It’s that time of year again. Pumpkins get turned into Jack-O’-Lanterns, the sky gets darker, and the dead rise! Mabar has come!
The eerie plane of night has once again made its way to Delera’s Graveyard in DDO, and everyone’s getting into the festive mood!
The costumes (cosmetic armors/ hats/ pets) are out, and everyone’s after that hard to get candy!
Darkest Chocolates, Spooky Almonds, Black Apples, and many other forms of ingredients we all need to get that certain special something (like the Doomsphere pet, or perhaps that wicked looking armor and helm- see screen cap at top of page if you don’t know what I mean).
This year, besides some awesome new cosmetics available as prizes, there’s some wonderful new quests to help us farm up the necessary ingredients to get the items we want so badly: Hayweird Foundry and Getting Ahead. After trying them both, it seems that Getting Ahead took much less time, and gave approximately the same number of ingredients. When run at 5 above your current level, you’ll get somewhere around 8 of each ingredient. This is good! The four older quests made it so you had to farm each of them a number of times to get the quantities required. The fact the two new quests give all of them (though in lesser amounts), means you only have to run one quest, or- maybe both?
With the time needed to run each quest (about 20 minutes if you fought everything), or- if you’re like some of the players I’ve talked to- far less than that if you know how/ what to do.
Personally, I ran with my Paladins- mostly because I knew they would survive. Not only do they have the gear to make it through, but it is the playstyle with which I am most familiar. This caused the keys (special items needed to get into each quest, and melee builds don’t farm them very well) to drop very slowly. In fact, in a four hour period, I’d only gotten two. This was unacceptable!
I was told how to acquire more keys, and when I followed the advice I was amazed at how much difference it really made! I now tend to get about 1 key every six minutes (on average)!
Anyway, after I gathered the necessary keys (about 12), I began to run Getting Ahead. It wasn’t long before I had the Doomsphere cosmetic pet. I am now currently farming the ingredients needed for the armor and helmet you can see at the top of the page. 😀
What I love about Mabar is the Halloween theme. All things dark and deadly, such as vampires, skeletons, and zombies, are out and about. It is up to us to defeat them!
Some of you may already know this, but Halloween is my absolute MOSTEST FAVORITESTEST time of the year. I’m an old horror movie buff, as well as a former pseudo goth, so this kind of stuff is totally my thing. Vampires, werewolves (of which I wish there were more of in DDO), skeletons, mummies, zombies, wraiths, and specters- I tell you, it’s enough to make you Wheep. Eh? See what I did there? XD Okay, I’ll stop now.
At the end of Getting, you will face the Headless Monstrosity. By himself, he’s not much of a threat. Basically, the Headless Horesman from Sleepy Hollow. However, he’s not alone. I cannot tell you just how many zombies are with him- mainly because I’m always far too busy to spend the time and count, as well as they move around too much to keep an accurate count!
Seriously, these are Night of the Living Dead type numbers! And you have to fight them AT THE SAME TIME AS THE BOSS! O.o
Good thing that a properly built paladin can take that kind of abuse and survive. Once the BBEG is down, take your time and get to work putting the remainder to rest. Once you’ve cleared the room, you’ll see you got a very nice reward. Typically, at 5 levels higher, I’ve gotten 8 or 9 of every ingredient.
Now, while I admit these are great things, there are some improvements I would like to see next year.
I hope they continue to increase the number of great items you can get as rewards for farming ingredients. I hope they find a way to make keys drop just a bit higher for melee builds. I would love to see more monster types in the quests, werewolves and vampires especially. Last but not least, I would love to see more quests!
I’d say the thing that bothers me most about Night Revels is the monotony. Four of the six quests give only two ingredient types (one of which is always Darkest Chocolate, which you also get from the public area). This leaves two quests that players can farm for the ingredients: One is quite good, the other is a lot longer, more difficult, and gives only 1 more of each ingredient than the other.
Also the lag, but with all that spawns, and the many instances of each quest being run, I imagine that server performance is very difficult to maintain.
So, in reality, there’s really only one quest you can farm said ingredients, and after a while that can become quite a bore.
Overall, I’d give Night Revels either 7 or 8 out of 10 review. However, as is obvious from my statements above, I am a bit biased toward everything horror. 🙂
Thanks again for stopping by, and for taking the time out of your busy day to read this blog. I appreciate your continued support!
Citi Plays DDO 
We found just running all 6 quests 5 levels above our own level was enough – we got 40 of each ingredient, so 2 circuits was enough for the pet 🙂
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Reblogged this on DDOCentral.
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You can draw the headless monstrosity out by itself. Just range it…at least, my ranger was able to. Although, I did have to clear a few others before being able to do that. Still, you don’t have to fight all of them. And once he’s dead, you can make a quick dash to the chest, grab everything, and book on out, so still don’t have to fight all the zombies.
So – what was the ‘secret’ to acquiring more keys?
😉
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not really much of a secret, actually. Just seems to work better than any other classes. Level 7 Pale Master wizard with Acid Rain. No gear, no metamagics required. I use Acid Rain and Scorching Ray to deal out damage and kill things quickly. Pale Master gets you skelly, which then helps spawn more… I think? If not, it at least helps kill things. 🙂
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