Ba-ba-ba, barbarian

The best thing about this post is the title, because it works with both “Barbara Ann” by the Beach Boys AND “La la la, linoleum,” as sung by Sesame Street’s Ernie (much to buddy Bert’s chagrin) in the “L Is Such a Lovely Letter” song.

And now I want to filk both of those.

But anyway.

I’ve been wanting to get Niituna, my raised-by-orcs dorf barb, on the livestream for a while now. This was her lucky week – except for Comcrap Comcrapping out as we were headed to The Unquiet Graves after completing Impossible Demands.

Tuna’s probably the toon I do the most roleplaying with. I can pretty much be me and still get into the personalities of most of my other toons, but it’s a bit harder with a barb who would gladly have big ol’ zeroes in everything but Str and Con if she could.

She seems to loot a lot of shields she doesn’t want (“Dose tings for stoopamid palamadins”) and would not be caught dead drinking broccoli juice (“Vegematables and salamads is what skinnamy rogue eatses”).

Considering how VERY undergeared she is (level 7 armor at level 20 is just the tip of the iceamaburg), she fared mostly well. I think the only death she had came during The Lost Thread, when she insisted on finding all da traps wit her face.

A little of Tuna tends to go a long way, so I haven’t yet decided if she’ll be on next week’s stream as well. But if you still have a Tuna hankering, you can always go read the post from the time she hijacked this blog.

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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Back to the Stone Age, reaper style

Soooo, a while back I did an eTR/TR combo on Zak for the livestream. And I screwed up his appearance thanks to a mouse misclick, but he hadn’t been on the stream since then.

Last night that changed, as Zak – now looking like a properly impressive Dragonborn instead of a nondescript beige pile of scales – headed into Sharn Syndicate along with Slvr’s bard-who’s-now-a-monk. On three-skull reaper.

If you read this blog on a semi-regular basis – and I’m certainly not insinuating that you do – you might have seen another recent post called “Getting stoned on the stream.” The title referred to, erm, dying. Rather a lot. As Zak demonstrated to the very, VERY best of his ability, that whole multiple-deaths thing wasn’t a one-off; he picked up the soulstone torch from Meren and managed to outdo her death count quite handily.

We failed the Statler Brothers quest the first time (maybe we were too busy watching flowers on the wall… if you get that, I bet you haven’t been a teenager for a while) when we let Maxwell Statler die. Made it through the second time, but this time Rance Statler got himself killed, so alas, there’s now just one Statler Brother. Probably makes it tough to harmonize, eh?

Those pesky Binders gave us some trouble too, going all Eveningstar Villager on us during our first attempt. But the real fun – and the most soulstones – definitely happened in the capstone, Come Out and Slay. Oof. YAY for fighting near shrines! BOO for not being able to re-enter in reaper mode! (‘Cause yeah, we wiped the first time there, too.)

And also BOO to the level 5 rogue hireling, who seemed rather determined to be in a position of too far away from the trap boxes to disable them, or claim that they were blocked, or just sit there and say he was doing something about them whilst actually doing nothing at all. But a tiny YAY that – once he actually met the criteria of being close enough to the box, not having the box blocked, and being motivated enough to make that 30 TP Slvr spent on him worthwhile, he was able to disable all of them without blowing them up.

Zak was within spittin’ distance, as the rednecks say (but don’t call him a redneck, even though his neck IS red) of level 6 by the time we were at last mercifully done. So after closing out the stream for the night, we did a quick Reaper 1 Redfang, and then dashed into Searing Heights to pick up a couple slayers and explorers, and in the process Zak achieved Human Hunter and got his level. Good times! 😀

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! 🙂

Catching some breaks

I never got around to blogging last week! Oh noes! And I nearly didn’t get around to it this week either… but for the best possible reason, because this past (extended) weekend was VACATION!

I spent four-plus days (Wednesday night through Monday morning) in New England. Had a mini Flower Sniffers meetup with Seki and Slvr, went to the New England Aquarium, rode lots of commuter trains, and got to spend Quality Time With A Guy. I even cooked dinner, which turned out – by my standards – surprisingly well (tasted good, no one died). And I leveled up in Pokémon Go, found some really cool stuff during a few thrift shop/flea market runs, and got my nails done by a professional for the first time in my life. So YAY vacation!

DDO, of course, had to pick THAT WEEKEND to offer a renown boost. I really didn’t want to take time away from Fun Vacation Stuff to play a lot of DDO, but I did log in every day for my double daily dice. And I ran Acanthia through the Deneith part of the heroic Pirates saga, ’cause she’d already done the 3BC part. And I turned sagas in. All told, we gained about four levels. If only DDO had put off the bonus ONE MORE WEEK! I’d’ve had a LOT more sagas done; got a number of toons who are only three or four quests short.

So since I neither ran much DDO nor blogged last week, this week’s DDO video is from last week’s epic Storm Horns questing, when we ran A Break in the Ice and Breaking the Ranks. Hence the blog title – plus, you could definitely say that getting to go on vacation qualified as catching some breaks.

Tuna should enjoy Storm Horns, considering it has TWO quests with “break” in their names – she does love breaking stuff. Or as she calls it, “SMASHING ALL DA TINGS!” I’m hoping to run her on the stream this week; she’s about 80K shy of heroic cap, so soon she’ll be able to run with everybody’s epics. Meanwhile, Zak is up to level 5 and completed his first successful four-skull reaper solos tonight. However, three-skull Redfang was just a bit too much for him. Sadly, I’m still a very, very long way from having enough reaper XP on anyone to get the reaper pets. *sadface*

Just because I think they’re kinda cool, I’m throwing in a couple of videos from my trip to the New England Aquarium. Here are some fishies… some probably very bored fishies. I mean, I’D be bored if I did nothing but go in circles all day. But at least they look good doing it.

And… JELLYFISH. OMG. I could’ve watched these little guys for HOURS. Except other people wanted to see them too so eventually I had to get out of the way, but I did buy a really cool hoodie with a glittery jellyfish on it from the gift shop.

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! 🙂

The sagas begin

Well, actually, the sagas are already underway, but when you have the chance to make a play on a Weird Al title, you should take it. Right? Right!

I’m really not fond of Lines of Supply unless I’m on a toon with semi-decent crowd control. That leaves out most of my melees. Luckily for monk Acanthia, who’s been working on her sagas of late, Mock was around Sunday night with a very handy Wail of the Banshee and a righteous wicked dancy ball!

All that lovely CC let us complete all the optionals, despite wave after wave after wave of resolute supply carriers and their rather more aggressive guards – and that was even without the aid of net traps, because by the time we were done convincing the harpies to help us out, there wasn’t time to go visit the trap guy. Hope he didn’t miss us too much!

That had to be one of the best, easiest, most fun completions of that quest I’ve ever gotten. Even the cheetah-speed gnolls didn’t stand a chance.

Our all-optionals run of Tracker’s Trap went just as well, although the loot gods seemed to think Acanthia wanted heavy maces – besides some lootgen ones, she pulled TWO Magistrate’s Scepters. Sadly, neither Mock nor I have any toons who use heavy maces, so the named ones got vendored and the rest went to Even for deconning. My essence stack is back up around 15K… which will last me maybe five minutes the next time there’s a crafting bonus weekend. LOL

And then we called it a night. Normally I’d go for another hour, but I was pretty darn exhausted after a busy weekend. I’m also two days behind my usual blog timeframe – silly real life!

Laegonn has some serious headway on his epic Eveningstar sagas. Sere’s got a completed epic Gianthold, and most of my other epic toons have some good progress. I’m really hoping to get the Flower Sniffers to level 150 with the next renown weekend!

Tuna ran Coal Chamber to complete flagging for the Shroud. Solo elite at level 18 – I was really rather proud of her; she’s pretty undergeared (level 7 armor, anyone?) She’s also now banking 19. Gotta get her to 20 so she can run with the epic toons in the guild! I think Keava’s the only one who has a toon around Tuna’s level right now.

AND, last but NOT least… after six years of paying $30 every three months for my VIP, I’ve just ponied up for a one-year subscription! YAY! 😀

My sub ran out on May 3, and I was going to let it slide until I get back from vacation week after next since I most likely won’t be playing DDO while I’m away anyway. But logged in tonight planning on running Coal on Tuna, and… I don’t own Vale. Checked the shared bank to see if I had an XP pot – oh, I can only access the first 25 items (which should be changed; they’re all my items. I should be able to withdraw ANYTHING in there, just not put anything new in). Didn’t have access to Acanthia ’cause I’ve never bought monk; Laegonn or Chalei ’cause I don’t have half-elf; Zak ’cause I don’t have warlock. Yeah, that wasn’t going to work, even if it was only for a week. So now it’ll be a whole year before I have to think about that again!

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! 🙂