shaman epic faction WTF???
 

So I've had to have a friend charm the stupid thing for me since it isn't considered an animal. I got the first gem and turned that in at freeport. gem. I've turned in two sets woe/envy/marrs promise. I'm still apprehensive??? The wandering spirit also gave me a gem when charmed but the spirit in Ej won't accept it. Is this working as intended?

Sort of.

The part that isn't working as intended is the fact that shamans start at Apprehensively. Every class should be defaulted to apprehensively upon character creation, EXCEPT Shamans. They should default to Indifferently, allowing you to do these parts of the quest.

A few people have randomly posted evidence but there is no specific thread about this issue. Get a few quotes from 2000-2001 about starting at indifferent and you should be gold and they can patch it so that all shamans begin at indifferent.

?

Yeah need some research about this. Easy to fix if so.

Or, create shaman on eqlive, find a TrueSpirit npc, con it. Screenshot and submit. Better evidence than nothing.

Did you skip the test of patience? I don't know how much faction it gives vs. a woe/envy turn-in, but it might be more than one turn-in (which would explain what you're seeing, if you skipped it).

On live (Vulak server) I was able to raise faction by speaking to the true spirit in BB after killing Peg Leg and then porting to WC and running to Freeport to turn in the gem to Bondl Felligan. This was done with an Iksar Shaman without any other faction work. I repeated the process until faction was maxed and skipped to the tear turn in portion of the quest. I have not played a shaman on p99 but this is how the shaman epic is working on Live.

This isn't a classic post by any means but from this other thread:

I can look for more in era about shamans starting indifferent or I can log on my PC shaman to confirm the above quote.

2007 Allakhazam

2001 Allakhazam

lets get this fixed. Is there anyone that believes that shamans ought to have to track down an enchanter at multiple points during this quest in order to get the damn mob charmed so that it will talk to them?

Might I direct you to the Paladin Fiery Avenger quest? It really wasn't that implausible of a notion. And you really only needed to track one down til you are out of apprehensively. Epic quests take collaboration and tea worked throughout their duration. Even with this restriction it is the easiest epic bar rogues. Atleast you can still finish it in your low 50s where's necros mages Druids warriors rangers wizards are in guilds that kill raid mobs every week and they still don't have their epic after many months of that because epic drops off raid bosses are rare.

It should be fixed, yes. But it really isn't that unreasonable of a bar to set to achieve an epic. You want unreasonable let's talk about the necro of Mage epics.

not real evidence obviously -- and I don't know how you guys can remember so much about stuff you did ~13+ years ago -- but having done shammy epic during velious era when i was like 14, four things stand out in my memory:

1) rocking atari shield

2) swimming out into the middle of nowhere solo being fucking terrifying even doing the surface clipping thing. fuck big bodies of water during classic eq, seriously

3) leaving a laggy streak of purple particles from EJ through FoB after getting sow shoes

and 4) having to get an enc to charm a dog for me one (1) time to get the whole thing started

pretty sure i would have done all the steps in order without repeating anything, didn't know any better at the time

While we're talking about the Shaman epic... I have no hard evidence besides doing the quest 3 times on live.

I've never heard of anyone having to charm anything to do the quest. If you do the quest "normally" you should always have enough faction for each step. (This is as a shaman... are we talking about non-shaman faction? Because that was different and required some grinding)

The biggest inaccuracy with the epic here is how common the books are in CoM. No one ever used the CoM books to faction skip on live, yet everyone uses that method here. The drop rate on most of the books might be a bit right, but the Student's Log from the Spectral Courier was too rare for that to be an option. I personally spent about 16 hours camping that one book when I did my epic in Kunark. That was highly unusual, but the Courier still spawns way too often on P99. 1 spawn per 4 hours or so would be a start, instead of 1 spawn per 30-60 minutes as it is now.

The method that everyone used to faction skip on live was turning in Woe/Envy + Marr's Promise. I feel the faction you receive for this section of the quest is too low. It was 3-4 turn ins of Woe/Envy/Marr's Promise (including the gem turn in in EJ) to max faction on live.

Here's a non-classic comment about starting the epic:

Then there was a discussion about whether Sneak would have been enough... some people saying that an Indifferent faction about Sneak (0) is required... no conclusion was actually made though.

Here's a shaman factioning up by doing the first part of the quest: