No, I haven’t turned into Jay-Z. And I could’ve waited for one more pet so it would’ve been 99 pets to match those lyrics better. But unless DDO releases another pet in the reasonably near future, my next acquisitions will be the reapers, and I intend to get all four of those the minute I have enough reaper XP. (So, y’know, around the year 2031…)
I debated a couple of names and nearly went with TakenForGranite, but that just seemed sad – who wants to take their pet for granite, even if it’s a rock? And then AgateYouBabe popped into my head. If you don’t get it, clearly you need to brush up on your bad 70’s music.
Agate likes to do – well, mostly nothing. His favorite activities are the first three tricks in his repertoire: Sit, Stay, and Play Dead. He performs these with stunning skill on a regular basis. He can also Dance and do a Flip, but he finds those incredibly tiring and usually needs a good long stint of Sitting, Staying, or Playing Dead afterwards.
His favorite quests are Eyes of Stone and Palace of Stone… and that one part in Undermine. He used to like Dreaming Dark, but then he found out that it’s quori, not quarry.
Agate and his rock-solid brethren have been added to Even’s Guide to Cosmetic Pets, so that should be completely up to date. 🙂
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! 🙂
Wow. 2016, huh? Why does this have to be a leap year and make us suffer through one extra day?
Even aside from all the celebrity deaths, this year has seen both of my parents suffer severe health problems, leaving me to mostly take over dealing with my mother (who’s already driven both of my brothers away). And in just the last month, I lost both of my 14-year-old kitties, about two weeks apart. I got my first cat when I was five and since then have never been without at least one until now; it’s the first time since I was maybe two or three that I have no pets of any kind.
I’ve had one really good thing come out of 2016, and a couple of minor things. But overall, it sure has been a tough year.
Just two nights ago, Abs and I were talking about all the celebrity deaths, and I remember saying that 2016 better not take Carrie Fisher (who was at the time reported to be in stable condition after a heart attack).
“She’ll be OK,” Abs said. “The Force is strong with this one.”
I guess it wasn’t quite strong enough.
Carrie Fisher was a remarkable person, and I admire her for being brave enough to share her own struggles with mental illness and to fight so hard for others affected. I’ve battled depression most of my life, and it’s always seemed like something I should hide, be ashamed of. Carrie’s openness about her own issues helped me feel like I’m OK and not alone.
But the one thing I will always remember her for is the very first Star Wars movie. Her character, Princess Leia, has been found and captured by the stormtroopers, who hustle her immediately to Darth Vader.
Vader’s scary enough all by himself. And she’s surrounded by a bevy of heavily-armed stormtroopers. I remember watching and being terrified for Leia. I thought she would cry, or faint, or beg.
Nope. She stood right up to Vader, stormtroopers and all, with jutting chin and flashing eyes and even a bit of snarky humor.
And I sat there thinking, “WOW. Look at her! She’s not even afraid!”
Up until that point, I’m pretty sure I’d never seen a truly strong female character in any movie. Carrie’s Princess Leia was a revelation.
Probably seems like a little thing, but it was something that stuck in my memory, something to hang on to when the people in my life turned on me.
On the bright side, Even added a solo heroic elite Tempest’s Spine to her solo raid repertoire. Yes, really and truly solo, not using multiple accounts and re-entries and all that; if I say one of my toons soloed something, I MEAN that toon actually SOLOED it. Honesty, y’know? Anyway. I was looking through her compendium and laughing at all the low-level quests she still hasn’t run this life since, being PDK, she started at level 15… and realized she’d never run heroic TS AT ALL.
I somehow missed one rune but got ol’ Sor’Jek down to about 50% anyway before he blew me off the mountain. Picked up the missing rune on my way back through, and from then on, taking him down was a piece of cake.
And how about a happy accident? Logged on last night and there were no other Flower Sniffers online yet. So I was browsing the social panel, and accidentally clicked on an LFM from someone trying to farm a Bonebreaker from Palace of Stone.
“Oops,” I said, “didn’t mean to click that…” And then I thought, what the heck, I’m not really doing anything anyway.
So I stayed, and we had a couple other people join. Did one run each on epic normal/hard/elite, then decided to do one more run on EH. And in that last run, the Bonebreaker FINALLY dropped for the guy (or girl, or non-binary – don’t know for sure). Best misclick ever!
And thank you, Standing Stone, for finally correcting the “animted” mudballs to “animated” ones. That one bugged me just about as much as “an” planar shard. LOL
I was thinking about a year-in-review post and managed to come up with two ideas. Couldn’t decide between them, so I’ll be doing them both. They’re both filks, but entirely different from each other.
I’ve had this idea kindasorta kicking around in my head for a while, but it needed some motivation to make its way from whatever fluff might be between my ears to an actual blog post. That motivation came in the form of a comment from DDOCentral on one of my recent posts: “You really should make a list of all of the cosmetic pets in DDO.”
Well, alrighty then! It’s pretty darn long, but then there are a LOT of pets! Ninety-seven in all, and 199 tricks, as well… so many of each, in fact, that I gave up on the idea of putting tables for each directly into this post, and embedded the spreadsheets instead.
If you want to just pull up the master spreadsheet in Google docs (probably a good bit easier to view than the embedded version), here you go! Be patient; the images may take a few secs to load.
I’ve never actually seen the Nicolas Cage movie “Wicker Man,” but I’ve seen the infamous alternate ending. If you haven’t, I won’t spoil it; you can always search YouTube (believe me, you’ll find it). If you HAVE seen it, you’ll know exactly why I picked the image I did for this week’s video.
I’m starting to amass quite a collection of Legendary Five Rings, Legendary Chains, and the like, to the point where, even with 19 toons to equip, I’m probably going to have to start vendoring them just to save inventory space. But it’s worth it. Update 32, Against the Slave Lords, is a rollicking good time.
Go ahead, pull the rope (boy, did I fall for that one the first time I ran the quests)! Want some honey? HELP, A BEAR!
After taking the last two weeks off from livestreaming due to pesky real life, I decided I needed a break from reality this week. Even though I probably should have gotten some sleep, Slvr and I headed off to the new quests instead.
I was originally only going to run the first quest, but that went so well – and was so much fun – that we decided to keep going. The second one took us to 2 am, which is my normal cutoff time… and again, it seemed a shame to stop when we were on such a roll.
We completed the entire chain on Legendary Hard in just about exactly three hours, including a pit stop after the second one to sell, repair, and rebuff since Even’s inventory was getting full.
Don’t think Slvr died at all; I deliberately killed Even in the mirror beam once just so I could get video of her using her Jack Jibbers blade. (For as long as I farmed that damn thing, you’d think I’d get to use it more.) Hopefully the video’s as fun to watch as the chain was to run. There’s plenty of what we like to think of as witty Flower Sniffer banter, and we actually do fight everything – no taking exploity shortcuts and then standing around for 15 minutes doing nothing but belching and waiting for the rest of the party to finish the quest, no looking for equally exploity perch spots so that we can hit stuff without it hitting us back. That’s not how we roll. Also, we occasionally often talk like kobolds.
Even though I was pretty tired and starting to yawn quite a bit by the end, I was REALLY glad we decided to stick it out and run the third quest, because I got an OOOH SHINY…
Makes a darn nice replacement for the Consuming Darkness Even was wearing (I thought she was wearing an EE, turns out it was an EH – her EE has been, for some reason, collecting dust in her bank. Probably just forgot to get it out when she leveled.)
Had a few other “ooooh shiiiny” moments this past week as well. Seki pulled the Legendary Dashing Gloves from Good Intentions and passed them to Even for Dissy, who’s been yearning for them for a while. Vic helped a random PuGger get a Great Shard of Power the other night; did a few runs of Devil Assault and then four-manned heroic Shroud. I was thinking, gosh, it’s late, I think I’m done after this one, and no sooner had I thought that then I opened the first underwater chest and found the shard. Gave the guy a shipvite so that he could craft his great crossbow, so while it wasn’t MY shiny, still a good feeling.
And then… AND THEN…
If you read this blog on a semi-regular basis – and I’m not implying that you do – you might know that I have this thing for cosmetic pets. There were only two I lacked, both from the Monster Manual – the rust monster and the wraith.
There’s really no good place I can find to farm rusties. I joked about putting up an LFM for Legendary Shroud – “Do NOT kill the book! Keep killing the respawns until I get the rustie pet!” There’s just really no other place where they respawn except the earth cave in ToEE 2 and the end fight of Siegebreaker… and they don’t respawn MUCH even then.
But if you can handle hanging out in Fall of Truth, wraiths respawn there as long as the Disciple of Lies is alive. (You can kill him and he’ll come back to life if Bjorn the Liar isn’t dead.) And they respawn at a pretty good rate, about 300 an hour.
Few nights ago, I was ticked off and frustrated about a couple of things, and I happened to notice that I needed just about 800 more wraiths for the pet. Bit over two hours, I told myself, goferit, you’re too worked up to sleep anyway.
I think it actually took a bit less than two hours, but at last, I saw the beautiful message pop up to tell me that I’d earned 35 Turbine points and… a violet wraith companion!
I’ve been trying to figure out which is a better place to farm rusties – the cave at the beginning of Gwylan’s Stand, or the start of Stromvauld’s Mine. There are seven in Gwylan’s, four in Stromvauld’s, but the Stromvauld’s ones are a little quicker to get.
There are some in Ataraxia’s Haven, but the number seems to vary pretty widely and they’re pretty far in. Rainbow has plenty – IF they’re there at all, and again, if you want them all, you have to run quite a bit of the quest to get them. Same with VoN 5, which isn’t soloable because of the lever mechanic, so you’d need at LEAST two highly-coordinated people.
Ah well, 1,713 rusties to go. I WILL get there someday.
Streamin’ with Even is live every Sunday night at midnight Eastern time. 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! 🙂
Got my first glimpse of Keava’s new Shadar-Kai Taurriel tonight, and she looked… strangely familiar. I knew I’d seen that rogue before, but where?
Right on my login screen, that’s where. The hair color is different, and Taurriel’s eyes are darker, but otherwise she’s the spitting image of my own Seregeth.
This could come in handy when questing. One sneaky rogue sidles up and gets the enemy’s attention. The mobs whirl around to attack – and see what they think is that same sneaky rogue waaaaay on the other side of the dungeon. While they’re scratching their heads and going, “Wait, what?” the twin rogues whip out their trusty daggers and start assassinating. I like it!
Just some random thoughts tonight, because I had a most awesome weekend-into-Monday and I’m exhausted. Slvr discovered that if you climb the bell tower in Three-Barrel Cove when the rare encounter airship Ill Fate is up, you can get a great look at it from above. You can also land on it, which I didn’t get a chance to do because Slvr blew it up too fast. Sure beats trying to fire a ballista when a horde of angry pirates are swinging their whirly chains at you!
Had a strange, slightly cool, and slightly creepy thing happen in a guild run of heroic Shroud Friday night. Everything had been perfectly normal – well, as normal as things can be when the Flower Sniffers of Destiny get together – until Phase 5. My gimpy li’l rogue Meren had grabbed Adur-Nac and was pulling him away so that he could be killed when she noticed that something weird was going on with his name.
He had the correct floaty text in Phase 2, but he kept his “death_adurnac” moniker throughout Phase 5, or at least until we killed him. No one noticed if his “ghost” form also had the glitch. I’ve never seen that in Shroud before, and as many times as I’ve run Shroud, that’s saying something. So it was kinda neat… even though seeing “death” in front of Adur-Nac’s name didn’t settle gimpy Meren’s nerves any.
Yes, it’s a picture of a dretch. Because I can. Grabbed it from a splash screen because I was too tired lazy to dig through all my screenies looking for a good dretch shot. Dretches rock, and we need more of them. And we especially need dretch cosmetic pets. I have it on pretty good authority that this won’t happen for a long time if ever, but I’ll never give up hope. C’mere, little dretch! Glarb! Eat my sorrow and drink my pain! NUM!
Citi wrote about dretches in a blog post a while back, suggesting that they need a little theme music when they fall under the spell of Otto’s Irresistible Dance. The cool thing about the DDO blogging community is that, with a few exceptions (as anyone who’s read some of the comment sections on my blog knows, heh heh), we enjoy helping each other out. The lovely grimorde obliged Citi with a video giving dretches their right to party. It’s 18 seconds you’ll thank me for, I promise!
The Flower Sniffers are getting down to the serious business of trying to get everybody flagged for everything. Keava made us a cool spreadsheet in Google Docs (we tried using forum posts first, but the alt-itis some of us – yes, ME – suffer from kinda made that too clunky) so that we can all put in our characters and what they’ve run. Slvr added a few quest arcs… now all I need is the ambition to go through all of my toons and see who’s flagged for what.
And at some point, we really need to have a nekkid guild fun run/raid night with EVERYBODY. Because Acanthia’s bank is starting to fill up with Potions of Wonder. The pic is from a couple of weeks ago; she now has close to 1,500 wonder pots. The plan is to get the entire guild on, take our clothes off, head into a raid, pass a stack of pots to everybody, and start chugging. That’ll definitely be one for the livestream!
Speaking of the stream, I’m moving to midnight (Eastern) Sundays from 11 pm so as not to conflict with any other streams.
Last, but certainly not least – today will mark the 200th issue to the DDO Chronicle! May you have many, many more!
This past Sunday’s livestream featured Even and Gonari duoing the epic elite Sschindylryn chain. Keava couldn’t join in, as he was splitting his time between work and leveling up his newly-TRed warlock… maybe that’s why this week, while there were certainly some laughs, nobody tried to grab Elminster’s thingie, or offered their Pale Rod to anyone, or told everyone to stop beating up Draya Dun’Robar so we could check and see if the Drow commander was male or female. Must work on that!
Next week’s livestream will probably be EE Demonweb. DRETCHES! Yay! You can watch live at 11 pm Eastern time on Sunday by visiting my Twitch channel.
The past week also marked the acquisition of Dandelion, my new blonde bear cub cosmetic pet, aka Creature Companion #94. Just finished a run of Fall of Truth to farm wraiths; still need nearly 2,400 of those for the wraith pet. I don’t get it. Vey doesn’t play nearly as much as I do, doesn’t farm wraiths, and only needs about 900. And then it will be on to the rust monster, unless of course DDO introduces another cosmetic pet that’s easier to farm. *koff*DRETCHALREADY*koff*
But the BEST thing that happened last week was our Friday guild night, when we had seven – SEVEN! – Flower Sniffers on at the same time! And in the same quest! We’d nearly given up on Runn when she finally showed up… and told us she had never, ever run Chronoscope before, ever. We were in the bank fight by that time, so we told her where to find the quest and how to get to the tavern, and then ran back and collected her. And passed her some loot, because she DID NOT PIKE! She told us! Keava made it on despite the U.S./Australia time difference, new guildie Cerah also made it for what I think was her first guild night run with us, and we even talked Citi into rolling up a toon and joining us! The stars must have been aligned pretty well, or maybe it’s the strawberry moon that’s out tonight… we were only short Shin and Seki, who have this weird concept about real life coming before DDO. Pffft. LOL
‘Twas a super fun run that went amazingly well – elite Chrono at level can be a bit dicey, especially with a first-timer, a transplant from another server with no gear, and two members who haven’t played much DDO in quite a while… not to mention five PuGgers of unknown origin. But I’m pretty sure we had only three or four deaths total, which was less than the number of Hellfire Crossbows that dropped and weren’t wanted by anyone!
Hopefully this Friday we’ll get another good Flower Sniffin’ turnout for guild night. Hmmm… I’m not normally much into PvP, but a guild one might be fun. I might even stream that!
But oh, those last two pets I need – wraith and rust monster from the Monster Manual – are NOT gonna be easy. Or quick.
As far as I know, there’s no good place that has respawning rust monsters. I’d heard the acid part of ToEE2 did, but I spent probably an hour and a half running around in there. Know how many rustie respawns there were? Two. Yeah. I could’ve run the start of Gwylan’s or Stromvauld many, many times in that span. Or even Threnal Arena. Or Rainbow, or Ataraxia. Or even VoN 5.
The end fight of Siegebreaker does have respawning rusties… but at a rate of only about one per minute, meh. Definitely better than ToEE, but hardly efficient.
Wraiths are a bit easier. I could run part 3 of Delera’s over and over (although I should mention that running anything over and over is totally not my idea of fun… unless it’s the Pit…). I could make laps around Tomb of the Shadow King and cull out the wraiths from all the other respawning undead, which is about as efficient as Siegebreaker for rusties, which is to say not very efficient at all.
But there’s one more place where you can get a few hundred wraiths per hour, IF you have a toon who can handle it. For 18 of my 19 toons on Thelanis, that doesn’t apply.
Luckily, though, I have Even (as in Even the toon, just so you know I’m not referring to myself in the third person). And Even has set a couple of goals for herself, namely to try and solo tougher content, specifically raids and epic elites. So a while back, she made her first stab at soloing Fall of Truth. Didn’t work out – she had only a non-epic Bow of the Silver Flame for a ranged weapon and ran out of arrows looooong before the crystal was shattered. But I noticed that there are a whole, whole, WHOLE bunch of wraiths in there.
Besides, Even loves Fall of Truth, because the Stormreaver shares her chartreuse hair color. (OK, Turbine calls it “acid green.” But close enough. And YES, Slvr, chartreuse is a real color. :P)
If you want to farm as many wraiths as possible from FoT, it’s actually pretty simple – don’t kill Bjorn the Liar and the Disciple of Lies. Because as long as they’re alive, they’ll spawn wraiths. And the Stormreaver will be nice enough to kill those wraiths for you while you fight the other stuff. I definitely recommend taking down the other two dragon/giant pairs, though – as the video from this week’s Sunday stream shows, my video card does NOT like dealing with their ice storms and dancy balls.
At a rate of 300 wraiths per hour, I think I need about 12 more hour-long farming runs to finally get my violet wraith pet. And then, rusties, look out, because Even’s gonna be coming for ya!
I was really glad that Turbine extended the 10th anniversary event by one more day, because last night – when I’d originally been planning to run it one last time – I ended up farming hellhounds to get the hellpup pet. (And finally, success! … yes, that’s 93. LOL)
So tonight, after a great time running mid-levels with guildies, I started up the stream and headed off to House P for one last hurrah. And hurrah it was. Pretty sure I talked to every NPC, and clicked the Oracle until I’d gotten what I believe are most or all of the tips (well, it took that long before mine came up, LOL).
The resulting video is kind of long as a result, but now I have the event immortalized on my hard drive… and my YouTube account.
I hope Turbine brings back at least the anniversary dungeon every year. I had loads of fun with it, and seems a shame to go to the trouble of developing it to keep it around for a month and a half and then toss it for good.
Many kobold shrieks, slaughtered devs, and creepy Jeets thoughts later, I’ve gotta hand it to DDO for an awesome event. Thank you! 🙂
OK, it’s almost all the pets. I still don’t have the rust monster, wraith, or hellhound from the Monster Manual (working on them, though!). But as far as I know, I have all the others, along with their associated tricks.
In case you were wondering, that’s 92 pets. Ninety-two. Which is a LOT of pets. And every single one of them has a name. All you people running around with unnamed pets make me sad. *sniffle*
But that won’t stop me from making sure I get any future pets that are released. Among those I’m hoping to see in the future are DRETCHES!, griffons, harpies, halflings, gnomes, succubi, oozes, llamas (no, they’re not in DDO, but neither are toucans), and… a scurvy-infested blowfish. Oh! And dragons! Basically, if it has any pet qualities AT ALL, I want a pet version of it.
I’ve been wanting to make a pet video for a while now. Was going to do it over this past weekend but Stuff Happening, technical difficulties and all that. But it’s done now!
People who aren’t me may well find it extremely boring. Especially my attempts to monologue. But the residents of Even’s Home for Wayward Pets (c/o Good Ship Flowerpot, Fourth Lower Deck, Thelanis) don’t really care as long as they have the run of their own stateroom, with their friends from Wild Grove on one side, Otto’s Irresistible Dance Hall on the other, and of course the hot tub for relaxing.
I thought February had already been a pretty good month for cosmetic pets. First the fiendling companions – standard, magma, and shadow – and they JUGGLE! Then the invisible mini-stalker; I’d like to take credit for that, since back in early April 2013, I wrote a blog post that included the line, “It’s probably a bit late for the April Fools’ Day post I had planned, complete with screenshots of my new Invisible Stalker pet.” But I think it’s just coincidence that there is now indeed an Invisible Stalker pet. (If they ever release a dretch pet, that is TOTALLY on me – but that’s a topic for a whole ‘nuther post.)
The three fiendlings and Claude, the Invisible Stalker, put me at 88 pets. I had just four left to go: the wraith, rust monster, and hellhound from the Monster Manual, all within reach if I want to do some serious grinding, and… the violet gelatinous cube-let, which drops only in the raids Fall of Truth and Caught in the Web.
And from all accounts, the violet cube is a very, VERY rare drop. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen anyone with one. Wiki says that it drops on all difficulties, so I’d taken to farming EN Fall of Truth (because I think that even if Even could survive EH solo, it’d be too grindy to bear, and I get too lost in CitW). Then a friend told me that it only drops on elite. I despaired. I almost never see FoT LFMs, and I knew damn well that Even was not ready to try to solo that on EE.
So I gave myself a break from FoT and started working on getting some more solo raids and EEs done. Managed to add Belly of the Beast, Chamber of Raiyum (aka Wiz King), Desecrated Temple of Vol, Master Artificer, and Lord of Blades to Even’s list.
The pillars in LoB glitched – everything was dead except Ol’ Shiny himself, but the pillars wouldn’t go “live” so I could kill them. And as long as I couldn’t kill them, I couldn’t kill the LoB. Took him down four or five times, but he’d bring himself right back at full health. So I finally sent in a ticket and got a great GM who got that solved for me.
Was fighting the flu and feeling pretty poorly, so I was thinking of going to bed after I got done selling and repairing from LoB. And then Slvr said something like, “Hey, wanna do an FoT while my bard hides in a corner?”
Oh, what the heck, I thought; I can’t sleep anyway, my head’s too stuffed up. So off to Chez Stormreaver we went.
Maybe it was the flu, maybe I was rolling badly, but it was the most freaking worst time I’ve ever had in there “solo” (since Slvr was, as promised, hiding in a corner). The Stormreaver killed the Silence dragon while I was still working on the Confusion pair. I was getting lambasted by one “boom” after another. And there were about 10 times more air eles than I EVER remember seeing in there on ANY difficulty. I had to redo Confusion because once the giant was down, the eles blew me across the room just before I could give the dragon his final cleave.
Same thing happened when I thought I was about to finish – had the Stormreaver and Truthful One both at such mere slivers, you couldn’t see any red in their bars. Killed the Stormreaver and went to hit Light the Dark, which would most likely have done in TO, and the stupid air eles tossed me to the other side of the room.
By the time I finally managed to get them both down within a few seconds of each other, Slvr had gone from a bard hiding in a corner to a soulstone hiding in a corner, and I had gone from, “Sure, I could go for a FoT” to “DEATH TO ALL AIR ELES! NEVER AGAIN!”
We opened the first three chests. Nothing of note save one lonely heroic comm for Even.
I opened the last chest. Nada.
Slvr opened the last chest. And linked…
A VIOLET GELATINOUS CUBE-LET PET.
I squeed. A lot. Loudly. And named her after Slvr’s bard, who loves purple.
Five new pets in about a week – yeah, that’s a damn good week, LOL. That brings the total number of pets in Even’s Home for Wayward Creature Companions to 89.They can often be seen on the fourth lower deck of our ship, where they like to head over to Otto’s Irresistible Dance Hall and boogie with the various creatures who wander in from the Wild Grove across the way. And even though 89 is a LOT, they all get a shot at having fun. Some of my toons have “preferred” pets – Even tends to run with the black panther cub a lot, as it looks like (and is named for) my real-life kitty. Vic the mechanic loves having her bronze golem to tinker on; Ivy the BF pally likes the steel golem because it’s nearly as shiny as she is. Dissy has a special bond with the pink fire ele, which looks marvelous paired with her lavender hair. Reera the swashbuckler, like any good pirate, has a parrot – a scarlet macaw to match HER hair.
Incidentally, Claude, as shown in the inset, is not invisible to everyone. Sadie got this snap and sent it to me via Facebook. Slvr said he can see Claude’s outline as well. But all I can see are his pirate hat and floaty text. I’m OK with that – after all, he’s an Invisible Mini-stalker, not a Nearly Invisible Mini-stalker.
Not that they don’t switch things up now and then; Vic and assassin Sere appreciate Claude the Invisible Mini-stalker’s transparency when they’re trying to sneak past enemies. Reera really likes Claude too – he looks great in his pirate hat (sorta like when you kill pirates in 3BC and their hats float in midair for a while afterwards). The violet cube goes with Dissy’s hair at least as well as the pink fire ele.
Eighty-nine down, three to go – anyone want to do some Monster Manual farming with me on Thelanis? 😀
Even Now 