Fist de Yuma - July 2, 2002

Alliance Boot There has been a big demand on the boards for a problem to be fixed. For the most part this is not a problem to what I hope is the majority of alliances. Only when new untrustworthy people are given a high place in an alliance can this happen. A player high up in the alliance breaks from his patron. They do this after carefully finding out each member below them. The new monarch command helps with this regard. After they break they, one by one, boot every player. There is even a macro to do this. Because of macros, rank chains, cross-servers swear-ins and dead accounts this can be devastating to an alliance. It can be something that an alliance may not recovery from for months to come, if ever. A normal alliance can fall victim to this but it is rare. A high level account might be sold/hacked or a member can be come disgruntled. Even then most will not take these actions because it would hurt them as much as the alliance. A normal alliance is more a tree and less of a line than chain so the damage is not as great. So this is mostly a chain problem. A chain will place vassals under a member for xp pass up. The higher the level of the player the higher up the placement and the more damage they are able to effect. The call on the boards to restrict the alliance boot command has been strong. It seems like ever forth post was a demand that it be fixed. The funniest line is that it is an exploit, like a chain is not. The likely hood of it being changed is zero and none. The developers hate chains as much as we do. They have code to kill chains but MS ordered them not to put it in. Like combat macros Turbine would rather find a way to eliminate them than deal with the problems they cause. (I forgot to add, "combat" in when I last wrote about macros, sorry. Most of us don't care one way or another about any other macro.) I cannot say for sure but I get the idea that Turbine developers are rolling on the floor when someone destroys the branch of a chain. Underhanded lies There is a big problem. There is a type of board that has a security hole. This hole has been exploited to capture Passport account information. All it would take is for someone to set up an account on such a board with their Passport e-mail to get hacked. This security hole has been known for some time now. It has been patched and only a few non-patched versions are a danger. If course there are people who are lazy or malicious so there are un-patched boards on the web. One of these got a lot of people hacked on Wintersebb this month. The problem was quickly tracked down and people warned. It seems that one alliance board was poorly set up and captured a lot of data from the people who used it. Where the slander comes in was someone using this to attack a completing board. AC Revolution is a board I'm posting to a lot these days. (http://www.acrevolution.com/ ) I still use the other boards but for previews of the column or honest debates I use that one. AC Revolution is trying to be an alternate to some of the other boards. When the hacking issue came up a poster on one of the other boards was quick to point out that AC Revolution uses the same system software. No one was hacked that used ACR. ACR is patched and updated all the time. The person controlling this board is doing a great job. For a slimy person to relate this board to un-patched, unsecured barely out of beta boards was uncalled for. In that the post the poster did not mention any of the boards where there is a real problem so I'm sure it was a deliberant attack. He only posted the board their board is in competition with. Of course the sheep immediately picked up on the post and started spreading it far and wide. There are a lot of different ways to lie about someone. I hate all liars. I cannot say for sure if this was pure ignorance on the posters part or malicious slander. All I know is he owes an apology to AC Revolution. Bad names and chain sensitivity. You can generally tell when someone knows they're wrong. They overreact to any criticism about their actions. The louder the defense the more likely they know how bad their position is. Remember this if someone disrupts a speaker. The idea is to make it impossible to debate the true merits because of the noise. I ran into this yesterday while waiting to do a quest. I saw a name that I had to report. It inferred to the world that he masturbates a lot. What I do when I see names like "I jack alot", "Pud Thumper" or "Hot Sunt" is hit the abuse button and report the name. It is simple and works. Many names that should never have gotten into the game have been eliminated over the years. MS has a person who reviews the reports and decides if the name is one that needs to go. If a name is not offensive nothing happens. If "Pot Smoker" is ok no one knows and nothing is done. If the name is deemed unacceptable the person is warned to remove items and then deleted. Only a fool would make a name that has a chance of being deleted. Unfortunately there are a lot of fools in the game. There are also fools willing to loudly defend such fools. The other side is stupid names. There is nothing we can do about a stupid name. Generally they find themselves ignored. When asking for help they will find few willing to even acknowledge their existence. Right after reporting the bad name another player started spaming for help. His name was something like "Hi my name is Bob". We pretended like he was not there until he ported out. After that we all started laughing about his name in fellow chat. It was here I made an error. In the jovial atmosphere of the time I said I had reported the other name. Most of the time is such fellows it is all Elders and we know that what is said in fellow chat stays in fellow chat. One member is someone I had helped a lot in the past. He had left Elder to join a chain. He asked what was wrong with the name. I said if I was wrong about the name nothing would happen. He immediately started saying I was wrong to report the name because he was a high level player. That was when I made my second mistake. I said his level was chained and did not mean anything. This is my honest belief. A chain level is not the same as one that was earned. Shortly the masturbator sent me a tell asking if I reported him. I said that no one should have told him but I would be honest, I had reported him. He then started berating me about it. Like I said the louder they are the more they know they are wrong. I answered in a respectful manner. I was in a good mood and saw no need to get into a pissing contest with someone who likely was being deleted soon. Then he did something only the really stupid kids do. He asked me a question and squelched me. Now why ask a question if you have the person squelched unless you only want to make them mad? Serves no purpose. I asked the fellow who had told that I had reported the name. The chain member said he did. He then started berating me and left. This made the quest weaker but there was nothing much I could do. I knew I was wrong to have slipped. I should have just report the name and left it at that. Sometimes the happy joking part of a day can end up the worst. Then I started getting tells from other chain members. I had the time, as the quest had not started, so I explained my actions. The player would be deleted if the name was bad or nothing would happen. If the name was bad it was only a matter of time anyway. Some intellectual genus said that the name "Fist de Mage" was offensive to him. I said, "Please report my name." It helps to understand the system. I have little fear that "Fist de Mage" would be a bad name. If so it would be my fault for making it. The last person to send me a tell started with, "People like you make me sick." After more on a similar vane he give me, "I hate it that I have to risk my life to give people like you freedom." Now this was over the line. I told him that he has no idea who I was. He did not know that I was a 20 year retired Marine and I had served in Nam. How could he make such a stupid judgment over reporting a bad name to MS? He then preceded to insult anyone who served in Nam. Then to add to his stupidity he accused me of starting the debate. I pointed out that he sent me the tells, I had no idea who he was. He said no I sent him a tell. I copied his original tell and sent it back to him. That ended that. I wonder if the army needs to do more drug testing? Points on Mage nerf A lot of people are still upset over the loss of the ECO. The coming drain changes have even more people upset. While the drain change will take some getting use to there are a few points about our skills we have forgotten. When we started this game some skills buffs had such a poor time length as to be almost useless. Seven minutes on a focus and self buffs really hurt. Many of us were using items to overcome this limitation, which meant taking Lore was mandatory. Even then the longest we could fight was fifteen minutes or so. The first change came when they lengthened the Creature stats buffs to the same time as other buffs. This helped a lot. Of course there were those who complained it was a Lore nerf, these people will always be with us. The next change was level VII spells. Getting all of these in took a while. First was War. We really liked having those and it was a treat to have all the scrolls so you could make the run with friends. Stuff that was hard to kill now fell to one shot. Of course we fizzled the hell out of them. The other VII's were slowly added and the added 5 points really helped. The double time length was even better. Of course getting all the spells was a nightmare of searching and trades. The next change was Major and Minor items. Very few mages don't use a focus stone or drum these days. About all that don't are BM's who don't have Lore yet. All this has pushed our skills higher and higher. The loss of the ECO is less than the gain from Minor items. You could say that Melee took the major hit on this as they need more items than a mage and have less slots to put them. A mage needs to cover Focus, Self, War, Life and Creature with minor/major items. Many mages can pass on Creature as only Og and a few other templates use Yield as a weapon. You might say that mana conversion falls in there but a7fter a base 240 or so it is close to an effective cap. Right now I have the Elisa Favor for Focus, my drum for Self and a Minor War helm. I also found a Minor Creature helm I use on the Queen quest. (I'm still resisted up to 6 in a row trying to land that yield with 393, one resistant monster there.) I'm looking for some gants and shoes to cover Life and Creature. It will take time but someday I'll have it all covered. Of course if I can find Major items that will push up the bar even more. Turbine understand that and Major items are almost impossible to get. Take the case of a melee now. Lets go with a Sword as that should be the king of Melee soon. They would need a minor; Focus, Sword, Coodi, Quick, Melee, Strength and Healing just to recover their combat skills. For buffing they would also have to obtain a Creature, Life, Item and Mana Conversion. If you think it strange I add mana conversion for melee and not mage think again. A mage can get to a base 240+ mana conversion without to much difficulty. It is almost impossible for a melee to make that number. I also add Item as only the really high melee's have a fizzle free skill there. There has been one skill where the ECO loss hurt mages a lot. War loss of ECO is extending battles and making some darn right dangerous. A Chaos wisp is nasty monster. The only good thing was a vuln and blast with piercing took them down every time. Now there is a good shot you may need two War hits. With a Chaos wisp you many not last to land three spells. Many very dangerous monsters are now far more deadly. I have to be far more cautious with Chaos wisps than I was. Fortunately they seldom get so close that I cannot dodge their spells. Those without quick fingers are SOL. From the chat I found that this problem is being addressed. For War only the ECO is coming back. It will be skill based so it will be better than before. Of course this gains even more for the BM over the Og but that will not hurt me. I'm not so stupid as to be against something that helps me because it helps someone else more. So overall we have gained far more than we have lost this year. I find it strange that it is the Mages, who have the least loss, who do the most complaining. Flag quest I was not going to do the Flag quest. It did not seem much of an item. I got a letter from a guy who said I should do the quest just for fun. He had a lot of praise for the quest. With a little digging I found I needed to talk to a guy at some coodi, way Northwest. Checking ACE I saw that it was not far from my house. Well not far is relative I guess, it was a good run. I decided to let Jr do the quest. Grivvers are a touch better with him. Good attack and defense skills and level VI Life protects. I figured this would be one where defense counted more than offense. Of course my chance of imperiling a Grivver is slim and none. Jr is on a different account so he cannot port to my house. I have a simple route that is close to my Lifestone in Nanto. From there I ran the far north beach until I was directly north of the coodi. After some twits and turns I found the guy on a hill overlooking a valley. He is a strange fellow who was always hungry. The valley was packed with Grivvers. I talked with him a while and found I needed to go to a nest in the valley and bring back what I find to him. The run across the valley was not to bad. I did not stop to fight. When questing I try not to get distracted with inconsequential battles. I ran into the portal and was ready to go into dungeon crawling mode. There are a lot of Grivvers here. I mean a whole lot. They could not inflict much damage on me but fighting my way past them took time. The spawn is fast so you have to keep moving. There was several times where I had to kill some a few times before clearing a path. I followed the right wall and that got me to a big room. There was a hole in the floor covered with webbing and a few blocked and unblocked passages. I found one that led down and followed that. It led to another room below the last one. It has pile of trash and loot there. The loot could not be picked up so it was decoration only. There was a Auroch Cow wrapped up in webbing and did not appear happy about it. From there I found another passage to a big room with more Grivvers than I could count. There were so many Grivvers that they re-spawned before I could clear it. After seeing that I decided to let my defense work for me and charged into the room after the boss Grivver. The battle was not short and a bit iffy with hordes of other Grivvers sticking me. Damage wise I was not doing bad but stamina drops fast in battles like that. Finally the Grivver dropped and I got the webbing. I killed a few Grivvers to make a hole to run and took off. Finding my way out was not hard. Mostly just taking any passage that led up. I got out and ran back to the guy on the hill. He looked at the stuff and directed me to another spot. The castle I found was new to me. It might be an old castle that I never ran across. It is in a spot I had not done much around. It had a lot of skeletons but they were a zero problem. I found the machine and it make me some thread. Next stop was the castle where you get the matties robes made. I had always ran there from the Bandit Castle but that is a long boring run. I could run from my house. Might have been a good idea as I sometimes run into a Mattie. Got a hide running to that castle once. I did not want to take that much time. The quest was wearing thin on me. Using ACE I found a house portal very close to the castle. I used that to get there. I found the last machine next to the leather worker. That got me the flag. I admit that the flag does not look bad next to my house. I really have to start working on that house. It is mostly empty right now. I'm slowly adding items to it but it has not been a top priority. When they add a roof hook the flag will be better. I'll just have to decide what color to dye it. WE Players I decided to break down and get my new Sword player some armor. I had a few items stuck on a mule that would be good. While at the mansion I got some gants and shoes to fill out the armor. I also was given a nice sword. It is the one you get off a shard. It is a great sword for someone who cannot use the newer ones yet. From there I ported back to Holtburg. I ran out to the edge of the protection pillars and hunted there for a few hours. I had some nice battles with Tuskers. Male and Female Tuskers are not as good as Guards and Slaves but for an 11lv sword they are a handful. Remember I don't have the massive buffs many use at lower levels. I put a lot into melee defense. I plan to head over to the Crit around 20lv. I'll need to find some level III protection stuff before I really hit it. My plan is to have a melee defense high enough that I can stand in there before I go. Far too many go to the Crit before they are ready. There are big of packs of Reedsharks where I was hunting. Good xp and a few II items I can use. I made 12lv and halfway to 13. The BM is doing well. With the new spell timer I can do a lot of buffing and still have time to hunt. I lucked out and found an alliance mate in the small jumping room. We fellowed up for a while. I imperiled and he killed. In a spot like that you can do very well with teamwork. He had to leave and I was on my own. I could do ok against three or four but more than that was a problem. Mostly I only got into trouble when some spawn in back of me while in a battle. I take damage but not a lot at a time. When in a hopeless battle I would kill what I could and leave just enough mana to port out with. I met another alliance mate who was running a mage. He was 28lv, one above me. We teamed for a bit but he kept dieing. He was a new mage and could not figure out why I did so much better than him. He also had Creature, which made him a lot stronger than me, for now. I asked him about his banes. He said he thought banning would take to much time. LOL and dieing doesn't? I explained how banning is key to keeping a mage alive. With the new time length there is no reason not to bane. A lot of people think that a mage is all about shooting spells and draining. A mage battle is a dance where a single misstep can get you killed. It is not without reason that mages have a higher death total than other classes, especially at the start. Of course many mages think melee is about pushing attack and getting coffee. Nothing can be further from the truth. I find it easer to battle using my mage than my melee in most hard battles. For one a mage does not have to drop out of attack mode to heal. A mage can attack from about anywhere but a Melee has good and bad spots to attack. I cringe when I see two melees fighting a monster shoulder to shoulder. One should always swing to the rear. Against a shielded opponent it is mandatory. So both sides have different things they must do to be effective. It is possible to get to very high levels without leaning how to fight today. Sadly many players take the short cuts and never learn some key skills. The Arwic Mafia At first this created some anger, mostly because it was such a surprise. After taking a look at it this is one of the best things to ever happen to the PK scene on MT. If not for the looting part I would have supported them from the beginning. Four or five guys created templates with a lot of health and little magic, in other words pure melees. They started going PK between 30 and 40. They hunt in a pack and do hit and run raids. We first learned of them when they attacked our mansion. It seems they had done some raids before but our PKs retreated to the mansion to regroup. Without the surprise element they were dead meat. To get around that they swore into Elder for a day and got a lot of kills. High-level mages fell to this. Since then our mansion is always on alert so we have not seen them much. Other alliances have felt their attack and a lot of high-level players have shocking fell before them. I'm getting the idea that this is a pure fun group. No trash talk, even on our board. I hope their success will elevate PK on MT. Right now our PK is dominated by 100+ chain members. To see a group of low levels taking down the big guys is enough to shake this up. As they get stronger it will only get better. Good tactics and fun play will win over the powerleveling d00ds any day. To follow there exploits go to http://www.geocities.com/arwicmafia/. Queen quest, again, Part one Aaa in a fair world my column would be done. After a lot of worry about having nothing to write about I got the above done and ready for editing by Sunday afternoon. I had done two Queen quests by then but had no intention of writing about them. Then I did a third quest and enough happened that I needed to write about it. If I'm going to write about one I might as well right about all three. The first one was not planned. I was running to the plateau to see if there was a quest going on. At 50 million a point I'm still looking for a War Teresa. The odds of finding one are very bad but over time even low odds can be overcome. As I hit the plateau I saw my old friend and vassal Ladon. Ladon had lost the account for some reason so I just ran by. He called me to stop. The true owner was playing Ladon! It seems that his brother controls the account but he gets to play it now, with some restrictions. One being that he stay in the chain. There was an all chain group set to do the Queen quest. Ladon asked me of I would go with them. Ladon at 98 and me at 110 were two of the lowest members of the group. They had not done the Quest much and wanted my help. There is one thing to be said about pure power, it will overcome a lot. We had some ups and downs but no real danger. A 126 player died twice while being sprayed. I was told he lagged out. So be warned, even the easy parts to this quest can be deadly. The Dam has a problem. Not sure if this is deliberate or not. The spraying is far slower than it was. I'm not sure if I had done a quest before the patch or not. If it changed with the patch it might be a change Turbine wants, if after it is a bug. In any case this one took far to long. We lucked out and it did not take so long that we needed to be sprayed twice. I did my job as the de-buffer. The killer was a melee so there was the lag danger. It was a very high melee so we had a better shot. This lag problem is a problem over time. If the kill takes over five minutes it can be deadly. As the lag hit, me and another mage started blasting. It was very close to 50% but I was hoping to split the damage between me and the other mage. That worked and the Melee got the kill. The head was recovered. Another danger this quest has is not getting the head before it rots. I'm sure there were people in the group that would prefer I was not there. My stand against chains has created a lot of hard feelings. Nevertheless we had a good time and no one gave me anything but respect. Queen quest, again, Part two The next two were setup up weeks in advance. First up was an Elder group was set up by Mrs Smurfette. Of course it was her quest so it was her kill. That is what we are doing with this now. The person who wants the kill sets up everything and gives out invites. A bit on the quest. The quest can be fun but there are better quests to do. The xp reward is lower than just hunting. Unless you really luck out the loot will not even pay for your comps. There is a danger of leaving a body that cannot be recovered because the group quits. In other words, other than seeing the Queen for the first time or getting the title, it is not worth doing. Fortunately for the quest those are two good reasons. Like I stated in the last column, I go to help. I has a letter about this quest from Winson Yee, aka Kmg of Frostfell. He said that using a UA with a fast strike will pin the Queen in place. A few other melees will keep the Queen blocked enough that if she breaks from the UA it will not go far. Kmg also said that for some reason the Queen cannot hit a UA while he is hitting her. Other than lucky hits between swings the queen is helpless again a UA on fast strike. This was something I wanted to test out. Unfortunately no one in our group was UA. UA has not been a class used much lately. There are only a handful of high-level UA in Elder, me, Elder and Crynus are all I know of. Elder we might get but not this time. I have a hard time being in two places at once. I have not seen Crynus but see his friend Cat all the time. I'll have to see if I can get him to test this out. So I was going to see if our sword people, in fast strike, could do it. This was very iffy as I was not all that sure about the fast strike and we did not have many melees, three or four I think. As I had no intention of writing about this so I did not get the names. I knew I was writing about the last one so I have those. We started out getting sprayed in the Wasteland hive instead of the Dam. This is a much better way if know how. Right now only William the Bat knows how to open the doors but I intend to find out. Like the Dam there is a spray problem. At one point there was 20 minutes between people being sprayed. Only the fact that we had one fellow to spray kept this from being a disaster. The big advantage to Wasteland is a direct portal to the Royal hive. You can start the quest as soon as you get done being sprayed. With a good group of Elders holding the doors getting to the end was simple and quick. William the Bat had the doors open almost before we got to them. We cleared the guards and got ready to take the Queen. The first thing I noted was there was no place to pin the Queen. The time we accidentally did a one pass one or two melee had her pinned. This gave credence to Kmg plan. I think one of the melees was a UA on that trip. To be safe I had all the mage form up behind the eggs. In hindsight I think we needed to back up until out of radar range of the Queen. Being that it is a dungeon our spells have greater range that the radar. This may not have helped but it is something we should have done. I was counting on the eggs to block any attack our way. We killed the first Queen and Mrs Smurfette was blasting. I was de-buffing but being resisted a lot, as usual. I was using my minor Creature helm so my skill was up to 393, still below the pre ECO killing but respectable. (The loss of cross buffing really hurts on this quest.) The melees were having a hard time. I asked to have each melee targeted for heals but neglected to assign one. I think two were on one Melee as Balash was uncovered. That is the trouble with doing something new, you miss things. For a while things were working. We had not made a major dent in her health but normally a free Queen can wipe the table in 20 seconds. The fact that we were still alive after the battle started showed it was working. Then all hell broke lose. The first was Balash calling for a heal. Seconds later he died. I leaned later he was not being hit much but one big one hurt him. He was still ok until he tried to heal. That stopped his swinging and lowered his melee defense, pure death. With Balash dead the Queen started to move. Well hell she walked over the eggs like they were not there. I guess I should have tried to move over them to see it they were real or not. Stupid, stupid, stupid. They looked real so we never tried to walk over them. I heard a few screams and knew this was a bust. I took just enough time to type, "Run" and rushed the portal. I was one of the last ones sprayed so I knew I was ok. The others I was not sure of. Most of us made it out. Those that did not rushed back to the hive, praying the spray was still active. All but Sword Blade got back. We waited and planned how we were going to do this. William the Bat still had his paper think Creature armor, great for everything but the Queen. As luck would have it Moby Dick has a set of Hollow Armor on him. That gave us a meat aaaaa Melee shield. With all but Sword Blade we rushed back down. With a powerful mage like Mrs Smurfette and a brave melee like William the Bat we had little trouble. I de-buffed the Queen, William jumped down, the mages or melee with healer hearts, healed him while Mrs Smurfette blasted the Queen. William smartly grabbed the Head while we cleared the guards. Even with the trouble and deaths we all agreed it was a blast. Queen quest again, part three. I'm running the gantlet this week. It starts with a powerful if inexperienced group, moved to a group with half the firsts power but far more experience to a group what was even weaker and had little experience. This one had bad mojo from the start. The servers had big problems and we had to delay two hours. Most of the players were in Europe so it was their late night. The delay really hurt them. This had been setup by Kempeck weeks before. It started out bad and got worse as the day went on. Nevertheless the moral of this group never wavered. Their entire focus was fun. Even when someone made a horrible error and we were stuck they joked and had me rolling in laughter. The Red Rage alliance I have know for a while but never adventured with them. After this one they can call on me any time. It was a pure blast. This was Kempect's quest. I was trying to help him but did not want to take over. This meant asking questions and prompting. The idea is to help the leader chose by showing his options and asking pointed questions. Kempect also wanted to get the kill. Melee kills are far too iffy for me but at 98 I had hopes he was strong enough. I'll start by listing the names of who was with us. Kempeck(Duke Red Rage), Red Fate(Thane crunchyfrog), Nuclear K(Rage), Pheonix Rose(Rage), Bivitar Hawkens(Rage), Naga(unknown), Napalm(Rage), I B Scared(Rage. Came on second spraying), Cyrion(Rage. Left after 1st queens death), War Monger(Rage) Kempech told me later he wanted to make up their lack of power with numbers. This meant we had others there for support whose names I don't think are listed. Kempech at 98lv was the highest not counting me. The rest were in the low to mid 70's. We started at the Dam as I'm not up on Wasteland switches yet. When I am that is where I'm going. For large parties using both will be a big help. There were three macros at the Dam, which did not make me happy. You would think that three players in the upper 90's would be playing, not spoiling our adventure. We had little trouble getting to the door. After the door was held I made sure to go back and help the switch pullers find the way. With more than one passage it is easy to have two groups using different routes. The spraying was not fast but Kempeck had a plan. After we were sprayed we ran to Mount E and logged. We then logged a mule and sent a message to his wife's player. When everyone was sprayed she sent us a message to log back the player and start buffing. The idea is to keep the spraying fresh for everyone by logging off. I assumed this would work as another player said they were going to do that a week before. He said they all were getting sprayed and logging off for the night. They would do the quest the next day. He never got back to me so I assumed it worked. We all buffed up and headed down. Kempeck had the switches and has lock pick. This meant we did not have to hold the first door. Other than a few times people ran by the passage everything was smooth. Having two fellows was not good but we kept it together. We cleared out the guards and, after a little prompting, got everyone next to the portal. I de-buffed the Queen while the mages blasted. This is one of the fun parts, watching hordes of mages firing off spells from all directions. The first Queen died and we rushed to the portal. As I got out I saw the message, "I cannot get into the portal!" Ooo shoot (or something to that effect), their spray was out, the timer is real time, not game time!! The fingers flew to /f port. Not many of them made it out. Mages have an advantage, they don't need to a draw wand. I think one or two of the mages made it out but not sure if any of the melees did. They joked about getting my message and pushing the buttons. This left us with five people and not enough to kill the Queen and recover. We needed to get the rest sprayed and have them rejoin us. They asked me if I was willing to go help them get sprayed. I was but first I wanted to see if I could get some help. /tell William the bat, hi (not on); /tell Moby Dick, hi, (not on) /tell Mars-Hill, HI (you tell Mars-hill, hi). Mars-hill agreed to help. He was at the mansion getting some trade work done and then would be at the plateau. To make a long story short Mars-Hill got them sprayed and then lagged out. So we did not get to use him in the Hive but his help saved us a lot of time. Thanks Mars, I owe you big. People like Mars-Hill is what the game is all about. I told Kempeck that we were in recovery mode. We would do our best to get him the kill but if the lag hit I would call on the mages to finish her off. He was in total agreement. Like I said, a great group of people. The group joined us. We lost a few people who had to leave and picked up some new members. To help things I had asked if there was a mage who did not have the Queen kill. Pheonix Rose did not and with 385 War was good for hitting the Queen. She has better War than I do so I expected her to get the kill even if I blasted at her side. With luck Kempeck would still get the kill with us splitting damage. We had one glitch that was a product of us being tired. I said out loud that we would use the same people as before, meaning door holders and switch pullers. The last time I had gone back to the jump point to lead the switch pullers to the end. I was going to do that again this time. What I missed was Kempeck asking if he would still do the switches. If I had seen that I would have said yes he was. It would have clear he had missed me saying to use the same people. We had both missed messages so the result was a big mess. We got to the first door and Kempeck was with us. There was no one on top to do the switches. /em Doh! So we had one of the people who had just been sprayed port out and run back. Kempeck guided him to the switches and we got the doors opened. While waiting everyone started joking around and having a good time. This is how you tell a good group from an average one. When things go bad for most groups you hear bitching that will go on forever. Many times people will port out in disgust and you will fail on the spot. Not this group. Their moral was high and no one was complaining. This is despite the fact that it was very late night and early morning for most of then. One was at 6am his time. Many were nodding off during slow parts. Like I said before, they kept me in stitches for most of the wait. We got the doors set and everyone at the jump. I ran back to lead the switchman and the door holders to the end. I briefed them about the lag. I'm sure when I said lag they were thinking something entirely different than I was. Queen quest lag is like no lag I have ever seen before. It is cannot move your mouse lag. It is he most frustrating hell you have ever been in. Monsters all around you, people depending on your help and you frozen in complete frustration. Cries for help and OMG statements and you cannot even stop doing whatever the last 5 keystrokes wanted to do. This is one thing I found out this time. I tapped a key several times trying to get it to do something. As that worked I tried to do something else. No dice. It repeated the key taps 4 more times before releasing me to do something else. There is a good two to three seconds from hitting a key and the results. If you hit twice it will go into the query and you get both. We rebuffed here and were ready to rock. Even with another point of Creature I'm still playing hell to de-buff the Queen. With 40 off her magic defense, Focus and Self, I was resisted 7 times trying to land an Imperil with 391 Life. Finally I had the Queen de-buffed and said, "Go". Kempeck had been waiting my signal and jumped. He was the only one who had done this quest much. He knew how bad the lag gets. This is why he readily agreed to Rose getting the kill if the lag hit. Like I said before, I had high hopes that Kempeck had enough power to take down the Queen. I checked the de-buffs later and I had done the full set. For some reason he could not keep up with her healing. I'll have to ask him if he was using an attack other than Piercing or Bludgeoning. I had both de-buffs on in anticipation of Rose and me blasting with shockwave. The lag set in and the Queen was at 90% health. I had already de-buffed her twice more. I was about to do it again with the lag got to bad. I called for Rose to start blasting and I followed. I was hitting for good damage and Rose was at my side blasting as well. The Queen slowly fell to around 50%. I was out of mana and could not move my mouse well. With a bit of a hurry I had it clicked to heal like last time. Giving it one shot I let the mouse settle for a full five seconds before clicking. That worked and I had mana back. I started blasting but it was clear the de-buffs had expired. Trying to put Bludgeoning vuln had me resisted several times and I was out of mana and stamina. Rose was also out of mana and there was nothing we could do but watch the Queen rapidly heal to full. Kempech died because no one could heal him. Someone else had jumped down trying to help Kempech and he died. I'm not sure if anyone on the ledge died before we could port out. Just porting out was an adventure in frustration and waiting for the mouse arrow to settle on the spell. I know I had letters on how to move from spell to spell with keystrokes. The delay is so bad that I doubt it would work. I guess with careful counting it could but it would be about as fast as mouse anyway. I was out and at Nanto. The only reason I had survived was my massive buffing and good armor. Having al 500 underwear under fully buffed GSA works wonders in battle. I was tired, 10pm my time and we had started at noon, but ready to go again. I hate failed quests. Unfortunately it was just to late for most of the group. With only a handful of player left and not even close to enough power, it was hopeless. Also most of the people with bodies had logged off. Turbine will have to take a close look at this problem. Meanwhile I'm tempted to say I will only do this with a mage killer. As we have done it with melee I will not take that stand yet but even when we succeed it is a close thing.