Exquisite Turmoil

So, we decided to do a Shard of Fear run tonight, check out the new zone.. yeah, didn’t go so well. To start off, when you first zone in there are “scarelings” flapping around. They look like cucuys from Unrest, have an enormous agro range, and like to agro you as you’re standing at the IZ still waiting for the healer to zone. Very reminiscent of Plane of Fear, at least. So after one death (well three, if you count Selise, Syslik, and Kethryveris), Venovia zoned in and was able to get us rezzed, and things progressed apace. There’s a little dead dooder lying on the floor and you get a quest from his journal to find some glasses. After wandering around for a bit, we found his goggles and got a quest update, commanding us to destroy the bone towers.

The bone towers are guarded by level 73^^^ fetid fiends, and encounters of 3 72^^ fetid fiends. The single 73^^^s aren’t bad, but once you have to fight one of the encounters, good lord! They have a 10 second stun and they like to chain cast it. We definitely spent at least 40 seconds stunned at one point. Obviously, this makes them very difficult to defeat if you don’t get a resist on your healer or someone who can cure your healer, because they also hit pretty damned hard as well. Anyway, when you kill all of the fiends outside of the tower, it spawns a named (who drops no loot, the bastard) and once you defeat him you have “destroyed the tower”. We destroyed two bone towers, and spent a little time hunting named.

We killed one named spider who wasn’t that difficult, although he did have a nasty AE (but after the first try we just kept everyone but my tank out of range). On the second pull the named went crazy and like.. ran away (pathing bug, I’m sure) and ran through a bunch of other spiders and brought them back to us. Third time’s the charm, of course, and down he went, dropping his crappy cloth hat (congrats Yadinal, though if you wear it I’ll have to kill you :p) Continuing along, we got a few random drops from random mobs. Notably, Dawnfear the Reaper, which went to Syslik, much as I wanted some cowbell for myself, I’m afraid I never use 2h.

Next up on the list was Fearmonger, a gorilla with a fear. Pretty straightforward and easy, went down easily and dropped crap for loot, whee for wooden chests. After that, we decided to go after the named monkey on top of the tower, Kyr’Tok, who will henceforth be referred to as “Assrape”. On our first pull of Assrape, I went to the top of the tower and jumped off with him in tow. I’m pretty sure that I died before I even hit the ground. Pull #2 consisted of the same thing, but with reactives up and my 30 second mit buffs running. This time we managed to drop him to about 40% health but Assrape has a massive knockback and was very fond of blowing me out of heal range. As well as blowing everyone else around while they were trying to cast. So then we figured hey, lets go inside the temple and pull him into there, that way we can corner him and not worry about knockbacks. Unfortunately, this resulted in my death before making it into the temple. Our next attempt was to have Syslik pull with DA. The theory here was that he would make it into the temple at 100% health with his uber DA running, Selise would grab agro, and we would perform some assraping of our own. Unfortunately, Assrape’s AE ignores the z-axis and managed to hit everyone inside the temple while Syslik was pulling, as well ignoring DA. At this point I had had enough, decided it was late at night, didn’t feel like using my third repair kit, and called it a night. More Shard of Fear to come tomorrow. Hopefully the ensuing post will be a bit more pleasant.

All in all, I had a pretty good time despite all of the deaths, but I am very much looking forward to understanding the layout of this zone better. I am not particularly fond of exploring things on my own, I would much rather have a walk through. And a map. I am capable of getting lost in my own driveway, let alone in a brand new open zone with no map. Ah well. The trials of being female, I suppose. Dan does not seem to be troubled with this affliction. And by affliction I don’t mean being female. I am very certain that Dan is not female. By affliction I mean the complete and total lack of directional sense. Or any sense, he might tell you :p Anyway, I do believe it’s bed time!