New instance: Maraudon

[Nija]

It needs to be called MARATHON.

Two horde quests start for this sucker in the fishing village of Shadowprey. One neutral quest starts above the kodo graveyard, at a small hut. Another neutral quest starts right outside the instance, in the labryinth surrounding it.

Alliance quests, I hear, two start in Nigel's Point, the Alliance town in Desolace - giving the same quest rewards as the horde quests do. VERY GOOD rewards too. How about a 35 dps 1h sword that has a chance to give two extra attacks on hit? A 28 DPS bow? What about a 46 dps staff?

Alright, once you get the quests you head to the VALLEY OF SPEARS, centaurland, and fight a few of them to get to some huge door. You open the door and head into the cave - much like the Wailing Caverns entrance area, but quite a bit different. There are two instance entrances in this cave, along with a quest chain, and no less than 5 different types of enemies all over the place - trying to kill you. Elite lizards, elite hidden dudes, elite centaur GHOSTS, normal elite centaurs. Jesus.

As you enter one of the instance entrances, you'll see at the first group of monsters that this is not, in fact, a 40-49 instance. If you go in the same entrance I did, the 3rd group of monsters you'll encounter is a group of 4 level 46 elite PLANTS - which are non-sheepable. Each one spams a knockdown. My group makeup was 51 mage, 51 sha, 49 war, 49 priest, 48 sha. We made it 5 hours into this thing before wiping. Then, me being the hamhanded idiot that I am, instead of hitting the REINCARNATE button, I hit the RELEASE SPIRIT button. Which ended our journey. They REALLY should add an "are you sure, retard?" dialogue to the res window when you have an alternate to releasing to spirit healer.

5 hour of exploring. We killed 6 mini-bosses. According to the people in other groups that we were talking to in /1, we were "pretty close" to the end boss.  We encounted one bugged quest, but I think it's just a scripting bug - you get the exp, the guy goes to do some crazyness, and then he sits in a loop doing and saying the same series of things. Most of the stuff the bosses were dropping was cloth or leather. Druid stuff, too, for all 6 of 'em who play still.

The size of this place is incredible. Also, the variety of the locations. This single dungeon alone is bigger than every dungeon in AC2 put together, and it might even be bigger than an entire CONTINENT in ac2. One entrance puts you in a poison-themed cavern with crazy smoking waterfalls and poison maggots. You'll fight about 60 at a time it seems. As you progress you'll fight some weird venus flytrap things, including a giant dancing venus flytrap boss. (he wiggles much like meatwad does, and yes i did take a video, no i've not encoded it yet) Then you'll encounter some weird dryads, which are like centaurs + night elves. Then, a huge waterfall rivaling the one in Azhara in size, along with a few dozen high level non elite turles for you aspiring leathercrafters.

Anyways, very challenging place. From the part that we did explore, I'd say it's probably 5 to 6 times larger than Wailing Caverns. I've not seen it all yet, either. We wiped to some crazy level 49+ giant, who happened to wander by while we were killing a friend of his. They have a knockback attack that'll put you way, way out of the fight, plus do an incredible ammount of AE dmg. We could handle 'em one at a time, but the second showed up and some rock-monster also showed up. You kill those rock guys and they break into 3 smaller rock guys, who again break into 2 even smaller rock guys. Swarmed eventually.

So in closing, yes I spent 5 hours in a single instance last night. Yes, I'm going again tonight.

[MrHat]

It needs to be called MARATHON.

Two horde quests start for this sucker in the fishing village of Shadowprey. One neutral quest starts above the kodo graveyard, at a small hut. Another neutral quest starts right outside the instance, in the labryinth surrounding it.

Alliance quests, I hear, two start in Nigel's Point, the Alliance town in Desolace - giving the same quest rewards as the horde quests do. VERY GOOD rewards too. How about a 35 dps 1h sword that has a chance to give two extra attacks on hit? A 28 DPS bow? What about a 46 dps staff?

Alright, once you get the quests you head to the VALLEY OF SPEARS, centaurland, and fight a few of them to get to some huge door. You open the door and head into the cave - much like the Wailing Caverns entrance area, but quite a bit different. There are two instance entrances in this cave, along with a quest chain, and no less than 5 different types of enemies all over the place - trying to kill you. Elite lizards, elite hidden dudes, elite centaur GHOSTS, normal elite centaurs. Jesus.

As you enter one of the instance entrances, you'll see at the first group of monsters that this is not, in fact, a 40-49 instance. If you go in the same entrance I did, the 3rd group of monsters you'll encounter is a group of 4 level 46 elite PLANTS - which are non-sheepable. Each one spams a knockdown. My group makeup was 51 mage, 51 sha, 49 war, 49 priest, 48 sha. We made it 5 hours into this thing before wiping. Then, me being the hamhanded idiot that I am, instead of hitting the REINCARNATE button, I hit the RELEASE SPIRIT button. Which ended our journey. They REALLY should add an "are you sure, retard?" dialogue to the res window when you have an alternate to releasing to spirit healer.

5 hour of exploring. We killed 6 mini-bosses. According to the people in other groups that we were talking to in /1, we were "pretty close" to the end boss.  We encounted one bugged quest, but I think it's just a scripting bug - you get the exp, the guy goes to do some crazyness, and then he sits in a loop doing and saying the same series of things. Most of the stuff the bosses were dropping was cloth or leather. Druid stuff, too, for all 6 of 'em who play still.

The size of this place is incredible. Also, the variety of the locations. This single dungeon alone is bigger than every dungeon in AC2 put together, and it might even be bigger than an entire CONTINENT in ac2. One entrance puts you in a poison-themed cavern with crazy smoking waterfalls and poison maggots. You'll fight about 60 at a time it seems. As you progress you'll fight some weird venus flytrap things, including a giant dancing venus flytrap boss. (he wiggles much like meatwad does, and yes i did take a video, no i've not encoded it yet) Then you'll encounter some weird dryads, which are like centaurs + night elves. Then, a huge waterfall rivaling the one in Azhara in size, along with a few dozen high level non elite turles for you aspiring leathercrafters.

Anyways, very challenging place. From the part that we did explore, I'd say it's probably 5 to 6 times larger than Wailing Caverns. I've not seen it all yet, either. We wiped to some crazy level 49+ giant, who happened to wander by while we were killing a friend of his. They have a knockback attack that'll put you way, way out of the fight, plus do an incredible ammount of AE dmg. We could handle 'em one at a time, but the second showed up and some rock-monster also showed up. You kill those rock guys and they break into 3 smaller rock guys, who again break into 2 even smaller rock guys. Swarmed eventually.

So in closing, yes I spent 5 hours in a single instance last night. Yes, I'm going again tonight.

Sounds cool, thanks for the write up.  I won't be doing this w/ my L44 group now.

[Rasix]

Sounds interesting if I'm still a bit off from being able to attempt it (almost 42).  Is it all one big area or is it broken into smaller doable units ala Scarlet Monastery (which bugged out on us for the second time last night, FIXED MY ASS)?  

Of course, that doesn't sound doable by our 3 man group as most higher level instances are proving to be so.  God, I'm going to have to group with retards for something challenging.   Seems a bit long, I'll probably have to save that one for weekends.

[Phred]

Sounds interesting if I'm still a bit off from being able to attempt it (almost 42).  Is it all one big area or is it broken into smaller doable units ala Scarlet Monastery (which bugged out on us for the second time last night, FIXED MY ASS)?  

Of course, that doesn't sound doable by our 3 man group as most higher level instances are proving to be so.  God, I'm going to have to group with retards for something challenging.   Seems a bit long, I'll probably have to save that one for weekends.

It's all one instance. There is a back door like Uldaman that would let you skip half the content though and go on another time. Can't see doing it with 3 though. Too many large pulls. Guess I've been lucky. I am still teamed with a  warrior I met opening day at L6, and we've slowly added people to our regular group who are competant and non-greedy, so we've been having a good time doing instances all the way up.

It was semi-challenging for a group of 50-54 people, and way more fun than the sunken temple, which seems to have been designed by whover did vex thal in EQ. We got the same looping quest guy and were worried that we wouldn't be able to get to the princess, but we eventually found her. That's one ugly princess I'll tell you. Besides the rewards for the quest, there's some other nice items in there. My hunter got some chain legs with 20 agility and +4 to bow skill. There was a good range of items dropping, so that everyone in my group came away happy.

[Nija]

One entrance will put you closer to the Princess (i think, never actually found her) and Vyletongue, the other entrance will put you in Poisonville, closer to some items needed for another quest. So it's not quite as segmented as SM, (which i still think is the best instance) but it's pretty good.

There are many paths to take, and I can already tell it's going to take a lot of time to learn. There are lots of dead ends too, but not 30 minute long dead ends, more like 2-3 groups of monsters then you hit a wall dead ends.  We were intent on killing everything though, just to get a feel for the area. That's probably why it took so long.

3 man group definately won't work. You'll be fighting groups of 8 towards the end.