Well, it's Sunday afternoon. Bi is at work and the boys are back with their mother, so me and the dog settle down for a little EQ. I am hoping to get an exp group prior to the raid on the Chardok nobles that is scheduled for 7pm.

As I log in, Nanbkek is asking in guildchat if anyone wants to go to the Ykesha zones and farm for charms. Excellent, just the sort of thing we could do. Well, one thing leads to another and we have a small raid going. At it's height we have 3 groups including 2 level 63 wizards, 2 61+ epic clerics, 2 64+ monks, etc. People were clearly bored and didn't want to start anything too involved before the raid.

Things go OK, I learned the way into the Crypt of Nadox. Don't worry, I will add another post here soon about the entrances to the new zones. We get all setup and fighting which includes a lot of waiting around for people to show up before we get too far in or pull too much. Once we get a sizable force in place, Laenyel decides he and his 27 hit points are going to pull. Well, under the theory that he knows what he is looking for (much more so than us), we let him. All is good for a while.

Then we get a two or three pull, no big deal, this stuff is all about level 50 or so. Brekk root parks the adds and we go to work. Well during the fight someone comments "that pig is back." Knowing that in this crowd a comment like that could mean anything, I pan around a bit, half expecting to see some enormous fat woman in a mumu or something. Nope, a smallish boar spawned near us on one of the doorway guard spawn points. Cute, good graphics for once (for some reason the VI artists are really good at depicting fantastic mobs and suck at depicting real animals). Then I /con it...

"Ah...guys, that thing cons red to me." Nanbkek, our tank, concurs. The consensus is that we will get to it, no worries. Well, I am a little worried about this casual treatment. First of all, it's the only thing in the zone that cons red to me. I know I am nearly the lowest person on the raid and therefore the others aren't going to take nervousness by me very seriously. But, this zone was developed in the PoP era. Mobs hit hard for their level even if they are a little on the fragile side.

Well, just to be safe, I slide around to the other side of the mob we are fighting so I can keep an eye on the bacon. Doesn't take too long for someone in the party to blunder into agro range of the pig... Pandamonium ensues.

Unfortunately, SOE has been having a little router issue the last couple of days and I go LD right then. Not good. It takes me 20 minutes to get logged back in. I split the time doing dishes and vaccuming while trying to get a connection to the login server. I am sure I am going to be naked in the Nexus when I finally do get back, or, all alone in the middle of the new zone.

Wrong on both counts. There I am, still in the Crypt, full health but in the middle of an abattoir. Bodies everywhere, except for one contented looking pig, back on this spawn point. There is no one left in the zone including another party that was hunting nearby. I beat a hasty retreat to the river of lava to consider my options. Then Brekk shows up. Like me, he went LD before the pig got to him. He start dragging bodies to what looks like a reasonably safe place. Rokken shows up after hearing about the wipe in guildchat.

Rokken said, "you guys wiped to a pig?!"

"Dude, he triples for 350 and is red to me," replied Nanbkek having had his purple troll ass handed to to him with the cleric being the first to die.

Rokken kinda felt bad since he was going to be our puller and ditched us for unspecified reasons. So, he helps drag corpses. Then the other group starts coming back. They have with them an epic cleric and a KEI enchanter, so we get back on our feet pretty quickly.

Refreshed with new buffs, reinforcements pouring in, it's time for a pig roast. It doesn't last long this time. Now we are off and crawling through the tunnels properly. Nothing interesting is dropping and after a fresh batch of reinforcements arrive, we decide to try the next zone in. Rokken has intel from his cousin, who is soloing in the area, that an evac takes you to the far side of the zone where you can zone into the next zone.

So, we do that, all is good, but time is short, so after a very little bit of poking about, we evac out to prepare for Chardok.