140 Rolls By

Baba at max detail settings, hunting bots in Omni Forrest

Baba was getting a little tired of PW Borgs and thought he would try some leveling off mobs in the wild.  He found a canyon in Southern Foul plains that looked like it had a mix of snakes, Drills, and big cats, at around level 120 which he thought would be tough enough to give some decent experience, yet not be risking reclaim all the time.  Well it turned out that yes he could handle them smoothly individually, but the layout of the canyon was too tight and it was impossible to keep from picking up more adds while kiting single mobs.  He picked up a train of 4 or 5 120 level mobs which he had to run across half the zone to lose.

He then spent some time hunting low level bots for the last piece in the first part of the Alvin/Dodga quest.  He had started this quest back when he was in his 60s, but gave up after collecting 6 of the seven pieces.  That seventh piece was just not to be found by him.  He killed about 90 in one trip which yielded two drops of quest items, but not the item he needed, the scrap of notum.  The next day he killed about 150 bots in a session which yielded 0 quest pieces.  Somebody noticed what he was doing, and could not resist mocking him for still doing this quest at his level.  I guess compared to expansion shoulder pieces, the ones from this quest are pretty wimpy.  Maybe so, Baba just hates too leave things like that unfinished, so every once and a while, he goes out looking for the last quest item.

Strange clump of mobs in river, click for larger view

While traveling around he came across one of those strange clumps of mobs, this time in Athens near a bend in the river.  It must be something in the virtual geometry that causes so many unlike mobs to congregate in one illogical spot.   AgentBaba our agent alt spotted a similar thing near one of the player cities just north of the Rhinoman valley in Newland Dessert.

Speaking of AgentBaba, she leveled up to around 25 out in Newland Dessert, and then returned to the Subway in Borealis to see how far she could level in there.  The  Gripo-Com AKR 1K21rifles recommended by Hahnsoo’s guide worked out extremely well for her.  She was doing damage close to what several true twinks were getting in the Subway.  The Gripo’s are fairly fast and have a very nice crit.

On her arrival to the entrance to the stairs to the deep subway she was challenged by Eumenides, who she was quite able to put away with little fuss or muss.  To her delight, he dropped the best bit of subway loot, the ring of Nucleus Basalis, so she then had no need to join suicide Abmouth teams.  She then spent a day or two leveling up.  With the great damage from the rifle and her evades, she had no trouble with any mob in the subway.  The only one that was a threat were Virgil Aneid and Abmouth, which she did her best to stay away from.

One of the more curious mobs in the subway is a small female is the deep subway named “Redundant Scan”.  During AgentBaba’s extended Subway experience, she must have fought this mob 20-30 times.  Very often “Redundant Scan” will break off from combat when her health gets to about 40% and start running away.   For a ranged toon like AgentBaba, this is no problem, as poor “Redundant Scan” is unable to outrun projectiles.

After she hit level 32, the number of mobs that would give her any experience was reduced to a very small handful.  The two giant spiders, the shades in the Vergil Aeneid section, and the two cyborgs in the room before Virgil were the only ones to give experience after hitting 32.  It was getting boring having to sit around waiting for them to respawn, so AgentBaba decided to quit while she was ahead and was in the process of leaving when she reached the stairs that go up to the rooms with the sand fleas.  At that point she got a join team pop up.  She had been posted on looking for a team the whole time, and gotten 0 invites so far, so she just as she clicked yes, the ugly form of Abmouth filled her view.  A trox doctor that had been teamed with a semi-twink looked to have lost his team-mate to Abmouth, and was now determined to avoid reclaim.

AgentBaba first impulse was to flat out run away, run away, Monte Python style, but decided to try and help out as best she could.  Not only was there Abmouth, but the doc/trox had also picked up a train of several infectors and cyborgs as well.   AgentBaba was surprised that even though she was pouring damage into Abby, neither Abby or any of the adds, paid her any attention.  The doc/trox seemed to be going into that slow motion, death spiral dance, so AgentBaba knew that it was now time for her to split, or she would be next.  She ran for the exits and was quite surprised that she managed to escape.   I have got to note at this point, after taking an Enforcer, Agent and Adventurer through the subway, that the Agent was by far the most effective.  The Enforcer’s non twink weapons were too weak, they lack self healing, and have no evades.

Player City south of PW notum mines, click for full view

Baba did go back to Perpetual Wastelands and resumed hunting Borgs there.  He used to be able to expect to grab a level in about an hour there by himself, but ever since he hit around level 135, the experience each Borg gives has taken a nose dive, and it now takes him 2 to 3 hours to get a level at the same spot.  It has become less dangerous.  He can flub a pull and survive pulling 3-4 Borg at a time.  Baba still has his eye on moving up to a Pained Panther from his Panther.  While trying to compare the two, he ran them both through the Auno damage simulator. The simulator asks for the input of your initiatives and your add/def setting.  This nudged Baba to to check his Agg/Def setting at the Unity of the Rose site.  The Agg/Def calculator told Baba that he could set his all the way back to 25% and maintain the same attack speed.  He tried this on his last Borg hunting trip and it did seem to help with fewer Borg crits landing.  This is an easily overlooked benefit of the Panther weapons, and most likely other fast melee weapons.  Once they are in the less than 1.5 seconds range, they enable enforcers to adjust thier Agg/Def settings quite a bit at no loss in damage.

Styling and Nuking

Babaoroody's more traditional look, click for larger view.

Baba stayed in Sunday, his pride still smarting from his noob like actions the day before in a Perpetual Wastelands Borg Team with several org-mates from Angels of the Night.  There’s an old saying that if you want to build up your confidence, wear some nice clothes.  Armor-wise, Baba always wears his best, but what he wears in his social tab is something else.  For some time now, Baba has been sporting a garish white and blue zebra striped jumpsuit with his red Albrecht tank armor.  His real armor, hidden by his social items, is an eclectic mix of found/looted Miy’s of various flavors, and various colors.  He was not happy with that patchwork look and had chosen the jumpsuit to cover the drabness of the mainly dark colored pieces.  After rummaging in his bank inventory for sometime, he came up with a redish looking pair of Flowers pants, some gold gloves and forearm guards, with like colored short sleeves to show off his still impressive biceps.

While Baba was staying in, Babaente and Tireen were out running team missions for tokens.  Both leveled during the day, with Tireen hitting 70, and Babaente hitting 69.  It has been one of those long dry spells for Babaente in terms of getting new Nukes.  The last time she was able to go a step up in her single and area of effect Nukes was before level 60. As the mobs kept getting stronger with each new level, the Nukes got less effective.

NT’s are blessed or cursed depending on the situation, with a huge selection of Nukes.  It’s like having a gun that has an ammo selection switch that allows you to instantly start firing the perfect type of damage ammo suited for the opponents weakest armor types.  The Nukes cover just about every damage type there is.  We have to admit that so far we have not found a way to quickly determine the best damage type to use for each mob.  Babaente has thought of filtering and sorting known armor types for thier weak points, and then try and identify where possible the type of armor used by known mob types.

Until she has something more to go on, she had Tireen make a buying trip to Omni Trade to pick up the next step up area of effect Nuke Limited Scrapnel Spray, which according to      Ramorak’s nuke tables, should give her about 6,700 damage points in your typical 30 second mission clash.  This is roughly 1,000 more that the Plasma Swirl AOE she had been using.

Meetmedere, from directly above, click for larger view.

Next they pulled 3 missions, all in Newland Dessert, with on at the Rhinocockpit and 2 in Meetmedere, almost door to door.  They came across several rooms with multiple chests and/or barrels which alas, yielded nothing Uber.  The new AOE nuke proved a big improvement whenever they had to fight more than one mob at a time.  Fortunately, all three Bosses were nothing special and were found in mostly spacious rooms.

By the end of the 3 missions, they had increased their token counts by 9 each.  When they got back to Newland City, they sat atop the Miir shop to people watch for a while.  Targeting individuals as they pass below and hitting shift right click brings up the basic identifying information. They usually try the info pages link to the person’s equipment layout, but it seems quite a few players disable this feature so as to keep their AC holes a secret from potential PvP contenders.

3 things to open, click for larger view.

When the inspected toon turns out to be level 150 or above, our pair likes to also then do a !whois command to one of the games bots, like AOFroobs (/tell AOFroobs whois xyzperson) to get more information such as the players history.  It is interesting to see that on average the higher the level, the longer the person has played.  It seems to be a geometric kind of increase.  Where many players show fast progress from 1 to 50, 60 to 110 seem to take a bit longer, and then the period from 120 to the 200’s seems to require many months and for some years.

Many of the most popular game titles yield little more than a few days or a few weeks of game play.  Anarchy Online offers a truly outstanding extended game-play that can last many years.