Tag Archives: TR

Side Project, Darth Samius is ON!

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Something I have been thinking about for a long time is how to make an anti Samius for my Darth Samius build as well as something I can do in my spare time while waiting for Tobril’s Real life to settle so we can xp things together for a spell.

And then yesterday I saw Ambitious’ blog post How to Ungimp Yourself, watching his video I became inspired to make a full on huge hitter dps build. I have a few guys that hit simi hard. But normally I am more about consistently then the one big swing, unless I am on a caster then that is a different story. So I don’t really have a huge hitter on that level.

So lets change that. To do so I will need your help. With build ideas and tweaks to the one I come up with.

The base, I have an level 13 – xp for 14 first life barb that I will cap out in my spare time while Tobril’s work keeps him from our planed TR time. I swear things were easier with Fopo, he didn’t have a real life that got in the way of my game time 3-4 days a week. Even though he is married with two kids. Hope his ddo break is almost over.

A Barb past life will be a boon to any alt and a name change will set him right up.

Other then that I have nothing set in stone. No build ideas or a real list of must haves although after playing with the barb as is; not WF might make the list. I have little to no gear yet for this guy. But I will flag for shroud and gather a few sets of shards for GS crafting post TR. Unless you guys shoot me an item that I could use this go around then I will get what mileage out of it that I can.

Anyway it is a short one. Seen in your heavy hitter builds and let me see if I can get those huge numbers.

❤

Early thoughts on the Catholic Priest

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Over the last few days I have really been thinking about how I will be leveling up next life and I think I have a loose out line that I am calling the Catholic Priest model.

Why am I calling it that? Because it is a holy man with the bad touch. ☺

Okay after doing some reading I found in the case of a level tie how the game decides to break ties. And if you don’t know it is like this take all the original classes and put them in alphabetical order then add the new classes in the order they were added. The wiki has a list on the Past_Life_Feats page under the heading Dominant Class. But if you can remember in alphabetical order then new you will be good most of the time. So Monk/Pally tie would go to the Pally as it is an OG class. Barb/Bard would go to the Barb as it would come first in alphabetical order.

So a 9/9 monk/pally split would work out for my past life being a pally. And that is good news, as that leaves me with 2 extra levels to play with.

I am debating on splashing for trap/full umd or feats. I was going to do arty levels because I really like how their spells even at low levels. And then I could go Helf and the Rogue Dilly for more sneak attack damage then I could with two rogue levels.

And come one what holy man doesn’t want to smite evil into the spleen of evildoers.

But I have to say that fighter is also a good option over Arty. Sure you loose trap skills and full umd but gain 2 feats a haste attack boost and +1 str. So I will need to look at that option later on.

So lets look at the meat of the build, stats. 14 15 16 12 12 12. With tomes stat requirements, ie GTWF, are handled when we can take them. If we first level arty that is 20 skill points enough to start all of our important skills and for monk levels that is 5 so con/search/disable and then we can use the second arty level around level 10 or 11 to re-max umd and any other skills we left behind. Once int tomes start to roll in extra points can roll over into Umd or Balance as needed. I also tend to skip a level or two of maxing trap skills to get balance to 10 I find that 10 is a good number for me in balance.

I just looked at the time and my to do list for the day and I better run. More on this Monday, either more thoughts or maybe a probber layout or even how I started to build the thing. You know when I will start a TR. ☺

❤

Missing Items

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Over the last year to 18 months I have done more then a few TRs and it seems like every few lives I realize that something has gone missing. When I catch something missing I have no idea when I had it last or if there is anything else that has vanished. But the result is the same, the item is gone and I am confused wither or not there is anything I can do about getting these items back short of farming the raid. I did say all the ones I know that have gone missing have been raid items right?

The first time I noticed something missing was back when I did my Bard or Barb life. I had just turned level 12 and I was wearing shitty armor and I remembered that I had a set of Marilith Chain and Demon Scale from the DQ. I couldn’t remember which armor was the “good” for dps but I had them both. Before I started TRing I had taken all my active raid timers to a 20th list and I was passed the bad set in the chest and taken the “good” set in the end reward list. Thinking well if I am going to TR a whole bunch having armor would be the worst idea.

Of course I was missing the Marilith Chain when I went looking. Ended up using the Demon Scale for a few levels until switching to a Chain Shirt of Crippling and that went out for one of my many sets of Dragon Touched armor. But now that I think about it I don’t have the Demon Scale or the Chain Shirt of Crippling any more. Don’t think I would have sold them. But after I got fairly high in the Cannith crafting system I stopped using them so they might have gotten lost in the Armor wars. But I know that the Marilith Chain was stolen from me.

Long time readers might remember that durning my Sorc life I took a few weeks off grinding the xp to take a few raids to 20s again and to farm Epic von6 for shield parts, which I totally got by the way. But as I ran eV6 about 10 times for the shard for my shield I was passed lots of other base items just in case. Some I used others got added to the bank and doubles got sold. One such double item that I know I sold one of and kept the other was the Ruby Encrusted Gauntlets. I remember thinking that I could foresee making a set of gloves epic at some point the boost to fire spells and epic slots in gloves, but that was a long shot as I have 7 fingered gloves and like UMD.

But I had two pairs. I know that I had at least one set during my Arty life as I tried using the non epic version for its clickly thinking that if anyone can make this clickly worth wild it would be an Arty. It wasn’t by the way. But that was only a few months back.

Jump to last night when for some reason I thought that they might have some kind of combustion value and allow me one less weapon swap in combat and my glove slot happens to be empty now that I am no longer using the Vulkoor’s Might set. And no joy in the bank, which I guess is okay as taking a look at the ddowiki today, the level 9 version does not have any combustion.

So have you noticed any thing gone missing on TR? Like me does everything that goes missing seem to be raid items or is that just a trick of the mind and non-raid/named items go missing from time to time but I just don’t notice?

<3s

Flame Throwing Winter Wolf

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I said yesterday that I would explain how I play my druid and I think the title sums it up nicely but I will elaborate some.

I have a Merc Stealth keyboard:
Merc Stealth

As you can see it has a wonderful video game section that allows me to play ddo much better then I could before. But like all layouts there are keys that are easier then others to hit. For me the “quick keys” that I find easiest are 1-4 and 7-9.

I bring it up because I think that showing what spells align with which keys shows the order of importance.

So my quick keys are:
1 Takedown, Quick back of the hand DC for its trip effect is 24ish which works on most mobs. Might need to find a vertigo item and boost it more. By far the most used spell/special attack.

2 Baiting Bite, this is my kill guy attack. If I need something dead now I hope this guy is of timer. So far max damage I have seen from this attack was 389, yes I rolled a crit but as the wolf forms are 19-20 they are not bad. But I am level 9.

3 Call Lighting, on monks this is where I put stunning fist. This is the easiest of the number keys to hit and I hope starts to show how even though I am melee a lot of the time I am just as spell caster as ever.

4 WoF. Every caster I have has their main AOE spell on the 4 key. It is just kinda my thing. Having this spell here just makes things easy for me. And you haven’t lived until you stunned or tripped a burnable monster in your main AOE.

5 Ice Storm, I want to have to reach for this key some, I don’t want to put of my WoFs because of a slight error. On monk lives I use this key for my finisher.

6 Flame strike, It is a little slow but as it does fair damage some of which is good damage I like to have it around. More then once this life I run to red skull WoF and then used Flame strike on top of wall to clear the agro. But it is over out of the way.

7, the second easiest quick button for me to hit. It is currently Panacea but once I have another 5th level spell slot it will become Cold Breath I think.

8 I think is currently Spike Growth. I like to have a CC spell here and for a while Snare or Entangle took the slot but I wanted more AEO damage for some of the gather mobs kill kill kill fests that I am currently running for xps.
9 Vigor, I just want to say I really like this spell. And I can’t wait to play with more of the regen spells. But they are not extendable? Come on Turbine, WTF?

10/0 is always Cure pots. That is another for every alt thing. But I almost aways reach across with my mouse had to hit the other 10/0 key

So to me that kind shows the melee and caster nature of the druid but incase it is not clear to others my current style is pull until I get slowed or I need to kill for a quest adjective. And then AOE and more often then not stand and trip and or eat people.

I guess weapons might also help make a clear picture but as they are about to change tonight (I will be leveling up) I think they can wait until the level up dust settles.

BtW I know I say this about every class, but I really like the Druid and I am really thinking about making Javabot one full time now.

<3s

So I am a dog….

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Friday I took the day off work for some brain scans. Turns out that my sister in law was running the CT that day so we were able to catch up some. Big plus side, she saw that there was a brain in my head so no more brain less jokes. ☺

Before the scans I took Sam and powered thru the last 6k I needed to cap out for my fighter life. I am so tired of punching everything to death. I need a caster life real bad, hence my excitement to start my druid life.

After much thinking, less so then other more complicated builds, this is what I have decided to do. I went Dwarf thinking HP and SP lines wouldn’t suck. A larger con with an easy self-healer would be ok, as well as having the boosts to tactical skills. Hey I just did a fighter life remember? My Dcs should be fairly good for tripping and stunning even with out a +10 item thanks to some APs. And nothing burns like a tripped bitch in a WoF!

My leveling plan is druid until I feel like I need another feat/ after getting WoF with monk being the most likely splash. I think all the monk-unarmed stuff works while in animal form. Maybe I should make a Vet 2 guy and try a few monk levels just to be sure. Can you Vet with a druid now?

Anyhow Friday afternoon I hit up the TR tree and became a druid. Let the XP zerg begin. My goal is to catch up to Tobril who is powering up right now and is about 10 levels ahead of me.

Level one was about the same as every other level one. Take whatever two hander I could find on the AH for 100 plat or less and clean out the first few island quests until hitting level 2.

At two find BtA Holy of Icy burst great axe on one of the 3 possible bank alts but while leveling up I got to pick a shape sifting form…. Well from what I have read bear is more dps and even though I am tired of melee 24/7 the first few levels are always a melee-fest. But using my brain for a min I look at my spell list for the “form” spells. And the wolf form Takedown is worlds better then Maul (the bear form 1st level spell). And you know all those extra tactical boosts might help with that Trip DC, right?

” Takedown – This attack deals an extra 2[W] damage, and you may trip the target, rendering it prone. Some creatures may be immune to this effect. A successful Balance check negates this effect. (DC 11 + WIS mod. Any effects that improve the DC for the Trip feat also improve Takedown.)”

So I take wolf form. With a little reading of my enchantments I see Blood Moon Frenzy, aka kill a guy and run faster. Moving faster means less time in quest and more xp/min.

Levels 3 and 4 are fast and thankfully my pile of uber handwraps are going to be a real help as your weapon type doesn’t seem to effect your animal forms attacks any, super nice. 5 and 6 aren’t too bad as I get in with other speed leveler and he can open STk pt3 and Bloody Crypt. 11 runs of the former at a min or two a run equals big xps and a little slower but still good runs of the latter takes care of the rest of the easy levels. 7 and 8 are a little slower as now it is Saturday and I need to do some non-ddo stuff. But firing up the kids account reflags me for bloody which I do a few hards totally skipped Proof, which is fast/good xp for me most of the time.

I try bear form for a little bit but it is just too slow after so much time as a wolf and Baiting Bite is so much stronger then the bear’s Shred attack. 4[w] vs 3[w] and opening people to sneak attack vs a sunder? Don’t get me wrong it looks like Tremor might make bear form better but that is a few levels away. But looking more at the list looks like the pack spells start to give more amp…. Hm more amp is more better…. So wolf might stay the clear winner.

So logging last night a little away from level 10, I really love level 9. There is just a great amount of quest at level 7 to really power up with. Like I said above I am doing the winter wolf form now at least until I get 6th level spells to try out Tremor. I have tempted to take some monk levels. 1 level would allow me to take stunning fist and having a “fighting” level will open up trip on its own. A second level will allow me to get into earth stance which I think would boost the unarmed damage if I was using a Jidz, add in the past live monk feat and I could have both good dps and good spell casting. Starting to sound a little too good. Good DPS, selfhealing and spell casting?

More on how I am playing, as it is totally different then my only guide, aka the wife, is playing hers.

❤

Is that time again

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With less then 200k until I TR Samius again it is time to start thinking about builds and what is left for him…

Double-checking Samius’ my.ddo page it looks like I have everything but Druid and Pally left to play out before opening up completionist. Then I have different questions to answer for myself… But for now the questions is Druid or Pally?

The other day before Gencon I was feeling burnt out on melee lives. Or maybe I was/am just tired of the different bowonk shells. Don’t get me wrong the bowonk is super strong and is covering all the bases in the HP/DPS/healing/ Xp per Min piles but how many lives in a row can I play with is more or less the same class? Again it is stupid strong to the point where I was auto attacking end quest boss fights last night and watching Sherlock on Netflix (btw it is really great! I ❤ the BBC most of the time even if they killed Coupling)

Leveling the pally will be the fastest on one of the Bowonk shells I am liking the 9/1 monk/arty shell in everyway (other then being burned out on the melee style) so it will have to wait until after a caster focused Druid.

So lets look at the Druid because I haven’t really looked at it all that much. The wife has one she is soloing with atm and she loves it.

So a quick look at the druid class and it looks good. Mostly shape changed focused with a sub focus on the pet. Uses the ¾ Bab, d8 hp and has Fort/Wis as good saves over all it is a tree hugging Clr.

And what do we know about Clrs? It is all about the DC and spell list, ie Clrs have the 2 best spells in DDo. Okay really the best 3 spells: BB, Destruction, and Heal.

Druids get Wall of Fire (lvl 9 ie just in time for Shadow Crypt and other Necro quests) , Finder of Death at level 15 just in time for Giant Hold. Looks like heal is also level 8 spell so level 15 but they also get Panacea and a ton of Regen like spells is ample self healing and catch all healing.

The question becomes do I splash a rouge level and/or 1 or 2 monk level or 2 monk levels or not?

I think getting to WoF is super important and their spell list handles most umd scrolls easy enough but they are missing some like teleport.

Anyway I think I will try out a pure druid unless hand wraps work while in animal form in which case I might have to add a few levels of monk after level 9 earth stance dire bear with a max Wis, stunning fist/stonedust wraps and a jidx/and a past life monk feat? Sounds sexy to me….
I foresee more reading on druid/monks for me.

❤

Ac Changes and Me (P1 – Little Samius)

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Getting home to an updated client was real nice. I was able to change and long on with out hours of waiting for things to update and mad tweeting about how I couldn’t get on. So I am calling last night a win on that alone. I got to play. There are lots of people that couldn’t due to waiting for updates. And to those people I say Remote Desktop or phone your kid/wife like I did.

Speaking of the wife real fast. Today is our 13th wedding anniversary. In light of my new try to get healthy mindset I bought her a bike last Friday and now she thinks I am trying to kill her via bike riding. But really I just want her to be healthy too. If she is going to make me live a long life she better tag along or else….

Anyway back to ddo.

After spending a ton of plat reupping the ship buffs (the DG got hit with the ship wipe bug) with two rentals a buff my haggle bard became broke as shit but Samius was able to buff so worth it?

Now normally I don’t bother with AC until level 5 or so on Samius. A crafted Invulnerability outfit with a med guild slot is all the defense I need for the first few levels. But I thought lets look and see how things stand with the AC changes. At level four I had a 29 AC which the little defense calculator told me was 50% to 64% miss seems good, right? I am not sure if I was fighting mobs over the level that Turbine does its calculations against or if elites factor in to things more then the calculator can factor in but there was a constant stream of red 0s flying across the screen. Meaning I was getting hit but my DR was reducing the damage to 0 or less. I caught myself dodging once all night, but my dodge is all of 1% so that makes sense expect I have 3 monk levels and 1 artificer level thought monks were like the dodge masters??? I will say I don’t feel any different AC wise right now at level 4. I normally get hit a lot and live via the Invulnerability DR.

On the flip side I did notice a difference in my attacks landing. While no to yellow skull I felt I was missing more then before. It could be that I normally use higher pluses wraps or a staff at this level where this life I only have my +0 lesser vamp wraps boosted via my arty spell to +1. Yeah baby! Arties rule, even at level 1!

But I was missing a lot more then I normally would during normal play, however I did red skull myself in a few places and I felt that I didn’t have the normal difficulties getting out of the red skull that I normally do. So maybe there the Ac/to hit changes were helping me. Fopo will know better then I because he is always complaining when I red skull us when he can’t hit. But if didn’t like the red skulls he wouldn’t play with me, right? :p

At the end of the night I leveled to 5. And that is where I start to switch into early AC with the Jidz, a 3 piece Abishi set and shield wands. So maybe I will know more in the next day or two.

Think the guild will be hitting the new stuff to night and I plan to take my tank and that might be an AC shock! I will let you know tomorrow.

❤

Believe It or Not this is my Fighter Life

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Saturday night I capped out As400 and started preparing Samius to TR. I know there is an update coming/is here. But I have to keep my eye on the ball if I am going to hit my completionist goal this year. And really I am not worried about doing the new stuff on Samius yet, give him a few levels when he can get xp out of them. For now Samyus, Butters, Java and As400 will be my explorers into the realms.

I was on the fence as to how to best level Samius this go around a few reasons.

Fopo is planning to use his xp stone to jump to 16 when he reaches level 8. And it is a great plan for him. And if I didn’t want as400 ready for this new content I would have done the same, but I did.

So I will need to be able to mostly solo from 1 to 16 assuming that Fopo waits for me at 16 and doesn’t push on to cap out. Which he could and if he did I wouldn’t blame him for doing so.

Lastly I might not be soloing the whole time, Steiner Davion, Phlor and the wife all have TRs coming up in the next few days/weeks. So depending on everyone’s leveling speed and how much time I spend on alts working on the new content I might be leveling real slowly. Slow enough that people can catch up with me. I just don’t know.

All that typing to get to here, the real start of the post. I can be long winded for no good reason.

How would you build a solo fighter build? What would the first 5 levels look like? Would people know you’re a fighter? This go around I am going 10/9/1 Fighter/monk/artificer. Level 1 artificer and levels 2 through 10 monk, aka no fighter levels at until level 11.

This is what I am calling the Heavy Bowonk build. I get skills (traps and full UMD), a blue bar (for AA) and a few helpful spells from the artificer as well as assess to a few cool wands with out umd checks. Also my scrolls get a little boost. Monk gives me well most of what I need to cap out; ToD, evasion with high saves, free heals, Amp, earth stance (hps, dps, more ac and dr (assuming that MotU didn’t break earth stance)). Fighter will give the feats for both ranged and two weapon fighting as well as more hps and the bonus to fists dps if I do Kensei 1. Not to forget the past life fighter feat once I TR again in a few weeks.

Okay time to go. Look forward to some posts real soonish as to how the AC changes affect me while leveling. You can thank Tobril for requesting them if you get tired of me talking about AC. Remember the Bowonk model can reach real solid AC numbers while leveling. Becoming almost untouchable at different points in the game with simple gear swaps.

Anyway back to work. ❤