To elaborate

The screenshot you see in the post from late last night is one of my Knight. Standing in front of the Demon Prince Tchar’zanek. On his knees! I was very lucky to be able to go along with my guild to fight the king last night. I logged on about 15 minutes into the city siege, and word was that “stage 2 might happen”. My guild already had a warband going, so I found an empty one, and basically surfed the forums for 45 minutes.

My boredom paid off though, and I got to be the ferryman bringing the warband to a clear road to the palace, and a consolatory spot to do this with them. See, at RR63, I don’t possibly have the wards necessary to be able to tank any of the bosses, or do too much damage to them. So, I mooched. I like to think of it as payment for ensuring their safety and access to the content, but hey, call it what you want. I happily went along with the quasi-alliance/guild PUG warband, bugging out two of the four sub bosses to kill them. I think a lot of us were surprised when we successfully killed two of them legitimately, considering how many unwarded players we  had.

 All of the sub-bosses in the palace are the same mob, with different abilities. All of them are giant bird, Demons of Change, and rather dull. One is a pure DPS race, another spawns tons of creatures, another gives a crazy color-coordinated damage/heal system, and I can’t remember what the fourth does. For the most part, they’re uninteresting. This might be intended to provide a juxtaposition to the final boss. Eventually, we got to Tchar’zanek himself, and this was one hell of a fight. Time wise, it was faster than all of the sub-bosses. But if you were to measure fun and intensity, he won hands down.

You start off fighting the big guy in front of his throne, and after giving him a beating, he stuns everyone, blows out the back of the palace, and sucks everyone through the hole onto a floating island. All around the island is space. Deadly, open space. Once the next phase of the fight starts, mobs poor in, and giant colorful tornados swirl all over. It’s pure chaos. The prince starts knocking people back and up randomly, and then the tornados send them flying like a little girl from Kansas. I spent a good minute straight in the air, just tossing daggers where I could. Situational awareness is vital here. Being aware of where you are in mid-air, and making sure you don’t fall off the chasm to your death is paramount. If you fall off, you respawn outside the city (yes, the CITY). The fight itself doesn’t take very long, but it’s intense, fun, and just the pure essence of chaotic. So many things are going on, that I just had to focus on staying in the center of the island, and hitting the boss man as hard, and as often as I could. I’m just glad I got to experience this fight before they implement whatever their proposed changes are to make it more PvP.

In terms of loot, I made out pretty well. I got the six royal crests for the encounters, of which I broke down four of them to finish buying the last of my warlord gear, and I walked out with the sovereign belt. Two actually, which I felt bad about, because there were three Knights, all the same RR, and we didn’t have a plan in place on how to handle multiple drops of the same item in priority. We all needed on both, after I said, “It’s about a 10% chance for any of us to win both of them!” Yeah, I felt like a jackass.