I spend a good amount of time in IRC, being a mod and all that. There was a lot of traffic going through with people asking about beta, release, and all that good stuff. I had to resist the temptation to break NDA and tell them all to stop panicking, that the game was great fun and would be out soon! Meanwhile, I was sending messages to other folks in knew in beta who were waiting for the server to go up. Jonkar, leader of a RP Merc clan gave me a little hint about a place it might be possible to get some great loot. The loot in question was scaled or plate armor of some sort, the location...deep in Alfar territory, on an island in a lake, with horrible skeletons guarding the treasure. We couldn't do this alone.
Messages requesting help were sent out to those we could reach, and before long, we had a group of hardy humans willing to march to battle to try to be some of the first players to get this armor (ok, well we thought we were the first).
There were about 8 of us, 2 I didn't know. The two set off ahead instead of waiting for the whole group, constantly firing manna missle into the sky to level their skill and never responding to group chat. I would find out later these two min maxers who felt it necessary to give away our position every 2 seconds, and had tried to swing the majority of the group into killing me and a few others for no real reason. Jonkar, thankfully, told them to shove it.
We ran for about an hour, seeing many camps and monsters on the way. We found a clan city (I marked it on my paper map) and an underground fortress with a great lake in the center. There was not much to be seen here at the time, but we looked forward to coming back when the camps would be populated.
Eventually, we found a tower in the wastes filled with troll lords. We needed to go through in order to get to our lake, so we decided to fight them. This was our first group PvE experience. The trolls were firing things at us, darts of some kind, doing minor damage. We managed to trap one and melee it down quickly. It had dropped what I thought might be a breastplate of sorts, but someone else looted it before I could even move my mouse. We were about to move onward, but a second troll came upon us. At this point I was low on health and we all ran into the tower to hide. Mistake.
Well, from the Lord's room came yet another troll charging down the stairs at us. We managed to off this one too, but we were seriously hurting and starting to get overwhelmed. At the top of the tower, a third troll lord trapped us. I jumped out a window, landing on a rock spire and started running for safety. No one had a heal spell they could use at that point, so I knew my only chance was to get out of range. Just when I thought I could get away, I got insta killed(instead of downed) and sent all the way back to Sandbrook.
So ended my first real adventures in beta. The rest of my group went onwards towards the hidden skeleton lake, but ran into Alfar instead. The fight was fierce, from what I heard, with humans winning out, but more Alfar on the way. A great battle was brewing as both sides called for reinforcements. But before the two forces could clash a second time...the server went down... but it was the first large fight in the Darkfall beta, and was discussed all the following week.
Well, that was my last group encounter in beta, as school began to rule my life and I found little time to log in, but there are a few more beta memories to share. In the next post, I'll talk about my first run in with the bloodthirsty Alfar.
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