Filkin’ Around: “Pally”

 

Our little band of Flower Sniffers of Destiny has been shortmanning raids of late – raids because they’re fun, shortmanning because of the lag monster.

During a fun but failed (because we let too many good guys die) attempt to four-man Defiler of the Just the other night, Seki said that Even seemed impossible to kill.

He mentioned that again tonight, after a successful three-man Fall of Truth and a not quite as successful Fire on Thunder Peak, also three-manned. We were actually not doing badly in FotP until Even accidentally grabbed the aggro of BOTH dragons and couldn’t shake it. PDK flesh must be a gourmet delicacy to dragons; even when she turtled up and let Seki and Gonari – neither of whom is any slouch when it comes to DPS – go after the dragons, all the dragons wanted was paladin shish kebab.

Sooo, no completion since you can’t damage either dragon if they’re near each other, and with them both aggroed hard on Even, there was no way we were going to get them separated. Eventually Seki had to log – real life, sleep, that kind of nonsense.  😉

I considered recalling, but RESPAWNING HELLHOUNDS. And I do not – YET – have a hellhound pet.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. A couple hundred hellhounds later, my fingers were cramping up and I was feeling almost ready to pack it in. Almost, but not quite. “I’ll just keep going until she dies,” I told myself. I figured it wouldn’t be terribly long before I ran out of both mana and Lay On Hands. I was right – kinda. The outdated con-op goggles Even wears, although they took a heck of a beating, kept replenishing her spell points when she got too low to Cocoon. Her Lay on Hands regenerate – not terribly quickly, but fast enough. Oh, and she’s using Terminus, which tosses a hjeal on her every so often when she gets hit.

No, Even wasn’t going down without a fight. “OK,” I thought, “I’m just going to stop hjealing her.”

But there was the not insignificant matter of those random shield hjeals, and then there was this nifty thing called Eternal Defender – short version, if Even’s hit points drop below zero but not lower than her range of unconsciousness, she immediately gets a hjeal. And with her crazy high heal amp, it’s a pretty nice hjeal, too. Oh, and I can’t remember the exact number, but her range of unconsciousness extends pretty far.

I stopped blocking. I took off her armor (Breastplate of the Celestial Avenger). I unequipped her shield…

… none of which helped. She still stood there very much alive for an inordinate amount of time considering there were two dragons, a bevy of magma brutes, hordes of skellies, the occasional necromancer, and, oh yeah, those hellhounds, all trying very hard to kill her.

I don’t know exactly how long she actually lasted. She’d been going for quite a while before I got the idea to start up the video capture, and the first capture went for maybe 10 minutes before failing because I ran out of disk space. (Oops.) After that, I tried to stop each video somewhere around a minute; ended up with four short clips I strung together, chopped the beginning off so it’d match the length of the song, and put on my filk hat. (No, I don’t really have a filk hat. Maybe I should get one.)

tl;dr: I tried really hard to kill Even. It took a while.

Lyrics are NOT in this post because I FINALLY GOT CAPTIONS TO WORK! GO CAPTIONS! If you don’t see them, click the little “CC” button near the bottom right of the player.

Sadly, I don’t know how to contact Dolores O’Riordan to see if she’d sing my lyrics to the Cranberries’ hit “Zombie.” I used Karafun’s karaoke version for this video.

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Show me the way

 

I knew it was going to happen eventually.

When DDO introduced Bigby’s Guiding Hands, I rejoiced. An aid for people who get lost! That’s me! Also, the Hands are based on one of my old blog posts that suggested something like a bag of bread crumbs for those of us who are navigationally challenged.

But I also cringed, just a little, because my friends and guildies (and sometimes even myself) are fond of saying that I get lost in Market Barracks. Which isn’t quite true, although it’s one of the very few places in DDO where I haven’t gotten lost… yet. But I knew that eventually I was going to step into Devil Assault and be greeted by a Bigby’s or two.

Tonight, it happened. Devil Assault, a break somewhere around the third or fourth wave. I turned around, and voila – there was the Bigby’s, pointing the way to the exit door so I’d be able to find my way out when we were done.

Well played, sir, well played. LMAO

Filkin’ Around: Steelstar Killed My Gimpy Bank Bard

 

My unfortunate, intentionally-gimped bank bard wishes she’d not chosen DDO’s 10th Anniversary Party for her debutante ball.

True, Scrag the kobold was happy to see her. And the Coin Lords gave her a nice salute when she arrived.

But then… but then…

Being a bard, she chose to describe her experience at the party via song. Not just ANY song, mind you, but a filk. Thus, my latest creation, to the tune of “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles (which was the first video ever played on MTV, in case you didn’t know), is the Amazing Gimp-O-Bard version. While you’re reading the lyrics (and hopefully singing them in your head – or aloud – to the melody), try to imagine them as performed by a somewhat plaintive sun elf wearing a big mushroom hat and strumming her lute with a bouquet of flowers…

 

   Steelstar Killed My Gimpy Bank Bard

I should’ve buffed her hitpoints past one fifty-two
Played that one song to get her DCs up there too
But she got stunned and there was nothing she could do
Ow ow ow

She ran upstairs and tried to dirge that dev arti
His robo dog just knocked her down and bit her knee
Wish she’d dumped Heighten for a toughness feat or three

Ow ow ow
She’s now a soulstone
Ow ow ow
He silenced her notes

Steelstar killed my gimpy bank bard
Steelstar killed my gimpy bank bard
He shot her up, it broke her heart
Ow ow ow ow ow ow

Her party favors – well, I guess they’ll stay with Jeets
The other devs she’ll never get a chance to beat
That oatmeal raisin cookie wasn’t such a treat

Ow ow ow
Some celebration
Ow ow ow
She’s bruised and achin’

Steelstar killed my gimpy bank bard
Steelstar killed my gimpy bank bard
His lightning blast zapped her health bar
His rune arm tore her all apart

Ow ow ow ow ow
Ow ow ow ow ow

Steelstar killed my gimpy bank bard
Steelstar killed my gimpy bank bard
His lightning blast zapped her health bar
His rune arm tore her all apart

He shot her up, it broke her heart
She missed him with her throwing dart

Oh, my gimpy bank bard
Oh, my gimpy bank bard

Steelstar killed my gimpy bank bard
Steelstar killed my gimpy bank bard
Steelstar killed my gimpy bank bard
Steelstar killed my gimpy bank bard
Steelstar killed my gimpy bank bard (Oh, my gimpy bank bard)
Steelstar killed my gimpy bank bard (Oh, my gimpy bank bard)
Steelstar killed my gimpy bank bard (Oh, my gimpy bank bard)
Steelstar killed my gimpy bank bard (Oh, my gimpy bank bard)
Steelstar killed my gimpy bank bard (Oh, my gimpy bank bard)
Steelstar killed my gimpy bank bard (Oh, my gimpy bank bard)

 

Boldly going…

 

… where no Flower Sniffin’ paladin has gone before.

Even is my go-to toon for – well, pretty much everything. Out of all my toons, she’s the one I get for the tough stuff. She’s the one with 60-ish EE solos and a fair number of solo raids under her belt. I’m not trying to brag; Even happened by accident – I didn’t plan her build  at all, just made it up as I went along, and it ended up working out nicely. I have 18 other Thelanis toons who can’t come close to doing what Even does.

But the one thing Even hasn’t yet been able to do is solo the Shroud. She’s only gotten past Phase 1 once. Darn portal keepers – for some reason, she NEVER seems to be able to find them. Killing them isn’t a big deal, since they go down in one hit. FINDING them – that’s a whole ‘nuther story. So Vale ends up going coterminous and Even gets booted. The one time she DID make it all the way through to Phase 2, she couldn’t beat the fire ele back to the crystal, and I finally got tired of having to prep and kill everything all over again and gave up.

Vic is no Even. She’s a little first-life squishy mechanic rogue with one epic past life. I had never even thought of trying to solo a raid with her. But the other night, she was in a shortmanned heroic Shroud (’cause she was bored and someone was farming shards), and I noticed that when she was on a portal by herself, she was taking it down WAY faster than Even ever did.

“Hmmm,” I said to myself, “I wonder if she could solo Phase 1 at least, because she probably wouldn’t get nearly as many portal keepers as Even does.”

And so, once she was off timer, I gave it a try. Phase 1 went beautifully. Phase 2 went far better than I’d ever expect it to go. But in Phase 3, I made the mistake of trying to solve all the puzzles, and ended up running around a corner straight into the Prismatic Wall of Death.

So tonight I gave it another whirl. Easy cruise through Phase 1, bit more trouble in Phase 2 – think it took me about half a dozen tries to get all four rednames down at once AND beat them back to the crystal. Changed strategy in Phase 3 – didn’t even try to solve puzzles, just shot all the crystals and then ran water to the rooms in the north. And then I sat in the middle and waited… and waited… and waited for the wall to come up, because I didn’t want to risk it dropping on her head.

Once the last fountain had water, I pretty much knew that, barring something REALLY weird happening, she was going to get the completion. She had to kill three or four rounds of gnolls in Phase 4, and the rednames weren’t overly cooperative about separating at the start of Phase 5, but finally it was just Vic and Harry.

And then it was just Vic.

I got the last bit of the end fight on video. Muted the audio, not sure what’s going on there – the game sounds didn’t come through, but there were some loud clanky noises that sounded like bad plumbing.

There are plenty of people who can solo Shroud faster, on a higher difficulty, or both. But it’s not something I ever thought Vic would be able to do at all. So yeah. It feels pretty good!