Quillmane  

My infos are mostly based on this great guide by vmardian but I updated it to 2018 with my own experiences:
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=14838#m1244522592305661865


1. Placeholders

There is only one placeholder for Quillmane at the same time. The placeholders that I had seen:

a lioness (after Quillmane got killed, this one does ALWAYS spawn next and does walk to northwest)
a lion
a mist wolf
a shadow wolf
an elephant
an escaped split paw gnoll
aviak avocet
aviak egret
aviak rook
centaur charger
centaur courser
centaur foal
centaur sheltie

These ones may be also placeholders, however the cyclops and the treant are (also) placeholders on the Mroon cycle:

aviak archer
a cyclops
a treant


2. Spawn area

A retangle between the western zone border and the hermit house in the east,
Splitpaw in the north, Aviak village in the south. Mobs only spawn inside these borders.


3. Respawn time

66 seconds (was 78 in the past)


4. Roaming area

After spawning, the mobs wander towards Splitpaw spires but do not always cross them on the first pass. They then do wander northwards but do not cross the undead ruins near the bridge. They pass them eastwards or do stop before them and then tend to walk south up to the aviak village. I have seen placeholders even walk east and west in the northern area but not exactly east and west.


5. Strategy

Make sure that no other players are hunting in the zone as this will disturb the tracking results pretty quickly !

As a druid bind yourself at the center of the retangular spawning area. A tracking skill minimum of 175 is highly recommended as this can cover 95% of the spawn area. As a ranger with a tracking skill above 200 you can hang around southeast of Splitpaw when waiting for the next spawn. Boxing a bard for the Selo song can speed things up. Keep the bard at your bind point or tracking camp. As a ranger you can also let him auto-follow until you found the placeholder for the Quillmane cycle.

The hardest part is to find the placeholder, this can take a few hours. Lions, escaped splitpaw gnolls and "an elephant " are the most common, so start tracking and killing them first and head as fast as you can to the center of the spawn area. A druid tracker with 175 tracking does work much better than a ranger with 300 tracking because of the gate spell. Sort your tracking by "normal" which does show the latest spawns always at the top.

After the first Quillmane spawn and kill its getting easy as you now can be sure that you found the right cycle and the next spawn (a lioness) will be the right placeholder. Be carefull with escaped splitpaw gnolls as they can spawn very close to the Splitpaw spires and the gnolls there (Tesch, Rosch, Nisch) will jump on and kill them very fast.

For more infos read this guide:
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=14838#m1244522592305661865

GOT IT !!)

Edited, Jan 8th 2018 11:02am by lovguild

I have camped Quillmane during the time they boosted the frequency of the names. Zliz's guide is pretty good to follow but I would like to add some comments based on my observations.

I was playing a level 85 druid with 175 in tracking. I had the zone to myself and I was lucky to be able to get Quillmane’s spawn cycle quickly. I proceeded to camp him successfully for about 6 hours and the PH’s I kept seeing from the cycle were: an elephant, a mist wolf, a shadow wolf, an escaped Splitpaw gnoll, a lion, and a lioness. Those PH’s were all I saw during the first 6 hours I was camping Quillmane.

I would like to point out that I positioned myself slightly south east of the Split Paw zone to try and be centered on the southern portion of the map. On occasion I would have to run either further south east or south west of Split Paw to pick up a fresh PH/Quillmane spawn on track if it seemed like nothing was appearing on track around the one minute mark. My guess is that it’s probably because a druid’s tracking skill at 175 isn’t enough to cover the entire southern portion of the zone. I also noticed that the PH’s/Quillmane did not always stay in place facing north for 20 seconds. As soon as I saw a fresh spawn from the cycle on track I would sometimes find it already roaming.

After about 6 hours other people started coming into the zone. A couple were low level players hunting for xp near the Aviak village, while others were also trying to get Quillmane to spawn, unaware that I already had the cycle going. That is when I started to see the other PH’s listed on Zliz’s guide. I started seeing aviaks, centaurs, treants, and even Crack Tusk fresh on my tracking. I also noted that I would sometimes see a cyclops and undead cyclops appear as well, but I determined this was due to other people in the zone throwing the rhythm of the cycle off. When the zone became empty again I managed to resume the cycle and again observed the same PH’s/Quillmane for about another 4 hours. I have almost managed to equip all of my toons with a cloak that day, totaling at 10.

Although I cannot dismiss the possibility completely, I strongly believe that it’s highly unlikely that aviaks, centuars, treants and Crack Tusk is part of the Quillmane cycle and can be discounted from the list of PH’s.

My reasons for coming to this conclusion are based on these thoughts:

1) In the past when servers were more populated it was hard to determine what mobs were actually a part of the Quillmane cycle due to other people hunting in the zone. This can be especially true for druids or bards whose tracking skill is unable to cover all the possible areas that Quillmane and his PH’s can spawn.

2) Having a mob roam into a druid’s or bard’s tracking range may have given the illusion that they were part of the Quillmane cycle e.g. aviaks.

3) Since this was during a time where Daybreak made it so rare spawns would appear more frequently I find it highly unlikely that Crack Tusk, a named elephant, is part of the spawn cycle for Quillmane since I did not see him spawn at all when I had Quillmane’s cycle going for those 6+ hours.

4) For 6 hours (and another 4 hours when I resumed the cycle) the only PH’s I saw fresh on my track were an elephant, a mist wolf, a shadow wolf, an escaped Splitpaw gnoll, a lion, and a lioness. This leads me to believe that the other PH’s listed were due to interference from other players hunting in the zone, as well as insufficient track skill by druids and bards that misled players to believe for so long that aviaks, centuars, treants and Crack Tusk were also PH’s for Quillmane.

Again, I will not deny the possibility that the other PH’s might just be really rare to appear in Quillmane’s cycle, but it would be nice if someone else can verify my claims so that we can condense the PH list for Quillmane.

TLDR: I camped and spawned Quillmane multiple times successfully for 6 hours and only ever saw an elephant, a mist wolf, a shadow wolf, an escaped Splitpaw gnoll, a lion, and a lioness spawn as PH’s for Quillmane.

I was in the northern part of the zone right near the zone in to North Karana. Then i see Quill just south of the skeleton area where Grimrot spawns. I drop Quill and i get the legs. Then like 5 mins later Quill spawns again in the same area. This time i get the cloak.

I was killing a few centaurs, adult elephants and a few aviaks. I don't know if I had anything to do with this double spawning. But i thought
Quill spawns only in southern part of zone around splitpaw..

strange....this was the first time i ever saw Quillmane...


Reuvan the ranger
Bristlebane server

Start with:
1. A ranger with 200 tracking skill (make one yourself or make a friend) with the tracking set to normal
2. Someone high enough level to hang out at split paw and not get owned

Quillmane's place holder follows these rules:
1. Place holder will spawn south of split paw (I found some directly east but not many)
2. Place holder will eventualy pass by and through split paw
3. Has a 60ish second spawn timer (seen it pop at 60 and then at 66 and some at 68. Could be server latency that causes that difference)
4. The Place holder durring my time there was:
a Lion
a Lioness
an Elephant
Escaped Split Paw Knoll
Shadow Wolf

The rub:
1. Take the non-tracker and go to split paw. Murder everything there, gnolls, wanderers, does matter just kill it. (and make some profit too)
2. Draw lines between the aviak village to the hermit, then from the hermit to split paw and from split paw to the aviak village
3. Put the tracker in the middle of the triagle
4. Murder any of the above creatures that may cross your path (I was dual boxing at the time so I just killed stuff at split paw)
5. Wait for Quillmane to spawn

Once Quillmane has spawned:
1. Track him down (duh)
2. Once he is dead start your timing device and have your tracker run back to the middle of the triangle like before
3. In about 60 or so seconds something will pop, you now have Quillmane's PH
4. I am not sure how many place holders you had to kill before it would pop but it was at least 5 or more (because my mercs would be ready to go again)

Now I did notice while I was in South Karana that there were multiple an Elephants. I think the others are for other rare spawns.
Kill one and wait for something to pop at the 60 second mark and chase it down until something interesting spawns.Took about 8 kills to get the cloak.

If you are on the Vox server and need this beast killed, or if you want a demonstration so you can do it on your server look me up.

Nadias (Ranger)
Setesh (Mage and proud owner of his Epic)

***WARNING*** This takes patience!

There are many guides to spawning Quillmane on the internet, most are elaborately detailed and require more than one player. However my method I just did spawned Quillmane three times (with one cloak drop). Most mobs in SK are on a short respawn timer (about 30 seconds). What I have found is that NAMED and their PHs are on longer timers (about 68 secs). What you will need is a little patience, a good tracker set to NORMAL track and a timer (I used the stopwatch app on my iPhone). I bowed down mobs and timed there respawn based on when a mob popped back up on my track window. Once I found a mob with a 68 sec respawn timer I continued to hunt and track these mobs. Sometimes you hunt this mob and you get a named, not necessarily Quillname, but Brother Qwinn, etc.... If you do get a named other than Quillmane leave them alive and start finding another mob on a 68 sec timer and hunt (this is the patience part). You will eventually spawn all named in the zone or you will eventually come across Quillmane. Once you find the magic flying donkey stay on him or his PH who is on the 68 sec timer. You can hunt and basically chain spawn Quillmane. Most of the PHs are lions, lioness, an elephant, an escaped Splitpaw gnoll, less often "other mobs" (like centaurs, wolfs, etc). Keep to this method, it is tedious but you will get results. I tried for days killing the entire zone with ZERO results. I spent about 2 hours with the 68 sec method and it paid off! Good Luck!

Killed him 5 times this morning. most ph's headed north after spawning and were in the south to southwest. A few were in the east, a couple over by the hermit hut that headed east for a short distance then turned north. I made a social for timing. /pause 560,/say start timer /pause 60,/say 60 secs /say 66 secs. For a total game time of 620. not sure if it is really 66 secs, my stop watch button sticks. but the social timing worked.

Just wanted to share my experience camping this damn cloak and to confirm some of the points made by others:-

FYI it took me 25 kills of Quillmane before he dropped the cloak!

I can confirm that the tracking method detailed by others below does work, with the main points being:

- 66 second respawn time of placeholders
- Main placeholders are lions, lionesses, Escaped Splitpaw Gnolls, 'an elephant', a mist wolf, shadow wolf. Included much less frequently are random aviaks and centaurs.
- All placeholders spawn south of splitpaw in an east-west band across the zone.
- Pretty sure that all placeholders walk north first after an initial standstill for approx 30sec
- Don't even think about trying this without a tracker!

Hope that helps and hope you have better luck than my 25 attempts!



Edited, Sep 25th 2013 10:57am by ZinZap

I want to warn you I am not an expert on Quillmane, spawning or tracking. I am going to give my recent experience in hopes that you will find it helpful during your quest. Because this guy is a real pain to spawn. But once you do spawn him, you will be grinding him I swear. Quillmane takes patience and dedication. I compare it to the Plane of Sky part and to the Fire elementals you hunt in the trap. Just a bad spawn and a bad drop rate of the item you need. However once you pinpoint his exact place holder (PH) then you will be getting him to spawn a very quick and at a relatively easy pace.

Like I said earlier, I am no expert but I have found things to be different from the info I have read through, but PLEASE read through the forums and not just this. I got different bits and pieces from each post I read forming a picture on this guy so it may behoove you to do the same. Also check the dates of the posts/threads because a lot of the information was from 2002-2006 or when the fabled came out.

I want to say good luck to those that want to solo without a tracker (Bard, druid and ranger) (side note why cant a beastlord track? Lol). More power to you. However if you want that quick and easy pace then you will need a tracker. I used a level 55 ranger, no AAs, 200/200 tracking skill. Keep your tracker on NORMAL. It will place newest spawned creatures at the top of the list.

Spawning Quillmane:
I really stink at spawning Quillmane, I based it more on luck, but here is how I got him to spawn. Where to start your killing is between the Aviaks, Splitpaw Gnolls, and the hermits house (building southwest with a cottage inside walls). I suggest pulling as much as you can then nuking with aoe and killing everything within a few seconds. I am not using the timer at this point. I found it to be useless until Quillmane spawned, however do not cut it out, because the creatures do have different spawn timers. It seemed regular mobs would spawn within 32 seconds or had a 4-6 min timer. The NAMED PH mobs will have the same timer as Quillmanes PH. So with your timer counting to 78 secs will guarantee all of the mobs spawned (adjust how you see fit) to the PH. Then you could pull just the 78 second ones to kill. Keep killing like this until Quillmane spawns.
NOTE:
-Kill ROAMING Mobs, not stationary (note newly spawned mobs will be stationary for a short time)
-Leave Named Mobs, ALIVE
-Do not kill mobs that you did not intend to kill, let them beat you up or just run away from them til out of agro distance (you will lose agro).
-Quillmane DOES NOT have ONE SPAWN LOCATION. He has quite a few, but his spawns will be below the splitpaw southern line, but across that whole southern zone.

Finding Quillmane:
After finding the elusive beast don’t kill him right away. It took me like 10-12 kills just for one drop so it will benefit you to follow these steps. (just pull him and let him beat you up, or just leave him alone until your ready to kill, he is NOT a hard fight at all, easy peezy)
1. Kill two or three STATIONARY gnolls at splitpaw, and let them respawn 4 to 6 minute timers. This will be your buffer for all creatures between you and Quillmanes PH.
2. When gnolls respawn they should be at the top of your NORMAL track list, now kill quillmane, if cloak drops great! If not continue…
3. His PH spawn will be exactly like his spawn, all over the southern zone you made from splitpaw. So running around is A GOOD IDEA! And forget everything about only lions, wolves, forget all that NONSENSE. Because I found it to be anything that can roam (DON’T KILL NAMED CREATURES!!!). Centaurs, aviaks, Cyclops, undead Cyclops, wolves, lions, or anything else that spawns at the top of your list, don’t let any stone be unturned.
4. The TIMER!!!!! His timer IS NOT 78 seconds (I said that earlier just to be sure of his PH spawns as you pull and kill). I found Quillmanes PH TIMER to be 40-45 seconds (RARELY BUT HAPPENED WITH A LION AND UNDEAD CYCLOPS) and 62-66 seconds. I could not find any other type of timer with him. Just continue killing the PH until Quillmane spawns, however….
5. I warn that killing Quillmane rapidly seemed to cause the zone to SPAWN NEW creatures to push to the top of the tracker to counter this way of playing. If this happens I would go kill Gnolls again to put at top.
6. And I do believe Quillmane could have two possible timers, but works with either (both don’t have to be dead), I do not have the evidence for this just a feeling from how my experience went. I had a 45 second undead Cyclops spawn then a 62 lion spawn, I ended up killing the lion first then the Cyclops (just to be sure), I felt at that point I could handle two spawns. After I killed both however, only one spawned. So it could mean that Quillmane needs both creatures dead.
NOTE:
- 40-45 second timer (rare) and 62-66 (common)
- Killing quillmane rapidly causes more new mobs for tracker, kill some stationary gnolls as a reference on tracker to cut the bull-corn mobs
- Don’t leave any mob alive that spawned on these timers, no matter if they are a Cyclops or centaur or aviak or wolf or etc. ( to be safe, HOWEVER….)
- HOWEVER, DO NOT KILL ANY NAMED. Even if it spawned on timer, you must had the wrong PH. THIS IS HELPFUL just for one reason that you don’t have to deal with his PH again.
- Do not kill unnecessarily and keep tabs on your normal tracker and timer at this point.
- When I killed quillmane like this there were NO OTHER PLAYERS in the zone, so I was just Killing one mob every minute or so and it was still causing multiple new spawns, like the zone refreshed or restarted or something. I believe SoE does not want us to grind in this way…but ***** them, its already hard as it is lol.

Here are a links to places I looked. Thanks to all who helped me both on my server and online if you read it, your hints and guides were helpful to me.
Burdoc (73) of Vazaelle…Now Drinal

Allah quillmane:
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=3677#post

Allah fabled quillmane:
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=14838

Allah cloak:
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=1039

Allah fabled cloak:
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=27244

Allah South Karana:
https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/zone.html?zstrat=44

Echelons Quillmane guide:
http://home.comcast.net/~echelonforester/quillmane2.htm

And thanks to Zarovich with his update on the Allah quillmane link.

Hope this helps! Good luck!!

I can confirm that LoserCard and Panzer are both correct.

I used the typical method, but I found the 66 second spawn cycle and got two Quillmane kills. On the 2nd kill, two mobs repopped, one at 66 seconds and another at 78 seconds, so I started killing both. I abandoned the 66 sec one eventually because it was way over by the hermit and stuck to the 78 sec one.

So both are correct.

Having just spent the past 4 hours chain camping Quillmane I'd like to correct some misconceptions about Quillmane's spawn.

1. Quillmane/PH's spawn timer is not 78 seconds, infact it is exactly 66 seconds for every type of PH of Quillmane. This was timed by 3 people using digital timers/stopwatches. I don't know if this is a recent thing, but it is what it is as of January 5, 2013.

2. I am not sure if other people were picking up the random repops, but the only mobs that I encountered spawning Quillmane were: a lion, a lioness, a centaur charger, a centaur archer, a centaur courser, a centaur foal, a centaur sheltie, a mist wolf, a shadow wolf, an elephant, and an escaped splitpaw gnoll. I never killed any aviaks, treants, or cyclops. This was in an empty zone, killing ONE mob every 68 seconds. So either the others are VERY rare or other people are mistaken or it has been changed.

3. Like others have mentioned, the most effective means of isolating the placeholder from other mobs is a familiar. For it to be the most accurate, the familiar must be popped right before the PH should spawn. This would put the top two recent spawns on a tracking list PH first and Familiar second.

4. Quillmane DOES NOT move in any sort of figure 8 pattern. I followed him for an hour across the zone and it seems that he travels up and down three rows in no particular order. The west row is the first set of hills west of Splitpaw. Quill will travel up and down various paths. The middle row has multiple paths STRAIGHT through Splitpaw entrance. The east row travels up and down east of the little hut. He will travel to each of these rows and always continue from top to bottom or vice versa, and will never stop in between to turn around or travel east to west in the middle area. Quillmane does pass by the undead temple and makes a turn right through it.

5. The best possible way to find his PH is with 3-4 people, one of which must be able to track. One person in West row, two people in East since it is so wide and the tracker in Middle row. Each person has their own 66 second timer, kills a possible PH target, and pops a familiar right before 66 seconds is reached. The tracker then sees if any mob spawned immediately after a familiar and targets them to confirm. Using this tactic we found it in 30 minutes and we continued to camp him for the next 3 hours. You have to becareful to not lose the PH line since there are random repops of mobs and they will be pushed to the top of the list.