And Stay Down!

 It only took me six months but I finally did it. I killed Vorigan Mistmoore.

What? You haven't heard of him? No reason you should have, if I'm honest. He's hardly the most famous of the Mistmoore clan. That would be Mayong, the one with his own zone in both EverQuest and EverQuest II.

Vorigan is some kind of relative. There was some mention of it in the conversation after I went back to tell Tavian Faust, the vampire who sent me to kill Vorigan in the first place, but I wasn't really paying attention. 

I seem to remember some kind of warning about not going up against Mayong for a while since he might not be happy I'd just killed two of his children but I really wasn't taking much in. I was still reeling from the exhillaration of having finally gotten past the fight that's stymied me since January.

It's not as if Vorigan's even the final boss in the Visions of Vetrovia Signature questline. That is Mayong Mistmoore. Of course it is. He's up next in the final confrontation, Eyes on Vacrul Throne, the twelfth episode of a thirteen part epic, the thirteenth being a debriefing with Antonia Bayle back in Qeynos.

I know that because after I did the hand-in I read ahead on the wiki to see what came next, hoping the whole thing was nearly over. Until then I'd barely looked at it, other then to check strats on some of the bosses.

I checked Vorigan's strats a dozen times and it helped me not at all. EQII no longer attracts a lot of detailed commentary so information is hard to find. The wiki is still admirably up-to-date but if you need a second opinion, you might struggle.

 

The walkthrough for Vorigan did have plenty of detail. It just didn't help me much. Or at all, really. The full instructions for fighting him are:

• Hail the named to start fight. Interrupts can be used to stop his casting.
• Bloody Buffet - Run over the blood boils that appear to remove his incremental stoneskin.
• Vampiric Hemorrhage - Joust out of range or use an interrupt when he casts. If it hits you there is a knockback and a fast-acting trauma that will kill you if not cured very quickly.
  • Seems to be preceded by him leaping into the air. An interrupt at this point works nicely.
  • Staying near the far wall may help. However the knockback throws you in random directions, sometimes while in mid-air, so is very hard to correct for

I managed the "Hail the named" part just fine. After that things didn't go quite so smoothly. 

The first few times, back in January, I spent most of the fight being punted across the cavern, often dying before I even hit the ground. If I managed to avoid that, my Mercenary would inevitably die instead, cutting off the flow of healing but more importantly removing my main option for those essential trauma cures.

I tried bringing my own cure trauma potions. I tried putting my back to the wall. I tried jousting out of range. I tried interrupting Vorigan's casts. None of it worked. I can't remember how many times I died, back at the begining of the year, but it was a lot. 

Eventually I gave up, intending to wait until either I'd geared up sufficiently to overpower the script or someone posted a strat that worked.

Over the months I tried a couple of times with no better luck, then today, as I was swapping out several pieces of gear for upgrades from the new Scorched Skies dungeon, it occured to me my Bruiser must now be "geared up sufficiently" to give it another crack. 

So I did. And died nine times in a row. 

I know it was nine because I'd just repaired to full before I went in and I had to use a repair kit when my armor was at 10%. In the end I think it was ten or eleven deaths because I died a couple more times after that, before I finally got it right.

I also watched two YouTube videos of the fight. Yes, there are two. I was surprised as well. Neither of them really helped. 

One has no commentary at all, which is a shame because the person who made it clearly has some kind of strategy that works. He runs into the large pools of blood and stands there and nothing seems to hurt him. I tried that. I died.

The other is a guide of sorts. There's no narration but there are notes. It's helpful but unfortunately the character doing the fighting is so overgeared for solo content, Vorigan barely gets to show off his tricks.

Best loot of the day and it's from the holiday event.

After I'd watched it a couple of times, I noticed, on the one occasion the named does his emote and casts his fatal dot, the player was indeed able to joust comfortably out of range. That didn't depend on gear, just on observation and timing.

I'd tried it several times and it had gone horribly wrong but I had been panicking, running recklessly in random directions, assuming the range of the spell was large enough to reach most of the platform. Maybe it wasn't so big as all that.

I tried again and the merc died and then I died but I could see it might work. It ought to work. This isn't some super-difficult fight that everyone dreads. If it was, even given the age of the game and the corresponding lack of attention it gets, there would certainly be threads on the forum complaining about how unfair it is and demanding it be nerfed. There are none.

Clearly other people haven't been roadblocked by Vorigan the way I have. The two videos suggest there are multiple ways to beat him. My character is easily powerful enough. The sub-bosses in the rest of the instance are absolute pushovers for him now and he can comfortably handle the newer instances that have been added since, all of which are objectively tougher.

Even the issues I was having back in January, where for some reason I couldn't get the camera scrolled back far enough to read the emotes needed to judge the timing, have vanished. I could see and read them perfectly this time around.

Nope, I'm afraid to say there was only one thing getting in the way: lack of skill. The answer to that is usually "Git gud." So I did.

Well, kinda. I concentrated, used my brain, stopped panicking (as much) and took my time. I watched for the emotes, kept my eye on the boss instead of my hot keys and generally played properly for a change. 

Can't say I enjoyed it. Certainly wouldn't want to do it all the time. But it worked. Each time Vorigan went to cast his big spell I didn't waste time trying to interrupt or hit him one last time. I just jousted out of range, backpedalling so I could watch the progress of his animation. And it worked.

The up-gearing helped a lot. My Bruiser's dps is much better than it was six months ago, meaning I only had to dodge two or three casts. I also took the trouble to read all the descriptions of his combat arts, which reminded me he has a trauma cure and several self-heals that I'd completely forgotten about, although in the event the winning fight was one where my merc actually managed to keep herself alive, so I didn't need to use them.

I'm hoping the final instance won't contain any nasty surprises like Vorigan. It shouldn't. In the whole of the VoV Signature line, he's the only one who's given me any serious problems and I'm fairly sure now that most of those were of my own making.

I'm going to give it a couple of days at least before I carry on. Even if I manage to complete the Sig Line this week, that will make it the longest I've ever taken to complete one since they were made soloable a decade or so ago. Not counting the couple of years I was playing catch-up and didn't get the expansions when they came out, of course.

It'll be good to have it done before the warm-up for this year's expansion, anyway. Can't be too long before it begins. A couple of months, maybe.

Probably best not to think about that too much.