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!