Fist de Yuma - July 16, 2002

Well I was right about there not being a patch this week. Turbine is still doing their event, an event that is more for the developers than the players, so they are not late. I can only hope that we get the patch early next week so I can render the utterly flawless junk I've been saving. I'm saying this event is more for the developers because of the COD story I saw. http://cod.xrgaming.net/news/showarticle.php?id=1054 It showed that Turbine still has a lot of enjoyment with what they are doing. For that I'm glad. What they need to understand is, for the players, this was very limited. It was interesting but that is about it. For one only a few players had a chance of making the events. I was on quests for most of them and could not break away. They were in hard to reach, not well-known spots. That in itself would not have been a problem except they started soon after the announcement and were over quickly. Most of the player base was unaware that there was anything going on. Only sites like Crossroads of Dereth keeping us informed let us enough to make sense of it. Lastly it was mostly a watch event. Only in the last one was player participation allowed. (He killed everyone who did not run.) The last event was Turbine's big surprise. They had people invited to watch the show at Turbines building. Other than one columnist having the main villain nailed it was mostly a surprise. There were a few problems, one that almost destroyed the storyline. For those who are not up-to-date on what I'm talking about I'll give you a run down. Our Queen, Elysa, and Asheron has been dedicating festal stones. At each event Martine shows and Asheron tried to convince him to get help. If you don't know who Martine is you need to hit the boards and do some reading. In this last event a brick gets tossed into the works. It seems that all the trouble in the past few months was not Martine's fault. He was a dup of another Empyrean by the name of Gaerlan. The Olthoi killed Gaerlan's brother while with Asheron on a mission. Gaerlan blames Asheron for his brother's death. Given that Martine was more than a match for Asheron having both Martine and Gaerlan after him puts Asheron is a tight spot. At the end of this event Asheron is in hiding. Gaerlan feels the best way to draw him out is to kill us, which he did. The developers were screaming, "Kill him" and "That one" as the person running Gaerlan romped over the player base. Of course if given a chance at all the player base can show Turbine a thing or two about battles. Without an unbeatable player Turbine is toast. The magic resistance of Gaerlan was 1000 on all servers except one. Something broke on MT and the players could land on him. One mage landed a Yield, another a Vuln and it was blast city. Only his massive health kept him going. Even with the ability to one shot hit anyone in the game the players quickly had him running for his life. Gaerlan ported out with 20% health. In a way it was the only part I found exciting. Gaerlan is a master of Elemental golems. The Pyreal golem we hate so much is his invention. It is also likely that the Elementals showing up in odd places is his work. What I expect to happen There are a lot of ways that Turbine can go with this. Martine can join with Asheron to defeat Gaerlan, or at least weaken him enough that we can defeat him. That is the most likely. I expect that the final show down will be next month or the month after that. It is possible they will keep it going for many months. One thing to watch is Nuhmudira. She has been released by monsters with an unknown agenda. What that agenda is and what form of revenge Nuhmudira will take will make this interesting. Will she be grateful to those that voted to save her? Will she take revenge on those that voted to condemn her? Her part in this, along with Martine's, are the things I have no idea of. I hope I'm wrong but this is what I expect to happen. A bunch of low-level quests will be set at the next patch. These quests will get an item. Combining these items will let the high-levels finish off Gaerlan. The second possibility I would like even less. This will be a dungeon that needs several groups of varying levels to complete. I hate those with a passion. If that is what they do I may not even go. Standing around watching people die while another group tried to figure out their end is not fun. If we are really lucky there will be a series of quests. These quests will be doable by mid-level groups or a strong solo player. Each will be required to be completed of you want to join in on the final battle. That would be a lot more work and difficult to set up. I don't expect it but have hopes. Unless Turbine comes up with something new one of these three are what they will do. I'm not sure how much I'll be doing with this. With the advent of chains there are hordes of high level, EGO driven, greedy, immature players to contend with. If this follows form it will go like this. Players will do the lower level events and get the items. Then a massive group will form up to do the last one. Because of lag, greed and incompetence it will fail. This will repeat itself several times. Then a small exclusive group of strong, experienced players will form up in secret. They will not be the most powerful players but will know the game and have teamwork. They will take advantage of what the failed groups leaned and finish Gaerlan off. One prediction I'll make. The new Atlan weapons will be quite useful for all this. I can only hope the group on MT invites me along. The last one like this I was a touch weak to go. Because a lot of hard work I'm not weak but there are chain people with half my experience but far more power than me. I'll just have to see. It is events like this that the chain people live for. It is also the major thing that is unfair about chains. Those that do it right and work for their level are at a big disadvantage to those that chain and are given their level. At Gaerlan's Castle. I headed out to the new Castle hoping that there was a quest of some sorts going on. I was doubtful but it was worth checking out. I went to the north one, as it was the easiest for me to get to. I'll be checking out the south one later. There was a horde of people at the castle. Many were trying to jump inside. While I doubted this was possible it was worth trying. Fist has a fair jumping ability. I logged him and ran to the castle. I had 24 million points free at that point. I put them into jump. That got my jumping skill to a buffed 470. That combines with my running skill of 420. If that was not going to do it nothing would. The only person with a higher jump was a chain member's 480. The wall has a sloping lip at the top. I hoped that the slope was low enough to let me run up it. Few players had the ability to get their head above the lower lip, let alone their feet. I could get over the bottom lip of the slope and a few feet above it. From there I would just slide down. I guess Turbine anticipated people like me who had invested a bit into jump. Death and frustration I have had an interesting string of problems lately. I would go into a battle and monuments after firing off my first spell nasty stuff will spawn next to me. Attacking three Virindi, only to have two Vapor golems or Ziffers spawn next to you can change an average battle into a nightmare. If once or twice I would not have been concerned. For some reason one in three battles have gone this way. If it had started right after a patch I might have suspicion. As is I'm sure it is just bad luck. After playing around at the new Castle I decided to go hunt north ML with a friend. She hunts late at night, about the time I'm ready to log off. Because of this we don't get to hunt together as much as I would like. We got about halfway to the far north water line. She was fighting three Vapor golems and I had just finished off some Virindi. I rushed up to check for keys on the Observer. There were a few dog/pigs off to the side. They might have been a problem but I bane my lower armor against them. As I reached the Observer's body I locked up. This has happened before but it is rare. A driver problem I believe. With no big monsters near me I was sure I was ok. I reset the computer and tried to log into passport. Dam, I could not get the page to load. As far as the Net was concerned MS did not exist. My other computer was logged into MS but would not load AC. I was SOL and had to wait for MS to fix their problem. If I had been hanging at the mansion or something I would have just gone to bed. It was 1am. Without knowing for sure if I had died or not I had to wait. I was on a spawn site so it all depended on how long I stayed there before the server booted me. I knew from experience that if you don't log back quickly the player will stay logged in for an awfully long time. There was also the fact that my friend was in a big battle with Vapors. If the zone had a problem then she might have been kicked as well, pure death when fighting Vapors. Finally at 3:30am I got back on. Sure enough I loaded up with the bright yellow sun in the corner. I did not know how much time was left on the banes so I did not chance it and did a full buff. I have high enough skills now that even with vit I can do a fizzle free buff. I did note that I'm losing 16 points off my skills now when I have 5% vit. As it is a percentage the higher you are the more you lose. I fought my way back to my body. Checking I saw that I was killed by an Observer. I guess I stayed there long enough for one to spawn. From there I decided to finish off the buff before going to bed. After checking the area for my friend's body, she must have got out ok, I headed north. I can across three Vapor golems. I cold vuln one and had the all to familiar spawn sound. Off to my left were two Virindi. To make matters worse all three Vapors charged! I quickly hit the exec with fire vuln and blasted him. The Observer fell to the same, using blade. Now for the Vapers. One thing you can count on after fighting Virindi, you will have Bafflement on you. Even with Bafflement VI on me I don't have to worry about fizzles or many resists from Vapors. Now Zeffers and Observers are another story but Vapors don't have their high magic defense. I got cold vuln on one and hit it with the first blast. When they make a high skill do more damage I might take one of these with a single shot but for now it always takes two. As I wound up the second spell all three blasted me with Fireball VI. That is another thing you can count on when facing Virindi, having fire Vuln on. This took me down to 68 hit points. The spell fired and one Vapor dropped. If I had been using my old style I might have been ok at this point. That style was to start draining. With Vapors having 600 hit points I would have had my full health in no time. Strangely I think I can return to my old style with the drain nerf, at least with Vapor golems. 10% of 600 is very close to what I was getting before. With less of a drain on their health multiple drains will work better. I'll be testing this after the patch. Unfortunately I have been using heal VII as my main health recovery for some time now. Stam to health or mana to health would have been a lot better than heal in this case. As the spell started to unfold I was hit by another fireball. That took me down to 31 points. I guess I did not have fire Vuln on after all. Of course I believe Turbine cheats a bit as monsters can fire a VI spell far faster than we can. Maybe that is where fast-casting came from. Still there were two of them. Before my heal fired the other one got his fireball in. There are not many that can take a fireball VI spell in the face five times in a row. With damage from the melee hits and what the Virindi had done there was no chance at all. Darn, I don't die that much and here I was dieing twice in a row. I quickly buffed up, passing on banes as I had my timer going now. I recovered the body and logged for some rest. What is wrong with this picture? I admit that things have gotten far to ease for people in this game. When we started there was always something we had to worry about. Getting good armor, protects and just finding out what to do was hard. Dieing in the middle of nowhere was a lost body. No corpse command. Lagging on a run was the same. Many of us had armor with zero protects to many attacks. Ash G's were pure death if you were caught in plate armor. Only when they upgraded the armor did this change. Before that the poor protection of leather was the best you could get. Learning spells was an arduous time consuming drudgery. Even the best utilities demanded you brute force most of your spells before getting the tapers. Most mages headed out to hunt wading like a duck from the comps they carried, which were heaver than today's. They would have a short hunt and have to run back to restock. Think how short your hunt would be without peas. Buffs for personal stats (focus, endurance, strength ect.) only lasted seven minutes, and that was at level VI. There were no VII spells so the max you had to hunt was fifteen minutes before having to rebuff. Buffing was harder for a mage as you needed so many spells. Many players had more buffing time than hunting time. Melee had it much worse. Getting protections you needed plus the combat items were a pain and a half. Most players were using gloves with creature spells. Any hit to the hand was like zero armor. Not many melee could tackle Tuskers and live. Those fighting Olthoi found that their protection to acid was zero as well. So as hard as Mages had it Melee had it far worse. Many mages could get away with a robe and some cheap items. Their drop on death was not much. Melees never had that option. Today I see people who claim they cannot hunt without level VII buffs. Ridicules. I have two players who hunt without buffs in WE now. I relish the better weapons and armor, easy access to spells and high xp monsters. They are doing much better than my players did two years ago. It is laziness or just high expectations? I was proud as hell years ago when I went from 22 to 25 in three days of hard fighting. Three levels in three days was unheard of! Today three levels in three hours would not be worth commenting on. The reason I was thinking of this is Ur III's buff bod. Some players expect to have level VII buffs at their command. Jr is not powerful enough to use VII at this point. I self buff with VI spells. If I had to depend on a buff bod to fight I would just quit. To demand VII's is the height of arrogance. Why would a 10lv demand buffs a 78lv cannot toss? Surely he could do well with IV's or V's and be grateful for them. After all no one had access to such when things were harder. What the answer to this is I'm not smart enough to say. There are a lot of players who play hard, have fun and had never had buffs. I have a vassal who refused to even take money. He wants to do it totally on his own. Unfortunately for every one of those there are 10 lined up at the buff bod. Fast scramble The teaser came out Friday and it had a lot. Just what is going to happen and what our involvement is I'm unsure. The last part had me in a scramble to complete a quest I had been avoiding. With Nuhmudira being released there was a good chance that Nubmudira's Boom will be a suspended quest. I really had no desire to spend a lot of time wandering around the maze in the Gelidite Library. The only player I have who really needs it is Deadeye Fist. Fist and Jr both needed to find broken amulets to get theirs working. Of course the only player who had found them was Deadeye, who could not convert without doing the Library quest. With a lot of family over the weekend was shot. Monday is the day I spend writing and editing the column so finding the time to do this was problematic. I solved it by getting up at 4am Sunday morning. I used the Stonehold portal to get there. That is close to my house. With buffs from Mage I knew he would have little trouble. Of course without a Atlan Bow the Elemental monsters took a while to kill. I guess that will be my next project. I'm sure I'll need the new Atlans to fight in the upcoming event. Once past the monsters I started the non-joy of negotiating the maze. After getting one note I ran across Duri's new mage. He had a map! While the map was not perfect, and we where lost a few times, he did get us to all the notes a lot faster I had ever done before. From there it was my turn to lead. I met him in Lin and we got the easy parts out of the way. I jumped into the 45+ one to cleared the start while he buffed. Unfortunately Duri was not high enough to get in. I think he is 42lv. I decided to do it fast and circle back to support him. This almost led to disaster. I got to where I knew the Gorlet was and lagged in place. By the time I got out I was surrounded by four of the monsters and taking a lot of spell damage. I finally ran away and was able suck down an Elixir. As I did they caught up and started chain casting on me. I was sucking Elixirs while trapped in place. It was a race to see who would run out of what first, me of healing Elixirs or them of mana. One ran back to his spawn site and I had a path to run some more. I found a dead zone and was able pull my orb and port out. I quickly did /lifestone to get back to Lin and ran over to support Duri. This maze is a little different than the 45+ one. It took us a little bit to find a Gorget. Then we ran to Xarabydun for the next to last step. Duri had some elixirs. Those mixed with mine had us going. I explained to Duri that, as a mage, he only needed the Boon spells. (Plus 15 to magic defense.) I had to find the exact spells I needed for Fist and Deadeye. Jr, having Life and Creature, just needed the Boon as well. As luck would have it the Creature Elixirs I had were Focus, exactly what I needed. Duri had Life Slashing, which was one of the two I could use with Deadeye. From there I had to logged Fist and get him the Gorget. Fist had a Bludgeoning protect Elixir so all he needed was any Creature to have his going. (Fist has the Creature skill.). I expected a little battle before Fist got his Gorget. As luck would have it someone else had just been there. Most of the Sclavus were dead. Fist moved right to where I knew a Gorget spawns and was out in record time. Checking the mules I found a Creature elixir so all I needed to do was find Jr any Creature Elixir. There was no need to find him a Life, as I said, I only need the Boon. I had read that the hunting around Bandit castle would get a Broken Amulet fast. By this time my nephews were up. They play from time to time but had never see Jr at work. They were amazed at how powerful he is. For them a battle with a Shadow Lt is a long drawn out affair. For Jr it is an Imperil and a few swings at most. After about half and hour of hunting I found a Broken Amulet and had my Gorget done. The family was up and moving, I went back to bed. I'll let Rosa worry about breakfast. Entitlement mentality. Sadly there are those in this game who feel entitled to anything they want. If blocked from their want they feel justified in causing as much trouble as they can. So convinced of their "Rights" that they will then take it to the boards, fully expecting have the other side vilified. This happened the other day. There was a group of people hunting in fellow. The dungeon was something like 46 to 56 limited. The fellow was mostly a group of Elders and the fellow leader was a 56lv. A guy came there who as 47lv. He demanded to be put into the fellow. Of course he could not be as you need to be 50+ to get into a fellow with a 56lv leader. It was not even possible to redue the fellow as there were no one within 5 levels of him. Of course the guy tossed a fit. To get even with the people for not allowing him into the fellow he started to skim. I guess he was to stupid to see he could not fit into the fellow. I'm guessing that most of the players in the fellow were melee. A skimming mage can take most of the kills. Fortunately that ability goes away after the patch. So justified did this moron think he was that him and another guy made posts on the boards about it. The immature players loved it that a lower level could "Pwned" them. Everyone else was trying figure out what the hell he was complaining about. In other words while trying to slam Elders he only made himself look like as ass. We do have people who restrict fellows. Many of us don't approve of it but that is our opinion. Elder has set the rules, no one can be forced to take someone into a fellow. This one did not even fall into that category. If he had been 50lv there would have been no problem. Bells Bells Bells. I logged on the other day with Mage and Ur III sent me a tell. He wanted to go get some bell parts for the Queen quest. I had done one part of this quest with Moby Dick, the easy one. The other two I had heard were a touch dangerous. Ur and Sassy are both archers, a few levels below 60. With buffs and me imperiling there was not much we could not take down. The only drawback was our inexperience with this quest and the possibility of us having to split up. We got to one of the dams. We cleared everything around the dam. I'm sure that the macros were not pleased. I had never seen this portal before. Amazing what you can miss in this game. Inside was a waterfall, like the other dam I had been in. There were a few Vapor golems in the waterfall. Fortunately there were no macros to spoil it. We jumped down and killed the Vapors. This is where having healing would sure be useful. Having to toss a spell to heal the constant damage is a pain. We found a ramp out. This lead to a gate with two Diamond Golems behind it. The Golems de-buffed me to hell and back. I saw no reason to kill them so we just ran by and I poped a gem. The layout is similar to the other dam where you are sprayed at. There're changes of course but the general lay out is the same. This let me find the door we needed rather fast. Of course it was locked and not pickable. We back tracked looking for a switch. I was sure there were no other ramps out of the waterfall. We had followed the walls around the waterfall and only found the one. When we got back to the Diamond Golems we found the switch in their room. Now we had a dilemma. I was the one who knew the general route back to the door. I was also the only one who could fight the two Diamond golems in the room. There was no choice. Ur and Sassy would have to fight their way to the door while I stayed at the switch. I buffed them up. From getting Ruble with Deadeye Fist the other day I know a fully buffed archer could stand up to the Olthoi with little trouble. Two would own them. They left and I waited. I battled the Golems and had both War and Life de-buffed. I still need some work on Life. When it drops to the 350 range I start fizzling. After a few minutes they were back. A lag turn had them messed them up and they had to backtrack. They started back and I had another battle with the two golems. Nasty stuff to fight alone in an enclosed area. The battle ended and I got a message from Sassy. She had died in the acid pit. As she was the lock picker we were SOL. There is a door at the end of the acid pit that has to be picked. Ur fought his way back and we took the exit portal. They decided that we needed at least one more strong player to do this. I thought we could do it, we were darn close before, but did not push it. Anyway I found a nice place for my archer to hunt. The hunt for Gaerlan I was in OHN cashing keys in the chest there with Mage. The flood room of OHN was about the only chest I use now. I have over 250 keys and really have little use for them. The trade value is nill so I could only hope for a keeper or two and maybe some utterly flawless stuff to render after the patch. I was talking to Nabata and Monty Cristo on co-vassal tell. Mage is under Balash and those are a few of my co-vasals. Monty said there was a giant crystal golem at the subway exit. We rushed there. I hit subway after getting the call. I had an Olthoi buff on and it was about to fall. It took me 4 minutes to buff. I did the best buff for the shortest time, which was a Brood buff. That would give me double buffs for bludgeoning and all protects for spells. I got out and it was dead. We moved to Lin where I sold off the junk I had from the chest. As usual there was no attack on Lin. We figured the town is ignored so often it was about due. I decided to head to the subway. I moved to the bottom and waited word. I got a rumor that a golem was in Hebian-to. I hit the portal and ran to town. There I saw Mrs. Smurfette. It looked like she was looting a body. I ran to the plaza and saw that the golem was dead again, darn. My plan for Gaerlan was to try and land a Yield. That was what got him in trouble the other day. I figured there might be a bug that let you land a yield from a skilled creature mage and thereafter he could be hit. With my minor helm I have a buffed 396. There are some people with higher Creature but not many. While standing around the golem I saw a spell fly across the plaza and kill a player. I figured to run behind a building and try to get the Yield to land. I do not need line of sight. I got a few steps when I started to move like a mule. I sidestepped and a spell flew by. More people died. I looked at my stats and they were all at 10 except self and focus. I was able to calculate that the spell he put on me lowered all my stats by 250 points. I was way down the hill at this point but spells were still flying by me. I figured he was chasing and I was not running very fast. Without over 300 in self (320) and focus (304) I would never have had the ability to port out. I dont know who was more surprised I could portal recalled after being hit with that spell, me or Gaerlan. Just to sure he was not guessing I was at the sub, I lifestone recalled to Nanto right after that. From there I recalled to the mansion and waited out the spell. After it fell I teamed with Mrs. Smurfette and we hunted Gaerlan. There were no reports of him anywhere so we figured he had gone to another server. So he got his revenge on MT. If they give us a shot and he will not have it so good. All this is fun and such but we need to get the patch going. No state of the network stuff yet. Does this mean no patch Tuesday? I hope not. Hate to think I rushed my plans for nothing. Maybe later tonight, before I post this, they will have it up. This is one bit of text I would love to be deleting.