Working on 138

Mr. Baba. Click for larger View

Baba spent some time recently studying his stats and the requirements to equip a Pained Panther. He has been thinking of pursuing going to the Crypt of Home, so he thought he should get familiar with who drops what there as well. He is within fairly easy range of equipping a Pained Panther without being over equipped now. To stay out of OE he would need to have Skill of Viking running. To equip it all he needs is 131 wrangle, his skill of Viking, and Rhinoman Leather jacket, the combination of which will bring his 2 hand Edged skill up to the required 1001.

It was time again to fence loot, so Baba met up with Babaente an NT to transfer the loot bags to Tireen, a trader. Tireen dutifully went to the Newland City traders shop and proceeded to feed the loot to the terminal. While there a passing player noticed and commented on her Solar Powered Backpack. Then Tireen split the proceedings with Baba and Babaente.

Once Baba had his bags back, it was time to head out to Perpetual Wastelands again. On the way across PW from Mort, he swerved North just past the two level 105 Cyborg dynas to scout out the area north of there which he had never really looked at. There were quite a few 140+ mantise type mobs with a few lower level ones at around 120-130. He did not find what he was looking for. He had heard some players refer to hunting scorpiods in PW, but so far he has not located any scorpiods in PW. From an area just east of the Mantis hive he proceeded east towards the Main Borg base. Before he got there he found a lone Cyborg Colonel way out in the middle of no where. Baba figured he must have been trained there, away from the small base that is north of the base with the Helipad.

Stranded Colonel in the middle of PW, Click for larger view.

When Baba arrived at the PW dunes site, he touched down and buffed up. He did a quick face palm when he realized he had not brought an experience boost stim. He still has some left over from the anniversary celebration, but they were in his bank. Without the extra experience, it was doubtful he will hit 138 tonight.

He went to work on the Borg on the main dune. Now that they are less of a threat, and give less experience, he does not have to try hard to avoid pulling several. He can handle two or three rather safely now. Tonight he was experimenting with some added alpha attacks. He moved the ring of eternal darkness and the weeping flesh ring to his social tab, so he could place hot buttons for them on his hot bars. The added damage from the weeping flesh was welcome and worth the effort. The Eternal darkness was somewhat flaky. The first few times it worked great, but then after a while it would lock up and not return when it should have. Baba had to go back and see if something else he was casting is conflicting with it.

Baba dings 137 by himself in Perpetual Wastelands, click for larger view.

By this time it was getting late and Baba was starting to think about logging off. By now he had cleared the main dune section and moved down to the ‘pinch’ section. The ‘pinch’ is where section of small dunes between the Helipad and the large dunes. Along with being a great place to level, like many popular leveling spots or dungeons, Perpetual Wastelands also attracts it’s share of undesirables. One of them showed up next and trained practically all the Borg in the North East sector of PW on to Baba.

Baba had been there for about a quarter of an hour taking Borg down in ones and twos when he notices something odd in the distance. Back on the main dune he could make out what looked like a bunch of Borg all standing still together in a clump. A few minutes later he noticed it was moving towards him. It turned out to be a level 126 NT using their yalm to aggro Borg on the ground and collect them into one huge kite. The NT trained the Borg on to Baba, so Baba had no choice but to make a run for it north. Once he had left the main dunes behind, the NT pulled the kite/train back to the dunes section. After Baba was sure he was safe he jumped into his yalm and flew back. Back at the Dunes he watched as the NT flew around the entire North east corner of PW collecting more and more Borg in his kite until he had collected just about every Borg there.

Once all the Borg were in the kite the NT dropped out of his yalm and started running circles on the Helipad while nuking them standard NT kite style.

It is a petition-able offense to deliberately train a group of monsters on you. This evening Baba was too tired and just did not feel like staying up another 45 to 90 minutes that it sometimes takes to get any action from a petition. If there is one consistent criticism we have of AO, it is that reporting harassment is a huge hassle in it self. One has to read the help file on the obscure petition command, then create the petition, and then respond to the auto followups and then wait 45 minutes to an hour for a ARK to show up. After that it could be a while the ARK can make a decision or find someone who can take whatever action it is that needs to be taken. It was late and Baba had been thinking of logging off just before this whole scene erupted. He had managed to fill several bags with loot that included a number of great Miy’s armor pieces and he had managed to bring his experience bar to about 70%. He decided to log off while looking forward to more closely inspecting the new Miy’s pieces soon.

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.