Refraction
It was all timing. First a title 3 Trader, Tireen popped out of suspended animation to sit on top of the small hill overlooking Claw Camp in Pleasant Meadows. She equipped her Yalm and did a quick scout flight of the surrounding area for the bane of kite parties, the Slayer Droids. She found none, so the server had not been reset since someone had trained the somewhat dim Slayer Droids to the middle of nowhere. Her duty done, she waited for the title 3 NT Babaente to pop in.
Babaente, as soon as she materialized out of suspended animation, went through the steps to team Tireen and herself. This done she proceeded to buff up, while, Tireen popped off one of the 8th Anniversary experience buffs, and then re-equipped her Yalmaha and positioned her self 50 or so meters above the batch of dead tree trunks next to the hill where Babaente would be leading her kites to.
blob
After Babaente completed getting her usual set of buffs running, she activated one of the experience buffs just as Tireen had. Glancing at her NCU panel before closing it to clear her HUD, it was fuller than normal, thanks to the experience buff and an Fixer run speed buff some generous soul had ninja’ed her with as she had been sitting outside the Newland City Advanced Shop.
The extra pressure of having to ‘make the best’ of these timed buffs added more butterflies than usual to her just before the kite starts nerves. The Claws were rather spread out with many outside the camp, making it hard to collect a bunch at a time, so she settled for just two at first, but she quickly found that with the wonderful amount of extra run speed from the Fixer buff, that she could lead the Claws around with impunity as she wished, so she casually routed them around the camp to pick up a good sized kite eventually.
Petals
She then lead it over to the tree log area and had fun with the wonderfully abundant run speed. She had ample time to stop and cast more frequently than she had ever had before, so she took advantage of this. This brought the kite down much faster with her casting AOE nukes about twice as often as without outside buffs. By the time at least half the kite had dropped, her HUD flashed the always welcome ‘new level’ icon. It was just after that that trouble reared it’s head.
Her Nano bar was hovering at around 40%. In her usual set up, her rate of kiting and nano use (from nukes) rarely put her nano bar lower than 75%.
While she was able to continue at the faster rate, and she completed the kite, she had a rather flummoxing experience as soon as she finished looting the kite’s corpses. When she sat down to use a nano kit to start recharging her nano, it would not work, giving her a message that she could not be in combat to use the kit. This was crazy as she was not in combat, but she noticed that her combat logged still showed new lines of “attacked by xx Claw etc.” scrolling up, yet no Claws were near her.
At first she thought maybe one of the other minor outside buffs she had picked up in the city were locking the skills required to use the nano kit, but a frantic inspection of all her running outside buffs, yielded nothing untoward.
So here she was, frustrated and disappointed. With a sinking feeling she watched her NCU panel show the Fixer run speed buff running down while it seemed to take forever for her Humidity Extractor buffed nano delta to recharge her nano to where she could start another kite.
Onus
She should have been kiting like crazy now, and leveling herself and Tireen up like mad, She was just about to log off and write it all off to some kind of weird server problem, when Bitbomber (lvl 29 NanoTechnician, male, clan, J’avais envie) ran up in Playful Cub form and asked if Babaente was kiting the camp. Babaente told the fellow NT that she had been, but that she was having some problems, and could not continue, so she encouraged the Bitbomber to go ahead and start kiting the camp. After several more exchanges so everyone was clear it was OK for the new-comers (several other players in the NT’s team had arrived one by one) to ‘play through’ and take over the field, as Babaente was finished there for now.
So Babaente retired to the hill near by, while the new team went about kiting the camp. Babaente noticed that her combat log was still showing the new NT’s mobs as attacking her, so she could still not recharge her nano. She eventually moved to the opposite side of the hill where the server finally figured out she and the other NT were two separate toons, and the ‘attacked by x Claw’ lines stopped appearing in her log. Rather than run out her excellent run speed buff just sitting there, she decided to log off and return some time later and hopefully when the camp was free again.
Later she reviewed the log to find:
Other hit by nano Claw-C27 Outlaw was attacked with nanobots from Bitbomber for 185 points of projectile damage. Attacked by Claw-C27 Outlaw!
Babaente is wondering if these Claws aggro every player in sight when anyone attacks them. It has to be that or some sort of weird server or lag problem that was causing the system to not recognize that she was out of combat and should have been allowed to use her nano kits.
Babaente returned the following evening determined to get some leveling out of her Fixer Run Speed Buff, but fate said it was just not in the cards. The lag demon was out and about Pleasant Meadows and Babaente got wiped twice in a row before she decided to stop trying. Both times her HUD showed her well ahead of the kite, when suddenly, with no warning, her scrolling combat log went dark red with “Claw hit you for xxx damage” lines and the reclaim white out took over her HUD. After the second time she resigned herself to spending the rest of that evening allocating out her IP points gained when she dinged 72 the previous day.
Comments to Baba: