A quick round up for last week

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This week in DDO….

The TR’ing continues. It’s been a bit slow as we TR’d last weekend because we were bored, but one of our guild was away doing family stuff so he missed our mad dash from levels 1 -5. So we created 3 halfling monks and a dwarf cleric and ran around with him this week catching him up.

This is my first halfling character. I’ve never really been interested in playing them before (apologies to Samius & geoffhanna) but wow – they are fast little buggers aren’t they?! I fully intend for this character to become a bank character, but I may consider a halfling monk in a future TR build….

This weekend, one of our other guild mates was off doing real life stuff so I broke out a character I haven’t played for a while, my khopesh wielding barbarian. Boy have I neglected him! He needs gear (I appear to be still wearing the goggles you pick up from Korthos island!) I got him up to level 18 just running IQ on normal with my partners artificer. It was a nice easy set of missions, perfect for a Sunday. And as they are both 1st lifers we don’t have the ‘urgency’ to run on elite with these characters.

One of the nice things about getting to 18 was he could now wear the Elocators Habiliment. The bad thing about getting to 18 is that he is now wearing the Elocators Habiliment! I mean – have you seen it?!? lol But the displacement clickie is nice, my AC goes up, and due to the lack of attention I have given him it’s the best he’s got. Now, do I think about running some Siber Atoll for Dragontouched armour, or wait until level 20 and get him the Druid set from Eveningstar with PDK helmet & gauntlets…?

Meanwhile, things got back on track with the TR train yesterday afternoon. We’re now all at level 6 with level 7 banked. Splinterskull is out of the way – and even though it was fairly quick to run with us all I’m really hoping we can avoid repeating it for XP needs. I’ve got another Visor of the Flesh Render – I don’t need to run it again just yet thanks 🙂

However, we did run the Sharn Syndicate quests – when did they change the sound effects?? If you don’t know what I mean, I suggest you go kill a female halfling in there (Binders is a good mission for them). They sound…er…well… a bit rude we think! Are they channeling succubi? 🙂

And just for the record, the current TR group is (and their previous lives):-

  • Hymm – half-orc barbarian (human monk/human monk)
  • Cedarian – human paladin (half-orc barbarian/human fighter)
  • Antaka – half-elf ronk/mogue whatever 🙂 (half-elf monk/halfling monk)
  • Korvisa – elf artificer (elf ranger/elf ranger)
  • Ventenar – elf favoured soul (half-elf favoured soul)

Um.. I might have got some of that list wrong 🙂 I’m sure my guildies will let me know if I have!

From human monk to half-orc badass – I mean barbarian

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*Hymm was wandering around House Jorasco enclave, minding his own business, when he tripped over a rather large stone. This struck him as strange. His training as a Shintao monk had made him graceful on his feet. It was unlike him to trip over anything.

Curious, he stooped to look at the object that had caused this uncharacteristic event and was surprised to see that the stone had a large label on it, reading “property of Kruz”.

Hymm picked the stone up, thoughtfully weighing it in his hand. He was acquainted with Kruz. Thanks to him he had taken his training as a monk one step further and become more powerful. Was this a sign….?

Deciding to find out, he changed route and loped across to where the mystic orc was to be found. “Kruz”, Hymm called as he approached “I think this is yours!”. He tossed the stone to the orc who deftly snatched it from the air.

“Ah, my friend, you found it” Kruz grinned. “It is time for the next stage in your journey”.

“So soon?” asked Hymm, “I thought I would have more time to prepare…”

Kruz shook his head “No my friend, I am sorry. The stars are aligned, your comrades are ready, it must be now”. Hymm sighed “So be it”.

Kruz closed his eyes and muttered an incantation under his breath. A slight smile played around his lips. “Why are you smiling?” asked Hymm suspiciously. “You’ll see” replied Kruz.

An intense burst of pain coursed through Hymm’s body. Although he had been through this before, it seemed stronger this time. He gasped slightly as the searing heat spread through his body, burning his form to ash to feed Kruz’s tree, then creating him anew.

Becoming aware of himself again, Hymm looked at himself. His arms were larger than before, well muscled, and he felt larger, both in body mass and height. Licking his lips he realised he had tusks and after a few seconds it clicked. “Half orc?” he asked. Kruz clapped a hand on his shoulder, stretching slightly to reach. “Yes my friend. This body will suit you well. You are to learn the ways of the barbarian. You will smash & hew your way to glory. You’re comrades await you – go!”

With a flash of light, Hymm found himself aboard his guildship. He friends stood before him. Grinning, Hymm knew the adventures were about to start afresh.

* I decided to do this in the style of krissonofpark. I hope I did him justice 🙂

** And if you hadn’t guessed, yes I have TR’d my main guy. In a way I’m kind of sad because I really like my light monk. But I have my dark monk to feed my need to punch bad guys and I know that overall, this will make Hymm stronger 🙂

Update 15, Bugs & Apps

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We ran the new content on Monday. I did find it funny that I kept seeing tweets and posts from Turbine about new monsters in the update… when they are just green flesh golems 🙂 But the missions themselves are pretty fun, the last mission in particular looks great. Sure, there are bugs with the missions, sure there are new bugs created by the update (will todays hotfix sort some of these out I wonder?) but there was nothing that caused us to actually stop running the missions.

Meanwhile, my partner would really, REALLY like Turbine to get that invisibility bug sorted out, which they reckon had been fixed but hasn’t. If you haven’t seen it, it occurs when you go from one instance to another in a zone. For example, running between decks on the guild ship. Or in and out of caves in the Orchard of the Macabre. You pop out and all you can see is a floating weapon. I’ve only had it happen a few times myself, but she has it happen a LOT! Lol

The Shroud & VoD raids continue as we try to get some nice gear for our next TR lives. We’re also trying different combinations of characters in the hope we can continue running them once our level 25’s have been reduced back to level 1 🙂

In other news, jjflanigan has put together an android & iOS app for Cannith Crafting. Very useful and I highly recommend you give it a try!

***EDIT***
I really wish they’d fixed the hirelings in the hotfix today. Or is it just me that has hirelings that refuse to stand still when I tell them explicitly to do so??

The Last Week in DDO

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Apologies for the delay between blogs. Real life is unfortunately being a bit of a pain at the moment and making me do other stuff 😦

However, I have managed to get some quality game time in. Last week our current guild grouping hit level 20 (I was going to say capped but I guess that doesn’t apply anymore!) Which has made me really happy because it means I have a high level dark monk character I can play while I work on my multiple TR’s for my light monk. Although I did start playing around with the idea of TR’ing the dark monk build and including a splash of another class to see if there was a way to incorporate more feats… Damn I should have bought more Hearts while they were on sale!

Anyway, since the 5 of us have hit 20 together we decided to start the Eveningstar quests again. And it was great! It was like playing them as new (apart having a good idea of tactics this time round) and we all really enjoyed them again. Mind you, I do think they are some of the more fun quests in the game anyway 🙂 My dark monk now has his Ancient Gemstone docent and Grave Wrappings. I’m just working on building up commendations. I think the healing amp on the Purple Dragon Knight Gauntlets will come in very handy for him. Also, his current equipment appears to be kind of sucky…

Also, we have dragged our 5th guildie kicking & screaming through the Shroud with us. Ok maybe not so much kicking and screaming, but he did have to get himself flagged. So we are now running 5 man Shrouds every 3 days and the extra DPS is cutting the run time down to about 40-45 minutes.

Most excitingly, yesterday we attempted our first VoD. Only on normal, again only 4 of us, but it went surprisigly smooth. And I got the Enlightened Vestments (bonus – they actually look nice)! It took longer to find the entrance and get that middle button pressed! Which ended up being lit completely by accident when a tiefling ran across it while trying to get to one of us on the far side. I’ve read that a summon monster should work, but we haven’t been able to work out how you get the monster to spawn on the switch – none of us could target the switch. So if any of you guys & gals have a reliable way of hitting it – could you let me know?

Well, I guess that’s my ramblings done with. Hope you’re all having fun and I’m looking forward to todays Update 15 🙂

See you around!

Third Life TR Talk

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In our guild, we tend to try and TR together to make it easier for levelling up. Overall, it’s a lot easier to get through missions when there a few of you, plus it’s always a laugh 🙂

We are now looking to start on our third life TR’s. The problem I had is that I have a choice of two characters:-

Fyrne, currently a warforged Favoured Soul. This guy is my intended completionist, although I’m not sure I’ll complete with every class 3 times, or just the once (does that even class as completionist?). Anyway, I’ll be honest – I don’t like playing this character at the moment. The favoured soul class is doing nothing for me. Which does make this guy an ideal candidate to TR into something else to try. However, I also have…

Hymm, currently a human light monk. This is his second monk life and I love this character. To be fair, I love the monk class anyway. I have a dark monk build that is about to hit level 20 that I also really like playing and he can fulfil my need to punch things while Hymm TR’s. My plan for him (or Hymm :-D) is to try and get 3 x barbarian, 3 x paladin & 3 x fighter lives. Whether or not I manage that many lives is yet to be seen….

After careful consideration I’ve decided to TR Hymm. Because when it gets right down to it, I like characters that can hit things 🙂 Fyrne is going to have to do a sorceror, wizard, cleric & bard life at some point…. and I’m not sure I’m ready to handle that just yet (even though I have a wizard, bard and cleric in my alts) lol

Decision made, the next steps are:-

  • Use this checklist!!
  • Make sure I’m stocked up on House Cannith marks
  • Get some low level armour & weapons crafted (Hymm also happens to be my crafter)

Just for giggles, the rest of the group are:-

  • Antaka (light monk) who is TR’ing into a paladin
  • Willowing (rogue) who is TR’ing into a rogue ( my partner does like her rogues 😀 )
  • Korvisa (archer) who is TR’ing into an artificer
  • Ventenar (favoured soul) who is TR’ing into a favoured soul

A nice mix there I think. Now we just have to coordinate the actual step of TR’ing.

See you around!

What’s in a Name? Part 2

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Apologies, this is kind of a filler piece as I’ve been busy this week and haven’t had a chance to put anything else together. We (as a guild) are gearing up to TR’ing for our third lives so I’ll be putting something together for that hopefully later this week.

Meanwhile, here are a few other NPC’s that we have alternative names for:-

  • Huckaby Isable (Orchard of the Macabre rare shadow) – Huckleberry Finn
  • Quinny (Orchard of the Macabre rare undead rat) – Quincy (OK that’s not very imaginative – I suspect we just misread his name and it’s stuck!)
  • Rochussen (Vale of Twilight rare elemental) – Rocky Rockyson or Rock Hudson
  • Bralani (from Running with the Devils) – we call these biryani (type of curry)

On a completely different subject, I’ve started focusing more on learning how to code for iPhone apps. I have a couple of DDO related ones that I’d like to provide that are currently available on the Android only (many thanks to JayDubya for giving me permission to recreate his apps). I’m nowhere near ready to release anything but I’m putting this on here as a way of forcing myself to keep up with the code, instead of going home and playing DDO instead!

A little bit of everything…. #gangnamstyle

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This is going to be a random blog about all sorts – apologies if it’s boring 🙂

Didn’t get to play much this weekend as we had family visiting but by Sunday afternoon we were free to do what we liked. Jumping on we (that’s me and t’missus) found a couple of our guildies on and decided to attempt another 4 man Shroud but on hard…..hmmm…Harry took out the cleric very quickly on part 4 due to some major lag. We got him down to about 1/4 but couldn’t quite manage it. My partner decided she had had enough and went to watch the olympics. The rest of us jumped in a Shroud pug…and I’d forgotten what they were like. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great group & everything went smoothly. But we spent 10 minutes waiting while they chatted (they obviously knew each other) and waiting for those last few people to turn up.

I was going to turn in for the night when a ‘Caught in the Web’ LFM went up. So we decided to jump into that. They were a great group of guys, loads of fun, but we had problems as we reached the portal keepers and ended up wiping. So, that was kind of disappointing – but we’ll get there eventually.

Yesterday, I came across a Korean music video that I went on to tweet about. It’s the craziest thing I’ve seen, not my type of music at all, but very addictive. Since then, Cordovan has tweeted that it’s doing the rounds at Turbine, MarDeRoam has put it up on the forums and I’ve decided I’m going to subject you all to it too!!

PSY – GANGNAM STYLE

Oh and by the way – that’s me on Twitter. If anybody wants to follow me @grimorde you’re welcome to. But be warned, I do occasionally tweet about non DDO stuff like work!!

See you around!