With Icy Keep and Underfoot now released, we now have plenty of stuff to keep us busy …

Once that was out the way we went raiding and  killed all the easy stuff. Turns out that was too many mobs to list in a simple post but as ever our progress is shown on the left.

Now onto the more tricky things.

By way of an update:

Zarrakon – Dead

Gynok – Dead

Tyrannus – Dead

We may even put some screenshots up if anyone remembers to take any …

Xygoz – Done

Milyex Vioren -Done

Qunard Ashenclaw – Done

Cinder Queen – Done

Travenro the Skygazer – Done

Hoshkar – Done

Silverwing – Done

Phara Dar – Done

Mythical spam till the server could take no more – Done

Trak – Erm……well we sent one stupid, idiotic, noob, brave adventurer in to check he was actually there

Well, having now been there a few times I can say that they were both right and wrong.

The lag is pretty bad. Since experiencing the horror of game breaking lag in Shard of Hate though it now seems manageable and in fact I don’t really notice it any more. The memory leaks are there and frankly inexcusable – SoE deserve all the vitriol and scorn poured down on them for allowing their premier raid zone to go live with such bugs.

The progression is totally messed up. The Nexona/Druushk combo are a huge ramp up in difficulty from previous encounters. It’s hard to pass judgment without having cleared the zone completely but having some of the hardest mobs right at the start just to cockblock Mythicals is obviously a complete joke. It is frustrating as hell that noone on the dev team thought to stop and say “this is really dumb” and the lack of any sort of common sense between them is scary at times.

However, despite all these frustrations, you can’t get away from the fact the zone itself is great. It’s easily the best zone in the expansion and looks awesome even on the standard raid settings of blurro-vision.

I also enjoyed the first two encounters too, sure they are easy but then they are just hors-d’oevres, tasty little starters to the zone to whet your appetite and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.

Kluzen is a bog standard encounter with an entirely predictable surprise and trivial to any raid that has made it that far. He’s the first named in the zone though and drops little of worth so as a warm up act that’s fine. Then on to Ekron which (memory leak aside) is a fun encounter with an interesting, if not unique, script and is about the right level of difficulty for where he is and what he drops.

Then of course you hit either Druushk or Nexona and its like a huge smack in the face after the preceding two. From the progress made so far though I think we can do them both and hopefully soon.

So yes, on Flames they were right but then no one there mentioned how cool the place looked. A pity that such a fantastic and interesting zone is scarred by some poorly thought out cock-blocking, dreadful progression, crap loot and inexcusable bugs. That could sum up the whole of the Rise of Kunark expansion really. I hope they get to grips with these things for Velious.