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.

 

Charming Fellow

Babacratus

Babacratus recently went off on a fruitless tangent to Steps of Madness, did some exploring in Elysium and then got back to the business of leveling in Nascense.

It started when asked his older siblings, Babaengy and Babaemphee to help him acquire a Neleb's Nano-Master Robe from Steps of Madness. The plan was, since Babacratus now had the stats at lvl 66 to equip said robe, that Babaengy and Babaemphee would fight their way in, and once there, Babaengy would Beacon Warp Babacratus in. They should have tested it first. Although both are at level 100, and all the mobs were gray to them, it was a slow slog in. Somewhat like the Temple of the Three Winds, there are lots of gray mobs packed closely together such that if you aggro too many at once, you will be toast. The layout is even more tight and cramped than TOTW and in several places the visibility is poor due to lighting and poor sight lines, especially at doors which typically open into rooms packed with mobs waiting to pounce on anyone foolish enough to just barge in.

It gave team pets a chance to get back into practice and in spite of the frustration caused by the visibility and gray crowds of mobs, the run in took about 40 minutes. Once they made it to Neleb's area, they found a trio of 200+ players, camping Neleb. There were also 3 or four Neleb corpses laying around which Babaengy inspected and found they all had robes ready for the taking. Since they are no drop though, they would have to warp Babacratus in to pick one up. It was then that they discovered that the looking for team window will only display players within teaming range, which they had forgotten Babacratus was too low to team with them. Neither Babacratus or Babaengy could see each other in the looking for team window, which is the only way to team with someone that you cannot select by clicking on them in the vicinity. Beacon Warp only works with team members.

There are several ways determine who you can team with.

• One is to use the command line and enter the command "/tell helpbot level" which will give you information about the level missions you can pull and which levels you can team with.
• Another method is to take the lowest level players level and multiply it by 1.4 to get the highest level they can team with. The highest level player can multiply thier level by .74 to get the lowest level they can team with.

Somewhat dejected, team pets fought their way back out, returned to Newland, and logged off for the night. Babacratus then logged in and thought that the simplest thing to do would be to level up a few more levels to where he could team with team pets.
The next day, Babacratus did a little exploring of Elysium and tried to do some leveling from the base of the ramp at Port Seven to the spider hill past the Stormshelter dungeon. He gained one level, but did not adjust fast enough to how much more social these mobs are. They will come to the aid of another like mob from quite a distance. They will also aggro by proximity at a much longer distance than mobs on Nascense. He eventually took a quest from one of the ramp guards, and managed over a hour or so, to tippy toe around red mobs to within eyesight of the mission objective. At that point, on a sand bar next to the river, he was attacked by a giant eremite. He tried to run, that was fruitless and he was soon back at his last garden save point.

He next thought about it some more and went back to the Aban Garden and used the transport pillar there to get to Garden of Enel. From there, using an insignia, he transported to Ripwell where he was able to then walk unmolested in the back of the mission place and complete it. The next mission step required him to go further south, but he quickly got swarmed by several red level Hiathilins and managed to elude one while his Driod killed the other, and then they finished off the other. These mobs are in the 70 to 80 range and are too high to charm. He then returned to the Nascence wetlands to try his hand at the level 80 Hecklers there. The problem he ran into there was that all the other mobs in the area seemed too low to be any aid against the Hecklers. At around 22 about all they do is serve as a meatshield for his Driod. Using this method he could just barely take down the first two Hecklers, going clockwise from the bridge, but later Hecklers are space closer together and it was impossible to pull just one.

He discovered you cannot charm the mini bosses on the wetlands, but at least go some nice drops afterwards. He also tried charming a level 35 mob from the next area down, Core and it worked great until the charm wore off. At that point, he could not re-charm it, and it went running back to Core. There is a dungeon on wetlands, which will have higher mobs in it, but dungeon mobs cannot leave the dungeon, charmed or otherwise.

Up to this point he has had to deal with charms by simply waiting for them to time out if/when he wanted to get rid of them, that or tell them to wait and run away. He was reading some AO official forums and just happened to come across teh proper commands to get rid of your charms:

• To kill the pet, target it an type in command line: /pet %t terminate
  (note at later levels if you have multiple charms of the same type mob, they all will terminate.)
• To simply release the pet, target it, and then enter in the command line:/pet "%t" free
  (note this behaves the same regarding multiple charmed pets of the same type.)

Macros to do the same things:

• /macro termpet /pet "%t" terminate
• /macro Freepet /pet "%t" free

Level 80 Heckler XP

The next day after pulling the ridiculously easy Alien daily mission "High Toxicity" which simply involved targeting 3 not so toxic plants and getting a new alien title, he returned to Core Wetlands. This time he approached the Hecklers with 2 charms and his Driod. The first thing he did was survey the island to find the highest charm-able mobs, which turned out to be level 25 Spinetooth Hatchlings, and long charmed that, then he located the closest Heckler to the bridge and then he short charmed a level 22 Spinetooth Hatchling. He sent the level 22 in to attack first and once it's health was starting to plummet, he sent in his other Spinetooth and his Droid. This worked really well, it tended to keep the Heckler's aggro, and often both the long term charm would survive as well as his Droid past killing the Heckler. The short term charm also proved useful to pull. If he sent it to attack a Heckler and it drew a social add, Baba would recall it using behind or follow. This allowed him to gain level 69.

Red Xs = Hecklers

He is not quite sure why, but only the first Heckler would follow, which would bring it far enough away that Baba and his other pets could then attack without fear of other Heckler adds. While each Heckler was giving 20-22k in experience, it was a slow process, slower than leveling in the Core dungeons had been, due to the extra time involved in acquiring the level 25 Spinetooth, which all seemed to be located near the center of the Wetlands and then finding a Spinetooth close to the Heckler as the second short term spawn.
The night before Baba had been somewhat dejected and resorted to doing some research on the NET forums where he at first found nothing related to how to deal with the Core Wetland Hecks.

Eventually he gave up finding something that specific and settled for just reading general Bureaucrat charm information posts. While doing so, he came across the fact that he could charm at least two pets at his current level. The Crat has to use one long term and one short term charm. The short and long term classification matches with the most telling statistic which is long term pets have a 7001 code at Auno.org which indicates that no other long term pets can be active. The short term charms have a 7000 code which means that they can be done with 1 other pet active.
For examples see:

• Long term - Solicit Support - Auno Entry
• Short term - Personal Magnatism - Auno Entry