Phantom Blade  

 

I found two of these "Phantom Blade" items on what looked to me like a magician-player summoned swarm-pet that was orphaned (meaning the player was not online and not in the zone, but its pet was still in the zone). I attacked the orphaned-pet NPC, and at the end of the fight, I found two of these on it.

Specifically, I was in Velketor's Labyrinth, and found this player pet standing at the door to Velketor's room (where Velketor the Fabled Sorcerer was currently up) facing into the room. This was on the povar server. I was on my druid, and the tracking list showed that this "pet" was likely in the zone for quite some time before I arrived, as there were many respawned mobs in the tracking list above it.

At the time of this posting, there had been recent problems with player pets staying in the zone if the played went linkdead. The bug was fixed, but it seems that sometimes this still happens.

I can't find any details as to where this item may be from. My guess is that when the server creates the swarm-pet, the pet has this on it. But usually the pet poofs after the swarm is over, so nobody knows that this is on it. I don't know of any way to obtain this item otherwise.

Why I believe it is a swarm pet is that the NPC was named in the form of "<playername>`s pet", was white-con to the level 80 druid I was on at the time (so level 80 NPC), and whose graphic was that of a gargoyle. This naming convention, and the gargoyle graphic level 80 pet, reminds me of one of the magician swarm-pet spells around this player level.

Other research - on the eqplayers.com item search system, I find that this item has been "discovered" on only a few servers so far, stemming back to around August 2006 or so. Similarly Magelo has its first entry as July 23, 2007. So this is not an item that people come across too often.

It's likely that this is happened upon by people when pets get orphaned for whatever reason (maybe not due to this recent pet-stays-in-zone bug but due to some other long-standing bug where a pet may stay in the zone).

I gave the two items to my magician's air pet who had just been summoned and did not have any player-given weapons equipped. The pet's visible on-screen graphic did not show anything in its hands. Similarly when I saw the orphaned player's pet who dropped these, it did not have any visible graphic of any equipped weapons.

Hopefully this helps understand where this item may be from.

Rondor

[edited typos and dates]
[edited equipped look info]

Edited, Mar 24th 2009 4:13am by RondorNorador

Edited, Mar 24th 2009 4:18am by RondorNorador

Edited, Mar 24th 2009 4:35am by RondorNorador