The Hunt for Bloodtalon

I decided to get Blintz moving on the “These Boots Were Made For…” heritage quest last night.  Our little guild is slowly working its way through level 28, but we need a few big hits to make the progress tolerable as we strive for 30.

I had already picked up the quest in a previous venture into Antonica.  I had even done the opening segment, the harvesting of the iron and the wood.  I remember that part being horrible, but much has changed since I last started on this quest.  Instead of collecting 100 wood and 100 iron, you only need to collect 15 of each now.  And, since you can now harvest more than one item per pass on a given node, the harvesting is even further reduced.

I was done after three iron nodes and two wood nodes.  Compare this to the early days when you not only needed 100 of each, but each of your three harvest attempts at a node would yield at most one iron or wood.  Oh, and if you did a harvest and it failed, that counted as one of your three shots at the node!

Some day I will get over how bad we had it in the old days… but not in my lifetime. 

I had then run back to Hwal Rucksif, since I had barely ventured out of his sight, turned in the harvested booty and got the next stage of the quest.

This brings us to last night, at which point I was ready to go hunting.  I went in order of difficulty, knocking off the ore from the gnoll miners in Blackburrow in a trice.

Then I started down into Stormhold for the Caveroot Horror. (For some reason I was referring to him as “Rotweed,” but that is another named treant mob, isn’t it?)  I actually met up with a group down in Stormhold pretty quickly, but had to log for dinner before the Horror popped.

I got back into the game and met up with another group.  They were all from the same guild, Lineage, and they let me join them for Caveroot and Bloodtalon.

They were all mid-20’s while Blintz was fresh into level 30 and now fully equipped with tier 4 gear, so I was a decent addition to the damage capabilities of their group.

We cleared the placeholders twice before Caveroot spawned and then knocked him off pretty quickly.  He is only level 20, even if he is a triple-up-arrow heroic, and if I had not been grouped up with lower level players, he would have been grey to me.  With this group, he went green for me, so I even got a little adventure and AA experience.

We then ran out to the Thundering Steppes where they waited while I picked up and finished the griffon quest.

When we got to the area where Bloodtalon spawns, there was already a group there, the same group I had left before, plus a few more people.  So we ran over to the Watcher of the Fields, picked up his quests, and ran around knocking them off and killing some decent experience mobs. 

After a bit I had to log again to put my daughter to bed.  This took a bit longer than I thought as she was promised an episode of the “Backyardigans” before bed (“The Secret of Snow” for those familiar with their body of work) and I was sure I would have to find another group for Bloodtalon.  But I said I would watch the show with her, so I did not hurry it along. 

Once the show was over and she was tucked into bed, I logged back into EQ2.  Who should be there but the very same group, almost exactly where I left them.  It turned out that the first group was having trouble getting Bloodtalon to spawn.  He can be that way some nights.  Anyway, they invited me back and we ran around TS for a while longer until the first group finally got BT up and killed him. 

Now it was our turn.  Bloodtalon is one of those mobs around whom there is a lot of garbage lore.  I have had people tell me he’ll only spawn if you’ve killed all the mighty griffons at once, plus Zail the Smoothmane and Captain Duras.  I had one guy in a group who was adamant that you need only kill the one griffon (mighty, majestic, or otherwise) that spawns on the hill in the south east corner of the griffon run. (And it seemed to work, but we might have just been lucky.)  I have heard or read other theories on spawning Bloodtalon that would just make you say, “WTF?”

As a group we adopted the simple policy of “it flies, it dies.”

(I did have to put in for a fae exemption after I said that.  I forgot I had wings!)

And thus we circled the griffon field and slew everything in the air, including any passing hawks, which were needed for one of the watcher quests.

Another player showed up and was invited to join us.  We slew for a while longer until Bloodtalon finally spawned.

As a fight, Bloodtalon was not such a big deal, though we had a well balanced group.

But more importantly, this group was one of the reasons you actually play an MMO; It was a group that worked well.  Everybody was nice.  Nobody got upset over anything minor like stomping on somebody’s HO by mistake. (I’ve been in pick up groups where people scream and lecture about this.)  In the end, it was a group comprised of people with whom I would gladly team up again.

Since it was getting a little late for me (work in the morning after 10 days off… boo!) I had to run off.  I went to get the update from Hwal as a last step and, while I flew, I looked up Lineage guild on EQ2Players.com and got a bit of a chuckle.  They are another small group of players with a lot of alts, which pretty much describes Shades of Twilight, our own little guild.  I sent a tell to one of the group mentioning the similarities in our guilds and he said that they were all friends and just liked to play together without any of the guild drama.  I could hardly disagree, as again, that pretty much describes us. 

I was jealous though.  They had four people on that night while I was the only Shade playing.  Oh well.

So to Gaddunkadunk, Skrixx, Arquilias, and Solveneshi of the guild Lineage, thanks for a great group!

(And to Znock, who is in another guild, and who joined us near the end.)

Now I have to finish up this quest!