Old Al'Kabor players are probably the best EQ players to ask this of, so while I already have quite a bit of information on the zone, I do want to pick your brains over some of the finer details. Specifically I'm looking for comments on the following: Any information regarding wurm splitting. Any information regarding the different kinds of wurms. Were respawn rates 2 minutes, or 2.5 minutes? (seen both mentioned) Trash mob spells/abilities; Reality Warp in particular. (which mobs have this?) procs or casts? How much regen did the dragons have? Can racnars be charmed/mezed? Which mobs see sneak/hide? Any anecdotes regarding mob resist levels. Lists of all drops in the zone. Were lava drake aggro radii 225? (measured that on Ragefire. note that spell range w/o focus = 200) Did walls block LoS? i.e. could you corner dragons to avoid their AoEs Were dragons belly casters? (I think this very likely) Any differences on AK from pre-revamp PC EQ. Feel free to volunteer information not listed above. Screenshots or logs also welcome, as always.
respawn I believe was 2.4, not 2 or 2.5 but it is close enough to both of those either way. I do recall needing to hide around corners to avoid AEs based on a timed based AE attack. All dragons were belly casters all the way up through at least Dragons of Norrath expansion which is when I stopped raiding on live. Sorry I couldn't help with anything else.
Dragons seem to have a roughly equal chance of dropping either 3 items or 4 items. Lots of repeats, i.e. they love to drop their more common items two or three times on a kill. I suspect the rarer items don't have a chance to drop in every slot. Dragon respawn seems to be 7 days. I killed Xygoz 29 times for reasons that no doubt seemed good to me at the time. He dropped 13 razor sharp shortswords, 17 razor fangs of Xygoz, 8 smoldering cudgels, 13 left eyes of Xygoz, 16 malevolent runeblades, 9 frozen zweihanders, 17 spears of constriction, and 5 staffs of null. List of drops compiled by Gnostica. I've removed some errors, and marked some things that seem questionable to me - usually because I'm not sure they dropped, or between two similar versions of the same item are listed and one presumably replaced the other - with asterisks. Phara Dar Claw of Phara Dar Crown of Rile Katana of Flowing Water Robe of the Azure Sky Shroud of Veeshan Shield of Elders Sword of Rile Yunnb's Earring Druushk Blood Orchid Katana Katana of Endurance Maelstrom Sarnak Summoners Staff Shissar Deathspeaker Staff Shissar Focus Staff Skullcrusher of Kragg Veridix's Shortsword Hoshkar Blade of Falling Stars Fatesealer Feverblade - Bane of the Shissar Green Dragon Scales Grey Suede Boots Katana of Endurance Robe of Burning Rage Shissar Apothic Staff Shissar Elementalist`s Cane Shissar Protection Staff Sword of the Shissar Veldrak's Shortblade* (Presumably replaced with Veridix's shortsword?) Veridix's Shortsword* (We definitely saw this drop on Drusshk on AK, but the internet seems to think it drops from both mobs) Nexona Blackstone Maul Bo Staff of Trorsmang Howling Cutlass Nightfall Pulsating Gem Robe of Adversity Sprinkler of Suffering Star of the Guardian Ykeshan Broad Axe Silverwing Blade of Falling Stars Blued Flower Katana Dragon Claw Main Gauche Dragon Spine Staff Executioner's Blade Hammer of the Dragonborn Lyran's Mystical Lute Robe of Asphyxiation Runestone Maul The Scimitar of Lifestealing Xygoz Frozen Zweihander Left Eye of Xygoz Malevolent Runeblade Razor Fang of Xygoz Razor Sharp Short Sword Smoldering Cudgel Robe of Invocation* (Reported by Indie to have dropped on Al'Kabor, but nobody else seems to have seen it. I killed Xygoz 29 times, and I know Frosst killed him at least 10) Spear of Constriction Staff of Null
I never saw anything in VP use Reality Warp. The dragons had enough regen that a level 65 monk and warrior could have beat on one more or less forever, but throw a druid nuking into the mix and they died. Maybe 1000 hp/tick? Lava drakes are bellycasters and have huge aggro ranges, but don't seem to respawn as quickly as the rest of the trash. Fifteen minutes? Racnars can be charmed and mezzed. So can wurms. Everything in the zone can be pacced. No idea about sneak/hide - nothing saw rogues with the SoS AA - but dragons, lava drakes, and a small minority (15%?) of wurms saw regular invis. Racnar and most wurms did not. At 65, resists seemed unremarkable against everything but dragons. Yes, walls blocked LOS. Yes, dragons are bellycasters. In-zone evac spells work, and the Arx Key (Sanctus Seru clicky port) works to port out. All other port/evac/gate effects are disabled. Edit: Oh, and chase range on the dragons is unlimited, but everything else seems to have an unusually small chase range. VP is an outdoor zone.
From my memory: almost nothing saw invis Drakes did have big agro range and some whirl proc but if you outran them they stopped perusing you and forgot you Dragons had huge agro range My brother and I used to 5 box all the dragons in POP just by invising to them on war/ rogue and pulling to zone in. Never had to kill any drakes because I just outran them and jumped down Hoshkar's balcony.
Thanks for taking the time to respond guys. Very helpful. One of my logs shows a guardian wurm procing Reality Warp, so at least one type of wurm has it. It's resistable so you may not have noticed it if you always resisted it. Regarding the Robe of Invocation: several allakhazam posters mention the robe no longer dropping anymore, but Gnostica replied with that it drops from Xygoz. Can anyone verify if this did or did not drop on AK? It's a big ticket item.
There is a thread from p99 in 2011 when they were gathering info on vp and I saw this posted by Asher : https://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27566&page=5 There was no wurm splitting at all on Al'kabor. (Only Live server with old VP still active) I remember hearing stories from other players about a wurm that hit like a truck but I never saw a wurm that hit for 1500. Wish I had useful info to add but I only raided VP 3 times around kunark and I wasn't the raid puller until early velious, I don't think we ever raided it again once Velious was out.
I saw that post. I question its accuracy. Information on wurm splits seems to be a bit contradictory and thin because people avoided killing them. I think it likely that splitting wurms may have just not been common enough that people didn't encounter them on raids. Also, this is from an AK log: Nester veeshanspeak cut.txt 22900 [Sun Jul 15 15:30:36 2012] Guardian wurm claws Goerge for 1550 points of damage. btw, Nester is awesome.
ahh ok cool, since AK had the original VP I think I'll sit this one out and let people with more recent clearings chime in Although there's one thing I forgot to mention which may or may not be useful ; during PoR era they accidentally linked original VP back in. This is after VP had been revamped and you had to get the cipher of veeshan etc. It was in game for about a month before they realized it (apparently no one did VP at all at that point). Anyways I farmed the dragons pretty hard for a month there, just for fun, but skipped all the trash. I thought maybe if those original zone files/code were still around in PoR maybe the progression servers are using them now and possibly accurate.
On the subject of the wurms - I never ran into one that couldn't be mezzed, pacced, and charmed, but it's possible I never tried with a 1.5k hitter. Some had an AE effect, but I can't recall off the top of my head what it was. The majority did not, but AEing guardian wurms certainly weren't rare. I don't recall running into a splitter. I wasn't slaughtering wurms by the hundreds, but I did kill at least one, and often two or three (if AEing wurms were up) every time I killed a dragon (of which I have to have killed at least 50), so it wasn't a common phenomenon, per se. Of course, it's possible my attention wandered and I simply thought a split was an add at some point. Or at many points. But I think I'd have noticed if it were happening more than, oh, 10% of the time. As previously mentioned, most didn't see invis, but the odd wurm would. I could be wrong about this, but I spent some time in VP with good RoS faction (I liked the PL alts by AEing the castle in Mistmoore), and have a vague recollection of running into a rare guardian wurm on dragon faction. The majority are on Minions of Scale, like the rest of the trash. Perhaps the odd RoS-wurms are the 1.5k hitters, or the see invis wurms, or both. Interesting about reality warp. I must have always resisted it, or it must have been an extremely rare ability. I would usually swing by VP just before bed after a raid, and have been known to space out a bit when I'm tired, but I would almost definitely have noticed being translocated to the zoneline during combat. Odd. On the subject of the Robe of Invocation - I'm fairly sure that Indie was the only person who claimed to have seen one drop on Al'Kabor. I'm not sure if Gnostica was with him when it dropped, or simply going on his word, but I don't believe Gnos had a rend robe himself. I'm sure someone in Destiny will speak up if I'm mistaken. As I said above, I killed Xygoz 29 times without seeing a robe, and Frosst claims to have killed him at least 10 times. Nobody in Tem ever saw one drop, and I believe a Vintage member told me they'd never seen one, either. It is possible, of course, that the robe dropped very infrequently, but I think it's also worth entertaining the possibility that Indie's robe came from a GM event or that he was confusing it with another item.
I happened to have been online when the GMs asked people to test VP on Ragefire beta, so I got summoned and keyed and had a jaunt through the zone. I can say that Ragefire's VP is some sort of attempt to recreate old VP instead of the old zone; either that or they added new spawns to the zone. CT on the other hand appeared to be the actual old version. I also noticed that some hateplane NPCs had been altered from AK's versions, even though they put in the old NPCs back. The Velious DE mobs were missing emotes and their HPs were lowered. I didn't notice any splits on Ragefire, but the zone was altered too much to use it as a reference. This log has 8 wurm slain messages. One of the wurms was doing 1550s, and one of the wurms was procing reality warp. The log was from a ranger however, so he was only tanking one wurm and that one had the proc; the other ones could have had it as well. It was 3 procs in 11 hits. All three were resisted. A level 60 with 200+ MR should resist it every time since it has no resist adjust. I can, however, find no evidence of wurm splitting in this log. Without some evidence I probably won't implement that, which is kind of a shame since the zone is already rather easy due to design flaws on VI's part. It is possible that splitting wurms never saw invis, and so were always avoided-- or were in remote regions of the zone. The reality warping wurm was next to lava drakes.
We used to kill wurms alot on p99 ( mostly to annoy the other raiding guild ) we often came across splitting wurms always reminded me of reavers in com you could get no splitters then one that splits 10 times in a row, The nasty 1500 hitter was quite rare not sure what percentage but it was the rarest of the wurms. I spent alot fo time raiding VP & was never hit with reality warp. The Blaze.
Regarding line of sight in this zone: On ragefire some walls blocked sight and some did not. The walls near the pillow room and the dead-end corner southeast of the pillow room did not. However I could not aggro silverwing while it was in the pillow room and I was in the 4 racnar room, which was within aggro range. (Dragon aggro radius is 500, i.e. huge) Nor did Hoshkar sitting in his chamber aggro until I turned the corner. Can anybody verify if that was the case on AK? Although making custom zone LOS map files is beyond my ability, else I might have done that for hateplane.
A few things: 1. Are you sure walls blocked AEs? Typically in outdoor zones this is not the case. 2. Are you sure Evacuate/Egress/Abscond type spells work inside? I didn't think they did, but getting keyed to VP was on my to do list near the end of AK, never got around to it. 3. You list Shissar Apothic Staff on Hoshkar's loot table... Is that correct. I remember reading this thread: http://www.eqclerics.org/forums/showthread.php?t=4332&highlight=Apothic Suggesting the crappy AC buff clicky replaces the greater heal staff. It's possible they both dropped and those clerics were getting unlucky, the item drops on live in the revamped VP, which would be peculiar if it was removed in the first place.
1. Yes. As Torven observes, certain parts of the zone could be a bit ... idiosyncratic about line of sight from a geometric perspective - I've definitely had lava drakes aggro when I thought a wall was between us - but VP is an LoS-strict zone. This is standard for pre-PoP outdoor zones that are dungeons or cities. Think Mistmoore, Karnor's Castle, or Cazic Thule. 2. Yes, they worked, and returned players to the zone line. 3. Good catch. Nix the heal stick!
The nice thing about VP is that it's still up on Live, even if the NPCs were revamped. I think it's unlikely that they changed the LOS blocking data with the revamp, so I can more or less go there and test which walls block and which don't, unlike hatelpane. Cavedude and I were briefly brainstorming ideas to create 'LOS free regions' in zones to disable LOS only in certain regions.
Well, on EQMac, walls did not block AEs in Plane of Time (the 1.0 version we had). However the version most everyone remembers from PC; walls did indeed block AEs. This is why people always killed Quarm where they killed him with the casters in the cubby. I mention this as one example where a zone revamp involves a changing of LoS blocking AEs. So I wouldn't trust Live's version too terribly much, as it is possible in the revamp it was changed.
Well, flipping a no-LoS switch is changing a boolean value in a database. Altering the zone's LoS map file to selectively remove specific walls is a lot more work. So I think there is a good chance Sony didn't go to the trouble in the 2003 revamp for a zone nobody went to before or after. The choice I have is this: Flag the entire zone as LoS on, flag the entire zone as LoS off, or use Live's VP to figure out which walls are ignored. AK is gone, so Live is all we have.
I could be wrong, but I *think* that when Silverwing gates, she gates to the west end of the big foyer outside of the entrance to Phara Dar's lair. Confirmation on this would be good, though, as it's been a long time. By the way: While I am looking over this thread, I am sure my suggestion for dragon regen is way too high; on thinking it over, it was probably a bard and a warrior whose melee damage I couldn't kill the dragons with, and it was likely not the case that regen actually outpaced my DPS so much as it was close enough that the fight was impossibly slow without a nuker thrown in. That could easily have been as little as 200 or even 150 hp/tick. If you have logs from Nester, though, perhaps you've already been able to calculate the dragons' regen precisely?
The west end of the 'pool room' is the obvious guess, but I don't like to guess. AK logs are useless for max hp and regen calculations because spell damage wasn't shown to third parties on AK. (was a later PoP addition) Also damage shields aren't shown to third person, and regen estimates are sensitive to inaccurate damage tallies. A 65 warrior with a Blade of War can dish out something like 100-150 DPS depending on buffs. 1k/tick could still work if they were geared. Do you recall what they had?
Re: Silverwing, I do think I've actually been summoned by her after a gate, and that I ended up there. But I could be mistaken. Re: the warrior, he had a Bloodfrenzy and a Hategiver with all his AAs and max haste. I parsed the bard at 70 DPS once, but that was against the green-con Katta banker. I was probably singing PoV on the bard and not twisting, so no Rizlona.
I just parsed a log of a warrior using a bloodfrenzy and a Vyzh`dra's Render of Souls doing 110-120 or so depending on the zone. (PoP zones, and Sleeper's Tomb) 1k sounds right to me.
When you say AoE, do you mean a Nag/Vox AoE, Wurm Blaze (1k fire AoE), or Wurm Breath? Wurm Breath is a weak very small radius AoE that guardian wurms tend to have that I've seen in logs. You can find old sources that say that some wurms had either a Nagafen or Vox AoE or Wurm Blaze, but I don't have those in my Nester log.
It wasn't short range, the damage wasn't high, and it had a dispel component. I suspect it was lava breath. It wasn't super common for a wurm to AE, but it was common enough that I got burned by it enough times charming near Xygoz (either because my pet pulled adds by AEing them or because I ran into a wurm whose AE would dispel charm on my pet) that I learned to check for it.
They did. The only effect I've ever seen NPCs refuse to use against pets is Cazic Touch. (Even Touch of Vinitras, the Luclin DT, would hit pets.)
Wow, they really do! On this page (http://www.steveprutz.com/eq/vp.htm), the second map is correct; all the others are wrong. In all cases, there is only one locked door per lair, and it is the outermost door separating the hallway leading down to the lair from the main part of the zone. So the door at the east end of the "pool room" is locked, and the three doors off of the balcony above Hoshkar's lair.
