Hanging up the plow

 

I’d been SO good.

 

After my last post, I resolved to stay away from Spinner of Shadows for a while. I was just Spinnered out. And until last night, I’d kept that resolution. Not ONCE since I made that post had I set foot in that webby, columned room.

 

I’m not sure why I decided to give it another try. Maybe it was because Acanthia looked so bored, just hanging out on the ship sorting through bank stuff. Her Neverwinter alter ego had already gotten a fun couple of hours playing with Shin, Comic and Bonnie; Even’d run elite ToD before that. It just didn’t seem fair to stick poor DDO Acanthia at the bank.

 

“Just ONE more try,” I told myself sternly. “I don’t care what drops or doesn’t drop. You’re not running this damn quest more than once tonight.”

 

But once was all it took, because gleaming at me from that beautiful pink epic chest was my long-sought-after Shard of the Silver Slinger, the last piece Vic needed to epickify one of her favorite crossbows.

 

I think Garret the Fainted, I mean Tainted, er, no, Sainted jinxed me. Usually when Acanthia solos EH quests, she brings him along for deathward and as a failsafe in case of lag spikes and such. But the last few times, I noticed she was using her healing ki to keep HIM up far more than he was healing HER. So Garret stayed in the hireling folder, playing poker with the owlbears, panther and the level 24 rogue hire. (It may have been strip poker. They didn’t say, and I didn’t ask ’cause I didn’t really want to know.)

 

With no Garret around to worry about, the quest itself didn’t take long. Once the fighting was done, Baz and Slvr jumped in to give me a few extra chances at the shard, and then I put up a “free loot” LFM.

 

I’m not sure who passed me the shard – I’m almost positive it didn’t drop in my name, because I didn’t see it when I first opened the chest. Or maybe I’d just gotten so used to NOT seeing it that I didn’t realize what it was. Then someone said, “The shard dropped!” And I looked again… and there it was.

 

 

And now I’m really, REALLY never going into Spinner again… until it’s time to epickify Char’s Bow of the Silver Flame.

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Bite me, Spinner

 

Y’know how when you click on the Silver Flame Guardian in “Spinner of Shadows,” you get a dialogue box with the Guardian telling you crap about granting you its essence and how it can help you defeat the Spinner and all that?

 

I don’t get that any more. When I click the Guardian, there’s a little exasperated pause, and then it gives me a box that says, “Seriously? You AGAIN? Stop bothering me! If I wanted you to have that shard, I’d’ve given it to you by now.”

 

No, it doesn’t really say that. But it might as well. Vic has a Silver Slinger, a Scroll of the Silver Slinger, and a Seal of the Silver Slinger. She’s had them for quite a while. But sadly, the shard eludes me, despite running Spinner so many times, I find myself looking for ward crystals every time I squash a spider on the bathroom wall.

 

I’ve run it solo. I’ve run it in groups. I’ve run it on eNorm because I didn’t know if they’d fixed the bug that was preventing epic scrolls/seals/shards from dropping on higher difficulties, and then started running it on eHard after I found out that – as they should – epic upgrade items seem to drop more frequently there.

 

Last night I got the bright idea, after soloing EH Spinner on Acanthia, to put up an LFM for free loot and ask for the shard to be passed, should it drop. The party filled in record time, but no shard for anyone, at least not the Silver Slinger one. Too bad I’m not trying to epic a Luminous Truth or pretty much any item that starts with Templar, because those show up more often than chicken butt jokes on Miley Cyrus’ YouTube channel.

 

Every night, after I get to the point where I’ve Spinnered till I just can’t Spinner no more, I say, “I give up. I am never, ever, EVER running that #$%& quest again.” And then the next night rolls around, and despite my best intentions, I find myself trotting down to Harbor to talk to Orrex once again. Last night, though, I actually meant it… but only because I’d hit ransack. And then I remembered that I don’t have to run it on Acanthia, not when I have Even, Jall, Vic, Dissy, Char and Meren all eager for loot and epic XP – and NOT at the ransack point.

 

It’s not like Vic doesn’t love her Needle – oh, she does, very much. And she’s quite fond of her Slaver’s Hand, too. But being just one piece away from an epic Slinger for so long – well, it’s a matter of pride now. No way am I giving up.

 

I did pick up some other scrolls and seals – alas, no shards, although I think a few of the people I ran with pulled various ones. And it occurred to me that maybe, while I wait to pull the Slinger shard, I could think about epickifying (YES, dammit, that is a word) her Doublecross Bow even though she rarely never uses it. So I dug out my scroll/seal/shard green bag and checked to see if she was missing any pieces for the Doublecross…

 

FML. I have the seal. I have THREE scrolls. But once again, no shard.

 

See you again tomorrow night, Spinner.

Fun for ALL, Part I – Gimp is as gimp does

Since DDO currently won’t load for me, figured I might as well blog, y’know?

 

So, I’ve had this idea for a series running around in my head (hey, I need SOMETHING to fill up the space in there). Actually it was originally going to be a single post, but I’ve been working sporadically on the draft for a few months now and it’s way, way, WAAAAAY too long. Ergo, a series dedicated to the idea that DDO should be fun for EVERYBODY, regardless of class, race, server, skill level, or anything else.

 

A while back, after running (one of the Eveningstar quests, forget which one) on epic elite, I got a tell from someone who’s read my blog but hadn’t run with me before that night. He told me he was surprised that I ran EEs because “you keep saying you’re not an elite player,” and he also mentioned that he’d seen my LFMs, which nearly always say something like “noob/gimp friendly, first-timers welcome.”

 

Well, I’m NOT an elite player, but I DO run epic elites. I rarely PuG them mostly because, if I’m running EEs, 99% of the time I’m in a full or nearly-full-and-able-to-shortman group. I PROBABLY would not use the “noob/gimp/first-timer” disclaimer if I were putting up an LFM for an EE quest… but then again, I might, because I believe five (or 11) solid toons shouldn’t fall apart just because one person might need to be carried a bit, as long as that person is trying their best.

 

One thing I’d never done before until recently was join an EE PuG made up entirely of people I didn’t know. But I was on Jall, kind of felt like running something but couldn’t decide what, and saw an LFM for EE End of the Road with two spots open. What the heck, I thought, and clicked it.

 

I can’t remember the makeup of the party, except that Jall was the only divine, there was an arti, and only one person was over 500 HP besides Jall (in fact, two of ’em were under 400). The leader was already in the quest, and everybody else just kind of went in when they got there and took off. So we ended up with six people who were nowhere near each other at first. Then the leader said he’d never run the quest before, and a couple others said THEY hadn’t run it before either, and turned out NONE of us had run it on EE (well, Jall had it, but from a group she’d joined late that already had most of the stuff cleared by the time she got there, so it was an easy run to the end fight – I didn’t really count that).

 

Cringe-worthy? It definitely could have been. But then the arti started making jokes about his low HP and “crappy trappy” skills (his words, not mine, although he wasn’t able to disarm any of the traps), and somebody else started making puns out of everything anybody said, and we all got to laughing, and nobody seemed to care that with a group like this, we were probably facing a guaranteed wipe.

 

The leader was far ahead of everyone else and died once in the traps around the locked chest (which he didn’t know was locked), but must have gobbled a rez cake because he got himself back up before Jall could get to him. There were some close calls, but once the rest of the party figured out which blue dot was Jall’s, they stuck close for aura healing. I did ask them to stay with me for heals so I wouldn’t have to drink pots – ASKED them, not ORDERED them, which was probably why everyone was quite happy to do so.

 

The leader, not being close to us, decided his best chance for survival was to run through without fighting. He wasn’t a jerk about it at all; there was just a lot of space, including traps and mobs, between him and us, and he figured tearing through would give him the best chance. It did slow the rest of us down a bit while we stopped to fight, but it really wasn’t a huge deal, and it beat having to look for the leader’s soulstone along the way had he tried to make it back to us (staying put for him wasn’t much of an option as he had some stuff aggro’ed on him).

 

Remember, the leader had never run the quest before. So when he got to the end, he ran through everything and jumped down into the endfight room, not realizing it was, well, the endfight room. He didn’t last long and wasn’t able to make the jump back up to the shrine to rez himself, so I figured I’d just shrine once we cleared the outer area and then the rest of us would all jump in together and I’d rez him.

 

Except Razagnol, the boss demon, was pretty darn angry by then. So we clear the inside of the main enclosure and start running around the walkway to the shrine… and even though he’s down in the room below, he starts throwing us around. Over the fence, out into the wild. Of course no two of us ever seemed to land close to each other, and there were still some dire bears and spiders out there… but miraculously no one died.

 

It probably took us at least five or six tries to find a sweet spot on the walkway where ol’ Raz couldn’t toss us out. Shrining was out of the quest, but luckily Jall wasn’t down too far on mana; she’d thrown out a few BBs but had been using aura and bursts for heals. So one major pot brought her blue bar back pretty close to full. She buffed everybody up, and then on the count of three we all charged into the end room.

 

Jall got the party leader up right away and we all TRIED to stick together – TRIED because Raz was still inclined to throw us over the fence. The upside to this was that, once tossed, nobody was taking damage out there because pretty much everything was dead. The downside was that it was really hard to stack DPs on Raz since Jall was getting thrown into the wild too often.

 

Don’t ask me how, but… once the leader was rezzed, there were no more deaths. Jall did drink one more pot towards the end from trying to spam DP, Implosion, Searing Light, and anything else she had on Raz, but everybody was great about making sure they were sticking close to her for aura and burst heals – well, when they weren’t flying through the air.

 

Nobody could have called us an epic group, or an elite group, or possibly even a GOOD group. I’m sure a lot of people would have ragequit just upon seeing our collective HP total (when Jall has 150 more HP than anyone else in the group, that’s not a good thing), or upon finding out that several people had never done the quest. Once the talking and joking and laughing started, though, that kind of stuff didn’t matter. Obviously I WANTED us to get the completion, but it would have been a great time if we hadn’t.

 

And oh yes – we DID get the completion. With just those two deaths the leader had. And the loot was crappy, but we even made jokes about that (of course, the chain rewards were better).

 

This is why I avoid LFMs that say things like, “Be uber/awesome/useful,” “Best destinies,” “KNOW IT,” “Have at least XXX HP,” “BYOH,” etc. Our gimpy little group proved you don’t need ANY of that to complete EE content. Oh, it helps, no denying that… but this run was FUN. DDO is supposed to be FUN. Not just fun for the egolitists, but fun for EVERYBODY.

 

And in other news… got up early to do some errands and then joined Comic and Mizz on a wild ride that included a trip through Haywire Foundry even though poor Yttsie is 4-5 levels below Comic’s Timp and Mizz’s, uh, Mizz and then, since Yttsie was power-leveled and got no XP, a happy jaunt through the Demon Sands, where, as Mizz pointed out, there are NO DEMONS. Real life called me away, but I left Yttsie logged in to pike slayers and came back to find that she’d picked up around 17K XP. So thanks, guys!  🙂

 

Also, if you saw this on Twitter, you’re not hallucinating; that doesn’t mean *I’m* on Twitter, just that I set WordPress up to automatically twit my blog entries.  LOL