Lunar Madness: The Great Hollowshade WarFollow

It was foggy that night, out in the hollowshade moor. A strange feeling of dread lurked within the echoed hills of darkness..... Something strange was afoot in hollowshade.
The air was thick with stench, the putrid odour of foul unwashed creatures. The grimlings were everywhere. They had taken over hollowshade moor. Grimlings moved out in the morning and had taken the whole zone by the end of the day.

Enter the lunar mutants. We gather in hopes of taking down the foul grimlings, for we will no longer handle their foul stench and wicked ways. The outpost was heavily guarded.

First, a strategy discussion takes place. How will we fight? Will we approach from behind? Will we sacrifice the barbarian for the good of the rest of the team? should we try and split them, take them out one at a time?
(The bosses are yellow to a 32-33, so i dont think they're actually lvl 40, but somewhat lower, maybe 35?)
We deliberated over attack strategies for some time. Eventually, a somewhat haphazard plan of pulling the boss through the back was made.
We then prepared, buffed and got ready for this move. Pulled, got The boss as well as only 1 add! amazing!

We burned down the boss with all our might, all casters ran out of man, but we won. The first victory!~
Prince Garzemort, among the loot: Glyphed Shield of the swamp
, and 2x of Short sword of the swamp

The vah shir took over the outpost again, but not for long. Soon, we head to the owlbear caves in the north and slaughter the denmother. This triggers another group of hollowshade to attack! this time, its.... The howling Sonic Wolves!!!

Quickly the sonic wolves overtake the moor. The outpost is taken over again. We must reclaim it! Our second battle would come swiftly.
Using a similar strategy to before, we Fight Gnarlick. It is a close fight but we are victorious once again.
Loot was : 2 x Cloak of the blind wolf

For the glory shot :)



We hope we can do it a few times a day, might be good to annouce to people that we're going to take down a boss so that drops dont go rotting. It was close on the second one, but we found 2 takers for the loot. But all in all, it was great fun to have our first mini-raid of hollowshade!
(Trappin mentioned it used to be harder for them to take the outpost,they must have changed it at some point. Now,once the monsters attack the outpost the vah shir flee to the city right away, and the outpost is taken. This actually makes it easier for us to kill the bosses.)



Edited, Oct 18th 2013 11:42am by AtnaEverywhere

Edited, Oct 18th 2013 9:10pm by AtnaEverywhere

Sword and cloak would be awesome upgrades for Mystro, but unfortunately, he'd likely never get to them in time to loot. Since the expac, I am having trouble zoning most of the time. EQ crashes to desktop. It happened earlier as I tried to meet Jhenni to collect a sword gift.

Hollowshade is xp well into the high 20s... so until the zoning fixes up for you, you could sort of live there?


Grats on making sage here by the way! (I love clicking that rate arrow and seeing a colour change)

KC for what it's worth, one of my friends I regularly group with was having the same problem all through beta and when the expansion first went live. He finally petitioned and got contacted by a gm or dev online and talked to him. They were able to fix this exact issue for him. He is EXTREMELY computer illiterate, so is unable to tell me what they had him do to correct the problem. All I know is that we play all night now and he no longer crashes, and it was so bad before that he was depressed and thinking his only option was to quit until he got a new computer. So I would suggest you petition or call customer service. I don't know if it is related, but I was having frequent crashing during the beginning of the Veil of Alaris expansion, and going to the advanced settings on the launcher and turning off mip mapping fixed it. Not to suggest that will help you, just to illustrate sometimes new game features bring out strange new bugs and the seemingly weirdest adjustments to your game or computer settings can often fix them.

Some observations on the war:

Cycle #1

I wanted to trigger owl takeover so I killed the grimling named first. He died, zonewide message for owls attack, they do and camped switched.

Next I move to the sonic wolf cave and killed their named. zonewide message for owlbear defense too thin. I kill attacking wolves. I wait, wolf named respawns and I kill him. This time I get the owlbear attack zonewide. They do and zone goes all owls, fort pops owl boss.

Cycle #2

As above, except I keep getting "owl defense too thin" and the named placeholder... for 6-7 cycles. On one of my named kills (I was getting tired) I missed the sonic wolf attackers and they took out the owlbears in the Northwest (normal) location.

So now I have south as owls and both caves as wolves. Ghowlik spawns (named wolf) in Northeast (normal) location. This time I get the owlbear attack message and owls take it over. This puts me at 2/3 owl again, but they don't have their home cave.

Sonic wolves still hold the owl home cave, and no named or obvious placeholder is up. I wipe the spawns in this cave 8ish times. No named or placeholder spawns. I call it a night right after zonewide message calls out Sonic wolf attack and the Northeast cave reverts to wolves.


What I think I know:

-killing the default zone counterclockwise will give you the mob of the camp before you started killing (so killing grimlings 1st gives owls, killing wolves 1st should give grimlings, killing owls first should give wolves)

-the first kill will pop attackers and turn the zone 2/3 one type of mob

-the second kill will either give the zonewide "weak defense" message, which is the camp you just killed NOT switching and getting attackers to prevent the takeover of the whole zone, or the zonewide message "attacking" from your chosen mob type that will takeover the final camp you just named-cleared and result in the whole zone going to your chosen mob.

What I wonder:

-if you fail to deal with the "weak defense" message you not only don't get the camp you wanted switching to do so, but you will lose one of your other camps too. AND If this happens, it seemed that the war was effectively broke until the zone decided to resolve itself. I couldn't prove this as I logged... but I have a feeling my failed cycle #2 resulted in the zone turning itself into full sonic wolves.

I'd love to have some other-server input. We're running into some item farmers (really! lol) that are making running the cycles impractical right now. However, once they accomplish thier tradeskill/quest (whatever it is) I'm sure we'll have the zone to ourselves.

~
Heh. Never occurred to me the HSW would ever be farmed, strange times are these. :-D

Okay dokay I'll run through the war tomorrow night then.

Hey Snailish

I ran the war through 4 cycles (reset at the end so Vah Shir controlled fort) -- never had an issue with weak defense or no weak defense messages.

Not sure what's up on your server, but Luclin/Stromm is behaving as expected/desired.

~
No problem! Took me a couple of hours before I could even get started -- been so long since I ran my Beast, I was looking at her spells thinking ... "Growl of Panther...wth does that do again? Does IoS matter if I have Tnarg on...wait, what's this chingas do again and what is it doing in my inventory?"

:-D

Glad I could help. I should state I had the zone to myself the entire time, so, I think your random farmer is likely the case.