Restoring Mark V (Part 1) Quest

The quest involves locating an anchor and a crystal shaft that Angharad, The Hediad offhandedly claims are missing and stolen years ago. She never actually hires you to find these, but then again, this isn't a regular quest where you can easily influence the spawning of tickets.

• Where are these items? Apparently they were highly prized and stolen by the powerful barbarians, the Mawrs, that reside high in the mountains and are not really accessible.
• To get them to descend, you do not have to do anything at all. They decide to come down and swarm the Pass every once in a while. When this happens a lot of horns blow and it's rather hard to miss. Just mind your own business and hopefully it will happen.
• A gazillion of ultra-rabid gnome berserkers led by the two powerful Mawrs will swarm entire area. The fact they are gnomes is heavily outweighed by the fact they are lvl 85+ with bosses in the 100+ range, capable of toss-bashing you for the entire duration of your (very short) combat, before shooting you with guns through full ac, spells and racial armor-ancient for **DISMEM every single round.
• As it happens, you can probably try (and die) outmaneuvering them, and if by some blind luck you manage to kill the mawrs, return the missing items to the Hediad.
• You will receive a choice - chained or double weapon?

Chained weapon is Serpent's Tongue and double is the Lightning Strike. If you are taking this on a warrior or a bodyguard, remember that the skill Double Parry requires a double weapon, but the chain grants Disarm bonuses, while both benefit from Double Hit. Choice should reflect your play-style. For non-warlike classes any of these will do.

You can now continue with the optional Restoring Mark V (Part 2) Quest.

Note: As all quests that involve a lot of combat, this one is significantly easier to do with a really large group. Once the gnomes descend you're really looking at about 80+ level 85-90 mobs that seep towards the main pass (they cannot enter the hidden passageways back to the area proper) and will eventually fill out the pass with 3-4 mobs per room. Among them are the two sanced bosses at level 100, which when killed spawn the megaboss at lvl 110 or so. Killing the megaboss does not give any special reward. Solo combat against them all is difficult since they succeed bash/toss very frequently and can easily wipe smaller groups. Since the area is no-teleport-out zone and also no-angel-allowed, dying deeper in the pass may mean speedwalking will be next to impossible and you'll be left to morgue it out. There is also a corpse eating wolverine in the area which does not make things any easier. Moral of the story - get a quest-sized group and do it properly as the experience gains are very high and worth it.