Fist de Yuma - July 15, 2003

This and that I have noted and big increase in errors with my columns of late. I do go over it and over it but the last month had me writing on Mondays a lot. Anything that I cannot let sit for a day or so can contain multiple errors. This is brought about by familiarity with the words and what I'm trying to say. If I know what is should say it is easy for my eye so skim over errors and see what I want, not what is really there. Waiting even one day can help overcome that. Dyslexia is a pain in the ass. It is such an embracement to have published something and then note errors that make me look illiterate. People might understand that "Hit" was meant to be "Bit" or "Here" in place of "Her" but it can spoil the flow of the story. Anyone reading it for the first time might think I'm an accomplished sixth grader. So the columns might be a bit smaller for a short while. Some events might be a little more dated. The reason for this is anything I write on Monday will go into the next week's column. I'll be cutting off writing for the column on Sunday evening. I cannot guarantee that this will remove all errors but there should be a lot less of them. Missing Rosa As I have said before my wife Rosa is away for three weeks. This is week two and I'm really missing her. Even my ability to smoke fine cigars from Mikes store (www.MDCigars.com) is not coming close to making that up her being gone. Of course I have to cut off the smoking and let the smell clear starting today. From now on I'll have to take a trip to Mike's to enjoy a good smoke. Rosa returns just after midnight on the 20th. We are planning a small surprise party for her when she returns. Family is coming down from Phoenix to greet her. EVL Madness I had said before that the Olthoi were getting harder to fight. I had that in mind when Kirney Slane asked me to take her for a pincer run. She had just made 50 and knew she could not do it alone. I had just returned from the Slot with Fist's Armorer and was full of loot and salvage. She needed to do a few things as well so I told her to wait at the top of the Plateau for me. After taking care of business I met her at the Plateau. We started running the river route. I'm not sure if she was lagging really bad but she was having a hard time keeping up with FA. Given that FA started with 10 quick, and only has enough points to make him keep up with everyone else, it was likely lag. I had to stop our run in the center of the river when I got a tell from Cher. Some immature player had got into the allegiance and was cursing and making racist remarks at the mansion. I had Fist set to go on my second computer so I just hit the button to swap computers and logged him. The immature player was very surprised when I logged in back of him. I quickly booted him from the allegiance and swapped back to FA. I guess he was use to inactive monarchs and did not expect such prompt action. That taken care of we headed off to EVL. I was hoping that it was mostly empty as my last trip was an adventure in damage control. At this point I'm not sure if I can take on more than three and live. Even three had me spending a lot more time healing than attacking. Our way down was without danger. Only a few EV's were alive and we quickly dispatched them. I hit each with Imperil and KS would kill them with one to three shots of her xbow. As my main concern was keeping her alive I had to put myself in a touch of danger. I would block the hall and let KS pick them off. As none of them got by me I could just worry about me staying alive and let KS kill them. The only time we had to face more than two was at the very bottom. I blocked the passage and hit them with Imperil when I was not healing. We quickly cleared them and she got her pincer. From there I decided to start running out. In hindsight we would have been better off porting out at that point. Because we had not faced any really bad battles I was not worried. As we exited the first passage, going into the room with a ledge on the side, the three that spawn there attacked me. Several more Olthoi ran out of the hallway and I was suddenly in big trouble. Even with al 600+ buffed armor and banes that put me over 1200 I was getting ripped to pieces. I even had my underwear buffed and that added another al 200+. That did not seem to help much. It was especially bad because I also had to keep KS alive. Seeing my health drop like water pouring out of a broken glass was bad enough but hearing her scream from hits had me on the edge. With 150 hit points I tossed a heal on her. By the time I could toss a heal on me I was at 20 hit points! With only four EV's on me I was really having a lot of trouble. At least twice I was watching health drop close to zero while attempting a heal. I was lucky and the heal landed before I died but I needed two more to be close to safe. Remember I have close to 300 hit points! Fortunately all this time I was doing the staying alive disco dance KS was plunking away at them. I changed tactics and started draining instead of healing. I found that attempts at Imperil only got me close to dieing again. The few Imperils I did toss made the battle shorter but with an unnecessary risk to both of us. I say both because there was little chance she would live if I died. Slowly but surely KS knocked them down. My draining helped a little bit but it was mostly KS's bolts that did the job. After that battle we moved a little bit and had one more battle. At that time I decided we should not risk another battle. There was a horde of them waiting around the bend in the passage and not worth the risk. We ported out. After that battle I made two decisions. One was that Fist de Yuma will be leading any attack on the mature Queen, when we find it. Fist de Mage would not last long. Two was to hold off on selling back Missile for lockpick with Fist until after we battle her. In fact I'll likely be adding to Missile until I don't need it any more. The reason for that is the Queen has a missile acid attack. If I can evade even a few shots it might make the difference. I cannot be positive that this patch will have the main Queen battle. I cannot even be sure I'm right that she is coming. I think it is likely but only Turbine knows for sure. Rumor There is a rumor making the rounds that the Olthoi Acid attack has been changed to a missile attack. This would be worrisome as only a few people have Missile defense. I myself don't put much stock in the rumor. Jr does not have missile and I did not note any attacks succeeding against him. To be absolutely sure I'll be watching hard when I got pincers for Fist de Yuma Jr and Deadeye Fist this week. Neither have missile so if there has been a change they will see it. Goals and meet the players One of the joys of this game is working toward goals. Each goal takes time and persistence. Of course some would rather cheat but that is a different story. For those of us who don't macro or chain, advancement can be slow. (I'm not saying Chaining is cheating but the requirements can be so intense that many have to macro overnight to keep up.) Of course advancement is not our main goal, just something else that makes the game interesting. As you get up in levels each goal take more time. Turbine has done a lot to make advancement at high levels easer and more fun. VoD is the greatest thing they have done. Raising the experience reward for many monsters is another. The Moby group under William the Bat has advanced at Chain rates and are having a lot of fun doing it. Whereas I really enjoy hunting VoD with a select group of friends it is not often that I can do that. My hunting these days is mostly Fist's Armorer in The Slot. I hope to form up a strong group for a daily VoD but that might not be possible. For every 10 million points I make with Fist's Armorer my other players make 2 million. The chain people, please don't start with the letters, it is not chaining and you know it. As I make around 5 million on a trip to The Slot I pass up about 1 million each time I go. That is not much at high levels but it will add up. Where I really see progress is with the mules. Slowly but surely they are advancing toward my goals. I'll start at the bottom for goals and work my way up. Fist's Armorer Fist's Armorer was created seven month ago. The intent was to create an Armor Tinker so I could drop the skill on Fist de Mage. As I like playing a mage, and the stats for a mage are ideal for an Armor Tinker, so I made him a BM. Starting stats were 10, 100, 10, 10, 100, 100. Changes have made it so a 10 strength player is more than viable today. When the game started it might have been better to make a 100, 10 start. I find that even with a low strength start I'm seldom forced to raise it. Current strength is 134, more than enough most days. About my only reason to raise strength now is to increase my drain resistance. Players who are new to the game might be surprised at the burden problems we had when the game started. Comps weighted more than they do today. You also needed a lot of comps. We did not even have Peas to help with storage and weight. Imagine all the different comps that were needed for a four-school mage. When they added Peas weight went down but comp space doubled. You needed one space for the comp and another for the Pea. The first step to fix the problem was to make comps lighter. Then they added Peas. Cash was not weightless. In fact it was considered almost impossible to make an M note because of the weight of the pyreal. Most mages set out to battle at 150 burden or more. With buffing timers at 7 to 12 minutes you buffed far more often and needed more comps to keep going. The invention of Peas was a big help but the new system is far better. In fact this was such a problem that you saw far fewer mages than you do today. At 99lv he has all the magic skills along with Lore and Armor Tinkering. I have focused on War with is now a base 336. It will be a long time before he gets where I want him but those are side goals. Sadly, to make his goal I'll have to drop Armor Tinkering. Of course that will make his name a bit confusing but I can live with it. This is the one of two players I have with a level goal instead of a stat/skill goal. Fist's Armorer's goal is to specialize Magic Defense. FA is my attack mage. I intend to push his War and Life hard so I can focus on pure attack abilities. To make that effective I need less concern about being attacked. Specializing MD will make places like VoD, if not safe, a lot less dangerous. His high health will also be a big plus. Of course melee attacks are becoming a lot more of a problem these days. There was a time when high AL armor made a mage almost immune to melee damage. EVL is a good example of the changes Turbine is making. Most Mages avoid the VoD Lugies if they are smart. Still, having to only worry about one type of attack is better than having to worry about two. If I can start resisting Vulns I'll be less susceptible to melee attack as well. Making his goal requires me to get to 115 while un-training Armor Tinkering. Later in the column you'll meet the one being groomed to replace him as an Armour. Cliff's Carrier Cook This player was created on December 28 1999. So with the ignorance of the period I'm very surprised to see him as a great all around mule. Without really knowing what I was doing he was created as an 85, 25, 100, 10, 100, 10 tradesman's template. Of course it would have been nice to have made him 100 strength. I specialized Cooking, Assess Person and Alchemy. I'm sure there was more but the changes downgraded many skills to trained a while back. I hope they make Assess Person useful someday but, because PK's can have some use out of it, I'm doubtful they will. For a long time he did not do much as a Tradesman. When FA started to push up his levels that changed. CCC is now a powerful tradesman with multiple skills. His Cooking and Alchemy skills both buff to over 425. Magic Item Tinkering is at around 511. Lock pick is at 400 and I'm starting to push up Item Tinkering to a respectable number. Unlike my other players there is no goal here other than to keep pushing stats/skills. The skills he has are mostly ones that cap. Other than lock pick and possibility Item Tinkering there is little reason to push them any more. Fist's Mule two This one got a big push as a Cooking/Alchemy Tinker Mule for a while but his training Cooking was a big drawback. When CCC started getting his big push I swapped F2 to a Weapon Mule. This allowed Fist to untrained Weapons Tinkering and spec Magic defense. He had perfect stats for weapon tinkering and as a mule in general. 100, 10, 100, 10, 100, 10 were the starting stats. With only one skill to worry about he caught up with Fist's numbers in a few months. He just passed what Fist de Yuma had at his height. Fist max'ed out with 517 weapon Tinkering. F2 is 519 today. (All numbers are without brilliance.) His goal is simple. Every point goes into Weapon Tinkering or a stats that support it. With no other skills to worry about I expect him to get to get fairly high. Of course I'll never get to what the Chains can do but he'll be respectable for most projects. Cliff's Bowman My old time readers might recognize this name from years ago. It was a flawed attempt at making an Archer at the start of the game. (Birth 12/15/99) He was retired to mule status with piss poor stats for a mule. Only his mid level status kept me from deleting him. His start was a pitiful 70, 60, 90, 60, 30, 10. He even trained Melee defense which made him far too vulnerable to be effective. With the creation of Deadeye Fist CB's life as a player was at an end. What got him new life, as a Tradesman, was the ability to change stats and FA becoming too fun a player to keep as a tradesmen. After many trips to the temple he will make an outstanding Armor Tinker. Of course that will take me months to accomplish but with FA needed 16 more levels before he drops Armor Tinkering I have the time. Just how high a skill he gets remains to be seen but I expect he will exceed FA's numbers very quickly. It helps when you can focus on one skill to the excursion of all others. Deadeye Fist Now we are back to a player. Deadeye is a pure tank Archer. With a 30/10 focus/self start he will be hard pressed to buff with VII's. He will likely have to stick to level VI buffs for some time. His focus is pure attack skills. Coordination and Bow are where all his points go. Surprisingly his melee defense skills are holding up very well, despite me not pushing it much. I find that one-on-one he is not hit as much as Fist de Yuma, who has far better melee skills. His start was 100, 10, 100, 80, 30, 10. This means he will be very strong against melee but quite weak against magic. Of course with a range weapon he will not have to stand face to face with a War attacker and, with the power for the bow, not against any monster for very long. Someday I expect he will be a super VoD support player. He will be self-buffing, hard-hitting and able to stand up most melee attackers without danger. When combined with a Mage or a good group in VoD he will do horrific damage. I expect him to be in great demand. Until then he is quite ordinary. His main diet today is Olthoi. Even against a group of Warriors he is quite effective. I was amazed to one shot a Warrior when cruising Olthoi North. DF is the second player to have a level goal vs. a stat goal. He will get Creature at 105, which competes the template. (Alchemy at 125 will make him truly self sufficient.) From then on his goal will be to get magic so he can buff with VII's. Fist de Yuma Jr My link of players ends with Deadeye Fist. From here on I have a normal patron vassal relationship with my players. Of course anything that FA makes will end up here but it is through other players and not a direct link. Jr is a Life UA that will be switching to Sword at 125. You might say that it is a goal but it is more a secondary goal. In fact most of the goals with Jr are not main goals. He is mostly raising stuff evenly to be an all around player. He started with 100, 10, 100, 50, 60, 10. He spec'd Life, UA, Melee. Not sure what they call it today but for some time this was called the "Fist" template. In the end I feel Jr is going to be my strongest melee. With Sword and Life at high levels there will be little that can stop me. With the creation of the Life Bolt spell Jr even has a range weapon. So far his main focus is getting his UA and Melee skills very high. They are a base 364 melee d and 386 UA. In time I'll move to getting life to 315 base so I can create/use the Life helm but that is a ways off. His current base Life is 295 and those 20 points will be very costly. Right now he is my Hollow Cave fighter because of his good melee skills and lock pick. He will sell Lock Pick at 125 so he can pick up Sword. Fist de Mage Fist de Mage is on a pure skill goal right now. I was looking at Rain Pea the other day and was surprised to find I was only nine points from maxing War. With five Tesserae's in storage this meant I only need to raise it four more points! I have since chipped that to 3 points and need around 600 million points to finish it. The next point cost 184 million. While that kind of cost may not faze a Chain player it is a mountain for me. It takes me a month or more to move even one point. Of course if I do some hard hunts I can cut that down but the best I can do one point is around 2 weeks. If I can solo VoD for hours on end for a few weeks I can finish it all off sooner. If I focused on Mage my other players would suffer so I'll just wait it out. So this is a long-term project but it should be done in the next 80 days or so. After maxing War I'll turn to Life and Magic defense. I don't expect to ever max the skills, as without the treasisa's it would be too costly to even do War but I'll get them very high. With the ability to change stats he is a little different than when he started. The biggest change is his having all the magic skills specialized. Having Creature spec'd makes him the ultimate support player. Current stats are 40, 70, 10, 10, 100, 100 start. I have raised them to 193, 226, 136, 118, 273, 276 with 271/380/430 Health/Stamina/Mana. Main skills are base 352 Creature, 354 Life and 365 War. The only trained skill worth mentioning is Magic Defense, which is a base 266 and buffs out into the 330's. Tree stats has him at an equivalent level of 143. Fist de Yuma Ok, this is the big boy. After looking at Mage I looked at what Fist needed to max UA. I have 5 treasisa's stored for him as well so it would be worthwhile making the push. I found that Fist needed 16 points to max it, 11 using Tesserae's. I have since worked it to needing 7 more UA or 1.2 billion points. Of course I'm getting tremendous assistance from my alliance in the endeavourer. Using Treestats I see I make around 13.6 million a day. If that holds I should be maxing UA in around 100 days. That is a long time but I'm in no hurry. Again it is a long wait between pushing that button but a big sense of accomplishment when I can. After the changes his beginning stats are a good melee start of 100, 10, 100, 70, 40, 10. He has Melee, UA and Magic D specialized with the normal set of melee skills trained. His current base is; 279, 186, 277, 239, 213, 177 with 257/362/335 Health/Stamina/Mana. His spec'd skills are at; Magic d - 279, Melee d - 391 and UA - 409. After getting the last 7 points of UA I'll start working on some neglected areas, such as health and stamina. The only planned change with him is to drop missile and pick up Lock Pick. Just when I do this is open to debate. I'm sure I'll be needing Missile when the Mature Queen shows its face. I might even temporarily put points into missile for that one event. I'll get the points back when I sell off the skill. Midnight adventure I logged to do a Slot hunt around 12am Sunday morning. To my surprise Winter Raven also logged on. She had been pushing her SC player to 126 so I had not seen her for a while. We decided to team up on The Slot hunt. I enjoy hunting in groups and solo but hunting with Raven is the best of both. We think alike and really complement each other. Her being an Archer and FA being a Mage means we are the perfect team as well. The run south had us killing a few things but it was just a warm up. The real action hit when we reached the first spawn in The Slot. Drudges, Shadows and Virindi quickly fell and we moved on to the bigger spawns. In the first hour we quickly cleared up to the main hub where we rebuffed. After clearing that in record time I led us to the Plains proper. We were doing great and had cleared several spawns. We advanced a bit to reach the next spawn and were engaged when we had a re-spawn on top of us. Now this was nasty. We were fighting Bandies, Virindi, Tuskers, Olthoi and Drudges all at once. We retreated two times to reset. Most times the majority of the monsters will go back to the spawn and leave us with a manageable fight. Not this time. I had my hands full with some Olthoi. You know how I love fighting Olthoi with my mages these days. Which is to say, not at all. Raven was covered with Virindi. We really needed to swap monsters but I had trouble getting the monsters to agree with that plan. Then the monsters had an alternate plan. They would kill Raven and pile on me. What saved me was running out of mana. After tossing several heals on Raven and myself I was at 22 mana and in real danger. I took to my heals just as Raven died. If I had hesitated, even for a second, I would have likely joined her. As it was far too many chased after me. I was at full health when I started running so I had time to recover mana and reengage. When I finished them off I was pleased to see we had retreated enough during the battle for Raven's body to be clear. She had dropped a major piece of armor so I had to recover it. I met her back at the Dires LS. I spent a few minutes killing Shadows to clear her vit. With a few magic buffs to get her going she was back to full power in a few minutes. We then decided to toss caution to the wind and head out VoD. Midnight VoD Our goal at VoD was Virindi and Drudges. Both are dangerous but worth the risk, especially the Virindi. We did not see many people at first so we weaved our way between three big spawns to a pod of Virindi. I have hunted with some great players but few have the combat sense that Winter Raven has. It is like she can read my mind. We had the Virindi so confused they did not know which one of us to attack. It is ideal if we can get them swapping back and forth between the two of us. Not to say we weren't taking damage but most of the time we could stay well about the danger zone. As long as nothing unforeseen happened we had a good chance to survive. Landing for me is a big problem, as I said last week. 401 Life and 408 War are about minimum in VoD. As it was I landed around 40% and at times a lot less. There was real frustration when I was resisted over and over again. Any de-buffs and I might as well forget it. As we started to take on the last Virindi a Shadow attacked us from the rear. This surprised me because we were well away from the other spawns and not moving. Running around will many times draw other stuff on top of you so it is best to stay put. Use potions and healing but running will seldom work. If you must run then be sure to have a good idea where it is clear. I swapped from the Virindi and killed the Shadow. I figured the Shadow would die fast and we did not need it tossing a bunch of wars and de-buffs during the Virindi battle. After the battle I asked Winter where that Shadow came from. She said another player ran it up on us and either died or logged. As I did not see any bodies I figured he had logged on us. A short time later a big group ran though us without thought. I figured the last thing we needed was an inexperienced group of thoughtless players fighting near us. We headed off to a side canyon I had found the last time I was here. It is a dead end but a good hunt for a while. The first thing we ran into was a large group of Drudges. We had a blast killing them and moved on. Next was an Undead that died fast but put a few de-buffs on me. We killed a few isolated Shadows and crossed a clearing to some trees. There, a few feet away, was the Monkey from hell. I had tried to battle this with Mage one day. Mage is far more powerful than FA and could barely dent the health. Of course Mage tried to face it head on and spent a large amount of time healing. I quickly looked around for a trap. I was very surprised to see we were standing right next to one. (A trap is two trees close enough together that the monster cannot run through them.) I tossed a few de-buffs and Raven led it through the trap. From there on it was just a matter of blasting until it died. I was not landing much at all and played hell getting the de-buffs on. I hit a gem to clear de-buffs as the Undead had my magic lowered about 10 points. I had to search my spells to find Fester as FA never had any use of it before. Not an easy thing to do when in battle. I saw some text message warning me that buffs were running short. A glance at my timer showed less than a minute left. I figured I could quickly buff my magic and get back to the battle. As long as the Tusker did not break out of the trap, or other monsters did not attack us, we could be ok with no protections or banes. Slowly but surely we whittled the Tusker down. Raven had to stop to make more arrows and I had to re-apply the de-buffs once but we finally killed it. I was surprised to see we only got 600k apiece for it. We got almost as much for a Virindi and could take 5 or 6 in the same length of time. I was proud that we had defeated it but it is really not worth fighting. With no buffs and the late hour we decided to head back to the mansion. Just before we did mansion recall there was two large spawns very close to us. I commented to Raven that it was lucky we weren't a few steps closer.