No wraith for the weary (yet)

 

Even though my cosmetic pet count is up to 93 thanks to some serious hellhound farming, I’m not ready to quit yet. And many thanks to Geoff Hanna for his very nice tribute to my pet collection!  🙂

But oh, those last two pets I need – wraith and rust monster from the Monster Manual – are NOT gonna be easy. Or quick.

As far as I know, there’s no good place that has respawning rust monsters. I’d heard the acid part of ToEE2 did, but I spent probably an hour and a half running around in there. Know how many rustie respawns there were? Two. Yeah. I could’ve run the start of Gwylan’s or Stromvauld many, many times in that span. Or even Threnal Arena. Or Rainbow, or Ataraxia. Or even VoN 5.

The end fight of Siegebreaker does have respawning rusties… but at a rate of only about one per minute, meh. Definitely better than ToEE, but hardly efficient.

Wraiths are a bit easier. I could run part 3 of Delera’s over and over (although I should mention that running anything over and over is totally not my idea of fun… unless it’s the Pit…). I could make laps around Tomb of the Shadow King and cull out the wraiths from all the other respawning undead, which is about as efficient as Siegebreaker for rusties, which is to say not very efficient at all.

But there’s one more place where you can get a few hundred wraiths per hour, IF you have a toon who can handle it. For 18 of my 19 toons on Thelanis, that doesn’t apply.

Luckily, though, I have Even (as in Even the toon, just so you know I’m not referring to myself in the third person). And Even has set a couple of goals for herself, namely to try and solo tougher content, specifically raids and epic elites. So a while back, she made her first stab at soloing Fall of Truth. Didn’t work out – she had only a non-epic Bow of the Silver Flame for a ranged weapon and ran out of arrows looooong before the crystal was shattered. But I noticed that there are a whole, whole, WHOLE bunch of wraiths in there.

Besides, Even loves Fall of Truth, because the Stormreaver shares her chartreuse hair color. (OK, Turbine calls it “acid green.” But close enough. And YES, Slvr, chartreuse is a real color.  :P)

If you want to farm as many wraiths as possible from FoT, it’s actually pretty simple – don’t kill Bjorn the Liar and the Disciple of Lies. Because as long as they’re alive, they’ll spawn wraiths. And the Stormreaver will be nice enough to kill those wraiths for you while you fight the other stuff. I definitely recommend taking down the other two dragon/giant pairs, though – as the video from this week’s Sunday stream shows, my video card does NOT like dealing with their ice storms and dancy balls.

At a rate of 300 wraiths per hour, I think I need about 12 more hour-long farming runs to finally get my violet wraith pet. And then, rusties, look out, because Even’s gonna be coming for ya!

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One last party

 

Alas, poor Jeets, I knew him, Malicia.

I was really glad that Turbine extended the 10th anniversary event by one more day, because last night – when I’d originally been planning to run it one last time – I ended up farming hellhounds to get the hellpup pet. (And finally, success! … yes, that’s 93.  LOL)

So tonight, after a great time running mid-levels with guildies, I started up the stream and headed off to House P for one last hurrah. And hurrah it was. Pretty sure I talked to every NPC, and clicked the Oracle until I’d gotten what I believe are most or all of the tips (well, it took that long before mine came up, LOL).

The resulting video is kind of long as a result, but now I have the event immortalized on my hard drive… and my YouTube account.

I hope Turbine brings back at least the anniversary dungeon every year. I had loads of fun with it, and seems a shame to go to the trouble of developing it to keep it around for a month and a half and then toss it for good.

Many kobold shrieks, slaughtered devs, and creepy Jeets thoughts later, I’ve gotta hand it to DDO for an awesome event. Thank you!  🙂

All the pets, all the tricks

 

OK, it’s almost all the pets. I still don’t have the rust monster, wraith, or hellhound from the Monster Manual (working on them, though!). But as far as I know, I have all the others, along with their associated tricks.

In case you were wondering, that’s 92 pets. Ninety-two. Which is a LOT of pets. And every single one of them has a name. All you people running around with unnamed pets make me sad.  *sniffle*

But that won’t stop me from making sure I get any future pets that are released. Among those I’m hoping to see in the future are DRETCHES!, griffons, harpies, halflings, gnomes, succubi, oozes, llamas (no, they’re not in DDO, but neither are toucans), and… a scurvy-infested blowfish. Oh! And dragons! Basically, if it has any pet qualities AT ALL, I want a pet version of it.

I’ve been wanting to make a pet video for a while now. Was going to do it over this past weekend but Stuff Happening, technical difficulties and all that. But it’s done now!

People who aren’t me may well find it extremely boring. Especially my attempts to monologue. But the residents of Even’s Home for Wayward Pets (c/o Good Ship Flowerpot, Fourth Lower Deck, Thelanis) don’t really care as long as they have the run of  their own stateroom, with their friends from Wild Grove on one side, Otto’s Irresistible Dance Hall on the other, and of course the hot tub for relaxing.

Think Pink!

 

Meant to get this posted sooner, but due to technical difficulties… Anyway!

I’ve been lucky enough to get to run not one, but TWO Shrouds with Geoff, Judye, Tholgrin, Bonnie Bew, the good (if short) folks of Halfling Commandos and Torchwood, and – most importantly – Raid Princess PINK!

I rolled up a brand-new (and brand-newly-gimped) bladeforged pally named Foiled Again for the event. She killed a few things. Very few. I’m blaming her starter gear. Uh-huh, yeah, that’s it. I wasn’t the only one in the party with a sword inadequacy… but that’s a story for another time.

We went in on normal (because lag) for our inaugural attempt, and it went amazingly well. Disappointingly few shards dropped, but looked like Pink picked up a fair few ingredients, at least. I presented her with a bouquet of  flowers to celebrate her first-ever Shroud, and Bonnie gifted her with her very own fiendling companion!

In fact, the first attempt went so VERY well that when we went in again a week or two later, we decided to try it on hard. That… didn’t go as well, LOL. We weren’t doing badly until Phase 4 and THE BLADES. OH, THOSE BLADES. At last Bonnie was the only one left alive, and rather than spend time and resources trying to push through, we opted to start over on normal. More ings and a few shards for Pink, and  more fun!

I didn’t stream our first Shroud, but Bonnie did, and you can watch it here!

Pink did AMAZINGLY well – far better, for sure, than I did in my first Shroud or two or 10. Thank you guys SO MUCH for including me!  🙂

Gettin’ twitchy wit it

 

“Help, my Archons have fallen and they can’t get up!”
~ Even the pally running Defiler of the Just

Sometime in the semi-distant past, I created a Twitch account and downloaded Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), thinking it might be fun to stream live video when I played DDO. And then I mostly forgot about it.

Until recently, when someone in a PuG was questioning me on the number of cosmetic pets I had, and didn’t seem to believe that I have 92. Yes. Really. Ninety-two. And I said to myself, “Self, you could get a screenie of your pet tab, but there’s always someone who’ll say you Photoshopped it. But if you got VIDEO…”

So I thought really hard until I remembered my Twitch password, and then I fired up OBS. In a rather surprisingly short time, I had my first livestream going. It was pretty boring, just a quick runthrough of the anniversary event. But it was a milestone, because now I was a livestreamer!

But video is not always good. As described in my last blog post, a guildie had jokingly called Even “unkillable” during a shortmanned guild run of Defiler of the Just when she stood amidst the blades and mobs that had killed the other three and took very little damage. The joking continued when we moved on to Fire on Thunder Peak; when it became clear we weren’t going to complete, Even couldn’t recall out because she kept getting hit and interrupted, and couldn’t make it to the door because she was completely and utterly surrounded.

And thus the fun started. At first I thought I’d try to keep her up and kill hellhounds toward the Monster Manual pet. That got tedious after a while, and I was ready to pack it in. Ended up booting my video capture software; details are in the aforementioned blog post, so I mostly won’t bore you with them. Except.

For anyone who read the rather extensive comments on that post, a few clarifications: I did not, nor have I ever, used Eternal Defender to give myself an unfair advantage. I have it on a hotbar along with Power Attack, stances, etc., which I toggle on each time I log in. I try not to let Even’s HP get to less than 50%, let alone less than 0, so I did not know there was a glitch with Eternal Defender because – and apparently this is too difficult a concept for some people to understand – it almost never kicks in. And so I’ve never noticed it, because there hasn’t been anything to notice; it’s never kicked in more than MAYBE two or three times in one quest, and it’s never occurred to me to be all, “Oh, I must immediately see how many turns I have left!” If I’m getting hit that much, my focus is on trying to stay alive, not the number remaining on my turns. I’ve since talked to a Turbine employee about the glitch. Aside from being a big bad exploiter and a big bad non-glitch-reporter, I am also a big bad mean person. If/when that’s refuted, I’m sure I’ll be a big bad something else, because that is the pattern. I have no control over that. Any drama over this is not of my making.

But anyway! I’ve streamed several times since getting everything set up. It’s kind of like having a new toy – I want to use it ALL THE TIME. So nearly every night I’ve been firing up OBS and looking for something streamable to run. There’ve been a couple things to figure out along the way – if you’re ever really bored and don’t mind losing five minutes of your life you’ll never get back, there are two incredibly dull videos on my Twitch channel that are basically me standing around in DDO trying to figure streamy stuff out. There’s a video of Even farming wraiths in Fall of Truth, which would be much better if I’d remembered to unmute my mic. You’ll just have to take my word that my commentary was scintillating.

Someday “soon*” ™, when I have some time to kill, I’m going to find a nice quiet place, boot OBS, and start parading each of my cosmetic pets through all their tricks. It’s gonna take a while; figure at one minute per pet, that’s a bit over an hour and a half. For my next video after that, I’ll probably stream my guildmates hosting my cosmetic pet intervention…

Yarkety Yark!

Even is being mean and refusing to post this for me.  Instead, she invited me to an author on her blog (likely hoping that I’ll start blogging myself, HAH) and forcing me to do it.  Since I have no idea how long the Kobold forums are going to be live, here is the filk I was inspired to write on the *Yark* thread.

The tune is, of course, Yakety Yak, by the Coasters.

Icons of Khyber and prayer beads
So much better than heroic deeds
If you don’t hop up that sewer wall
Adventurers are gonna make you fall
Yarkety Yark (don’t jump back)

Just remember the Waterworks
Those adventurers are such jerks
Just get all shinies out of sight
Or humans will take them in a fight
Yarkety Yark (don’t jump back)

Just put on your skull mask, ick
And then you look like Kasquick
Being descended from dragons
Kobold always prone to braggin’
Yarkety Yark (don’t jump back)

We gonna mine the shinies
Smokin’ crystal, don’t blow please
Transport back to the Foreman
This job is such a bore, man
Yarkety Yark (don’t jump back)

(There, Even… Happy now I blog kobold filks, to paraphrase a kobold?)