Since she hadn’t really gotten any of her other tradeskillers through the introductory quest line in the Moors she brought along Serrenial, her 80 Provisioner. This matched up well with Sisca, 67 Alchemist (Sage line), and Acsis, 52 Tailor (Outfitter line), giving us coverage of all 3 of the base skill lines. So off we went to isle of Mara.

Apparently the Gnomes in Steamfont were having an issue and could use the help of some skilled crafters so Acsis fired up a portal and we headed off to see what we could do to help. When we arrived at Gnomeland Security we spent several minutes running around looking for someone to direct us before we realized that there was a new doorway that led to an underground research workshop. Zoning in there we saw this giant dragonbot on a rampage tearing up the place. Talking to the foreman revealed that they had built the dragonbot to help defeat the bot that had gone haywire and driven them out of Ak’Anon all those years ago but, again, something had gone wrong and he was malfunctioning. Not to worry though, they had a cunning plan! They would just build a bigger and more powerful bot to beat up the bot that they had built to beat up the first bot. Gnomish logic. Oh well they were willing pay good money, they were providing all the raws and I had a druid to get me the hell out if it all went horribly pear shaped.

The crafting part was fairly straightforward. There are 4 phases to the build, and if you do them one phase at a time you can watch the construction happen. Each phase need 3 each of 9 different items, 1 item per tradeskill class. So, even if you have a full group of 6 someone will still have to do combines for items outside of their primary skill set. With our little band of 3 that meant that 2/3rds of the combines were going to be outside our comfort zone. All of the items needed come from a special recipe book that they also provide so you really don’t need to bring anything. Though I would strongly recommend bringing any tradeskill stat boosting items you have, those out of class combines will really make you work for it.

A couple of hours later we had finally managed to get all of the pieces together and the gnomes went to work building their killer bot killer bot while we sat back and watched. Once he was completed he quickly waded in and actually attacked the other bot instead of turning on the gnomes like all their other creations.

Cue Robot Wars theme music

In case you were thinking of trying to take him out yourself

  Victory!

The good news is that once our guy had beaten the dracobot he just stood there and allowed us to loot. Awfully nice of him.

Each of us also got a token that we can collect and use to spend on various tradeskill focused items, including mounts that up your harvesting skills, at a merchant in Mara.

All in all it was an entertaining way to spend an evening and, for tradeskillers at least, it resulted in some nice rewards without actually having to kill a single mob. When you combine these quests with the dailies in the moors and the other various tradeskill focused items that were added with this expansion I think that all tradeskillers need to get together and buy Domino a really nice dinner at the next Fan Faire.

This last update also added a murder mystery – the Seeress of the Temple of Life (Rodcet Nife’s prophet) was killed.   Everyone ran some of the (rather boring) bone chip quests to get the orb to 100%, and then we spent time solving the mystery on both sides.   I really enjoyed the first time through on either end, though it most definitely is time consuming!  But, the evil and good sides are of course close parallels, so not quite as entertaining the second time, and the third and fourth was rather boring.   The quest rewards are exceedingly good, so I’m glad I ran it with my main avatars, but it was a bit tedious towards the last.   One thing about the rewards is quite nifty – two of them grow with you!   They are at the x5 level, and they can be mounted to display in your room.   Mounting and then unmounting them (making them usable again) will set them at the closest x5 level.  Thus, should you acquire them at 25, you can level them to 35 and so on to 75.  This makes them exceedingly good rewards all told.