I managed to put together slightly over one and half groups for him. To get him to spawn, at least one member of the raid force needs the necklace obtained from doing the Halloween maze. He’s on an one to three hour spawn timer, and upon spawning, goes for the person with the necklace in their inventory in an attempt to snatch it off. If the person dies, the necklace is consumed. Otherwise, it can be used again for subsequent spawns.

In only place where The Headless Horseman can be killed effectively is on the grounds with the field of bones near the tree. My first attempt lasted almost 45 minutes before wiping because we were clueless on the strategy and tanked him elsewhere, where he had a 99% damage resist debuff. Stupid of us, but we were all once young and naive.

Tanked in the right spot, he was easier than cake and took little effort.

This morning, at 0950h local (GMT +8) time, Calreth was the mythical Dragon’s Marrow. This was made possible by the members of the guild, Paradise Lost from the Oasis server, who organized and was the main force behind the combined the Leviathan and Veeshan’s Peak raid today, with special thanks going to Stargrace and Shadowgeist for getting me into the raid, Ultann for getting me into numerous other raids which were unfortunately unsuccessful. Also, Kasul, Latharek and Clerissa for being online to share in my joy. Still to mention are the other people who gave me a chance in raids and groups despite my lack of mythicalness.

Darathar

Kasul and I decided that, being the only two in the guild that missed out on the previous raid, we’d try to get it done over the weekend, especially since I had a long weekend off.

The Speak as a Dragon/Fire and Ice/Deception quests, also known as the ‘Prismatic 1.0′ line, can be seen as the original ‘epic weapon’ quest in EQ2, before any expansions were released. The weapon is of no practical use today, other than being a pretty for the appearance slot, but it’s still a nice relic to have.

Putting aside lore and such, the quest itself is rather straightforward. Kill various epic dragons to obtain shards that are used to resurrect Vox, talk to Vox, and kill more epic dragons. I’d make a poor school teacher.

Kasul and I were lucky enough to find ourselves a healer. Gray or not, epics are still epics, and they do still dish out a reasonable amount of damage if you’re one with poor avoidance, like myself. The Darathar fight sends you to a special instance of The Isle of Refuge, except in this version, the proverbial bad guys have overran the place, and you need to set things right.

Basically, the Darathar fight can be said to consist for 3 ‘checkpoints’, at each quarter of his health. The first time you get him down to 75%, he heals back up, and again at 50%, and once again at 25%. In the event that you passed one of the ‘checkpoints’ and wipe, he won’t heal again when you reach the quarters you have previously passed.

Darathar surprised us with a nasty frontral AE right when we pulled him, resulting in Kasul and I dead and leaving us with low power throughout the fight after we were rezzed. Without proper power regen, I end up buffing myself with Ro’s Blade and melee-ing it throughout the fight, together with dots and the occasional ice comet. Still, Darathar went down quickly enough, and Norrath is once again, safe.

It’s never easy finding a raid as DPS. Most of the time healers and bards are the sought after class. I was promised a spot many hours ahead, but when it was time for the raid to form up, the story changed and it would seem that they were oversubscribed for DPS and lacked healers. Thankfully, Stargrace was kind enough to come along with me on her mystic and use that as a bargainning chip to get into the raid. No one turns down a mystic. It looked promising, I could almost see the quest update at that point.

Fast forward, things didn’t go well. It was the first time for a good number of the raid force, and the result of that was confusion on a large scale. Also, too many people were giving instructions which didn’t help matters. I don’t think we even got Leviathan past 96%.

Setting the above aside, Calreth participated in a leviathan raid over the weekend. Leviathan, who resides in the Chamber of Destiny, is one of the three epic mobs required for the Wizard’s epic weapon, along with Imzok in Protector’s Realm and Druushk in Veeshan’s Peek.

Don’t celebrate just yet. The outcome of this raid is still quite uncertain. Leviathan is a tricky mob. The raid starts off with clearing trash mobs which drops fish (Yha-lei) skins that would allow a person to, I assume, disguise themselves as food that Leviathan would attempt to consume.

Once trash mobs are cleared, most raids would then make their first attempt at leviathan himself in what is termed as a farming fun. At this point, selected members of the raid take turns putting on the fish disguise and being swallowed by leviathan, killing some kind of stomach creature to collect explosive vials. Once a sufficient number of vials are accumulated, the raid then wipes itself and begin the actual kill attempt.

The whole idea behind this is to get swallowed by leviathan just like in the previous attempt, but this time, detonating the vials farmed inside him, causing massive internal damage.

We didn’t get to the second attempt because we ran out of fish suits at this point. The trash mobs that drop them respawns, but takes a few days. Hence, it’ll be Tuesday morning (GMT +8) when the next attempt would be made. Hope that goes well.

Also, I finally had the chance to run Runnyeye: The Gathering (RE2). RE2 has been out for months now, but I could never quite slot myself into a group there, except until now. Ultann and Kasul (it was his first also) came along and we blasted through the instance rather quickly. The internal layout is exactly like that of Runnyeye, except populated with different, and much higher level (83 seems to be the average) mobs. It was a fun filled trip.