Fist de Yuma - January 13, 2003

Just in time Turbine Here it is Friday and really nothing to write about. I leveled Jr to 100 with a few hours killing in the 70+ Tuskerville. I built up a few bags of material with Hollow hunting. I killed a bunch of Broods with MS. Overall it has kept me busy but not great subjects for a column. Then the player notes hit and I have a bunch to write about. This is really exciting for us old timers. I applaud Turbine for helping out the people who have stuck with their gimps for so long. Elder and I will have dramatic increases in power. In case you did not read the notes yet they have found a way to change your stats after the fact. This will allow the first generation templates to repair our mistakes in character creation. Changes for Fist As I have said a few times here I started with 80/90 strength/coordination with Fist. The total stats were 80/50/90/70/30/10. It seems like a no brainier to move 30 points of endurance and max out strength and coordination. Of course it will take me six weeks to do that as there is a two week wait between changes. The only question after that is do I take 10 more endurance and put it somewhere? The biggest problem Fist has when in battle is endurance. I have solved this by pulling a magic item in battle and doing revit. With 30 to 40 points off endurance I'll have less stamina and it will drop at a faster rate. A while back there was a change made to combat. Your endurance drop is less for melee hits and swinging depending on your endurance and strength. I hear it is weighed in favorer of endurance a bit so the endurance lose might be more of a factor here. Of course with 20 points of strength and 10 points of UA added I'll be taking down monsters at a faster rate. I'll also have more melee defense and that might allow me to pull the magic item more. If I can pull the drum and toss revit without getting my head handed to me all is good. The biggest problem with pulling a magic item is I start getting hit at a vastly increased rate. With my very high melee defense I do evade but with what I fight any hit does a lot of damage. I saw a Hollow Olthoi take out a lot more people this morning, one a 126 archer. It does not take many hits to kill someone. I'll also have around 20 less hit points. With close to 300 this will not be a tremendous factor but I have gotten away from many a battle with less that 20 hit points. I was raising coordination. At over 60 million a point it is not going up very fast. I'll have to back out of that now and start raising endurance again. At 45 million a point I'll not be raising it very much. The good thing is I can raise stamina/health directly so I'll be able to get back the numbers. The stamina rate of use I hope is countered with my adding strength but I'll see when I do it. Mage changes The changes for Mage is just the opposite of the changes for Fist. I'll be lowering strength and adding endurance. At this point Mage's strength cost just under 5 million while endurance is over 5 times that. Starting today I'll be adding to strength to make up for the loss. With the changes Turbine has made to burden high strength is no longer a great advantage to a mage. I don't think I'll be going the 10/100 route. Just how far I drop strength I'll gage as I go. When in good looting places I get overweight in about 50 minutes but that only results in being slower. The advantages of more health and stamina in a mage will far outweigh the advantages of greater strength. Changes in Jr This is far harder to decide. The only place I need added is melee defense. The only place I can take away from as Focus. Being that Jr is more of a magic player this is risky. I'm borderline for VII's now and a VII life debuff is out of the question. What I need to decide with Jr is will he use magic for buffing or actively in combat. With more and more monsters having magic defense out of his range having greater quick might be better. This is something I'll have to think about before doing. The Rest Deadeye is about right on. I'll think about lowering strength and adding focus down the road. He gets Life at 75 and Creature at 115. Until then I'll need the high strength to carry the arrow load. I might dump some items off of Cliff Bowman and go get him more strength. He is a mule now and the 70 point strength start is a problem. Like I said the changes here are exciting. Life Magic changes This I'll take a look and see attitude with. At first glance drain one is back as the savior spell of choice. It will add only 60 points a shot but it is fast and can be reused a lot. The higher health drains we might see in PK but I don't see them affecting PvM much. Gaerlan Quest This is a great change. No more waiting for hours on end, wasting comps and mindlessly killing Elementals, all with the thought that it might be broken again. This is one of the fun quests Elders like to do once a week so the changes are a big help. Market place I really like this one. The subway will stop being filled with people. Mostly I ignored them but the lag can be painful when you're in a hurry. Another advantage is meeting people. As more people get into the game that could not learn Sanctuary it has been harder for people to link up. New players need to meet patrons so they can get to the mansion. Trades from the boards need a central location. All this is solved in one felled swoop. What affect it would have on PK remains to be seen. I can see people trying to hold the Market. If there are no portal exits the PK's might remain at the Subway. One advantage to the Subway is you can run there. There is nothing worse than porting into an unknown situation. Better to run there and scout it out first. Of course I would love to see more content but that was not addressed on the notes. People don't want to have me writing about doing the same quest 20 times. I may do the quests and have a blast each time but the readers want new stuff and I aim to please. Spelling There is one thing that irks me about a handful of people. These are mostly people who never write but are great at spotting mistakes others make. Often times their comments have several errors and they look foolish. The one thing that gets me is "Get a sell checker." This comment shows they have no idea what they are talking about. I admit I make far too many stupid mistakes. Being dyslexic makes it really hard to spot the correctly spelt but wrong word. Misspelled words are highlighted in red with MS Word and can be quickly repaired. So there are few if any misspelled words in my column. I might use addenda over agenda but both are legitimate words. When someone learns to grab meaning and not detail when reading such an error is easy to pass over. I spend a lot of time reading and re-reading this column to remove the errors. I kick myself when I see one after I post it. It is a great embarrassment to me when I see an error. I even appreciate someone pointing out and errors I repeatedly make. This has helped me remove flaws in my writing. I don't need some no talent hack telling me to get a spell checker. Gaerlan We will be very happy if the changes to Gaerlan work. We had our Sunday night quest set for 6PM EST. Someone did the quest a bit before so we had to delay that for an hour. Even then we had to wait over and hour trying to get it to spawn. While we were waiting for it to spawn another group showed up. They seemed like a good group. Given that there was no way we could prevent them from joining the quest I invited them to join us. That set the tone of cooperation rather than conflict. At last the portal spawned and we were off. First thing that happens is Wuyung lagged out. We waited for him to run back but it was not a great start. From there things went a lot smoother. I set myself at the end of the pack and William the Bat took the lead. If someone lagged or was having some trouble I messaged William to hold everyone up. That worked nicely. We had one of ours lag out and we were too deep in to get him back. Jeff, my brother, (Mage Sailor Bane) is leaving for war very soon. He expects to be gone for a year or more. I wanted him to do this quest before he left. Jeff is a great player but I think he would be better playing melee more. He has a nice BM but tends to play him like a melee. He dies a lot that way. Things got a little troublesome when we hit the rolling rocks. We had two bodies before I even got into the hallway. I was playing it very cautious. Jeff followed me to one of the cutouts and lagged a bit. He almost made the right spot but not quite and was run over. The next cutout I ran to had Wuyung following me. He too lagged and died at my feet. I recovered Wuyung's stuff and Moby Dick recovered Jeff's. I was about ready to move forward again when saw Jeff's death message. Before we were done he had died three times and was in vit hell. In all I thinks we had 9 or 10 deaths with the rocks. We spent some time recovering but with everyone LS'd or tied to Eastham it did not take us very long. While everyone recovered and got past the rocks I did a re-buff. With unknown players I was not sure if some joker would spawn the temple or not. No one played the fool so it was not needed but better safe then sorry. I think it was Ree Con who buffed Jeff so he could fight. With his vit buffing would be painful, if possible. I told the group the plan. William the Bat and I would make a shield wall at the hall entrance. It would be safe behind that. Mages and Archers were to stay behind the wall with melee's drifting back to heal when necessary. I buffed up my frost weapon. I know it would not do much damage but I only needed one hit to get tagged for the quest. My frost weapon has a 17% base melee bonus and buffs out to 34%. The only time I was hit was when I was switching weapon. I had to switch to my Cestus once to make sure I got tagged. The frost weapon did zero damage and I was not sure of that would get me tagged or not. It likely did but I did not want to take a chance. Being well baned I only took 2 and 6 damage from Gaerlan's sword while the weapon was switched. The group made one big error. I was told later that the second group thought Gaerlan was farther forward than he really is. They ran into the room thinking he would be in another one. It really messed us up. Moby was to do the de-buffing long before anyone got into battle. With everyone rushing forward Moby was franticly trying to get the de-buffs on. He was too late for some. At least one of the other group died right off. A second person died and I'm not sure if it was one of theirs or ours. I had one bit if text that proved they were not blowing smoke about not knowing where Gaerlan was. Xamacq exclaimed, "What is he doing here?" The big problem with two groups is trust. Each feels the need to get there first. I set myself up next to William in time to prevent Gaerlan from getting into the mages. When that happens people die fast. Gaerlan was running against William and me a lot during the battle. I just stood there for the most part. The lightshow was outstanding with spells, arrows and swings coming over my shoulder. I have a picture and will try to get it posted on the VN board column soon. At the start of the battle I noted Wuyung in the main room. I was like, "What is he doing there?" He was running against the monsters trying to get behind the shield wall but was trapped. He was lucky to survive that. When looking at the screen shot I saw him way into the room, likely running against the wall. I asked him later what happened. He said he was following me and lagged into the room. After that he targeted the Elementals and prayed as he could not make it to the shield wall. I got a message from Jeff in the middle of the battle. Despite the vit he got a hit on Gaerlan and was tagged. That was one worry we had. Gork, who was in the second group, got the kill. He messaged me saying he was sorry and did not mean to steal it from us. I told him that as long as he never had the kill before he had every right to get it this time. I should have explained that before we started forward. Those who are powerful and want to kill Garland repeatedly I have nothing but distain for. After you have killed him once let someone else have a shot. If you have not got the kill then go for it. I got the shield and Jeff got the War wand. MS was disappointed to get another War wand. She has several of them and needs the Life. Strangely Moby Dick got the shield. Lucking out I did one last hunt in the Hollow Cave (Venemous Nidus) this morning. I know that after the next patch the low value armor will stop dropping. I have a nice set of armor for myself so I'm mostly saving the stuff to give away later. I had poor luck in the first 45 minutes or so. I got a hit on one set of leggings with a minor spell. Checking really quick I saw it was AL 217 wms 3. That in it self made it good armor. Checking on the minor spell later I found it was a minor Self. Jr has big trouble buffing right now. His Creature is around 314 and Item is even lower. This makes for a lot of frustrating fizzles. I have started using my focus stone to get a few more points but the mana loss creates another problem. This set of leggings has melee requirements so I cannot use them with Mage but Jr will love them. Of course it means getting another bunch of Steel bags together to tinker it. This will mean even more hours in the Hollow Cave. Fellowship Confirmation Clint of FF sent me a PM on this and I have to totally agree with him. The fellowship confirmation was put in because of griefers fellowing with someone without their knowledge. This could happen while AFK or when fighting. For the most part this was a very small problem and easily fixed. The confirmation panel on the other had is a pain in the ass. What Clint is proposing is to make this optional. Add a flag to use the confirmation panel or not. I wholly support this idea. End of line Well this is not one of my biggest columns. I hope that there is enough new content to keep me fat in stories with the coming patches. Meanwhile good hunting everyone.