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NoTD 2017 - Digging up Trouble

Nights of the Dead is a celebration of the creepy, the scary, and the things that go bump in the night in EverQuest II. There is quite a bit to do, buy and craft this year so it is a very good thing that this event lasts for almost a full month!

Sadly, I ran out of "oomph" before I got to writing a short story for this event, but this preview is plenty long without it! :D

This event runs from October 6 through November 2, 2017 on the live servers with the following exceptions for the TLE servers: Fallen Gate will only have a special vendor in Qeynos/Freeport (no actual event), and Stormhold will have everything except the fact that the lost necklace cannot be looted from the Gleaming Chest in the Hedge Hollow.

New Crafted Items

These items require common tier 2 harvestables and fuel, as well as one Nights of the Dead treat. The treats can be brought back by your upgraded pack pony (100 treats per run), can be looted anywhere that purple shinies spawn (cities, Nek Forest beach, etc), and can be looted from the corpse of any creepy or crawly creature in the lands.

This year's recipe book is "Celebrations of the Dead X" from any "a Nights of the Dead merchant". These merchants can be found in any home city crafting society area. The book costs 60s, 90c and requires artisan level 2 to scribe. There are 17 recipes contained within it.

My apologies for the irregular backgrounds on some of these screenshots. There are quite a few preview issues due to textures, lighting, etc. so I had to get creative.

Black Hearted Chandelier
Black Striped Woolen Scarf
Condensation Beakers
Entombed Iksar Skeleton
Evaporation Apparatus
Fruits of Mourning
Ghoulish Delight
Goblin Skull Candlestick
Linen Lined Coffin Bed
Mistmyr Armoire
Pit of the Deep
Russet Lopleaf Plant
Sealed Stone Coffin
Shroud of the Revered
Skull Inlaid Tile
Small Autumnal Blueleaf Sapling
Stained Corpse Cover

Note: the Skull Inlaid Tile has the building-block tag.

New Purchased Items

These items are sold on the "a Nights of the Dead merchant" that can be found in any home city crafting society area. (If you have other NoTD candies, and need them converted into candy corn, there should be a Gigglegibber in the same general area as the merchant that is a treat trader.)

Carnage Hound* - mount
300 candy corn
Graveyard Window Small
10 candy corn
Mouldering Sanctum
10 candy corn
Nights of the Dead Gooblin
Costume - 1s, 20c
Nights of the Sarnak Skeleton
Costume - 1s, 20c
Ossuary Window of Necrosis
10 candy corn
The Eternal Dirge
10 candy corn
Toxin Eel - housepet
25 candy corn
Grisly Bonecraft Chandelier
10 candy corn
Bone Bat Scare Tile*
15 candy corn
Ghostly House Actor*
50 candy corn
Petamorph Wand: Bleached
Bone Asp - 5 candy corn
Petamorph Wand: Putrescent
Goo - 5 candy corn
Hinged Vampiric Mirror
30 candy corn
Nights of the Rjuarkian Orc
Costume - 1s, 20c
Nights of the Thullosian Ogre
Costume - 1s, 20c
Aged Brittlebone Skitterer
(housepet) 25 candy corn

*NOTES

  • Carnage Hound can be turned into a house item. In mount form it is a level 1, 130% speed ground mount with a +5 to focus, disruption, ministration, subjugation and ordination.
  • The Grisly Bonecraft Chandelier has an extremely long chain.
  • The Bone Bat Scare Tile and the Ghostly House Actor have effects that don't display well in previews. Ocarinah has kindly put together a YouTube video of the effects. (I even forgive her for calling the house actor a gnome instead of a lovely halfling, as it is hard to tell them apart when in ghostly form. ;D)
  • Note that the Bone Bat Scare Tile is NOT a building block. (Probably due to the effect on it.) Also, it CAN be placed under another tile or rug, and have the effect be triggered, which is great for those of you who want to hide it and scare the beejeebies out of folks!
  • Hinged Vampiric Mirror is a door, and default placement is with the bottom of the mirror touching the floor. I was also able to walk through the glass part of the door.

Gravedigging Rewards

Find a shovel near a cluster of gravestones in a city* during the event and pick it up. It will equip in your weapon appearance slot, and you can keep it after the event. You will then want to find gravestones that are clickable, and click on them to "wake the dead". *The gravestones are in every home city EXCEPT Neriak (Queen Christanos does not approve of such things), Darklight Woods, Maj'Dul, Haven, and on the docks in the Great Divide.

A bit more on the shovels: they're not next to every cluster of diggable gravestones, but there are enough of them around that you shouldn't have to look for too long. Once you have a shovel in inventory, you will not be able to see any further shovel spawns. You must have the shovel actually equipped in appearance (not used from wardrobe), in order to be able to wake the dead. If you stuff the shovel in your wardrobe before you are done gravedigging, you will need to then loot and equip another shovel (it can be found again once the shovel is no longer in your physical inventory) before you can resume your digging.

When you have the shovel equipped, certain gravestones in the various clusters of city graves will become clickable to "Wake the Dead". Dig up these graves and you will get: a mob that will attack you, a mob that you hail and can choose if you want to fight or not, a quest trigger mob needed to start the new quest, or a present containing one of several items. You also earn an achievement and title for digging up 25 of the graves.

PROTIP: Turn "Singular Focus" on before gravedigging if you have any AE autoattack ability, and there is a chance of patrolling guards. The last thing you need is to hit a guard when you are fighting the mobs that can spawn from the digging! Really, watch for guards, and watch your AEs!

Arrangement of
Snuffed Candles
Bloody Tooth
Skeleton Plushie
Deadly Terra-Widow
(Familiar)
Fresh Grave Mound
Mummy Head
Petamorph Wand:
Bone Ghoul
Putrescent Slime Cube
(Heirloom fluff pet)

Sooooooo, what about that familiar, eh?

A Quick Note About Event Housepets

Kaitheel made a late-breaking change to "many" event housepets to turn them from no-trade to heirloom. This change isn't just for NoTD, but for other events as well. Unfortunately I don't have a list for you of which ones were/were not changed.

New Quest - Broken Mirrors

In order to begin the quest, you must first do some gravedigging, as mentioned in the section above. Eventually, you will dig up a "forlorn apparition" and need to converse with her for a while in order to be offered the quest "Broken Mirrors". You must then locate her within the city. A guard can point you to "forlorn".

Once you find her again and collect the key next to her feet, there should be a special ghostly horse nearby to click on to zone you into the quest instance.

This quest requires that you find and click on certain memory items within the house. Once you have found them all, you need to start fighting the ghost -- with a twist. You start the fight, then she says something, and a buff appears under her name. You then have to match that buff with the proper memory item in order to damage her. She'll then eventually say something else and the buff will change, forcing you to run to click another memory item, and so on. Eventually, she ends up with a fury buff, which is your cue to head to the bar and start destroying bottles. (It REALLY helps a lot to clear the mobs in the bar BEFORE you finish finding all the memory items the first time, so they're not adding to the chaos during the final encounter with the ghost.) You can avoid much of her damage by making sure the bar, or the table/chairs are between you and the ghost while you're breaking the bottles.

To help you find the right items when you need them during the fight, here is the list of memories and the items linked to them, along with their general locations within the house:

  • Agony - Diary - 2nd floor, East room, on the dressing table (there will be a floating piece of furniture in front of it when you have to go back to it during the fight, so remember where it is!)
  • Betrayal - Rose - 2nd floor, West room, on the bed
  • Deceit - Dagger, entry area, on a table
  • Honor - Scroll - 2nd floor, bookcase on the South end of the landing
  • Rivalry - Letter - 1st floor, East room, a flapping page on a table

The quest gives you a choice between 3 rewards. (Choose between two house items or 25 candy corn.) You can only complete this quest once per year per character.

Acidic Weblurker
(housepet)
Haunted Crib
(animated)

The Haunted Crib floats and bobs about, even in the preview, so it was fun getting a screenshot where the crib was fully visible in the preview screen. ;P

For those with alt-armies and/or a hard time remembering what you have completed, Casdoe of Maj'Dul has updated her Nights of the Dead quest tracker XLS spreadsheet for folks to download. She has also created a PDF version of the quest tracker for those who prefer it in that form. This quest tracker was re-re-updated on September 22 to pick up the pumpkin bombing collection and the Howling achievement series. Thanks again, Casdoe!

New Quest Reward

The returning quest "A Dream, By Any Other Name" which is the second of Setri's quests (the first is "Survive the Night"), has a new quest reward this year. The new option is "Raggedy Setri Plushie". The old rewards (Baleful Scarecrow Mask, Death's Doorstep, or 25 candy corn) are also still options, if you'd prefer one of those.

Other New Achievements

In addition to the hidden gravedigging achievement for digging up 25 graves, there are two sets of new achievements.

There are three achievements for killing the calcified skeletons that are found on the beach in Nektulos Forest. (25, 100, 250)

There is also a hidden series of achievements for howling ... yep, the /howl emote. This one is also a 3-achievement set, but it involves stalking down other players. {grin} You need to wear in armor or appearance slot, one of the following 2 items: sinister werewolf mask from the highest category of race prizes (ghost races are in Antonica and CL during NoTD) or the were-hunters helm for 50 candy corn from the Nights of the Dead vendors located in home crafting areas. Once you are wearing one or the other, you then have to /howl at players. (Each different player counts once, we don't know how long the recycle time is for howling at the same person, but it seems to be over an hour.) Again, the howling achievements are hidden until you complete them.

  • Baying at the Moon - /howl at 10 players
  • Crying at the Moon - /howl at 50 players
  • Howling at the Moon - /howl at 100 players. Rewards "the Moonshadow" suffix title

Don't Go Yet - There's More!

(No, you can't die from pumpkin bombing, but it was a great way to show off the new writeable cenotaph that you can get from the new collection mentioned below, as well as the new vendor-buyable mannequin!)

Pumpkin Pulping Improvements

Pumpkin Pulping was added back in 2014. After I explain what is new, I'll repeat the information that I presented at that time, so you don't need to go rummaging for it.

Pumpkin Pulping has, until this point, been mainly about throwing pumpkin bombs down for your friends to pulp (grab). The rewards and achievements were for the person grabbing up the pumpkins, not the person doing the bombing. This has led to some complaints over the years and the developers, who have already given us a metric boatload of new items this year for the event, decided to do something about it this year.

This year the person throwing the pumpkin bombs gets rewarded every single time they fling down a bomb -- and this is already on the live servers now if you have pumpkin bombs stored from last year.

Target a player in a city zone, throw the pumpkin bomb, and you receive one random reward from "The Spirit of Giving". (More details on pumpkin bombing in the "2014 Details from Pumpkin Pulping" section below.)

The eight cupcake collectibles make up a collection called "Frightfully Frosted Cupcakes". For your reward, you can choose one of three cenotaphs (headstones) that act as signs. Two of the cenotaphs are shown down in the 2014 section below, and the third is new this year - "Inscribed Cenotaph"

The three titles are, of course, self-explanatory.

The other items included as possible rewards are an "ancient desert urn" and a fabled flying mount with very nice stats. You'll note that the urn shows up in the "Spirit of Giving" options above, but the mount will just appear as a random additional reward. (For one alt he showed up on throw #25, for another he showed up on throw #2.)

Baktor will drop into your mount tab if you are notified that you get him, and he can be turned into a house item. Now, at this point, I expect some people to be confused, because when this first snuck in, "Kartob" showed up as a possible reward on Test and Live, and folks were able to get multiples of this no-trade mount. Changes were made to Test and the mount was pulled from the reward box, went through a name change, and a bit of a stat change, and now seems to just add himself to the rewards when he feels like it -- and he doesn't often feel like it! (The rarity has been massively increased.)


2014 Details from Pumpkin Pulping

Again, the below is the original information on Pumpkin Bombing to explain the process and the original rewards. The information above this section covers the new stuff, and the below is a rehash for folks who have either forgotten details, or who are new to the event.

  1. Buy pumpkin bombs from the Nights of the Dead vendors in every home city crafting area. They cost 2 candy corn per. You will want several.
  2. Grab a friend (or more) and have them buy some pumpkin bombs as well.
  3. Head to an open, flat area in a city zone. (Walls, pillars, bumpy terrain can all eat some of your pumpkins on you.)
  4. Target your friend and fire off your pumpkin bomb. 8 mysterious pumpkins will pop in a circle around them, which they have to grab ("pulp"). These pumpkins will give them either a collection item (common), a tree (rare), or the ultra-rare collection item that goes directly in the meta collection. You cannot target your merc, only another player, so really, grab a friend.
  5. Have your friend return the favor and fire a pumpkin bomb around you, because you cannot pulp the pumpkins that you created from your bomb. However, be aware that anyone else can grab the pumpkins that you bombed your friend with (not just your friend), so you'll want to hit somewhere low traffic if you don't want strangers running through grabbing the pumpkins before you and your friend can grab them.

There are four collections of five items each. Handing those in gives you four of the five collection bits needed for the meta-collection. The final piece of the meta-collection, Jack's Lantern is directly from a pumpkin, and is extremely rare. In addition, there are two trees that you can randomly get from the pumpkins, "small autumnal blueleaf sapling" and "autumnal goldleaf sapling".

So, what do you get from the meta collection? You choice of one of two tombstones. Oh, but not just any tombstones, but ones that can be customized with a name and some text. Yep, I foresee some really silly gravestones in people's graveyards...

Small Autumnal Bluleaf Sapling
Autumnal Goldleaf Sapling
Etched Centopath
Engraved Centopath

There are achievements for pulping 1, 50, 250, 500 and 1000 pumpkins (that we know of). After you receive the 500 pumpkin achievement, you earn a title "The Pumpkin King".

Created: 2017-09-13 07:02:44          
Last Modified By: Niami Denmother          
Last Modified on: 2017-10-05 08:05:49          

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