Baba Beats Borg for 135

Sand Worm Dynacamp in far West Perpetual Wastelands, Baba spotted this on his way from Mort Sentinels to PW Borgs. click for larger view.

Baba returned to Perpetual Wastelands to work on his 135 level this past Sunday.  Having done nothing since hitting level 134 other than sort loot and trade, his experience bar was empty.  This would be a good time to try an experiment, with no experience to loose, he headed for Tir County.  He had seen the Vermin Disposal Unit, a unique Dynacamp many times before as a lowbie traveling around the region.  He could not tell how difficult it would be for him to take it on, so he was going to find out tonight.  Heading west from Tir city, he quickly found it in a narrow strip of green just south of a player city in the west end of Tir.  Perhaps because it looked just like the waste control units back on Shuttleport Island, he thought it would be a push over like they were.  This did not turn out to be the case.

Unusually crowded reclaim in Newland City, click for larger view

It was it is a lot tougher than it’s health bar and warning imply.  It turned to out hit very very hard, slicing through Baba’s armor and dealing him 1900 damage for ‘normal’ hits and 2500 or more for crits.  With hits like that, Baba barely managed to cut the unit down to 75% health before Baba was looking at 25% health.  Baba tried to mongo for enough health to let him run away, but he soon found him self back at reclaim, which was unusually crowded tonight.

He stopped off in the Advanced store to give himself a healing pop from the implant machine and then sat down next to the bank terminal to pass the next few minutes.  Checking his skills window he remembered that he still had to allocate out IP points from hitting level 134.  Due to a virus problem with the ether net, his usual spreadsheet was not immediately available, so he had to do this one from memory.

Baba has finally reached the stage where most of his basic skills are starting to max out, so he is beginning to have a surplus of IP points and can start building up a few areas he has had to short change in the past. These have been primarily evades and duck skills.  After topping off all of his important priorities, he put a large amount into evades.  Hopefully at some point, this will result is fewer crits landing on him.

While he as doing this, two kind souls, both doctors in his range, who happened to also be passing the time in the shop ninja buffed him with various heals, which he gladly thanked them for.    Once his IP were saved, he headed out the door and ran for the grid terminal outside the Newland City Gates.

He took his usual route to PW, which is grid to Sentinels in Mort, and then fly due east to Perpetual Wastelands and then across PW to the north east corner.  For the second time in recent visits, he seemed to be arriving just after someone else had cleared the field of Borg, and only a handful of Borg could be seen.  This was fine with Baba, as sometimes, a full field is hard to pull single Borg from.

By the time Baba had hunted down enough of these Borg to reach about halfway on his experience bar, he got an important sub-galactic phone call, that he did not want to miss, so he retired to his safe spot over by the cliffs and went into suspended animation so he would not waste the experience stim he had running.

Close call after bad pull, click for larger view.

After the call finished, and he returned refreshed, he went back to hunting the Borg.  He had one bad pull that got him a Major and two Generals.  It was a very close fight, with both he and the final Borg being down to less than 20% health at the end.  Fortunately the Borg seem to stop landing crits once you have them down past 30%, so Baba did prevail.  The next pull was almost an exact copy, except the 3 Borg were just Majors, and Baba had no problem taking them down.

Baba has gotten his Borg kiting moves down much better now.  Once he has the Borg(s) kited to the spot where he wants them, and he gets them running in a circle, he first hits his Fast Attack, and then Brawl.  Curiously he has found that his Brawl special will not fire if more than one keyboard button is depressed.  This was preventing him from using it, as he was using the forward and left arrow keys simultaneously to run in a circle.  He found that in order to get the Brawl key to respond he has to lift either the forward or the left key for just long enough to depress the Brawl key.

Baba dings 135 at PW Borg Dunes, click for larger view.

He usually lifts up on the left key, causing him to run straight for a second.  Baba uses his action panel buttons as indicators to show when the cool down for each of these attacks is reached.  After using one of these attacks, the button is grayed out, and it comes back to full color when the cool down period is over.  Baba had two other keys he uses while kiting Borg this way.  He has his hotbar key 1 set to fire his Flurry of Blows and his hotbar key 2 to fire his library of foul language taunt. He often throws in the taunt while waiting for Fast Attack and Brawl to recharge.

Once again, he had to move south to the uneven dunes section close to the Helipad for more Borg.  Tonights loot take of note was a few Miy’s pieces in the 130-200 range.

Claw Camp, Pleasant Meadows, Classic Kiting Spot

Claw Camp, Pleasant Meadows kiting spot with level 80 Claws, click for larger view.

Almost every up and coming Nano-Technician hears about Claw Camp as one of “the” must do kiting spots on Rubi-Ka.  The average Claw level of 80 places them as a major next step up after graduating from the mutant mining camps in south west and north west Lush Fields.  The jump from 50-ish to 80 is big enough that most NTs will need to level up some or get outside buffs in order kite at Claw Camp.  This is not meant to be an ultimate guide to kiting or to Claw Camp in particular.  It is meant to simply describing how one NT experiences it.

Last night Babaente popped in after re-animating from suspended animation to find herself sitting on the small hill overlooking the south west Claw Camp in Pleasant Meadows.  The weather was clear, and there were no other players in sight, plus there were no Slayer Droids to be seen.  She put in a telecommunication to Tireen who eventually showed up in her Yalmaha.  Tireen parked her Yalm a few hundred meters up directly over one of the large tree logs that are scattered next to the hill side.

This provides Babaente with a visual aid on the mini-map so she can circle her kites around Tireen’s location, therefore insuring she gets experience via proximity and being teamed with Babaente.  Babaente next got out her tool box of hacked boosted grafts, activating Hasty Augmentation for added damage, Glowing Retribution for protection, and Playful Cub for 100 run speed and +7 damage. Lastly she cast her regular NT buffs like Humidity Extractor, and lastly her Terrain Knowledge for +40 more run speed.

Slayer Droids protect Claw Camp during an previous visit, click for larger view.

After this ritual is complete, it was time to grab her first kite of the day.  She approached the camp, and tabbed through the various claws looking for the one with the highest level.  Once it was selected, she cast a Mass Claw eyes, which aggros every Claw within range, and it is time to start running in the opposite direction.  She led the 8 or so Claws towards the small hill, veering to the left at the base in order then start circling the various dead tree logs and tree stumps that litter that area.  These are useful at the beginning of the kite to slow down and encumber the kite when it is most dangerous.  The Claws have a pretty good melee range, so it is important to not let them get to close.

So far, there had been no lag, and soon the most treacherous part of the kite has past, the beginning when the hunter is trying to wear down the mobs health to at least 50%.  The slightest trip up or stumble in this phase can quickly lead to death or loosing 50-75% of the hunters health as the result of coming too close to several Claws.  Once the mobs are at 50% or below, the kiter can relax somewhat, and start to tighten the circle as the weakest Claws start to trail behind the stronger ones.

With the first two kites behind her, she felt the tension in her shoulders dissolve. Usually in the first kite or two, if lag is going to bite, it will happen then.  The combination of her base run speed skill of 365, plus 100 from a Hacked Boosted Graft Playful Cub and 40 from Terrain Knowledge for a total of 505 run speed, gave her just enough speed to stay out of melee range of these level 80+ Claws.

Starting to get a feel for the overall speed and how the Claws give chase, she continued to pull kites, now putting more effort into setting up the initial pull in order to get as many Claws as possible in the kite. She used the layout of the camp to do this.  Since it is circled by a low fence she found the most productive way to collect a large batch was to start outside the wall at the back of the camp.  From there she would tab through the Claws to pick out the one with the darkest red target highlighting.

With the strongest Claw targeted she would cast a group area of effect blind/taunt nano and start leading the aggro-ed mobs around the perimeter of the camp towards the entrance.  While doing this she would time casting area of effect nukes so they exploded when the kite was passing close to mobs not yet in the kite, hoping to aggro them as well.  By the time she led the kite out the entrance/exit, she would be heading south west for the base of the small hill.

When ever she was able to pull 10 or more Claws (i.e. most of the camp) the kite would be a bit more demanding and technical, requiring more attention to keeping it together.  She found the often when leading a group of 10 or more over an obstacle like a tree or tree log, several could get their pathing confused and they would sometimes drop out of the case.  These then became a danger, that she needed to take special care to not come to close to them before leading the kite by them and popping another AOE nuke to get their aggro again.

Claws appear to be somewhat social to the extent that when leading a bunch of aggro-ed Claws in a kite, a stay lone Claw will attack if the kiter passes too close to them.  The fact that you have aggro from a group of them is enough motivation for them to put the kiter on their hate list.

When the satisfying end of each kite rolls around, Babaente enjoys clicking on each corpse to inspect them for loot. after a full 60 minutes (the duration of a single Playful Cub cast) and roughly 10 to 12 successful kites, Babaente had several backpacks of monster parts and assorted shop food.  While the shop food is not as plentiful as what was typical in Biomare, the monster parts represent a healthy flow of credits after conversion to plasma.

With a just a few minutes left on her Playful Cub, she decided to retire to sit on the hillside to think a bit about her experience here as she waited for the nano to time out.  Although the Claws gave pretty good experience, they also have a fair amount of health.  Babaente’s nukes are too weak at this point to bring down the kites fast enough to satisfy power levelers.  It takes her 5-6 minutes or more per kite now.

She has been having such tunnel vision while concentrating on her kites, she had forgotten about Tireen hovering a few hundred meters above.  When she asked Tireen to check her experience, she said “it looks like my experience bar hardly budged.”  After Tireen inspected her stats more closely, it became clear that she had leveled to 72 during this time, so she clearly had some work to do soon in allocating out IP points.

Babaente had gone from having about 1 quarter of her experience bar full to around 95%.  She is looking forward to returning for another round and hopefully pick up another level.