A sticky situation

I’ve never actually seen the Nicolas Cage movie “Wicker Man,” but I’ve seen the infamous alternate ending. If you haven’t, I won’t spoil it; you can always search YouTube (believe me, you’ll find it). If you HAVE seen it, you’ll know exactly why I picked the image I did for this week’s video.

I’m starting to amass quite a collection of Legendary Five Rings, Legendary Chains, and the like, to the point where, even with 19 toons to equip, I’m probably going to have to start vendoring them just to save inventory space. But it’s worth it. Update 32, Against the Slave Lords, is a rollicking good time.

Go ahead, pull the rope (boy, did I fall for that one the first time I ran the quests)! Want some honey? HELP, A BEAR!

After taking the last two weeks off from livestreaming due to pesky real life, I decided I needed a break from reality this week. Even though I probably should have gotten some sleep, Slvr and I headed off to the new quests instead.

I was originally only going to run the first quest, but that went so well – and was so much fun – that we decided to keep going. The second one took us to 2 am, which is my normal cutoff time… and again, it seemed a shame to stop when we were on such a roll.

We completed the entire chain on Legendary Hard in just about exactly three hours, including a pit stop after the second one to sell, repair, and rebuff since Even’s inventory was getting full.

Don’t think Slvr died at all; I deliberately killed Even in the mirror beam once just so I could get video of her using her Jack Jibbers blade. (For as long as I farmed that damn thing, you’d think I’d get to use it more.) Hopefully the video’s as fun to watch as the chain was to run. There’s plenty of what we like to think of as witty Flower Sniffer banter, and we actually do fight everything – no taking exploity shortcuts and then standing around for 15 minutes doing nothing but belching and waiting for the rest of the party to finish the quest, no looking for equally exploity perch spots so that we can hit stuff without it hitting us back. That’s not how we roll. Also, we occasionally often talk like kobolds.

Even though I was pretty tired and starting to yawn quite a bit by the end, I was REALLY glad we decided to stick it out and run the third quest, because I got an OOOH SHINY…

Makes a darn nice replacement for the Consuming Darkness Even was wearing (I thought she was wearing an EE, turns out it was an EH – her EE has been, for some reason, collecting dust in her bank. Probably just forgot to get it out when she leveled.)

Had a few other “ooooh shiiiny” moments this past week as well. Seki pulled the Legendary Dashing Gloves from Good Intentions and passed them to Even for Dissy, who’s been yearning for them for a while. Vic helped a random PuGger get a Great Shard of Power the other night; did a few runs of Devil Assault and then four-manned heroic Shroud. I was thinking, gosh, it’s late, I think I’m done after this one, and no sooner had I thought that then I opened the first underwater chest and found the shard. Gave the guy a shipvite so that he could craft his great crossbow, so while it wasn’t MY shiny, still a good feeling.

And then… AND THEN…

If you read this blog on a semi-regular basis – and I’m not implying that you do – you might know that I have this thing for cosmetic pets. There were only two I lacked, both from the Monster Manual – the rust monster and the wraith.

There’s really no good place I can find to farm rusties. I joked about putting up an LFM for Legendary Shroud – “Do NOT kill the book! Keep killing the respawns until I get the rustie pet!” There’s just really no other place where they respawn except the earth cave in ToEE 2 and the end fight of Siegebreaker… and they don’t respawn MUCH even then.

But if you can handle hanging out in Fall of Truth, wraiths respawn there as long as the Disciple of Lies is alive. (You can kill him and he’ll come back to life if Bjorn the Liar isn’t dead.) And they respawn at a pretty good rate, about 300 an hour.

Few nights ago, I was ticked off and frustrated about a couple of things, and I happened to notice that I needed just about 800 more wraiths for the pet. Bit over two hours, I told myself, goferit, you’re too worked up to sleep anyway.

I think it actually took a bit less than two hours, but at last, I saw the beautiful message pop up to tell me that I’d earned 35 Turbine points and… a violet wraith companion!

I’ve been trying to figure out which is a better place to farm rusties – the cave at the beginning of Gwylan’s Stand, or the start of Stromvauld’s Mine. There are seven in Gwylan’s, four in Stromvauld’s, but the Stromvauld’s ones are a little quicker to get.

There are some in Ataraxia’s Haven, but the number seems to vary pretty widely and they’re pretty far in. Rainbow has plenty – IF they’re there at all, and again, if you want them all, you have to run quite a bit of the quest to get them. Same with VoN 5, which isn’t soloable because of the lever mechanic, so you’d need at LEAST two highly-coordinated people.

Ah well, 1,713 rusties to go. I WILL get there someday.

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! 🙂