Sing, my Pretties, SING! #EverQuest
stargrace 
Saturday night adventures found Oger, Elte, Nonpoint, and myself in the Demiplane of Blood, a raid from the Depths of Darkhollow expansion. I had never been to this particular raid before, but Elte was confident that we could clear a good portion of it without any issues, even though there were only three of us (and you can’t use mercenary). Oger is sitting at a comfortable level 77 and my enchanter, Kameeko, is still hovering around 90. The first tier was pretty easy and we didn’t have any difficulties. Then we came to The Performer, which is a really unique (and annoying) boss fight.
Basically, there are a handful of NPC in a room. During the ‘fight’ you’ll be helping them out by performing a song. Each NPC will randomly emote something to you in light blue text, and you’ll have to /say the corresponding phrase to whatever it is they’ve told you. In other words the entire raid is going to sing along their own unique phrases. There are 20-30 different phrases that you’ll have a choice of saying, so the easiest way to complete this raid is to hotkey each phrase, and associate it with the corresponding NPC. As an example, Aelfric the Flautist will say Please, – and you’ll have a phrase to /say in response to that to continue the song. The raid can only get so many phrases wrong before you run out of chances, and while you’re watching your chat box for these phrases your raid (or group in my case) will be protecting the performers from waves of orcs, drachnids, and shadowmanes.
Thankfully Elte had social keys for each of these emotes that we needed to perform, and we could easily load them into our UI – the rest would be up to us (ie: hitting the right emote at the right time). You have to target the NPC and then /say each emote, and you also have to be careful because the performer can be attacked accidentally by yourself. No AOE in other words. I had to mem wipe a few times to fix this.
Once we got started things went pretty well. It’s a long fight, you basically sing along and fight waves for 20 minutes. During the waves a few bosses spawn. I didn’t grab any ‘blockers’ as they’re called, so I was a bit slower than everyone else running through the zone.
Upon zoning in, you will be hit with the AE effects Mire of Crimson Mists and Aura of Crimson Mists. These will hit you every five minutes. In order to negate these effects, you must loot an item from each of the Tier 1 bosses and turn them in to the appropriate quest NPC in the non-instanced Dreadspire Keep. Each turn-in negates the effect by 25%.
Eventually we made our way to Tris Wallow III – which is where we ran into issues and had to stop for the night (also, Roley and Adrianna DeFarge is a long fight, but we had no issues thankfully). I’m not sure of all the mechanics, but it involves healing her during one of her phases, and with only one cleric in the group there was no way we could heal (and cure her) in the time frame allotted. By the end half the group was charmed from not looking away from her gaze, Oger was dead (the joys of being his level), and things were going down hill quickly, so we called it a night.
Still, it was a lot of fun, and I learned a few new things. I’m looking forward to seeing what adventure we find ourselves in next. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!