West Karana

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.

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 :)