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.