With our farming of LDON done, it was time to head back to Omens Of War expansion into Muramite Proving Grounds. Omens have proven to be a bit more difficult than we were expecting. In part, we believe that we had some weaknesses in gear slots and other things like lack of Advanced Abilities (AA).

The journey to Muramite Proving Grounds can be a rather short one. While you can get here the long way going through a bunch of Omens zones. You can also just buy a stone in the guild house and set the teleporter to Walls of Slaughter. It is then just a short run to the zone line for Muramite Proving Grounds.

The only real trick to the whole thing is being careful of some names that run around on the way to the tunnel that leads up to Muramite Proving Grounds. Partway up the ramp into the tunnel is also a massive outdoor raid boss that has some devastating DoTs that will kill you if you get aggression on the boss and do not get it cured. So being careful while running around with invisibility on is best.

The door into Muramite Proving Grounds is quite iconic and even intimidating. It is a metal-looking door with a bunch of spikes on it. It is not the hardest zone in Omens but it is getting close. While there are a bunch of trails to run within there we will just be sticking to grinding for experience.

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There is a little bit of room at zone in if you need a place to gather a group or set up. It is however not the safest place in the world. These days the place was dead silent. Back in the day, you would have people here trying to solo or getting aggression on something while trying to make it out to a group and train back trying to escape.

We took it as a moment to buff up and get all set up. I was busy double-checking I had everything ready to go on the shadow knight and cleric I was boxing. As there were some changes I’ve made since we were last in Omens.

One thing we could not quite work out was where to set up a camp at. I know I’ve spent a decent amount of time here. It was not as much as some other Omens zones but still, you would think I could recall. Truth be told I always had to use my map to get through this place as I tend to get lost easily and this is just one of those kinds of zones.

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The zone layout is a bit odd. You do have a few dead ends and some other confusing places to navigate. All I could recall about my “favorite” spot back back in the day was it is within the range of a couple of names and not that far from Riftseaker’s Sanctum. I naturally can’t wait to get into the zone but we need a few more levels at least.

We ended up mostly wandering around and having a rolling camp. While we had some decent damage this place was a lot harder than the LDONs we were running. Granted the experience here was also a lot better.

I can recall from back in the day this place was a lot easier than what we were facing now. That was because by this point I was a huge raider with insane gear, clickable items, and AAs. At some point, I’ll need to backtrack and perhaps work on my Epics for at least the cleric. I do miss having my shield and one-hander that you can revive with.

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As we were running around the zone we did aim to hit up as many names as we could. We ended up getting a few minor upgrades. While the gear itself was not that great. Some of it did help fill weak gaps in our gear such as this earning that the shadow knight looted.

I have also been spending a lot of time going over AAs and seeing what ones I need and trying to get used to having them again. While I found most of the ones for the shadow knight a bit lackluster as he has a few for his pet that I never use. I felt right at home when it came to all the fun stuff I could get on the cleric.

One thing that starts to make me playing a cleric feel powerful and why I can’t stand playing a healer in other games is the number of options I can have available to use. There are a lot of situations that can occur like a bad pull, someone training creatures, a hard name, a bad tank, dps overdoing it, a random spawn in camp, and most importantly me being lazy.

While there are a bunch of great AAs for the cleric that is passive that I have been picking up. Such as ones that reduce mana cost, reduce my aggression from healing, increase how much I can heal for, and so forth. It is about the ones you can activate and use for a short powerful gain.

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Since I did not have my shield epic I was lacking having a way to use the entire group's health to my advantage during a bad situation. So one AA I wanted was called Divine Arbitration. While you need to be careful when dealing with people with not a lot of health. It balances out the health of the group to be equal. Making it so you can recover if a DPS or a tank is about to get killed. It has a short 3-minute timer as well.

The cost of using such an ability tends to be rather high, however. If you are using it to save the tank before they get killed the rest of the group is likely to be in low health. This means you are going to have to use quite a costly mana healing spell such a group heals quickly after to recover.

There is also one that can be used to heal the group. So as you can imagen some of these AAs pair well with each other. I started to quickly fill up my hot bar with all kinds of fun things I could use in the situation that would warrant it.

While a lot of them feel like must-haves. Some certainly feel like they are worth their weight in gold more than others. Such as Silent Casting which lasts for a short time and had a bit of a cooldown. I tend to use that when adds get pulled so I can get heals in and essentially reduce my chances of getting one of the adds attacking me for healing to almost zero.

As far as the shadow knight, I picked up anything that looked like it would keep him alive longer for passive AAs. I also did pick up his harm touch, leech touch. Along with anything else that might help him hold aggression better. I however just don’t get as excited for his AAs as I do for the clerics.

Final Thoughts

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We still have a lot of grinding to go before we get the levels we want to try out Riftseaker’s Sanctum which I already know is going to be a challenging but fun zone. I’m not sure yet if we are going to continue grinding here, go elsewhere, and explore some other places.

If we stick out here there more than likely won’t be a post next week for this series. If we do some exploring elsewhere then there is bound to be something to share about. Leveling has slowed down a lot. There are also a few other things I want to start working on other than grinding for experience.