Fist de Yuma - July 23, 2002

It could have been worse I logged on far earlier than I thought I could. The patch was done early. It was also a lot shorter than I thought, that or Turbine/MS has increased the download speed. I have mules with 30 credits and not a darn thing to use them on. When mules were first created they needed a lot of id skills. Now all you really need is strength. Tradesmen need Cooking, Alchemy and maybe lock pick and Fletching. If only one account Creature and Mana Conversion could be useful. Other than that there is nothing for mules today. To really be useful tradesman cannot even be normal mules. Swearing people to them and going out to hunt is almost demanded if you are to have any skill worthwhile. So I added Mana Conversion to one mule, though I'm not sure if he has the room for Creature spell comps. With Mage on one account and Jr on the other I have someone who can toss tradesman buffs when needed. It was with reluctance that I added Weapon Tinkering to Mage. I could get healing if I waited to 115. There were a lot of times when healing would be useful. I was not sure if anyone else in Elder was taking Weapon Tinkering so I did. Fist took Armor Tinkering. Other than a range weapon there is not much Fist can to with his 7 points. Elder has somewhat the same template and has Xbow. He said that Xbow is not all that useful for him. Ever since the word on Tinkering came out I have been saving for that. In hindsight I should have reversed who got what. I should have got Mage Armor Tinkering and Fist Weapon. With Endurance/Strength Fist has 130 starting points. Instead he took the Focus/Endurance and only had 80. Mage would get a 150 start on Armor and a 160 on Weapon. So overall reversing the skills would have better spent the points. Weapon being the one I wanted most of all caused me to jump and get the best stats with Mage. If I had it to do over again I might get Fist Weapon and let Mage get Armor. Fist can pick up Armor at 125 if Mage gets healing. I'm not sure what Magic Tinkering will do or if it will be worth taking. First thing I did was go do a hunt. I was glad to see they fixed the Virindi Exec. The ones below the plateau were returning several thousand few points and not dropping Sings. That is fixed. I did have a chance to try out an emergency drain. I had just finished off a pod of Virindi. I tossed a cold vuln spell on one of three Vapor Golems. Two of them charged. I heard the spawn sound and a Virindi Exec was five feet to my left. He started to chain cast fireballs at me as I killed the first Vapor. I selected the next Vapor and drained myself up to full heal. Then I turned on the Virindi E. After killing him I returned and killed off the Vapors. It was very smooth and the drains worked well, even though I was still using level one. Of course if the Vapors had started chain casting fireballs on me it might have been a different story. Most of the loot was junk but I did get two Sing keys and a really outstanding Sword. 20 to 39 +7 +9. I gave it to Balash, who was ecstatic. From there I just did some reading and clearing around the house. Big party with a lot of family this weekend and still stuff that needed repair. This was fortuitous. When I went back to the game around 11pm it was down. A full roll back to before the patch. Now that I know Mars-Hill is taking Weapon Tinkering, and has far better skills than I do (500+), I can skip getting weapon for Mage and do Armor instead. That will still leave Fist with Weapon and Magic Tinkering at 125. I'll still be thinking about it so who knows. For those that don't know there was a good reason for the down time and rollback. Someone found that if you Imp an armor piece, and then Tinker it, you could add 200 points to the armor rather than 20. They had two things they could do with this knowledge, report it to Turbine and no one else, or tell all their friends so they can repeat the bug. Of course with all the grief playing cheaters in the game you can guess what they did. That left Turbine with two choices; delete all the broken armor and do a hot fix, or do a hot fix and rollback. Of course a rollback is easy and finding all the cheaters is hard. So we suffer. It would be a lot better for the game if they deleted the cheated armor. Balash will lose a great sword and I'll get to rethink my setup with Tinkering. I'll lose around 5 million points for Mage and around 10 for Fist but I can live with that. Like I said it could have been worse. The Collector! I was running Jr to EVL. On the way I saw some Broods and decided to quickly log Mage. I'm still looking for a War Tressia. At 53 million a point I really could use some. I calculate that around 330 base I'll need the Treassia's to max my War. This is billions of points off so I have time to collects the Tressia's. I ran Mage there and killed the few Broods I had seen with Jr. This looked like the remnants of a spawn so I moved south. Just south of the mountains that hold Mount E, in the foothills, I saw a Virindi Exec. As I moved forward I saw he has a companion called, The Collector. When you kill a Virindi Exec they die complaining about how The Collector mislead them. This has been going on for months and I always wondered what they were talking about. I vuln'ed the Exec and it charged. Along with it came a Tusker. Now both are not hard for me at all. The VE fell and I turned on the Tusker. Humm, instead of Armored Tusker this was Plated Tusker. I put fire vuln on the Tusker and started getting blasted by lightning in the back. This type of Tusker is not drainable so if you take fast damage you're in big trouble. I was running with 40 hit points and a horde of dots behind me. I finally found a tree to screen from spells behind and healed. The mob returned to their spawn site. I returned and saw that a Chaos Wisp was the little backstabber. A piercing vuln and several spikes later I was done with him. I vuln the Tusker again to draw and blasted him. He did resist a little more than an Armored Tusker. Holly Molly, 60k in points, let me have a few more of these. Well more I wanted and more I got. The next Vuln had me attacked by three of them. I was glad I had my Brood buff with its layer bludgeoning protection. That left The Collector and two Altered Drudges. I'm way past worrying about Altered Drudges, they can not even land on me any more. I figured The Collector would have high magic defense so I led with Yield, then Fire Vuln. It changed me and I fired a level VII fireball. What the......41 damage? I was sure the vuln landed. I tried blade, same results. This was going to be a long one folks. Blast, blast, blast, blast, he drains me to full. Blast, blast, blast, blast he drain me to full. The Collectors non-voice booms in your mind, "We are undaunted by your unusual limb-flailing advancing behavior." Now a Plated Tuskers spawns so I have to fight it. I de-buff The Collector again and it is nice enough to charge back over the hill at me. Blast, Blast, Blast, it heals to full. Blast, Blast, Blast, it drains me to full. The Collectors non-voice booms in your mind, "Soon your pieces will be flying apart with great velocity." During this I have to recover mana and healing. Between blasts from it and the drains I'm under 100 hit points several times. The Tuskers keep spawning and I have to fight them off before returning to TC. Of course each time it is like starting over. I tried doing a full de-buff on it. I switched to my Queen de-buffing bar (Yes I have a full bar dedicated to de-buffing the Queen.) and de-buffed TC for everything I thought might have an effect. The Collectors non-voice booms in your mind, "Flesh poison within the experiment. Who gave it the nerve to be killed here?" The second time it moved back to the spawn site it did not heal. This gave me a starting advantage. At one point I had it to a sliver of heal and another Tusker spawns. I try to keep blasting but it healed enough not to die and I was at 50 hit points. I had to stop blasting, heal and kill the Tusker. TC was back at three-quarters health by the time I could start blasting again. It retreated back over the hill so I decided to pop a gem before restarting the battle. You cast Nullify All Magic Self on yourself and dispel: Fire Vulnerability Other VI, Blade Vulnerability Other VI, Blade Vulnerability Other VI, Blade Vulnerability Other VI, Blade Vulnerability Other VI, Bafflement Other VI, Frailty Other VI, Frailty Other VI, Frailty Other VI, Bafflement Other VI, Imperil Other VI, Bafflement Other VI, Frailty Other VI, Bafflement Other VI, Frailty Other VI, Imperil Other VI, Imperil Other VI, Imperil Other VI, and Imperil Other VI. Another Yield and Fire Vuln to start the battle. The Yield had run out. The Collectors non-voice booms in your mind, "We have learned the art of intimidation from the finest of your kind. Words such as these they shout at us in the Maze. Why are you humored?" TC does not seem to understand humans much. I guess he did not read the notes on the Martine experiment. I got him to a thread again and this time I was not going to stop for anything, it was him or me. It healed and I kept blasting. Through the shredded mess of the Collectors black cloak, you catch a brief glimpse of a silver-tinged violet light... but it quickly fades, turning to a fine white ash that is torn away by the wind. An echo of entitys hollow voice booms in your mind, "How curious. The vapor-sea burns. Perhaps we should hollow the experiments, and inhabit them." After all that I figured massive xp. 18k. Humm that was is kind of low for this fight. Loot? Summon primary portal gem. I don't really need that. How disappointing. I got more off the VE. The Collector revisited Of course being that this was my first confrontation with TC I did it all wrong. According to Mars-Hill Acid would have brought it down fast. I guess I should not have given up trying other attacks. After blade did no more damage I stopped searching. Getting pounded on by the Tuskers did not help with the tactics. Hard to think, "I need to find out what spell works on these" when you are having a hard time staying alive. I also found that the gem I got is not a portal spell in the way I thought it was. It is part of a Dagger quest. I'll give it to one of my dagger vassals. (Doh, no give.) Now there was two ways I could have worked out this ignorance on my part. I could do what I just did and write about it as it happened, or I could go back and rewrite it to make me look good. Honor may make you look foolish at times but I sleep well. New Weapons My reason for running Jr to EVL was to try and get some of the upgraded UA weapons. I know the chances are low but low is better than nothing. After my adventure with Mage I never got back to Jr. It was the next day before he got to fight. After buffing up I went in search of EV's. I tried the first set of doors. That sometimes is not camped. It holds 4 EV and I can fight them one at a time. No, an archer was camping them. I headed down the main hall to a side room where one spawns. There was one there. Imperil and three fast swings later it was dead. Check body, LOL 4-14 +8 +12 cetsus! On my first kill! I quickly buffed it up and that is now Jr's main weapon in EVL. I only did one buff there as I quickly fill up with loot. I got a 3-12 slashing weapon to add to my collection. I also got some nice weapons from friends. At this rate I'll have a weapon set up that I never dreamed possible. The one pass Queen Quest I got a call tell Tars on Saturday morning. He wanted to know if I would lead his alliance's Queen quest. Rosa had gone out to do some shopping with her sister so I could to play. Most of the time I cannot play on Saturday as Rosa always has something planned. I said that I was not sure of what my wife's plans were but I would try and make it. It was set for 5pm PST. At 4:30 Rosa was not home and I was ready to go questing. The group was slow in forming. When we got everyone together it looked ok. A good mix if melee and mages. The only problem was I was the only person who had ever done the quest. There are a lot of parts of this quest that take two widely separate people doing things. Both places where you get sprayed need a switch puller or, in the case of Wasteland, a switch stepper. When in the main hive you have a set of floor switches to open the doors leading to the Queen. I only just found out that the switches were in the floor below the ramps. I always thought it was some room with switches in it. So with no one else to help this was going to be a confusing mess. Someone in the fellow saw Duri Gallant run by. I sent him a tell and he was all for going. He got a hold Tavvaz and William the bat. Tavvaz said she would go and also would talk to William. With William along it would be smooth. Miss Smurfette ran by and asked if I needed any help. I said I would call her if the people I was counting on had a problem. She said great and moved off to do some Brood hunting. At 5:30 Rosa walk in with a horde of family. She suggested I defrost some steaks and fix dinner. I knew that this quest was going to last far to long to do that. I had two choices, back out of the quest or have Rosa mad at me. O'well, Rosa will get over it. With luck I might slip cooking into the down time of the quest. A short time later Duri sent me a tell. He had been in the sun all day and was feeling sick. I have done that a time or two and told him to go to bed. If you push it you'll really get sick. Tavvaz and William the bat never did log back on. I'm thinking there was some confusion or something came up. In any case was back to square one. I sent a fast tell to Miss Smurfette to come help me. She said she would be right there. I really hate the Dam. I figured this would be a good time to use what I had leaned about the Wasteland hive. I really needed to do it with William once before doing it on my own. William gave me a good walkthrough so I felt I could do it. I know the value of a melee/mage team. The best way to do the switches is such a team. I had Miss Smurfette lead them down while Tars and I headed to the switches. Miss Smurfette is brave and smart but had only one this quest once. I'll make a long story short I'll tell you that Williams instructions did not work. They seemed to work as Miss Smurfette thought there was only one door. She told me the way was clear but only had the first door, they had never got to the second door. We backtracked and did what should have been the right switch. No go. We did the other side, no go. So that meant one of the left hand passages was what we needed to do. Of course with a 50/50 shot to get it we got the wrong one. By this time Annusaki the Sad had joined us. She had never done the Queen quest before and wanted to tag along. We finally had the doors open but I kept failing the jump. When you jump into Wasteland you need to go in slow. If you don't you shoot over the ledge and fall into the north pit. The lag was bad and even moving at a slow walk I was overshooting. Took me around five tries. We finally got to the spot and two of them had been sprayed. The spraying was very slow. It did not take me long to figure out that the 90 minutes would be up for the first ones sprayed. I hated to do this a second time but there did not look like any way to avoid it. I was finally sprayed and only Tars and Sad needed spraying. I moved into the hive and explained what we were going to be doing. Remember they had never done this and most had never even read about it. One person who shall remain nameless forget my warning about staying close to wall. He drew four EV down on us. I was totally unbuffed so I froze. I had my mouse wavering over the heal key as there was no way I could fight. Fortunately a few people were still buffed and could fight them off. Tars got sprayed and joined us. I knew it was a short time before Sad was sprayed so I told everyone to buff up. I set NB2 to start buffing and rushed to the Kitchen and put the Steaks on. I set the timer to 5 minutes and talked Rosa into turning them. She was not happy. After getting buffed Sad and MS ported in. MS rebuffed and we were ready to go. "Click" goes my modem. Oooo shoot, or words to that effect. (As a 20 year Marine I have learned a few words to color the atmosphere when needed.) Quickly redial and log back in, portal to Nanto and start running. I sent Sad a tell explaining. She said the group was in a panic when I logged out. With only half and hour on my spray I hit Mount E and rushed to the hive. I got them together and MS lead them to the Queen. Tars and I went searching for the switches. Let me tell you. It is a lot easer to Imperil and let the melee take care of the monsters with a few swings than fight alone. It took a few tries but I got the right switches and we were ready to go. The doors were set well and there was no trouble. We needed to buff again after all that so I gave the word. After seeing NB to do its thing again I rush to the Kitchen and got my food. I'm not saying that some people take a long time to buff but I was able to eat my dinner before they were done. At this point Rosa was more than steamed. I had to get this over fast or suffer all week. I knew everyone was tired at this point so they were willing to take a chance. We would kill the Queen in one pass. Of course they had never done the quest before so they had no idea what they were getting into. After we cleared the trash I moved over to the eggs. Strangely they were real. Either I made some observation error last time or they were made real after this patch. In any case I felt the four melees could use the eggs to make a hell of a wall. Each melee stood between two eggs to make a wide wall the Queen should not have been able to pass. This time I moved the mages out of Queen's radar range. I knew that was my major mistake last time. That meant we were not behind the melee wall but off to one side of it. I still felt it was better to be out of her radar range than anything else. I warned that if she got around the melee wall to port out. Do not wait to take damage! If she was on the move, recall immediately. I gave the same warning to the melees. Each melee had a mage targeting them. Tars was not covered but I said I would cover him after de-buffing the Queen. We were set. I debuff the first Queen and she fell. The second one Caliban was to kill. That was the one reason I felt we had a shot, a mage killer. Well it worked beyond my wildest dreams. The Queen froze in place! She did not even move to attack the melee's. Other than her acid missile attack she did nothing. Of course I cannot say the same for the other things that spawn there. Caliban is a 100lv mage but was having trouble landing despite my de-buffs. The Guards and Broods were filling the space in front of the mages in no time. With the melee's not having much trouble we could break and kill them. I was sure glad I had MS and Sad along. Their healing and timely shots on the Olthoi kept it from getting dangerous. Sad was using a lot of mana on her healers heart. She was the only one smart enough to heal the mages. I fed Caliban some mana from time to time but it was Sad who kept Caliban's and my health up. I had to de-buff the Queen three times before Caliban got her to halfway. After that it was easy. I got her down to a sliver and let Caliban finisher her off. I was afraid that even with her below half when I started I might do too much damage. The Queen fell and Caliban got the kill. We sweep the rest away after a long battle. It was a thoroughly enjoyable quest. I got meet some great people and learned a little more about the quest. MS said she learned more that day than any of the quests she had done. Of course she was a major leader and that is how you learn. The members were outstanding. They followed orders, asked timely questions and did not overfill the screen with text. I recommend; Tars (88), Caliban (100) , Ashren (80), Mournblade (97), Graendolph the Elder (81), U Po Kin (74) and Ldy-Savannag for any quest. They are all steadfast and brave but best of all, team players. Another point of view It is always good to see things from a different perspective. Tars was with me most of the quest. He wrote his view of the quest for me and here it is. The Queen Quest has been something I'd wanted to do for a long time now. I was 68 on my main when it came out (I think) and hit 70 pretty soon afterwards. Well, the boards were such a mess with scheduling that it took this long to get a slot for our group. But we were finally doing it! Actually, it wasn't even that easy. My original slot had a conflict because I posted the wrong day or something (*kick self*), but luckily a guildmate managed to grab another one for us. As the highest level melee in our group, I was by default the tank, so for weeks before the quest I powerleveled, trying to raise my melee d to the point where I might have a chance of surviving this seemingly impossible task. I've read Fist's column for a while, and I remember hearing stories of insane lag, and level 126s being chopped up like so much Grievver liver. In preparation for my inevitable death, I sacrificed wearing my major staff bracers that I had grown so fond of, but were sadly AL 118, for the more protective high AL armor that I was sure I would need. I also borrowed a diamond shield from Saru no Kuso (thanks again) who couldn't come on the quest. My final stats were 395 buffed melee d and 406 buffed staff. I thought I was pretty well prepared, until I found out that I was about 30 points too short in the melee d department from Fist. But still, that was the highest it would go, since it now costs around 9 million a point at level 88. Luckily, this happened to be the patch where staff finally got some love. No more Atlans and Soul Staves...now we would use real weapons! A guildmate kindly donated to me a small, short stick, which the process of IDing it revealed to me as much, much superior to my much larger and cooler looking Soul Staff and Atlan. The melee defense modifier seemed very important to me as well, as I had never had more than a +5 before to anything. The thread on our message board which announced the Queen quest got a lot of support. Unfortunately, a lot of people weren't able to make it, even among those that signed up. Our designated Queenslayer, our wonderful monarch Hekate, was not able to show up, so the task fell to the mighty Caliban, an all-trained, level 100 mage. We also had Graendolph the Elder, a level 81 sword person who had outkilled me since he was level 60 or so, Ldy-Savannah, who, ominously, was very adept at dying (we all love you Ldy :P), Mournblade, a self-professed level 5 newbie in a level 97 archer body, U Po Kin, a 70ish UAer who has shared the pains of a gimp racial weapon, and Ashren, a level 80 dagger dude with a nice attitude (well it rhymes anyway :P). I had to scramble at the last minute to find bellgivers and a leader, as some of the people who had offered to help weren't able to make it. It took at least 5 tells to get Fist's attention. I'm sure it wasn't his fault, as he was probably busy in a swarm of creatures or swamped by tells, but it made me worried that I wouldn't be able to find a leader. He proved very enthusiastic about helping us out, and I was confident that we'd have a good run. To start the bells, I ran with Mournblade and Graendolph's secondary character out to the first menhir ring. It was broken already, but I didn't know this. After a while I realized something was wrong, and as I was unable to contact the group before us, I sent out scouts to the different rings. Finally, I came across a group of people doing the stave quest, on the third ring. They had been trying for months to do it. The best way is to schedule a time for your own for the stave quest, so you don't run into conflicts like this, but they might not have known any better. In any case, they were very helpful and stopped to let us through, which incidentally saved us about an hour of time (which we would later be very happy for). After we broke the 5th ring, we waited a little bit for Miss Smurfette to come. Fist mentioned that we might have some problems from the level range of the group, so he kindly invited some friends along. Miss Smurfette showed up, and we started off to the Wasteland Hive. There we met up with Annunaki the sad, who unfortunately was not able to fit in the fellow. Either Mars-Hill does not know the Wasteland Hive switches or Fist miswrote them, because this next section would prove to be the longest part of the quest. Fist and I ran to do the levers while the main group headed towards the place to get sprayed. In addition, I believe Fist when he says he's old school...I'm thinking old school hunt-and-peck, no offense intended, of course : ). The communication problems made for some laughs, and I freely admit my part in the mistakes. We ran this way and that, but it took us 2 buff cycles to get to the right eviscerators. It was pretty fun though. Fist would cast weaken lock on the door and I would open it with my trusty lockpick, and we would run through and find out we were in the wrong place, and go back to try it again. Eventually we made it, only to find that the Wasteland Hive spray is bugged. It took us another buff cycle to get everyone sprayed and into the Royal Hive. It's a mighty, cavernous dungeon, and I'm sure if my graphics had been at max it would have looked pretty neat. As soon as we were buffed and ready to go, Fist gets modem trouble and has to run all the way back to the Hive; luckily, his spray timer wasn't up. We head off, I with Fist for levers and the rest of the group heading in the general direction of the Queen room. I got lost almost immediately, because it's all interlaced, with passages in unexpected places and strange things going on with doors. I caught up with him in the last few switches, and we headed on down to the royal chamber. I managed to trigger the local message: Tars has killed on of the Queen's Royal Guards! or something similar, which was pretty cool. We decided to give the Queen a try without recalling out, as it would be a long time to be sprayed again, and we figured a death wouldn't make a difference since we would be coming back anyway. We positioned ourselves between the eggs to block the Queen's advance to the mages of the group. The first Queen fell fast, and the second one spawned immediately. The Queen was bigger than I expected, and very mean looking for a level 200. Although I had expected to be shredded to bits, the Queen got stuck and couldn't hit anyone as Caliban blasted away at her. The person assigned to heal me actually restored more than 0 once, when my regen failed to kick in before the person could cast the spell, and I got a mighty 2 health back. The guards and eviscerators hit me 5 times for 1-4 points each during the entire time I was in the bottom chamber. So much for my 20 treated kits and 45 health elixirs... Graendolph got disconnected unfortunately, and missed the final twitch as the Queen fell to the ground. I ran forward and picked up the head and a carapace and shouted to other people to pick up the items on her corpse, as I had heard they expire with the corpse. I plan on giving Annunaki the sad the carapace. What a quest! It was really exhilarating to be able to do that finally. This is a highly recommended quest for anyone who can do it : ) Many thanks to Fist, Annunaki the sad, Miss Smurfette, and all the members of my group. - Tars, level 88 Gimp Staffer, Magistrate of the Path to Redemption, Morningthaw