How To Beat Triad Of Elements - The Easy Way!

I just finished my first run-through of Triad of Elements, the new solo dungeon that was added to EverQuest II last week  for the SummerJubilee. It took me a couple of hours - or a couple of days, depending on how you care to measure it. 

If you complete the instance ten times, you get three "plumes" to go in the new Plume slot. The plumes aren't Heirloom. They're No Trade. That means you'll  need to do the instance ten times for every character you want to have one.

By doing the instance ten times, you also earn the right to buy a recipe book you can scribe to let you craft plumes that aren't quite as good. This is so people who haven't done the instance can have a plume, which is handy for two reasons. 

Firstly, the instance will go away when there isn't an event on to support it, so from time to time crafted plumes will be all that's available to new or returning characters. Secondly, the effects of the plumes are cumulative, based on how many people in a group are wearing one, so if you do any group content, people are almost certainly going to be inspecting you to check that you are.

Come over here and say that!

If you do the instance twenty times, you can buy even better plumes from the event merchant so unless you're happy to be that guy with the crappy crafted plume, chances are you're going to be running Triad of Elements at least ten times and more likely twenty.

I don't know about you, but I don't much enjoy running the same instances over and over again. I barely want to run most of them once. The idea of spending forty hours grinding through the same really annoying five bosses twenty times each does not spark joy. 

Of course, the first run is always the slowest. It wouldn't be two hours every time. Even so, it's still going to be a long-ass pain in the butt. Right?

Nope. Not at all. 

My first run may have taken a couple of hours but my next run probably won't take me more than twenty minutes. If that. And most of that will be the running from one stage to the next.

Yes, Zel. It does look like a dragon...

Here, I'll tell you what. I'll knock up a quick guide so you'll be able to zip through the whole thing in no time, too. I don't usually do guides but this one's pretty straightforward. I can sum it up in a single sentence if you like.

Hell, why waste a whole sentence? Here's my one-word guide to acing the Triad of Elements in next-to-no time, at no risk whatsoever, while still getting all the rewards. Ready? 

Chronomentor!

Yep. That's it. That's all you you need to do. Go to your friendly Timeless Chronomage in the starting city of your choice, pick a number very much lower than the number next to your character's name, pay the trivial fee to have yourself converted into a pint-sized powerhouse, able to one-punch dragons and stand in the fire without singeing an eyelash.

Don't forget to resummon your merc and your mount and your familiar and your anything else that needs to be reset to the new level, although honestly you're probably not going to need them. It's going to be a cakewalk.

I'd love to be able to claim credit for this amazing strategy but I was trudging through the damn thing at my regular level, when I tabbed out to look something up and happened upon the tip in a forum thread complaining about the instance being unreasonably difficult for healing classes.  

Do you need me to go get the magician, miss?

That was today. I wasn't playing a healer at the time, I was playing my Berserker, but it was still going too slowly for my tastes. 

When I'd started the instance on Saturday evening, I didn't know chronomentoring was even an option. The first time, I went in with Mitsu, thinking it would be a good way to get some xp and level her up a bit, while learning how the dungeon worked and getting some screenshots for the inevitable post. 

Triad of Elements is an unusual instance in that it scales all the way from level one to the cap. You can go in at any level and it will be your level, with appropriate loot and XP. It's also a true solo instance, not one of those Heroics where you get a buff going in to allow you to handle the difficulty. The mobs are proper solo mobs, which is great, except that proper solo mobs at level can be quite tough, particularly when you're as undergeared as Mitsu is and also have no clue how to play your class, like I don't.

After a few minutes, when I hadn't even worked out how to get out of the first room, I decided there must be easier ways to level. I did a bit of googling to see if anyone had written a guide yet. They hadn't but Naimi Denmother had posted a complete video walkthrough on her YouTube channel so I watched the first part of that, up to the first boss.

The video's extremely helpful but also unedited and, as Denmum says, not a speed run. It lasts almost three-quarters of an hour, which is time you can knock off the two hours I said it took me to complete the whole thing, because I stopped after each boss and watched the next part of the video, just to be sure I wouldn't get any unpleasant surprises.

This all started at about seven in the evening on Saturday, which in retrospect was a really dumb time to start anything that couldn't be stopped at a moment's notice. Beryl the dog comes alive in the evenings. The time to do dungeons and kill boss mobs is in the morning, when she's comatose, or in the early afternoon, when she just idles, waiting to see if anything exciting might happen.

I was aware of that when I began. I figured I could do one boss before she woke up and started batting my mouse hand with her paws. I was exactly right, too. I'd only just killed the first boss when she charged up and went into her "Come on! It's my time now!" routine.

Which would have been fine, if I hadn't just discovered that the first boss drops an item you need to kill the second boss and that item is flagged Temporary, No Rent, meaning it was going to vanish the moment I zoned out of the instance or logged out of the game. 

I did consider leaving everything running and coming back to start up where I left off after our walk but I wasn't confident the PC wouldn't lock up or EQII freeze or some such irritation. Better stop and start over another time.

Anyone got a pack of cards?

Which is what I did today. I logged back in, still in the instance, just to make sure that pesky Temporary item really had disappeared. It had. It was while I was trying to find out if there was any way to get another that I chanced upon the aforementioned forum thread and thereby saved myself a very great deal of time, trouble and tribulation.

After kicking myself for not thinking of it without having to be told, I mapped to Freeport, set my level from 125 to 50, cancelled the persistent instance, mapped back to Moors of Ykesha and went through the portal again. There was a small crowd waiting outside, presumably for their timers to run down so they could go back in for another run. I think you can do it every ninety minutes. 

I worked steadily through the five bosses, stopping to watch Denmum's video before each, which was what took up most of the time. Every non-boss mob in the entire place was a one-shot, if I even bothered to fight them. Most of them killed themselves getting riposted as they set upon me.

The bosses took longer because they all have mechanics to negotiate. At the speed I was going, I found those mechanics entertaining and interesting, which I can assure you would not have been the case if I'd had to do it properly. I categorically prefer combat to be trivial and quick these days. 

There's no equivocating about it any more. I'm too old for "challenging" fights and contrary to popular opinion, I find this kind of content more entertaining the easier it gets. I'm orders of magnitude more likely to do my twenty Triad runs now I can speed-run them at no risk than I was when I thought I'd have had to plod through, taking care and attention.

And don't get up!

It would still be worth doing it this way just for the plume unlocks, even if the loot that dropped was for the reduced, chronomentored level but thankfully it's not. The dungeon gives you loot appropriate to your real level, which for my Berserker meant a couple of  minor upgrades as well as a very nice crafting book he didn't have. 

It was a weaponsmith book, which is his specialism, and it contains three recipes for Resolve 410 weapons, which would be an upgrade for anyone on the account except him. He'll be making them for everyone that can use a sword, dagger or mace.

All in all, it was a fun experience but the best part is knowing I'll be able to zip through it quickly and painlessly in very short sessions as many times as I fancy. Always assuming no grognard at Darkpaw decides we should all have to do it the way they think it was meant to be done, of course.

Hmm... 

I probably should've kept all this to myself, shouldn't I? I guess I'd better get on and do it a few more times before they catch on...