(Swash)buckling down

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!  🙂