Epic finished; my observations.

[Incite]

Hail Fellow Beastlords,

I finished my epic on Prexus last night in the early hours of the morning.  Thanks to all here who have researched and tried different things and cracked the epic in the first place; and to those in serverwide.beastlords who answered my sometimes silly questions and let me taunt them about my easy ME camp.  This is my "thank you" for you: my observations through the quest, I hope they are of help to those who follow.

This document assumes that you have read through one of the excellent guides or checklists on this site.  This is document is intended for posting on http://www.beastlords.org only; feel free to link to it but not reproduce it.

Apologies in advance for poor spelling and grammar; I've put in too many late nights getting this quest done.

General Observations

We have one of the easier epic 1.5s.  I've seen two others on the server, I'm sure there are more.  I have only seen one other non-beastie with epic 1.5 and that's a shammy in my guild.  The whole thing has taken me just under two weeks start to finish, although I've been doing little else in game.  It seems important that you do things in order and say everything you are supposed to say; the reports of a hidden flag system for the epic seem correct to me.  You can go and repeat the last key phrase to NPCs if you mess something up and they give you what you should have again.  If you mess anything up it seems you just go back to the previous step and start from there again.  Vast improvement to the EQ questing system; props to SoE on this.

Part One

Riwwi groundspawn was easy - the guide failed to mention it was underneath the water though.  You can see it by looking directly down into the water if you are standing levi'd over it.  Make sure you are invis; maybe 1 in 50 mobs in Riwwi see invis so be careful.  You will have problems getting out of the water if you are not levi'd; the whole of GoD seems to have this problem.

PoD groundspawn:  Tried trioing Gryme, me, my necro and cleric - all 66th.  Well I had 5.9k HP buffed, did well all things considered and got him down to 50%.  I was going to take another shot at it with full raid buffs (VoQ, Bot9, etc) but rounded up a couple of friend and we romped through.  Killed the spider after for kicks and got mushed by the 12 spiderlings that spawn.  Fun!

Ailing walrus:  I know people have had problems with this one, but took me less than an hour.  Had a guild wizzie come along and we killed everything near the WW zone line, he popped on 2nd clearing.  Hits for 660ish, fully slowable - easy kill.

Gunthak:  Make sure you talk to Muada before you give the Savage Lord Hunter the BDs!!!  I lost 3 BDs because I didn't do this.  

The combine:  I hate tradeskills.  Fortunately my tailoring was already at 66 from my guild's joining quest, so I only had a short way to raise it.  Farmed crystalline silks in CC for ~4 hours total and bought a bunch from the bazaar.  Made crystalline silk stuff up to 112 skill, grabbed a +5% tinkered mod item, combined successfully no problem.  My gut feeling for this is that the trivial is around 50 and that with 100+ skill you have next to zero failure; but that's just a gut feeling.

Part Two

Respawn on the elders seems fairly short, < 2 hours.  Some seem to despawn soon after you have done the hand in, some to not.

Marrey McGrannel:  Don't go to TD like I did to start with.  Duh.  If you levi roughly over the loc and look down, she's easy to spot.

Irionu Bastun:  Easy to find, head due west from the PoK book.
Rashara Wrualla:  First time into JP for me; it's a bit laggy.  She's near the river in the east of the zone.

Ikpug Giblod:  Mad props to whoever found this guy in the first place!  He's a pain; I ran my necro up with an EE and a coffin, killed myself, ran back, summoned my corpse, rezed myself in.  Trivial to do this way, fighting up seems risky; some friends fought up, elemental level gear, and wiped at the top from 10 adds out of nowhere.  

Elder Diddugu:  Pretty trivial, run out, open trade window, have friend invis you, sorted.

Part Three

Ah the infamous Maidens Eye.  I hate this zone!  Who ever designed it needs remedial game design courses.  I was lucky however this took me two hours and a half start to finish.  Be careful up here if you have as crap gear as I do.  The beast spawned and I was fighting two other mobs, and a mistimed heal and I was down.  I CR'd to Umbral zone line and had another try but ended up zoning.  At this point I yelled for help in guild and a druid/warrior duo turned up along with a rogue.  We ended up with a 6 mob fight on our hands but it was dead easy; and he dropped the essence.  Let's hope we see some changes on this, 30+ hour camp times are crazy.  Until there are some changes this will be a huge bottle neck and a contested camp.  Mad props to Annonymous on Prexus who respected my camp while I was CRing!  /rude to a jerk from Stasis guild who trained half the zone on the guy who was at the camp the night before me.

The Nightstalkers were easy.  Ran in, said hi to the person at camp, asked if he minded if I grab the beastie epic drop if there's one spare.  There was one rotting; 30 seconds later I was headed out of zone.

The drogmar took me longer than Maiden's Eye.  I set a timer to 18 mins and cleaned the house between spawns.  Three hours total on this one.  He hits for ~600ish; almost took the cleric out before I had aggro though; if you multi-box make sure you have your tank sat closest to the spawn point.  ;)

Part Four

The spinxes: Thanks again to Annonymouse and her guildies who ran along with me to help with this.  Having done it I know I could have easily 3 boxed it, but I was not sure before I went.  The first mob is a "mostly successful" slow, both hit for ~660, both are pretty easy fights.  If you have faction issues, paci or HoN is a great help, you can get close enough to hail without aggro and then camp out and back to reset your faction.  

Part Five

Back to Ruasha then out to Dranik's Scar.  The hand in mob is down for two EQ days and then up for a while ... I am not sure what the up time is as I did not time it.  I suspect it may be up two days, down two days same as the City of Dranik hand in mob, Erana.  

The twelve mobs on hand in spawn a wee way west of the hand in mob; run to the south wall then run west a short distance, you can't miss the clump of mobs spawned on the rock outcropping.

People tend to have some trepidation on this fight, I did.  It has the potential to be a complete nightmare; however it's not for a simple reason:  the teathering that is supposed to make the fight difficult makes it rather easy.  At any one point you can run out of the teather radius and the mobs will reset back to their spawn points and forget you.  I did this fight twice, once for Annonymouse, once for me the next day.  Both times it looked far scarier than it was.  Single pulling the named proved easy the first time using an SK, the next day it seemed impossible.  A good strategy is to pull the non-named in ones and twos and kill them, however you need to DPS hard at 20% as they run and are not snarable - and once they are out of their teather radius they reset!  The named is an easy tank for any plate class with semi-decent gear and is fully or mostly slowable; a one group fight.  At one point the named appeared to despawn but had actually reset itself into the middle of the rock.  We ended up with two non-named and the named and it was not difficult; the non-named was beating on my cleric for a while, she ended up running it out of the teather range and it reset (thanks to group mate who prompted her to do this!).  If you get the named out with 2-3 adds then have your tank taunt the named while a high aggro class gets aggro then runs the adds out of teather range you will have a single pulled named.  I suspect the teather range will eventually be made a lot bigger though or the fight changed in some way to make it more what was intended by the designers.  

When you are done, don't do what I did:  Run half way to JP and realise that you didn't do the post fight hand in to the mob in Dranik's Scar!  

The Final Fight

Erana is a two hour up, two hour down mob.  I would like to see this changed, it is incredibly frustrating to be getting people together and watch her despawn.  Also once you have successfully done the final fight you need to wait two hours before doing the hand in to her.  This is just pure silliness and I am not sure quite what SoE were trying to achieve with it.  

I assembled my raid at the zone in and we fought up to the fight room.  We had thirty people; it was sheer overkill.  I was wanting twentyfive to thirty to be sure of a win and it was certainly more than enough for a trivial win.  We parked at the top of the stairs and I ran back down to Erana and did the hand in; the brave bard ran down to the main room and started kiting while the mage pulled.  The first warder came up fine and was dead in thirty seconds or so.  As the mage was pulling the second warder the bard was squished horribly; I believe due to the AE.  The rest of the mobs, boss included charged up the stairs and turned the mage into dark elf flavoured mush.  The tanks piled in, I told everyone to DPS the boss and less than a minute later everything was dead.  

Doing this again I would not kite the mobs I would have everyone set up in the room and stand up fight them.  Your raid will suffer one or two AEs maximum.  RGC removes the effect, but most of us seemed to resist the AE.  Have the tanks be ready to split off mobs and healers to keep them standing, everyone else burn on the boss mob and he goes down very quick; clean up the warders and you are finshed.

Well I hope this helps people with their epics, feel free to shoot me a tell on Prexus if you have any questions, might take me a while to reply sometimes but I will help if I can; I would be happy to lead the final fight raids on Prexus if I am at a loose end.  Thanks again to all those who helped, and to all those who've written things up here on the boards for reference.


Regards,

Incite Riots & Garbage the Bear of Doom,
Clan nan Dreolan,
Prexus server
1st October 2004[/u]

[Eatbugs]

Erana is a two hour up, two hour down mob. I would like to see this changed, it is incredibly frustrating to be getting people together and watch her despawn.

I thought our epic was the only one with this problem when I was going through it, but having helped on a number of other class epics now it seems to be a common thing.  You're right - it's extremely frustrating to get several groups together, get them to a zone and set up, and then have the trigger or mob despawn.  I have no clue what they were thinking on these.  Maybe they wanted to encourage the placing of bots to check on things?  :P

[Ukator Iceblood]

I think its so multiples wouldn't be done back to back. However it would be nicer if she just despawned for two ours after you hand the item back to her. I'm at this step and kinda dreading dragging people there only to have it despawn.

[Aspro]

She despawned while we were clearing the room  :? , the 2 next time we came, i triggered before anything else ^^

[Nusa]

Just be nice enough to your raid buddies to sit and watch the trigger spot until it either spawns or despawns. Then you'll know when to gather people and have plenty of time without worrying about despawn.