Last Bard Life

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I’ve not had much chance to play over the last few weeks, but when we have squeezed in the odd hour we’ve made the most of it. Rachel’s pure Paladin that I am running with has already proven it’s a rock in both heroic and epic quests. For my last bard life on the path to triple completionist I decided to try a variation of a build fellow guildie Tobril has been running for his epic past lives.

The build is 3 rogue / 4 fighter / 13 bard. I went with a Shadar Kai race and focused on INT as my main stat, using the Harper tree enhancements to make this my damage stat. The build has proved to be really good. If you caught Samius’ Twitch stream last Friday you might have heard him mention the fact we were happy with our builds enough to run eE. We don’t normally bother. We’re more than happy to run eH so we can get through quests in a good time and not spend forever in an eE version of the quest. But this pairing has blitzed through eE quests without any real trouble. Yes there have been some deaths ( mainly me 😀 ) but it’s never been a problem.
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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…)

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!

Epics….

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Our guild has regularly been 3-5 manning epics for a few months now. Not a big deal to the majority of DDO players I would imagine – you’ve probably been doing it for years! But we’re a small guild of friends and we like trying to do this kind of thing together to ‘learn the ropes’ as it were, rather than making complete fools of ourselves in a PUG 🙂

Up until now we’ve been running House P, House D & Red Fens. Last night we decided to try something we have not done yet – House K. We decided to start with Tharashk Arena.

The first attempt ended at Gate 1 when the trolls coming from the room got slightly rowdy, out of control, and we just couldn’t put them down quick enough. hmmm… so regroup, rethink on the tactics and back in again. I should mention that the party make-up was 2 light monks, one cleric and 1 ranger.

This time round, the light monks cookie doughed (sorry – that’s what we call Kukan-Do :-)) two of the trolls in the doorway, stunned two more with Stunning Fist, effectively blocking the doorway so they couldn’t all charge out at us. That made it nice and easy for us to stay all together to make it easier for the cleric as well as controlling the mob.

That got us to the arena itself. And this is where we discovered something we didn’t know. The rooms the monsters come out of can be accessed, if you get in there when they are coming out. Which meant, for the second round when you get the mephits, ogres, minotaurs & kobolds all at once, we could actually stagger the intake of monsters to take out by luring them apart.

So, we finished Tharashk Arena on epic for the first time last night. It took some planning and thought, but I love that this game allows you to think of strategic solutions to the high level content, rather than having to rely on certain party builds!