Doing our level best

Sunday night, I had three main DDO goals:

Get Laegonn to level 30

Work on making progress with his sagas

Find something to run for the livestream

Keava was able to join us despite the 11-hour time difference, but we were short one Seki, who was feeling considerably under the weather. So we decided we’d go clean out the Eveningstar War Hospital for him, and as long as we were there, we might as well run the whole Druid’s Deep chain – you never know, Wood Woad bark might have medicinal uses. Plus, it fulfilled all three goals.

I was thinking EH, because Laegonn is the toon who proves that not all warlocks are overpowered… or even powered at all. But Keava and Slvr were confident we could handle EE.

“OK,” I replied, “but I’m going to spend the whole quest hiding behind you guys.”

Which I did – and that’s probably why HOLY CRAP LAEGONN DID NOT DIE AT ALL! Somebody get me a calendar and a red pen!

We breezed through the chain pretty easily, actually, and then ran Lines of Supply on EH because we all needed it for sagas. That was a cakewalk as well, right up until we were running back to the start to loot after getting the completion – my nearly-10-year-old computer decided to reboot itself. So I missed out on a couple of chests, but at least I got the completion and XP.

I also got a pretty nice sack of XP, but not QUITE enough to epic cap Laegonn – think he was a bit over 6k short. But that’s what VoN 3 is for. All it took was one optional, and Laegonn was ready to level.

He’ll probably spend the next few weeks doing saga quests and fleshing out the other ED spheres, and then he’s going to TR into a Drow pale master and leave warlocking to Zak.

Even has all her sagas done on true elite, so I’ll probably get her a sovereign renown elixir next time there’s a renown weekend. I have eight medium elixirs in the shared bank, which should come in handy.

Laegonn made some more saga progress tonight, polishing off the High Road chain on EH with a lot of help from Keava. Also thanks to Keava, both Reera and Sere have gotten in some good saga runs. I’m hoping we hit 150 next time there’s a renown weekend!

Streamin’ with Even is live every Sunday night at 11 pm Eastern time on the official DDOstream! The show is also hosted on my own Twitch channel, 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! 🙂

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Storming and Strom-ing to lots of XPs

Meren must be feeling pretty special – she’s been on the stream for the past three or four weeks straight!

She got herself leveled up to 9 this past week, racking up some very nice XP in Stormcleave Outpost, Stromvauld’s Mine, and Caged Trolls, plus getting the Phiarlan Carnival chain started.

Thank heaven for guildies leading the way in Stormcleave, because on my own, I always seem to get turned around and lose my way at least once, so it takes me a long time. Despite Meren getting burdened from overestimating her ability to carry supply crates, we made it through rather quickly, at least by my standards.

And since we were already in the Anvilfire Inn to turn in Stormcleave, it seemed only right to do Stromvauld’s after that.

As Gom pointed out, the quest name “Stromvauld’s Mine” may not denote that the mine is Stromvauld’s. It could be possessive in a different sense, as in “Stromvauld is mine.” But then to whom does Stromvauld belong? Is this Xandria Lok-kalerin’s way of telling him, “Hey, I OWN you now?” Or maybe Alciana d’Deneith makes this possessive a little *too* possessive to warn off attractive female customers in the Anvilfire Inn?

I’m an inveterate collector – not to be confused with an invertebrate collector, as I neither lack a backbone nor hoard creatures who do (unless they’re cosmetic pets).

So although the quest went well, I was a little disappointed at the end of A Small Problem, because I missed at least two collectibles, thereby frustrating my compulsive urge to collect them.

On the bright side, Puffgranny joined us! Hadn’t run with her in a few weeks, so it was great to be back in a party with her! 🙂

Sere’s been getting some playing time lately. She’s done most of the epic Gianthold quests with Keava, and then picked up a fairly humongous amount of XP in a wild, crazy, mixed-up, fun-filled guild/PuG romp through EE VoN 5 and 6.

She also got flagged for the Thunderholme raids this past week. I have no doubt she’ll die frequently and horribly if I ever take her into either one.

Reera’s also been doing some VoN quests (and Sere rhymes with Reera, in case you were wondering – and I’m not saying you were). At 26, she’ll probably be the next toon I take into Thunderholme.

Even, of course, is never idle for long. She needs heroic Rest Stop, A Stay at the Inn, and End of the Road (dammit, now I have Boyz II Men stuck in my head) to finish the last two sagas, all on true elite.

Hope everyone had a great Easter weekend! Mine was interesting – had a Stouffer’s lasagna for Easter dinner, then went to a friend’s party where we made Ukrainian Easter eggs. They’re decorated just like regular Easter eggs, except that instead of hard-boiling them, you poke a hole in each end and then blow out the insides.

So yeah… I spent Easter blowing eggs. LOL

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! 🙂

Over our heads, but it sure feels nice

It takes more than a few deaths to rattle me. So even though Meren, my somewhat-to-totally gimped level 8 Favored Soul, had struggled a bit last week in the first part of the Sorrowdusk Isle arc, I was ready to take her right back there this week.

Logically things would’ve gotten real ugly real fast for Meren, as the quests were now several levels higher than she and guildie Gom are. And to be fair, we did run the last few on hard – but c’mon, that STILL made them level 11 quests, and we’re 7 and 8.

Most illogically, the whole thing went really well, with only one or two deaths apiece… including the part where Gom and I were both soulstones and had to rely on our hirelings getting us back to the shrine.

But hey, Meren proved last week in Tear of Dhakaan that she’s dumber than a hireling, so it was all good, LOL. Plus we got a ton of XP! Maybe I should run that chain more often!

We managed to exceed Gom’s bedtime by a good half hour, but I still had plenty of stream time left. And I was actually feeling kinda confident in Meren since she’d performed far better than I’d expected in quests she was way under level for.

Oh, and since I’d run right by a certain House Deneith landmark on the way to and from Sorrowdusk…

DAMN RIGHT I DECIDED TO RUN THE PIT. LOL

Upon hearing this, Slvr announced in Twitch chat that he was coming as well. His level 5 hireling was surprisingly competent, all things considered, although his arti dog went a bit brain-dead. I mostly left my hire parked at the start, “just in case.”

The Pit is always a good time as far as I’m concerned, no matter how badly you do. And we could’ve done a lot worse. Meren died twice, once by failing a save against Slay Living shortly after blithely assuring Slvr that we wouldn’t need Death Ward (oops!). And the second time was from a massive spike of electrical damage during the end fight, courtesy of a trog caster with a big ol’ crown on his head.

Slvr and I had both run Pit on these toons already, so no first-time bonus, and the couple of deaths meant no flawless victory bonus either. Still, Meren collected more than 30K XP for the run… that’ll come in handy, as she’s on her third life!

Cookie to the first person who knows where I got the title of this post. 😉

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!  🙂

Getting stoned on the stream

No, I haven’t been engaging in illegal activities whilst livestreaming! But this week I did get stoned – soulstoned, that is – a bit more often than I’m accustomed to.

As I can be fond of saying, I have Even, and then I have 18 other toons with varying degrees of gimpiness. I can count on Even; her attitude is pretty much, “OK, I’m getting through this and so are you even if I have to carry you through and rez you on the other side.”

But for this past Sunday’s stream, I wasn’t on Even. Instead, I had level 7 Favored Soul Meren getting some much-needed third-life XP as Seki and I took our lowbies into Sorrowdusk.

For some reason that’s not an area I run very often, so I’m not that familiar with it. I kept thinking that at some point we were going to have to assemble parts of a turtle… in hindsight, I think that quest is actually in 3BC.

But I did correctly remember the bridges with the big scary traps. Miraculously I managed not to die in those despite my paltry 5 jump score (having exactly as many jump pots as I needed helped).

Unfortunately I did manage to get one-shotted several times by the mean, nasty, totally overpowered mobs. I mean, they killed me, so clearly they were overpowered, right? RIGHT?!

… OK, or maybe Meren’s just gimpy and a bit undergeared. Oops.

I think she ended up dying more often than Flower… kinda humiliating considering that Meren’s supposed to be a healery type, AND was the only one in the party who could rez. Seki got quite a workout running her stone back to the shrine!

Once we had the first leg of Sorrowdusk done, it was time for Seki to log. Several Twitch chatters suggested Tear of Dhakaan for Meren’s next effort.

She didn’t have the stats to get several of the shards, and her humiliation grew when Laerathor the hireling was able to pull the Wisdom rune she couldn’t get. Yes, Meren is dumber than a hireling, and now there’s video proof!

But she did get the completion, and was able to manage her spell points better than Laerathor managed his, despite her lower Wis score. And the evening yielded a goodly bit of XP – when she was done Tear, a few minutes in Searing Heights was enough to get her to level 8.

OurDDO is almost functioning at 100% again. I managed to fix a rather major cosmetic issue all by myself! Both HTML and CSS were involved, neither of which I’m overly proficient in.

There is still an issue with the feed aggregate script, which is a Google thing and waaaay over my head, not displaying any posts at all if certain blogs are included. Figuring out which blogs cause the issue is not difficult, but it’s long and tedious. If the site isn’t displaying your posts, I probably just haven’t gotten to verifying that your blog isn’t one of the ones the script doesn’t like; I’m adding the blogs back in one at a time and checking after each one to see if everything’s still working.

“Soon!*” ™

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!  🙂