You, Again?

I think I have a nemesis.  Isn't that a requirement for a superhero and/or supervillain?  To have a nemesis?  Based on what happened in an EE run of "Bargain of Blood" the other day, I must have one.

Back in July of last year*, I posted about a certain red-named "rare" mob that frequents the various quests in the "Sentinels of Stormreach" (SoS) chain:  The First Mate.  The red-named minotaur can also be found in the wilderness area of the Searing Heights.  And since you need to go through the Searing Heights to get the the Bargain of Blood quest, it is not that unusual to run into the First Mate in the wilderness, and then again in the quest.

But I have never seen - or even heard of anyone else ever seeing - what I saw on that fateful run....

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It was guild night and one of our regulars e-mailed in and mentioned that they were just too tired to login.  No worries - real life happens.  So we remaining two wondered what we'd do.  Well, since we both have epic-level toons, and we both have some gear we'd like to epic-ify, we decided on some Shard, Seal, and Scroll (SSS) hunting.  We settled on running the Sentinels chain in hopes of obtaining the (too) hard to come by seal of Elyd Edge.

According to the DDOWiki, seals from SoS can drop in any epic chest, so we figured we'd start with Bargain of Blood, as there are a few chests in there.  We enter on EE and proceed.  Nothing out of the ordinary - go through the first gate, go through the second, 'main' gate, fight our way up the ramps, over to where the assassin optional is (destroy the logbook) and see the ol' red-named First Mate jump into the fray.  No worries - he is a rare spawn, so he does show up on occasion.  We dispatch him without too much trouble.

We then make our way over to the first set of shrines, and we run into a little trouble because of a couple of spell-chucking champions.  A few death, nothing too serious, and we're whittling down the remaining mobs, when all-of-a-sudden... WTFrenchToast?  Guess who shows up - AGAIN - jumping over the spiked, log wall, no less?

Yep, mister rare red-named himself.

This bizarre occurrence has me once again feeling supervillainesque...Wait!  Didn't we just kill you not more than 5 minutes ago????

Yes.  Yes, we had.

I have never, ever seen a rare - the SAME rare - spawn TWICE in the same quest/instance before.  How is that even possible?  And yet, there is no denying that he did.  (I wish I had video, but alas! I am not a streamer...)

So is that the next step in DDO's evolution?  Start taking too long in quests and the rares start respawning every 5 minutes?  Only perhaps this time, they get stronger with each respawn?

Oy, vey!  It's enough to make one's head explode...

Of course, to make matters worse, neither time was there a chest left behind to loot.  I mean, OK, if you're going to keep throwing the same rare in the same quest/instance at me, at LEAST give me a nice chest to loot.

Adding insult to injury, there was no Elyd Edge seal found in that quest, either (though we did get a chimera's tooth seal).

So we next decided to run Storm the Beaches on EE.  And guess who dared to show his ugly red-named self in there?

*Sigh*  He - just - won't - stay - dead.

But at least he only showed up once that time...once.

...I'm really starting to hate that cow....


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* That being 2016, for those reading (much) farther in the future than when this post was originally made.