Good morning friends! One of my guilty pleasures in MMORPGs is farming loot and killing bosses. More specifically I love it when you can find a nice tight loop that takes about as long to run as it does for the bosses to respawn. While outdoor named farming does not appear to be anywhere near as lucrative for expertise bumps, it still has other benefits. The loop I am going to talk about this morning is in the North Eastern corner of Ebonscale Reach, in an area filled with Lost called Skysong Crypt. I ran this the other night with my good friend Vernie and while we only walked away with a few expertise bumps, we each got several other interesting drops. More specifically a number of the encounters are capable of dropping very solid item level 590 weapons, that could be upgraded all the way to 625 if you choose via umbral shards.
There are a number of ways to get there, but my personal favorite is to port into the Traveler’s Precipice shrine in Northern Ebonscale and then run up along the Great Cleave boundary and drop down from above into the area surrounding the Skysong Cathedral. Doing this has a few benefits, the first being that there are a number of Iron and Starmetal nodes along this route. A secondary benefit is it allows you to skip a lot of corrupted mobs at Skysong Temple and a number of Lost mobs at a town along the way to the Crypt as well as the bulk of the trash mobs leading up to the Cathedral. You do however have to be comfortable with jumping off a mountain in New World and understanding how to catch yourself along the way to lower your falling damage.
Once we are set up in the Crypt area there is a loop of four named mobs that are worth killing. You start at the Cathedral itself by killing Ivan the Inevitable then looting the big chests up on the altar. The chests are helpful in serving as a loop timer because they will respawn every hour. Out of the door of the cathedral, you run west along the path and encounter Slayer Rosellen again looting the chests after she is dead. Still hugging the wall you want to jump across a couple of fences and outside a shack, you will find Mordici the Mortician. After killing him make sure you duck into the shack and loot the chest in there before running up the mountainside and hugging the wall to avoid as many geists as you can. The path leading to the top of the mountain will have your last boss in the sequence, Farley who hits like a freaking truck so be warned. If you have your logging up to at least 150, you can chop down a few Ironwood trees at the top of the mountain before dropping back down off the side into the Cathedral courtyard and starting the loop over again.
Ivan will have respawned allowing you to begin the loop again. All of these are capable of dropping the Obsidian Gypsum for your three daily boss kills, and all of them have some fixed drops that are available from their loot table. One thing of note is that “named” drops in New World have fixed stats and the 590 Item Level items will always drop at that level so long as you yourself are level 60. Additionally, all of these encounters have a higher-than-average chance of dropping the various crafting materials required to make the level 600 Legendary weapons. We farmed this loop the other night for less than an hour and I walked away with three legendary material drops, and Vernie got a legendary pattern. Let’s go over the bosses and their notable drops:
- Ivan the Inevitable
- Unstoppable Decay – 590 – INT/FOC Void Gauntlet
- Aurora Borealis – 590 – FOC/STR Evasion necklace
- Járngreipr – 590 – INT Ice Gauntlet
- Artisan Jewelcrafter’s Tunic – Jewelcraft Tradeskill Set – BOE
- Slayer Rosellen
- Silencer – 590 – STR Blunderbuss – BOE
- Slayer’s Crossbow – 590 – DEX Bow
- Woodworker’s Cap – Logging Tradeskill Set – BOE
- Mordici the Mortician
- Fifth Floor – 590 – STR Blunderbuss
- Rigor Mortis – 590 – CON/INT – Ice Gauntlet
- Ephemeral Seal – Legendary Lost Trophy Material
- Farley
- Weaver’s Hat – Weaving Tradeskill Set – BOE
As you can see there are a good number of interesting things available from this loop. You will of course get your average rate of random drops, some of which can bump up your expertise in addition to a large quantity of max-rank potions of all sorts. However, if you are doing this you are most likely doing it for the specifically named drops on the cycle. Farley is obviously the least beneficial kill but mostly serves as a way of padding out the loop to ensure everything has respawned and serves as a handy way of closing the loop without backtracking. There is another named mob in the area called The Cursed One, but it does not appear to have anything notable on its drop table as the mob is used specifically for a quest.
This circuit would potentially be doable solo for a very highly geared player, or someone extremely good at avoiding damage. We ran it with two and it became pretty easy and did not require us to have a healer. Basically as a result it is a good thing to do when you are looking for something specific that can be done with a handful of folks that don’t necessarily have a strong enough group composition to do harder content. I do feel it is important to emphasize that they have really nerfed the drop rates of expertise bonuses from world spawns. At one point this would have been a reliable method for grinding up your gear level and currently, it really isn’t. They want players in dungeons and doing the grind that way, but I still find a lot of these open areas fun to explore with friends.
If you are down for mayhem and adventure, and the chance for some sweet drops… then this is probably going to be up your alley.