The Magician's Tower

I just wanted to let those that don't have early access, what to expect. When you first zone into Brel'ls Rest you will want to invis up. There are some KOS mobs (not nearby unless trained) there (Plants, Steam Elementals, Lavakin) but I haven't found any see invis yet and even a yellow connned named plant did not see invis (more on him later). You will easily find and an area with some lava and you will see a walkway that runs left to right. Go up the walkway and at the top is a gnome quest giver. Get all the quests that he gives. They are single task kill quests for most of the mobs you find there. Now you can go back down and begin. I found that the lavakin was a good one to start with best killed on the far right near the bottom of the walkway (you will know you are in the right spot since the lavakin hang out at the bottom of the walkway and in behind). My group was MAG MAG MAG ENC MER MER (CLR MERC x 2). Mercs are J5 and everyone is in T3 gear. If you have hunted in Old Bloodfields then you will find that mobs in UF are about 1.5 times as tough as the mobs in BF. When I got a 2 pull the ENC could mez the add and the pet would live (Pet is Minion 2 focused). When I got a 3 pull the first pet to aggro never lived before the mez (Mob DPS was too high). The best way I found to deal with that problem was to have a ready to go suspended pet that I could pop out. You will be able to make full use of Servant and AA since the HPS of these mobs is enough that they took a good long time to kill. In some cases I even had to debuff and reslow again with the ENC before the mob was dead. Aggro range is actually quite small on the mobs, so adds were really not a problem and quite manageable.

Respawn is 12 mins. After Lavakins are done stay right there and do the Steam Elementals. You can single pull with pet from a pool of 2 Elementals nearby. Since respawn is so fast I recommend you just stay in that spot and wait for respawn of the Elementals and clear Lavakin as necessary. Once Elementals are done. Invis up and go to the other side of the walkway and stand below the walkway in the large area near the lava where there are no mobs nearby. This time you have to go lava diving to find your mobs. These mobs look like the creatures that crawled out of Chekov's ear in Star Trek the Wrath of Kahn and I was able to single pull most of the time with pet, I just had to dive into the lava to get a target. Once that is done you will head towards Pellucid's Grotto to kill your quota of Burnyai miner guys. They seemed to be random respawn on the types so I just cleared an area to fight in near the zone out of Pellucid's Grotto and waited for respawn. This the spot I got a yellow conned named plant Thornscrape. He added to a fight where a regular plant was almost dead. He killed 2 pets before I could blink my eyes and casted a AE DD 4000 snare 3250 dot that hit most of us even with 600+ resists. I was trying to replace pets and send in Servants but this bad boy was just too much for us. I couldn't see what he was hitting for but he felt like a 10k hitter (found out his max hit is 6500 according to Raspers) and he was much tougher then any SoD named I had ever encountered and we are all Void E flagged so we have seen our share of named. I rezzed and rebuffed and took one more run at him but got a bad 2 pull with a 3rd add and just had to gate as the Snare Dot hit half of use again (no deaths but 2 pets died that quick again).

All in all, I love the challenge already and you are not going to see anyone in the zone but the best players in this expansion. There is no room for kiting, but you can snare and root stuff and they never resisted anything I casted except the fire-based DD spells 40% of the time on the lava dwelling creatures, but that was to be expected.

Oh and I looted a turn in game with a spell name on it. The spell named didn't say what class it was but I looked it up and it was a 84 Necro spell RKII. The gem was tradeable and the turn in guy is right near the zone in, so I suspect the spell reward is no drop. I also heard that RKI spells came from the missions only. I have not tried a mission yet.

Kshipper

Great stuff! Thanks for the info. Did any summon?

Oh yes.. I found lots of summoners but never a problem for a mage with his trusty pet. =)

After you do the previous kill task the next task to do (Gnoll who your friends are) is given by Berrina Saltidnark (she is near the zone in). Here your job is to get a device from the gatekeeper (he is at the top of that walkway and you need invis off to get it, and all you have to do is talk to him). With the device you head down to where all the gnolls are. I found the best way to do this was to kill the single plant just outside the entrance to where all the gnolls are then hand the device to a Gnoll Charger (level 85) that wanders in and out of the camp. Most of the time during this quest the mob attacks you refusing to help you on your quest and you will get an update to your task when that happens (you need to defend yourself 5 times) and then once in a while the gnoll will say some text in support of your quest and you will get an update then too.

Once the Gnoll Charger is down you can hand the device to one of the 2 gnolls outside the camp on the same wall where the plant was. I found that the nearby gnoll never assisted even when the other gnoll aggro'd on me, however there was a quest named looking gnoll that walks around (Ripskin) that WILL assist a small percentage of the time, so watch for him since he does path through there. I did kill him just to get him out of the way but there were quite a few faction hits with that kill so I decided to leave him alone (there is a quest where you do kill him, and loot a no drop ring off him and that is his normal drop, no other good loots on him that I found).