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.
We've all lived through the Dell Eras, but have we all lived through Deleras? eh? eh? See what I did there?
*cough*
Can I just say this NPC gives me the heebeejeebees?
That FACE! I get it though . . . poor guy is all haunted and standing outside a necromancer's lair for his whole existence. The Friendly Necromancer needs his own NPC as well.
I think I'd want the NPC outside of my lair to be a green unicorn though. Yeah, that sounds about right for The Friendly Necromancer's Lair. Anyway, yes, I did the whole suite of Delera's missions twice and ended up solidly into level 8 in the process. Good times there, and I ended up doing a lot of commanding of undead! There's nothing more satisfying than having this guy chuck lightning bolts for me (although they seem weaker than my lightning bolts /shrug)
This led to a lot of awkward moments for my cleric hirelings though. I don't know how appreciative they were of all the backhugs from skele-friends. I guess as long as they're getting paid, right?!
Lemme tell you, getting a cleric hireling with Dispel Magic is a good idea when you're a necromancer in a Delara's dungeon. Waiting 1-4 minutes for these guys to be uncharmed in a situation where you have to defeat all of them to get a door to open is not ideal. (I know what you're saying . . . stick to Firewall, kid. SHUT UP!)
OK, fine, Firewall it is . . .
*wipes hands* and that's Delara's! Can I just say that the end of the Delera's adventure is really weird still? I remember being a little confused because it wasn't 100 percent clear you were supposed to go talk to Delara in an instance after talking to Mr. heebeejeebee above . . . and then do it again a second time?! Amiright? It's strange! Are you feeling me on that?
Anyway, if you just READ the quest text and piece it together (yup, I had to go digging to find out you press "L" to open up your quest log in DDO), you eventually find your way around to wrap it up so you can get your amazing VOICE OF THE MASTER trinket. word? word!
So what's next for Mr. Necromancer? Well, I'm open to suggestions, but I was thinking of wandering over to the Necropolis (another seemingly great spot for necromancers) and maybe back to Cannith for a bit to get upgraded versions of my favorite gear. I LOVES ME SOME CANNITH MISSIONS!!
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!)
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:
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.
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.
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.
I hate to admit it, I had to Google this reference to get it . . .
Utaalk!!! Adarab!!! Otkin!!! is Klaatu Barada Nikto backwards. What the heck is Klaatu Barada Nikto? Well, Wikipedia talks all about it hehe. Yeah, I'm showing my lack of geek . . . let me make up for it with gratuitous YouTube videos!
. . . and made even more edgy by Army of Darkness:
So, as you may have guessed, Team Spode returned to the quest of Acute Delirium last night and attempted HARD MODE!!!!
Yeah, that didn't go so well. We finally realized that we needed to slow down and not get too zealous about following Haxxorrax the Mind Flayer into the laundry room at the back of the not so peaceful pub and hotel located in The Twelve's downtown district after being swarmed by more evil eyes, beholders, Deranged Followers, and Xorian Renders than you could shake an artifact of unimaginable evil power at. (*breath* trying reading that last sentence aloud.)
Seriously, I counted like 30 mobs around us when we wiped that first time in Hard mode.
Our second try at Hard Mode went a little better until we were swarmed again by Frost beholders, Xorian Renders, and Evil Eyes while we attempted to gather beds and bookshelves to make our airship to Xoriat. Nope.
With half the play time gone for the night, it was definitely time to salvage the night on Normal mode and try our luck at getting Spode the Watcher's Blade he so badly desired . . . and didn't get. That's ok though. We still had an absolutely blast killng beholders and bursting giant beholder guts last night. It's definitely one of the more memorable and humorous quests we've done in DDO. :)
I will say that (for me personally) the saving grace of the night was finally tallying up enough adhesive slimes to improve my Infused Chaosrobe by adding Melodic Guard to it. yay!
Team Spode will return again next week with a different adventure to undertake. We're not exactly sure what that will be at this point, and we're certainly up for suggestions. Go ahead and make them!
