BLOOD OF ZEK

Always on, almost everywhere. PvP is enabled server-wide. There's no flagging and no opting out — step into the open world and you can attack, and be attacked by, other players.

Where you're safe:

• Sanctuaries — 27 zones are permanent safe havens (every city and the Bazaar). No PvP can happen inside them.
• Safe rooms — bounded safe spots can exist inside otherwise-hostile zones. Right now there's one: the firepot room in Timorous Deep, reachable via a transporter in the Bazaar. No harm lands there, even in a duel.
• Instances — every zone has a private instanced version you can retreat to (see The World → Instanced Everything).

Who can fight whom:

• ±4 level bracket. You can only engage players within 4 levels of you. A level 30 fights levels 26–34; a level 60 can't touch a level 50 — fights stay competitive and you can't be farmed by the cap.
• Newbie shield (under level 4). Characters below level 4 can't attack or be attacked.
• Allies are protected. You can never harm — or be harmed by — anyone in your guild, group, or raid. Area-of-effect spells and abilities splash enemies only, never your own side.
• Duels. Any two players can /duel to settle things regardless of level gap (consensual; not counted as open-world kills).

When you die, you respawn at your bind point with all of your gear and items.

The kill announcement. Every open-world PvP kill is broadcast server-wide with the killer's and victim's names. The zone is deliberately left out of routine messages — but the bounty system calls out locations when someone's on a spree, so the server can hunt them.

Rewards. Every kill harvests Souls and feeds the bounty system — both covered next (see Souls and PvP Bounties).

What they are. Souls are the spoils of PvP — a currency earned only by killing other players. Every other currency on the server comes from PvE or objectives; Souls come from blood. A single kill feeds two separate Soul ledgers.

Personal Souls (yours):

• Each player you kill grants you 1 Soul — 2 while Rallos Zek rules the heavens (see The Constellation → Deity Wheel).
• They show up in your inventory's Currency tab alongside your other currencies.
• They can currently be used to buy cross-class spells in the Marketplace. Augment Makers and Soul Grafters are also purchased with this currency — but because we're in open beta, those two are free right now and the spells are extremely cheap (see Economy & Items → The Marketplace).

Guild Souls (your guild's war-chest):

• That same kill also deposits Souls into your guild's shared Soul bank — but only if you're in a guild (no guild, no deposit).
• Guild Souls are never shown on your character sheet. Officers and the guild leader can see your guild's balance in the "Zone Battle" section under the EQ button, or with the #guildsouls command — it's leadership-only by design.
• They are the war-chest you spend to challenge for territory in Zone Battles. Guild leaders and officers bid Guild Souls to contest zones — the single most important use of Souls on the server (see Zone Battles).
• Because Souls come only from real PvP kills, a throwaway alt guild has zero Souls — there's no shortcut to a war-chest. You earn it in blood.

Every kill puts a price on your own head. The flip side of a kill streak is that you become a target. The bounty system turns the open world into a self-policing revenge economy: the more you kill — and especially the more you grief — the bigger the reward for whoever finally takes you down.

How a bounty builds:

• Every PvP kill adds 1 Soul to the bounty on your head and extends your kill streak (kills without dying).
• Streak milestones at 3, 5, 10, 25, 50, and 100 kills-without-dying each trigger a server-wide announcement calling you out by name, and add a bounty kick on top — +0, +2, +5, +10, +20, and +50 Souls respectively. The whole server learns there's a killer on a tear.
• Griefing is punished hard. Kill the same player more than once within a 2-hour window and the bounty for each repeat doubles — 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, up to a cap of 128 Souls per repeat — and fires a GRIEFER ALERT naming you, your level, your current zone, and your total bounty. (This is the one case where a kill broadcast does reveal your location — so the server can come hunt you.)

Collecting a bounty. When a player carrying a bounty dies to another player, the killer collects that entire accumulated bounty in personal Souls — and the fallen player's streak and bounty both reset to zero. Ending a tyrant's spree pays.

The takeaway. Rack up kills and you'll grow rich and famous — but you'll also paint a target on yourself, and the bigger your bounty, the more the server wants your head. Farm the same victim and you become a marked griefer with your location broadcast to all. Dominance is meant to stay dangerous, and victims always have a path to revenge.

Organized war for territory. Beyond open-world PvP, guilds wage scheduled, structured battles for lasting control of the server's most valuable zones. Hold a zone and your guild gains a powerful home-field advantage there — until someone takes it.

The contested zones. 13 zones are up for control, across three tiers (mirroring the Marketplace gear tiers):

• Tier 1: Nagafen's Lair · Permafrost Keep · Plane of Hate · Plane of Fear · Howling Stones
• Tier 2: Karnor's Castle · Chardok · Timorous Deep · Skyfire Mountains · The Emerald Jungle
• Tier 3: Veeshan's Peak · Dreadlands · Old Sebilis

How control changes hands:

1. Bid Guild Souls. Officers spend the guild's Soul war-chest (from PvP — see Souls) to bid on zones. You can bid on as many zones as you want in a cycle, but if you win more than one bid you must choose which single zone to attack.
2. Schedule the battle. The attacker and defender negotiate a fight time. If they can't agree, it defaults to 7:00 PM Central.
3. Fight 12v12. The battle runs in a private instanced arena — twelve per side, no zerg. Attacker wins → takes the zone; defender wins → holds it.
4. Get paid. The winning guild — attacker or defender — instantly receives 3 Conquest Points per member for winning the Zone Battle.

Domination is temporary by design. The more you hold and the longer you hold it, the weaker you fight in Zone Battles:

• −10% to your damage and healing for every territory your guild already holds — applied whether you're attacking or defending.
• An additional −15% for each time you've successfully defended that specific territory.
• These stack (capped at −70%). A sprawling, long-held empire becomes progressively easier to topple, so territory cycles constantly instead of locking up.

What owning a zone gets you:

• A strong home-field combat buff in the open-world version of that zone: +20% damage dealt and 25% damage reduction — letting a smaller guild defend its turf against better-geared rivals.
• 1 Conquest Point per member, per owned zone, every night at midnight.

Where to manage it. Track ownership, place bids, and view your guild's Soul bank in the Zone Battle section under the EQ button (backed by the #node… commands).

Scheduled arena events. The server runs organized PvP matches in a sealed arena pit. The territorial Zone Battle (above) is fought in this same arena — but that one's a guild war for territory. The event below is open to the whole server, with nothing but rewards and glory on the line.

Daily Battle — a free-for-all, every single day. No sign-up, no guild war-chest, no flag. Anyone can walk in.

• When: every day at 6:00 PM Central (server time). The whole server gets countdown warnings at 1 hour, then 30 / 15 / 10 / 5 / 2 / 1 minutes out.
• How to get in: starting 30 minutes before the fight, hail any Herald in the world and say [Battle] — you're ported straight into the pit. The instant the battle begins the gate slams shut: no late entry, and no dying-and-rejoining.
• The fight: last team standing wins. Your guild is your team — guildmates can't hurt each other, everyone else is fair game. No guild? You fight for yourself.
• Stay in the pit. The fighting area is bounded; wander out mid-battle and you get two warnings, then you die.
• No turtling. Healing weakens as the match drags on, so fights end instead of stalemating.
• Winning gets harder the more you win. Take the Daily Battle and your guild fights the next one at a penalty — −15% damage and healing per consecutive win, stacking up to −70%. A single loss resets it, so nobody farms it forever.
• Reward: the winning guild earns 3 Conquest Points for every member — paid to all guildmates, including those who were offline, not just the ones who fought. (Guildless winners earn nothing — there's no guild to pay out to.)

Best of the Best — a monthly 1-on-1 tournament COMING SOON. Bracketed single-elimination; the champion earns a permanent custom title and a unique ornament available no other way. The 1v1 engine already works; the monthly bracket is still being built.

Die and you keep everything. Whether a monster, the world, or another player drops you, you respawn at your bind point with every item and every coin still on you. Blood of Zek has no corpses at all — nothing to drag back through a dungeon, nothing to loot, no gear left on the floor. The classic EverQuest corpse run is gone entirely.

Death is a setback of time and position — never of your equipment. Bind where a Soulbinder allows, and that's where you'll wake up.

PvE deaths cost a small slice of experience — about one-tenth of classic EverQuest's penalty. With no corpses and no XP-rez to win it back, the full old penalty would be too harsh; this keeps a real sting without gutting an evening's progress.

• No penalty under level 10 — the early levels are free to die.
• PvP deaths cost zero experience. Falling to another player never touches your XP bar — the price of PvP is paid in Souls and bounties (see Combat & PvP), not levels. Dying in a duel is free too.

Even without corpses, your group can pull you back into the fight. When you die to PvE, a headstone — "<your name>'s grave" — rises where you fell and stands for 15 minutes.

• Cast a resurrection on the gravestone and the fallen player is pulled back to that exact spot — a clean recall to the front line instead of a long run from bind. A raid can recover from a bad pull without everyone wiping back to their soulbind.
• It restores no experience — it isn't an XP rez, just a way to put a downed member back on their feet where they dropped.
• It can't be looted (there's nothing in it — it's purely a rez marker) and it fades on its own after 15 minutes.

PvP, duel, and arena deaths leave no gravestone. You can never be rezzed back into a fight you just lost — fall to a player and you're out, respawning at bind. The gravestone is a PvE recovery tool, not a way to chain-feed a battle.

The heavens turn on a clock. Sixteen of Norrath's gods rotate through the sky. At any moment one is primary — ascendant over all the others — and when their reign ends, the next god in the wheel rises.

• Each god rules for 4 real hours. A full trip around all sixteen takes about 2⅔ real days, so the sky is constantly shifting.
• The clock runs on real-world time, identical for every player and unaffected by restarts. No god is ever permanently dominant, and nobody can "reset" the sky to favor their patron.
• Every ascension is announced server-wide with its own unique message as that god takes the sky.

The sixteen, in wheel order: Innoruuk · Cazic-Thule · Rallos Zek · Solusek Ro · Bertoxxulous · Brell Serilis · Bristlebane · The Tribunal · Mithaniel Marr · Erollisi Marr · Quellious · Prexus · Rodcet Nife · Karana · Tunare · Agnostic. (Each god sits directly across the wheel from its sworn opposite — hate faces honor, war faces peace, plague faces the Prime Healer. The full story is in The Lore of the Wheel.)

Worship the god who rules, and the night rewards you. While your own deity is the primary god, you gain a blessing during the nighttime stretch of their reign:

• +10 to all resistances (Magic, Fire, Cold, Disease, Poison, Corruption)
• +30 AC
• +5 HP regen, +5 mana regen, +5 endurance regen

It applies only to followers of the currently-ruling god, only at night, and refreshes whenever you zone. Choose your deity with intention — it decides when the heavens favor you.

Rallos Zek's war-blessing. When Rallos Zek — the Warlord, the server's namesake — holds the sky, the whole server feels it: every open-world PvP kill harvests 2 Souls instead of 1 (see Combat & PvP → Souls), for everyone, follower or not. For now Rallos is the one god whose reign carries a hard gameplay bonus; the other fifteen ascensions are atmosphere, with thematic blessings planned for later.

Sixteen gods. Sixteen positions. An ancient turning that has governed the skies of Norrath since before mortals first looked upward and gave the stars names.

The Eight Sacred Oppositions — the wheel is built on eight pairs of divine opposites, gods whose very natures are in conflict. Where one rises, its mirror waits on the far side of the sky.

• Innoruuk ↔ Mithaniel Marr — Hate and Honor, the oldest war. No subtlety, no nuance. One is the distilled essence of hatred, malice, and corruption; the other is truth, valor, and selfless heroism made divine. They anchor the wheel as its primary axis — the purest darkness and light between which every other god is arranged.
• Cazic-Thule ↔ Erollisi Marr — Fear and Love. Fear is the force most capable of destroying love, so the Faceless Lord stares across the sky at the Queen of Love. The placement does double duty: with Cazic-Thule opposite Erollisi, she and her twin Mithaniel fall into adjacent seats — inseparable, as the lore demands.
• Rallos Zek ↔ Quellious — War and Peace. The Warlord holds that enlightenment comes only in battle, that the universe was forged by conflict and will end in it. Quellious seeks peace above all, fierce only in its defense. Where Rallos rises, Quellious waits; where Quellious holds sway, the Warlord grinds his teeth.
• Solusek Ro ↔ Prexus — Fire and Ocean. Flame and the jealous heat of the sun against the vast cold depths where life began. And Solusek sits beside Rallos by design: the lore records the two entering a secret conspiracy, plotting to siphon power from the Plane of Fire to forge a weapon that could reshape Norrath. Conspirators belong side by side.
• Bertoxxulous ↔ Rodcet Nife — Plague and Healing. The most absolute enmity in all of Norrath's divine lore. The Prime Healer has exactly one true enemy. Bertoxxulous, in turn, is reviled as an abomination by nearly every god — even the evil ones — which is why he sits slightly apart from the dark coalition, in the one corner of the wheel where he is merely tolerated rather than despised on both sides.
• Brell Serilis ↔ Karana — Earth and Sky. Everything below the stone against everything above it: the Duke of Below's caverns and mountains opposite the Rainkeeper's storms and lightning.
• Bristlebane ↔ Tunare — Mischief and Natural Order. The Mother of All embodies growth, life, and the harmony of creation; the King of Thieves delights in chaos and disruption for its own sake. Order against entropy — an ancient conflict, even where the lore leaves it unspoken.
• The Tribunal ↔ Agnostic — Divine Law and the Faithless. Six hooded figures who have existed as long as order itself, opposite the rejection of all divinity. To stand before the Six Hammers and declare you believe in none of them is the most complete inversion of everything they stand for.

The Clusters — beyond the oppositions, the arrangement echoes Norrath's great alliances:

• The Evil Coalition — Innoruuk, Cazic-Thule, and Rallos Zek hold three consecutive seats: a dark triumvirate of hate, fear, and war. When the wheel turns through them, three straight nights belong to evil.
• The Twin Gods — Mithaniel and Erollisi Marr, children of Tarew Marr and co-creators of the barbarian people, are always neighbors. The wheel honors that bond.
• The Good Coalition — Mithaniel, Erollisi, Quellious, Prexus, Rodcet Nife, Karana, and Tunare form seven consecutive seats: the longest stretch of light on the wheel.
• The Ancient Pact — Brell, Karana, and Prexus, the coalition that first created mortal races to counter Veeshan's dominance, echo each other across the sky.
• The Companions — Brell Serilis and Bristlebane share a temple in Ak'Anon; old friends on opposite sides of the law, seated together.
• The Void — Agnostic rests between Tunare, the Mother of All life, and Innoruuk, the Prince of Hate — flanked by the purest good and the purest evil, belonging to neither.

Every cycle, the hunting shifts. When the wheel turns and a new god rises (every 4 real hours), the server lights up a fresh set of hot zones and announces them to everyone.

• One hot zone per level band. Six bands are covered — 1–10, 11–20, 21–30, 31–40, 41–50, 51–60 — so there's almost always a hot zone near your level. Up to six go hot at once.
• They last the whole cycle (day and night) and rotate at the next deity shift. A zone won't be chosen two cycles in a row, so the hot spots keep moving around Norrath.
• The announcement rides in right behind the deity's ascension — the new hot zones and their level ranges, signed off with "Loot tables are inverted. The rare walk the land."

What a hot zone gives you:

• Double XP and double AA — the fastest leveling and AA grinding on the server.
• Inverted loot. Each loot table is flipped, so a mob's rarest, most valuable drop becomes its most common one. The named you'd usually camp for days still has to die for it, but during a hot cycle it surrenders its best piece far more often than its junk.
• The rare walk the land. Any rare on a 10%-or-lower spawn chance gets a +25 boost to its odds — enough to turn a ~5% rarity into a roughly 1-in-4 sighting.
• Bosses spawn now. The instant a zone goes hot it repops, so raid bosses and rare mobs sitting on long timers appear immediately — no waiting out the respawn.

Make your own hot zone. You don't have to wait for the wheel. Hand a single Raid Token to any Herald standing in an open PvP zone, and that zone goes hot for the rest of the current cycle and the next — the same double XP, inverted loot, and rare boost, wherever you want the action. (One catch: a token-made hot zone won't force-spawn raid bosses.) It's blocked in safe cities, the Bazaar, instances, and any zone that's already hot — and it's one of the best ways to drag rival guilds into a fight on your terms (see Combat & PvP).

Three currencies, three ways to earn. Everything you buy on Blood of Zek runs on one of three currencies, each tied to a different kind of play. All three live in your inventory's Currency tab and can't be traded to other players. Gear, by contrast, is freely tradeable — the economy is meant to have a real player market. The only truly bound items are the currencies themselves and the augments you forge from your gear, which are No-Drop but Heirloom: you can pass them among your own account's characters, just not sell them to anyone else.

Souls — the blood currency. Earned only by killing other players.

• 1 Soul per open-world PvP kill (2 while Rallos Zek rules the heavens). That same kill also drops a Soul into your guild's shared bank.
• Spent on: cross-class spells, racial arts, and augment/soul-graft crafting (free during beta). Your guild's pooled Souls bankroll Zone Battle bids.

Conquest Points — the objective currency. Earned by winning and holding.

• 3 per member for a Zone Battle win, 3 per member for a Daily Battle win, and 1 per member, per owned zone, every night for territory you hold.
• Spent on: cross-class skills and disciplines.

Raid Tokens — the raid currency. Earned by killing raid bosses — and where you kill them matters.

• 3 Raid Tokens for an open-world boss kill, but only 1 if you take the boss down in a private instance. You open one by sealing a Blood Pact with the zone's Herald (say [request]) — it creates a private Dynamic Zone copy of the zone where the boss spawns. You get one kill (it won't respawn), and the pact holds for 3 days. The open-world spawn, by contrast, is shared — anyone can crash it — so it pays triple.
• Every eligible attacker gets the full amount; it isn't split up.
• Spent on: raid gear — the four Gear Tiers in the Marketplace.
• (Full Blood Pact / Dynamic Zone mechanics in The World → Instanced Everything.)

One store for everything you earn. Blood of Zek repurposes EverQuest's old cash-shop Marketplace button into a custom, no-real-money store. Open it from the Marketplace button in the EQ menu and browse a tree of everything your three currencies can buy — from anywhere in the world, even mid-raid.

Getting around. The left side is a two-level tree:

• Cross-Class Spells / Skills / Disciplines — each opens into a General tab plus a tab for every class that has the ability (see Cross-Class Abilities).
• Gear Tier 1–4 — the raid-gear vendor, sorted by tier and slot (see Gear Tiers).
• Augments — the crafting containers that turn gear into stat augments (see The Augment Forge).
• Soul Grafting — a container that binds your soul into an item to add your race and class to it, so you can wear a drop that wasn't meant for you.
• Ornaments — cosmetic weapon reskins, sorted by weapon type (see Ornaments & Mounts).
• Mounts — rideable mounts (see Ornaments & Mounts).

Click a category and the right pane fills with its items as tiles.

Buying. Click a tile to select it (it highlights gold), then hit Buy — the server deducts the right currency automatically (Spells & crafting use Souls; Skills & Disciplines use Conquest Points; Gear uses Raid Tokens) and hands you the item. Your current funds in that category's currency show right in the window, and Inspect opens any item in the full native item window so you can read its stats before you commit.

No real money, ever. There's no cash shop and no pay-to-win — the Marketplace spends only the currencies you earn by playing.

Most drops come in three grades. Nearly every piece of gear that drops on Blood of Zek exists at three power levels, and which one you get is the luck of the kill:

• Base — the normal item.
• Advanced (named "Advanced …") — 1.5× the base stats.
• Masterwork (named "Masterwork …") — 2× the base stats plus heroic stat bonuses.

When a tiered item drops, the grade is rolled — roughly 75% base / 20% Advanced / 5% Masterwork — so the piece you're after exists at every grade, and landing the Masterwork version is the real chase.

Weapons scale too: Advanced and Masterwork multiply weapon damage (1.5× / 2×) while leaving delay unchanged — a Masterwork weapon hits far harder at the same speed.

Each grade adds augment slots (see The Augment Forge):

• Base — 1 stat slot.
• Advanced — 2 stat slots.
• Masterwork — 2 stat slots plus a third, effect-only slot: a weapon proc or an armor worn effect, not stats.

One augment per stat, per item. You can socket one Dexterity aug or one AC aug, but never two of the same stat — a +15 AC aug won't sit beside a +10 AC aug. Each stat counts once, so you always run your single best of each.

Buy Masterwork raid gear with Raid Tokens. You don't have to rely on the drop. The Marketplace's Gear section is a Raid-Token vendor stocked with the Masterwork drops of the raid bosses, in four price tiers by boss difficulty:

• Tier 1 — 10 tokens: the classic dragons & gods (Nagafen, Vox, Cazic-Thule, Innoruuk, Drusella Sathir)
• Tier 2 — 15: Kunark dragons + Sebilis/Chardok bosses (Severilous, Talendor, Faydedar, Venril Sathir, the Chardok royals)
• Tier 3 — 20: the Veeshan's Peak dragons, plus Gorenaire & Trakanon
• Tier 4 — 25: Phara Dar, VP's final dragon

Everything in the vendor is Masterwork grade, browsable by slot, with Inspect to preview the full stat line before you buy.

Turn gear into augments. Got a piece you'll never wear? Don't vendor it — forge it into an augment and socket its power into gear you do wear. You feed a source item into a crafting container (a "combiner") and out comes an aug. Containers come from the Marketplace's Augments / Soul Grafting sections (bought with Souls — free during beta) or the Keeper of the Soulforge in the Bazaar.

Stat augments — bottle a stat. Pick the per-stat combiner (AC, STR, HP, mana, a resist, etc.), drop in a source item, and you get an aug worth a slice of that item's stat. How big a slice depends on the source's grade:

• Base source → 25% of the stat
• Advanced → 35%
• Masterwork → 50% — and the aug comes out Heroic (a Masterwork piece with 20 Dexterity yields a +10 Dexterity aug, +3 heroic).

Haste is the exception — it bottles at 50 / 75 / 100%. Values always round up, in your favor.

Effect augments — bottle a clicky/proc. Use the Proc, Worn, or Focus combiner on a Masterwork source that carries that effect, and you get an aug that grants it. These drop into the Masterwork effect slot (the 3rd slot — weapon procs / armor worn effects). Effect augs require a Masterwork source.

Soul Grafting — wear what wasn't yours. The Soul Grafting combiner binds your soul into a piece of gear, adding your class and race to it — so you can equip a raid drop that wasn't meant for your class. (Also reachable from the Marketplace.)

The rules:

• Weapon augs go only in weapons; armor augs only in armor — never crossed.
• A stat aug is locked to its source's slot — an aug forged from a chest piece fits chest slots, a ring aug fits rings, and so on.
• One augment per stat, per item (see Gear Tiers) — only your single best of each.
• Augments are Heirloom (No-Drop, but shareable among your own account's characters) and they pull out free, so you can re-slot as your gear improves.

Even your bags come in three grades. Just like gear, most bags drop as Base, Advanced, or Masterwork — rolled at roughly 75% / 20% / 5% — and the higher grades are serious inventory upgrades:

• Advanced — 1.5× the slots, plus improved weight reduction (+25%).
• Masterwork — 2× the slots, and 100% weight reduction (everything inside weighs nothing).

So a 10-slot bag becomes 15 slots at Advanced or 20 at Masterwork, and the server's largest bags top out at 80 slots at Masterwork. A full set of Masterwork bags massively boosts how much you can haul — and keeps you weightless doing it.

Look the part — for Raid Tokens. The Marketplace also sells pure-cosmetic gear that changes nothing but your appearance, paid for in Raid Tokens.

Weapon Ornaments — reskin any weapon. An ornament is an appearance-only augment: drop one into a weapon's ornament slot and the weapon keeps every stat but takes on the ornament's look. They're sorted by weapon type — Swords, Axes, Daggers, Maces & Hammers, Spears & Polearms, Bows, Staves, Wands & Orbs, Hand to Hand, Shields, and Instruments — at 10 Raid Tokens each, and the Marketplace's 3D preview (see The Marketplace) shows your character actually holding one before you buy.

Mounts — ride in style. Summon a rideable mount from the Mounts section at 50 Raid Tokens each. Right-click the mount to call your steed.

Both are bought like anything else in the store — select a tile, check the preview, hit Buy.

Every zone exists twice. There's the open world — shared, contested, where the hot zones, the best rewards, and all the PvP live — and a private instance you can seal for yourself. You pick which one you play in.

The Blood Pact. Every contested zone has a Herald of Zek. Hail the Herald in the zone you want and say [request] to seal a Blood Pact — the server creates a private Dynamic Zone, your own copy of that zone (mobs and bosses included), for you and your group.

• [enter] steps you in. Already hold a pact? Any Herald can [enter] you back into it from anywhere, and [status] shows your active pact and your current lockout timers.
• A pact lasts 3 days, and you hold one active pact at a time.
• The 3-day lockout for a zone is stamped the moment you seal or join the pact — not when it ends — and it's personal: join a pact that's already on its 3rd day and your own lockout still runs a fresh 3 days from when you entered. You can't get another pact for that zone until your own timer clears.

Safe, but quieter. Inside your instance, nobody can crash your camp or PvP you — ideal for a controlled raid or farming in peace. Two of the open world's draws don't follow you in: hot zones only ignite in the open, and raid bosses pay triple there vs. 1 token in a pact (see Economy → Currencies). But your guild's Zone-Battle home-field buff does — own the zone, and you keep that ownership bonus inside your instance of it, exactly as in the open world (see Zone Battles).