We Was Robed

The past week Bamboobill and Zigwee have been running missions out of Meetemedere and managed to go from level 56 to 60.  At least three of the missions took place just on the other side of the huge easterly cliff wall south of Rhinoman Cockpit in a very small oasis-like patch inhabited by several Rhinomen and a Dynacamp Rhinoman.

Each time the Dyna had a different name; Warchief Skullgrabber the Destroyer, Warmaster Backbasher, and Chief Ribbasher Thunderthews. They each had unique Auras and varied in size from normal, to half again as big, to double size. Baba made an outline of these Auras and what they indicate a while back, and this wiki Newbie Guide goes into more detail.

The missions alternated between the easy large Boss rooms to the cramped dreaded tiny Boss rooms.  They got several this time where the Boss and the minion were practically sitting on the elevator. In these cases Bill and Zig either dropped straight in and winged it, or only on of them would drop in, avoid the mobs as much as possible while picking up or fixing whatever the mission objective was and then taking the elevator out. Unless the Boss is the mission objective, you don’t have to kill the Boss or minion, if you kill 90% of the mobs before the Boss room, you usually still get your token reward.

After a few nights of this they soon hit level 60, and felt almost ready to take on the Temple of the Three winds.  They needed one item before they could set off for TOTW, a quality level 83 Motivational Speech: Bravery Overcomes nanocrystal that provides +15 offence and 60 defense to the team.  It's not sold in stores, but can be rolled in missions. 

They did not feel up to trying to run a 83 level mission, so they asked Babaente (lvl 83 NT) to roll the mission and then she gave a duplicate mission key to Babacratus (lvl 187 Crat) so he could clear out the mission quickly with no fuss, letting Babaente stroll in and pick up the mission objective which happened to the nano they wanted which she then passed later to Bamboobill. (Baba’s toons  don’t generally accept missions where the objective is to spot or kill individuals, it is too easy mistakenly spot the objective before killing all the other mobs to get a token and sometimes the kill objective is a Boss in an impossible tiny room with an above average minion .) While on the way to the mission, Babacratus passed an odd looking cave formation just outside of 4 Holes.

Onward to the Temple

If you have been away from Rubi_Ka for some time, a couple things have changed about the Temple of the Three Winds regarding getting there and leaving there. The mini quests to get access to a portal that zaps you directly there have been moved to ICC, and there now is a ICC shuttle close to the Temple Entrance that will zap you back to ICC when you want to leave.

The last time any of Baba's toons saw plenty of teams and lots of players looking to team at TOTW, was back in 2008 when Babaente made her pilgrimage there.  Since then every Baba sponsored toon that has gone there has found almost no teams or players looking to team, and instead saw mainly a mix of multi-boxing duos, outside buffed twink wannabees, and real twinks (self buff only.)  Bamboobill did not see a single player under level 59 inside on his visit.

It is still nice to remember the good times of 2007 through 2008 when TOTW was a place where 70 to 80 players under level 60 would show up and be busy outside the entrance forming teams, and then fighting as teams in the dungeon. These days so many new players just buy Heckler Juice from the store and go straight to 200.

So they made their way to the Temple.  The outside entrance is rather plain and unimpressive, however once inside they learned the main thing you need to know about the Temple which is it is filled with trash mobs in passages where it is impossible to go around them, and that other players often deposit trains of these mobs on you.  After a while of this tedium, Heckler Juice starts to be more appealing.  Not wanting to create a huge train, it took our pair quite a while to slog through hall after hall of these trash mobs.  In fact, they spent more time in those halls than they did eventually at their objective, Aztur the Immortal's room at the far end of the Wing of the Future.

The trash mobs are called Cultists and they turned out to be very weak charm pets, many died before the charm wore off.

When Bill and Zig reached Aztur's lair, they found a multi-boxing MP+Engi duo and a couple of independent twinks already working the room.  These folks were mainly focused on taking on Aztur which requires killing two mini Bosses in order to get Aztur to spawn.  During a lull between those battles, Bill and Zig successfully pulled Exarchs one at a time, and after only two, had the looted an Exarch robe for each plus a few nice rings (Notum rings and ring of Tattered Flame.)

Bill and Zig, giddy with having what they came for, forgot they could just zap out of the dungeon using Zig's Team Grid Phreak nano, and instead started the long run to the entrance.  It was slow and tedious to have to kill gray Cultists every inch of the way.  About halfway to the exit, some other player dumped a medium sized cultist train on them.

Bill and Zig decided to make a break for it for the exit, picking up even more cultists with every step. Near the T junction where the east and west tunnels meet, Zigwee got stuck, the train was upon him, so Bamboobill had to double back to help.  The managed to survive, it just took a while to burn all the Cultists down individually since neither Bill or Zig have any area of effect attacks. Bill has some AOE roots, snares and calms, but they don't reliably work for him at this level.

After getting out, they sat down and equipped their new Exarch robe back items which basically increased most of their armor ratings by roughly 200 points over the ICC cloaks they had been wearing. Feeling cocky they thought, Let's try Foreman's!

Fiasco at Foremans

After making the long flight in from Bliss to Foreman's they were running their first Ace Starr mission just inside the Foreman's entrance.  On the short run to their objective in the dungeon to a friendly NPC, Bill charmed a guard and they had no trouble killing any resistance on the way. 

When BambooBill approached the first security monitor which was located just by the inner door of the dungeon he made a fatal mistake.  He assumed the mobs on the other side of the door (which they had killed coming in) would not have respawned yet. As he was trying to apply the device to turn off the monitor he tripped the door to open, and instantly all three respawned mobs were on them. Just as our pair managed to fell one of the guards, another player came running by which caused one of their attackers to set off chasing the other player.  Bill thought great, that leaves us only 1 mob left to kill. Then to his horror his Droid was now running away chasing the guard chasing the other player.   After recalling the Driod, just as it arrived, 3 or 4 more regular guards and one elite guard came out of no where and joined the attack on Bill and Zig.  They are not sure what drew the extra guards in. Was it the returning Droid? Was it another player training them?  It still puzzles them.  With their health plummeting faster than the rate they were killing the guards, they tried to make a run for the exit.  Bill made it, but Zig did not.  

The nightmare was not over yet for Bamboobill, there was a patrol guard standing right next to him when he came out the other side of the dungeons door and the guard attacked him right away.  Bill actually managed to outrun the guard, run past several others out the base's entrance and into the woods.  He then had to run about a quarter of the way to Bliss to lose one persistent guard chasing him.

Bill and Zig decided run missions in Varmint Woods for a while and not return to Foreman's until they were at least level 75 with their chops a bit more together.  It was nice to be back doing comparably low stress missions.

 

Getting Belted

Bamboobill and Zigwee's buff up sessions before missions have been hampered by them running out of NCU to load buffs, even with Zigwees NCU compressor buff.  It was time for the Anarchy Online tradition of equipping higher capacity belts and NCU as required.  This involves researching which Belt and NCU items have the least requirements, sorting everyone's inventory and bank to see if they own any of the desired items, then running the various toons to the bank and then out to drop the items off to Bamboobill and Zigwee.

AO Item Assistant+

AO Item Assistant+ was a huge help in finding which belts and NCU Baba and Friends already owned.  AO Item Assistant+ does a fantastic job of keeping track of multiple character inventories and bank content with a great search function included. Another nice feature is if you right click on the listing for any item, it gives you a link to the item at AOITEMS or AUNO for more information.  I highly recommend it. 

5 Slot Belt Requirements

So research took an hour or two.  According to AO Item Assistant they had two low quality five slot belts and 10 low quality 32-64 NCU chips. It took a while to log the different toons, take them to the bank, then run out to Meetmedere to hand over the goods to Bamboobill.

As Bamboobill had the lowest Computer Literacy (the requirement for belts) he got the lowest quality belt and NCU.  They both had to put a few points into Computer Literacy and use the general Comp Lit buff, but the 5 slot bests and 5 32-64 NCU each went in with no issue, and now they have close to 200 NCU each. 

The cherry on this cake is the extra NCU is enough for Zigwee to load an Matter Metamorphosis Infuse needed to run the next step up NCU buff, so even more NCU can be on tap.

The night was getting long, and they decided to run a few missions rather than spend time seeing what combination of new buffs they could load, so they set out with their usual complement.

Hammerheads

The pulled 3 level 55 missions, in the Newland Desert.  The first two missions turned out to have rather small levels, but the mobs made up for that in size.  Giant Spiders and huge Hammerheads populated both missions.  The Hammerheads are a pain as charms.  They are so huge, when they follow you, you cannot click on anything around you, so you constantly have to tell them to wait behind while you loot stuff.  You are also stuck looking at their rear end often.

Spiders

The spiders on the other hand, were some of the best charmed pets ever.   They never once lost aggro. Usually the Droid pet and the charm pet are terrible at keeping aggro, even with buffing the Droid. The spiders seemed to be on par with Mech Dogs in terms of damage output and defense and just as durable, so they are now Bamboobill's favorite charm pet even if they are a bit too large and sometimes obscure the view.

The team is still getting used to the vagaries of AOs Line of sight issues with targeting.  Often you can clearly see a mob in full plain sight, but AO acts like there is something blocking line of sight, and if you press tab to target the nearest enemy, it will ignore that mob and target any other mob that is within line of sight.  

They both dinged 56 in the first floor of the third mission, and decided to call it quits for the night, so they retired to the Newland Desert Outpost that was close by. 

Dis-Connect, The Game

Zigwee and Bamboobill, fixer and crat (level 54), were rocking a team mission in Rihnoman valley when it happened.  They were enjoying the benefit of Zigwee’s latest HOT Kitchen Sink Surgery and also having Bamboobill’s level 66 Director Grade Assistant Droid along to deal handily with typical mission Bosses.

Bamboobill
Froob Crat

They are the latest sponsorships of Babaoroody.  He had been in suspended animation for so long, He and his many alts had forgotten so much.  When first coming out of suspended animation he had tried reviving his paid Crat, but soon realized he had no clue on how to play it any more or any of his alts.  He decided the best way to get going again on Rubi-Ka would be to start new toons from scratch at Arete Landing, so Froob Fixer Zigwee and Crat Bamboobill started life.

The Fixer/Crat combo so far seems to be a really good one.  Between the Fixer's HOTs and the Crats droid and charmed "pets", it works really well and is far less complicated than some of Baba's previous combinations like Engy/MP.

Depending on the MP's heal pet is way more problematic than staying alive with Fixer HOTs.  Heal pets often catch aggro and die, or like all pets have pathing issues, and may not be able to get to the party that needs healing fast enough.  Crat also seems better than Engineer since Crats have a pet and at least one charmed pet.

Zigwee
Froob Fixer

They have been pulling missions mainly for the XP and tokens so they have been rolling them in Meetmedere and accepting only ones located in Newland Desert.  That way they can fly to the mission without having to zone or make a lot of grid and/or whompa hops.

Missions are a mostly low stress avenue for them to learn how everything works on Rubi-Ka.  They are still debating if they will go to Temple of the Three Winds when they reach 60, theres really not much there they want other than Exarch robes and perhaps a few notum rings.

Newland Desert is one of Baba's favorite zones, it was really the first zone he had explored when he started out. It is full of interesting places like Meetmedere, Rhinoman Valley, one of the oasis where techno-scavengers could be farmed, and Newland Desert outpost when it was the location of the portal to the Temple of the Three Winds.  

After getting buffed up in Meetmedere by Babaempee, the pair headed off to their first mission of the evening in the far west of Newland Desert.  The mission turned out to be the cramped cave style, with tiny rooms and corridors, which resulted in pulling unwanted adds several times.  Things went well anyway as between the HOT and the droid and charmed pets damage, the adds were dispatched with Zig and Bamboobill's health never going below 90%.

After completing the mission in the extreme far eastern part of Newland Desert and starting on the flight back to Meetmedere, they spotted a small outpost with a couple of mission terminals, so they saved some time and stopped there to roll the next mission.  They picked one in Rhinoman valley and were soon there bashing away and made it to the last floor before the Boss floor. They came to a long stretch of cave where they could see an open door with the Boss room elevator symbol in sight.  There was a mech dog about half way down the corridor, which Bamboobill thought he would pull. He hit Tab and sent the droid to engage the mech dog.  There turned out to be a second higher level mech dog in the room with the Boss elevator and inexplicably his tab had selected that mob over the one closer in the corridor.  As mech dogs are social, this brought both down on the party, but still it should not have been a problem, they have survived worse.  It was at this point that the Internet service did the conk.

When they logged back in curiously, the mobs were dead, Zigwee was still alive, but Bamboobill was back at reclaim in Meetmedere. After rebuffing Bamboobill, they went back to the mission and completed it.  The Boss room turned out to be one of the easy ones, a huge square room and no minions.  They collected loot from the Boss and added their latest Clan mission tokens to their boards. Only about 100 left to go for Dawn level boards.