Small square Boss rooms

Babaente and Tireen are so close to thier 250 token boards, they can almost taste it.  It won’t be much longer till they reach it, and can go back to Kiting and possibly the Biomare dungeon.  They may even take a vaction, while Babaoroody gets back to leveling.

Rhinoman Cockpit Oasis - Click for larger image

June 4 found them rolling team missions in Newland Dessert City.  After the drubbing of the previous outing, they have dialed down the difficulty level a few points. They completed three team missions Thursday. The first was left over from the day before, and the other two were new rolls.  All three were in mine type locations with an odd mix of mech dogs, mutants, and mantises.

Using the north gate mission terminals in Newland Dessert City, they have been pulling missions located mostly around Meetmedere or to the east near the Rhinoman Cockpit Oasis on the other side of the acid river and the high flat top ridge.

Small square Boss Room with obstacle - click for larger image

They also had a run of the the smallest type Boss rooms.  This room type is immediately recognizable for it’s small square layout and a large square rock/pillar in one corner from which the team can often conveniently hide and lure minions to without aggro-ing the Boss.  Generally this room is one of more easy and flexible Boss battle grounds.  There is one variation that they ran into with the first Boss room of the night that was not so easy.

It is one of our least favorite Boss room arrangements, where the  Boss and minon(s) are waiting practically on top of the teleport spot.  This presents a curious bit of a strategy conundrum.  Should the team concentrate on one mob at a time and if so which one?  The popular consensus seems to be that the team is most effective if it concentrates fighting one mob at a time, in what order however is up for debate. In traditional real time strategy scenarios, the rule is eliminate the greatest threats first.

This may not be wise in the Boss room scenario, because some Bosses may take quite a long time to down due to thier special abilities or defensive strengths above that of normal mobs.  Long enough that if not stopped a minion could go through the health of one or more players in that time.

So far in most scenarios our pair have faced, the best strategy has been when faced with the necessity of fighting the Boss and one or more mobs at once, has been to focus on the weakest target first, eliminate it, and then retreat to the previous level to heal before returning to take down more minions, or if none are left , the Boss.

What about crowd control?  What about using calms and roots you say?  These topics are rather sore with our pair at this stage in thier career.  From levels 1 to around 40, the calms and roots they could equip seemed to be mostly unreliable and ineffective.  Around level 50 they found that roots started actually working, at least 50% of the time.  Even if one lands, the longest lasting they currently have is about a minute

Rhinoman Cockpit Oasis mission entrance - click for larger image

We have not been able to determine from our reading and asking around if this is par for NT’s and traders in the 50 to 70 range.  So far the most success our pair have has been with roots in mission situations where a mob can be spotted from a fairly good distance, like a mob in a room at the end of a long hall.  At thier current levels multiple re-casting is out, either to get a landed cast or to re-root a mob that is about to have its root time out.

This is mainly because roots take a pretty healthy chunk out of Babaente’s nano supply.  This is not advisable because nano is Babente’s ammunition.  If she uses up 50% or more of her nano with more than one root cast, she does not have enough nano left to bring the mob down.  The few times she has tried this, she was able to escape by using her Notum splice to refresh her nano supply, but this is not a routine strategy since the splice has a 30 minute cool down.

Warped!

Spotted hovering over Omni HQ

Babaente and Tireen have been steadily slogging their way through team missions for that last week or so.  Babaente has locked her experience for now at 60, in case she needs to escort Tireen at the Temple of the Three Winds, which Tireen plans to visit after she dings 60.  While they both have been there before, Tireen needs to be able to get to Lien for dark memories mainly.  She also still lusts after an Exarch robe.  Babaente has hers along with a Notum splice which she has yet to have utilized beyond equipping it.

When they started running this string of missions, there was a pretty good sized gap between the two team mates, with Tireen in the low 50s and Babaente in the high 50s.  With Tireen rolling the missions, the mobs were pretty easy for Babaente at first, but now that they are both about the same, the boss mobs are getting to be pretty hard to handle.  Time to dial back the difficulty level a bit when rolling.

For a week or so now they have been diligently using mission buddy to choose only missions with rewards they could use or sell. Beyond the rare and not likely to be seen loot, they have been mostly going for boosted grafts which can then be hacked to remove the profession requirements.  For them the most sought after are the Hasty Augmentation Cloud, a damage booster, Lesser Protective Field, an AC booster, and Blood Circle, a heal and health delta booster.

Bank mules line up, with names like Armorbank, Buffsbank, etc., seen at ICC whompas.

After about 15 or so missions, they had collected one or more of what they were seeking and could reasonably expect to find.  With this in mind Tuesday evening they thought they would cut out the time required to roll and select missions, and just take the first missions that came up which they could reach.

They figured that if this could buy them time to even run one or more missions per night it would increase their odds of finding something phat while getting to their over all goal of filling out their token boards as fast as possible.

Well, it did not quite work out that way.  The bosses in all three missions were way over anything they have faced before.  The first one, a ninja type, surprised them by warping them back to him, if they tried to exit the boss level to heal.  This resulted in Tireen getting sent back to reclaim.  Babaente finished off the boss, and then waited for Tireen to return to apply the fixit item to complete the mission.

Tireen with Flag of Sacrifice award

The next boss was a super engineer that had some kind of aura that made it almost immune to Tireen and Babaente’s damage.  Babaente tried to exit to heal, but got warped back again, with the result being sent back to reclaim.  Tireen was able to finish off the Boss and she went ahead and picked up the ‘find it’ item.  This was a mistake, as it caused Babaente to miss out on tokens for that mission. Apparently if you are not in the mission when it is completed, you get no tokens.

The last boss was also very hard.  This one also seemed to have an aura that stopped most of Tireen’s energy damage.  Babaente’s poison nuke worked, but the only way she would survive was to kite the boss by running around the walls of the end room.

At the end of the evening, Tireen exactly 120 tokens, so she quickly upgraded her token board resulting in her total health topping out at 1440 now, compared to lvl 60 Babaente at 1k now.  Tireen was also able move from a ql81 Vektor to a 96.  Her stats are starting to get high enough to start replacing her maxed out ql 47 living Cyber Armor with a grab bag of hand me downs and looted armor including a Miy’s nano helmet.