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.
Last night was a lot of fun. Team Spode was warned about the final boss in the "In the Flesh" quest by Ekeiram, and definitely Yaulthoon is not an easy fight . . . even on normal mode, but Team Spode would not be deterred! Even if we went an hour OT on our regular playing time.
The night started out pretty mellow. We just needed to help Tony finish up the Sinister Storage quest since for some reason he didn't get flagged as completing that quest last week. Basically this quest asks you to defeat waves of "sinister" Xoriat baddies as they flood into a storage room. Unlike the good ol' Protect Baudry's Interests level 2 quest, there's no giant crate of supplies to protect. This is just straight up slaughter as you wipe out all the Thraak Hounds, Mind Flayer Mages, and creepy Taken as you can until Mahlurat (a flesh-render of the nastier variety) shows up.
There was nothing much to report from this quest other than Team Spode was victorious! A couple Staffs of Fleshshaping dropped for us. MAN, so upset the Staff of Fleshshaping has the same look as my Master Transmuter's Staff. Ahhh well. :)
Compared to Spode's new sword, the INSANITY, the looks of my meager weapon is definitely nothing to get excited about. Here's a short exchange from last night where we discuss the size of Spode's sword.
In the Flesh is a great instance and definitely an epic ending to the Harbinger of Madness quest series. How often do you get to be trapped in a mind flayer's mind, being blasted with Psyionics in DDO? I'm not sure, but I think I'll put this experience down as "unique" to the game.
Since I finally figured out that Fraps was the answer to my problem of not being able to record what I'm saying while videoing AND since I'm in kind of a video mood today, I'll just let the combat video speak for itself. (need to turn down the pick up of my headset mic so that I'm not subjecting people to the background sounds of my real life home LOL)
Of course, that victory was after about an hour of trying to figure out exactly how to go about killing this thing. The first time we saw the globes coming at us, I thought, well . . . perhaps you have to hit them back at him baseball style. (scratch)
Not much longer after that we figured out that the bubbles would burst the bubbles holding Yaulthoon's prisoners. The DM's voice helped us realize that made yaulthoon susceptible to damage. Thanks DM!
The real problem was with that horrifically beautiful Mind Thrust ability from the Mind Flayer. Every time we'd get Yaulthoon down to about 15% life left, he'd just rip us apart with these beautiful strands of pink death. On the third attempt we decided to check DDO Wiki and see what we missed. What we had missed were (as I so eloquently state in the above video) "those darn pods around his feet."
That made all the difference.
The other major challenge from In the Flesh came in the form of what is known as a doomsphere. From what the wiki is telling me, there are only three doomsphere mobs in the game. Dead Pykzyl (which surely is a street name of saying Dead Pickle) wiped us a couple times as well . . . we'll be back to destroy you Mr. Dead Pickle! We're saving our revenge for the upcoming weeks.
At the end of the day and largely thanks to the sweet 20% exp bonus going on during the holidays, Ulan dinged 15 and I upped my level to 17. Spode finished two of the three 1500 kill quests in Gianthold, and now is only 3 ranks behind my exp lead in the group. Just between us, I think he's on a mission to pass me by. :D
Of other news, it's good to hear that Lessah is back amongst the community! Cocktail Hour's X-mas special was a good one! Also, can't forget to mention DDOCast's Holiday special as well. I've been downloading back episodes of DDOCast lately and listening to them on my drive to work.
Heya! I just wanted to take a quick inventory of all those who've been dropping by my DDO blog lately. Please, if you have this site marked in a feed or just check here every once in a while, I'd love to have you give me a shout out in the comments just to say hello.
Feel free to introduce yourself, tell me what server you're playing on, or just say hi!
Sometimes I wonder who is stopping by randomly through Google searches, and who actually drops by when I make a post. I'd love to build a nice reader base on this blog, and I have some tricks up my sleeve for the future of this blog that I think you will all enjoy. If you have any suggestions, make 'em! I'm all ears, or eyes as the case may be. I'm all about improving.
Thanks in advance for taking the time to say hello. I have commenting approval turned "on" for this blog, so you may not see your comment appear immediately, but I'm always checking my various blogs throughout the day to approve comments.
You have a lot of madness in DDO. Madness seems to be a Turbine developers favorite psychosis. The Path to Madness. The Maze of Madness. Madstone Crater. And now The Harbinger of Madness, which is really just a setup for the Reign of Madness, right? There's so much madness that it's enough to drive someone to the Chamber of Insanity!
I don’t blame Turbine for all this madness though, I blame . . . Madness!
Insider's perspective: when Madness sings "Our House," they're talking about the House of Xoriat they're trying to establish in Stormreach.
So, I can tell you right now, that Team Spode LOVES Harbinger of Madness. I made the comment over e-mail today that I think Harbinger of Madness is less about the exp (which is “ok” not “killer” though), and more about the loot. We had three unique drops on Normal mode from random chests that were some of the best pieces we’ve seen yet in our little ragtag band of mid-high levelers.
Spode got a nice sword named Insanity (who doesn't want to fight madness with insanity?), and we saw some other loot that made us wonder what else we could find, DDO wiki has some promising items listed.
What else was nice is that the difficulty wasn’t too bad! At least on normal mode. There were a few mishaps here and there, but nothing horrifically ugly that we didn’t overcome. If hard mode brings better loot (as one would suspect), sign us up tenfold. The quest chain in total seems like it would take around 3 hours to complete. We only had two, so we left the last instance for next time we meet.
(The general consensus was that we weren’t planning on meeting Christmas day, so we’ll probably be meeting up on the evening of the 26th. And if that doesn’t work, we just may take a couple weeks off until the holidays are over.)
Ophiga had a great summation of our experience in Harbinger of Madness, and to be honest, I don’t have a whole lot more to add. I would like to say that this quest series so far has been creepy awesome! Two thumbs up! Children missing from a school? Cocoons harvesting flesh golems? Beholders? Mind flayers? Undead? Strange Camera seizures as you pass through particularly haunted rooms? Yup, Harbinger of Madness has exactly what I like!
I love quest series like this that evoke a certain mood and succeed while giving you challenging game play that isn’t too punishing and then finishing it all off with rewarding loot. That’s an art, and I feel the developers at Turbine did a great job right here. In a way, Team Spode has been playing through a lot of aging content where GOOD loot has been hard to come by in areas that were tuned to drop loot in a different age of DDO. Most of the gear we are wearing hasn’t come from the chests we’ve looted, but from sales at the auction house.
And that’s why Team Spode loves (Or at least why I love) Harbinger of Madness so far. It’s awesomeness is perfect for our little group. Please give us more of this. Yes, PLEASE. Failing missions in Cannith sucks. Failing Blue Dragon fights sucks. Complicated crafting recipes that require extensive farming sucks. Harbinger of Madness ROCKS. YES, PLEASE! I completed the dungeon, now give me the awesome loot. DONE. I don’t have to craft loot. I don’t have to cleanse loot. I don’t have to improve loot with a raid. I don’t have to do anything but profit. It’s like freaking Diablo II. YAY! The only thing that would make this better is if awesome loot and health potions just squished out of monster’s bodies when they died.
So from the bottom of my heart, thank you Turbine for the Harbinger of Madness. If this is what’s on the menu of the future, sign me up for seconds and thirds.
I actually hit Veteran status last week (finally) and it was a pretty awesome moment. I love knowing that I could totally skip levels 1-3 now on a character. I guess that means I can delete my son's level 3 paladin and reroll him level 4!
None of us were really feeling like doing a Cannith mission night, so we decided to do some lower 11-12 level stuff and have a touch of fun while getting some faction. First up for us was INVADERS!
Ophiga and Joe opted for cleric NPCs and then said I should choose another class for my NPC, so I went with the bard. This meant a night full of disco balls at every turn. All night it was like the DDO Dance Movie by CestLeVie1234 on Youtube:
I love the combination of otto's and firewall in screenshots. There is nothing cooler than fire and disco at the same time. In fact, I have a new favorite screenshot from last night where one of the rolling dark matter orbs rolled in view of the camera. Check this out:
Love it!
INVADERS! is completely packed with Beholders. We tried this one on a random night back when Lessah was in the group and failed miserably. Ahh the difference of four levels. We were a total wrecking ball on this instance. Many beholders were felled! RAWR!
I actually wouldn't mind running that instance a few times again for the beholder optic nerves necklace and some more faction. ONWARD TO CHAMPION STATUS!
So the back story on the Invaders quest is as such:
Xoriat, you know that crazy plane of craziness, er madness? Well, all the crazies from Xoriat got together and thought it'd be wicked awesome to head to Xen'drik and kick some butt here, and what better place to start than good ol' Stormreach Sewers. They've got some insider human cultists working here, and, I mean, if you're going to clear a place out, totally head for where the new players are. Right? Makes sense to me. (If I was a giant dragon wanting to cause a cataclysm, I'd head for Stormwind right off the bat. Whoops, wrong game) That's like page 1 of the evil invader handbook right there.
NO WORRIES! Team Spode was there there to stop their plans! Here's how the XP report rolled out.
Next up for the evening was a House Kundarak quest called Made to Order.
You know, behind every crazy contraption in Dungeons and Dragons Online, there's a tinker out there (an artificer if you will) making their gizmos and gadgets "made to order" for all the dragonmarked houses of Eberron. Deneith needs weapons for their mercenaries, Jorasco needs 'em for their defibrillators, Phiarlan needs them for creating special movie effects (better than pixar, those tinkers), and Kundarak goes for the oversized security golems. And here is where Team Spode's intervention was required.
Buried away in the Black Forest, we find a special artificer named Haywire. What kind of crazy tinker in the tinker biz would name themselves after a defective wiring state? That's hardcore! That'd be like a doctor nicknaming himself, "Amputator."
That aside, Hazra in House Kundarak had a real problem on her hands, Haywire (His real name is Phinneas Hayward btw) hasn't sent word for quite a while, and Hazra is getting antsy for more golems.
NO WORRIES! TEAM SPODE LIKES TO HELP!
Haywire's abode is a crazy track-filled lava pit. At one point I sprung off the rails and broke into a bar of Ozzy Osborn's Crazy Train . . . 'cause I was going off! You know, the rails! On a crazy train! . . . yeah . . . that joke didn't go over well did it. I tried though.
If the Invaders quest was all about beholders, Made to Order is all about the golems. Clay golems, Iron golems, and of course, the final mega construct: a Marut gone bad!
As it turns out, Haywire thought he'd fix up a Marut named ARN-01D (or Arnold if you're into nicknames) and bring in some big bucks. Too bad that thing turned on him when it found out Haywire was trying to make himself into a cyborg with an awesome arm implant. Silly Haywire, doesn't he know that Marut are Inevitables? That kind of silly behavior ain't natural. He must be terminated!
Basically the dungeon is a hack n slasher in a semi-straight path. You just follow the rails and make sure you collect all the seals on your way. If you don't, you'll most likely have to backtrack a bit like we did. Apparently the end of the instance is one that used to be exploitable through pulling the Marut towards the group hiding outside its room. The all you have to do is range it to death. That isn't Team Spode style though. We went in with guns blazing!
Here's how the final xp report looked.
OH DANG. Look at my numbers for breakables! I'm such a halfling: can't leave anything untouched. Luckily our bonuses helped make up for that super harsh -75% exp loss from being so overpowered for the instance. hehe.
Good times.
Next week Ulan returns and we get to deal with more Xoriat craziness as Team Spode delves into the Harbinger of Madness quest line. Can't wait!
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!
