GoD Expedition Zones - Second Tier

[Jaqyl]

Since I haven't been getting the expeditions, I don't know what the NPC's name is to get in these(I think its Apprentice Sudu?), but I'm refering to the two instanced zones

Tipt - The Treacherous Crags
Vxed - The Crumbling Caverns

These are a step above the four instanced zones in the pyramid, and I thought I'd share my experiences so you know what to expect.

First off I'm posting here because if you're not in an EP+ guild than most likely these two zones will rip your group to shreds. The trash mobs hit for up to 1200, most with a max hit no less than 1k. The one named we've found so far Umbiki in Vxed
http://home.triad.rr.com/nexuscore/eq/items/Umbiki-GoD.jpg
. . . hit my monk puller for 1550, and hit me for 950 while defensive. There is good news, while the mobs are high dps, they are low hp, so they die fast. Our one wearable loot so far is . . .
http://home.triad.rr.com/nexuscore/eq/items/RoFP-GoD.jpg
Assuming itemization isn't screwed, I'm looking forward to seeing what else drops from these two zones. Oh, a ranger friend from another guild was doing these at the same time as us and had Bauble of Rejuvenation (http://lucy.allakhazam.com/item.html?id=68601) drop off a named for them in the Tipt zone.

I'd love to hear from anyone trying these zones, both experiences with the zones themselves, the name of named(some named may not be initial caps, so would help to have confirmation on those), and drops of course.

[Phantron]

In Tipt mobs hit for around 1200. The mini boss hit for around 2k (only double though). Mobs here also seem to have extremely high attack.

[Swobu]

My group did all four expeditions last night and when we hailed the High Priest he said that we could go the mouintainpass (or something) but had to talk with Apprentice Burundi.

We did, but she wouldn't let us pass, said we werent ready and had to help HP even more - alltho HP had nothing new to say.
After the initial hails on Burundi, she stopped replying all together. But when we tried to trigger with "Ready to pass" she says:
"You look heroic enough, but I can't open for you before you seek out HP."

Any ideas?

[Tima]

Ive explored Tipt a bit and my main problem so far is, you wipe, its over. My group dropped in and began clearing. We fought a good ways into the zone and even had a couple named popping up on track. We got excited and began pressing a bit harder and came to a suspicious clearing. Well, we ended up wiping to said suspicious clearing.

We hoofed it back to the zone to find it fully respawned with lots of huggable fun see invis/sos mobs up in between our naked selves and our corpses. So, we got to end the instance, wait for our corpses to pop and start over...

Im not against cr, what Im against is this sorta anti-cr thing GoD seems to have. I dont like the idea of not being able to make some sort of recovery, the die-then-start-over thing reminds me way too much of the Velious/ToV days.

[Roks01]

Im not against cr, what Im against is this sorta anti-cr thing GoD seems to have. I dont like the idea of not being able to make some sort of recovery, the die-then-start-over thing reminds me way too much of the Velious/ToV days.

the point is not to die.

[Drugant]

Can you explain the suspicious clearing so that some of us can file that away for later use?

[Tima]

We had gone up a huge sloped ramp just past a bridge / waterfall area and when the ground leveled off there was a large empty round clearing with a large stone in the middle. I peeked around, curious why there were no mobs in a place like this that had plenty of room for a couple.

I called for the group to move up to the clearing so we could keep moving forward. It seemed to take the entire group entering the clearing to trigger the trap (little fuzzy on exactly what triggered it, but me solo in the area didnt do it, the thing only happened after the group had joined me), but 4 (maybe more, only saw 4) or so happy little lizards spawned around the room, surrounding us. They quickly dispatched the casters which led to my messy death shortly after. They were mezzable because the chanter snagged one with it before going down himself.

[Raaj]

3ppl trigger trap. The lizard things dont see invis from the trap.

[Warfust]

Hit that same trap. Almost survived it, hehe.

Spawns 8 mobs I think. Only agroed 2, but that was enough when we were not ready and the puller had one inc as we moved up....


And yes, the lack of CR ability can be a pain. But you do have unlimited time from the ones I have done so far, so I guess group makeup can at least get you started from the ent (or a safe spot if your lucky) a little faster.

[Ainian]

The progression nerf is kinda cute.

Can you say overboard?

[Paen]

Originally posted by Ainian
The progression nerf is kinda cute.

Can you say overboard?

What progression nerf? Curious if you had issues with the NPC to hail in Vxed not spawning also, we did it yesterday and won and did Tipt today and won, got Kod'Taz access and went back to help someone redo 5th and no matter what we tried the npc to hail in 5th trial wouldnt spawn.

edit: nm, apparently its been changed to needing 100kills or so before the named to hail spawns which is only thing we didnt try.

[Jaqyl]

Here are some more items we scored in the Vxed zone today.

http://home.triad.rr.com/nexuscore/eq/items/BAG-GoD.jpg
http://home.triad.rr.com/nexuscore/eq/items/PGL-GoD.jpg
http://home.triad.rr.com/nexuscore/eq/items/PGoR-GoD.jpg
http://home.triad.rr.com/nexuscore/eq/items/SSG-GoD.jpg

Too tired to give mob info, just off named in the zone.

[Uthuk]

You can always ask a nice necro to summon corpses to help CR I mean.

Just swap him into expedition etc.

I know, it's not always possible but giveing a tell to ask won't hurt.

[snasty]

Think the timer is 7 hours for the mountain trials.

You can add a rogue to go corpse you also.

Snasty

[Derrict]

We got an emote at the 3.5 hour mark saying no one could be added beyond this point, this was in Tipt.

[Thalzaar]

finished vxed last night and we killed that Umbiki fella twice i believe. he dropped some stupid hybrid cloak twice that we gave to an mage pet, heh and we got a pretty nice all/all mask with 115hp/mana with druzzil's distance and vengence 5 off some random mob.

grats cleric! lol

[Phantron]

You can't add anyone after you beat the Kyv Heartstrike Jhiru in Tipt. I guess that's why his loot is stupidly overpowered for the encounter (not that he's a pushover, but Cleave bracers are way overpowered).

[Dima]

Got a vengeance 3 aug off Umbiki

[Madronedorf]

<3 cleave

[Nurok]

swobu tell her "take heed" and she will give you the progresion instance. You can also tell her "vxed" and "tipt" but thats will give you a instance for exp not for the progresion quest.

[Dakryn]

Anyone got a link on the bracers?

[Frax]

http://lucy.allakhazam.com/item.html?id=68603

[Dima]

Bracer increases crits 35ish %. Yes, you will crit ALOT. someone with BoW will have a 30dps inrease from it, druid in group of mine (tipt) finally is able to crit with her staff!

Farming bracer and getting leather though = suck !

[Dakryn]

Not bad,how hard is the mob/time it takes

[Surlok]

Mob hits for 2k rampages partially slowable,don't remeber if it also flurries...

Takes about an hour or so I guess to work through the tipt trial I don't recall wasn't paying to much attention to time...

The trial is really fun The Riddle Guy if fun and the Kiv boss is a great fight.

Its definatly the trial that will keep most people from EP or lower guilds out of Kod'Taz and beyond...

[Phantron]

Guessing by spdat cleave 1 is +20% chance to crit though some people think it's higher.

Even at +20% crit rate that's a roughly a +14% DPS (crit hits like 70% more damage).

Warriors can pump out some serious damage with a cleave bracer when critical since it effects crippling blow too.

You can do it Tipt well under an hour if you already have the key. Without the key, it takes a bit longer.

[Toga]

Said Boss quads 2200, and rampages. He is partially slowable and does not have a ton of hp. I would suggest a warrior MT, another plate offtank, shaman to slow and heal rampage, cleric to heal MT, ench to handle mezzes to get there.. plus a dps class.
He is by no means easy.
or
Use riposte disc on him on pull (equip a 2h weapon).. it's actually quite funny to see a mob drop 30 percent Hp from your ripostes.

[Phantron]

His HP isn't nearly that low. Riposte tanking is still a good deal to deal with him while he's getting slowed. Chances are he's probably hasted from one of his friends too.

[Apocaly]

They removed cleave from all items due to *stacking issues*. I really loved that bracer =(

[Gurunt]

Of course they removed it! It was a decent meele focus.. that goes against "the Vision 2.0"


Wonder why they never had "stacking issues" with 30% nuke increasers.....

[wandor]

Wonder why they never had "stacking issues" with 30% nuke increasers.....Same reason they never had stacking issues with 41% haste and 66% spell haste and 15% v3 haste.

[Epsonaga]

Once you know how to play in Tipt trial, you can finish it in one and half hour or faster. Compare to the first time I used 6 hours and still got a fail in this trial ;) ... Use ripost disc will be much easier for warriors on tanking the last named.

[Ainian]

Originally posted by Gurunt
Of course they removed it! It was a decent meele focus.. that goes against "the Vision 2.0"


Wonder why they never had "stacking issues" with 30% nuke increasers.....

Did you own the bracer? I did, and it was incredibly overpowering. Critical hits 1/3 of the time? Or something insane like that. If you didn't think this was going to be nerfed, well. . .

I know at least I fully expected it to be.

[Gurunt]

Well hopefully they'll fix it and return it.

It sounded better than it should have been for the difficulty (being on teh bracer anyway.... )... removing it completely is just dissapointing.

With what many of the spell foci do I don't think what people posted (20% to 30% more crits) was overpowering... with spells foci you can cut the casting time by 2/3 while increasing the damage of the spell up to 40% while spending up to 30% less mana.

[jobned]

So far i made it through sewers, vexd and to first named at tipt trial. First named was pretty easy to tank with my 8600 buffed hp. Had druid and cleric healer. Unfortunately the cleric walked into rampage range and died so we had to stop. Will be fun to see if the final named is impossible as you say once we get to him )

BTW first named dropped a nice 2hp 2mana regen augment )

[Jaqyl]

My and my cleric's magelo's are in the sig. Assuming me as tank and my cleric healing, with guildies at the midEP range in gear level what kind of group makeup would I need to succeed at the final Tipt trial? Or is it even viable at my current gear level. Btw there is only one cleric in my guild that is better geared than my clericbot so he's representative of high end healing for my guild. I'm assuming at least one other healer? would that be another cleric or would a druid type work? Also assuming an offtank for rampage? preferably a paladin? Would like to go in with a group well structured so I dun waste my and my guidie's time.

[Nayl]

Jagyl - I've tanked Tipt now successfully three times. You can compare your gear to mine, its pretty close. I'm not going to give you a spoiler, but take a good puller, a secondary healer and a slower and you have the basic ingredients to beat this thing.

I am laughing, frankly, at the amount of hot air being generated on these boards about how incredibly uber your gear has to be to handle the harder parts of GoD. You need good gear, but the people who are suggesting in other threads that you have to have every slot filled with Time gear, all of which must be augmented with LDoN raid drops are simply talking out their asses.

My guild has been in time for about two months. We've killed Quarm four times I think. Two other guilds on our server are ahead of us in moving in to GoD. One of these guilds has been farming Quarm since last October. The other one is still trying to finish up tier 5. The one quality these guilds share that is putting them ahead of us in GoD is that they are innately more hard-core in their approach to getting people through the trials. I

Its not the gear as much as its the will to do it.

[Kildace]

I am laughing, frankly, at the amount of hot air being generated on these boards about how incredibly uber your gear has to be to handle the harder parts of GoD

Are you describing tipt as one of the harder parts of GoD? heh.

[Nayl]

No, actually, the comments I'm referring to were made in reference to Ikkinz. And no, I haven't seen Ikkinz, or even Kod`Taz yet (Vxed flag bugged somehow so I have to do it again). So sorry to have presumed to speak of something that those more uber than I have been privy to for a whole week. But I've been listening to this trash talk since I started reading these forums, and having spent the last year helping my guild progress from HoT to Time, I've come to realize that the people at the front of the pack like to make mountains out of the lot of the molehills they climbed. Most of the time, it makes me think of this:

MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

GC: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

TG: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

EI: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, (pause for laughter), eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."

MP: But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.

ALL: Nope, nope.

[FulorianC]

Iroincally, you see this because you are a PoP baby. You believe you are actually fighting the same fight as the people who had a hard time with it.

I've got news for you.

Killing NToV 8 months ago does not make you as skilled as those who did it 3 years ago.

You are saying that up until now, you've been doing encounters AFTER they've been mudflated, and now that your finally able to even discuss cutting edge content.. discuss it, mind you, not see it, your going to put down those who claim it is difficult as a lot of 'hot air'? Because when you did the same encounters these people found hard, you had 5 more levels, AA, and free gear in bazaar better than they had access to period?

Maybe I'm going over the top here.

But no encounter you have done so far has not been mudflated to relative ease, and your strutting your stuff, and don't seem to be aware that its a brave new world out there.

[Nayl]

Iroincally, you see this because you are a PoP baby

Hardly. Nayl's been kicking around since late Kunark. Didn't join a raiding guild until a touch over two years ago, only to watch it spiral down into near extinction. 18 months ago we got a new guild leader, and started heading in the other direction. Killed Aaryonarr about a month before PoP opened.

I've heard this same dismissive bombast from the frontrunners on my own server all along the line from then to now - you weren't first, you didn't do this when it was actually tough and challenging, blah, blah, look at the size of my virtual penis, blah. Getting grief here for talking about content that I am all of a week behind the curve on just points up how funny this is. I also notice that there is a lot of very convenient memory loss about anything that gets tuned up in difficulty after the holy pioneers of the chosen uber guilds have already passed that way - Xegony, Elemental minis, etc..

I don't mean to take anything away from those who go first. Doing expansion content totally cold the past two weeks has given me a whole new viewpoint on what the game can be like. But I dispute the idea that mudflation renders everything my guild has accomplished somehow less worthy.

[FulorianC]

Nobody is trying to shrink your V-penis, and your not shrinking theirs. I'm just saying that your experience thus far is ONLY in old content, that has been beaten to death, the strategies are commonly available, and in some other wall all of them have been deflated over time.

This is new. This is the first raid expansion your guild is coming out kicking in. And your passing judgement on encounters you've never seen, based on your experience with mudflated content. Thats just not fair.

[FulorianC]

And this is totally off topic, but is it my imagination or is your gear frighteningly similar to mine? Not in level, in the same items in slots.

[Frax]

Originally posted by FulorianC
Nobody is trying to shrink your V-penis, and your not shrinking theirs. I'm just saying that your experience thus far is ONLY in old content, that has been beaten to death, the strategies are commonly available, and in some other wall all of them have been deflated over time.

This is new. This is the first raid expansion your guild is coming out kicking in. And your passing judgement on encounters you've never seen, based on your experience with mudflated content. Thats just not fair.

I know plenty of great EQ players who won't join an uber guild, and plenty of horrible players who thrive in uber guilds because they can hide in the mass of players. There is no mystery to playing EQ, it still always boils down to "Is there enough healing to sustain the group/raid until mob(s) are dead." Thats all this game has ever amounted to, assuming someone is incapable of judging their chances against something because they weren't the first to do it 3 years ago is absurd.

[Nayl]

Where it gets really spooky is that we both have Bloodfrenzys with Ykesha augs. I've got a suspicion that your approach to buying your gear is much like mine, i.e.; if its a reasonable upgrade, bid on it, regardless of how many dkp I have.

I concede freely that I don't know what I'm talking about directly with regard to Ikkinz. But its not hard to get a decent idea or what's involved from what's being said here and extrapolate from what I've seen in Tipt. Add to this all the overblown genuflecting about what level of gear is a must for these encounters, and I just tend to be amused and skeptical. Mainly because I've been having the continuing experience of doing things that my equipment isn't supposed to be good enough for all the way through PoP.

Like I said in my first post, what seperates the front-runners in this game from everyone else is having the will to go there, much more than having the equipment.