Saturday Update

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Firstly, apologies for the lack of a blog last week. But Samius did a fine job of covering for me 🙂

During the week I’ve been running my main TR, Hymm, on Sarlona. He’s taken 15 and will probably be taking 16 soon, so looking at getting the Gianthold flagging missions out of the way.

The twice weekly runs on Orien continue. Monday we ran VoN 1-4 which, regardless of a few hitches with traps, went very nicely. Thursday we reran Deleras Tomb. As my artificer had already run these I switched to my light monk, which made a nice change 🙂
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Weekly Catch Up

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Well, it’s been another busy week in real life but I’ve managed to get some decent gaming time in – here goes 🙂

During the week I’ve been running my main TR, Hymm, on Sarlona and had a few nights running with Micki & Dom on Orien.

Because both my TR’s had hit level 13, but two of our guildies are not really playing at the moment, the other 3 of us decided to switch which TR’s we were concentrating on. Hymm is my main guy that I like the most 🙂 He’s now at level 14 and with 15 banked.

Thursday night I ran the Phiarlan Carnival chain which went really well. Though Micki has no idea how to find her way around A Small Problem 🙂 Friday we ran The Pit & Gwylans Stand. I got to run these with my level 8 light monk I’m experimenting with on Orien and yay! I didn’t die 🙂
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EEE (Epic Elite Eveningstar)

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We had a bonus day of running with the Defense Guild team on Friday due to Thanksgiving, so we decided to finish up from last week and complete the U16 chain on eE. There were just two missions to finish the chain, Stay at the Inn & The End of the Road. Both went fairly well, my partner seems to be finding her rhythm now as a cleric for a full party (i.e. she has to keep Samius’ tank alive while we run around sorting ourselves out 🙂 j/k).


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Weekly Run Down

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It’s been a busy week, both in DDO & real life. But since I’m fairly sure you don’t want to hear about the project I’m on at work that’s filling my spare hours, or how I’m ripping out my garden, I’ll stick with DDO 🙂

We got one guildie back, then lost two. One of the guys has had some changes at work, so he can’t play for a few weeks. One guy has a new girlfriend. So we’re down to our three main players at the moment.

Thursday night I played on Orien again. Was killed for the first time ever by lag. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had plenty of lag in game before. But this was a complete standstill, cannot do anything while a horde of orcs massacred the party 🙂
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A Night of Firsts…

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Most of last week was spent getting characters flagged for raids. We’ve been all organised. I put a spreadhseet together and everything…. 🙂

Anybody who read mine or Samius blog from the start of the week will know that my guild, Heros of the Dragons Wrath, has been teaming up with the Defense Guild. Due to the time difference the only real time we get to group up is weekends, their mornings coinciding with our mid-afternoons.

Saturday we had a quick run around. Samius had things to do so after a quick run of Madstone Crater, he left and 3 of us ran around with Tobril in Eveningstar. We blasted through the Druids Deep chain on eH, with only a slight hiccup with the quest Thorn and Paw when the last wall wouldn’t come down. Until my partner, Trapping (she likes rogues!) found a Red Musk zombie lurking in a bear pit and finished it off 🙂 No hag on the last mission, though, so no chance of Ivy Wraps, which was a shame.

By the time we finished the chain, Samius was back but we had to log off for the night.

Sunday, the DG guys (and gal) jumped on just as I was about to go sort food out. By the time I got back, they were running the DQ pre-raid, so my partner & myself jumped in for the end of that. Lailat goes down very nicely and we all pile back to Zawabi’s ready to go off and kick her butt again. Only to find that my partners cleric had already run the DQ raid and hadn’t reset the chain! But, the DG guys are happy to run the pre-raid again, another eN run in the hope for the odd seal or shard 🙂 Back to Zawabi’s again, into ADQ. I cannot remember if we did eN, or eH, but either way this was the first time we’ve run this raid on epic. In the past our guild have 4 manned it on normal, but this run was easy and smooth, with Samius tanking Lailat; Tobril, Torrance & Trapping DoT’ing; while I whack away with my fighter (when I’m not knocked on my arse).

eVoN is suggested next. One of our other guildies, jpedd, comes on with his sorc, I switch to Dimichaerii my dark monk, Trapping stays with her cleric. Now, we have actually done eVoN5 before, but it’s not one we run very often so we’re not that familiar with it. But, again, it was breezed through. Even short manning it we had plenty of people for pulling of levers & such. Also, I started using the US pronunciation of ‘lever’ – I’ll have to be careful with that 😀

And so we come to eVoN6. We’ve run this at heroic level, maybe twice before. Never at epic. Tobril gives us instructions and we’re off. It took us a bt of time to organise our Djinni killing, but we get there, take down the portals, regroup. Onto Velah. She looks awesome. I feel kind of guilty for hitting her 😦 But I want her loot, dammit 🙂 Down she goes. A few shards to the team and I get my first flawless Red Dragon Scale – nice.

We take a quick break, trying to decide what to do next. The brave people from Defense Guild agree to a ToD. Again, we’re shortmanning it and the three of us have never, ever, done a ToD before. (I know, it’s embarrassing that I’ve played this game for over 2 years and never had the nerve to join a group running this.) We get past the judge & the jailer, onto to the final fight, deciding not to try for the optional chest. Samius does a great job of tanking both Horoth & Suulomades while we beat down Horoth. Again, it goes really smooth 🙂 My partner gets a ring, I get some war trophies.

All in all, it was a great weekend. Fun runs, lots of XP, I really enjoyed myself. Thanks guys! Oh, and Turbine devs – I think you really need to make a mini Arraetrikos companion…

On a more serious note, Hurricane Sandy is due to hit the East Coast of the US today. Hope you guys keep yourselves safe! (Here’s hoping Turbine has those servers tied down…)

Dancing with Defense

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This weekend was a bit up & down. Or rather, down and up… Saturday was a bit of a bust. I actually thought I’d picked up a flu bug, but turned out the cold I’ve had for the last week decided to up the stakes. So I didn’t really do anything on Saturday.

On Sunday, feeling slightly better, I got dragged back online by my partner and discovered Tolero was currently pugging on Sarlona for her 24 hour charity drive. So we jumped in Red Willow Ruins with her group. That was fun 🙂 And congratulations once again to her for managing 24+ hours of gaming. How great is the DDO community for raising that much cash?

One of our other guildies arrived later on and we ran the first chain in Eveningstar with his newly capped paladin. I got some nice XP, getting me closer to finishing my 3rd level of US. I think once I’ve hit that and got my next fate point, I’ll switch to another destiny. Although I’ll miss those hit points…

Finally, last night, we grouped with Samius, Torrance & Tobril of the Defense Guild and ran a few raids, eH Chrono & hH VoD. That was a lot of fun 🙂 They really know their stuff, and it’s a lot easier running them with a group of 7 compared to our usual 4 or 5 🙂 My partner was pleasantly surprised to realise her cleric hadn’t had to pot once.

Hopefully, our 5th guildee will get his internet sorted out this week and will be back with us by the weekend. Just in time for Mabar 🙂

Have fun, see you around!

Easy Night

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Due to various scheduling issues and previous appointments & commitments, my partner & I were the only ones one from our guild for most of last night.

We decided to run the first chain in Eveningstar with my level 24 monk (who has already done them) and her level 21 cleric (who she desperately wants to level up). And I realised that a) I had forgotten how pretty is is out in Kings Forest b) eN is quite easy….

It made a nice change from running our TR’s, who are now sitting at level 13 & 9 respectively. Because they are so close together I feel like I’m running the same missions over & over. Which is something I don’t really enjoy doing.

On Sunday night our guild decided to try eH Offering of Blood, something we’ve not tried running on epic before. There were only 4 (out of the 5) of us. It was going fairly well. There was a slight hiccup to procedures when we got to the second bridge, where the traps are, and realised the rock ledges around the side of the cave were no longer there 🙂 but we got past. Unfortunately, we completely wiped when we got to the last fight. The scorpions just stunned us over & over…. oh well. We have some ideas of what to do on our next attempt. And I definitely want to try it again, it’s something different, I’ve realised my monk is not flagged for ADQ (no idea how that happened!) and it was 45K XP!

See you around!

XP Restrictions

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I was running Lord of Dust on eH this morning, once again looking for a possible shard drop, but also getting xp for my epic destinies, when I noticed this:-

So, this means I’ll get no more decent xp on this mission unless I change to eE? Darn!

Random

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I’m tired so todays blog will consist of random thoughts 🙂

My dark monk, Dimichaerii, has gone a slightly different route on his point spend in Grandmaster of Flowers in comparison to how I spent them on my light monk. I got the Drifting Lotus feat the other nght and I love it 🙂 Knocks bad guys on their arse, does great damage (on the mobs I’ve tried it against) and looks cool!

I’m listening to old episodes of DDOCast, currently at episode 133. I am taking bets with myself on how long it takes for Jerry to pronounce Samius’ name correctly. So far I’ve lost the bet twice 🙂

Episode 132 (I think) had a great segment by Xylosent (I’ve probably spelled that incorrectly!) about his love of DDO and what it means to him. This was recorded just before DDO went free to play, when it seems the now VIP’s were worried about how it would affect the game. But I think everything he said still holds true now. Check it out.

3rd life TR is going slow, but mainly because one of the guild is working late at the moment so we’re hanging on for him. Not that I mind – it means I get some epic runs in, or play with some of my less played characters. But the quest for the elusive Shard of the Envenomed Blade is still ongoing while running the U13 epics {sigh}

See you around!

Upping the Epics

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Last night we decided to take our epic runs to the next level – Epic Elite!

Since one of our guildies has lost his VIP for the moment, but has the MotU expansion pack, we started with the first mission of the first chain in Eveningstar “Impossible Demands”.

And, surprising to us, it went quite well. A few deaths, sure, but we finished it without too much trouble. So, daringly, we decided to attempt the next one “The Unquiet Graves”. With my partner running her rogue and bluffing the incanters out that also went quite well… until the sneaky run for the end chest in an attempt to get it without having to trigger the remaining drow running around 😦 Fortunately we had the xp & favour so it wasn’t that big a deal.

More excitingly, I had a +3 INT tome drop as a mission end reward. Although my monk doesn’t really use INT, eating the tome takes me to an INT of 11 so I can now drink Silver Flame pots without ship buffs and not worry about running around helpless for 30 seconds 🙂

Overall, a fun night and hopefully we’ll be continuing with the chain tonight!

See you around 🙂