Pelor and Destroying the Wand of Orcus

What do they say in the Matrix? “No one ever makes the first jump.”

Well last night’s attempt to destroy the Wand of Orcus was the first jump for all but 2 of the party members, and it showed.

The whole idea of bringing the wand to Pelor is quite a fun twist. You get to fight through the plane of Elysium which has been taken over by the hordes of the abyss.

Many of the spawn compositions are quite challenging because they include unusual combinations of Party Kick back monsters and tough old favorites such as Balors, Mariliths etc.

This keeps the party on their toes, and keeps them from just going duke nukem on the big badies until the problem monsters have been eliminated.

The whole trip though Elysium to the Palace of the Sun takes about an hour of game time, this is a tad slow as the group adjusts to the new challenges they encounter.

As always the Death Knights seem to be a sticking point for the group, they are tough and can turn and fear their opponents causing chaos to erupt wherever they go. Pretty much the current strategy seems to be, have the Bard use Dirge of the Deathless (This is an epic spell that grants temporary Fear and Critical Hit immunity) while the tanks pile on the Death Knight (no negative damage can be used as this heals the Death Knights) and the casters go crazy with acid damage and evards to bring them down as fast as possible.

Once the group arrives at the Palace of the Sun, they are ushered into the Invocation Chamber where they give the pieces of the Wand of Orcus to Pelor. 

Pelor then goes into a trance state as he attempts to focus all of the powers of light on destroying the wand.

This is when the Lords of the Abyss, chose to make a final attempt at reacquiring the wand pieces.

Graz’tz, Obox-Ob, Jubilex, Demogorgon and Orcus all send hordes of their minions to wrest the wand from Pelor’s hands.

The party then has the unenviable task of defending Pelor who is in a state of total concentration from these hordes as he works on the wand.

The group must prevail against 13 mega spawns that gate into the chamber, each spawn is composed of some of the nastiest denizens of the abyss who continue a relentless assault upon Pelor and the wand.

The novelty of all this was too much for the group last night and Pelor fell to the hordes  demons on the 4^th spawn. But our group is resolute and will attempt to destroy the wand again on Sunday.

Stay tuned for more exciting developments in this mega quest, which is played out only on NWN Higher Ground. http://highergroundpoa.proboards.com/index.cgi

Thursday Night on Higher Ground:

My group has been slowly been collecting tags and the pieces to the Wand of Orcus while adventuring in  the abyss as preparation for returning the pieces of the Wand of Orcus to Pelor for its final destruction.

Last night was our final night of tagging for the first of two scheduled attempts. Many in the group needed the wand piece held by Obox-ob to have a full set. And this is why last night once again found us in Zyon  the twisted horror infested realm of the Demon Lord of insects.

The main challenge of this run is keeping characters from being infected by the Ekolids (Insectoid Demons). Just being in their presence is enough for a low saves caster to become infected.  If this happens, the character begins to grow Ekolid eggs inside their body, making it difficult to concentrate, then causing excruciating pain and finally culminating in a scene much like the alien movies where hatching Ekolids overwhelm their host and hatch from the host’s body to plague the group with more and more Ekolids.

I have had numerous experiences with newer parties where the entire screen was completely filled with Ekolids from infection allowed to progress unchecked.

Last night we cautiously made our way through the twisting tunnels leading to Obox’s throne room using a puller (a character with greater sanctuary, Mordenkainens Disjunction and black blades of disaster).

The idea is that they encounter the spawn first mord them to get their spell resistance down, and the use a black blade to lead them back to the party which is set up at a choke point with area of effect spells ready.

Barring a random spawn which can land on the party, this allows some control over where the fight will take place and provides a terrain tactical advantage to the players.

Using this technique we were able to reach Obox-ob’s throne room in about and hour of game time, and were now ready for the trickiest part of any part 3 abyss run.

Because Demon Lords are able to summon at a very fast rate (Around every 30 seconds or so), any party wishing to beat them is forced to really bring the fire power to take them down quickly.

Unlike the Hells where it is often possible for under powered parties to wear a spawn down by slowly picking it apart, in a Demon Lord fight you are done one way or the other in a fairly short time.

Last night’s party had 3 arcanes and with proper tanking and support the party was able to make short work of Obox-ob, this is the only way to go because long term exposure out in the open to so many Ekolids as the Obox spawn is quite large would invariably lead to massive infection issues and a wipe.

After finishing off Obox, some of the more crazy hmm I mean intrepid group members tried to go after Graz’tz  Lord of Azzagrat with a party of 4. We learned the hard way that the party mix must be exactly right or a party that small cannot deliver damage fast enough to Graz’tz to bring him down.

To the party’s credit we did reach the throne room and cleared his throne room spawn several times until we were forced to conclude that the damage output we brought was just not enough to take him down before he was able to summon more and more minions.

All in all quite a fun night, I hope this gave you a bit of an understanding what some of the very tough end game content on high ground is like.

Btw I am on every night at 8:00pm east coast US time. If you get on and need a bit of help or direction starting out feel free to send me a tell using our chat commands (Type: !tell “bin so bad” then your message).

I look forward to meeting you online and introducing you to this amazing world.

Orcus as Demon Lord and Thanatos

Thursday and Friday Nights:

Thanatos the abode of Orcus is s a frigid place filled with undead. For the past two nights and with gritted teeth we have worked our way through all 9 layers and into his citadel of Everlost.

Getting in is only the first challenge. Hartoon who is the gate keeper for Orcus is a super Lich who has 7 phylacteries that must be destroyed before you can actually harm him. Over time we have developed a technique that is a kind of cat and mouse game to avoid having to fight the same battle 7 times.

Even using this technique this can still be quite challenging and will test most parties resolve.

Last night’s Orcus fight was quite close. On the surface we won and took him down in under 3 minutes. But having fought him many times as a demon Lord and 4 times as Prince of Demons, I could see the writing on the wall, as players began to go down become incapacitated from the various effects and kick back from the rest of Orcus’ spawn.

Even as Orcus was near death I could see, that the many debilitating effects focused on the party were taking their toll. Plus the Blood winds (Party Kick Back Mobs) where playing havoc with the casters that needed to use Area of Effect spells on Orcus.

As is often the case, party composition is the key to success, often times parties will just not have enough quick damage to take down a Demon Lord before his summons overwhelm them. This coupled with a party’s lack of strategy can be fatal to the overall effort.

I am looking forward to this evenings assault on Zyon 1,2,3 and our showdown with Obox-Ob.

Neverwinter Nights Higher Ground Thanatos

Saturday night in Thanatos,

Thanatos if the abode of the infamous demon lord Orcus. This run starts out in Orcus gate a city of the undead, but quickly transitions into frozen tundra with a never ending blizzard.

These are some of the hardest maps in the abyss due to poor visibility and many overlapping spawn points that keep you fighting though the whole map.

Last night’s group had three sorcerers which helps speed up the run greatly. To everyone consternation we actually wound up doing the run twice as we had one of our regulars come late and miss the tag for part 1 (You cannot attune part 2 if you don’t have a part 1 tag). This would have thrown off the whole cycle, so we moved servers and redid the run.

Tonight We are shooting for Thanatos 2 and 3, Part 3 is where we confront Orcus as Demon Lord and attempt to wrest a piece of his wand from his cold dead hands.

Side Note: A full abyss cycle consists of acquiring all 5 pieces of the wand of Orcus from the 5 demon lords in the abyss (Roughly 45 layers).  This process can take as little as a week (If we show up on time and run fast) to a year or more for players with limited game time.

Does Friday Night in Zyon = One night in Bangkok

We started by clearing the Plane of Portals (This is the entry to the layers to the abyss).

All went well until we got lost, lol no one had opened a map so we wound up in front of the Azzagrat portal which was not the abyss plane we wanted to take on last night.

We then fought our way to the correct portal, and managed to clear the first spawn.

This is when our druid crashed and lost all his epics. So he decided to run back to Zariels workshop (Most hells and abyss runs start there). While on the way he somehow managed to rest spawn and die.

So half the party had to port back and then run to try and rez him. Luckily we got to him before he limboed. But it was about this time that our ranger took a wrong turn and went to a different map of the abyss even as I screamed “Nooooooo” at him.

Needless to say he ran right forward and spawned quite a bit of the map before the two sorcerers in the party got to him. Once again we rezed him in time, but this began quite a fight between the 3 of us and quite a big nasty spawn.

All this wound up eating up quite a bit of our time so the planned Zyon 1,2,3 (Each abyss layer is composed of 3 maps thus 9 maps to get to a Boss fight with several minis in between.) Had to become a Zyon 1,2

We had a few players that were newer to the abyss, which makes for a fun Zyon, as the main demons there called Ekolids infect players with low saves, causing them to die and hatch more Ekolids!

It was actually quite funny to see the 2^nd map of part 2 almost completely crawling with Ekolids. Most  of us were down to only 1 or 2 rests by this time.

In the end we won and got the tags, though it was a long and painful run to be sure.

After this i needed a break so went to see Hangover 2 (Quite good and funny) Then logged on in time to help out on a Dis run through the hells.

Returning the Wand of Orcus to Pelor

We are getting close to the end of the first cycle ( Meaning we have managed to defeat 4 out of the 5 demon lords nessesary and taken their pices of the wand of orcus.

Marketing HG

I did quite a bit on the new marketing push. Will post results here quite soon