Fist de Yuma - January 6, 2004

This and That Usually the last thing I write when doing the column is the "This and That". I can use it to explain a few details that come up between the posting date and when I write the essay. Of course that means it gets a little less editing than the rest. When doing the column I go over each essay whenever I get a chance. The more I read it the more errors I catch. Sometime it is a simple error like repeating words. Repeating words are word that repeat throughout a paragraph. It is very easy to do and makes the read horrible. It also lets me catch words that are spelt correctly but are the wrong word. It is easy to put in "Though instead of "Thought". Both are correctly spelt so the speller is useless in catching it. Such errors are a nightmare to catch when dyslexic. Believe it or not I agonize over sentence structure. Many times I rewrite a passage over and over again trying to get it right. I will generally start editing at about 10pm on Monday night and will be done sometime between 1am and 3am. This is the finally editing as I do the same, if with less attention to detail, Monday morning and throughout the week. Editing errors brought by rewriting a sentence is common. It is easy to rewrite part and not take out what you're rewriting. You'll see such as, "I felt it was is a good time." This is caused by changing "is" to "was" and forgetting to remove the "is". The final edit is reading the entire column backwards and out loud. This will catch errors where what I read is not what I wrote. It is easy to read what should be there and not what is there. Reading out loud and backwards makes it a lot harder overlook such errors. To my regret I do skip that part out of pure weariness at times. It is hard to do and I'll avoid it if I can. Never ask a dyslexic to read out loud as it is an agonizing experience for us. We may read well and comprehend better than most but if asked to read out loud we will sound like a poorly taught eights grader. So if you find a few errors in the "This and That", forgive me. If you find it anywhere else, feel free to point it out. I may know better but then again I may not. My fans or better said, my critics, have helped me eliminate some of my repeated errors over the years. I misspent lightning as lighting for over a year until someone pointed it out to me. The bottom line to all this is that the column can easily take up to 15 hours to write a week. Most of that is in editing/rewriting and not writing. Even still there will be errors slipping through. The "This and That" also lets me add in last minute events and thoughts. I like to add in personal details here at times and "This and That" is a good place to put it. One announcement is the resumption of my Vault column. You can find the current at; http://acvault.ign.com/features/columns/fistdeyuma/01-05-2004.shtml I don't think doing the column will get my VIP status back. I'm a bit out of the main stream for the owners there. I'm hard to fit in a box so I'm bound to make someone mad. Nevertheless the column is worth doing so I'll keep at it. Funny Solution There is a running debate on the Turbine board about bad names. I have gone over this childish demand for attention before so there is no need to go into it again. Deleting a player is such a drastic measure that they tend to let things go that they really shouldn't. One person pointed out a solution to the bad names that does not evolve deleting the player. This is a rename by Turbine. This was used by another game to get rid of the badly named players. (It should be noted that an obvious attempt to get around the name filter should not be rewarded. Giving them the choice to rename the player would be a reward and should not be considered.) What they did was rename them to something stupid but not offensive. Consequently "Cupid Stunt" becomes "Happy Player 0001". After a few dozen players get this treatment they will get the idea and stop doing it. If not they will be stuck with "Happy Player 0178". I'm doubtful if that will be Turbines answer to this but there will be changes. This is a copy of IBN's post in that debate. The policy and procedures regarding offensive names are currently under review. This was true even prior to the acquisition being finalized. The Real Fix There is only one real fix to bad names. That is the players themselves. If a badly name player is shunned by everyone, never allowed into a fellow, banned from allegiances and squelched by all, the problem is fixed. Remember these names are a call for attention. Ignoring them, shunning them, acting like they don't exist, will hurt them far more than anything Turbine can do. Report and squelching the account is my first response today. I can repeat a funny quote from the Internet but we all know that arguing with them makes you a retard. Things happen When I go out hunting for items I seldom get anything. Where I do get things it is when I'm just playing the game without thought of acquiring items. I was on my way to the 80+ Olthoi Armor dungeon with Fist. I ran from Arwic to the mountain shortcut and then the Bandit Castle portal. At that point some Olthoi Warriors jumped me. I decided an un-buffed robe, with no protects and no creature buffs, was not a wise way to run around. My melee and magic defense will mostly save me, even un-buffed, but I was only a few ticks of bad luck from death. My defense's kept me out of trouble until I outran everything. I'm sure they would have heard my shout of pain in Arwic if they had managed to land a blow. I stopped, put on my armor and buffed. To escape I had ran in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go. Where I wanted to go was packed with creatures. There was clear space in the other direction so I was forced to go there. As I returned I decided to extract a little revenge. As I cleared the Olthio I started getting some incoming rocks from a few Lugies on a hill. I was darn lucky they were not a touch closer to the portal because I don't have Missile defense any longer. I quickly killed them off and discovered they were protecting a chest. I grabbed my lock pick and opened it up. To my surprise there was an al 214 wms 3 coat inside! I had been in search of armor like this for a while. My goal is to stop having to swap my armor between players. The color was a gold brown that I think will look great on Fist de Yuma Jr. The 25k value is a draw back but that is something we have to live with now. Aaa to have that month over again. When I got back to the mansion I fired up Cliff Bowman and tinked it up 10 times. That made it al 412. Then I did a mule search for some leggings. I found some that matched the color. The trim is not perfect but tolerable. It was wms 5 so that limited the tinks. I applied 7 bags of steel to get it to 367. I'll look to improve it but leggings have always been harder to find than coats. All I need to do now is collect more steel to get the shoes done. Jr is using my Major Quick helm so that is covered. All I had to do was dye the helm gold. I'm going to have to collect seeds or find where I can find gold plants as I'm almost out of the dye. The gants will have to be the Sunstone sword gants. I got another coat in the same manner a long time ago. I was looking for steel and seeds off of Rampagers while leveling FA. To my surprise I found a 405 wms 2 coat on the Tusker. Sometimes things happen. Mage Hunting While hunting Owanda is fun and rewarding I do like to take out my Mages a lot. XP wise I about break even with Owanda hunting. Passup from Owanda is around 20%. That means I can make around 4 million an hour for Fist's Armorer when hunting Owanda in the Matron. I make around 5 million an hour while hunting on the Plains. Given that this XP is passed up through the mules as well, Owanda is the better choice if XP was my only goal. Of course the main goal is having fun. I enjoy hunting with Owanda but many of the people I'm forced to hunt with in the matron are less than mature. The matrons are getting filled with the greedy kids and forcing out the fun people I use to hunt with. Of course that could have been a school break occurrence and it might go back to being how is was this week. I can only hope. So to break that up I'll go hunt with FA, just for the pure fun of it. Hunting outside with a mage is so different from dungeon crawling with a melee that it might as well be a different game. It is fast thinking and good tactics that are paramount. With Owanda it is more numbers and equipment. Yes there are tactic to melee but the are easy to learn and simple to use. One thing I'm finding is I'm more likely to find a useful item while hunting the plains than the Olthoi. This is surprising as I was under the impression that Muts had one of the highest loot levels. Given the difficultly of killing one, especially a swarm, it should be the case. Nevertheless I almost always get a weapon or useful major in an hour hunt on the plains and almost never get something like that while hunting the Matron. I'm starting to understand why the majority of the matron hunters don't even bother to loot any more. Hunting with a mage had changed a bit with Rend wands. I find myself pushing War a lot more than Life. While there are times when I'm forced to fall back on Vuln and Blast I mostly have time to swap to the proper wand. It helps that "like" groups are mostly all that charge. The two wands I find myself using the most are Fire and Lightning. Fire gets the biggest use. Drudges, Shadows, Tommies, Tuskers and other fire vulnerable monsters are most prevalent on the plains. The next would be Bandies, which is why I use lightning a lot. You'll also find a mix of Olthoi so I have to keep my Bludgeoning wand handy. Where I mostly have to use Vuln and Blast is against Golems. Different types will group and of course they all defend each other. The plains golems are mostly vulnerable to Cold or Acid. Given the ease of killing them I tend to not waste time with wand swapping. Of course that means you need 7 wands on your bar and have the wherewithal to know which one is which. That is not as easy as it sounds, especially if you ended up with similar looking wands. For that reason I try to balance between wands, staffs and Orbs. One thing I left out is the most useful wand of all. This is slashing. Why slashing? Because the Grivvers ability to counter buff the de-buffs. With a slashing Rend wand I can kill off the hardest Grivvers with two or three spells. While if I had to pick one Rend wand to use it would be fire, the next choice would be slashing. The ultimate frustration of hunting the plains is de-buffs. My War is at 417 in combat mode. Yesterday I found myself at 371 after some de-buffs. While 417 would mostly land 371 would almost never lands. I try to use my gems sparingly but the Plains will eat them up fast. I'll be happy when I reach 115 with FA and can spec Magic defense. While it will not stop the de-buffs it will limit them a bit. When I get FA to Mages numbers the Plains monsters will dread my coming. (grin) Burden The burden issue is becoming a problem with my melee players. While of course they are a lot stronger than my mages they have to carry so many weapons it is ridicules. One thing I need to do is set up a mule bag to store weapons that don't see a great deal of use. They have to be quickly available but are not used on a daily bases. I think I'll have to use my house chest for that. Lets take Fist de Yuma Jr. While sword weights have dropped you can count on at least 450 burden on average. I have some swords in the low three hundreds but others in the mid six hundreds. You need one Rend sword for each element of battle. This means six swords. (No bludgeoning with a sword.) Then there are the times you will team with a mage. This will be best served by having AR weapons. Lastly you have VoD weapons. For that you need CB or CS swords. If you go overboard you end up with 18 swords. Of course most of us will settle with just one AR/CS/CB sword so reality is 12. Still that is a lot of weight to carry around. While Fist is not in the same boat weight wise, UA weapons being a lot lighter, he is having trouble finding loot room. With the weapons, Magic bags, Gems, Mana stones, Comps and DI's there is not a lot of room left over. I think one of the reasons I like hunting Owanda so much is he is focused on Olthoi. Because of that he has less pack space and burden problems. I will mostly hit the dungeon with an empty main bag and room in the side bags if I need them. He will also go into combat with less that 50% burden, despite having a 40 Rations or more. Owanda hit pay dirt Ok, you might judge by this that I have no life. (grin) It would not be true but it will look that way. Heck it might be true but I don't care. New Years has never been a big deal to my Rosa and I. While I do drink ever so often I never get drunk. She is strictly no drinking or for that matter dancing. A religious thing she was brought up on. Given that I have never danced worth a hoot anyway it was not a problem for me. A party where everyone is getting drunk and acting the fool is not as fun when sober and Rosa would be rather upset to even see it. So to make a long story short we are not party people. (Of course our holding party after party for the family might dispute this. I guess it is your definition of a party.) There is a benefit to this lifestyle. A few of our family cannot eat spicy foods. This is due to their hard drinking. While they are finding some health items to help with the problem Rosa and I are eating things that would almost kill them. (grin) In any case on New Years night Rosa went to a midnight service at her church and I was home alone. Hell we did not even have a beer in the house. I was figuring that some of the hard stuff was still around from Christmas but I was wrong. Without a car I could not even go buy a bottle. Just as well I guess. I fired up AC and logged Owanda. I decided to give the Hollow Cave a shot. I figured all the @#@%^% players would be out getting drunk and I might only have to share with one or two people. To my surprise I arrived with no one there. I even got lucky and started picking up sings right away. In that hour no one showed. My building Owanda's numbers is really playing off. Combined with my new mace I was eating up the Hollows like they were children. I had my power level set to 3/4 and was still killing with a single swing. I never set it lower because of the two high ones sometimes did need two swings but I bet I could be killing at half power as well. This means I'll have an even better shot against the macro archers when I face them. Just to test a theory I put power on min for a while. I had used Fist here a short time back and it would be a good comparison of their power. Indeed my theory about Owanda hitting as hard or harder than Fist is true, at least against Hollow Olthoi. I ended up with some nice salvage and 10 sings. That is better than average. I headed back to dump the loot and rebuff. The second hour was not as fruitful as far as sings go. In the first 30 minutes of the second hour I did not catch a single sing. In fact I ended up with only 21 sings after three hours, slightly below average. I did get a lot of wands for Rend later. I'm getting so many wands I have raised my requirements for them in Bandit. In the middle of the third hour someone showed up. I said "hi". I could tell he was not happy to see me, especially when he saw how fast I was killing them. I said I had 21 minutes left. He thanked me and logged. I had filled up my storage mule along with Fist and Mage with loot so it would have taken me a while to set up to go back again anyway. I had spent all my sings on Granite bags that week so getting 21 sings was great. It is not often you get the Hollow cave to yourself for three hours. Of course playing AC alone through New Years Eve would have some wonder but I had a blast. (grin) Olthoi Armor Early in the column I mentioned going to the 80+ Olthoi Armor dungeon with Fist. This was more for scouting than an attempt at the armor. The word I had gotten was it was almost impossible to rebuff there without help. I was told that even the most powerful would have a hard time with the spawn rate. I did not worry about the buffing as I have done combat buffs before. I was sure I could take on about anything but was not so sure I could out kill the spawn rate. If you cannot kill a lot faster than they spawn you're doomed to failure. To say the place is a maze is an understatement. I was totally lost after the first few minutes. I'm guessing there is a theme but I never got a handle on it. I tried to just go south but kept running in circles. After wondering around killing mostly mid level Olthoi I came across an archer who was hunting there. I asked if I was even close to the right direction to the Queens and Matrons. He said no. He was kind enough to help me get headed in the right direction. I never had time to write his name down but if you read this, Thanks! While going with him we came across a group of three who seemed to be on the way to get the armor for themselves. I got separated from my helper about this time. I asked the group if I could join them. They were happy for my help. The three were; Vic Rattlehead, Neferata, and Wolf-pac. One had the route down, mostly. We did have to backtrack a few times. They were kind enough to stop and let me rebuff. Neferata infused me with mana to speed up the process. It became clear to me that this was an experienced group and not three people fighting together. At the first Matron I killed it but did not loot. I figured they should have first shot at the armor. When no one took advantage of that I opened up the body and grabbed the item. It turns out that they had all the matron items from a previous trip. From there we headed off to the Queen. At the last passage we came across two or three bodies. It was their bodies so now I understood why they did not need the Matron items. Saying this place is neck deep is Muts is an understatement. I was covered with them more often than not. It is a good think I have great armor and outstanding Melee defense as otherwise I would have been dead meat. The passage led into a large room filled with Olthoi. The passage was not safe as there was a back spawn of about six to eight Muts. They are not Swarm Muts but hard nevertheless. I let them get their items first. They had to leave at that point. I told them not to worry, I would grab a corner in the room and go back for the Matron items later. All I asked was for someone to give me a Tusker portal gem for a fast escape. I had used mine last gem during the Dark Essence quest a while back. One gave a gem. Vic Rattlehead said he would stay to help me. I was very grateful because I had no idea if I could hold the passage or even a room corner for very long. He also knew the way back to the Matron. While we had a few tense moments it worked well. Vic took some hard shots and was screaming in my ear for a bit. He had fairly high Life and could put de-buffs on the Queen for me. I lucked out and got all the Queen items in a short time. She drops two items on death so if you're lucky you can collect them in a hurry. We back tracked to the Matron and hunted there until I had all the items. We finished off the buffs by killing and looting Muts for a while. I turned in the armor and was surprised to find it is al 500! I thought it was 400 but that must be one of the lower sets. While Owanda does not really need such great armor for his Hollow hunts I'm glad to have it. I figure (and hope) that someday Turbine will raise the Hollow's ability and clean out the trash. Being it is part of a quest I don't see it happening. I'm not sure if this armor would work in the Matron dungeon. In fact I will not even try until my melee defense is a lot higher. If it does work it will cut down buffing immensely. As he gets closer to self buffing cutting down on the spells will be important. Mage can over buff because he seldom fizzles. I expect to fizzle more than succeed when Owanda starts buffing.