You should be able to invis then invis vs undead when you hit undead mobs if you come down the path with the spiders. I'm really glad you are enjoying kaesora, it's one of my favorite zones and it doesn't get enough traffic. The xp in the hole is really good at your level. The mage can do well with elemental DD line, loam drops off of any elemental mob, xp is good, and there are some good PP drops. I'm not sure on the level but the mage can summon some weapons that proc a elemental DD which would be great for your charm pet and mage pet.
Good point! The only tricky bit is the switch from invis to IvU at the start of the church, where there are both live and undead roamers.
Well, I did 40-49 in the Kaesora church. It was fast, but staying there for nine levels stretched the definition of 'fun'. If other folks are following a similar leveling path, I'd suggest mixing in some lguk/solb/kedge/hole/etc for variety, atmosphere, and nameds/loot. But now I can do Seb! Mm, Seb.
I was exploring Permafrost with my rogue, and it looks interesting, the goblins are really packed in there. The main problem is that when my rogue snuck into the king room, the gate closed behind him and now I can't figure out how to re-open it. Is there a switch somewhere or do I need to clear a path down there with my boxes and port out?
I could've sworn there's a way to open that door by clicking a torch or something, but I'm not sure if you can here or not. May have to clear a path in
i dont think there is an exit once you are inside otw to vox, the first gate you can open but tnot the second
I do get a message saying something like "That object is not close enough" if I click the door from a distance, but nothing happens when I get close. It's very possible I'm not looking at the right spot, though, I do not know this zone at all. Ah well, time for the enchanter box to pull her weight. This dungeon would be rough without crowd control. The goblins are grouped up and have a fair number of casters and healers. Just fyi for any future dungeon crawlers.
Just thought I'd add that I leveled my SK in the Kaesora church, too. The exp stayed fast all the way to 51, when it greened out. Although many mobs were light blue at 50, the exp rate was almost the same as it was at, say, 47. Plenty of safe places to AFK, and in addition to the ~20 mobs in the church and surrounding buildings, you can run around in the hallways and ruins above the church and kill another dozen mobs each respawn cycle.
Where do people like to camp in the Hole? As far as I know, it's the only high-level zone with a decent ZEM. Seems like it'd be a good place to get to know! Fanglore and I explored the zone a bit yesterday. We camped in the jail and killed ratmen, elementals, and the Improved Healing III idol dropper. But the pulls got a bit long, and the charmpets were kind of underwhelming. Any suggestions for a camp in the Hole with tons of nearby mobs? Thoughts on where I could find good (highish level, decent chunk of hitpoints, not terribly resisty) mobs to charm?
You could try the undead tower and farm some decent priest gear (withered leather). Only problem is getting there.
Savannah and I got there pretty easily between the two of us 3 boxing each. If you wanna go down there sometime Pithy let me know. I can drag my toons along and show you guys how to get there. Spent a good week there 2 weeks ago just farming withered leather with Savannah for cash and to fill in gaps on my shaman.
Undead tower is an incredibly fun place. There was an old guide form eqclerics.com that was all about how it used to be a phenomenal solo spot for a cleric. There's some cool named mobs there too, like Dartain the Lost. I was talking with a friend I met in Kurn's about Droga. The Inner Sanctum area is legitimately one of the most action packed places in Kunark to level. Snare is a must, as is some good crowd control, but the drops and experience are well worth the effort. I spent a lot of time camping the lumpy goos in Dalnir's back on AK. I was pretty desperate to have my own Iksar Skeleton Pet, even if it was temporary. It seemed like a really fun place, but very packed and another place where snare is clutch.
Bumping this thread for new folks. Touring Norrath's dungeons was a super fun way to level. Now that Velious is out, there's also Crystal Caverns (30-45 ish?) and the Tower of Frozen Shadow (35-50?). ToFS is an amazingly rich zone! Tons of mobs, decent drops for the level range, fun progression through the floors, and plenty of challenges to keep you on your toes.
I'm pretty sure all of them are. I'll check my logs. I believe I keyed to floor 2 on AK and then after AEing the floor for something ridiculous like 4-5 hours I got no keys for 2nd floor.
This was a fun thread to read. The wife and I like to get off the beaten path in EQ as much as possible.
Man, I wrote the OP back in May, 2016. Hard to believe I've been playing here for five years. <3 This thread was about fun dungeons to level up in. Places off the beaten path that I hadn't really explored in era on Live. Back then, folks suggested a bunch of cool zones: Najena, Upper/Lower Guk, Permafrost, Mistmoore, Solusek's Eye a/b, Splitpaw, Kedge, Dalnir, Kaesora, RunnyEye, Unrest, and more. When I leveled up my first trio (enc/clr/mage), I explored less than half of those zones. As a little nostalgia project before PoP launches, I just rolled a trio of noobs (monk/dru/nec) to dive into some other new-to-me dungeons. So far I've done Blackburrow (decent) and Befallen (pretty cool!). I'm thinking I'll hit the Warrens next before I out-level the place. Then maybe RunnyEye? Pathing there was murderous back in 2016, but hopefully navmesh has improved it. New folks, feel free to poke me on Typo/Tpyo/Ytpo if you want to team up and go explore some weird dungeon. My toons are around level 16 atm.
Love Befallen and Blackburrow at low levels. Befallen is also the greatest dungeon name ever. Really love Kedge at higher levels. Once you learn the ropes, squirting around in there is a blast.
The greatest dungeons taken together IMO are Solusek's Eye & Naggy's Lair, as well as Upper Guk + Lower Guk Live/Dead side. Both of these expansive dungeons, when taken together as whole (ignoring the zone lines) harken back to really BIG dungeons (aka Megadungeons) of the classic pen & paper game Dungeons & Dragons in its earliest iterations (Original D&D, Basic D&D, & Advanced D&D). Furthermore, both of these sprawling series of dungeons offer a means to go from the appropriate entry character level up into the 40s+, without having to go anywhere else besides the bank/vendor/spells/buffs in PoK or where ever. For size Upper & Lower Guk beats out SolA/B, but I think I like SolA/B better for the variety of mobs, difficulty of navigation, exploration, etc. Part of that preference for me probably also stems from getting sick of killing frogloks sometimes, between Guk & Seb (and lots of other places!). The Hole is another dungeon zone that is right up there with SolA/B & Guk, at least to my mind. Its an intricate place that can take some time to navigate and learn the layout, and the entire premise of the zone is fantastic! A city that falls into a chasm because of a terrible war of magic during a civil war! Fantastic, and harkens to the story of the city that fell into the earth in the original Dragonlance saga. I do wish this zone had better itemization though. Definitely worth farming, but it seems a bit lackluster on that side of things. Great ZEM for the level though! Mention has been made of the High Keep ZEM treadmill, and obviously the intent of this thread was to go to other, less visited dungeons. Understandably so, given that the treadmill gets old the first time around. However, for people just trying out the game, or those who never really did High Keep back in the day, it is actually a pretty good place to learn the ropes of grouping or 3-boxing as you progress from the goblins in the basement, then to guards, and finally to the Royals. The ZEM here is high, which is a big draw on the xp treadmill, but its also a place where someone can start at the appropriate level, work their way through the different "tiers" of the zone, all in one handy leveling spot. With bankers and vendors, if you can access them after burning your High Keep faction! Obviously I'm only touching the surface of the topic of dungeons, and there are an amazingly large number of them in this game, even if several of them are underwhelming or downright not very entertaining. I would have loved to see a counterpart to Permafrost Keep in the same manner as Upper/Lower/Live/Dead Guk or SolA/B, but alas there is none. Also, some of these dungeos are just screaming to be retooled in some EMU server to be high level zones with reitemized loot tables ala the revamped Accursed Temple of Caziz Thule. And speaking of Cazic Thule, it a shame that the original zone no longer exists here and other servers where the zone was revamped to a higher level version. That is not a complaint, per se, because I really like the high level revamped version of CT. However, I did enjoy leveling up in the older version when that still existed, and it was a zone with fun exploration, encounters, and a good spread of levels for that range as you went deeper in. A PoK book in Feerot to the older zone would be fabulous! And of course, a mention should be made of some of the "outdoor" dungeons like Unrest, Karnor's Castle, CT, etc., simply because they are outdoors. SoW & Selo's make these "outdoor" dungeons fun and interesting in different ways, especially back in the day when these zones were permacamped and players actually had hotkeys /shouting "Train to Zone!!! Run NOW!!!" Heh.
Thinking on this a bit more, one of the great things about the "all in one" dungeons like SolA/B or Guk Upper/Lower is the fact that these zones offer the new player here a place to box through the content of one, and then level up another box crew in the other places that are conducive to this "craddle to the grave" type of dungeon experience. Pithy's comment about how a dark elf trio could go from Nek Forest to Lavastorm, Najena, and the SolA/B was very interesting to me. Someone else made the comment about how Upper/Lower Guk serves the same purpose for trolls and obviously ogres as well. Interestingly for the good & neutral races, and from looking at the maps of the old world (Antonica especially, but this pertains to Faydwer & Odus a bit too), you have to travel further away from respectable places in order to get into the dungeons, while passing through prospectively more hostile outdoor zones to get there. Tie that in with the amazing faction system (despite some of its flaws, the worst probably being that newbies won't understand it enough not to ruin factions they need later on, at least in the original game), and it really is both a commentary on the genius of the game designer (in a much lower computer tech level), the obvious roots they had in role playing games, and how they drew upon the source material of the earlier pen & paper role playing games, especially Dungeons & Dragons. In D&D, getting farther away from home base (i.e., the hamlet, town, city, secluded temple, etc.) was dangerous; the terrain was less tamed, there were fewer roads, much of it would require blazing your own trail as you crawled the wilderness map to discover dungeons and keeps to raid, and the "mobs" (i.e., monsters, as all creatures that were not specifically NPCs or player characters were termed "monsters") are on different "factions" (i.e., alignment in D&D) and thus progressively more hostile to the player characters. Towns and cities had guards, militias, soldiers, etc., and mounted patrols are quite common near "home base" areas. EQ obviously did not have mounted characters or NPCs for a long time, but the idea from D&D carries over. The further one traveled from civilization, the more dangerous it became, the less likely you were to find friendly places to stop and rest and refit, and the the monsters encountered would typically be more evil, vicious, and harder to kill. Obviously the distances here are compressed due to the technology limitations of the time, and the need to actually get somewhere in the game so you can enjoy it. The Commonlands are a great example of this. Head out from Freeport, and there are still roads or paths to follow, guard stations to run to for help (and have your xp stolen!). Qeynos Hills follows this pattern as well. Further, you have both the good and the corrupt factions of guards in Freeport & Qeynos, and both have evil, dangerous underworlds directly beneath the the feet of the civilized types! Dark elves & thieves in the tunnels beneath the city, aligned with a corrupt faction of guards who mean ill to their own people? The cult of the loathesome Bertoxulous down in the catacombs? Blasphemy! We must find some reliable adventurers to investigate this, report back to us, and perhaps handle these ruffians and wicked beings who are trying to overthrow law & order! Post a bounty, make a proclamation, and let the steadfast come forward to serve their people and their king! And for the select few who survive, prestige, riches, and closer ties to their own people. The theme of corruption, wickedness, and aberation are strong themes in the fantasy of Dungeons & Dragons, and the literary source material from which the content of the game was drawn, as well as the notions of heroism, nobility (in the moral sense), and alignment faithfulness. Alas, most of that passed away as the game "progressed," and the notion of factioning and questing to stay on the right (or wrong) side of the aisle has long since become defunct as game play passed beyond the staid and boring "world of mortals" to far flung, malign, untamed, and unexplored (but not uninhabited) continents, and of course other planes of existence, where men and elves, dwarves and hobbits and gnomes, are the exception rather than the rule. Most of the game world has become a place for unscrupulous freebooters to raid and loot and plunder, showing their true character and unfaithfulness to their own kind, ruthlessly fighting for treasure and arcane artifacts, uncaring or unheeding of the plight of the mere mortals that have become nothing but a stepping stone in their pursuit of power and glory. And look at that. We might have come full circle from the Mortal Realms to those places where only Gods & Heroes dare tread, finding ourselves right back where we started. Owing a debt of gratitude to the authors and game designers who laid the foundations for this digital hobby in the first place. Perhaps the likes of Robert E Howard, HP Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, etc., as well as the pioneers in role playing gaming like Gary Gygax, would find great satisfaction that the developers of EQ practiced the most sincerest form of flattery. Truly, there be giants, and we merely stand on their shoulders.
The Warrens were definitely worth the visit! Froakmonster tadpole, giant cavebear, tricksy mischievous batlings, fearsome royals. And plenty of grrr, bark bark, grrr. Good fungeon!
The Warrens is awesome, though you better have a snare or at the least, a root class. Mobs run and are in dense pockets. Spent so much time there back on live with my brother and then EQMac levelling new characters. The Kobold Teeth were great for exp and the chance for ringmail. I seem to remember turning in enough of them to get a Paineel key from the guards, but I may be misremembering, was so long ago. Too bad about the recharge cost on Scepter of the Forlon, otherwise the zone would consistently see more traffic.
