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EQ Chronicles: Beating the Nasties

It’s a rare occurance for an act intended to harm someone to actually end up doing them good. When my Bard was brutally blocked from a fair encounter by a group of selfish high level uber-guilders, it seemed he would just have to deal with the loss. But this time being ripped off had an unexpected benefit.

Quietly treading water in the underwater zone of Kedge Keep, carefully positioned at the bottom of a shallow tunnel nervously waiting for some friends to join us, my little Gnomish wizard companion and I were rather chuffed. By sheer luck we had journeyed to the secluded zone at a time when noone else was there, and the highly sought after giant fish-thing Phinigal Autropos was at home in his lair.

Now Pinegal is not your ordinary fish-thing. Not only is he accompanied by a train of very nasty swordfish guards, he is himself a wizard of some note quite capable of accounting for several inexperienced groups. The reason players - particularly Bards, Wizards, and Mages - religiously make the long and dangerous trek through the maze of underwater tunnels to his dark lair is because of what Phinny (as he has been dubbed, not without a certain amount of hollow bravado) often carries in his kit bag. The fishscaled king is the sole purveyor of three items required by three seperate classes for their epic weapons. I say purveyor, though the only way to acquire them from him is to prise them from his cold, dead, grasping, fins.

This made him a bottleneck of sorts, and explained his regular absence: he was far more often than not idling away the days in a virtual dressing room somewhere backstage of EQ, awaiting his next spawn after being ritually dispatched almost as soon as he made his 12 hourly entrance. As if this didn’t make things hard enough, he also only rarely carried each epic piece. Thus Bards, Wizards, and Mages had to make the watery pilgrimage as many times as was necessary for him to drop their particular item, or until frustration permanenty separated them from their faculties and they fell in screaming spirals to the unforgiving depths for the last time.

All of which explains why we were rather pleased to see him at home and unattended. Our friends were scant minutes away, and when they arrived we would launch our hopeful attack. We were excitedly planning our offensive as we waited.

Enter the callous uber-guilders. Paying no heed to any of our polite protests, they swam past us, into Phinny’s lair, and started attacking. All we could do was watch on and take small satisfaction as one of them fell during the battle. Phinny and his train were vanquished, the cruel usurpers looted the corpses, and then left in a cold blink of a port spell.

Dejected and disheartened, my Gnomish friend philosophically began the long swim out. There was nothing left to do. Unwilling to accept defeat so easily, I cautiously peered into the empty lair. Phinny’s corpse floated still and silent just above the entrance ledge. Strange, I thought, I wonder what they left on him. Timidly I inched up to the body lest any remaining guardians surprise and slaughter me, and clicked on it. I was greeted by a strange piece of pink coral. It was No Drop, which meant once taken it could not be passed on, and so was probably part of a quest. As much out of empty defiance (take THAT you bastard kill stealers! I’ve got your CORAL! Ha-HA!) as curiousity, I looted it and left the zone.

Short research on the net revealed the small chunk of coral as one of the harder pieces in a quest for a set of shoulders. A very nice set. Holy cow! Look at the stats on those things! This may be more valuable than I thought.

And indeed it was. The quest for the Strength of the Elements shoulders comprised a search for four disparate pieces of ancient ore lost eons before during the formation of the deep dragon claw scars that raked jagged and sheer through the heart of the frozen continent of Velious. The first, and argueably most difficult piece, was in the sometime keeping of Phinny and had been inadvertently donated to me by the kind kill stealers. Thanks guys, may Rallos Zek bless you with a brick. The second appeared at a particular point on the ground between wandering dragons in Skyfire Mountains. An easy search and retrieve mission. The third was carried by a rare wandering air elemental in the chilled dragon realm of the Western Wastes. The hardest thing would be finding him, but once found he wouldn’t be too tough with the help of a few friends. No problem. The fourth piece was held by Master Yael in The Hole.

Oh oh…

Master Yael was no joke. Not only was he right at the very bottom of one of the nastiest and furthest removed zones in the game (the same zone that produced the neurotic drama of a previous Chronicle), he was a raid level mob who sported a recycling Death Touch. Death Touches, or DTs, are one of the harshest imaginings of EQ’s designers. They are unresistable, unavoidable, instant deaths for one character in the party. Yael produced this bitterly unfair attack every 30 seconds. On top of that, he was another highly contested mob, and fell within minutes of spawning. And of course, he spawned once a week. I would have to discover when Yael was due to spawn (no easy matter as the information was tied to the time he was last killed and closely guarded), organise a dozen or more friends who could be bothered to drop what they were doing and journey with me all the way out to The Hole, win our way down to the lair, and successfully kill him - DTs and all - before anyone else got there first. No wonder I had never heard of the shoulders before. The quest was all but impossible. The only thing in my favour was that I didn’t have to try to chase down Phinny (thanks again, miserable spawn jumping scum).

So I stashed the prized bit of coral in my bank and forgot it for a while. One night I ran out to Skyfire to retrieve the second bit of ore, ran it back to the bank, and stashed it quietly next to the coral. Months later I spent some time in Western Wastes trying to track down the Air Elemental. Twice I managed to cross paths with it. The first I was rushing across the snow with my guildmates on the way to a dragon raid, and didn’t have time to stop. Reluctantly I had to let it disappear into the distance, sputtering a white particle trail behind it. The second time I was alone, and couldn’t raise any help. I again had to watch it slip off into the chilled ocean. More months later, I found myself in the Wastes, and tracked it down. This time I was a buffed level 65, with lashings of new gear and a swag of powerful new songs. In a fit of unusual courage I just barely managed to take it down alone before it and several of it’s local buddies reduced me to a pile of bloody pulpings. It was a close call, but a third piece of ore joined the other two in my bank, this one a brilliant icy blue.

So all that remained was nasty Master Yael. As luck and persistence would have it, I discovered a way to find out whether or not Yael was in his lair all the way from the zone in. After watching on and off for a few weeks, I found him up and unattended in a completely empty zone early one evening. Without really expecting much response, I put the question to a bunch of friends. Sure they could come, they said. They would even bring some other friends of theirs who weren’t doing anything.

Before long some old guildmates, some new guildmates, and sundry assorted associates piled through the submerged locked door, and pulled themselves out of the water entrance onto the starting area. At first we proceeded cautiously, the zone holding bad memories for us all from various previous visits, but it soon turned into a reckless slaughter as we ploughed our way through mobs that had been reduced to triviality by our new level. It was without much mishap and rather quickly that we reached the underground lake which marked the entry to Yael’s lair.

The next part was tricky. The only way down to the lair some hundred metres below the lake was to jump from the stone rim at the far end. If you missed a small pond waiting at the bottom, you landed on hard ground - and not surprisingly - died. If you landed too far out in the water you came within Yael’s aggro radius and said hello to a personally delivered DT. An over enthusiastic Shadow Knight in our group ventured too close to the edge and, whoops….. slam. Fifteen minutes or so, a summoned corpse and a resurrection later, a more subdued SK and the rest of us collected ourselves for a collective plunge. I hit my invulnerability song which rendered all members of my group impervious to damage for 18 seconds, and off we went.

My group survived. Three members of the second group made little craters in the dirt at the bottom of the lair. The others managed to attract the attention of some of Yael’s wandering guards before any of us had made it out of the water. Then someone aggroed Yael. It was mercifully quick.

I was beginning to doubt the possibility of ever seeing my covetted shoulders, but to my surprise, most people wanted to keep trying. Being on the end of a thorough beating in EQ can be unexpectedly exhilarating. A quick thinking necromancer had avoided the slaughter by succouring (self-porting) himself back to the zone line. He then summoned all the corpses, and the cleric who had run back from her bind point (where she respawned naked upon dying) proceeded to rez the entire party.

After some time debating our next attempt, someone mentioned he had once heard about a little known secret tunnel that supposedly ran all the way down to the lair from a central point in the dungeon. That was worth checking out, we decided, and proceeded to fight our way back to the general area the tunnel was thought to start, from where we sent out scouts. Soon one of them sent the message that yes, a tunnel was there, and he was following it. Not long afterwards he confirmed it led past a run of nasty mobs to the very side of Yael’s lair. We were in.

Several short battles later we stood buffed and ready within sight of Yael. The stubborn stocky little earth elemental was imposingly unperturbed by our nearness. As I would be the major beneficiary of the excursion, I volunteered to take the first death touch. With a defiant cry I bolted toward Yael with the rest of the party laughing behind me.

LOADING… Please wait.

It was painless I promise you, and so fast I didn’t even receive text notification of what had happened. Back in the dungeon Yael had shouted my name to the zone and my crazed dash had ended in a lifeless skid in the mud at his feet. By the time my system zoned me, naked and pristine, to the relative calm of my bind point in the green and gentle climes of the Plane of Knowledge, Yael was dead. The brave Necromancer had eaten the second death touch due to his reckless stacking of DoTs (Damage Over Time spells) on the stubby brown dungeon boss, and joined me at his bind point. The others had dispatched Yael in our absence. After being rezzed back in and to the genuine cheering congratulations of my friends, I was allowed to loot the final piece of ore. Other pieces of armor held by Yael were rolled for and won by various members of the party. With many thanks to all, I accepted a port back to my bind point, and began the final journey to find the quest NPC in the Western Wastes, hand in all four of my ores, and claim my prize.

Alone at the furthest edge of the Wastes, I found the NPC hidden in the shallows of the icy western ocean. I carefully took the ores, combined them in a box given me after a short conversation, and watched as they magically morphed on my cursor into a set of shoulder armor. I had done it. It had taken over a year in total, but what began as an act of selfishness had been transformed into a rare and useful boon that would benefit me for a long time to come. A wry smile came to my lips as I thought that if the bullies back in Phinigel’s lair had known where it would lead, they would have destroyed the precious coral instead of smugly leaving it behind. What was intended as hurt turned out as help.

And that, as they say, is sweet revenge.

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  posted by monty · at 8:16 am · filed under EQ Chronicles