West Karana

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 :)

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.