Baba on Home's Tower
Still pulling missions towards his 1k token board, Baba had a couple of close calls durring the same mission in Clondyke. The first occurrence was definitely caused by inattention on his part, or as the mil-spec types would say in war porn speak ‘a failure to maintain situational awareness.’ The map upgrade that shows mobs as red blips and human mobs as white blips is a major advantage, but it also has a few gotcha’s. Although this map upgrade ’sees’ through walls, and lets you know where mobs are, it does not tell you where the walls are. Until you enter a room, that area is blacked out on the map. Two red dots in a black area could be two mobs standing side by side in one room, or two mobs in two different rooms separated by a wall. In this particular situation one red dot was obviously in the room he was about to enter, but there was a second dot, further away that looked to be in a different room. Baba let down his vigilance for just long enough to decide to enter the room with out first checking it out using the gimpy ‘run up to the wall next to the door, switch to 3rd person view, zoom out, and then move the camera angle to view inside the room’ method.
Baba’s reward for not running this brief ritual, was to be attacked by a Bileswarmer and a wolf. The wolf had been the mob that appeared to clearly be in the room on the mini map, and the Bileswarmer had been along the wall to the right of the door, far enough away to appear in a different room on the mini map.
Even with kiting, mongo-ing, alphas, and a Challenger nano, they took out 50% of Baba’s health before it was over.
The second close call was a cold and calculated risk. When running missions for tokens, it is necessary to kill all the mobs in the mission before completing the mission goal. Sometimes if there are allot of mobs, and Baba manages to kill at least 95% of the the mobs, he can still get the token reward if he completes the mission with 1 or two mobs still standing. No one seems to know if there is an actual numeric limit or percentage. Baba has also been denied his tokens with 95% of the mobs put down. So to not kill all the mobs before completing the mission can put the token reward at risk. In this mission, near the end, Baba had located the kill person target in one room, with one other mob next to the target and two swarmer mobs together in a separate room. Baba can handle single swarmers with no problem, but two requires concentration and errors can be fatal. With the luxury of it being a solo mission with no time lock running or impatient team mates involved, Baba took a minute or two to review his situation, make sure all his buffs were running with plenty of time left, recharged health and nano, and waited a minute or two to make sure all his alphas were not locked.
He approached the room with the two swarmers and visualized his plan of action. First he would target himself and cast Challenger, and then he would right click on his Assault Class Tank armor for it’s 15 second 2k AC’s, and then attack the swarmers by running right up to the first and unloading with his flurry of blows, followed by a Fast Attack and then a Brawl. By the time the ACT was running out, the first swarmer was hitting the floor, so Baba targeted the second swarmer and kited it out to the hall. Baba’s health was down to around 50% so while kiting the remaining swarmer, did a mongo. This swarmer must have gotten lucky and landed a couple of crits at this point as Baba’s health was down to the 10% range and kiting was turning into a slow motion version since both he and the mob had very little life left.
While Baba’s equipment may be fairly mundane, it did allow him enough nano left to be able to cast another mongo, which gave him the edge to outlast the swarmer. Baba savored his victory during the prolonged time it took him to get his health back up to 100%. Yes, Enforcers have lots of health points, but they have to use the same health kits to recharge that everyone else gets, so it can take 3-5 charges with their related lock out times to heal up.
Baba has been doing a little thinking about what achieving the 1k board will bring. In addition to some big boosts to his health and nano, there are nice buffs to defense, offense, damage, and experience. There are some huge jumps, at least for an enforcer of +210 run speed, computer literacy and nano programming. Baba may just be able to equip a six slot belt. Then it will be time to start teaming again to focus on leveling in order to raise his skills and abilities so he can equip higher level enforcer nanos.
Baba’s following mission was in one of the most difficult to reach for clanners, Eastern Foul Plans. With no grid outlets, or clan accessible whompas, it quite a trek. There is a neutral whompa in Belial Forest at Wine, but there is a barrier between the regions that cannot be crossed. Baba located the grid at Harry’s to be the closest he could get and then had to yalm the rest of the way. The mission was inside an Omni Base, however it is actually very lightly guarded with just a few low level guards. The mission was easy to reach and Baba was not attacked by any guards.
This was a find person mission, and it looked to have about the average number of mobs. Baba quickly located the objective and then scoped out the rest of the area. There were two large rooms ringed with adjoining rooms plus the usual mix of single rooms etc. Baba left the large room with the target for last. When he had finished all the other mobs, he peeked into the targets large room. Bad news, the target was right in the very center of the room, and there were 7 other mobs spread out around the room in adjoining rooms. Baba was afraid he was not going to get his token this time around, since there was no way he was going to get past his objective and kill the 7 remaining mobs without getting attacked by the target.
Baba decided to go ahead and write this missions tokens off and went ahead and targeted the objective mob. He got the reward and he got the tokens, despite having 7 mobs still standing (about 90% had been killed.) Baba is wondering if this is something new, a tweak of the game settings, or if the rule about awarding tokens is more flexible than he had thought.
The next mission found Baba in the picturesque city of Home in Broken Shores. Before entering the mission Baba stopped off on the top of the majestic temple tower that stands over the city to take a quick snapshot. He also paused on top of the tower to distribute his skill points, since he leveled in the last mission to 114! After allocating them out, it looks like Baba can now equip the next step up in Enforcer shields, Barbaric Blades.
It may be Baba’s imagination, but the loot tables seem to have been shaken up some during his absence. In the last mission, quite a few of the mobs yielded absolutely no goodies. Every other mob in this next mission seemed to have multiple high quality items. Since the mobs in this mission were mostly Rhinomen, Baba was happy to see a number of Rhinoman armor pieces.
This was a find item type mission and things were going smoothly until he forgot something he had learned months ago the hard way. There was a Rhino mob in the center of a large room that was surrounded by single rooms all around the perimeter. Baba had forgotten that Rhinomen could quite possibly be the most social of all the mobs. When aggroded, they alert any other Rhinos within 15-20 meters. They can be in other rooms, but if the doors are open to the those rooms, they will respond. Had Baba remembered this he would have pulled the 1st one in the middle of the room out into the hall, but instead, he ran up to it and attacked. Immediately two other alpha level Rhinos joined in from surrounding rooms. Despite several mongos, challengers and even a desperate activation of the Assault Tank Armor’s 15 second 2k shield, Baba went down. He did manage to take all three with him, but that was little consolation as he had to rez back in Old Athens and make the trek back to Broken Shores. After completing the rest of the mission, his token count stood at 682.
While all this was going on, Baba had a personal chat with Puppyhugger, one of Esdian’s toons. Baba’s chat challenged, and at one point mistakenly sent a response meant for Esdian to Baba’s guild, causing considerable confusion and makeing Esdian wonder why there was no response.
Baba recommends AO’ers to check out Esdian’s blog. Even though in game chat is great and the basis of the social aspect of AO, there is so much that in game chat is just not conducive to. Chat is really great in that you can be doing anything in the game and also carry on a chat conversation. Blogs are not constrained by the need for short, terse messages, so players like Esdian can share more about what they know about Rubi-Ka.
Baba returned to Old Athens and was sitting down to log out, when a lowbie stranger run up begging for a ES (Essence of ____), which Baba quickly cast on them. Inside Baba got all warm and fuzzy, knowing this was a sign of progress, when lower players start asking you for buffs, at least for Enforcers.
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