When LDoN (Lost Dungeons of Norrath) came out I thought it was the greatest thing ever. This was back in September of 2003. I loved the way people grouped up to do them, and their difficulty. While I was never as amazing as some people at them they were still a lot of fun for me. I remember trying to coerce people into doing certain ones so I could save up my points to get very specific spells. Healers would hog the ones they needed so they could get theirs. Healers pretty much controlled the groups since you couldn’t do anything without one. The ones in North Ro I typically avoided because the creatures would mez and charm a whole lot, and it hurt. The Butcherblock vampire ones were the easiest, and the ones I had the most experience doing. Even when Nostalgia started up last April we did LDoN a few times and wave after wave of memories washed over me.
I never knew there were LDoN raids.
Apparently, they were not that popular. I’m not exactly sure why. The zone would consist of no more then 54 people and as I wandered through last night I wondered how they even fit. Tipa explained to me that raids would typically split their force in order to clear the zone in time. When these dungeons were new, the level cap was 65. Now it’s 85 and as we made our way through I still thought to myself “wow, this is just so neat”. I talk to people all the time about how in EQ2 nothing really seems “bigger” then the players. For me personally, nothing gives me that “wow, maybe we can’t beat this” feeling. Especially with raids being so small. Amasing such a huge amount of people to take down a god actually felt like we were taking down a GOD in EQ. It’s been a feeling I’ve missed a great deal.
So it was that me and my two partners in crime found ourselves facing Geomancer Paara. The group consisted of 80 Magician, 79 (grats on the ding!) Monk, a boxed 79 cleric, and myself as a 72 rogue.
It took a while to burn through all of the trash, and take care of the ‘fake’ named in the zone, all of the guards that protected the area, but we did it and it wasn’t bad experience. The encounters were anywhere from light blue to dark blue to me – aside from two named and then the final named which were yellow and then RED to me. The final boss of the zone was an even con to a level 80. This was going to be FUN!
Well, we didn’t manage to beat the final encounter. We did pretty dang well though for something that is supposed to require 54 people and still con’d so high to us. The named has a few nasty dots that go off, a blind being one, as well as spawning adds that decided to eat the healer (and me) and then as the monk and magician duo’d everything for a while it slowly went downhill. We gave the encounter two great attempts before the timer triggered telling us we’d only have five minutes to finish up. A lot of +7 augments dropped, and some crafting trash as well as other odds and ends, I really had a great time even in this older content. Afterwards my friends were talking about trio’ing some of the old PoP gods, and I just sort of stared at them and said “we can do that?!” – back when I did PoP those raids were so intimidating to me and they were my first raids ever in any game. Needless to say, I hold them in pretty high regard. It’s great to be playing again.