Babs Reigns on our Parade! THE MADNESS!

In this newest shocking bit of news on The Stormreach Sentinel we uncover that Babs is a card carrying LARPer!!!! GASP!!!!!!




Yup, last week Team Spode rained on the parade of the Reign of Madness and we brought Babs along for the ride. (Yes, she's a bard.)

So here's the deal, Team Spode has been busy lately. None of us seems to have time for anything, and I'm personally consumed with . . . well . . . what I'm consumed with lately, and I've been a bit neglectful with this fine blog. I appreciate your patience my friends. Babs appreciates your patience as well. (Btw, did you know that Babs requires rose petals in her toilet backstage? true story.)

Spode had spied a quest over in the Twelve and told us to follow him there. We obliged and discovered that his exciting quest line was none other than the Reign of Madness quest line that we all had wanted to do anyway. Reign of Madness is a four-part quest series that is the higher level Part 2 of the Harbinger of Madness quest chain that Team Spode dearly loved. It's kind of a no-brainer that we wanted to run this adventure pack, and it didn't disappoint! Loot a plenty and bizarre occurrences abounded in the two quests we completed a couple Sundays ago. Here's how it rolled out for us:

First up for the night was Acute Delirium. Spode had ventured into the instance by himself solo earlier in the week and got smoked by a number of baddies. After a bit of a hiccup with Ophiga purchasing the adventure pack we were underway and chasing down the evil Haxxorrax the Mind Flayer while Evil eyes and deranged followers tried to stop us. Our goal was to snatch up Belashyrra's Sceptre and . . . well . . . stop the madness! Unfortunately part of Bab's luggage escaped and swallowed the sceptre, and we had to deal with that.


Chester the mimic was awesome, btw. Babs has the coolest talking luggage.

What happened next was something definitely straight out of Disney's Sorcerer's Apprentice because the mimic used said scepter as it was about to die and opened up a portal to the plane to Xoriat. Then a huge beholder from Xoriat floated down and decided to swallow the scepter, "Yum!" as it said. To make matters crazier, the only way to chase the beholder into Xoriat was to construct a yacht made out of magically animated bookshelves and beds. I'm not making this stuff up. well, our boat of beds wasn't nearly as cool as Lessah and Clankenbeard's guild ship boat, but it worked out ok.

After sailing out into the wild red yonder of Xoriat, we soon discovered the natives were restless. By natives, I'm talking about eight elder beholders. As I understand it, you get a cool bonus chest when you kill all eight beholders without them ever setting a tentacle on the ship, but Team Spode wasn't that quick on the draw unfortunately. They still all died, just not outside of the ship, and we successfully saved Babs and her roses.


Too bad we had to jump inside the giant beholder's mouth and spoil Babs' mood.


After a quick trip into the beholder, retrieving the sceptre, and forcing "Quixxellops" to "quickly throw us ups," we were out and back down to good ol' Eberron where the Lord of Eyes himself greeted us with a conundrum where we either give him back his sceptre or he leaves open portals to Xoriat and Khyber. I wasn't really in the giving mood, but since all the other options really just led us to giving him the sceptre . . . PFFFT . . . FINE! YOU CAN HAVE YOUR STINKY SCEPTRE!

Gleek likes toys.

Speaking of toys, we received both of the rare named drops while we were running this adventure. Both the Lenses of Opportunity and the Watcher's Blade dropped for us. Spode and Ulan were happy. ;) I feel bad about Babs though . . . I think she's still in Xoriat somewhere. O.O

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Next up for the night was a trip through The Sane Asylum. To sum up this instance quickly . . . you get to save Fred! Yes, THEE FRED! You know, Fred the Mindflayer from House Jorasco? Not, this Fred.

Apparently you can solve a puzzle to free Fred, but we opted for killing a couple of Beholders instead. It was a little confusing, but we stumbled through it. From what I'm reading now on DDO Wiki you can kill a beholder, do the puzzle, and kill the other beholder later so you get more chests? Something like that. You can read it for yourself! yay!

In the end, you have to face off with an Ice Beholder named Nurse Ratchet who has a nasty raid-like mechanic where the beholder teleports to a random party member and then pulses with energy that WILL KILL YOU! Nurse Ratchet made Team Spode look like Steaks.


Imagine that, an ice beholder cooking us into steaks? FREEZER BURNED STEAKS! So mean.

So, it took a bit of regrouping and re-entering, but soon we had recovered from that nasty surprise, finished off the icy nurse beholder, and completed our quest.

Sadly neither of the mega-awesome mega-amazing trinkets dropped for us. I would gladly wear either: Shard of Xoriat or Sustaining Symbiont. Melikes! MEWANTS!

I know I'll be running these quests a few times more since I'm after the melodic guard augment for my Infused Chaosrobe.

I can't wait for Team Spode's next adventures through the Reign of Madness, but sadly it's going to be another couple of weeks until our static group runs as a team again. Keep us marked in your RSS feeds kids!

Until next time . . .

Happy Dueling!

Why are there so many songs about Crimson foot spiders?

Oh Vale of Twilight! I feel just like Fluttershy Pony for you. Just imagine this was a halfling singing about Vale of Twilight:


One of my favorite moments from the night was Team Spode unleashing their army of Cake Djinnis:


Mmmm, fluttershy halfling likes cake! btw, congrats on the sixth birthday, DDO! And thanks for the free loot!

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This week we decided to go back in to that same Let Sleeping Dust Lie instance from last week. It was a real nail-biter there at the end when we were down to our last spider:


Two things about that screenshot:

1- one spider left
2- Yes, that is a Kar-thul Harrier shakin' his derrière! WAVE YOUR ARMS IN THE AIR! WAVE YOUR ARMS LIKE YOU JUST DON'T CARE!

We kind of got lost in the tunnels there at the end trying to find all the various journals and keys and whatnot, but at least this week we cleared out those entrance tunnels before reading about how we shouldn't kill the spiders. What did we learn kids? A little lack of knowledge goes a long way! RIGHT!

Thankfully we stopped the rakshasa's plans to use dustamancy to control Eberron and earned 12k exp to boot.


Not bad! Not bad! Here's the score card:


Sorry we let you die, hirelings! Next time have a few more hitpoints.

We also collected our first Greensteel components on Sunday. Locust Husks and Shavarath Stones for all! Oh, Greensteel, you look so difficult to create. Who knows, perhaps Team Spode will finally step foot in a raid at some point, and who knows, perhaps that raid would even be The Shroud. Stranger things have happened! (Team Spode in 20 Shroud raids for an Essence of Cleansing? Um, I think not.)

Anyway, after that we rounded out the night with a few kills out in the wilds. BTW, what's up with the free meat on a stick there in the Vale? Spode stopped at every one of those and sampled the free meat on a stick.


Seriously, it doesn't get any better than free meat on a stick.

WE LOVE YOU VALE OF TWILIGHT!

Happy dueling

Yaulthoon on Fail Mode!

Yup, here we are after our attempt on Yaulthoon on Hard Mode:


At one point we had him down to 33% . . . and were so busy killing the adds that we forgot to notice the pods at his feet.

Thus, this week, Spode steaks are on special.

Our main problem was getting separated last night, once we scattered to and fro, the mind flayers, beholders, and Xorian renders would tend to smoke us. Yaulthoon on normal mode? Well, you mostly just have to deal with Taken. Hard mode is harder.

Enjoy those steaks! We'll be back next week! It's looking like Necro IV and the Orchard of the Macabre is on the horizon for Team Spode. I keep trying to convince my cohorts to hit these Cannith Challenges with me. There is a dragon in one of these after all. Team Spode loves dragons!

Happy Dueling!

Oh the Trials by Fire for Team Spode!

Team Spode wasn’t in rare form on Sunday . . . we were in Medium Well Done form.


This is what you expect to see of Team Spode from a Trial by Fire—we didn’t disappoint.

A good chunk of Team Spode’s night was simply gathering together and moving through the vastness of Gianthold. We’ve been working a lot of the Northeastern instances, but we were trying to explore a bit and find a new instance to destroy. The end result was we finished three rare encounters in the wilds of Gianthold and wound up at the entrance to the Trial by Fire instance all the way down on the southern slopes.

It’s an instance full of trolls and spiders. After we ran into a barred off location just two doors down from the entrance, we spied a hidden hallway that the DM told us hadn’t been used in a while. We begged to differ. There were many many giant spiders down this hallway, which begged the question, “how did these things get so big?” They had to have been eating something, right? I mean, the trolls and the spiders seemed to be on friendly terms. Hmmmmm. Either the spiders had been snacking on trolls on the side or they had been munching on people like us. This brought up an interesting point. If Trolls regenerate all the time, then perhaps trolls are the perfect snack! You eat a limb, the limb grows back. Troll is the food-source to end mass hunger! Of course, it probably doesn’t taste like chicken. Personally I prefer snacking on Doritos to Troll arm, but if you put the right seasonings on there I might try it. I'm a double-barrel halfing! I'm a halfling on the edge!


The real problem with randomly heading to the Trial by Fire instance after spending 45 minutes to an hour wandering around in Gianthold is that pretty much all the spell casters were out of juice by the time we entered the instance, and there were no shrines in sight (we really should figure out that teleporter system in Gianthold). I was uber grateful for my Echoes of Power ability and innate low cost fire spells that allowed me to contribute a spot of flame thrower damage last night. Egads, I really was scraping the proverbial barrel of my mana pool this instance. This also meant no giant walls of fire for a good portion of the instance, and this meant a lot of pain when we came upon a flock of ranged attackers.

Don’t get me wrong, for the most part we were doing a stellar job of staying afloat. Hackin! Slashin! Doin’ our thang, but eventually we ran into a fight with some significant DPS where my cleric NPC (the only one with a touch of mana left) died and then Spode, Ulan, and the other NPC cleric also died. So it came down to Ophiga and me hiding behind a corner going OH CRAP WE GONNA DIE TOO.

I opened my bags, bit the bullet, downed a mana potion, used a heal wand a few times, and went in with guns blazing: chain lightning, firewalls, you name it! BAM BAM BAM! We grabbed the soul stones and then CRIPES, there was a freaking shrine right around the corner. Don’t you hate that? I hate downing a mana potion just to find a shrine next door, but I didn’t feel confident enough to rely on echoes of power to get me through the room of dead friends on the floor. You know?

What’s great about Trial by Fire is that it’s kind of tricky. You have this wonderful spiral down to a lava pit, you have a map that’s stacked upon itself, and you have a small little pit in a far room that’s just easy enough to overlook, but that one little crack in the floor is exactly where you need to go to finish the instance. It took us . . . a while . . . to find that little crack in the floor. It took us long enough that I started to give up hope. I was convinced the place was bugged. I immediately started cursing Turbine for a buggy instance, but it wasn’t. It was just tricky.

Well, there was one bug we found. There was a troll stuck in the wall where we couldn’t hit him and he couldn’t hit us, but it wasn’t for lack of trying . . . I tried dancing him to death.


After finding that final floor pit, we killed the boss with no trouble at all. pfft, anti-climactic point of no return, but it was still a successful dungeon. Jump in the pot and celebrate our medium well done state!




So by the time we made it out the door, Ophiga was ready for bed, but Joe and I were hungry for more. We talked a lot of smack to get Ophiga and Ulan (the east coasters) to run over with us to the Minotaur’s Maze instance. In fact, I promised her that we’d just peek our heads in and not stay for the whole instance. One we were in and saw what a rogue’s heaven this instance was, I think I started to see her pulse rise. I imagine that, had I not blown the whistle at midnight, she would have just kept on merrily disarming traps and pulling levers to her heart’s desire.


No no no . . . that’s an adventure we’ll be sure to have next week as we continue to explore Gianthold’s gianty goodness. :)

Happy Dueling!