Urash Dâr is a questing zone in the Ikorbân region built for level 150 content. I was the area owner for this zone and built all of the quests players can complete outside of the Epic Story quests. This included designing and building the quests in the landscape as well as writing the story elements that go with them. As part of the quest chains I also built story instances for players to allow for more set piece quest and story moments which involved more complex implementation to have more story elements outside of a regular quest.

Other work I did in this zone involved building points of interest in the landscape to accompany quest beats, adding to monster camps and doing custom placement to ensure that quests flowed well, and building out repeatable quests in the area that gave players things to do even after completing the story in the form of bounty quests.

Group Content

In addition to standard quests, I built multiple areas intended for group content. One in Dil-irmíz in the under-city of Umbar and another in the northern section of Urash Dâr.

For these areas I built various repeatable quests for daily and weekly resets for players to farm reputations or rare materials in the form of bounty or collection quests. I also built out rare spawn monsters that roamed the area as mini-bosses that gave players valuable rewards. Part of the work on these areas, especially in Urash Dâr, was to integrate it into the story of the zone and so they both were built with narrative reasons behind the monsters in these areas being much stronger than the surrounding zones and also acted as friction to prevent players from easily getting into areas that we wanted to block them off from.

• The Anâkhi Ensemble

  • The second boss is a council fight with three separate bosses, one melee, one ranged, and one support. The fight is designed so that the players must chip away at the bosses health bars while there pools of area denial coming out through the fight as well as some adds being spawned. Each boss has a major ability that can be interrupted, and if it isn’t, then it will likely kill the targeted player. The intent of the design was having the players deal with multiple enemies but requiring that they focus on specific things and ensure that they rotate their interrupts and defensive abilities well while not becoming overwhelmed or running out of space in the arena. The boss has an alternate version of the encounter if players enter the instance Solo in which they will simply fight one boss at a time with different dialogue being played to tie it into the story better. This allows for players to still experience the fight but not suffer from a limited number of tools against three enemies at once.

• Nâkhugir

  • The final boss of the instance is the most mechanically involved fight. The players will fight a giant scorpion in its small arena which has multiple damage over time abilities and can cause some area denial to spawn. Each time the boss is “killed” it will rush to the center and burrow under ground. Once this happens, it will spawn a set number of smaller scorpions who simply walk towards the center to burrow and players must kill them before they can reach their goal. Each scorpion that reaches the center will heal the boss 10% of its max HP when it comes back up from its burrowing state. Players must repeat this process until there are no more scorpions left to reach the boss when it burrows. Additionally, the room is filled with scorpions on the ground which cause constant room-wide damage unless players pick up one of the torches located around the room which gives them a temporary buff to stop the AoE as well as remove a “shadow” effect that is on the smaller scorpions on higher tiers which prevents them from taking damage. The intent of the fight is for it to be an attrition fight of slowly whittling down the boss as the adds that spawn until you can finally kill it, all while moving around the room from torch to torch and handling the buff timers on them to ensure you don’t run out and die from the room AoE.

More information about the instance can be found here: Ashunûg, the Fane of the Accursed