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 :)

In the Flesh?

All we wanted to do last night was finish The Harbingers of Madness quest for the second time, this time on Hard mode. The quest on Normal mode the week before last had kicked our butts; the Ghost of Pyzjyn slaughtered us, and Yaulthoon the Mind Flayer walloped us several times until we found out his trick.

In the time between then and now, though, I’d respecced into a damage build instead of a fairly useless trap-focused build (though I am still able to find and disarm traps). I wondered if this new focus on damage would let the group take on the hard content we really should be doing when we can. Normal mode is for solo and small groups; we head in with four PCs and two dedicated cleric hirelings. And Gleek and Spode have devoted a lot of time outside of our weekly gaming toward making their characters utterly uber.

Fact is, we rocked at the entire quest… mostly. We did get overwhelmed at one point and had Xorians camping us at the shrine. My hireling cleric kept using the rez stone to come back to life. Where she’d be instantly killed. It was kinda funny. We eventually released, cleared that nest, rested and moved on to Yaulthoon.

The final fight on Hard mode requires a little more care. Normally we run around, attacking monsters and dragging them back to the central spot where Ulan and Gleek have set up their blade barriers and fire walls. That wasn’t working. We worked on our strat, kept close together where possible, and after a few tries finally had Yaulthoon in a good place. I hit my triggered attack and haste buffs and together we sliced the massive mind flayer down to a fraction of his health.

We were all focusing on clearing another wave when the Mind Force blasts started. We’d all forgotten to clear the fleshy nubs at his feet in order to complete his destruction. I had no idea he was so low on health…

It was too late for one last try. We failed the quest, but I nonetheless think we did really well. There’s no reason we can’t do things in hard mode, once we know the encounter.

Drow in Spaaaaace

My first Dungeons and Dragons character, I had no idea about. She was a dwarf cleric, a Hobbesian cleric — solitary, poor, brutish, nasty and _short_. Healing was more fun when hirelings would do it, so I picked up a fighter level and made her into a melee cleric. I put points into whatever stats seemed good at the time. I had fun, but she was a horrid healer. No idea what I was doing.

When we all restarted, we decided to keep letting hirelings be our main healer, and I switched to rogue. Again, I just put points — wherever. Took a level of fighter. I had fewer hit points than anyone, my dps was crappy, couldn’t find traps well. I decided I was too stupid to level my character on my own, so I bought a +1 Lesser Heart of Wood (the +1 to remove the fighter level) and started over as a Rogue on the Mechanic Path — a trap disarmer. Every time I went to the trainer to level, I’d just click “stay the course!” and the trainer would make all my choices for me.

A LITTLE better, but I still had fewer hit points than anyone, I couldn’t hit monsters unless they were below my level, was usually killed in the first AE in boss battles. I proved to myself for the third time that I am too stupid to level a character in DDO on my own.

This weekend I went to the DDO forums, looked for a Drow Two Weapon Fighting Rogue build, bought a Lesser Heart of Wood (each time with real cash, of course, no free respecs in DDO) and followed the plan to the letter.

I now have comparable hit points to everyone else and did well on the dungeon score cards as we re-did the first three quests in the Harbingers of Madness line — on hard mode. I actually was able to damage a boss. Wow. Also it turns out my previous build didn’t have Two Weapon Fighting. So I was only hitting with my main hand weapon. I am slightly less able to find traps, but the build should keep me able to do that job, as long as I augment my character with Tomes of Stats that permanently raise your characteristics.

In DDO, it is required that you “eat” tomes to raise your stats. There’s a sale now on a Tome that will raise ALL stats three points — but it costs $35 and I just don’t think it’s worth it.

So anyway. I am too stupid to build my own character in DDO. I liked, in Rift, that I could experiment and try new things. DDO’s F2P model requires that they get money from you however they can, and thus, players cannot experiment with different builds, and like me can end up with a horribly gimped character.

Team Spode has carried me for months, and I just felt sick at how little I contributed to the group. On normal mode dungeons, traps rarely hit hard, so the group would run straight through them to get to the next fight while I’d hang back disarming the traps nobody stopped for. Why should they? But since I couldn’t fight or buff or do anything else useful, I could at least get the group 15% experience bonus for removing traps.

The only other game that has made me feel this stupid is EVE Online.

If you’ve played DDO, it’s likely you’re better at it than I am. But maybe you see some of yourself in my mistakes. Don’t trust the game to lead you on to a good path. Don’t trust yourself to figure out the best option. Just let someone else drive the car.

For those who asked, this is the build I used to remake my Drow rogue: Drow TWF Rogue Build.

Yaulthoon, in the flesh?

In the flesh, indeed. After crawling through the luxurious Harborview Lofts — entirely transformed into upscale accommodations for twisted monsters — we finally met Yaulthoon… in his mind. Nothing seemed quite real.

We didn’t get to him right away, though. First, we had front row tickets to a fashion show.

Fashion Forward

Yaulthoon isn’t your garden variety boss. No. As the architect of the Harbinger of Madness, the creator of the Taken, the gardener of horrors, he’s proud of his works. Proud. “How wonderful it must feel,” he shouted at us. “Knowing that one of your old Stormreach friends might be a small piece of flesh within one of my artworks. I am envious!”

For it was he that had been responsible for kidnapping the lost souls of Stormreach, sealing them within fleshy wombs and transforming them into the Taken.

New for this year — hats!

A display case

Discerning shoppers could stay for the fashion show or just browse the display cases, many showing the Taken performing the same sort of mundane, everyday routines they might have done before they were transformed. Sitting down to eat. Reading a paper — perhaps the Stormreach Chronicle! In their madness, they would sometimes escape and then we would have to kill them a little bit.

I don’t know many people in Stormreach. I didn’t have to wonder if I was killing anyone I knew.

Pykzyl (the living)

Pykzyl the Beholder stepped in to slow us down. Have you ever seen a beholder dance? They stick all their tentacles out and wave them in turn. It’s kind of beautiful in a way. Gleek’s become a big believer in the power of dance, and this has made so many of our fights so much easier.

Devil hounds get up on their hind legs and step from side to side, like Scooby Doo. The Taken turn and turn and turn in blissful emptiness. Beholders do “the wave” by themselves.

Pykzyl died. Death can’t keep a good beholder down, though. Yaulthoon raised him and set his shade behind a locked door that came with a warning. Don’t open this, it warned, if you want to live. We opened it and died. And died. And died. And died. And died.

So that was fun.

We let him be and did a couple optional explorations. Then on to meet Yaulthoon in the flesh.

Briefly — but then he sucked us in to his madness, a dark plain of flesh dotted with meaty hairs and swollen pustules. And looking down at us, Yaulthoon’s avatar. He was SO GLAD to see us. Unhappy a little that we’d killed all his display models, but our corpses could help build back the supply.

The DM had told us that we couldn’t attack him directly, but what does he know? We soon convinced ourselves that the DM was not lying (this time). It didn’t take us long to figure out that the bubbles of pain Yaulthoon was blowing at us could burst those swollen pustules, causing him pain and allowing him to be attacked for a brief time.

Yay! We could kill him! We took him down in waves of Taken, hiding behind pustules and bursting out to do damage. Then he went insane — MORE insane — and started hitting us with “Mind Thrust”, which I resisted a couple of times before it slammed my soul out of my body.

We regrouped and came at him again — same story. It was time to look at the Wiki… and it told us about the fleshy pods that would appear at his feet when he was about to do the Mind Thrust. Destroy those and he would be powerless for a short time.

That was the secret. The third time was the charm, and he died.

I didn’t get anything in particular. The primo light armor dropped for Ulan and Spode, and I believe it was an upgrade for both of them (this light armor an improvement over Spode’s heavy armor proving what good armor it was).

We emerged into the Stormreach Harbor sunlight, blinking our eyes clean. The rewards for finishing all Harbingers of Madness quests are random, apparently. The light armor was not available for me, but the dagger _was_, so I chose that.

It can curse me, sure, but it is the most powerful weapon I own. It might be the most powerful weapon I _ever_ own.

Next week: We’ll either redo this quest chain (for more loot) or head back to the Necropolis. Personally, I vote for the loot. I want my own chance at that armor. Or the bow.

Plus, maybe we can kill undead Pyzkyl this time around.

And once I am thus equipped, there are dragons that need killing.

This post cost me $15, by the way. Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” is now digitally mine. I had it on LP and on CD, but I tossed the LP when I moved to Connecticut (along with all the rest of them), and my daughter borrowed the CD a decade ago and borrowing is a one way street with her :P

Ophiga with dagger

Polycurse Dagger