Category: quests

Around the Realms in Twenty Questions

by Tharius

A new Vast Horizon feature, for the regular readers of Ceirana’s Window to the World is a new noteboard for a game of 20 Questions.  For those not familiar with the game the basic idea is that the host will pick something and you have 20 questions to figure it out with your guesses at the answer counting towards the 20 questions.  For this incarnation the question has to be a yes/no question.

I managed to figure out the first mob (yay) was Weeping Willow in The Keep of Mahn-Tor by a process of elimination.  A couple hours of running around looking at mobs and maps.  All in all it was pretty fun, I encourage you to look for it the next time you’re out telescanning.

Some hints for players:

  • keep your questions simple… yeah you want to get the most out of it but if it doesn’t give you info in both the yes and no it’s not so good (example: is it a male? Good!  is it a male or a horse? Bad! a male dragon isn’t a horse, of course!)
  • try to use your question to narrow the field … we had every mob in Realms to pick from, narrowing it to non-male non-humanoids who wore no equipment and were aff sanc or who could cast it made the list so much more manageable
  • be specific: the question “Is it in the Forgotten Woods Geo?” could mean the area that when you type where you see the Forgotten Woods or it could mean any of the areas IN the Forgotten Woods
  • don’t be too specific: asking a question that applies only to a very narrow field of choices doesn’t help.  If you get a yes then you’re golden, but it’s more likely you’ll get a no.  “Does it have brown hair?” is perhaps not as good as “Does it have hair?”

Ok … happy adventuring.

Tip Toe, Through the Tulips …

by Tharius

Ahhh, spring is in the air … the smell of serious funk … wait what?  Someone parked an ogre east of Darkhaven and he stinks up the joint!  All the tulip scented fabreeze in the Realms won’t cover that up.  We’ll keep dumping boo-kays of flowers on him anyway until he goes away and makes up with his wife :>

This quest brought out my thinking cap a few times … how to obtain the tulips is one problem and which to hand in is another.  Finding them boils down to telescan until you’re sick of it then do mkill farming till you’re sick of that, then traffic for ones you’re missing and repeat.  Ok maybe not quite that bad but … well … ok.

So the pink, red and coral tulips can be found by telescanning.  As Akael noted, tulips also appear in areas that are non-teleportable, but beyond running through the areas a few times a day to check your mainstay is going to be the ones you can find by teleporting.  Gnarish is making out like a bandit, I’ve rotted the teeth out of a few characters eating zombie candies and scanning all over hell’s half acre.  In the process I’ve hit my totems on the right characters multiple times, hit Window to the World noteboard and also hit a new Twenty Questions noteboard – more on that in a minute.

So the twist with the pink, red and coral tulips is that they’re increasingly rare.  So by the time you’ve found enough corals it’s likely you’re overflowing with pink and reds. As much as I appreciate the idea of a sliding difficulty scale, I wonder if just having them closer in rarity wouldn’t have achieved the same… you still have a ton of randomness because of the teleporting aspect.  Oh well.

Next come the violets and silvers which you get from mkill.  The violet mobs are pretty soloable.  The son of a gun of it is that both the violet and silvers are pop items.  So you find the mob and kill it and maybe nothing.  For the violets, well, oh well.  For the silvers which are multi-av mobs … yeesh!  That’s mean!  Think about this, for a full turn in of 35 sets you needed 21 of each tulip on a multi-av mob which might not pop … how many kills do you think you’d need to get a group of 3-5 a full set?

Some of us noticed that 2 of the mobs were much more manageable … Dennis Moore is a good 2 man run and with the right set of characters Zyla can be soloed … when this is the more manageable …

The CM mage crew at Zyla
The CM mage crew at Zyla

 

So how do we leap to 35 sets means 21 of each flower?  Ahh this is where the maths comes in.  A quick visit to Math is Fun gives us the chance to set up a combination of pink, red, violet, coral and silver tulips.  Repetitions are allowed {silver, silver, red} is ok but order is not important {silver, silver, red}, {red, silver, silver} are the same.

Combinations with repetition (n=5, r=3)

List has 35 entries.
{pink,pink,pink} {pink,pink,red} {pink,pink,violet} {pink,pink,coral} {pink,pink,silver} {pink,red,red} {pink,red,violet} {pink,red,coral} {pink,red,silver} {pink,violet,violet} {pink,violet,coral} {pink,violet,silver} {pink,coral,coral} {pink,coral,silver} {pink,silver,silver} {red,red,red} {red,red,violet} {red,red,coral} {red,red,silver} {red,violet,violet} {red,violet,coral} {red,violet,silver} {red,coral,coral} {red,coral,silver} {red,silver,silver} {violet,violet,violet} {violet,violet,coral} {violet,violet,silver} {violet,coral,coral} {violet,coral,silver} {violet,silver,silver} {coral,coral,coral} {coral,coral,silver} {coral,silver,silver} {silver,silver,silver}

If you’ve done it right you got this list. For the die hards who started early and managed to get all 35 sets, my hat is off to you.  I got about 26 sets and I can’t even stand one more Zyla kill right now, even if you told me that in the final hours the pop rate goes to 100%.

A good quest overall, a bit long though.  4 types of flowers would have given 20 combinations, so all in all drop the 3rd telescan type, make red a tiny bit tougher to find and I think maybe it might not have felt so bad by the end.  Still as with many quests I got out and killed Zyla for the first time, never mind the first time by myself.  My scripts for telescanning and for CM mages got a great upgrade but now it’s time for a few days of something else 🙂

Cheers!

To the Thieves Guild and beyond!

by Tharius

You say 'i am ready'
Deliess Whurgirn, the Guildmistress of Shadowport says 'So be it, Lareawan. Good luck.'
Deliess Whurgirn, the Guildmistress of Shadowport brandishes a wand at you.
You feel yourself transported far away from the security of the Thieves Guild...
The Falcon exclaims 'Ah, I see my lovely lady has sent another would-be adventurer to risk life and limb in the search of gold and gear. So be it!'
The Falcon's backstab _demolishes_ you!

For the last little while I have travelled to Shadowport, keeping in touch with Deliess about the possibility of fighting the Falcon for his mask. Every 2 hours or so, when I remember, I run down there and find out if it’s time to fight. 3 times I’ve been rewarded with the sweet, sweet words telling me to prepare. The first time I didn’t notice that sanc ran during the fight, just as the difficulty ramped up. The second time I went LD just as I was reciting razorbait, damn unstable connection. This time … this time though …. The Falcon is DEAD!!

Twice during the fight he caught me with a gouge before I could hit true sight, scary moments where I was down to a couple hundred hit points …

Someone parries your attack.
Someone parries your attack.
Someone dodges your attack.
Someone parries your attack.
Someone thrusts its foot out and kicks you.
Someone's kick jolts you!
You dodge someone's attack.
Someone thrusts its foot out to kick you but is unable to connect the blow.
Someone's stab gashes you!
(something gets damaged)
You wish that your wounds would stop BLEEDING so much!
You feel seasick as murky waters rise from someone's hand.
Lareawan * * (408/1760h 622v |S|Someone is you're blind!)sty eva

It’s been a while since a fight got my pulse pounding but this one did it. Much the same feeling as playing Diablo 3 hardcore on a higher level.

This fight to me was more about the accomplishment than the reward but I won’t turn down the reward, the mask is quite a handy item that allows me to swap out the spaulders for leader sleeves, a dr less but 30 more hit points, which is a decent trade.

If you are planning to do this, all I can suggest to you is that preparation is the key. I spent a fair amount of time rampaging Olympus for ambrosia before setting out, living near Thoth in the Blasted Lands for triple heals, got my shockstone from Nevermore, Tree of Life for glyphs, made sure my equipment damage triggers worked and renamed the duplicate pieces if I could so they’d track better … and on and on. Any advantage I could give myself to help me out.

Ultimately the 131 dr didn’t do the job, the 1760 hp didn’t do the job, but staying cool when things went sideways was the real key. Even being very careful about curing blind if the gouge would outlast the true sight wasn’t a guarantee that I wouldn’t end up blind, I ended up gouged twice after true sight dropped due to sitting in a bash or circle lag, but reacting while blind and dropping to evasive and then healing to full as quickly as I could after the blind was critical. I was lucky that I didn’t get gouged again before I got the next true sight or have a huge damage round.

Lareawan *|* (1660/1660h 580v |A|The Falcon is almost dead)
The Falcon parries your attack.
The Falcon parries your attack.
The Falcon parries your attack.
The Falcon parries your attack.
The Falcon dodges your attack.
You dodge the Falcon's attack.
The Falcon thrusts its foot out to kick you but is unable to connect the blow.
The Falcon thrusts its foot out to kick you but is unable to connect the blow.
The Falcon thrusts its foot out and kicks you.
The Falcon's kick brushes you.
The Falcon attempts to distract you with foolish swordplay.
The Falcon lunges forward, striking with its blade.
The Falcon's swordstrike grazes you.
The Falcon leaps into the air and kicks you on the chest with both of its feet.
The Falcon's leap scratches you.
The Falcon vaults through the air and crashes feet first into you.
The Falcon's vault scratches you.
The Falcon says 'Your skills may be strong, but I am a true master!'
The Falcon tumbles out of the way and takes on an aggressive stance.
The Falcon's backstab _cleaves_ you!
(Set's ring of Power gets damaged)
That really did HURT!
Lareawan * * (1117/1660h 579v |A|The Falcon is almost dead)

A 500 hitpoint round like that would have finished me off when I was blinded, I went to around 400 hp twice, but a little luck saved my bacon. There’s other ways to deal with blindness, like blind fighting on humans or whatever but those weren’t options for me (dang it, I just got used to using optometrum on a ranger again …) .

Your circle hits the Falcon!
The Falcon is DEAD!!
As The Falcon falls, his most prized possession falls from his face...
The Falcon says 'You have done well to best me, Lareawan... You are a true master.'
You hear the Falcon's death cry.
You get 10895913 gold coins from the corpse of the Falcon.
You get the Mask of the Master Rogue from the corpse of the Falcon.

For those who haven’t seen the mask before:

Object 'the Mask of the Master Rogue' is infused with your magic...
It is a level 50 armor, weight 2.
Locations it can be worn: face
Special properties: dark unique
Genres allowed: rogue
This armor has a gold value of 23532.
It is one of the pieces of the set 'Guise of the Falcon'.
Owner: Lareawan
Armor class is 10 of 10.
Affects dexterity by 1.
Affects luck by 1.
Affects affected_by by hide.

Seeing as there is only one face wear location I’m not sure how much use the unique flag is here, but a bit of future proofing I suppose. The big thing to notice is the 10 ac. This thing can and will scrap, and though the quest tag can rot off so you can get another one, apparently it takes so long as to be practically never.


You take a closer look at the Mask of the Master Rogue on your body...
The master rogue knows the advantage of covering his or her face in the
midst of a sly deed, and this mask looks like a perfect solution. This mask
is also imbued with magic to enable its wearer to see much which cannot be
seen.

The mask has a small picture icon on the inside, along with the word:

Falcon

In conclusion, yes it is possible for a stock thief to do this, with a fair bit of luck. The shorter you can make the fight, the better, and that’s where extra dr will come into play. I did this with a Lifebane and a Darkfire Thrasher, not entry level but not ‘blivs either. With 500 hitpoint rounds not only possible but regular extra hitpoints will not hurt a darn thing. Overall, just have supplicate favour and don’t be afraid to go and try.

Motivating Exploration

by Tharius

As I said, I would like to open some discussion about things that might help improve aspects of the game that people seem to historically complain about. One of the issues I’ve heard is that although we have a ton of areas, exploring them feels unrewarding.

Not every area can be chock full of top end best in slot gear for all characters and alignments. Given the number of areas we have we’d have to have hundreds of wearlocs to accommodate this influx of fantastic l00tz. Additionally not everyone is motivated by l00tz!

I have been farming achievement points in Diablo 3. I try to accomplish them in the highest difficulty I can, even if sometimes it’s normal. I am not suggesting that the Realms has to become Diablo, but I think that when we see a system that keeps people motivated and encouraged that it’s worth asking “can we replicate it”?

I believe the answer is yes! Quests exist, tagging exists. Some facility has to be created to display achievements and the tagging might need to be extended in order for it all to work but I don’t think it’s impossible.

Additionally it would breathe life into old areas as immortals and players alike suggest achievements for areas. I would thoroughly enjoy finding achievements and trying to create new ones.

What would it look like? Well I think that all achievements should be visible with their requirements spelled out. We have enough unsolved puzzles without adding more. If you create achievements correctly it might even hint to players that some puzzles exist without telling them how to find that puzzle. Achievements should be soloable predominantly. We have enough mkill situations that require groups, or some group play might be needed indirectly but let’s encourage the single player experience again so people aren’t frustrated waiting for groups to form.

Some examples?

    Find all items in pre-auth.
    Read all the points in the Geography room.
    Obtain a pair of lizard gaitors before level 4.
    Visit the recruiting rooms of the Guilds of Nature, Origin and Spirit.

I would also love to see groupings so that you could create an achievement whose requisite is completing a number of other achievements. For example you could create the “Darkhaven Explorer” which requires you to finish a number of achievements related to Darkhaven like visiting the library, lounge, the old guild homes, find Sonoria, and so on.

People like Loril have spent TONS of time putting in game quests into the Realms, maybe a system like this is a little more directed and gives someone something to follow … especially early on. An achievement might be to find a tourist by level 5 but doesn’t have to tell you that the tourist has a quest available.

Thoughts anyone?

The Brujah Return (for IOQC)

by Tharius

So I mentioned getting myself ready for IOQC but what about the IOQC?

This month’s quest was hosted by the Order of Inconnu written by Lady Velya herself.  I quested on Tharius as part of the Dragonslayer team which also consisted of Sophie, Yibaroane, Malfian and Gagnon.

The quest had us retrieving ancient tablets from increasingly more difficult Brujah warriors.  The first warrior was straightforward and in fact stopped the fight before we killed him off.  We had returned to General Assembly for a clue since he had turned himself pacifist but it turned out he was waiting for a little briberooni 🙂

The next two warriors kicked like mules though.  Of course both used a great number of vampiric attacks but also rained a fair amount of gouges and hellfire into my life (I really have to find a good way to cut hellfire down, it’s starting to show up everywhere!!).  A couple of deaths and regroups and we managed to get the job done, switching to ambrosias for the last fight really helped recover from the gouge lag.

I’ve been running around investigating the history of the old clans so to see a direct reference to Brujah here was nice.  Of course both the Inconnu and Brujah are themselves references to White Wolf Games Vampire:The Masquerade so the reference may not have been to the in game pk clan but rather to the original source material but either way, nicely written and themed.

Congrats to DS for coming first in this event, I was proud of our team for working well together.  Solutions to the clues came from 3 different people and lots of suggestions and communication team wide.  Congrats to the other teams as well, I didn’t mind waiting 45 minutes to pester Destre for glory work while you guys were still out and adventuring! 🙂

Good luck next time!!

Catacombs of Mahn-Tor (or 2 thieves and a barbarian levelled makes someone something something…)

by Tharius

The last week has been another detour through adding experience points to characters.  The baby barb that I started to kill Brutus with hadn’t put on a point of xp since I wrote that blog post, so it was time to finish him off.  Ended out with a 933 hp base, which I was pretty satisfied with.  I also levelled 2 thieves for other people and I felt the came out with decent enough bases, 742 and 728 respectively.

This is not another blog post about the evils of leveling or rerolling … this is another blog post about “while I was levelling I tried something new and ..” 🙂

This week’s wander was to the Catacombs of Mahn-Tor, a nifty little adjunct to the Keep of Mahn-Tor.  Once you gain entry there’s a few sealed off tombs that make you grateful that pass door can still be brewed.  Might have even found a bug, because once you door bash them open after repop you can’t walk through them and door bash thinks they are open.  Each of the tombs can provide you with a fight, whether the remains of the King and Queen or just the ancient warrior spirit.  You will additionally confront ghosts, spirits and even a wraith in the hallway.

I’ve noticed that there certainly seems to be more to the area than what I’ve discovered, the flame of the elder was nice as are the cotton bindings but the burial armor seems out of place.  Whenever I see a piece of equipment with negative stats and no apparent use it triggers alarm bells in my head.  Additionally some of the vaults can be opened and closed.  I have not yet determined if bringing the corpse of Mahn-Tor into the catacomb is triggering anything yet, I haven’t gotten it figured out just yet, but I’m having fun trying out different ideas.

I’ve run away with the king and queen’s body before too, I just haven’t decided where to take our mummy jerky yet 🙂

Stay tuned 🙂

Old MacMillan had a corpse, ee aye ee aye woohoo!

by Tharius

So this morning I posted about yesterday’s experience with Brutus.  Rather than edit it to reflect today’s experience, I’d rather bring you along for the ride today.

The baby barb took a beating at the hands of Brutus.  Using uppercut or pummel got as far as few bruises with ridiculous equipment damage.  In other words not enough damage output.  So what the heck can you do with a baby barb to improve the damage output?  Looking down the slist to level 42 I took a suggestion from Ardeth to give something different a try, I went and coughed up the cash for a lance in the barb home town and found out what hurdle is used for!

All of a sudden, the health levels start dropping, the incoming chokeholds were pretty managable but boy oh boy the surprise rends hurt!

Brutus Hammersmith is DEAD!!
You receive 15524 experience points.
You receive 31048 extra experience points for taking vengeance upon Brutus hammersmith.
Brutus Hammersmith falls to his knees, defeated.
Brutus Hammersmith exclaims 'you have bested me!'
Brutus Hammersmith looks down at his fatal wound, and then up into your eyes, a saddened look wiping across his face.
Brutus Hammersmith says 'Tell that vile woman I will see her in hell...'
A finger is sliced from Brutus Hammersmith's dead body.
You get 1390000 gold coins from the corpse of Brutus Hammersmith.

Since I was in gear that was quite easy to replace (yay levelling gear) I went ahead and just stayed stubborn and tried to drop him, well, I’ll pay the price by doing a tour of the realms for gear tonight.

You are using:
<used as light> the sigil of Sil-Galith
<worn on finger> [nothing] 
<worn on finger> [nothing] 
<worn around neck> [nothing] 
<worn around neck> [nothing] 
<worn on body> [nothing]
<worn on head> [nothing] 
<worn on legs> eltor-hide leggings
<worn on feet> [nothing] 
<worn on hands> [nothing] 
<worn on arms> a tattoo of interlaced leaves
<worn about body> an Elvish Cloak
<worn about waist> [nothing] 
<worn around wrist> [nothing] 
<worn around wrist> [nothing] 
<wielded> [nothing] 
<worn on ears> [nothing] 
<worn on eyes> shades of light
<worn on back> [nothing] 
<worn over face> [nothing] 
<worn around ankle> a blue, glassy chain
<worn around ankle> [nothing] 
<wielded as lance> a sharpened dragon tusk lance

I don’t feel bad giving some hints, since lots of people know how to do this kill on a shieldbashing Paladin, it was nice to do it on the barb though.  The hardest part of this is the eq damage, of course.  So… next time, do it on a druid?

Cheers!

A wrap up to the Olympics

by Tharius

Well the Olympics have come and gone and I had a great time.  Here’s a wrap up to the event.

I said in my last post that I hoped that it would be more than a tele-scan but less than a full fledged scavenger hunt and that’s right where I think the event fell.  You did a traditional tele-scan to find letters and then used your letters to build words off a prescribed Nation themed list.  The more letters you were able to use in words, the better you finished.  The half-elves took first in this event, Gagnon was able to split off early and start unscrambling words rather than tele-scan on his mage which gave us a great advantage.  A few small nits to pick, nothing serious … I’d put it in the feed back department.  The unusable characters and the wildcards were a bit frustrating.  In an event like this I’d rather the luck be in the finding the letters and the skill in the word assembly, wildcards take away from that.  Additionally the wildcard letters were in fact just re-purposed unusable letters, and not all of them, which made it one more complication to try to keep straight while looking at the jumble.  Other than that I think the event was a challenge and a lot of fun.  I hope that if this sort of event becomes more common then the people deciding how many of each letter to scatter look at the letter frequency within the words they select rather than looking at standard English letter distributions as we have some things that skew the results (for example H is far more common in the race names due to the word “Half” all over the place than it is otherwise in standard English).

The final event was the Pkill, where I expected to be splattered quickly and often.  As it turned out, the event was a King of the Hill event where you earned points by staying in the designated room.  If every team had strategized to stay in the room as long as possible by not attacking anyone we would have had a terribly boring tie but thankfully that didn’t happen.  Of course, fleeing and returning quickly were vital to a good strategy.  If you killed a PK then trying to keep them from CRing was useful, but if it took you out of the room to do it, then you were only trading off them for you and at no net gain.  PFs didn’t need to cr or even respell, so it was just rush back.  PKs had some advantages like being able to shove people out of the room, but it really wasn’t a deciding factor.  I was taking 2-3 people pretty routinely and it wasn’t until Ceir started bashing me that I was having trouble at all … I mean a pk circle causes you to flee and return, but oh well 🙂  All in all a lot of fun, I killed Creemore just because he figured he’d get picked on, so I didn’t want to let him down.  A lot of the TSers present seemed to attach each other with great relish, perhaps a little pent up frustration from many long meetings!! 🙂

Congratulations to everyone who participated, and thanks again to all the immortals who invested time in preparation for this event, particularly Eisengrim and Gonnil who hosted events and managed the herd admirably.

The Nations Olympics

by Tharius

As we head into weekend 2 I thought I’d take a minute to say that I’ve been enjoying the events that the immortal community has worked hard to prepare for us.

In the quest for the torch (a little quest for fire?) our team did fairly well until the last clue … the solution to that clue was “Tayalardian Rangelands” an area that our group was pretty unfamiliar with.  That clue held us up for the better part of an hour I’m guessing and certainly dropped us in position.  Grats to everyone questing on a thief who stood at DH[] peeking the inventory of other questors as they ran by!! 🙂  I’ll admit, I checked ‘locate object’ 🙂  You should always use whatever your class has to offer, and keep quest items in containers or use config +cloak! 🙂  An unimpressive 6th place for us, but we did our best and discovered a blind spot in our realms-ucation 🙂

The second event was mob kill … well.. it was… the mobs killed 🙂  I insisted on questing on Tharius, which means dealing with his inherent bad stats and for some reason got all buggered up while tanking and ended up splattered before I should have.  No good reason … full stomach and didn’t see it because I was distracted trying to fix a missed wear/wield.  Awell.  The team did well, taking 3rd overall.

Third we had the flee event.  To be fair this is a mostly random event since you have no control over your flee direction.  Still it was a ton of fun, you gotta stay on the ball and not waste any time, we took 3rd in this event by 1 second… yep, 1 second *fshake*!  We had 2 heats, in the first one I couldn’t get the right flee to save my life and in the 2nd one I was through in no time at all.  Maybe averaging the two runs might have been fairer, but all in all a good event.

Today is the item find, I have no idea if I’ll have time to do this or not, I’m hoping that it’s more than a tele-scan but maybe not a full fledged scavenger hunt; people seem to feel obliged to make scavenger hunt clues as obscure as possible.  I’m sure it’ll be well thought out regardless.  If I have time I’ll be there, it’s been a rough day, had to put down my kitty Cooper this morning, poor guy had a brain tumour that started to really impact his quality of life, so I don’t feel up to much.

Will try though, and if not, I’ll try to be around to die in the Olympic Pkill!

From Guild Port to Dragon Raid, only 3 1/2 months behind on my posts! :)

by Tharius

So when last we talked I got about as far as the guilds being ported onto the game port (aka 4k). At the time they had appeared there many immortals had gone over them with a fine tooth comb and they had been approved by the CoE. We were all asked to go back through the areas and start looking for typos and spacing issues, things that were introduced as part of respacing or editing. I’m certain that some made it into the game on the night the guilds opened, because Destre was busier than heck fixing things, but back to that in a moment.

The hint that things were getting close to completion was the appearance of the first of the “guild member” quests. I imagine the idea was to stimulate people who were not logging in on their guild characters to do so and it was at least topically successful. For posterity’s sake the quest was to gather vials of dragon’s blood from the white dragons of the Realms of Despair. The difficulty of the dragon decided the number of vials that would pop. When you returned the vials to Sonoria she would award you 1 glory to a maximum of 15.

This was the first time I’d seen a repeatable, automated glory quest so I had to inquire of some higher ups as to whether it was ok to repeat the quest on other guilded characters as normally you would only go at these things ip1. Some people seriously farmed the dragons to add the 15 glory to each guilded character they had. I’m sure there was more than one headache over this … the more obvious the more problems … Dragon’s Pass and Dragon’s Tower were zoos but Icingdeath and Phenn were less so.

During the second “guild member” quest everyone was instructed to find dragon ore which could be smelted and eventually forged into weapons. The particualr weapon you received would award 1 (dagger), 2 (sword) or 3 (halberd) glory. Through a small bug you could earn up to 17 glory (instead of the maximum 15) by getting to 14 and turning in a halberd. The in theme story line was that we were preparing for a dragon attack, which a few us knew would be the guild port (many suspected).

On the evening of September 19, 2013 the attack hit around 10:30-11pm. Having waited all day I was just wrapping up a Shades of Light run led by Jaxxon of Arete when the echos started appearing. I was heading to bed when this run wrapped up and was quite ambivalent about participating … after all, who the hell knows how long it would take. Still, wanting to see what it was all about, I jumped over to Lareawan and by the time I got myself organized GoV had already fallen. I ran around Darkhaven killing white dragons along with many others and it was well after midnight when we all wrapped up.

A few points about this quest… though officially kill stealing was not allowed, because you could draw the white dragons just by throwing a punch (yes, you can start a fight with another mob while you’re tanking one) if you didn’t kill steal you didn’t get many kills. For most of the quest I didn’t kill steal but when I saw people tanking 6 of the damn things, you’re darn right I started kill stealing… and since the biggest kill stealer got the biggest award a few days later when Kinux started handing out glory and noting people in the news, I can’t say I’m sorry I did it … should have started much sooner. 😛 (Ok, that’s a little childish but when you pat people on the back for kill stealing you do ruffle the feathers of the people who tried to follow the rules … it’s fair to say though that it was chaotic and I am certain Kinux and the other immortals had their attention going in a dozen or more different directions).

The weapons that everyone made during the second quest were never distrubted to the guards in contradiction of the second quest storyline and no in story explanation was ever given for their non-appearance. Of course it’s probably just an oversight, but what the heck, I can pick nits if I notice them :-> I hope to make reference to this in an IGQC quest. The other thing to note is that Kilgharrath was not killable and thus was not killed. I hope to make some reference to him in future IGQC quests as well.

While the quest was running, unknown to many, Ceirana was going crazy behind the scenes clearing out the old guilds of people and unlinking the exits. I think she was loading up people and transing them to Harakiem and force quitting them, but you can well imagine just how many people log out in a guild, so it’s equally possible she just put a program in each room of the old guilds to do it as you logged in.

As the old guilds fell the new leaders were installed. Myself as Guildmaster, Hubris (former Guildmaster of Guild of Warriors) as First and Mooq (former Guildmaster of Guild of Thieves) as Second. Due to the brands not working correctly we had to sort of make things up on the fly and at one point some people were even using induct triggers to handle the flood of requests (at least 1 level 2 got inducted!! since fixed!!) I didn’t get to bed until well after 2:30am, which makes for a very early morning since I was back up at 6am with my little boy.

This seems as good a place as any to put a pin in things, lots of things run through my head as I’m recounting but we’re well on the way to getting my point of view on the mergers out … I look forward to getting current so that I can post Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and not feel like I’ve jumped ahead :->