A Fun Little Trinket

There are a number of interesting and powerful trinkets in DDO.  However, there is one that I find to be tremendously fun, the Shard of Xoriat.  The Shard of Xoriat looks like one of the disks that are used in the Dreamforge to upgrade the items from the Inspired Quarter and Dreaming Dark quest packs.  You can only get it out of the quest, The Sane Asylum and it also an exclusive item, meaning that you can only have one in your inventory at any time.

The Shard of Xoriat grants a +1 Exceptional Charisma and Greater Enchantment Focus.  However, its most useful characteristic is the ability to summon an Xorian creature to your aid three times per rest.  The creates that you can summon include a chaos beholder, a mind flayer, a flesh render, a greater evil eye, or a Taken.  All five of these creatures have their own unique flavor to them that makes questing just a little more fun.

The Shard of Xoriat is a fun little item to have.

The most powerful of these summons is the chaos beholder and the mind flayer.  The choas beholder has its own way of doing crowd control by hypnotizing your enemies.  It is fun to be in the thick of combat to all of sudden see the enemy monsters with “pink hats” on their heads.  It also tends to shoot other rays out and to grap aggro fairly quickly.  Likewise, the mind flayer is pretty powerful as well.  He tends to like to cast firewalls, cyclonic blasts, and freezing sphere.  It is great to watch your mind flayer stun an enemy and then start to pull its brains out.  Sometimes I feel guilty when I finish killing the monster before he gets through with his meal.

The mind flayer is one of the summons you can get from the Shard of the Xoriat.

The flesh render is also another aggro magnet.  He likes to just run headlong into battle and to soak up as much punishment as possible.  Although not nearly as effective as the chaos beholder or the mind flayer, still a pretty good distraction to enemy monsters.  The greater evil eye is just funny.  You can tell that enemy monsters have a hard time hitting him, especially when he goes into that “X” flight pattern.  I know I get frustrated when I face off against them, I can only imagine what the monsters feel like.  The greater evil eye tend to just shoot out their arcane zap and arcane blasts as their main attacks.  The weakest of the summons is the Taken.  Although he is weak, we does gather aggro quite well.  It is fun to watch him limp along into battle.  He usually doesn’t last long, but if you need a quick distraction he does provide it.

The Shard of Xoriat has a minimum level of 15 to use.  As soon as I reach level, I tend to grap it out of my bank and start summoning the fun creatures of Xoriat.  I have seen it drop fairly regularly, so if you get a chance to run The Sane Asylum I would recommend it just so you could get a shot at picking one of these up.  Besides being exclusive, it is bound to account, so you can transfer it to your other characters through your shared bank.

Thanks for reading everybody and happy hunting!!