Fist de Yuma - February 25, 2003

This and that Last weeks column created a firestorm. Even things I thought quite tame raised some heat. In hindsight I should have pulled one of them. I was going to but the rebuttal was so good I kept it in. Nevertheless some of the words were harsher then they should have been. I'm adding another rebuttal in this column. I'm not taking credit but the day after the column came out several names were put up on the hall of shame. I'll believe they are taking action when I see the macros gone. The strangest thing was I took tremendous heat from the Elder board on people fighting under their level and no heat from the General board. The General board is one you should only visit with flame retardant on. For some reason the General board felt I was spot on. I could be taking on more responsibilities in the near future. This will mean that what I write here will not only reflect on myself. This will not change the tone of my writing but you'll be seeing far less controversial stuff from me. I'm going to try and focus on the great people who play this game. I'll still write about my adventures and missteps but if it is embarrassing it will be about me, not about others. I think for Non-AC and political stuff I'll create a mailing list people can subscribe to. It is easy to make such lists. It would give me an outlet to rant about things that have of no relation to the game. I'll be posting the link to subscribe to that soon. I want to also let this column be an outlet for others. Several writers have been printed here; some have their own columns now. I would like to help as many people expand there writing talents as I can. Rebuttal This was the first rebuttal about chains that did not contain curse words. He is clear and concise. It has not changed my mind about chains but it is good to know it has helped someone. From Cusseta1 Fist, I always enjoy your writings. I mostly enjoy the stories you tell of your adventures. That is what I like about the game. I enjoy logging in and having fun. I am mostly a loner in game and am very independent. I have never really had any vassals, but have made a lot of friends. I play the game along with four RL brothers, one sister-in-law and two nephews. Here is a link to my in game website. I don't update it as much as I use to, but it will give you a little insight in to my enjoyment of the game: http://roberto-eduardo.netfirms.com/ There are two topics you have touched on which I would like to address with ya. The first being playing styles. Ever since I started playing I hated to die. It just made me so upset. Almost all of my deaths are due to lag. Sometimes I would have to log off and settle down before I could go recover. Man, when sticky melee was introduced I almost quit. Lol (editor, A lot of mages did quit when that was introduced.) I am one of the people you may find in a lower level dungeon such as the tusker pits. I really don't spend very much time in dungeons because of fellowships and the pressure to kill kill kill. I like to have fun and in a dungeon like this I can have tons of fun with not much fear of getting killed. So next time you see a high level in one of these places think of me. I am a big ole chicken and stick to safe places. This is not to say I don't test my skills. Which brings me to the second topic. XP chains. My RL family went to Meginjarder and joined the chain. Eventually I had to follow so I could be with them. I hated to leave The Orions, but you gotta go where RL family goes. They convinced me to join the chain. It has really changed my attitude towards them. I finally have a high level character that can go anywhere and I am enjoying it immensely. With my new high-level character I can finally do things in game that I never would have been able to. I can also kill things I always use to be scared of. Thanks to the xp chains I am having a lot more fun. I have met a LOT of nice and helpful people in Megin. OG II being one of the main ones. He really cares about his allegiance. He wants us all to enjoy the game and be honorable. Sure there are people who have joined only for the chain and then leave, but you will find a lot who have decided to stay and have no regrets. There is always someone around willing to help out. And if you like quests you can find one starting up or being planned daily. I hope I have given you a small insight to another side of what you see in game. I love this game and have tons of fun. When I log in that is my main objective : what can I do to have fun. I hope you check out my site and see some of my accomplishments. Not everyone is here to be the best or to win. I am a perfect example. Keep the stories coming. I sure miss the Olthoi stories. When I went to the Olthoi Horde Nest for the very first time I thought of you and your stories. O, and when I made it to the end for the first time with no help I thought of you again and said to myself: "Wow! Fist would be proud of me" More rebuttal I got some nice cooking information from Lydia Itio. She also has a very good reason from someone being in a low level dungeon. From Lydia Itio Also, I did hear of an original reason for a high level to be in a lowbie dungeon. Shirley Star, a member of my allegiance, is a high level player IG but in RL a 70+ year old woman with cataracts. The higher dungeons are too dark for her to see, so her son escorted her to the brighter olthoi arcade. Fortunately, her eyesight is too bad most of the time to read the flames from the lowbies, but occasionally she does get her feelings hurt. We try to stop by the arcade to see how she is doing and get ppl off her back. I guess this game is diverse enough that you never know who you are dealing with. I can only imagine how bad the people who slammed here must have felt when they found out who she was. FA moves on After making 50 with Fist's Armorer I headed up the road to the 50+. Now this is more like it. Armored Tuskers are hard! They hit hard and have a high magic defense. At best I can fight three of them. The people are great. There was only one time when I was trapped without a group of fighters to keep me alive. A fast call for help kept me from dieing in that one. I told them, "Way to protect the mage gang." Someone thought I was being sarcastic but I reassured them I meant it. They did a great job. One problem I have is buffing my armor. To bane my armor I have to give it to Mage. This leaves me naked and there are times when a Tusker will work their way back to the buffing spot. I try to set myself so a tusker is blocked from attacking FA but that is not easy. I had one time when a Tusker came running in while FA was totally naked. The tusker ran around Mage and started wailing on FA. I was so unprepared for this that I went into a freeze. I could heal FA or attack the tusker. It would have been a lot better if I had one option because with two I did nothing. I could not decide which was better so I didn't do anything. Fortunately FA still had Armor and Bludgeoning protection on. I tend to buff a minute or so before they run out. Otherwise I'm sure he would have died instantly. After a few swings the tusker attacked another guy who was buffing. I shook off my shock and started blasting. Between us we burnt it up and no damage was done. I was surprised to see that FA had a lot of health left. Mule leveling The first day in the Tusker Armory I quickly made it to 55. The xp flow was about 7 million an hour so I was moving up fast. The only problem is having to have FA and Mage there. Mage is needed at the mansion a lot for Tinker duty and other things. Having FA leveling this fast is making some other problems go away as well. FA is sworn to a mule tree so he is pushing up three of them as he levels. CCC did not start with great stats and with the new spawns I'm not sure he can make it to the temples for changes. So he will stick to Dyeing, Alchemy and Magic Item Tinkering. I'm also building up his magic skills so he can buff people someday. Fist mule two I thought was going to be strictly a carry mule. With CCC not having the stats I'm going to make FM2 the weapon tinkering mule. It works out better this way as the xp can be focused. Cliff Bowman will remain a strict carry mule. I guess I could fix his starts and skills but I have Deadeye Fist so I don't need another archer. So he adds all the xp into strength. This will allow him to carry the heavy armor. I'm sure that there will be those out there with a "Gotya" and say this is a chain. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Yes they are linked but I linked them, not someone else. I provide all the xp, not some macro. They will never move to another patron. Nevertheless I expect to see some angry response on the boards on how I have a chain. Moonmist to the rescue Most of the time while in the 50+ today I was the low man by 22 levels. You might think that I would be ineffectual being so low. It turned out to be just the opposite. I was praised for making it a lot easier for them. I'm getting times when I cannot land but I get others where fire vuln is fired off several times in a row. It is starting to get harder to raise my magic skills but I can still do it several times an hour. I figure the next day I go there I'll start landing most of the time. After a few hours two people came in. One was a 58lv fighter. I was glad that to have someone close to my level. While deep into the dungeon I saw one Tusker. There were no fighters around but I have had little trouble defeating three so one was not a problem. Most of the time I don't do a full fight. After a vuln the fighters kill them faster than I can toss a War spell. It is better for me to just run around and vuln every tusker I see. As I hit the tusker with fire Vuln two more, who were out of radar range, came running up. At that exact time there was a full spawn. I went from one tusker to ten in seconds. Between healing and trying to get one out of the way I ran myself out of mana. I was at 20 heath and 7 mana. My chances of surviving this was slim and none. I had to give it a shot even though I was sure I was dead. I hit my heal V spell and a miracle happened, it fired off! Now I had about 90 health and 0 mana. The fellow leader had dropped a mana elixir on me the last time I was buffing. It was pure luck I had it. I used that to get some mana back and tossed another heal. A stam2mana VI had me back in fighting shape. I was still not out of the water. With 10 tuskers on me it was only a matter of time. While being so busy staying alive I did not see the 58lv fighter come running to my rescue. Somehow Moonmist had worked her way next to me. Given I was surrounded and my back to a wall I have no idea how Moonmist was able to do that. Her actions relieved pressure on me in two ways. She blocked the tuskers on my right from getting to me and some of the ones who could get to me attacked her. How a 58lv melee was able to stay alive in that mess I don't know. Moonmist had to stop fighting and heal several times during the battle. Free from the stay alive problem I was able to start vuln'ing and blasting the tuskers. After I killed two and Moonmist killed one it was all downhill for the tuskers. Not only was it a horded battle but it was the two lowest players that did it. I never met Moonmist before but that is one to watch. When I had to log off to start dinner I had hit 58lv and also leveled two of my mules. FM2 is up to 422 weapon tinkering with a goal of 500. I have not run the numbers but I figure by the time FA hits 85 (when he gets Armor Tinkering) FM2 will have the goal made and then some. O's so close Late Friday afternoon Fist's Armorer hit 60. This let me train Creature. I took Lore first as I knew he would need to get to around 65 before he can self buff anyway. Though I stared out with over 100 pyreal scarabs I ran out. I brought 4000 tapers with me but still had to have someone grab some for me. Non-stop fighting for hours on end will flat eat up the comps. During the last buff things started to get a touch bad. There is really only enough room in the Armory for one fellow. The max xp flow is with about 6 people. I'm not sure if it was school letting out for the weekend or what but a bunch of people started flooding in. Many of them were rude players. I had to stop vulning unless only my fellow was around. This means that as our buffs dropped we called it for the weekend. No use stressing over stuff. I still had 20 minutes on my buff and was pumping all the xp into Creature and Item. I knew I needed to get to around a base 250 in them before I could start buffing. In a pinch I could go with 240. With the fellow members leaving and the new players eating up a lot of the xp I saw I would not make it to 240 even. If we had the xp flow we had the day before I would have put a good dent in Item and Creature. As is I'll have to restart leveling him on Monday. I figure it will take me eight to nine more hours to be self-buffing. Scrolls I saw that there were some key spells missing on Fist's Armorer. For one I needed Fire Vuln VII. There were also some useful spells such as Force Arc that I needed to find. I had been cashing in keys but that is boring and iffy. I decided to head over to the marketplace and see what they had. I recalled to my house and picked up 100 plats I had stored in the chest first. Gambling may have eaten up my cash but it gave me a load of plats. Searching each trade bot for the right scroll was killer boring. To make matters worse my system would freeze every minute for about 10 seconds when in there. I'm not sure if that is related to my lock up problem or not. My lesser computer does not have that problem. After searching all the trade bots twice, once in the afternoon and once in the late evening, I got all but three spells I need. There are a lot of "Other" spells missing but I'll fill them with chest pulls. Of course one of the spells is crucial. Focus self VII is not a spell I can do without. I found a bunch of Focus other but not one self. The others are stam2mana, which I can live without for a while and Acid Protect Self. I'll just be careful about acid tossing creatures until I find that. I spent a lot of Plats but it was worth it. I figure it will only take me eight to nine hours before FA is self-buffing. Of course with a 10 strength start I'll have trouble carrying enough tapers. Drum While searching the trade bots for scrolls I noted a fire hide on one. As they are boring to hunt for I figured I would buy it. Prices vary a lot between the bots. Some are outrages, such as asking 20 plats for a scroll. (I found the Focus self but it cost me 20 plats.) Others are more reasonable and even low-balling. I got one of the scrolls I needed for a single plat. The last bot I was searching had the other two pieces to the Drum. They were overpriced (34 plats for the two) but I had the plats to spend. I got them and only needed to get it made. A quick port to the mansion let me get the carving and whittling knifes off a mule. I got a gem for the vender that is close to where the Tommie that makes the drum lives. After a short run and a few fights (new golem) I arrived at the Tommie camp. I quickly put it all together and had the Tommie inspect the drum. This will help me out a lot. With the Drum my skills are only one point lower than with the focus stone. My choice is a staff I have tinkered up but the stuff I was fighting had too high of a magic resistance to use it. The focus stone left me with very low mana. With the Drum I have my old mana back and more. I expect I'll have an easier time of it when I go back to Tusker island. Of course I will be hitting the 60+ this time. I'm not sure if I'll stay there beyond getting a Tusk. The place is renown for macros. With a macro camping very spawn it is not worth the stress most days. I'll see how bad it is when I get there. Of course my real goal is the 70 plus and Plated Tuskers. When I hit there I'll have a bad time but it will push me to the 85/90 range I need to be. Once I get his Armored Tinkering to 500+ I can make Mage into a Tri-Spec'ed and just use FA for tinker work. Checking out new spawns Other than the run to the Tommy camp I had not had time to check out the new spawns. I use the fast computer when leveling FA. This means Mage and Fist are on the slow computer. I figured I would wait until the weekend when Tusker island is too packed to hunt before checking it out. After switching accounts I gave the good armor to Mage. I also gave him my CS +14% staff to try out. That was a big mistake because he ended up selling it. At least FA has a Drum to replace it with. I lifestoned to AB and buffed. I headed west and then south looking for spawns. Right off I got a sing off of a Exec. I killed a few new Bandies and Drudges. I ran into a few new Golems. The place was flooded with Sovereigns. They are not worth the effort because of low xp and loot. I hear that will be fixed soon. I killed a few just to do it but this really did not look like Mage territory. There were far too many Mage de-buffers for my liking. I decided to check out the slot. The slot seemed to have normal spawns. They were a little smaller and regenerated faster but nothing drastic. After the buffs started falling I ported to Lin and sold off. I'll have to explore a little more and see how things have changed. New de-buffing method The next thing I wanted to look at was VoD. The big change was the run there. I found a lot more Diamond Golems than before. Of course that meant I arrived at VoD with Life and War inept on me. First thing I faced was the new Armadillos. While they hit hard, especially with the de-buffs I had on, they were easy to defeat. Not much loot but that is norm for the stuff there. The object is keys. The next up was some of the nasty Drudges. While fighting one I had a brain storm. While I have high magic defense (330) it is still a rare event when I resist one of these. During the battle they do good damage but nothing I cannot easily keep up with using drain one from time to time. Where I start getting into trouble is War spells, especially after a vuln. There was a time or two where a fizzle would have got me killed. After I rare resist I thought that if I take the time at the start to de-buff their magic the battle might be easier. I already was hitting my Olthoi Queen de-buffing bar to lower their magic resistance. With a 396 War I need more than Yield to hit consistently. While on that bar I lowered their War. That had me resisting their spells more often than not. Overall this meant a faster battle. Tossing a few added spells did not take much time and the fewer heal and drain spells more than made up for it. With that habit set I also decided to change the way I de-buffed non War monsters. The Lugies and their hollow weapons are not a great danger because of my outstanding armor. Still they were hitting me with consistent 20 hit point shots. The next one I faced I decided to lower their strength while doing the magic resistance. That was sure to lower the damage they inflicted. I cannot say for sure if this had a big effect or not but it cannot hurt. Examples of honor Some people take the word "honor" and have no idea what it is. Others see honorable people and see, "Fool". Those with personal honor understand and will gladly assume the name "Fool" if they can keep their honor. Honor is not about reputation. It is a personal thing that we hold dear. At times our personal standards of honor will cost us dearly and many times take great moral courage to maintain. In the end it is always worth the cost. I have an example where honor got someone in trouble because of an error. Correcting that error would cost him greatly. Because of the honor on the other side the cost was small. There was a bid on the boards by Insomniak. Someone named Twisted Chic got the last bid in, which was considerable. A few minutes after the deadline someone else put in a higher bid. Insomniak checked the bids and saw that Twisted Chic had made the bid at the last second without making other bids. Insomniak had a rule against making bids in this manner and decided to take the late bid because that person had been bidding all along. Last minute bids without bidding at any other time is called sniping and not allowed. This created and uproar on the boards. Insomniak explained why he disallowed the bid. Twisted Chic pointed out that he had indeed been bidding all along. Somehow Insomniak had overlooked the post as it was on another page. Insomniak must have been horrified as his error. The next day he made this post. Sorry about all the trouble. You can have the xbow today for nothing, its no big deal. I must have overlooked your post on the first page, A few people that have a distaste for me were HAPPY to point that out. This was going to be very costly for Insomniak. The bidding had gone very high for this item. Twisted Chic then shows his honor. Insomniak I'm in game and I do thank you for reviewing the auction. I do plan to pay for it, just waiting for him to get in game. Yes it was very nice for him to review the auction. So in the end it worked out for both parties. Both walked away with their honor intact. Arwic Security compromised I was porting into Arwic to run to the subway. I wanted to check out how the PK's were doing. With the new shield I was hoping that melee was making a comeback. I did not see any evidence of that but I'll keep monitoring it. I had wondered if it was possible to get into Arwic without going through the gates. The reason I thought about this is a PK idea I have. I think it would he a grand event to have an attack on Arwic. Maybe have someone or some item on top of one of the towers there. The attacking force would have to get the item or kill the person in the tower. For that matter just getting there could be a win. With narrow gates and high walls it would be interesting to say the least. One tactic would be to get over the walls without having to attack through the gate. So I looked for a way to jump the walls. I buffed up my Jump and found it to be 491. I have a few minor items I can add to that but it would only add a point or two. Jumping from a dead start got me about knee high. There was a rock close by but it was to far from the wall to make it over. I saw a tree but it was opposite of one of the towers so that was no go. The dirt piled up from the old holes was too far away and did not look high enough. That got me to the pillars near the west gate. These are left over stones from old Arwic. I found that I could get up to the closest one with a shift jump and from there it was an easy leap to the walls. Now I admit that few will have my jump but with today's cheat chains they can get those numbers in a few days. I guess a few people on the walls guarding against this might help but I'm not sure. There is also some stones near the south gate that might let them jump. I did not check that out but will soon. Crazy man I use to be called the crazy man of HoE. That was until Balash come into his own. His exploit's pushed me back to a "Bold" status. The below is an example of that craziness. My vassal Balash, better known as The Crazy Gharu Swordsman, wrote this. All start Saturday night when my former vassal Nabata send me a tell. She wanted me to come in the weekly Bobo's recall quest with her, so I can see her die at my feet. I recall to Kelci's mansion and I wait for everyone to show up. The quest started badly for me, as I lag out when I ran to the cottage. A reboot later, I am back in with Moby Dick sending me a tell. After talking to the NPC, we ran to the waterfall. At waterfall, someone accidentally recalled before entering the portal. Well, it's something that happens sometimes heheh. During the wait for this person to come back, I talked a bit with Miss Smurfette. Since we were so many, I was ready to bail from the quest, I don't like it when too many players are involved, I am more a loner. Well, she didn't take it well that I want to bail, she mention that I have gave my word that I would be the Quest Idiot. So, I decided to do all of the quest, naked, only with my shield and my fire sword. Nabata says, " You will be so dead LOL" Miss Smurfette says," Wear at least your underwear buffed" Linen says," You're nuts!" All started very well, the monkeys never had a chance we burn them very quickly, and each time they attack me, my super natural aura of craziest dodged the hit. In fact, I was hit only once during the first part of the quest, for 161 damage J. Don't think I held back, I was always on the front row to fight them!!! After so many portals that I can't remember, we hit the Throne chamber, and there we go to fight the champion. At the start, I was taking a beaten by all those coward missile thrower, but finally, they switched to more juicy target (Or, they listen to Crazy's roars). I keep burning the champion. (A burning monkey champion smells as bad as a burning monkey slave.....). Finally, William the Bat got the kill!!!!! And I had survived another crazy run.... As I always say, you are crazy when you survive doing something very stupid!!! We had 4 gharu swordsman in this quest, all in our fellowship. William the Bat, aka Batman, Nabata, aka the insane chick, A Fictional God, I name him the false god ... And your servant, The Crazy Gharu Swordsman.....