Swamp Fever

 

On Wednesday evening I killed The Elder, Valheim's second boss, keeper of the keys to the gates of iron. Literally. He drops a key. It opens a gate. Behind the gate there's iron. Piles of it.

Killing him came as something of a surprise. I thought that was going to be the hard part. With the big fight out of the way I imagined my forge turning out iron weapons and armor the very next day. It certainly never occurred to me it would take me three days to find the blasted gate!

The gatein question is attached to the front of a sunken crypt. Not a specific sunken crypt. Any old sunken crypt. It's just a regular crypt that's sunken. In a swamp.

Swamp is the third of the five biomes in Valheim's Early Access. Two more to come. Actually there are six already, if you count Ocean. Only no-one seems to. 

In order of difficulty they go Meadows, Black Forest, Swamp, Mountain, Plains. I thought the last two were the other way round but in his comment on Wilhelm's  "looking for swamp" post  SynCaine says not and he's way ahead of me so I'll take his word for it.

Because every Valheim world is procedurally generated from seed there's nowhere you can go to look up where to find a swamp nor yet a sunken crypt. You just have to go find it for yourself. 

Except I already had found some swamp. Two dirty great patches, close together, right next to where I'd built my log cabin. I figured there'd be plenty of sunken crypts there. 

 

There weren't. There weren't any. Not one. I even googled what the damn things looked like so I could be certain I wasn't running past them without noticing.

Not likely. They're very distinctive. They look like Victorian mausoleums with green torches either side of the entrance. You can see them for miles in the gloom of the swamp.

Or you could if there were any. Which there weren't. 

Needless to say I looked again. Then again. I killed a lot of draugr. I killed a lot of blobs. I got quite comfortable in the muck and mire. Too comfortable. I got cocky, went roaming through the swamp in the night-time and it came on to rain and visibility went all to hell and I ran into a bunch of draugr and thought I'd plow through them and one was an elite and I died in the water, under a fallen tree.

Took about two hours and half a dozen deaths to get that corpse back. It had all my best stuff on so I had to do it. If it hadn't been for the stuff I'd bought from the merchant (I finally found him!) which cost all the gold I'd found in two weeks of graverobbing, I might have left it there. I was starting to wonder if it wouldn't actually be quicker to make an entire new set of gear than go get the old stuff back.

That about convinced me I wasn't going to find any crypts in the swamps I knew. I'd have to find some new swamps. That was my Friday, looking for swamps. I mapped all the areas of the large starting island except for the deep south, where it turns to plains. 

There was the start of a swamp down there but it was too dangerous to cross the plains to get to it. A major feature, intended or otherwise, of Valheim is the way the mobs from one biome roam into all the others. I might have a post about that some day but for now I'll just say it's like the old EverQuest days when you had to keep your eye out for griffins and spectres going on a rampage. Plains mobs encroaching on swamp environments is the stuff of nightmare.

 

After a few hours I was sure there were no more swamps I could reach by foot. It was going to take a sea voyage and some blind luck. 

For once I exhibited some sense. Instead of rushing headlong into it I did lots of prep. I worked out a likely destination and a route. Rather than waste an hour sailing my karve (It's a mini-longship. I guess that makes it a shortship) halfway round the island, I portalled over to the house near where I needed to start and made a new one there.

I took off all my good gear and stashed it in chests. I packed some food, some wood and rocks to make a shelter when I landed and all the mats I needed to make a portal so I didn't have to do the whole thing twice. Then I set sail, fully expecting a disaster.

It all went perfectly. The wind was in the right direction all the way. I made landing in a good spot. I got a shelter up and built the portal. There were a few greydwarves coming in but I dealt with them. Once I had my beachhead set up I headed off to explore. 

It turned out to be just a smallish island. Not tiny. About big enough to take one game day to go round on foot. And it didn't have a swamp to be seen. 

Bugger. Back to the chart table. This time I decided to go the way I'd tried right back at the start, when I'd sailed my raft into a storm and been eaten by a sea serpent. I'd seen land ahead just before I drowned. I'd try that.

 

And it worked! It was a much longer journey. I saw a sea serpent but it didn't see me. I landed on a small island at the head of a chain of them leading in to a wooded shore. There were a lot of greys but this time I'd equipped myself a little better, having learned from last time, when I had to spend the first few minutes making a stone axe because I'd travelled too light.

With a second base camp in place I once again installed a portal. Just because the last one was a waste of time, no reason to skimp. And just as well I did because this time I found what I was looking for. And a lot I wasn't.

But that didn't come until this morning. Last night was all huzzahs. I found some swamp! Even better, I got back in one piece, didn't wreck the boat (it was close!), got the portals paired and didn't die once. I went to bed feeling very pleased with myself. 

Today soon put a stop to that. I won't go through the painful details. Suffice it to say at one point not only was I trying to find a corpse with all the good stuff on yet again, this time with no grave marker to tell me where to look because of how many more times I'd died trying to find it, I was also trying to find another corpse I'd left somewhere not really all that close. It was wearing my second-best gear.

My judgment was becoming impaired from the endless carnage. At one point I built a supposedly unassailable shelter on a rock in the sea only to fall off the rock and drown as I missed the door trying to get in. There was a blob chasing me. I panicked. Lucky gravestones float. Not that I was carrying anything worth salvaging by that point.

 

And yet, in the end, I prevailed. I managed to find and grab my best gear and when I was leaping and bounding over rocks with blobs in squelching pursuit I spotted my second-best corpse on a tiny island. Once I was dressed I mades some chests, stashed most of my stuff, kept the armor and weapons, went back, cleared the general area and got my reserve kit.

It was glorious. Well, apart from the skill loss. I really wish they'd change that to a skill penalty against future gain. I must have dinged 35 in axe ten times now.

And the best part? On one of my desperate, hopping, swimming, stumbling runs through the brackish water and over rotten tree-stumps I spotted a sunken crypt. It was as hard to miss as everyone says they are. 

Amazingly, after that everything went smoothly. Well, I only died once more. I was careful. I made yet another house, right in the swamp, near the crypt, this time by fortifying the trunk of a giant tree. I even managed to get a bed, a workbench and a fire in there. And two chests. 

You can put a workbench on top of a fire and still use both. Did you know that? I knew you could put a workbench on top of a bed and still sleep in the bed but a bed's not on fire, is it? I'm guessing they'll change all that, eventually. Beta is better.

 

I got to the crypt without incident. An ooze was camping the entrance but I just sprinted past it. Inside there were two blobs in the first room. I killed the first and survived the poison with about ten hit point left. Then I killed the second and died on the final tick. So close. If I'd had the patience to wait for the fermenter to finish making my first batch of poison resistance potion I'd have survived. Nah, who am I kidding? I'd have used it long before on one of the corpse runs.

But that was the last death. It was a thirty second run back to get dressed and then three more round-trips to get the pick-axe repaired. I wore it out mining scrap iron in the crypt. Those two blobs turned out to be the only creatures down there but there was a ton of iron and I got it all. Now I never have to come back, not to that particular crypt anyway. Nothing respawns inside crypts as far as I know.

I stashed my iron in a chest in my fortified treetrunk, jogged back to the portal at the beginning of the island and ported home. Now I just have to figure out how to get my ore back to the smelter. It means a boat trip at the bare minimum and possibly a long overland run after that, unless I upgrade my original smelter and forge, which are much closer.

Or I could just break the whole lot down and move the entire operation to the new island. All decisions for tomorrow. Now I'm off to sleep.

After all that lot I'm flippin' exhausted!

Yo! Bum Rush The Show

Lateish yesterday evening, just when I was just thinking of calling it for the day, I tabbed out from Valheim to find Wilhelm had posted the first part of the story of his team's attempt to kill the second boss, The Elder. That got me thinking about my own couple of run-ins with the titanic treant. 

Those hadn't gone too well and I'd kind of drifted away from the plot a little. I'd spent most of yesterday building a huge stockade that stretches all the way around both my stone tower and my log cabin. I had some other large-scale building projects in mind. It didn't seem likely I'd run out of things to do for a good while, so why bash heads with a boss just because some raven flapped up and told me I should?

Wilhelm's post had re-ignited my curiosity, though. A few days had passed since my second attempt to cut The Elder down. I wondered if he was still crashing around in the forest or whether perhaps he'd gone back to wherever he came from, awaiting a re-summoning. 

At this point I should probably have made a plan instead of jumping straight through a portal. This is the downside of instant travel. It allows you to make snap decisions. Also from here on there are spoilers about the boss and the fight, just in case anyone's behind me and still trying to keep it fresh.

Last time I'd made a run at The Elder I'd done a fair amount of set-up work, including placing a portal in a hut on the edge of the forest where his altar stands. As it would transpire, this was crucial to my eventual success. Also my immediate defeat.

Part of the problem was, as always, over-confidence. I was dressed head to toe in grade three bronze armor, with a fine wood bow, several hundred fire and flinthead arrows and a grade three bronze axe for close-up chopping. I'd made some sausages out of draugr entrails (best not to think about it) and some bluebery/raspberry jam, all of which had bumped both my hitpoints and health regeneration to previously unheard of heights.

I wasn't figuring I could beat The Elder but I was pretty sure I could get in, give him a go and get out in one piece if things didn't go my way. There was just one thing I'd forgotten. It was the middle of the night.

When I jumped down from the portal (I'd built it on the roof to keep the local wildlife from destroying it while I was away) I realized I could barely see ten yards. I should have called the mission off right then but you feel silly having come all that way, don't you? And anyway he might not even be up any more. I at least had to check that out.

As I ran through the forest with no yellow fog or big red name across the screen I thought he must have despawned but when I finally got close to his altar, there he was. He'd wandered back to his calling place. And he spotted me from a very long way away.

All the guides I'd read about the fight agreed the way to solo The Elder is to bow-kite him around his altar, hiding behind the four stone pillars which block his massive ranged attack and popping out to pepper him with arrows. I tried that. It went disastrously wrong. 

In the darkness and chaos I got pinned down by his roots and stuck up against some immovable object I couldn't make out in the dark. The Elder closed in and stomped on me a couple of times and that was the end of that.

I was cross. It was a stupid death, entirely my fault. I'd been unprepared and I'd panicked and now I'd lost a load of skill points and my corpse, with all my best stuff, was right in the middle of the boss's home base. 

 

In other games I've played this would be the time to back off, take stock, think about how to deal with a difficult situation. Valheim doesn't work that way. When you die in Valheim you get a temporary immunity to skill loss, the only real penalty there is in dying (and a harsh one it is). That immunity lasts ten or fifteen minutes and each new death while it's up refreshes the timer.

It took me a while to see it but this effectively turns you into a superhero. You can be killed, sure, but death no longer has a sting. Therefore, the key thing to do when you die and leave a corpse with stuff you want to recover isn't to take time to prepare for a difficult corpse run. It's to get the hell back as fast as you can so you can do it before that immunity fades.

This is where portals become so very potent. I hadn't even thought to rebind to the nearby hut. I woke up in my bed back at the log cabin. From there it would take longer to get to my corpse than the immunity buff would last so a skill loss death loop would be all too possible. Only I had portals. It took me a few seconds to get back to the hut on the edge of the woods and less than a minute to get from there to my corpse.

Naturally, since it was still dark, I couldn't find it at first. I got killed looking for it and then killed again the next time but that didn't matter. The second time I spotted where my original corpse was and the third time I was able to grab it. 

There might have been another death in there somewhere. I wasn't keeping count. The important thing was, in no more than five minutes or so I had all my stuff back. What's more, I was back in my log cabin scarfing down sausages and buffing up for another run. 

 

It was daylight when I got back. As I was doing the corpse runs I'd spotted a stone crypt in the woods. In fact I'd had to duck inside it to escape. That hadn't been quite as safe as I'd expected. The Elder's roots go right inside the crypt when he attacks, which is very weird. I'd been thinking of the crypts as instances separate from the outside world. You do zone into them after all. Apparently it's not that simple.

While I was skulking in there it had occured to me I could use something Wilhelm had mentioned in a comment. Instead of hiding behind the pillars at the altar I could pull The Elder to the crypt and run him around the outside. I fancied my chances of that better than lurking behind a pillar.

So that's what I did. And it went surprisingly well. The crypt did indeed block the ranged attacks and also most of the roots. I was able to get plenty of shots on target. I could tell I was hitting him because The Elder was on fire. 

The problem was his health wasn't dropping. He didn't seem to mind being set alight and clearly my bow skill wasn't high enough to do him enough damage. Well, sod it. My highest two skills are Axe and Wood Cutting. He's a fricken' tree, ffs!

I abandoned all subtlety and rushed him. I began manically hacking at his legs and his health began to drop fast. Unfortunately, so did mine. He was stamping and his roots were grabbing and eventually I had to back off. 

 

But I had my belly full of sausages and jam. And cooked meat. I had almost twice the hit points I'd had last time I tried him and they regenerated faster. I took out my bow and put some more flaming arrows into him to keep him interested and when my health was back in three figures I charged him again.

That way I managed to take him under half health. And then a spear whanged past my head and into the ground. We'd managed to dance close to the edge of the plains and a fuling had spotted me. 

Remarkably, I had managed to kill one earlier, when the same thing had happened but I hadn't been in combat with a giant tree at the time. They're tough, fulings. I couldn't afford to have one pranging spears at me while I was concentrating on the boss. 

I ran, trying to get clear and got killed instead. It would have been a disaster except for that immunity buff and my portals. And the helpful way that mobs regenerate health slowly over time rather than snapping back to full when out of combat.

In a minute or two I was back. I found my corpse (it was close to the hut), grabbed my stuff, ate some more sausages and went looking for The Elder. He'd rgained a little health but he was still only around fifty percent. I had my immunity buff so I had no fear. I charged in and started hacking.

And that's how it went for a few minutes. I danced around his giant feet, chopping at his toes. When my health went worryingly low I sprinted away and amused myself by firing arrows at him from maximum range. He looked spectacular, his vast chest a mass of withing flames, his huge arms flailing, knocking down trees left and right. I'd have loved to take some pictures but I didn't dare - it was a full time job keeping just in range and not getting stomped.

Finally he was down to a sliver of health. I was down to about a third of mine. I'd been backing off at this point until then but I gambled I could down him before he got me and I was right! Boss down!

So much for the recommended strategy. Right back at the start, when I first summoned him, before I'd watched any videos or read any guides on the fight, my instinct had been to melee him. Even in leathers with my flint axe and just some berries to sustain me I'd taken him to 85% before I died. 

It confirms something I've been thinking for a while now. Other people may do better with the bow but my viking seems to be a berserker. She does best on the charge, axe whirling, a warcry on her lips. Forget subtle tactics, just get in close and hack.

And that death penalty can be turned to your advantage. Yes, the skill loss on the first death is vicious, but eat that and you become invincible. Provided you have a portal close by. It's going to change my strategy going forward, that's for sure.

Of course, when I went to pick up the loot my bags were full. Aren't they always. I had to throw out some greydwarf eyes and a couple of rocks to make space for the mysterious Swamp Key and the Elder Trophy. I'm guessing the former is what you need to get inside the crypts in the swamp biome, which is where you find iron, or so I've heard. It also explains how the next step of the crafting tree is gated by the second boss.

As for the trophy, I went back and hung it on its hook at the stone circle. Thanks to my portal network the trip took me no more than a couple of minutes. 

Next up, the swamp boss. I believe it's a blob. And it's supposed to be harder than The Elder. 

Might wait a while before I go see for myself.

More Of The Same

 

Time for a few bullet-point updates on how things are going in World of Warcraft Retail. Keeping it short because this kind of stuff tends to run away with me and sometimes even I roll my eyes when I read it back.

• Invulnerable Hunter Pet

Yeah, I don't have one any more. After I finished writing about it, I went back to hunt and quest in Northrend for a while, before moving on to the expansion Chromie expected me to be in, Warlords of Draenor. I wondered if that would set things back to normal but no, the cat remained all but indestructible as I plowed through nearly two full levels, logging out out just before I hit fifty. 

I only saw the pet take significant damage once. It was while I was on an escort quest alongside two other players, all of us doing our own thing. It was a farcical sight, three of us running along behind identical triplet NPCs, each of them getting ambushed by three sets of mobs. 

At one point there seemed to be a mechanic where mobs kept spawning and in a few seconds there were so many of them all you could see was a big, red blob where all the nameplates blurred together. I was tabbing through as many mobs as possible, setting the pet on all of them, and after a while his health did drop a few notches. 

When some of the mobs peeled off onto me I had to feign and I watched while the cat fought an army. Couldn't see him for the crowd. He went to maybe 80% health at one point. Mobs kept dying but more kept coming in and he clearly wasn't going to make much headway but nor was he in any danger of dying so I stood up, whereupon a bunch came at me and killed me. I may have shot some of them first.

 

Other than that, nothing could put a scratch on him. Didn't matter what expansion, zone, mob or difficulty level. I even logged right out of the game once to see if that would make a difference but nope. Just the same when I got back in. 

Then this morning I logged in, decided to go  to my Garrison and finish a few things, picked up a quest there to clear some racoons out of the herb garden, set the pet to gathering them up so I could multi-shot them and next thing I knew he was dead and I was feigned, trying to figure out what happened. Since then the pet's been completely back to normal, taking the damage you'd expect, needing to be healed all the time, losing aggro if I go too fast (did I mention the invulnerable pet also held aggro like superglue?).

No explanation for what started it or why it stopped. I hadn't changed anything I was aware of. I'm putting it down to a bug but who knows? All I can say is it was nice while it lasted and if someone wanted to make hunter pets work like that all the time I wouldn't be the one complaining.

• Garrisons

Since I've mentioned them...

I read a lot about WoW's garrison feature back when Warlords of Draenor was the new not-so-hotness. Opinions seemed to be mixed. Those who'd been hoping for something like a real housing option were disappointed while others, taking the system on its own merits, seemed a lot more impressed. Since I wasn't playing WoW at the time I didn't pay that much attention but I got the impression that it was kind of a fun mini-game and potentially very profitable. 

When the EverQuest games added the Overseer feature last year I saw a number of comments comparing it, unfavorably, to the mission system that comes with having a garrison. I really like both editions of Overseer, particularly the more filled-out EQ version, so I was expecting to enjoy my garrison when I finally got one. 

 

And I do. I can easily see how people got addicted to it when it was a live option. Even as a legacy relic it seems like it could be a lot of fun. As housing it reminds me very strongly of Guild Wars 2's Personal Instances: a bunch of buildings you can't do much to customize with a load of NPCs wandering around looking like extras inbetween takes.

It clearly beats GW2 in that you do at least get some choice in what buildings you see and where they're placed and the overall structure has a form of progression but compared to any game that has actual housing... well, this isn't that. On the other hand, it's better than nothing and it does feel somewhat like a place your character might want to hang out.

I can also very much see the attraction of having all my facilities somewhere I can teleport to from anywhere on a twenty-minute cooldown. I haven't had much of a chance to dig into the mission system yet, but it looks interesting. If it wasn't for the fact that everyone did all this to death several years ago, I could see a number of blog posts in it, too, but I'll do my best to restrain my enthusiasm for going into this outdated content no-one cares about any more in nit-picking, tooth-grinding detail.

 

• Ding! Level 50 Hunter

The last five levels seemed to go reasonably quickly. Or it did until I came to do the last five per cent this morning.

Is it just me or is it sadistic to have a death mechanic that gives you a ghost form and a map marker so you can return in complete safety to recover your corpse and then allows you to die somewhere that's not only impossible to reach but where even your ghost dies if you try. Your ghost ffs! How does a ghost die? And then you're back in the same graveyard, looking at the same map pin in the same damn place and if you go for it again the same damn thing happens!

It went like this: I lit up a quest marker and saw it was most of a zone away so I got on the griffin and hit autorun. Then I tabbed out to do something else. I tabbed back in and out a couple of times and I was still flying. Then I tabbed in one more time and I was dead. 

I'd died of exhaustion, apparently. I figured maybe I had the angle wrong and flew too high. That'll kill you in some games. But no, when I checked the map my gravestone was way out at the furthest edge, in the ocean. In the opposite direction from where I'd been heading. Somehow, maybe one time when I logged in and out, I'd managed to get turned around and flown off the edge of the map, or tried to, whereupon the game killed me.

 

Fair enough. My mistake, no doubt. I'll just run and get my corpse. Long run. Maybe I'll just tab out... and I'm dead again. I tabbed back in just as I was about to arrive at the marker but I didn't see the revive button pop. 

Second time around I paid more attention. Didn't tab out. Looked at the screen up the whole time. Watched the yards count down... 

About a couple of hundred yards out the exhaustion warning came on. The two timers raced to meet in the middle and the exhaustion timer won. I never got the option to resurrect although I was only about fifty yards away when my ghost, um, gave up the ghost. 

It appears my corpse was beyond the point the game would let me go, which I understand, only why even let me think I could get there? I took the durability hit and rezzed in the graveyard (and then nearly got killed by a passing bird but let's not mention that). When my rez sickness wore off I got back on the griffin, flew the right way for once, did my hand-in and dinged. There wasn't much time for a celebration before Chromie whisked me back to Stormwind. Which was handy because...

 

• Farming The Rares In Icecrown

Back in Stormwind I got the quest for the Shadowlands pre-event and its going pretty well, thanks for asking. I did a couple of rounds with the shaman last night and got another nice purple. Then today I took the hunter through the Alliance version of the questline before spending a couple of hours doing the dailies and hitting each rare as it popped.

Things have gotten much more organized. When I was first doing it a couple of days there seemed to be radio silence on the map. I never heard anyone speak. Today there's plenty of chatter and someone calls every rare, in advance, with a map pin linked in general. 

It makes a huge difference. The event suddenly feels communal and relaxed. There's plenty of time to get to where you need to be even with slow flying, just as well since I can't afford the 4,000 gold for the hunter's training yet.

The twenty minute fixed spawn (I was misinformed when I reported it as fifteen last time) is perfect for having the event on in the background while I'm writing a blog post. It reminds me enormously of last year's combined fifteenth anniversary and pre-expansion events in EverQuest II, when I spent several weeks killing dragons on a very similar schedule. That was a better event all round, not least because the dragons took longer than fifteen seconds to kill.

The drop rate is reasonable. I've had two purples on each character so far, plus a ludicrous number of Pitch Black Scourgestones. There's a daily for those but it only needs twenty-five. I've got almost a thousand already. I think you can turn them in for rep with the Argent Dawn somewhere. Yay! I guess. Not sure how long I'll keep it up but I do find these things quite moreish.

• Caravanserai

Perhaps the most surprising thing that happened last night was when I took a quest from some priest or other and he started telling me about a caravan "led by a woman that looked like a wolf". Hang on, that sounds familiar...

And so it should. It turned out to be none other than Fiona, my friend from the Plaguelands. Only of course she's not my hunter's friend at all. He's never met her before. She's a pal of the shaman's. There was nothing in the dialog to suggest otherwise but it made me wonder whether there would have been, had the shaman been doing it. I'm going to have to bring her to Draenor to find out.

It's a very nice piece of continuity, anyway. So far there haven't been any actual wagon rides but I live in hope. Fiona and her boys are solid characters. It's good to see them being used again in a later expansion. Did they make a cameo appearance in Mists of Pandaria, too?

I could look it up but why spoil the surprise?

And that's about it for now. Didn't really keep it all that short, did I?

Looking For Grom'Gol In All The Wrong Places: WoW Classic

On Saturday morning I did a bit of this and a little of that, then after lunch I logged into Classic. The thing with Classic at the moment is, once I get started I don't want to stop, so I try not to start too early.

Before I went to bed on Friday I'd picked up several quests at the Raceway. The demented goblins there wanted various body parts from the local wildlife to further their course record ambitions. Or something. I was very tired and Goblins don't make a lot of sense at the best of the times.

Even though I hadn't had the energy to get started on the quests, I'd managed to scope out the options before I called it a night. I'd found there were several pockets of level 30-32 mobs in among the 34s and 35s. I generally back my hunter to win most fights with anything up to and including four levels above him so that looked good.

Since he got out of the starting area it's been his practice to take mostly orange quests. The enhanced experience and rewards far outweigh any deaths he encounters by overreaching but constantly punching above his weight  does mean he tends to need a rest after a couple of hours. Or, I should say, I do.

Hunting that way also relies on not getting adds. Well, not too many adds. I can usually handle two mobs a couple of levels above me at once, especially if they're animals. Scare Beast is great for that. It also helps enormously to have a wide open, flat space with excellent visibility. Shimmering Flats is perfect.

Or it would be, if it didn't have some of the most annoying pathing I've seen. The mobs aren't packed tight but they wander in hard-to-predict ways, zigging and zagging, stopping, going back in the direction they came, turning, carrying on. I'm sure there's a predictable pattern in there somewhere but you'd be a long time defining it and committing it to memory.

Bear down! Run away!

Everything also has a big aggro range, or it does when it's a few levels above you. It took me a good while, half an hour or so, to establish a fairly safe routine. Before that there was a lot of running away and small amount of dying. I also ran out of food and drink and they didn't seem to sell any at Raceway, so I had to take a trip to Gadgetzan to restock.

I love Gadgetzan. Not surprising. Goblin is my favorite Azerothian race. It's a full service town too, which is handy. They have a bank there and an Auction House with almost nothing for sale. Less than one screen for all the weapons! I thought it was linked to the Booty Bay AH , both of them being Goblin-operated, but maybe not.

Eventually I settled down to slaughter the desert fauna. The quest to rip some body part I forget from the twitching corpses of Scorpids went easily enough. Probably only had to kill three times the number of drops to get that done.

There was one that didn't need me to kill anything, just pick up thirty parts from old, broken race cars. That sounded like a lot but there were plenty of ground spawns. I had them to myself because Shimmering Flats was mostly empty of players. The odd person passed by on their way to somewhere else but in the couple of hours I was hunting I saw maybe just two or three others doing the quests. It was so peaceful. Apart from all the killing, but that was mostly me.

Eventually I had two of the four quests completed but it was plain that I wasn't going to finish the other two. I had twenty of the required thirty basilisk kills but the third type of basil I needed only came in flavors 34 or 35. As for the hardened shells from tortoises... after maybe two dozen kills I was 2/9. What gives? Doesn't every tortoise have a hard shell?

Night-time shot from Friday auto-leveled to look like daytime on Saturday. Convincing, isn't it?

I gave up on those two for the time being, handed in the ones I'd completed and took a break. When I came back I decided it was time to move on.

The guy I'd delivered the box from Ironforge to had given me a box of ammo to take to Hemet Nesingwary. As a pair of fetch and carry quests, that has to break some kind of distance record - a round trip from Ironforge to Stranglethorne by way of Shimmering Flats!

At this point, had I had the brains I was born with, I would have Hearthstoned to Ironforge and griffined to Duskwood but oh, no. I was on an exploring binge and nothing would do but to run the whole thing on foot.

I decided to retrace my steps as far as The Barrens, then find my way to the other Goblin outpost I remembered, the one on the coast where you can get a ship to Booty Bay. That did seem to make sense. Barrens had been a safe run  and Booty Bay is right in the zone I needed. If only I had remembered exactly where that Goblin town was...

I got back to the cliff lift with no problems. Had to kill a bunch of centaurs and cats. Got on the lift, set the pet to passive, legged it off the platform with Tauren guards in hot pursuit, switched the pet to aggro, pointed him at them and carried on running. Got a good lead, swapped him back to passive and kept going 'til they leashed. No-one died.

So far so good. And that was the end of my luck. Or, I should say, my judgment.

Oh, come on! I thought bears liked swimming...

Seeing Theramore to the East as I ran through The Barrens I decided that would be the quickest way to go. I thought I remembered the Goblin port was just North of there, along the coast.

It is, in fact, although not that close. What I'd completely forgotten is that Theramore isn't in the low level Barrens but the significantly higher-level  Dustwallow Marsh. I found that out when I veered off the road to take a shortcut through the undergrowtth and got sideswiped by some mob with a deathshead for a level.

Even then things would most likely have been fine if I'd rezzed at Theramore graveyard and carried along the road. Too easy. Too sensible.

I died again getting my body. Third time I got on the road and down to Theramore, where I came up with the stellar plan of swimming north, running along the shoreline when it seemed safe to get out of the water. That worked for as long as the only mobs in range were non-aggressive turtles. When I came to a tribe of high-30s Murlocs, not so much. I avoided them by heading inland, whereupon several spiders decided to have me for lunch.

I think I died three more times getting my body and slowly edging it over to the paved road. Could have been four. Then I died once more on the road itself, when I ran across a flooded bridge with hostiles in pursuit, only to find the water was deep enough to force me to start swimming. Swimming is slow.

Eventually I made it out of Duskwood and back into The Barrens with my armor hanging off me in tatters. Looking at the map I saw I was about two minutes North of where I'd turned off to go to Theramore. Not my finest hour as an intrepid explorer...

Leaving Ratchet. An hour late and half a dozen deaths down.

The rest of the trip to the Goblin port, Ratchet, as I discovered it's called, passed without incident. I repaired and took the boat to Booty Bay, another great town. I pottered around there for a while, bought a parrot pet for forty silver from a goblin selling "Pirate Supplies", checked the Auction House, which seemed better-stocked although not by much.

After a while I thought I'd better get on with my delivery. I checked the instructions. Nesingwary's last known location was North of somewhere called Grom'Gol. Sounded straightforward enough.

I had it in my mind that Nesingwary hung out somewhere in the North of the zone, so I headed that way. Coming out of Booty Bay into the Stranglethorne jungle, every mob was either a skull or eight or nine levels above me. Learning my lesson I stuck to the road. I got chased a few times but I got away.

As I went North the levels declined until I was seeing things I could kill. That made sense. I'd been given the quest at 28 so it would seem logical it would be in some area I could reasonably expect to handle.

I got all the way to the end of the zone, hung a left just before the exit to Duskwood, jogged up the path to where I thought I remembered seeing Nesingway the last time I played, a decade ago. Surprise, surprise he wasn't there. It's a different bunch of questgivers entirely.

I picked up a quest to kill crocolisks while I was there. If I'd set about doing it right away this post would be a lot shorter. Instead I headed off into the jungle in search of Grom'Gol. 

Everywhere was busy. Lots of mobs were being killed by lots of groups, making travel seem safer than it really was. I roamed around the Northern end of the zone, trying to open the map. I even killed a few things. It was fine until I hit the Venture Company's mining operation. Those hostile goblins were six or seven levels above me and aggroed from a long way off. They were also mostly casters. I was fireballed to death before I could work out which way to run.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

Another couple of deaths recovering my corpse and attempting to get clear gave me a great idea. I'd noticed that even though discoveries made in ghost form don't clear the fog of war from your map, those discoveries do still flag up on screen. I figured it would be a lot safer to go looking for Grom'Gol as a ghost.

And it was. I covered the entire map, or I thought so, anyway. Hard to tell when there's no record of where you've been. As a ghost I couldn't see any mobs or NPCs so I might have run right over Nesingwary without knowing it but I wasn't looking for him. I was looking for the ever-elusive Grom'Gol.

Never found it. Still haven't. After more than an hour of staring at a greyed-out vision of the afterlife I gave up. I found my corpse, got back on the road and left Stranglethorne to go spend the rest of Saturday finishing some Duskwood stuff I had left in my book.

On Sunday morning I had a hospital appointment. That went quickly and smoothly. I was back in Azeroth and hunting by eleven a.m. I joined another player to finish the "Legend of Stalvan" questline, something few people seem to bother with, probably because 90% of it is running around. I also grouped for the last of the "kill a metric tonne of werewolves" sequence. I could have soloed both but it's more fun in a group, especially on a Sunday morning.

That done I couldn't put it off any longer. I gritted my teeth and headed back into Stranglethorne. To give myself an easy start I thought I'd knock out the croc quest. Crocs, naturally, live along the river bank. I dropped down to the river, killed an annoying fish that snapped at my heels as I swam across, then headed East along the waterline, looking for crocs.

About twenty seconds later I was handing my crate of ammo over to Hemet Nesingwary. His camp is right by the river in the North East corner of Stranglethorn Vale.

Where Grom'Gol is I still have no idea.

Death Cab For Cutie

Brad McQuaid's Pantheon team likes to sound the waters for feedback on just how old school they should go. A recent tweet on the official feed asked "If your character died in an extremely difficult area, would you bother to try and get your corpse back or just leave it to rot and take the exp hit/loot loss?".

Keen, who likes to bounce off Pantheon's churning idea mill, posted this morning in response. He opened his argument with a cheerful statement on all our behalfs: "I think we can all agree that no one would leave an EverQuest body full of loot to rot. It's simple untenable."

Oh, really? I beg to differ.

In the first six months I played EverQuest I left my corpse to rot three times. Three times that I remember.

The earliest was in Nektulos Forest. I was playing a Dwarven Cleric because some demented guide I'd found online claimed it was a good class/race combo for soloing. I mostly soloed when I started in EQ. Just being there was overwhelming enough without having to talk to people as well.

Clerics, dwarven or otherwise, did not solo well in Classic EverQuest. After two weeks of playing several hours every day I'd made it to level nine or thereabouts. I was hunting Wisps in the extremely badly-lit dark elf starting area when I ran over a small ridge and fell into a river.

I would have made it out if it hadn't been for the piranhas. I tried several times to swim down to my corpse so I could get my stuff back, such as it was, but all I achieved was a couple more fish-bitten corpses.

I was pissed off but I was already somewhat fed up with the tedious, slow grind of leveling a cleric so I took it as an opportunity to re-roll. On a different server.

These fish are no respecters of level, either.

Not too long afterwards I was playing my ranger in Blackburrow, when I made the mistake so many had made before me. I poked my nose into the hollow tree stump near the entrance. Next thing I knew I was deep underground, treading water in a shallow pool with a bunch of deep-red con gnolls staring down at me. The fall hadn't killed me but the gnolls soon fixed that.

I spent hours trying to get back to my corpse. I had a little help from sympathetic adventurers but we were all low level and no-one else wanted to die in the depths.

I never got my corpse back and I very, very nearly quit. It was the first time any video game had ever affected me so viscerally and there was absolutely nothing positive about the experience at all. I stopped playing for three days, which at the time was the longest I had ever stepped away from the game since the day I installed it.

The lure of Norrath was so strong, though, that I couldn't stay away. Not to mention that Mrs Bhagpuss was still playing, so I couldn't even pretend the damn game didn't exist. I re-rolled again and moved on to yet another server.

My third unrecoverable corpse came with the launch of Ruins of Kunark on April 24th, 2000. Well, it might not have been on the actual launch day. I can't remember if I was able to log in right at the start and I think I began by rolling an Iksar, anyway.

Suffice it to say it was the first time my Druid, then in the her very low twenties, stepped off the boat in Firiona Vie. Off she went to explore the new lands. Lasted about three minutes.

Nice. Bait the trap with your own kid.

Somewhere in deep undergrowth, with ferocious frame-rate lag (caused by the soon-to-become infamous trees) turning the game into a slide show, she ran into a nest of thrashing leeches.

I spent what felt like several hours trying to find the corpse. Even when I knew where it was I couldn't get to it. After a bunch of deaths, not all of them mine, I decided to cut my losses before someone lost a level. I left my corpse and everythng on it to rot in the steamy jungles of Kunark and went back to leveling in The Karanas.

Those are the three unrecoverable corpses I remember. There may have been others. Certainly I died in much worse places later on but by then either I'd worked out better techniques to get my stuff back or the game had changed to make it easier or both.

The time eventually came when I actively enjoyed corpse recoveries. I turned into that guy, the one who'd respond to your desperate plea for help in /ooc or guild chat. I'd get my druid to port you or my enchanter to invis you and together we'd get you up and running again.

I remember spending an entire session helping some Erudite recover his corpse from the Qeynos sewers. That was some of the most fun I'd had in the game back then. I remember when six of us stayed up until five in the morning on a work night getting our corpses back from the sixth floor of The Tower of Frozen Shadows. I remember the time a guy paid Mrs Bhagpuss to drag his corpse the entire length of West Karana and then had a paranoid fit that she was going to steal all his stuff and threatened to report her, so she just dumped his body by the side of the river and left him to get it for himself...

So many stories. But losing all your gear because you can't get your corpse is a thing of the past, of course. Are there any mainstream MMORPGs left where it could still happen? I can't think of one. Mostly what you get these days is a swift trip back to a nearby waypoint or graveyard or bind spot. You might lose a bit of xp, maybe your armor takes a tick of damage.

In EverQuest these days you can just pay an NPC in the Guild Lobby to summon your corpse and your Mercenary will rez it and get you 96% of the xp back. In EQ2 you get a tiny sliver of xp debt and a free trip to a safe part of the zone. In GW2 you pick a waypoint, pay a silver or two and start over as though nothing happened.

She died of a surfeit of lampreys.

About the only MMORPG I occasionally play that still makes it relatively awkward is, most surprisingly, World of Warcraft. It always puzzles me that the poster game for convenience expects you to run back to where you died if you want to avoid some fairly annoying penalties. And in black and white, too.

Looking ahead to Pantheon, I suspect the team will attempt to please everyone. Some version of corpse runs will exist for those who claim to like them (as I once did and still, perversely, might even now). For the average player, who at best finds the interruption to gameplay irritating and at worst might decide to give up on the whole thing, I'd bet there'll be some other option.

As there should be. While I would be the last person to claim that having to recover your corpse to get your gear back isn't immersive, that's the damned problem. It's too immersive.

Even twenty years ago, when I took all this stuff far more seriously than I do now, I wasn't playing MMORPGs so they would stimulate my emotions to the point where they actually hurt. It happened. It happened too often. It was never good, it was never fun and I never want to do that again.

There's a vast difference between a frisson and a shock. A little tingle can be exciting. A burn hurts. To my way of thinking, if a video game is engendering feelings that emulate those you'd avoid in real life, it's doing something wrong, not getting it right. Yes, you get some great stories but the cost is too high.

I'm all for being given the option to sneak back in and put one over on the dumb goblins that got lucky by snatching the loot back from under their noses. I understand the satisfaction of payback, calling in some favors, going back mob-handed to take names and kick ass but it needs to feel just real enough to give you a glow - no more than that.

Shouldn't be that hard to arrange should it? You just have to leave a back door.