Good Morning Friends! Welcome to Myrkgard, or at least the semi-safe camp area near the priests. One of the things I dig about the harder areas of New World is that they leave these areas open so that you can set up a camp in the middle of the zone as a recovery spot. This means if things go horribly wrong, you can always just take the death and respawn in a reasonably safe area to pick back up the pieces. I spent some time last night hanging with my friend Cid and drug Eliyon and eventually Warenwolf out to do the priest farm. As it stands several of my weapons are now up to around 530 watermark and my armor is bumping up towards 570. This of course all depends on the viability of drops and so far I have not found much for myself.
I wound up going to bed around eleven last night or midnight server time, and the group I was with was more or less still going strong. I opted to camp out in the safe spot where we set up our tents and my hope is in a few minutes when I finish this blog post, to attempt to find a morning group for priests. I am off today for Veterans Day, so I of course feel like I should be thanking all of the Veteran readers out there for your service. Both of my Grandfathers were Veterans of World War II, and my wife’s biological father served in peace time and her stepdad was one of the “Chosin Few”. So I was raised with a respect for military service and the sacrifices that have been made.
My evening started with me hopping on the Zerg train for a trip to Myrkgard and in theory the entire gamut of Ebonscale Reach and Reekwater as well. The problem is the Zerg culture has spread a bit and it has ultimately diluted the power. Originally this initiative was started by Give Er, but the Zerg is much like a train of lemmings and they are willing to follow any loud voice telling them what to do. It was due to this that things have fallen apart the last two times I have attempted to ride the train. Things went pretty smoothly through the Mines and was we took down a number of portals on the way to Myrkgard itself and even through the city proper. Things fell apart however when we started trying to tackle the portals northeast of Myrkgard. The party ultimately ends up splitting and going to different portals, which means everything becomes significantly harder… and when things get hard people start flaking out on what is generally “free loot”.
Things went downhill from there… and when it came time to jump zones the goal was to follow the normal progression… Shattered Mountain > Ebonscale Reach > Reekwater. However some idiot in chat started calling for folks to go to Reekwater which once again split the party and confused the Zerg. So what ended up happening was some burning of Azoth as we bounced between the two zones for a bit trying to summon forth a critical mass of players… but failing to do so. I myself hopped off the train and started trying to make other plans. I saw that Give Er kept trying to resurrect the zerg and I think failing. I have however met several cool people through the Zerg and populated my friends list with a few nice folks who are down for nonsense. I ended up joining up with Cid and we went to farm Adjorjan for a bit before eventually the Myrkgard group materialized.
So the good and bad about Zerg culture spreading… is it means that you are only what seems like a few minutes from another Zerg group trying to break Myrkgard. This was super helpful last night as we got set up in place for the Priest farm, and as we had other people coming along after the fact. If a Zerg is running you can often use them as cover to get set up safely. Overall though last night went way harder than it should have because we had a group of folks who had no clue how to break aggro and refused to listen to our pleas for them to just lay on the ground. Additionally they seemingly had no clue how to run the rooftops and just ended up training huge packs of mobs through the streets between the two camps. This meant everything was just more dicey than it needed to be… and as a result we got in far fewer kills than we potentially could have because we had to clear a dozen trash each time we fought a Priest.
You might think that it was an extremely frustrating night, and on some level you would be right. However on another level I got to hang out with friends and do some stupid stuff for loot. That is pretty much the highest form of enjoyment for me, so I am completely down with whatever frustrations we had to deal with along the way.