So, on Plane of Nostalgia we've been ripping through Kunark pretty well and are close to unlocking the Shadows of Luclin expansion. Our final hurdle is Trakanon - a poison dragon far more powerful than anything we've faced so far.
Defeating Trakanon is going to require us to gear up as much as possible, so we've been working on our resist gear and epic quests. We've finished a few epics so far (paladin, enchanter), and a few nights ago, Nil, Ayedin and I got together and booted up our characters to finish his monk epic. All we had to do was travel to a newbie zone and kill this guy:
Turns out Xenovorash was harder than we thought, and we died several times before he despawned. This meant that Ayedin had to re-farm all the components, and we would have to try another day. Well, enough of us were around this past Friday to give it another shot. We killed Xenovorash in one attempt, and he was actually the first boss we've faced that finally forced us to use a Complete Heal chain. =D
Afterwards, we decided to take a single group into one of the most difficult zones in the entire game - Cazic Thule. Usually when we group, it's 1-2 people controlling all the characters. But tonight was the first chance many of us have had to group while playing only a single character. It allows you to move fast and accomplish a lot more... so long as your teamwork and communication are solid. Our group makeup was as follows:
Tank - Lunarocean (played by Nil) - level 59
Healer - Nilianil (also played by Nil) - level 59
Puller/DPS - Aepoc (played by Ayedin) - level 60
Crowd Control - Nandarie (played by me) - level 60
DPS - Azazel (played by Sab) - level 60
DPS - Thelly (played by Thelly) - level 54
With only one healer and no cleric, we knew it would be tough, but we decided to give it a shot anyway. We ported in to bypass the first half of the zone, and found ourselves smack in the middle of the maze:
We started clearing and, aside from the random getting-summoned-into-the-wall-bug, we were doing pretty well. We did learn that Zealots cast a painful poison AE rain, but timely stuns made them pretty reasonable to kill.
Our only issue is that the zone respawns are very fast. As we were handling a two-pull right before moving up (which involved dps not assisting, so crowd control was impossible...), a third mob spawned. It was a zealot. One AE, and we were all dead.
So, we got our corpses dragged to the port-in and tried again. We had much better luck this time, and we were making good progress. Then Ayedin asked us to move up, and we suddenly found ourselves staring at a giant temple:
I was like "oh fuck," because that's a pretty easy area to die in. I didn't think our group was ready for the temple.
There's mean shit there. The repops are fast. Mobs roam all over. And the lizards go from green (easy) to brown (not easy).
What followed was a completely hectic twenty straight minutes of us fighting at the temple entrance, with roamers and repops constantly aggro'ing and our casters running on fumes. We eventually battled through and moved on mere seconds before repops.
We slooooowly worked our way around and up the temple. One of the lizards happened to drop the best loot we've seen on the server so far:
http://eq.magelo.com/item/27948Congratz to my bard on that. We also picked up a great shoulder for Azazel and another earring for Lunarocean (with 10 ac!!!).
As we spiraled our way up the temple and got close to the top, we started seeing these guys:
That told us we were getting close to whatever was inside. And this is what we found waiting for us:
We killed him, though! And what uber loot did we get? Why... a skull-shaped container... It turns out that if we farm up more rare loot in the zone and combine it in the container, we can spawn some sort of super-dragon-boss that would kick the shit out of us. Hooray!
So, with nowhere else to go, we jumped down inside the temple and found ourselves above a giant sewer system.
I did not remember this area at all. Pools of slime lurked below, but the real threat came from above. Something must have bugged out (it might have been pet pathing), and some lizards aggro'd us from up above. Unexpected, but not an impossible battle to handle, right?
Well, when Lunarocean went to tank up the mobs, he sort of... rocketed out of the water and fell to the bottom. That left the lizards to feast on the rest of the group.
The end result?
Still, a successful (and entertaining) run overall.
I hope to be reporting a Trakanon kill soon. It's going to be one hell of a challenge.
Topic: EQ Journal - Cazic Thule (Read 3996 times)