Fan Faire

Fan Faire is now over and I have put together a list of the EQ2 related news from the weekend. Im sure I’ve got stuff wrong and missed stuff out, i’ll edit in as and when i discover errors 🙂

 

You can watch the first of the webcasts >> HERE <<  (the main EQ2 stuff, including some video of the new expansion area, is about 55 minutes in)

You can see a short video of the new area >> HERE <<

Miragul’s Phylactery – The Crucible

A Guide to Miragul’s Phylactery : The Crucible 

Location : Everfrost

 

 

Void shard mission giver – Chief Scholar Lakewind -261, -4, -366

Quests to get before entering :
Making Sense of Miragul Part 3
Getting there before the Coalition

Anyone need some grin? I have plenty to spare…….

Sunday night was a great night for me, took Kalyyn into VP and finally got his mythical!!

This is the second time the people I have been raiding with have cleared VP, but , unfortunatly, I missed the first Hoshkar kill.

We started into VP on Saturday night and cleared up to Nexona. Sunday night we continued through.

We had decided on an 11:00  time limit, and it was getting close to that as we pulled the previous named Ashenclaw, so I wasnt expecting to get the update until Monday.

But, Ashenclaw went down easy and the rest of the raid was nice enough to stay on a little later to get my update 🙂

Hoshkar

 

The Hoshkar fight is a strange one, basically Hoshkar is on an island surrounded by lave, the raid jump onto a small island which revolves around the larger one. The tank jumps onto the big island and drags Hoshkar round in circles while everyone else blasts away from the outside.

He went down easily and quickly and, as we where calling it for the night anyway, I grabbed a port to Kunzar Jungle and handed in the final part of my mythical quest.

As the onscreen message appeared I was out of my seat and doing a victory lap of the living room!! How I didnt wake the kids i dont know 😛

 

The Templar Mythical has some great stats and effects, its a shame it looks like something that Ogres would use to lay Norrathian paving slabs 😛

Luckily we recently went back and finished the prismatic quests (mainly to grab Darathars head for the Guild hall) and I chose the rod, looks great in the appearance slot.

 

I am enjoying raiding and look forward to giving Trakanon a few lumps with the mallet! Also wil be nice to see a bit deeper into the TSO raids.

I do want to limit the raiding a bit now though and get back to running instances etc.. with the guildies, this is definitely where I have the most fun in EQ2.

80!80!80!80!80!80!80!80!80!80!

wOOt!

Last night our guild ( Light of the Wolf ) finally hit level 80!

It was a great feeling, we formed the guild almost 4 years ago and as a very, very casual guild, at times reaching cap seemed like an impossible task.

I know that guild leveling is much easier now than it was, but it still feels like a huge accomplishment for us.

Since we formed i have met many great (and a few not-so-great) people and formed some lasting friendships. People have come and gone (some come and gone and come and gone and come and gone, such is the way of the MMO player 😛 ) but virtually everyone who is or has been a part of LotW over the years has made some contibution. We could never have done it without such efforts.

I must admit to being a bit disallussioned with the guild over recent weeks. I think this is probably caused a lot more by R/L happenings tbh.

It takes a lot of effort to run a guild and try to keep everyone happy and the usual spring-drop-off, in numbers, seems to have effected me far more this year than it usually does.

But……

i think im getting over this now 😛

I have been trying to balance more between doing stuff for myself (selfish bugger i know 😛 ) and guild stuff. I may have tipped a little to far in the selfish direction but im sure i’ll strike a balance soon.

Also, the lull in numbers that hit a couple of weeks ago seems to have been a temporary thing. We are still much lower in active members than we where a month or two ago, but we still have enough online most nights to have a bit going on. Im hoping to entice in a few new members too 🙂

And hitting 80 has re-awakened my love for the guild in a bigger way than i thought it would!

We had an event last night, to try and get as many guildies involved in the final ding as we could.

We where sitting at 98% so decied to hit the Godking, to grab the last bit of status and get his head as a trophy!

I wont go to much into details of the fight etc… (im sure other blogging guildies will do a better  job than i could) but, suffice to say, it was chaotic but we killed him!

The funny thing was though, we didnt get any status from the kill, so we had to run back to the GH and throw out some crafting writs to get the final few %

It did work out well though, as Emaimee (Our guild leader and the longest serving EQ2er in the guild 😛 ) handed in the final writ which bought us to 80, very fitting I thought 😀

While we where doing this, the guild I have been raiding with was doing really well in VP. Although I missed out onmy Mythical update, i woudl much rather have been with my own guild and Hoshkar isnt going anywhere!.

The raid has now worked its way through VP and just has Phara Darr to kill, They are going in tonight (unfortunalty I wont be able to make it) and im sure they will take down the last of the Dragons!

Here be Dragons!

The slug is dead! long live the slug!!

We hit the Chamber of Destiny last night with the intention of going straight for the Leviathon kill, we had already hada farming run earlier in the week to collect the vials required.

Luckily for us, we decided to do a full, farming, run at him before resetting for the kill. Luckily I say, because we wiped first attempt!!

All was going well, our bruiser had the Greenmist orb and was heading to the point to use it when he got hit by the noxious dot, realised he had run out of cures and died!

Our Pally set-of to rez him but got hit by a tentacle, thrown into the low-ground and caused an AOE which wiped us 😦

the second attempt was much, much smoother and down he went, one big, dead, blob-thing!!!

Dead leviathon

With Levi down, it was time for Kalyyn to step into Veeshans Peak for the first time!!

 

What a great looking zone, and huge! I was expecting a large zone but nowhere near the scale that it is. I would guess the whole zone is around the size of Antonica. (I did take some screenies, but they dont seem to have saved )

We made our way down to the first named with few problems (well, our MT did pull a big beastie and , while running back to the group, fall off the edge of the platform and into the lava 😛 )

 

We made it to the first named, Kluzen the protector, one big, bad Wyvern, must be at least 4 or 5 times the size of the Wyverns in Kylong Plains.

He went down with little trouble and I was eager to carry on, but it was starting to get late for some and a few people had to go, so we decided to leave it there and continue on another night.

 

Kalyyn needs Hoshkar for the last of his Mythical updates. Im told his encounter is fairly easy, but im not sure how deep into the zone he is. Im sure we will make our way to him soon enough 🙂

 

With about 15 of us left and wanting to carry on somewhere, we called in some reinforcements, Suzita and Dimzad came to join us (Dimzad on Hewgo, his Conjy) and a few others from the other guild. We had almost a full raid, although the class mix was a bit off , so we decided to hit Shard of Hate.

 

I’ve been into this zone a few times, but only to the end twice i think. It always amazes me just how streaky the RNG for loot is in this place. Sometimes you can go all the way and get only 1 or 2 exquisite from trash, others they drop ten-a-penny.

Luckily for us, last night was probably the luckiest night i have ever seen for exquisites.

I didnt keep count, but i think we had about 10-15 exquisites drop from trash!!

At one point, we pulled 3 of the living-chests at once and each one dropped an exquisite! most of the loot wasnt that great, so Kalyyn got to mush it, but we did get a few masters (Including a lovely ranger one for Suz 🙂 ) and a couple of nice upgrades for people.

 

By the time we reached the sisters it was 2am and judging by the way the quality of voice-chat had dropped into the sewers, I get the feeling a little alcohol had been imbued by some 😛

 

We spent a while here swapping alts in and out so we could have a bruiser available, but by the time we where ready the raid had dropped to 18 people and we where a little short on healers. it didnt look promising for the kill, but we hit them anyway and I was pleasantly surprised when they encounter was beat first time, with very few problems.

 

Owing to the hour and the lack of numbers, we called it a night here, there was no-way we would be taking on Byzola or the Maestro, but maybe we will come back another night, before the instance expires, and take them out.

 

Im looking forward to my next visit to VP, hopefully Sunday evening. Will be nice to throw ourselves against some dragons 🙂

The Void : Anchor of Bazzul

A Guide to Veksar : The Void : Anchor of Bazzul 

Location : Moors of Ykesha. South of Firmroot Moot  ( -215, -50, 150 )

Shard Mission NPC : There are no daily shard missions in the Void instances

Of voidbeasts and sea creatures

Hi all, sorry I havn’t blogged for a while, but time to catch up a bit now 🙂

Im hopeing to get a couple more instance guides up (both here and on my guild forums) at some point this week. I have a couple half-written , just need to turn them into a state that makes some sort of sense to everyone else, not just me 😛

The last couple of weeks have been quite fun in EQ2.

We took a guild group into Anchor of Bazzul-Fawlty last week and had a great time (double shard mission and the extra 2-shards from the final boss made it even better!)

The group consisted of Me (playing Kalyyn), Seabreeze (Emaimee’s Dirge), Suzita(Ranger), Dimzad(Zerker), Ruari (Warlock) and Jianne (Swashy)

We absolutely blitzed through the zone, I dont remember one wipe. This felt great as the last time we took the same group in we didn’t manage the first named! (To be fair on us, this was  quite some while ago and we are all much better geared now).

The previous night we had taken 2 groups through Obelisk of Ahkzul, one group of mains another of alts, for the double shard mission.

Although we have run this zone many, many times, I still do enjoy it.

The loot isnt great and its not difficult at all, but I like to see just how fast we can clear it in (Our current record is 27 minutes from zone-in to final boss killed, but im sure we can shave that down quite a bit 😛 ).

There are not many other zones in TSO where you can just run through blatting everything without much thought. Also, the coin chest from Kierax the Energy Wielder is a nice bonus. When we run with a guild group through here, we put the proceeds from this chest into the guild-fund. Its normally enough to pay the rent on our Guildhall for at least a week 🙂

This encounter still hasn’t got old for me, as I am usaully on my Templar or Pally, I get to ‘go bouncy bouncy’ most times. (For those unfamiliar with the encounter, one or two of the group have to bounce around over a huge ‘void’ that acts like a giant trampoline, catching and absorbing flying energy sparks to stop the named killing the group). It must appeal to the big-kid in me, as I always enjoy this. (or I have some sub-concious Superman-fetish 😛 )

The only flaw with this zone is there is normally only 5, non-blue, shinies! So if we take a full group of 6, someone always misses out on one.

 

Over the last few weeks I have been grouping and raiding with people from another guild quite often and we have formed a semi-alliance with them.

They seem a real nice bunch and have just started raiding Veeshans peak as a guild. They all seem pretty much of the same mindset that our guild has but have larger numbers, if we can get our 2 guilds working together more this should be beneficial for all of us. Especially now the summer-fall-off has now really hit and active guild member numbers are really low 😦

I’ve raided a few times with them now and like to think I have made a good show of myself.

We have killed the first couple of nameds in Tomb of the Mad Crusader with relative ease and taken the first named in the Palace of the Ancient one, just for loot-farming.

Venril Sathir seems to be the raids nemesis!!

I’ve spent about 9 hours with them so far, throwing ourselves at him and he hasnt died yet!! (Our best shot got him down to 8%!)

This encounter is very unforgiving, it only takes one person to make a small mistake or not be completely aware of the encounter rules and its time for a 24 man floor-nap.

There are so many fail-conditions here that everyone has to be completely focused for the entire fight. Im of the opinion that if you dont get him with the first 2 or 3 attempts, you may as well give up for the night and start again, fresh, another time. After a few deaths some peoples attention starts to wander and that just leads to more deaths.

the funny thing is the raid had previously killed him on only the 2nd ever attemopt at him 😛 Im sure we will get him down next attempt though.

 

We hit the Chamber of Destiny last night, farming skins and flasks for the Leviathon kill.

We are going back in tonight for the kill, I dont foresee many problems with this and kalyyn should then have his VP access, ready to step inside for the first time on Friday 🙂 Roll on Mythical!!

the Leviathon

the Leviathon

Updates that just dont update

Well, its Wednesday morning, its just after 9am here and the GU51 update was suppossed to be with us by now. Dragged myself out of bed this morning, got the kids ready and off to school, ran around and done a few of my chores (Ok, Ok, I will get the rest done at some point 😛 ). Clicked on the little red icon and waited for the update………

No downloading, no patching , hmmmmmmmmmmmm

‘Login rejected: The clients version doe snot match the servers. please re-run the patcher’

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!

Ok, close it all down, re-run patcher, still nada

Now my brain finally starts to wake up. Check the forums, downtime has been extended, ok, i can live with that. But it should have been back up half an hour ago!!

Oh well, usual euro-server patch day i guess 😛

Now, this is where a normal person would go have some breakfast, do the vaccing etc…. but, those that know me have probably realised i have a thing about server-disco’s, probably bordering on the obssesive 😛 Since I got my first disco some while ago I have always enjoyed trying to get as many as i can for some reason (I have never set my alarm to get up at 6am on patch day, or booked the morning off work for one, oh noes, ok, well, maybe once or twice, or maybe more :P)

 

Anyway, back to the patch screen, no joy this time and I think I will be forced to break out the hoover and take it out on the floors 😛

Its oh so quiet………….. and dont you just love the ‘uber 1337’

Hi all and sorry I havnt blogged for a while, been to busy writing small posts that turn into huge essays on my guild forums!! 😛

The guild has been quiet lately, this always seems to happen around this time of year, i think a combination of the latest expansion starting to lose its novelty value and the sun attempting to shine does this. the guild officers have been having some discussions on turning things around, im sure we will manage something.

 

We had some fun over the weekend, Friday night there where only 3 of us avaliable at 80, so, I bought out my Pally, Ashen, Suz bought out her Inquisitor, Saraya, and Dimzad bought out his Coercer, Glarim (oh, and I bought my little rat wizzy, Poxridden roadkill out on follow, to help a little with the dps!)

We hit Chelsith, only intending to get an epic quest update , from trash, for Glarim. We didnt expect to do mush else, Glarim is very freshly 80 and Saraya was only 78.

After getting the update we all decided it would be rude not to pay at least one named a visit, so Ashen charged off into the first pool and started to clump the big, ugly, worm-thing he found inside.

Not too long later, one dead worm!!

Crap loot (as usual) from worm-face, but it was good AA for Saraya and Glarim so we continued to attempt clearing the zone.

It was a lot of fun! Chelsith has never been one of my favourite zones, the flying ‘poo’ adds have always made it a bit annoying, but I really enjoyed myself tonight.

It helped that we had a couple of pieces of decent loot. I dont think I have ever seen anything of any use drop inhere before, but tonight we got a really nice healer necklace for Saraya and a Ranger master dropped for Suzita to have!

We couldnt manage the final named, as soon as he dropped the adds we wiped, by this time it was getting late though, but Saraya did a really good job keeping me up through the rest of the zone and there was some great mezzing from Glarim!

After Chelsith, I logged to my templar to check my broker and got a tell asking if I wanted to come to a Pawbuster raid. I was tired and about to hit the sack, but as Kal hadnt been in to pawbuster and needed him for the Fate of Nirrath quest, I decided to go along.

It took a while for a full raid to gather, but I was very pleasantly surprised by just how smooth it went. I know Pawbuster isnt the hardest of raid targets, but with a pick-up raid, with a lot of underequipped and experienced people in it, i expected to wipe a couple of times before everyone knew what to do. But, he went down first time, no problems or anything (despite one of the other raid members insisting that Sanctuary and aoe-blocks didnt work against the stifles from Pawbuster and then insistsing that SOE must have ‘nerfed’ the encounter sometime in the last 2 weeks when shown that the where wrong 😛 )

i do love people that act like they are the best players that Norrath has ever seen, then go to show themselves up in the grandest style! (Luckily, there are not that many of them in EQ )

My favourite example of this was in a pick-up group a few weeks ago.

I cant remember the exact zone we where in, but it was one of the Befallen ones.

I was on my Templar and a Fury was invited to fill the last spot. The Fury was kitted out in all fabled gear, mythical etc…..

As soon as we enter the zone he pipes up in group chat ‘no real need for another healer here, i can solo heal this, get another class’

Luckily the rest of the group told him that as I was along first, we would roll as we where.

We start getting into the zone, Im healing away as much as I would expect if I was a solo healer. i just assumed that the Fury was DPSing so didnt think much of it.

After the first named, which seemed a bit of a struggle, more than it should have been.

After the fight someone linked a parse. Fury was just above me (and i mean just!) which, as anyone that plays a Templar will tell you, doesnt take a lot of doing!! 😛

next named was much the same. And on several occassions it seemed like the Fury was just auto-attacking.

The tank of the group said something along the lines of ‘Fury.. could you at least help kal a bit by curing, if your not going to do much else’

There was a slight pause and the Fury replied ‘ As soon as there is a poison I can cure, i will!’

This started quite a surreal discussion, the Fury insisting that he could only cure noxious, that his single cure and group cure both only cured noxious, that all healers could only cure one type of Dot or debuff.

The whole group spent some time trying to explain that all healers have a specific group-wide cure, but the single target cure will work on all the different types, but he just wouldnt have it. (keep in mind he is fully fabled and mythicaled!)

Eventually, someone said ‘have you borrowed this character or did you buy it?’ a pause of a few seconds, and Fury goes LD 😛

Vyemn, you’re a Wuss!

Saturday night was great fun! Kajen organised a guild run into The Laboratory of Lord Vyemn.

We had an attendance of 13 people, All but 2 where level 80 and those 2 where mid-70’s.

Towards the end of KoS and into EoF it got to the stage where reading the words ‘Labs run’ in chat would send a shiver up my spine! I lost count of the amount of times I ran this zone.

But, after a long break, going back in with a group of guildmates was a blast! It helped that the raid was entirely guildies and I tanked with Ashen the Pally (I think all of my previous runs had been with my wiz).

None of the encounters where really taxing but it was a nice middle-ground point where we all had fun.

We only had 2 wipes, the first was completely my fault. We had been pushing it, seeing how many groups of trash we could take, 2 was easy enough, 3 was fine, 4 was fun.

But 5…. think I pushed it a tad to far here 😛

the other wipe was right at the end. ” Isnt vyemn suppossed to be in this big room?” said Mr Tank, closely followed by “Ahh yes, there he is, all revive! ”

Im pretty sure everyone had a great time. Its really good when we can get a large group of guildies out and about together.

Im looking forward to the next run (going to prod Kajen to organise one soon 😛 ), a few guildies where away and couldnt make Labs and we have a few that where a little to low in level. be nice to hit something that a load of us can attend, maybe Courts (havn’t been in there for a loooong time!)

Also, be great to hit Harla dar soon, I know a few people need the big lizard for HQ updates, and a peek inside Lyceum would also be fun.

Thanks again to Kaj for organising this night.

p.s I took a load of screenies (well thought I did) but for some reason not one of them saved into my screenie folder