I have a bad feeling about that floor

After last week’s mass dragon death in Gianthold Tor, we were back in the Cornfields of Catastrophe Greenhouse of Gore Tidepools of Terror Orchard of the Macabre. These civic leaders really need to work on coming up with better names for their neighborhoods or nobody’s gonna want to move there.

The module failed to impress last time we went and this time was no different. We had our choice of beholders or vampires. Spode really wanted to get his vorpal freak on with vampires because, the problem with beholders is you can’t really cut off their heads! But after dispatching some nameds in the Orchard, it was at Doomsphere’s doors we found ourselves.

I think I remember the instance clearly. We go in, kill trash, fall through a floor, split the party to kill two guys at the same time, fall through a floor, find the boss, fall through a floor several times each time fighting a more difficult version of the boss and waves of trash.

The beholder, Doomsphere, eventually started walloping people with anti-magic rays. We wiped three times. Each wipe meant all but one of us had to release, heal, then fight back to the instance. The second time I didn’t even get a chance to get rezzed before the party wiped again.

No loot to speak of, experience was crappy, no traps, monsters for the entire module are thick with incorporeal spooky types, only got three kills in the entire instance (really??? how is that possible?). I spent most of the night dead. I should have brought a book.

I’ll be glad when we’re done with this module. Ruins of Gianthold and Harbinger of Madness were way more fun.

I dinged a rank, I’m on the last rank before level 16. Ulan dinged sometime during the week, so I’m the last one… I should probably buy some hirelings and farm some xp this week.

Go ask Alice, when the white dragons fall

None of us was happy about the way we left Gianthold Tor; expert at getting through the dungeon and killing the Gatekeeper, unable to kill the three dragons at the end. We’d all gained a level since we left the Tor, though, and the Harbingers of Madness gear was a literal game changer for most of us.

The rewards for grinding Gianthold Tor for rare dragon scales are not that great, given the effort involved. I estimate it would take killing a dragon thirty times in order to get enough scales to make a piece of armor. We were never going to spend half a year farming this instance.

But the dragons had to die. Last night we returned to Gianthold Tor and we killed the dragons.

The Death of the Black Dragon

All the dragons have a giant protector, and both dragon and giant have to die within seconds of each other. For this, we split the group. Spode tanked the dragon, Ulan the giant, and Gleek and I would switch from one to the other to keep their health balanced as we took them down.

We’d all acquired special cold resist gear when we were here before. We suited up, potioned up and buffed up, went in, and died pretty fast. Came back, changed our positioning a little — dead dragon. Between the four of us, no dragon scales.

Next up: the blue dragon, whose power was lightning. Since this was said to be the easiest of the three dragons, we’d tried this one a few times before. The room gradually becomes more electrified as the fight drags on. If you can’t kill everything in two minutes, the room itself will kill you.

Again, first time failure. Second time we kept the clerics near to the wall, outside the worst of the electricity, and won. One blue dragon scale between the four of us.

Gleek challenged us to kill the black dragon in his room full of acid pools the first time. This trick requires keeping the clerics and everyone else on one of the islands floating in the acid pools. And we did it — first try. Two black dragon scales among the four of us.

Three dragon scales out of twelve chances = 25% chance at a scale. If I’d need 20 black dragon scales for some decent light armor, I could expect to kill the dragon 80 times (on normal mode). I’d get some scales from other people in the group in trade for the ones I wouldn’t need, of course, but that’s still going to be a significant number of kills required.

We’re happy we killed the dragons, but I don’t think any of us see any reason to go back.

Is something ... missing?

Having spent the last month or so running errands for lazy journalists in the Harbingers of Madness module, we all felt it was time for a little change. Thus we were soon returning to our old haunts (heh heh) in the Necropolis, looking for a little adventure in the Orchards of the Macabre.

I can just imagine what the Stormreach zoning board thought when they got the property proposal for review. “So, you wish to build an orchard along the northern border of the city? Well, I see no reason to object… Hold on. An orchard of the _macabre_?” “Well, yes. Don’t you think apple trees look really scary? I know I do.”

We should totally do this in real life. My apartment complex? My apartment complex will now be known as “The Demesne of the Damned”. My car? “Hellwagon of Oblivion!”. My CAT? “Apocalypse Demonspawn”. It’s like the Stormreach city leadership doesn’t even care any more. They aren’t even trying. “Orchard of the Macabre, sir? Very good sir.” (Sound of rubber stamp hitting parchment). “There you go. Please exit through the Gate of Garrotting and give this deed to the Clerk from the Nether Planes.”

I originally wrote “clerk from the nether regions”, but that might have been misinterpreted, and I imagine the guardians of the Inferno of the Damned feel really sensitive about jokes about their smooth, featureless “nether regions”.

As usual when we first reach a new adventure area, we just wandered about killing creeps and looking for exploration points until we reach something interesting. The dungeon known as the Inferno of the Damned. The first dungeon we’ve done, as far as any of us could recall, with a woman narrator.

The dungeon exists in two planes; the normal plane and the “inferno” plane. We quickly started calling these the “ice and fire dimensions”. Stuff killed in the ice dimension is resurrected in the fire dimension, so each of the four guardians (North, East, South and West) has to be killed in ice and then killed again in fire.

Travel between the dimensions is accomplished by destroying an altar of damnation (to be transported to the Inferno) or by destroying an altar of benediction (to be transported back to the prime material plane). The guardians are summoned by setting torches aflame with fire spells in the normal world, then travelling to the inferno and extinguishing them with ice spells. The quest tracker helpfully tells you in which dimension your next objective is.

The dungeon is mostly the same in both dimensions. Mostly. Some paths are blocked off by fire or ruin, and it is necessary to pop between dimensions frequently in order to progress. This split of the dungeon into parallel realities left behind some quirks like a shrine with the resurrection stone in one dimension and the rest stone in the other.

We stumbled through the maze and eventually managed to kill all the guardians and return to the center room in the normal dimension all at the same time to confront and kill the final boss in what turned out to be a really trivial fight. The gear from Harbingers of Madness makes a real difference. Plus, Gleek has been grinding out the House of Cannith challenge dungeons for even more uber items.

No loot of real note dropped for anyone. I received two parts to a Sigil Frame somewhere along the way; I don’t know what this is for. If past experience is any use, the pieces will be difficult to complete an entire set, and in the end result in gear nobody will need by the time we have done these dungeons enough to get them. I’ve dragged a lot of quest items to the trash just because why bother?

Dinged rank 74 (level 15.3) on slayer rewards during our romp in the Orchards of Madness. By the time we returned to the Necropolis, I was about 3/4 through the rank. Closing in on level 16. The Inferno of the Damned had traps, but I was ready: I’d bid on and won some Clever Goggles of the Eagle +11 — +3 INT and +11 Spot. Not one trap got past me. Hello 15% intuition experience bonus!

The trash mobs in the orchard proper often immediately resurrect as undead, sometimes ghosts which require ghost touch weapons. Additionally, some were skeletons requiring blunt weapons. I was switching weapons madly until I got bored with that, and just stuck with my short swords for trash mobs.

For the final quest reward, I chose +5 DEX boots of tumbling +3. These replaced my +3 DEX boots of jumping +5. I jump more than I tumble, but I need the extra DEX more than both. I also got a +1 Tome of Constitution in a random chest. My first tome! I “ate” it and my hit points jumped from 226 to 261.

My original build prior to any respecs had me at about 90 hit points. By way of comparison. I never even really noticed (nor did anyone else) until a patch had the UI start showing real numbers for health and mana. Everyone was just as shocked as I was at how poorly I compared.

Not blaming the game, just blaming me. Every other modern MMO takes you by the hand on all important choices, leaving you free to screw things up only in things that are easily changed. DDO is happy to let you fail. That might be one of the most notable things ABOUT the game, actually.

Auraxyllon

None of Team Spode much liked working so hard on In The Flesh and failing it Sunday. We were so close, but we were just out of time. We decided to meet mid-week and try it again — on normal mode — to finish the quest series and get the rewards.

We grouped up on time, went into the instance, summoned the clerics, and thrashed the instance — Yaulthoon for sure, and even the undead beholder that thrashed us again and again a few weeks back. First try. My respec definitely helped, but these instances have raised our level of gear, and they’ve also taught us how better to work as a team. It’s a lesson we desperately need — because there’s no reason we can’t win every instance we come across on normal mode. Losing a normal mode instance means we failed.

Anyway, we didn’t fail tonight. I’m sure we would have succeeded as well on hard mode — and maybe we’ll have that chance. Spode missed talking to an NPC and missed out on the final quest arc reward so it might be worth another run.

I got the armor, though, AND the bow, so that worked out well. Now all us stabby slashy types have the Parasitic Breastplate. Spode thinks this would be a great fashion show. I think it would make a really boring one :)

With the instance out of the way, Gleek wanted to show us some of the Cannith quests. Yeah, okay. But there’s a DRAGON!

That’s all it takes!

There’s also a lot of experience, too. We did the Extraplanar Mining: Buying Time challenge adventure twice. The first time we tried it at level 17; Ulan and I, the lowbies, couldn’t really do much to the mini bosses and so we died. We still got credit for finishing the first challenge of the adventure, though — 8,121 xp. We went in again at level 14, completed it like a boss, met and killed the dragon, got nearly 12K xp. Plus some of the mephit wings we need to buy some of the faction gear, in particular some weapons with decent stats but procs like you wouldn’t believe and pretty substantial elemental resists.

Gleek has been gearing up with this challenge gear and it’s easy to see how much it’s improved his DPS (Sunday when I think he almost killed hard-mode Yaulthoon by himself).

Tonight I learned the drawback of my respec into the Assassin line — we came to the trapped entrance to the undead beholder’s lair, and I hadn’t spotted the trap. Yeebo mentioned that he’d had to keep a lot of +Spot etc gear around. I took some time before we started this evening to make a couple extra hot bars with all the swappable gear I thought I’d need. I hit the hot key for my +10 Spot goggles and the trap popped right up. Disabled it no problem and on we went.

I have some bids in the auction house for +Spot gear that also contains useful stats — +6 clever goggles with a +3 spot, and some +11 goggles for when I just really need to know about traps before Spode the Human Trapfinder gets to them :)