Fist de Yuma - April 1, 2003

This and that First off, thanks for the kind words and advice toward Jeff and Rosa. A lot of people have sent me letters and talked to me in game about them. Rosa is doing great. The doctors expected to be putting her on pills but diet and exercise has lowered her numbers without them. The doctors were not shocked but at least surprised she was able to do it. They don't know Rosa like I do. We don't know how long this will last but we hope a few years. This is a nasty disease that will keep getting worse. The doctor said she will go blind but if she does things right it will be very late in life, like her 90's. If she does not do it right it will be far sooner. Jeff can send out e-mail now. He said hi to all his friends and said he missed them and AC a lot. He is safe but darn tired. He is lucky that we send him boxes of stuff every week. Most over there don't have family support and get nothing at all. Jeff shares a lot of what he gets so we send as much as we can afford. I think his wife Markey cries every day but she is hanging in there. We give her what support we can and Rosa talks to her every day. Ok funny story. There is a reader who is sending me a home built computer for Rosa to check e-mail and browse. He wrote me that the project was delayed. It seems his small child wanted to help his dad. His dad found the chocolate milk and computers don't mix. It was so bad that he had to toss the computer. When I told Rosa she was more sorry for the father than anything else. We don't have any kids but are around them all the time. So we understand. We can only imagine how it happened. Return to FF Long time readers might remember when I was testing the "Fist" template. I made something close to the final version on FF years ago. Someone made a post asking if I ever go to FF and it made me want to do a tour of the servers. When I logged on FF I was in a bit of a trap. I had logged next to my lifestone in the deep south along the ocean. This is the one you get to by traveling west from Mayoi. It was a nice spot with two portals close by. If course it had changed a tad since I was there before. A 16lv had no trouble hunting there. It was mostly Mud/Water golems with the worst thing being Ash G from time to time. When I logged there today I was surrounded by some high level nasty Drudges. Not something you want to face with a 16lv. They also blocked the route to the portals. Fortunately they were far enough away that I was not attacked. With movement impossible I was in a quandary. Lifestone would only bring me right back where I was. The Lifestone recall spell did not exist when I last played him last so that was out. I had no idea what my tie was but it did not matter, my Item is too low to toss the spell. Thank God for marketplace or I would still be there. What I needed from the marketplace was a patron who understood I would not be playing on FF much. From there I could get a portal and then hit the LS in a place more reasonable for my level. I was in a fairly nice alliance the last time I was here. I was hoping I was still there but after almost two years I did not expect to be. I would have to depend on my luck and reputation to find a patron that would fit my style of play. Well my luck is holding. After talking to a lot of very nice people I met Otikda. He knew me from the column and was willing to take me on, even it I did not play there much. Porting into the mansion of the Marlana alliance was a pleasant surprise. I have pointed out that many mansions are virtually abandoned these days. This one was more like Elder's mansion. There were about 10 people there with members coming and going. What was really surprising is they had under 600 members. I would say that mostly are active players. They wanted to give me a lot of nice things but I asked for middle of the road stuff. I don't play FF enough to rate great stuff and as a 16lv did not really need it. I ended up with some nice 220 average armor and a few weapons. Given that it replaced a mattie coat and some al 101 leather leggings it was a big upgrade. My plan is to test the new monster balancing as a low level. Good but not overwhelming stuff and a willingness to play with self buffs. I might hit their buff bot to get Mana Conversion but that will be it. I think this will be a lot of fun. In the next month or so I'll be loaded up all my players on the different servers and getting them into good alliances. Then I'll play them a few times a month so I get a feel for what is happening at different levels. There are a lot of pretenders out there. We even had someone in Elder who has been mistaken as me. We are not sure if it is deliberate or not. So the only name to trust is Fist de Yuma. I have all of them locked up. Any other name is not me. Tusks It had been a while since I have gone and gotten Tusks on the islands. With the new plug in I have each quest of this sort I do will be recorded so I can see what I need at a glance. Other than the bumper car run through the 40+ I had little trouble with Deadeye. At 76lv and good melee defense most things do not touch him. Only worry was magic and at a full run that was not a big worry. Of course if trapped I had a good chance of being war'ed to death. Other than the 60+ each dungeon is laid out so you can run to them in order. Sliver, Armored, Plated, Rampager is my order. Like I have said before, I have a good memory of dungeons so it only took me a few minutes to get to the tusk spots. The only real trouble I had was in the Armored Dungeon. It was almost empty with no one at the bottom. I had to clear it before I could make to the Tusk room. Wouldn't you know it, as soon as I got the tusk people stared hunting there. I did not turn his tusks yet. I'll wait until my next level I think. Fist de Yuma Jr had a little harder job. He needed to hit the 80+ for a tusk. (100+ is out of the question for solo.) The last time I was there I was lost and ended up porting out when trapped. I kind of felt it might happen again so I got the 60+ Rampager before hitting that one. That meant backtracking from the Rampager. As I hit the 80+ I saw two people fighting there. They told me to head west. I hit a wall of Tuskers and had to retreat towards them. They added me to the fellow. I still had 30 minutes on the buffs and figured I could find a place to rebuff if I stayed. For some reason there were not many people fighting. I know this is packed most days. Whereas I did avoid a few hits any time I had three or more Tuskers I was in for a hard dance. I would mostly have to heal several times for each tusker killed. I had a limited amount of stamina elixirs so that was also a worry. Several times I had to use Heal Elixirs to get into healing range. There was one time where I hit 10 hit points as I drank the elixir. Traps were pure death. The only thing that kept me a live was a large supply of dispel gems. With hard fights about every ten feet keeping track of my progress was almost impossible. I was running a lot and would only fight when trapped. Those battles were mostly with six or more and each one was a chore. I hit a tunnel and was fighting my way in. A guy ran out of it asking where the exit was. I told him I was looking for it and we should team. He was running as I said that and did not reply. He ran off my screen. Other than the two in my fellow and him I did not see anyone else hunting there, very strange. After clearing the tunnel I found it led to a cave. I backtracked and in the next passage I saw a spot I recognized. There is a small cave with exits next to each other. You go in the one and out the other. That twists to a ramp and into the Tusk/exit room. The fight into the ramp was not easy. I would say another six or seven. With around 10 to 15 hits needed to take one down and them hitting me very hard a battle like that is scary indeed. To make matters worse as I advanced into it I was hitting traps. Each one required and immediate dispel. The tusk/exit room has a trap that almost got me. I was fighting three or four when I hit it and for a while was standing on top of it. I finally found a spot away from the trap where I could clear. I found a tusk and was ready to leave. Up on the wall edge was a body. I was not sure if it was the guy who ran by me or not. The room was still clear and I had a few minutes on my buffs. I sent him a tell asking if he wanted me to recover his stuff. I did not get an answer. With buffs ready to fall and the room filling back up with Tuskers I had to beat feet to the exit portal. I hope he got his body but he would need a lot of help. I learned a valued lesson. GSA armor will not work in the 80+. I was getting hit for up to 50 points! It would not take many hits like that to take me out. I figure I'll take Mage's armor next time. That has over double the AL of GSA. Tri-Spec I guess I lost track of something. Easy to do with all I have in the fire. When the patch came out it said they had shorted the skill changes to two weeks. I felt that would let me get the next item for spec'ing War and I would just have two more weeks. When I got there I found that I had all I needed to spec War after I got a gem to untrain Armored Tinkering. With Fist's Armorer tinkering skill in the mid 400's I could afford to do it. I sold off Armored Tinkering, moved Mana Conversion to trained. With the two points I had free that gave me enough to use my spec War gem. The xp I got back from the two skills I intended to use on Mana Conversion. There was a bug that fooled me. Mana Conversion was highlighted but it was really on War. I had over 300 million points and hoped to get Mana Conversion close to what it was. Well two clicks later all the xp was gone. O'well, adding two more point to War did not hurt. It costs me 172 million a point for War now and is a base 362. Of course I'll he adding to Mana Conversion for a long time. The Slot I decided to go check out the new monsters and see just how bad the plains are now. I was getting ready at the Mansion when Winter Raven asked me what I was going to do. She asked to go along. She had some SIK's to cash on steel chests. Because she had the Ladies Island recall spell we could meet at the Plains Rim portal. I found out a lot about my new vassal on this trip. After buffing we headed south to the slot. Winter Raven found that her bow was a lot less able to hit now. Those she could hit she was very effective on. A few times I had to toss a heal in her direction but for the most part we were not in danger. With me slightly in front and doing the de-buffing she was allowed to pick them off without as much danger. The big mobs had us fighting independently but she held her own no matter what. We were surprised to find a body of Xan at the second Slot spawn point. She had been killed by a hollow. That did not give me great confidence about Raven's chances as Xan is 126 in Raven is in the upper 60's. Xan was not on but Moby Dick was. He took care of informing Xan. It turned out that her and William the Bat were hunting and just forgot to get that body. She was grateful as several of her better death item were on it. The spawns are very different. There are a whole lot of Virindi of different types now. Virindi and Shadows seemed to be the main monsters that day. This might change as spawns sometimes get stuck on creating the same thing. This was great for me because, with the changes, Mages Magic defense is well above their abilities. With 330 magic defense I was seldom damaged with spells. Of course melee was another story but with my good armor I was taking little damage overall. After clearing a major intersection Winter Raven said she had to rebuff. This surprised me until I figured out she was using VI spells. Not only was she standing in with me during the big fights but she was using level VI spells! I added a load of VII Creature and Life to her and she did the banes. Now we were ready to rock! We hunted several of the branches of the intersection for a while. Lot of xp and great fun. I'll he happy when the loot improves but for now I'm very happy. We moved to the next intersection and cleared that. With an Archer/Mage team the spawns did not last long. They regenerate faster but even with that we kept everything so clear we had to move to find monsters to kill. I used my normal path to get up to the plains proper. There we got a little surprise. After clearing a spawn we moved forward to loot and clear the next one. The second we stopped a spawn of big black monkeys came. I have a natural reaction when hit with a sudden spawn, I run. I feel it is lot smarter to ID the monsters and decide to fight or run, while on the move. If you stand there and decide it might be too late. It also has the advantage that if you die, you die away from the spawn. Raven was right in back of me and stopped to fight when I did. I heard her taking massive damage and hit her with two over 100 point heals. That meant she had a hand full of points at most when I started healing her. The Assaulters are nastily hitters. After they turned on me we were able to clear without too much trouble. Winter had two problems. Her level VI banes had dropped at an inopportune moment. I believe she also had some de-buffs on. Here again my high magic defense saved me. If attacked with this many Assaulters imperil and bludgeoning vulnerability is deadly. With my resists I was de-buff clean. Buffs were getting short so I carved the four sings we had found and split them between us. She hit me with Brilliance so I could carve a high level heart we got. Now I can start stringing the Granite keys I have. I'm looking forward to hunting with Winter Raven again. If you happen to see her out hunting, invite her into your group. She fights far better than her level might indicate. Ooops After finally making 80 I was ready for Bobo. Of course I wanted as big a group as I could join for it. The most stable I know is the RD group. It is run twice a week with Saturday 4PM EST being the one I wanted to join. I buffed up and did the Hut part. I then ran to the waterfall dungeon and logged. When the time came I logged and sent a tell to RD. The group got there and we buffed up. With a mass of people there was little trouble. It is funny to see battles like this today. There will generally be around two or three mages and melees. The rest will be archers. Lot of twanging going on. We moved through the first two dungeons with no trouble or deaths. I was so safe that I did not bother to dispel the de-buffs from traps. Generally if I hit one and I'm attacked I have to dispel or die. The third dungeon is different from the first two. This and an oddly setup spell bar was my undoing. I had been leveling Fist's Armorer sticky on Tuskers. I started with low level ones and worked my way up. Other than the first 20 levels hunting Lugies Tuskers were about all I had fought. I also had been using Einstein a lot. Einstein lets me use two keys for all attacks. If I have one monster set for piercing and another for cold the same key will fire the different vulns or blasts. With this patch I had some instability with AC. In fact I'm locking up again and one outright crash. So it looks like I'll have to get a new Video card after all. Not wanting to use Decal while questing I had been using my hot keys. This was not as effective or as fast as using Einstein but it is what I used with mage for most of his lifetime. The problem was this was not Mages spells bar. Mage has the entire list of wars on the hot keys with the vuln's in the same order after them. I would use the mouse to click the vuln and the hot key to blast. When facing one of the things that look somewhat like a scorpion I wanted a spell that is on the five hot key with mage. Well that spell was not there. What was there was portal recall. Yep, almost at the very end, after 45 minutes of battle, I ported out. AB Run I decided I wanted to have Fist's Armorer lifestoned in AB. There are a lot of advantages to doing that, not to mention being able to hunt there. After asking a few people at the mansion if they had a tie and getting a negative answer I decided to run there. Here is where getting into a rut can cost you a bit. The best way to run to AB is to take the portal in Mayoi. That puts you past the west end of the landbridge. I had been use to using the land bridge portal in Qbar and totally forget about the Mayoi portal. I guess it only cost me 10 to 15 minutes but I should have known better. The run at first was smooth with little danger or even monsters worth killing. I did pick off a few Golems and such. I was surprised at the xp they returned. When hunting The Slot with Winter Raven I had Combater off, thinking that might be my problem with Decal. Given that my lockups and crash returned after I turned Combater on it is still not clear of suspicion. I might turn it off again and see if the problems go away. Meanwhile I'm getting good feed back on the xp I'm getting. As I got away from the landbridge things started turning nasty. I had been adding to Magic Defense with every point I could grab and, before hitting this section, it was working. After I hit the sandy parts everything started to land. I did luck out big time. As I hit the key to cast blade on a Grivver I locked up in the middle of the windup. I was sure I was dead and would have to redo the run. I was over an hour out so I was not looking forward to it. After rebooting the computer and relogging I was surprised to see I did not die. Despite my tossing an Arc spell it was blocked by a ridge. So I was not attacked. From there I rebuffed and decided to just run. I was almost directly south of AB at this time. It was a good thing I did because the stuff around AB is well over my pay grade. As I ran I was hit with de-buff after de-buff. The painful one was Weakness VI. With a low starting strength it does not take much to put me at burden. When running for your life you don't want to see that yellow pack up there. After finally having it wear off a passing drudge promptly reapplied it. I did not take much damage overall. I have a lot of experience with running to hard spots. I got several 5 hit point mules with 10 quick to Arwic. That was one of the most nerve-racking thing I have ever done. Hell anything above a rabbit could kill them. I finally got to AB and hit the LS. After I get a lot more magic defense I'll be doing some hunting around there. Bobo, second try I decided after the AB run that I needed Nuhmudira's Boom. The added 15 points to magic defense would be well worth the effort. I was going to check the boards to see what was happening and then head out on the quest. One of the posts on our quest board was a Bobo group forming up. I make a post saying I wanted to go and headed out to Tusker Island with FA. This is more like it. The 40+ was hunted to extinction with nothing but bodies between me and the temple. It was my last trip there with FA. Deadeye still needs a few levels but I'm not sure if he will be doing tuskers much. I waited but no one was showing up. I was thinking the quest was bust when I got a tell. They were already at the waterfall but would wait for me. I quickly added some run buff and headed out. Fortunately I was still buffed for the run through the 40+. I did not know if I needed to hit the hut again but decided not to chance it and did. I found that the person who talks to you will do so even if you are a long way away. I was halfway to the waterfall before he shut up. I was lucky that they were still getting ready. I was able to do a full Bobo buff before they left. I though I might have to do a few spells at a time until done. Again we had a powerful group. We had a lot of 126's and a full complement of archers. It was not a walk over but even when some peoples buffs dropped at the end we did not have any deaths. They just stayed back or in the middle and were never hit. I was not sure how useful I would be in the main battle. With only 387 War and Life I might not land. (Only 387, how we have changed.) I was told not to worry about it, they would have a Yield and other de-buffs on it. As we set out to battle someone yelled Northwest corner. I rushed over to hide behind the fighters and started blasting. Mom did not raise a fool, if I can hide behind a melee I will. I was surprised to see I was hitting right off. With several blasts of 500 or more I felt I had done my job. In fact I was only resisted once. I'm not sure if it was the de-buffers or a lowering of the magic d on this but I did a lot better than I expected. In fact I did a whole lot better than expected, I got the kill! Being 83lv and barely in the class of most there this was very surprising. It was a pure fluke as Mage with 395 War and Fist with 460 UA never got the kill. After getting the spell I searched out the magic defense shine. That got me 2 million points toward magic defense. I was hopping for more but that was a pure gift anyway. With the points from battles I was able to add two magic defense points. Nuhmudira boon I still needed to get Nuhmudira Boom. The first thing I needed to do was hit Maggies and get come locations and portal routes. I've done this quest many times with the full runs and wondering the maze so I felt using some aids would not hurt. Maggies site provided a link to a map! I don't know what was used to make this map but it is outstanding. I tried printing it but it would not fit on a page. Not wanting to play with it I just loaded it up in the background. After finishing off Bobo I headed to the mansion. I asked the people there if anyone wanted to go on the quest with me. Monte Cristo, Winter Raven new mage, missed the name and another player with a very long name joined me. I'll call him K as it began with that. Both Raven and K were below the 45 level for the best necklace so they will use it in the future if they are smart. Monte Cristo could use it right now but has a neck item he cannot live without. So the only one who got to use the item now is me. We headed to Qbar and took the Azaroth portal and then ran to the Stonehold portal. From there it was short run to the Library. I'm not sure how Turbine is going to change the lore on this one. The lady we are voting to save or kill has escaped and a member of the consul. I'll leave that up to Turbine as I have what I came for. I did not think we would have much trouble but I was wrong. K is a very low level and the fire elementals felt if they had to die they would take him with them. Fortunately K had portal recall and only had to make a short run back. After we got to the maze there are no monsters. We could remove our mana eating items and go without buffs. Using the map we moved slowly so as to not get lost. The map was a big help. I can read maps very well. I would track out a route where we could just follow a wall for most of the way. Getting the last four in the hard maze really slowed us down. We had to stop at each intersection and I would alt out and read the map. I would say it took a touch over an hour to make the run and gather the pages. It was a good thing that there were no monsters. During one alt out I had a total crash. Blue screen and error messages followed by a reboot. Before voting we buffed up. Knowing we would gather some vit, and K already vit'ed up, we wanted to have some buffs first. I had forget to keep my pre buffs and had a hard time getting my Creature spells going. I have a full set of VII spells but are missing most of the VI and lower. About the only pre spell I could find was a level V self spell. Finally I stopped fizzling and got the buffs going. We voted, got the vit and were ported outside. I made a portal to Lin for Monte and I. We met K there. I needed to read a bit more about the quest as I missed a few steps. That is what I get for trying to do a quest from memory. I had not done the quest for months and left out visiting the agent. I had them going to Xbar and during a battle K died again. I asked if he was trying to break William the Bat's record or something. I finally got my information correct and we had the steps set. Raven's mage and I hit the Idol dungeon in search of Broken Amulets. I knew we needed a Creature one to make the necklace work. You can apply a Life one after the Creature but as the best you can get is level V all we really needed was the Creature. That would give us the +15 to magic defense. We finally found a Broken Amulet but it was a Life one. Monty found one but it was life as well. I hit Maggies site and found we needed to hunt Grivvers and Bandies. I gave this information to them. With one Broken Amulet I could get the necklace and then get it to work later. I ported back to Lin and hit the dungeon. I already know a good spot to find the necklace so after a few short battles I had it. Monte was on so I told him to hit the dungeon. I explained the route and found him in battle after the jump. A short time later he had his. They had to leave but I was determined to finish the quest. Grivver Valley I had done the Flag quest a while back with Jr. As I remembered it there were a lot of the Grivvers of the type we needed there. I again headed to Stonehold and ran to the valley. I lucked out and got a Broken Amulet right off. I decided to get three more for the rest of our group. Since I was there I decided to do the flag quest as well. I found two more just hunting around and one more while doing the quest. I might have gotten more but I stopped looting. After getting the silk I just ran and only fought when I had to. To my surprise adding the Creature elixir got it working. I thought I needed to run to the desert town some time on this quest. I remember doing it the last three times. O'well it is finished and I should be taking even less damage now. When I see K, Raven and Monty I have the Elixirs for them. A good if long day was finally over.