EQ Chronicles: Faction, and *gulp* Dragons
I’m on holidays and have been playing a bit more than usual of my current gaming obsession, EverQuest. My Bard has been steadily climbing in level and has been camped at an evil inhabited zone called “The Overthere”. He was recently taught an important lesson in the importance of faction. As with much knowlege, it came painfully.
He also came face to face (well almost) with the fabled dragonkind while detouring insanely through Skyfire Mountains after a succesful guild raid. A beautiful but potentially fatal zone.
My guild organised a “low-level” raid for those of us not up to the extremes of end game raids. For such excursions you need to be level 59 or 60 and decked out with pretty special gear, as you are going to be taking on Dragons. Not the puny, undernourished and poorly imagined kind typical of modern fiction, but those of Tolkienesque Smaug-ish dimension (right click and Save As to experience a 4MB video illustration of what I’m talking about).
The majority of us however, are not there yet, so about 15 of us toddled off to Kaesora for some mid-level action. You will remember this zone from a previous Chronicles entry. It’s the one that accounted for a level 60 Mage, a level 51 Druid, my poor little 23 Bard, and almost nailed a 59 Rogue - all on the same dreadful evening. But I can’t .. *twitch* .. speak of that now.
Kaesora is still a handful and not to be taken lightly, but 10 levels later it wasn’t nearly so scary. Good organisation and some nicely balanced groups turned the Library (where the.. Mage first died.. *twitch*) into a very nice hunting area thank you very much. I scored some shoulder armor to replace my dungy leather gear, and a nice cloak thanks to the generosity of my guild mates. I also gained a full level from the impressive experience given by the mobs there.
After a full and productive evening, three of us decided we’d had enough and were offered a port back to where we had come from. Now, Druids can only port to particular stone rings scattered throughout zones all over Norrath (Wizards port to Wizard spires), and the closest ring to The Overthere was in a zone called, ominously, Skyfire Mountains. A friend with us, who was very knowledgable and experienced in EQ matters, assured us that this was the closest zone to OT. What he failed to mention was that is was inhabited by dragons, and contained the entrance to Veeshan’s Peak, the EQ holy of holies containing the mothers and fathers of all dragons and the ultimate end game battles.
Highly instructive is this official statement by Verant:
We recommend that only the most advanced and organized players in the game even attempt to enter this zone. The customer service staff (GMs and Guides) will not assist players in any way in regards to this zone. This includes help for issues such as unrecoverable corpses (see your local Necromancer), or characters finding themselves stuck (see your local Magician), bugs, etc. The only assistance that will be offered by customer service reps in this zone are those covered by the Play Nice Policies.
All of which is fine if you’re level 59 or 60. In the low 30’s it had us soiling our armor.
It is imperative in Skyfire that you are invisible. Dragons and their kin which cover the zone can see through invisibility, but through a quirk in faction (see previous entry) while you are invisible they consider you friendly. If you are ever visible, you are toast - quite literally. We were all made invisible before porting there by our knowledgable friend’s Enchanter. In usual procedure, I fired up Selo’s Accelerando, my running song when we arrived. Selo’s doesn’t stack with the Enchanter invisibility spell ie. the two can’t co-exist. I, of course, didn’t know this. I appeared.
Oblivious to my danger, I observed the fact in game.
“Hey, I’m visible.”
“Stop singing Selo’s! You’ll die!” was the belated instruction. It would be nice to know these things before the fact I mused, as I quickly swapped to my wind instrument and started singing my invisibility song. Thank goodness I’m a Bard.
Invis song is great and has saved me many times, but as I discovered to my misfortune when tiptoing through Sol A - a zone jam packed with hateful goblins - it can miss a beat and *whoops* you’re visible for a moment. Heavy breathing on the safe side of the Sol A zone with only five percent of my health left and at least 20 angry goblins behind me, I vowed not to ever forget that. Now I was in a zone of such instant death I wouldn’t have time to be worried before it descended upon me with fell power, and all I had to undergird me was a fickle little melody.
So off we trudged, scouting as far as we could from anything that moved. Inevitably, one of us got lost.
This wasn’t as bad as it at first seemed. As with many dangerous things, Skyfire is also hauntingly beautiful. Verant did a fantastic job with it. Glowing red lava rivers flow slowly through a land blasted with darkness and scored by steaming fissures. It is a wasteland of black loveliness populated by variations of dragonkind’s lesser kin. Wyrms and Chromatic Drakes wander endlessly through the bouldered mountains and valleys, unworried by the lava which they seem to cross as easily as water.
We cowered at the extreme edges of the map until I discovered all the wyrms conned indifferent or apprehensive to me (conned = “considered” which is done by pressing the ‘C’ key and brings up a mob’s disposition toward you). My knowledgable Enchanter friend was busy trying to locate our lost companion, so spellbound I wandered toward a large dragon monument.
That’s the entrance to Veshan’s Peak the Enchanter warned me.
Have you ever been there? I asked.
No this is the closest I’ve ever been.
Coming from someone with a level 57 character (the Enchanter was one of his lower characters), that statement carried a brooding, silent weight. After a pause, I started walking there, feeling somewhat like Frodo being drawn, head lolling and mouth open, toward the Tower of Cirith Ungol. The appearance of several massive “Lesser Wyrms” brought me to my senses, and I never did get to see inside. Maybe next time.
In the process however, I had become removed from our experienced leader. Seeing him in the distance I began following. Again inevitably, I too became lost. So now there were three of us in a kill zone of godlike proportions, all separated. Only one of us - the Enchanter - had the invisibility spell. Our first lost friend had a spell of his own but he had to keep casting it at regular intervals to make sure it didn’t lapse, taking him with it. As a result he was running out of mana. I had my dubious song. The zone was massive, and none of us seemed to know where the zoneline to The Overthere was.
I begin a circuit of the mountain walls, passing Drake after Drake and several impressive dragon monuments including a graveyard and some Mordor-ish looking black gates with glowing red runes. It was creepy, nerve-wracking, and exhilarating. I was encamped by wandering magical reptiles, but my song was holding. After at least half an hour of anxious scurryied scouting, we all made it to the zone.
The Overthere, which before the evening had seemed lofty and dangerous, looked like a suburban playground in contrast to Skyfire’s endless gloom when we zoned into it. A Sabretooth tiger and a Sarnak Knight attacked us, but in the full daylight of OT we dusted them off like gnats. We had been to the other side and returned. Nothing seemed the same.
posted by monty · at 4:02 am · filed under EQ Chronicles