Fist de Yuma - April 27, 2004

Another bad week It has been an especially bad week for my family. It started with Rosa's father having another heart attack. This time they had to fly him to Phoenix. Two of Rosa's sisters started driving to Phoenix to be with him. One was the sister recovering from cancer surgery. She started bleeding and had to be rushed to the hospital. We drove up on Friday and got there as he was in surgery. Everything was looking good. He was feisty and seemed to be recovering well. Others in the family were driving up and we were planning to how to best take care of him as he recovered. We went to my brother in law's and house for dinner. Most of the family returned to the hospital. One brother in law and I stayed at his house. We got a call a few hours later saying he had been transferred to ICU because of a drop in blood pressure. A short while Rosa's sister called and said he had passed. This is a very close family and the father was well loved. Everyone was in tears. Devastated is not a strong enough word to define the effect on the family. So it will be a very short column this week. We are making arrangements for the funeral and expect many family members from around the country to be showing up. I hope to have a column next week, but my play time will be severely limited. Disappointment After finishing up last weeks column I logged on Deadeye Fist for a little hunting. I have him in the 60+ matron for three reasons. Number one is that the 80+ is to much work to be fun. The Muts eat him alive. Without a shield he takes massive damage. I can live but I'll burn a full healing kit in an hour. The second reason is Granite. The 80+ does not drop any at all. The 60+ was dropping it a lot. With a very large need for Granite, I have to have a player hunting it full time. Lastly the 60+ is mostly empty, especially late at night. This lets me relax and not worry about stepping on someone's toes. Well I got a very big disappointment. I hunted an hour and got zero Granite. I got a lot of great loot, so it was not a waste of time. Most of it I'll stick on a mule and likely never use. Much of it I grabbed because I know a vassal will need it. So the trip is profitable. I get a few million xp and I help out my members. Sadly I'm going to have to find a new spot, as I really need granite. I'm going to start exploring until I find what monsters drop it. Hopefully they will be worth hunting for other reasons than Granite but Turbine policy on Granite makes me think I'll be disappointed. Luck at last We were doing our Wednesday night VoD hunt. I really look forward to this night. It even let me get in a touch of hot water because of playing during family time. (g) The XP is nice but it is more for the fun and adventure than anything else. I was finding that I really needed to use my Drum in VoD, as even a handful of points made a big difference. With the Drum I was at 452 War and 447 without. Those 5 points also added to my Creature. Much of the time I was using the Awakener. That would push my Yield capability up to 434. I had two problems arising from not using a well tinked MCI. (Magic Casting Item) The first, of course, was I was not critting as much. That was not a major problem, but I was use to having a lot more crits. The second is the drum does not have a Mana Conversion bonus. So I found my mana draining a lot faster. I think there is an upgrade to the drum out there, but I have not bothered to look it up. I was surprised that Nene wanted to fight the Jell-O's. They are not very good XP and can be very dangerous. Nevertheless Nene had us attacking them a lot. What I did not understand was Nene knew something I did not. After we killed off a set Nene yelled to go loot. This was a small group for us so I was looting. Normally I just sit back and wait for solo hunts to get any loot. What I did not know is the Jell-O's are dropping some outstanding loot! In two battles I got a 21 - 40 +10 +11 wms 7 acid sword, and a Major Self staff. Now my loot luck is generally poor to poorer. When the hunt was over I decided to see of my luck would hold. I had Nene hold the staff and loaded Cliff's Carrier Cook to try and add some Black Opal to it. I figured if I could land on it this would make one outstanding VoD MCI. Well sure enough, my luck held. I now have one outstanding MCI for VoD. It solves all the problems I was having with the Drums but adds a small one. I will have to keep pushing Creature a lot more than I planned to make up for not using the Awakener. Disappointment part II In my desperation to find granite I downloaded a program that tracks loot. Loot tracker is a nice little program but is only as good as the data provided. As of yet there are not enough people using it to get a solid tracking. I first checked for granite, and it gave a few monsters with a fair drop rate. I noted that there were not many samplings so I took it with a grain of salt. Still it was better than nothing. I noted that one of the bigger hits was a low end Tusker. I decided to go check out one of the dungeons that have this Tusker. I loaded up Death Mute. To tell you how weak the Tusker is, I did not bother to buff him. Two complete passes through the dungeon netted ten units of Granite. I found a six and a four item. I noted that my killing several hundred of the Tuskers without getting much Granite dropped that monster from the list in Loot Tracker. Hopefully more people will start using this program so we can get a larger data samples. Meanwhile Turbine really needs to take a look at the Granite drop rate. At the current rate I'll never catch up with my weapons. (My editor thinks Lugians drop Granite. I'll check them out soon.) Virindi adventures One of the main targets in VoD is Virindi. The two types return a massive amount of XP and good items. They are very nasty but their relatively low hit points make them a good team and solo monster. One thing we are finding is that many times the Virindi will target whoever starts the battle and will do their best to take him or her out. Normally Nene will be the one to start the battle. She is the one who leads the group, and we all jump on what she targets. Ever so often I'll take the lead in a battle. We were finishing up an Olthoi battle. I got a hit with Bandit on some spawning Virindi. I did not want to have another group grab it before we could so I ran over to them. I waited until the last Olthoi fell and typed, "Here". I then hit my target Virindi with Yield. I was ready for what came next, which was why I survived it. Our group caught with me about the same time as the Virindi hit me. I took a little damage. I did not want to be even close to hurting so I healed it. I then went into total heal mode. Our healer helped keep me alive. Halfway through the battle he hit me with a dispel to help limit the damage. Even with two people healing and a clearing of de-buffs, I was within one spell of dieing during the battle. Fortunately my heal hit before the next War spell. When three Virindi are attacking you, things can get troublesome for anyone. Until there was only one Virindi I was doing nothing but heal. Virindi are rewarding both in XP and loot but there is always a risk of losing the battle against them. Do I play too much? I was playing around with Treestats one day this week. I decided to take a look at how long I had been playing in the game. Treestats tracks your real life age and your in game age. So rather than Turbine's month, days, hours it had days and hours. I was surprised to see that Fist has 104 days 1 hour in the game. That is not a lot by some standards. I know that Cher'okee is sitting on over six months. Where I start to exceed the standard is when I take a look at more of my players. Mage has 101 days and 4 hours. Now I'm starting to get some numbers. I wrote down the numbers for ten of my Morningthaw players. (Three well played mules plus my seven playable.) I have more than fifteen players in MT so this is not a total. I also have a lot of hours on other servers. Still I did not want to make this an all day project so I just grabbed what was easy to get. The total was 294 days! So I'm not all that far off from having a full year of playtime. While my play is not as great as it was when I first started, I still spend a lot of time in game. It will be interesting to see how long it takes me to get a full year of play in. (g) Being goal orientated can add a fun to even little things. Allegiance I get a lot of requests for information about our allegiance. Our web site is Casadeyuma.com.