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My Fascination with Gorge of King XorbbFollow

#1 Jul 30 2017 at 8:00 AM Rating: Excellent
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Check out the zone page for Gorge of King Xorbb and you'll see years of posts there from myself and others. It's a zone that has long-held people's interest, mainly for King Xorbb .

Recently I have spent a bit of time in the gorge playing my level 17 monk. This zone has some interesting things happening and is stylistically quite different from much of the game, many of which a higher-level or modern-geared character (i.e., defiant with high resists) would miss:

-the muddites do not run away at low health. @ 17 the minors range from grey to dark blue, the elders are mostly dark blue. They proc a blind effect on you and stun a lot. They drop pottery mats in large numbers. You gain goblin factions killing them. Note that sometimes the muddites wander very high on the canyon walls (this zone was badly bugged for years with NPC lost in walls, that was fixed a while ago).

-The regular minotaurs are mostly dark blue at 17. They do run at low HP. They get farmed for battleaxes and such. The Chasm Minotaurs are mostly yellow-con at 17. Minotaurs kill most of the goblin spawns in the zone. Again, + faction with goblins.

-I don't kill the goblins, as I like being allied with Runnyeye. Since I am about the only person that thinks this way, the goblins drop all sorts of rusty gear. Sometimes the goblin veteran will social aggro assist when you are fighting a non-goblin (which they shouldn't). You can be on friendly terms with the Runnyeye faction goblins (gorge faction goblins) long before you will sway Pickclaw Goblins (modern rulers of Runnyeye) to like you.

-Evil eyes are well-known to spawn at the altar, including the named... but not King Xorbb (despite ancient rumours of that). There is at least one roaming placeholder that can be an evil eye. Both times I have killed Xorbb he was out roaming. There is also a low-hp "trap" evil eye that procs a disease/poison on you. The other named (Brahms, Spinflint, Qlei, etc.) are just about as rare as Xorbb and at least one of them is invisible until aggroing you. They may in fact be on the same spawn cycle...

So why did I go back here again? One is not killing evil eyes as a 17 monk in classic gear (they will charm you by the way). Most of my playtime in the past few weeks has been 15ish minutes here or there. That's enough time to kill some muddites until my health is low, especially when I ran out of bandages. Luckily you can zone into East Karana and the peasant village has a variety of vendors of all the basic needs. I've made it to 18 so far, but it is a slow-play way for sure. While relatively easy, it actually holds risk for me at 17 and I have to pay attention (risk would be far less if feign death was reliable).

The Gorge is a small zone that take time to travel due to the tunnel design. Without SoW it is slow. The south tunnel is ideal for kiters to learn their tactics as few mobs roam there, and once you break the spawns it is hard to be surprised by a roamer. Plus you can always zone. Being on progression, I have seen quite a few groups working from the Runnyeye entrance. Biggest problem there is a good group will get ahead of the spawns and have really long pulls. If I was in a good group, I would just roam the zone as a hunting party or park at the central altar and have multiple pullers bringing the whole zone in to the group. The evil eyes have a couple of decent drops.

Compared to popular zones XP won't be fast for most due to the distance and level range of the mobs. Muddites aggro even when grey so this zone is a lot of extra aggro for no xp once you are level 19ish. That and it is really far from most places, though Mistythicket>Runneye>Gorge is pretty direct if Misty is nearby for you. On Agnarr, I have yet to see the zone empty during classic era, usually at least one other teen level character there and a 30+ person farming the centre eyes. The zone also has a lot of passing through traffic.

It remains one of the "original vision as designed" places in the game, and not many zones have the complicated NPC table for such a limited used zone. Check it out, maybe you'll solve some of the longstanding riddles.
#2 Jul 30 2017 at 10:57 PM Rating: Excellent
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I don't know if it was default, or I unintentionally factioned there but I used to bank in Runnyeye and chat with Lord Pickclaw with a wood elf druid. I always found it rather funny that the uninformed upper level goblins were KOS but the people in charge downstairs were happy to talk. Not much talk but any talk from a mob you expect to want to kill you is still flavor. EQ has lots of flavor if you go looking for it,
#3 Jul 31 2017 at 6:51 PM Rating: Excellent
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Taninger wrote:
I don't know if it was default, or I unintentionally factioned there but I used to bank in Runnyeye and chat with Lord Pickclaw with a wood elf druid. I always found it rather funny that the uninformed upper level goblins were KOS but the people in charge downstairs were happy to talk. Not much talk but any talk from a mob you expect to want to kill you is still flavor. EQ has lots of flavor if you go looking for it,



If you played EQ early enough I believe you could have ruined your Runnyeye Goblin faction before the Pickclaw takeover happened and things got moved/changed into the Gorge. Then you could have killed a bit in Gorge (or some other way of raising Pickclaw if it wasn't some weird default thing).

I'm not clear on the timelines of changes to Runnyeye/Gorge, but believe it was very early in the game's history and has never been relived on progression. Pretty sure progression just gets a slightly depopulated version of both, and Runnyeye with some out-of-era drops.
#4 Jul 31 2017 at 7:09 PM Rating: Excellent
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My fascination zone is Butcherblock Mountains. I spent a ton of time there at low levels and then went back to quad guards at "higher" levels. I've been intrigued by the oddball mobs in the zone like the corrupt guards, the high elf vendor in the broken down tower, the strange pillars at which ogres seem to worship, the Chessboard (of course) and the Kaladim Citizens, who used to be quaddable but now can't even be damaged nowadays. It mystifies me what their purpose was, beyond in the old days being fodder for quadding druids and wizards. It seems to me EQ devs have never quite liked quadding as a strategy so after awhile they took away "KC's" by making them untouchable. Now they're very weird mobs---you can't do anything TO them nor will they interact in any way. I can't think of many other mobs like that, certainly not in the Old World EQ.

With respect to the Gorge, evil eyes have always creeped me out.... I'm thinking now of the packs of them roaming The Devestation!
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