Rebels with a cause

Shroud, Shroud
Don’t be left out
Buff up and get your DR breakers out
Come on, hit our LFM
Come on

Remember back when Shroud was really hard and you’d sit around waiting forever because you couldn’t get a hjealer?

I loved it back then, and I love it just as much now. I’ll run Shroud pretty much any time, any toon, with almost any party or no party at all.

So when BonnieBew told me she wanted to do another #SHROUDPALOOZA, I was in!

Doesn’t seem like it’s been four years since the last one. Heck, now we even have Legendary Shroud – which is awesome, but for reasons of inclusivity, we stuck with heroic.

Besides being great fun, #SHROUDPALOOZA is also for a great cause – we’re raising money for Extra Life, benefitting Children’s Miracle Network. For more information on #SHROUDPALOOZA, check out the website. To donate to Extra Life – and get entered for some great prizes, including a year of DDO VIP, visit this link:

#SHROUDPALOOZA 2018 kicked off this weekend on Thelanis, and it was awesome! We got four runs of Shroud done in our allotted three hours, so Harry got lots of hugs! I had a couple of old friends I hadn’t seen ingame for a while hit the LFMs, and met lots of great new people as well.

Next up is Sarlona on Oct. 20. I managed to get my very first non-Thelanis toon, Ironica, leveled up and flagged, so I’m really looking forward to that one! She’s barely level 15 and seriously undergeared, but that’s fine. #SHROUDPALOOZA is for everyone who’s kind and respectful, regardless of level (hence why we’re doing heroic rather than legendary Shroud).

She’ll probably die. A lot. And being only level 15, I doubt she’ll make much of a dent in the kill count. It’s all good, though, as long as she has fun!

So if you think you’d like to run #SHROUDPALOOZA with us but you’re worried about things like not having enough DPS or not knowing the raid well enough or stuff like that – don’t! Just hit the LFM and we’ll be glad to have you along! All you need to be is flagged and between levels 14-30 inclusive.

On the other hand, if you’re going to troll us for not running legendary, brag about how you can solo it, go on and on about your DPS, link all your raid gear to show how awesome you are, berate people for mistakes, etc. – I suggest you find another group, because you won’t enjoy ours, nor will we enjoy having you. It sucks that I even have to bring this up, especially since most DDO players are great people; it’s a shame there always seems to be that ONE conceited jerk.

Whether you run Shroud with us or not, there are other ways to participate as well! Donating is always welcome, of course. And you can watch live and chat with us on DDOStream.

AND… there’s an ART CONTEST! Just like actually running #SHROUDPALOOZA, we really don’t care how good you are (or aren’t), or what form your art takes – as long as it’s PG-13. 😉

Draw a picture, write a poem, sing a song, do an interpretive dance of Harry being banished back to Shavarath, knit some Shards of Power, have your toddler fingerpaint a Prismatic Wall of Death – any kind of Shroud-related artwork at all! Some of the prizes up for grabs include VIP codes and DDO points, so get creative!

Thanks to everyone who ran with us, donated, watched the stream, and/or chatted with us during our Thelanis run! Hope to see you on Sarlona next! 😊

Bringing more than sexy back

What’s back? Lots of things!

For starters, this blog, which was in danger of going a full year without a new post. What can I say – real life happens! I’m going to try to post on at least a semi-regular basis. We’ll see… 😄

One thing I definitely need to blog about is Gen Con! This was my second year attending, and it was great! To the ones who gave me a good-natured hard time about not posting more on social media – hey, I was having fun, enjoying the company of some awesome people, and going to LOTS of events – I didn’t have time to keep whipping my phone out to update my Twitter feed! 😜

Also, OurDDO has returned! Between RSS feed aggregator scripts being, well, aggravating, and Photobucket deciding I couldn’t link images any more without ponying up a not insignificant amount of money, I was starting to think it wasn’t worth the trouble… but then I installed WordPress on my site and found a nifty plug-in that handles the feeds pretty easily.

I haven’t been able to get the carousel to work within WordPress, although I’m not giving up on it. And I need to get around to updating the blogroll and putting that on there.

But while stripped down, it’s fulfilling its purpose – bringing you EVERY post from EVERY* DDO-oriented blog, updated around the clock.

If you have a blog that’s at least partly about DDO and you want to be included, drop me a line at EvenNote (at) gmail (dot) com, and make sure to include your blog’s URL!

* – Blogs that violate DDO’s Terms of Service or OurDDO’s guidelines are not included.

And… SHROUDPALOOZA IS COMING BACK!

Get flagged, get your friends flagged, get your alts flagged, because we’re bringin’ Shroudpalooza back!

The original Shroudpalooza happened a few years ago and was amazing good fun. If you’ve never heard of it – basically we just run heroic Shroud as many times as we can in three hours!

This year’s Shroudpalooza will be open to all levels (so XP is unlikely, but that’s not what it’s about). We’re starting on Thelanis on Oct. 6 and will do a different server every other week, wrapping up with Cannith on Jan. 12.

For more info, ask me, BonnieBew, or Tholgrin – we’re all on Twitter – or visit our brand-spankin’-new website at http://www.SHROUDPALOOZA.com! I’ll be posting more info here “soon*”™!

But wait, there’s more – D&D Night has returned to DDOStream, AND it’s soon to become a weekly event! We’ll be playing Sunday nights at 7 pm Eastern time on DDOStream. Come watch – you might get to see DDOCast Patrick’s barbarian toss my half-elf bard across a ravine! … at least I HOPE she makes it all the way across.

Streamin’ with Even is not back, because it never left. 😉 The show is still Sundays at 11 pm Eastern on DDOStream. I’ll be posting an updated schedule for streaming on my own channel here in the near future.

It’s good to be back! 😄

A brief history of Flower Sniffin’

Way back when, in the days when Acanthia had (temporarily, as it turned out) taken over as my main, I was successor and roster keeper in a pretty darn ginormous guild.

It’s a great guild with a lot of great people, and I’m happy to run with them lo these years later. But it was a LOT of stress. And guild business took a serious bite out of my playing time.

So I rolled up a new toon and didn’t tell anyone in the guild about him. He was my way of staying incognito for those times when I just wanted to be able to play and not have to deal with other stuff. At the time, Slvr’d been in his little guild of one for a couple of years. He asked if I wanted to put Zak – the new toon – in his guild. I figured I might as well – ship buffs, y’know?

That was probably around five-ish years ago. I think Slvr’s little guild of one was like level 17 when I put Zak in there.

But oh, how we’ve grown. I ended up bringing all my other toons over. Then Shin and Comic joined (we were already in a guild with them on Cannith). And then Seki and Keava, followed by Mizz and Citi and, most recently, Mabel and Turnberry.

Ten whole people! Considering we don’t do any recruiting, that’s not half bad. Basically if someone’s run with us a bunch and we like them and they like us and they either have no guild or are in a guild they’re not overly attached to, we drag them in kicking and screaming.

Originally the guild was named after Slvr’s dorf main. Later he changed it to Flower Sniffers to reflect our playstyle and philosophy, adding the “of Destiny” because Destiny is our Cannith guild’s name.

We’ve been inching closer and closer to level 150 over the last few weeks. Back when we hit 100, I tried to get it on video but my computer spazzed out. I wasn’t about to make that mistake again. So I sent ’round an e-mail to everyone hoping we could get us all on this past week’s stream as we celebrated hitting 150, got our guild fame announcement on video for posterity, and then celebrated with a wonder pot party.

Keava, Citi, Mizz, and Turnberry couldn’t make it, but I did up an overlay with everyone’s main toon headshot (except Turnberry – I need to get his) so that the entire guild would be represented. Vic turned in a saga to start the stream (since she was my very first toon), and then I swapped to Zak – the first of my toons to join the guild – while Slvr turned in sagas until we hit that lovely 150 mark.

It took me several minutes to realize the color had changed on the guild tag above our heads. Sorry for the loud squeeing on the video – I got really excited when I saw that!

The promised wonder pot party in Chrono followed. At level 6, Zak was by far the gimpiest, and he died several times when our wonder pots spawned Shroud blades or bees. I don’t THINK he got killed by anything else… or did he? Guess I’ll have to watch the video to find out!

Thank you, Sniffers, for a great trip to 150! We may never make it to 200, but it’s been terrific so far! 🙂

Many thanks to the Damsels of DDO, aka Lessah, Mythery, and Sahba Jade, for having me on this weekend! 🙂

My original plan was to roll up a deep gnome iconic and zerg it to 20, since they were running their low-20s gnomes. Alas, real life intervened and left me with about two hours to roll up the toon and then level it. And then my computer crashed while I was leveling, and then Comcrap Comcrapped out for about 15 minutes.

I finally ended up with a 14 monk/1 wizard and thought I’d try Lords of Dust on hard. I mean, how bad could that be, right?

Yeah, pretty bad. I had wizard gear, so no handwraps, which meant I was fighting TRULY unarmed. I also had no plat to buy anything because I rarely play on Argo, so I ended up getting a Gold Seal cleric. She kept right up with me in the kill count, because with no weapons, my DPS was exceptionally sucky.

Made it to the fight with the named rakshasa, the room with the last altar, and managed to kill off the boss’s minions before things went south. The hire was out of mana, I was nearly out of hit points, so I just started running back hoping to make it to the shrine. But the rakshasa ran faster than I did and got me and the hire in about two seconds.

By then it was time for Thelanis guild night, but I did have just enough time before the show to log in a toon that had a bit of plat and check the AH for cheap handwraps. Lucked out and got a set of ML 12 vorpals for something like 1,500 plat. Major props to the Damsels for getting my gimpy level 15 wonk (mizard?) through In the Demon’s Den on hard plus the three main explorer areas in Reaver’s Refuge without a single death!

You can watch the stream video here, and listen to the following night’s podcast here.

Streamin’ with Even is live on Thelanis 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. Feel free to send me a tell if you’d like to join! Thanks for reading and/or watching! 🙂

Going a little Haywire

Last stream before Gen Con! Boo-yah!

We’d been kind of intending to run some more Crystal Cove for this week’s stream, but over the past few nights we’ve managed to get five of us through the first three quests in the Vault of Night chain. That left us with only Haywire Foundry to be flagged for the raids. And since we’ve run, like, A LOT of Cove over the past week or so, we decided to finish up VoN flagging instead.

Meren the gimpy Favored Soul was glad for a chance to use the Mace of Smiting she’s been toting around. It’s just been sitting there taking up inventory space but not getting much use – that changed what with all the various mechanical beings scattered throughout the Foundry. This helped her stay ahead of Arkyn the hire, the two arti dogs, and the inimitable Misadventure in the kill count, although the actual live people outkilled her by a wide margin.

The main problem she had in VoN 4 was at the end, with all the jumping when the countdown first starts. Meren’s jump skill is all of 5 (and that’s WITH a +2 jump tome). Slvr passed her a jump pot, which got her up to 22, but she still needed a couple of tries to get up the pipes and over the broken staircase.

On the ship, we had to put our Stone of Change next to some crates down in the cargo hold, because she can’t make the jump up to the Stone without hopping on the crates first. Why would you want to jump up on the Stone, you ask? Because it’s our dnace floor! Yes, we have an Otto’s Irresistible Dance Hall on the fourth lower deck, but back in the old days of airships, we started using the Stone for our dance parties. Besides, we have to share the Otto’s Hall with all the critters who wander over from the Wild Grove across the way.

Anyway, Meren did eventually make it up, by which time the other Sniffers had cleared out most of the iron defenders along the way. Thanks, guys! 😀

We finished not quite in time to get into Crystal Cove before the doors closed, so Gom suggested either Black & Blue or… the other quest from that update (too lazy to look it up). Black & Blue has a dragon, so that seemed like a pretty clear choice.

I think Meren only died once all night. Arkyn the hireling was another story. Once she rezzed him only to have him die again instantly when he ran right back into the lightning trap. Hirelings. Gotta love ’em. Not.

So yeah, I’m crazy excited for Gen Con. 😀

We’re leaving here Tuesday night, will drive until we’re tired and then get a room for the night. That’ll be at least a couple of hours, because finding a hotel anywhere near Williamsport now that the Little League World Series is starting will be nigh impossible. We should get to Indianapolis sometime Wednesday, and Gen Con starts in earnest Thursday. *bounce*

It’ll be quite the break from DDO – I doubt I’ll have time to get on tomorrow (Monday) night. We’re leaving Indy on Sunday, Aug. 20, but only driving until we’re tired and getting a room; I probably will get home sometime Monday the 21st. The Flower Sniffers are well into level 148 and have strict orders to NOT level to 150 until I get back, because I want to get our guild fame announcement on video and then go into Chrono and have a wonder pot party. And yes, that will TOTALLY be streamed on my personal Twitch channel. 😀

Streamin’ with Even is live on Thelanis 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. Feel free to send me a tell if you’d like to join! Thanks for reading and/or watching! 🙂

YARK!

Crystal Cove is back!

Normally I don’t particularly care much one way or the other about Cove, partly because I think I have all the Cove gear I need, and mostly because I totally suck at running it.

Really, I do. I’m a poor choice for scouting/clearing because of my penchant for getting lost, and an even poorer one for running torches because of the getting lost thing and also because I can never seem to get the hang of placing them. I either have them too close together and run out, or too far apart so the poor kobolds end up as lost as I am.

But it was Gom’s first night back on the stream after having the summer off for real life, and Slvr can solo Cove in his sleep, AND we not only got PuffGranny to join our Cove runs, we suckered her into – I mean, convinced her to become a Flower Sniffer too!

So Cove actually ended up being a lot of fun – plus, KOBOLDS! And most people who know me know that I NEVAR (shoutout to Citi) pass up an excuse to talk like a kobold.

Meren is still trying to figure out whether she wants to be a melee, casting, hjealing, or buffing Favored Soul. Also, she’s still wearing Korthos gear at level 9. Oops. So I just hung out in the center on guard duty for our first run, but then it occurred to me that that made for an exceptionally boring stream.

I got brave and took on scouting/clearing duties after that. I even parted with a few of my precioussss Bigby’s Hands to mark promising patches of oooh shiiiiiny crystals. Sooo pretty!

Chances are pretty good that we’ll run Cove for next week’s stream as well. But the week after that, I won’t be streaming because we’ll be on our way home from Gen Con! If I can get the Twitch app to work on either my cheap phone or crappy tablet, I may do some streaming from Indy on my own channel. We’ll see!

Streamin’ with Even is live on Thelanis 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. Feel free to send me a tell if you’d like to join! Thanks for reading and/or watching! 🙂

Taking the easy way out

Ever have one of those weekends where things keep going wrong but still turn out great?

That pretty much summed up this past weekend for me – all kinds of silly little things not going as they should, but still probably the best weekend I’ve had in the past few months.

So I was pretty darn tired when 11 pm Sunday rolled around and it was time to stream. Most of my brain cells* were screaming, “SLEEP!” But there were a few screaming, “RENOWN BOOST WEEKEND!”

I didn’t have anyone with sagas complete or even nearly complete, so I was tempted to go for sleep. But the Flower Sniffers are fast closing in on level 150, and that 30% renown boost was too good to pass up.

Ergo, I compromised, zerging through the heroic Pirates saga on level 30 Acanthia, who still had a renown pot going from the last guild renown weekend. Slvr brought his level 23 barb, we skipped Irestone, and in just about an hour we picked up a decent chunk of renown.

* – I may be giving myself far too much credit by calling them “brain cells,” but that flows better than “miscellaneous cells that live inside my head.”

So here’s what went wrong this weekend (some for me, some for the person I was with, some for both of us):

• Dead car battery
• Lots and lots and LOTS of driving
• Somewhat unexpected extra driving
• Burnt-out taillight
• Slow service and crappy food
• Smelly hotel room with filthy tub/shower
• Seriously major work emergency
• Dead car battery, again
• Weirdly heavy traffic
• Road construction
• Lost wallet
• Were served food that contained something one of us can’t eat, after asking the waitress to make sure nothing like that would be in it

And yet… ’twas a really great weekend. I’m happy to report that the taillight was replaced easily, the wallet was found with all its contents intact, and we were able to swap out the unwanted food item for something acceptable.The driving is mostly over – at least for a few weeks. 😀 The work emergency is handled as much as is possible at this point. The dead battery turned out to be defective and has been replaced. And neither of us will ever stay at Red Roof Inn in South Williamsport again. LOL

Streamin’ with Even is live on Thelanis 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. Feel free to send me a tell if you’d like to join! Thanks for reading and/or watching! 🙂

Gag me with a mindflayer

It feels very strange to have so very much stuff going on in real life that Sunday’s stream was the first time I’d logged into DDO since LAST week’s broadcast.

So since I hadn’t been on in a week, I still hadn’t run Desire in the Dark, the capstone of the Update 36 quest arc. I figured, well, no guts, no glory, so I got Even, Slvr got his warlock, and we headed in on legendary elite.

If you haven’t run the quest yet, you might want to wait to read this, because serious spoiler alerts are incoming.

Lots of them.

Right after I type several lines of text.

And separate them with line feeds to give you time to get out now if you don’t want to be spoiled.

Wait.

That sounded wrong.

You know what I meant.

Last chance!

So anyway…

You know what was kinda sad? Probably the toughest time Even had was against the waves of dretches down in the water after talking to the mindflayer.

OH YEAH, THE MINDFLAYER.

HE’S TOTALLY GROSS.

I MEAN, SERIOUS EW GOING ON THERE.

The guy (he? she? they? Do mindflayers have gender?) KEEPS PUKING ON YOU.

YES, I *DO* NEED TO USE ALL CAPS FOR THIS.

BECAUSE MERE WORDS CANNOT CONVEY HOW UTTERLY DISGUSTING THIS THING IS. BUT I CAN EMPHASIZE THEM FOR, Y’KNOW, EMPHASIS.

Anyway.

The dialogue in this quest is flat-out FANTASTIC. (I did feel somewhat like the puking mindflayer when I saw the following message on a debuff: “You’re skin feels very oily since you touched that gold.”

As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m an editor by trade. “YOU’RE skin feels very oily?” MAKE IT STAAAAAAAHP! DDO, seriously. It should be “YOUR skin feels oily.” Unless you mean, “You are skin feels very oily,” which makes no sense and is also grammatically incorrect. Now I know why the mindflayer felt so ill.

Other than that, the NPC dialogue was nothing short of stellar. Even liked that a number of menus had paladin-specific options (now my other toons are wondering if their classes have specific options as well).

I also enjoyed all the dretches – even though they tried so VERY hard to kill me and not ONE of them said “glarb” (c’mon, DDO, with all the other great dialogue here, can’t you give the dretches some too?). And the succubi, ’cause I haven’t unlocked the art for them in my MM yet. AND THE PURPLE WORMS! Moar plz!

The mazes weren’t TOO terribly difficult, but then again I was following Slvr. Not sure how well I’d’ve fared on my own, especially since I didn’t have any Bigby’s with me. The dancing succubi, besides helping my count toward the art, were cool. Aside from the dretches, I thought most of the quest didn’t seem as difficult as I expected for legendary elite… even though I disregarded Slvr’s advice and looted a few innocuous-looking gold piles.

The end fight, though – that had some interesting moments.

Me: So this guy is apparently a huge sack of hit points, but unless he’s got tricks up his sleeve, he doesn’t look too terribly awful to fight on elite.

Slvr: HE DOES

And HE DID. Even though…

Me: He doesn’t even have sleeves! He’s wearing a tank top!

Slvr: Then his tricks are up his kilt.

Yeah. NOT going there. Regardless of where they were stashed, Graz’zt (the end boss) indeed had tricks. And Even did NOT like them, not one bit, because…

“You are afraid.”

WHAT?! Even’s a paladin! They’re immune to fear! But apparently NOT immune to being afraid. NPCs cheat! LOL

I actually liked having an end fight that was more than just whaling away on a huge stack of hit points, though. And without that little trick of his, Graz’zt would have been far too easy a fight for legendary elite. Even HE thought so – at the end, he said that the battle had been heroic, but not legendary. Dude.

The end chest yielded a Legendary Deep Demise with a +4 mythic boost for Even. I’m kinda torn on it (Slvr didn’t want it). Sere would love the +18 Int and the weapon boost, but right now I don’t have anyone who both uses daggers and needs illusion focus. Maybe Laegonn, once he TRs into a pale master and does a LOT of leveling up.

With only an hour of my usual two-ish hours used, I pondered what to do next… and then remembered that I hadn’t yet checked to see if my absolute favorite typos in the game had been fixed in the recent flurry of typo fixing. So it seemed the thing to do was to go run Tower of Despair and see if Horoth still called his Soliders of Shavarth.

I’m sorry to report that for some reason, it took us fooorrreeevvveeerrrrrrr to get through the whole raid. But I’m very happy to report that Horoth still has Soliders, and they’re still from Shavarth! Much as I usually hate typos, I’ve gotten kind of attached to this one.

I still have no idea what the Soliders are solider than, or what’s solider than a Solider, or what’s the Solidest. Nor do I know if there are Liquiders or Gassers… which totally sounded better in my head.

Streamin’ with Even is live on Thelanis 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. Feel free to send me a tell if you’d like to join! Thanks for reading and/or watching! 🙂

Two rangers and a rogue walk into Tethyamar…

… and the rogue says, “OW! I hit my head! All the doors here are made for dwarves!”

Indeed, the architecture in Update 36, aka Duel in the Underdark, definitely looks as though it were designed for dwarves, by dwarves, one especially low portcullis in particular.

Vic, being elven and somewhat taller than the average dorf, had to mind her head a few times… and being somewhat squishier than Even, should have minded her red bar a bit better as well. Two days earlier, Even and the Flower Sniffers had had a relatively smooth, painless trip through the four U36 flagging quests on LE. Our gimpier toons, though, had a few struggles on LH.

Melee DPS and/or crowd control and/or better hjealing than Garret and Erytheia might have helped. Two arcane archers and a ranged trapmonkey don’t give you a lot of variety when it comes to dealing damage.

But the Flower Sniffers have never been overly concerned with how much time they spend as soulstones. Mostly we just wanted to have fun with the new quests and maybe pick up some cool new loot.

Yay for us, we did both! I’m really enjoying the new quests. Great storyline, nice variety of mobs (it’s not just dwarves and Drow), and some really cool touches. One of my favorite little extras is the appearance of the undead in your focus orb. Some of them have mushrooms sprouting from their skulls; others appear to have weapons buried in their backs (presumably how they died?).

Vic was wielding the Legendary Heavy Boltslinger Even pulled in Friday’s run. She also, much to her delight, ended up with the Mantle of the Dwarven Commander (which dropped for Slvr, but he passed it to her). And I think we’ve all now pulled at least one Stonework Beam – hope they’re still dropping that thickly when Seki starts playing more regularly in a few weeks, because that’d be great for him! Too bad they’re BtA or I’d just send him mine; I don’t have anyone who uses q-staves. You’d think with 19 toons there’d be ONE who’d want it!

There are a couple of things that could stand tweaking or more. The DM chatter in Tethyamar is a little excessive. It’s “brethren,” not “bretheren.” And there’s that one optional where the door sometimes doesn’t open after you complete it, leaving you trapped unless you have DDoor (or do what we did and complete it after you’ve finished the rest of the quest).

Oh, and there’s a totally idiotic gate/lever combo. The lever to open the gate is… BEHIND the gate. You can get to the lever with a little hand-eye coordination by jumping around the gate (as Vic does in the video), or with Cannith boots from the opposite side. But you needn’t bother, because even if you go through all that, the gate opens to – wait for it – a blank wall.

I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how my other toons fare in U36. We’ll be running the capstone for the stream this Sunday. I may have spots open, so if you want in, be flagged and on Thelanis!

Streamin’ with Even is live on Thelanis 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. Feel free to send me a tell if you’d like to join! Thanks for reading and/or watching! 🙂

ERMAGERD ERNDERDERK

Update 36 is coming “soon*”™. Considering that U36 is titled “Duel for the Underdark,” and that the most adorable gnomificer, like, EVER has recently leveled to 20 and finished a King’s Forest S/R/E run, it seemed only right to take Trici, the aforementioned gnomificer, on a tour of that vast realm, where darkness pervades and danger lurks at every unseen corner.

Armed with her trusty arti dog, Minni, and decked out in possibly the most boring-looking armor in all of DDO (Arcane Armor – great armor, terrible appearance), Trici and Slvr managed to get that whole vast realm explored in less than two hours, despite getting blown off Micahrastir’s perch within three seconds of getting up there.

Minni and Albus the hireling were parked there and set on attack, but the dragon eventually got the best of them, even though they were dressed far more fashionably than Trici – Minni’s got a somewhat outdated but unabashedly bright hot pink docent, while Albus has fun turquoise trim on his armor*… which reminded me that I forgot to enter the DDO fashion show. Sigh. Must stop procrastinating – I’ll work on that next week sometime.

Trici had a blast blasting away mindflayers, draegloths, and purple worms (all of which would make great cosmetic pets – just sayin’). And for a change, I had hardly any connection issues at all!

Somehow we got on the subject of player housing. Probably it was a subconscious thing, wondering where we were going to put all the pretty armors. Might also have come from a recent conversation with a friend about playing Minecraft (which I’ve never played, but would like to check out), which got me to thinking about the stuff I used to build when I played Second Life, and so on.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking that one way DDO could implement player housing would be to have small “personal” airships available for TP. No buffs or anything like that, although maybe some purchasable, upgradable storage. And decorations! The petrified dire bear in Nessaleesa’s Garden would be cool. And the Standing Stone monolith from LotRO. And the fictional stuff in this comic by DDO player Nirelle! (Does she still play? Is she still in Inferus Sus on Thelanis?) I know I’d be happy to shell out my DDO points for a beholder rug, Black Abbot coat rack, soulstone chandelier, bouncy dragon, and… Harry plushie, either virtual or literal.

So c’mon, SSG, shut up and take my money. LOL

* – I didn’t notice that the title screen on the video was a closeup of Albus’ spiffy turquoise-accented armor – the part covering his, uh, torso “and such” – until after I’d already written that part. 😀

Streamin’ with Even is live on Thelanis 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. Feel free to send me a tell if you’d like to join! Thanks for reading and/or watching! 🙂

Tower of Frosty Crafting

No, there’s not really crafting in Tower of Frost! But I did run Tower of Frost on Sunday’s livestream, and since it was the last night of the 50% bonus Cannith crafting XP weekend, I did some crafting afterwards.

ToF is always a good time. I hadn’t run it in ages, though, and it showed. It’s ALMOST impossible to get lost in there, but hey, challenge accepted! I managed to not get SUPER lost, but there were definitely moments when I wished I had a few Bigby’s Hands in my inventory instead of keeping them all in my shared bank.

Now THERE’S something I’d do if I were ever in charge of DDO for a day – make your bank space, shared bank, and TR cache available from wherever you happened to be. And then I would max out my shared bank space to store my Bigby’s, XP/mana/renown/slayer pots, extra Cannith boots – all the stuff that’s useful to multiple toons, so whoever needed it could access it, when they needed it.

I could go on about things I’d do if I were in charge of DDO for a day, but it’d take me far longer than a day to write it all down. Let’s just say it’d start with DRETCH COSMETIC PET and go from there. 😉

I decided to do epic hard because my weekends have been busy of late and I’m tired by the time Sunday night rolls around. It was mostly laughably easy for Even, though, so I think if I run it again for the stream, I’ll definitely go for EE. She’s done it solo before, but it got a bit tedious, especially the hedge maze and the optional summoned demon, who on EE is basically just a massive bag of HPs.

I say this every time I run ToF, but someday I’m going to remember the trick to the story puzzle. Note to self: Set all three scenes to the SAME story. I always end up trying to do all three scenes and then going nuts figuring out why the guy still won’t let me through. LOL

Sadly, no named loot was to be had. But at least Even got lots of stuff to decon, and she can always run it again – despite his assurances otherwise, she doubts Theobald will keep his promise to pay his rent on a timely basis, so she’s pretty sure she’ll have to go back in there and straighten him out from time to time.

Even’s crafting level was sonething like 204 when she started her crafting binge. She chugged a 75% XP pot and deconned all the lootgen she pulled from ToF, then set to work making ML shards – easiest way I’ve found to get crafting XP quickly. By the time I logged off Sunday, my crafting level had increased to 291… and I’d gone through around 23,000 essences.

My approach: Wait for crafting bonus weekends, use 35% crafting success boosters, and then just keep crafting the highest ML shard that you have at least a 25-30% chance to make. That means upping the ML you’re attempting every few tries as you level up, but the XPs really start piling on even though you’ll fail on more shards than you make.

And make sure you stock up on success boosters – guess who ran out and ended up buying some from the store ’cause she was too lazy to run to House C for more?

(Yes, I was too lazy to make the pixels that comprise Even-the-pally “run” to another area. That’s just sad.)

When I’m binge crafting, I like to move my essences and success boosters to my inventory so I can keep tabs on them. I also just discovered that you should also move your dissolvers out of your bank into inventory as well – if you do, you’ll get a small amount of plat for some of the items you decon. But if your dissolvers are in the bank, you get squat.

After a bit of experimenting, I think I figured out how to calculate the amount of plat you’ll get for an item, or if you’ll get any at all. Many items have a plus sign followed by a number in the upper right corner of the examination window. Pretty much all of the armor and weapons I’ve checked has this number; most clothing items don’t, and jewelry seems to be hit or miss, haven’t noticed a pattern there so far.

If your item has such a number, you’ll get plat for deconning it (provided your dissolvers are in your inventory and not in your bank). Otherwise, no plat.

The formula* for the amount of plat you get is 60 multiplied by the listed value – the number after the plus sign. This is NOT the same as the item’s enhancement bonus. So if an item’s listed value is +6, you’ll get 360 plat from deconning it; +10, you’ll get 600; etc.

* – Tonight I found ONE case that didn’t follow the formula. Didn’t take notice what the item was, or its listed value, but I got 760 plat for deconning it. Since 760 is not evenly divisible by 60, not sure what was going on there.

If an item has no listed value, such as most clothing and various jewelry items, you get no plat for deconning it, regardless of where your dissolvers are stashed.

This got a lot longer than I intended. Maybe I should work up a separate post on just crafting!

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! 🙂

I gnome my way around

Do I really know my way around? In general, OH HELLZ NAW. But I’ve run the Lords of Dust chain enough that I mostly don’t get lost there. Well, there is that ONE part in Servants of the Overlord where you’re running around looking for crests and there are a lot of passageways branching off here and there – I do tend to forget which ones I’ve already done. But that’s just extra backtracking rather than actual lost-ness.

Besides, Sunday it didn’t matter what I ran – I could be confident I’d gnome my way around because I was on Trici, my totally adorable though undergeared and kinda gimped gnome artificer… or “gnomificer,” as she prefers to be called.

I was figuring on a solo night – Slvr was out of town, Seki was being a dad on Father’s Day, Citi should have been doing his grocery shopping (but was probably working on his Haunted Mansion campaign), Keava was at work, Shin was probably resting up to go to one of his jobs the next morning, and it was a work night for Comic as well.

But YAY Twitch chat! About halfway through Lords of Dust, a viewer mentioned that he had a level 16 toon on Thelanis.

Combined, we were a couple of lean, mean, spider-killin’ machines. Trici did die once – that first big fight with the Drow priestesses and casters and warriors in Servants – but IIRC that was surprisingly the only death (well, Minni her arti dog died once too).

The end fight in Servants was actually kind of ridiculously easy. Spinner of Shadows went really well too. If Seki and Slvr are off again next week, I may trot Trici out again for Beyond the Rift (Seki has no toons in level range; Slvr does, but none that he wants to play).

Another Twitch viewer joined us just to voice chat (he wasn’t flagged) as we were wrapping up Spinner. If Trici indeed runs Beyond the Rift next week, she’s likely to have company even if there are no other Flower Sniffers around!

I hadn’t played Trici in a while and was a little surprised to find that she was already banking 18 when I logged her in. The XP from doing the LoD chain got her just over a rank from level capping, so I went ahead and leveled her up. Definitely a productive night!

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! 🙂

Computer crashes and raiding dashes

My current PC will celebrate its 10th birthday in November. In all that time, the only stuff I’ve done to it is to replace the video card and the power supply.

Luckily it’s held up well, since it was pretty darn state-of-the-art when I bought it – quad core, 2.66 mHz speed. But as computers go, it’s getting pretty old, and it likes to get cantankerous.

One of the things it enjoys doing lately is to just reboot itself with no warning and for no apparent reason. Sunday night, I was getting ready to stream and was talking with Shin in guild chat, and the computer decided to reboot itself three times in half an hour.

So I scrapped my plans to run something interesting and meaningful, because if the PC decided to act up during the stream, I wanted to be doing something relatively unimportant. It’d been a while since I’d run Tower of Despair, so I figured a good old-fashioned classic raid night was just the ticket.

Naturally once I’d changed up my agenda, the computer decided to be on its best behavior. But no worries. I love ToD; I’m up for running it any time on any toon. Slvr was on as well and feels the same way about ToD as I do.

We had plenty of time left when ToD was done, so on to Shroud (heroic – I didn’t think we could duo legendary, especially if the computer crapped out again). And then we decided to kill the last 20-ish minutes with ADQ 1 (EN) and 2 (EE), which took us to almost precisely 1 am.

Of course, we both pulled Shards of Supreme Power out of the Shroud end chests – where the heck are those things when I’m on a toon who actually NEEDS them? And I was surprised to pull unbound – well, BtC on equip – Gloves of the Falcon from the epic chest in ADQ 2. Think that’s the first time I’ve ever pulled an explorer item from that raid. They’ll be a nice upgrade for my F2P rogue Genn’s feather falling gloves.

The computer, like Genn’s old gloves, will be replaced in the near future – but probably not until at least mid-August, ’cause I’m saving all my extra cash for Gen Con! My friends are probably getting tired of listening to me enthuse about it, but I’m so excited to be going! It’ll be my first-ever con. I bought a four-day pass and a bunch of event tickets – got my event schedule all entered into my Google calendar tonight. Among other things, I’ll be going to the They Might Be Giants concert, a Mercedes Lackey book signing, an evening with Patrick Rothfuss, “Silly Irish Songs for Cat Lovers,” AND…

A ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW PARTY!!!

So yeah. This computer is just going to have to make it a few more months. LOL

Meanwhile, my six-and-a-half-year DDO anniversary is June 8, and on Monday, Charlotte and Fern celebrated their first birthday! They don’t really like people food or canned cat food, and Fern’s tummy has issues with treats, but they loved their brand-new birthday catnip mousies. 😀

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! 🙂