My thanks to the EMs for running this event, and for going back and locating the stragglers through out the dungeon.
I was in some ways in an ideal position to appreciate the different experiences people had of the event, because whilst it may not have been obvious, I was actually playing two accounts at once from my computer; one on the Enhanced Client as Aron on my own account, and to avoid memory/resource clashes, my friend The Black Cobra's account under the Classic Client at the same time, as he had to work tonight.
Here "we both" are, and the first Greater Dragon I ever tamed, waiting for the initial gate;
From there, I'd move myself forward to fight, and every time the spawn was clear, move the Black Cobra up and hide him at the back, appearing only to ressurect anyone I saw who was dead nearby on that character too. Neither one of "us" died even once, although I did lose my dragon a single time to Exodus; however whilst the Enhanced Client (with all graphical thrills turned off, and FPS limited to 60 so it didn't try and over-reach itself) didn't crash a single time during the event, Cobra over on the Classic Client crashed about 8 times in the final battles with the Minions and with Exodus himself, failing to log back in because of instantly crashing again at least 2 of those times. My computer isn't high end, although it is nerdily tweaked a bit, so it was simply the CC was unable to handle massive amounts of players and effects I think.
From here, we moved on to the camp outside Trinsic; the rest of the shots will be in EC, as by default CC doesn't have a screenshotting system and I didn't want to risk running FRAPS etc on top of a dual-boxing attempt...
The arrival of our guides for the day;
Nimuaq was not best pleased Dupre didn't have the older, suit-like armour as seen on UOGuide... There wasn't much introductory speech it seems, we very quickly went through the gate to Honor in Ilshenar, and made our way past Ver Lor Reg towards Exodus Dungeon;
A lot of people were delayed by the spawn (especially that which spawned as a paragon) whilst a few ran on too far ahead and got themselves killed, NO NAMES MENTIONED OF COURSE...
Waiting for Dupre to go ahead, we then went into Exodus itself, and headed directly west (north west on your screen due to isometric perspective) where we found a wall blocking our progress... the frustration with which apparently drove one of my wider alliance members crazy, and made him attack my dragon and get himself killed; the ONLY thing I managed to kill in this entire part due to the refusal of pets to normally attack Exodus minions.
Dupre would claim the resulting hole in the wall was "in the north east corner of the room", but it wasn't; it's actually just about where you can see people "smashing" here;
Inside we found ourselves in the remains of Ver Lor Reg; our goal was to break down the walls and then destroy all the exodus minions inside. I tucked The Black Cobra safely in the northern-most corner here, and proceeded to fight my way around along with everyone else;
Even amongst all this death and destruction, I was shocked to find our Lord Protector was still more interested in stealing people's skimpies...
Having finally cleared all of the Destroyers, Dupre led us into the centre of Ver Lor Reg to regroup. Suddenly Exodus leapt out upon us... killed a few people, and then promptly fell down a hole into the void on the left!
He's somewhere under that first mob of dragons there...
It was here however my best memories of the event came too; Taking specially coloured cloth from my bag, our guild the Sosaria Red Cross set up a field hospital and started ressurecting people as we aim to do. That's John on the Red Cross there, myself with my dragon, who has just died fighting Exodus, and myself again on Black Cobra (with the black cloak and blue shield) ressurecting people when Aron was on mana cool down...
Perhaps realising we were more organised then he, Exodus ran off slowly towards the far left corner of Ver Lor Reg, until he was trapped and unable to flee further;
He's not actually red in the EC, he's just currently selected as target for some of my attacks...
Cornered and down to about 8% hit points here, the end was soon to come; perhaps he died knowing that, despite the complaints about tamers, dragons just can't get close enough if there's a row of players in front of them... only one seemed to have moved fast enough to stay in melee range, the rest were struggling to get past the walls or the rows of cheap armour ahead.
But die all the same he did;
And this is where the event went sour for me. Neither Aron nor the Black Cobra got a scroll, despite getting hits in from a greater dragon and constant earthquaking when he was within range on Aron, or using Earthquake/ Energy Vortex on Cobra. Nor apparently did the single person who couldn't maintain any maturity whilst visiting Europa, ("iii") who proceeded to disgustingly abuse the EMs for the rest of the event. Meanwhile in Global Chat before we'd even left Exodus some people were spamming theirs for sale at 95m. I didn't care about the gold, but having played Ultima III myself, all I wanted was a little personal reminder I'd been there at the eventual death of Exodus... Sigh.
We proceeded to leave, and move to Honor gate. I missed a screen shot of the actual explosion, but here's the last known photograph of the working gate, and then some quite salty language from Dupre when he realised it was gone;
We returned to the camp outside Trinsic, and by now considerably depressed, I quickly ran all my own characters to the book spawner, to ensure I could hand those on to people who missed the event and didn't let me have their account for the day too, and then logged off. I thus missed what ever Dupre and Fynn had to say I'm afraid, but I did get one final screenshot of Noskette fanning the crowds cool after their long struggle...