Part of the berzerker epic requires killing a dragon/fish in Dagnor's
Cauldron.

A friend in my guild has a berserker alt and a lot more pull than I do
with guild management, so he managed to get this scheduled for himself,
I came along because A) I always come along for epic fights or pretty
much any of the other "need help with quest" stuff that anyone does.
But also because B) hey, I'm going to have to do that one sooner or
later, let me see how its done.

Well, I'm late because I log on when I log on, with no control over
that; RL comes first.  This is part of my problem in organizing anything
of this nature, I can't really schedule it in advance since I don't know
if I'll be there!  Plus I'm never on the signup sheets to do anything
even though I end up showing up at 80% of them, because I'd rather do
that and miss a few due to lack of room than sign up and be a no show...
even though I've yet to hear of a raid called on lack of berzerker; this
preference probably made more sense back when I was a cleric.

Turns out they haven't started yet, and in fact after I show up they
quietly let the end of the spawn time go by, condemming us to sit half a
Norrath day waiting for repop.

The other berserker is sort of running the show (its a fairly casual
guild and its often hard to tell who's in charge of anything); he has us
all formed up at the Hero camp just to the SW of the zone in chasm.
Next spawn is at 11pm norrath time, so there's lots of hanging out and
some competitions to see who can one shot various green mobs and so on.

Spawn time comes and goes; the tracker is AFK says the other zerker in
tells.  Eventually he's back and we get ready to go.  Tracker turns out
to be a druid, who goes out and promptly gets dead; ranger runs out and
pulls the rest of the way to us.

Praklion is a big fish dragon just like Fae and his ilk, but a good deal
more entertaining to fight.  He has four procs, or perhaps three, at any
rate I witness them all; there's a whirl till you hurl sort of one, a
mezz sort of one, both around 3 tic duration, and there's a DD one which
is good for 1200.  Hardest I got hit by his melee was 438 points, but
more frequently he was hitting me for 100 or less; with healing I could
have tanked him myself unless he got lucky and triple procced the DD and
got no resists.

But the fourth proc, or perhaps its part of one of the others, is
drunkeness.  Now my AT is abyssimal because I gave up working on it when
I found out that my exploit had been patched: once upon a time you could
start to camp out, then at about 15 seconds to go, slam down as many
drinks as you could while waiting for time  to finish.  Logging back in,
you'd be sober but still have the skill ups.  Why that worked I don't
know, but it made an otherwise very tedious and pretty much wortheless
skill easy to cap out.  At any rate, I'd worked at it on and off, now
and then, but was only up to 60 or so skill.  Apparantly over 176 AT you
don't get the drunkeness effects from Praklion... but I did.  On the
other hand, my years of experience doing drunken gnome runs and the like
meant that, since I'm not a caster and don't suffer interrupts, there
were no real practical problems with being that drunk and fighting.

That effect made things a bit difficult, as most of the casters also had
poor AT, and many of the melee did too and didn't have my experience
with running around in tunnel vision.

BUT thats not the real ugliness.

Unlike most mobs I've faced, Praklion is a runner, but not just an
ordinary runner, he's a champion.  He runs early, at around 50%, he
can't be snared or rooted or stunned, so when he runs its serious.  He
runs into the water, which makes following him or finding him tough due
to visibility and the fact that most people, myself included, haven't
maxed out their swim skill, and he runs to random spots in the water,
not to his spawn site, so you can't set up an ambush for him there, plus
his running in and out of the water creates confusion for the casters,
who can't cast spells across the surface barrier.  And he regens at a
high rate while in the water if he manages to get away from the killing
force.

First time, we got seriously fragmented and suffered a partial wipe,
some of the casters had been affected early by the drunkeness and never
managed to aggro him... or so we thought.  We were in the process of
recovering bodies and rezzing the dead, myself included, when suddenly
Praklion showed up and ate about 6 of us, would have taken down more but
he despawned mid fight, apparantly his 2pm curfew is really strong.
Apparantly when he gets to full HP he changes his mind about who is and
isn't on the hate list... didn't hate em enough to summon them but did
hate em enough to come get them.

Hmm, come to think of it I'm not sure he does summon... no, he does.  At
one point I was trying to kite him around but kept getting dragged back
into his clutches and having to run back out of range, so I'd lose a
couple thousand hp per pass what with him hitting much harder on my
unbuffed person and me not resisting his DD much at all.

Well, rezed again, this time we formed up at the Unrest ZL area, closer
to his spawn site.  Which turns out wrong, he seems to spawn at random
in the depths, or perhaps he just wanders fast.   And we hadn't yet
discovered that his "run to" spot isn't his spawn site, anyway.

Puller dies again, second up puller gets him ashore.  As before, at
about 50% he takes off running, this time pursuit is more organized
though, and prepared with levitation in the form of DMF -and- SOE
(everyone had EB of some type the first time, but few were airborn)
those with poor swim are able to keep up with the rest by staying above
the water.   Fish drops having killed only the puller, my friend gets
his axe... I in the meantime am shamed because I managed to lose the
fish and never did find it again, not even the body.  Course my friend
had done similarly, I know because he had to get a  loc to find it to loot.

Then, to my surprise, the guild decides to stick around and do it again
for me.  Respawn time is only half a norrath day away by now, time
enough to rez the dead guy, repair buffs, and hang out playing a little bit.

I'm nominally in charge... but the raid has just done this fight
successfully as is, so I'm not changing much.  And I don't have a good
writeup of walkthru of it anyway, so I'm no wiser than my buddy...
except that I've just seen it done twice.  So my orders are to pull up
to center island for initial engage, then use every pet we have,
clerics, enchanters, druids, I don't care.  Pets, you see, are very good
at following things that run.  Levitation all around of course, that was
successful as well.  Bard autofollowing the MA, who'd demonstrated an
ability to stick with the mob anyway.

We had a low level druid with us for some reason (45... wow.  How she'd
managed to live thru the second dragon fight I don't know... unless it
was by staying away from it)  Asked her to stay away during initial
fight, and then once the fish went into the water, stay above him
keeping him on track.  With this fisherman's bobber floating above his
position, it was relatively easy to follow along to where he stopped,
and then dive in, following the trail of pets to his fight spot.  Fish
ran twice, and both times I was able to get back on him as were most of
the rest of the DPS, and most of the healers were able get close enough
and under the water to do their job.


Somehow a 65 shaman ended up dead next to the body, other than that it
was pretty smooth.  Looted my axe, thanked everyone for sticking around,
and went off running errands; hand in axe here in zone, then off to LOIO
to hand in the medal and bracelet for my next step, which is to kill an
Ireblind Imp in Fear.

Sadly, unlike the Shaman epic, none of the intermediate steps are at all
useful, personally I think this is a flaw in epics in general; to me it
should be building step after step, but instead most are a whole lot of
work with nothing to show for it till the end.

Grage, 58 Berzerk, Luclin