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Dark Age of Camelot is an MMO focused on Realm vs. Realm combat featuring three Realms at war - Midgard, Hibernia and Albion. DAoC features multiple class/race combinations, a robust trade skill system, and a comprehensive player Guild system. Zones by Realm: Midgard City. Jordheim (City) Kobold Undercity (City) Normal. Aegir's Landing (Normal) Delling Crater (Normal) Faraheim (Normal) Gotar (Normal) Grenlock's Sound (Normal) Gripklosa Mountains (Normal) Iarnwood Forest (Normal) King Eirik's Throne Room (Normal) Malmohus (Normal) Modernagrav (Normal) Munin Sound (Normal) Muspelheim.
Items you will need to purchase. Stone Key. Cellar Key. 1 of 4 Ampitheater Keys ( This is just personal preference. There are 4 possible keys you can use depending on where you enter from.
I just buy all 4). Ancient Crown. Sobekite Hidden Door Key. Buliss Shield. Thao’s Staff. Dimitrii’s Sword.
Kaletor’s Staff. North Hall Gate Key (Group Step)Solo Steps.
Port into “Sobekite Eternal”. From Djinn, go East into the room, then South. Talk to Amenemhat and start the encounter. He will go to the very top of the arena where you must run up to fight him. Head upstairs and stay close to the wall when at the bottom floor. There are purple con crocodiles in the water that can aggro. When you enter his circle, he will start the fight.
If you get low on HP, simply move out of the circle and heal up. When done, you can speak to the Sobekite Observer just north of the circle and he will teleport you to the Djinn stone.Group Steps ML 2.5 Item Needed: North Hall Gate Key. Quickest way to this step is from a Djinn, port to “temple.” This will put you at the 2.10 encounter. Run back and head down the slope of the temple and reach the cave at the bottom. Once you zone in, head north. Turn to the West 1 room, then you should see a Gate up to the north.
Unlock the door w/ the Key and run up stairs. You will find a room with chess pieces setup.
Each person who needs credit for this must talk to one of the player statues and “Associate” themselves with one. Go around to Each piece and setup battle tactics for each: The most COMMON ones that people do are: Pawns - Stun Rook - Defend Bishop - Heal Knight -Weaken Queen -Drain King - Command.
Once you set a piece, you can say “different” so you can “associate” with another piece. Just remember to stay associated when the fight starts. Once all commands set, 1 person go talk to Chath on the other side of the room and start the encounter. Now just sit back and watch the fun.
If your pieces fail, you can keep doing it until they succeed.Battlegroup Steps ML 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.6, 2.7, 2.9, 2.10. Suggested Order for BG raid: ML 2.3, 2.1, 2.2, 2.4, 2.6, 2.9, 2.7, 2.10Items Needed:.
Stone Key. Cellar Key. 1 of 4 Ampitheater Keys. Sobekite Hidden Door Key. Buliss Shield. Thao’s Staff.
Dimitrii’s Sword. Kaletor’s StaffML 2.3. Have the BG port to “Sobekite Eternal” and get buffed up. When you are ready to move, have everyone use a waterpot. This will be the only time they will need it.
Just below the djinn, there is water leading to a tunnel. Drive the BG under the water and through that tunnel until they reach the very bottom. You can either go West or NE to either camp for 2.3.
I personally go west because it’s right there. This step is very difficult with a few people, but cake for a larger BG. If you have a small BG, have 1 person slowly pull mobs as the BG stays put spread out.
Slowly he/she will make their way to the very top of the pillar where the Chief is sitting. Once you kill the Chief, you will receive 2.3 credit. It is important that everyone be here for this step due to the mass agro that could show up.ML 2.1 & 2.2. Once you are done w/ 2.3, swim back East and up the Tunnel you came from and have the BG rally at the djinn. Move out into the temple, then turn North at the first room.
One room up, then make a West turn into an alcove. Have the person who has all the items put on the Ancient Crown, and stand next to the wall and /use the Sobekite Hidden door key. This will open up the revolving door and have the BG move in. If someone gets stuck outside, simply double click the door to re-open it. Open your /map and move the BG to a 4-way area where to the West is a dead end. Just stand here in the 4-way for a few minutes.
Eventually, the mobs will show up and you kill them. Shadow Reaver is for 2.2 step, Sinhue and Ata are for 2.1 step. No special tactics are needed.ML 2.4. Make your way back the way you came from 2.1, 2.2 to the hidden door and exit it. Rrionne is a random spawn area mob, she wanders the main hallways. When you encounter her, kill her Reflection first off, then focus on her. Kill Rrionne for 2.4 credit.ML 2.6.
There are 4 doors that open up into 2.6 area, 1 on West side, 1 on East, and 2 on the South Side. If you bought all 4 Amptheather keys, just find the nearest one, target the gate to find out which door it is, and unlock it. Inside you will see Kanahkt in the middle of the arena, talk to him to start the encounter. He will run up the stairs and pick a statue to fight. You will fight 4 total statues.
Once the statue is ready to fight, masses of Gray (they start out as gray) Orbs will fly out. If you have a Small BG, these orbs might be a problem if you don’t either kill the statue quick, or these orbs. Typically, the statue dies quick, but if you have less than a group doing this, you might want AoE casters killing the Orbs. Once all 4 statues are killed, 2.6 credit.ML 2.9. If you have all 4 the Amptheather keys, exit out the SouthEast door and go directly across the room to a Stone Door.
Open it w/ the key. ANNOYANCE NOTE: Have 1 PERSON only click this door or have the BG stay back away from the door so they can’t touch it. If more than 1 person clicks it, it will close and be a severe headache. This step is very difficult w/ 1 group or less, it is recommended to have more than 1g. You will find a NPC in the middle of the room.
He will ask for the 4 weapons to start the encounter. My personal preference to setup this is to have all tanks in the far alcove, while casters and healers near the entrance door casting. If your BG has Realm Abilities for Damage, this is the encounter to use them (TWF, Neg Maelstrom, Static Temp, etc). Hand all 4 pieces of equipment to the NPC and begin the encounter.
4 statues will spawn and begin attacking. 2 of the statues are huge annoyances w/ a PBAE and a Spam Root. Kill Kaletor and Thao ASAP. The other 2 are tank mobs. You MAY get ported into the Alcove and get spammed on. For casters/healers this is a bad thing.
Save your healer instas for this moment. If you can, try to run your way out of the spam root but it doesn’t always work. Credit happens when all 4 statues are dead. BUG ALERT: Once in a while, near ¼ of people will NOT get credit for this.
Usually I will have enough credit through /bg grantcredit to get them all. Unfortunately, you can’t always get everyone in, and rather than hold up a BG to do it again, its best to just pass it over the 2nd time.ML 2.7. Once done w/ 2.9, exit out the door and move East then Up the North Hall. Stop at 30k 15k loc and look West to see a flight of stairs. Travel all the way DOWN the stairs to the Cellar Door and unlock it.
Have no one talk to the NPC. When you speak to the NPC, you will get 3 choices, Fear, Terror and Horror. Fear is for Solo encounter only; Terror is for 1group only; and Horror is for BG credit. For Horror, it is just 1 mob spawn to kill. She is pretty easy to kill, but can hit pretty hard so have heals on standby. For Terror, a hall of mobs will spawn.
For some odd reason, I only killed of these mobs and got credit. It is supposed to be once you clear the room you getML 2.10. From 2.7, run back up the stairs and into the hallways. Run back to the Southwest corner of the map (/map) and back into the crack in the wall to the Djinn. Port the BG to “temple.”.
The BG will find Runihara right in front of them. If you have a large BG, who cares about strategy, just send tanks in, healers out healing.
For a smaller BG, tactic is essentially the same, have either a Tank go in and spam taunt. Wait for about 10% or so for him to gain full agro while healers are outside healing. Then just send other tanks casters in and drop him.
The spikes don’t hit for much anymore, you can easily out-heal the damages on them. It is pretty straight forward, just heal the tanks, drop him quick.
Welcome to another week of Five of the Best, a series celebrating the lovely incidental details in games we tend to overlook. So far we've celebrated hands, potions, dinosaurs, shops and health-pick-ups - an eclectic and specific bunch! The sprinkles of charm games are tastier for. Here's another five for your Friday lunchtime. Today...
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Maps! Lovely old maps where be dragons. The spellbinding tease before a story. Maps promising ornate cities, bushy forests and bumpy mountains. Maps with dark caves, smouldering volcanoes and strange beasties. Maps of great adventure and excitement yet to be had.
The first map I really remember was The Hobbit. I'm sure it's the same for many of you. That simple map drawn by a dwarf. That simple map followed by dwarves and hobbit and wizard, there and back again. It's not the fanciest map - it's not as detailed and sprawling as The Lord of the Rings' map - but it had all the mystery and intrigue it needed to glue my eyes to it, to wonder when - if - we'd ever get to the end, to Smaug.
That love of maps continued with games. Do you remember the gorgeous cloth maps games used to come with? Oh my! Why did that ever change? Richard Garriott's Ultima series was brilliant for this - he seems to understand a map's power so well. I spent hours looking at Ultima Online's map, at the evocative dungeon names - places I was nowhere near powerful enough to explore so they bloomed in my imagination.
But packing maps hasn't completely vanished. CD Projekt Red has a fondness for the old ways, so The Witcher 3 came with a beautiful illustrated map. It's so colourful and fanciful - the sea monsters, particularly - it's a pity the game doesn't have the same art style (though it's beautiful in its own right of course).
Maps are a stable of any fantasy adventure, really - any world you spend a long time in. Skyrim's satellite-style map really brought out the power of the jagged, snowy mountain ranges. The gradual shading of Dragon Age: Origins' parchment map was an effective way to reinforce the spread of the game's evil, the Blight. Mass Effect's Galaxy Map is jaw-dropping, and a clever way to remind people of the majesty and vastness of space.
There are so many wonderful maps I cannot possibly name them all, but here are five of my favourites for various reasons. Naturally, you will have yours and I would love to hear about them below.
Dark Age of Camelot
It's a map of a fantasy land you're yet to explore, which in itself is exciting, but the real magic comes from there being three lands, three realms, three sides - and each are inaccessible to the other. If you decide to inhabit Albion (a kind of England), for example, you can't also explore Hibernia (a kind of Ireland) or Midgard (a kind of Scandinavia), and nor can they do likewise. The warring sides are separated, destined to only ever meet in nervy contested zones populated by capturable keeps and housing your side's powerful relic.
Yet, you can see these other lands on the Dark Age of Camelot map. You can see them and wonder what life is like for the people in them. You can wonder how your enemies grew up, where they levelled, what dungeons they frequented, the memories they made. You can see them and imagine, which is always a beautiful, romantic thing to do. It's also a powerful way to underline the game's big realm war idea, to remind you that other people are out there, and one day you will face them...
Grand Theft Auto
It wasn't only fantasy games which had out-of-the-box maps. The original Grand Theft Auto had one and you had to use it. There wasn't a big in-game map you could refer to. If you needed to know where the nearest spray shop was after pulling a heist and being chased by the police, you needed a navigator - someone in the passenger seat. I played that role for a friend. He'd do the arrow key work and I'd have the map in my hands, bossing him around the city. 'No don't take that turning you idiot!' 'Spray shop coming up on your right now now now!' 'No I won't just stop and ask someone - I can work it out!'
Super Mario World
Super Mario 3 was the first Mario game to have maps - and they were wonderful. But while it allowed you to pick a path through each themed area, it stopped short of sticking the whole thing together. This is where Super Mario World comes in: a whole set of continents, adrift in the ocean, and with such lovely names! Cheese Bridge! Donut Plains! Vanilla Dome!
Mario World's map was a gorgeous piece of work in its own right, and it did an incredible job of getting you set for a Mario adventure of much wider scope. But it did more than that too. Mario World levels often had more than one exit, which meant that the game's true end-game came not with defeating Bowser but with unlocking absolutely every location available. On a functional level, the Mario World map is a bit of a puzzle, then, not as intricate as the interlocking worlds of Zelda's Link to the Past map but certainly building on the same principles.
And again, just look at it. What a beauty.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance
The maps in Kingdom Come: Deliverance are the most beautiful of any medieval role-playing game - maybe any role-playing game full stop - I've ever played. They're hand drawn and have a kind of childlike enthusiasm to them, all curvy edges and simple, strong lines. They almost look woven from certain angles. The diagonal-down viewpoint only enhances this, giving real substance to the friendly furrowed fields and dinky houses and huts.
It's as if the maps are concerned more with looking pretty than being geographically accurate (although, skilfully, they still manage to be). This ramps up tenfold wen you zoom into an individual map for a specific town or city. Here, the diagonal view is even more pronounced, hills and landmark features even bigger. There are even giant people adorning the map, drawn to represent the kind of industry the area is famed for. Gorgeous and useful as it gives you a sense, at a glance, of what the place is about.
Also, cloud-cover is represented literally, as curly-lined clouds gradually clear from the map the more you discover of it.
Sea of Thieves
We're spoiled these days, always having giant auto-maps to hand - great charts which fill themselves in as we explore. But I suppose a good user experience dictates we have to have them - we have to know where we're going. The map is an aid and not a part of the game itself. Or is it? When I first played Sea of Thieves, I couldn't even work out where the bloody map was!
Turns out, it was on a table on the deck below - fixed to it. You can't carry a magical map around with you. You have to chart your progress on your ship's map, either leaving the wheel to do it yourself, or having another crew member relay it to you. You even have to cross-check treasure maps against it, looking for similar shaped islands to set sail to.
Reading the map, in other words, is part of the game. Not only does it encourage teamwork but it couldn't fit the nautical setting of the game better. You steer by rough bearings, by West Northwests and the like, not by exact coordinates, so it becomes a game where you spend less time looking down at the particulars and more time looking around, at the hypnotic rolling sea and the horizon, where the sails of other ships may suddenly appear...
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