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Well, we tried to take down Chel’Drak on Wednesday night. This mob is a seriously bad ass dude. I don’t think we came close to doing any real damage to the thing. I’m not surprised this mob hasn’t been beaten yet. Here’s a picture of this wicked machine, I took some video too that I’ll post after the weekend.

There is a five-day lockout timer on this mob even for killing the trash on zone-in, so we won’t be back for another week. That’s probably a good thing though, less they rename it to “Chel’Drak the Bankrupter” considering the repair bills.

Note I didn’t take this picture, I snagged it from the EQ2 forums. I’ll post my own shots along with the short video.

It was a pretty decent weekend for playtime despite my original thoughts. After a kick-ass Friday night run through Deathtoll, we were set for a Halls of Seeing adventure but it wasn’t meant to be. Low turnout meant resorting to other things, like a 4x Trail of Awakening run to wrap up that quest for a few folks — myself included. We went through smoothly with the usual number of dead wizards before wiping on the final boss due to crazy aggro adds, the result of bad positioning. We all zoned back in and worked our way to the final guy and cleaned him up properly, resulting in quest updates for those that needed it. We even got a real nice Master chest drop with a sweet mantle in it.

So now I have that annoying blue symbol floating in front on my character now — JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE. I feel like such a cliq member now. Nice to know that Sony made a fairly easy quest item like that so good that everyone uses it. No, really, EVERYONE.

After that successful run, several of us went to the Village of Shin to work with on whistling fist clan tower quests. Several of us were stuck on level two, so Sileen (Elissa) ran us through them so we could get our updates. It took quite a bit of time, but we made quite a bit of progress. The next stage is the city inside the city (instance) and is a level 75 heroic quest. So that should be a bit harder, but doable. Creon has the quest down so hopefully it’s just another walkthrough. Not sure what the end of the quest line is yet, but I’m sure some guilds are crusing through it full speed. Time to check the boards I guess.

Oh, and I had a great Father’s Day too.

Last night, Mob Squad rolled into Deathtoll on a mission to destroy Tarinax, the skeletal dragon required to complete the Qeynos Claymore quest line. We went through the zone fast and furious, taking down mob after mob, named after named. We got a ton of relic pieces and several masters, plus a few fabled loot items as well.

We then took down Tarinax on the second try. The first try, positioning was not our friend and we weren’t able to rotate properly to keep the fight up. After a recovery, we setup differently and smacked that bag of bones down with style. Aggro was a pain as usual on this fight, but we managed to keep the right folks alive and the fight was won. There were four items in the chest, a relic silk robe, a master spell, a neck/wrist haste item and a plate helm. Loot overall for the night was plentiful, I actually received the haste neck/write item (screen shot soon).

The final mob in the zone was bugged, staying unattackable despite our efforts, so we didn’t get to take him down. And the Amorphous drake was an easy fight, but only dropped a legendary chest for our effort.

Tonight is the Halls of Seeing, so we’ll see how that goes (get it, SEE how that goes, ha!).

Yesterday, Sony launched the new adventure pack, The Fallen Dynasty, with Live Update #24. This update made some major changes to the way control spells work for all classes. Stun durations seemed to be reduced across the board, along with some interesting changes that allow coercer spells to land on epic mobs. So we could be seeing some interesting changes in raid tactics soon. They also took in-home selling out of the game and made it more like WoW (big surprise). They also made it so when quest NPC’s are in range they show up on the map like WoW (another big surprise).

So how is the adventure pack? Pretty slick so far. I’ve completed the quests in the initial village, sat and listened to the monk teacher spin a dozen yarns about the history of the monks, and gained access to the third floor of the tower. I’m currently on the parts that involve The Forgotten City. More on that in a second.

The artwork is great, the pig races are hilarious, and the story seems deep so far. I found an instance with an epic crab in it, several guilds were massing force to try and take it down. It’s instanced, and it’s a single mob, so it sounds like the old T5 raid zones where you go in, fight, get prize. We’ll see how the loot fares once we take it down. Zone layout in the Village and Mystic Lake are very progressive, so players of all levels (well, 55+ anyway) should have a good time. There are a couple of quests that require both a kill and the drop, so that’s definitely a choke point in the new quest line — expect to get your pull ganked a couple of times.

The Forgotten City is an obvious copy of the real Forbidden City — at least in concept. There are terracotta warriors spread throughout the zone but that is where the reference ends (at least as far as I got into it). It reminds me a LOT of the crystal caverns in velius (eq1). Very vertical in design and highly recursive — I could easily see myself cruising through here with a rocket launcher fragging. The layout is fun, but on my own a big hard to get around without picking a fight that I would most certainly lose.

Some others in the guild made it into an instance from the Forgotten City. That instance seemed to drop some legendary items at least. Word in guild chat was that it is a pretty hard zone, but I haven’t been there to see it yet. Hopefully we’ll get some more folks on later this week and get some groups into there. So far, I’m impressed with the pack and no emergency patch or server crashes for a change last night!

Banzai!

I played a bit over the past weekend and managed to make a trip down to Solusek’s Eye to turn in my relic chain boots. I haven’t posted any of my recent loot, so I figured a few pictures were due. The earring I got over a month ago in a group in Den, but couldn’t wear it until 70. The rest has been acquired over the past week. Thanks to Nogal for the drop (yeah, I realize they’re lore and both your tunes had them already!) and Boehm for the help navigating the new and improved Sol Eye (mucho grats to the person who mapped that zone into eq2map, yikes).

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Last night we rolled with an awesome force into Deathtoll. We were smoking, class setup was great, groups were solid, we had an excellent chance to take down Tarinax. Well, at least until the server crashed. A GM showed up after an hour, but there was no way they were going to reset our timers. So we’re basically locked out until next week. We did get a few drops, including Relic Chain Boots for me.

Then we went to the Isle of the Ravesect for some practice on the Mutanegenic Outcast. We learned a lot, but it was late, people were still pissed off from the crashed server run on DT, and spirits were low so we called it. A few of us, not yet ready to call it a night, went into Lab for some relic farming. We managed to snag at least a couple of pieces and even scored a Legendary chest with a pair of Nightchord Bracers (score!). Since Berrykiss already had them, I was the default to get them and got a very nice upgrade from my T6 fabled bard bracers. Another grats to me!

Tonight is the Halls of Seeing — hopefully we’ll have a solid force and server that stays up for the duration. If we have anything like the groups we had last night, we should have a solid chance and taking down the entire zone. At least that’s the plan.

We did Lyceum again last night. The run was smooth, quick, and not bad considering up until the end we only had three groups. We had three people join us for the final guy, who went down on the first try. Some pretty slick items dropped, including the Armguards of Dread which were given to me. A nice upgrade from the Drape in terms of mitigation, plus I need more wisdom and these have +30 WIS on them. So it’s a nice upgrade indeed, considering I’m at the agility cap when in raid.

I think we’re doing the Halls of Seeing tonight and Friday night is Deathtoll again. Maybe that means we’ll do Lab on Saturday. Which would be cool, lots of relic drops in that zone.

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Starting Sunday and ending Monday night, I went from 68 to 70. I was only about 40% through 68 when I started, and the Sunday run was a heavy one. Lots of instances and plenty of killing to get the XP needed to hit 69. Once I hit 69 just inside HoF, I managed to pull out another 40% before logging. On Monday, I whopped out another few instances and helping some guildies camp some items in PoA brought the rest of the XP out. It was some hard work, but no more grinding!

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