What takes two hours to do, results in a blade nobody will use, and no status at all?
That would be the signature quest that ends in Eitholi, Blade of the Fae. Here in the dressing room, since Etha — now known as Ettie — can’t wield it. Green glows are uber. Too bad the stats aren’t!
It wasn’t a total wash. Ettie got enough AA experience from all the subquests that she dinged 30 AAs, and, after finishing the Wisdom/Ritualist AA line, is heading down the Stamina line, which includes a very cute little buckler attack.
To be honest, I had no idea what the quest was when I started. YEARS ago, I’d picked up a quest from some fluttering ghostly angel thing on a cliff in Butcherblock, and just never worked on it. Well, back then, you had to understand the language of magic to advance the quest. A quest requiring someone to explore level 40+ zones to learn a language to do a level 20-ish quest? There was no way that was going to happen, so I just let it sit there in my quest journal.
Since I can’t level Dina any more, being at max level and max AAs, I’ve been spending a lot more time on Ettie, and it’s been a bit of a contest with myself to see how far I could get on this quest (“The Wind that Speaks Her Name”) before I got a group. Last night I got all the way to Greater Faydark, headed toward Crushbone, when I got a group invite for Deathfist Citadel.
I’ve done it before, I always have a couple of quests that need me to go there, so I’m happy to go. They didn’t have a healer and I didn’t think I’d have any trouble keeping a group alive there. Defilers are pretty good at their jobs, and their slows take the bite out of any fight.
So I was more than a little alarmed when the group started discussing if maybe one of them should switch to a healer, since they couldn’t find one.
I’m a defiler, I said. I can heal, you don’t need another healer.
The tank discussed switching to his warden.
I’m a defiler — shaman subclass, I’m a priest classs, you don’t need another healer!!!
But, said the tank, I need Fyst on this character, so I dunno.
HELLO??? Is this thing on? Can anyone read this message? Seriously, I asked that. I’m not even exaggerating here.
Someone piped up, and mentioned that he thought defilers were a cleric class, and the group had a healer.
I cannot COMPREHEND how people can play a game this long and not know the difference between defilers and inquisitors, or believe a defiler is a kind of necromancer. Maybe they should just change the class name to “Evil Shaman”.
Went through the entire dungeon, no deaths, dinged to level 43, it was fine, no problem. Yeah. Okay. NOW you know what defilers do. We keep you ALIVE.
Anyway. When I got out of DFC, I started in on the quest in earnest. Made my way to Crushbone Keep, found the sword that was stuck there, cleared a room of mobs so I could rez someone who was dead in the middle of it, did some of the badge collection quest from the zone, wandered off, and spent the next forty-five minutes looking for someone named The Witch of the Wood.
I finally backed off far enough to notice a climbable wall leading right to her.
I didn’t speak her language, so I went to Kelethin and learned the Fae language.
Nope, that wasn’t it. She spoke Fairy, not Fae. Because, I’d know the difference. So half an hour toward killing treants for Fairy language bits, and then she tells me a story about a Fairy who had gotten herself trapped in a sword, which had been stuck into a tree, and the tree had grown up around it, and I should go find the tree and the blade in it.
The tree had turned into a Treant who was menacing the cliffs above the Shores of Growth in the Nursery. He said, sword? Oh yeah, I have a sword, and it hurts like anything. If you could get some aviak eggs from Butcherblock, that’d be sweet. We can mix them up into some sort of magical Vaseline and it will slide right out.
Yeah. Whatever.
So another half an hour trying to figure out how to get up to that nest I could see stuck to the side of a cliff hundreds of feet above my head.
Turned out to be ANOTHER hidden climbable wall. Got the eggs, went back to the Treant, he decides he doesn’t want eggs after all, he just wants to kill me, so he attacks me. Occasionally he stuns me, but my faithful wolf, Cinnamon, takes over when that happens.
Finally kill him, I pull the sword from his splintered corpse, ding 30 AAs and add an exciting 0 guild status to my awesome total of 70.
Oh, well. At least it makes for a nice screen shot.
I’ve actually never done this signature quest before…
Now I know why.
“Someone piped up, and mentioned that he thought defilers were a cleric class, and the group had a healer.”
Wow, the cluelessness. Of course, I know groups that have gone into The Vault in KoS with only one healer, a shammy, and an illusionist. Group member says, “man, I don’t know about this with only one healer”. So they knew about shammies. But then, after a nasty fight with adds, all mezzed. They say, “What just happened? Why didn’t we die?”
Because they never heard of mezzing. At level 70. SOE has fixed that now, most people know what mezzing is and how it can help them. (This is me making my happy elf face here). So you have topped me in the neverending search for cluelessness.
I expect you were ignored in part because you were small, female, and cute. My daughter has a T-shirt that says, “fear the cute ones”. Amen, Praise Marr, Hallelujah!
lol 🙂 Well, they didn’t know how cute I was until I successfully outran an army of orcs to get to DFC. Yay for shammy wards.
I had the same problem with inquisitor — my level 80 cleric still stranded on Befallen because I didn’t feel like having her be an option. If you have an 80 healer, and people find out about it, that’s all you get to play. But anyway. I’d get group invites for her, who is fantastic at healing, and have people think I was a dps class. Which, you know, even Battle Cleric specced, we don’t come close to real dps classes. They thought Templars were the only clerics.
Given all that, I’m not quite sure myself what the differences are between defilers and mystics, except that mystics are said to have the lowest dps of all classes, so i guess they don’t get the defiler uber dots.
When I think of Defiler….the first thing that does NOT come to mind is anything that has to do with “healing” …hehe
(I like playing that class though…)
But, then Age of Conan has the Tempest of Set….which again does NOT scream heals!
What other games have class names that just does not scream that classes job?
I guess having 24 different classes is confusing for some people. My two favourite classes in EQ2 was Brigand and Coercer; pretty much always ended up explaining to a group what I was doing – in particular the Coercer, who people knew pretty much nothing about except perhaps that they could charm mobs.
But I think those two were the least popular classes in the game when I played it, do not know if this has changed in any way now.
Last I heard, Troubadour had finally grabbed the title for least-played class from Coercer.
The only kind thing I ever hear about Troubs is that “they are great in mage groups on raids”, but, they hasten to add, they don’t do a thing for melees, and neither really does scout-like dps, so having two bards (one of each) in a group isn’t a real benefit.
So with that sort of continual bad press from ‘conventional wisdom’ and the actual design of the class — a class that once had only the normal scout run speed buff while dirges got Selo’s — it’s no wonder it’s in the tank.
Brigand has been FotM a couple of times, but I think they are still pretty rare.
I hated it when coercers became FoTM with the new revamp not too long ago. Now there are always 100 ench LFG on Najena (and since I have one of each) it can get annoying. Troub scooped up that least-played position pretty smoothly. Maybe TOS will help fix that – though it’s some times nice to play a ‘rare’ class and be needed for raids, it would be nice if more people realized what they can actually offer to a regular group (like Tipa and her mezzing capabilities).
I hated doing that quest too, and I didn’t do it at the recommended level. 😛 The forced stealth spell the treant casts on you at the end bothered me, I wanted to use the griffon to move around in Butcherblock but of course, with the spell on I couldn’t.
Player ignorance is always a problem, especially in a game with so many classes. It doesn’t help that the shaman role has changed dramatically from what it was in EQ1, where the shaman was a sub par healer at all levels. Giving shaman a stronger priest role has benefits, but changing player perception takes a long time I guess.
In regards to the signature quest and needing to speak Druzaic, the designer admitted that when he designed the quest, he was doing it on the dev version of the client and had the character he was running through it on default – which has all the languages known automatically. He didn’t realize that he was requiring a language that wasn’t really available to a character of that level. He corrected it, and it shouldn’t be requiring it now (or really in the last eight months or so). I had a character stuck at the same place, and by the time it was corrected the quest was grey to her.
I once had a group that thought that coercers were a type of healer. Granted, that was a long time ago. There are a lot more coercers around these days, but as with most FoTMs, you can tell who took them as FoTM and who has been playing them for a while.