First single kite level

Alien Invasion Flight over Shade Pipe.

Babaente has been leveling all week at Shade Pipe. In the process, she eventually leveled up enough to be able to equip a hacked boosted graft sparrow flight. Even though sparrow flight is not as fast or as high flying as a Yalm, it is faster than running, at least fast enough to outrun most Rubi-Ka mobs, so crossing high level mob areas is no longer a problem. On her way to Shade Pipe one night she cut the corner of the mutant area and collected a huge train of hammerheads behind her, much to high for her to kite at this stage, but rather funny looking. When she hit 37, her Living Cyber Armor topped out at level 50. Now when she levels, she only has one morphing memory and the Ring of Nucleus Basilus to level up. At level 50 Living Cyber Armor (helmet, chest, gloves, pants, boots) combined with her modest Acolyte robe yields over 1k AC. Even so, with the nanomage miniscule health bank, she is still as squishy as ever. She died once when she picked a fight with a single level 40 eye mutant at SW mines. She wanted to practice using the battle prepared nano recharger. Ignoring her health bar like a enforcer, she did not notice it was almost all gone in time to save a trip back to Newland reclaim. She did however, get to successfully practice using the battle prepared nano recharger for the first time.

Babaente took a little time from leveling to upgrade her med and nano kits a step each from 20s to 30s. She devised a new tool to help her allocate IP when leveling based on the chart of IP costs at aofroobs.com.

This helps one to keep focused, and know when IP is tight which ones cost the most and which cost the least.

She has another spreadsheet for storing a copy of her ability and skills amounts that also has lists of her professions nanos and other item requirements that have conditional formulas to highlight items when requirements are reached.

With this knowledge she asked Baba to pick up the appropriate level med and nano kits, plus several NT nanos she could now or would very soon be able to equip. Once he flew out and made the hand off, she considered where to hunt next. Since she hit 37 the Shades at Shade Pipe have turned gray, yielding 500 or less XP points each. Now that she had a new AOE nuke that was considerably more powerful than what she used on the shades, she decided it was time to move camp to the SW mine that is coincidentally just a little distance away to the south west.

She did a couple of tentative small kites outside the mine barrier, just to get a feel for how many applications of her new nuke it would take to fell this mixed batch level 40ish mob types (various mutants). Just two small 4-5 mob kites and her xp jumped to about 1/4. Feeling confident she entered the mine inner area and proceeded to about the 7 o’clock position just south of the entrance, and cast her opening nuke on a group in the entrance. Once she had aggro, she started running counter clockwise around the mine, picking up more and more mobs on the way, by the time she completed a lap and exited the entrance, she had about 20-30 mobs in tow, and performance started to get jerky, and slow. To compensate she led her kite down the road a bit to a more open area before starting to keep them ‘herded using small circle patterns.

The only problem moment came at one point when the initially targeted mob died, and she accidentally nudged her mouse while trying to kit the keys to select another target. (She had turned off auto-attack.) This accidental nudge of the mouse transferred control away from the keyboard direction keys. The kite briefly caught up with her while she was working to regain control, and her health got beaten down to about 50% before she was running free again. This fumble behind her, she was greatly surprised and elated when she dinged while the kite was only about 1/2 finished. By the time the last mob dropped she had gained about a level and a fraction from one kite! The NT bug has bitten hard!

Later on Thursday evening she only had time for a brief session. She logged in at SW Mine and after a couple of warm up kites, did one massive kite collecting all of the mobs within the barrier, and kiting them out onto the road leading east where she dinged to 40 by the time half of the kite started dropping. When she logged off after a grand total of maybe 10 minutes online, she had gained a level and a half.

In the meantime, Babaoroody has started to do some recon at the Steps of Madness, where a sought after NT robe is to be had. He flew out to the dungeon located in Greater Omni Forrest via Harry’s, a long trip. On his first foray, he got too confident after smiting the level 50ish mobs in the first 100 feet or so, then he blundered into the next area and aggroed almost the whole room of 5-10 meatballs. Individually, they are no sweat, but as a group, they quickly sent him back to Newland City. The next day, he saved himself time and effort and got the NPC Zyvania Bagh in Newland City to warp him there. Zy can be found just inside the town lake gate.

Baba in the house of Neleb

This time when he got to the spot where he was wiped before, he carefully pulled each one individually using one of his taunts. He made his way to about the 3/4 point in this linear cavern, when real life intervened and he had to log for that morning. Later close to bed time that night he logged in only to find Neleb down and several 60-70ish level exarch robe wearing types clowning around, so he logged off. The next morning when he returned he found himself all alone with Neleb and his cronies. He started pulling the mobs one by one. All of them were easy except for one of the meatballs, which cast a nano that prevented Baba from attacking. Fortunately this particular meatball, does not do much damage by itself so, it was no problem to wait out the nano, and then flatten it. Once all the mobs but Neleb were down, Neleb himself was quite easy to take down. After looting Neleb and taking a trophy shot, Baba decided to train out, but got wiped when the train caught up with him when he got momentarily lost trying to find the exit in one of the larger rooms.

Back at Newland, Baba inventoried his take. All of the useful goodies are no drop, but the items used to upgrade the robe are not, and a careful count showed he had more than enough of each required item. As long as one takes the time to loot each mob on the way in to Neleb, one should collect have all the required items to upgrade Nelebs loot.

Take away lessons:

• If you like to level fast, NT is the way to go. One level solo is less than 5 minutes at level 37.
• Get warped instantly to Steps of Madness by Zyvania Bagh in Newland City, and save travel time.
• Steps of Madness mobs are not very formidable taken one by one, but take care not to aggro more than one at a time. Even title 4 and up players can be overwhelmed if swarmed here. Pulling single mobs is the key to navigating this dungeon.
• Steps of Madness mobs seem to be on a very fast respawn. In the first 2/3 of the linear dungeon, mobs appear to respawn in 5 minutes or less.
• Steps of Madness lowbie mobs drop multiple pieces that will be needed to upgrade several of the uber loot items the boss mob Neleb drops. Be sure to loot all of the low level mobs on the way in if you intend to upgrade the boss drops.
• If you want to try and train out of a dungeon and attrack as few mobs as possible, turn Agg/Def all the way down. At full Agg, every mob within sensing range will be aggroed as you pass. Baba will research this further and report later in more detail on this.
• Hacked Boosted Graft Sparrow Flight is a great lowbie alternative to a yalmaha. They show up as mission loot from QL 60 and above, and are not “no drop” so they may be bought from other players for a fraction of the cost of a yalm. They offer speed and security for lowbie travel.
• The aofroobs.com Skills Chart is your friend. Use it as an aid in prioritizing and allocating IP points because it tells you the relative cost of each. Very useful when you need to stretch out and get the most out of limited IP every level. All lowbies do not have enough IP to max everything, so choices have to be made, let this help you make those choices more intelligently.
  
• Neleb and/or one of his meatball crony personal bodyguards have a nano that shuts down your attacks for a brief period and a nano that is like a shield or layers. The simplest strategy is to pull each mob from a distance, and battle each one at a time. The ability to cast nano debuffs on Neleb and his guards could be useful but not required here. Neleb and his henchmen appear to be level 50-60 but Neleb appears to have around 100k+ health, so good damage dealing is required to avoid a drawn out fight. The henchmen have a fast respawn time of just a few minutes, so plan for adds if the battle draws out.

Helipad transforms to trainstation

Another train wreck in PW. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress.

After the training incident this past Sunday morning, it was that evening before Baba had a chance to log back on. It was rather late and he barely had an hour available, so he headed out to Perpetual Wastelands and the Borg Hideout. It is one of the more hard to reach spots on the planet with no grid or whompa exits in the region. The closest regular grid point is in the region to the west, Mort. So after leaving the Sentinels grid point in his Yalm, and crossing the PW border, he started spamming the system with /list commands to see if the trainer from the morning was around.

Things looked clear, so Baba proceeded to the northern most section of the dunes beside the landing pad or Helipad. Note: Despite the fact that helicopters are not depicted anywhere in Ruby-Ka, the landing pad is marked with a large H which many people take to mean Helipad.

Baba choose to pull Borg from the desert side because that was the side the Borg were the least dense, and so more safely pulled individually. Baba took his time and after about 45 minutes was getting very close to leveling. He arrived at the point where it was clear that one of the next few kills would give him a ding when he got an invite to join a team that were pulling Borg out of the base and onto the Helipad. Baba accepted, but in retrospect should have warned them that he only had a few more minutes before he had to log

Baba used his Yalm to hop over the 50 or so Borg between him and the team, and soon found himself at the Helipad teamed up with:

• Nawky 146 MP atrox Neutral, member of NEPA
• Stondric 130 MA solitus male Neutral, member of Atav
• Blammo 110 Agent opifex male clan, member of liberation front

No one was eager to be the puller. Baba has had disastrous results trying to pull out individuals when he was solo from the Borg Hideout. Perhaps he should have volunteered to pull from the desert. Nawky, being the senior member, eventually took up the task and started pulling. The team took down a Cyborg Lieutenant General with little problem and there was a short breather where everyone was able to heal and catch their breath.

All of a sudden the team was drowning is a sea of Borg. Borg seemed to swarm in every direction. There was nowhere to run to, so the team did the best it could against the impossible odds. The team managed to take down 4 generals before being wiped. They would not have lasted that long if it had not been for Nawky’s heal pets, and Stondric’s heals. Since more adds would have been impossible, Baba was spamming his mongo at the end.

In team chat afterwards, it was the consensus that someone had trained the Borg horde on to them, but no one had been able to identify the party(s) responsible. Baba had mixed feelings. He was disappointed to witness this kind of poor behavior for a second time in one day. He was disappointed in the whole operation. Somewhere it seemed it would take a great deal of effort to ignore logs which show practically all the mobs in the northeast quadrant of a region being aggro-ed at the same time and the near simultaneous wipe of the only team in the region. Baba had been running list commands, and was convinced that his team was the only players in the region, knowing of course how the list command ignores players who have set them selves to anonymous.

He felt it was still a win for him, since, somewhere in that last stand, he had dinged to 127, and he had been planning on leaving soon anyway. While sitting at reclaim and talking in team chat, bystander Terryb (220 engineer solitus male Neutral, member of Neptueg Atav), provided Baba with several needed heals. (Baba wonders if he was an alt of/or knew Stondric)

Baba thanked the team and went to a shop to divy out his skill points and sort his latest loot before logging off. There is not much to relate regarding Baba’s skill point allotments. The only major change he has made since level 100 has been to stop putting points into Psychic. This has allowed him to finally max his 2 hand edge skill, so now he is working on maxing fast attack and brawl, after pumping all of his nano skills. The loot take included some nice Miy’s pieces, but nothing he could equip any time soon.