Life with Lifin Part Deux and STONES

Servers are down for maintenance this morning, so . . . once again . . . time to type up a bit about what's going down with Lifin the cleric, and a few other side notes.

Lifin is now level 11. I was riding kind of a nice wave of experience with Skifty, my artificer lady, and then she pulled ahead big time. I've been taking it all extremely laid back and casual whereas Skifty was living the big exp life. I think the major difference here is that Skifty is VIP and I'm FTP (although I've unlocked pretty much the whole game through the DDO store). I don't worry about things like "breaking a hard mode streak" or anything like that. As long as I'm running with a VIP I have immediate access to Elite instances that shell out a ton of exp. Skifty is also running with the 20% exp pots as well. Me? I'm using the 5% pots you can get for cheap from the Cannith missions.

Skifty is on a quest to run through his second life, then work back up to 8th and use the stone of experience to get his character back up to 16th. Genius plan, right?

Stone of experience you say? Oh yeah, the Stone of Experience is all the rage right now. Actually, it was all the rage like a month ago. ;) The Stone of Experience is a little thing VIPs get to help people boost their exp from level eight to level 16. If you use all three shots of your stone of experience on lowbies, you get a free cool white panther cub. It's beautiful actually. I had a guy named Achaius on Cannith use it on my bard last night.

Remember my bard? No? I don't blame you. I hardly remember him. LOL. Yeah, he had been sitting at seventh forever because I leveled him for one purpose, and that was to get into and hold open the doors to the Shadow Crypt for the static group so we could run it over and over and milk it for exp. Once you get the compass directions down, it goes pretty smoothly. Team Spode milked that. I digress.

So, anyway, yay! I leveled up my bard to eighth last night and started asking for people to hit me with the stone! I found that the most effective method was to start a high level group that just said "I'm looking for someone to hit me with a stone of experience." BAM! Archaius tells me to run over to the Wayward Lobster and ding 16! That's right! I now have a severely under geared 16th level bard sitting on Cannith right now WOOT!

I'd like to do the same thing over on Thelanis with my second level Artificer, but I don't know if I'll make it to eighth with her before the Stone of Experience promotion end date comes up around 20 August. If I was a betting man though, I'd bet DDO would put the stone of experience into the DDO store after all has been said and done. /shrug

Wait . . . wasn't this post about Lifin? YES, IT IS! I have screenshots from my soloing adventures . . . like these:

Lifin vs. The Smolder.

Smolder is a little fire elemental boss out in Searing Heights. A lot of my recent exp hunting has just been soloing around. 750 kills, 9 rares, and however many locations later, Searing Heights provided some fun! I wonder if they'll ever fix the music bug in Searing Heights? Have you ever noticed that? There's a spot over in the Sulatar stronghold where the music starts to get extremely psychotic and looping over itself, then when you exit the instance, it . . . never . . . goes . . . away. You have to log out to clear it.

Here's another great pic, Lifin's Hireling shaves the legs of Dr. Rushmoore's Girlfriend:

Like I've said before, when I'm on my own, I'm pretty much a Cannith mission guy. I've got these down pretty good. Dr. Rushmoore's is probably the most frustrating out of the bunch because it's pretty much a crap shoot whether you'll get all the crests you need on your Pathway to Victory!

I've been doing pretty good on these though! Check out my exp report here for The Dragon's Hoard mission. Three stars!

I've gotten my kills to within 30 of getting four stars here, but I'm convinced it's just too big of an instance to cover all by yourself like that. Instead what I've found is that the best course seems to be getting just enough crystals to get the instanced finished, then killing through the corridors looking for the dragon. Since the foreman dying is actually one of the objectives, there's really no worry about returning to help him and the kobolds out once you have your crystals. In fact, this is the best place to be right here . . . Dying dragon with dead foreman:

Yay for death all around!

Another thing . . . see that treasure bag in the screenshot above. Yeah, there's another glitch in these I've always wondered if they'd fix. The creatures in The Dragon's Hoard drop all kinds of little baggies for you to pick up off the ground, but you never can collect them. Click--nothing. Click--nothing. And sadly, even knowing I can't pick them up . . . I always try. LOL. Why do I do that? Conditioning from the rest of the world I suppose. ;)

So, in general I've been having fun. Hope you all have too.

Happy dueling!

Life with Lifin (episode 1)

Well since the DDO servers are down this morning, why don't I take a minute or 30 to talk about the Life of Lifin, my super dee dooper awesome cleric over on Thelanis?

This is Lifin at his best:

Yes, that is a couple of attackers turned to stone by the extremely awesome level 4 Rockboots from the Cannith Challenges. Lifin is completely geared out with Cannith Challenge loot to be honest. He's getting permanent blur from bracers of the wind, brandishing seeker +1 from a ring, sparkling from some Mournelode Plate, bonking mobs on the head with a Mournelode Mace, and I already told you about the Rock Boots . . .

Sometimes I think the Cannith Challenges were custom made for guys like me who usually only have 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there to steal while still loving DDO and wanting to keep up a little with the gear grind. I'm finding that every time I peek through on to a new tier of Cannith clothing, I'm right there soloing my way to a few new pieces of gear.

This is also Lifin at his best:

That's me hanging with the Warforged in Tangleroot. Apparently everyone plays a Warforged but me, and as you know, I have a thing about halflings. One of those is a girl Warforged btw. (shhh, I still haven't figured out how to tell.) Healing these guys is really what I wanted to do with this character, and it's pretty cool when I get the chance to do it.

So my new guild is a completely different scene than my other guild on Cannith. My other guild seems to be a big operation with 70+ levels and a full guild airship decked out to the 9's with all the +2 amenities you can shake a rapier at. These guys got nothing. It is only like five people in the guild after all. I think I'll pass along this link to the guys so they can see we can have a ship for 50,000 plat and move along. (The crew rental cost should be easily explainable . . . it's the amenities that'd be the hard sell. BTW, is the SHIP01 code for free amenities still working? LOL)

OH, you gotta check out this cool picture I snapped last night:

Tower, my fighter hireling is looking awesome there thanks to the pyrotechnics of Skiftnickle the female warforged Artificer standing behind him. I call her Skifty for short. Is it just me or are Artificers about the most awesome class ever in DDO? I think I'm going to have to roll one of those up because watching Skifty destroy Necropolis's Bloody Crypt and House Jorasco's Redwillow's Ruins (save for the nasty trap cave) on elite last night was a thing of beauty. I really was only there for good looks and a couple good heals.

In any case, I shall continue hitting my Cannith missions and working my way to the upper eschelons with my new awesome Cleric, Lifin. I'm sure to make all kinds of mistakes as I'm not really looking at many guides on how to level a cleric. I'm just going with my gut and making decisions that seem to make sense. I may pay for it later, but so far things have been pretty good.

Happy dueling!

Times May Change, but DDO Stays Awesome!

So, you may have noticed I haven't posted in a while. Two months without a post is kind of a big stretch for this blog, right? Right!

Things got a bit crazy in my life (and still are) because I got a job working as a Community Manager for KingsIsle for their new game Pirate101. This made my life a little more difficult the past couple of months. I've moved about 1,000 miles away to a new city and a new state and started a new job all at once. To say this whole experience has thrown a curve ball in my blogging habits would be an understatement.

Also, Diablo 3 happened.

Team Spode has always said that when Diablo 3 was released, we'd drop whatever game we were playing and play Diablo 3 for a season. It was our mantra for I don't know how long. Funny enough, Spode found his computer ill equipped for the graphic requirements of Diablo 3, so he ended up buying a whole new computer for the endeavor. (He mentioned how much better DDO's graphics looked on his new rig btw.)

What I haven't written about the past two months is that Team Spode delved deep into the steampunk zones of Cannith.

Because of this delving, Spode and I took 20th level as Ophiga and Ulan hit 18th level. WOOT!

The instance that gave us the most grief in Cannith was probably Schemes of the Enemy. It was a completely painful experience, full of magefire cannons and electrified walkways leading to the grand daddy of all magefire cannons.

A very weary Team Spode made it all the way to the grand daddy magefire cannon twice. The first time we spent a lot of effort spinning dials below the cannon and trying to deactivate its very ouchy beams of ouchiness. That just didn't work well for us. What we found out worked for us was just hammering on the magefire cannon with its defenses intact until we busted IT UP! It took a while, but was much simpler. SIMPLE, GOOD FOR TEAM SPODE CAVEMEN AND CAVEWOMAN!

Also what happened was the birth of the Menace of the Underdark expansion! I took the journey with Elminster through the Rift and discovered that DDO had become . . . LOTRO!

;) Seriously though, it was very strange to see DDO as a high fantasy game instead of the Steampunk world of Eberron.

. . .

So where does this leave this blog and Team Spode? I'm not sure. Team Spode is now journeying in Diablo 3 and we have a ton of new content in DDO still, but I think it means that you won't see me talking as much about Team Spode on this blog for a while and instead, you'll probably see me talking about my new adventures on Thelanis.

What I found was a couple of the guys that work at KingsIsle play DDO on the Thelanis server! So for the time being, that's where I'm hanging out in DDO these days (other than my occasional stints back on Cannith as I upgrade my level 18 Cannith mission gear to the Epic Cannith mission gear).

I'd like to introduce you all to my cleric, Lifin!

RUN, LIFIN, RUN! Lifin likes the Cannith missions just as much as Gleek did, and yes . . . I still have an obsession with halflings in DDO.

Happy dueling