Sometimes I don’t go looking for camps… but the camps find me. Last night was a bit of an interesting evening because I started out just returning to semi-casually questing in Shattered Mountain and wound up defending Everfall from an invasion. I’ve talked about the casual nature of rolling up on a “camp” in New World and either getting invited to a group or forming the group yourself. This has been way more commonplace than I ever realized, and now that I am actively looking for it… I find them constantly. This has led to me striking up random conversations will all sorts of players. Last night when I was in the middle of questing through Illurmin Rift, I noticed a handful of players standing around on this pillar pictured above. This sort of thing has now made me stop to investigate and see what sort of shenanigans I could get myself into.
It turns out there is a boss named Pit Lord Daehi that spawns there, and this one little spot on the column shown in the first picture is one of the few places you can stand in the area and not be ticking down a corruption debuff. So I stopped the quest I was working on and started farming with the group of folks that had gathered there. It is similar to most of the camps in New World where the boss respawns roughly every five minutes. It also suffers from the false spawn problem of it almost instantly respawning… but dropping nothing when this happens. So the pattern is… jump down and fight the boss, then scramble back up the column to wait for the next spawn and occasionally have to kill tendrils that can see you while standing on the column.
It turns out there are some pretty tasty drops that you can encounter at this location, and I really want the Pit Lord Dominator sword, which has not one but TWO life regen perks on it once upgraded to legendary. The above image is not a complete list of the drops, but everything that was seen by my farming party. Unfortunately, I saw none of the 590 Named weapons, but I did pick up two copies of Chef’s Shoes, a pair of Mining Googles, and Vengeful Fisherman’s Pants. I was getting a ton of purple drops, just nothing off the named weapon table. Unfortunately, we were only out there for about an hour and a half because in talking to the group… two of them happened to be the company that currently controls Everfall. They have done a pretty great job with maintaining that town and were sharing how low on people they were going to be for the upcoming invasion. Since you can now sign up for an invasion from the world map, I opted to do this in order to help out my new found friends.
So as a result just about 15 minutes before 9 pm, we called the group and all ported out to get ready for the battle. I opted to go into my “Basher” configuration where I am using a Hammer and a Great Axe like I have done before in invasions. Basically, this is the bog standard PVP tank configuration which exists largely to harass the oncoming attackers by slowing them or stunning them. In an invasion, you have to deal with multiple rounds of spawning enemies that all charge the point you are defending. The goal is to keep them away from the gate you are guarding and keep them from dealing damage to it. So when a wave of runners spawns I would throw down a gravity well or a well-timed shockwave to glue them in place while the ranged DPS grinds them down quickly. The basher looks like shit on the DPS charts, but the job of locking things down is critical both in invasion and in PVP wars.
I will cut to the chase… we did not win the invasion last night. We came damned close and far closer than I have ever before. I’ve not queued for an invasion since the early days of the game before folks had really figured everything out. It turns out this company had never lost an invasion, and last night we came within 26 seconds of winning. We were down a full squad and a half of players, which made all of the positions extremely tight. Unfortunately, the last wave was just too much to handle without spare bodies and we had to shift toward the middle to deal with a Spriggan, which is a boss type that can drop a gate down EXTREMELY quickly… and at that point, one of the other gates got overwhelmed. Once the invasion mobs are in the center of the base, it does not take terribly long for them to obliterate the central pillar and capture the keep. We were so freaking close and everyone fought valiantly, but we just could not muster the folks to make it happen. It is at this point that I realize that I should have been queuing for these invasions all this time because we are seemingly needed.
The problem that we are dealing with at the moment however is apathy brought on by an upcoming round of server merges. Themiscyra and Frislandia are being merged into Heliopolis and with that comes a shuffling of the deck as far as companies go. Because we are merging into Heliopolis, this means that no one that currently holds territory on our server will hold territory after the merger. There is of course a compensation package for those companies, but a lot of folks have lost the will to defend territories when they know it will be all for naught on December 2nd. I believe all of the invasions that happened last night failed due to a lack of attendance. Brightwood I heard only had two squads out of ten maximum squads defending the territory. My goal when we merge is to start attending more invasions because while I do not care about Wars… I do at least want to protect the crafting machines in a given territory as much as I can.
In the meantime, however… I do plan on going back out to Illurmin Rift in Shattered Mountain and trying to farm up a sword.