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.