Tales from Norrath: Don't Sleep in The Hole
By Marino 10 Comments
In my previous entry, I briefly mentioned a guild mate of mine named Glimpse. Glimpse was a high elf enchanter and I think he was still in high school at the time. Most importantly though was his notorious reputation for being a tad narcoleptic. It didn't really matter what time of day it was or what we were doing, if he was AFK for even a couple minutes, we just assumed he had fallen asleep. It was just an accepted risk. Glimpse was a cool guy though, so no one ever really got angry about it. Although, while this was quite funny at times, it could also became hazardous. Like that one night in The Hole.
A Brief History of The Ruins of Old Paineel
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Operation: Keep Glimpse Alive
The Hole has seen a few different types of revamps over the years, but it's always been a challenging zone. It was also the location for certain parts of several different class' epic weapon quests. A pair of ghosts named Kindle and Polzin were sought by enchanters. A wretched erudite was tracked by rangers. A ghost named Glohnor was a target of shadow knights. Paladins all needed a tainted sword carried by the Keeper of the Tombs. And, at the very bottom, was a legendary dragon-slaying Erudite named Nortlav who often carried red dragon scales that both bards and warriors would want. We were there to hit a number of those targets for members of the guild, but the last one was an Iksar known as High Scale Kirn that our buddy Szago needed for his shaman epic.
We'd been there for a while, so it was getting late. I forget exactly how the encounter with Kirn goes, but we got him. We probably had about 25-30 people down there and we started to head out. The easiest way out for casters (wizards, enchanters, magicians, necromancers, clerics, druids, and shaman) was to just cast Gate, which would return them to their bind point. Wizards and druids also had group teleportation spells, so they would typically get the melee folks (warriors, paladins, shadow knights, bards, rogues, and rangers) out so no one had to try to fight their way back out.
Well, Glimpse was in my group. And, as if you didn't know where this was going, he'd fallen asleep. The problem was he was the group leader. This meant that he was the only person that could invite people to the group, and we didn't have a druid or wizard in ours. You had to be in a group in order for the teleport spell to work, so others could disband and group up with a porter, but Glimpse was effectively stuck there either way.
Why is that a big deal? Well, when you die in EverQuest, not only do you lose experience, but your corpse also keeps all of your stuff. So, when you respawn, you are 100% naked. You have no gear and none of your bags or other inventory items. If you didn't get to your corpse within 24 played hours, it rotted, taking everything you were wearing and/or carrying with it. So, leaving him to die was not an easy choice to make. Also, we didn't know where his bind point was. All casters had a spell called Bind Affinity. If you played a melee class, you needed a caster to cast this spell on you in a city so that if you died, you would respawn (hopefully) relatively near wear you were raiding. Casting it on other players only worked in cities, but the caster could use it on himself/herself almost anywhere. We would have liked to assume Glimpse was bound in a safe place, but if he wasn't, letting him die could send him into a death loop that could potentially delevel him all the way to a newbie.
Yeah, you read that right. If you died over and over, you would lose levels. And corpses with nothing on them rotted faster than ones that did. So, what did we do? Well, myself and a few others knew we could probably at least hold the room once the mobs started respawning. We could do this indefinitely and hope Glimpse would wake up. A small group of us, in one of the most dangerous zones in the game at that point, protecting a sleeping enchanter. Maybe we were delirious from being up that late, but the whole situation was hilarious to us. Unfortunately, it got to a point where one or two of us simply had to go to bed. There was no way three of us could hold the room, so we said goodbye to our sleeping enchanter and ported out of there.
Within fifteen minutes, Glimpse was dead. Luckily, his soul wasn't bound in a dangerous place. The next day we all had a good laugh about it. Luckily, necromancers had a spell that would summon corpses, so one of our necros escorted a naked high elf to The Hole and got all his stuff back in time.
I don't know where "Glimpse" is now or what he's up to, but I hope he's got some good friends to keep an eye on him when he's out late and surrounded by ghosts.
Next time I'll talk about a time that I bound my soul within the scariest zone in the game.
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