Back in the Game – Life 13

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It’s been a busy 6 weeks. We moved house at the beginning of August, moving into a property with no internet. Then we went on holiday. When we got back, we still had no internet but I tried my mobile phone’s 3G tethering and found it worked surprisingly well for playing DDO. Then Rachel’s hard drive died and she couldn’t play 😦 so we stopped while I had a new drive ordered & delivered & I had time to put it in.

So the past week has been the first time we’ve properly been back in DDO for a while. Surprisingly I didn’t really miss it that much (yep, there goes my DDO street cred!).
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GenCon & San Francisco: Day 2 – Dungeons & Teddy Bears

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Day 2 was an early start with Teddy Bear Chainmailing at 8am. We met up with Torrance and stopped off to grab some breakfast before trying to find where the class was. Which, after we had walked over to the Convention Centre, we realised was taking place in a hotel back near where we were staying :-/ Well the walk gave me time to eat my muffin 🙂

The class was fun. We were given a teddy, a bag of chain links and 2 pairs of pliers (unfortunately we couldn’t keep those) and instructed to start by getting a pile of open links (twist slightly with the pliers) and closed links. From there we were shown how to start putting these together, basically building a strip to go around the chest of the bear. Once I had the pattern down it was fairly easy. Then I had to create two smaller strips which were added above my original section, front and back, and connected over the shoulder. My bear looked like he had a chainmail halter top 😀

Rach decided to go for a bondage/thing look and Torrance had the best looking bear IMHO with a chainmail bikini!!
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Pirates & Airships & Swashes of Buckles – Oh My!

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last week, you’ll know that U22 Pirates of the Thunder Sea was released on Wednesday for DDO. I’m not going to go into lots of details. Geoff covered a lot of the issues with the new release really well in his blog earlier today – go read that. (There’s even an amusing anecdote about a dog)

But here are my general thoughts on it:-
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Jumping Around

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Thinking about it the name of this blog post could cover two things.. I meant it to relate to the fact I’m switching between characters a lot but it pretty much describes my playstyle with Hymm’s current life too 🙂

Heroics

I have two heroic characters I’m running at the moment, Hymm & Dimachaerii.

Hymm is now 2 rogue/6 ranger/7 cleric, with level 16 banked. I’ve been quite happy with how the build has turned out so far, damage is OK, heals are OK (he’s not really built as a main healer type but does nicely in emergencies) but I do spend a lot of time running around backwards shooting at mobs while Rach’s fighter build cleans up the majority of the bad guys. I’m looking forward to getting Blade Barrier 😀

Killing the orcs in ‘Feast or Famine’


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Halfway There (for this life)

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Just a quick update this week.

Most of my DDO game time has been spent with Rach, running our current TR’s. Hymm is now level 10, with level 11 banked until we finish off the level 9 quests. When we hit level 9 we got to some of our favourite quests on hE. Rach suggested we grab an XP pot when we ran them as they are also decent XP. So we both crunched up a 50% XP pot through the DDO 40th anniversary trading cards, drinking it just before finishing the first on our list – The Pit. We followed that up with Gwylans Stand and (thanks to Legend for reminding us!) Tear of Dhakaan. In all we made over 120K XP just from those three 😀

Keeping a look out while Rach gets the water in Small Problem


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Back to 1

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Yep, Hymm finally finished life 9 – Druid. I can honestly say this has been one of my least favourite DDO lives in the last 12 months or so. I’m still having a hard time pinning down the reason for it. The DPS on the character was good, I really love Earthquake and when I was paying attention I could keep myself & Rach (we’ve mostly duo’d) alive.

I think my main dislike is the animation for switching forms. Everything slows down, the flash of light is too bright… did I mention everything slows down? Oh well *shrug* it’s done now. I do think when I next run a Druid life I will go full caster using the elemental forms & see how that works.
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U21 is here

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This is a really quick look at U21 which was released by DDO yesterday.

I only had a quick hour to run around so I headed up to the Thunder Peak with Rach. Guildies Samius & Jayuus joined us shortly after. Jayuus had already had a run round for a few hours in the Ruins of Thunderholme so he ran us to the first red named, Dagan for a quick kill.

Fighting dawrven skeletons


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From Twitter to Podcasts to Audiobooks

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It’s strange, sometimes, how we get from one place to another. And I don’t mean a physical journey.

I joined Twitter back in 2009. Mainly as a resource for development, finding other developers & getting information on the latest technologies. Then I started playing DDO in 2010 and started following people who also played DDO. My twitter stream exploded 😀 But, apart from people, I also started following the #DDO hashtag, looking out for information & using it as a way to connect with other players. That resulted in my finding tweets from @Samius & @Lessah who, at the time, were doing regular DDO Cocktail Hour podcasts.
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DDO Catchup & Trying Elder Scrolls Online

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DDO

It’s been a slow few weeks with DDO. You remember how I said it took 3 weeks for Hymm to level from an iconic 15 to 28 last life? Well, not this life! I’ve been running a druid/monk/fighter PDK and I’m almost at level 20. For some reason I have not enjoyed this life. I’m still having a hard time working out why. The damage is good, I have some healing ability, but I just don’t seem to be enjoying it. Well, maybe I’m a bit bored of running the iconics, as I am now on my third iteration. Running those same quests can get a bit monotonous eventually 😀 I am thinking of taking a break from the iconic lives on my next TR and iTR’ing back to level 1. Maybe that will break it up a bit.

Druid, artificer & a small army of minions…


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New Site Stuff – Server Load

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Thanks to the DDO Oracle I have a new image on my site. It’s just over there… to the right 😀

From the man himself:

Updated hourly, consider it sort of like a server up display, except instead of a green “yeah” light it shows the load for the last 4 hours. If the load average flatlines to zero, take the hint – that’s red.

Pretty cool 🙂