As you’ll know if you read Samius’ blog, 3 of my guild and 3 of his guild TR’d last weekend. We’d all purchased Otto Boxes while they were on sale in the Turbine store and were waiting for confirmation of when the next XP bonus weekend would be. I wasn’t expecting it to be the following weekend.. oh well – all plans put on hold 😀

This is just a general ramble about my impressions of the weekend. To start with, I hurriedly put together a build on the Friday. Hymm will eventually go back to being a monk. He has 2 monk lives & 1 barbarian life done. Ideally I’d like 2 more barbarian lives, 3 fighter lives and possibly 3 paladin lives before he returns to his monky goodness. I didn’t feel like going barbarian again, so I knocked up a 1/9/10 artificer/monk/fighter build. Basically I’m a monk with some boosts from the fighter class. The artificer class was taken first to give me skill points in Open Lock, Search & UMD. I’ve taken the cleric dille (he’s helf) for now, but once I’ve got all his gear sorted out I may swap that out for rogue dille.

As Samius mentioned, to start with there were 5 of us. 4 of us had started with a level of artificer 😛 and 1 rogue. No shortage of people for traps…. We blitzed through Korthos, which was both fun and different. I can’t remember the last time I ran Korthos with an (almost) full party! Finishing Korthos took us to level 3 and as we hit the Harbor our 6th party member joined us.

We spent the rest of the afternoon/evening running Harbor, Marketplace, Tangleroot.. I think that was everything. By the end of the night we’d all hit level 8 (a few of us had to hit some explorers to get the last bit of XP required)

Sunday morning we all stoned our characters, fumbled through our TR caches for new gear and hit the quests again. We ran IQ (full Mindsunder chain, most of Dreaming Dark) and most of the Reavers Refuge to get us almost to 20. At that point, the Defense Guild decided to call it a day, as did one of my guildies. At that point I was 9000XP from hitting 20. Since I knew I wouldn’t be on Sarlona until the following Friday and we were planning on hitting the epics the following weekend with these chars, I dragged my remaining guildie around the Vale of Twilight to get the last few kills I needed to have 200 kills of both Lammania & Shavarath. The XP from that took me nicely to level 20.

I don’t think I could do this on a regular basis for all my TR’s. It’s a great way to TR, especially for a character that’s 3rd lifer or above. And running with a full group, especially people I’ve now played with on a regular basis and know & trust, really does make the difference. But the Otto’s box costs.. and I was tired! 😀 But – it was a great deal of fun!

My thanks to Aldrac, Row, Samius, Tobril & Torrance for the fun!

Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational fighter/monk

Or.. something like that anyway 😛

Have fun, see you around!