This is a link to the wiki page on PVE "lairs." These are mini encounters with champion level bosses located in the RVR zones of each tier (to prevent higher levels from farming the loots.)
http://warhammeronline.wikia.com/wiki/Lair
A friend of mine emailed me this blog page with a really good run-down of the first tier lairs they had discovered.
Edit - I linked the images from the blog, but they don't seem to work.
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Warhammer Online PVE: The hidden lairs of War in tier 1
via a wall of text by [email protected] (br3ntbr0) on 9/22/08
In this article I'm going to take some time to touch on one of the PVE aspects of Warhammer Online that I have been pleasantly surprised with, lairs. Lairs are small, hidden areas that are tucked away in remote parts of the game world. They consist of a single Champion (read: elite) mob that has a really good loot table for a mob of its level. The twist on this is that each lair has its own special puzzle or something to figure out in regard to access. You can't just walk in, you have to meet the criteria to enter and have solved the puzzle. My guild on Thorgrim has been exploring these lairs and solving the riddles of the Tier 1 lairs, and you can see that reflected in the ultra cool snotling headpiece that my Goblin Shaman is sporting in the picture below:
This cool lid is brought to you by Stinkeye, courtesy of the Bandit Queen.
Warning, if you don't want to know too much info about the tier 1 lairs in Warhammer Online, you may not want to read furter. My experience in lairs and spoilers are incoming...Here I'll discuss the specifics of the 3 lairs I've discovered with my guild in tier 1. All 3 lairs we discovered are in RVR areas, so the chicken mechanic applies here. This guarantees that high level players will not be able to come back to these lairs and help out the lower level players to "farm" gear from the mobs in said lairs. Tier 1 caps out at level 11, and the RVR flag should guarantee that level 30's or 40's don't come back here to farm the gear for other players or alts. This seemed to be well thought out by Mythic to prevent such exploitation.
Norsca tier 1 lair:
I believe this all started when someone in our guild was exploring and found a lair in southern Norsca. I haven't found any info on this lair posted anywhere, so I'm not sure if we are one of the earliest groups to discover it. Regardless, we were able to find little info on it, so we had to figure some things out for ourselves. In fact, the only lair shown on the wiki was a level 40 lair. Here's a map showing the location of this lair:
Here you'll find the Tier 1 lair in southern Norsca.
With no info as to how to access this lair, we were left to simply investigate and try to figure it out. This lair presented us with a unique puzzle. Out in front of the lair door were several rune pedestals on the ground, each with a different icon engraved on them. We soon discovered that each rune is specific to a race, and once the appropriate player of a given race stood on top of the pedestal that an aura began to surround them:
A cool puzzle is used to unlock this lair.
Upon opening, we proceeded to enter and kill the lair boss. I'll have to update this post later with a picture of the boss, as I've forgotten what the name of the lair and the boss inside are
But now you know how to find it! The boss inside dropped a level 20 shield for Chosen, which seemed weird that a level 11 mob dropped level 20 loot.
Ekrund tier 1, Lair of the Bandit Queen:
With loot lust coursing through our veins, we began exploring in the game and on the web to see what we could find. We quickly discovered the Lair of the Bandit Queen and the info linked there as to how to open the door. Thank goodness that someone posted the way to open it, because I have no idea how we would have ever figured out that you need to kill an enemy player while the aura it gives you is active. Like the Norsca lair, there are ZERO hints as to how to open these doors unless you find a spoiler online or in a game guide by chance.
This lair in particular is a problem on less populated servers, as finding an enemy player close enough to the lair to kill is problematic. We did discover one thing about the aura though, if one player in a group stands by the door, another player in that same group can go out really far and kill another player and still have the aura. This range does have a limit, but it seems fairly long.
Players with 2 accounts can easily create a sacrificial player of the opposite faction in order to open the door though. Don't ask me how I know this ;p I'll try and update this post with a screenshot of the lair door and the map. At the time of this post the servers are down for maintenance, but the wiki link above gives some great directions to the lair.
Now with the door open, we proceeded to go inside and kill the boss, named Renatta Betz. She was no pushover to a group that had no level 11's in it. I'm told that a solid group of level 11's can do this with one group. We had several level 5's and 7's and so forth, so we made a mini raid out of it. These lairs don't appear to be population capped, so we were able to bring in two full groups in a warband to take her down.
Our first try went poorly since we had no idea what to expect. She death touched our tank (the Norsca boss does this too) and then proceeded to kill everyone else. We then figured out that we could send in a squig herder pet and let her death touch the squig instead of one of us. It worked, and we killed her. To my excitement, she dropped a rare level 10 Waaaghat of the Bandit Queen for me. Apparently no one else with the curse client has this yet, as I could not find it on wardb.com to link it, but here's what it looks like:
This is a picture of a dead sexy Goblin and his amazing new hat.
The Blighted Isle tier 1, Lair of Lady Alisha:
Later, someone else in the guild shouted that they found yet another lair in the Elven tier 1 pairing. This lair was called the Lair of Lady Alisha and had yet another unique way to open the door. You have to swim around the back side of the island to a hidden cove where there is an item you can click on to unlock the door. See the images below for the map and pictures of the access area, which contains an item called "Rune of Control":
This map shows where you'll need to swim to access the cove.
When you see this cove you've found the way to open the lair.
We piled in and engaged this boss, but something went wrong and we had to run out to try to reset the encounter. The door closed and we had to re-open it. However, something went wrong and we were unable to open the door again as the rune went inactive. I don't know if this is designed to be a 1 attempt only type of lair, but that's what happened to us. The respawn timers of the lair bosses is unknown to me right now, but we do no its longer than a few hours as we re-checked these pretty often to see how soon we could go back. They do seem to be available daily unless someone has killed it recently. For this lair though, many of us leveled up and were unable to go back to try again, so perhaps we'll do so on some alts one day to see the encounter again.
Well, that's it for my look at tier 1 lairs in Warhammer Online. I will close by saying that I am highly impressed with these lairs and the bosses and loot inside them. I didn't think I'd be doing so much PVE so soon (our server is low population during non peak hours) so we resort to PVE since we get no RVR or scenarios on the Destro side. Regardless, we had alot of fun figuring out how to get them open. Like all mmo content, the spoilers are now going to be widely spread across the internet so the challenge won't be there for many players that come through later. For that I am sorry, but it seems unavoidable. I figured I'd share my experience in order to reinforce why I had fun and what makes this PVE content so good.
There are many more lairs to be found and explored aside from the existing lists of known lairs, so get out there and find them!
http://warhammeronline.wikia.com/wiki/Lair
A friend of mine emailed me this blog page with a really good run-down of the first tier lairs they had discovered.
Edit - I linked the images from the blog, but they don't seem to work.
---
Warhammer Online PVE: The hidden lairs of War in tier 1
via a wall of text by [email protected] (br3ntbr0) on 9/22/08
In this article I'm going to take some time to touch on one of the PVE aspects of Warhammer Online that I have been pleasantly surprised with, lairs. Lairs are small, hidden areas that are tucked away in remote parts of the game world. They consist of a single Champion (read: elite) mob that has a really good loot table for a mob of its level. The twist on this is that each lair has its own special puzzle or something to figure out in regard to access. You can't just walk in, you have to meet the criteria to enter and have solved the puzzle. My guild on Thorgrim has been exploring these lairs and solving the riddles of the Tier 1 lairs, and you can see that reflected in the ultra cool snotling headpiece that my Goblin Shaman is sporting in the picture below:
This cool lid is brought to you by Stinkeye, courtesy of the Bandit Queen.
Warning, if you don't want to know too much info about the tier 1 lairs in Warhammer Online, you may not want to read furter. My experience in lairs and spoilers are incoming...Here I'll discuss the specifics of the 3 lairs I've discovered with my guild in tier 1. All 3 lairs we discovered are in RVR areas, so the chicken mechanic applies here. This guarantees that high level players will not be able to come back to these lairs and help out the lower level players to "farm" gear from the mobs in said lairs. Tier 1 caps out at level 11, and the RVR flag should guarantee that level 30's or 40's don't come back here to farm the gear for other players or alts. This seemed to be well thought out by Mythic to prevent such exploitation.
Norsca tier 1 lair:
I believe this all started when someone in our guild was exploring and found a lair in southern Norsca. I haven't found any info on this lair posted anywhere, so I'm not sure if we are one of the earliest groups to discover it. Regardless, we were able to find little info on it, so we had to figure some things out for ourselves. In fact, the only lair shown on the wiki was a level 40 lair. Here's a map showing the location of this lair:
Here you'll find the Tier 1 lair in southern Norsca.
With no info as to how to access this lair, we were left to simply investigate and try to figure it out. This lair presented us with a unique puzzle. Out in front of the lair door were several rune pedestals on the ground, each with a different icon engraved on them. We soon discovered that each rune is specific to a race, and once the appropriate player of a given race stood on top of the pedestal that an aura began to surround them:
A cool puzzle is used to unlock this lair.
Upon opening, we proceeded to enter and kill the lair boss. I'll have to update this post later with a picture of the boss, as I've forgotten what the name of the lair and the boss inside are
But now you know how to find it! The boss inside dropped a level 20 shield for Chosen, which seemed weird that a level 11 mob dropped level 20 loot.Ekrund tier 1, Lair of the Bandit Queen:
With loot lust coursing through our veins, we began exploring in the game and on the web to see what we could find. We quickly discovered the Lair of the Bandit Queen and the info linked there as to how to open the door. Thank goodness that someone posted the way to open it, because I have no idea how we would have ever figured out that you need to kill an enemy player while the aura it gives you is active. Like the Norsca lair, there are ZERO hints as to how to open these doors unless you find a spoiler online or in a game guide by chance.
This lair in particular is a problem on less populated servers, as finding an enemy player close enough to the lair to kill is problematic. We did discover one thing about the aura though, if one player in a group stands by the door, another player in that same group can go out really far and kill another player and still have the aura. This range does have a limit, but it seems fairly long.
Players with 2 accounts can easily create a sacrificial player of the opposite faction in order to open the door though. Don't ask me how I know this ;p I'll try and update this post with a screenshot of the lair door and the map. At the time of this post the servers are down for maintenance, but the wiki link above gives some great directions to the lair.
Now with the door open, we proceeded to go inside and kill the boss, named Renatta Betz. She was no pushover to a group that had no level 11's in it. I'm told that a solid group of level 11's can do this with one group. We had several level 5's and 7's and so forth, so we made a mini raid out of it. These lairs don't appear to be population capped, so we were able to bring in two full groups in a warband to take her down.
Our first try went poorly since we had no idea what to expect. She death touched our tank (the Norsca boss does this too) and then proceeded to kill everyone else. We then figured out that we could send in a squig herder pet and let her death touch the squig instead of one of us. It worked, and we killed her. To my excitement, she dropped a rare level 10 Waaaghat of the Bandit Queen for me. Apparently no one else with the curse client has this yet, as I could not find it on wardb.com to link it, but here's what it looks like:
This is a picture of a dead sexy Goblin and his amazing new hat.
The Blighted Isle tier 1, Lair of Lady Alisha:
Later, someone else in the guild shouted that they found yet another lair in the Elven tier 1 pairing. This lair was called the Lair of Lady Alisha and had yet another unique way to open the door. You have to swim around the back side of the island to a hidden cove where there is an item you can click on to unlock the door. See the images below for the map and pictures of the access area, which contains an item called "Rune of Control":
This map shows where you'll need to swim to access the cove.
When you see this cove you've found the way to open the lair.
We piled in and engaged this boss, but something went wrong and we had to run out to try to reset the encounter. The door closed and we had to re-open it. However, something went wrong and we were unable to open the door again as the rune went inactive. I don't know if this is designed to be a 1 attempt only type of lair, but that's what happened to us. The respawn timers of the lair bosses is unknown to me right now, but we do no its longer than a few hours as we re-checked these pretty often to see how soon we could go back. They do seem to be available daily unless someone has killed it recently. For this lair though, many of us leveled up and were unable to go back to try again, so perhaps we'll do so on some alts one day to see the encounter again.
Well, that's it for my look at tier 1 lairs in Warhammer Online. I will close by saying that I am highly impressed with these lairs and the bosses and loot inside them. I didn't think I'd be doing so much PVE so soon (our server is low population during non peak hours) so we resort to PVE since we get no RVR or scenarios on the Destro side. Regardless, we had alot of fun figuring out how to get them open. Like all mmo content, the spoilers are now going to be widely spread across the internet so the challenge won't be there for many players that come through later. For that I am sorry, but it seems unavoidable. I figured I'd share my experience in order to reinforce why I had fun and what makes this PVE content so good.
There are many more lairs to be found and explored aside from the existing lists of known lairs, so get out there and find them!