April 30, 2009

New Servers up on Free Realms

It’s always nice to see growth in games – and as I took a peek at Free Realms today I noticed a choice of 6 servers rather then two. Hopefully I’ll have some friends kicking around as well if the chat servers are fixed that is.

Anyone know how the server system works? Can you see your friends online on other servers? Can you change server mid game? Or are you required to switch to join your friends who may happen to be on another server? Let me know, thank you!

Smile, Darathar!

Pictured above, Darathar smiling with ‘the crew’ just before we battled him to steal a prismatic egg. Keyboard issues were fixed for Wpus and it was time to finish the quest. We started off by heading to three zones to raid various dragons and take the shards from their corpses that would allow us to resurrect Lady Vox. If you’ve never done this quest before it’s quite a bit of fun (and even if you have done it before) as you’re about to resurrect the dragon you release each one of the shards and then get killed. If you’ve done it properly you spawn a non agro version of her, if you do it wrong – you spawn an agro version and you get to do all of the raids all over again.

After you speak to her she sends you back down to talk to Nagafen (again) who sends you out to battle three more dragons for some rings, as well as a group instance of DFC to take down an orc. Once you’ve obtained all of the rings you head to the Oracle tower in Antonica and you have access to the Isle of Refuge.

Almost as soon as we got there it started raining, so the screen shots look a little washed out. Darathar was sitting as smug as ever, laughing at us (practically). I remembered this raid. I remembered positioning, and MOST of the strats – what I didn’t remember is that you want to position yourself just inside of his front paw so that you don’t get pummeled by the massive AOE that goes off.

You still need to do this, it doesn’t matter if you’re level 50 or level 80, we had a good 3+ deaths from folks getting one shot by that tail lash. Once I remembered where to stand things went much smoother.

I was sort of disappointed that the script was not the same, I remember him flying away at specific intervals and killing anyone who accidentally left a dot on him as we stood there stunned during the length of his flight. He never left this time around, though we did get stunned.

It was still a mighty battle, and in the end we won (just barely). OneĀ  of the greatest things about doing this prismatic line (aside from the appearance weapon at the end) is that Darathar drops one of the guild hall trophies that you can place in your hall. We now own two of them (though we don’t have a hall yet). We have Darathar, and Gynok. Of course, we also don’t have the bases for them yet because the reflective shards are going for 5p a shot and the bases themselves are being sold for 8p a shot, but since we don’t have a hall yet, it’s alright, we’ll just hang onto them.

After we defeated Darathar it was time to head back to Nagafen – where I instantly killed the group, all save for the Shadowknight who had bloodletter up. Lucky. It was an accident though, honestly! I was attempting to turn on auto attack in order to get some action screen shots, and so I targeted a group member who just happened to have Nagafen targeted right then. I watched, practically in slow motion, as my character swiveled around and tried to hack at Nagafen’s ankles. Needless to say we were all one shot with a 25k nuke.

Ouch.

It’s these memories that make the game what it is though, truly. I’ll be teased about that for some time to come. Any time there’s something that relates to that memory, people will bring it up and we’ll all have a good chuckle. That’s what brings me to these games. That’s what keeps me playing, and that’s what I love.

I hope everyone had an amazing Wednesday! See you in Norrath.