This is an event in BEM, related to Ogri'la and Skyguard, for the (BEM/GL-only) Unstable Flasks, new gems, and boss summon materials. There's some info in the "Ethereum Prison" thread, but this event in BEM is unrelated to Etherum Prison, so it seems to warrant its own thread.

Looking for more information on this, and updating this first post as it comes in.

Initial notes: Event happens every 2 hours (seems to be even-numbered hours). Guy at Skyguard camp near Ogri'la will tell you how long until next. The Techs and the Skyguard fighters cannot be healed. The mobs do not aggro you until they start charging you, so you can stay near the crystalforge to avoid pulling tons of them. The Skyguard Rangers and Lieutenant seem to do a good job fighting the first few waves on their own, but they can do nothing against the towers. There are no breaks between waves, as the mobs auto-respawn and charge. But you can purchase from the vendor any time he's still alive, even if he's taking damage. This event is the only place to obtain Unstable Flasks of the Elder, Physician, Bandit, and Soldier; Beast and Sorcerer can be obtained any time.

1. First wave is non-elite melees ("Slavering Slave"). Easy.

2. Second wave adds elite melees ("Bash'ir Subprimal"). Also easy.

-- Then the tech sends up some flares and the flask vendor (Aether-Tech Assistant) arrives. Can buy right away and leave if you just want flasks. Can probably solo the event to this point. Flasks cost 10 shards.

3. Third wave starts soon, adding 3 towers that shoot AOE bombs on you. Need ranged dps to take these down. Probably need at least 5 people to survive this.

-- Then a second vendor (Aether-Tech Adept) arrives, selling some new gems. These gems cost 40 shards.

4. Fourth wave starts, with a bunch of elite melee ethereals attacking. This probably requires 15+ people to survive. One report that 20 people can "easily" survive to here.

5. It appears that The Grand Collector is the final mob in this event. Apparently he drops 1 Apexis Crystal only. (This is odd because it generally requires only 5 people to obtain an apexis crystal, via the other summons in the zone, while this guy requires about 25.)
http://files.filefront.com/bashirbem.../fileinfo.html - Fraps of fight.
-- After surviving The Grand Collector, a third vendor arrives (Aether-Tech Master), selling new meta gems, and some other items. The "accelerator module" he sells can be used to summon a raid-size boss, Bash'ir's Harbinger (reported to drops Apexis crystals and green BOEs). His Geodes contain blue BOEs--apparently, blue BOP helms with random stats, of armor type specific to your class (Slatesteel (plate), Mistshroud (mail), Skystalker's (leather), and Windchanneler's (cloth)). The metagems cost 160 shards; Accelerator Module costs 35 (in line with the shard cost of other miniboss summons in BEM); large geodes cost 4, and small geodes cost 3.

Theres a topic concerning that quest series here: Ethereum Prison Information

Try to make better use of the search function next time: http://elitistjerks.com/search.php?searchid=135008

Although there is some info in that thread, this event is actually not part of the Ethereum Prison quests. I've edited my post to clarify that, and updated with some of the info you pointed me to.

Pater,

We've tried this event once with mish-mash raid group of 12 people. It was intense after towers showed up. Took us about 10 seconds to realize towers were shooting everyone. Once towers went down elites just rolled over us as we did not expect them to show up.

After looking over some of those gems, it may be useful to go through with the event fully to see what is at the end.

Yes, I've tried it about 3 times, never with more than 10 people, and have wiped to the elites.

Towers are not bad if you have a couple of ranged DPS people.

Again, this has info about the fight from someone that cleared the whole event, so speculatory threads are pointless.

First--the person who cleared that event and posted about it did not give much information about it. I've added his information, but there still some unresolved points.
Second--that thread is titled Ethereum Prison Information, and this event is not part of Ethereum Prison.
That said, mods can lock this if they feel it doesn't deserve its own thread.

I've brought this up in that thread and gotten exactly 0 helpful responses. Good new thread.

We have brought the following numbers of people:

12
15
18
30

We have gotten destroyed at various stages each time, either by the elite Ethereals or by the boss. The boss, the Grand Collector, is untargetable half the time and has a massive AoE ability called "Resonant Feedback" that appears to deal damage based on the number of ethereals still alive. Due to the fact that many of the elite ethereals can heal, we have always had quite a number still alive when the boss pops. He starts untargetable, then becomes targetable, moves into the raid, can be tanked, but then becomes untargetable again and spawns a clone of himself and both start AoEing the raid. I have no idea really how his AoE works nor how to prevent it other than trying to tank him well away from the raid...which wouldn't prevent him from going in anyway during his untankable period.

Thoughts?

Thank you for saying this. Apparently some people are so upset about this thread that they feel the need to be pointlessly rude, as well as give a negative reputation hit for posting it. To me, that seems like an abuse of the reputation system.

There was a reasonable amount of info in the other thread, but, because it was entitled Ethereum Prison, people were not using it to discuss this BEM event. 4 days ago was the last significant discussion of this event there.

I've noticed a disturbing number of posts like these lately.
Mods read their own boards, can moderate their own boards, and can use their own discretion on whether or not a topic deserves its own post.
Several people chiming in with glorified versions of "In before the heap" only add too clutter in a game with forums that typically need no help in that department.
Yes, I also do realize that my post is slightly hypocritical, but the point still stands.

I appreciate this new thread. It is on topic and to the point with a great summary post to start it. The other thread is about 4 or 5 topics at once, all jumbled up. Yor, ethereal keys, summoning demons, Obsidia eggs, UI lag, and yeah, some mention of the Bash'ir landing event scattered in a few pages.

And I still see no mention there of what the final boss drops.

Where can I find the stats on these meta gems? (or are they uncut?) I tried looking the NPC up on Thottbot, but didn't search for the right thing, or it's not listed.



--
(on a side note, people who make posts like "omg you make worthless thread" are only contributing to the problem, rather than helping. It would be better to say: In <link>this</link> thread, posts #-# you can find this information: <list of relevant information>. Otherwise, you simply clutter a thread more than is needed and you help no one, more often than not.)

The Wowhead links to the vendors is linked in the text above. Sorry that links don't stand out more.
http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=23245

Edit,

Pater beat me to it.

Oh, good call, thanks. :]

I have heard that the Grand Collector drops an Apexis Crystal but have not heard of greens/blues/epics.

Edit: I've also heard that the event spawns many more mobs as you bring more people, but I can't support that definitively based on our anecdotal experiences. Any thoughts?

I can't think of any events that spawn more adds the more people you bring, so that would be kind of unique, wouldn't it?

I can say this--if you only bring 5, you're not getting very far into the elites, if you can even get past the towers. If you come back later with 10, then you'll get farther, and see more mobs/waves than you did with 5. So I can see how people would infer that it was the bringing more that led to more mobs, while in fact it may just have been that they got to a harder stage of the event.

That's probably the case, that it scales to the number of people you bring simply by your being able to last longer. (On another thought, I can't think of any other events that sell flasks either. :P)

True - like you pointed out, I'm not sure how they would code the "detect number participating," since we haven't seen that mechanic before. Also, it would allow griefing, even from people of the same alliance.

I think it's safe to say until we have good evidence otherwise that the event just progresses from a 1-person thing to a 25-person thing over time, and doesn't get any harder or easier based on the number of people participating.

Got together 20 people to do the event yesterday. The entire event was easy and we just plowed through it with no problems, didn't even pay attention to what the mobs were doing cause mowed them down so fast. And then we got to The Grand Collector...

Got him to about 50% health and he did Resonant Feedback... 90% of the raid died, then him and the rest of the elites still up easily killed off the rest of us. A few more people in the raid, as well as knowing he's going to do that ability will definetly make it doable. Even just having the rogues, pallies and mages invul through it will allow them to hold off the swarm long enough for people to get back from the graveyard and just zerg him down if you want to do it that way.

Were you low HP at Resonant Feedback? i.e., how much damage did it do? or is the damage a function of how close you're standing to each other, how many elites are still up, etc? Did he clone, say anything interesting? Did the tech say anything relevant?

I was able to do this on Saturday. The first time was with 15 people and we got overwhelmed at the tower part. The thing that is difficult about the towers is that if melee go out to attack them they will aggro all of the mobs around each tower. When the towers are destroyed they also do AOE damage. It's just very hard to get people to be a little disciplined and not have them go out and aggro all of the mobs.

The second time was with about ~25 people and we immediately killed the towers which made for pretty smooth sailing after that. The boss seemed a bit weak until he did his resonant feedback attack which caught us completely by surprise. The damage was a little over 1k/second if I remember correctly. Maybe half the raid died but we were able to kill him. He dropped an apexis shard for sure but I can't recall if there was anything else. After he died we just had the three npc's there where we could buy the blue gems and metagems. After about 5 minutes they yelled that they would report back their findings and took off.

I was able to fraps the event, and will post it when I get home from work. I don't think the difference in the amount of people the second time had any affect, but hopefully it'll answer alot of questions.