How to spawn the Lurker at the Threshold

The Lurker at the Threshold is a hidden raid boss that can be spawned in the Threshold of Divinity, the social part of House of Crom. After long efforts, some people have finally figured out how to spawn him and enough information has now been posted in the epic forum thread that the rest of the details can be reconstructed without too much trouble.

Or click here to see a larger map in vector format (SVG).

1. First, you need a Restored Keystone. To make it, you first need a Faded Keystone Fragment, which drops from the rare form of Narvi (Narvi the Opener of Hideous Doors). If you have this fragment in your inventory during the Alchemist Myk-ra encounter, and get hit by his Transmute spell, the fragment gets changed into a blue item called Energized Keystone Fragment.

For the next step, you’ll need the following ingredients in your inventory: 1 Energized Keystone Fragment, 1 Aqua Regia, 1 Aurichalcum, 4 Powdered Desert Glass. Then you can go kill Artificer Xan-Phon; after he’s dead, someone should do fire damage on the Heating Device (the pillar right of the forge) until it reaches 100%; then the person with the aforementioned ingredients in his/her inventory can click the forge and will have those ingredients replaced by a Restored Keystone. (The list of ingredients is hinted at by one of the Atlantean inscriptions in the Artificer’s room. See these forum posts: link 1, link 2.)

Both kinds of fragments, as well as the Restored Keystone, are tradable generic items, so you can also buy them from other players on the tradepost etc.

2. Now go place the Restored Keystone into the holder next to where Narvi is standing. You’ll probably have to kill Narvi first as you can’t reach the holder without aggroing him. Once the keystone is placed into the holder, it is lost from your inventory and there’s no way to recover it; it will stay in the holder until this instance of the dungeon resets, and then it will disappear for good. So you’ll need a new keystone the next time you want to do this in a different instance.

3. The next step is to “charge” the four circular platforms on the ground by spellweaving on them. These four platforms are located as follows (see the above map): one near Jotunrodull; one is reached by jumping down from the Hero Plateau; one is on the Ledge of the Scholars; and one is where the Arcanist Khor-nu is standing (so you have to kill him before you can charge the platform).

To charge a platform, someone has to spellweave on it for 2 minutes. Any class that can spellweave will do. When the platform is charged, yellow glowing particles appear on it, and the spellweaver gets a short cutscene which shows that the portal on top of the ziggurat (behind Narvi) is opening little by little.

Once a platform is charged, it remains charged indefinitely (until the instance resets). So you don’t have to have multiple people doing this simultaneously or anything like that; you can simply have one group moving around the dungeon and charging the platforms one by one.

4. When all 4 platforms are charged, the portal appears fully open. On the Ledge of the Scholars, there are 4 clickable Atlantean Scriptures (actually 5 but one of them isn’t clickable so I won’t count it). The Scholar NPC on the Ledge of the Scholars moves towards the middle scripture and starts repeating 4 lines of text, with pauses in between and with a longer pause after all 4 lines.

For the next step of the ritual, you’ll need one person on the ledge and one by the altar (next to the portal). When the Scholar says something, the person on the ledge should click the Scripture which produces a “matching” line of text. At the same time, the person by the altar should do the corresponding emote. The correct order of the scriptures, if you number them 1–4 from left to right (as you stand on the ledge and look towards the ziggurat), is 3-4-2-1. The corresponding order of emotes is /pointup, /horizon, /poundchest, /beckon (these are based on hints given by inscriptions in Priest Syth-Los’s room). The complete ritual looks like this:

Scholar: In his house, Yog-Sothoth waits dreaming.
Scripture 3: He is the Lurker at the Threshold, and his computation is eight, and twenty, and four hundred.
Altar: /pointup

Scholar: Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth.
Scripture 4: He knows the gate. He is the gate. He is the key and guardian of the gate.
Altar: /horizon

Scholar: The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be.
Scripture 2: Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.
Altar: /poundchest

Scholar: Open the gate, Yog-Sothoth! Shatter the doors between the screaming stars!
Scripture 1: Ia, Old One! Ia, Faceless One! Ia, he whose name is The Abnormal Ones Are Coming! Ia! Ia!
Altar: /beckon

The person clicking the scriptures has to have more or less maxed out his/her Atlantean language skill (by consuming 8 Fragments of Atlantean) in order to be able to click all four scriptures. The person doing the emotes doesn’t require anything special.

5. If this ritual has been done correctly, four candles and a book will now appear on the altar. Anyone moving close to the altar gets a 60-second buff called Ritual Blessing. A female character wearing the Royal Atlantean Gown should now approach the altar, get the Ritual Blessing buff, and then click the portal. This summons the Lurker.

If you didn’t get the emotes correctly during the ritual, the candles and book might still appear, and even give you a buff called Ritual Blessing, but it will have a different icon (orange instead of yellow) and will last just 30 seconds instead of 60. This is your clue that something went wrong. If the gown-wearer clicks the portal while having this wrong buff, she will get a message that “something with the ritual has gone horrifically wrong” and will get oneshotted by a gian hand reaching out from the portal. But this is nothing tragic, the candles etc. will reset when the Scholar on the Ledge starts his four lines of text again, so you just have to wait a bit and you can try repeating the ritual again.

During all this clicking and waiting, Narvi will probably respawn, but he doesn’t hinder the ritual in any way. He’ll disappear anyway if you manage to summon the Lurker. I saw barriers going up at the entrances into Narvi’s area when the Lurker was summoned, so I guess that if you want to actually kill the Lurker, you should probably assemble your raid team in Narvi’s yard before you summon him.

Update: the tactics for the Lurker encounter have recently been published by X.legion on the German AoC forum: link.

Update 2: the above link is now broken since the old EU forums were shut down by Failcom, and it seems that nobody bothered to transfer the tactics to the new forums. Here’s an archived copy of the old forum thread: link.

The Sixteenth Portent

At the end of the first cycle of 12 portents, the devs announced that they would be replacing two of them with new ones, supposedly for being unpopular or something like that. I wonder thy the Dragon Spine portent, Serpent Man Oldblood, whom we fought in March 2014, was scheduled for replacement; there was nothing particularly wrong with that fight, nor did I have the impression that it was unusually unpopular. There may have been a bit fewer people there, but that’s probably just because the Dragon Spine is not accessible to people on free-to-play accounts.

(Click to enlarge.)

Anyway, the new March boss still spawned in the Dragon’s Spine, but is now a humanoid mob called the Dust Fiend. It spawns at (920, 680) in front of the Palace of Cetriss, near the T5 raid entrance. In terms of appearance it is nothing to write home about, and reminded me a little of the sand demons that were introduced with Turan. (Incidentally, there is also a quest called The Demon of the Sands in the Gateway to Khitai, at the end of a chain from Dair Usun in Menudsjin’s camp; but the resulting boss, called Writhing Sandstrosity, actually looks like a kraken.)

Initially, the boss was CC’able, so the fight was completely trivial since he pretty much never had the time to use any of his abilities. After a few days, they patched this in a hotfix and the fight was slightly less trivial, though still not particularly challenging. His abilities include: Swirling Sands (spawns moving fire circles on the ground; the circles knockback any players standing in them); Quicksand (spawns a circle on the ground, gives anyone standing in it +70% hinder movement and a slashing dot); Sandstorm (puts a 15-sec debuff on people near the boss: +50% miss chance, +0.5% fizzle chance, and a slashing dot).

Curiously, the boss has just 18.97 million HP, which is about 6% less than most world bosses.

(Click to enlarge.)

The loot follows the usual pattern: you mostly get a blue box, Hunter’s Trove of the Dust Fiend, or occasionally a purple box called Slayer’s Cache of the Dust Fiend. Presumably you can also get this purple box from the blue box (instead of directly to the boss), but this never happened to me this week (admittedly, I didn’t farm the boss *that* much). On one alt I got a Slayer’s Cache of the Inferno Lord from one of the blue boxes — i.e. I got a purple box belonging to one of the previous bosses, rather than to this one.

There is of course a new pet, Companion: Dust Fiend, which looks like a miniature version of the boss but doesn’t do anything terribly interesting. He does have a few nice spellcasting animations:

(Click to enlarge.)

(Click to enlarge.)

For comparison, here’s the Sand Demon, the combat pet that comes with the Turan pack:

(Click to enlarge.)

Things I got from the blue boxes on my guardian:

Count	Item
Social animations, particles etc.
1	Bottled Spirits
5	Cool Runnings
1	Eighth Plague of Stygia
1	Ritual Knife
Food, potions, buffs
0	Potent Daggamalt, Dire Sweetpressed Haste
0	Ta Neheh Leaf Elixir
0	Kingsmight Ale
3	Elixirs (2 Invigorative Rejuvenation, 1 Precision)
6	Philtres (4 Constitution, 2 Strength)
1	Minor Elixir of Resurgence (self-rez)
Vendors of crappy social consumables
0	Traveller’s Merchant Contract
Social armor sets
3	Harlot’s set
4	Khemi Guard set
3	Shattered Colossus set
6	Slayer’s set
3	Vizier’s set of State
0	other social armor sets
Other social armor
1	Crown of Autumn
1	Tigerskin cloaks
Raid gear
7	T1 armor
3	T1 weapons (1 sword, 2 shields)
3	T2 armor
1	T2 weapons (1 sword)
AA urns
4	Flask of Completion (20000 Mastery XP)
5	Flask of Direction (50000 Mastery XP)
0	Coffer of Radiance (62500 Mastery XP)
Tokens
6	50 Esteen Tokens
5	30 Marks of Acclaim
Pets
3	animal pets (2 Charcoal Firebird Chicks, 1 Topaz Komodo)
3	dancing pets (1 Aquilonian male, 1 Cimmerian male, 1 Stygian female)
Purple caches
0	Slayer’s Cache of the Dust Fiend (purple cache)

Also seen on other characters: Stygian Special Mushroom, Hero Ascendant social armor, Coffer of Radiance.

And an overview of purple caches from all bosses so far, on all of my characters (some of the bosses from the 2nd cycle are omitted as I wasn’t farming them much):

Boss	Total no. of kills	# purple caches			Drops from purple caches
		from blue	direct	total	Simple Relics	Urns	Rare Relics	Pets	Gear
Dragon	185	6	2	8	7 (29)	0	0	1	0
Yeti	61	3	2	5	4 (15)	0	0	1	0
Basilisk	141	4	2	6	2 (7)	2	0	2	0
Serp. Man	78	3	6	9	7 (25)	0	0	1	0
Thrice Dr.	236	1	12	13	8 (31)	4	0	0	1
Ice Worm	191	1	9	10	8 (33)	0	0	1	1
Nergal	91	0	4	4	2 (7)	1	0	1	0
Leviathus	161	1	5	6	5 (20)	1	0	0	0
Execut.	122	0	6	6	4 (15)	0	0	2	0
Lurker	151	4	5	9	6 (29)	1	0	1	1
B. Queen	220	3	5	8	4 (15)	3	1	0	0
Inf. Lord	154	2	4	6	5 (19)	0	0	0	1
Second Cycle
Dragon	69	0	1	1	0 (0)	0	0	1	0
Dust F.	91	1	5	6	4 (16)	1	0	1	0

I got a second legendary Black Dragon minipet during the second appearance of the Black Dragon boss (December 2014). Sadly, as I already had one from last year and it’s BoP, I couldn’t do anything other than vendor it :S

Targets of Interest achievements

Here are the coordinates of the mobs you have to kill for the ‘Targets of Interest’ achievements. I’ll add other playfields as I get around to doing them.

Acheronian Ruins

• Tham’Kur (170, 170)
• Tapah (413, 182)
• Bat Demon Kothar-Wa (468, 250)
• Al’Gol the Corpsefeaster (375, 430)

White Sands Isle

• Flesh-Eating Plant (662, 430)
• The Silverback Behemoth (682, 320; actually he patrols around)
• The Ravenous One (631, 199)
• Gorilla Queen (218, 180)
• Tear-Kirahn (565, 346)
• Greater Black One (955, 671)

Tortage Underhalls

• Askia (279, 155)
• Ceremonial Master (164, 323)

Bubshur House

• Shepses (375, 305)
• Akhiban (335, 235)
• Menkafri (288, 188)
• Akhita (255, 260)
• Lurker in the Dark (196, 295)

Khopshef Province

• Mantis Champion (195, 297)
• Hep Kab Chief (302, 655)
• Captain Sylfest (207, 766)
• Sektep (301, 1322)
• Bubshur Undead Guard Chief (441, 1292)
• Abasi (681, 1392)
• River Raider Chief (1132, 1380)
• Jahi (1400, 1460)

Wild Lands of Zelata

• Mercenary Pathfinder (1122, 1367)
• Nemedian Quartermaster (1116, 1018)
• Nemedian Tactician (1001, 832)
• Nemedian High-Priest (1041, 685)
• Mercenary Commander (patrols all over the Nemedian camps in the east of the playfield)
• Nemedian Forager (1007, 400)
• Nemedian Executioner (887, 274)
• Nemedian Mage (845, 315) and (842, 339)
• Nemedian Bannerman (791, 263)

Conall’s Valley

• Yeti (848, 1044)
• Battlemaster Torgvall (1300, 875)
• Commander Magni (1368, 800)
• Commander Vakarr (1584, 1036)
• Lodur Frostbeard (1622, 1133)
• Jorgrimm (1752, 1071)

Field of the Dead

• Ymirish Houndmaster (85, 551)
• Ymirish Wolfrunner (182, 341)
• Vanir Shaman (344, 388)
• Thorain Redfang (367, 373)
• Audun Nightstalker (437, 416)
• Hakon Wolftamer (287, 679)
• Werewolf Chief (343, 818)
• Bloodclaw (397, 823)
• Ymirish Bearlock (628, 979)
• Lieutenant Rhor (645, 966)
• Lieutentant Haken (540, 992)
• Specter Warchief (886, 975)
• Vanir Warmaster (1000, 780)
• Ymirish Frostlord (981, 740)
• Gurnakhi Champion (1090, 821)
• Specter Warlord (1009, 1080)
• Brand Hellhammer (1081, 398)
• Ymirish Field Commander (1109, 419)
• Vanir Headman (1007, 378)
• Ymirish Seidir (1013, 420)
• Specter of Chieftain Flann (876, 1028)
• Specter of Chieftain Giron (515, 189)
• Specter of Chieftain Talorc (587, 573)
• Specter of Chieftain Enfreth (470, 300)
• Specter of Chieftain Bricriu (582, 400)
• Specter of Chieftain Iogenan (575, 160)
• Specter of Chieftain Munaith (750, 250)
• Specter of Chieftain Cemoyd (548, 404)
• Specter of Chieftain Nechtan (660, 279)
• Specter of Chieftain Fidaich (441, 234)
• Specter of Chieftain Olgudach (631, 249)
• Specter of Chieftain Cinaith (504, 388)
• Specter of Chieftain Lutrin (562, 183)
• Specter of Chieftain Gailtram (478, 169)
• Brigand Philipus (1183, 267)
• Outlaw Tobias (1302, 282)
• Outlaw Henricus (1221, 251)

Eiglophian Mountains

• Cannibal Chief (360, 423)
• Cannibal Chief (1069, 295)
• Cannibal Chief (506, 761)
• Diabolist Aino (904, 767)
• Nunatak (910, 661)
• Necromancer Kullervo (1020, 926)
• Vainamoinen the Dreamwalker (934, 908)
• Titan (711, 1073)
• Pongidae (842, 1231; actually he patrols over a wide area)
• Na’Tsu’Ko (1073, 1230)
• Kamoinen (1133, 1265)
• Torumjumala (1219, 1290)

Cannibal Cave

• Chief Uruk’Ar (227, 190)

Ymir’s Pass

• Gelba (457, 710)
• Captain Hramgar (155, 770)
• Chief Groel (144, 1012)
• Yzdar (794, 1275)
• Champion of Ymir (996, 1259)
• Zantillo (1127, 866)
• Captain Rocca (1390, 877)
• Jevina Nightsoul (1349, 306)
• Zaroth the Black (1188, 211)
• Cowled One (1204, 450)
• Skuld the Ghost King (771, 295; patrolling)
• Urdalus the Ghost King (665, 365; patrolling)
• Parabella (439, 545)
• Tharr the Battlelord (385, 427; patrolling)
• Nardum the Quarry Overseer (227, 384; patrolling)
• Kyrostias the Tormentor (858, 569)

Atzel’s Approach

• Ice Demon (149, 825)
• Atzel Fortress Gate Captain (691, 772)
• Black Dragon Magnus (620, 642)
• Lieutenant Eyvie (171, 673)
• Chill Crawler Brood Mother (77, 387); this is a group boss, try to kill the minions extremely quickly, otherwise the boss becomes invulnerable to damage for a while
• Troglodyte Chief (65, 127)
• Nether Lord (917, 432)
• Beastmaster (837, 151)
• Crazed Troglodyte Chief (876, 18)

Thunder River

• Blood Fang (481, 1587)
• Tarakwi (1085, 1000)
• Risen Avenger (1282, 1757)
• Occultist Kodril-Kau (1445, 1172)
• Ikkerons (1239, 802)
• The Darkwalker (1122, 786)

Coast of Ardashir

• Roshanak the Merciless (738, 603)
• Jochi the Kozak (926, 416)

Kheshatta

• Chosen of Set (1124, 830)
• Apostle of Set (1122, 790)
• Blessed of Set (1148, 700)
• Crimson Boss (710, 1012)
• Death Master Harbinger (956, 359)
• Black Ring Prodigy (727, 461; patrolling)
• Rogue Guard Captain (675, 375)
• Gullah Blade Master (509, 176) and probably elsewhere; the mob is really called Gallah Blademaster
• Black Ring Warmage (293, 693) and elsewhere
• Bat Demon Lord (273, 756)
• Seremis the Outlaw (527, 1047)
• Hong Gildong (698, 610) and other locations

Tarantia Common District

• Risen Warrior (238, 1051; only appears at night — after 19:00 in-game time)
• Amun-Nepthek (94, 937)
• Lazar (269, 1007)

Tarantia Noble District

• Ares the Pyromancer (811, 1088)
• Elihud the Mender (898, 1045)

Villa Amiel

• Chef Vibius (283, 177)

Villa Camillus

• Lord Camillus (338, 176; upper floor)

Villa Lentulus

• Gurges the Nimble (221, 308; top floor)

Villa Paetus

• Lord Paetus (283, 286; upper floor)

Villa Verde

• Kephalos the Cruel (253, 251; upper floor)

Gateway to Khitai

• Gluttonous Archfiend (588, 355) and elsewhere; patrolling
• Huge Grim Fiend (689, 287); patrolling
• Kuchu Khan (1168, 304)
• Yurki (1351, 730)
• Huang-di (750, 820)
• Kasar (710, 752)
• Cong the King (1228, 384)
• Zang Xin Elder (1116, 171; patrolling)
• Zang Xin Lieutenant (1254, 374)

Northern Grasslands

• Senior Warmonk (159, 457)
• So’tu the Smasher (96, 756)
• Zang Xin Defiler (148, 630)
• Cro’tan the Knowing (181, 767)
• Mu the Ferocious (370, 112)
• Zan the Bonechewer (535, 145)
• Fu the Screamer (656, 286) and (735, 58)
• Lemurian Queen (1350, 324)
• Lotus-touched Craterspawn (1185, 179)
• Malevolent Craterspawn (698, 174)
• Bloody Thief (960, 377)

Chosain Province

• Darkspawn Corruptor (335, 1135)
• Ling-Kung (110, 800)
• Man the Merciless (390, 530 in a cave; and also 488, 567, which is in a cave upstairs)
• Bing-Zhong (810, 132)
• Baio the Guardian (1261, 1025)
• Soul Harvester (1382, 1345)

Kara Korum

• Hu’nan the Soultouched (823, 1121)
• Merek the Tainted (980, 900)
• Uncontrolled Kang-Zai (234, 383)
• Overgrown Craterspawn (644, 466) and (897, 327)
• Lun the Insane (928, 397)
• Shi’za the Malicious (1257, 808)
• Kha-tan the Crazed (1647, 1217)
• Mei-ta the Mad (1444, 574)
• Malevolent Apparition (1753, 347)

Paikang

• Gibbering Hermit (416, 305)
• Dark Legion Commander (568, 184) and (817, 318); two patrolling ones
• Hellish Fiend (742, 371; actually he patrols around)
• King Pong (830, 525) — jump to his island from the Shadows of Jade camp, around (796, 510); I jumped with a tiger, got killed while landing, and used a self-rez potion; but apparently you can also survive the jump. You can apparently also pull him with a ranger (with the +range modifier).
• Dominant Baboon (860, 476)
• Master Dong (1207, 1390); he has a 95% damage deflection and +200% bonus damage buff; you need items from the Brittle Blade quest chain to remove those buffs, or you should fight him with a group

Dragon’s Spine

• Abomination (2×) (550, 862)
• Hapikern the Physician (1172, 399); rare spawn, also for the Bane of Serpent Men

The Twelfth Portent

This month’s world boss was called Risen Inferno Lord; after I heard of this pompous name, I was a bit underwhelmed by the boss’s appearance — it’s the fat floating devil guy that we already saw years ago in the Oasis of Zaara halloween quest. The boss spawns in Kheshatta in several locations: near the Caravan Raiders’ Hideout (1130, 435), in the East Ruins near the snake boss (1120, 855), in the bat camps (265, 680) and in the oasis near the Ghanatan camps (700, 175). I was surprised by how many people were confused by the terms ‘bat camps’ and ‘oasis’, and were instead using the terms from the in-game map (‘Black Ring Explorers’ and ‘Ghanatan Camps’). I guess this means they weren’t around in the days of epic Kheshatta farming :S It was even more depressing to see questions in global along the lines of ‘bat camps? where are there bats in Kheshatta?’, which suggests that some people haven’t even played through the entire playfield properly 😦

This boss is preceded by a single green mob called Flame Oracle. This oracle is labelled as a raid trashmob and gets oneshotted by an impressively big hit as soon as the boss appears (“Flame Oracle’s Risen Inferno Lord hits Flame Oracle for 5078321 fire damage.”).

(Click to enlarge.)

All damage done by this boss is fire damage. His primary single-target attack on the aggro holder is called Inferno Bolt. There is also a 360 degree self-centered AoE attack called Spiraling Inferno, during which the boss flies up into the air, spins around his own axis and does a knockback and a hit of fire damage on the players around him. Blazing Inferno targets a random player (the spell is cast 3 times in a row on that player); this player gets a 10-second debuff of the same name (and a burning particle on himself). This player, and other players near him, takes hits of fire damage every 3 seconds until the debuff expires; there seem to be more hits of damage if there are more people standing nearby, but I didn’t find out the exact mechanics of it. The boss also has an attack called Incendiary, which targets a random player and puts a 6-second debuff of the same name on him; when this debuff expires, that player and anyone else within a 5 meter radius takes a hit of fire damage. There’s also a single-target fire attack called Flame Strike, which seems to be ranged and is used as an anti-kiting mechanism.

In terms of loot, there’s nothing new this month either. The boss drops Stygian regional items, e.g. social armor (Pharaoh Honor Helm, the Harlot set, Khemi Guard set and Vizier’s set) and consumables (Eighth Plague of Stygia, Stygian Special Mushroom). There is of course also a new mini-pet, Inferno Lord.

I had pretty bad luck with the drops this month; I only got the first purple box after 125 blue boxes. By my calculations, if the drop rate of purple boxes is 5% (as seems likely to be the case), then the probability that you’ll have to wait that long (or longer) for your next purple box is about 0.16%, or 1 in 609 — very bad luck indeed. I had a bit more luck in the last few days and in the end I had 150 blue boxes and 4 purple ones. Unfortunately, I got nothing but relics from the purple ones. However, I haven’t opened any of the blue boxes yet, so there’s a small chance that some of them will drop a purple box and I might get the pet that way.

Recently I was transferring some of my characters to the testlive server multiple times so I could take screenshots of all the legendary cloaks, and it occurred to me that I could also use this to get more statistics about the world boss loot drops. I have about 150 unopened blue boxes on my guardian, so if I transfer her to testlive once a day, I can eventually open several thousand blue boxes and thus get a much bigger sample than I could if I just opened the boxes once on the live server. The table below shows the results after opening 697 blue boxes on the testlive server and 150 on the live server, for a total of 847 blue boxes.

While opening boxes on the testlive server, I also got the pet there so I can include some screenshots of it anyway:

(Click to enlarge.)

(Click to enlarge.)

I find this pet very annoying — they gave it the sound recordings from the Oracle of Derketo in the Pyramid of the Ancients. This includes lots of maniacal laughter (which he does while pointing at you! :P) and the following lines of text:

Inferno Lord: I will wait for you in hell, wanderer.
Inferno Lord: You believe that you can stop me? You believe you have the right? Come, mortal. There are other worlds than these.
Inferno Lord: Your soul will scream for an eternity!

For comparison, here’s the Soul Devourer, the pet from the Oasis of Zaara halloween quest, which has a couple of advantages over the world boss pet: the Soul Devourer is bigger and, most importantly, quiet. On the other hand, the world boss pet has a fiery particle effect and a spinning animation, both of which the Soul Devourer seems to lack.

(Click to enlarge.)

Count	Item
Social animations, particles etc.
12	Bottled Spirits
33	Cool Runnings
14	Cowardice Remedy
27	Eighth Plague of Stygia
14	Electric Boogie
19	Fermented Brain Juices
16	Ritual Knife
23	Sticky Fresh Blood
25	Stygian Special Mushroom
7	Void Essence
Food, potions, buffs
15	Potent Daggamalt (8), Dire Sweetpressed Haste (7)
47	Ta Neheh Leaf Elixir
22	Kingsmight Ale
32	Elixirs (11 Guile, 5 Invigorative Rejuvenation, 5 Physical Might, 11 Precision)
20	Philtres (8 Constitution, 12 Strength)
6	Minor Elixir of Resurgence (self-rez)
Vendors of crappy social consumables
8	Traveller’s Merchant Contract
Social armor sets
13	Harlot’s set
34	Khemi Guard set
29	Shattered Colossus set
23	Slayer’s set
9	Vizier’s set of State
0	other social armor sets
Other social armor
4	Pharaoh’s Honor Helm
9	Crown of Autumn
22	Tigerskin cloaks (7 Emberskin, 3 Ivory, 5 Shadowskin, 7 Snowskin)
Raid gear
90	T1 armor
70	T1 weapons (32 swords, 16 shields, 22 polearms)
37	T2 armor
15	T2 weapons (5 swords, 4 shields, 6 polearms)
AA urns
43	Flask of Completion (20000 Mastery XP)
34	Flask of Direction (50000 Mastery XP)
17	Coffer of Radiance (62500 Mastery XP)
Pets
29	animal pets (1 Barachan Gull, 6 Black Cobras, 3 Charcoal Firebird Chicks, 5 Fat Harries, 2 Field Mice, 1 Fire Salamander, 1 Frost Salamander, 4 Hippo Calves, 1 Topaz Komodo, 3 War Piglets, 2 Wolverine Kits)
18	dancing pets (1 Aquilonian male, 1 Aquilonian female, 1 Cimmerian male, 2 Cimmerian females, 4 Khitan males, 3 Khitan females, 2 Stygian male, 4 Stygian females)
Purple caches
11	Slayer’s Cache of the Inferno Lord (purple cache)

And an overview of purple caches from all bosses so far, on all of my characters:

Boss	Total no. of kills	# purple caches			Drops from purple caches
		from blue	direct	total	Simple Relics	Urns	Rare Relics	Pets	Gear
Dragon	185	6	2	8	7 (29)	0	0	1	0
Yeti	61	3	2	5	4 (15)	0	0	1	0
Basilisk	141	4	2	6	2 (7)	2	0	2	0
Serp. Man	78	3	6	9	7 (25)	0	0	1	0
Thrice Dr.	236	1	12	13	8 (31)	4	0	0	1
Ice Worm	191	1	9	10	8 (33)	0	0	1	1
Nergal	91	0	4	4	2 (7)	1	0	1	0
Leviathus	161	1	5	6	5 (20)	1	0	0	0
Execut.	122	0	6	6	4 (15)	0	0	2	0
Lurker	151	4	5	9	6 (29)	1	0	1	1
B. Queen	220	3	5	8	4 (15)	3	1	0	0
Inf. Lord	154	2	4	6	5 (19)	0	0	0	1

This month’s I got a Runic Band of Inherent Hatred (ring with 78 con, 30 crit rtg, 30 hate inc rtg, 133 protection) from one of the purple caches; this is the fourth piece of purple gear I got so far (from all the world bosses together).

(Click to enlarge.)

The Eleventh Portent

This month’s world boss was called Banshee Queen of Acheron; she wears a mixture of guardian culture armor and a few Turan-style pieces from the item shop. She spawns in the Wild Lands of Zelata, near the bridge that leads towards the Sanctum of Burning Souls (1205, 645); apparently there was another spawn location, in Thunder River near the Xibaluku entrance (920, 960), but very few people bothered going there since the Wild Lands location was so much more convenient — Funcom even added a new rez pad on the other side of that bridge; so I never went to the Thunder River spawn point myself.

This boss is preceded by a single green mob called Black Ring High-Necromancer; he does a summoning ritual which includes bones rising up from the ground — a cute animation that I haven’t seen before in the game. When the queen spawns, she says: “Blood… Blood… I thirst for living blood!” This phrase sounds familiar to me from somewhere, but I’m not sure where — perhaps from one of the bosses in Atzel’s Fortress. (Update: yes, it’s from Tainmic.)

(Click to enlarge.)

She does slashing damage on the aggro holder. Occasionally she cast Bleeding Wounds, which puts a slashing dot on one or more players (-5% slashing damage every 3 sec, for 30.5 sec). I’m not exactly sure who gets affected by this; IIRC she targets a random player during the cast, perhaps everyone near that player gets the dot as well. Every 35 sec or so, she casts Power from Pain, which puts a 1-second debuff of the same name on about 12 random players, and the boss gets a buff of the same name on herself (which immediately stacks up to 10 stacks). This seems to buff her damage considerably for a short time (about 10 sec); I occasionally saw unusually high ticks of the Bleeding Wounds dot in my combat log, and she occasionally did unusually strong slashing white hits, practically oneshots. There is also an attack called Mark of Pain, which seems to be a single-target hit for 3386 damage followed by a dot that does 4 ticks of 846 damage each; all of this is untyped damage, so it bypasses bubbles and mitigation; it was probably an anti-kiting mechanic. There is also a slashing attack called Consume Life, which seems to hit the aggro holder every 10 seconds; 2 sec afterwards, the boss gains a buff of the same name (this seems to be a health tap buff lasting around 5 sec).

In terms of loot, there’s nothing particularly new. Predictably, the boss drops Aquilonian regional items, e.g. lots of Mitra’s Blessed Ointment; of the social sets, I only saw Sanctum Atlantis and the two global sets (Shattered Colossus and Slayer’s). I also saw an Atlantean Spellbinder’s Tunic but not any other Aquilonian social armor (e.g. the Tarantian masks that we saw from the Black Dragon boss).

Mitra’s Blessed Ointment gives you a 5-minute particle effect that looks like a halo above your head. Here’s my PoM looking all saintly and innocent at the temple of Mitra in Old Tarantia 🙂

(Click to enlarge.)

(Click to enlarge.)

There is of course also a new mini-pet, Banshee Queen, which I sadly didn’t manage to get despite lots of farming 😦

Here’s an overview of the loot I got on my guardian from this boss:

Count	Item
Social animations, particles etc.
3	Bottled Spirits
5	Cowardice Remedy
5	Electric Boogie
3	Fermented Brain Juices
10	Mitra’s Blessed Ointment
10	Prayer Book
6	Ritual Knife
6	Sticky Fresh Blood
1	Void Essence
Food, potions, buffs
2	Potent Daggamalt, Dire Sweetpressed Haste
11	Ta Neheh Leaf Elixir
6	Kingsmight Ale
6	Elixirs (0 Guile, 2 Invigorative Rejuvenation, 0 Physical Might, 4 Precision)
2	Philtres (2 Constitution, 0 Strength)
2	Minor Elixir of Resurgence (self-rez)
Vendors of crappy social consumables
3	Traveller’s Merchant Contract
Social armor sets
11	Sanctum Atlantis set
4	Slayer’s set
10	Shattered Colossus set
0	other social armor sets
Other social armor
1	Atlantean Spellbinder’s Tunic
4	Crown of Summer
2	Tigerskin cloaks
Raid gear
16	T1 armor
17	T1 weapons (4 swords, 4 shields, 9 polearms)
8	T2 armor
9	T2 weapons (3 swords, 2 shields, 4 polearm)
AA urns
9	Flask of Completion (20000 Mastery XP)
8	Flask of Direction (50000 Mastery XP)
4	Coffer of Radiance (62500 Mastery XP)
Pets
13	animal pets (2 Barachan Gulls, 2 Black Cobras, 1 Fire Salamander, 1 Frost Salamander, 1 Hippo Calf, 1 Topaz Komodo, 2 War Piglets, 3 Wolverine Kits)
7	dancing pets (1 Aquilonian male, 1 Aquilonian female, 1 Khitan male, 1 Khitan female, 1 Stygian male, 2 Stygian females)
Purple caches
3	Slayer’s Cache of the Banshee Queen (purple cache)

And an overview of purple caches from all bosses so far, on all of my characters:

Boss	Total no. of kills	# purple caches			Drops from purple caches
		from blue	direct	total	Simple Relics	Urns	Rare Relics	Pets	Gear
Dragon	185	6	2	8	7 (29)	0	0	1	0
Yeti	61	3	2	5	4 (15)	0	0	1	0
Basilisk	141	4	2	6	2 (7)	2	0	2	0
Serp. Man	78	3	6	9	7 (25)	0	0	1	0
Thrice Dr.	236	1	12	13	8 (31)	4	0	0	1
Ice Worm	191	1	9	10	8 (33)	0	0	1	1
Nergal	91	0	4	4	2 (7)	1	0	1	0
Leviathus	161	1	5	6	5 (20)	1	0	0	0
Execut.	122	0	6	6	4 (15)	0	0	2	0
Lurker	151	4	5	9	6 (29)	1	0	1	1
B. Queen	220	3	5	8	4 (15)	3	1	0	0

This boss was the first one where I got a rare relic — after a total of a little over 1500 world boss kills! I guess this tells us something about the drop rates…

(Click to enlarge.)

The Tenth Portent

This month’s world boss is called Remnant of the Lurker and looks like a slightly smaller version of the Lurker at the Threshold from the House of Crom. It spawns at the entrances to the House of Crom, on both sides (in Field of the Dead (550, 1285) and in the Eiglophian Mountains (165, 1280)).

Before the boss spawns, five green mobs appear, called Memory of X, where X = Khor-nu, Xan-phon, Queen Cao-Polyphya, Myk-ra, and Syth-los; they look like the bosses of the same name in the House of Crom. The Queen repeats the following speech in the /say channel a few times:

Memory of Queen Cao-Polyphya: Remember our pact, oh Threshold Lurker. That is not dead which can eternal lie. Give me nepenthe, give me sleep. Bring me a favorable dream.
Memory of Queen Cao-Polyphya: I dream. I walk up the steps of the ziggurat. I ascend toward heaven. The ritual is nearly complete. Below, my people cheer, and I love them.
Memory of Queen Cao-Polyphya: The gods have forsaken Atlantis to endless tragedy. Our culture breathes its final breath, but they cheer, for I, their queen, have a plan. My people love me with a love that is more than love and trust me past all calamity.
Memory of Queen Cao-Polyphya: Though the gods are silent, Valka will answer tonight. He must. For I carry a swaddling bundle, the Little Prince, divinely conceived. The god of land, sea, and sky will come down to see his son.
Memory of Queen Cao-Polyphya: Oh Valka, Lord of the Heavens, delight of the gods, from whom all evil retreats — to thee do we cry for banished children of Atlantis. Almighty Valka, your children cry out in the dark! Raise us from this ocean of tears.
Memory of Queen Cao-Polyphya: I stand atop the ziggurat. Bellow, my people chant the prayers I taught them. The ritual is complete. My people cheer. The eye of heaven opens! Valka, god of all gods, is about to answer our every prayer…
Memory of Queen Cao-Polyphya: It is a pleasing fiction… A pretty lie… No, no! The truth flutters in as a moth-winged nightmare. Fie! Fie! Truths are poisoned thorns on a flower’s stem. I squeeze! I squeeze!
Memory of Queen Cao-Polyphya: This dream turns rancid. Truth is the worm that devours everything in life that is sweet. Below, the people cheer, but only because they know not the truth: no one is coming to save us.
Memory of Queen Cao-Polyphya: The truth is, I kept a secret. How could I tell them? My people give me their love and faith, use the last drops of their blood and will to build this temple, because they believe in me. How could I tell them all was for naught?
Memory of Queen Cao-Polyphya: The truth is, while I gave them hope, there was no one to give it me. A secret held grows inside, gestates and devours everything that was sweet and good. Truth is the conquering worm.

This explains the background story of the House of Crom and is similar to the things she’s saying in her room in the Vile Nativity. Once the boss spawns, the green mobs die from the first big aoe hit.

Some people compared the boss to a raspberry, but I’ll always think of it as a giant brain. It’s tempting to imagine the mighty Lurker shivering in fear while a mob of zombies approaches, drooling at the prospect of such a feast 😛

Braaaaaaaaainz!
(Click to enlarge.)

The mechanics of the fight are relatively interesting, and I was particularly glad to see that there are no knockbacks 😛 The boss does crushing white hits on the aggro holder. Occasionally he casts Tendril of Despair, which spawns a giant tentacle and does a crushing AoE hit to people around it. There’s another AoE attack called Soul Eater, which hits people around the boss with unholy damage; it also puts a 2-second debuff of the same name on them, but this debuff doesn’t seem to do anything. Often, but not always, Soul Eater also heals the boss, most commonly by 112500 points, though I’ve sometimes also seen other numbers, going up to 150000. They tend to be relatively round numbers, so I guess the amount depends on the number of players hit by the AoE, but it isn’t a plain old linear function. Life Syphon is a channeled spell which does about 10 ticks in 4 seconds; each tick does a small amount of unholy damage on the aggro holder and heals the boss for around 13k hit points. The boss has a special animation during this spell, rising in the air a bit and spinning in a circle. There’s also Fragment of Reality, which spawns an add (a small brain) on a random player. Finally there’s Transcending Reality, where the boss disappears into the ground and spawns a number of adds (Fragments of Reality); the boss reappears about 20 seconds later and the adds disappear. The Fragments of Reality tend to just float around randomly and eventually do an unholy AoE attack called Reality Burst.

In terms of loot, there’s nothing particularly new. Since the boss appears in Cimmeria, it drops the Cimmerian regional social armor sets (Black Leather, Hyperborean Shaman) in addition to the global ones (Shattered Colossus, Slayer’s). Among other social items, there’s the Crown of Winter again. Among crappy social consumables, Winterdream Wine seemed to drop particularly often.

There is of course also a new mini-pet, Remnant of the Lurker, which is decently large and surprisingly cute for an oversized floating brain 🙂

(Click to enlarge.)

The pet doesn’t do anything terribly interesting; it has a Life Syphon animation, and it can disappear into the ground like the boss does during Fragment of Reality.

Here’s an overview of the loot I got on my guardian from this boss:

Count	Item
Social animations, particles etc.
2	Bottled Spirits
2	Cowardice Remedy
3	Electric Boogie
5	Flaming Sanduca
4	Ritual Knife
3	Sticky Fresh Blood
10	Winterdream Wine
4	Ymirish Prayer
Food, potions, buffs
1	Potent Daggamalt, Dire Sweetpressed Haste
7	Ta Neheh Leaf Elixir
8	Kingsmight Ale
4	Elixirs (0 Guile, 0 Invigorative Rejuvenation, 3 Physical Might, 1 Precision)
0	Philtres (0 Constitution, 0 Strength)
0	Minor Elixir of Resurgence (self-rez)
Vendors of crappy social consumables
3	Traveller’s Merchant Contract
Social armor sets
8	Black Leather set
3	Hyperborean Shaman’s set
1	Slayer’s set
4	Shattered Colossus set
0	other social armor sets
Other social armor
2	Crown of Winter
5	Tigerskin cloaks
Raid gear
16	T1 armor
10	T1 weapons (3 swords, 3 shields, 4 polearms)
6	T2 armor
2	T2 weapons (1 sword, 0 shields, 1 polearm)
AA urns
6	Flask of Completion (20000 Mastery XP)
2	Flask of Direction (50000 Mastery XP)
4	Coffer of Radiance (62500 Mastery XP)
Pets
5	animal pets (1 Black Cobra, 1 Fat Harry, 2 Fire Salamanders, 1 Wolverine Kit)
2	dancing pets (1 Khitan female, 1 Stygian male)
Purple caches
4	Slayer’s Cache of the Lurker (purple cache)

And an overview of purple caches from all bosses so far, on all of my characters:

Boss	Total no. of kills	# purple caches			Drops from purple caches
		from blue	direct	total	Simple Relics	Urns	Rare Relics	Pets	Gear
Dragon	185	6	2	8	7 (29)	0	0	1	0
Yeti	61	3	2	5	4 (15)	0	0	1	0
Basilisk	141	4	2	6	2 (7)	2	0	2	0
Serp. Man	78	3	6	9	7 (25)	0	0	1	0
Thrice Dr.	236	1	12	13	8 (31)	4	0	0	1
Ice Worm	191	1	9	10	8 (33)	0	0	1	1
Nergal	91	0	4	4	2 (7)	1	0	1	0
Leviathus	161	1	5	6	5 (20)	1	0	0	0
Execut.	122	0	6	6	4 (15)	0	0	2	0
Lurker	151	4	5	9	6 (29)	1	0	1	1

This is the third time so far that I saw a piece of non-raid purple gear drop from the world bosses; it was yet another crappy ring (Pearl Ring of Assault: 44 evade rtg, 55 hit rtg, 55 crit rtg, 44 immunity rtg, 120 protection).

(Click to enlarge.)

Ancient Letters

I was only recently shown how to find this quest, and since it doesn’t seem to be widely known, I figured a post about it might be useful.

The patch notes for Update 3.2, in January 2012, contained this tantalizing item: ‘There is a new quest available in Ardashir Fort called “Ancient Letters.” ’ Until recently, however, I had no idea how to actually get this quest. I remember that relatively soon after 3.2, I was looking around a cleared instance of Ardashir Fort but didn’t find any way to obtain it; I also saw at least one forum thread in which others were also wondering how to get this quest (and/or giving up after much effort trying to find it), but none that would actually explain how to get it.

To get the quest, jump on the boxes near the wall in the harbor area, where you fight Arman and Sodabeh. You’ll see an Ancient Book; clicking it gives you the quest. (Note: the boxes are blocked by an invisible wall until you kill Sodabeh.)

(Click to enlarge.)

The quest itself is simple; you have to talk first to Kheradmand in Ardashir City, then to the Stygian Archaeologists near the arena, and finally to Ankh-Ausar in the Dragon’s Spine. In 3.2, when this quest was introduced, Dragon’s Spine of course didn’t yet exist, so I guess the quest text must have been updated at the time when Dragon’s Spine was launched. IIRC Ankh-Ausar stood in Khemi originally,* before the Dragon’s Spine was released, and the quest probably sent you there.

[For some definitions of ‘originally’. I first became aware of him in connection with the scrolls quest in Ai and T’ian’an Districts, so it’s possible that he was introduced into the game only in update 2.2, when those two dungeons were released.]

You might wonder why Funcom would bother introducing this quest in 3.2, five months after Ardashir Fort was released. The reason is that 3.2 also introduced the House of Crom, and Ankh-Ausar gives you some hints about the House of Crom when you’re handing in the quest to him:

It [i.e. he book you found in Ardashir Fort] appears to be a history . . . of a sort. By gods, friend, it would seem that a contingent of Atlanteans tried to colonize the mainland after the sea swallowed their civilization . . . perhaps in what is now the Pictish Wilderness or Cimmeria. It would have to be a place of high elevation . . . maybe even Mount Crom. . .

It is a history, but it is written in the form of a tragedy. They built a grand temple and. . .something went amiss. Yes, a tragedy in five acts. But I will tell you what is even more curious.

This book has only four acts. It would seem the author was — hmmhmm — interrupted. The opening of a door . . . the Threshold Lurker . . . curiouser and curiouser. . .

Apart from that, the quest reward is a Phial of Tranquility, which gives you 1 Expertise point.

Seven more armor sets from the House of Crom

A farmer’s tale

When the House of Crom was released and I realized there were 15* sets of armor dropping there, I was impressed by this sudden abundance of new gear; usually we are accustomed to gear being doled out in much smaller amounts. For example, Ardashir Fort and Arena have 6 sets; Ai and T’ian’an District don’t even have sets, just a few odd bits and pieces that are mostly copies of previously existing Khitai armor items; the unchained version of Amphitheatre contains 5 sets; and more recently, the Sepulcher of the Wyrm has just 3 sets, and parts of 7 Dragon’s Spine sets (the rest of which is partly from vendors and partly presumably forthcoming in the new Coils of Ubah Kan dungeon).

[* As a commenter on one of my old House of Crom posts pointed out, there is in fact also a 16th set, but it drops only from PvP in the Threshold of Divinity, so it’s unavailable on my PvE server.]

Anyway, 15 sets seemed quite impressive to me, though it eventually turned out a bit less impressive as I realized that many of the sets were just copies of each other with slight variations in color. Still, 15 sets is a lot and initially I didn’t even dream about trying to collect them all. I would have considered such a goal to be sheer madness; after all, this isn’t epic Field of the Dead that you can farm by yourself whenever you like. Initially I farmed a full-plate set for my guardian and was content with that.

Gradually, and without specifically meaning to farm any other sets, I picked up various parts of the PoM/ToS sets on my ToS, the demo/necro sets on my necro, and the heavy DPS set on my DT; eventually I figured I’d make a moderate extra effort to complete those sets as well, just so I could take screenshots of them. Still later I similarly noticed that I could complete the HoX and Excavator sets without too much extra effort, so I eventually posted screenshots of those as well.

Soon after writing that latest post about House of Crom armor screenshots, I came to realize that between that and my previous efforts, I had by then collected as many as 8 out of the 15 armor sets from the House of Crom. That’s more than half of them; and this observation inspired me to think of collecting the remaining 7 sets as a realistic and reasonable goal as well. If I might paraphrase the observation from the end of one of my old posts: if a certain amount of farming is reasonable, then twice as much farming is also still reasonable. (Well, I guess this is one of those situations where it wouldn’t be a good idea to apply the principle of mathematical induction :P) And in fact, just as we saw in that old post, farming for multiple sets is in fact easier if you’re farming for them all at the same time, with the same character. So if I do it all on one character, the goal of farming for the 7 remaining sets, while ambitious, isn’t in fact all that extreme compared to the farming I’d already done before. I decided to use my DT for the purpose, partly because she had lots of bag space available and partly because everything is so much easier to do if you don’t have to rely on finding someone else to tank for you.

And the farming effort turned out to be less extreme than I had imagined. My main worry was how to get people to help me farm the unpopular bosses: the Arcanist, Jotunrodull and Shryke in the Threshold of Divinity, and the Sentinel and Queen Cao-Polyphya in the Vile Nativity. The Arcanist was easily enough taken care of by starting my own Threshold of Divinity rare farming groups, and thus being the group leader; this put me in a good position to tell people to kill the Arcanist as well, and it usually turned out to be no problem. As for Shryke, I wouldn’t dare to try killing him with a pug group from global, but fortunately you don’t need a whole group for him; he can be killed just fine by 2 people (a tank and a healer) as long as they know what they are doing. With a bit of prodding and nagging, I was often able to find one or two guildies willing to help me, and we could even go and kill Jotunrodull while waiting for Shryke to respawn.

For Vile Nativity I mostly relied on forming semi-guild, semi-pug groups, and again being the group leader puts you in a good position to get people to kill the Sentinel and the Queen, even though the vast majority of Vile Nativity groups skip them. In earlier times I had some unpleasant experience with puggers there who preferred to quit the group rather than come kill those two bosses, but this time I didn’t encounter any such uncooperative people. I did, of course, still encounter a fair share of incompetent, drooling morons, but that’s inevitable when you team up with people from global. Anyway, in the end the boss that caused me the most trouble wasn’t Shryke, as I had expected, but the Sentinel of Defense — it took probably more than 20 kills to get the last item I wanted from him, which is a bit of bad luck since he only has 6 different armor pieces in his loot table.

Incidentally, throughout all this Vile Nativity farming, we never saw the Royal Atlantean Gown drop even once — another sad proof of its unfortunate, excessive rarity.

Anyway, without further ado, here are the screenshots. Since my earlier posts took care of the soldier, PoM/ToS, demo/necro, and HoX sets, the sets in this post are for barbs, sins, rangers and BSes.

Wells of Night

Many House of Crom armor sets come in pairs, and the assassin sets are no exception. The Wells of Night is the one with HP and stamina, but low DPS:

In terms of appearance, both sin sets are very similar, except for the color; and they are also very similar to the HoX set (Bedlam).

Most of the sets in the House of Crom have names based on the theme of madness and incomprehensibility, inspired by the idea familiar from H. P. Lovecraft’s stories, namely that the Lurker at the Threshold and similar entities are so far beyond the scope of our normal world that dealing with them will drive you insane. In the case of the Wells of Night, the connection to Lovecraft is even more direct, as this exact phrase appears several times in his work (e.g. The Horror at Red Hook, The Whisperer in Darkness).

Lunacy

This is the more offensive-oriented sin set: it has plenty of DPS and critical rating. On the other hand, it has much less hit rating than the Wells of Night set, and no constitution.

Ichorous

The barbarian sets also form a natural pair along similar lines. Ichorous is the one with lots of HP and stamina, but little DPS:

All the barbarian and medium sets are very similar in terms of appearance, again differing only in color. Their trademark feature are the extremely horny helmets, which provide excellent GPS reception even in the darkest depths of the House of Crom.

Insanity

This is the other barb set; it has no constitution but plenty of strength, which provides not only DPS but also armor.

Also note the classy skull on the left shoulder.
That’s from the last person that tried to make a ‘me so horny’ joke.

Membranous

Bear shamans and rangers, unlike barbs and sins, don’t get a pair of armor sets each; instead, each gets a separate offensive set (with strength for BSes and dexterity for rangers), but they both share a defensive set, which has generic combat rating (with low overall DPS) and plenty of constitution. This defensive set is called Membranous:

Inconceivable

This is the BS-specific set; it has plenty of strength, which makes it uniniteresting for a ranger, while to a BS it provides not only good DPS but also more armor than the other two medium sets. One thing that strikes me as a bit unfair is that there’s no heal rating on this set (or any other medium set here); unlike PoMs and ToSses, which do have a heal rating set here in the House of Crom, the bear shamans don’t.

Writhing

This is the DPS-oriented set of rangers. It relies on dexterity, which makes it uninteresting for bear shamans (or indeed any other classes):

Many thanks to people who helped me farm Shryke, especially Mel and Volo! ❤

Comparison of PoM/ToS weapons

I take my lootwhoring very seriously, so as soon as the weapons that drop from the last two T4 bosses became known, I set up a spreadsheet to compare their stats and to plan what I wanted to get for my ToS. I was pleasantly surprised to see that range of available options is much broader than what we saw in lower tiers. Eventually I decided I’d expand the table a bit, adding T3 and T3.5 raid gear, as well as a few good faction and 6-player dungeon items, and thus the following table was born.

As is usual with these things, if you have a ToS or PoM and have been interested in gearing it up, such a table probably won’t tell you much that you don’t already know, but sometimes it’s nice to have things in a table and stare at the numbers a bit anyway.

Note: wisdom is not shown in the following table; instead, its constributions to magic damage and mana regen are included in the corresponding columns, and its contributions to holy/unholy protection are ignored. The column labelled “*” includes all the stats that don’t have a standalone column of their own; move your mouse pointer over a * symbol to see them.

The table is sorted by magic damage (including any trickledowns from wisdom), and the rows are color-coded thus: faction and 6-player dungeon items, T3 items, T3 crafted items, T3.5 items, T4 items.

Item	Mgc Dmg	Heal Rtg	HP	Arm.	Mana	Hate Rtg	Hit Rtg	Crit Rtg	Crit Dmg Rtg	*
Collector of Blood + Bloodbane (faction 1hb, Amphitheatre shield)	46.2	386	600	900	231	-29	55	108	65	*
Left Hand of Nergal + Ward of the Arch Lector (T3.5 1hb + shield)	70.8	780	624	920	354	-65		108	62	*
Valka’s Woe Hymn + Impenetrable World of Valka (Lurker 1hb + shield)	72.0	386	680	908	360		30	99	65	*
Samoore’s Staff of Divinity (T3 PoM staff)	96.0		400		870	-65				*
Collector of Blood + The End of Kings (faction 1hb + shield)	102.6	770		850	513	-29		108		*
Lemurian Firestick + Cabochon Azurite + Brutal Brilliant Royal Onyx (culture crafted)	103.0		500		400			75	145	*
Collector of Blood + Relic of Dark Blessings (faction 1hb, Amphitheatre tali)	108.2	661			231	-29	50	101	65	*
Rod of Righteous Might (T2 quest reward for Seruah)	110.0		288		450			80		*
Staff of Kwan (blue from the Palace of Yun Rau)	‡118.2				831			65		*
Ell of Torment + Waning Boundary + 2 × Protective Oblique Corundum + 2 × Omnific Marquise Pushparagam + 2 × Cabochon Azurite (T3 crafted dagger + shield; note 584 protection!)	119.0		560	1066		-16		96	67	*
Maahes’ Crackling Spite + Feretrum of Mitra (T3 ToS 1hb + PoM shield)	119.2		528	902	865	-18				*
Hammer of Lambent Fervor + Feretrum of Mitra (T3 PoM 1hb + shield)	119.2		600	902	906					*
2 × Relic of the Oyster Mucus (Sepulcher talis; note 490 protection)	120.0						112	100	120	*
Scepter of the August Ones + Laughing Auspices of the Celestials (T4 1hb + shield)	120.0	1218	360	925	850	-52	42	62	129	*
Lemurian Firestick + Cabochon Azurite + Tempestuous Oblique Melanite (culture crafted)	†121.0		500		400			75	95	*
Staff of the Crustacean (blue from Sodabeh, Ardashir Fort)	121.0				720			98		*
Tail of the Vaaghasan (faction staff)	121.2	705			1016	-50		105		*
Toil of Woes (The Devourer, Amphitheatre unchained)	122.0						100	90	105	*
2 × Relic of Dark Blessings (Amphitheatre talis)	124.0	550					100	96	130	*
Scepter of the August Ones + Advocacy of the August Ones (T4 1hb + heal tali)	124.8	1233			1089	-40	82	124	144.0	*
Maahes’ Crackling Spite + Coruscant Ward of Maahes* (T3 ToS 1hb + shield)	127.2		384	902	815	-49				*
2 × Samoore’s Radiant Scripture* (T3 PoM talis)	130.8		384		654	-48				*
Spire of the Firmament (T3 ToS polearm)	130.8		304		874	-62				*
Filament of Nightmare + Cabochon Azurite + Omnific Marquise Pushparagam + Brutal Brilliant Royal Onyx (T3 crafted staff)	131.0				550			112	184	*
The Three Fangs of Reckoning (Lurker polearm)	134.4				672		112	100	134	*
2 × Tome of the Black Gale (T3 ToS talis)	135.6		368		408		100	108	130	*
The Infernus of Dagon + Tome of the Black Gale (T3 necro dagger + ToS tali)	135.8		376		537	-30	78	106	132	*
Maahes’ Crackling Spite + Tome of the Black Gale (T3 ToS 1hb + tali)	136.0		376		609	-18	50	54	65	*
The Necros of Dagon (T3 necro staff)	136.0		344		667			102	133	*
The Infernus of Dagon + Arca of Jaggta-Noga (T3 necro dagger + demo tali)	137.0		512		703	-30	28	98	133	*
2 × Arca of Jaggta-Noga (T3 demo talis)	138.0		640		740			92	132	*
Left Hand of Nergal + Tome of the Black Gale (T3.5 1hb + T3 ToS tali)	138.6	395	184		558	-31	50	108	127	*
Left Hand of Nergal + Arca of Jaggta-Noga (T3.5 1hb + T3 demo tali)	139.8	395	320		724	-31		100	128	*
2 × Mark of the Ancient Sands (blue drop from Ardashir Fort)	140.0			164		-64		94	112	*
Ell of Torment + Austere Brilliant Diamond + Cabochon Azurite + Omnific Marquise Pushparagam + Tome of the Black Gale (T3 crafted dagger + ToS tali)	140.8		184		204	-16	50	151	132	*
Ell of Torment + Austere Brilliant Diamond + Cabochon Azurite + Omnific Marquise Pushparagam + Arca of Jaggta-Noga (T3 crafted dagger + demo tali)	†142.0		320		370	-16		143	133	*
2 × Talisman of the Ziggurat (blue drop from the Threshold of Divinity)	144						68	96	116	*
Scepter of the August Ones + Token of the Divinity Serpent (T4 1hb + DPS tali)	148.8	923			754	-60	104	122	134	*
Filament of Nightmare + Cabochon Azurite + Omnific Marquise Pushparagam + Tempestuous Oblique Melanite (T3 crafted staff)	†149.0				550			112	134	*
Scepter of Ten Thousand Hells (T4 staff)	162.6	924			828	-42	112	114	120	*
Tongue of the Eight-Way Wyrm (T4 polearm)	171.0	790			555		80	111	136	*
Razor of the Divinity Serpent + Token of the Divinity Serpent (T4 dagger + DPS tali)	173.4	600			402	-76	124	121	130	*
Nergal’s Trident of the Eternal Storm (T3.5 ToS staff)	‡179.0		536			-64	84	97	119

*Note: Coruscant Ward of Maahes (the ToS shield) and Samoore’s Radiant Scripture (PoM talisman) are missing from the loot tables in Thoth-Amon’s Stronghold and can only be obtained from the Raidmaster on the testlive server [1, 2]. They are included in this comparison only as a curiosity. We can see that compared to the PoM shield, the ToS sacrifices some constitution to gain some magic damage and -hate. And compared to the ToS talisman, the PoM talisman sacrifices hit rating and critical rating to gain some -hate and mana tap. Its clearly unfinished nature is demonstrated by the fact that it has the same model as T2 talismans, unlike all other T3 weapons, which have clearly different models than T1/T2 weapons.

†A black gem slot is more favorable to a ToS than to a PoM, as there is a black gem with electrical damage but none with holy or generic magic damage. A yellow gem slot is slightly more favorable to a PoM, who can use a gem with 26 holy damage instead of 23 generic magic damage.

‡Some items have different amounts of electrical and holy damage; move your mouse over the ‡ symbol to see a tooltip with more details. For example, the Staff of Kwan is a rare example of a Khitai item that is intended specifically for a PoM and not for a ToS, as it has some direct holy damage. This sort of thing was more common in old-world content, especially in pre-1.05 days.

A few observations

Faction and 6-player dungeon items

Among faction items, the most obvious choice is whether to use the staff or the 1hb + shield. The difference in heal rating is really too minuscule to worry about. The staff gives you a bit more dps and -hate, whereas the shield gives you some armor and mana tap. Buying the staff is cheaper (in terms of gold and rare trophies) than buying the 1hb + shield.

One downside of the faction shield is that it has no HP. Alternatively, you could use the shield from the Amphitheatre, which has 600 HP but no magic damage (and you’ll compete with tanks when rolling on it :P).

A stat that is notably absent from faction weapons is hit rating; this is probably Funcom’s way of increasing people’s interest in raid weapons. A nice way to get hit rating outside raids is with the Amphitheatre weapons (shield and talisman).

Compared to the faction weapons, the talisman from the Amphitheatre gives you hit rating and good DPS without sacrificing too much heal rating.

The talisman from the Sepulcher of the Wyrm is mostly notable for its protection, which is otherwise rare on weapons. For this you sacrifice all heal rating, and you’ll have to compete against mages and the occasional lootwhoring DT when this talisman drops in the dungeon.

The talismans from Ardashir Fort and from the Threshold of Divinity are extremely good blue items; they have a shitload of magic damage and good critical rating, but they lack heal rating, constitution, and the Ardashir Fort one also lacks hit rating (but it has -hate). The Talisman of the Ziggurat is bind-on-equip, so you might even be able to buy it.

I also included the Lemurian Firestick, a culture crafted staff with notably good stats for a blue item.

T3 raid drops

In T3, all weapons have constitution, whereas in T3.5, T4 and faction gear, only shields have constitution. Of course, one downside of all T3 gear is the absence of heal rating.

The T3 PoM staff is deservedly unpopular; I don’t know what they were thinking when setting up its stats. It has nice -hate and mana tap, but very low magic damage. The T3 ToS polearm is similar except that it has decent magic damage. Both of them lack things like hit rating and crit rating, which is probably the main reason why they are so unpopular.

The two T3 blunt weapons are quite similar; the PoM one has mana tap, the ToS one has health tap and -hate.

The T3 ToS talisman is very nice as it provides you not only with good magic damage but also hit rating and crit rating. One of its few downsides is the lack of -hate.

I included the T3 necro staff, necro dagger and demo talisman in the comparison since a lot of ToSses seem to be very interested in these items. I never entirely understood why. The gain in magic damage compared to the ToS talismans is negligible; the crit rating is nearly the same (slightly lower, in fact); and you’ll miss out on the hit rating. Possible advantages include more HP on the necro dagger and demo talisman, and -hate on the necro dagger.

T3 crafted items

There is of course the question of which of the many T3 crafted weapons to include in the comparison, and with which gems. I included the Ell of Torment (dagger) and Waning Boundary (shield) since the PoMs and ToSses that I’ve seen using crafted weapons usually use one or both of these. I also included the Filament of Nightmare (staff) due to the above-mentioned curious obsession with necro staffs among many ToSses.

The main feature of the Ell of Torment and Waning Boundary seems to be protection (and critical rating on the dagger), not so much magical damage itself. So they are mostly included in the table with protection gems, giving you up to 584 protection. For comparison, the protection sword and shield from Gyas (Blade of the Void, The Shield of Chaos), if you were able to pry them from the cold dead hands of rangers and tanks, would give you a total of 395 protection (and no magic damage etc.).

On the other hand, you can also get an impressive amount of magic damage and crit rating from the Ell of Torment by putting suitable gems into it (and combining it with a T3 talisman).

The Filament of Nightmare can give you a lot of magic damage if you’re a ToS and use an electrical gem in the black slot; it also has a decent amount of critical rating but is otherwise not that impressive. Just like the Ell of Torment, it lacks hit rating. For a PoM it’s even worse as you can’t put anything really useful in the black gem slot.

T3.5 raid items

The T3.5 shields (both from the Temple of Erlik and from the Lurker) have a lot of HP but no magic damage or wisdom. Basically they’re like taking the faction shield and replacing wisdom by HP.

The Lurker polearm doesn’t strike me as particularly impressive. It’s hard to see it as an upgrade at all, compared to e.g. T3 ToS talismans; especially considering how easy it is to kill Gyas compared to the Lurker.

The 1hb from the Temple of Erlik can be seen as a nice (if not exactly breathtaking) upgrade from the faction 1hb. The Lurker 1hb seems unimpressive; it sacrifices all the heal rating, while gaining only a little hit rating and mana tap.

For a ToS, the new T3.5 staff (introduced in update 4.1.4) offers more magical damage than any other combination of weapons, and is comparable to the T4 dagger and DPS talisman in other ways as well; the main difference is that it sacrifices all heal rating in exchange for a generous amount of HP.

T4 raid items

I was impressed by how much better the T4 items are compared to anything else in the game. If you look at healing gear, you can get ~1200 instead of ~780 heal rating; if you look at DPS gear, you can get ~170 instead of ~140 magic damage. All T4 items also have good critical rating.

The T4 1hb and healing talisman have very similar stats. If you use them both, you get the maximum amount of heal rating currently possible in the game. Alternatively, you can replace one of them by the shield, gaining some HP and armor while sacrificing some hit rating and critical rating.

Compared to other shields, the T4 shield doesn’t have that much HP, but it has a lot more heal rating and a still decent amount of magic damage.

The T4 staff and polearm have fairly similar stats, the main difference is that the staff has -hate and some more hit rating and heal rating, whereas the polearm has a bit more dps and some life tap. I guess a ToS should aim for the polearm and leave the staff to PoMs, who can’t use polearms. However, ideally you’d probably want to go for the dagger + DPS talisman as your DPS gear anyway.

The T4 dagger and DPS talisman give you an excellent combination of magic damage, -hate, hit rating etc.

More screenshots of House of Crom armor sets

As mentioned in one of my earlier posts, 15 sets of armor drop in the House of Crom. I collected one of them, Atlantean (the only full plate set here), relatively soon after House of Crom was released, but I didn’t take too much trouble to collect any of the other ones. If it was possible to buy lots more storage space, I wouldn’t mind trying to collect all 15 of them on one character; it would make an interesting challenge 😛 Alas, this is not realistic, and even collecting just 5 or 6 sets on one character would take up more storage space than I can spare for this sort of thing. Even if I delete each set as soon as I complete it and take a screenshot, I still need space for multiple partially-completed sets during this process. So what I ended up doing is to collect just one or two sets on several alts.

Another thing that makes these sets painful to collect is that inevitably some of the items drop from bosses that people rarely kill. In the Threshold of Divinity, you usually find groups of poorly geared and unskilled players that just want to farm rare trophies efficiently, so they skip Shryke, Jotunrodull and Arcanist Khor-nu, who are either too hard, too far out of the way, or take too long to kill; similarly, in the Vile Nativity, most groups just care about the cloaks and thus skip Queen Cao-Polyphya. It took me a nontrivial bit of effort to form/persuade groups to kill these bosses. So I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my guildies who helped me farm Shryke, Jotunrodull and the Arcanist. If I had to rely only on people from global, collecting these sets might well have turned out to be impracticable. The nuissance of forming groups to farm these bosses is also the main reason why I didn’t try to collect any further sets beyond the ones shown here.

This post will contain screenshots of the sets I managed to collect; you can follow the links to old posts for more about their stats and to see what drops where.

Sadly, it turns out that most of these sets aren’t particularly good-looking. What is more, many of them aren’t terribly original either; related sets share very similar designs and often differ in little else than color. Perhaps the idea was to make sure that you won’t look like a clown if you combine parts from two related sets (the stats certainly seem to be designed exactly for this sort of mixing and matching); too bad that you look like a clown in most of these sets anyway, even if you equip all 8 items from the same set 😛 On the positive side, these sets seem to look just as good on darker characters as on lighter ones, unlike several of the sets from the Amphitheatre of Karutonia.

Update: by now we have screenshots of all 15 sets in this post.

Atlantean

This is the only full plate set in the House of Crom. It has a ridiculously high amount of constitution, but no DPS and not much armor.

See also my old post about the Atlantean set and a comparison with other full-plate sets.

Beyond

This is the only heavy set in the House of Crom. It has a lot of DPS, a decent amount of armor, but no HP.

Nebulous

Two PoM/ToS sets drop in the House of Crom. Nebulous is the “defensive” one; it has HP, heal rating, even hate decrease — though I doubt you’ll need it, as this set gives you no wisdom or magic damage whatsoever.

Unutterable

This is the other PoM/ToS set from the House of Crom, the “aggressive” one. It has a very impressive amount of wisdom for a blue set, and also some critical damage rating; but it has no HP or heal rating. It might also be of interest to the occasional DPS-whoring pyjama DT early in his career 😛

See also one of my recent posts for a comparison with other PoM/ToS armor sets.

Spheres

Similarly as for the PoM/ToS sets, the House of Crom also contains two demo/necro sets. Spheres is the “defensive” one, with plenty of constitution but only a moderate amount of magic damage.

Sepulcher

This is the “aggressive” demo/necro set, with plenty of magic damage (in the form of intelligence), as well as hit rating, crit rating and crit dmg rating, but no constitution.

One of the things that annoys me about Both Spheres and Sepulcher is that if you show the headpiece, your hair appears shortened, without any obvious need for it. My necro has the maiden braids haircut and the braids disappear if I equip one of these circlets. The PoM/ToS sets don’t seem to have this problem, as you can see from the earlier screenshots.

Excavator

This is a social set and can thus be equipped by all classes. Unlike other sets, it drops from only two different bosses: the helmet, wrists, hands and shoulders drop from Overseer Olik in the Vile Nativity; the belt, boots, chest and legs drop from Rune-Caster Narvi in the Threshold of Divinity.

It’s a nice looking set, but in hindsight, collecting it on my necro may have been a mistake. It has such a clearly northern look (somewhat similar to what the Vanir in Conall’s Valley and the Field of the Dead are wearing, and unsurprisingly since it’s named after the (Vanir) excavators in the House of Crom I guess) that it can’t help feeling kind of incongruous on a Stygian character. I suspect it would fit a Cimmerian barbarian better :}

Bedlam

Most classes can choose between two sets in the House of Crom, but HoXes get only one. Bedlam is a fairly aggressive set, lacking constitution but with a decent amount of magic damage (463 magic damage; for comparison, the Brittle Blade purple set has 581 and the T3 raid set has 416) and critical rating (178 crit rating; the BB purple set has 205).

I’m intrigued by the style of this armor, which seems to cast the HoX as some sort of feathered savage witch-doctor — not something that is typically suggested by other HoX sets in the game. I might actually end up wearing it as vanity gear on my HoX.

Wells of Night

Many House of Crom armor sets come in pairs, and the assassin sets are no exception. The Wells of Night is the one with HP and stamina, but low DPS:

In terms of appearance, both sin sets are very similar, except for the color; and they are also very similar to the HoX set (Bedlam).

Most of the sets in the House of Crom have names based on the theme of madness and incomprehensibility, inspired by the idea familiar from H. P. Lovecraft’s stories, namely that the Lurker at the Threshold and similar entities are so far beyond the scope of our normal world that dealing with them will drive you insane. In the case of the Wells of Night, the connection to Lovecraft is even more direct, as this exact phrase appears several times in his work (e.g. The Horror at Red Hook, The Whisperer in Darkness).

Lunacy

This is the more offensive-oriented sin set: it has plenty of DPS and critical rating. On the other hand, it has much less hit rating than the Wells of Night set, and no constitution.

Ichorous

The barbarian sets also form a natural pair along similar lines. Ichorous is the one with lots of HP and stamina, but little DPS:

All the barbarian and medium sets are very similar in terms of appearance, again differing only in color. Their trademark feature are the extremely horny helmets, which provide excellent GPS reception even in the darkest depths of the House of Crom.

Insanity

This is the other barb set; it has no constitution but plenty of strength, which provides not only DPS but also armor.

Also note the classy skull on the left shoulder.
That’s from the last person that tried to make a ‘me so horny’ joke.

Membranous

Bear shamans and rangers, unlike barbs and sins, don’t get a pair of armor sets each; instead, each gets a separate offensive set (with strength for BSes and dexterity for rangers), but they both share a defensive set, which has generic combat rating (with low overall DPS) and plenty of constitution. This defensive set is called Membranous:

Inconceivable

This is the BS-specific set; it has plenty of strength, which makes it uniniteresting for a ranger, while to a BS it provides not only good DPS but also more armor than the other two medium sets. One thing that strikes me as a bit unfair is that there’s no heal rating on this set (or any other medium set here); unlike PoMs and ToSses, which do have a heal rating set here in the House of Crom, the bear shamans don’t.

Writhing

This is the DPS-oriented set of rangers. It relies on dexterity, which makes it uninteresting for bear shamans (or indeed any other classes):