Tireen dings 50

View of NW Mine from Fixed Dungeon Entrance

Babaente was very busy Friday evening and Saturday afternoon at the NW Mine in Lush Fields.  She had the help of Babaoroody, who would drop in from time to time to give her an Essence of Titan health buff and do some trimming of the Lifebleeder population.

She confirmed her theory that kiting might go smoother if she did away with using the auto-target and auto-attack settings.  Hunting this way, does not require any more key presses.  She usually manually targets the first key mob, and when the kite is getting near the end, she manually uses the next hostile mob button to select the most healthy mob remaining in the kite.  The best part being that she had absolutely no occurrences of the stop, cast fails, and auto turning to face the kite.  This became fairly obvious after only the first 2 or three kites.

Flat road area, Tireen pulls her kites to this area.

The next kiting factor she worked on was spiraling in at the very end of the kite.  This is useful mainly when the kite is very large and if the kite has mobs with varying health levels or the mobs were picked up at different times.  In these cases, running long straight patterns tends to cause the weaker mobs that are getting close to death to fall behind.  If they fall too far behind, they can lose aggro and go back to standing or milling around.  This is wasteful of your time, if not checked and can be dangerous if you happened to double back  on one that may not be exactly where your systems tells you due to lag.  The near death mob then becomes an attacker again, and can inflict some surprise damage to your health bar.

To counter this, a circular or semi circular route works very well.  You have to experiment with the radius of the circle versus the run speed of the mobs that are healthy and the ones that are slowing down. When done right, the slowest mobs will gravitate to the center of the circle, where they will continue to be damaged by the nukes aimed at the stronger ones that are running faster.

It’s a great feeling when you start to see the yellow experience numbers start to flash up in front of you when the tail of the spiraled kite starts to die.  It is also time to be extra careful to insure you do not collide with any of the weakened mobs.

Another thing that Babaente only realized fairly recently is that if you are a kiter, you benefit from putting IP into first aid because you can use first aid kits while running.  Since they lock first aid skill for 40 seconds, the higher the quality level the better.

By the time Saturday afternoon was ending, Babaente was at level 54 and Tireen was at level 50.  They had said that when they were both 50 or above, they would head over to the Temple of the Three Winds.   There are just a few things they need to do before that.  One is that they need to buy and equip the various nanos that they both have increased their skills enough to meet their requirements.  For the trader Tireen this includes Advanced Health Funnel, Capable Health Haggler, Deprive Skills Lesser, Skill Wrangler Commonplace, and Strip Assets Continuously.  For Babaente this includes Crunch Com Compressor and Curtain of Darkness.

In reviewing both of their stats after the recent levels, they also have some other immediate needs.  Tireen has reached the point where she could easily fit into some QL 74 implants which would be a logical progression from her current QL 50 implants.  They would also give her enough Shotgun skill to be able to equip the QL 69 Vektor ND she has waiting in the bank.

So rather than be at the temple Saturday evening, it looks like it will be the excitement of shopping for clusters in Omni Trade for Tireen.

KITE, a new definition

A Lifebleeder, not welcome.

Kite as in Anarchy Online kiting, usually stands for “killing in transit”.  To kite in AO, is to aggro one or more mobs and run fast enough to stay a comfortable distance away from them and use a weapon or nano to deal damage to them.  This past Thursday morning Babaente learned another appropriate meaning for KITE.

Babaente and Tireen continued on kiting at NW Mine in Lush Fields through Wednesday evening.  Both were getting very close to leveling, and they stopped for a breather.  When they were ready to resume, Tireen logged off so Babaoroody could log on had get rid of a couple of pesky lifebleeders.  There were two in particular that were each in the center of large clumps of mobs.  The was a fairly large conglomeration of mobs on top of the same mountain with the static dungeon, but it had a lifebleeder in the middle.  Baba got rid of it and one other that was not too far away.

Next he tried kiting several using his yalm, and tried to lead them to a far away corner of the region.  This did not work as they, immediately returned to their original spawn points.  Next he tried kiting them to a far off spot and then killing them, hoping they would only respawn where they had died, but this also was unproductive.   Their respawn points seem to be within a set rather small area, regardless of where they die.  For now, Babaoroody will have to settle for dropping lifebleeders mainly when they happened to be located in the middle of the kite field or too close to a large number of mobs, and hope they either respawn much later, or farther away.

After buffing up, Babaente started her run using the clump on the mountain to start with.  The kite was the largest yet she has managed at this location, but the visibility was good, and there was a period of fairly good network performance, so response was crisp.  With such good conditions she decided to lead the kite around a few other areas in the hopes of picking up more mobs in the kite.  This succeeded, but greatly extended the length in time of the kite.  By the time the last mobs dropped, most of her 30 minute buffs were running out.  Both Babaente and Tireen leveled off this kite, Babaente hitting 51 and Tireen going up to 46.

After allocating out their new IP points, even though it was late and time to log, Babaente wanted to use the occasion, i.e. having zero experience, to try and kite one of the lifebleeders as a purely information gathering exercise.  The information the exercise provided was that low title 3 NT’s have no business trying to kite level 81 lifebleeders because not only do they have a very fast run speed, but they appear to be able to cast their ranged energy attack while they are moving.   The lifebleeder deals damage at a much greater rate than a low title 3 NT, and after a very short chase, Babaente was back at reclaim with the knowledge that she needs to give lifebleeders a wide birth.

Only 4 more levels to go, until Tireen is level 50 and then they will be off to the Temple of the Three Winds.

The trio returned briefly Thursday morning before work to get a kite in.  Determined to make it count, Babaente collected her largest kite yet at the top of the mountain where an unusually large number of mobs had gathered again.  She then led it down through the east part of the mine area, and then out to the west side of the mine.  All was going well, until the weaker mobs started breaking off.   This was a new occurrence for her, previously when her run speed was less; the weakening mobs would keep up the chase until they dropped.  With her better run speed now, if the fall too far behind, they break off the chase and go back to wandering around.    This has been manageable when dealing with 10 or less mobs, but it just became a big mess, with this kite of over 20 mobs.

It also did not help that there is a very wide range of different mob types at NW Mines.  There is a mix of shades, and most of the mutant variations, such that they all have different run speeds, and health bars.   This had not been a problem at SW Mines, so we are not sure why it is here.

She was trying to run circular patterns so the weak mobs would get picked up again.  It kept getting harder and harder to avoid the many strays, plus lag was turning up with the result that out of the blue, she would see her health drop down to 10 percent.  She recovered several times, and got the kite back together, but there were just too many, and it was too difficult to keep such a big kite together. Finally after getting bitten hard again by lag, or perhaps a few weakened mobs that did not show up on the map, she took a huge hit to her health, and decided to run for the fixed dungeon to survive.

She made it to the dungeon, where she logged off safely, vowing to keep her kites at NW Mines to more manageable groups of 5 to 10 in the future.  She also vowed to clear out the central section first, so as to have a wide open kiting area and not have to worry about unwanted adds.  Babaente’s new interpretation of KITE is “keep in temperate enumerations”.