Watching the Watchers

One of my favorite pieces of gear in DDO are the Cannith Boots of Propulsion.  It's one of those items that all my characters get.  And farming for them isn't too bad, though I have had to make several runs to get them, at times.  But this post is not about the boots - they just happen to be the vehicle for the rest of the story...

So on our last Cannith guild night, we decided to run our L20 characters through "Schemes of the Enemy" to farm for the boots.  To help maximize our chances (in theory) , we ran on HE.  Now, to be fair, we've been pretty much running everything on 'elite' throughout our level progression, and only dropping to a different difficulty when we could not figure a way to win but still wanted/needed the completion (for flagging, and such).  There have only been (less than) a handful of quests where we dropped to a different difficulty.  But I digress...

We tried bluffing and diplo'ing the soldiers outside the 'vault' main entrance, but no lock.  We decided to leave them alone and not fight them.  We get to the doggie door, defeat the dogs and their artificer master and...two out of three of us get boots.  Huzzah!  We decide to go ahead and continue to the end, seeing as how we hadn't run the quest before and 2 out of 3 of us had already gotten the boots, knowing that there were more chances after the end fight.

We actually had a relatively easy time getting through to the final fight.  A death or two, all recoverable without recalling, and nothing too serious.  We boldly enter the final area and get things kicked-off.  And that when things started falling apart.  Not quickly, mind you, but still - falling apart.

All was relatively fine through two crystal destructions, but after that, our hires were dead, we had several deaths so equipment was wearing out, Peacemaker was down to about 50%-ish, but those thrice-da..., um...thrice-darned watcher constructs were simply getting out of hand.

You see, apparently on elite (not sure about the other difficulty settings), those things just keep spawning.  Notice, I did not say "re-spawning", as that implies that more only come after you kill some.  No, I said "spawning".  It doesn't matter if you kill any or not, they just keep appearing, multiplying like rabbits.  To make matters worse, many of them spawn as champions.  And while the 'base' units are relatively easy to kill, the champions, of course are much harder.  On top of that, even with a dedicated watcher-killer (that would be me), they seem to spawn faster than I could kill them, so there was an ever-increasing supply of them.

I kid you not - by the time we had finally taken out Peacemaker, there must have been over 100 of those dastardly constructs (I wish I had a pic, but neither I nor my guildies though to take a screen-shot...as far as I know).  I'm certain we were killed more times by the watchers than by Peacemaker.  We actually did have a couple of recalls, because we were soooo close to killing Peacemaker (roughly 10% remaining) when we were all running around in our skivvies (thanks to all the broken gear), but finally - painfully, we managed to take down Peacemaker and stop the spawning of the watchers.

Unfortunately, unlike some other quests, killing the final boss does not kill-off or make inert the watchers.  So we spent a few more minutes - and deaths - killing them off before getting that sweet, sweet end reward of (7) chests.

And yes, our last party member did indeed pull the boots.

It was probably one of the longest end-fights we'd done as a group, to date.