Deep Subway 101

Leet Sportin

Baba is camping dynas for the Skill of Highlander 2he buff nano, and since there has been little save a great deal of repetition to report, we will check back in with Baba either when he gets the drop, or he gives up the quest in frustration.

In the meantime, we will follow Babaente, Baba’s female NT alt, who was first created over the 2008 Labor Day weekend. On Tuesday evening, Baba made another pass through his bank looking for things Babaente could use. He found several more items that may help. A leet doll has been gathering dust in his bank now goes to Babaente to add 3 to her nano init. One of those 7th anniversary special backpacks that looks like a mini jet pack, to replace her plain looking standard small backpack worn as a functional social item. But this happened later. At the begining of the evening Babaente was seen running to the subway and the usual pick up team routine. Head down to the approaches to the strikers area and pick off disobedient pets for morphing memories and the droids that look like crat droids for experience, while toggling “Looking for Team” on.

Babaente got several invites, but each time she tried to respond by clicking on the yes in the dialog box, nothing would happen. After getting frustrated by this for 20 minutes, she figured out that because the dialog box was appearing over herself in 3rd person view, the system was interpreting her clicks to be on her bounding box and not the dialog box. Once she shifted her view to avoid this, she successfully joined the team when they patiently tried again. It was a three person team, but with the crats driod, it looked like four.

Babaentes September 2 2008 Subway team:

• Chillin 17 crat solutis, male, clan
• Gjfixit 21 fixer, male, clan
• Phyks 24 fixer, optifex, female, clan

Note: Babaente did not record teammate levels during the run, but pulled these from the Funcom.com site the next day, so it is possible teammates may have gained levels since that run.

Babaente recognized Phyks from teaming with her several times over the previous weekend. Without a tank, they bypassed the striker/architects section and went straight for the deep subway. This was Babaentes 2nd trip into the deep subway. Babaoroody actually had never made it that far. Babaoroody leveled past 25 before he found a team that went there. Since Babaoroody was a first toon, he had to run many small quests and missions to earn credits during the early title 1 phase. Babaente is lucky to be able to just concentrate on enjoying the subway and not have to worry about earning credits at this stage.

Babaente at level 17 modeling her whachamacallit backpack.

After telling Baba about the deep subway, he regrets not managing his progress so that he could have experienced it. It shows a great deal of originality in design and layout. It’s quite easy to get lost in, with maze like tunnels, and frequent use of the z dimension, i.e. bridges, ledges, overhangs, etc.

Once past the remains of the boarding areas, the blues and white hues are left behind, and replaced with some great atmospheric dingy rusty reddish industrial look reminiscent of certain massively popular first person shooters.

The mobs of the deep subway also stand out. Many are of the cyborg/borg type, which are some of the best detailed and convincing mobs on Rubi-Ka. The borg types also vary in size, with several being towering giants that are quite imposing.

While working their way down to the bottom, the team worked out who could do what and where. There were a few close calls, one with a bunch of infectors, and another with several borg types that cast roots and/or blinds on the team.

Once they reached the lowest level, they was doing well knocking down the standard type borgs there. They reached a very large open area of connected\ halls or warehouse type areas, there were several giant mob corpses lying about, so it meant another team must have recently cleaned out the place.

Before Babaente could even try and inspect one of the corpses for loot, a pair of large borg type mobs spawned and it was off to the races.

Both team mates were higher levels than Babaente, so most likely this was not their first time in this part of the subway, and they were running about like mad.

Babaente was trying to watch them and get a handle on what their strategy was while she tried to keep her distance from the mobs and sniped at them from the longest range she could. This was working ok, as they managed to fell each mob as they spawned. Things changed however when Virgil Aeneid showed up. This is a borg type mob that looks like it must be 20 feet tall. Very scary looking dude, with a BFG. Babaente kept up her strategy of mostly keeping her distance and sniping but for the most part standing still. This worked ok for a while, but Virgil is has a health bar longer than any Babaente has encountered so far in the dungeon, meaning, meaning it was going to take them a prolonged amount of time to bring him down. Babaente was even feeling pretty confident at this point they would triumph, but then the adds started showing up.

Taking down a big mob with a team is tough but not very challenging. When additional mobs start showing it, that’s when multitasking combat gets hairy. Babaente has not up until this point seen any need to use her roots, and therefore had not even added them to her hot bar yet. She could have used them there. Now there was Virgil, plus several spider mobs and a couple of smaller borg harassing the team. Now the other team mates were really running far distances, from one end of the large area to the other, while Babaente moved very little. Babaente now was paying the price as the adds, while not blockbusters, were starting to chip away steadily at her health bar. The team managed to clear out the adds briefly, and Babaente decided to let loose with her beginners nukes on Virgil.

While they did help bring down his health bar some more, they also caused Virgil to start paying more attention to Babaente and blasting huge chunks of her health away. She switched back to her more powerful Hot Foot, and continued to chip away at Virgil, but between Virgil and the adds, she ran out of health and found herself back at the gates of Athens. The rest of the team did manage to outlast Virgil and were triumphant, so Babaente was glad that she had at least contributed.

At this point it was getting late, so Babaente left the team and spent a little while allocating out her new IP points from the level gained tonight. She actually was only a few more kills away from another level when she bought it.
Babaente had not really been expecting to be facing the subways major bosses so soon, so she had not really thought through what she might have to do to survive. Fortunately she has Babaoroody’s Borg experience to draw from.

Babaoroody knows how to kite borg as an enforcer. Basically kiting borg as an enforcer involves running around with them in chase, but staying close enough so that the enforcers melee weapons can be used while on the run. Advantage goes to the enforcer since he can fight while running, while the Borg cannot, it has to stop to aim and fire most of the time. Some borg occasionally manage to get off a running shot, but not enough to be a fatal concern. Babaente has no experience kiting as a newbie NT. For one thing, she can’t cast while running, so she can not kite like an enforcer. At this stage it must involve running long enough for her casts to recharge, stop and cast, and then start running again. Baba told her there are some roller rats that will be of a high enough level to be red to her over in the by next village, Athenshire. She may pay them a visit just to try out this run, stop, cast and run again style of kiting.

This was also a lesson for Baba, in that Babaente could relate how a team without an enforcer has to do alot of extra running about and other hoop jumping with no enforcer there to keep the mobs attention and aggro. Both came away with a new appreciation of what enforcers bring to a team.