Phat lewtz and all that

For once in her life, Acanthia’s been on the back burner lately while I work on Even, Jall, Vic and Tirae, who’ve leveled up to 24, 22, 23 and 24 respectively over the past week-ish. In the process, they’ve occasionally pulled some nice gear… but mostly they’ve had a LOT of fun.

Jall finished flagging for CitW last night with some help from Baz. She’d already soloed Reclaiming the Rift, but Trial by Fury proved a bit much – not for her, but for me. Too many paths to choose from led to me getting Jall lost. A LOT, even by MY low standards. And when she fell through the same hole for the THIRD TIME and got punted back to the start of the quest, I ragequit (is it really a ragequit if you’re soloing?) and headed to Cannith to get Tirae her polar bear.

After cooling off with some skating runs on Cannith – and some polar bear cuddles for Tirae – I decided I was ready for another shot at Trial by Fury and headed back to Thelanis. By this time Baz was on, and sent me a tell saying he was at the end of Detour and asking if Jall wanted to come for some XP and loot. I hadn’t had her out to High Road yet (well, she only just turned 22 and it’s a lvl 24 area), but I like XP. And I like loot. And Detour’s not very far into the wilderness. So off she went, grabbed a journal or two, killed a necromancer and his summoned minions, and picked up around 27K XP in Detour for doing… absolutely nothing. LOL

We went from there to Demonweb, where we (FINALLY!) got Jall all the way through Trial by Fury AND Baz netted the Hide of the Goristro he’d been wanting for a long, long, LONG time. We also ran Deal and the Demon (“Ah,” Ymris says. “You have come to honor our bargain. Good.”) after farming the “easy” and soon-to-be-gone chest several times; Baz got THREE Spider-spun Caparisons, Jall got rocks (but Baz passed her a caparison to AH).

Somewhere along the way, Baz also pulled a Planar Focus of Subterfuge, which he very graciously passed to Jall to pass along to Vic. (Hey, Baz, I passed you a thing or two, didn’t I? I’m feeling greedy all of a sudden!) And Jall got a BTC Planar Focus of Prowess in her chain end rewards; it has +8 Con, which will be a VERY nice replacement for her current HP trinket. A few nights ago she also pulled a Seal of House Dun’Robar with +7 Str and Exceptional Combat Mastery; I’m debating what to do with that. Acanthia and possibly Even would love the ECM, but both already have +7 Str items and I’m not sure I want to replace the rings either is wearing. We’ll see… if only I had a way to send it to Tirae over on Cannith, since she has no ToD rings!

Tirae is flagged for CitW and now just needs to actually run the raid. She’s sporting epic-level Ivy Wraps courtesy of Shin and, somewhat to her surprise, finding that she likes them quite as much as she loves her Grave Wrappings (also procured by Shin). I really need to save up some TP and get her a sixth inventory slot for all this cool gear – she’s my only epic-level toon with only five slots.

Squishy gimpy trapmonkey Vic didn’t pull anything to write home about whilst getting herself CitW-flagged, but finding out that she’s perfectly capable of soloing King’s Forest, Underdark, Sschindylryn and Demonweb was reward enough for me.

She’s racked up enough commendations to start her Druid commendations set, but mostly… she’s not really impressed with it. Oh, they’re nice items, but aside from the set bonus, most of the effects are stuff she already has. She’ll probably end up getting the set, but using it only situationally at best.

And last, but never least… Even.

Even’s been a busy girl. She tanked Horoth on elite for her 19th ToD and it was a cakewalk. Then she joined a bunch of her former Monty’s guildies (she’s former, they’re current) for a hard run as her 20th and cruised through tanking him again. Sadly, she’s STILL waiting for a Band of Siberys.

Then it was off to SubT with mostly the same group to get Baz his first-ever Hound run. Even had NEVER tanked Xy’zzy before; her 65-ish unbuffed intim is a bit low. But she’s got a solid fog clickie and we needed a tank, plus we had several first-timers so were doing a normal learning run, and I decided to give it a try. Other than Mama Dog bowling her over before she could get her first intim off, the run went VERY well; she got intim back quickly and kept it.

Way back when, Even used to be an intimitank. When I GRed her, I was thinking about all the times she lost aggro to hate tanks. So I went the incite route; her intim is a bit low as a result, but she holds aggro MUCH better, and her intim isn’t TERRIBLE. And now her incite will be even better – when we opened up the chests at the end of HoX, she pulled Levik’s Defender, and then won the roll on the bracers! While she loves her Bastion, the Levik’s set is going to be VERY nice for tanking. Kinda made up for no Band of Siberys and for losing a roll on a Sword of Shadows during eVon a few nights back. *beam*

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Sister acts

I’ve always liked to think of my toons as one of a kind. Darn that Baz, though, going and shattering my illusions one snowy night in Eveningstar…

Baz: Bren! Have you seen the NPC at the end of the skating course?

Me: No, should I?

Baz: YES! Get out here! You have to see this!

Me: What the hell, I’m not having much luck farming coins anyway.

And there she was – Ayera Brightleaf. That probably doesn’t mean much to you… but check out Acanthia’s last name in the shot above (and many thanks to Baz for getting that shot for me, since I can’t see my own last name above my head). And she’s not even a halfling! What the heck?!

I never gave Tirae a last name, but she’s far more of a sister to Acanthia than this Ayera chick. (Acanthia sez: “In my family, be halfling or begone.”) Acanthia’s been sporting an upgraded Spider-spun caparison for a while now. Tirae’s had one sitting in the bank, but it wasn’t upgraded for the Way of the Sun Soul set bonus. And she’d never equipped it, since it binds on equip, and she was kinda hoping to fork over all her plat and maybe some of her paltry supply of green steel ings if she found someone willing to upgrade it for her.

But she lucked out and found an upgraded caparison – the one with the Wisdom bonus, which is the one she wanted – on the AH for only 200K plat. That was enough to put a serious dent in Tirae’s funds but not bankrupt her, so buying it was a no-brainer. It makes her look very ninja-ish with her dark hair and complexion, although she’s a light monk. Naturally the only thing left to do was shuck off her Sun Soul vestments (nekkid monk! – well, for a few seconds), don the caparison, and get some screenies.

It’s really hard to pick just a couple of shots out of the bazillions I took. Amrath seemed to be a fitting backdrop for Tirae’s new dark, sinister look, though.

Now I just need to get her flagged for ToD… *sigh* She’s only got New Invasion so far.

Shenlie, though human, is kind of an honorary sister to Acanthia and Tirae, mostly because, well, they’ll all my toons, and so they’re all kinda connected if not actually related. As she’s sporting a new look with some long, pretty hair Comic passed to me from a lottery win, I thought it was worth throwing in a shot of her as well.

I need to find her better armor, although what she’s wearing – the starter leather armor – is a GREAT look for a druid… which is what she is.

Meanwhile Even is moping because last night she was going to get her first shot at tanking Horoth on elite. She’s tanked him on hard, and tanked Sully on elite, but so far no elite Horoth. Her party had just stepped into Nytherios’ room when boom boom, out went the lights – we had a snowstorm last night, and the power decided to go out right in the middle of ToD.

By the time it came back on and I got her back into DDO, the ToD group had long since disbanded, although when I sent the leader a tell to explain and apologize, he asked if I wanted to run Abbot… OK, what he actually said was, “If you don’t get your ass to Abbot, I’m going to drag you in here.”

Even’s not Abbot-flagged (there’s really nothing from that raid I want for her), so I got Acanthia, who got her first shot at tiles… and fell into a gaping chasm to her death because when her partner said, “OK, now run four,” I didn’t realize she needed to jump and Abundant Step to make it the rest of the way across. But we had a couple of people do a brilliant job, including the guy who ended up blind-running tiles and the folks who got around eight of us rezzed once the puzzles were done, and we got the completion.

That was my first Abbot in prolly a month or two; the last time I ran one, I was in roids and kept hitting R instead of T, thereby running off the platform to my death… four times. Nice to have gotten back on that bike and made it through one!

Bear necessities

Dear DDO,

Please stop making lovable creature companions, because I’m afraid I’m going to sign on some night and have my friends pull me into an intervention cleverly disguised as an elite CitW.

Yesterday, I had 19 pets. NINETEEN! That’s seven more than a 12-step program could help with. But did you do the responsible thing and set up a Pet-A-Holic support group, complete with toll-free number? Noooo, you had to go and dangle a new – and especially cute – polar bear cub in front of me.

I tried to resist – well, OK, I didn’t really try all that hard. My “resisting” amounted to a few minutes of, “Gee, do I really want to shell out 95 TP for skates?” And it turned out that, yes. Yes, I did. Twice, in fact – one pair for Acanthia and a second pair for Tirae. (Actually, the skating is so much fun, it’s kinda worth the 95 TP even if you DON’T want a polar bear.)

I couldn’t help it. Despite the long list of things I wanted to accomplish – farm commendations on Even, Jall and Vic; work on getting Shroud mats for Tirae; level up Dissy; give my poor neglected lowbies some playing time – I found myself dashing through my allotted four skating runs each day (well, eight, since I did four on Thelanis and four on Cannith) and then spending an inordinate amount of time jumping off the Harbormaster’s house (I probably owe Zin some shingles) or fighting waves of respawning fire reavers in Lords of Dust.

Sadly, I suck at getting coins. Not sure why; last year Acanthia was raking ’em in by jumping from the roof of the Leaky Dinghy, but for some reason that’s not working as well for me this year. Luckily for me, Baz RAWKS at getting coins and is also incredibly generous, so it really didn’t take long to amass 10,000 motes and turn them in for Snowball, my new polar bear cub.

So instead of trying to break my bad habits and cut back on my pet addiction, I’ve added to it instead. Why, DDO, why? Is it not enough for you that Jall and Chalei can’t seem to stay away from mana pots, or that Acanthia is irresistibly drawn to Potions of Wonder, or that Dissy can’t control her urges to keep buying more hair dye to change her look? Must I also be fated to having more furry friends than a neko at a Second Life convention?

Please, DDO, take responsibility for those of us who are too weak to resist these utterly adorable companions. (Hey, maybe that’s why I can’t resist them, it’s the adorableness, ’cause nobody’s ever gonna call ME adorable. Yanno?)

Love,
Evennote

P.S. – Please make scorpion, beholder, mephit, air elemental, fire elemental and ooze pets. I promise I shall shower them with all the hugs and exclamation points I’m unworthy of receiving myself.

P.P.S. – Please put the bear tricks back in the store. Snowball has to dance alone because Tiguak doesn’t have the dance trick. This makes him a sad panda – OOOOH! We need PANDA companions!