Ahhh, Cannith Challenges . . . ne'er before have words sung more true:
It's a brand new game
and a brand new world.
New rivals,
as you fight for survival.
Who knew the ultimate strats of these Cannith Challenges would be unveiled with such eloquence:
You gotta play smart.
You gotta move faster behind
every win there's a chance to begin, again!
You gotta take it all if you wanna be a master...
I'd love to hear good old Clankenbeard sing that tune. It was definitely the tune I was singing to Glaive the Warforged bartender all night as I visited him time and again for a mana refill:
Glaive took my money and I tipped him with my pokemon knowledge.
So Team Spode was down a member. As you might recall, Ulan is off gallivanting among the drug lords in Mexico, enjoying the heck out of the resorts and beaches down there. Crazy Canadian needs his sun to handle the upcoming months of cold. Don't blame him.
That left Ophiga, Spode, and I to fend for ourselves for the night. We had never tried the Cannith Challenges, so we decided to give a couple of them a go. The first one we tried was Lava Caves: Colossal Crystals.
Since we had never been in here before, we formulated a plan to kind of run things like a pirate cove adventure . . . Keep one person near the foreman and the main camp to kill the incoming baddies and Spode protects me and the kobolds as we built a path of torches trying to collect as many crystals as we can. This seemed to be going ok at first until we realized that, well, 200 some odd crystals out of 10,000 wasn't so hot and we hadn't really found any progenitor crystals to speak of.
no no no. We're missing something. hmmmm. (strike)
Our second time through we opened up the DDO wiki page and that didn't tell us a lot, but at least we had a map with some white arrows that seemed to indicate the position of a progenitor crystal.
Again we formulated a plan and started out building a torch path to the left. The only problem there was that there was no way in the world we were going to gather enough torches to stretch to the big square room we were shooting for. It was just far too long of a run.
Spode decided to just keep following the path and see if he could encounter these "gates" that we had read about and that we were collecting crests to unlock. Spode finally found the gate +1 GIANT blue crystal (yay!) . . . and we ran out of time. (scratch)
The third time through we decided to try and walk the kobolds along in a path by removing a back torch and planting a front torch, removing a back torch, and planting a front torch, so as to "capture" the kobolds, and force them to walk along with us. That proved to be impossible since as soon as a kobold grabbed some ore, they made off to the exit like they knew where they were going. (scratch)
Unfortunately we only got three tries at this since Spode was out of tokens for this particular adventure, and we had to quit and move to something else.
What we realized at the end was this adventure was probably all about using the teleporters to get the kobolds to the progenitor crystals. There were some "hot spots" that glowed on the ground where (unbeknownst to us) you can plant a teleporter to create a two-way door for the kobolds to run through instead of it being a one-way trip. At least that's the theory. We'll have to try it out when we get some more tokens for that one for sure!
If I took a moment during writing this blog post to search "Lava Caves: Colossal Crystals" . . . Ah crap, found a walk through . . . and a really good one at that, thanks DDM's Realm!
~~~~~~
The next challenge we had tokens for was Kobold Island: Short Cuts.
As was to be expected, our first time inside this challenge area was a blood bath. Here's me standing next to my soul stone and a couple of evil succubi. Great. Thanks Succubi.
Again, we were simply learning the ropes here at the beginning. The portals we clicked on weren't tied to the same location and the group quickly became separated and confused. We ran out of time, but managed to collect a few dragonshards and get the basics of the instance down. You need to get mechanical parts from Kobolds so that you can start running the dragonshard extractors. Once the dragonshard extractors start running, then they get attacked. Got it. Got my rez from Spode. Time runs out. (scratch)
On the second run through Kobold Island, we actually got a small extractor running and realized that there would be no way we could reach that objective with this thing running this slowly, and we decided to go find a large extractor we could start up. Wow! I've never fought one of these crazy teleporting demons before.
At least that was kind of fun!
What we then discovered was that those large extractors take dragonshards AND kobold parts to get running. DANGIT! Time runs out (scratch)
Glaive told me on my rest between attempt 2 and 3 that I should probably check my bags. He was totally right on there. I told the group they should check their bags and click on these supply crates in their inventories. LOOTS! (I think he was just trying to get me to stop talking about Charizard.)
Apparently any time you kill a red named, they give you these. Daddy likes!
On attempt 3 at the Short Cuts instance we finally understood that this was really like a tower defense game since you can purchase a turret to guard your crystal extractors. Ohhhhhhh! We even managed to upgrade a small extractor to Tier 2 and somehow make it so it wasn't working anymore. LOL.
Once again, we ran out of time . . . only this time we were out of time for the evening. (scratch)
Again, probably a simple search and reading DDM's write up on the Kobold Island Quest would have helped us quite a bit. No biggie. Team Spode runs things blind a few times . . . we like it that way.
So we learned a lot and had some fun for the evening. Got our noggins thinking, and I got to trade fire-type pokemon strats with the warforged behind the bar.
life is awesome
Happy Dueling!
You sure know how to write exciting! After reading this i'm almost tempted to try some more challenges. Almost, cause i don't seem to have a feeling for them. I did well in the Pirate Cove, but these new challenges are somehow unbeatable for me :-(
ReplyDeleteTwas good to read you and the rest of Team Spode had fun in there!