Lioness and kitties and OurDDO, oh my!

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! 😀

*drum roll*

OurDDO is back! You can now find it here!

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!

Battlebard!

Sometimes I really need to have a little faith.

The other night, I asked Slvr, “Do I want to work on sagas with Even, or take Dissy into Thunderholme and get her killed?”

Slvr generally knows what I want better than I do, so when he told me to take Dissy to Thunderholme, I logged her in (although I lamented to him on AIM, “But she’s gonna DIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEE!”, to which he replied, “I have faith in her!”).

I wasn’t optimistic – my level 26 gimpish first-life Drow bard, alone in a level 29 wilderness? Well, not QUITE alone; she grabbed the level 24 rogue hire because I didn’t know how hard the traps would hit her, and she ended up bringing her owlbear as well to keep aggro off the rogue while he disabled.

Dissy’s intentionally built more as a support toon than as a soloer. She has yet to earn a single XP in any destiny other than Fatesinger, mostly because I’ve just never felt like farming destinies on her. So she has no handy twists, or even fate points with which to twist anything.

But her Fascinate worked surprisingly well against the undead in Thunderholme, while her Song of Capering and Otto’s kept the Cult of the Dragon necromancers from being able to do anything except dance. Even the rare encounters – she got something like eight of them – didn’t give her much trouble. The biggest problem she had was completely breaking her Elyd Edge on the battleragers (’cause I forgot to grab her a Mutineer’s Blade from the shared bank) and having to turn to her Mad Lute.

I’d only been planning to take her as far as Dagan to flag her for Fire on Thunder Peak, but I’d gotten pretty far through the levels when I realized I’d gone the wrong way (me, lost? NEVER!) and was actually headed for *gulp* Sarva.

I wasn’t too worried about Dissy’s ability to take out Dagan. But Sarva… Sarva and her minions are another story. So when I finally reached the very bottom of Thunderholme and saw her standing there in the center, I decided my best option was to park the rogue and owlbear by the shrine, invis Dissy, and sneak over to get the journal.

Oops. I must’ve double-clicked when I told the owlbear to stay put, because he followed Dissy in, and of course Sarva saw him. Uh-oh.

I summoned the rogue, had Dissy play Sustaining Song, and buffed as fast as I could. Then I started spamming Dirge and sonic spells interspersed with Siren’s Song.

It got pretty ugly. I had to rez the owlbear several times, and the rogue once or twice as well. And Dissy came scarily close to dying herself more than once.

But Sarva’s red bar dropped to a sliver and then poof! she was dead, thanks to Siren’s Song going off at a VERY opportune time. Dissy and her hires took out Sarva’s minions, looted, and recalled, because by that point nearly all her gear was in serious need of repair (plus it was around 6 am and I kinda wanted sleep).

After facing Sarva, taking out Dagan the next night was a piece of cake. So my gimpy little bard is flagged for both dragon raids, where I have no doubt she’ll die frequently and ignominiously… well, almost no doubt. After all, I didn’t think she even stood a chance against the ordinary mobs in Thunderholme, let alone Sarva and Dagan.

So look out, Aurgloroasa, Nevalarich, and Tharaxata. Dissy’s coming for you!

Hanging up the plow

 

I’d been SO good.

 

After my last post, I resolved to stay away from Spinner of Shadows for a while. I was just Spinnered out. And until last night, I’d kept that resolution. Not ONCE since I made that post had I set foot in that webby, columned room.

 

I’m not sure why I decided to give it another try. Maybe it was because Acanthia looked so bored, just hanging out on the ship sorting through bank stuff. Her Neverwinter alter ego had already gotten a fun couple of hours playing with Shin, Comic and Bonnie; Even’d run elite ToD before that. It just didn’t seem fair to stick poor DDO Acanthia at the bank.

 

“Just ONE more try,” I told myself sternly. “I don’t care what drops or doesn’t drop. You’re not running this damn quest more than once tonight.”

 

But once was all it took, because gleaming at me from that beautiful pink epic chest was my long-sought-after Shard of the Silver Slinger, the last piece Vic needed to epickify one of her favorite crossbows.

 

I think Garret the Fainted, I mean Tainted, er, no, Sainted jinxed me. Usually when Acanthia solos EH quests, she brings him along for deathward and as a failsafe in case of lag spikes and such. But the last few times, I noticed she was using her healing ki to keep HIM up far more than he was healing HER. So Garret stayed in the hireling folder, playing poker with the owlbears, panther and the level 24 rogue hire. (It may have been strip poker. They didn’t say, and I didn’t ask ’cause I didn’t really want to know.)

 

With no Garret around to worry about, the quest itself didn’t take long. Once the fighting was done, Baz and Slvr jumped in to give me a few extra chances at the shard, and then I put up a “free loot” LFM.

 

I’m not sure who passed me the shard – I’m almost positive it didn’t drop in my name, because I didn’t see it when I first opened the chest. Or maybe I’d just gotten so used to NOT seeing it that I didn’t realize what it was. Then someone said, “The shard dropped!” And I looked again… and there it was.

 

 

And now I’m really, REALLY never going into Spinner again… until it’s time to epickify Char’s Bow of the Silver Flame.