So . . . I'm all evil looking now, floating around in a T-pose like I'm some kind of spooky half man / half undead.
And that picture pretty much sums up what I've been doing. After dinging 12, I decided to take the much needed Cannith break to trade in my old gear for new gear. I made my big list before ever stepping in to a Cannith mission of exactly what I needed and struck through them as I accomplished each.
WOOT! All my gear has been upgraded now, and I'm doing great. I have been kind of eyeing the Elemental rapier of air, however . . . that'd be 400 scorps, 400 mephit, and 400 talisman . . . ugh, maybe later.
For now there's baby dragons to be slain!
I had the gumption to try and solo the black dragon that spawned afterward. Um, without using the rest shrine even! Yeah. Well that didn't work out for me, but at least I got some xp for the mission.
Outside of that, I've been feeling like taking down a few more wilderness areas! I'm currently hanging out in Ataraxia's Haven looking to shake down some evolutionary science . . . GETTIN' JIGGY WITH THE PRIMITIVES!
Is it just me or are their clothes super awesome? Monkey mans are one of my favorite mobs in DDO.
I'd wear that . . . or at least admire you as I kill you because I like your fashion sense. Wait a second, I'm sounding like necromancer over here.
After I do the Ataraxia thing, I'll probably hop over to my old hunting grounds of Gianthold. I loved that spot! It's been a lot of fun re-familiarizing myself with all the old haunts. Good times.
Well, my good DDO buddy (and favorite Twitter cheerleader), Mari from The Thieves Guild on Argo, requested a walk through of a few Cannith missions . . . so here is the first of possibly many?
If you don't see annotations along with the video, try heading over to YouTube to see it here.
. . . if only I had a full crew of six people to back me up and who also knew this instance! I dare say 5-stars would be a possibility then. ;)
I mostly solo these and shoot for 1-2 stars . . . 3 stars if I get lucky. :)
I've recently been playing through the second tier of the Lava Caves Cannith missions to earn more jade scorpions so I can upgrade the items I bought at level 4-5. It was tough remembering the routes to the progenitor crystals, but eventually I got it and ye' ol' memory kicked back in . . . and after a couple of fails . . . I was ROCKING THE SCORPIONS!
Can I just say how much I love the commentary from the Kobolds as they pick up that giant progenitor crystal and haul it back to camp? It's my new favorite thing in DDO.
You may have to click on these pictures to see them fully, but:
"Wide load kobold, coming through!"
"Are you telling me I have to haul this thing ALL THE WAY!"
"Oof, this thing is heavier than it looks."
"Kobold can't... see... anything."
I remember struggling quite a bit with this mission back in the day, and Ophiga actually ranted about it on her blog once . . . but I've got this DOWN now. No worries. In fact, it's probably something I should make a YouTube video of.
Why hello there! It's been, what, three and a half years?
WHAT?! No . . . say it isn't so! Three and a half years was simply a blink of the beholder's eye!
Well, that's what happens when real life gets in the way and your static group becomes lost in a world of superheroes. It's true, we entered into DC Universe Online and . . . we're still in there. I really think Lord Spode of Team Spode finally found his perfect game. He loves it. It wasn't all DCUO though, we also took a short break to play some GuildWars 2 . . . yeah that didn't last long. Let's just wrap up the catch up in general and say . . . LISTEN, I'VE BEEN PLAYING A LOT OF OTHER GAMES! SHEESH!
So why am I back in the world of DDO right now? Well, a week ago, I felt something . . .
It was this feeling that maybe, just maybe perhaps I was feeling a bit unfulfilled because I never rolled a necromancer in DDO and tried it out. I mean, after all, I am The Friendly Necromancer . . .
And that's exactly who I am now. Without further adieu, I would like to introduce you to . . .
"Thefriendly Necromancer"
My little Drow Necromancer is now level 7 and rising. Here's how it's broke down so far:
1- I started him at level 4 . . . because I could . . . some old veteran's benefit thing let me do that. WOOT!
2- The first "real" thing I did was run him over to the Cannith missions because that was totally my gig back in the day, and . . . yup . . . it was like riding a bicycle.
IT'S RAINING MAD TALISMANS!
3- At the end of the day, I was bouncing a bit between Cannith missions and Searing Heights and dinged level 5 without many issues. Sure, it took a bit of figuring out which keys did what, and I'm still amazed at exactly how many hotbars it takes me to play DDO, but it is what it is.
4- By the time I hit level 6 I had a full set of Cannith mission gear. You know what I'm talking about:
Rock Boots
Frozen Tunic
Bracers of Wind
Blasting Chime
Cloak of Flames
Ring of Master Artifice
That stuff!
5- After that I looked up Level 6 missions and saw that good ol' Three Barrel Cove was right in line for that level, so I went and did the suite of missions once through, killed 750 things in the cove, and payed a visit to my all time favorite party barge:
. . . and my all time worst puzzle room (Not really, but it feels that way) . . .
. . . and as they say in Finding Nemo, just kept swimming.
(I love screenshots in DDO)
So there you go! For now I'm enjoying all that is the world of Eberron.
What's next, you ask?! Well, I'm thinking I may go check out Delera's Tomb and surrounding quests. It's been a while since I've been over that direction, and as a master of necromancy, this should be right up my alley. (If there's one thing I do well as a necromancer in DDO so far, it's stop the undead in their tracks.) What do I think of the Necromancer specialization so far, you ask?! (You're asking all the right questions today . . .) So far it's not bad! I like my skeleton pet, and I've got him pretty buffed out. As long as I keep him hasted, he does pretty good. I also like my health sacrificing spells. I'm not quite sure what to think of the undead combat forms though. I soon realized that my cleric henchman didn't seem to want to heal me or my skeleton, since we're classed as undead. Hmmm, I need to read up a bit on how that all works or what would work better. I'm not really doing much with multiclassing . . . just sticking on the necromancer line so far, but . . . if I have any revelations, I'll be sure to pass them along. (and vice versa!)
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.
A couple weeks ago I decided to give Dr. Rushmoore's Mansion a shot and see if I could solo it like I have on a few other Cannith Challenges. As to be expected, I failed the first few times and eventually took a look at the map and guide over on DDM's realm.
What I was overlooking the first few times through was the importance of smashing those breakables at the entrance. The picture portals is kind of a neat feature of this instance, but ultimately meaningless. They always port to a random location that's nearby and . . . not necessary. It was far more important to go through all the rooms in the entrance and break every single barrel, crate, and boudoir furnishing.
What I've developed for my solo runs is a little map of where I go.
It works a bit like this:
1- Enter the instance, cast up your cleric, buff, and open the door.
2- Clear out the entry area hitting every room you can find, breaking every breakable around, and killing everything AS FAST AS YOU CAN. (I can't stress that enough with this instance. It's called Dr. RUSHmoore's for a reason. You rush rush rush rush and rush some more . . . or "Moore" as the case may be). Killing is done on the run if possible. By this time you should have a number of crests.
3- Open the first door to the Gallery and gain an additional 2 minutes.
4- Clear out the Inner Courtyard with all the gargoyles and again break everything . . . mainly the tables, chairs and vases.
5- Using Q can help you see if there are any crests just laying around. Pick them all up.
6- Open the doorway leading to the library and collect an additional 2 minutes. If you're lucky you will have run into the foreman along the way. Make sure you talk to him so he will follow you around.
7- Continue pressing Q to find any crests laying on the ground. continue killing things until you make your way into the bathhouse. Usually you'll have to down an elemental or two in the bathhouse. Now you need to make a number of judgement calls.
* Do I have enough time to purchase two minutes of buffs from the foreman and complete the optional objective? * Do I have enough mana and time to skip the shrines here or do I need to take 30 seconds to use it and buff? * Do I have enough time to venture beyond the hidden door in the bathhouse to kill the mini-named (doesn't count as a real named) spider in the sewer beneath the mansion? * Do I have enough crests to make it into The Backdoor area or do I need to hunt for more?
8- Once you've quickly made all your judgement calls you need to proceed down through the Backdoor area. Note that this place is FULL of traps. At the end of each ramp downward there is a cage with a locked door. The knock spell has easily been opening these doors so I can smash all the breakables within and collect even more crests. I've just been running/jumping through all the traps to this point. There's usually no time for me to disable them anyway.
9- Use more crests to open the door to the Exit to the Canals area. Gain an extra two minutes.
10- Swim across the water and use four more crests to open the door to the Assassin's Crib and take out Smiling Sam. Couple things to consider here.
* There are usually two to four crests down in the bottom of the water if you're looking for more crests. * You have to talk to Smiling Sam and choose to attack him. I'm not sure what the diplomacy check does, but anyone named Smiling Sam must die. * If you opted to not use the shrine back in Step 7, you're most likely close to being out of mana . . .
11- Make your way up to "The other backdoor" and use even more crests to unlock the path to The Boudoir. Gain an extra two minutes.
12- Kill your way up to the top of the ramp and pray you have enough crests to open up the door at the top of the ramp. If not, be aware that a metric ton of sonic traps and blade traps will spring up and if not kill you, kill your cleric.
13- Enter the Boudoir and kill all the npcs first before taking out Dr. Rushmoore's Succubi girlfriend.
At this point, you're pretty much done with this method. Looking at the map, you might think, well couldn't I go on to the Planar Observatory? Nope, sorry, the crests to open this doorway are on the other side of the door. If I was running this as a group, I'd definitely split the group in two at the Bath House and send the other team through the secret door and ultimately into the Banner Hall.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
And that's basically how I solo Dr. Rushmoore's Mansion. I'm level 17 running it on level 15 difficulty. If I take down only one boss, I'll usually earn somewhere between 60-80 Goblets. If I take down two bosses, It'll amount to around 100-110 Goblets.
It's not a very "fun" instance to solo to be honest. It's very frantic paced and can involve failing simply because the random crest generator on the map wasn't very kind to you. On the other hand, I think this one could be a blast with a group. In fact, I can't wait to try this with Team Spode.
Thanks for reading and please feel free to leave your comments, questions, and clarifications if you have any.
The first thing I wanted to do with these new boots was go check out the Risia Ice Games ramp and see if I could stand on it without slipping.
Nope. I guess even some areas are still too slippery . . . even with the Rock Boots. It was kind of nice to see that the Iron Defender oil spit in Rushmore's Mansion had no affect on me though.
Speaking of Rushmore's Mansion, I had my first taste of that challenge today and have been getting schooled (as to be expected). It's definitely a different challenge than all the others I've done so far with significantly less (as in no) laying of torches in a pathway. That's a nice change. I don't want to say I'm burnt out on the challenges just yet, but if I end up upgrading these items to tier 3 or the epic 20th level versions, well, yeah . . . yeah, then I'll be sick of torches.
Rushmore's Mansion seems to be more about killing as much stuff as you can and breaking every barrel in sight. I'll have more to report when I finally figure this instance out. In the meantime, I've got some reading to do on DDM's realm.
I know on the last post I said I'd be shooting for the Frozen Tunic, but to be honest, I'm really digging the Infused Chaos Robe I got from the Harbinger of Madness quests recently. In the end, it seemed a bigger upgrade for me to pick up the Bracers of Wind instead. Check these things out (this is the level 16 version):
My wife made fun of the name of this item after I told her I had just got the bracers of "wind." ;) RIGHT, you better brace for my wind! Obviously the perfect compliment item to the bracers of wind would be the blasting chime. You should get a set bonus for having those two items: on successful hit 10% chance to cast stinking cloud.
So, all my efforts to get these items has now left me level-capped, dangit. Team Spode has a rule that no one character can be two levels above the lowest level character in the group. Thus, I'm level capped. It's a good rule. You really have to keep within the same level as your group mates, and to be honest, I have no problem with "losing" experience. We're all so close to the top now, that it's really no big deal. Also knowing that these Cannith Challenges never stop giving great experience is good to know too. I kind of see them as a great fall back for people who are on their next lives. There's plenty of exp to be had here. (Although I'm dying to try out Fire Savant III when I finally get to take level 18.)
Next up for me, I'm thinking I'll go for the Rock Boots. The slippery surface immunity, earthgrab guard, and stoneprison guard effects are awesome! Although I rarely cast poison spells, you never know when that will come in handy. Black Dragon bolt, anyone? I'll probably have to swap my Dex bonuses over to my gloves, but that shouldn't be too hard to do.
I talked a little bit about the Risia ice games last year. I was kind of bummed out that people seemed to be "cheating" to get the purple coins and I was just simply struggling to get the low level coins.
The Risia Ice Games made another appearance during the summer if I remember right (like Christmas in July or something). I did MUCH better with coin collecting then because I was in fact higher level with better spells and stats. I still don't use the "teleport" method. I just jump for my purple coins.
But in the end, it seems all I'm really searching for are the motes and the ingredients to make icy burst kits, but I'm not sure why . . . habit formed by the other three or so Risia ice games I've participated in. I was able to hand team spode a bunch of icy burst weapons back in July, but now it all seems we've moved past that need. So, I suppose I'm doing it for alts and . . . for money? Ok, i'll do it for money! :)
There is something hugely satisfying and fun about grabbing a big purple coin at the end of the jump though. That alone is addicting.
I also spent some time hitting the Extraplaner Mining quests last night since I'm still drooling over these cool gear upgrades. Quite honestly, I wouldn't mind having all of them. To those ends, I have a lot of farming to do. Quite honestly, I don't mind the farming since I'm enjoying soloing these challenges. Here's my component list after last night:
Needs more cowbell, I mean scorpions!
The Risia Ice Games and the Cannith Challenges are actually quite similar in some aspects. It got me to thinking last night, either I rent Ice skates for 10 minutes and shoot for the fabled recipe 5/20 from a purple coin turn in, or I spend 10 minutes earning a bit of advancement toward Cannith gear by laying torches and burdening kobolds. They both are like little mini-games within DDO. They both would end in a reward of some kind. They both are fun. Hmmm.
Right now I'm leaning toward the Cannith challenges. I think I want that gear just a little bit more than money or an icy burst weapon.
How's about you? Any plans to grab purple coins over the next week or two?
So, I've been going a little crazy on these Cannith missions this holiday weekend. You know, lots of time and extremely distracted children can make for some awesome DDO fun.
So check it out!
Now all that's left is to upgrade that a couple of times and add some awesome crafting shards to it. :) BUT, before I go that route, I think what I'll do is earn what I need to secure my next HAZ WANT Cannith item, The Frozen Tunic! Here's what it looks like.
To those ends, I'm going to need a lot of Magma Shards from the Lava Caves: Time is Money instance . . . and I'm already well on my way . . . man I love holiday weekends. I was a bit surprised to see the experience rewards I was handed for soloing Time is Money on level 17 difficulty and finish 4 of the star objectives . . . behold the most profitable 15 minutes of play time for me EVA!
Needless to say, I'm sold on this Cannith expansion. I love these challenges now that I'm starting to figure out how to run them. The hardest part is getting over that hurdle. Once you figure out how a challenge works, you're golden. Remember when I was lamenting over a level 10 completion of Colossal Crystals and only earning 16 Jade Scorpions. Yeah, the jade scorpion reward for this challenge completion at Level 17 was a very welcome site.
167 scorpions . . . much better!
I'll try to post more information on how I'm soloing these soon, but not until I post about tonight's Team Spode adventures first, which are just a few hours away (we moved the game night this week to Monday night due to the holidays).
I broke down and purchased the Cannith Challenges update to DDO about a week ago. This did a number of things for me:
1- I could toss all those ridiculous single tokens for missions and clear up almost an entire tab of inventory.
2- Opened up the challenges for me to explore on a whim.
3- Gave me a new goal in life: The level 16 version of The Cloak of Flames. Daddy has want.
To earn the Cloak of Flames I need 600 jade scorpions, 600 mephit wings, and 600 Arcanaloth Scrolls. To translate that further, to earn the cloak of flames I need to beat the Lava Caves: Colossal Crystals, Extraplaner Mining: Buying Time, and Extraplaner Mining: Labor Shortage Challenges a bunch of times.
Basically when I'm not playing with the Team Spode static group, I'm soloing. I'm not one to hang with the guildies or PUG a lot. Personally I'd rather solo unless I have a bunch of friends online that I know and trust (yeah, that's saying a lot for my guild isn't it--Hey! They supply me with guild ship buffs and I supply them with Favor . . . it's a relationship built on practicality more than love).
I'm happy to say that I've been perfecting my solo skillz with Lava Caves: Colossal Crystals since the last time I posted about it. I've got it down now where I don't need to purchase extra hirelings. I just simply park my cleric at the teleporter spot and run off to kill stuff on my own. I've almost got it to the point where I can get two progenitor crystals, but man is that tough. I haven't quite made that mental breakthrough yet. When I do though, you'll hear about it here.
The next challenge I've been soloing is Extraplaner Mining: Buying Time. I'm going to say this challenge is about 10 times easier than Colossal Crystals . . . and about 10 times more profitable. I usually leave this instance with two supply chests in my inventory and about 5,000 exp richer for my efforts, and this is playing on the level 12 and 13 difficulty when I'm level 17!
Here's how I do it:
1- zone into the instance and summon my level 17 cleric. I immediately buff myself and my cleric as much as I can.
2- I begin gathering up all the torches except for the one in the middle and the one leading off to the left.
3- I purchase extra time from the foreman and as many torches as are available from the crystals my kobolds have already farmed.
4- kill the first "incoming" wave. (doesn't take long)
5- begin by laying down my torch path to the left. Eventually my path looks a little like this:
6- I lay down the first five torches in building my eventual pathway and then run back to the entrance.
7- Kill the next incoming wave. After this, I usually buy additional time and more torches, extra kobolds, and kobold barrels.
8- I run back and lay down the next five torches in building my eventual pathway (laying down extra barrels if I have them and killing all the baddies in my pathway as well) and then run back to the entrance.
9- Kill the next incoming wave. (If I can, I buy even more additional time even though this kills one of the star objectives I'm going for).
10- At this point, you should have made your quota, and I just stay put for the next incoming wave because it's usually a horrible named that will just tear the kobolds apart . . . and surprise surprise, she looks like an old familiar foe of Team Spode!
11- For my final HOORAH I drag my cleric along with me and finish up my path. About 33% percent of the time, there will be a spirit dragon in the room I went toward. I summon up my efreeti buddy and we all lay the smack down on the dragon.
12- By this point my mana is usually at empty and I'm relying on Echoes of power for damage. Kobolds will start to die back at the entrance and time will tick down to 0:00 and the challenge will complete. Congratulations, time to profit and do it all over again.
I really like this challenge. I've heard some negativity about them, but this particular challenge isn't one I'd gripe about. It rocks in fact.
Let me know if you have any extra hints or tips on this instance, and I'll update this post with them.
I don't know if you've ever done this . . . you know, where you kind of replay a defeat in your head only imagining how to win until it kind of drives you crazy and you have to try it just to get it out of your head? No? Well that's what happened to me. I couldn't get our defeat in Colossal Crystals from Sunday out of my mind. I thought it through, and I believed I knew what I needed to do to win so I thought, "What the heck! I can solo this thing!"
And I did!
Here's how it worked for me:
I bought an extra cleric and a barbarian from the DDO store before zoning into the instance. I decided to run it on Level 10 difficulty just to make sure I could pull it off since it was all in my head at the moment.
I parked the barb and extra cleric right next to the kobold teleporter pad on aggressive/stand in place mode facing forward. I bought two teleporters with the crystals, gathered up all the extra torches and bought a few more with crystals.
One teleporter went down right on the pad at the entrance. The other went in my back pocket. Then I took a cleric, invis’d both her and me, hasted us, put the cleric on passive/follow, and ran to the progenitor crystal in the semi-straight ahead direction, jumping past the baddies, and looting all the crests I could along the way.
I was lucky enough to find an octopus crest on the way in (this was a very good thing as the crests don’t seem to always be in the same locations). Then I laid torches from the progenitor crystal back to the nearest glowing two-way teleporter spot, killed everything in the path of the torches, laid down that spare teleporter, and watched the kobolds pour in!
My little kobold buddies looted all the crystals in their path until it was cleaned out, then one kobold started running toward the progenitor crystal. I buffed this little guy as he ran toward the crystal with everything I had, stone skin, blur, resists--you name it, I put it on him.
After my kobold buddy looted the mega crystal, about 3 waves of enemies started to spawn included some named mobs. Since it was level 10 difficulty, this didn't prove too difficult to clear.
Then I followed the kobold through the teleporter and helped the parked but active NPCs kill the mess of monsters that was around the entrance teleporter.
The kobold with the giant blue crystal ran in for the win and bada bing bada boom . . . YES! Win!
I then found myself unable to use the main teleporter to get back to the second teleporter, I don't know if that's planned or a bug, but I had to run back to where I was, which takes a couple minutes. By this time, it was pretty clear I wasn’t going to get any of the optionals, so I just let the timer run out and received 14 scorpions for completing the instance on level 10 difficulty.
I'm not sure, but I imagine it's a lot more scorps for higher difficulties. Soloing this at higher difficulties is totally next! But for now, I'm just happy I ran through the scenario I had been rehearsing in my mind to conclusion.
A win is a win. ;p
Looking forward to Sunday and Team Spode's further adventures!
First, we begin with the theme song for the Cannith Challenges:
Ahhh, Cannith Challenges . . . ne'er before have words sung more true:
It's all about the challenges. 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:
It's all about the battle. 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!
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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.
