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.
“Help, my Archons have fallen and they can’t get up!” ~ Even the pally running Defiler of the Just
Sometime in the semi-distant past, I created a Twitch account and downloaded Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), thinking it might be fun to stream live video when I played DDO. And then I mostly forgot about it.
Until recently, when someone in a PuG was questioning me on the number of cosmetic pets I had, and didn’t seem to believe that I have 92. Yes. Really. Ninety-two. And I said to myself, “Self, you could get a screenie of your pet tab, but there’s always someone who’ll say you Photoshopped it. But if you got VIDEO…”
So I thought really hard until I remembered my Twitch password, and then I fired up OBS. In a rather surprisingly short time, I had my first livestream going. It was pretty boring, just a quick runthrough of the anniversary event. But it was a milestone, because now I was a livestreamer!
But video is not always good. As described in my last blog post, a guildie had jokingly called Even “unkillable” during a shortmanned guild run of Defiler of the Just when she stood amidst the blades and mobs that had killed the other three and took very little damage. The joking continued when we moved on to Fire on Thunder Peak; when it became clear we weren’t going to complete, Even couldn’t recall out because she kept getting hit and interrupted, and couldn’t make it to the door because she was completely and utterly surrounded.
And thus the fun started. At first I thought I’d try to keep her up and kill hellhounds toward the Monster Manual pet. That got tedious after a while, and I was ready to pack it in. Ended up booting my video capture software; details are in the aforementioned blog post, so I mostly won’t bore you with them. Except.
For anyone who read the rather extensive comments on that post, a few clarifications: I did not, nor have I ever, used Eternal Defender to give myself an unfair advantage. I have it on a hotbar along with Power Attack, stances, etc., which I toggle on each time I log in. I try not to let Even’s HP get to less than 50%, let alone less than 0, so I did not know there was a glitch with Eternal Defender because – and apparently this is too difficult a concept for some people to understand – it almost never kicks in. And so I’ve never noticed it, because there hasn’t been anything to notice; it’s never kicked in more than MAYBE two or three times in one quest, and it’s never occurred to me to be all, “Oh, I must immediately see how many turns I have left!” If I’m getting hit that much, my focus is on trying to stay alive, not the number remaining on my turns. I’ve since talked to a Turbine employee about the glitch. Aside from being a big bad exploiter and a big bad non-glitch-reporter, I am also a big bad mean person. If/when that’s refuted, I’m sure I’ll be a big bad something else, because that is the pattern. I have no control over that. Any drama over this is not of my making.
But anyway! I’ve streamed several times since getting everything set up. It’s kind of like having a new toy – I want to use it ALL THE TIME. So nearly every night I’ve been firing up OBS and looking for something streamable to run. There’ve been a couple things to figure out along the way – if you’re ever really bored and don’t mind losing five minutes of your life you’ll never get back, there are two incredibly dull videos on my Twitch channel that are basically me standing around in DDO trying to figure streamy stuff out. There’s a video of Even farming wraiths in Fall of Truth, which would be much better if I’d remembered to unmute my mic. You’ll just have to take my word that my commentary was scintillating.
Someday “soon*” ™, when I have some time to kill, I’m going to find a nice quiet place, boot OBS, and start parading each of my cosmetic pets through all their tricks. It’s gonna take a while; figure at one minute per pet, that’s a bit over an hour and a half. For my next video after that, I’ll probably stream my guildmates hosting my cosmetic pet intervention…
I was going to play some DDO tonight once I finally got to the computer, but alas – DDO is down; YAY! – it’s because U29 is getting up and running!
So then I remembered, “Hey! I have a DDO blog! A sadly neglected DDO blog… but a DDO blog nonetheless.” And I figured, even if I’m the only one who reads it, this is a great way for me to keep a record of what my toons have been up to and what they’re planning on being up to next.
I’m now up to 18 – yes, EIGHTEEN – toons on Thelanis, which is pretty much the only place I play any more. Even had taken a bit of a break for a while as I worked on leveling up a couple of her brothers and sisters, but after being caught off guard by the last two guild renown weekends happening at very inopportune times for me, I resolved to GET SAGAS DONE NAO. Next renown weekend, I’ll be prepared.
Our little band of Flower Sniffers is up to level 95 – not bad considering only two of us play most nights. Even’s nearly done with the epic Eveningstar sagas, all on true elite, and is rather proud that she soloed her way through most of the quests. She just needs two more Wheloon quests to have them all done. She’s also halfway through a true elite epic Gianthold saga, and hasn’t started epic 3BC yet. I’m thinking that just with the sagas she has completed, and a few scattered ones that other toons are holding on to, with renown pots (which I’ve stocked up on thanks to some really nice sales) and our small guild bonus, I think we have enough renown banking in sagas to get to 100. Hopefully we can get all of us on for the guild fame announcement… and then I think we should all strip naked (our toons, that is… anything else is a personal decision *g*), head into some quest we’re wildly over-level for *koff*PIT*koff*, and put a serious dent in Acanthia’s stash of nearly 1,200 Potions of Wonder.
Even also finally realized her goal of soloing Fall of Truth, even though it came about in kind of an odd way – I originally only went in there thinking it’d be a great place to farm wraiths for the Monster Manual pet. But after a while, she noticed that the wraiths really weren’t spawning any more. I was going to recall, and then I thought, ah, what the heck, let’s see how far she can get.
After she got each of the dragon/giant pairs down on her first try, I started thinking maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. When her handy thunderforged throwing axe made much shorter work of the crystal than her non-epic Bow of the Silver Flame had in her only previous solo attempt, I let myself get cautiously optimistic. But it wasn’t until I realized that the only two mobs left were the Stormreaver and the Truthful One, and they were both down to a sliver, that I really thought she’d make it. Sadly, no violet cube in any of the chests, but still a great feeling to get the completion.
And speaking of cosmetic pets, not counting any potential new ones from U29, I have just four left to go – wraith, rust monster, and hellhound from the Monster Manual, and violet cube from FoT/Caught in the Web. Even has made two tries at soloing CitW; first one, something was glitched because Ana wasn’t there, and the second time she got whooshed over the edge by one of the stupid legs.
I really like Even’s soloing style. It’s very resource-INdependent – no store items, no hirelings at all (unless absolutely needed for stuff like lever-pulling, and then used ONLY for that purpose), no multitudes of buffs. She’s been twisting Energy Burst for some AoE damage (very helpful in places like Wheloon), so Jall mailed her a few dozen mana pots to help her keep that going. Stalwart Pact, Holy Sword, Zeal, Death Ward – that’s pretty much it. When I remember, I’ll use Prayer and Divine Might; once in a while she’ll whip out a Blur wand or a True Seeing scroll if the situation warrants. No invising through quests; she stands and fights everything (although she’s been learning to kite because trying to stand one’s ground in a horde of angry Shadar-Kai assassins can be a bit TOO exciting sometimes). She Cocoons if she gets down to around 900 HP and usually doesn’t need more than one Cocoon per fight, if that. I have to admit, I’m really liking the thought of a level 30 Even.
I debated epic TRing at least some of my 28s before the update hit, but aside from Even, they all have a lot of saga quests to run, and that should help them all get the last two levels. Maybe if I’d been seriously thinking of TRing any of them to begin with… but I wasn’t. The next two to TR will be Meren (from rogue back to Favored Soul) and Ivy (from paladin to arty).
Char is enjoying her third life; she’s now a lvl 5 druid, although sometimes she kinda misses her ranger days. Vic is back up to 28 after an eTR a while back, joining Even, Jall, Dissy, and Zak at the (old) epic cap. Chalei’s still 26, and Laegonn just hit that mark as well; Acanthia’s up to… OMG, I forget, 24 or 25 after a semi-recent eTR. Meren, Riva, and Sere are also 25; Ivy’s 24; Winnie’s banking 19; Thangie and Getting-the-bank-bard-I-never-intended-to-play are 18; F2P alt Amie is 13 (and soloed her way through the LoD chain at lvl 12 because she wanted to see Eveningstar); Reera’s banking 7, and my new barbarian Tuna (short for Niituna) is 7.
OK, that’s actually 19 counting Amie, but she’s on her own account and doesn’t get much playing time, although she HAS managed to get her little guild of one up to level 20 and is the proud owner of a Windspyre Sparrow.
*sigh* Blogging is fun. But I have somewhat less free time than I used to, and I’d really rather be playing DDO.
Even Now 