendor in Center City, bringing my Combat Rating to 56, I think.

Even given the half hour we spent doing quests in Center City, we ended the Stronghold with forty five minutes left. We decided to have a go at another Tier 3, South Gotham Courthouse.

The Bailiff

South Gotham Courthouse has been bottled by Brainiac and is in the process of being digitized. Our job is to take Gotham back, one building at a time, and so we’ve managed, somehow, to attach a staging platform to the side of the bottle and get heroes inside it somehow. Graviton generators inside the bottle prevent the use of super travel powers, so we were stuck walking everywhere.

After disabling the digitizers who were subsuming the humans caught in the bubble, the Brainiac-ized court officials decided to put humanity on trial, just for us. Starting with jury selection. Brainiac robots would try to fill the jury box with robots, while we would try to fill it with humans. We eventually figured out that most of the team needed to hang near the jury box and stop Brainiac robots while someone found human jurors and carried them back.

Oracle managed to get a comm line in and directed us to the graviton generators. We had to use jump fields, conveniently positioned right beneath them, to get up to the generators, defeat the guardians, and shut them down. Hey, I remember this fight from EQ2…. anyway. Once that was done, we could fly again. YAY FLYING.

The Prosecutor and Defending Attorney

We then faced the Prosecutor and the Defending Attorney. You’d think ONE of those two would be HELPING us, but it seemed the court was stacked against us, and the court was about as impartial as Gordon Ramsey on Pasta Night. The trick is to keep the jurors disabled (where are the human jurors? No idea) while destroying evidence and killing witnesses to keep the lawyers from making their case and enabling them to be attacked.

We died, and died and died and died and eventually just ran out of time. It’s looking, though, like we’ll just have to keep the group split, again, and have someone killing the couriers and witnesses while the main group keeps the jurors down and kills the lawyers when they are killable. Seems like it could be a long fight — and there’s a boss still to come after these, the Supreme Justice that we can see at the very top of the courthouse.

Sad bit is, even when we do beat this mission, the courthouse will probably still be bottled.

EQ2: Scars of the Awakened: Part 4, The Completening

Tipa — Sun, 12 May 2013 17:25:29 +0000

The Field Marshal and I go a-hunting

I really have finished the Scars of the Awakened storyline, all the tradeskill quests, all the adventure quests, gotten the titles, loot and achievements and picked up a couple upgrades from my innumerable trips through the Siren’s Grotto solo adventures. I’m going to try and describe the zone’s story, as I’ve come to understand it.

Velious was the place where the planet-sized mother of all dragons, Veeshan, clawed Norrath to claim it as her own. The Great Divide, Wakening Lands and Cobalt Scar were all wounds left by her monstrous claws. She left her draconic brood to grow and thrive on Norrath and then went to the Plane of Sky where, after many centuries, her long-imprisoned descendant Kerafrym the Sleeper, found her, killed her, and started his war against the dragon faithful that united the warring Claws of Veeshan (CoV) and the Ring of Scale (RoS) against the Sleeper’s faction, the Awakened.

In EverQuest 2′s timeline, the Awakened have recently rampaged through the CoV city of Skyshrine. Skyshrine’s king, Yelinak, has fled and claimed sanctuary in the dwarf city of Thurgadin. Having left Awakened forces behind to hold Skyshrine, the dragon rebels moved on to Cobalt Scar, the source of an immense, evil draconic force.

The Combine empire, forced back to Norrath from their home on Luclin after Kerafrym destroyed that moon in his rage, has forged a path through Velious from the Great Divide through the Withering Lands and over the protected sides of the immense plateau that the CoV dragons made of Skyshrine and its surroundings to save them from the Awakened (a trick that didn’t work at all, clearly). With the path open, the Combine forces discover that their worst fears were realized; Kerafrym is establishing a beachhead on the Skyshrine plateau from which to conquer the lower world. The Othmir who were stranded in Velious when the plateau was raised entered Cobalt Scar with the Combine, but ran off to find their long-lost brethren without waiting for the Combine to clear the way, and have not been heard from since.

That’s where we players come in.

Kelorek’Dar

The Awakened Forces

The Awakened are based in the Drakelands in the west of Cobalt Scar. They are led by Kelorek’Dar, an epicx2 whose position is marked in the tactical map the Grand Marshall is examining in the main Combine camp at Scarstone. (It was by looking at the map that I knew where to find the drake lord). SOE loves anagrams, and Kelorek’Dar’s name re-arranges to Drake — something. Klore? I dunno. They need to wipe out the Combine forces in order to continue their assault on Norrath.

The Fina’s Retreat Othmir

Most of the Othmir that accompanied the Combine forces from the Great Divide are stranded on a large rock down toward the beach from the Combine supply camp. They are penned in on all sides by the walrus-like Ulthork, some of whom are insane, and all of which are hostile. The players here will fight the Ulthork and help Osh, the Othmir Speaker, connect with their god, Prexus, the god’s avatar, Lodizal, and with the Othmir left behind in Great Divide and the Eastern Wastes.

The Undead Othmir Camp

The remaining Great Divide Othmir continued searching for their lost cousins, and found they had all been killed and re-animated as undead. With the help of Osh, the player will discover the ancient evil that lies beneath Cobalt Scar. It is the evil of a powerful, long-dead dragon (that doesn’t correspond to any EQ1 dragon that I remember; the one dragon in Cobalt Scar, way back when, was a water dragon). When disturbed by an inquisitive Othmir High Shaman of old, its evil power killed the all the Othmirs and re-animated them as undead. The player will put the spirit back to rest, but its evil influence will continue to be felt for years.

The Supply Camp

This is the first outpost of the Combine Empire in Cobalt Scar, and is where players will enter the zone until they unlock the travel point in Scarstone. They are in occasional communication with Scarstone, but have lost contact with a camp of Outriders who had opened a path through the forest maze to allow travel between the camp and Scarstone.

The Kelethin Outrider Camp

It’s not clear what happened to the Kelethin Outriders, who apparently were taken from the camp without fight or struggle. The quests I did leave the question up in the air, but hint that the forest itself rose up one night and took them, Huorn-like, to their dooms. The forest spirits and other, normally benevolent, forest entities are violently enraged and have risen up against Scarstone, though this may be because the forest has been partially cleared to build the Scarstone camp. Scarstone is protected against the forest, but the Kelethin Outriders were not able to place their wards in time to prevent their own destruction.

Scarstone

The main Combine Empire camp, the focus of the defense against the drakes, and the direct entrypoint to Cobalt Scar, once unlocked via the adventuring or crafting timelines. Both timelines deal largely with fortifying the camp against drake attack and making sorties into the Drakelands. However, they still have questions about the rise of the undead on the eastern and northern shores, and the mysterious sirens to the northwest.

Howler’s Cove

These undead are the risen remains of sailors whose ships were called to smash themselves on the shoals and reefs by the Darkwater Sirens. They have been re-animated by an evil power emanating from Siren’s Grove.

Fighting mindflayers in the Tavalan Abyss

Siren’s Grotto

Initially asking for help from the Combine forces to save them from the undead, the player finds within the Alluring Embrace instance that the sirens have been capturing and enslaving Combine soldiers. It’s possible but unlikely that the sirens were responsible for the abduction of the Kelethin Outriders, as the ones you can save say they are from the main camp. When the queen of the sirens is defeated, she calls upon the Tavalan mindflayers to grant her sanctuary as she escapes to their lair in the Tavalan Abyss.

If you follow her through the portal to the depths of Darkhollow, you’ll eventually find the Queen in her sanctuary. Defeating her lets you confront the Lord of the Tavalan, whose power of fear and mind-control had corrupted the siren queen.

The adventure timeline ends with you and Field Marshall Vishra entering a special version of the Tavalan Abyss, the Tear in the Grotto, to discover that the source of the queen’s power was a fragment of the necrotic dragonbone that had killed and corrupted the Othmir and raised the undead in Howling Cove.

Scatterfall the Not-a-Fae

That’s my understanding of the plot behind the new Game Update. This would have been a really slick Adventure Pack back in the day, but now it’s just a free update. The amount of new lore is amazing; it advances the Velious storyline and sets up more stories (a return to the Undershore, maybe?). There are all-new armor sets with new looks and equivalent to the Chains of Eternity sets, the solo zones are first rate, and I look forward to someday seeing the group versions of those zones.

Careful readers of this blog may remember Scatter as a Fae. Well, one day, call it Saturday, I was waiting for my timer to expire so I could re-run the Daily Dreadcutter, and noticed that with the Blessing of Xegony flight power running, my character was being dwarfed… BY A DWARF. Every time I do get into a group, it’s hard for people to keep track of where I am because, too small. Frustrating, especially if you’re a tank.

I looked through my illusion collection and found a wood elf illusion. I dropped my Fae flight power, cast the illusion, and summoned the mount I got from spending the Dungeon Maker marks back when I was powerleveling myself in those, back when that was something you could do.

The Once and Future Fae

I actually really like the look. Probably not quite enough to pay real money to make it permanent, but there’s something to be said for looking normal once in awhile. I bought some raid boots, and when I ported in to collect them, I was happy to look like a proper tank, with glowing shield and a very cool sword I got from the Tavalan lord, a look sure to inspire any group that would take me as their defender.

I haven’t been sword-and-board with Scatterfall for ages, preferring the slow but astonishingly damaging swings of a greatsword. But, until I can pair my new sword… sec, lemme drop a better picture of it… it’s so swordfishy, the folks in the auction channel wanted to buy it from me….

Swordfish: The Movie: The Game

Anyway, until I can pair my new sword with a comparable sword, I’m using a weighted cazicite shield with the appearance of an aetherplate shield from the CoE timeline. This allows me to use a power from the shield AA line to improve hate and just make me more tank-y. In my Daily Dreadcutter runs, instead of being able to slice down the nameds before I kill the adds (and go dragging them with me), I kill more slowly and the adds are typically dead by the time the nameds are. On the other hand, I take so much less damage that my death prevention trigger spells don’t even fire.

All this is getting me closer and closer to being able to tank for a group. Inching up on 60K health unbuffed, my haste is near the 400 target, and my multi-attack near the 600 target, so getting close. Granted, these are the targets for a melee dps, but I don’t know what the target stats are for a tank yet. Probably should be working on hate and block. But, I do end up soloing 99.9% of the time. And my zerker AAs give me huge boosts to hate and block as it is.

These are the uncertainties that keep me from grouping :P