Elk Hero of Whitebay Auberean Irregular

Flame filled the world. Unbearable heat belched forth, obscuring everything into a world of flame. The roar of the crackling blaze was second only to the bellowing of the Storm Tyrant. Grasp utilized long-practiced defender skills to heal the massive damage. Her only hope now was to outmend the flames. The group had been too small to fight Tyrants, the lack of a sage or healer spoke volumes to that effect. Still, this had not been a fight of their choosing. Carefully the four had skirted the tyrants to battle the Carnage Shreths and Mountain Dillos. It was one such battle that had attracted the Storm over to them.

On the ice that covers the Gevoth Crater, a lone swordswoman falls before the might that is a Tyrant. On a nearby mound, an Archer is heedless of the danger that will soon stalk his direction. His sole focus is the widening gap in the monster's armor. As the creature bawls out in victory over the defender, Tao Tie relentlessly unleashes shaft after shaft, each one unerringly hitting the mark. He scarcely notices as the beast turns its blood-streaked body towards him. Before it can take yet another step, the assault takes its toll. One great wing crashes down, echoing like thunder against the icy hills. An instant later the other wing collides with the land. The once-deadly maw collapses inches from Tao Tie's feet, its eyes, glazed with death.

Elk Hero!
That's right, Eeriest Elk is now the MSinsider Hero of Whitebay, having almost single handedly defeated the Gurog invasion, before being slaughtered like a trussed pig. But that should, by no means, lessen his heroic qualities as declared in the MSInsider's exclusive article detailing the Eeriest one's battle prowess and lamentable slaughter. Here is the link touting the Ode to Elk, Martyred Hero of Whitebay. http://microsoftgamesinsider.com/AC2/Community/scribe_LC_2.htm

Now as to what happened. I had left Elk on Linvak due to a hopeful running of "Relics of the Golden Age" (GA) quest. This is the first of the Darkfoe armor quest and quite a nicely done one as well. As I logged in the number of red dots made me wonder if I was in Palisade. It was Gurogs though. Buffing up, and summoning a minor and a brat, I went to work hurling my spear hither and yon. Never having fought Gurog before and being the tender level of 33, I wasn't quite sure how intelligent of an idea this was, then again, Elk has never been accused of being intelligent. Much to my surprise the Gurog died shortly after killing my Brat. I summoned up another and a second minor and started going to town. By this time a goodly number of Heroes had entered the town which made it much easier for a missile wielder to not engage in melee. With a good number of slain Gurog under my belt I started feeling some confidence, until I got targeted by one of them. I hadn't been watching my pets and didn't realize that my brat was dead again, so when I started chucking my spears at the oncoming Gurog I expected at least one of my pets to come help. The two minors were obviously in distress over the loss of the brat and didn't heed my summons until I was very low in health. The Tumerok heal is mediocre at best (moreso when compared to Bring Peace from the Defender's tree). So at that point I fell before his murderous axe and found myself back at the Sanctuary Life Stone (LS). I'm sure that my comrades, devastated by the loss of me, pushed back the tears and despite overwhelming odds surged forth to victory in my name. Although I can't seem to find anyone who wants to confirm this.

The Power of the 'Zerk
The Shades of The Lost Heroes quest (Boots) has an annoying bug that will strand people in the boss room. When your group kills the Krypt Keeper, everyone gets flagged to use the portal to visit the lost spirit of Kartok. However the portal access gets turned off after one person goes through. So, your group enters the lair after fighting the gauntlet throughout the dungeon. You attack the giant undead and slay it. Everyone runs to the portal and only the first person there enters and then it's shut off. If someone left the fellowship before he hit the portal they would go in as well. Now your party is halved in power and you have to fight off the spawns again.

The well-published work around has been to drop the fellowship upon killing the Keeper and then reforming it. In this boot run we got stuck twice. As luck would have it, along with our group was a Bezerker named Adamant. We caught up with him at the silent city. He was soloing the boot quest. If you have been in these dungeons you have an idea of how difficult a task that is. With the April Patch one of the key elements to Lugain fighters has been reigned in, Reap by name. I'm not sure how this affected Adam's soloing ability yet.
My Icefire quest timer was almost up. I had a Golden Age flail in my pack so I mounted up and ran the Ancient Periapt (AP). This upgrades your weapon and sets up the Icefire quest. Next I ran Lodrog the Forsaken and thanks to the armory was done in record time. I made it to the Frozen one and waited for people to show up. After 20 minutes I was still alone and unsure if I could take out the Gig myself. I know that other Defenders have done it, I would just like some added insurance. This led me to ask Adamant if he could help. He was eager to test himself against the Gigurath and started running from East Gevoth. No sooner did I /tell him when some people started showing up. I waited until Adam arrived and went to start the quest. The Frosty one ignored me. Now this is embarrassing, I did everything right, I got the GA weapon, did the AP and then Lodrogs just before this. What is wrong? Well, I had 30 min left on my timer was what was wrong. Somehow I must have misread it.

Apologies were offered all around but the group there decided to stick around. While waiting, Adamant decided to test his mettle against the Gig. Now since I have been doing this quest I have seen full fellowships slaughtered and many a long battle take place. Never have I seen a lone Lugian take down this huge monster this quickly. He was hitting for 2500 which is staggering. Needless to say we got the oil and finished the quest. Thanks Adamant, quite a show!

Magical level 48
There have been a few magical levels for me. Level 15 so I could go to Omishan, level 30 so I could go to Linvak Massif, level 19 so I could traverse the Kydi vault, level 21 so I could finish the vaults on Osteth and so on. Now that I'm marching towards level 48 I realize that it's a truly great level. The last vault, Gevoth, will be open to me, the gust tyrant pet can be mine as well and Linvak Recall, that gem of all recalls. Getting there is the only problem.

Oh, I have time to get anyplace - that isn't the issue, I just want to get to level 48 before the April patch. It's a self-imposed quest. If you read last issue you know that I'm laid up and can't do much of anything else at the moment. So I have 90 million xp to make in about 11 hours. First off I head to East Gevoth Ringway. It's the only non-PK outpost on the Palisade ring. From there it is a harrowing ride south on my Ataur to the crater of the Tyrants. There is a lifestone near the Gevoth Vault that gets you into the thick of things.

I dismounted in time to help ward off a Tyrant attack on the lifestone itself. Of all the Lifestones about Dereth, this one is the most fraught with danger. I quickly got into a fellowship that was running from three static spawns, two Storm Tyrants (Group MOB level 60) and a Squall Tyrant (Group MOB level 57). This group of warriors consisted of Bob Svenson, Reign, Ezikeil Rag, Mirdin and Khamul. All through the wee hours of the morning we battled tyrant after tyrant. Sometimes it would get the better of us, the majority of the time we kicked it's scaly butt. When fighting a Tyrant you need a good coordinated group, the healing has to be spot on and everyone needs to pay attention. Some of the area of effect spells (AOE) they use are very nasty.

It was a good morning and we were averaging about 14 million an hour. The group broke down with people needed to head off to do various things. I myself had a few morning chores to do as well.

When I got back into game I hitched up with what could be suggested as the same grouping. Bob Svenson, Reign, Miridin, Shamul and Dalia. We fought the two storms and the squall for a time until another group moved in. Then we headed out against Cloud Tyrants (Group MOB's level 54) and Crag Tyrants (Group MOB level 51) with a few Carnage Shreths (level 50) and Mountain Dillos (level 50) as well. Of these monsters, the Dillos are the easiest to kill. They don't hit as hard and have very few AOE that stop you from fighting. The Carnage Shreths have Plague Wind that drains your vigor over time. When faced with that as a defender I had to outheal the effect, then hit our sage with vigor heal, to keep the party going. As with all hunting, downtime is the xp killer.

I'd offer this advice to people in a hunting party. Keep your healer alive. If he is being attacked, get the creature off of him quickly. If you have some healing skills, get into a position where you can target him. Know what your foe is capable of and how to best defend against it. This is a learning curve that three battles should spell out clearly. One of the nasty AoE's that Tyrants use is called Pacify. This renders you utterly useless, you cannot cast or fight. If caught with this and you're the Tyrant's primary focus, running may not be an option. If you aggro another tyrant or a Shreth to your group by running, it can break your group into chaos quickly. It may be better for the majority to take the vitae and run back under LS protection. If you're not it's focus, backing off a bit and letting the fellowship know you're pacified is probably best. Watch that icon count down and know exactly what you're going to do when it runs out.

Because everyone's fellowship list has a different order, setting up a looting queue can be difficult. Tyrant parts are in high demand and rather than have everyone in the group jumping in to loot first, which will destroy moral quickly, using the fellowship list is a natural way to track who is next in line. Once you choose someone to track the names and everyone agrees to go with their list, you have pretty much eliminated that as a problem. Fellowship etiquette demands that only the person whose turn it is to loot opens the corpse. If you ID the body and see an item count, you can be sure someone looted out of turn and quite possibly stole your Tyrant Claw. If it's not your turn to loot and you are not in midst of a battle, move away from the body and get ready for the next task at hand.

I was close to 30 million experience left to level 48. Unfortunately I was starting to nod off at the keyboard. I logged out to take a bit of a nap. Staring into radiation can make one sleepy. When I got back in game my vassals had produced 5 million xp which put me around 30 million. A guild group was forming to do some hunting. The Tyrant Crater was getting pretty camped, so I took the option and hunted Shreths and Dillos with Arcus Toxophillus, Ox Levian and Tao Tie. We didn't do too bad, at one point we ended up on the receiving end of a Storm Tyrant. We had it very low in health when Arcus and Ox were layed low. This left me and Tao fighting. I was it's primary focus and Tao was firing his bow from a good distance away. I kept up with the damage it was dishing out till near the end. When it finally got the better of me, it was only a few bow shots left for Tao to take it down. One of the better battles of the day!

I had to take another break. When I returned, I got back into the static spawn group. This time it was with Goober, Sackett, Nevthus, Pent and Talmar. I was below 20 million and in about an hour I had gotten level 48. I had hoped to do the Gust Tyrant Quest right away, but with only 15 minutes to the patch and having no clue where in the Frozen Ravine to run to, I logged out to see what joys Turbine was going to provide me the next day.

Less than Stellar:
Well this was it, Patch day. I have been looking forward to this since the last patch. However this time my situation allowed me to be here at the computer as soon as the download is ready. I found that the servers had already come up and I quickly started the process. I hit the game and started looking around. Beacons were in some of the outposts and towns of Linvak. I carefully noted the locations and fired them off to the Warcry site. I have one character on each of the continents, so investigating and confirming was rather quick. I even got a group and started clearing out the Wintershollow ringway of Gurog. Rumors flew me to the crater pathway on Omishan. A huge group of beacon-summoned monsters were inside. The group in there cleared it out a dozen times, but nothing happened to let us know what was going on.

Some of us started checking the websites to see what the nature of this event was. None of us could figure it out so far. News hit that Frostfell had destroyed the Beacons. I got a hold of someone with information and nothing seemed right. The location of the new NPC didn't match up and the beacon he claimed to be on Ikeras wasn't there. Having reached a few dead ends I started looking around for lore. Rithwic is now overtaken by Drudges and the lake is getting even lower. The sunken city is rising above the waters and a curious skeleton of a large anchovy makes me ponder the meaning.

As the day progressed a few things came to light. The tyrants and giguraths had their experience reduced. Then it was found that the server broadcast messages, which go off when someone got the event quest and gave the rest of us instructions, was set to 'off' by the patch. This meant that a major tool for deciphering the quest was yanked away. There was some issue with crafting that I didn't bother to understand and some bad implementation of anti-pk coding. This, added with near zero new lore, left me disappointed. My one ray of hope for this month is we could see the content rolled out over the next couple of weeks.

Good News:
I took my leg to the sports doctor. He informed me that I had a partial rupture of the Gastrocnemius at the point where it meets the tendon. He also fitted me with a walking device called the Equalizer Air Walker http://www.roycemedical.com. This great device let me throw away the crutches. So I can now move about the place and do a lot of stuff I couldn't do before.

-EE