One of the best – heck, probably THE best – thing about livestreaming on the official DDOStream channel is the chat, where I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some awesome, amazing, quirky, talented, and zany people.
Having those convos going really adds to my enjoyment of whatever I happen to be running… especially when I’m feeling a bit off (woke up with a crushing migraine, probably why I felt kinda flat last night) and am playing a gimpy toon, like Reera the squishy swashbuckler.
Seki (26) and Reera (25) got through the anniversary event just fine at level 27. We were doing OK at 28 – until we ran into Vargouille, who at least had the decency to be hanging out close enough to the shrine for us to rez ourselves when we died.
Which happened approximately once every 1.4 seconds.
Each.
While taking a moment in soulstone form to collect myself before rezzing for yet another try, I happened to glance at Twitch chat on the tablet and saw this:
Agaxxion: Death by dev
Death by dev indeed! Every single piece of gear I had equipped had a black zigzag line through it from all the times I’d died. I have no idea how many times that was – I was basically rezzing, tossing a DoT or two on Varg if I could, and nearly instantly dying again. I think Reera was profoundly grateful that death penalties cap at 5.
Help came from one of our Twitch chatters, as Fehands (aka Ironhands – yay for chemistry class!) took pity on our poor battered pixels and joined us, making the rest of that run as well as a couple of subsequent runs go MUCH better.
Citi showed up as well, and with the extra firepower, we even got a couple of runs at 30 done with minimal pain and a fair number of party favors – gotta save those up for an Admiral of Bling, Foil Hat, and of course COOKIES!
Hope this post turns out all right – finally broke down and got a smartphone, and I’m posting from that. Big difference going from a 24″ monitor and full-size keyboard to this tiny little screen!
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 and/or on DDOStream’s YouTube. I’m usually on Thelanis, usually/often/sometimes 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! 🙂
Another one of my gimpier toons introduced himself to Twitch and livestreaming Sunday night as Zak the super-squishy pale master rounded up some friends and headed to Gianthold for some reaper mode fun.
I think having five Flower Sniffers for the stream, including Comic Relief in his “Streamin’ with Even” debut, was also a first! And DDO blogger Luedwig Bait’Hoven joined us for the first time as well. Even Citi managed to make it on!
Two-skull Prison of the Planes turned out to be a bit beyond our reach, although Zak surprised me by being the last one left standing (mostly because he spent a lot of time RUNNING AWAY, which is a perfectly valid playstyle when you’re as gimpy as he is). One skull, though, turned out to be just about right – oh, we still died, and not infrequently. But compared to our two-skull effort, piece of cake!
Finally getting to be on the livestream was Zak’s reward for finally getting to level 30 the previous night. Now I need to get Laegonn, who is proof positive that not all warlocks are overpowered, or even powered at all, to 30 as well, because they’re going to swap – Zak’s going to TR to a ‘lock, and Laegonn will be reborn as a pale master in training.
I’m also considering TRing Jall. She’s pretty solid up to about EH, but she really needs some better gear to be viable above that. Plus, healbots are coming back into style thanks to reaper mode, and that’s always been her primary focus (although she did surprisingly well in the killcount running EE Demonweb for sagas tonight).
The prospect of trying to level up three newly-TR’d toons is a little daunting, especially since Char’s only gotten to level 11 since her TR and Meren’s still stuck at 6. But I think, in the long run, it’ll be worth it for all three of them. And I expect Jall in particular should have a pretty easy time racking up reaper XP as she levels up.
Got some cosmetic work done on OurDDO, still have a bit to do… mostly just need to redo a couple of things in Photoshop so the header isn’t encroaching on the slider. I’m trying to match, sorta, the general look of this blog.
Also still looking for feedback on the possibility of having some minimal ad space available at even more minimal cost to DDO blogs and fansites. So if you have any thoughts on that, please let me know in the comments, or send an e-mail to evennote (at) gmail (dot) com!
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 and/or on DDOStream’s YouTube. 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! 🙂
Having already completed the Three-Barrel Cove portion of the epic Pirates of the Thunder Seas saga, the Flower Sniffers took a break from reaper mode to get started on the Sentinels of Stormreach half.
It was a good opportunity for me to dust off poor, gimpy swashbuckler Reera, who’s not gotten much playing time lately, since she had Seki and Slvr around to help keep her squishy butt alive. Reera’s *really* not cut out for soloing much.
She’s also not overly cut out for epic elite, but we tried it anyway – and hey, we didn’t do half bad! Had a pretty easy cruise through Bargain of Blood and The Black Loch before Seki had to log.
… also, I just realized that, considering the saga name, I should have talked like a pirate at least once or twice. I did talk like a kobold several times – maybe I could say I was talking like a kobold pirate?
Citi had shown up in the meantime, so we dragged him off to the Subterrane to run Vision of Destruction. For one thing, I still had about an hour of stream time left. For another, I thought it was something Reera could handle. AND, I wanted video evidence that I CAN INDEED FIND VoD.
Side note: The very first time I ever found VoD by myself, I was on Tirae, my Cannith monk, farming planar shards. I was just running around with no clear idea where I wanted to go, when I suddenly realized that I was standing next to one of the runes you have to light up to open the barrier to VoD. Figures the first time I ever managed to find it on my own was completely by accident!
Poor Citi didn’t realize we were schlepping him into a raid. Citi has a deep-seated aversion to raids. We shanghai’d him in there anyway. Glad we did, too, because 1) with Slvr tanking and Reera gimping, we REALLY needed his DPS, and 2) he was on his pally and got Divine Vengeance! The toon’s a bit overlevel to get a WHOLE lot of use out of it, but definitely a great thing to have sitting around for TRing.
Reera’d hit 25 whilst running 3BC the other night, and she’s now off to a good start toward 26. I’m hoping to get some sagas done this week; I have a feeling it won’t be long before we get a renown weekend, seeing as how it’s been a while since the last one. And I need to get Zak and Laegonn to 30 (Zak’s almost there, just needs about another 450K) so they can TR and switch places – Zak’s going warlock while Laegonn will become a pale master (because right now, Laegonn is absolute proof that all warlocks are NOT OP).
Since this past weekend featured a crafting experience bonus, I considered doing some crafting for the stream… except I’ve never really gotten into crafting all that much. But that bonus was too tempting to pass up, so after we finished VoD and I closed out the stream, I logged in Even to take advantage of it.
Slvr and Citi told me to do the tutorial in House K so I could get a 75% crafting XP booster – and now I kinda wish I HAD streamed it, or at least recorded it, because it was a great example of what NOT to do. Accidentally used the disjuncter instead of the dissolver on the second step and couldn’t get the tutorial to advance. So I bought a cheap quarterstaff from the AH and tried to do it again… but it STILL wouldn’t advance. Citi and Slvr kept suggesting new things to try, none of which worked. It wasn’t until I thought, hmmm, maybe I should just trash the original q-staff, the one I disjunted instead of dissolving, that I was able to complete the tutorial. Guess the Maker was pissed at me for ruining the weapon he gave me!
After that it went quite well, though, and Even’s crafting level went from 90 to… 134, I think, aided by approximately half a million plat spent on essences and gear to decon. I even remembered to decon all my lootgen from tonight’s questing instead of vendoring it… although it was a little discouraging to find that yielded only enough essences for not quite three shards.
Another side note that probably isn’t interesting to anyone but me: I won all the auctions I was bidding on, so my stash of Bigby’s Guiding Hands is starting to look pretty respectable. I have at least 50-ish of every color… except red. I have no red – yet. But I can make a lovely colorful display with my blue, green, orange, purple, white, and yellow ones!
I still need to prettify OurDDO. I’m just lazeh. And I have an elderly, attention-demanding, hypochondriac, guilt-tripping mother to deal with. AND two new kitties to play with, when they’re not amusing themselves by shredding rolls of paper towels everywhere. (They’re lucky they’re so cute!)
Meanwhile, I had a bit of an idea. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m not keen on the suggestion to add a PayPal donate button or anything similar to the site. But I’m kinda considering adding some ads. Not generic intrusive spammy ads, but something in the right-hand column, just some small-ish boxes, that would be available for DDO bloggers, etc., for a nominal fee – a way to promote DDO blogs, livestreams, podcasts, etc., and cover the cost of server space and domain and all that.
They’d have to fit into specified dimensions, and I’d be happy to make a graphic at no charge for anyone who didn’t want to do their own.
So I’d like to get some feedback on this. Good idea or not? Is it something you’d use? I’d like the ads to rotate rather than have the same ones all the time, so what duration should they be? I’m thinking by the week or by the month. Any thoughts on rates?
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! 🙂
It took me about seven or eight months from the time I first started playing DDO until I went VIP. I’ve never regretted making the move to a paid subscription, but Monday night may have been the happiest of my VIP days, because…
LIONESS HIRELING!
Isn’t she gorgeous? And she looks so cool hanging out with my tressym!
I named her Zazzy (the lioness, not the tressym – can’t remember if the tressym in the pic is Fern or Charlotte; real-life Fern and Charlotte are sisters who look a LOT alike). “Big Bang Theory” fans may get the reference.
That’s Charlotte in the foreground and Fern hiding behind her the day I brought them home from the SPCA. Normally Fern’s a bit more adventurous while Charlotte’s calmer but not as daring. I’m listening to them hold their 3 am chariot races up and down the stairs as I write this! 😀
The lovely and talented grimorde was kind enough to take a look at the new scripts and figure out why adding any Blogspot blogs caused the whole thing to be blank, so that’s fixed! Thank you, Grim – it’s much appreciated! 🙂
Don’t get me wrong – I still have a LOT of work to do on it. Most of it’s cosmetic stuff – font colors and sizes and such – although there’s a bit of layout tweaking I’d like to do as well. The URL sucks, but after dealing with a lot of vet bills and Christmas, I really can’t justify spending any real-life money on this right now.
A friend suggested adding a PayPal donation button, but… I dunno. OurDDO is something I *choose* to do. If I expected anyone else to foot the bill, it’d be better for me to just not do it. I’d rather have it as is, in all its flawed “glory,” than ask others for money to fund it. Plus, I don’t feel as guilty about sometimes letting it slide a bit when real life crops up!
Forget cool gear. Forget fancy new enhancement trees. Forget goals and accomplishments. The ONE thing DDO could have done to absolutely guarantee that I’d want to run the hell out of reaper content was… to throw a cosmetic pet into the mix.
And DDO went one better – well, no. THREE better. Because there are FOUR new reaper pets. FOUR! Reaper mode, here I come!
To that end, the Flower Sniffers decided to cautiously get their feet wet with some reaper questing for Sunday night’s livestream. Even had already soloed a couple of reaper quests just to get a feel, and we’d done one-skull Vol for Friday’s guild night (and STILL no Mythic Emerald Gaze, dammit!). So Seki suggested continuing with our Orchard questing by trying out Inferno of the Damned, reaper style.
The 300-ish reaper XP we got was… a bit discouraging, LOL, considering that the reaper XP for the *lowest* reward tier is 625,000 (then 2.5 mil, then 5.625 mil). Granted, we were only on one skull since we were three-manning and were looking more to get a feel for what reaper would be like than anything else. I really hope the XP increases A WHOLE FREAKING LOT as the skull level goes up.
One-skull doesn’t seem, to me, to be much if at all different from epic elite, except for having to defeat the occasional reaper… and so far they’ve gone down pretty easily. I actually think that EE Vol was a tad bit easier on one skull than on EE. Even’s not had any trouble with her self-healing while soloing, although I’m sure that would change if she tried to, say, solo eight-skull What Goes Up. LOL
I normally am not fond of Inferno – with my penchant for getting lost, it takes me FOREVER to solo it. But Seki pretty much knows it cold, and when you get a couple of Flower Sniffers together, it’s pretty much gonna be a fun time whether we cruise or wipe. Fortunately, while we maybe didn’t quite cruise, we didn’t come close to wiping! 😀
Following Inferno, Slvr mentioned that he needed some High Road quests for sagas, so he and I duo’d Detour and escorted Bunsen Honeydew – er, Benson Virandsen – successfully to the end, despite Bunsen/Benson’s admonitions that it would have been easier with actual Harpers by his side. I don’t know why. All the Harpers ever seem to do is run their mouths a lot – case in point, Elminster. But at least Bunsen/Benson actually helps out in between his lectures. Plus, that scroll he’s carrying spawns DRETCHES!
Also, I’ll DEFINITELY be filking *Don’t Fear the Reaper.” I will almost definitely mention cowbell in there somewhere. And I’ll post it “soon*”™!
People who know me well might be going right now, “OMG SHE DIDN’T EVEN MENTION THE LIONESS, WHAT THE ACTUAL, ISN’T SHE VIP?!”
Yes, I’m VIP. Yes, I eagerly logged in to find my new lioness hireling tonight! And then I spent probably an hour taking screenies of her. But ’twas a long day and I need sleep soonish, so I’m going to blog about her probably Tuesday or Wednesday. LOL
I was hoping to have OurDDO up and running again by now, but… real life and all that. I have all the files, I have the server space, I just haven’t had a decent amount of time to sit down and get it all set up. Plus, still trying to figure out that pesky bug that prevents the new aggregator script from pulling any feeds at ALL if there are any Blogspot feeds in the list. Might have a workaround for that if I can’t get it figured out.
OurDDO absolutely WILL be back, and I’ll definitely be working on it this week. 🙂
Unfortunately one thing I completely forgot when cancelling the old OurDDO account was our Flower Sniffers message board, which was also stored on that server. Oops! Sorry, my fellow Sniffers, but I’ll get us a new one set up in the near future!
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! 🙂
Even Now 