The Triumph of Persistance

Subtitle: [Subtitle removed because poster is too lazy to go back and finish telling the story]

Epic Quest.

EverQuest.

Yeah....

I've tried to do this epic thing before, with my druid back on the other server. Never got very far on it. Also did some work on the enchanter epic.

Now I'm starting the cleric epic. If I'm lucky, I might actually accomplish this one. It's a good epic. A lot of epics aren't good anymore, when compared to the newer, jazzier weapon drops from Planes or Gates. (Speaking of Gates, one of my guild friends has been nagging me and Kevin to get Gates and decided that he would mail us a copy. I told him if he did mail us a copy, we'd buy the second copy. Seems fair to me.) But the cleric epic is still good. Even if the item itself isn't too spiffy (but it is) the click-effect itself is worth toting this thing about in your inventory. 96% rez. Not that I can't cast a 96% rez, but it takes about 1/4 of my mana, and if you've just had a total raid wipe out, that's a long time to wait to get everyone up and ready to fight again. Much better to whip out the Water-Sprinkler (I didn't name it, not my fault) and click everyone alive again.

The problem is, Sony wanted the epics to be these semi-rare, very valuable items. More valuable, since you couldn't sell them. They're no drop, and most of the stuff you need for the quest is no-drop. But Sony's idea of making something valuable is to make it damned annoying.

There are three main parts to the quest: the Goblin War (or Orb of Frozen Water), the Summoning of Ixiblat Fir (or Orb of Clear Water) and Zordak Ragefire (or Orb of Vapor).

I've got about half of the Goblin war part done - first I killed the king of the Deepwater Goblins. I did this on the lying, bad advice of a spy for the Lord of Fire, Fennin Ro (he's a god). Said spy - Shmendrik Lavawalker - tells me that the King is planning to raid a nearby village and he (Shmendrik) wants to save it. So I swam down and slaughtered Lord Berguggle. Goblins (and orcs) are all bard-wanna-be's. They all sing little rhymes when they're going to try and kill you, "Puny creature at my feet, I think you will be good to eat!"

I took Lord Berguggle's crown and gave it to Shmendrik as proof that I had stopped the goblin threat to the village. Shmendrik laughed at me and declared that the goblins were the only ones who could stop him from burning the village flat and ... I killed him. He came back to life as a fire elemental and I killed that, too. From the fire elemental, I recovered Lord Berguggle's crown and gave it to Natassa Whitewater, who was going to take it back to the goblins and try and smooth things over. She cautioned me that she thinks Fennin Ro was behind this attempt and I should talk with Omat Vastsea to learn more if I want to undo the fire-god's plotting.

Well, being the good cleric I am, I stopped at this point and went to print out a walk-through of the quest. And promptly stopped heading through the epic in a straight path and went to what is often described as "the most mind-numbingly boring part of the epic;" gathering Pearlescent Fragments. This is actually for part three of the quest, but as it's supposed to be the thing that takes the longest, I thought I'd get it out of the way.

Besides, Kevin and I can hunt here by ourselves in relative safety. The pearl shards can drop off any mob in the zone at a rate of 1 shard per 200 kills. or so.

Well, while a cleric and a warrior are an efficient team, we're not exactly what you'd call "quick killers." It takes about a minute or a minute and a half to kill a 40-50th level mob, which is what these are. The mobs are all mostly fire immune dragon-kin. Drakes, wurms, wyverns, chromodracs, with the occasional toothy "feeder" thrown in for variety. The feeders are often called "spermies" because they look sort of like giant sperms. With teeth. If you take that formula of 3 - 5 minutes per mob - a minute or so to track one down and bring it to be killed, a minute or so to kill it and a minute or so to heal up afterwards, we were looking at a long, long stay in this zone (65 hours. give or take.)

Well, of course, we didn't leave it at that and frequently badgered friends and guildmates into coming down and helping us with a stint or two. With a few friends we could kill faster. We had a few 2-4 hour stretches with a few guildies or friends. We also did two two hour stretches with a bard friend who can kill unbelievable amounts of mobs in a relatively short amoung of time. In perhaps 16 hours, we'd collected 2 pearl shards.

This was further complicated by the fact that Sony had yet another DX9 glitch that was causing mobs to spawn under the world. Which meant the whole zone would be populated by mobs, but you could only actually get to maybe one every five or ten minutes.

Last night, after seeing Shrek 2 with our nephew, Kevin and I logged into EQ and prepared for another few hours of little progress. Actually, we were hoping to get into an LDoN group, but the pickings were slim, so we thought shard-hunting would be a good way to pass the time while we waited for something else.

A few of the guild's higher characters were on, so after about twenty minutes or so (and one massive over-train that we had to run to Burning Woods to avoid squishness) I started some subtle nagging. "Hey, Dayzz, you promised to help me with this, now get your assets down here!" "Uuan, nice to see you just logged on! Guess you're not doing anything yet! Drag your button over here and help me out!" "Snowmist, Iildaine, what are you up to? Nothing? GOOD!" Like that.

With the group I pulled together, we were killing upwards of five mobs every three minutes with constant pulls coming in. Sony fixed the DX9 problem last week in a major patch, so there were loads of mobs to be had. And we killed everything that we could find.

About an hour or so into this mad-pulling, I looted one pearl. Slowly, people started peeling off to go do something else. I nagged more guildies into coming down to replace them. Then for a while, it was just Kevin and I remaining. We had to move our camp to a slightly less dragonkin-inhabited area because we couldn't hold the camp by ourselves. A guild shammie - Jessikka - logged on and agreed to come down and help out. Another pair of guildies had a really dismal failure on a plane raid and decided to come down and help me out as well - after dying some 6 times in Plane of Innovation, they decided that my getting my rez-stick would be a good thing.

We killed for a little longer and surprisingly enough, looted the 4th shard shortly after Honoth arrived.

So.... now I have to plot some raids.

There are only 5 mobs left that need to be killed, most of which are force-spawns. The last tedious bit is killing the fire-goblin king, who is on a 19-minute spawn and can spawn either a Large Fire Goblin, a Fire Goblin Shamman, or Lord Grimblox. The spawn is random, and I've read the stuff from people who say he can spawn immediately, after 2 kills or after 15 HOURS of waiting.

Gyek!

Posted by tisfan at June 20, 2004 11:37 AM