Mission accomplished

Alternate title: “How NOT to run Abbot and win anyway.”

If you read last week’s blog or watched last week’s stream, you saw us have a great time totally failing at Abbot.

So for the past seven days, I’ve done what Allen Iverson hates to do: PRACTICE. (It’s a sports reference.)

And practice, and practice, and practice. Because honestly, considering that I almost never run Abbot because I hate it so much, it’s kinda miraculous we got as far as we did last week, when I seriously considered asking if we could change the guild name to “Flower Soulstones of Destiny.”

In all that practice, I managed to successfully solo each of the Abbot puzzles. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to solo them all in the same run. I also managed to die. A lot. And I spent a heck of a lot of time being encased.

Since what I was doing wasn’t working, I made a few changes. I switched from Unyielding Sentinel to Exalted Angel, partly for Leap of Faith (always handy in tiles) and mostly for Reborn in Light (always handy, period). I dug Even’s Shield of Reflecting out of her TR cache because someone told me its “immunity to petrification” feature would prevent the Abbot from being able to encase me (he lied).

But no matter what I tried, one fact remained: Tiles don’t care how good you are. If you’re soloing, and therefore blind running, it’s all about luck.

Luckily for me, Seki showed up just in the nick of time tonight. YAY, no having to solo tiles! Someone else to help throw roids! And lots and lots of light damage to help take the Abbot out faster! (And the trash too – seriously, Seki totally annihilated me in the kill count!)

As it turned out, both of us kinda sucked at guiding each other through tiles, but turned out dying a lot was a GOOD thing, because when push finally came to shove, we each happened to have the goggles we needed in our possessions, so neither of us had to blind run.

And that’s when we finally let ourselves start thinking that hey, we might actually DO THIS!

It was Seki’s first-ever successful Abbot completion; as he said, an accomplishment 10 years in the making, and I think only Even’s second of this life – which would probably be her second ever, because I don’t THINK I ever flagged her in either of her first two lives.

Aside from blind-running tiles, the biggest problem Even’s had in Abbot by far is getting encased and then having the Abbot call Inferno.

One thing that’s saved her butt is Eternal Defender, the capstone core enhancement in the Sacred Defender tree: “Toggle: While Eternal Defender is active, if you drop below 0 hit points but are not killed, two uses of Turn Undead are immediately expended and you receive a reactive heal for 250 points of Positive Energy healing.”

With Even’s range of unconsciousness at 85, and with her rather respectable heal amp, which affects reactive heal, Eternal Defender can often keep her alive when she’s encased and in flames. There’s just one little bug; it does NOT take any turns away when it kicks in.

In last night’s run, Eternal Defender kicked in seven times, assuming I counted right. Trying to keep track of stuff like that is really hard when you’re doing a lot of intense fighting, but I think that count’s pretty accurate. Even has 24 uses of Turn Undead, so – assuming I didn’t turn any undead (I didn’t) or use any abilities that take her turns (I think I used Divine Might once or twice), that would give me 12 Eternal Defender kick-ins before I was in *ahem* questionable territory.

Seven < 12, so it's all good. Seven is also Even's new record for Eternal Defenders in a single quest; her old one was five. I sincerely doubt anyone seriously uses it to cheat; if it's kicking in that much, your luck's gonna run out sooner or later!

Streamin’ with Even is live every Sunday night at 11 pm Eastern time, now on the official DDOstream! The show will still be hosted on my own Twitch channel as well, but if you’re watching live and want to chat, DDOStream is the place to be. Videos are archived on my YouTube channel. 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!  🙂