Monk-y business

“Watching @EvenNote’s stream from last night/this morning is making me want to play a monk again….” ~ grimorde

What a lovely compliment for Acanthia to get, especially since that was the first I’d seriously played her in quite a while!

With changes to other classes, the addition of warlock, etc., monks no longer stand out as the DPS machines they once were. I was shocked a few weeks ago when Acanthia decided to follow in Vic’s and Even’s footsteps by soloing Shroud – her DPS was not as good as Even’s, and Even, while having a few levels on Acanthia, is definitely not a DPS build.

But there’s no denying that, DPS or not, monks are just incredibly fun to play. Who cares how cool a sword looks when you can beat stuff up with your bare hands?

And there all all the fun monk-ish things you can do. Stunning Fist, Kukan-Do (basically a long-distance stun), Drifting Lotus for a bit of crowd control. Dismissing Strike to instantly vanquish tainted creatures such as undead and evil outsiders; Quivering Palm to send nearly anything into oblivion with a single hit. The “sekrit” Shining Star finishing move (Otto’s Irresistible Dance, monk-style).

And possibly my very favorite monk ability: Tomb of Jade, which lets you turn a tainted creature into a green statue (Smite Tainted Creature and Jade Strike also have a chance to do this).

So while it took a bit of time to get used to playing Acanthia again, ’twas definitely worth it! And of course, no matter which toon I’m playing, I always have a great time during our Flower Sniffers guild runs. Having several impromptu ones in addition to our regularly-scheduled Friday guild night made for a most excellent DDO weekend. Didn’t hurt that Acanthia hit level 27, either!

Even’s taken a bit of a back seat while Acanthia and Char got some playing time to take advantage of this past weekend’s XP bonus. She still hasn’t gotten a chance to use her long-awaited Cursed Blade of Jack Jibbers, but she did get a bit of a makeover – I glamered an Elemental Victory for her (the gems, especially the green one, really bring out the highlights in her hair) and also made her a green dragonscale armor kit. The glamered Marilith Chain she’d been wearing matched her hair a bit better, but just wasn’t quite Even, design-wise. She likes the little skirt on the medium dragonscale armor, and the fact that it shows just a bit of cleavage – sometimes it’s nice to feel like a girl, especially when you’re a short, stocky Purple Dragon Knight.

The bit of questing Even did this past week didn’t go quite as well as her beauty treatments. She joined a PuG doing EE Deathwyrm and was assigned the role of tanking Aurgloroasa. The party leader was not a native English speaker; maybe that’s why some members of the party chose to ignore him. He was still assigning roles in the shrine room when several people decided to just go ahead in and get started.

There was a barbarian who apparently was miffed that Even got tanking duty instead of him, because he said, “Well, if I can steal aggro, and I probably will, then I’m tanking and she can do trash.” Heh. Nice try. He indeed tried to steal aggro from Even – with absolutely zero success. In fact, he kept nearly dying because even after his attempts to get aggro failed, he didn’t have the brains to get BEHIND the dragon where she wouldn’t be able to hit him as hard. We didn’t have a tank hjealer, so it was just Even and the barb on the dragon (until the party leader FINALLY convinced him to give it up, which took a while), and I wasn’t about to waste my resources hjealing him. Tossed out a few Lay on Hands, Cocoons, and scroll heals to other people who were actually helping the party, but definitely not worth giving them to the guy who was not contributing anything but attitude.

So finally, I was left alone with the dragon, as it should be. Shadows started coming up, people were going to the dark side… and NO ONE, apparently, could find the real phylactery. At this point I stopped hitting Aurgloroasa and just blocked and intim’ed, because once you get her down so far, if the phylactery still hasn’t been found, she just hjeals herself back up. (Which I’d forgotten about, and ended up inadvertantly taking her down a couple of times.)

Some party members apparently didn’t realize this, or didn’t want to take their turns going to the shadow side, because people started randomly coming over and beating on the dragon. I told them to stop. The party leader told them to stop. Two or three other people who actually seemed to have a clue told them to stop. I think some of them just REALLY didn’t want to go over to the shadow side, because that gets pretty nasty on EE – we had something like 57 deaths.

Then the trash handlers got – I don’t know what they got, but it wasn’t the trash. Even had 28 kills when we first stepped into the main room. As she was tanking, you wouldn’t expect her to get more than MAYBE half a dozen more in incidental damage. But once the trash handlers stopped handling the trash, she kinda had to do something – she had no problem dealing with Aurgloroasa on her own, but when you add a couple of casters plus six or eight or so skellies to the mix, trying to keep one’s red bar up gets harrowing. By the end, Even had 63 kills, so 35 while she was tanking… yeah, the trash handlers could’ve been a bit more on the ball. LOL

So I was getting kind of annoyed, and the real phylactery was STILL unfound… and then people started having to leave because we’d been going so long. We’d been in there more than two hours and had zero to show for it. The one thing I’m kinda proud of is that, despite getting no outside hjealing whatsoever – and without having Eternal Defender go off AT ALL, in case any of the egolitists out there were wondering – the ONLY death Even had was at the very end, when I deliberately got her killed because everyone else had left and I was getting hit too much to be able to recall.

Char, who after two ranger lives is spending her third life as a druid, is now banking level 10 after running VoN flaggers and Red Fens with Vey and Seer. She’s not too sure what kind of druid she wants to be. I’d originally planned on making her a caster type, but it’s just SOOOOO much fun to run around as a winter wolf! Ranger is where her heart is at, though, so she might just end up becoming the first of my toons to get a fourth life. That’s quite a ways off, though!

Streamin’ with Even is live every Sunday night at midnight Eastern time. I’m usually on Thelanis, usually on Evennote, and usually have room, so feel free to send me a tell if you’d like to join! I’m also definitely open to suggestions on what to run next. You can send ingame mail to Evennote on Thelanis, or email me at evennote (at) gmail dot com. Thanks for reading and/or watching!  🙂