Dual Logged Team Missions

Interesting camp near rock with a tunnel through it found in northern Galway County

Babaoroody has spent quite a few hours flying about the mainly neutral regions of Rubi-Ka in search of a kiting field with 50-60 level mobs. He found tons of QL 60-70, and 70 to 80 concentrations, but very few 50’s. In Stret East Bank, just east of the tall rock formations just beyond 2HO, he saw the largest concentration of QL 60-70 claws and mutants he has ever seen. In Upper Stret East Bank, while searching for kitable 50s, he found a concentration of QL 100-150 Noken in a dense forest northeast of the outpost at the end of narrow inlet of water. They are hard to spot as they blend in quite well with the large trees of this forest. He also spotted some Chirop larva, another weird looking beast nearby.

Babaente and Tireen seem to have hit a dry spell in regards to kite leveling. Babaente and Tireen had their last good kite run in Stret East Bank just south of the ferry landing, with a dense area of malles and scorpiods ranged 50-60.

Unfortunately, the mobs do not have a fast re-spawn, and most of them are gone now. Baba found two villages in Northwest Pleasant Meadows with 50ish level human mobs, but the landscape between the coast and these locations is sprinkled with Slayer droids, and would be problematic to reach on foot for Babaente.

With no good kiting prospects at this point, it seems as though the pair will need to either run some team missions, or head out to the Temple of the Three Winds individually.

Team missions might be the best bet, as they both need to start working on their prospective token boards. In fact that is exactly what Babaoroody recommends. He did not do well at TOTW from the 30 to 40 level range, so he concentrated on leveling up to 50 via missions and collection tokens. With level 50 and the benefits of the first few token board steps, he was able to handle most of TOTW with few problems.

So now the question will be what level missions to pull and what kind. After some research on the net, the pair decided to let Tireen, the lower level member roll the team missions, at about 45% setting. The slider settings were all Evil, All Chaos, All Order, All Open. These settings gave missions with mostly human mobs, fewer traps and hidden areas. They chose missions for how close they would be to minimize travel time, which is problematic when dual logged. While the follow command works great, each zone takes walking each toon through individually and then reestablishing the follow, necessitation constant switching back and forth between sessions. Once in their mission, however the NT, Trader combo works well because the higher level NT can be controlled directly, while the trader, on follow, will auto attack anything if attacked. They found that in the Boss rooms, the best approach was to have Tireen enter first and start combat, and then Babaente would follow and also engage. Once Tireen has entered combat, she will continue on auto attack, so it is only necessary to control Babaente. Unfortunately NT’s will only auto attack with their pistols, not their nanos.

They ran 4 missions, 3 of which went very well and one which they abandon. The one they abandon had been an experiment with rolling a mission at 50% difficulty, and the end boss was too hard for the two of them to take down. They were both very close to leveling and had gained allot of experience since their last saves, so they thought it better to save the experience and move on to a new mission.

The only rough spot was Babaente seems to have problems with mob MP’s in missions. When they engage one, Babaente auto targets the MP’s meatballs, however, when they die, and before the MP can cast another, she has not been able to target the MP. Or she gets it targeted, and but nothing happens when she tries to cast nanos on the MP.

Fortunately Tireen was able to finish the MP’s off. She is doing quite well as a damage dealer since she recently equipped a level 52 Vektor ND shotgun. She also found a 56 and a 69 in Omni Trade that she bought. In addition, she recently looted 107 Vektor ND Lizard for future use.

Team missions besides giving good experience, definitely yield far better loot. In just 4 missions, they came up with several very relevant weapons. In one mission chest they found a sealed weapon receptacle with a soft pepper pistol in it. One of the end bosses gave up a ql 36 original electrocutium that Babaente will be able to equip fairly soon. The pepper pistol however is going to require Babaoroody to level up a bit more until he has enough weapon smithing skill to assemble it.

In one of the chests they picked up the nano pylon that is required to rebuild the soft pepper pistol after it is liberated from the receptacle. The rest of the take included several loot only nanos, nothing super rare, but bread and butter types. Tons of adventurer only type armor. Baba is thinking of having an adventurer rolled just to have someone to give this stuff to instead of shop fooding it.

Tireen gained two levels bringing her to 38 while Babaente only gained one level bringing her to 46. Babaente still has a another level or three before she will be able to equip her next higher up Area of Effect nuke. They will need to experiment more with the difficulty setting so that Babaente gets more experience. At 50% most of the regular team mission mobs give her experience and are not a problem to beat. It is the team mission Bosses, that seem to be running 50-50 in terms of being something this pair can beat. They both also gained mission tokens, so they are on their way in regards to their token boards. We suspect they may use team missions to level up until they are both over level 50, at which time they may head out to the Temple of the Three Winds.

Token on down the line…

Baba perched in Clondyke

Baba seems to have been on a roll pulling missions to either Pleasant Meadows, Upper East Stret, Clondyke, or Lush Hills for the last few nights. Despite not changing his mission settings, he has also seen a very wide variety of mobs for a change, including, humanioids, manteezes, avain mates, Aquans, droids, and one of his least favorites Hellhounds.

Even with kiting, hellhounds seem to drop Baba’s health more than any other mob of the same level, or about the same as the T-700 driod things. Baba definitely thinks twice about approaching a room with two or more of either types inside. If he does, it is not without casting a few extra nanos like a Challenger, making sure his alphas are unlocked, and places one finger over his mongo button. More than once repeated mongos, is the only way to survive soloing a pair of hellhounds or T-700s.

The Avian Mates were a seen by Baba for the first time on a recent mission. They look like a flying demon with 2 sets of wings. Since they kind of fly around and hover, Baba likes to train these into large rooms or halls and then use his prodigious Enforcer jumping skills to fight them, kind of like rocket jumping in Quake.

Baba is primarily doing missions right now to collect tokens for his 1k board. In the last six missions recently he got two with Plasteel Battle Suits as rewards. Tireen pulls in 175,000+ for these from the shops. He also found something he had not hear of before. A personal grid converter is what it is called. The description seems to imply that it provides grid access from org city’s by clicking on their grid controller. Sounds like just a curiosity, since at this point Baba doesn’t spend much time at his org’s city being a froob, and also it looks like it can only be used once (one charge.)

While researching the personal grid converter we found a site in french with a nice collection of AO dungeon maps.

One thing Baba has noticed that appears to be new in Rubi-Ka following his return is that in mission mobs seem to move around more. They used to mostly just stand on one place, or at best walk back and forth a few paces. The mobs now traverse whole lengths of halls and some even change rooms. It was quite a surprise when after he trained a mob into a hall way and was working on it, another attacked him from behind. The second mob had come through a door way from a room out into the hall and Baba is sure he did not bump into the door and open it for the mob.

Fortunately, the mobs are still mostly stupid and non-social between life forms, so using Enmity, it is fairly easy to pull single mobs away from clumps of several in large rooms, without the whole pack getting involved.

Baba's 1st Alt Tireen & 1st mule Babtrice

Baba, his alt Tireen, and their mule Babtrice had been meeting in backyard #1 in Newland City. Baba had picked it out initially because it was off the beaten path, and hopefully they would not be interrupted, and because this was his first time dual logging, he wanted as few distractions as possible. Now that dual logging is becoming old hat, the run from the whompa for Tireen is getting to be a drag, so Baba moved their meeting place to the backyard that is on ground level right next to the Reet’s R Us bar, which is much more convenient for Tireen, being just a few steps from the whompa to ICC.

Baba tried setting Babtrice to follow Baba and attempted to lead her from one backyard to the other. This quickly showed Baba some of the problems he has read about with pathing. Babtrice got hung up in several places on the way. What was really odd, however was on Baba’s screen he could see Babtrice a few steps behind him in the middle of the square they were crossing, but then she disappeared. On Babtrice’s screen she was still back at the last point where she had gotten stuck, and when she ran under her own power to where Baba was, he was nowhere to be seen, however, switching back to Baba, and he could then see her. No wonder dual logging is mostly just used for transactions and buffing!

Baba and Tireen used this last trade off of loot to be shop fooded, to also do some price comparisons on stock commodity items like health kits and nano-rechargers. Baba even with computer lit skill that is several hundred more than Tireen pays what looks to be around 5-8% more for these kinds of items, than Tireen does from Omni Shops.

Armored tank train outside of 20K

On his last mission for the night this past Thursday, as he was leaving a completed mission in 20K in Pleasant Meadows, he spotted a very wierd looking land vehicle. Actually it was as a train of huge military (armored and armed) transporters of some type. They had tank treads instead of wheels. Just one of those surprises that pop out as one explores the expanses of Rubi-Ka. Baba has no idea if these things are just eye candy or if they ever move or get involved in gameplay. Baba tried right clicking them, but got no info displayed.

We came across a nice online utility that will help Anarchy Online players determine what maps they lack, and of those, which ones they could equip with their current skill level ‘Which maps am I missing?‘ is an online form that you give a list of the maps you have and your navigation skill level, and it comes back with a list of maps you don’t have, but could equip. Much faster than going through the map list one by one at a shop machine. The site also offers a ‘Premade imps filter’ page which helps you find premade implants to fit a specific need.