So Everquest Legends released a new update just a few days ago that included a couple of new playable zones, a new dark half-elf race (the Ayr'Haeth), and a Halloween quest. It's actually a pretty great free expansion, and the fact that the raid zone Nektropos is our new end game area, it's causing a lot of buzz for players.
Hoop 1: I had to find where the new content was. To get to Nektropos Castle, you have to swim through a river in Nektolus Forest, which brings you to the new zone called Lake Nerius.
Hoop 2: The problem here is that one can't simply walk into the gates of the Nektropos Castle, you have to be invited, which means there's a key quest. You get that by talking to Retainer Ozval in a little outdoor brick, uh, tent area in the Lake Nerius Zone.
Retaining friendship with Retainer Ozval
He sends you on a quest that involves killing a high-level fish in Lake Nerius who swallowed a ring. Then you have to go to Felwithe and Ak'Anon to get a couple items from shop keeps that owe the family a favor so you can restore the signet ring to its original splendor.
Hoop 3: If you're an Iksar like me, you're going to have to illusion up, faction up, or swap races so you can talk to these NPCs. Not too difficult and especially since I recently leveled an enchanter with all my race illusions unlocked.
Hoop 4: Just restoring the ring isn't enough, you need to give it its magic back. To do that, you'll need to go to a new NPC hanging out in the Plane of Hate called the Priestess of Ulkorruuk, so you'll have to be at least level 46 so you can get into the Plane of Hate. The Priestess is deep in the second level of Hate, so you'll have to do some clearing to get to her.
As far as key quests in Everquest go, that's really not that bad! It was like an hour or so of just running around, and NOW you can enter the Nektropos Castle.
Inside the castle, you'll now talk to Lord Ollix Everling who says you'll have to talk to his mother to figure out why Lord daddy Rikantus Everling of the castle is freaking out, killing his beloved daughters, and making freakish monsters in the basement.
Hoop 5: You have to make a key to access the upstairs, so there are four ground spawns in the lower levels you have to gather up. As it turns out, the key is to fix the harpsichord in the downstairs. It's missing a white key, a black key, a string, and a plectrum. Do that and you can now wander around upstairs, but dangit . . .
Hoop 6: To unlock the door to talk to Lady Silenuie you have to go talk to Plimptos (yes that's his name), who is a poor unfortunate soul that's been tortured to death, resurrected, and tortured to death again, over and over like a hundred times. He tells you to kill all of the now undead daughters and the rest of the family, but to do that . . .
Hoop 7: You have to talk to the handmaiden to open the doors to the daughters. After that, you can now go around and kill all the daughters and obtain seven different colored robes which seem to be for some kind of a pastel fashion quest, but I just tried them on, giggled, and deleted them from my inventory.
Hoop 8: After killing off the daughters, you need to head into the basement (behind a secret bookshelf door) to finish off Lord Rikantus Everling, who kicked my butt a few times until I figured out what you needed to do. This was Tier zero mind you. I SHOULD be able to smoke this guy with no issues. Nope. It was probably the most difficult fight in Everquest Legends to date.
Basically, you have to slowly kill him because at set percentages, he spawns things. As soon as he spawns a Guardian golem, you need to switch targets and kill the guardian immediately. If he spawns zombies, just ignore them, they will despawn after you get Rikantus to the next guardian spawn. UNLESS, you kill Rikantus too quickly.
It's a tricky fight that I eventually won by only using my pet to attack Rikantus to chew him down slowly while swapping between defensive stance, evasive stance, and balanced stance; and letting my pet taunt when I was tragically low on health, sacrificing my pet, and then resummoning a new taunting pet. I think this will be tuned down in the future, but I got it done after 3 deaths and some experimentation.
Hoop 9: Finally you can enter and talk to Lady Silenuie . . . only to find out that she won't talk to you because of low faction issues. There seems to be some complaints on Discord that this is seen as a bug, but others said they were able to get past this by using the Sneak ability and saying the keywords "dead" and then "confess."
Hoop 10: Since I don't have a rogue class leveled up to 50 and you have to fight Lady Silenuie after you use the keywords, the only method I had to getting the sneak ability was to unlock the Halfling race.(This hoop is a me problem because my rogue is only like level 20) So I ran and bought 500 bandages and turned them in to Joogl Honeybugger in Misty Thicket. And then went into Runnyeye and mass murdered pickclaw goblins until I received the ally faction notification for the Priests of Mischief.
Hoop 11: After editing my main character loadout to be Halfling instead of Iksar, I ran back to Lady Silenuie, hit the sneak button, and said the keywords "dead" and "confess." NOTE that you can't just click the word "confess" after seeing it in dialog. You have to physically type "/say confess" -- at which point she'll attack you.
Finally you go down, deliver that sweet death Plimptos is looking for and return to Lord Ollix for your reward.
WHEW.
I kept ahold of all my keys because I don't trust the keyring in Nektropos just yet and I'd rather just run around without all the hoops, if you know what I mean.
From what I've read, there's another zone beneath Castle Nektropos that is a starting area for the new race . . . I think that's next on the agenda after farming Nektropos a few times on higher difficulty levels.
Happy Dueling!
