Strange things are Afoot

Hey Rasko, no time to dance with the ladies, back to the quest!

Yesterday was quite a day. My blood mage hit level 22, the double kill exp weekend seems to be living up to its name, people everywhere. At least where I was. Even the crafters pulled themselves away from the tables long enough to see some sunshine. While there’s no double exp for quest turn ins, if you find quests that require killing and not just a whole lot of running around, the experience is quite nice. Especially if you’re in a group like I was for the better portion of the day (even with all the corpse runs.. oh my goodness, while the corpse runs bring back some pretty awsome memories of EQ1, consenting monks to drag / feign death their way into safer ground, it’s… just.. painful some times).

So how did I spend my day, besides hunting down various group members corpses?

Working on the infineum cloak quest, strange things are afoot. You’ve probably seen one or two people wearing it, it’s dark grey with a white stripe along the edges (I think, I’m tired now so maybe I don’t remember it properly). You can get the quest starting at level 19, but it’s a difficult one. Unless you have a bunch of very nice higher level people to help you out, I’d say wait until 23-24 before attempting it.

Name: Strange Things Are Afoot

Location: Coterie Infineum Sanctuary, Donovan’s Roost

Quest NPC: Scholar Donovan (( A little gnome, standing on the upper portion of Donovan’s Roost, which is South West of Khal — he will NOT have a quest icon over his head, but if you hail him and talk to him a little bit, his text will eventually offer you the quest ))

Required Level to Start: 19

Go north once you’ve hit the entrance of the mines, you will see some golem rock mobs in the mines. You need to find the wanderer named Warden Pondar, the quest gives you the general location, hail him to get the next update in the quest.The Warden will tell you to find a slave. The slave is hidden behind a crystal outcrop near the mine’s entrance. Follow the right wall to the first crop of crystals. The slave gives you another quest called “Helping a Runaway slave”. You must kill a captain and get the key to unlock the slaves girdle.

Continue the wall you and you will move through a crystal maze that takes you to a camp up on a hill. Captain Fubared is at the back of the camp. You can go around the camp to the pavilion and kill the mobs there and inside the tent. If you fail, be sure to wait for respawns, or else they’ll spawn as you’re fighting the captain (and his spawned adds, more about that in a minute).

Take the key to the slave and update your quest to find the mob Infineum Thrall near that area. You have to kill them and loot the pick axes. After you have all the pick axes you have to harvest 5 rock nodes. They’re semi rare in the same area, they’ll have a ! indicating you can harvest them. Return the quest to Donovan, who’ll in turn reward you with the cloak.

Tricks of the Trade

The Captain fight is the first fight I’ve encountered that required a strategy to succeed. There are numerous ways to killing him. The method a majority of groups on the server use is the following:Bring two groups into the tent (once it’s cleared) and wait for the Captain to spawn. He will be non-aggressive. Have someone with the quest hail him, and he will turn and attack. Have the group SLOWLY DPS him down to 80% (He is a four dot by the way), he will spawn TWO Three-dot (they used to be four dot, be happy) adds, one will be a healer. Have the SECOND group, take care of these adds, as well as everyone from the first group, EXCEPT the main tank and one dps, who stays on the Captain. Once the two adds are dead (kill the healer first, and have a bard or other crowd control person handle the add until people can get to it) turn back to the Captain. Kill him to 60%, he’ll spawn more adds. Rinse and repeat. He spawns adds every 20%, and they have to be killed (while he gets killed, slowly, or else you’ll be swamped with adds). Be sure those healers get taken down first, or else they’ll heal him. The good part to that is at least he won’t spawn adds if he was already below 20% and he heals to 60%, so long as he already spawned the ones at 20%.

The issue with this method, is that every 20% he resets into non-aggressive mode, so he turns yellow. If the second group out dps’s you at those moments, or aoe’s in any way, they can (easily, and by mistake) KS (Kill steal) your Captain, and you can end up getting them the update, instead of yourselves. I should know, this happened yesterday for four separate groups who happened to be wandering through working on their quests. Two of them were kind enough to stay and try to help us complete our quests once they’d gotten their updates. So 6 hours later, we finally got ours. The group consisted of a 23 paladin, a 21 bard, a 22 monk, a 23 shaman, myself as the 22 blood mage.. and another class that I forget.. perhaps a dreadknight of some sort. I’d suggest you make friends with a psionicist. Those people are awsome. The power regen buffs they have is just, very very nice and probably saved my butt more times then I could count, especially in the beginning of the quest when I was the only healer.

If you’re going to one group it, be decked out in the best gear, and bring two tanks, two healers, and one CC plus one pure DPS. Be a few levels higher (23-24) and you should be able to accomplish it, or bring some higher level friends with you to run you through it. I know Stormhaven is one guild that brings their guild mates through it quite frequently, to help them out (those who have done it already).

The infineum quest chain involves more then just this cloak, there is also a ring apparently. Not sure if I’m so keen on doing all that over (again) and probably harder, but we’ll see how it goes. It certainly made for an interesting day.