Fist de Yuma - February 10, 2004

This and That I really intended to send this column to my editor on Saturday. I had it mostly written by then and my other adventures are being written for next weeks column. On Friday I started getting my first sinus infection of the year. I use to get them about twice a year but last year I had four. So I spent a lot of time in bed drugged up. With luck taking the drugs early will keep this one to a week instead of a month. In any case I was not able to send the column out to my editor. I spent a lot of time editing this evening but I know from history that I¡¦ll not catch as many errors as my editor would. If I stayed up until 5am doing the column Rosa would be after me with a frying pan. So please forgive my small errors, I did the best I could with another very long column. Possible path One of the things we have noted of late is some of the best things from AC2 are migrating to AC1. Allegiance chat is only one and it is possible that we will see many more. So it behooves us to keep and eye on AC2 as any change there might be a harbinger of things to come. Turbine has stated they are going to make changes to buffing in AC1. Looking at AC2 we see they have the ability to buff groups. This is a great idea. It will not relieve the boredom of buffing but will limit the drudgery to one person in the group, or at least spread it out among a few players. I have expected to see this change in AC1 for a while now. Turbine has just announced a change to that in AC2. It is a change that will bring chills to many in AC1. What they are going to do is kill off the ability to buff others with a bot or even another account player that is not in a fellow. If you are not in a fellow you cannot buff others. You cannot buff others outside of your fellow. Further restrictions have the buffs dropping in two minutes if the buffer leaves the fellow. I cannot be sure if these changes will come to AC1 but I would not bet against it. Rebuttal We get a lot of good information from Turbine these days. You may have to look for it but Turbine is on top of rumors and giving us the right information as soon as possible. Here was IBN¡¦s response to the AC2 changes. I wouldn't put much thought into this with regards to AC1. The magic systems of the two games are so different that many of these issues do not apply. For example, there are no spells that your character can cast on me that I couldn't (eventually) cast on myself. This isn't true in AC2 because of the skill tree system. In addition AC2 is focused much more strongly on group play than AC1 is, so their concerns about soloing don't really apply to AC1. It is possible that in the future you could see reasons that buffing manually is more valuable than going to a buff bot, but I wouldn't expect to see any changes of this scale going into AC1 regarding buff bots in the foreseeable future. (grin) This is good news for a lot of players. There are templates that will never be self buffing. They either use Items or a buff bot. Whereas Items work you are much stronger with a Bot. I was going to make a big push to get my last three non-self buffing players to self buffing. I can work them at a more relaxed pace now. What am I? I understand that glass thing but have some confusion on where I stand. A glass filled halfway is called half-full by an optimist and half-empty by a pessimist. When I¡¦m filling a glass and it reaches the halfway point I think it is half-full. When drinking and it reaches the halfway point I think it is half-empty. What does that make me? Fellowship spells? One of the great things about AC2 has been the ability to toss a spell on a group of people. While hunting in VoD the other day it would have made things much faster if the mages could have worked together with the buffing. While some of us were taking 4 minutes to buff, other were taking 10 minutes. If the mages could have shared the work of buffing, the melees could have worked on Banes and let the mages take care of the rest. Of course we felt group buffing was a pipe dream until this little blip of information hit the boards. It was in response to another subject but gives us a hint on what they are working on. Zyrca If it makes you feel better, I didn't even know that AC2 had fellowship spells until sometime after I started code work for them on AC1. I¡¦m not sure if that is a slip or if I missed something but we can expect fellowship spells sometime in the near future! Getting closer I got an Internet call from someone the other day. If course I could not answer because my microphone is still broken. This got me off my dead butt to start working on it again. I found a third mike to test it with and it still did not work. Just for grins I decided to try something we use to do back in Electronics class years ago. I plugged in the headphones to the microphone jack and tested it with a recorder. It worked! This means either all three microphones are broken or there is an incompatibility with the microphones and the computer. In any case the computer is eliminated as a source of the problem. Or is it? I found that the same mikes work fine on Slow Mo so it is a computer incompatibility. Still no matter what I did I could not get any recording from a microphone. I either need a totally different kind of microphone or an amplifier of some sorts. In any case I¡¦m more confident that there is a simple solution to this problem. An alternative solution After working for another hour trying to make my microphone work I decided to just do what I should done to begin with. I installed the phone program in Slow Mo. While it will require me to swap computers, that is only a button way. I would still like to get the microphone working on H2O but this will work in the mean time. Nice to know that works At 10:30 on Thursday night I had just started browsing the boards. Out of the blue I head a ringing sound. I quickly realized it was my new phone program! At last, a chance to test it. I hit my button to switch computers and fumbled with my headset. I answered on the forth ring. It was some nice Japanese lady who I think was just randomly dialing people. She said she was practicing her English. We talked a bit and said goodbye. Now that I know it works I can stop puzzling over H2O¡¦s mike problem. That may be something I need to think out someday but for now it is working. If you want to talk sometime I¡¦m on as Fist_de_Yuma. If I¡¦m playing I¡¦ll ignore the call but I¡¦ll see you called and try to call back. PK fun I¡¦m sure I¡¦ll get a bunch of kiddy VN DT insults over this but that¡¦s ok, it was fun. Al Bis Mal was wiping the floor with all comers at the mansion. Mal is a former monarch on DT who decided to swap to MT a while back. I was not sure he would fit into Casa de Yuma but he surprised me. He is one of my better members these days and a great future asset in the future allegiance wars. I decided to see if I had any chance against him. Normally PK is not my thing. For one I refuse to have anything to do with fast casting, which puts me at a big disadvantage. I also do not have a very good PK bar. While I¡¦m great against monsters, PK is a different story and needs a different setup. As it was I was swapping between bars looking for spells half the time. A lot of my problems was with the spell bar. I would hit a key expecting a result only to find I was on the wrong bar. I also have a few hot keys that got in they way of the PK fights. I have V set as blast and B as recover mana/stamina/health. When in a hurry it was far too easy to hit B instead of V. I would be standing there tossing recovery spells, while getting my end kicked, instead of firing off a War spell. It is not good to make yourself a standing target. Hitting stamina to health and being on the wrong bar caused my first death. I really did not want to do drain stamina. With my second battle I had another mage take a pop shot at me at a bad time. I was going to ignore Mal and go after the potting mage but he was white when I got back. (grin) At a lower level and without Mal¡¦s skills he was someone I could beat. I was not pissed as we were just having fun and anything goes. Besides, what good would it do? I then tried a different tactic. I treated Mal as a VoD monster and started de-buffing him to death. While it never got me a kill I did force him to use a lot of gems. After my de-buffs he could not land on me. I wanted to try a trick on him. I ran out away from the mansion. My intention was to draw him from the mansion and then use a fast portal to get away. I would then recall back to the mansion before he could. It almost backfired because he had de-buffed my run and I had a hard time getting separation. I was determined not to use gems and it was another disadvantage I had. He was smart enough to run back to the mansion instead of recalling. If he had recalled I was waiting to ambush him. After another death, again from being on the wrong bar, I tried a different trick. I re-buffed and ran to the mansion rather that recall to it. I got within range of Mal before he know I was there. My intent was to fire off a spell from range and then a vuln. If I timed it right the vuln would land just as the war did. If I did not one shot him I would at least have a short-term advantage. It worked, or would have it I had not hit the wrong key. Instead of hitting the vuln key I hit the Arc key. That was mostly force of habit as I do that often when fighting monsters. If you time it right you can land two War spells at the same time using a blast and arc. This will kill most monsters but barely dent most PKs. Keyboard habits you learn fighting monsters will not work with PK. Rene showed up and quickly buffed to join in the fun. She chased me a bit until I figured that Mal was only watching. I stopped and hit her with a Vuln and then a blast as she ran up on me. I figured I missed because there was no damage showing on her health bar. Her blast did not miss. I was around 1/3 heath and decided to just hack it out. I fired off another war and to my surprise she died! Talking about it later she also did not see any damage from the first spell I fired. There was either a touch of lag that kept us from seeing the first blast or I one shot her. As she has 330 hit points it was likely the former. While I¡¦ll never be a great PK player I hope to learn enough to lead when we have allegiance wars. VoD Hunt We planned on a VoD hunt for Wednesday at 9 EST. That is a touch late but the only other times I had available were too early. I spend the evening with my family and play during the day and late evening/early morning. I logged on to a large group gathered around the buff bot. We had not restricted this hunt to high levels so there were many who needed to use the bot for buffs. This was to be a fun hunt. We would not care about loot or XP. We were doing it for the pure fun of it and nothing else. The Casa de Yuma creed is to have fun and help others. If we level along the way then good but that is not the goal. I buffed up and ported to the VoD LS. I made a fellow and started adding people to it as they ported in. The new ability to add people from longer range and auto accept makes fellow creation easy. With around 6 people we started the run to VoD. A pure XP fellow in VoD will avoid many monsters and focus on the high XP/easy to kill ones. We attacked everything that came across our path. I made Rene the fellow leader. Her job is to make initial contact with the monster. Everyone else piles on what she attacks. My job was de-buffing. With a lot of mid level melees in the group I needed to de-buff the melee and missile defense as well as lower the monsters magic abilities. We had people logging in and joining us during the first hour. We soon had a full fellow. We added members as some left but kept around 8 people in the fellow more often than not. Rene showed the group how to trap a monster. This tactic is great for keeping a monster that tends to retreat to the spawn site in range. If you have the numbers it is also possible to use Heid¡¦s squeeze tactic to totally disable the monsters melee ability. Cher¡¦okee was red linking and needed to log off and on. The fellow was moving so I stayed back to pick up Cher when she returned. After she got back I added her to the fellow and we started searching for the group. We started getting deaths, two came very fast. I said, ¡§When I said come die in VoD with us I was only joking.¡¨ We found the group to the west fighting to clear two spawns of Jell-O¡¦s. These are about as nasty a group of monsters as you can fight in VoD. Their added abilities to de-buff make them even worse than before. I quickly got behind a tree, debuffed them. Then I would use slide and blast to start killing them. As the Jell-O¡¦s started running out of mana they charged. That made them dead meat but it took a while. We recovered the bodies. As our first hour past we sent the buff bot people to the mansion and had everyone else start buffing. I finished my buffs in about 5 minutes. We had others that were taking 10 minutes. Strangely it takes a melee a lot longer to buff than a mage. Not only do they have to buff their shield but each weapon they are using. Melees also tend to fizzle a lot more so it can take them twice as long as a mage to buff. I¡¦ll be very happy when and if they put in group buffing. At least let melees buff all their weapons at once. While buffing we had a funny thing happen. Dread Lord Shang was running to find us. I saw him pass by us with a horde of monsters on his tail. I gave chase in hopes of healing him. By the time I caught up with him his health was very low. I could barely see any red at all. I tried to hit heal but he ran out of my range before the spell went off. He came back towards me and I was ready to try healing him again. He said later that he was at 6 hit points for much of the run. Before I could click on him I found myself surrounded by Olthoi. The Sentinel was eating me alive of course. I had read that the Olthoi Sentinel will chase forever so I was looking for out. I knew it would be better to escape before I took to much damage. Otherwise stopping to port out might not work. I stopped and clicked Sanctuary recall. This is an instance recall and will get you out of trouble in a hurry. You may be surprised to know that when the game stared all recalls were instance. Of course the PKs took advantage of that and Turbine had to add in a delay. I died finding that out one day. I informed the group what happened and quickly started the run back to the group. Before I found them I ran across a pod of Virindi. I stared the de-buffing attack process when Dread Lord Shang joined me. He never was able to break from his chasers to join the group. With the help of a powerful archer we quickly dispatched the Virindi. Not sure how much it was worth to the group with the 2.5 klick limit we have. DLS and I headed into a valley. We found an Obliterator. I had read where these were not as hard as before so DLS and I decided to take it on. I quickly saw that if it was weaker it was not by much. Even after a full set of de-buffs and lots of hits with war and arrows we had barely dented its health. We might have had to give up but the group started finding us about that time and the Obliterator was quickly dispatched. Someone said it was worth over 2 million points! All I can say is I did not detect any weakness in the Obliterator. At the end of the second hour a lot of people were calling it a night. We lost Rene and Cher¡¦okee along with our healer, MT. The rest of us started buffing for another round. This was a nice group, a good balance between melee and mages. It was also small enough that it would work together better. Large groups can be a little hard to handle if they are not use to working together. We had; Al Bis Mal, 89lv mage and PK extraordinaire, Annunaki the sad, a 126+ mage, Red Dominion a 89lv Archer who played healer, Dead Lord Shang, 93lv Archer and of course me, 126+ Og Battle Mage and worlds worse PK. I played de-buffer and back up mage/healer. As we moved around we kept running into bodies of our members. We took a little risk and made sure they were recovered. They all contained change so it was ok. We removed the change to let the body go. We headed deeper into VoD. I saw another group so I tried to lead us away from them. After killing a group of Biles we ran into the second group again. As I worked the group around them I saw a death message and another person take off running. I tried to heal him but he ran out of range before the spell went off. The second group broke up after that and we added Gremere Jr to our group. He is a 104 swordsman. With the addiction of a good sword our group was complete. We found a nice valley that had a good mix of monsters. We killed off a Virindi pod first thing and then a group of the new undead. We only had one mix up. Half the group decided to attack an Olthoi mob at the same time as the other half attacked an Obliterator. This had us fighting both at the same time, not a good thing at all! As the Obliterator was attacking me I moved away from the group to keep it out of their hair. I saw a tree next to a hill and figured to trap it. Before I could the Obliterator charged back to our group. I¡¦m thinking someone sent an arrow its way. I figured the easiest to kill were the Olthoi. I started de-buffing and killing them off. When we finally cleared them we started in on the Obliterator. To say the least it was exciting. About this time I saw a death message from Dread Lord Shang. He gave me permission to loot but I was not sure if that was his first or second body. I looted the one that was close and rebuffed to search for the second. Annunaki the sad and Gremere Jr stayed with me. I got the location of Dread Lord Shang¡¦s body and found it was where I had just recovered one. DLS said there was only one body. About this time a pod of Virindi spawned. I figured we would take care of them before leaving. After we cleared them I saw a group of Drudges. Now everyone knows how much I hate Drudges. We decided to kill them off and then leave. The first draw had us fighting two of them. Not hard but of course one is better. The second draw also had two. In the middle of that battle four of the darn grasshoppers jumped us. I¡¦m generally a safe than sorry type of player. I would rather run before I need to than when it is to late to run. I said, ¡§retreat¡¨, and took off. It took a bit for the other two to follow my lead. It worked and we had it down to one Grasshopper and one Drudge. After we cleared them we finished off the Drudges and headed home. I returned Dread Lord Shangs stuff. We then spent another hour just hanging around talking. All and all we had a great night of fun and adventure. Shield hunt Ever so often Turbine will mess up. For a short window the players will get an item or items that will never be attained again or will be much harder to attain in the future. What comes to mind as never again is pre-patch armor. For those that don¡¦t know the term, it is extremely low value armor. For one month armor with a value of 5k or less was dropping. We did not know this was a bug so many of us did not take full advantage if it. The pre-patch armor that is in the game is likely all that will ever be. That was why I wanted to cry the other day when I failed on the 10 tink of some pre-patch leggings. As it was already at a higher al than any leggings I had I should have quit with the 9th tink. I had a 90% chance. Unfortunately I have an almost 100% failure rate with anything less that 95%. Turbine has admitted that the current drop rate of the Nefane shell is bugged. It should be some low rate but is currently dropping at 100%. The Nefane Shield is a must have for any melee. While a bit heaver than I would like to see, the spells are outstanding. While the Moderate Impregnability might not be all that useful the Moderate Invulnerability is darn hard to find. With four melees, and a hatred of having to swap to items between players, I decided I was going to take advantage of this bug. I lucked out that the patch was delayed a week. I never got a chance to go hunt in the first part of the month. I already had one shield so I just needed to find three more. I put the Nefane on my Bandit Sight hit list and ported to the Bore. Of course I should have put Listris Nefane on my hit list, as there were a bunch of Glissnal that kept filling up my screen. While worth killing they were not my target. For short cuts sake I¡¦ll when I say Nefane I mean Listris Nefane. Right off the bat I could perceive that this might not be a good day for me to be hunting. I had a touch of lag in the Bore and found myself headed down a passage I did not even know existed. I finally got turned back around and was able headed in the right direction. I had to kill a few Tuskers to make a path and was at less than half health when I hit the exit. I decided to keep heading east after landing at the Caul drop off point. I hit a big drop and took a little damage from the fall. I cleared out a bunch of Mites and Rats until I had a clear spot to plan. I decided to just run around, going east when I could, until I found a Nefane. I would then clear the trash around it before taking it down. After a short run I found one in the middle of a bunch of Dark Zefirs. It took a while but I finally clear them and was ready to take on the Nefane. It is easy to kill compared to the Dark Zefirs and I did not expect any problem. I fired off the spell, ¡§out of comps¡¨ was my answer. Out of comps? I had just stocked 2000 tapers the day before. It seemed I had burnt most of that 2k in the VoD hunt. So with the Nefane just three or four spells away I had to let it go. I was extremely frustrated. I ported to the Sub and ran to the Martine vender. I restocked and headed back. I had to wait at the mansion for a bit as the Bot was in use. He has the bore portal I use. I finally got the portal and was off for my second try. The run through the Bore was, if anything, harder than my first run. I got trapped and had to fight my way up the passage a step at a time. With a body about every 10 feet I¡¦m guessing that many fail this trip. I started running east again after hitting Caul. After making the same jump as before I ran up a hill to another jump. I followed the canyon wall for a bit and found an opening to another canyon. After a lot of running I got a hit on a Nefane. I ran up a hill and started to clear the chasers. I¡¦m guessing that I was kind of de-buffed to purgatory and back at this point. In hindsight hitting a gem might have saved me. I did not have a gem on my hot key and by the time I figured out I was in trouble it was to late to dig one out of my pack. I was attacked by a hand full of Mites and Rats. I¡¦m sure there were a few Dark Zefir in there as well. My plan was to heal until most returned to their spawn site and then clear the rest. Only they were not leaving and each heal started a bit below the last one. A stamina to heath did not help much as all the melee attacks had lowered my stamina. What got me was being stubborn. After all the time it took to find the Nefane, and having already lost one, I was determined to hack it out. Instead they hacked me down. Now I was in big trouble! I had no idea where that body was. I had run through enough canyons that a direct run to the body would likely be impossible. Fortunately all I had lost were DI¡¦s. Still I did not want to lose them as they are kind of hard to get. I buffed up and did last portal recall. This time there were a few people fighting the Bore monsters. Once I got around the battle there was nothing to stop me from going to the portal. I decided that the best way to get back to my body was to follow my exact route as before. I have a good memory so it would be possible. Still I had made enough turns and jumps that I was not confident of my ability to repeat the trip exactly. The only unsure part I found right off. This was a hill I had run up. It took me a few minutes to find it but after that the route was straightforward. Just follow the wall and bare left when there was an opening. So I found the body but recovering it was another story. It was just inside the detection range of three big spawns. I would have to clear out a group of Mites, Dark Zefirs and Rats. To make matters worse the only path to the body was within detection range of two more spawns. I cleared out the two spawns that blocked the way to the body. As long as they did not spawn too fast I had a place to draw the other monsters to. I ran up to the body and watched the spawns closely. A bunch of Rats and Dark Zefir charged me. I ran to my fighting spot. The battle was more healing than fighting but I was able to kill one Zefir before half of them retreated. The rest I cleared but it was a close battle. The Dusk Zefir that spawned near my battle did not help much. It started chain casting at me like he was a Wisp wantabe. It took six such battles to finally clear the body. In the meanwhile I lucked out and had a Nefane spawn next to me. That gave me one Shell, two more to go. From there I moved out of that dead end passage to a more open battlefield. I started clearing out the Zefirs and a lot of Mangy Carenzi. I got another hit on a Nefane and cleared/killed it for the second shell. From there I decided to just clear all the spawns and see what replaced them. In about five minutes I got another Nefane to spawn and had my third shell. I¡¦ll be heading back there with FA soon. Fist de Mage is great hunting there but he really has no need for the xp. Fist¡¦s Armorer is my future mage powerhouse so he is the one I need to keep hunting with. With all my melees having a shield I don¡¦t need to do special hunts for the Shell. Others in my allegiance need the Shield I¡¦ll not pass on a chance to get one. Dolt Moment Sometimes you just plain forget things. Later the same thing happens and you are left scratching your head when the answer is right in front of your nose. When someone points it out you go Dolt! Our guest writer this week pointed out that the Bore is such a pain because it is double spawning! The two Guardians at the end should have been the finisher. Everything was double so why did I not see it? Pure brain fart. My other guest writer pointed out a math error I made last week. When using a computer calculator I really miss the comma¡¦s a good calculator will give you. I missed a zero so my calculations were off by a factor of 10. This means not 80 days to 200 but 800! I know a lot of people that could hold a 50 million a night standard for 80 days. I don¡¦t know anyone that could do it for 800 days. The high levels chainers will not be going anywhere but the new people will be leveling at a much slower rate. No wonder our no chain allegiance has been at such a handicap leveling wise. Guest writer; Krieg Pfeil There was a math error in your article. You were figuring the days it would take someone to reach level 200 and then max level. Instead of using the 50 million/day you stated you figured it with 500 million/day. 500 million is 1/2 billion per day, 40 billion is then 80 days like you stated. It would be 800 if you were doing 50 million/day. This just shows that even if you level hardcore you can't do what the chains can do. This is because under the old system for every point of experience a character in a chain earned by leveling more than 6 times that number passed above him to the chain. With the way turbine has proposed doing it as of the next update the amount passed above someone in total will be less than the person actually earned. According to their caps the max you can pass to your patron is 90%, he can then pass 10% of that to his patron who passes 10%, etc... which caps passed exp at 99.9...%. This is not a bad thing at all since I think earned exp should be higher than free exp for characters in game as a whole. What this system allows you to do is to level mule type characters directly, it would be easier if you could swear characters together that are on the same account, but is a big help none the less. This lets small groups of people set up their own exp groups and be as effective as those who setup their entire allegiance to passup exp. By preventing the exp passed into a chain from being greater than the exp actually earned it prevents large exp groups from exploiting the system and gaining ranks of level 200 characters that literally have not seen the light of day. Like I have said before I play on DT and have only played on DT. I enjoy AC in both a PvM sense and a PvP sense as I think it is a great game. Everything that is wrong with the game I can associate with the VN DT crowd. You don't have to point out the fact that they are idiots, childish, etc at best. It is like saying the sky is blue. If I spent the time to prove everything wrong that people posted on that board, I would have time for nothing else. Why waste time on them when it could be better used or at least funnier to use elsewhere. Thanks. Guest writer; Aelryinth of Leafcull Druge Seraph Mystics outside the dungeon use lightning as well as acid...I have yet to get back into the dungeon to see if they updated the ones inside there. Caul Island seems to be divided into spawn zones by various beasties. To the north, the Margul seem to rule. To the east, I run into a lot of the new Rifts popping up stuff. Haven't been to the west...time to explore more, I guess. Of course, this could be just observational error. The level 160+ stuff is all VOD quality stuff, but is only found several clicks from the drop point. The Drop from the Sing Bore is now the exact same as the Caul Island Recall. The reason the Sing Bore is so dangerous is simple...it's double spawning (something that has happened to the BSD's and the Tusker Temple in the past). I.E everything is spawning twice. The Two Guardians at the end was the tip off...not to mention twice as many minions as there used to be. So they didn't really add much new stuff...they updated what was there. But now there's twice as much as there used to be because of the double spawn! Is this deliberate or an accident? I'm inclined to think the latter...why have two unique virindi at the end? And as we know from way back when...hordes of stuff on fast spawn is death no matter what level you are (I got killed by the druges as well when they respawned). For Caul Island hunting.. Single Melees/Archers: Buff a slash render and a cold render. If you have Blud, you can sub that for slash rending. So far, everything out there has proven to be most vuln to cold or slash to this old sword guy. Axe guys been happy to tell me that their hammers are doing more dmg on the Margul then their axes, and are also nice against the Carenzi and the zefrits. The Rifts are annoying as heck. Slashing does okay on them...but they seem to auto buff Slash Prot as soon as I start hacking on them...which drops dmg to next to nil. Sigh. So far they are the only creature I haven't been able to effectively solo...even the level 161 Margul can be soloed, if you are patient. If in fellow: Armor Rending Slash/Blud , and Cold. Mage vulns, imps, go hack. My AR slashing was more effective then cold on the Biaka, the highest level Margul..but Blud was more so. Our mage had to throw two vulns...but it made more sense then wasting a war spell. My axe using buddy was crowing that he was taking kills from me as he plied the AR hammer I'd imbued for him...with no iron on it yet! heh. Biaka are living sing chests...lots of loot, and good stuff. Level 7's. The level 155 Hellions drop level 6 stuff. The most annoying them about them, other then the level 7's they drop on you, is they cast item debuffs...blood loather, etc. ugh! They also use about 3 different damage types each... If you want to hunt Marguls, be aware they move slowly and are easy to lure apart with people...but if you throw out vulns and imps, you pull TONS of them from a much broader range. I think this is a Good Thing...if you are patient you can pull out 1-2 at a time...if you hammer arrows or vulns into a mess, you get a horde on you and had better run. In terms of xp and killing difficulty, you are actually probably better off running around the dires and killing drudges (esp cabalists), gotrok titans and banderlings then most of the Caul stuff. In fellow, the xp/hour is significantly lower fighting the Margul (who are 500k a pop) Biakas then being out in the VOD at 20 mil+ an hour. However, there is a LOT more loot in killing Marguls. And I just heard Tusker Obliterators in the VOD had their HP halved and xp upped...they are now easier to kill then Mowen. Heh! Olthoi Sentinels have been downtoned as well...the mages are now popping them. Which is good...running thru VOD was a death sentence if a Sentinel got on your tail...impossible to outrun and doing hollow dmg for click after click...I always had to stop, turn around to get my shield in front, heal up, and hope the bloody thing ran away.... I don't expect the Sing Caul to be an important hunting ground for anything more then a very loot hungry fellowship, as the xp is so low...and the creatures in the VOD all drop the same level of loot too, and with less seeming risk. ==Aelryinth of Leafcull Guest Writer; Rene Romanova My thought on the VOD hunt All in all I had a good time last night. I have some suggestions on how to make things safer and more organized. I hope to do this again soon. In no way is this a criticism, just a few helpful pointers on making things go more smoothly. 1) Never charge in - we are always at a disadvantage going into a spawn spot. Always have archers or mages try to draw the mobs. We had several deaths due to this and then had to recover in the spawn. 2) Use terrain - the trees are our friends. For magic casting mobs we can hide behind trees and rocks and attack when we are ready, taking minimal damage. 3) Use group tactics - there are many techniques here. I'll mention only 2. Set up a melee wall so mobs can't get to the weaker melee-d folks. Surround the opponent - the mob can't escape if he's trapped. Grievers are famous for taking a swing or two and bailing. It's hard to kill what you can't hit. You can also use trees and rocks to help surround. 4) Know your mob - have a leader call out an attack type. After several times you will remember what type of damage to use on which mob. Also, some mobs simply aren't worth the time and effort to kill. They take too long to bring down for little xp. 5) Designate rolls - we did this pretty well. We had a de-buffer, a healer, and a target leader. 6) Use CS or CB weapons. Rending does not help since the mages usually throw an lvl 7 vuln on the mob. You will get higher or more crits. 7) Attack as a team. Always try to concentrate on killing 1 mob at a time attacking 3 or more makes it a 1 on 1 or at best a 2 on 1 battle. This causes death, confusion and lack of cohesiveness. Mages should de-buff(missile-d, melee-d, healing rate, and sometimes weapon), vuln, imperil, then go to war. This makes archers and melees very effective. If done properly and with party strength, the mages won't end up killing most of the mobs. 9) Buff as a group - if possible this makes the whole team effect, if your mages are buffing and melees are done and start fighting, this makes for long, costly, ugly battles. (Editor: I find that this is more likely Melee still buffing and Mages running off to fight.) 10) Buff in the same area and away from spawns - enough said 11) Don't draw mobs to the buffers - if I had a buck for every time someone drew a mob to someone buffing I'd be rich. This is absolutely foolish and gets the buffers killed. If you must attack something move to a clear spot. Some mobs AI (like tuskers) will send it to the next target when it gets bored and if the buffers are too close it gets ugly sometimes. 12) Inscribe your DI's - well and a lot were not inscribed, at one point IƒºI saw a lot of them last night. had 3 people's loot on me. Lucky I got most of them correct. 13) Remember that other VOD hunting groups can be very harsh on people new to the VOD or low in level. Be prepared to not be accepted into a fellow even if you are lvl 126. Gaandar's add I would like to add: 1. If you can't kill a creature solo, don't start the attack on anything unless you're the lead. 2. If you're under level 85 or so, you can't kill a creature solo. (Editor: Gaandar has said this is an insider joke and not to be taken seriously.) 3. Don't start the attack on anything unless you're the lead. 4. If you do start the attack on something, fight to the death instead of dragging the creature back to the buffers (you can call for help). 5. Don't try to run through or close to K'neth or Grommies (personal experience) (twice) (ugh).