Necro this!

The UK is in the midst of a particularly cold spell at the moment - the kind of cold where its on every news broadcast. Its hardly the end of the world but it is mighty cold. Suits me though, more of an excuse to hide indoors and set myself up in front of the PC for hours on end.

Last night my EQ2 adventuring took me to the Lair of the Necromancer. A small solo instance in the Nektulos Forest zone. As you can imagine the small underground crypt featured plenty of undead and concludes with an encounter with a necromancer. The instance also features a fair amount of spiders - irritating, evil spiders. 1 on 1, provided I got the jump on them, I could take out a spider with little trouble. However, caught unaware at the wrong time the spiders proved to be a major irritation. The key problem being that their early attack is a root and this pretty much instantly counters my standard root, run away, nuke, repeat strategy - it quickly became root, stand still, nuke, die. So a couple of times death ensued when a wandering spider caught me just after a fight or, worse, joined in a fight already in progress. However, soon enough I figured out the route to take and got lucky enough to take out the rare spider spawn a couple of times as I made my way through. The boss, however, also proved to be a bit thorny. Towards the end of the instance there is a set of double doors that open out into a small square chamber. In the middle of the chamber are four unattackable fanatics conducting some sort of ritual. In each corner of the room is a skeleton - taking out the skeletons is a relatively simple task and once all 4 are down the fanatics become attackable. The fanatics are grouped up as an encounter and although I was initially concerned that 4 of them might wipe me out, judicious use of encounter and AOE spells took all 4 out quick enough. Once they were dead the final boss spawns with his pet. Again, I'm slightly concerned that I'm going to get overwhelmed - however, I figured if I kept the boss at range I'd hopefully be able to withstand enough of the hits from the pet whilst nuking the boss down and once the boss was dead the pet would die instantly too. And it worked just fine. Except I didn't know that the boss summons 2 skeletons just before it dies. So while I could finish off the boss no problem with a sliver of health left, the skeletons pretty swiftly finished me off. Twice. However, on the third try I was a bit smarter with my roots and nukes and managed to take out the boss with plenty of health to spare. I was then able to clean up on the summoned skeletons and that was that, instance complete!

For my troubles I got 4 or 5 skill book drops and a few items which I couldn't use and probably a level and half's worth of experience. And a whole lot of fun. It was really nice to have a bit of challenge that for my level was balanced just right - it was neither so easy that I could breeze through it or so difficult that it was obvious that I was never going to do it.