Fist de Yuma - May 27, 2003

I was wrong When I checked out the new mage armor I saw two U's in the protection listing. For some reason I interpreted that as unprotected. In fact it is unparalleled! Why I did that I'll never know. I knew better but once I got it into my mind that it was unprotected it was hard to change it. Someone sent me a PM when they figured out what my error was. For that I thank them. I hate appearing a fool, especially in the column. (grin) With that knowledge the armor is well worth getting for both my mages. I have an old set that Mage has but it was created when I had War trained. This meant I would have to go back to the Hall to get the second infusing. It had been years since I had done the quest and I was not sure if it had been improved or not. I was going to have to play it by ear for a while. Sure I could look it up but what fun would that be? It is better to go and make a few mistakes than do a list quest. By list quest I mean following a list of objectives someone writes for you. Go do this, go do that, go here, go there. It might get the quest out of the way really fast but is that the true object of the game? A hint here and there, sure, but following a checklist is lame. So my first objective was to upgrade my old mage armor to double infusing. That required me to take a trip to Hieromancer's Hall. With the North Dires portal very close to the Hall this is not a big run. Even without that portal it is not far from Teth. In the old days this was a sort of hard quest but nothing two mid levels could not do. It is a touch harder to do solo because of the timed doors and switches. I was surprised to see the spawns around the North Dires portal so strong. There are lots of Vrindi, Shadows, Olthoi (O's and M's.) and Hollows. I fought for half an hour and pulled two sings. One was miss-carved with 458 skill and the other I used on a Trove. I figured I had better stop hunting and start running if I wanted to get there with one buff. From then on I just ran and only picked off the really needed kills, such as Platinum golems and Shards. I had a sneaking feeling that Turbine might have upgraded the Hall a bit. When I arrived I did my strongest buff. It takes almost seven minutes to do but I wanted to be ready for anything. Sure enough when I hit the portal there was a download. Something had changed. The first change I saw was the weak bandies had been replaced with Maulers and Manglers. That was not a big deal as I had been killing hordes of them since I was 45th level. Of course my memory might be bad and these Bandies were what was there before but I seem to remember them being weaker. My plan was to clear out the Bandies around the switch and move up the stairs. After clearing out the golems I would hit the switches and jump down. I would run to the switch and then race to the end. With luck I would make it to the end before the door closed. To my surprise the weak golems had been replaced with Diamond golems! I guess it could have been worse. Only problem with Diamond golems is it takes three spells to kill one, a vuln and two blasts. After clearing them I started my run. I hit the switches and jumped down. I ran to the switch and headed back up the stairs. I got to the top and headed to the ramp. On the ramp I got a little surprise. There were a few Bandies and a Umbris that blocked my way. I was able to get around them but it cost me time. I opened the door and ran around the lightning monsters to the ramp. I took the right turn to the door and had it slam in my face. For a second it looked like I had made it but then the server caught up and pulled me back. Now I was surrounded by six Umbris' and they were pissed. It took me a bit to clear them so when I got back to the switch room the Diamond golems were back. This time I made sure to clear the ramp and then killed the Golems. I figured the hall was big enough to let me run around the Bandies on the bottom. If not I would have to start over. After jumping down I raced the Bandies to the switch. They tried to surround me but the left a gap that I exploited. I left the Bandies in my dust and raced up the stairs. This time there was no delay at the first ramp so I made the first door with time to spare. I made it to the stairs and got trapped running at the top circle. A quick jump got me on the stairs and through the door. From there it was just plug in the stone and wait for a new one to spawn. Now I'll have to find some hints as to the next part. I want to cry Winter Raven found me the sword of the gods. It was a 22.5 - 40 with double digit bonuses and wms 5. It would be Jr's main weapon when he gets sword at 125. I was praying that if I could get just one weapon infused that this would be it. I did not have any full sunstone when Raven gave it to me but I quickly filled a bag this weekend. I crossed my fingers, spin three times, held my lucky charm after saying three hail Mary's and two Buddhist chants. I applied the sunstone. It broke. Boring but necessary, Part one I finished one boring quest and started another today. One is almost required for a player today. The other was not badly needed but changes make it necessary. The first quest was the Credit quest for Fist's Armorer. I've been putting this off because I did not need it yet. I really can put it off for a while longer but felt it was time to get it out of the way. I had FA circle the plateau twice and crisscross it several times without any luck. I had spent over two hours but intended to stay until I got it done. I was forced to take a break when the hot-fix shut down the servers. I circled the plateau one more time and was in the northeast mountains, just before the talking trees when I finally found him. One vuln and blast later the quest was done. I ran over to the delta town and got the credit. That give me three credits. I'm not totally sure what I'm going to do with credits now. There are only two options worth thinking about. First is to specialized Creature at 115. That is strong but Mage is already a Battle Og so having two may not make much sense. The second option would be a lot of work and add a bit of frustration. Abin already is going through this frustration. The option is to spec magic defense. That would require selling back Lore. Without lore trained I would be hard pressed to make even 170. Most items I have require over 200 lore. Abin got around this by putting on his items before un-training Lore. That worked until he accidentally took them off the other day. So I would be dropping a few points off my main skills because I could not use minors. That is balanced with the ability to resist most War tossing monsters and quite a few Creature and Life spells. I'll likely go with spec'd Creature. I can only hope that Turbine changes its mind and lets me spec Armor Tinkering. That will give me something to do with the two points I'll have left over at 126. Boring but necessary, Part two This second quest is to get my Acid for the mage armor quest. The funny thing is I just dumped a vial of it because I did not think I would need a set of mage armor for FA. Now that the armor is worth having I need to do the quest. I figured I would take care of two things at once. I made sure FA had two M notes and made my way to StoneHold. After talking with the Lugie I paid for the two gems. I ran north to the Grivver valley, were you do the silk quest. I've killed over two hundred Grivvers and not got any Acid yet. I have gotten the Silk and I'll make into a flag when I have time. I have two silk balls now so I have a reason to go finish the quest. FA will keep at it until he lucks out and gets the Acid. With the ability to port to the mansion and dump loot and then use portal recall to get back, there is no reason I cannot spend all my game time on this quest for a while. On the good side I have picked up eleven broken amulets. Now any family members getting the magic d necklace can skip this part. Finally Over 600 Grivvers and three days later I get my acid. The big problem was everyone got the same idea as I did. The place was packed like I have never seen it. I was lucky in that people were willing to spread out and not try to push people out of their hunting spot. I can one shot a Grivver most of the time but an Archer is a lot faster. If one shows up and wants to hunt there I have to leave. No more than two minutes before I got my Acid I thought that was going to happen. The archer said he would hunt the top and leave me the bottom. For that I'm very grateful as I would still be there if he hadn't. There was no time to rest as my pincers timer has expired and I needed to do that quest next. I only stopped to dump the heavy sellable items at a vender before running to EVL. EVL was far more crowded than I see it most days. It must have been the weekend. Most of the time I avoid hunting on the weekend as many places get too many hunters in them. So I did not get much loot for the trip but it was fast. I made the mistake of logging Fist to check something and got into Tell Hell. Normally that is not a problem because Chat Helper will handle it. This time I had the account loaded on the slower computer and decal is not installed there. So I was trying to cut and paste names and talk to people at the mansion at the same time. If you were talking to me and my answers were a touch slow you now know the reason. One of the people I was talking to was Vengful-Vaude. I have some items for his composite bow stored up. With all the tells I lost track of answering him. I need to collect up the items and go track him down. I almost made a big error with tinkering. I was adding Iron to a sword for a family member and using Tink-It to check the odds. Between changing things I forgot to switch the material from Granite to Iron. We had an 8% risk on the last tink showing but that was for Granite. Being that we were using Iron it was really a 20% risk. Fortunately it did not blow up. My tinker skills are slowly moving up. For weapon I have a buffed 534 w/brilliance on one mule. FA is still adding to his magic skills so his Armor skill is only 517 with brilliance, enough to get 10 tinks on a wms 3 item if lucky. I'll likely never get the super high skills the chains can get but I can save our members from paying for most of the tinks. I don't charge but members will generally give me a bag of material for helping them. Much of the time I end up giving that to someone who need it. Next goal is to get the mage armor for FA. This will require me to find the vender. He is not in the Dires any more so I need to do a little research. After that I'll to search out the portal. This random stuff is getting old. FA is not as powerful as Mage, not even close, so I'll likely ask Abin or Winter Raven to help me get the armor. Then I'll wait for a group to form for the upgrades. From that I'm hearing the upgrade will not be easy. Even magic skills far higher than mine are being resisted. This will test my support skills with FA. Mage is the support king so I have no worries with him but FA is not set up for it. Roads well traveled When Turbine made changes to monster placement they also changed the placement of Mage Armor support. Before the vender and the Humning portal was all over the Dires. It was seldom that I could travel through the Dires without running across both. At first glance it would seem that this is an improvement. The land where the vender and portal could spawn was increased. In theory this would mean they would be easer to find. With the quest coming back into vogue this month you would also think they would improve the spawn rate or, even better, provide a permanent spot for them. Instead the above they seemed to have lowered the spawn rate of both to the point of absolute frustration. I spent several hours looking for a vender without any luck. In fact if an alliance member had not given me the item I needed I would still be looking. After getting the item I needed to find the Humming portal. I read a report of one being out near Bandit Castle. I decided to run the road between the Bandit and Neydisa Castle. This is a road I know only to well. For the most part it is a boring run with nothing to look at, just endless grassland. I first came across this road early in the game. I decided one day to go explore the land. The was the first of my many wanderings over the years. It was a time well before ACExplore and other aids. I set out from Arwic and headed northwest. I ran across many things but in the end the most amazing site was Neydisa Castle. What was really surprising was that a number of my friends had gathered at the Castle. I did not know it at the time but this was the start of the great Matty hunt. The hills west of Naydisa was a prime hunting spot for them. There was a quest someone wanted to do that required us to go to Bandit Castle. If we had known better we would have ported to Arwic and taken the Mountain short cut. Being ignorant of the faster route we ran the road for the first time. The next time I did a lot of running on that road was when houses were put into the game. It was rumored that there were many houses on that route. There were but I ended up getting my house much farther north. So I knew running this road is search of a Humming portal was not going to be fun. Even a little hunting and exploring did not help to relieve the boredom much. I did find a strange note attached to a tree about something to the north. I found the Virindi Complex. I'm not sure what that is. I'll have to spend some time exploring it someday. After running up and down that road several times I came up empty. On the board I read about a portal near Teth. This did not match what one developer said but I was desperate by then. I searched all around Teth and came up empty again. I logged for a few hours and came back about 11PM. I read on the board that there was a portal in the far south near the twin portals and lifestone. I figured it would be gone by the time I got there but it was worth a run. If I was to have any chance at all I needed to get there fast. This meant using all my navigation skills. Running there from Qbar or any other city would take far too long. I knew there was a housing portal near the coordinates called Lugian Meadows Settlement. I also knew there was a portal to it in Mayoi. I ported to Lin and took the Khayyaban portal. I hit the housing portal and exited at Mayoi. A fast run to the portals got me a handful of clicks from the reported coordinates. Much to my surprise it was there! A player named Ravena had been staying there to keep the portal active. He was also the one who reported the portal on the board. It seemed him and others had been searching for the Humming portal for alliance members. I'm grateful to Ravena for his taking the time to search out the portal and hold it in place for people. I wish Turbine would understand that boring searches like this need to go but at least my endeavor is over. I thanked Ravena and got my gem. Next I ported to sell off and dump the material I had collected during the day. It is 2AM and I'm about to head in. Getting the Mage armor The only thing I really remembered from doing this before was some notes in a room. I knew to get that note and give that to the golem. The first two were easy. They were so easy in fact that I let my guard down a touch for the third. The first surprise was a stamina trap that took stamina to zero. I retreated to get stamina back and two golems followed me. I was resisted a bunch, something that did not happened with the others. They also landed a few de-buffs on me. The worse I got was half health but it was not the simple battle the first two were. I was not sure what to do with the items I got. I looked around for something to give them to. I did not find anything so I gave them to the golem I was using the notes on. That worked and I had the armor. Now I needed to get them infused. Easy but scary There was a time when Diamonds Golem combined with Bandies and a Umbris was pure death. Between de-buffs, hard hitting and the extreme difficulty of resisting de-buffs such and encounter would result in death or running. When I hit the Hieromancer's Hall with Fist's Armorer I had decided to play it safe. Rather than try the same run that Mage did I would have another of my players come and hit the switch to the last door. This meant all I had to do was get to the end. I ran up the stairs and decided to run to the first passage. I would clear that and then go back to clear the Diamond Golems. The problem was two Diamond Golems followed me into the passage where they were joined by two Bandies and a Umbris. I was blocked in the center of the tee with monsters on three sides. This was where my investment in Magic Defense paid off for me. My magic skills might be a touch low for my level because I have put a lot into Magic Defense. As my main diet had been Tuskers high magic skills were more important. With foresight I kept putting points into Magic Defense and this was the payoff. One by one I picked off the attackers while being sure I kept my health up. A battle that only a few months ago would have been pure death was, if not easy or safe, never a big threat. I moved back to the main room and cleared out the Diamond golems. I hit the switches and ran to the door. I logged waiting for my other player to open it for me. Here I had a decision to make. My first thought was to switch both computers to different accounts. This would let me hit the switch with FA ready to go in. With no danger I could have FA on the slower computer. I was ready to do that. I figured the work to swap the accounts was really unnecessary. The door stays open a while so I could just as well take Jr to the switch. He would hit the switch and log off. I could then log FA and walk through the door. This had the added advantage of not having to exchange the armor and weapons to Fist. Jr had the melee armor and weapons and I would have had to make the transfer if I used Fist. Also Jr can imperil the Bandies making the battles a lot faster. One thing I noted was despite putting a lot into quick and run on FA the run to the Hall was a lot faster with Jr. I had little trouble clearing the Bandies but was surprised to not effect the Guardian much. No matter what weapon I used on it I was doing 1 point of damage per swing. I'm guessing there is an element I missed, as I'm sure a melee can fight this. In any case I decided to bypass it. I did not bother to clear the Bandies around the switch. I just ran over, hit the switch and ran back to the hall that was cleared. I logged off and logged FA on. The door was open and I walked into the room. I don't know what the requirement for War is now to infuse this armor but I had a lot of trouble with a buffed 399. It took me six or seven attempts to get the legging done. I kept failing on the second infusing. The top hit right off but the Girth took several attempts. I have the first part done for both mages. I need to attach myself to a group going for the upgrades. It might be possible for Mage to solo it but I would rather not chance it when my attempts are restricted. Mage Upgrades the armor I was hoping to find a group to upgrade my mage armor with. While talking about it with Abin Al-Sahad he volunteered to go with me. He had already done his armor but needed the helm. After buffing we used our gems to get to the first section. I thought the puzzles were rather unique. When we got to the end there was three other mages getting ready to go. We decided to team up with them. First thing to do was get the helm. I was following so it would be hard to give you a run down on how to do this quest. There are enough portals to get anyone lost of you don't know the route. We were luckily to have someone who knew the way. The group besides Abin and me were Verid, Slayer II and Veneta Darius. With an all mage group I was not sure what to expect. There was no need to worry because we had little trouble basting them. The first problem we had was the need for a picker. I had the skill but could not find a pick in my pack. While exploring our options I discovered a pick in a pack. When you have full packs it is easy to overlook something. The next step was to get the gems to combine with the armor and helm. This meant a few of us would need to get four gems. We had two different colors we were looking for, blue and green. I don't know many who feel the red looks very good. Fortunately the two colors have a hallway linking them. When we got to the first room we found it packed with Olthoi, I mean Acid vault stone room numbers. We decided to vuln them all before we opened the door. I don't know the magic resistance on these Olthoi but my 428 was not landing very well. If fact I had to change to a focus stone and was still getting resisted a bunch. After getting the last few gems we moved to the last part to cook the armor. Here we found the worse Olthoi of the bunch. We had people screaming their heads off from hits. This was the first time I had to switch to support made and start tossing heals. One player got kicked which cause us to fight several spawns before we could leave. Finally we got everyone done and could port out. The armor gives Mage some really great numbers. Right now I'm at 428 Creature, 429 Life and 439 War with that armor. That is with a non-bonus wand. It would be even higher with the Drum or Focus stone. First test The spawns around the North Dires portal can be rather nasty. I was hoping to have a little luck with Sing keys and cash them in a Trove. A lot of people are pulling majors and I feel it would only me a matter of time before I get something worthwhile. I felt it would be a great test of the new Mage armor. With only the shoes to buff I was down to 25 spells from 69 with my old armor. If it worked out I was going to have a lot more hunting time and a lot less buffing time. The first spawn I ran into was one of your more nasty ones. A bunch of Shadows joined a battle that started with a few Virindi. Then some Tommies and Drudges spawn on top of me. I was quickly learning that my old armor had spoiled me. Arrows from a few Tommies were hitting hard. Melee blows were in the double digits with some hits close to 40. At one point I was at 6 hit points. I was hit one time before the drain landed so I was more than lucky. After 10 minutes I'd had enough. I buffed up my old armor and put the Mage Armor away. I might have really high magic numbers but the way I fight defense means more. To compare hits in the 20's turned into hits under 5 and most hits were 3 or less. There might be a place for this armor but the extreme hunting spots are not it. Of course not everyone has al 400 armor so they will love the mage armor. I'll have to pick my spots as to when to use this armor. Most of the time my old armor is a lot better. Out of touch? Ever so often one of the Turbine/MS people will say something that does not make sense. I sometimes wonder if they are in touch with what is going on with the game and people. What brought this thought up was Ken Karl's posting on the Turbine board. The question was about giving us more Villas and Mansions. KK wrote, "Our main focus for additional housing at this point will continue to be through Residential Quarters. You may see an occasional month where we add Mansions, Villas and Cottages, but that will not be the norm." I had to wonder about the answer because there is no demand for RQ's right now. In fact there are empty ones RQ's on most if not all the servers. People are spending high amounts for Villas and Mansions while RQ's are worthless on the market. Why add to something that is in abundance and neglect that which is in demand? To me is seems to show that, at least in KK's case, they have lost touch with the players. Last months debacle with macros is a prime example. They destroyed the hard work of many players and could only shrug over it. Srand seems to have a much better understanding of players needs. That gives me some hope. KK has some study to do because much of what he says shows a lack of rapport with the game and players. Greed Well we have suffered a hot patch and now a disabled quest because of greedy people. Every server but MT was down with their attempt to fix it and disabling Bobo is what they ended up doing. It seems that if there is a way to ruin the game someone will find it and start carving. The exploit is caused by a broken part of the reward section in Bobo. People turning in the Paw at the Magic Defense reward got the reward and the Paw back. This would allow them to keep giving back the Paw until they had maximized Magic Defense. You would think that getting four billion points into a skill would be enough. Noooo, they then went to the skill sell back and sold it off. That gave them four billion points for other skills and the ability to go back to Bobo and do it again. They are darn lucky that I'm not the one in charge. There is no way anyone should not understand that this is wrong. I would ban their account and disallow them from returning to AC. It is time to rid of us of the people who think of themselves first and everyone else not at all. I was wrong again This time it was not my fault. I was going on information that seemed reliable. The details above on the exploit appear to be wrong. It does not change the fact that our grief is caused by greedy people so I left it in the column. It was also a part of the Bobo quest but the details are not yet revealed. How did I find out I was wrong? Srand made the following post; "You know, it's pretty amusing to me the misinformation about this exploit. I haven't seen anyone post accurate details yet -- which is useful since the details are a nice way to sort through accusations." OMG! My animals are Griefers! By Nao As a few of you remember, I tried to nerf my cats awhile ago. Norman, had an extremely high damage mod on his unarmed weapons, so I had to permanently remove them from the game. Saxon on the other hand, was faster, but didn't have the damage range that Norman had, so I tried to nerf them by putting those little plastic tips on them. But to no avail, he managed to haxor them in short order. They were camping my couch for easy xp. I tried lots of things to keep them busy. I got them fish, but they were unable to solve the quest. Norman, even got lockpick so we have to keep the cat food under under lock and key now. He was picking his way into the cabinets and looting. So finally we hit upon the perfect thing for them. We have introduced the BIG MONSTER on them....Dane, the puppy dog. Now they are no longer camping the couch or the bed, and spend most of the time "Perching". Actually, they don't spend anytime on the ground now...lol Unfortunately, we need to do something about the monster now. He has completely taken control of the game. He loots all their food and toys and generally griefs them constantly. He's even beginning to greif Sikma...who swears that he's sworn allegiance to me, and that I'm covering for him...lol The worse thing is we had to get a racial restricted portal (cat door) for the laundry room, to keep Dane from Looting the cat brownies. However, now he camps the portal to catch the unsuspected and un-buffed cats. The cats have learned to be fully buff their run skill before they exit the portal. Well we tried to remove the Cat Loot from the monsters reach, however Dane has managed the Corner Jump Hack, and has managed to get to the loot even when it's on the counter or kitchen table. Dane has tried to haxor the game as well, but wasn't as successful, the most he has been able to do is chew thru several network cables. We need your help I'm a strong believer in the power of prayer. If you don't pray then stop reading this. If you do pray then please add Nabata to your prayer list. I cannot say why just yet, just that she needs it.