It's been payback time in Blackburrow the past 2 nights. Both evenings, I've teamed up with another level 15 or level 16 player and cleaned out the room that got me killed last weekend. In fact, I met a level 15 rogue who managed to clean the 'Elite' room by herself (this room is also known as the 'green' room). Normally this room spawns 4 gnolls (two of which con blue to me, the other two con green), but when we went back down to retake it after coming up to take a level 23 gnoll (Tranixx Darkpaw) there were the normal 4 plus a gnoll shaman. We retook the room, but it was close (Fanorinea the rogue kept wanting to do all the tanking instead of letting the pet absorb some damage). To give you an idea, we started retaking the green room at 18:21:09 and killed the first one at 19 seconds in (I took the shaman first), the second went down at 58 seconds into the fight, the 3rd at 71 seconds, the 4th at 86 seconds, and the 5th at 105 seconds. It was a very long fight and I was out of mana and had to melee the last gnoll to help finish it off. I concentrated on fire shielding, healing my pet, and using my DD spells on the current target. Once you take the room though, it's a slow spawn (1 or 2 at a time, every 5-10 minutes), so she started pulling from the 'commander' room (which may also be called the 'clover' room?) to our camp spot in the 'elite' room hallway.

The first pull started at 19:26:39, she got back with the train to the hallway at 19:27:08. I was pretty well rested up and my pet was into the fight within 2 seconds, but one of the gnoll guardsman aggro'd on me, so I had to spend precious seconds getting it to aggro on my pet instead. My first offensive spell was a Column of Fire (AoE) which hit 2 of the gnolls for 51pts and 1 of the gnolls for 30pts (not too bad), my second spell was a shield of fire on Fanorinea (I should've done this first) at 19:27:32, the 1st elite gnoll gaurd dropped at 19:27:38 (I should've dropped it sooner), then at 19:27:48 I had another gnoll aggro on me and had to spend a few seconds getting it off (about 10 seconds). The 2nd gnoll (guardsman) dropped at 19:28:06, my pet still had 100 percent of his hit points, but I knew that Fanorinea was hurting (already down below half I think). So I started assisting her, and nuking whatever she was fighting (91pt DD fire spell, eats up mana fast). The 3rd gnoll (elite gnoll guard) dropped at 19:28:20, but Fanorinea died at 19:28:26 leaving me alone with some very ticked off gnolls. At this point, my goal is to keep them aggro'd on my pet, and hope the elite room spawns don't pop at my back. The 4th gnoll (gnoll commander) dropped at 19:28:43 from my pet finishing it off. So I looted the corpses and settled in with my pet to keep the room spawn under control and med up until she came back. (If you don't keep ahead of the spawn rate, I'd have had to leave and we'd have had to break the room again.) It wasn't a bad pull (only 4) and we should've taken it with no deaths (but I learned some doing it).

The second pull started at 19:41:23 and Fanorinea got back to the hallway with a larger train this time at 19:41:31. Again, I immediately got aggro'd by one of them and had to spend 5 seconds getting it off of me before I could cast my Shield of Flame damage spell on Fanorinea. I immediately got jumped a 2nd time and spent another few seconds getting it off of me onto my pet. At 45 seconds into the fight, I was still getting hit (couldn't cast) and my pet was down to 55 percent and Fanorinea was getting beat pretty good (and none of the gnolls were dead yet). It took 2 tries to get Shock of Blades off, and Fanorinea finally put the first gnoll (elite gnoll) down at 19:42:21 (50 seconds in). I switched to assist mode (having finally unaggro'd everything) and burned a gnoll guardsman that was the current target for 91pts. The 2nd gnoll (gnoll guardsman) dropped at 19:42:33, the 3rd gnoll (gnoll commander) dropped at 19:42:36. The 4th gnoll (elite gnoll guard) dropped at 19:42:53, a 5th gnoll (gnoll guardsman) dropped at 19:43:12, a 6th gnoll (gnoll commander) dropped at 19:43:26, and the 7th gnoll (gnoll guardsman) dropped at 19:43:44. Sheer chaos for 2 minutes 13 seconds, but we scraped by (barely, I was out of mana at 19:43:33, Fanorinea was down to 5 percent of her hit points, don't know how ragged my pet was). About 15-20 seconds after we finished, the room popped with 2 gnolls that we quickly took care of.

Once the two of us broke up, I gated back to town, did my shopping, hung out at the newbie gates in N Qeynos and gave away Studded Leather Collars (+3AC +1STR +1STA) to any newbie who came up and poked me. (Boy did I get a quick response!) They came running from all over to poke me for those collars (I could've sold them to the merchant for 1pp or to other players or 4-8pp). I managed to get rid of 3 of the 5 (sold the last two), so I did pretty good.

After that, I got bugged by a newbie (level 2 Enchanter) who claimed he was KoS at his guild, wanted me to help him get his pet. But he wouldn't say more than 2 words in a sentence and was almost rude and abrupt ('follow', 'now!', 'come', 'pet', 'to guild'). I can't decide if he was that poor of a english-speaker, or if he was trying to get me to join his group, then he would go beat on the guards and they would come after me (a form of player-killing). I eventually just went invisible and left the zone.

After wandering around Qeynos Hills for a bit, I went back inside of BB and setup camp at the entrance to watch the lower level players creating trains and running to the zone boundary. A level 15 paladin (Raadian) was also watching the fun, and we grouped up after a bit to share any experience or loot from the gnolls that we killed to save a lower level player. I concentrated on throwing fire shields on anyone who was fighting, and throwing daggers at occupied gnolls to get faction increase with the Qeynos Guards. We spent almost 2 hours, sitting and chatting at the entrance while train after train of gnolls arrived at the station (the biggest might have been 8 or 10 gnolls chasing 3 or 4 players).

About midnight we got bored and decided that since his friends weren't going to show up (he was waiting to transfer some equipment), we should head to the Karanas and get experience for ourselves. It took about 90 minutes to make the run to Qeynos so he could do some banking, met up with his friends, and for us to traverse all the way through W Karana to N Karana (we couldn't find anything to hunt in W Karana). BTW, to get from Qeynos Hills to N Karana, he had us follow the beach at the south edge of the zone in W Karana instead of taking the path (apparently, it's safer). So we were happily killing beetles on a little hill north of the teleportation ring in N Karana (just a little north of the stone bridge on the south edge of the zone), keeping a nervous eye out for Hill Giants and Griffons when about 2am I spotted Grimfeather (a named griffon) to our north. We watched him fly away and went on with our business of killing beetles.

Sure enough, 2 minutes later when we were looking for the next thing to kill, I suddenly get clawed for 86 pts of damage, I'm immediately stunned, then bashed for 21 pts, I get unstunned and it claws me again for 59 pts. My pet managed to aggro it at this point (4 seconds in), but it immediately got clawed 3x for 86 pts, clawed for 46 pts, bashed for 21 pts at which point my pet was dead (325 pts of dmg in 4 seconds). My pet was dead 8 seconds into the fight, I shouted 'run to zone!' to the group, but was immediately set upon before I could find my Gate spell. I got clawed for 37 pts, 44 pts, then 86 pts and I was dead. If I had started casting Gate right when my pet aggro'd, I still woudn't have made it (it's an 8 second spell, GrimFeather was only off of me for 4 seconds). Total elapsed time, 12 seconds. Raadian died shortly after I did (but about halfway to the zone line). Fortunately the corpse runs were easy as we were bound close by and Grimfeather just calmly flew off.

They say that if you can hear Grimfeather's wings beating the air, you're a dead man. I believe it! This does not bode well for me hunting Lt Midraim later in N Karana (with random death stalking the plain). Guess I'll have to just be very careful and keep a nervous finger on the Gate spell key. Still, it was fun and I made my first contact on the continent of Antonica (Raadian has only been playing for a few months as well).

Vorish of Morell-Thule, High Elf Mage lvl 16